1362

The weather guessers got it all wrong on the weekend which was not stormy and wet as they had predicted. Late Friday afternoon and evening there was nasty weather, flash flood warnings and all that, but it stayed on the other side of the mountains.

Third Wednesday was, mercifully, Magic. I ended up with even less than I'd calculated, just a few coins in my pocket. So silly, this monthly rags to riches nonsense.

Interruptions to the usual peace and quiet of the Dark Corner. The Sleeptalker arrived at about 2:30 one morning last week. Unlike his previous visit, he never stopped talking, beginning with a plaintive "Albert..." when he arrived. I was already awake, of course, before he spoke. Any unusual sound, no matter how quiet, in my immediate area, gets my waking attention. He sat and talked, or one could say ranted. First about his mother. As usual, when he goes into one of his mother rants I tuned out, didn't pay much attention to the details. I feel like saying, "you're thirty years old, get over it!" But then with mothers it isn't always easy "getting over it", no matter what the age. Then he shifted to a rant about Angelo. Had I seen him? No, I thought he was still in jail. Maybe not, because the Sleeptalker was furious with him, wanted to "kill him". The details of this situation again escaped me.

I asked him, when he arrived, what he was doing down there. He said he couldn't sleep without his medication. Medication? What medication? The evidence suggested the only medication he'd been taking wasn't prescribed by a doctor. I wish whoever is sharing the glass pipe with him would stop it, or at least not do it so often. They must see how twisted he gets.

The other interruption was the Tweaker who arrived with a new lady friend in the early hours of Monday. They smoked the pipe, had sex. She surely had more patience than I would because it takes him such a long time to reach completion. She must have been good at it because he was much more vocal with his orgasm than usual.

Autumn life in Honolulu.

Another reason to survive the winter: Fleming is coming to sing with the Honolulu Symphony in February.

1363

How sloppy of me. I called 1362 "1363". Corrected. This is the real 1363.

Rain, rain, torrential rain. Once again the weather guessers tell us we shall have a stormy, wet weekend. I fear this time they have it right because it started raining on Thursday afternoon and has continued almost without cease until late Friday morning. In Hawaii, where we have no freezing temperatures or snow and ice, rain is the homeless person's worst enemy. I had to abandon my usual spot at the Dark Corner and move over to a more sheltered one.

I recently praised Wally Lamb and now must praise him again after finding his first novel, She's Come Undone. Remarkable, that a man could write such a convincing first-person narrative of a woman's life, from childhood to early forties. Truly splendid writing.

And thanks once again to that bookshop with a clueless manager, I found Maeve Binchy's latest, Nights of Rain and Stars, for only a dollar. I'm sorry to hear from her website that she is having health problems and wish her all the best.

Health problems. Well, the internal plumbing continues to be a plague although I seem to be getting better at staggering as quickly as I can to the nearest toilet, always careful to park myself within close distance of one, and to be certain to visit one before undertaking some chore which might take me to areas which don't have any (like downtown Honolulu).

And now there's another annoyance. ("It's always something" is the rule, not the exception when it comes to old and crumbling bodies.) Some strange peeling on the palm of my left hand. Doesn't respond to Lotrimin, so I guess it isn't fungal. Same problem on the sole of the left foot. At least with the foot it doesn't have the omen-ous implication of the palm where the ailment rests right over the end of my lifeline.

Oh mama, can this really be the end? Not really complaining, if so. (Although I doubt anyone has died from chronic diarrhea or peeling palms.)

1364

Hurricane Kenneth fizzled to a "tropical depression" and by the time it reached our neighborhood, it didn't even have that distinction. It did leave behind lots of clouds and quite a bit of rain, although it arrived here earlier than expected so most of the rain on this island came during Thursday night and Friday. It was gray and gloomy for much of Saturday but little rain fell. (The sandbags stacked in front of some campus building entrances weren't an encouraging sign, though.)

So I left the campus earlier than usual each day, took refuge at the mall. Absurd, letting weather "forecasters" control one's life that way, but I suppose we are all feeling a bit more cautious after the Gulf Coast disasters.

So it was a dull weather weekend and rather dull otherwise, too.

1365

I replaced my little Sony radio. It must be a very popular model for Sony since this is the third one I have bought (over perhaps as many years). The cheaper Chinese radio had fairly decent reception but little ability to prevent greedy, stronger stations from interfering with the one being listened to. It also didn't have stereo-FM. Most of the time, that doesn't bother me since I am listening to news and news-related talk shows on National Public Radio, but it is, of course, valuable for music broadcasts.

After re-acquiring the Sony, I even listened to several broadcasts of symphonic music which is fairly rare for me. I wonder if Beethoven invented all those tunes in his Seventh Symphony, or did he borrow some from folk music? In any case, it was great background for my ever-expanding fantasy life.

I have not been in the least impressed by broadcasts from the Washington National Opera and am relieved to see that we shall soon be getting some from the Houston Grand Opera which was thoroughly impressive last year. First, alas, we'll have to get through the begging bowl routine which will soon begin.

The lazy option of sleeping later on weekend mornings disrupted my usually accurate internal clock. I woke at about 3:20 on Monday morning, looked at my watch and thought, "ah, I can doze for another forty minutes." At 4:30 the people arrived to open the cafe and I was sound asleep. Bad, bad! I decided that when I awoke after three in the morning, I would move over to GovSanc2 where I could then be lazy and sleep until five. The sheriffs seem, sensibly, not to bother patrolling the area at that time of the morning.

The success of that strategy does depend somewhat on the GovSanc2 population which varies greatly. Sometimes a dozen or more people are there, sometimes only one or two. And the areas which are in darkness are very limited. It's odd how much colder the concrete benches are than my tile floor mattress at the Dark Corner.

And it is getting noticeably cooler, especially at night. Possibly a little more than usual for early October. And here we go again. The weather guessers are saying we have a stormy, wet weekend ahead. The weather gods are definitely looking at us with an evil eye on autumnal weekends in Honolulu.

the tales