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.
Santa Monica civic
I sat behind you at this concert (Portishead, Santa Monia Civic Center, if you don’t remember). You were a dancer. You did ballet. It seemed far too refined for me. For my birthday, you bought me a plastic hula dancer for my car that bobbled when the car moved. You thought about me outside of our interaction. I suppose that was good. The hula dancer was horribly inappropriate, the worst kind of appropriation of something I actually do care about, but I wanted to fuck you, so I didn’t say anything.
Imagine flashbulbs going off. Life is that. What do you remember? A flash? Butterflies at the beginning. Love at a moment? Love ends. And then what? The way we deal with the way love folds our emotional clothes. It puts things in their places.
Lost. It’s hard to find the bathroom.
Love works separately from how you’d prefer it to work. It’s an octopus that squeezes to fit the empty spaces. Lost is lost. Love is not different. Love only hurts a little less because there once was something. It’s gone. There will be no more questions. If there were a few, theyʻre gone.
Vowels
Ask. I can almost guarantee you will disagree or maybe hate me. I don’t really mind. Life is a pole slathered in vaseline. I slip toward the floor. I belong on the ground. Bleeding and oozing is what I know. You are a problem. So pretty and so French. The words come out of you. I have to make the words. I have to make them mean something. You slink. I trouble to be hidden when I try.
You have a boy’s name in French, but you’re Swiss. Where I’m from, I just have my name. You are vowels, and I am consonants. Hard at every guttural stop.
I know you love me, but you can’t love me. That’s a hard love. I’ve lived it before, and you haven’t. That is what life is. I’d expect nothing else.
Consensus
The thing about doing the right thing. You’re probably going to piss someone off. There is no consensus. Think about it. What question has a consensus answer? Beatles or Stones? Creamy or chunky? Tits or ass? You want to go a little deeper? Buddha or Jesus? They both kind of said the same thing. There is no such thing as everyone agrees unless someone with a gun is pointing it and saying, “Agree!” At that point, come on. I’ll say anything with a gun in my face or a knife at my throat. The irony is we’re all the same. We’re all exactly the same. There were different traumas along the way. We’re all verily, similarly fucked up. In the same way, when you watch Discovery, and you thought chimpanzees were herbivores, and then they rip a monkey’s head off. I mean, you understand they have to eat, but that was violent in a way you don’t learn at the zoo.
Thatʻs not funny
These jokes are funny only if someone doesn’t know you. When they know you’re not lying. When they know it’s the truth. The irony is that’s what’s funny. Lies aren’t funny. You laugh at a clown because he painted a face over the truth. When you know the clown, it’s not haha funny. The paint comes off sooner or later.
Sharp
Sharp-nosed and tight. I didn’t know I had a type. I might describe what I meant if I weren’t sober. I like angles. I resist arcs. This is almost a self-hatred thing. I hate myself, but not like that. My dreams are consumed with sex and death. And I prefer the former.
Hypnic
I’m still here.
There are no plans to be anywhere else.
Icon after icon falls.
Most to decay.
And one hates to blame the victim,
But they seem to me, at least,
To be complicit in the ravaging.
I have these dreams, then hypnic jerks,
then staccato screams of, “Heh.”
Afraid for a microsecond,
I have to talk myself into knowing.
It’s just a dream.
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.