This Town Do Feel Mine

The other day I decided to bike around town. Nothing out of the ordinary there, but the face of the burg struck me as it sometimes does. Holy shit, I live here. I sometimes think that a purer distillation of Americana doesn't exist, that I've hit the main nerve, the wet dream of so many conservative folks who fervently desire to "Make America Great Again" or to descend into a time before, as my Old Man put it, the country "was going to hell in a hand basket". I'm not sure exactly when this was supposed to have begun, as it seemed to be an ongoing process, but I believe it was sometime around when hippies started showing up in large enough numbers to report.

I found a bracelet of Gavin's in one of my cabinets. It was broken and I repaired it with an improvised fastening device fashioned from a repurposed hair tie. I've taken to wearing it around for some reason, at all times, work, home, wherever. He turned 13 over the weekend and I'm not certain he'll want to wear it when I see him again this summer. Something about that seems fitting but also worthy of despair.

I got hella roasted on my bike ride, humorously enough, nearby my work. I then watched people falling out of the sky and wondered at them. One of the parachutists trailed an American flag behind its person while the jumping partner cut furious arcs through the overhead gray. Their bodies descended without incident and I remounted my ride to repair to the bar where I observed the wonders pictured above. The barkeep, Sarah, was grandly engaging and the words issuing from my face sounded foreign. There was little to do save watch the hockey game. It was a strange journey.

I biked around, visiting my local playgrounds. I didn't tarry as I was solo and my appearance was extreme sketch at best. The parks are places where Gavin, Kiernan, and I have spent time and the realization, never far removed, that that window of existence is fast closing encroached. I snapped photos, wishing to record the scenes for reasons tinged with nostalgia and wistfulness, two mind states I regularly admonish myself for harboring - the reality of impermanence demands I do so, but the emotive, ape parts of my brain hold memories of the times in those parks as highly relevant. It's an odd dichotomy.

Later, I sat lotus on a picnic table situated on the concrete park abutting the train depot in town. I faced away from our iconic water tower and studied the storefronts of the main drag, Alaska Street. The wind had arisen while I was in the bar and it tugged my hair, my beard. There was no one on the street and cars, such that they were, passed with abandon. I was there quite some time, watching. A man approached, he and his dog, and inquired should I like to smoke a bowl with him. I declined, with gratitude, and he left me to my thoughts. Later, I saw him underneath some birch trees nearby the depot with all his kit - bike, pack, dog, self - and the nature of this town's characters imposed itself upon me. There are rafts of suchlike people, all living their own crazed realities. It's something to think about.

A arrived with Uly in tow and we all headed out to the recycling collection center who was lately celebrating its 20th anniversary. Some students of mine had been steamrolled into prepping/carrying out the food/security for the gig. I was grandly altered by this point and several of the students admitted to not recognizing me until I had spoken to them. There were hors d'oeuvre of a fashion and pastries and other things on which to nibble and we took these to the collection bay where we watched local artists perform. There was an aged lady barbershop quartet and their voices betrayed none of the creeping ruin of their frames. They sang a few numbers. Tables were roundly thumped in appreciation. The other members of the audience seemed not to care much and so profanity was also employed. The singers concluded and we left to explore the grounds and socialize. The students seemed strangely mystified that I could exist outside the narrow confines of my work and it was good to show them a measure of quirk, to show that staff people aren't all robots, touting the DOL line of "work, work, work...". I like to think it did them some mental favors. 

A shuttled us back to the bar and my bicycle. I told her about the guy at the depot. We talked about the barbershop quartet. I went on about my students telling anecdotes, hopefully of the funny variety. We sat there in our bar, with our boy, in our town and I was swamped by the most attachment I've ever felt for an area, almost like nothing bad could happen here, even though I know this to be untrue as Palmer has all the problems anywhere else has - substance abuse, domestic violence, theft, corruption, teen murder even fails to escape us. Much like the parks' relationship to impermanence, it's an odd interbeing. The place is perfect. The place is simultaneously flawed. It's home.  

