Somewhere, over the rainbowWay up high

I am back at my home station here. Starfleet headquarters.





Things got a bit.. a bit... I'd like to say "hectic," but it was a pretty much the opposite of hectic. Anyway, old friends, things got too chill amidst the ocean breezes on Maui.




I spent some time with the family.



I spent some time kayaking.




I spent some time in the sun, drinking a frozen drink with a hibiscus blossom.



(That is a humpback whale.)




I spent some time driving on small, one-lane roads, which reassured me that there are still people living in brown, sun-kissed isolation, with chickens wandering free and startlingly bright white smiles, offering hot-out-of-the-oven banana bread that warmed me far more deeply than the sun ever could.





Liz and I went on a whale-watching cruise, then we drove around the West/North side of the island for the banana-bread goodness.




She and I get on like a house on fire.



Maui is damned unsightly. Reminds me a bit of Kansas.




Occasionally, you run across a situation so odd that it makes you yearn to throw a dead, limp squid on it, tentacles splayed in a way that you can taste the calimari, which you love despite knowing that beneath that fried, circular, almost-onion ring-like-except-for-that-strange-rubbery-chewy-sensation goodness, you are eating something that has ten legs, a beak, and squirts ink out its ass whenever Jacques Cousteau gets too close.




It's times like those that make you grip your grapes and ask yourself, "Why shouldn't I buy a ukelele? Why?"



Times when you find yourself shrugging your shoulders and explaining to the TSA dude in rubber gloves that yes, you have a ukelele in your luggage, dammit, and I am happy to see you.



There are times when I wish I had more Words. For you, for me, for posterity. Yet, everytime I sit and try to write, it seems that I lack the skills to translate the experience adequately into the English language. I feel like just making stuff up, but that would be an injustice to the experience... yet, I read exclusively fiction. Twisted fiction (this week, I read the new Irvine Welsh book, The Bedroom Secrets of Master Chefs, and the new Chuck Palahniuk book, Haunted, both masterworks of depravity).




Ahhh, who cares, anyway?





So long as you escaped from the Man for ten minutes on a Monday, forgetting where you were, taking a mental dreamscape internet vacation, basking in the warm sunlight, I fulfilled my end of the bargain.





When are you going to fulfill yours?

Hmmm?