Saturday, May 26, 2012
Friday, May 25, 2012
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Monday, May 21, 2012
Sunday, May 20, 2012
The worst part of returning to Hawaii is being reminded of the types of people who visit this place. One is inclined to sympathy, on these occasions, for the retreat of the rich into their enclaves. A few days on island can make a person secretly desperate for a world where the phrase "flyover state" is quite literal, where airlines do in fact deny the masses of the great intra-coastal cultural wastelands the opportunity to mingle here.
Part of the problem is the inevitable fish-out-of-water effect. People vacationing here, almost per se, come from someplace very unlike this place. So there is a certain amount of forgivable awkwardness that comes with the territory. But there's also plenty of unforgiveable tastelessness on display. You will see people who appear as though one of the highlights of their trip will be picking up a "Harley Davidson: Kona" T-shirt from the dealership in town. You see couples for whom wearing matching shirts may be done without a hint of irony.
We've had good ahi poke, rice and edamame for lunch on each of the last three days. On the front of the poke shop there's a sign publicizing the loss of a pet tortoise and urging its safe return and it is hard not to notice the date that is eight months old and start calculating some pretty bleak odds.
It's now easier to find imported coconut water in a carton here than it is to find someone selling fresh coconuts.
When you drive through the highlands of the Big Island there is an abundance of coffee plantations and abandoned storefronts. There is a former movie theater made of corrugated iron. There are newer coffee shops trying to appear youth-oriented.
After driving down from the hills you might come to a parking lot that feeds off to both a Hawaiian cultural site (the Place of Refuge) and a monument on the place where Captain Cook was killed. Both feel sort of ersatz and obligatory, but the snorkeling in front of them is genuinely good despite being so accessible. The giant coral heads are in good shape and fishes like yellow tang swarm and change directions in unison, birdlike.
On Friday night it rains hard. All the dry surfaces feel sticky and it silences the songbirds. Saturday morning is sunny and windless and we go to Kua beach. Saturday night B & E get married in what is as genuine and simple a ceremony as I have ever witnessed. Afterward we drive to the Four Seasons and celebrate with a memorable dinner of steak, lobster and crab, with plenty of Moet, a hundred feet from the sea.
The surf has been defiantly flat for our entire stay. The bodyboarders alone enjoy the tiny swell that breaks only over the shallowest reefs. By Sunday morning I find myself sitting by the road near our rented Jeep, alone, watching for any sign of building swell and occasionally taking a video on my iPhone, as if to have evidence that I am not imagining the stillness of the ocean. Driving back to the house, I notice that even the lifeguards have let their attention wander and are looking toward the mountains.
Part of the problem is the inevitable fish-out-of-water effect. People vacationing here, almost per se, come from someplace very unlike this place. So there is a certain amount of forgivable awkwardness that comes with the territory. But there's also plenty of unforgiveable tastelessness on display. You will see people who appear as though one of the highlights of their trip will be picking up a "Harley Davidson: Kona" T-shirt from the dealership in town. You see couples for whom wearing matching shirts may be done without a hint of irony.
We've had good ahi poke, rice and edamame for lunch on each of the last three days. On the front of the poke shop there's a sign publicizing the loss of a pet tortoise and urging its safe return and it is hard not to notice the date that is eight months old and start calculating some pretty bleak odds.
It's now easier to find imported coconut water in a carton here than it is to find someone selling fresh coconuts.
When you drive through the highlands of the Big Island there is an abundance of coffee plantations and abandoned storefronts. There is a former movie theater made of corrugated iron. There are newer coffee shops trying to appear youth-oriented.
After driving down from the hills you might come to a parking lot that feeds off to both a Hawaiian cultural site (the Place of Refuge) and a monument on the place where Captain Cook was killed. Both feel sort of ersatz and obligatory, but the snorkeling in front of them is genuinely good despite being so accessible. The giant coral heads are in good shape and fishes like yellow tang swarm and change directions in unison, birdlike.