Here's the street where I live. I feel fairly certain I've posted a similar type photo before, but this one always jars. There is not one, but two massive intrusions of rock, just sitting there on display. This is Matanuska Peak, the west face, and I see it daily on the short commute to work. I leave home and there it is. I turn 90 degrees right from this view and there lies Pioneer Peak, showing off its north face, massive craggy rock garbed with rags of snow. The tourists have arrived for the season and, weather permitting, they without fail snap selfies or take panoramas for posting on social media no doubt. I hope I never reach the point of acclimating to the views. I somehow doubt I will. 

Home. Evening. A was in the back, getting Uly to sleep. I sat out front and watched the sky and the birch and the pussy willow and the mountain (Pioneer Peak, ill-pictured here if at all discernible). Much like my earlier engagement with the bar, it has been and continues to be a strange journey.

It Hurts a Little Bit

Hey, take a look at this idiot.

I went to my friend D's book launch the other day. He had asked me to do the honor of interviewing him at a local bookstore about his novel and writing process and I had, of course, agreed to do so. After work, I drove into the city, through the spring rain during which I was dazzled by the sight of an eagle, fish in its talons, cruising over the roadbed, on its way home for dinner. Once arrived, the scene was grand - small urban coffee shop vibe with Mexican inspired tapas and beer on tap or in cans. D was on the small elevated stage, signing books. The place was packed, young and old, with friends of D's and those of his son who's no longer bodily among us. Soon, the event's hour came and I joined D on the stage. I felt a total fraud, sitting up there with him and asking questions about his book and recent run of publishing success. After the Q&A, D read a chapter from the novel and I watched him, reading in his characteristic way, the same way I read his words in my head, in his voice. There was something to it, and I stood at the back, taking in the reality that doing such a thing was possible. The reading concluded, I retired to one of the only two seats left available to guzzle beer and people watch, overcome with the deep knowledge of eventual death, but not in a necessarily bad way. The event ended and I drove home to my quiet town, my sleeping house, to sit with myself for a while. 

At work I got a promotion of sorts. The new jam is titled "Career Counselor" and I'm supposed to advise students about their career path and how they can be successful in the workplace (laughable, I know, given my highly non-linear track myself). What I really end up doing is inputting student's time off requests and providing haphazard, at best, mental health counseling that runs the gamut of topics - grief, stress, relationships, substance abuse, crushing existentialism (also laughable due to my inability to grapple successfully with those issues). It's a pretty good deal. I have my own office. I come and go much as I please. I'm generally left alone unless the world is burning down for one of the students. I don't have to put on the song and dance fuckery of entertaining/managing a classroom full of disaffected, low socioeconomic adolescents who would rather be just about anywhere else committing all manner of abuses of the flesh. It's a thing to watch them and to realize that I'm in the pull of a temporal black hole, approaching the event horizon, and speeding farther and farther away from where they are now and where I once was and that soon I will cross that boundary (or may have already). It's a hell of a thing.

I sit here, at home, surrounded by books. Sometimes (lots of the time really), I find myself in a state of wonder at how things have shaken out for me. I'm a skinny white kid from southern Mississippi who grew up in a trailer and somehow I've managed to never work, not really, a day in my life. By rights I should have been a day laborer, gone to prison, been hooked on methamphetamine, trailer park denizen, domestic violence champ, Bud Light swiller, serial bum, homeless, any of the futures that I know could have existed out there. Yet I reside in relative ease and comfort, watching my youngest play with a Melissa and Doug play pizza set as I listen to streaming Lofi beats and watch the world outside turn green once more. I spend my days writing away at things, at whatever shape my life has occupied. Nights I'm currently enthralled with ice hockey even though I've never been in ice skates and have only attempted, once, those of the roller variety. I've somehow managed to get married, three times even. I'm going to have a novel published this year. The entirety of my existence is a mystery, one unsolvable, and I'm drawn to the line from Blood Meridian when the kid spends a night with the hermit in the desert when the old man imparts this wisdom to him.

 "A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with."   

Winter-Fueled Self-Recriminations

Ulybear turned two a week ago. I know how I should feel about that (joyful, proud, excited, etc.), but I can't say that I fall into that realm. For true, I am all of those things, as another orbit around the sun has made him more robust and engaging and hardier and less likely to die from something as insidious as SIDS but there's all the baggage that goes along with having him become the individual he has always been and the reality that, truth be told, I'm far, far more lenient with him than I have been my older boys. I'm nicer to him. I always say please and thank you. I give him many more choices in things. Very few, if any, knife hands get thrown his way. I have yet to, as I once did with Gavin, force him to hold a heavy stone over his head and run around a house, shouting apologies, in penance for some now forgotten transgression. I'll likely never upend the chest of drawers, much like I did with Kiernan, and strew his clothes about the floor because he's not cleaned his room to the ordered specifications in the required time. 

