Notes on leaving Waikiki:

Humidity feels like a wet sari slapped on my chest after a short trip to the bottom of a boiling teapot. The breeze balances it out. Watched a man get attacked by locals when he came in from the waves. They broke his surfboard. Would have interceded but held back by simple cowardice or intrinsic white guilt. We took their sugar and their pineapples and their paradise and they broke a tourist’s surfboard. Did not possess the karmic equilibrium to adjudicate that dilemma. Dirty man with a very big parrot, or some other wide-blue-eyed bird that talks, asked a man on the street where his friend was. The man on the street hadn’t seen him. The talking bird repeated this and the friend in question seemed surely lost after that. Quoth, nevermore, etc. Ate grilled cow tongue and raw salmon that night in a Japanese barbecue. Drank in a club and watched two marines breakdance to hits from the ’90s. Kept drinking cheap happy hour beer to work up enough nerve to go dancing with beautiful tattooed graduates of the University of Hawaii and worked at it until 4 am when the club closed and my cheap tab with it. Stumbled alongside the river slowly outrunning the creeping homeless that can never leave the Pacific. Fled from a mongoose that wasn’t a dream. Dreamed that night of places where there is only one shade of green on our mountains and rainbows do not appear every day. Woke up to a rainbow outside my window, sunshine and rain. Ate a KFC breakfast sandwich under a banyan tree in the parking lot, parking hours nailed into one of its hundred trunks, and watched two Japanese children shoot each other with cap guns outside the smoothie cafe next door. In the Honolulu airport there is a Hawaiian botanical garden built into its center. You’re not allowed to touch it.