Category: History

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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.

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Dr. Dre and Shakespeare

I thought I wouldn’t make it without stealing. When I was walking down the hill. And I was thinking to myself that Dr. Dre was a genius. He rapped over a tuba. That doesn’t seem important. It’s literally seven notes over and over. Then he gets Eminem when he was still manic and high to say fuck god and scream and scream and lose his mind. And those seven notes make sense. Bah. Bah bah. Bah bah. Bah bah. (Whatʻs the difference between me and you? Go listen to it). But, I digress.

So, I’m walking down the hill. I feel fibrillation. The subtle vibrations of pre-seizure. My fingers cramp, my hamstrings buzz. They shake, but only I know they’re shaking. I think about Shakespeare and soliloquies, and I repeat in my mind just walk, just walk, just walk. My veins get pronounced. And walking takes a kind of tactile acuity with my toes. Fall and quickly stand. I turn my head behind the bus stop wall and vomit in the trash can quickly so no one notices. I clench, so I don’t shit my pants.

I walk across the parking lot to the gas station with a Baskin-Robbins, and I buy ice cream (pralines and cream) to try to look and smell normal. I buy a razor and shave in the porta-potty to look younger.

The auditory hallucinations become scary. They go from noises to songs to voices. I try to sleep when I finally close my eyes. Just try. The voices say worse things. They are equally unhelpful. Her voice plays on repeat.

This is fiction, but everything actually happened. I may have a few details wrong. I can tell you the color of the vomit. It was oily and almost yellow, and some of it came out of my nose. Its viscosity made me consider my condition. Opaque mucous means slow down, but stop at your discretion. Green-yellow is the rot on a scab. Be aware of it. Take action if it turns black.

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Iʻm still who I was

You don’t know me like I was. The me when I was corporate. It’s why I was always welcome and always rehired through my myriad proclivities. You never understood my value, and it’s why you wrongfully think that I do not have any, that I have no ambition. I am loyal. I am political. I know how to get what I want. In that world, I only knew resilience and survival. I ate people I didn’t like or who I thought were unhelpful. I would sabotage your metaphorical bungee cord and return your smile when you jumped. I’m much, much softer now, but there are still teeth in my mouth and bile in my gut.

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Summer Program for the Enhancement of Basic Education

I went to SPEBE at UH and they treated us like college kids. Probably the wrong thing to do. I kept Strawberry Hill in my room refrigerator. This is 1986. My cousin came and we binge watched before that was a thing. We saw Top Gun. I feel the need. The need for speed. Then we watched Karate Kid 2 two times in a row. Peter Cetera. And it was filmed by my house in Kahaluʻu. Then I drank two bottles of that Strawberry Hill. Then I puked. Like really puked. Like the first time you drink puked. Like Linda Blair puked. And then Tūtū died that weekend. And the day I got back, I got 100 on my exam. The next highest was 96. So I’m at least four better than everyone else. I don’t feel four better.

Last week, I was reading People Español at Supercuts. And I was reading it for 10 minutes before I realized it was in Spanish. It took those minutes before I was puzzled by a word. Then i remembered slang. Ya me voy. I’m going.

I met one person this week. One new person. I told her the Spanish story. She said that’s peculiar, I like peculiar people. I felt guilty. Because she liked me.

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Pā mai nei ka lā ma koʻu ili

I am fucking consumed with optimism, ambition, and a sense of purpose. And anger. I went to the heiau again, and the sun was drowning me in yellow rays of hope. Pā mai nei ka lā ma koʻu ʻili. Whatever isn’t forbidden is compulsory. Heads will roll, and storms will follow. But in this moment, I rule myself, and the world lies before me. And what I do next has to make a difference. Because until this moment, I have pissed on what was given to me. I make the same mistake over and over again. I know the wall is hard, but I can put my hard head through it this time. I miss my kids, and I love every single person I have ever loved. Aloha for me is not something that goes away. Not with betrayal. Not with lies. Certainly not with disappointment. Aloha means love among many other things. You don’t need to know ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi to know what it means. It’s that feeling in your chest when you pick up your daughter after her first day of kindergarten. It’s the smile that beams when you buy an unhoused kupuna a sandwich. I’m rambling, but my point is it’s all connected. Hewa in the right hand becomes hewa in the left. Aloha spreads the same way. You can’t keep it until you freely give it away.

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Kaumaha

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. Iʻve walked those hallowed grounds so many times. Iʻve looked out the window of that empty room where they kept her. Promulgate a new constitution. Her intent before she was betrayed. I didnʻt even know that word. Promulgate. Iʻm getting angry again. Why didnʻt she listen to Charles Wilson? Arrest three traitors and take a gamble that America wonʻt send the calvary to save these descendants of missionaries and suger barons.

I went to a gathering on Lā Kūʻokoʻa. What is ea? What does it men today? Ua huhū au nō. Kaumaha. So heavy. Sadness is correctly described in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi as heavy. I could write about this until you say, “Stop!” But it all comes ʻround again and again. Venezuela. Greenland. Ukraine. It’s all the same fucking day, man.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.