July 18, 2002 (Thursday)
13:15, Hawaii Standard Time.

All day yesterday (...and I do mean ALL DAY...as in [damned near] the entire 24 hours) was so terribly hectic and event filled that I was completely worn out by time I returned home from work this morning.

Some of the more notable highlights:

About an hour and a half past midnight some long haired heavily tattooed local boy approached me and was approaching other people going into the bars (or more accurately, men going into the whorehouse in the area) with a story about being a welder whose truck had just run out of gas and how he was a dollar short of putting a deposit on a gas can at one of the two gas stations in the area.

(SIDE NOTE): It was really amusing to see all of these guys pulling into the parking area, knowing that they were going to be wasting somewhere in the neighborhood of $250 on a half-hour whore, and every one of them to the man claiming not to have any money. It would be funny, if it weren't so pathetic.

Anyway, since I rarely ever bring money to work with me, except in those rare instances when I decide to drop into the supermarket on the way home for a pint of milk, so I can have myself a bowl of cereal that morning, I could only offer any number of suggestions as to what I'd try in the same situation. Every possible alternative I could come up with was either something he said he had already tried or could not do for some reason -- like he could not siphon any gas from his portable generator because the truck was diesel powered, or there was some sort of taboo on carrying diesel fuel in anything other than a genuine gas can.

After about 15 or 20 minutes, he managed to get the tenth dollar he said he needed for the deposit on the gas can and still needed a couple of dollars for the actual fuel.

His story was so detailed and so convincing that I indebted myself to ''The Governor''  (Art Reyes, an in-house security officer at the Sam Sung Plaza next property site over, who's running for that particular state office this upcoming election) for the two dollars requested. I figured if the whole thing was a made-up story (which it quite possibly could have been), it was a 'well sold'  made-up story... and I would be ONLY out of two dollars.

About a half-hour later the debt was cut in half when a Japanese man pulled up into the parking area of my workplace in his big silver Mercedes, unembarrassingly announced that he was going to the whorehouse upstairs, and decided to leave me a tip (...and I could have milked his ass for more by lying to him and telling him that there was a charge for parking, but being the honest guy that I am....).

Immediately after my time on the clock was over, I rode on over next door to give ''The Governor''  his partial repayment and to talk politics with him, as usual. And when I get to talking, I just don't know when to shut up, and we ended up talking story for close to two hours, and I still had crap I had to take care of later in the day. He told me about his own police citation he had received, and I decided to be more of a listening ear rather than sharing my similar experience from a couple of nights back.

During our conversation about local politics and about how Republicans are finally beginning to wake up to the Fascist realities of the ''Baby Doc'' George Bush regime lately with this ''Operation T.I.P.S.'' thing he's proposing (to the point that it's now starting to worry Right Wing mouthpieces like Michael Reagan  and no less than The Rutherford Institute), the ''welder'' guy passed by us. When I asked for an update, he said that his truck had been towed (but he did not offer those two dollars back).

Flash forward, 3:30 p.m. -- Rode down to the post office to send off the DVD I sold on eBay, and upon trying to ride off discovered what I believe is PART of the pattern of the problem plaguing this damned motorcycle (but it still doesn't explain how it completely drained that one time when it sat idle for only half a day).

Continued on to Kahala Mall to the Barnes & Noble store to see if I could exchange my defective copy of ''The Stepford Wives,''  but they didn't have the title in stock, which means I will have to return it to the online store.

(I find it rather curious that out of ALL of the DVD titles I've ordered, the ONLY one that's defective is a ''War of the Sexes'' Old-Fashioned Insensitive 'Controlling' Men vs. Modern Bitchy 'Liberated' Women horror story. Considering my fervent anti-N.O.W.  stance, could it be that the delivery of this particular defective disk was no accident?)

Went to work tired and headachy, tricked by the rain again, so I did not bother making the switch and just rode the motorcycle with its cluttered storage compartment everywhere, intent on just hopping on and going, no muss, no fuss, no effort.

July 21, 2002 (Sunday)
23:40, Hawaii Standard Time.

Finally found a use for the small floor cabinet I brought home from work early Friday morning, from outside of one of the shops which was discarding it (probably because of the two noticable chips on either side of the top edge and the missing foot pad) -- the same shop which threw out the wall clock I salvaged some months back. I eventually decided to use it to stack my CD holders on the shelf portion of it, and for the time being I have designated the enclosed area to hold my headphones and extension cord, plus my ''dejikame.'' The end result gives me a bit of extra room, plus makes the apartment look a considerably less tacky.

Also used that wiping down and rearranging time to clean up around the apartment somewhat.

July 23, 2002 (Tuesday)
00:05, Hawaii Standard Time.

