Old Writing

I Walked beneath the stars every night. I was the only one, little and lonely beneath that massive bright ceiling. I thought I was holding up the whole thing, the infinite chandelier, from old South Point Road. My mother was far away, I imagined, hands clasped in prayer that the stars would not fall on me. Give him the strength to keep them high, she asked. They're the only thing he can't afford to break.

By day I thought of nothing, simply moving to the droning pulse of circuits inside me, like a machine. But by night I let the sleeping senses awake. The road was narrow and lively with high leaning trees and walls of vines. Light of the stars poured down and over the pavement, carving a channel of silver in a black land. Shadows on the roadside danced in the breezes, and shadows of shadows danced in my eyes.

Old Writing

Kenny returned after a week's regular disappearance, and an irregular trial by centipede venom on the West side of the island. Taft bought orchids from a local farm and in the transaction was given a sleek, full body of a recently dead rooster. Kai returned from Kona with a friend with pink hair. A quiet new worker came from Wyoming, and a couple, with a screaming child, from the Western mainland. Fate seems to have just remembered that lonely little corner of the world, and shine a light in for a moment, only to blind the little creatures inside it. M sometimes thought of California and his family in it. It was the filter that held the sanity within the Western edge of the country, and everyone who reached Hawaii was crazy enough to pass through it.

Old Writing

There is a certain timelessness that seems to stitch together this southern tip of land. A gray light shines on the little tin roofs every morning, waking the young men beneath them, and turns golden by the time they are greeting each other by the coffeepot, and is hot and yellow by the time they are eating their eggs. Every morning it is the same, and every morning the young men speak the same words to each other.

Morning, says M to Hans.

What's Happening, he says back.

Oh nothing, he replies quietly.

They let silence settle over the first part of the ritual.

Big things today, Hans says, with a hint of suspense.

Are we picking oranges, asks M, and Hans proceeds to articulate the tactics and new obstacles that will transform the orchard into a battlefield, but M only nods occasionally, listening to his eggs hiss in the skillet.

The grey light turns golden, and the birds greet each other with the same words as the men below them, only in more erudite, nasal language. It happens this way every morning, and it always ha, even before there was anyone to write it down.

The men walk up the road, half a mile form the little tin houses to the big wooden one. They walk on a dirt path through a rusting iron gate, cracked for their admittance. They walk past rows of high pine trees, standing like sentinels along the edge of the orchard, and past heaps of strange antiquated machinery, all being painted the same idle brown by the mingling of iron and air.

What do you suppose that big one with the hovel is for, Taft asks, looking for a hook on which to hang a question.

Oh that right there is a terrestrial boar, Hans replies. Yeah, that's what they call it in the mining towns, he says thoughtfully. Everyday that he walked past the machine he added another stitch to his story, weaving a lure large enough or Taft or one of the boys to hook on to. He had hundreds of these tapestries stowed away in his mind for other objects.

How do you suppose Mort came by it? Taft asked.

Won it off a poker hand with a cane planter from up the road. Some folks say the mead he was pouring for him had something to do with it, Hans said without hesitation. Course that's a whole nother story. They let silence eat the rest of the details.

What's mead, Taft asked.

Jesus Christ, don't you know anything about the world? Hans asked. Mike, why don't you explain to him, he said resignedly.

Bubble baths

Dipping my toes into the puddles of luxury again, looking at the same sun I did in Hawaii but from the cage of smog here in Los Angeles. One week before I begin the Pacific Crest Trail, I can indulge in all the glistening delights of downtown, in a town where people still look in mirrors. Meanwhile my ghost has been buried by the bureaucratic stack of numbers and names back in the castle at school. They are putting idols on my tomb like Stonewall Jackson would pee on the grave of some poor runaway slave. Aloha Hawaii, Aloha huge oranges, Aloha big blue ocean.

Back at the Keys

Several weeks have passed without me penning eloquent thoughts. All the sentiments pile up in stacks somewhere in the dusty corners of my head. Letters I have written are sitting underneath my mattress, waiting for the day I go back to town. I stopped writing personal anecdotes in my journal and started writing bits of stories instead. It's what happens when life is no longer novel.

But that's not a bad thing. The fruit is easy to see and the trees are easy to climb. The stars aren't so bright anymore. I wake without alarm clocks. Soon I will have something adventurous to write about, and not the ferment of my mental complacency.

There are no problems we cannot dissect on our own. The mind is like a scalpel, and even before it is sharpened by the works of Kant or Rousseau or Steinbeck or Shakespeare it has still got the edge to whittle at questions. I enjoy having the seven or eight hours of silence everyday in the orchards, with the oxygen from glossy leaves tickling my brain as it cuts at little questions. Anyways, anyways, hopefully I will write something more intriguing later, that tells about what I've physically been doing.