Trouble in Paradise

theres a strange dichotomy between the way the culture hawaii accepts and repels its guests. on the one hand people here are warm and open and friendly and there is a strong sense of family connection that holds people together, but then there is also a strong sense of resentment for white people that stems from the huge amount of poverty that exists throughout the islands. lack of education plays a large role here too and as with any situation the easy way to try and find the answer to a tough problem is to identify a scapegoat and focus your anger and frustration toward it.

personally i went from being called ohana by a new found cousin of mine to having a knife pulled on me at waikiki beach so i had the joy of experiencing the full spectrum first hand. of all my travels ive never felt worse about being white than i did here.

scenically speaking hawaii is as beautiful as i remember it. pristine beaches, lush forests and generally very clean cities and the smell of tropical flowers everywhere gives a surreal feeling that i’ve not felt anywhere else. i love it here but i think if i was to do it again id have to have some local people my age to show me around.

seeing doug and the other cousins was really good because it gave me a chance to put a more human feeling with these names that until now had only existed in my distant memory. i wonder if everyone has as detached of a adolescent life as i had. i dont feel like i was even in the same body. like everything that happened before i was 20 was just a bunch of implanted memories. yes i believe im actually living in the matrix. which was that pill you were supposed to take? the red or the blue?

there isnt enough hours to sleep as long as id like to lately. my life is so easy and im so tired. i’ll make sense of it all eventually.

Such is the Mraz

jason mraz is like crack. i try not to like his new stuff because its so pop and so produced and i didnt really like what steve lillywhite did with the dave matthews album he was involved with but god damn it i’m sucked in every time. mr. a-z is his latest single and i listen to it about 5 times a day. such is the mraz.

im in the terminal of the san francisco airport waiting for my flight to hawaii for my cousin doug’s 65th birthday. i havent been to the islands since i was 12 and since i got home early from the tour i figure why stop this whole travel motif i’ve been swimming in lately.

i’ve been to the north eastern tip of the other side of the country where i froze my ass off playing for a crowd of hundreds of drunken colby college kids with keller williams. then i was in the most south western corner visiting my cousin in san diego. and finally as far north as portland oregon before money ran out.

ive seen deserts, dunes, palm trees, marshes, snow covered mountains, national monuments, forests of unmeasurable density, highways, dirt roads, oceans, rivers, yokels and yuppies and now i get to see mangos and hibiscus flowers.

i start a good deal of my paragraphs with myself as the subject. lets try and remedy that.

the san francisco airport terminal was gray upon gray upon gray this morning when my sister drove my dad and i here. the gray fog packed up against the huge windows that look out over one of the many gray runways and swirled around steel support tubes painted gray to match the gray of everything here. only now can i see i little bit of blue poking out of the gray.

i think i forgot to mention the swedes in my tour journal entries. maybe i did, i kicked a huge dent in their rental car when they came to see me play in aptos. thats what happens when i get free irish car bombs. anyway they came to eat with us last night and it’s always a pleasure to have a little european influence in the house. their sense of humor gets me every time. i have to get to sweden before this summer is over.

fragmented memories of incidents from the past few months dance around when i try to write and i sometimes miss a few of them because i have to latch on to one or the other when they come around and get them down before they disappear again into the nonsense that is my mind.

thought for the day: what would the world be like without caffein? i get they feeling we’d still be riding animals for transportation and id be scribbling this down on papyrus with a quill and ink made of crushed leaves and snail shells.

Such is the Mraz

jason mraz is like crack. i try not to like his new stuff because its so pop and so produced and i didnt really like what steve lillywhite did with the dave matthews album he was involved with but god damn it i’m sucked in every time. mr. a-z is his latest single and i listen to it about 5 times a day. such is the mraz.

im in the terminal of the san francisco airport waiting for my flight to hawaii for my cousin doug’s 65th birthday. i havent been to the islands since i was 12 and since i got home early from the tour i figure why stop this whole travel motif i’ve been swimming in lately.

i’ve been to the north eastern tip of the other side of the country where i froze my ass off playing for a crowd of hundreds of drunken colby college kids with keller williams. then i was in the most south western corner visiting my cousin in san diego. and finally as far north as portland oregon before money ran out.