Just got back from pushing the motorcycle back to home base a half hour ago. It wasn't too terrible, as most of the distance travelled was either on a downgrade or on fairly level ground -- most of the trip was down the mountain. So here's how I got to that point:

After picking up a couple more DVDs at my post office box, I went in to the company office to pick up the last three paychecks I still had sitting over there unclaimed. (People wonder how I can survive for such extended periods without picking up my measly paychecks; The method is embarrassingly simple: ''Live Within Your Means!'' -- even when they give you an insignificant 'pay increase,' as they supposedly gave to me sometime last month.)While there in the office I had to fill in sign a whole batch of new paperwork because, according to the way the system works here in Hawaii, if an employee of a company works less than 20 hours per week-- even if it's circumstantial (such as was the case with my motorcycle being out of commission much of the time --medical benefits are automatically dropped as soon as the work hours dip below that point ... which means I will once again have to wait an entire month before my medical plan is reactivated.

On the way from the office, I decided I wanted to stop into Ba Le restaurant on Nimitz Highway to see if they would accept credit cards, since I did not have enough time to cash my checks before the banks closed.

En route, I decided it would be a good idea to first stop in and to talk with the head mechanic at South Seas Motorcycles and present him with my motorcycle symptoms based upon what I had been reporting down in my riding log book. After listening to me describe what has been going on and the pattern I began noticing, his educated guess helped confirm my own suspicion, namely that the problem lies somewhere in the starter. (How come nobody else could figure this out?) He performed a series of 'start-&-stop' tests on it until it began displaying the very symptoms I've been unsuccessfully trying to describe to everybody else. The only problem with this ''hands on'' test of his was that he kept doing it until the battery had been totally drained of any starting power -- which only took less than a half dozen tries, which should not have been sufficient to kill the battery so efficiently. Even so, I still have this sneaky suspicion that this was perhaps part of his plan ... to get the machine non-operational as an incentive for me to leave it with him so they could do the repair job on it. Stressing that I had a job I needed to get to, and that I had only pulled into the shop on a whim just to get a quick opinion as to what the problem might be, I had them give the battery a jump start so I could leave.

Left the motor running outside while I changed into my work clothes, and parked it along the roadside in case the recharge from riding it was not sufficient enough to restart the engine when I was ready to return home ... which proved to be the case.

July 25, 2002 (Thursday)
06:30, Hawaii Standard Time.

Went to my second work location last night and was greeted with another one of those idiot office scheduling screw-ups where they marked me off of my schedule and replaced me with someone else for the night, making the assumption that just because I called to cancel the previous two nights at that location it automatically meant that I'd cancelled the rest of the week as well??? What drugs are these people on, anyway? They do this sort of thing to me all the time!

I wound up sticking around rather than going straight home because the night's replacement (a young woman named Christina) still needed a little additional training that she did not properly receive from the supervisor who was training her before I arrived. Consequently, we found a situation where the one dormant nightclub (which I was informed would be reopening tonight) was unlocked from the rear. In this instance I was actually glad to have the extra person there with me (even though I was officially not on the clock), just in case anything was amiss or should happen later on once we were off duty.

I stuck around with her throughout the work shift, talking story mostly about ourselves (which included some information of the personal  kind) and about our current and/or former love lives -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. Turns out that her sort of  'live in' boyfriend is (in her own words) a lazy, broke, heavy drinking, inconsiderate, mooching, unfaithful louse. (She ''loves'' him, of course.) She's also self-conscious about the amount of weight she's put on-- and where it got distributed --since having her baby two years ago, and I've expressed to her that even though she could use a little work getting herself back into a tighter and slimmer shape her condition was not nearly as bad nor as unsightly as she believes it to be.

I must admit that I also did a considerable amount of intentional flirting with her while I was there, and as the shift progressed I became less ''professional'' and more chatty and casual. I was actually enjoying having conversation with her. Perhaps her biggest scoring point was that she did not shy away from guys with my type of physique ... though the jerk she's with now gives the rest of us smaller-than-average guys a bad name.

At shift's end, I did the one thing I told her I never do: I asked for her phone number. Then, if that were not enough, I did the other  thing I told her I never do: I gave her my phone number also. (We also exchanged email addresses.) Will we ever contact each other? Probably not, but who can ever predict these sorts of things?

July 27, 2002 (Saturday)
14:40, Hawaii Standard Time.

Finally got off of my lazy ass yesterday and cashed those four paychecks I picked up Tuesday.

After paying the phone bill (a month late) I rode out to Waipahu to drop off my riding log book to my mechanic so he can figure out why the hell my motorcycle keeps malfunctioning. (He says he won't be able to come up with anything until Tuesday. Yeah, right.) I've already determined that if they don't fit the thing right this  time, I'm taking it to the shop on Nimitz Highway and letting them work on it.

I was so dead tired from lack of sleep that I went to sleep realtively early and slept through most of the night and much of the early day today.

August 7, 2002 (Wednesday)
15:00, Hawaii Standard Time.

Running around most of the day.

Stopped off first to pick up my paycheck, but they wanted to tamper with my schedule again, so I was kept waiting in a different department until I quickly got frustrated with their constant ''put 'em on hold'' tactic, at which point I began noisily and repeatedly crashing my keys on the counter top, which annoyed them to such an extent that they ultimately gave in and handed me my check and allowed me carry on about my business.

