Today I was out on the boat with my good friend Voni. We decided to go to the sandbar since the weather was nice and we wanted to do some relaxing and snorkeling. I tend not to go to the parts of the Sandbar where all the other boats go, since silence is solitudes favorite mistress after all. There was only one other boat within ear shot, the same one that I’d seen at the same spot last week. A powered catamaran with an eclectic group of tourists on board.

As we dropped anchor, they were preparing to leave. Unlike the last time I’d seen the boat leave, the captain decided today to break out his guitar and sing a song or two for his passengers on deck.  He put on a descent act and between the two songs made note to his passengers that there were four couples on board celebrating their honeymoon. Two couples had made the voyage from as far as Japan, and the other two I assume were mainland Americans.

On an otherwise unremarkable (at least to me in my current life) Thursday, I had casually decided to spend the sunny hours of the day doing what I do often, hanging out on the boat with a friend at the sandbar. Today, on that single catamaran alone, eight people had chosen this activity as one of the few things they would do on what most couples assume will be the best week of their lives. Their best week of their lives were spent doing what I do on an average Thursday? Can this be real?

I obviously spent some time thinking over this conundrum of epic proportions and decided to vocalize it to Voni. She had heard the captains speech about the honeymooners, but hadn’t thought about the situation quite like I had. We didn’t talk much about it at the time, but I’m sure in the days to come we will. I did happen to mention that I felt I had done nothing to deserve this, and she made some remark about how I was ‘blessed’ (a term I love to despise). My only retort was something to the effect that we should all revel in the random chaos that led me, in this universe, to be there at the sandbar with her at that moment, for us a Thursday and for others less than one hundred feet away their honeymoon.

Life isn’t fair. I get that. I’m fortunate/lucky/blessed/victim-of-chance/whatever-you-fate-loving-star-reading-cosmic-circumstance-tea-leaf-reading lunatics want to call it. I get that too. I can’t appreciate my situation in this life because I can’t remember all my previous lives where I endlessly dedicated myself to bettering the world, karmic amnesia. Sure, I can even get that too. I’ll accept it all (or none of it, but this isn’t where my current dilemma lies). It’s where do I go from here?

I don’t mean geographically. The sandbar is great, it’s beautiful. I’m in Hawaii after all (but it’s Oahu, it’s not Kauai or Maui), so forgetting the beauty that immediately surrounds you at all times would be a trying task for anyone but the blind. I know there are more beautiful places on this earth, I’ve been there. If I wanted to live there, I would. I don’t mean that any honeymoons I may have will have to be ‘better’ or ‘more’ than a visit to the beloved sandbar of Kaneohe bay.  Maybe it’s the romantic in me, but a week on the couch with the one you love can be just as rewarding (“Tell me that after you’ve been married for X number of years” you say. HAR HAR, “I’m sorry you decided to spend forever with someone who you didn’t feel that way about, everyone makes mistakes, I’m sorry you made that mistake. Yes I know a divorce attorney” I say. I digress).

What I mean is, if I decided to have goals/dreams (and for those of you who don’t know, I don’t), what could I possibly expect them to be? I live in paradise. I have a roof over my head. I have the only job I’ve ever wanted. I have every material possession I want (and I want less of what I have). I used to think I didn’t want to have goals/dreams because they limited people and a side-effect was a disconnection with life as it was passing (keep your eyes on the prize, and you forget your supposed to be enjoying the experience). Nowadays I’m more inclined to think that if I actually fabricated goals/dreams for myself they’d border on absurdity.

I know I’ve burned through twice my allotted quota of proverbial metaphors, but if you’ll permit me this final attempt I’ll be able to end this post confident that at least one of them will make sense. I’m not sure the last time I’ve had this much trouble articulating my thoughts on paper or out loud, unfortunately this isn’t a rarity lately (maybe I’m getting old). We are in uncharted waters, with no nautical navigation charts, no GPS or depth-finders here. We march to the beat of a different drum, and we don’t know what to do when our drummer quits? Different drum drummers are hard to come by. They don’t frequent craigslist or myspace (remember, they drum the beats on a different drum). If we are so lucky that we find a stand-in, what happens if we don’t like their beat? What happens if we can’t figure out how to march to it? Or worse, what happens if we figure it out just fine, but we aren’t sure about where we are marching to?

