Reflections from Hawaii, 2018, Nightfall

Dateline: Oahu, Hawaii
April 9, 2018

Last night I was up late.

I go to bed late and I get up early. What is that? Going all the way back to after I got home from Vietnam. Now, I’m not up looking for some enemy who can’t possibly be out in the night. I’m okay with that. Age does, indeed, help some things.

Now, I’m up writing or looking for anything of interest that might be sharing the night with me. That’s why the whales, real or imaginary, are so important to me. What shares my night. Only important to me, really, and I know that. If someone finds you out, staring up at a sliver of moon for hours at a time, they are not likely to understand what the hell you are doing or really care, other than to maybe think you need to be ‘checked in’ somewhere.

Last night was a particularly sharing bit of darkness. The waves help that alone. The waves hitting the rocks time after time, and endlessly, are kind of good company. They are constant assurance that the world is still spinning and things are going on out there beyond anyone’s control to generate all sorts of things, not just waves moving across oceans.

The whales are that way. They are a force of nature. Oh, not the kind of force humans can bring to nature. Whales just are. They are big and seemingly friendly. John Candy could have been a whale and I would have liked that whale. Just my strange way of looking at mankind and nature.

My whales may not even be real out there in the night, and that just about perfectly describes what I’ve come to understand is my major comprehension of the universe around me. Nothing is really the way it seems, and neither am I. And none of it has to be real unless I want something from it, or someone, or something, wants something from me.

Last night I was up late. I took this photo just to see what the silly camera built into an iPhone X would do and with it.
Not as bad as I thought, but neither is our world, our time or our universe…