It has been a long time since I have written. We have all been through so much since the last blog entry. Worldwide pandemic. Political upheaval and horseshit. Tiffany had a health scare where she internally bled so much it was a medical curiosity as to why she didn’t have a heart attack. She had emergency surgery in the thick of the pandemic when even spouses weren’t allowed in hospitals with patients, and I couldn’t be there for her through any of it, but she pulled through. And then we lost Eric. Suddenly. Excruciatingly.
And now, I find myself on vacation, back in Waikiki. Wonderful Oahu.
We booked this trip when the dust was settling from the third wave of the pandemic. Vaccinations had started to flow. We survived Trump, at least for now. Things were possibly looking up. Maybe that was the worst of it. Maybe not. Who knows? Throughout the middle of the pandemic, we (Clan Yu and Clan Dodge) booked Airbnbs here and there but always sequestered ourselves inside, holed up as if waiting out a nuclear winter – we were just desperate for a change of scenery. This TaiDodgeYu family vacation was an attempt to try something more significant. More normal, though not entirely the same. That would not be possible ever again since we lost Eric and Cayden moved away. But it seemed like things were safer and we needed something from a vacation. We NEEDED something. Maybe I’m speaking out of place for the others. I NEED something. I don’t think I know what I need, exactly. But it’s something.
Then as we were waiting for our vacation to arrive, the Delta variant burst through the chest of our collective country. Attacking innocents and dumbshits alike. The sense that life is getting dicey again grows stronger every day. Maybe we are here just in the knick of time before everything closes down again. Perhaps we shouldn’t have come. As we were being shuttled to our hotel from the Honolulu airport, Tiffany turned to me and asked, “Are we doing this too soon?”
Are we?
Maybe this is the worst of it. Maybe it’s not. Who knows?
Shit, ain’t that the motto of our modern existence.
So. Sitting in my red underwear at the Hyatt Regency in Waikiki, I am jotting down another vacation blog entry. How do you like them macadamia nuts? I seriously wrote that sentence as an homage to Good Will Hunting…but now, as I reread this, it sounds like Hawaiian wordplay about my testes…
Will this blog entry remain this stupid?
Maybe this is the worst of it. Maybe it’s not. Who knows?
The funny thing is I’m joking here to cover up more pain. We’ve been here for about twenty-four hours, and it feels like a lifetime. I feel raw. Exhausted. Emotional.
Yesterday morning we had to put Frankie down, and then a mere few hours later, we found ourselves on a plane to Hawaii. I actually can’t write about Frankie right now, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to. Pain is hard to articulate for me. I prefer to avoid it. That’s why I joke. As the plane was lifting off and I saw LA growing smaller in the window, I was hoping that maybe Hawaii could distract me from the pain just for a little while. To give my aching mind a rest from what feels like has been an endless, cruel succession of throbbing loss and stress and horror and grief that hits hard with it’s hand opened and nails sharpened, then lies dormant long enough to make you think that was the worst of it – then hits you fresh all over again with something new.
What was I saying? Distraction. Right. Distraction, that’s what I was looking for. And let me tell you, I wanted a distraction. Well one distraction comin’ right up. For on the plane sitting next to me was a girl that only one word in the English language can efficiently describe.
“PLAGUE.”
The Plague was sitting next to me.
Look, just to give you a sense, here is my modus operandi when I board an airplane:
I get on, I find the flight attendant nearest my seat, and I say in a charming tone, “Hiyeee….at your earliest convenience, could I bother you for a seatbelt extender when you have a chance.
I need extra seatbelt.
Then I put my shit up in the overhead and sit down, and I start to sweat profusely from intense self-consciousness about being a large passenger squeezed into a tiny seat next to a stranger.
So this time, the person sitting next to me was a fifteen-year-old girl whose sister and mother were seated along her other side. I smile very guiltily and stuff myself into the seat. I work the extender, and I prepare for take-off.
Then I hear it—a juicy cough. Everyone’s wearing masks, so I think nothing of it…at first. But then The Plague coughs again, and I mean it’s just globulous, horrific phlegm doing a devil’s dance in the back of her throat.
Then she pops a Ricola. Oh shit, this girl is either finishing up a cold or in the thick of one. I’m confident it most likely ain’t COVID because everyone must prove they are vaccinated or test negative first to get to Hawaii. But I haven’t had a cold in well over a year, and I don’t want one while I’m on vacation. After the doors close I ask the flight attendant if the FOUR empty seats directly in front of us are available for me to take. The flight attendant cheerfully tells me that they are upgrade seats and not open to me, then she slaps a sign on them telling other passengers in English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean that nobody can sit in them.
As I stare at the empty seats in front of me, The Plague KEEPS coughing. At least once every sixty seconds. Worse yet, whenever she pulls her mask down for a sip of water SHE FUCKING COUGHS OPEN-MOUTHED!
The first time this happens, I go into full red alert. My eyes dart wildly above my mask. I self-consciously press the mask wire on the bridge of my nose to clamp it harder. As we taxi, The Plague’s coughing up a storm and has three Riccolas, one after another. I’m starting to realize that she’s completely stupid and doesn’t understand that it’s not one Riccola per cough.
“Could this get any worse- to be stuck next to this virulent, thoughtless idiot in A PLANE?” I asked myself, panicked, in my head.
Well, yes. Yes, it can.
