Jaywalking and UFOs - a trip to Maui

For nearly 10 years, sarahapple and I have been talking through comments and emails - plunging along with each other through library adventure, mishaps, wild coincidences, artistic endeavors, child-raising, and medical emergencies. Finally, this week, we found ourselves running with arms flung out and hair flying into our faces, colliding into a hug on an airport curb in Kahului.

I am going to keep most of this trip in my pocket just for myself. We packed 10 years of words and stories into three days, it was so good.

But we went out and found adventure, too. The good kind, not the kind with flat tires and emergency rooms. For three days, we ate and laughed and sat on beaches and drank way too much kombucha. I chased Sarah down an alleyway to a tattoo shop, and walked with her around a massive prayer bell, and ran away from a strangely deserted temple-spa with COLON CLEANSING painted on the wall.

While sucking on green smoothies in Haiku, we watched a wiry old shirtless man in two pairs of pants stretch his loins on a hitching post and then suddenly begin bending himself into impossible, beautiful poses. We went phwoar loud enough that the smoothie lady looked over and said, "Oh, yeah, he was a ballet teacher before the car accident." He hopped on a little scooter-bicycle thing and went whizzing away with his feet up off the ground. "WHERE DID YOU GET THAT, DID YOU STEAL IT?" a man yelled after him. "I ordered it on AMAZON, MOTHERFUCKER," the ballet man called back cheerfully. He was amazing.

Wait no

And everywhere - coincidences. The tattoo guy told us about an artist he liked who drew alien abduction scenes into practically every tattoo he made. Skull and roses? Beam that shit up in an abduction. Mermaid? Put her on a UFO. Snakes and knives? Stab them into an alien. For the next two days, we ran into alien abduction scenes everywhere. In our instagram feeds. On facebook. On shirts in the stores. On the radio. At night, the airbnb hosts lit up their Christmas lasers and spangled my bedroom with green stars. After this week, there will be no way to ever settle on a tattoo without the subject getting sucked up into a tractor beam. It will all be celestial chickens and celtic-knotted UFOs, folks.

SARAH, YOUR PANTS!

We drove up to 'Iao Valley, where I was almost swept away by a flash flood when I was 16, and  snuck over the railing to climb down to the river. "This is your corrective experience!" Sarah said, paddling her feet in the water. "Rewrite those brain connections!"  

I let her rewrite the connections for me, mostly, but it worked anyway

And we exchanged cultural conventions. Sarah learned how to pronounce "humuhumunukunukuapua'a," and I learned how to pronounce "toque". Sarah learned that Americans use crosswalks, and I learned that Canadians just charge out into traffic. "THIS IS HOW WE DO IT IN ONTARIO," she yelled as I chased her, meeping like Beaker. Eventually I got into the spirit of the thing, and forevermore I will be howling "ONTARIOOOO" as I dash out in front of cars. Put it on my headstone.

Also we raided Target and bought matching shirts, which is almost the same thing as tattoos

Too soon, we flew away to our own corners of the world. I watched the islands pass by underneath the plane, listening to David Bowie sing about space travel.

For heeeere am I sitting in a tin can

Diamondhead waved hello. 

I'm getting the hang of making gifs, I think

Checked the news and learned that California had burned down. Got to work and found out that one of our storytime moms was horrifically murdered. Fucking hell.

Life is brutal in its speed and violence. It is shocking in its beauty and serendipity. We can just be the thing that we are with all we've got, and see other people for the things that they are, and try to be the shining thing instead of the sucking black hole.