alighting the parallel

wednesday night, m noticed the halo around the moon. we were about two blocks from where i first lived when i moved to seattle in 2002... i never would have thought that nearly 8 years later, i'd be trying to take a picture of the sky from that street. some things just never occur to me as possibilities.

the halo didn't show up, really. i haven't the equipment to capture aureolae.
tonight, 29 jan, is the first moon of the new year, which is apparently called the "wolf moon." today is also its closest orbit to the earth, otherwise known as its perigee. i have learned so much from being able to sloth around my lair in my knickers, sweatily manhandling my iphone!
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today is grey. this week's medication hit me hard. my whole body hurt and i awoke feeling both sweaty and clammy- a disgusting combination. actually, clammy is always gross. even the word is vile- it sounds like what it is. i walked around seattle center, intending to see where they've torn down most of the rides, but i decided that this would break my heart, so i wandered around the fountain instead. two boys were running through the spray in t-shirts. a lone man played guitar on a bench.

this pleases me. in the summer these trees shade the entire street.
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i didn't really show too many hawai'i pictures... realized this whilst scanning through today's far less attractive photographs. who wants to see mundane photographs from a sunnier, albeit grouchier era? fuck, it seems like months ago. i'm okay with that.
this is the drunk guy from the first night, the soon-to-be lovemakah. he was trashed. his name was johnny, i think. this was at the first bar we could find... "nashville waikiki." it was actually pretty cool, mostly because it wasn't playing country music. two young things with much hair product were dancing to the eurythmics instead.

the first day at the hostel... bad placement of head in relation to mural.

this was abandoned. i love finding shit like this.

another market in chinatown.

one of the hotel-spelunking elevators. "ooh, infinity!" i remember saying, waving my arm. d is in the background, detached.

you could find a HUGE VALUABLE pearl! only $14.95!

fuck, meerkats are adorable. alas, the little bastard wouldn't turn around.

there is something quite sad about taking one's self-portrait in honolulu. i wanted proof of being in the lovely room i got to enjoy for the last two days.

an artifact of the 'real' honolulu.

i am currently at one of my favorite cafes:

outside the window the sky is dark and rain drips from awnings. and if i look straight ahead, i catch a glimpse of my distorted reflection in a metal toaster. the music is really good. the mate chai is delicious also. this, right this moment, is my tiny slice of the world.

what can you probably only find in seattle? A GLOW CHAMBER.

these little nuggets tend to seduce me.
today, for example: i got rid of the VW golf. i was only 659 miles shy of seeing the odometer hit 200K, but she wouldn't have lasted that long on my watch. the donation folks came by, jump-started her, and drove her off while i studiously avoided the front window.
trampoline. buddy holly. sunshine. a random bus to a random cafe. somehow i ended up completely across town.

I drove sweet green back home today. Patrick installed a new battery for me; his neighbor (in the midst of renovating his glass-blowing studio) used his compressor to fill my front tire, and I filled her with 10.3 gallons of petrol. I inserted a beach boys cd and listened to "sloop John b" as we rattled merrily across the aurora bridge. she has insurance and current tabs. I replaced the "make levees not war" sticker in the back window. it is a singular thrill to turn an engine off and know it'll start back up again, a novelty the golf has failed to provide for the last 6 months. by the time I parked her outside my lair my sweater reeked of gasoline and hot engine fumes. I am sure the neighbors are muttering a collective "oh shit, it's back." I kissed the steering wheel before I closed the door.
freedom is a very seductive thing.

I am in the Honolulu airport, very ready to leave. this voyage has redefined my paranoia that shit, maybe it really is me... even though I see other people behaving badly. even if I don't respect the person, I respect the situation.... it ultimately sucked for me, and I feel terrible that my actions may have caused it to suck for them also. it is very difficult to imagine myself impacting anything around me in a long-lasting manner; I ripple, annoy, and vanish. this mindset allows me to behave much more obnoxiously than I might if I actually thought I mattered to anyone. that sounds pathetic when I reread it, but I'm being honest.
on thé bus here i listened to "another Green world" and tried not to cry.

over halfway

...i really am thinking of this voyage in such a manner, almost as an exercise in endurance.
there are, of course, many nice things.
this is from the first day, before i lobstered myself... how halcyon three days ago felt!

