messiestobjects

On The Island State, Every Night is Great--Oh Every Night Is Date Night In Hawaii

    We finally got our power back after 9 days, and I have just got caught up on all my school work. Oy what a month. So the above photo is an overview of Honolulu from the top of Diamond Crater. Julie and I hiked up it on our first morning in town. It was really hot. The island of Oahu is amazing, except for all the people. It really illustrates how the tourist industry is adept at turning a beautiful place into an ugly mess. Don't get me wrong; there are plenty of unsullied beaches and beautiful drives and amazing vistas, yadda yadda yadda. But the urban development and masses of crowds in inappropriate places is especially jarring because of it.

    That's the problem with being a critical tourist though. By definition there is a healthy dose of hypocrisy in such statements. If it weren't for the tourism industry, I'd be out of a hobby. I just wish that Americans could be less... crass and destructive about the whole thing. The below photo is of one of those secluded areas.

    It's the place where Scott and Sarah almost got eaten by that wave from my last post, and also apparently the crash site from LOST is around there somewhere. But we didn't go looking for it because jesus, what a crap show that turned out to be.

    Nice vista, baby! So mostly our trip to Oahu consisted of driving around and chatting with Scott and Sarah. But of course we also hit Pearl Harbor. Sarah's dad took us out there for the day. We went to see an airplane museum somewhere. I'm not really a fan of military museums, but airplanes are neat.

    I just find the fetishizing of weaponry to be... odd. Don't misunderstand, I find certain aspects of military history and technology to be fascinating, but people who think America is great because we're awesome at killing people is a strange consequence of our national identity.

    Pearl Harbor is odd that way all around. There was a lot of self-righteousness about our getting attacked there, and it was definitely a horrendously sneaky and duplicitous attack on the part of the Japanese. But we act as though it were totally unprovoked, as though we would never do the same, and as though we were totally innocent bystanders of WWII up until that point.

    The fact is, we were economically meddling in world affairs and the Japanese knew they had to take us out of the game if they were to solidify their hold on certain resources that they needed. There are other reasons that are wrapped up in various forms of Nationalism and Japanese Identity, but that was the economic reality. That doesn't make us right or wrong to be outraged, it simply means that it was a world war, and tactics demand certain actions.

    We ourselves bombed the shit out of civilian areas of Dresden, Germany later in the war with similarly vague justifications. I find it morally dubious to "never forget" Pearl Harbor and 9/11, apparently unjustified attacks against us, while there are no such sloagans in the US for Dresden or Nagasaki, apparently unjustified attacks in which we were the immoral aggressor. The above and below pictures are of the sunken USS Arizona.

    Bubbles of oil still percolate to the surface from the ship. I tried to photograph one but really, a zoom of a little black ball-bearing in green water is a bit dull. Here's the floating memorial for the Arizona that they boat you out to. As far as memorials go, it's a pretty nice one actually.

    So that was our day at Pearl Harbor. Tora! Tora! Tora!

    The other major event from our Oahu portion of the trip was scuba diving. Scott and Sarah are Dive Masters, I have my Open Water Diver and have scuba dived (dove?) in Germany, Croatia, Thailand, Florida, and Guantenemo Bay, Cuba. Julie, however, had never done it before and so scuba was a must on the bucket list. Sarah hooked us up with a dive shop in Waikiki.

    And oh what the hell: Not a very flattering shot of me, but look, we dove with Daniel Craig!

    The dive itself wasn't the most amazing dive I've ever been on, but it was still pretty sweet and it was fun to see Julie flop around under water during the very normal adjustment period. She attacked it with courage and aplomb however, and by the end of the day was pretty damn good at it.

    You Scuba! Nice wristbands, Olivia Newton John.

    Tandem Scuba. We saw sea turtles, but Sarah didn't have the camera down on that dive. It was cool though, it was a turtle cleaning station, where they go to hang out and let fish eat accumulated gunk off of their shells. It was pretty.

    Aww. I totally took a picture of them making out down there with her camera, but they didn't send me that one. I guess they were afraid I'd publish it on my world-renowned blog or something. As-if!

