slacker ass

Yes, I know, I've been slacking on a lot of things. Mostly because my parents have been in town for the past week and a half, and will be here through my birthday on the 31st. The trip I wanted to take them on up to Prescott that weekend is off due to the nighttime lows being too cold for them to transition from 70+ degree nites here to 38 up there.

Plan 2 was to drive out with them to San Diego to visit with my Aunt and Uncle there on Sunday and fly back to work on my birthday Wednesday, but with pretty much the entire part of Southern California being a giant charcoal briquette and my Aunt now recovering from knee replacement surgery on last Monday, that is pretty much off too. It wouldn't be a good idea for Dad to be in a smoke inundated atmosphere having basically one lung, so I think they will crash here through for another week til the air and fires clear up and my Aunt is better suited for company.

Meantime, I'll try to plan a day trip or two to somewhere interesting, that isn't cold, or too hot, or requires a lot of walking about, and suits their interests on a relative budget for all...I'll do my best. I'll try to post whatever I can in somewhat a timely fashion, but lately, I'm enjoying spending time with them and am not too worried about dictating it all promptly on the computer. Anyways, to toss in a warm and fuzzy for you, here's Dad playing with Jenny.

What hurts your soul

"You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? That it has no memory. That's where I want to live the rest of my life, a place with no memory."

Andy- The Shawshank Redemption

Many of us have a place that nobody else can understand what it means to us. Some may be in the middle of the Rockies in fall, Paris in spring, Australia in winter. Mine, as of yet-since I have yet to be at the base of the Maori on Easter Island, is Kailua beach, Oahu.

A vacation is supposed to be a way of escape, to forget what you left. This place goes above and beyond that.

If you've seen the original Men in Black, remember that cool silver flashy memory eraser doo-hickey that they used to make people forget things. Coming to this place is pretty much equal to living in a constant state of that.

Until they can find a way of bottling it or making it virtual, well, unless you have been there, you won't understand what it means to escape. We're all due for it.

what it takes to escape

What I can say that is in Arizona, I was thirty-one years old, and the things that I was choosing not to do were adding up into a whole other life I was choosing not to live.

-Adaptation by me to Steven Kolter's West of Jesus.

What is the consequence of escape? Material and interpersonal wise? I have a relative dead end job that I have been ramming my head into it's glass ceiling for the past 3 years. It's knocked me senseless and relatively unaware of my surroundings for the most part. The irony is that even if I were to work for a corporate bar or a family owned one like now, the results are exactly the same. I'd end up being a manager of some sorts, responsible for the leadership and delegation of other zombie like employees below me as I was once. Which makes me no better than they are.

As for my personal goods and immediate relations-I can always make new bonds with others. The ones that are truly meaningful to me, I know that I will always have them close to me.

Everything else is material, and can very easily be replaced.

So what is the holdup? Shack up a best friend of mine in my house? Pay off the bills in the house for the next two months, buy a laptop to pay my other immediate bills that I easily can pay online all the while doing it from some random roadstop diner in the middle of pigsknuckle Arkansas while on the way to all points east or west or north or south?

I've already delivered such speeches as per my potential plans to those closest and important to me. Consisting of finding myself and just going. They understand. The sad thing is with leaving them. If I could, I'd want to take them with me, but in reality, I know that if I did take such a journey, it would have to be one traveled by myself.

Last Friday evening, early, around 8pm, I got a visit from an old regular whom i haven't seen in almost 2 years. His name was Chris. Before he left, he was my age, and constantly wandered with a similar mask of pseudo happiness around the direct public, but you could tell that underneath the mask was a person in need of finding something that he did not have.

Two years ago he just disappeared. He went from showing up at the bar once or twice a week to nothing.

He showed up on Friday and it seemed like polar opposites. As if we were opposite mirror images of eachother. He the person that, although has been on a long journey and showed the wears of travel, seemed wiser and complacent from it, whereas I was the person that he had left years ago.

He left the valley and spent time in the seedy L.A. Underground music scene for a year and then up and packed up to Europe. Walking, hiking, hitching rides, trains, whatever...across the continent for another year and a half. Well, for 8 months at least. On that slow start to that Friday night, he and I were able to sit and talk about his travels for a good amount of time. After going through the Netherlands, Germany and the UK, he was travelling through France when he made friends with a bar patron in the middle of France. After making friends with the man and telling him of his travels, the man offered him a place to stay for dirt cheap. Turns out that this man was offering his dirt cheap abode to be nothing less than a 16th century castle in the middle of the French countryside. A whole wing of a castle to himself, with a handful of other renters living in the other wings of the fortress.