On Friday night it rains hard. All the dry surfaces feel sticky and it silences the songbirds. Saturday morning is sunny and windless and we go to Kua beach. Saturday night B & E get married in what is as genuine and simple a ceremony as I have ever witnessed. Afterward we drive to the Four Seasons and celebrate with a memorable dinner of steak, lobster and crab, with plenty of Moet, a hundred feet from the sea.
The surf has been defiantly flat for our entire stay. The bodyboarders alone enjoy the tiny swell that breaks only over the shallowest reefs. By Sunday morning I find myself sitting by the road near our rented Jeep, alone, watching for any sign of building swell and occasionally taking a video on my iPhone, as if to have evidence that I am not imagining the stillness of the ocean. Driving back to the house, I notice that even the lifeguards have let their attention wander and are looking toward the mountains.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Friday, May 18, 2012
Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.
- Joan Didion, writing from Death Valley, 1965
- Joan Didion, writing from Death Valley, 1965
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Kona
Southwest Hawai’i is rugged; subtly martian.
I have seen a lot of docile and vaguely contented people over 60. I have seen a middle-aged man and woman sit across from each other at a table by the water and sip drinks expressionless, both wearing baseball caps, his saying “Bridgestone Racing.” I have been chased by a sea turtle. I have seen an anthropologically significant sampling of the possible variations on the florid-short-sleeved shirt-and-khaki-shorts motif. I have learned, through direct observation, that skin-embedded sea urchin spines can be dissolved intradermis by application of vinegar.
On day two, I have the realization that people who grow up here without traveling to the mainland probably get a skewed view of mainlanders based on the types who show up here most often. Strangely, even after having gone to school and lived in the islands, I’ve never thought of this until now.
In the pool in front of the house you can snorkle. It gets to be five feet in the deepest places when the tide is in. The difference between high and low tide today is roughly 2 feet. The surf is all-but flat, but today is reported to be the peak of the current SSW swell, so I will give it a go.
A local father takes his daughter out into the tide pool at midday and a sea turtle approaches and the father encourages her to wave at it, anthropomorphizing the animal the way parents, animators and savvy zoologists are prone to do. It does in fact raise its head - insignificantly - above water to look at them. Out on the edge of the tide pool a soft and broad and brown man with bright Aloha-print shorts tosses a weighted net into the shallows, and I conceive for a moment that raising children here seems somehow especially worthwhile. This is a way of life that is actually rare and threatened, regardless of its merits. And I know this way of thinking is patronizing and maybe reductive, but it's a genuine impulse.
Any time of the night, when you wake up on the second floor, you can hear the surf breaking, through the screens of the open doors.
The house is a proper Hawaiian one, meaning it uses sea air for A/C and has plenty of bugs. I lay havoc upon the cockroaches with my right-footed Local-brand slipper (slee-pah). The curve of the right-footed one fits easily against the thumb and deals swift rubber pops of death to unwanted insects. It seems barbaric even as I am doing it, but I take solace in the fact their dry husks seem to turn up dead of natural causes with at least as great a regularity as those who die at my thong.
The islands remain my favorite vacation spot.
I have seen a lot of docile and vaguely contented people over 60. I have seen a middle-aged man and woman sit across from each other at a table by the water and sip drinks expressionless, both wearing baseball caps, his saying “Bridgestone Racing.” I have been chased by a sea turtle. I have seen an anthropologically significant sampling of the possible variations on the florid-short-sleeved shirt-and-khaki-shorts motif. I have learned, through direct observation, that skin-embedded sea urchin spines can be dissolved intradermis by application of vinegar.
On day two, I have the realization that people who grow up here without traveling to the mainland probably get a skewed view of mainlanders based on the types who show up here most often. Strangely, even after having gone to school and lived in the islands, I’ve never thought of this until now.
In the pool in front of the house you can snorkle. It gets to be five feet in the deepest places when the tide is in. The difference between high and low tide today is roughly 2 feet. The surf is all-but flat, but today is reported to be the peak of the current SSW swell, so I will give it a go.
