Kauai, Hawaii September 11
It’s no secret. Humans are riddled with neuroses. Yeah, a neurosis is typically a negative condition, but it could also be the thing that makes you interesting, or at least be enjoyable at times. Can’t you recall some really good mood, tilting into mild mania? Or a season of confidence so deep it dipped into delusion? I can. We’re in it together; the psychosis of modern existence. It’s like we all reside somewhere on the same continuum, traveling along a shared network of highways. I mean, you don’t have to be OCD to enjoy the completion of a thing, right? And there is nothing like checking that final thing off your list. Hell, it feels good to check anything off your list. And so it was with yours truly not so long ago. Out of the 50 states that make up the U.S.A., Hawaii was the last one I had yet to set foot upon. “Huzzah” I declared in my best Vic Neverman voice as I stepped into the quaint Lihue airport. “Take my picture baby so we can go! Time to find a bar!”
Granted, my enthusiasm was slightly exaggerated, it’s true. I know that forced mania doesn’t hit the same way, but at least I was making an effort, trusting the process. You show up for the moment whether or not the moment shows up for you.
I’ve done some stupid shit in my time. I am human after all. I had to go to desperate ends to survive the monsters under my bed. As a young lad, I’d hide under my blankets and if I could count to 10 before I was snatched up by the imaginary witch, I’d be safe. I found that the forcefield typically required multiple recitations before it was strong enough to grant sleep. As I have aged, I’ve learned I am not alone in wishful thinking and general fallacious reasoning. It seems to be the path of least resistance for a scared brain. When feelings of helplessness couple with a lack of understanding or a deep desire for a different situation, homo sapiens tend to overextend their powers of theory. And when the desired result is achieved, well, that becomes proof enough. It’s only weird if it doesn’t work. I’ve championed this to fellow sport enthusiasts when they question my snap pointing at the screen during each big pitch. The not so funny part about humans when caught in the grips of true belief, is that results are never analyzed unbiasedly. For instance, when the undesired result happens, a lack of faith is identified, or a lack of snap pointing. We could call it, the unscientific method or blind faith. I suppose even the madman has his logic, and so the vaseline in which he is stuck becomes his home.
Sometimes it blows my mind
It gets worse, much worse. The continuum of such delusions can be shared to the extreme. Institutionalized. Taken as serious as the grave. These curated judgments, still born of causal guesswork mind you, have given rise to mystical faiths, grassroots cults, and various polytheistic belief systems spanning through recorded time and culture, and surely before. Thousands of very organized religions persist in current day. How could one ever pick amongst the available options, most of which hold exclusive truth claims? Thankfully it seems, most people are lucky enough to have been born into the correct version. The apes with such behavior changing superstitions, successfully propagate their “worldview” through art, holiday, assembly, and the nursery. The really popular ones, historically, blossom into war, torture, and execution with a holy fervor. Into calendar dates memorializing the unwilling participants lost in the wake of their pious fanaticism.
Civilization has come a long way, and humanity, not so very far at the same time. There we were, 35000 feet in the air just moments ago, in a flying machine, and I see a fellow passenger make the sign of the cross with bowed head as we touch down on the tarmac. She looks relieved, grateful. She spots me looking at her and gives a type of warm, reassuring smile as if we are orphans parting to go to our respective forever homes. I try to wrestle my frozen cringed expression into a return smile, but she has already turned back around anyway. I stare blankly ahead. Shouldn’t we have a sign of the engineers, or mechanics instead of an ancient execution apparatus? Give credit to who actually makes a difference? “Save the world, pray the rosary” is a bumper sticker I’ve seen more than once. Could there be a more noneffective way to spend your energy or to create change? Might as well pray to the god of fuel, or combustion, hell, to the tarmac deity. But no, most of us don’t even see the wonder in paving ingenuities that can handle heavy loads and incremental weather. In fact, there are multitudes who could care less about these engineering marvels of our time, preoccupied with a belief that a magic carpenter gave up his weekend, and that disbelief in him, despite a complete lack of evidence, condemns you to burn forever in deserved punishment. Some sects go door to door to help you comply to their interpretation of their anthology of hearsay. Other sects are free to bequeath you to your afterlife damnation, and so have the good grace to leave you alone. Either way, these are the folks who credit the prayer chain, in place of the human doctors and years of research, for the success of medical procedures. And of course there are some 25% of our global population who’s tenets are linked with not saving, but annihilating (you)the infidel with eternal reward as a prize for the martyrs who carry out the holy action. Call me an unambitious humanist, but I’m not interested in afterlife crowns of gold or virgins offered as rewards in exchange for abandoning the life I actually have. I like the people who clap at the end of a good movie, giving credit where credit is due. It doesn’t matter if the crew responsible for the film are not present, the praise is at least attributed to the correct species and the shared experience that results from mortal acheivment. Ok, Ok Wara, Deep breath. You can at least make it a point to thank the pilot on the way out. Goodbye airplane, hello Hawaii.