    The thing about posing for pictures whilst scuba-diving: don't exhale! Ah well. Live and learn. Scott's like a zen scuba master down there on the left. So that's all I really got on Oahau. It was a lot of fun and of course it was great to hang out with my friend after not seeing him for like, 5 years now. Hopefully it won't be another 5 years.

    It was Julie and my 2nd anniversary while we were there, and I had some spare miles still so we used them to take a quick 2 day trip over to another Hawaiian island before heading home. Next post: Maui!

Boy, This Work Sure Is Hard.

So I was in Greenblatt's Deli the other day on Sunset Boulevard and this group of ladies sitting behind me were discussing a script that someone wanted them to make a movie out of. It was apparently about some boxer from South Africa during Apartheid, and during this conversation, I heard the phrase that made my trip to Hollywood complete: "I think there is definitely a market for a South African 'Rocky'." Ahhh... so Robert Altman. But it got even better as the discussion continued; they apparently forgot how marketable the idea was because she started to say that the guy would have to be flexible with his script as the "whole Apartheid thing has been done to death" and perhaps they could change it to a Muslim boxer, or a Muslim love interest because "that whole Muslim... thing... hasn't really been explored as much yet."

You can't make this stuff up, folks! Well... ok, they can, but I can't. I was so happy. That's really the best thing that happened to me on this trip. Although, if I was a sports fan, that wouldn't be true because I sat next to Kurt Warner on the plane ride from Newark to Pheonix. Although, since I had never heard of him until the guy sitting on the other side of me told me with barely concealed glee as we were getting off the plane who he was, I didn't get much out of it. I had had my headphones on and my face in a book for the whole trip, so I was confused as we began getting our luggage out of the overhead when some lady kept thanking him and how sorry she was to bother him but her son wouldn't forgive her if she didn't get his autograph (He was quite gracious about it), and in full earshot of Kurt, I turned to the guy next to me and said, "So who's this dude then?" After he told me, and ran down a list of Kurt Warner's football exploits, I was all like "Huh, that's wack, yo. But I don't watch football, so you're like, speaking gibberish right now."

I noticed while traveling from Newark to Phoenix to Santa Ana that every 4th person on the planes, in the airports, at my hotel here even, had a copy of the new Harry Potter book in their hands. Seriously. The front desk girl here is having a terrible time getting through it because although she speaks great English, it's not her native tongue but she's dying to find out what happens. Every time I walk by the desk she admonishes me not to tell her anything. It's all pretty funny. This is definitely going to be something that defines the 2000's when people reminisce 20 years from now. "So, where were you when the last Harry Potter book came out?" I just finished reading it myself, and I have to say that it's not what I expected, and it was pretty awesome. Definitely the most exciting one yet.

So otherwise, I've been to see the La Brea Tar pits, the big Hollywood sign, and I took a nice drive on Mulholland drive and a quick run through of Beverly Hills. Here's a picture of Hollywood High School. What's Lawrence Fishburne doing there with Elvis and Bruce Lee? Why is Dorothy so chubby? Who are all those other people? Is this the message we want to send to LA's young people?

I gave the Avenue of Stars and Rodeo Drive a big pass on the way to the Santa Monica Pier, which I could have passed over, also. Honestly, I can't figure out why rich and famous people like to live here. It's desert hot most days, the smog makes my eyes puffy, and the traffic is unbelievably insane. All that crazy talk about LA freeways is true. It takes about 2 hours to go 30 or 40 miles. Although, the Pacific Coastal Highway was nice. If I get time I need to go hit one of the beaches I passed. But, for my money, if I'm ever rich and famous, I'd live on Martha's Vineyard.

So here's a Sunset Boulevard billboard. I'd really like to know what the hell is going on in this Perrier ad. Um... no I wouldn't. Never mind. But I call this work of art 'Privilege', for obvious reasons. It all kind of ties together, I think.

Oh, did I mention that I'm here for work? I forget that part sometimes. Hee hee.

The Austrian Ski Patrol Is Always There When You Need 'Em.

I was reminded recently of a story about running from the cops. Well, sort of cops. I was living in Germany in the winter of '98/'99, and it was the best snowboarding season, ever. Bavaria was getting record amounts of snow. It seemed like every day, there was a foot of fresh powder on the ground. It would snow like crazy all night, and in the morning, clear skies. It did that every day for weeks. Like I said, best snowboarding season ever.