I then rode out to Waipahu to pick up my motorcycle riding log and updated it while there. (Two weeks of going over all the written material, supposedly, and still they can't come up with any ideas or clues.) I then explained my problems and handed the log book over to the service staff at South Seas before heading back into town.

Cashed my check, did some minor grocery shopping for mostly snacks and convenience foods, came home.

August 13, 2002 (Tuesday)
14:45, Hawaii Standard Time.

South Seas gets the job. Their mechanics apparently looked over the information in my riding log and seem to have come to the [preliminary] conclusion that my motorcycle's stater  may be the culprit (as was likewise suspected as a possibility by Staff Montgomery at Cycle Sports - Iwilei). I'll have them take a look at it on Friday.

Ran about town this morning (on next to no sleep) gathering up necessary information for my stinking annual recertification. Also picked up at the post office my eBay purchase of ''Star Wars'' (what clearly appears to be an Asian pirate copy from the 20th anniversary boxed ''trilogy set'' -- but since 20th Century Fox and George Lucas are deliberately dragging asses getting the individual chapter officially released in this country despite the widespread demand for the title.... it plays well enough, though the picture quality is obviously lacking somewhat and it requires a significant amount of alternative tweaking in order to get it to play in its desired format).

August 14, 2002 (Wednesday)
03:30, Hawaii Standard Time.

Strange event occurred about a half-hour before end of work shift. A blonde girl came to use the public telephone at my worksite, in tears. In the three weeks she had been on Island (at the urging of her resident sister, who was residing on Schofield with her military husband) she claimed to have been left behind on two different prior occasions, and on this third occasion had gotten into a physical fight with her host sister after trying to proclaim innocence over the presence of internet porn downloaded by the husband, who tried to pass the blame just like the typical guy busted with his winkie caught in his zipper. This resulted in her getting stuck in Honolulu (she got into the fight at her job, obviously as an ''exotic dancer'' or somesuch) with nowhere else to go (even if opting for returning to that stink hole Wahiawa, there was no way for her to get back on the military base without an ID). She tried contacting her boyfriend in Oregon, but ran out of change and was unable to set anything up with him for trying to get here out of the state. After going over a few ideas and options with her, she decided to return to her workplace down the street to see if her ''boss'' could possibly arrange something for her.

August 22, 2002 (Thursday)
04:00, Hawaii Standard Time.

Wrote my first haiku in over four years last night (sparked mainly by the oohing and ahhing of one of our local radio talk show hosts).

Rode out to and through Kahala and Waikiki after work this morning, partly to see if I could catch a glimpse at the latest person that's working at my former regular worksite ... where they were attempting to temporarily re-establish me last two weeks ago, which I was dead set against.

August 23, 2002 (Friday)
22:30, Hawaii Standard Time.

Rode the motorcycle out to South Seas later in the morning -- which I did not feel like doing again this week, either ... probably because my gut instinct was telling me that somebody was going to again inform me that they could ''find nothing wrong'' with it. And surely enough, after having dropped the machine off at their shop on Nimitz Highway and walking for an hour and a half back to the apartment and riding the pedalcycle back out to the service station and leaving the pedalcycle out there, requiring me to walk back out there for another hour and a half to pick the pedalcycle back up, my gut instinct had once again called it correctly. Not only that, but when these folks (supposedly) examined , they could think of, not only did they tell me the same thing everyone else has told me (which is nothing and that they've no idea what the possible problem is), but they said that everything was running perfectly and flawlessly! -- Yet, the bitch still has her annoying little habit of acting up on me at the most inconvenient times, go figure.

As a result of all of her continuous mysterious bullcrap, I got set back another twenty dollars. The next time she decides to throw one of those trademark costly little tantrums, I'm just going to throw her irritating ass off onto someone else's lap and let them put up with her bullshit. But for right now, I've got a pedal bicycle to pick up from next to the strip bar down there -- which I parked in the area intentionally, making the assumption that the large influx of people in the area would make someone much less likely to tamper with it in my absence ... we'll see.)

August 26, 2002 (Monday)
15:40, Hawaii Standard Time.

I amazingly (and willfully) broke with my own tradition today and went to the theatre (at the new Ward complex) to actually watch a Disney animated feature ... the first time ever in my life (not including the live-action/cgi amalgam, ''TRON,'' of course). Naturally, the movie was ''Lilo & Stitch,'' which, though not exactly a ''great'' movie, definitely not  anime, and nowhere near in the same camp as Warner Bros. ''The Iron Giant,'' was very cute, sweet, thoroughly enjoyable, and worth the price of admission (''matinee'' admission, anyway) -- and this coming from the man who, prior to attending this particular animated feature, had engaged in a [literally]  lifelong boycott against Disney animated theatrical releases and who, until just a few years ago, would not knowingly spend money on a film from any Disney studio (...we can thank  Burger King, KMart, and American Honda for the change of heart)! And, yes, the fact that the story took place in Hawaii was a major selling point ... The fact that many parents complained that it scared their small children was another. And, yes, I will purchase the DVD when it's released.

     

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