ive seen deserts, dunes, palm trees, marshes, snow covered mountains, national monuments, forests of unmeasurable density, highways, dirt roads, oceans, rivers, yokels and yuppies and now i get to see mangos and hibiscus flowers.

i start a good deal of my paragraphs with myself as the subject. lets try and remedy that.

the san francisco airport terminal was gray upon gray upon gray this morning when my sister drove my dad and i here. the gray fog packed up against the huge windows that look out over one of the many gray runways and swirled around steel support tubes painted gray to match the gray of everything here. only now can i see i little bit of blue poking out of the gray.

i think i forgot to mention the swedes in my tour journal entries. maybe i did, i kicked a huge dent in their rental car when they came to see me play in aptos. thats what happens when i get free irish car bombs. anyway they came to eat with us last night and it’s always a pleasure to have a little european influence in the house. their sense of humor gets me every time. i have to get to sweden before this summer is over.

fragmented memories of incidents from the past few months dance around when i try to write and i sometimes miss a few of them because i have to latch on to one or the other when they come around and get them down before they disappear again into the nonsense that is my mind.

thought for the day: what would the world be like without caffein? i get they feeling we’d still be riding animals for transportation and id be scribbling this down on papyrus with a quill and ink made of crushed leaves and snail shells.

I too call it Spinning

Below are my journal entries from the tour with my friends band Inverse. Good reading for those unperturbed by poor grammar.

Holes in the Washington Apple

last night was kind of a flop but i met some cool kids here in medford so it wasnt a total loss. none of the bands ended up playing because the venue we got booked for us was actually a internet cafe/ coffee house, which for an internet cafe/ coffee house was really cool and makes me wish we had something like it back home. but we needed a PA system and they had none so we played our acoustics outside the door until about 2 am. i sold a couple cd’s and called it a night.

i finished dune last night too, i dunno what im going to do with myself now.

the new jason mraz single has grown on me quite a bit and i found a new band for me called autolux and they win drum beat of the year with a song called turnstile blues.

last night had a few saving graces. we played a damn good game of poker which im finally letting myself participate in. i try to avoid fads so that i can mock them freely when they pass though sometimes i do get sucked in. damn you slap bracelets, i’ll never be free of your tyranny. we also had one of those infectious laugh fests as we were going to bed last night. the subject of the joke wasn’t intrinsically funny i dont think, but dominic, topher, and i laughed for a good five minutes over it. it was that kind of laughter that starts to hurt your throat and chest and no matter how hard you try to calm yourself, it takes hold of you and you’re at its mercy for as long as the feeling wills.

it was much needed after the disappointing beginning of this tour. washington should hold better venues.

But why were we looking at it in the first place?

the insanity never stops man, it’s like woah, every day is crazier than the one before! no not really, but i did fix the problem i was having with my new atm card by getting a new pin number and i almost got in a fight with a rather vulcan looking bartendress yesterday afternoon.

i put an informal complaint in to our waitress at the marathon bar saying that the newcastle i ordered tasted a little thin and like it ran through the tequila well tap. i didnt actually say the second part but that was the truth of it. the woman who i assume owned the place came over to the table we were all sitting at with a shot of the fowl beverage in hand and said to me that that was the way tapped newcastle tasted, inferring that my experience must be limited with such endeavors. i honestly didnt want an argument or even a free beer, i said i would pay for it and that i just wanted a beer in replacement so i could have something to drink with my gyro, which was quite tasty.

she stormed off more angry than she should have been with the exchange and i got a free hefewiesen. i tipped the waitress exorbitantly and invited her to come to the show. she didn’t come, surprise.

the so-cal boys dont like portland, they think its mossy and dirty looking. but i actually enjoy it quite a bit, there’s so many trees on every block and it just seems slower for a big city. a radio host once said that, in referring to the level of attractiveness in women, a portland 10 is a california 7. that made me laugh and so far i cant see the untruth of it. it looks like everyone here is going to art school. on the other hand its kind of nice to not be surrounded but unnatural levels of beauty even though i miss the university of arizona eye candy. but i cant say i ever talked to any of them, so really, what’s to miss.