Kuaii is a remote place. A beautiful place, with a single lane road circumnavigating the rugged interior of the island. Untunnled mountains finally prevent the meeting of the perimeter track, so your initial turn out of the airport proves to be an important one. All of life boils down to one primary question ; left or right. I turned right towards the bulk of the pavement, purposed to follow the snake as far as I could. The small businesses along the way were like passages you’d underline in a book to come back to. One can easily daydream of spending a summer as part of a this vibrant surfing, beach community, and such imaginings have a way to soften age and ability which of course, adds to the charm. But, I hanker for the end of the line. Venturing further into the tropical landscapes, cognizant of changing elevations, I aim towards Princeville. My attorney once told me that in order to really feel a change from your normal routine, you must do something special. His special would be referring to taking a Vicodin or MDMA for sure, but to his credit, it was about time I started looking for a watering hole. In the mountain switchbacks I found an outpost to turn into. The place was the Hawaiian version of the mainland American strip mall. The layout was different, having multiple common courtyards instead of wrapping around a parking lot. The collective footprint was roughly square in shape, and the parking spaces surrounded the interior establishments like a giant paved moat. It was here I found my destination for enhancement; a shtick in context that felt very much like a shtick taken out of context.
Close your eyes and picture a Hawaiian bar. Sun washed surf boards, repurposed as signs, beckoning the thirsty. Now let the surrounding setting of the beach or resort you pictured melt away, and open them up to see Tiki Iniki. The thatched palm leaf interior has bamboo rafters and a tiki bar theme straight out of the playbook. Never mind that it is flanked by the bank of Hawaii, post office, and Re-Max Kauai. To say it leans hard into typical expectations would be like saying a bag of deshelled pistachios takes all the preciousness out of it, which of course it does. But, you can still gorge yourself at pharaoh like speeds. The aesthetics here are as any new traveler would presume to experience, because every mainland Hawaiian bar looks just this way. In fact, the place could be transported to the airport and be pretty sweet. The prices already reflect such a relocation with a home style 32 dollar poke bowl and 20 dollar mai tai.
Keep getting stuck here all the time
One could travel back in time and sympathize with the primitive worship of a Volcano God. Especially by those island folk surrounded by fathoms of ocean. It is the volcano which gives rise to creeping, hopping, walking life. It is the land maker. And were the sea to rise and swallow the island, the coned peaks would be the last refuge against being wiped away into brine and foam. It’s a 6 hour flight from LA to Hawaii, but before planes…The nearest land was a 5 day boat ride! So devotion to the land giver would have been urgent. Early Polynesians explorers, in mere canoes, on the open sea, for days at a time, could very well have said their prayers to the volcano god, to provide them new settlement islands. Or maybe the smarter sailors picked the god of the Sea, or the goddess tuna, or some other of the thousands of options. But they were practical as well. In the case of landfall, they were prepared. These early settlers brought trees for canoe making, the wood for ship parts, using leaves for sails and sap for glue. This is the story of Hawaii and the tall, straight, still standing trees brought from afar.
It takes but one electrical outage to connect to how at the mercy of temperature and light humanity has been most of our existence. Even now, in current year, a big enough tsunami could render the airports useless and send any survivors back to the carving of timber. One thing is for sure, visiting such remote islands does make you think about such natural disasters. I can almost forgive the superstition of cause and effect, when the effect is preventing an uncontrollable fatal disaster, and the cause just requires your surrender to inner pleadings and subsequent bargaining. It’s as easy as Thoughts and Prayers. When it comes to the big ticket items, famine, natural disasters, plague, neighboring people with different faith…Bargaining with the unknown forces of nature is sure to require additional sacrifice beyond just surrendering your grip on reality. But to say such religious delusion could lead to Hollywoods depiction of sacrificed virgins into open volcano’s is preposterous! The volcano gods of Hawaii generally enjoyed sacrifices of pork, and fruit, or flowers. Throw in some lager and it sounds like a pretty good gig. Not all religious belief is barbaric! Let’s be clear. Human sacrifice had absolutely nothing to do with the volcano god. That was reserved for their god of war and was performed at sacred temples.