I was working as Night Hausmeister at the Von Steuben Hotel in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in the Bavarian Alps. Heh. As an interesting aside, General Von Steuben was a Prussian military officer who was either exiled or escaped from Germany after being found out to be a pedophile. He went to America and offered his services to the American military in the American Revolutionary War. I don't know if his vices were continued in our great, forgiving nation, (See Deliver Us From Evil... my God. I mean it. See it. Everyone needs to.) but he did become a war hero. Anyway, after World War II, when the US Army wanted to have a place for soldiers to go on R&R in Bavaria, they took the old Nazi Youth Headquarters in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and re-named it the Von Steuben Hotel. The Prussian pedophile was allowed to return home to Germany honorably, thanks to US! That always gave me the giggles. Uh... I mean, MANLY giggles, that is. Anyway, that's where I worked as Night Hausmeister, which is a fancy German word (House Master) for Night watchman/housekeeper. It's a nice word, I like it.

Anyway, my friend Dirk (Whose picture that is at the top) was the Night Auditor. Our hours were from 11pm until 7am. After I finished my work, I'd crash on the couch in the main lobby in front of the fireplace from like 2am until 5 or 6. We'd eat breakfast, run back to our rooms and get geared up, hop into his VW van (which he called his toybox because he was an avid outdoor sportsman and had four seasons worth of sporting goods he kept in there, including a unicycle and some juggling pins... don't ask, he was insane) and head to any one of about ten different Alps in the area for a full day of snowboarding on a foot of fresh powder. Get back home by around 5pm, sleep for a few hours, get up, go to work, repeat every day all winter. Again, best snowboarding season anybody's ever had in all of time!!! It was really great. Dirk was a really excellent boarder too, and my own boarding skills improved dramatically that winter, just trying to keep up with him.

But it was all possible because of the Happy Ski Pass... the season pass which Dirk and I each had that allowed us access to all the Bavarian Alps AND Austrian Alps in the area. Our favorite mountain was in an Austrian town named Lermoos, about 45 minutes down the road from Garmisch. They had some really awesome runs, and the best off-piste (off trail) boarding anywhere in the area... which turned out to be the problem. When the snow is really good, there is a particularly fun off-piste run that goes right down under one of the main chair-lifts, and due to the copious amounts of snow on this particular day, there were signs saying to stay out of that particular area due to avalanche danger. Of course, we either didn't see or chose to ignore the warning signs. It was a fantastic run. It was so fun and we were so cool for hitting it first that the Austrian Ski Patrol was waiting for us at the bottom.

They asked for our Happy Ski Passes. Dirk (who spoke fluent German)  started flipping out and said "No! No way! Mike, don't give 'em your pass!" And I was all like "No! No way! Dirk, don't give 'em your pass! What do we do?!" Have I told you yet that Dirk was a Genius? Well, he says "Dude! There's a Church at the bottom of this slope! (The slopes commonly would run all the way right down into town in the Alps) Get away! start boarding! They can't arrest you in a church, it's sanctuary!" So we run. I followed him down the slope, the Austrian Ski Patrol following us in a rather bewildered state... I don't think they'd been faced with this particular problem before. This picture is not of the Church at Lermoos that is being implicated in this story, but it's pretty, no? This particular church resides on the slopes of the Zugspitze, the tallest Alp in Germany.

Well, a not-so-much-longer-story short, we made it down because I don't think that the Austrian Ski Patrol was really trying too hard, because I think they weren't sure what to do if they actually caught us, ski-chases not likely being a part of their regular routine. We boarded right through the front doors of the small rococo Tyrolian church, which was mostly empty at the time, and unhitched our boards in the foyer. We ran to the back of the church, got out of our ski clothes, ran out the back door through the church cemetary and hopped the back wall surrounding it. We made our way separately back to the toybox, hiding from the ski patrol who apparently hadn't thought we'd try to escape from the rear and laughed our asses off all the way home. We avoided Lermoos for a few weeks after that, but of course we couldn't stay away forever. That run under the ski lift was too sweet.

Sanctuary. Sheesh. Thank God we were so dumb, or we might have actually had our Happy Ski Passes confiscated. Good times.