again last night the turn out was sad but the show was good and i found a couple new bands i like and i got a shirt and some cd’s. i took a picture of a homeless man named dick and gave him a couple bucks and a cd and he put shoe polish on his face like war paint and a plastic bag on his head which resembled a chefs hat with E.D. comedy, it seems, is all around us.

we found a sex shop to entertain us for a while before we had to set up for the show. comedic moments whilst inside: finding pauls twin, sideburns and all in a gay porn, and finding a marital aid called “the great american challenge.” i’ll let you use youre own imagination on that one.

<3’s for everyone.

Out in the Parking Lot

i deeply dislike wal-marts. we use them for their well lit, well cleaned bathrooms, but i try to spend as little time in them as possible. they seem like cultural wastelands piled to their impersonally high ceilings with nicknacks that range from slightly to profoundly useless. employees man the wide automatically opening doors with blue vests stamped with the seemingly friendly slogan, “how may we help you?” how may we watch you shop lifting?

my sour feeling toward mock authority stems from last nights encounter with another wal-marts parking lot security patrolman who felt the need to harass us intermittently while we had our rv parked. apparently “rving” because according to this man, rv is a verb, was prohibited in that parking lot and regardless of the fact that we explained to him on multiple occasions that we were only doing to be there a few hours to rest and catch a movie he felt it reasonable to question our motives.

and it wasnt that we were rude to him… to start with. i smiled when he told us the rules and said we wouldn’t be there over night. i smiled when i walked over to his truck with obnoxious flashing yellow lights to ask him if it was ok to stay there while we caught a movie at the cinema-plex across the way. i didnt even become rude when he gave me the stone faced look of a man who reveled in his place of power and told me we had to move the rv to the curb side of the the lot so we wouldnt impede other shoppers driving. his point was that our trailer stuck out about 3 feet into the road space between parking stalls. i laughed a bit at this and in an obvious attempt to show me he meant business he stared at me like a drill sergeant might stare at a soldier in training. that was the breaking point for me.

everytime he would drive be from that point on i would wave condescendingly at him with a big smile and a wink. we took pictures of him and as we walked back from watching the longest yard, and gave him the double finger point like “hey tiger!” i dont know why these little things give me such pleasure. but when you really have no recourse against being wronged, the only available actions sometimes take on childish heir. sometime after that he informed us that we had ten minutes to leave before he called in reinforcements because he thought we had lied about seeing a movie. he stood outside the camper out of my sight from the loft above the drivers seat and i called to him “would you like to see the movie stub?” knowing that would catch him off guard as he assumed he was correct, and he said “no, i don’t want to see it.” the surely nature of his reply made me laugh and i knew that i had won this stupid game.

i flipped him off as we left and felt satisfied with myself. have i grown as a human being from that experience? no, but i wont pretend that im above pettiness. we all slept in till around noon today and now we are sitting here eating and deciding where we are to go next since we don’t really have much to do till around 8 or so.

apparently the ugliness of the people we have seen here has not been lost of my companions. of course we take our sample from wal-mart parking lots so it’s had to say thats representative of what oregon really has to offer. all for now. its guitar time.

A drop in the Pale

oregon so far is a beautiful state. the vegitation is lush and even the major cities like portland have trees lining all the streets. but along with the greenery comes a huge amount of rain. its almost always cloudy if not overcast and the ground is rarely dry. i enjoy it none the less, but i doubt i would enjoy living here full time. im looking forward to taking more pictures to help remember what im seeing these days.

im listening to dune on audio book and through it i feel my thoughts are taking on a more formal patern of arrangement because of the proper english usage and the focus on inward thinking and analysis of minute amounts of data from the outside world. im probably just a nerd.

oregon is also a stark contrast to the southern california feel we’ve driven away from. from fake and baked perfection seeking teenies to overwieght slices of americana, it feels like the people here are the ones europeans think of when they try to mock our way of life. in a way though i do feel at home here with my pale brethren.