I was stoked, but when I asked him why he left, he just told me that it was time to go and move on to something new. I put him on pause for a few minutes while I helped 3 other customers, and by the time I had returned, Chris had once again disappeared.

All I know is that I am growing tired. Not tired of anything generalized for the most part, but personally. My work weeks are structured. Even my mother mentioned it as "that's the way life is dear." On our phone call today, I immediately called her out on it. " Well what if that's not the way i choose to make it work out like? What if I want to make it be different than that? Who says that it has to be that way?"

She had no response.

It's a odd feeling to have a parent, or someone that you consider to be a guiding source of life's ways to not have an answer for you. Then again, I shook off her misjudgement as that's all she's ever known from her childhood and young adult life and right through her current marriage to my father.

Depression can be a royal bitch. As if I believe in pills or therapy. Pills are just a way for my insurance rates to constantly rise and for pharmaceutical co's to get richer.

Therapy may help, for despite what my friends think, there are a plethora of events in my past that definitely affected my current psyche.

But not as much as the bitch it is to not have the self confidence to be self-assertive and do what makes you happy. It just is a big crutch now days that you can do what makes yourself happy, but you have to take into account what your actions may reflect on others, especially your family.

I cheers that a few times on Sunday for football, but strangely, I think I may have been the only one who truly meant it.

Who would think it? I remember back in the day in the living room of my man Ryan's house, that the Trizan-Ryan, Doug and I- that in all our talks and predictions, that not I were to be the one to be first to marry and start a family, but that Ryan was the first to travel and explore and marry, Doug would settle down and have the more lucrative career, and I am the one to be stuck at a impasse, not knowing where to head off to.

10 years of Aloha and Ohana

In Late 1997, 12 people crammed into a tiny duplex apartment that had tables and chairs laid out from the kitchen into the living room, on top of the couch and partially into the tiny 3 ft Christmas tree perched precariously atop a endtable. The bar consisted of 5 bottles of booze and a cooler sat outside the front door with a 24 pack of beer...which, if you wanted a beer, you had to ask the person sitting at the table in front of the door to reach back, around the door and grab a beer.

Tight, cramped and poor...but the spirit is still the same.

Aloha(Love) and Ohana (Family).

In 1997, it was the first year that I had NOT gone home for Thanksgiving. Homesick, I missed the family gathering wherein close to all 35 of my west coast side family members crammed into my grandparents house for the feast.

To make up for that, my novice cooking skills and I decided to have a gathering with my closest friends and co-workers....my other Ohana...my other family.

Little did I know that it would spawn a decades worth of habitually throwing this festas (Portuguese for festival, gathering, feasting).

In 1997 I threw it together, unplanned in a matter of hours. It was cheap and haphazard. A ton of things went wrong, but that never really mattered. It was the guests and the effort that mattered.

Now, a decade later, the beast has grown. This event starts getting planned 3 months ahead now. And with this being the 10th one, and the biggest one yet, ideas and concepts were starting to be slung around clear back in May.

This gathering has gone from a handful of guests to dozens. From a cheap $140 grocery bill to well over $1200. From a underage 20 yr old with 5 bottles of contraband booze to a 30 year old mixologist with an over 120 bottle stocked open bar. A tiny duplex in Tempe's ghetto with landing airplanes every 15 minutes to Gilbert's west side house 3 times the size of the Tempe location.

The irony? This may be the last. I may not be in Arizona for next year's 11th annual. My true blooded Ohana calls for my return to San Francisco. That however, is still up to the winds of fate.

This event has seen so many faces come and go. Some have moved away, some have disappeared, some have fallen out of grace, and some have stayed. One or two have stayed around for 8 or all ten of those years.

The premise is still there, and will be there again this year. The spirit of Aloha and Ohana.

The official announcement is that the

10th annual Holiday Social will be held this year on

Sunday, December 9th 2007 at about 7 pm.

Invitations are designed and will be given out a month before the event.

