in closing

wedding season:::

...

moloka'i picturewise

the story of bobby iao

a catalogue of events:::

6:00 am:  wake up in the Banana Bungalow Hostel, head reeling from last night's pursuit.  brandi and i set out from the farm to find the greenest beer on maui.  she's part irish.  i'd never had a green beer.  we found some and through a series of delightful events and quaint bus rides, we made it to Wailuku just as it was getting dark and rainy.  hostels are the most wonderful places in the world to observe people.  bar none.  these international loci of ragtag transients.  

6:30: get up feeling like i need to puke or poop or find a new head or something.  go to the bathroom and give awkwardly boisterous good mornings to the people brushing their teeth.  walk across the street and buy a bottle of water.  return to the room.  brandi's up.  we decide to go find some breakfast.  

breakfast:  eat a bran muffin.

8:00: check out of the hostel. decide to walk the three miles to Iao Valley Park.  Wailuku is a strange little town.  it reminds me a lot of Zanesville, which is kind of strange because i've only been in Zanesville once or twice, but Wailuku had a lot of three-story, white buildings lining the roads that either seemed to be completely deserted or some kind of strange office buildings.  Wailuku is the county seat.  so as you get closer to the central crossroads, the office buildings get whiter and there's more flags flying.  it's a strange feeling town.  brandi and i get along in such a way that we laugh almost constantly, and strange feeling towns are particularly well suited for this. 

walking along the road: the West Maui Mountains are strikingly sheer and sharp, so that they look like you could just walk right up to them, stand on flat ground and stare straight up the clean green faces of the peaks.  we walk about a mile before this guy in an old white truck stops to see if we need a ride.  he says his name is bobby and that the valley is a very spiritual place.

at the park:  bobby says he'll show us the good hike.  says we'll get wet.  brandi and i are wearing the same clothes as the night before.  tennis shoes.  sandals.  this park is another drive up and look around type.  tourists everywhere.  they all walk up a flight of stairs to look at the needle (the peak in the picture).  we do too.  then we head down and into the woods.  we reach the point where bobby says, "that's the paved trail but this is the real hike over here."  and we set off into the woods following the river, tall green peaks and the morning sun shining overhead.  

to be continued...

i need to hit the road to moloka'i and i'm leaving my computer here.  i would have liked to have gotten all this typed out nice but i'll have to finish it quick here.

...so we swam in this river with this guy we'd never met.  and i was slightly wary because of my previous encounter with local guys and the way they'd kicked me in the face.  but we followed bobby into the middle of the woods and all jumped in the river and screamed and hooted and had a good time.  he drove us to his house afterwards and gave us a hearty breakfast of cheerios and sunchips and peanut butter sandwiches.  he's a recovered crackhead.  we had wonderful conversations.  he is very happy to be alive.  he works at a verizon kiosk at the mall and positively loves it.  after hanging out at his house and talking about everything from god to charlie kaufman movies, bobby drove us to the mall.  he's a professional mallrat and thrilled to be so.  he was also, the whole day, always picking up bits of trash.  he said that his purpose is to help people.  but he wasn't preachy or pious in any way.  one of the most refreshing and hopeful people i've ever met.  i wish i had more time to type about him but i need to eat lunch and get on the road.  

to moloka'i!

cool documentary

"holden what did you get your ideas from?"

"i got my ideas from words and from groundhogs and and from rockets and from robots?"

"what about from scissors?"

"and from scissors."

....

this is a quote from the movie We Are Wizards.  its about harry potter fan culture.  you can watch it on hulu and i recommend it.  the quote is of a four year old.  with prompting from his seven year old brother.

narrate your own life

yes!  everyone just posted on their blogs.  jake, phil, rachel.  i haven't read them yet.  because i was so excited to see them there that i felt like writing something.  i can't tell you how wonderful it's been for me to read the stuff that you guys post.  and that goes to all of the blogs that i read, but its particularly delightful with the people i know.  

ok so here's some commentary on something:

one time, sitting around a campfire with some friends who were not close friends someone brought up what i have since come to think of as "jesus christ syndrome."

i read this article once about this sociological phenomenon where people think that they are christ.  and they become obsessed with writing down all of their thoughts.  and so they write obsessively and believe that their thoughts are vitally important and will be remembered by history.  they think that they are going to save humanity.

something to that effect.  it was years ago so i'm no doubt exaggerating the details that made the strongest impression on me, but thats the gist.  i remember sitting there, looking at the fire, thinking 

"that's kind of how i think about myself.  don't say anything or they'll think you're crazy."

beyond my own identification with this archetype, it seems that every bit of useful knowledge that has been preserved into the present was produced and recorded by someone who could fall into this profile.  it's a sloppy connection of symbols to lived experience.  

in all fairness this was only a passing comment in a conversation and maybe its unfit to hold it up and comment on it.  but, i've thought about it several times and so now that it has become my own mental object, i feel it's fair game.

the bothersome question:  why does the desire to record one's thoughts get connected to a notion of a delusional, arrogant, bloated sense of self?