Today Amy and I went to Ala Moana beach park for a bit to chill before her long flight home and for me to detox a bit from the usual stresses.  While we were in the water Amy noticed a guy near our towels, not very suspicious looking or acting but just, there.   I took the opportunity to make fun of her, which I have been known to do from time to time.  This time it was about one day that Amy left a note on some random girls towel on the beach.  They had had a conversation earlier and the girl was nowhere to be found when Amy had to leave, so she left her number on the girls towel and they later became good friends.

So I said to her “he isn’t leaving with any of our stuff so maybe he just left a note on your towel?” She pretended like she didn’t want to laugh but her cheeks gave her away and we had a good cackle in the ocean.

Inside jokes and sea-giggles, great story so far for you avid readers I know.  The rub comes half an hour later or so when we are back at our towels shooting the shit and I see a scrap of paper five or six feet away.  It’s folded lightly in half and the two sides that are visible to me are blank, but being a nosey-parker tree-hugger (thanks goes out to mother for my snooping abilities ), I got up to get the paper. I turn it over, and I find this staring back at me:

You are a very attractive and beautiful woman! Please write me.

I know what you are thinking.  Why the hell would this guy redact his own name and address from his pick-up-slip?  He wouldn’t, I did that for reasons I’m unsure of yet.  But let’s start with the obvious reaction: Really? If you take a minute to review the note (I know it’s short, but it holds so much power).  The fact that this note appeared a few feet from my towel just minutes after I had been making fun of Amy for doing something similar (but very different upon further review) was amusing enough.

I invite you though to take a second look at the note with me, as there are several gems hidden within it’s single-creased goodness.   Just scroll up a little and read it again, and take note of:

1. The Name: You can’t see it but I can and its a very straight-forward all American name.  It’s something on par with ‘Chris Brown’, and why this is important will be discussed momentarily.
2. The Address: Again, you can’t see it in it’s entirety, but I have left the important part untouched.  ‘Kamahameha’ is not a road/street/highway/word.  ‘Kamehameha’ (notice the fourth letter is an ‘e’ not an ‘a’) is a road/street/highway/word/king/fireball.  This guy misspelled his own address. Excellent start to what will become an epic relationship for sure. Something tells me he’s the kind of guy who asks for directions…to his own house.
3. The Statement: I can appreciate that you didn’t leave very much room for writing on your perfectly hand perforated scrap of paper. But then to use the little room you did have to be redundantly repetitious, is sorely inexcusable . It took you 46 characters (spaces included) to tell her she was hot.  Next time, if you insist on there being a next time, just write ‘You’re a hot hottie!’  That is just as redundant, conveys the same message, and is less then half the amount of characters. Woot! Also if you read this sentence a few times over it sounds like it was written by someone whom English was not their native language and with a name like ‘Chris Brown’ I refuse to believe this is the case. What’s up with that?
4. The Request: Yes. It really says ‘Please write me.’ You didn’t have enough courage to engage in a dialogue with her, fine.  You aren’t a hip kid and don’t have a MySpace/Facebook account to point her to, fine.  You don’t even have a computer or an email account, one last fine.  You took the time to write out your address wrong on a scrap of paper, and put it on her towel presumably when she wasn’t around (she may never have even read it, on account of the winds on the beach), which means you had a pen and paper at the beach but you don’t have a phone number?  Write?  Why not telegraph, or fax then?

Bottom line is, I’m not hating on paper-scrap-towel-dropping for those of us who lack Dutch courage (even though I give the roomie a hard time about the one time she did it, on occasion).  However, taking the easy road and avoiding any face-to-face interaction, only to make a request of someone to write you snail mail is a bit much, no? Maybe I’m just new-fashioned, but this is asking someone you don’t know to contact you using what is arguably the most costly and effort-laden form of communication, she needs paper, pen, envelope, stamps, the list is endless.  And if she is truly in-fact as ‘attractive and beautiful’ (two for one!) as you say she is, she probably doesn’t have anything to do but huddle herself around the fireplace alone (she is single of course, all the hot ones are) sip on a glass of wine and write you a long letter with her fountain pen.  She’ll sign the letter with her lipstick covered lips and close the envelope with a wax seal. Only for it to be found a little later on the sidewalk by some asshole with a blog.