Typically, at home, in a relaxed week, I have plenty of time. Most of which I allot to introspection, planning, procrastination of plans, opinion-forming, and indecisiveness. Here in Hawai’i, I don’t have this time. All the time I am being rudely awoken, rudely forced into activities, secretly being penned as antisocial in the minds of my compadres, told not to do things I’m fully aware I shouldn’t do, and then(which is my own doing) going out of my way to meet and make good impressions on interesting people I find here. The whole thing is constrictive on my own thought processes.

In any case, I hope this constitutes a worthy apology for why I haven’t been updating nearly as much as I should. I will upload pics from the trip very soon.

Someone find me a torrent of Ital Tek’s “Midnight Colour” please?

Hemp: paper, if America wasn’t ruled by the dollar.

This is seriously amazing. My favorite voice is that of the mellow camera-man.

So, purely out of boredom, my family friend, my cousin and I went for a late-night walk on the beach after getting settled into our condo in Kihei and having a lazy day of hanging over, beach combing, snorkeling(where we saw enormous sea turtles, amazing choral formations, colorful fish and lightning-fast crabs), people-watching, and just general sun-soaking. We walked the pitch dark lengths of the beaches purely unaware of the apparent dangers. We met a friendly local who was night fishing with his kid brother and his girlfriend and was down to give us the real low-down about Maui. All the while he was fishing with longs lines out into the sea, hooks baited with raw, sliced calamari. He was super nice to us, and kindly warned us that we shouldn’t be walking around this late in this area. Then after that we began chatting, and eventually he was telling us all about how he was an important dude here, that he ran this part of Maui. Amongst his tales(some quite possibly of the tall variety) he laid out a couple of facts: he grew and sold his own Maui Waui(near the big golf courses here), he made 40 bucks today on cock-fighting near Mile Marker 12 down the highway that runs around Maui(and also he hadn’t worked for 3 years thanks to this profession), he knows guys that drop $100,000 on single cock-fights on Maui, that “main-landers”(people from the US) are known here as “haoles”(which means something like “breathless” as in we’re white like ghosts), that when he was in high school he regularly combed the beaches at night with his “boys” looking for tourists to mess up(not to take their money, just to mess up),  that he sold weed to Mike Tyson, that some random cokehead killed and cut off the head of a girl in our very own hotel(OMG I cannot believe that I found a link for this! It fits the description other than the whole decapitation thing(which was probably hype anyway)!), and finally that he camps out and fishes regularly on Tiger Woods’ property here. Amazing, no?

Other events of today include coffee with 2 girls(18 and 17) from Seattle(who both found it to be uncomfortably hot here) which I was faintly disappointed by; the café was kind of lame/touristy and the coffee(though being Kona bean) was pretty bland/unfresh. One of the Seattle girls was a burista at some cool coffeehouse in Tahoma(link coming soon). Still awaiting that awesome flavor of a legitimate Hawai’ian Kona bean carefully produced into that wonderfully brown liquid we call java. Oh yea apparently this morning(I slept until 9) and last night I was sleep-talking intensely—and in French. This was obviously inspired by the happenings of my last post. I’m actually really glad it was in French… otherwise I may have revealed sensitive information/opinions I intend to keep quite. All I’ve had to eat today was half a burrito and some chips. Rough times.

Drink of the night: Beck’s, Miller CHILL(Lime), Crown+Coke

(tisk, tisk… beer for liquor, never been sicker)

After one too many Beck’s(as previously posted), I was being bummed at an uneventful first night in Hawai’i with my cousin. We agreed completely that this should be a ridiculous family trip, one that we should never forget. Regardless, we are sitting, drinking(unhappily), poolside at our hotel(which is far removed from any entertainment) when I randomly pick up on some French being spoken across the pool from us. My cousin(very easily, I might add) persuades me to go work out some of my French skills on these two seemingly nice, seemingly French ladies. After a while of self-checking(making sure I really wanted to go do it), I force myself to walk over to them and ask if they are French. One of them is from Nice, and the other is a French teacher in Alaska. The two have husbands/kids and are both surprisingly nice and open-minded. Apparently they randomly met each other “sur la plage”(on the beach) and realized they were staying at the same hotel. I pretty much just make an excuse for why I went to speak to them and then promptly leave. Good work on my part.

Jet-lagged and an early-to-bed type of guy, my cousin falls asleep literally lounged in a pool chair.

—wait a second, I must go do something important—

EDIT: So sorry, folks, I would finish this entry, but what I went and did turned out sourly and so this entry was lost from my mind… thus making it no longer a part of my stream of consciousness. I shan’t finish this entry.

After a day of jet-lagged beach combing and blissful conversations with strangers, I settle down to a sunset and a Beck’s.