inherently different

Archive for May, 2004

You know that American Idol contestant? Moesha? No, wait. It’s Jasmine. Yeah. Anyway, people here are nuts about her. They have articles daily in the Maui News it seems like. The thing is, I’m guessing it isn’t for any other reason other than she is a local girl. While I didn’t watch the show this season, I’ve heard she can’t sing.

Very asian-centric attitudes are prevalent. If you’re asian, you get at least 15 minutes of fame on the islands, whether you deserve it or not. I’m lucky in so much as my skin color and facial structure can be mistaken for Pacific Islander so I won’t get as much ‘tude as my haole girlfriend will. I’m gonna have to teach her to speak pidgin so she’ll blend in better.

I haven’t driven a car consistently since 1995. I haven’t had a valid driver’s license since 1998. Since I lived on Russian Hill in San Francisco a car (and by extension) a driver’s license were pretty useless most of the time.

I can’t get away without either anymore since public transportation is almost non-existant here on Maui. To get anywhere on this island, you need a motorized vehicle.

I had visions of riding around the island like Lilo & Stitch, you know, on a Big Wheel from place to place. Apparently, the local constable’s frown on 38 year-old men riding around on Big Wheels.

“When in Rome,” a wise man once said, “do as the Romans do!”

Of course, if you’re in Hawaii, doing as the Hawaiians do could get your ass handed to you on a plate, Poi optional.

It is funny. When I first moved up to the Bay Area from San Diego, it was difficult for me to adjust to strangers on the street looking me in the eye and saying hello. I’ve become used to it living in the city of San Francisco. Now, here, on Maui, no one looks you in the eye. I try, I make eye contact and the few who look back, think I’m challenging them to a fight to the death. Well, the males anyway. The females look at me with disgust… that isn’t unusual since I’m a fucking troll but still, I thought I would blend in with all the other trolls who inhabit this island.

Does anyone need anything from the islands? I’ll send you a paradise care package. In exchange, I’ll expect someone to ship me a Zachary’s Stuffed Pizza.

This is Charley Young Beach in Kihei. This particular beach is one of my favorite beaches on the entire island of Maui. Mostly because that it is relatively secluded and few tourists frequent its pristine shoreline. Also, it doesn’t have the sewage problems that many of the beaches on the southside of the island have.

I like it because it has a decent shorebreak that I can skimboard and it is about two blocks east of Cove Park which is where many people (local and tourist alike) learn to surf. This is facet is important because it means that locals won’t kick the shit out of a non-local who surfs this break. There are a number of reasons not to surf in Hawaii. Sewage, locals only attitude and treacherous reefs are probably the easiest to acknowledge. The other is the time suck factor. When I lived in San Diego I tended to put surfing above a lot of other activities like school, work and day-to-day responsibilities like eating, bathing, acknowledging other humans.

There are two other condos I need to check out this week. One is about 50 feet from the entrance to Charley Young Beach and the other is further up the road toward Wailea where all the resorts are. Another good reason to live here is the proximity to these resorts. The Red Queen should be able to find a spa to ply her trade and if writing the next great American Novel doesn’t work out for me, I could get a job working at one of the resorts as a camp counselor… Yeah, I know what you’re thinking… “E? A camp couselor? Working with kids?”

Well, it would surprise me too.

I’ve been here since Thursday. I’ve had intermittant internet access for a few days but to be honest, these people seem to be stuck in a time warp. You can’t possibly image how hard it is to find high-speed access on this island. I finally had to discuss the situation with a local I-Net provider. The conversation went something like this…
ME: So, high-speed for your company means any connection that’s 56K or better?
Local Internet Guy (LIG): Bruddah. You on Maui now, yeah? You on island time now, yeah?
ME: What the holy kamole does that mean?
LIG: You be patient, yeah?
ME: Look, you promised me that I could get access in 24 hours or less.
LIG: 24 Hour long time bruddah. Long time on da island, yeah?
ME: What the fuck you keep saying “Yeah” after every fucking sentence? Are you retarded?
[click]

Apparently, they don’t like it when you cuss at them. I think he’s sending over a few pipe-hitting Somoans on over to hammer me into a bag of poi with the DSL Modem. This island living thing might be really fun.
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s 10:30 pm on Wednesday and in less than 12 hours I’ll be living on Maui. I’ve got my bags & board packed, all my stuff stored and ready for shipping, and the Red Queen is now two weeks away from doing the very same.

