I’ve yet to figure what this says about me, but weird people are drawn to me. I swear to god, if I’m on my own, they flock towards me like lonely flies towards particularly friendly shit. Usually this isn’t too bad (and I’ve got some amazing friendships with people that can only really be described as oddballs) but it’s a fact. Only Tom Anderson has it worse, and this is because his ridiculous size makes him a target for those with an interesting take on the world.
It came as no surprise to me, then, that as I sat on a bus in Hawaii heading to the North Shore to catch some decent surf, an elderly man with 2 teeth who could have been a living anti-meth advert*, got on, scoured the half-empty vehicle, then plopped down next to me.
Generally, despite being English and therefore socially repressed, I don’t mind talking to strangers (in the most literal sense of the word) but I was loving the chance to have a bit of solitude listening to Russell brand, Matt and Gee talk about Noam Chomsky and Big Bird, and enjoying the sights of O’ahu.
Sure enough though, 5 minutes in, this OAP taps me, waits til I take my headphones out, and proceeds to points out the homeless people in the bus shelter. Homeless people in Hawaii are not uncommon, horrible though their situation is, and wandering the edge of Kuhio Beach in the evening is a saddening sight, but I’ve no idea why he felt it necessary to inform me about it.
Perhaps the guy just liked telling people about his local area, as another 5 minutes later he tapped me, waited for me to stop enjoying yet another pair of silky-sounding Sennheiser CX300s which I was determined to get the most out of before I inevitably broke, lost or swallowed them AGAIN, to describe to me the death of a young boy at the upcoming intersection.
This event had been memorialized by the placement of a statue of a bike like the one he was riding at the time. However I couldn’t yet see this and having struggled to understand the rambling murmurs of my new friend, so I did that thing where you laugh and nod in response to an indistinguishable utterance. I repeated this until I figured out that he was actually describing the untimely death of a youth, wherein I realized I was laughing and agreeing with a tragedy and was plunged into a guilty silence.
Thankfully, being already beyond the parameters of acceptable social interaction, I don’t think this fellow was worried at all.
*the anti-meth ads in Hawaii are actually pretty good: sharp close ups of shitty teeth or facial scabs with the phrase “meth: not even once”. Pretty powerful.
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