Posts

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Hard truths

And so reality had become motionless, inside a box of what he could think or feel. As his body melted, his mind froze. It is hard to describe what could never possibly happen. The worst part about any kind of incarceration, and he was almost perfectly incarcerated, wasn’t the lack of freedom. It was boredom. Freedom is mostly overrated, and almost always misidentified.

The hard truth that we don’t like to think about is that we’re all dying. Degeneration happens at different speeds, but it happens. He stopped the inevitable with a wish. And then he wished for an un-wish. Death has a reason. It may not be immediately clear. When you cannot die it becomes the everything. He wished he could die as strongly as he wished he might live. Lessons don’t come the way you want them. When they come.

Posted on

Killing me softly

There are songs that kill him. Songs kill slowly. They don’t cause cardiac arrest, and at the same time break hearts. This song was playing when, that song then. He couldn’t listen to some because it brought back a flood that he couldn’t dam. And maybe he wouldn’t even if he could. He liked being neck-deep in the water. He liked the ghost of her. She was nicer as a memory. So was he.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Wasatch

My reflections on Salt Lake City’s airport: Sitting in the belly of the beast. Well, the beast’s international airport, anyway. The mountains are snow-covered and beautiful. And, of course, the Department of Metaphors, located in my head, immediately sullies the beauty of the almost-winter, desert landscape with this thought: isn’t it appropriate that rising above the heart of one of the newest, strangest, whitest belief systems ever concocted by man, are the harsh conditions of the Wasatch mountains, also now covered in white, hiding the ground-level impurities and imperfections with a smooth blanket of pure, white snow.

Everything is in its place, buried under that which seems to fall from the heavens.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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…)

Posted on

Inexorable truth

We all know our own obvious flaws. It takes eons of time and wisdom to more fully understand our more nuanced scarcities, but the others are obvious. You don’t need to tell a fat person they’re fat. In the middle of that spectrum of our obvious proclivities, we are really capable negotiators of denial. A drunk knows he’s a drunk too. But there are a million good reasons why. When you’re fat (like I’ve been), it’s self-disgust and shame. When you’re drunk (like I’ve been), it’s because she did that, or he said that, or I lost my job, or she left me.

Here is the part that’s embarrassing. If you are half a human being, these are obvious, inexorable truths. Did I say obvious? Everyone can see them. Everyone knows they’re true. And I guess this evolutionary survival mechanism helps you explain why it’s not true. And this earned weird evolutionary instinct helps the closest to you in your tribe make you feel better; they describe infections as a phase. As an anomaly. They look for reasons to share blame.

I’m telling you now, a human living in the midst of proclivity. There’s probably no one to blame except the universe. And that’s not really blame; the universe is by definition everything. Your proclivities, faults, and failures are by definition part of everything. It was inevitable, but that doesn’t let you off the hook. If your sadness and falling down were inevitable, in an infinite reality, so was your happiness and standing up.

The choices we make feel like free will. Ok. I choose to be an alcoholic sleeping at a bus stop. Does that make sense? Ok. I choose to finish my master’s degree and buy a house and have a beautiful wife and two kids, and a garage. Those sound like opposites. I am the same person, and I HAVE chosen both. And they both seemed like the exact correct decision when I made them. EXACTLY. THE. SAME. Confidence at DEFCON 1 when I pressed the button.

What I’ve realized is that even the best minds of our generation risk being destroyed by madness. I’ve been mad. Mostly I love, but I’ve been mad (crazy) and mad, and when I was (second) mad, there was no reason to be mad. I’ve come to see, and it’s taken far too long, that madness is actually sadness. It’s like a white blood cell response to a threat to your body. You see a threat, and you grab a can of Raid and spray everything in sight. The people who love you and reach out a hand. Fear is a cunt. You spray their hands and mouth because you’re so afraid of whatever is making you feel is making you feel so much. You spray their hands and then go hide. And hide and hide and hide, until showing your face becomes a threat.