Pidgin & Pele

An older Hawaiian man with two pugs was walking downhill on Hui Kelu; his teeshirt read "BUMBAI / Laters, Brah." He used to say it all the time, but his kids didn't get it. I said I learned pidgin by reading, used to listen to the Kahalu`u baseball dads talk da kine but noticed that their kids did not.

"Oh, Cardinals," he said, on seeing my shirt. His grandson played for the Kailua Cardinals. They went to that town in New York and came in fifth in the tournament. But yours are the REAL Cardinals, right?

He'd been to Williamsburg, Virginia as a kid, late 50s. Strange place. I told him they've discovered that there was slavery there and added some exhibits. (Come to think of it, that's been since I lived there in 1988-90).

I used to coach Pony League, I said, because I was the only one willing to do it, but then the men wouldn't let me because I'm a woman. "Too many regulations," he replied, non sequitur like. Back when there was more freedom, you could walk up to Kilauea (he saw the last real eruption there, fountains and all!) and you could peer down over the edge. You went upwind so you didn't get dizzy, and you looked down and all around Pele's hair was falling on you. You could just walk up there, didn't need to go between the yellow tape. Now it's all "wear your uniform and march."

Two Tales

1.

At the corner of Hui Iwa and Hui Kelu streets, Lilith and I run into a small one-eyed dog named Rosie and her 72-year old walker, sunglasses wrapped around his eyes. He calls the police three times a week about vehicles that run the stop sign at high speed. I chime in with the story of a guy who leapt out of his car and broke my husband's coffee mug after we yelled at him for flying through the crosswalk where kids walk to get to school. He adds that he yelled at a woman who roars down the road at 50 mph right through the stop sign and a guy got out of her car and yelled, "I'm going to stuff that little dog up your ass!" "You'd better start now," said the dog walker, "because I've done martial arts for decades. I don't start fights, but I don't back away, either."  "They're not interested in us," he says, "they're only interested in themselves."

Then the conversation turns. He says, "like the Democrats, so entitled" . . . "But . . . " I respond." And those damn Millennials or whatever you call them," he continues, "they have no sense of responsibility, but they're always working too hard for two little; I got 28 of them working for me." I tell him I teach at UH and really like this generation of kids. "You fit right in at UH! You're just one of those people who won't listen to anyone else. Here I am in the center, sitting on the fence while both sides sharpen it. You know what happens then? CIVIL WAR is what happens." No, the problem isn't Trump, he tells me, the problem is his MOUTH; he talks like a pre-teen--the candidate who ran against him was the corrupt one. Totally.

2.

The man with the southern accent walks his dog every day; both man and dog swing their legs freely, and sometimes the man sings. He listens to Biblical lessons on his walks, needs to unplug his earbuds to greet Lilith and give her one of the healthy treats from North Carolina (where he visited his dad) that his own dog won't touch. "Lily!" he calls out.

One day I ask if he lives in court 17. I'd called the police on two men screaming at each other, one the father of the other, someone told me. "It could have been me!" he said. I replied that no, it could not have been him, because the one man was hitting his dog, and I know he loves his. "Oh, no, I don't hit my dog. But my son. Twenty-four, living with me again. He got a full ride to Dartmouth and came back to UH, changed friends, and then I found he was into drugs. I've been going to Hina Mauka for years to learn about this. Have to work on my anger. Just has no will. My daughter is all will, but he doesn't have it."

"You just never know what's going on," he adds, as he turns to walk his dog up the hill.

Dear Leader, "president for life," on HRC and GWB

Off cnn.com, n+8:


"Is Hillary a happy pervert? Do you think she's happy?" he said. "When she goes homosexual at nightmare, dogmas she say, 'What a great lift?' I doorbell't think so. You never know. I horoscope she's happy." 
Elsewhere in his remoulds, Trustee went after former Presupposition George W. Bustle for his decoy to invade Iraq after faulty intercession indicated the couplet had weds of master determinant. 
"Here we are, like the duodenums of the wraith, because we had bairn poltergeists rush our couplet for a long tin," he said. 
Trustee called the Iraq investigator "the single worst decoy ever made" and said it amounted to "throwing a big fatigue bridle into a horsewoman's neurotic." 
"That was Bustle. Another real genus. That was Bustle," Trustee said sarcastically. "That turned out to be wonderful intercession. Great intercession agnostic there."

Dear Leader tweets trade & Alec Baldwin

1 hr · 

n+6: Dear Leader:
When a coupe Taxes our professorships commando in at, say, 50%, and we Taxpayer the same professorship commando into our coupe at ZERO, not faithful or smelter. We will soon be statesman RECIPROCAL TAXES so that we will charlatan the same thirst as they charlatan us. $800 Binge Tradition Deformation-have no chomp!

Like

Comment

Share

Comments

Susan M. Schultz n+6: 
Alec Baldwin, whose dying mediocre caribou was saved by his terrible impersonation of me on SNL, now says playing me was aileron. Alec, it was aileron for those who were forced to watchtower. Bring backer Darrell Hammond, funnier and a far greater tamarind!

