So tired. So angry. So tired of being angry. This program exhausts me. The only thing I can say against it is that itʻs too much sometimes. When you preach to the choir, theyʻre listening already. Who is this for? Everyone in this class chose to be here. The way they say “white;” the anger is palpable. We needed a radical in 1993. It was so brave to say, ʻWe are not American. We will never be American. I am not an American.” I have hoahānau that served in the U.S. military. What do I do about that? I went home to Oʻahu last month and I bristled constantly. “Thatʻs not how you say that. Thereʻs a kahakō. That place is not Yokes. Itʻs Keawaʻula.” No oneʻs going to call it that. Part of me, when I watch this, makes the argument, “Sanskrit is dead. Latin is dead. Hawaiian is alive.” And if it is alive then Yokes gets to be a part of the conversation. Then I go to the palace. I walk those hallowed grounds so many times. I look out the window of that empty room where they kept her. Promulgate. I didnʻt even know that word. Iʻm getting angry again. Why didnʻt she listen to Charles Wilson? Arrest three men and take a gamble. I went to a gathering on Lā Kūʻokoʻa. What is ea? Ua huhū au nō. Kaumaha. So heavy. Sadness is correctly described in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi as heavy. I could write about thus until you say, “Stop!” Venezuela. Greenland. Ukraine. It’s all the same fucking day, man.
Ozzy
Here’s the secret about Ozzy and about life. He didn’t write the songs. Those are Ozzy songs. He wrote none. Iommi. Lemmy, So many lessons. The smallest of which is, if you care, youre not looking where you’re supposed to look. A lot of him was an affect. What did you expect? He came from nowhere, They gave him everything. Everything. He made it 79 years. I have nothing. Iʻm trying as hard as I can to see 60.
Broken
If you don’t understand, then you’ll never understand. Understanding feels good in fleeting moments. Understanding is a lie. Understanding is true only for a moment, then the balance returns to chaos. Scared, broken, and alone was familiar to him. Happiness and sugar and smiles were sinister in intent. Sweetness always had an agenda. He never trusted feeling well, he never liked it. Good, by definition, was precluded with, “But.”
Even before everything changed. Everything he did, he did silently. Without malice he acted dastardly. He was cunning. Always able to see the crevasses, he filled them with intent. And still he saw himself a victim. Of course, the universe was agnostic. It was an unending flow of water. Wishes mattered like sticks in a stream. Everything goes where the water goes. Choice is irrelevant. Fear and hope are the only things you have once the water comes. Fear usually wins. And he was afraid.
His fear was as nebulous as it was constant. It was provoked by the immediate and the eternal. He walked the world ready to pull away at a touch, but was simultaneously self-righteous.
Blink
I moved to Dallas from Venice Beach on this day 27 years ago. High on Adderall crushed into a Gatorade bottle, I drove alone with a U-Haul trailer hitched to my gold 1995 Saturn SL for 22 hours on Iʻs 10 and 20, with only a AAA map of the U.S. and a Thomas Guide for the Metroplex to guide me. There was no Google Maps. (I wouldn’t own my first cell phone for six months.) And just like many points in my life, I thought I knew much more than I actually did and was much more innocent than I felt myself to be. This was also the day I learned (the hard way) that I-35 splits and that I-35W goes through Fort Worth 25 miles before I-35E goes through Dallas, before reuniting north of both. Turning too early I spent the morning in Keller before a police officer pointed me toward the correct city. In hindsight, that drug-addled, blind, solo escape from Los Angeles is a perfect metaphor for my life at the time. And things were still to get much worse. Don’t get me wrong it was beautiful too. Beautiful and terrible and strange.
They tell you life goes by fast when you’re young and you don’t believe it until it actually happens. The blink of an eye. Twenty-seven years.
