Category: History

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Kahekili

Thunder is an emotion. I remember crying when I heard it. I never felt tough. I was never that guy. I was the one that had thoughts in my head. I was beat up by guys like you. I wasn’t fond of taking a slap.

But I guess you had to endure the pains life gave you. Gives you. Keeps giving. You may have asked for this. I didn’t ask for this. It just sort of happened.

I keep attention maybe two seconds at a time. It’s a blessing and a curse. Most likely a curse if you don’t like what I have to say. That doesn’t make me wrong.

Life is a mystery inside a riddle inside an absurdity. And we all know it. And we ignore it. You are a mess. I am a mess. And it’s such a mess when we push our mess together.

If you’d have asked me ten years ago, I would say I hate myself and want to die. Now people like that frustrate me. They make me sad in a way that I don’t like to be sad.

Words come easily. Words come like water. They flow. Sometimes they overwhelm me. They’re like a wave. They feel bigger than me. They are larger than life. But they’re just syllables. Just harmless vowels and consonants. They push together to make ideas. Ideas are what’s truly fucked. They make you think things. I’d prefer to have ice cream.

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Be here to love

Be here to love, otherwise everything is speculation. I’m not here to be angry, though given the right circumstance I can usually be counted on to be so. Old behavior is extrapolated into guesses about what will happen. Vague memories have a way of becoming hard truth. Everyone knows what happened, but everyone knows differently, passionately. There are no witnesses that have actually seen anything except what they’ve heard. Credibility is a measure more valuable than a credit score. It means more than the truth.

Nothing happens without an equal and opposite reaction. Lies beget lies. Sorrow makes thing sad. Revenge makes retaliation inevitable. I’m not interested in propagating any of that. I realize my choices might put me in the background for now. I’ve never stayed there before. Why would I?

What’s happening outside is not an ever after. Things will get worse before they get better. But things will change. It always has a way of coming around. See less

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You

You is a three-headed ghost from at least six different past lives. You is an empty canvas, therefore you is always full. You is the one. You is until something better comes along. You is an idea. You is an emotion. You is forever fleeting, therefore you is eternal. You is everyone. Therefore, you is no one. One of the cold comforts of a photographic memory, is that you can’t take away anything I have ever seen. And that is why you is always with me. I’ve seen you. Many sides of you. And I will have you until I see you again and forever after that. Even if I never see you again.

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Coyote ugly

“You un-friended me? That’s like a modern-day public pillorying.”
“Oh god, Kalani, you’re so dramatic. I had to cut you off. You kept posting weird shit on my wall. My family reads that you know?”
“I was just telling you that it’s probably not a good idea to friend your kids. Your 16-year-old doesn’t need to know what you look like dancing on the bar at Coyote Ugly.”
“Well, if it makes you feel better, I deactivated my account completely.”
“It actually does. Singling out one person out of 3 billion users is quite a statement, don’t you think? At least now I blend in with the rest of the planet.”
“I wanted my privacy back. And I felt like I had to respond to everyone who contacted me. I don’t need that. I actually feel free.”
“Hippie.”

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The ledge

I remember talking you down from there once or twice. That might be the difference between you and me. You came down.

I’m not quite sure if I enjoy the sweaty-palm excitement of maybe almost falling. More likely, the culprit is complacency. A person can get used to almost anything. And after this much time, one might wonder if I didn’t prefer the heights.

It sure does seem a long way down, though.

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The calculus of fidelity

So it happened on one of those days when we weren’t really together. Nowadays, that was almost every day. And the calculus of our expected fidelity was never quite calculated anyway. But there was a new glint of something in the reflection of the sun on one of those days. That’s the point, I mean. It only happened because it was one of those days.

I had drinks with a Bumble or Hinge named Jolene, and the first thing I thought to myself was that she was nothing like the song. Nonetheless, when she spoke, I found myself enjoying listening to her. Maybe the Ray LaMontagne version. That might actually be the perfect allusion, though I always hate when writers I like make allusions to songs I’ve never heard. It is, in fact, how I learned about Nina Simone when I was 15, so there’s that. Always exceptions.

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Enough

Hard, heavy cathartic. Like everything it isn’t perfect. When you plane a board to make it smooth. Heavy music planes my jagged soul. My girlfriend can only hear noise. I hear angels trumpeting. Deflecting. Whispering. Ssshhh. They’re not shouting, “Do it.” They are under the breath saying, “Enough!”

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The end of things

I never knew anyone like her. She seemed a different person than she was. She said, “I’m sorry people think I’m pretty.” And she was pretty. But the beauty came with pain. She was abused. And even though she was massively intelligent, the majority only saw her face and her body. Which were incredible. But some of us looked deeper. I loved her, like I might never love again.

What a waste. What a tragedy this love was. Empty. Lost forever. Never to be recovered. She had stars in her eyes. But terror in her heart and weight in her feet. We were lost before we were found. We were at some party, and she didn’t say anything. And I knew it was the beginning of the ends of things.

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Fractals

When she looks up at me, she has this light in her eyes, both giddy and conspiratorial, like the look a friend would give you 30 minutes after you’ve both taken mescaline and the patterns on the carpet start turning into Aztec fractals.

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When you stop

I’ve never been stabbed. I assume it’s not fun. I accidentally cut my wrist once and exsanguiated and hallucinated and thought my ex-wife, the first person I had sex with, my mom, and her twin sister were ten feet from the foot of my bed and waiting to see me.

That night (that morning?) before the ambulance, the police were banging at my door and i answered and I kept repeating, “I didnʻt do anything.” “Your neighbor saw blood on the sidewalk.” He wrapped my arm in the welcome mat and spoke to the walkie talkie thing on his shoulder, said some numbers, and I fainted.

For the record, those plastic wrap non-handcuff handcuffs are remarkably effective. They don’t let you stand up for an entire 72-hour psych hold. Even when, especially when, you think you didn’t do anything. Say that out loud and see what happens.