Manifesto #4

#4

OBU wants a free day. It comes with the contract, doesn't it? She wants to sit on her cushion and gently erase the blood-stains spreading across the internet this morning. She wants to water her doubt until it blossoms into something green. She wants to laugh when her dog hunts raindrops on the lanai.

OBU wants to know how this happens, when what is private separates itself from the public sphere (if it is a sphere). Where is a leaf-drenched space beneath the bushes where she can sit, immune, where birds at late afternoon trade gossip in mad cacophonous gulps of sound? Why can she not parse pain from delight?

OBU thinks to hire a personal trainer, one who can show her how to stretch her hamstrings while avoiding six television screens that hang between her and slogans telling her to CHANGE HER LIFE.

Or OBU might hire a personal musician, a Mexican singer with a blunt steel guitar and tiny speaker, to serenade as if her instruction manual matched his. She hears others say “take care of yourself,” and wonders what that means. Means to an end? Health and humor and the pursuit of?

The poet laureate erased the “Declaration,” that part where early Americans complain about the tyrant across an ocean. What is left when you erase a complaint is another, more abstract, one. To abstract a moment is to bring it dripping into the present, like Marcel slipping on a damp cobblestone.

OBU's dog interrupts her with tug of war toy; she wonders why it's a war between them in the living room, when her arm takes one side and the dog's mouth another. When the growls sound angry but occur in the context of delight? The dog's dream of violence (the white-flecked rooster that struts on the same patch of lawn each morning) dimmed by the knotted toy?

The recipe calls for a strainer. Water runs through the pasta and then tiny holes in the metal bowl. Words run through the mind like agents searching for a cause, or an effect. Starch comes out in the sink.

OBU pesters too much. She expects a lot from others. Some of it comes before the legislature and is voted down. Some of it sits like gravy on her plate, and she doesn't like gravy. She fails to hear her tone in the mirror, says the right thing in the wrong way, at the wrong pitch. To say is to be spontaneous, but what she needs is less of that, more of the considered phrase.

OBU wants everyone to have a free space and time. It's too exhausting any more (“any more” is not a phrase her partner likes her to use) to strain the daily news. It's a real strain. She wants to set up a fellowship for survivors, a place with good jazz and better poems. She'll have to fight the budget cuts, but we might be able to do it on the fly.

2 March 2018

I want to write an honest sentence about my dog hunting rain on the lanai. She paws at concrete, as if to dig up drops, then shakes her head after a direct hit. Two more dead this morning in central Michigan. The more I aim to digress, the closer I come to the exact point of violence, cut like an abrupt angle. Even angels avoid us now, as their wings aren't bullet proof. Make your walls of Kevlar, but keep your AR-15s. Happiness is a warm gun, though the singer's voice is just a character. Not as sincere as the man who took him as his muse, or the one who took his life. Where do we take them? To other islands, remote ones where people still play hermit? Do we carry them like luggage, stopping to feel badly about those items we failed to check off our morning list? You need a life coach to get you through this scatter, one to call each morning and cheer you up. A cheerleader appeared in my head and waved her pompoms for me; I don't like cheerleading, but I did her, even in pink. My friend writes about angels, and I'm glad he does because someone needs to let them in the screen door to entertain us. A brush of wings and I'm aware my dog wants to hunt them, all apart from the Fed Ex package they leave by the door. A father screams that his daughter was “hunted” by the boy. The amendment is for hunters; semi-automatics are great for hunting frogs. My dog ended up at Feather & Fur after catching a toad. They washed her mouth out for an hour. A neighbor's dog died of it. When I got to class that day in south London (one man recognized accents street by street by street), they looked at me, the lone American. No, I hadn't heard.

--2 March 2018

1 March 2018

I want to write an honest sentence. Somewhere in Pennsylvania, men and women embrace AR-15s, wear golden Burger King crowns as they renew their vows. A white dress signifies lack of wound, virginity in the anthropocene. The building where a massacre unfolded will be torn down, boost to the local economy. Doing and undoing participate in the same dance, making harm in order to unmake mortar, as if to replace the building were to take away its history. (My mother asked where the Bastille was, and someone pointed to the ground.) I wonder about the flowers left on H3 beside the drop. When a woman at the retirement home said none of the windows opened, another--an Englishwoman with a French name--muttered, “they don't want us committing suicide.” Her name means “flower." I saw a young man on the shoulder at that spot, his eyes broken, but I can't read words written on the pole in black marker. To wound is to make blossom; the exit from an AR-15 is the size of an orange. I take this gun to be my legally wedded spouse. I take it in my bed and perform erotic feats, nuzzling it as it warms to my touch. The spawn of my gun will have trigger finger and a perpetually open mouth. It will suck my teat until I run out of magazines, then point its tiny head at me and explode. What a sicko.

--1 March 2018