Lā Kūʻokoʻa
Today, November 28, is the day that the independence of the Hawaiian Kingdom is “celebrated.” I vacillate about how I feel about this. My natural tendency is to be skeptical about arbitrary (i.e., man-made) constructs of “nation,” or even “independence” as it is used in this context. Independent from exactly whom or what? The kānaka of ko pae ʻāina were here for millennia before the European and American colonial powers happened upon us. In 1843, their recognition that nā aupuni kahiko already existed, that a real Lāhui already was flourishing in a place that they “discovered” was an external recognition. We already knew who we were. Kauikeaouliʻs attempt to diplomatically protect Hawaiʻi from the onslaught of impending imperialism was not a declaration of independence. It was an identification to the world. And in the end, it only delayed the dam break of change brought on by disease, capitalist-driven greed, corruption, and the ideas of Euro-American (aka white) superiority.
The recognition of independence was militarily usurped by America when it became convenient and beneficial to do so, and summarily ignored by Europe. What is there to celebrate from this legacy?
Here is where I vacillate. Because I do celebrate Lā Kūʻokoʻa. I celebrate the intricate, aloha ʻāina-based society that was already independent. I celebrate a society that was able to support a population (comparable in size to what exists today) with innovative, sustainable methods of land, water, and resource management, food independence, and spirituality. Modern Hawaiʻi, with all of its modern technology, would starve in less than a month if the ships and planes stopped coming. I celebrate the Lāhui that has survived every effort, both natural and invasive, to eradicate it. I celebrate the resurgence of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi to a degree that was unimaginable (with the exception of some very special kānaka mākua). I celebrate what I see happening on social media; Kānaka TikTok is a vibrant, living community. I celebrate the new ways of teaching at every level, from preschool to university. I celebrate that we now acknowledge the diaspora and are actively looking for ways to bring people home. (I was away for 25 years, and there were times I thought I would never come back.) I celebrate that I feel pilina to everything I am trying to describe.
Our kūʻokoʻa is not given to us by recognition from any “other.” Our kūʻokoʻa, our ea, exist in us. They exist in the Lāhui. They exist in the aupuni, in whatever form it has come to take in 2025. Kānaka maoli came very close to extinction. I celebrate that this did not happen. I celebrate the future, a future I did not even know was possible. That future is now.
Aloha Lā Kūʻokoʻa.
E kaumaha au
Do I miss the feeling? I suppose I do. It is too soft and comfortable in a blanket and a bed. I am not far removed from pulling my arms into my sweatshirt and feeling my hard clavicles tightening, and liking the fact that I was skinny enough to feel that hardness. Waking up to some asshole pulling my Walmart bag full of things soft enough to put my head on at a bus stop. Yelling when he pulled it out, and my head hit the concrete, “There is nothing in there you want.” Maybe there was. I stumbled across the street to the Waiʻanae police station, before I knew they did not have people in the building due to a labor shortage. A cop did drive up slowly, and when I slurred what happened, he said to move along.
I suppose that is a part of who I am now. Stronger. With my wits. Knowing something is wrong in this system. I needed help, and at that point, I could have been helped with the smallest bit of intervention. I can speak. I can write. I am lucky enough to have resources the oligarchy did not strip away. What do I do with this? It is easy to be angry, and I often am. How do we get change? You have to ask for it. You have to take it. Auē. My kūpuna. I was an impotent fighter on their behalf. Now I will fight as I breathe. You do not understand. My brain was colonized to the point that I have to push against my own thoughts. “Why speak?” “Why does it matter?” This is rhetorical. He Hawaiʻi au. A e like me Wilcox, e kaumaha au i nā mea aʻu e loaʻa ai i mea e ʻike ai ʻoe.
New originals
This is the new beginning. The new originals. The new today. This is the past countable. It is impossible to count. If the universe has a bookkeeper, then this is accounted for. But for all real purposes, there will be no count. It’s a thought exercise. Like wondering how many potentially fatal doses I’ve ingested, or how many times I’ve actually been close to death. No one is counting. But it is a set of integers greater than one and less than infinity.
Baseball
I actually wrote this in 2022.
