Wonder What For
It's different. More lush. But if I'm not careful, I can slip into feelings of homesickness.
9/27/2023
A dream (a nightmare?) I woke up from at 7:12 am today. Initially transcribed on Apple Notes® at 7:13 am.
Grocery store line. Need new card. Not working. Employee leaves me there and never comes back. I exit and I’m somewere in the Koko Head/Makapu’u area of the island: the Southside, you could say. It’s different. More lush. There’s a new hike that I want to scale. Might as well. I’m not working. And new hikes don’t come along that often.
I pass through a glitzy neighborhood where a homeowner is getting ready for a hurricane by chopping down his neighbor’s trees. I’m going up the grade and the clouds are receding and it’s getting beautiful and the Ko’olau Range is crisp in the distance. And I’m thinking about my future. I have an idea for a book titled, “Diagnosing Your Discontents,” and it’s like, as I’m thinking that, I’m diagnosing mine. I had promise. I had promise early on. People recognized that. My professor at Mercyhurst, S.Z., recognized that. As did Professor M, that grouch who nonetheless took me under his wing. As did the chair of the Religious Studies Department who convinced me to minor in Religious Studies after I managed to get him off the whole “just do a double major” thing. This pattern of older white men taking an interest in me in an entirely nonsexual way followed me into my mid-twenties. Then what happened? I happened. And that’s great and all but sometimes I lose the plot. Like right now.
Man, it’s so beautiful. I wish I had taken better pictures when I lived here. Really good ones. Ones that were so good I just needed a few to remember this place by. Not the 10,000 average and sub-average ones I took and have never looked at again, partly because they are average and sub-average, partly because, if I’m not careful, I can slip into feelings of homesickness, in the process forgetting all the more important reasons we left that rock; reasons that have made my life richer and fuller and more meaningful and more reality-based: actual reality, not the reality we lull ourselves into because it’s comfortable.
And then I start to break down, and I can’t help myself, and I collapse over the freeway guardrail that is for some reason guardrailing this path that has only gotten thinner and thinner the higher up I’ve gotten. And I’m draped over that blazing hot hunk of metal like a soggy shirt. And in my sorry gaze, I see the Makapu’u Lighthouse, and further below, in the turquise water, a group of four oldtimer Native Hawaiians who are bodysurfing and talking shit.
“BRAHHHHHH!” three of them yell in unison at the fourth. I wonder what for.