As I was sitting on the plane pondering man’s technological, nature-defying maturity, a voice dripped in honeyed confidence interrupted my impatient musing. “Secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others.” A philosophy, no doubt. Part of the emergency airline instructions, yet applicable to the world at large. Let me ask: Would you secure your own oxygen mask first? I know very few people who would say ‘No.’ Indeed who would be fool enough to simply suffocate in the pious act of assisting others? Secure your own oxygen first. Help those in need afterward. If your oxygen gets low, make every attempt to increase its flow. Practical, but not selfish. Caring, but not altruistic. If only all our oxygen masks were permanently secured. But then we wouldn’t need politicians.
The drunken nights, the early mornings. The cramped cabins, the snoring grates. Poor decisions, fortuitous consequences. Cheap rum, cheap vodka, with or without mixers. The tropical sun glinting off buckling waters piercing pounding heads. Unpredictable winds ruffling parts, lashing bare bodies, or, at times, caressing grimy discomfort. The ambivalent sun: sometimes friend, sometimes foe. Surreal horizons, dead cultures. Authentic entertainment and barber shop chit-chat. Aired wares beckoning wallets. Overdriven bodies and upturned noses. Crags and pastures whirling past and the click-clack of freeze frame machines. The presence of familiars hurtling through foreign country. Droning whines and enchanted sighs. I wouldn’t trade any of it.
I will say that the ocean is the most magnificent thing on the planet. It existed before man, and it will exist long after him. The patient sea reveals just how completely and utterly worthless the human race is. The eternal crash of waves, the boundless blue horizons, the salted sprays. A lifeless indifference to organic creatures, an unfeeling scorn for all that is temporary. Its gnarled face impassionedly observing and digesting joy, misery, pain, pleasure, hunger, starvation, disease, death. Generation after generation the sea has witnessed. It ventures no opinions on human affairs. It simply rolls onward, tolerating all, outlasting all. The waters of the dead return to the sea in a comedic circle.
Paradise? I’m sick of that word. Hawaii has a dreamy beauty to it. Hawaii has a culture and landscape unlike anything in the world. Hawaii is a once in a lifetime experience and I recommend it to all. But it certainly is not paradise. Paradise is a figment of the toiling workingman’s desperate brain. Hawaii is presented as the ideal escape for the average American. Make enough money and experience paradise. Then spend it all at camouflaged tourist traps. Paradise? I refuse to acknowledge its existence, anywhere. Heaven is the paradise of religion. Subscribe body and soul to a questionable doctrine, die on a pious deathbed, and encounter the shoddy lies of primitive man. Paradise? Keep on dreaming. Only the weak live a weak reality.
And so I have written, with tired brain and weakened liver, of my time on vacation. I still have more to say, but it will stay locked up for now, to be poured forth in a million different verbal and nonverbal pronunciations in the near future. Another influence, another memory. A little more frosting on the personality cake. Good night and good munching.
