Tuesday, August 31, 2004

Corner Karma

I’m going to give myself a nice running start at this fine new Tuesday by disgorging an old scrawling that I’ve held onto for nigh these many years.  I was reminded of it by a few harsh words I let myself say last week to someone who really needed them, and then I suddenly found this little dialogue again in an old notebook.  It ain’t much, but really folks, it’s Tuesday - you don’t get much. 

* Are you standing here?
* What?
* I’m sorry, beg pardon, ask you a question?
* What?
* What is the name… the name of this place, this restaurant?
* K~.  K~.  It’s right here on the window.
* You see, I don’t speak - can’t talk with the… my mouth and head are not cooperative and I always never (degenerates into mutterings)
* What?
* I can’t speak the, say the words any more, native language is english, but the reading of wording is thinking of talking with (more mumbling)
* Listen.  Listen.
* What?
* Can you hear me?
* Yeah.
* This is not the time to start with me.
* Well you see I -
* Did you hear me?  This is not the time.  Don’t make me get mad here.
* Well I’m just trying to make myself....
* Don’t make me.  Just don’t make me. Not here.  What did I say to you?
* It’s not the time.
* Right.  It’s not the time.  Go on, now.
(unintelligible muttering, wandering away)

I’ve decided that this is Karma Week at the Chucklehut, for better or worse, as karma so often is, and this was Corner Karma.  Sometimes you just gotta stand up for yourself and your little spot outside the crowded restaurant.  I respect those who struggle to survive against the challenges of homelessness and mental illness, I honor their plight - but sometimes I just can’t deal with them.  Maybe that impairs my cosmic credibility but I’m looking back on that night of two years ago and I still feel justified.  And a little guilty.  Damnit. Okay, I guess my work’s cut out for me.  And isn’t that what Tuesdays are all about?

Monday, August 30, 2004

Straight to the Heart of Things

Hearts is not entirely a game of luck.  Fate, too, plays a hand.  And skill?  Skill is optional.  I should know, because I’m an expert.

Barry and Dave and Jon wanted to play and I wasn’t going to be the buzzkill.  I didn’t know the game, though, so they gave me a crash course and promised not to take undue advantage of me.  They rattled off the basic rules and I tried to absorb as many of them as I could.  The game involves everybody trying to win hands against each other and to avoid getting stuck with hearts - each one costs you a point in the end, and high score loses - just like golf.  Except with cards, and indoors.  Yeah, I didn’t get it at first either.

We started playing and I steeled myself against taking the competition very seriously, because I was clearly in way over my head with three of the smartest people I knew, all experienced players.... I lost the first hand, sucked up a heart.  And on the second hand, another.  Before I knew it I was pulling down hearts left and right and it looked suicidal.  It was.  I’d decided to play this little one-off game to its absolute hilt, if not beyond.  I was out to shoot the moon. 

This was one of those crazy desperate moves I sometimes make when absolutely nothing is riding on the results.  If any blowback could reasonably be anticipated, I’m typically risk-adverse.  But if it really couldn’t matter less what I do, I can be pretty aggressive with my doom.  I’ll push that goddamn button and see what happens.  It doesn’t have to suck.

That was my calm, rational decisionmaking process as I started playing to lose.  “Shooting the moon” meant somehow managing to lose every hand, to load up with every single heart, to acquire every possible point in the game.  If you do that, you win.  The scoring philosophy goes from golf to bowling - bigger is better. 

It took the boys a few hands to figure me out and then they started right in cooperating to stop me.  I don’t remember their weak little machinations; all I recall is that they failed and failed miserably.  I had the key cards and played them with Olympian wisdom.  My strategy was ruthless and instinctual.  At the end I had cleaned out every single heart and acquired them all as my own.  I had parried and feinted; I had looted and pillaged. I had literally cut out their hearts - a veritable Dr. DeBakey of cards.  I had shot the moon - a feat that had been explained to me before the game as so improbable an outcome as to render the strategy almost unworthy of serious discussion.

After completing this unlikely victory my friends were eager to play again and make up for the humiliation of losing so spectacularly to a rookie - nay, a mere novice, even.  I declined.  I’d risked it all to win that first game.  It was clear to me that I’d used up whatever quantum of heart karma I’d started with.  That victory would have to last me a lifetime.  I knew in my bones I didn’t have another one in me and I wasn’t going to play to lose.  Sometimes winners quit.

Friday, August 27, 2004

Tropical Tidbit Roundup

It’s time.  Time for me to leave for my conference, time for me to be back home.  I’ve been stringing this along for my own amusement for long enough.  Today I’ll wrap up my Tropical Tidbits, share the little epigrammatic notes I made for myself in the airplane back and on ensuing reflective days, all my quick notions and recollections, from which I’ve been taking my Tidbits to date.  I’m just going to go through the rest of them, unburden myself of a few more photos, and I’ll call it a day.  A workday.