There was another time, a few years later, when I was snowboarding at another location in Austria, (The Steinplatte, I think) when the Austrian Ski Patrol saved my life. I was going off-piste again, when all of a sudden I found myself staring down a 300 foot sheer cliff. I screeched to a halt, and sat at the very edge, looking down at my death. I couldn't move to try and unhook my board, because if it slipped while trying to unhook my foot, I'd be going off-cliff. I couldn't turn around because I was too close to the edge. So I sat. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Austrian 911... I tried to explain where I was, but it was difficult because my German has never been stellar, and besides, I was in the woods off some ski trail. So I sat there, staring down at my 300 foot death with my ass in the snow, eventually going numb from cold, for about 2 hours until the Austrian Ski Patrol found me... So you know, they're nice to have around when you need them. Even though they helped me out, I don't feel bad for not letting them take my Happy Pass all those years ago. Besides, if you think about it, I really owe my life to cellphone technology. The Austrian Ski Patrol only gets partial credit. The greater portion, of course, but still.

This is me on the Zugspitze. I have no pictures of the Austrian Ski Patrol, I'm sad to say.

Blue And Yellow, When Mixed, Make Green. That's Why The Ocean Is Some Days One Color, Some Days Another.

I know I know; three posts in three days! Obviously I don't know how to have a proper vacation. But I just wanted to say how awesome scuba diving is. Actually, scuba may very well have saved this holiday of mine from utter wastefulness. I saw a sea horse! Bright yellow and about 5 inches long, give or take a centimeter; it's hard to tell with the curly tail and all. Lionfish too. Those are pretty. And crown-of-thorns-starfish; those things are a trip. They are very blacklightish, and would look pretty good on a Black Sabbath album cover, aye?
But I'm a bit over the top mostly because I learned two new scuba techniques today. First I learned how to conserve oxygen so that I can extend my stay under water, and I must say I learned it real well. Previously, the longest I'd ever been able to stay under was about 40 - 45 minutes at 20 meters deep. I learned from my dive leader, on the boat ride out to the dive site, that minimal movement keeps your heart rate down, hence less oxygen needed. Common sense right? Yeah, but there's technique; the temptation to wave your arms about is so basic under there that you don't think twice about it, but it really shoots your heart rate up more than you'd think. So you cross your arms and don't use them at all, and kick only when absolutely needed. I outstayed everybody else on the dive (about 15 people) excepting only the dive leader. We stayed under for 62 minutes on the first dive and 63 minutes on the second! And I still had 50 bars of oxygen left! (You start with 200 bars) I was super happy about that. The second technique I learned was how to pee in my wetsuit. It's really important, because you don't want anything to distract from all the fun to be had floating around and about a coral reef. It's really hard at first actually; I had to try like 4 times before I managed to squirt even a tiny bit out. There are years and years of training and subconscious instinct that you have to override. Right from the get go of life, you've got lots of negative vibes coming at you whenever you pee your pants, and then when you conquer that issue, you spend years learning how not to pee even when you're asleep! (If you're going to the bathroom, and you keep peeing and peeing all over the place, and it keeps going and going and going, and you can't seem to find enough toilets to fill or trees to hide behind, it's a dream! WAKE UP FOR GOD'S SAKE!) Being called a bed wetter (not to mention having uncomfortably moist and unpleasantly stale pee-smelling sheets in the morning) is a serious learning stick. So, as I was saying, actually trying to pee while awake, wearing clothes, and nowhere near a toilet or a bush has a whole set of issues you've just got to deal with. But eventually I did it, and it was warm. Actually it wound up being the most relieving urination I can ever recall. Once I got over my repression, the floodgates opened wide up and I went four times in all, making the dive a much more enjoyable experience than it would have been swimming about with knock knees, not to mention having discovered my own natural wetsuit warmer method. So I'm really pleased with having got that technique down as well.
Tomorrow, alas, is another down day. I'm flying to Bangkok the day after tomorrow, and you can't scuba for 24 hours before flying because you have to let all of that nitrogen that gets in your blood dissipate, or your veins will explode in the low pressure high altitude. Can't have that. And I think I've done everything fun there is to do here, so, more beach sitting and reading, dadgummit.

Oh Pity! I Can Feel Your Pitying Eyes Burning Into My Heart Even As Far Away As I Have Run To Thailand! Pity Me Not, However, For Good Times Will Come Again, Someday...