It's strange to me to watch (my parental progression, I mean) and I get the feeling, unfactcheckable due to mortality, that my old man had the same type conundrum with my development. That smacks of hubris in the extreme but I feel it's a valid thing to explore. I was seven and nine years removed from my brothers and I know, both through their telling and my old man's own confession, that I had it far easier than both of my elder brothers. I can remember, out of context, speaking with my brother, the middle child of us three, about how I'd had it soft because "Pop could lay on a whipping in his thirties" a decade of his to which I was little privy and memory experience of which I had none. 

Uly on the left.

We went up to the mountains the other day for some skiing. The day was magnificent: clear, cold, new snow - the first in what seemed quite a while, and no wind. On the way in I noted the sledding hill in a rueful manner. Otherwise, I was stricken with the place, especially the seasonal attitude of the day and the sound of the snow underfoot and the crisp surface crust of the previously drifted dunes that crunched beneath my weight but held Uly's as he and I ambled about the area while A skied solo. Uly tired, and I booted off some snow from a picnic table seat so he could rest there. We, Uly and I, sat on that bench and watched the turn of the earth and the orb of sun in the sky and listened to the sound of the woods and we were quiet as we waited the final bit for his mother to return. After, we descended and resumed our normal lives once more.

We went down the Lower 48 way this Christmastide. I met the boys in MSP and we copped a cheap motel a bit down the road. There were only two beds and the elevator was sketch af but the television worked and so did the ice machine and refrigerator and we all cobbled ourselves into the room for a single night's rest before the trip out to Winona where Uly and A stayed with my newly minted in-laws. The weather was brutal - polar vortex cold and unseasonable temps. Morning after, we drove back, listening to the newest QOTSA album and grooving furiously to the tracks. 

Once in Winona, the boys, refueled by a night's sleep and despite the chill, availed themselves of the local sledding venues (not ideal but shouldered through regardless) and I watched those boys slide down the frigid and brush covered hills as A's father shoved them and followed after and the cold and the time and the fleeting nature of their childhoods came hurtling down with them into the pit that is me and I watched them go, run after run, yelling and laughing, until it was time, all too quick in coming, to head inside to warm up.

Maybe I'm just repeating myself here as I've said all these things, I know, before but I once heard a wise man say that we, as writers, are "all circling our own obsessions".

Autumn Hells

The other day I was out for a stroll, pre-snow. A's family was in town and the valley was in full autumn, gorgeously red and gold and brown and possessed of a certain mustiness that heralds the winter and can be likened to a berry-sort of goodness folded into a kind of muskegg and arboreal decay just before the freeze arrives and arrests most things organic prior to the spring major thawing. A's mom and dad copped a place at a bed and breakfast with full frontal view of Pioneer Peak. The vista granduered and the climate was frisky. All the elements were in place for an adventure. I availed.

This year's holiday time features a few things I dislike. There is air travel, first and foremost. Then there is hospitality-ing and guesting and Christmas partying (both of the corporate and familial variety) and a general feeling that all this merry making could be better served doing anything else. (I could finish the weird novella draft re-write. I could watch some football. I could get a new short story done before the new year as was my end of 2017 goal. I could get out there and do anything else life related that wasn't wasting time.)

Recently, I fell and broke some bones of the rib-cage variety. I was in the shower. The bathroom Defensive Coordinator called a two-gap blitz and came with the linebacker combo of Slippery Shower (TCU) and Indestructible Commode (THE Ohio State University). I was in the pocket. I turned to avoid the rush and was shoestring grabbed by Slippery Shower as Indestructible Commode plowed into my midsection. After the play I was up and calling signals, but the Head Coach (A), came in to call a time out. I finished the drive and was good to play, but had to go out of the game, not on IR, but not starting either.

It's been six weeks and I'm still not 100 percent.