The September Chill, chapter 2

It never got above 81 degrees the past 4 days while I was home. Every morning the coast was socked in with fog. Yesterday, the day i left, I left a very fogged in San Jose at noon, high was 65 degrees. I sleep good in this weather. The irony is that my bedroom window faces directly East, so that I naturally wake up with the light at 8 am. The only thing that would keep me in bed, not necessarily sleeping, is the September Chill. It's perfect. The window is cracked, and the coastal air flicks you in the face with a hint that winter is on it's way. It snuggles up next to your ear and politely whispers to you to either go ahead and get up to start your day, but if you decide to linger, it will keep you company along with your blanket and pillow...nice and cozy.

I was faced with that every morning while I was there. The only time I abused it was Tuesday morning, suffering from a slight hangover, a headache and a random case of insomnia that didn't allow me to sleep until 7am.

Both my folks were in good spirits while I was home. Both moved with ease. Mom's foot wasn't really hindering her, as the cortisone shots in her tendon helped her walk normal again for most of the day. Dad's PET scan came up negative for any abnormalities, so the only thing he's taking meds for is the occasional heartburn and indigestion and some random $10 a tablet to keep the drug companies rich blood pressure pill. Mom has a pair of similar pills. At least their collection of pill containers has dwindled down from the dozen or so to about 2 plus an Advil container.

It was a enriching feeling to wake up and not really worry about anything but to take my time and spend it with them. Of course I did my own thing at times, usually when they took their afternoon 3-4pm nap, or after 11pm when they went to bed.

Yes, this time I did make a routine trip to Chuck's Donuts at 2am, plus a drive up to Canada college to enjoy said taste treat with a panoramic view of the Bay.

I shocked my parents once, and that was a random thing to happen. I actually shut my father up and expressed not only deep seeded feelings, but a somewhat master plan to move back home. Dad didn't know what to think. I'm not sure that he still does. He understands what I meant, and a general plan about going about it, but we both decided that time will permit it's course of action. In essence, things will fall into place at their chosen time and place, hopefully guided my our nudging it along.

Needless to say, someday soon, Preferably withing the next year to 3 years, I will be waking up, in my own place, to my familiar September Chill of a friend.

The September Chill, chapter 1

September is still a warmer month. Summer is in it's death throes, and fall is on the horizon come the 22nd. Back home, daytime highs rarely cross the 80 degree barrier and night-time lows are hovering around the sweater threshold of 65. Of course that means nil to us average Phoenicians, as of now the day temps are still 100 and lows are a bone numbing 77. Here I don't have the familiar September chill that I am accustomed to from back home in the Bay area.

I recently got back from visiting home yesterday. I was there for 4 days. I wanted to return home a month after my Mom's party because I didn't really spend proper time with my family last month due to throwing the party and then playing tourist with my hometown buddy Doug and Crystal, who has never really been to the area. That and I wanted to start helping to clear out the house a bit.

While I was there, I cleared out one room and reorganized another-which took 2 days. The one room was my old room. Cluttered with past high school memories, empty boxes, outdated furniture and nick knacks. I assembled 2 heaping lawn and leaf bags of trash alone and 2 more plus a old console TV, boxes,books and a computer to donate to charity. One room...and that was the easiest room in the house outside of a bathroom.

My parents are pack rats to a point, either that or they are lazy, or ignorant as to how to get rid of something outside of bringing it to the city dump. You mention EBay or Craig's List to them, and they'll ask who Craig is.

After clearing out my room, Mom tells me that this room's walls were untouched since 1984, when we moved in to the house. It was evident even more so after rearranging furniture and tossing away old posters and frames. Apparently I used the walls as a target range for numerous pointed projectiles.

As a youth, with limited friends, no girlfriends and no real quality family time, being by myself in my room was a daily event. Boredom led to various imagination induced behaviors, some creative, some pointless and some destructive - those stories are for another blog. One year for Christmas, my Uncle frank gave me a mini-desk dartboard with mini metal darts. I quickly found that they stick in the wall better than the dartboard. Posters, stickers, pictures...none were spared. Neither was the walls. Thousands of pinhole marks are all over my old walls. It's a spackler's and painter's nightmare. Those weren't the touchstone scars from this room though.

Two small pieces of defacement meant more than anything else. I couldn't tell you when I made them back then, but the meanings are still fresh. One was a magic marker sentence above my headboard, underneath the window sill which says, "Go to the place of peace". The other, a knife carving in the wall next to the floor that simply said in bold blade wounds, " NO LOVE".

