5/21/06

Sunday night on a windy Honolulu evening

On Sunday at nearly 1PM. I'm in the back row of a Pacific New Media class in web design. Just came from the hospital from seeing a friend there (Mvskoke, from Broken Arrow). Good news, he'll be released to a rehab center next week. So he's up. For fun decided to bring in a can of beer and rig it up to the IV pole. Try standing in line with a can of Bud on Sunday morning to see what looks you get. No one knows me here--couldn't do this in Albuquerque or Tulsa or Okmulgee. Well, I could buy beer on a Sunday morning there and everyone would know it immediately. Guess they will now--

Later: from the hospital to a web design class where I learned to write html code and set up a web page--then to the gym to work chest and triceps, then a fundraiser for a wonderful local program called Kids Talk Story headed by Margaret South, wonderful and visionary screenwriter, teacher and community activist. The Kids Talk Story is her baby. Students write their own stories, illustrate them (or find illustrators) and then they make a book. The program has been very successful at Farrington High School on the Waianae Coast. Would like to do this for Mvskoke kids.

During the driving, and there was quite a bit for an island, listened to a relative pitch course. The lesson: on fifths, as in intervals. Not bottles. (See what happens by writing " a can of beer"? Words are powerful. They tend to engender more words like themselves. They are the building stuff of thoughts,and before thoughts: dreams. And they go exactly where they are intended, though some of us are better shots. Intent makes for aim.) A fifth comes after a square to the ground fourth. Soars a little. Is like an arc of wings on the horizon.

This weekend a respite from the horrible hammering of work crews on two sides of my place. The fighting neighbors' addition is probably half done. The workmen are loud but personable. The back lot is painful to watch. One house was torn down to make two. This is common these days because two will bring in twice as much money though will crowd the lot and squeeze thinking space and resources. And the houses usually block views of the ocean. The crew here is standoffish. I sense a rigid overseer. The workmanship so far is questionable from my point of view. I'm not a builder. The process there is far from over, especially if they have to redo some of what they've done. I've moved my computer and printer to the other side of the house for refuge though the sounds carry throughout the house and all over the neighborhood.

Now, why am I writing about it and recreating it again when I have a respite until tomorrow morning?

I keep thinking of the inmate practicing hula in her regulation garb during a change of classes while it rained in Kailua last week. Poignant to be dancing to a song of flowers and mist on the mountains which translates to longing for a lover.

When I came back from visiting a writing class, headed by 'Ilima Stern who volunteer teaches a once-a-week creative writing class there with Pat Clough, my sax and I sang and sang the heartbreak blues. We took the heart apart, and put it back together again.

Until then.

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