Hawaii

There are countless lovely, wonderful, crushingly beautiful things about the islands and the people who live here that won’t be repeated at this time. Instead, I’m trying to work out what has been bugging me about this place. Trying to bring into focus what keeps slipping away from me out of the corner of my eye.

There is no quicker way to set unreasonable expectations than by calling someplace paradise. It makes you vigilant; ready to find and tear at the seams to see what’s behind the manufactured curtain. Maybe it’s better that way though, nobody admires the oblivious.

The marginalization, fetishization, and then commercialization of natives and native culture is nowhere more apparent than in Hawaii. Observe the gentrified hula ʻauana, available for your viewing pleasure at malls and boardwalks, distilled to coconut bras and grass skirts for easy printing on postcards and beer bottles.

Consider the beachfront high-rise; built to enable the literal stratification of wealth, top level units are bought at a premium by those who fail to recognize that proximity to sand and surf is desirable, and not the inverse found in their city high-rises counterparts. Moreover, they foster an ironic immobility and incomplete isolation, their façade of exclusivity shattered every time you set foot on the street with the rest of us human detritus.

The dichotic standard of beauty of skin tone for whites and others; the general shallowing that a universal focus on physique has (though I may be projecting here); ABC Stores. 

You know what more than makes up for all that though? Poke. Holy fuck that shit is delicious.