Sunday, April 9, 2023

Easter 2023

 I slept in all I wanted which meant until 4 in the afternoon. At least I practiced the shakuhachi last night, and I played the last line in Nori No Miyama a *lot* of times since I have real trouble with it when I play it in class. 

I rode up to H Mart first for things like seaweed and other shelf-stable things, then to 99 Ranch where I got a couple of tea eggs and ate those, washing them down with a can of coffee from H Mart, then I rode all the way up to Seafood City. It's pretty interesting - tons of every kind of Asian thing - in that area and it was really busy. I was going to get a couple of beef skewers at this one place and the lady said it's a 40-minute wait because they have a lot of orders. That actually might have been OK if I was doing a lot of shopping, but I said I'll come back another time. 

The market is just a huge supermarket with tons of Asian, mostly Filipino, stuff. I got some boiled peanuts and ate those, and they're as good as I can hope to find on the mainland. I looked around the place and didn't find anything I wanted to buy, other than the peanuts. On my way out of there, checking out the complex across the street, I noticed a King Egg Roll and got two pork egg rolls and ate those. 

I'd realized that I'd kind of screwed up on the time. My plan had been to check out Seafood City and then on the way back, stop at Dai Thanh and get a box of frozen Tahitian prawns and come straight back here. But they close at 7, and it was almost 7 when I got the peanuts. So that nixed that plan. 

I stopped at 99 Ranch again on my way back and got a couple more things, this lettuce stalk that's used as a vegetable, some garlic, some Lee's coffee pour-overs and a package of pork (for some reason pork's markedly cheaper there) to make 3 dinners. 

I rode right back here, taking a quick look in the dumpsters on the other side of the complex here. I heard a sound like playing cards in a bicycle wheel and looked up and there was a zombie, towing the usual Max Max cobbled-together trailer with a bike, and apparently something was dragging on one of the wheels. Like a zombie would care. 

The warm weather and zombie physiology are combining to make the damn things more common out there again. On my way out, I'd had to veer wide around two very rough-looking zombies messing around with some kind of wheeled contraption in the road. They build bikes and trailers out of anything they can scrounge or steal, and they're not exactly master mechanics. 

I'd passed through miles and miles of what's called "cookie cutter suburbia" today. It looked like a really grim way to live - I passed along what on Reddit they call "stroads" which are streets but carry a lot of of relatively high-speed traffic. So, not the friendly little streets where kids might skateboard or ride their bikes, these things are dangerous! And mere steps from one's front door. So you live in your little fortress, treating going outside at all as the dangerous activity it is. Pile into the SUV, if you go out on a bike or skateboard you're watched over by a parent and you're wearing a helmet, pads, etc. And you're paying over $1 million for one of these houses with its micro-yard and that dangerous stroad right out front. It made me think, "If this is success, I feel pretty good about being a failure". 

I'm not saying our place at 348 Portlock Road was ideal but we had a big front yard, big back yard, big side yards, and the Pacific Ocean right across the street. The street was OK to go out and ride bikes on. We walked to school and to the market for little things. Neighbor kids had things like big trees to climb in, and the Lowe's across the street seemed to get a big kick out of our playing in their pool. It was all very social. And no hovering parents were necessary. 

About the ocean being right nearby, the ocean is wilderness. There are no fences or ownership, and it was full of wild creatures that came and went as they pleased. A kid could go there and whoop it up, or explore, or find seashells, or just wander around and let their mind wander, and watch the clouds or the crabs. 

And not far from our Portlock Road suburbia was Hanauma Bay, Sandy Beach (where breaking one's neck is a popular pastime) and such wild-ish places. There was also downtown Honolulu with the art academy, museums, the harbor, the big library, all kinds of interesting things. I even got a tour of the newspaper courtesy of ancient "Miss" Wilder around the corner who took me there (she seemed to know everyone) and I even got a lead "slug" made of my name. I wish I still had it. I also wish I still had the 20mm projectile my older brother found up on Koko Head.

There were fishermen to watch, and surfers too, and mysterious things to find from wheel weights in the street to what I called the "black wood" on the beach, which when sanded down and polished had a beautiful reddish color and I made little things out of. 

So it was a very different place compared to suburban places here now. Things now are very constricted and homogenized, and from what Ken's told me, his childhood was even a bit more "wild" and he got to do a lot of neat things and wander over a larger area. 


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