Lagoons that are nothing less than lava-lined swimming pools of 90-degree water, clear and pure, so perfectly balanced to my own biology that I can float in them for two hours and my hands don’t even wrinkle.

Going into one of said lagoons for a dip after a burning session of bikram-style yoga on a humid lanai in a tropical rainstorm, and letting the warm water wash the sweat from my brow and extract the aching exhaustion from my muscles till all the energy I’d expended had been returned to me again.

Hawks in the sky by day, owls on the hunt at night.

Getting out of the car at a shopping center and unwittingly dinging the van we parked next to; Mary waited for me outside my drugstore to tell me that the other driver was angry and taking down my license number.  I stepped over with my license in my hand and apologies on my lips, professing my true ignorance and my readiness to make things right; as I spoke to the diminutive darkskinned hawaiian woman, her face lined with deep wrinkles and her dress a cheerful contrast to her demeanor, she began to thaw a little.... after a few minutes we were almost having a pleasant conversation when a sliding window moved in the back of the van and a huge voice told her to forget about it, and then we shared a few moments of relaxed conversation, the three of us - her tiny self, my average self, and the manmountain in the van whose hand, when he shook mine, was the size of a hubcap, thanking me for visiting his island.

Driving to our anniversary dinner in Hilo and getting stopped at dusk by a parade of slowmoving undecorated old pickup trucks with campaigners and banners for candidates for small local political offices; the sidewalks were lined with people who’d turned out for the dullest parade I’ve ever seen in my life but they all seemed to be having a great time.

At mile marker 5 on route 130: a public water faucet sitting yellowly on the shoulder of the highway; every time we went past it there was at least one person and often several lined up to use it, filling buckets and bottles with public water, day and night.

Hawaii’s only native land mammal is a bat.  And they don’t even barely touch the land anyway.

Geckos are ubiquitous both in popular imagery and actual living conditions.  Interesting fact about them: when one gecko attacks and eats another smaller gecko, the smaller gecko screams.  Loudly.  It’s rather disturbing. 

Weird fruits I enjoyed: starfruit (more like watermelon than I’d have expected), dragon (dramatic-looking both cut and uncut; the ones that are white inside don’t taste like much but the ones that are purple inside taste terrific), bread (a specimen of which had been left behind for us by early-departing friends; I cut it up and fried it in oil and it turned out very like a cross between green plantains and fried potatoes). 

Tom the Baker: a three-toothed character on Highway 19 north of Hilo who sells cheesecake and masaladas (portugese-style doughnuts) out of his garage; he’s garrulous and accomodating and his wares are delicious, especially the four different large cheesecakes and two masaladas that we actually bought and gleefully consumed.

Rocks on the lagoon bed surrounding geothermic vents host shimmering white algae, which gleams silver in the water-filtered light; that white algae then grows a yellow algae that turns the jagged grey and black boulders into huge gold nuggets around which magnificently colorful fish frolic in the heated streams that emit from under their gleaming confusion.

An admonition in the lisping lilting voice of a precocious and beautiful two-year-old girl: “Finish your beer, Kelly.  Don’t you want to finish your beer?”

Defending myself from the sun like poison, but achieving a healthy pallor anyway

West side graffiti, spelled out in white volcanic pebbles against vast fields of black a’a like a thousand asphalt parking lots torn up on top of each other as far as you could see: “Lita was fun.” East side graffiti, spelled out in commercially printed letters on a clean white board tied to a huge tree on the side of the road near a small creek crossing: “Bawana loves Tanglefoot.”

Swimming in crystal-clear waters with prescription goggles, watching the turtles and fish and eels and abundant life everywhere, and then having my vision obscured by a coruscating current of heated water behind which the scenery shimmers and fades, unintelligible; then, swimming through into clear water again to see that the big rock you thought you were was just beneath you is actually a huge sea turtle, its carapace four feet across and five long, covered with thick moss, chewing up the small seaplants that peek up from the ragged rocky bed of the lagoon and taking a jacuzzi on the ocean floor.

Beautiful fish - tangs and angels - surrounding the mossy turtle, feeding like toys on the moss that’s grown on its back.

Turtles, in Hawaiian, are called “Homu.” I think I grew to recognize two homu in particular who took their teatimes in our lagoon.  I named them “Hoju” and “Arigato.”

And I still have a few photos you might find interesting, and even if you don’t I’ll post them here anyway and have done with it: