Every time....

 Up at 4. I drank a fair amount last night and watched YouTube stuff and sang a ton of stuff like scales and that thing that's in the Mel Bay guitar book that's the first real piece of music you learn to play, that for some reason has always stuck in my memory. Then I sang a ton of songs along with videos. 

Every time I think "Well, I was meant to be an artist and I really need to stop dithering around with this music nonsense" I open my mouth and sing a bit and am reminded that my father has left me a voice. There's a Japanese saying that means "everything I am is because of you" and although he was a Typical Deadbeat White American(tm) I seem to have inherited a bit of his "pipes" and he had good "pipes" indeed. I don't know why he didn't go on the radio, really. He had a friend, Mike Eisenstadt, who got on the radio as "Uncle Mikey" and got kicked right off the radio for playing something called the "Vatican Rag". 

This is not to say my mom didn't have a decent singing voice as well. She also sang with me when I was little, too. 

From reading r/hapas on Reddit I've come around to having a theory. Up until the 60s or 70s, people in the US married within their own group. My mom's folks were Lithuanian and married Lithuanian, but more importantly, they were Lithuanian Tatar and they married within that group. My dad was a bit of an outlier, pure-bred WASP and intended to keep to pure-Aryan breeding standards but he liked exotic things and it seems Mom really bowled him over. She was careful to keep out of the sun and in a newspaper article about the marriage she was termed "Balkan royalty". Uhm, only in the way Tatars were used as elite shock troops, like the British used Gurkhas. 

The truth is, in the USA the default and the thing that will keep you from being arrest for jaywalking or for ... being ... is white. And if Mom stayed out of the sun she could just squeak in. Imagine the ensuing surprise when we kids were popped out, all 5 of us, and proceeded to walk around the block and ride tricycles around, and wrestle on the lawn, and get as brown as we did. 

I'm seeing now why Mom stayed in so much, and Dad must have caught shit for being a "squaw man" and we kids "half breeds". I remember my mom being friends with a lady up the street called Mrs. Reismuller (spelling phonetic and my own) and then breaking up - did Mrs. R. make some unconscious aside about "racial purity"? 

So we moved to Hawaii where there are less side-eyes about my Dad, pale as they come, and a bunch of brown kids clustered around him. Mom eventually exchanged my deadbeat dad for another white deadbeat, trying as her life spiraled into failure to "stay white". She could have gotten by just fine in Hawaii, being brown enough that she got by for years driving without a license or insurance or, I believe, shoes. 

But her white deadbeat boyfriend convinced her to move to Florida where they supposedly took part in the Mariel boatlift, and then she worked as a security guard. My youngest sister went to live with them and they charged her rent (in fine white style) and she worked at a fruit stand to pay said rent while finishing high school then returned to Hawaii. Mom eventually died of whiteness, going out drunk driving (that most white of hobbies) with her boyfriend and getting in a bad accident, then the nursing home and the end at approximately age 60. "Live fast, die young, don't give a fuck about anyone else" being the White motto, after all. If only she could have been happy. 

I tried to show her how to be happy. "You have to go to the beach",  I said, when we lived in Hau'ula. She stayed under the shade of the trees and I tried to convince her to frolic in the water, leading by example. Now I know why, during the many times she took us to Waimea Bay when we still had a car that ran and lived in Pupukea, she'd stay under the trees. If she got too dark her boyfriend would leave her.  

This theory makes a lot of things fall right into place. Really only two of us have had reason to even think about these things, my oldest sister and I. And my older sister has had migraines from her teens and describes herself as a "photophobe", avoiding the sun. We're the two olive-skinned, hazel-eyed ones. We look "ethnic" it just came down to me to find out what the "ethnic" is. 

I was out at the beach, picking shells or fishing or surfing the most. So I'd get really brown and I swear, during one 4-day period when the waves were really good and I was out surfing every day, my eyes even turned more brown than hazel and when I saw a reflection of myself in the little gift shop in Pat's In Punalu'u I turned around in surprise thinking a Hawaiian kid was behind me. 

So I must have pissed lots of people off, being so hapa-looking and yet, in language and body language and little ways like that that people pick up on in Hawaii, insisting I'm white. Being what Asians call a "banana" - yellow outside, white inside. Rejecting my home. The only one who didn't see right through it was me. 

I made a run up to H Mart and got a couple of the fancy corn dog type things the little restaurant in there sells. They were fairly good, and I wonder when hot dogs stopped being smoky flavor? These were smoky flavor. I ate them sitting at the bench between H Mart and the FedEx, so I wasn't in anyone's way. 

Then I did some shopping, treated myself to some salmon sashimi and fish cake, saw they had Lagunatas beer in the can the looks like it's iced tea for $2 so I got one of those, and got a 12-pack of cans of diet 7-Up so I'll have that on hand for Ken. I felt pretty smart there. 

I was back here and almost done with my sashimi and fish cake and beer meal when Ken came by. I stuck the mug of beer in the fridge, and finished off the food as quickly as I could, and he brought in a bunch of stuff to sell, then we sat and BS'd for a while. He didn't want a soda, he wanted hot tea so he had that and I treated myself to a soda.