It was the Monday to Fridayness of it all that was so damn depressing…
routine routinely pounding my brain into a routine day after day;
lifting boxes, totes, crates, pallets…
working in the freezer section where it was 0 degrees
chucking boxes of beef patties and french fries onto metal carts
that were unfriendly and never had nothing to say...not my idea
of what I’d be doing when I came down to the sunny south to work in…
I could of stayed home and worked in the cold...this crap was killing my spirit
my back was dead tired like somebody who stayed up all night for three nights in a row working on a book and taking Benzedrine and drinking beaucoup pots of coffee…
which I would rather been doing BTW but I had rent to pay…
I was still young, still full of dreams and empty of money…
so scheming and dreaming, I got this great idea...save some money and go to Hawaii
for surely life had to better out there; among the palms and the hula girls…
maybe catch a Don Ho show or something...catch some waves at Waikiki beach…
so I put my head down, plowed through it for awhile...I didn’t go out hardly at all
and I even cut down on my liquor intake, which I can tell you was really rough…
finally, I saved some cash and I borrowed most and off I went…
naive and full of stupid dreams and illusions…
it was pretty cool for the first couple weeks
—HULA HULA HULA bring me some more cold Kona beer
and then reality set in…Dum, Dum, Dum, DUM…..
hell, I had to find a way to pay the bills there, and the bills were higher…
I looked around for something better but here I was
moving boxes in some hot as hell warehouse...struggling to pay the bills…
I thought they might need some help at Hawaii Five-O
but Steve McGarrett was nowhere to be found and didn’t return my calls…
I was pure perfection
a ne'er-do-well in the midwest, the deep south and now in Hawaii
the only difference being now I was a ne’er-do-well with a sunburn…
I was geographically consistent...hell, I didn’t even like poi my boy...for fun, I could take a drive and see what was left of the sugar refineries that were drying up…
or I could hop on The Bus; ride around Oahu killing the day away and I did that a few days…
I should of known better what the hell?...you have to try...after a year of that, I got this
...a plane ticket and after a night of mai-tais, I came back home to two feet of snow
on the ground, but I didn’t care…
could have spent time kickin’ around Honolulu in a cheap aloha shirt
the ones where the pocket pattern don’t match the rest of the shirt
but what was the point?...I wasn’t any happier there than I was when I was home