The Real Me

A and Uly gathering blueberries in Hatcher Pass.

"Get me off of this; I need confidence in myself," The Weeknd balefully implores of his newfound lover on the track "Wicked Games". Good Lord can I connect to that sentiment, especially in the wake of the autumn's advent and the crushing apathy that is work and the never ending heartbreak that is shepherding children into this world only to have them go before you onto this stage and render every ounce of the love you pour into them to an unused lard that sits neglected and turns rancid on the kitchen counter of their lives. Sometimes I feel that, if I had enough of that confidence that The Weeknd desires, I could believe the direction my life flowed was good and true and not illusory and fleeting and ultimately false. 

Today we went, with A's mother and auntie and Uly, to the oomingmak farm that resides in Palmer, just up the road here. We walked around the premises and had a tour from a super nice woman named Grayson (?) and saw the beasts and learned about the farm's operation and qiviut gathering schedule and processing. The tour guide let Ulybear feed some of the calves (weighing in at close to two hundo) with a branch affixed with dead leaves. The animals' eyes rolled and the calves called in the manner of bovines and I had the intense desire to face down these beasts on the iced over tundra armed with only a flint-tipped birch spear and draped in stinking hides, screaming into a sub-zero whiteness. I know I'd die in such a scenario. 

We went to the fair this year, as always. It seems that, as I get older, the fair gets more magical as if I were slipping, temporally, into an adolescence that I never experienced for real (as real as this simulation universe can attain). Uly and A and I had all manner of fair food (fried pickles and pretzels with cheese and fried peanut potatoes with real bacon bit infused mayonnaise) in addition to many beers (Uly abstained from the brew). There was all the human noise there and the farm animals and Capuchin monkeys riding border collies and different reptiles in an exhibit and a woman on a mobility scooter motoring down the pathway with an obese grandson huffing along behind at a trot petitioning his grams to slow down and it was a different world altogether, as it is. I wondered about all those souls in that company and how they maintained with their own specific set of life attacks. 

The leaves are turning and falling down and it is at once beautiful and metaphoric and heart-fucking-sundering but in the best of possible ways.

Die, Motherfucker, Die

Here it is folks, a compilation of the summer's photos. I'll minimally word these to give you all an idea of where/when things occurred. It's been cyclonic, to be sure, and it always leaves one with the relishing sadness of experiences that are too meteoric to be contained in the accomplishing of them. Here's hoping you enjoy.

View of the Matanuska, taken from Lazy Mt., July 2017. Hiked with the two oldest. Did not summit.

Afterward, there were darts and drinks at the Moosehead.

Lazy Mt. Second picnic table. Serious.

The boys devo'ing a table-top, turn based, fighting game populated by animal characters gleaned from Ulybear's toys.

In the van, bound for Hope before heading to Homer for camping. August 2017.

Ulybear picking and eating raspberries at the Porcupine campground in Hope.

In the tent. Hope, AK.

K showing off his "Top Chef" inspired s'mores creation, completed by a fire roasted raspberry.

Me and the seed. Land's End, Homer Spit. August 2017.

Kiernan enjoys the campsite fire on the Spit.

They leave on Saturday, then, it gets darker.

Mountain Hop

We went for a hike in the mountains the other day. It was transformative. We didn't go far, nor high, nor was the route technical or in any way difficult, but the hike changed us, in the way it always does. We took a previously unexplored trail and wound up in a mostly neglected cirque where there was evidence of an abandoned mining op and the remains of a rodent (skull, scapulae, fur) and hikers on the ridge above with their dogs and the quiet that reigns up there and water and rock and sky. It was me, my special lady, and my three sons.

It's summer vacation here. I've got the eldest two for a month and a half and its awful in the way that it always is. We have to cram in a year's worth of work into that time and it's not easy. The other day I spent an hour and a half with Kiernan wherein we did some serious psychological work to get to the root of why the sight of a blue painted house on the corner that was visible from the breakfast table conspired to make him cry (turns out a shit-talking ex-friend lived in a similarly colored house and that image brought up painful memories). Before that I parsed out all the reasons my oldest didn't want to play soccer here (a sport he loves), then we relayed that info to his mother (not ideal). It's terrible to watch them grow like this but all the while wondrous.