it seems that one of the main traits that makes humans distinct from all other life is the capacity to record and transmit the accumulation of knowledge.  we communicate with a lexicon of concepts that is ever expanding, and the articulation of which can be stunningly complex and beautiful.  but what's more shocking than our ability to make sense out of the vast symbolic systems that we encounter in bunches and with every second of our live, we can become aware of it.  

so if we came into this world members of a species that trained us to articulate the world around us in reference to a historically preserved lexicon of concepts, then we ought to take our powers of articulation seriously.  and if we are going to become more aware, or more fully functioning human beings, then we ought to articulate the structure of power that provides us with the particular ways that we think about the world.  

the full articulation of hegemony is a collective effort.  think of it like constructing some kind of massive monument by individual people adding one thing on top of whatever the last person brought.  it would be a myriad collage of things.  toothbrushes and computers and matchbox cars.  but if the intent was to build a monument and people kept adding things then eventually you would have some kind of structure that everyone could stand back and look at and try to figure out what it is.  is it beautiful?  ugly?  how does it work? what is it made out of?

and so i believe this is a profound instinct/gift of being human.  we can articulate and reflect.  it's a shame that our ability to does not usually translate into our compulsion to.  and i don't mean it's a shame like not being able to make it to a friend's birthday party.  i mean it's shameful.  it ought to haunt us that all human beings do not have equal access and do not feel equally empowered to represent their minds, to articulate their own humanness.  how sad that we (i) so often abuse the miraculous relationship between the way we feel and the way we feel about the way we feel.  

as far as we know, we are the only life form that can think, i want to eat ice cream.  then feel ashamed.  be emotionally, chemically, physiologically altered by nothing more than momentum of a thought.  then think, shame on me for thinking that.  and then we feel ashamed about feeling ashamed.  we could also feel spiteful about being ashamed or vindictive or self-loathsome.  the point is, when we consciously transcribe our thoughts into the objective world (write, draw, sing, garden, orate, or otherwise articulate our minds into an objective form), this allows us to take control of the way that we feel.  it gives us the space to view it.  and in this space we can question why we feel certain ways about certain feelings.  so in this it seems there is hope of gaining some perspective on the symbolic systems that we are suspended in. 

now, if we, a people, a species are to discover a way to transcend the destructive tendency of human history, we first need to articulate human history in an unprecedentedly holistic and vigorous collectivity.  we need every voice to join the din of collective consciousness.  we need everyone to drop something on the monument.  the sacred reality of information technology is that we now have the highest potential of accomplishing this than we have had at any previous point in our history.  

and know one knows what will happen, no more than you could know what it would look like if a hundred people brought a hundred random things and piled them in a field.  but one thing is for certain, it will give us something to look at.  when every human being has the means to articulate the history of their own thoughts, we will finally have a conceptual lexicon powerful enough to understand the structure of the power that keeps us locked in the cycle of fear and suffering and unkindness.  

this is how we trump the hegemonic oppression that would have us to be timid, to be less than we feel we want to be.  

its a big group effort but its starts feeling good right away.  

the bridge between poetry and ethnography

the common struggle or pursuit to find the finest moments of life and transcribe them.  how do you distill life into a pattern on a page?  

poetry, ethnography, different answers to the same question.

and there's just a bunch of room to discuss what's fine and the x's and o's of writing it all down.

short things / dylan lyrics

walking sideways along the highway

just outside town, i 

stick my thumb out at a broken old ford

and it slows down without a word.

...

farewell angelina, the bells of the crown

are being stolen by bandits, i must follow the sound

the triangle tingles, the music plays slow

but farewell angelina, the sky is on fire and i must go.

...

it would be better to turn into sea foam than a jar of mayonaise.  

...

the jacks and the queens have forsook the courtyard

and 52 gypsies file past the guard

in the space where the deuce and the ace once ran wild

farewell angelina, the sky it is folding, and i'll see you in a while

...

i do not enjoy cake, so you can have mine.

yes, yes, of course you can eat it.

...

king kong little elves on the rooftops they dance

valentino-type tangos while the heros wash hands

close the eyes of the dead, not to embarrass anyone

but farewell angelina, the sky it is changing and i must be gone

...

it's very hard to write quick whimsy like i did a few weeks ago.  i miss it.  it seems this getting my life figured out really cuts into my whimsical word count.  so i'll just supplement my own whimsy with some dylan.  that's what i've been doing for years.  when my own sardonic charm starts wearing thin i try to tap into his.   long periods of my life have consisted of disguising dylan lyrics as conversation.  

now, emerson said that books are to be used by the scholar during the times when she cannot be inspired directly by nature.  the record of inspiration past can be used to fill such voids.

so substitute dylan for books and me for her and thats how i get by.  

and if you've never heard farewell angelina,  google it forthwith.  it seems joan baez probably used to perform in more than dylan.  it's delightful.  when we were hiking through the crater i could not get the line 

king kong little elves, on the rooftops they dance

out of my head.