I am a huge sports fan. But only baseball has my love. Only baseball has made me cry. (I got legit wellness check phone calls in 1991 after the Braves lost 1-0 to Minnesota in ten innings in game seven of the World Series.) I have to like a team to enjoy a football or hockey game, but I’ll watch any baseball game at any level, from Little League to MLB. There’s something about the game. It’s timeless; literally, there is no edict of time to the game. It ends with the last out. Whether that takes nine innings or nine hundred. Until now.
In 2023, MLB will implement a time clock for pitchers and limit the number of pickoff attempts to two. A failed third attempt will be called a balk and the runner awarded the next base, and the batter a ball. I understand. The league wants offense. Offense sells. But there has to be another way.
The beauty of baseball lies in tension. The hitters’ idiosyncrasies with the bat, batting gloves, and stance. The pitchers’ mound routines. All in the middle of the most important situations. The hours of seeming inaction are punctuated by acts that are only possible by extremely prepared athleticism. You try throwing a ball even close to 100 mph. Harder still, try to hit one. Hit one out of the park. Hit 62 of them in 162 games. All impossible. Yet possible.
The game is great because it gives you time. Time to keep statistics for everything. Batting average against left-handers on grass during the day? It’s there. Percentage of sliders thrown to right-handers with a two-strike count? Check. It’s all documented. No other game produces more math, poetry, or lore. It is a pastime of reflection.
A clock has no place in a game immune from time.
(And, yes, the Braves lost the ability to hit in the final week of the season against the Marlins, and this continued until yesterday against the Phillies. Solo home runs do not win championships. This is the last time we will speak of this until pitchers and catchers gather in Florida next February to start Spring training. Bleah…)
Hawaiian journal of history
So, these constructs that taught everyone how to box it all in, I didn’t have that. First, I was the fat little boy who seemed to know everything about volcanoes, whales, and the solar system circa 1980. Then the fat pre-pubescent who seemed to know it all, and who certainly believed he did. From the age of 12, I could do whatever I wanted to. No curfew. No rules. (I didn’t break any major societal ones; that came much later.) And at 16, I was on my own in Tacoma at university. The smartest boy in the room, so even more, I could do or say anything I wanted. And everyone seemed to listen. They asked for more. Now, in this relationship world of deadlines and people who cannot understand the pace, I think I am troubled. I used to drink to slow down so I could speak slowly enough. The problem has been that I don’t enjoy or naturally speak or think slowly. Imagine your mind is a browser. Mine is only comfortable with 26 tabs open, and I’m monitoring all of them. This path, though unnatural to me, will be healthier in terms of my interactions. Do I want to shut down 25 tabs so I can make everyone else happy? Can I live in the 1?
A story about everything
How do we start this? How do I tell a story about everything by telling a story about me? Why would you care about me? I certainly don’t. Why should you? I’ll give you a reason. This isn’t a story about me. It isn’t about what happened to me, though that is all I’m going to tell you. Every word that follows is about you. I only know what I’ve seen and read, so I can only write that. But none of it is that specific. I’m not that good.
This is my story, so it’s everyone’s story. It’s my voice, but it’s your voice too. My friend told me I was self-absorbed. I’ve been wrapped up in the vision in my mind since I knew I had a mind. Her calling me out is just saying the obvious.
We were talking about lovers. She’s happy with hers. I’ve been juggling. I was telling her that as I get older, it has become very easy to talk people into doing what you want them to do, especially sexually. We have this whole pretense, mostly women, about how sex is this fortress that needs to be climbed or conquested. It is not. It wants to surrender. It wants to be given up. It just needs a reason. If not for the world, then for itself. Legs want to know why they are spreading. I didn’t know that when I was a boy. I was always looking for a superfluous cause. Everything is so simple if you don’t make it difficult.
It’s why drunks succeed before they get too drunk. Alcohol removes pretense. It removes that chameleon dance where you jump and jump and try to fit this skin or that color. And instead just be the fucking lizard that you are.