A local father takes his daughter out into the tide pool at midday and a sea turtle approaches and the father encourages her to wave at it, anthropomorphizing the animal the way parents, animators and savvy zoologists are prone to do. It does in fact raise its head - insignificantly - above water to look at them. Out on the edge of the tide pool a soft and broad and brown man with bright Aloha-print shorts tosses a weighted net into the shallows, and I conceive for a moment that raising children here seems somehow especially worthwhile. This is a way of life that is actually rare and threatened, regardless of its merits. And I know this way of thinking is patronizing and maybe reductive, but it's a genuine impulse.
Any time of the night, when you wake up on the second floor, you can hear the surf breaking, through the screens of the open doors.
The house is a proper Hawaiian one, meaning it uses sea air for A/C and has plenty of bugs. I lay havoc upon the cockroaches with my right-footed Local-brand slipper (slee-pah). The curve of the right-footed one fits easily against the thumb and deals swift rubber pops of death to unwanted insects. It seems barbaric even as I am doing it, but I take solace in the fact their dry husks seem to turn up dead of natural causes with at least as great a regularity as those who die at my thong.
The islands remain my favorite vacation spot.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Inventory
For those following our quixotic search for a new home and for those who just love graphs, below are bar graphs of the housing inventories in April for the past few years and the sales in April for those same years. Given that these include single family and all of King County (read: a bunch of overbuilt suburban plats), these already-bad graph are actually too rosy if you are talking about the condominium market in Seattle. Blurgh.
Monday, May 7, 2012
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Friday, May 4, 2012
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Werner Herzog's Note to His Cleaning Lady (By Dale Shaw)
Rosalina. Woman.
You constantly revile me with your singular lack of vision. Be aware, there is an essential truth and beauty in all things. From the death throes of a speared gazelle to the damaged smile of a freeway homeless. But that does not mean that the invisibility of something implies its lack of being. Though simpleton babies foolishly believe the person before them vanishes when they cover their eyes during a hateful game of peek-a-boo, this is a fallacy. And so it is that the unseen dusty build up that accumulates behind the DVD shelves in the rumpus room exists also. This is unacceptable.
I will tell you this Rosalina, not as a taunt or a threat but as an evocation of joy. The joy of nothingness, the joy of the real. I want you to be real in everything you do. If you cannot be real, then a semblance of reality must be maintained. A real semblance of the fake real, or “real”. I have conquered volcanoes and visited the bitter depths of the earth’s oceans. Nothing I have witnessed, from lava to crustacean, assailed me liked the caked debris haunting that small plastic soap hammock in the smaller of the bathrooms. Nausea is not a sufficient word. In this regard, you are not being real.
Now we must turn to the horrors of nature. I am afraid this is inevitable. Nature is not something to be coddled and accepted and held to your bosom like a wounded snake. Tell me, what was there before you were born? What do you remember? That is nature. Nature is a void. An emptiness. A vacuum. And speaking of vacuum, I am not sure you’re using the retractable nozzle correctly or applying the ‘full weft’ setting when attending to the lush carpets of the den. I found some dander there.
I have only listened to two songs in my entire life. One was an aria by Wagner that I played compulsively from the ages of 19 to 27 at least 60 times a day until the local townsfolk drove me from my dwelling using rudimentary pitchforks and blazing torches. The other was Dido. Both appalled me to the point of paralysis. Every quaver was like a brickbat against my soul. Music is futile and malicious. So please, if you require entertainment while organizing the recycling, refrain from the ‘pop radio’ I was affronted by recently. May I recommend the recitation of some sharp verse. Perhaps by Goethe. Or Schiller. Or Shel Silverstein at a push.
The situation regarding spoons remains unchanged. If I see one, I will kill it.
That is all. Do not fail to think that you are not the finest woman I have ever met. You are. And I am including on this list my mother and the wife of Brad Dourif (the second wife, not the one with the lip thing). Thank you for listening and sorry if parts of this note were smudged. I have been weeping.
Your money is under the guillotine.
Herzog.
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