Watching my youngest with his two older brothers is something altogether destroying. Uly shines to his brothers right away, engaging with them in a way he doesn't do with A and me, emulating them more fully, opening up more, observing, learning. He mimics what they do and enjoys their company differently than he does with his mother and me. He's taken to seeking out his brothers in the morning instead of solely needing his mother for the morning's entertainment. They all jive together, incomprehensibly, beautifully. It's more than I can take. 

We biked down to the river today. She was up, magnificently, higher than I'd ever seen. We went to the bridge and watched the roiling current eddy and gyre and crest the rocks where we normally could have descended and walked. The water rushed along, carrying with it the various driftwood parcels that swam on its movement. Gavin and Kiernan chucked rocks, larger and larger, into the brown torrent to see how large a splash they could produce. The youngest I watched with an unhealthy dose of paranoia, fearful that he might fall into the tumult below the bridge, thinking all the while that they, all three of them, were like the river, untameable, frightening, capable of being observed only. 

In the words of my friend Nick, "I don't know why living exists when you just want to die."

Fuck Everything

Been spending a lot of my free time these days getting stratospheric and staring out the window at the scenery. The birch tree in the front yard is transcendent. Beyond, rows of slanting houses tilt into the earth like absurd phantoms. The mountain that crowds the horizon is another reality entire to itself. The wine in my fist is sustaining on a level I don't believe possible. Birds arrive on evening missions to the feeders, mostly solitary, and spend their time gathering seeds from the spillage on the melting ground. The sky changes; sometimes there is a breeze, sometimes clouds. I watch the evening pinken, then dim, then pour myself the final abuse of that day's mini-bender. I'm going to be dead soon enough.

Last week there was a food truck/vintage shop festival at the fairgrounds. A and I visited with her parents who were in town for the week. I strengthened my morning coffee with vodka and we advanced to the grounds and perused the displays. I found a truck that hailed from my birth neck of the woods and ate a shrimp and catfish po-boy with fried okra as a side. It was delicious - fried perfectly and seasoned with just enough spice that the addition of Tabasco only heightened the flavors of the seafood and balanced the mayo-tomato-lettuce combo. The bread was the right consistency of toothy and fresh. As I ate, relishing, the meal made me think about my dead parents and what they might make of me being in Palmer, AK eating such fare. What might they have thought about having Uly as a member of their number? What about G and K who they likewise did not meet? 

I dyed eggs with Ulybear and fam this past Friday when I'd taken a personal day from work. It was A's parents' last day with us and they were soon to be flying back to MN. We did the usual stuff: put names on the shells, drew designs, dunked the eggs. While the grandparents had a time with Uly and his cuteness, I was drawn into my own interiority of previous, egg dyeing memory-scapes where G was younger and wearing one of my old, white t-shirts stained with dye, hands to match, holding up his creation in a photo I keep somewhere. There was G and K with friends in a similarly messy outing where they'd spent the day gorging on kid-friendly snacks and playing before the egg coloring finale. The scene congealed of a time they went to a secret proselytizing "egg hunt" where they sat through a non-denominational, feel good-ey, Christianity-lite service before being set loose to gather eggs "hidden" on a patch of astroturf at the Menard Sports Center. Of these things I said nothing.

Here's K at a soccer game I didn't attend. He's in the black kit, positioning himself, edging out that other kid and anticipating the drop of the shadowed ball that hangs just out of frame. Judging from the motion of the photo, he's going to get the first touch and ensuing advantage in maneuvering up the field. I received the photo - along with others of report card info and goalie work - on a Thursday morning while I was busy with a field trip with my students to the local recycling center. I scrolled through the photos as the pupils labored through a presentation on waste reduction. It would be four more hours before I was safely drinking secret beers at my local bar then on to home where I'd continue until it was time for window staring and the hoped for/anticipated nightly fade out. 

Fuck everything. 

Brain Problems

Here's a report:

The other day, I found myself out in the driveway, shoveling snow. This shouldn't be that bizarre an occurrence considering my locale, but the past two years have been shit with respect to snowfall and I've lived in places where snow removal has been someone else's responsibility. With the securing of a mortgage (via transferring my balls into the bank's vise), I've been granted the task of clearing said mortgage's driveway. Not to imply that I dislike the work. Indeed, I find the chore invigorating - outside, in the cold, laboring with a definite endpoint - and at the conclusion of which I can indicate palpable evidence of something useful having been accomplished. The driveway was snowy; now it is clear. I did that. Proceed to drink beer in triumph.

