"I'm a senior influencer," the tall Asian man said to me and Raschelle yesterday, as he asked me to retake his photograph. It needed to include his feet, decked in bright blue Hokas. The hat he wore over his white hair and pony tail also read HOKA. His daughter works for the company in California, and the photo was for her. He lives on the other side, near Skyline (the billion dollar rail system on stilts). Everything's so noisy over there, he'd rather live over here. Now, if only the Japanese had built Skyline, it would go all the way to Hawai`i Kai by now, through Waikiki (in a tunnel under the Ala Wai), and to UH Manoa. Their speed trains were built in the 1960s and there have been zero accidents. What are they doing putting all those sculptures on the Skyline poles anyway? (I suggested they made them look a little bit less boring.) But with everything so expensive already, why decorate a pole? The trains are elevated so that they don't have to have drivers, he said.
Today, another walker told me that the Chinese man whose odd Christian nationalist patriotic American tomb sits at the top of the cemetery has been detained for a year now. She called up a story from Hawai`i News Now last week. "A Chinese millionaire who has invested more than $100 million in Hawaii real estate is fighting deportation by the U.S. government, claiming he fears retaliation for supporting democracy while officials say he smuggled aliens and has communist ties." You've gotta read it to believe it, and even then it seems fantastical. https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/.../chinese-millionaire.../
I showed Bryson the photograph I took of him petting Lilith yesterday on his John Deere gator. "I saw it already!" he said, "Hoku and Ola showed me" He said he'd seen John, who is doing ok, better, somehow has taken a good turn. No, he doesn't have a new job but, Bryson said, as he stared off in the distance, "you've got to put yourself in his hands." He raised his toward the sky.
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