A few minutes after take-off, The Plague starts wildly fanning her face – as if she ate a chili pepper. But she didn’t eat a hot chili pepper, did she? She grabs a barf bag and wretches into the bag. In a shocking, weird twist, her mother and sister start laughing at her as she’s puking. So clearly, they are idiots, too. The Plague fills three barf bags with puke. The scent of stomach juice and Ricola seep into my mask.
Now I’m screaming with horror in my head. SCREAM-ING a scream that I couldn’t produce with my own vocal cords if I tried…imagine if the Wilhelm Scream snuck up behind Edvard Munich’s Scream and non-consensually butt-fucked him with the violent, sonic pressures created by his Wilhemic Scream…whatever scream produced in that awful scenario is the scream that was going off in my brain.
The Plague now sits with filled barf bags on her lap, not even making any effort to throw them away…as she gets on her phone to check her instagram. Finally, her mom takes them and throws them away for her. OH…OHOHOH SHE’S STILL COUGHING. ONCE A MINUTE ON AVERAGE FOR THE ENTIRE FIVE-HOUR FLIGHT. Pulling down her mask and coughing open-mouthed before drinks of water…then pulling down her mask to…to…
To wipe her running nose with her fingers then wipe said snotty fingees on her clothes.
And the thing is…the thing is she had long nails. Like, two-inch-long fake-assed fingernails. This fifteen-year-old kid had big long fake fingernails and had to use the pads of her fingertips to smear away the lava flow snot off of her face then wipe it onto her clothes. And when she wasn’t doing that, she was recording herself lip-syncing to TikTok shit.
So I’m sure you’re wondering why I didn’t just turn to her and say, “Hey! PLAGUE! KEEP YOUR FUCKING MASK ON!” I mean, I kept looking at her with disdain. There was even a point during the flight where I stood up and just stared at her…I guess I just felt it in my bones that because her smoker voiced, I’ll-laugh-at-you-while-you-vomit Mom was who she obviously was if I confronted them this would take an insane turn and I was emotionally raw and tired and I hate confrontation, anyway.
So I just did a lot of breath-holding. When the food was distributed I didn’t immediately eat. I didn’t want anything opened around her vapor. And there was NO WAY I was taking off my mask near The Plague. But I was starved.
So I ate my meal in the bathroom.
I went into the bathroom. I gingerly took off my mask with my pinkies, then washed my hands. I took out an airplane bottle of vodka and gently dowsed my lips in a frantic attempt to disinfect them, then I fucking inhaled this pesto chicken hot pocket in the bathroom hard and fast before I returned to my seat and tried to sleep.
But I couldn’t sleep because she kept hitting me with the bottoms of her feet as she was trying to curl up with her legs to her chest…but unable to hold that position. Then she and her sister got into a fight because her sister wanted to hang HER legs over her. But argument resulted in an exceptional coughing fit…and I heard The Plague’s mother tell her she only needs to pull her mask up when the flight attendants walk by.
And that is when I walked back to the flight attendants and said, “I will pay you a hundred dollars if you tell the girl next to me who is coughing open-mouthed and is clearly sick to keep her mask on. To the flight attendant’s credit, she took it very seriously, told her to keep her mask on, and then kept checking her throughout the rest of the flight.
By the time we landed in Honolulu, I was even rawer than when we left.
But then an old friend of ours, Bruce Hsiao (vaccinated), who lives on the island, greeted us with true Aloha.
He met us at our hotel and brought us supplies from Costco, including local rum and a hot dinner from Uncle Bo’s…of some of the most fantastic food I’ve ever had in Hawaii.
And I feel asleep feeling a bit better, a belly full of good food and rum, and the eternal hope that a year’s worth of mainlining my patented “Pandemic Sunrise” vitamin drink will help keep The Plague’s moronic germs out of my system.
And I woke up to the sound of waves. And I realized how ready I am for some adventure. I’m a lucky man. I’ve got Charlie and Chase and Tiffany here with me. Charlie’s boyfriend Leo is with us, too, and of course Joyce, George, Tyler, and Piper. It’s going to be great. What felt like a painful escape from LA, then a grueling gauntlet over the Pacific, might turn into some special memories.
And already today, we made some as Tyler, Chase, and I took surf lessons.
Our instructor, Kurt, was this tall, sweet, sincere dude with a bronze bald head from Moku Surf Shop. There wasn’t a rash guard my size in the shop, so he pulled one of his own out of his backpack to loan to me. At the end of the lesson, he just gave it to me so I can use it for the rest of the trip!
It shouldn’t be surprising that Chase got up and surfed ON HER VERY FIRST TRY EVER. And Tyler started standing by her THIRD TRY. On the other hand, I didn’t stand at all, but I knelt when I rode the last wave in (I quit early because I am out of shape), which made me want to do more surfing because riding that wave…that feeling…I don’t know how to describe it. Nice. I’ll just leave it at that.
Man, this post feels all over the place. But that’s how it is right now. Progress is all over the place. Pain is all over the place. My emotions are all over the place. I am just hoping that maybe the winds and waters of Hawaii will cool and nourish my soul a bit. Maybe make sense of some of it. That would be great. But if not, perhaps I should adopt the philosophy of one of the Moku surf shop guys, who, instead of making excuses as to why they were running late with our surf lesson just yelled, “It’s meant to be!”