today we went to the zoo; it's pretty much across the street from the hostel. it's one of the top 3 in the united states, per multiple placards, and it was pretty awesome. hotter than fuck, and d is one of those people who stands in the background rather than approaching or interacting with anything, but it was worth twelve dollars.

the signs are very respectful of the animals.

it was d's decision to take my picture with the goat. i like goats. they have fun pupils.

i really enjoy this building; i think it's a hotel. it has that air of "let's make the most ingenious, NOW structure we can, circa 1958" quality about it. it belongs on a postcard with scalloped edges, advertising the "tiki steakhouse" and "color television in every room" on the back.

amid all the hellacious floral and disposable dreck of hawai'i proper, one can enhance one's lifestyle.

these fuckers are everywhere. ah, l'america... it's all the same, ocean be damned.

103am: i am currently laying on my nasty hostel cot, sunburn throbbing, listening to d try to exhale a lung through his nostril. i miss the rain. we promised each other to snorkel tomorrow. hopefully i won't menstruate into the ocean and get attacked by a shark.

komoniwanna

i started today residually pissed from the night before. i left d sprawled in the room, sleeping (he told me later that he spent part of the night, after i returned to the room and he left, sleeping at the beach and hanging out at denny's, where he was propositioned by a midget prostitute- which i would not have believed if i hadn't seen her already myself) and started to walk. once one exits the plasticity of waikiki, honolulu becomes an actual city with its layers of quirk and filth. i would still never live here, but i appreciate it more.

i walked north for a long while, trying to find a diner i'd seen from the bus the day before. there was no diner to be found. there were very few places to eat in general; i ended up in an odd area of official buildings and acres of manicured flora and the occasional gas station. i walked to the actual downtown of honolulu, which reminds me, oddly, of downtown fairbanks: low-slung buildings with overhanging signs advertizing shops like "pat's teriyaki" and "fashion cabinet." groups of men malingered out front, smoking and looking slovenly. the corporate end of downtown was aflutter with pairs of women carrying bags from ross and long's drugs. (long's drugs! that's where i used to shoplift before they went out of business in alaska and, i thought, everywhere!) store windows contained creepily outdated garb: orange sequin-trimmed prom dresses, dusty vases, fake flowers. they actually sell fake flowers in hawai'i.
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on the other side of downtown is chinatown, the most authentic one i've ever been to in the sense that 1. i was the only white person, apart from an older couple, that i saw in its 6-block radius (i am often the only white person in any outside-of-waikiki setting. yesterday d and i were on a packed accordion bus and afterwards compared notes. "i saw two others" i said. "no, there was another guy up front" he replied. it's a new enough experience that i notice it. i am ashamed of my insulation.) 2. no one spoke english above the basic fundamentals. 3. products like this, which i have no idea how to comprehend. i think the definition is what throws me off; i imagine "cake" as "something with fairly defined edges."

the hawai'i capitol building is a marvel of bombast. i saw it from afar yesterday before i knew what it was.

this was tonight's sunset from a park north of waikiki that i do not currently recall the name of. the sand was pure white. no seagulls, no insects.

d and i met up later and behaved nicely towards one another. he calls it "hotel spelunking"- strolling into the nice places (of which there are many) to see what the accessibility of their spa amenities are. this is how i have now seen honolulu from the 31st floor of the sheraton and enjoyed a ($7.56!) gin and tonic from their oceanside, tiki torch-lit lanai. there is another lovely place a few blocks from the place we're staying (about 5 hostels are crammed along our block of lemon street- all that's missing is a locking gate at either end) with a pool that he "thinks we could totally get into." i smiled noncommittally.
d is sleeping/snoring in the room; i am back on the stairwell where the internet actually connects. to his credit, he stopped at the drugstore and bought breathe-rite strips and some fucking anti-snore pills, neither of which help at all. (he is too busy snoring to know this yet.)
the idea of being on vacation is finally starting to kick in. i feel mellow. happy. then again, there may be things other than hawai'i contributing to that.