Here's a picture I took that I didn't get to post in my last entry. I call it; 'Boy Shocked By The Monkey.'

Well anyway, I said it would be awhile. It’s hard to post when things are as crazy and hectic and as full of obligations as my last week in Thailand has been. I mean, it wasn’t easy several days ago, (I’ve lost track of what day it is, my head is so empty from my busy schedule) finding a place to stay that had the right mix of infrastructure (restaurants, bars, dive shops, motorbike rental) and also a quiet stretch of beach to live on that had that good get-away-from-it-all feeling that everyone seems to crave on their family holidays so much. In Thailand, it seems it’s either that full-tilt pandemonious crowd-seeking thing where the object is more to party than to relax, (Ko Samui, Ko Phi Phi, or Phuket) or to find that small, barely inhabited island where all there is is the beach and you, and if you’re lucky a place that serves food. (Ko Jam)
So, after much head-scratching research and hard, slogging footwork, I found the best of both worlds. I have actually found what I believe to be the best spot in Thailand, though I suppose you could ask any one of a million Thailand enthusiasts and they would each say something different, suggest that they know of a better spot for relaxation. There’s something for everyone somewhere in this country. But let me tell you what I have found: A bungalow operation, my own humble domicile being a 30 second saunter from clean white sand, with an outdoor restaurant serving incredibly good Thai food (The Pad Thai! Oh my!) by little smiling sing-song Thai girls right on the beach, with an excellent view of the ocean. At night there are wood-carved lanterns, hanging from a large leafy tree in the center of the dining area, swaying in the breeze while the sounds of the quiet ocean and Bob Marley, Jack Johnson, Bob Dylan, various Buena Vista Social Clubbers, occasional Jimmy Hendrix, Astrud Gilberto, and even Lemon Jelly and Belle & Sebastian, waft lazily from the adjacent bamboo bar, where long-haired tattooed Thai guys, who look like they meant to go to Jamaica but wound up here, sling drinks and smiles of ultimate sanguinity. A scrawny goofy-smiled Thai lad, who reminds me of the kid from ‘Dazed and Confused’, DJs from a small enclosure behind the bar and with a single-minded intensity flips through his CD book, always trying to pick out the next, perfect song, and every night plays the exact same set nonetheless. A wooden placard hanging over the entrance reads: “Most people see the world as it is and ask, ‘Why?’ We see the world as it isn’t and ask, ‘Why not?’” This, I believe, references more of a “Why not have a drink or a nap or play a game of hackey sack on the beach with us?” sort of attitude than a call to greater productivity, as it initially sounds. The beach itself is a half-moon shape about a kilometer long, creating an enclosed area on which I’ve never seen more than thirty people at one time, and often it is empty, the clear sea-green waves beckoning one for a private swim.
Yes, life here is hard. Every day I am faced with having to make hard decisions, such as: Do I sleep in? Do I get up and try to accomplish something? The day I arrived, for instance, it was already 2 o’clock in the afternoon by the time I settled my small bag of belongings into my bungalow, and after some deep thought, decided on activity. I rented a motorbike from the family who owns the bungalow operation, and drove the length and breadth of this island, discovering an old town inhabited by Thais and not very visited, and a Sea Gypsy villiage, where a Thai man in dreadlocks was whittling at something and gave me a crooked smile, being used to curious gawkers, I imagine.

The next day I went scuba diving… I’d forgotten how much I love scuba diving. The last time I went was seven years ago in Croatia. I needed a refresher course, which I thought I would have to do class and swimming pool time for, but no. I went to the dive shop, got all the gear thrown at me by a beach-bum lookin’ Thai as I walked through the entrance, got shoved onto a boat with several other divers, and was given a quick rundown, verbally, of diving procedure on the way to the dive site. When we got there, the beach bum Thai dive leader said “Now you ready! Get you gear on, follow me!”

It was, despite my initial panic and fear of getting nitrogen narcosis or the bends, fantastic. It came back to me pretty quickly, the conservation of motion necessary while flying with the fishes. I saw moray eels and tons of exotic fish of all sizes and colors swimming about the coral studded with starfish and sea anemones, lobsters, a sea turtle, went into an undersea cave, did a few flips just for the freedom of it. There was an underwater photographer along for the ride, and he got this shot of us and the sea turtle. I am the bald guy directly under the turtle.