In any event, I was out, shoveling and after I'd done the required work, I heard a mewling from beneath the porch. A long haired, orange cat appeared, rangy, ugly, obviously street-worn with frost-bitten ears and matted fur. I promptly told the cat to fuck off, that we weren't doling out charity, and entered the house. The cat apparently took this as encouragement and hopped up to the porch in order to eat the spilled bird seed from my feeders and to lap at the melting snow on my porch boards. He then proceeded to mewl and cry at the door, going so far as to jump onto the bench and peer into my kitchen as if he'd been freshly turned out of the house for the day and was unhappy with that reality. 

By that evening the cat was inside, perched in my lap; by today I've settled on his name as "Captain Lawrence Edward Grace 'Titus' Oates", of the famously doomed Terra Nova Expedition. He's ill-tempered with the other cat, drinks from the toilet, puked on the living room floor, is gross in general, and prefers my company. 

Of course I like him.

I went skiing with A and Uly a week or so ago on Saturday. I don't remember exactly. Alcohol is a hell of a drug. 

In any event, we went out to the old train tracks that snake down the Matanuska river. The tracks are out of commission and run all the way to Sutton, almost 20 miles away, and we headed out into the day in the mid-noon hour finding it beyond magnificent. The snow was ground down by boots and paws and our skis hissed over the already laid imprints. I bid them go ahead and stayed to myself, going slowly and looking for birds.

We went about a mile out then turned back, just before an area where there is a massive and on-going earth slump as the river takes its toll on the bluff. The trail is passable there, but we mostly always turn back at that point as we worry about Uly's (and our own) safety. Returning, I let A take the lead again and told her not to wait for me. She skied on and left me to my thoughts. The river below shushed. My skis murmured in their traces. My breath came in rhythmic rushes. For a moment, things were okay.

A and Uly stopped for me at an overlook near the trail head. A bald eagle coasted over us, descending, until he perched on the snow pack near the stream of rushing water in the riverbed below. We left.

Uly turned a year. He walks now. He's got his own shitter now and has used it twice. Just this morning, he was fussy and yawning and I asked him if he wanted to go take a nap and he nodded his head and said, "ya," before he started down the hallway, without me, toward his bedroom. I followed him back and he crawled into his bed. After I covered him up, I told him I was going to leave him and he should sleep well and long. He nodded again and I left him. Within ten minutes he was out, like a light, as the Old Man would have said.

I returned to the living room, where I had been listening to Pandora. A, who had been at the store, returned but soon departed again to ski solo. Now it's only me, alone, sipping beer and listening to hip hop.

Something about that seems so right.

Work starts again tomorrow. 

I recently saw a facebook article from Cormac McCarthy wherein he gave an interview talking about how the 9-5 workday (I'm interpolating lots here as I only read the headline) is the death of creativity and that's why he's eschewed such a lifestyle. Can't say that I disagree there. Tomorrow will dawn and I'll arise and go to teach children (yes children) how to write resumes and set goals and compose cover letters so that they too might enjoy full employment as that is the endpoint of our current and collective economic delusion. 

What of the cat's example? 

What of the eagle's? 

What of Uly's?

I'll leave with a line from The Weeknd's newest music vid, "All I wanna do is make money and make dope shit."

Kill me.

*\(-@-)/* ~Kawaii~ [^*_*^]

I recently spent a week in a Hawai'ian island paradise hellscape.

While there, I experienced things that were beyond all right reckoning. Chief of all absurdities were the tourists (of which I was one) who seemed to wander about, devoid of observable purpose, zombie-like, and in need of scripted activities or tours to keep their minds occupied. They seemed ill at ease near the jungle, or on the seashore, or in any of the locals’ shops. Many of them engaged in behaviors that seemed to placate by way of familiarity: eating dairy ice cream in a locale where shave ice was the preferred chilled treat, obscuring authentic food trucks in favor of more outlandishly priced “gourmet” restaurants, or lounging (fretfully) at the beach where they seemed to wholly misunderstand the concepts of “tropical” and “beach”. It was odd to see - stressed biotic computers who’d purchased an expensive voyage to a place that was purported to be relaxing yet failing to evidence proof of the island’s endemic soothing effects. Despite their unease, I felt certain that, if asked, most would have quailed at the suggestion of overindulgence in pharmacological venues to calm their nerves. 

