moonrise, and a silence inside

i like being a day behind on this weblog. or is that a day behind everyone? ;-) kinda gives me the feeling that i'm on the edge of the earth, if not the last few ticks on the International Dateline. my days and hours have slowed down considerably since i left Berkeley, and i'm beginning to move once again to the rhythm and pulse of sunlight and darkness... no alarm clocks to respond to, bus or BART schedules to mind, hours of officework to maintain. just the sun, the tides, the prevailing winds which bring afternoon rain, and moonrise.

late afternoon and early evening yesterday found me, my brother and my dad in Lahaina, hauling a truckload of books from my mom's resource center and library to the parsonage. my brother has a rugged 6-wheeled Ford 250 truck (bought used from some shipping company in Honolulu), which is good for schlepping any variety of large objects up and down the island's slopes. its paint job remains the bright orange of a utility vehicle. its diesel engine roar is satisfyingly thrummy and loud, and the clanks its gears make say that it's a beast of a machine. it has been temperamental, maintenance-wise, but now runs like a dream. perhaps Peter will weblog about the vicissitudes of owning a used orange truck, sometime.

distance is for the birds. who still, after all, have to get from point alpha to point zulu, even as they may wing gracefully and enviably through space, not following the contours of land. but for me, perhaps for us who do this, distance is truly a thing of the past now.

"this" of course, being the immediate connections we have with one another via this medium... the larger one of the Net itself, and the more niche-like one of weblogging. i liked something that Catherine said about this the other day, in her weblog. and i'm looking forward with great anticipation to what Laura will have to say/write about our weblogging community, in her class. two more articulate, elegant writers are hard to find. you kids and students in this here locus will stand to learn much, as far as writing skills go, if you pay close attention to how Laura and Catherine do their craft, weaving the threads of their daily lives into a written form, shared here.

we were driving home from Lahaina, along the shoreline highway. then, past a stretch where these tall African tulip trees border the canefields, we saw the moon rising above the West Maui Mountains, which wore clouds on their peaks, like yarmulkes. we stopped at a beach park and my brother and i scampered across the highway to the verge of the canefields, where i took that photo above (click on it to see a larger, better resolved version).

tourists driving along at that point might have been amused, as i was wearing only a pink towel, having recently come from a swim at the Lahaina Harbor (see pic), and had forgotten to bring a spare change of shorts. i had casually mentioned to my bro earlier that i wanted to get a lava-lava, one of those skirt-like clothes that Samoan and other South Pacific islander guys wear. over here, you snicker and laugh and point at them at your peril: they can pound you into the sand as easy as they do poi. ;-) generally, non-Samoan locals do not want to end up as sticky mulch, and therefore men wearing cool, patterned lava-lavas are considered normal, if not outright venerated. but don't expect to see a picture of me in one of those any time soon... a reed-thin, bespectacled Flip guy in a lavalava doesn't exactly conform to the local standard *snicker*

Oct Dec

{ net.casting }
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