Jenny is my barkeep. She is for sure old enough to have been working during 9/11, 25 years ago. Those who are old enough, remember exactly where they were when the world changed forever. It was when the second plane hit that took away all doubt. This wasn’t a single crazy person or some freak accident. It was premeditated, long planned for and we would come to find out, involved multiple suicide agents who were enacting a religious jihad that we simply came to label terrorism. I was landscaping in Beverly Massachusetts, wheelbarrowing mulch up a steep incline of grass, not sure what the scale of the attack was going to be. None of us did. “Aloha, whatcha drinking? You ready to order love?” I look up to Jenny leaning towards me. I decide not to ask her what she was doing 25 years ago.
She does utilize a heavy hand on the drink and fills a delightful tiki man goblet complete with an elaborate garnish. I contemplate taking one of these 3D printed cups home as a souvenir, but decide against it in the end with a deciding flip of a coin.
Looking around, the collection of spaces makes the crowd seem thin. As I would find elsewhere, these establishments are a heavy mix of catering to tourists and locals alike. Part of dining out is just island culture, Jenny explains. She tells me that 90 percent of all food is imported to the Hawaiian islands. Local farmers markets could really lighten the purse with this type of supply and demand I joke. Jenny shows me a crinkled face where a smile was anticipated to be as she hurries on to the patrons at the bars end. Jenny sports a slightly frazzled disposition of burnout and attention deficit disorder that is worn like an old flipflop. When she speaks, it is fringed with an exacerbation of a mind which is relentlessly shadowboxing with itself behind the scenes. Suddenly she is wearing sunglasses with seashells glued to the perimeter and tells me this is her get rich scheme; “sea glasses”. An inspired name I assure her. She reminds me of the shell artist bar tender from the legend of old Gregg who also likes to put shells on things. Perhaps I should order a Bailey’s in a boot? I’m not gonna risk the reference, and a sip from the open head of my goblet tells me I’m already set up.
As my chopsticks move fish around their crumbling mountain of white rice and onion, I try to imagine such a food vulnerability. The chickens! But there are feral chickens everywhere, bred from birds brought by the Polynesians who bred with modernly imported farm chickens and fighting roosters (liberated by the hurricane gods’ smiting of coops). I ask her about eating those. You may as well chew on lava stones she tells me. Probably only to be eaten as a last resort if a tariff, storm, or labor god halts import, I jest. This is strike two of failed humor, probably too close to just reporting facts to be funny. Like someone “joking” about LA parking garages charging more than double the federal minimum wage an hour. Hilarious. The drink is so strong only a jonesing alcoholic could enjoy it. I’m content to commit a party foul and leave half of it behind. The credit card machine is out, which somehow feels right. It already feels like going back in time here on the island, so watching the paper imprint being taken of my card fits right in. “Mahalo!” The bottom of the paper receipt reads. I dig in my pockets for some cash to leave for a tip, reserving my lucky dime for fun filled flips at the next destination.
What is the best part of a jigsaw puzzle? Is it the completion of the border where an early sense of completion sneaks in despite the bulk of work to be done? Is it finding the long sought after piece that completes the row boat, the lion face, or the spaceship? Or is it that final piece as it clicks into place? By the time I get to that last piece, it normally relieves the end of an obligation the project has become. And then the feeling of “now what”. Im not gonna mod-podge this thing and frame it, though the option is always considered. Generally, I let it sit out for a few days before breaking it down for storage. I try to enjoy the peace that accompanies a full puzzle without any missing pieces. In contrast with a terrible memory which formed one of my life rules: don’t ever buy second hand puzzles. My 50 state puzzle is complete, thank you Hawaii; the final piece in the hodgepodge picture of America depicting an emperor with no clothes and lady liberty bound and gagged in the back of a lifted Cyber truck.
Uncharted Dives 