I just took a walk down the street to grab a bite to eat and as I walked through Polk Gulch and into the Tenderloin, I realized that San Francisco hasn’t changed all that much in the 10+ years I’ve lived here. Homeless people stare vacantly at me as I pass, crack whores offer to suck my dick for a five bucks, cops shuffle from one donut shop to the next as they desperately ignore the people who break the laws they swore to uphold. Nope, the city doesn’t change but the characters involved might. The city is eternal.

I needed to experience the sights and sounds of the city as it prepared bed down. I walked further than I had to just to breath the acrid mixture of urine and exhaust. It wasn’t the first time I took these flavors in but as I walked down Polk, I realized it might very well be the last.

Time tends to fly when you’re building things. A case in point? It took 2 years to build the Eiffel Tower in Paris. On a more local level, it took over 4 years to build the Golden Gate Bridge and 5 years to complete the Trans America Pyramid. Granted, my life isn’t much in comparison to those monumental works but it took me almost ten years to build what semblence of life I do have. That’s a long time!

As many of you may or may not know, I’m moving to Hawaii on the 13th of May. I’m meeting a few people for a short, sweet goodbye beverage at Tonic (Polk & Union) on Tuesday, May 11th at 6:30 pm if you’re of the mind. If I don’t know you and you’re in the bay area, hell come by and yell at me for whatever idiotic thing I’ve said on here that you disagree with…

I’ve lived in the Bay Area for 12 years and in that time I’ve met a few people who have, for good or bad, changed me significantly. For the most part, the lessons learned have strengthened me in ways that would have been impossible without their participation. As I get ready to head into a new adventure, I’d like to formally acknowledge their participation in forming the person I am today.
Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t believe that this is even legal but a company is developing a technology that would pre-edit DVDs that have questionable language or visuals. According to industry reports, ClearPlay lets an adult watch an R-rated film like Gladitor with all the violence, nudity and language edited out. Which means that you can teach your child all about censorship without letting him/her develop a sense of right and wrong on their own. Goodie for the religious right!

Love & Death is yet another in a long line of books that detail the insidious conspiracy that robbed the world of an influential musician who may or may not have spoken for a generation. Like other untimely deaths, Cobain’s apparent suicide didn’t sit well with his fans and spawned an industry of investigations into the specifics surrounding his death. The latest book that details the flaws in the investigation of Kurt Cobain’s death doesn’t shed any more light on an already dark icon’s demise but it does shed light onto something I’ve long thought… and that is that dead men tell no tales, which is just another way of saying, we’ll never know what happened and we’re probably all better off coming to terms with this fact.

If you read the original Cobain investigation by Ian Halperin and Max Wallace (Who Killed Kurt Cobain? The Mysterious Death of an Icon), you really don’t need to read this one since all it does is reiterate evidence, interviews and timelines. The compilation of evidence is sometimes presented in a hysterical manner almost daring readers to find plausible explanations for the information that they have uncovered. Most of it is innuendo, conjecture and guesswork that shouldn’t be seen as anything more than what it is… sensationalism for the sake of a buck.

I’ll save you from giving them the few bucks they might otherwise get and tell you that Mssr’s Halperin and Wallace edge ever closer to actually accusing Courtney Love of murder without actually accusing her of murder. I would imagine that they are hoping to milk more money from Cobain’s fans with yet a third as yet unreleased installment in which they will finally say (write) out loud what they’ve been hinting for 10 years now.

The bottom line is simply that Courtney Love is a paranoid, erratic and clearly delusional character. Is she capable of the things the book almost accuses her of? Perhaps. Only one person knows what really happened in that greenhouse above the garage of Cobain’s house and I don’t think he’ll ever tell.