I have a porn star's name

Well, I can’t talk shit about hippies any more. Not even the religious ones. This morning, walking along the Haiku road on the way to the community center to catch the bus, I was picked up by a Jesus hippie who offered me a ride. People hitchhike here a lot, but I don’t, because I’m not used to it, and I don’t mind walking: it’s exercise! But I’m not gonna turn down a ride if someone offers. As soon as I sat down I saw a JESUS SAVES hat on the floor of his car and knew I was in for a spiel. He told me about a great beach called Makena where the water is beautiful aquamarine blue like in the Mediterranean and the shorebreak is dangerous, but if you know how to handle yourself in the ocean it’s a paradise for bodysurfing. He dropped me off right by the Green Banana Internet Cafe where I was going to speak with the owner, and sure enough, right before he let me go he made his “pitch,” which went something like, “Bro, I’ve just gotta tell ya that people have done a really awful job of misrepresenting God, this God is great, he isn’t trying to make you feel bad or scare you, he’s love,” and then he wished me a beautiful day. Whatever, no big deal. I don’t hate religious people, I was just raised with an antipathy towards religion that I still have, from seeing all the harm and evil that it’s done, and the way it’s twisted and abused in the service of evil by so many hypocritical evil bastards, and I’m happy where I am, with my mild semi mystical form of pantheistic spirituality. So, I’m cool on the religion, bro, but thanks for the ride, all the same!

Then I met Dean, the owner of Green Banana, who told me Paia is a “very transient” place and he may need to hire someone new soon. He also said he has the same shirt I was wearing (the “For Good Luck Rub My Tummy” one, Urban Outfitters I think) and, get this, told me I have “the perfect porn star name.” I said, “Well, if I can’t get a job in a restaurant or cafe, I suppose there’s always that to fall back on.”

Speaking of colorful bananas, they grow decorative pink bananas (and pineapples) here on the Islands. Decorative meaning you don’t eat them.

Our dogs, Ilio and Nikita (Russian must have the opposite gender endings from Spanish and the Romance languages, because Ilio is the female and Nikita is her son) are pitbulls, a breed that has earned itself much ink and controversy. When I told my Mom that today she said, “Oh, I don’t like pitbulls, I don’t trust them.” But Elio and Nikita illustrate both sides of that controversy. Ilio accepted me right away (especially after I fed her some turkey leavins from my own plate) and lets me pet her and shows no aggression, while Nikita, who is notoriously shy and mistrustful of any new people in his orbit, runs away if I come near, and growled in his throat when I once tried to pet him. He seems to be accepting me nonetheless in his antisocial way, and K. says he’s usually much WORSE around strangers than he has been to me.

There’s no lack of food at the house, that’s for sure. I mostly eat the leftovers of the food Cousin buys, and I’m still eating better than I did in Portland.

The image above is a mermaid sculpture I took a photo of in Lahaina a few days ago, really lovely - I told Cousin he should buy it for one of his houses.

Business and pleasure

Yesterday: a very active, focused day, and I burned lots of calories. Cousin dropped me off in Kahului and I job-hunted from 9am to 1pm there, but it was more schlepping along in the hot sun carrying my backpack, beach gear and laptop (the strap of the laptop bag digging into my sunburnt shoulder) than turning in too many resumes or applications: most places do their hiring online now. For example: Fedex Kinkos, Safeway, Ross Dress For Less (which IS hiring), Blockbuster, and Whole Foods (which isn’t open yet, still being built, and that would be about the ideal place to work for a few months). I made the mistake of buying groceries (apples, tea, strawberry frosted pop tarts) from Foodland, then went to Safeway and saw everything I’d just bought for about half the price. Of course Foodland is the local, karmically superior, less corporate choice, but until I get a job, I’m going to have to put savings above principles.

At 1pm I caught the Haiku Islander bus to Paia, where I made a halfhearted attempt at further job-hunting (turned in resumes at Charley’s, where we had breakfast the other day, and the Flatbread Pizza Co., which seems to do a brisk business), but soon ducked out to Paia Bay, the public beach, which is actually quite nice, and wasn’t crowded at all, to my surprise – K. said there aren’t too many visitors on the Islands yet, more will come later, with the summer season. I spent about three blissful hours body surfing, being tossed up and down on warm waves – about as good as life gets, from my perspective. I kept my laptop and other things close to the shore and continually surveyed them, since the girl in the surf shop warned me not to leave my things unattended. But it was smooth surfing. I feel effortlessly at home in the ocean. Practically everyone else had a surfboard, and I’d like to get one and try that some day soon, but I have plenty of fun with my plain old self. The old adage about how you should never turn your back on the ocean is true, though: a couple times I got caught, turning back to scan the beach, then having a big wave abruptly jump up and crash over me. It’s so unpredictable: waves that look like they’ll come in huge weaken to nothing just before they hit you, while a giant white-crested wall can roll up out of nowhere just a few yards in front of you. But that’s the fun of it: keeps you on your toes. It’s like the wave machine in the water parks I so loved as a child, except even warmer, and more fun, because the waves aren’t churned out uniformly by some man-made automaton: they follow the caprices of Neptune, a worthy and wily opponent. But an ally as much as an adversary, if you’re an aquaphile like me.

I'm peeling. It's something you have to go through to get your Maui tan, of course.

After my splendid ocean reverie I spent some time in the Green Banana Internet Cafe, applying for jobs online and such, then caught the bus again to the Haiku Community Center, and walked from there to Hohani Place, by which point I was really exhausted. It looked like it was about to burst into heavy rain the whole time, and I was considering what to do, since I was carrying my laptop with nothing to protect it but its carrying bag, but it never did.

I haven't really seen any destitute or homeless people here yet. There's a major difference from Portland.

We finally did our first GOOD session of work on Cousin's (as-yet-untitled) book yesterday: worked on it all day, minus little breaks for exercise and kite-flying and palm-tree hacking. Called my Mom to get her to corroborate some of the memories we were going over, of the old days in the trailer court and Cousin and Auntie’s apartment in Burnsville, and the fourplex me and my Mom had by Rockite Silo, etc, and my Mom was sullen at first but then got really excited and animated, because the memories of the time when she was young and alive bring her back to life, which is why I want to try to include her in the memory-collecting process as much as possible. And Cousin pulled out a suitcase with tons of old photos, some of which I’d never even seen before, including ones of my Mom and Auntie when they were cute little girls in bonnets, and one of my Mom around the time she was dating/married to my Dad and she was super hot, so skinny and pretty, it’s just hard to believe it’s even the same woman, that she was ever that fine. What was my Dad thinking to dump her? I’ve already developed a fondness for typing as Cousin talks, because he really gets revved up and his way of recounting this endless saga of absurd childhood incidents and tragedies and hilarities is SO FUNNY. Example: the one about his mother buying them their first color TV set when they lived in the trailer court, and how she flew into a rage while watching The Wizard of Oz because she forgot the first part of the movie is in black and white, so she started tweaking with all the tint and contrast settings, thinking there was something wrong with the TV, so when Dorothy finally opened the door in Oz the colors were all fucked up and wrong and overly saturated (this was during her heavy drinking days)!

This book is gonna be a lot of fun...although Cousin's haphazard, sporadic way of working on it is going to clash with my desire to set a regular time to work on it each day. Especially if I do end up getting a job, so my time is more restricted.