As I said, odd.    

Aboard the island I felt quite the foreigner for even being alive and imposing my consciousness on that place. The sham feeling persisted, was highlighted even, during interactions with the locals. The hotel lobby had a bar in which I spent some time (natch) and in that bar was a nice barkeep named Chris whose skin was the color of coconut shells. The ones available in supermarkets, not right off the tree. You know, the ones that fall on cartoon characters’ domes. In another part of the country, I’d have considered him Latino, but on the island I made him to be Native Hawai’ian (Hawai’ian Native?). He was good at his job, a conversationalist, impeccable drink maker, and possessed of the most important quality for a barkeep – knowing when to hold peace and let patrons mull the world.

Towards the last night I was there, I engaged with Chris over gins and tonics, and we discussed the nature of the island and how it’s changed. Chris said that until about 10 years ago (sweet Jesus that was 2006) the island had been a sleepy idyll, eschewed by many for the pleasures of Maui. Then, development took off and left the infrastructure behind. We talked of economics, and our children, and our histories, and how he’d been fortunate enough to buy a house and keep it. We chatted for a while, as other patrons came for “to go” Mai-Tais in plastic, lidded cups, and at the end of my rationed, public drinking time, he stood me two of my G&Ts and wished me a good trip home.

Outside of my already established interpersonal relationships, it was the most human interaction I experienced on the island.

At the resort, I continually felt the weight of what seemed to be the entire simulation universe. This feeling was magnified, especially when reflected in the constant undulations of the resort’s pool’s surface. I kept thinking that the waves and their propagation could explain something about the deeper nature of the physical world and were somehow analogous to the early mysteries of cosmology that resulted in the formation of the observable space around us. The phrase “localized space-time distortions” (as if I know fuck all about quantum anything) sounded nice and spooky, so I went with that and felt quite clever.

As I sat, drinking, and baking in the sun, and watching K figure out how to operate a snorkel we'd found in a bag on another pool deck (the bag was marked as being free to a good home), this line of thinking persisted. Despite the mental energy I was devoting to a topic I'd never understand and much like my vacation on the island, these thoughts too were shams, and only existed in my fallible brain because I’ve taken to ingesting things and watching way out of my depth lectures on YouTube as a form of entertainment after my small family goes to bed without me.

You could think it strange, but it's a good way to fill the time when you're alone and trying not to think about your impending death.

While we vacationed in our sham paradise, my friend, D, had an anniversary service for his son, whose funeral mass I attended. Since that heartache, he'd erected a memorial bench on a trail in Eagle River and the event was a trek out to the bench to honor the memory of one gone too soon. I'd been invited to go, via Facebook, but had to decline owing to the Kaua'i trip. In the aftermath of the service, when photo evidence appeared online, I studied the image in the suite where we were incomprehensibly staying. There, in the breeze of the tropic afternoon, was a snow-bracketed and candle-lined bench and I regretted, wholly, not being able to be there for him, or to light a Marian or St. Jude (one of my favorite saints) candle, or to pray in silence with those gathered at the site. My absence from something so concrete as the memorial shifted my perceptions of the island's irrealism into previously unattained levels and the desperate wish to return home seized me with fury.

When the trip was over and we safely arrived in Alaska, a visit to the mailbox found a package containing a Christmas present from D (a book about writers and drinking, obvi) with a personalized encouragement handwritten on the title page. Later, I sent a thank you email expressing my inability to return such a thoughtful gift and received such a kind response that it made me wonder how I'd been so fortunate to know, much less befriend, such a man. His simple act of continuing to exist seemed a massive refutation of all the vacation's apparent falsehoods, a grounding, a vast, calming effect in a world where air travel and resorts and spa visits and lu'aus and shell leis fill our collective brains as something to be sought after and procured, all while abhorring the question of why those such things are desired in the first place.     

{A beautiful, warped, and incomplete family, smiling in a place beyond comprehension.}