Two statements that screamed out for attention and help back in my adolescence. Some may still have some credence in my current adult life, but the latter is mostly a ghost now. If anything, the former is still a beacon of guidance at any point in one's life.

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?"—Mark Twain

There's a middle eastern proverb that I came across the other day that makes a lot of sense-

"You my friend have lost your camel,

Your people have told you many advices,

All of it are nice casual words,

Yet you still have lost your camel."

I would assume that back in the past, in that part of the world (and possibly still) that if you lost your camel, you were good as dead in the desert. It provided you with means to haul food, water, other items as well as give you transportation, bartering leverage, status and in a last case survival scenario-sustenance to survive. In effect, it was your life. You lose it, you have lost your life.

It's a clever metaphor for losing one's self. Despite all the well meaned advice from those around you, you are still lost, and the only person that can really dictate the finding of your camel, or in effect, finding yourself, is well....you.

And like Mark Twain's blank envelope, you have no idea what direction you should go.

I'm hoping that by escaping from this place for the next few days and going back to a easier time and place, that it will shed a little bit of clarity onto myself.

The only option outside of that shred of self guidance that I seek is to quit my job, cancel my bills, buy a surfboard, cash out a few thousand dollars in travel cash, pack up some essential gear & my dog in my truck and leave for a few months to I don't care where, just as long as it would be a place with no memory of anything.

Either that, or i stay here, lost in the desert and lose my life.

In the meantime, I'll settle for a small 4 day trip to find quiet with my family.

"Here's to getting the hell out of this foul stench-hole of a state."-D.H.

See you Weds nite.

Viral strain

Most attributed to my recent stress levels breaking me down lately, I got knocked on my ass by some random form of viral infection the past few days.

It's been really rare that a sickness kicks my ass, as usually I'm done kicking sickness's ass within 30 hours with the help of NyQuil, vitamin C and rest, but this one came out of left field and did a number on me.

Monday night I got home early and went to sleep before midnight, only to wake up after an hour and a half because i was shivering uncontrollably. It's 80 degrees in the house...

I get a winter comforter and get the dog on the bed and I'm still freezing. I never got any more sleep that night. Tuesday morning at work I was a zombie. I ached all over. All my joints were froze up, my head was pounding, I was sweating, and dead tired. I got off at 6 and went home. Napped for 2 hours-once again under 80 degrees of blankets. After midnight, once again, couldn't sleep-chills, sweats, fever, etc. I knock myself out with a NyQuil/Tylenol PM combo and slept through 3 pm the next day.

Wednesday sucked ass the worst. Work was slow and I felt like shit. I had a constant headache all night and I was so stiff that it felt like I was wired together with re bar and concrete. As per this virus' motif, come after midnight, he came out to play. I'm working in the back, where it's 90+ degrees and I'm shivering. I actually had to step outside where it was 100 to warm up a little.

I got dizzy and lightheaded and remembered drifting into unconsciousness once, but was smart enough to know to take a seat and focus on my breathing. That freaked me out man. All my joint and muscle pain mixed in with my breathing as i slowly started to have my hearing fade out and things got numb. Right when I thought I was gonna go down, my last thought was-"fuck, that hard kitchen tile is gonna do some damage when i fall face first into it."

I found a breathing cycle and slowly regained stability. I said fuck it, I gotta go. Since it was slow, I had done everything needed to close down already except mop the floor. I did so and left work early-driving home in 100 degree heat, with the truck heater on.

Crystal followed me home for my safety, and I got into the shower and cranked it as hot as I could, and it was still cold. I got out, double dosed the NyQuil and Advil and tried to sleep.

Now I was too hot, but I wasn't sweating. Little bastard got an immunity to NyQuil too, because that wasn't working. I eventually passed out across the house in the spare bed a few hours later out of shear fatigue from the day and fighting off this bastard.

Got up at 2pm and I was, well...fine. A little sore and grumpy, but ok.

Did some chores, watched some football, regained my appetite. Slept ok, still sweated my ass off and was sore all nite.

Friday, 2pm.

My neck and headaches are still fading in and out today, which I'm sure will be much worse when I get to work tonight, but tonite I hope for a first nite of solid, no drug induced sleep in eager anticipation for me to fly home to see the family on Sunday.