vowels

today was my first full day in honolulu. i am writing this on the stairwell of the hostel, at 120am HST, exiled from the room i am sharing with d so that he can sleep. he snores like i have never heard anyone snore before; it's louder and more disturbing than the garbage truck that idled under the window at 7am. it's a phlegmy, evil sound that he emits even when laying on his chest. the four people in the next room doubtless had trouble sleeping also. my own fucking insomnia, related this time to our residual tension and dread from last week as well as his horrible noise, has allowed me 6 hours of sleep since 9am sunday. i feel exhausted but not tired. but the trip has been an emotional drain thus far. d and i have been sniping at each other a lot. there were many times today when the thought "i don't even like you as a human" crossed my mind. so these photos shall remind me that there was much fantasticness gleaned from today as well... my bitchiness-calibrator.
these trees are everywhere. they are huge, about 50' tall, and the strandy branch-things hang to and sometimes root underground.

i do believe i am the palest person in oahu.

honolulu is embarrassingly picturesque. "what came first, the skyline or the strategically placed palms?" i asked d. as usual, he merely grunted. or perhaps i am less hilarious than i think i am.

i don't really like this town overall, though. waikiki is a fucking shithole, in the way that downtown is nothing but high-rise hotels and sprawling malls and cacophonic gift-shop-including chain restaurants and thumping dance music and cheesy plastic shit and people handing out flyers for the indoor shooting range.
however, the people here, the locals, are amazing... uniformly gregarious, friendly, enthusiastic about their home. the only rude folks i've encountered are the aforementioned tourists... a universal lament.
from the past 24hrs:
-a man fanning warm air from the bus exhaust vent as it pulled away from the curb.
-elderly asian women in orthopedic sandals and ankle socks.
-a group of stoners playing backgammon.
-being bitten by a cockatoo and bleeding for the next five minutes.
-a blue crab scuttling along the outside of the bulkhead at the beach.
-getting splashed by a wave as i was standing in the water and exclaiming, before realizing i was within earshot of several preteen boys, "ooh! that went all up in my business!"
-taking a random bus tonight, by myself, and listening to neil young, then bobby hebb, then gogol bordello. the lights inside the bus make people look dead.
-cigarette butts littering the adjacent rooftop.
-johnny, a falling-down drunk who'll be "fifty next year, bra!", telling about how he's going to make love to his woman for the first time on valentine's day.
-every clerk i've encountered greeting people with "aloha."
-learning about the haitian earthquake from fucking facebook.
-video-screen trivia at an irish pub. other patrons chain-smoked under the "no smoking" signs.
-humidity but no dew.
the climate is stunning. it was about 80 today, cloudless, no breeze. i would get incredibly fucking bored if i had to be in it all the time, but after three months of the seattle sky vomiting its misery down the back of my neck, it's a very pleasant change.


i am that girl.
now i must try to sleep. mind first, then body.

Karma. It burns.

This trip is going to be a clusterfuck. D doesn't even know where honolulu is; he thought we were going to Maui "'cause that's in Hawaii, right?" I do not want to share a room with him. It'll be fine; we will both have a good time regardless. I'm just feeling bitchy and disgusted right now. What a spoiled fucking brat I am- and I'm the only one who is paying my own fucking way.

Everything is fucked. I traded insane attraction and a bruised ego for something much more pathetic: a friendship tainted by intimacy I am repelled by.
I feel amoral and used and very fucking stupid.
The iPhone does not autocorrect the word "fuck."

from there to here

d has a charming habit of using props to describe damn near everything. a massage technique will be symbolized with sugar packets. if he's giving you directions, a fork will become the road, the salt shaker a house. he will include as many details as there are accoutrements at his disposal. last week, over a plate of particularly delicious fries, he demonstrated the tenets of calculus for me at the deluxe.

new years day 2010. i read an entire book (short stories about the futility of modern male life- it's called "trouble" and i forget the author, but it's mostly quite good) and blared nancy sinatra. she was part of a mix tape that i will never give to the person i made it for. 'tis a pity. it's a really good tape.

the sidewalk was most likely referring to something a titch more carnal, but it eloquently describes how i've felt about things lately.

it's a beautifully grey day. i walked to fremont in the wind. there is a mellow smugness that comes from being utterly un-hungover on new year's day. marvin gaye has replaced the bee gees. my keyboard is covered with glitter.
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i wish i could fall in love with the people who deserve it.