The Mondays

An incident in history being discussed on the radio right now: In 1919, in Chicago, a black kid was swimming in the lake, and wandered into an area that was considered to be whites-only. White people stoned him, that is, they threw stones at him and he drowned. The blacks over in the black section were outraged and asked a policeman who was there to do something, and the policeman would not. The result was a riot.

In the 1970s, when I was 10 or so, I was at the beach finding seashells. My being white, and at the beach, is considered a no-no in the first place so there's no "white section" it's all not for whites. I don't remember if I was already in the shallows to cool off, but I remember some "Hawaiian" (in Hawaii, if you're brown, you're "Hawaiian") kids threw rocks at me and they were throwing big ones, trying to hit me. I went further out into the water, past their range and just waited until they lost interest and wandered off. Had a rock connected; had I drowned, there wasn't a police officer on the island who's have lifted a finger to save me, all cops being non-white then. And there would have been no repercussions at all for the kids throwing the rocks, either. Yeah, I'm never going back to that fucking place.

Oh, and if I'd been hit and drowned, no riot for me. Whites are not only perniciously individualistic, but we're really beaten down in Hawaii and none would want to "make trouble".

Then there was the time one of the Ko kids, by which I mean kids in the Ko family who lived nextdoor, took a homemade bow and arrow and tried to shoot my good eye out, when I was walking back from that same beach with my mom walking right by my side. Just came up on the footpath, drew back, and pow! My flinch reaction saved me and I got a scraped cheek from the stick he used for an arrow. Mom being the Tatar side of my family and quite tan and dark-haired, and myself being blonde at least in the outer layers of my hair, I guess the kid thought this was perfectly ok. He may have seen my mom as "local" and me as the hated "haole", with maybe my mom being a babysitter or minder of some sort. And effectively it was OK, because there were no repercussions for that, either.  I have many stories like this.

OK enough talk about that shithole place. I was awake about 1:30 because last night after getting a practice in, I was just so tired that for dinner I popped a can of corned beef and had that with minced shallots and mustard, instead of cooking something. I washed my big towel which really needed it. It's this big towel I pulled out of the dumpster behind the Ace Hardware in the Westcliff shopping center in Newport Beach, California, around 2001 or '02. It had had perfume spilled on it but once washed up it was fine. That towel's been on every adventure with me since - to Hawaii and back, to the SF Bay Area here, out to Arizona for a year, back here, on the survivalist place in Gilroy, back here to San Jose, etc. At one time it was part of my "blackout" curtains at the old building. It's like that towel mentioned in the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy except it's not blue; it's blueish green. 

I had a guy coming by at 3 to pick up a thing he'd bought on Ebay, and he was by early, texted me that he's here, and I brought the thing out to him, real curbside pickup. Then I got busy doing at least some of the packing I should have done last night. I picked out large thing, the largest being a thing called a "Gene Zapper". My plan being to take these large items to the post office with the bike trailer and then take a lot of small things with me to drop off at the downtown post office tomorrow.

I was leaving here at 5 on the dot, did my drop-offs, and bought more paper at FedEx too. For some reason paper's $10 now instead of $5 or $6. C'est la guerre I guess.

I did my usual route for packing materials, and the dumpster by Grill-'Em yielded a poblano pepper only rotsy at one end, a red bell pepper with a few blemished, and a fantastically dirty cucumber, honestly it had leaves and all kinds of grot sticking to it.

I got back here and put things away, and had boiled eggs with furikake and Kewpie, more corned beef with minced shallots and mustard, and after wiping the cucumber down with alcohol and getting most of the leaves etc. off, then washing with soap and water with a nail brush, and then peeling and slicing it, cucumber slices. The cucumber was perfectly fine under all that crud. It's the same kind I grew up eating, that you have to peel. I guess those kept the best on the slow boat to Hawaii.