Posted 5:06 PM by Alfred

Hey, long time no, yeah, whatever. There’s some crap sitting in the kitchen that I wrote over the last week or two that for whatever reason I’ve done nothing with and I hate shit to go to waste so it’s leftovers time.

This was wrote 4 days after the Sunday, 10/15 earthquake:

I did this and I did that but what I didn’t do was skin your cat, you gotta believe and you gotta acknol, don’t misunderstand that I like alcohol, I may be sprung and I may be light but a bitch ain’t gonna know that I’m superbright. Wait, wait, not superbright, ultrabright. Or, um, yeah, ultrabright. Wasn’t that the name of that toy from the late 70’s early 80’s, it’s all a blur.

So if a guy with a mask comes into a doctor’s office, and asks for prescription medication without a prescription, is there an inherent flaw in the system, cuz a guy with a mask, by rights, er, definition, can’t really be prescribed anything anyway, you know, cuz his identity is a secret, so, can you hold it against him that he doesn’t have the proper paperwork in this case? I guess it depends on if he has to be masked in order to protect his own safety, because, you know, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and there are certain lines of work or lifestyle choices, legal, that cannot be pursued and still take advantage of those inalienables with knowledge of your place of rest in the public domain.

I got no innernet today, and yeah, we had an earthquake on Sunday. Shit shook and then it was dark for like 18 hours today, well, I mean, in my basement.

It was a dark and stormy night. Without benefit of an endless, uh, extension cord?


Ok, you caught me I added the extension cord bit just now.

And this was wrote around the same time, (actually a couple days earlier, the day after the quake). I was thinking about doing like a formal, er, well, more formal, dillio about the quake for blogcritics, but it kinda fell by the wayside, so here it is in its notes and cracked out form, I dunno, I don’t really dig my writing when I’m doing the “what happened that day” crap, but judge for yourself, or not, and now I’m just kinda over playing with it anymore, but as mentioned above, I hate just throwing shit out with the bathwater:

I wouldn’t call it an overwhelmingly tough day, but it was definitely surreal. Dark streets, people lined up for blocks for a big mac, radio shack selling batteries behind a desk at the entrance to a dark store, news coming out of Waikiki akin to the wild west, but overall, really, decent aloha from most involved, at least as far as I witnessed.

Growing up in southern California, I knew what was happening before the big one hit. I woke with a start, having felt a slight tremor. “That was an earthquake,” I said. My wife answered, “what, you had a dream we had an earthquake?” Seconds later, the 6.5 hit. “Get the baby,” which I did in a second flat, and we got underneath the doorways, looking at each other as the house shook for what was later reported a solid 15-20 seconds.

Maybe 5 minutes later, another smaller one (the 5.8, I’m assuming) hit, but it felt like a slight tremor compared to the first.

Once the shaking was done, we looked around, and happily discovered no damage, nothing had even fallen off of shelves, but the house had shook, we’d felt it, we’d heard it. Odd, being in Hawaii & feeling an earthquake, I’d turned off the part of my brain that was always ready for that, but I guess not quite, as I was ready. “That was a pretty good size one,” I said. Our four month old looked up at me with a smile, as if to say “good morning” blissfully unaware of what was going on.

Maybe a minute or two later, the lights went out. I verified that it wasn’t a problem with our fuses and looked outside to make sure we weren’t the only ones without power. It took me a little while, but I found a small radio down and some batteries down in our basement. KSSK is the designated emergency station, and for the first 15-20 minutes after the quake, they were still running preordained programming, some gab with local talking head Rick Hamada about local politics, but they soon got on the ball with coverage of the quake aftermath. Gradually stories started coming out, we HAD had a quake, the power WAS out, island wide and possibly statewide.

We made some peanut butter & jelly sandwiches and settled down with books and magazines, confident the power would be back up soon. We didn’t end up getting power in our section of Honolulu (lower Nuuanu) until 1 AM the following morning.

Hung out, wandered around at 2:15, found Korean barbecue down the street, got a plate.

Went to Pearlridge at 5:30, zoo, people everywhere, tyring to get food, gas, supplies.

Went to Aloha Tower at around 7, ghost town despite lights, party boats coming in. all lights on, but nobody there, except random people wandering around, looking for a party, especially tourists.

Supposedly Waikiki was like the wild west last nite.

End scene.

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