The days following from then until now have sort of gotten run together in my head. All that busyness, you know. One day I sat around a lot, drinking amazing fruit drinks brought to me in the shade on the beach and feeling the pain of activity seeping in, that sort of full body-tiredness one feels when one has been doing more than is good for oneself. (And oh, those fruit drinks… I tell you, in the west when you drink fruit juices, all you are getting is flavor, and sugar. Here, you get fruit in a glass. I’ve never tasted such a great thing. I mean, back home there are juice bars where they blend up fruit and give you the freshest drink possible, but it’s still not the same. I think it must be because of the way they grow their fruit here, or because of the particular strains they have. At any rate, believe me when I tell you, Thai fruit drinks rule the most) I rode an elephant at some point, to a rather pitiful waterfall (it being the dry season here) and a cave in which tigers used to live inside the jungle which dominates the center of the island, seeing a large cobra slithering by and a large black poisonous spider of undetermined type hanging in his web along the way.

Another time I took a boat ride to a small uninhabited island nearby where we were allowed to jump out and do some snorkelling… Which, after scuba diving I would have thought would be anticlimactic, but was in fact another fantastic way of interacting with coral life. They provided fish food, and it was a wondrous feeling, being surrounded by hundreds of exotic fish nibbling out of my hand, occasionally having my arm, fingers or even my back bitten gently by them as if they thought that I also might be tasty. I wasn’t, I suppose. Lucky for me.
However, all this hard work has had side-effects, of course. So much so that one day, being so wearied with the labours of this so-called vacation, I was forced to utilize the cabana which sits outside the restaurant, a bit closer to the beach and ocean, where they have employed four chattering, strong-fingered Thai women to relax the aching backs and muscles of their clientele with an hour and a half of traditional Thai massage. And this ain’t your grandma’s massage, neither. Those tiny little girls with their tiny little fingers will tear you up! They pull out your muscles from their cramped hiding spaces and lay them down, ship-shape and no-nonsense, back where they belong! Also, after several hours of snorkelling, my 45 spf sun-block having fled from my body quite naturally in the sea water, I received an awful sunburn on my back, and was duly obligated to re-visit the cabana for some perilous after-sun treatment. Ice-soaked towels applied repeatedly for half an hour, chilling me to the spine and back again! And then some sort of medicinal compound gently massaged in. Of course there is no total cure for sunburn, other than time, and I still feel some achiness even today as I recline on soft blankets in the shade of a tree here on the beach, trying to convey to you the hardness of my travails. Life is hell, and travel is its spiked whip, it is indeed.
Actually, this is the first proper vacation I’ve ever taken with a beach and tropicalia and loads of nothing to do and all that, excepting of course the family ones my parents brought me along to the Jersey shore for as a child. My first proper vacation as a hard-working adult, I should say… no need to make any comments, the snark is built-in. But seriously, no one ever told me how difficult and full of tests such a vacation can be! Never again! From now on in, it’s back to hypertrekking in strange and possibly dangerous places on my holidays, no more of this island paradise insanity. I hope I’ve been able to impart to you some of the reasons why these sorts of trips are best avoided. Who needs scuba, beach relaxation and friendliness when you could be roaming the unfriendly clime of northern Iraq with an Iraqi family you trust more than the Americans? Or being harangued by Egyptian touts while trying to view the Great Pyramids, then getting sick three different ways from some unnamed Nile virus? Or strolling down the streets of Fez where nobody leaves you alone and everybody trying to sell you something? Or getting whipped by drunken demons in a chill Bavarian night in December? Or sneaking across the Israeli/Palestine border in an attempt to get to Bethlehem with only one day to spare before your flight to Moscow leaves from Amman, Jordan? Or drinking absinthe in the Vatican? Or flying in a communist-era Russian Mig-25 fighter plane to the edge of space? Who needs a week of laborious fun on a tropical island when you could have all that? Well, don’t worry about me too much, dear friends. I only have four more days of this dull torture before I leave for Bangkok to have my eyeballs sliced open for refractive laser surgery, so soon I’ll be out of this dreary hell for some real excitement.