I just got back from a vacation on Oahu with The Skirt. We’re getting married holy crap.

Just kidding. See, the part where I tripped you up lies in the fact that Oahu is often confused with “crazyland”, where the improbable becomes probable. Not that there is anything wrong with The Skirt…it’s just that neither of us have figured out how doing something like that would make either of our lives better than they are now.

That’s a nice way of saying that I’m too good for her.

And that’s a nice way of saying she’s too good for me.

We both agreed that the vacation was going to consist of a whole lot of nothing. We had a house on the north shore with the following view from the back door.

And the following items of beauty in the back yard- The average/sucky pictures were taken by me, and the good ones were taken by my friend Russ, who was there with us for a few days and is a the best legally retarded homosexual racist photographer I have ever seen.

It rained lightly almost every afternoon, and then there would be rainbows all over the place. Gayest. Place. Ever.

In Hawaii, flowers bloom all of the time, and the streets are paved with candy. The air tastes like money and the birds can grant any wish you want.

Even the lizards are sexy in Hawaii.

If anyone can tell me why I would need to leave that house for anything besides food and beer, I’m all earplugs. Seriously, take your Waikiki night life and your Pearl Harbor and cram it. I don’t stand in line while I am on vacation.

I snorkeled with the sea turtles, ate fresh Mahi fish tacos, drank Li Hing margaritas, and basically had the best time of my life. Not once did I check my e-mail or even bother to charge my phone. That stuff just didn’t matter to me.

Nirvana. Nevermind.

Swimming with these guys is really something awesome. They just circle around you and look at you with one endangered eye.

Sometimes it rains while you are swimming, and sometimes you realize you are in the legendary surf of Waimea Bay and you just don’t give a damn. This is my favorite picture of the whole vacation.

Before we left Atlanta, everybody was telling us to go to Jameson’s to eat. When we got there we ignored the hype and went to Haleiwa Joe’s on the advice of people who actually live there. This is a message to people who come to Atlanta and ask me what to do for fun: When I say Buckhead sucks, it is because 96% of Buckhead actually sucks. Try East Atlanta, Midtown, or The Highlands. I live here and I’m not making this up. Still, half of you morons go get ripped off in Buckhead and then complain that it was pretentious, trendy, and sucktacular.

We did hit Jameson’s one night, and it was good in the sense that it was better than Spacklebee’s or O’chunky’s, but Haleiwa Joe’s was actually excellent food. That’s why you listen to the locals. Jameson’s has the advantage of a view like this while you are eating…

…but you don’t have to spend $100 on dinner to see it. Go over and grab a couple of drinks, watch the 5-alarm sunset, and then get good food next door.

The Skirt bought flip flops with a frigging integrated bottle opener in the sole. I couldn’t find a way to fit that into the story, but I had to mention it. They are awesome until you step in dog shit.

We went fishing on Sunday with Captain Jesse on The Foxy Lady. We left the harbor at about 6 am and caught some mahi mahi and tuna. Then on the way back just after noon, one of the rods started paying out drag like it was going out of style. A quick glance at the latest issue of Vanity Fair told me that it was actually going out of style, but I was wearing white after labor day, so I said fuck it. The deckhand gave me the rod and I started reeling and screaming like a bitch, sure that Nessie herself was on the other end. He said he thought it was a Wahoo, as that is what they generally catch in these waters.

Then I looked up and saw a Blue Marlin jump a few hundred yards behind the boat and I’m not ashamed to say I pissed my shorts a little. There was no way I was going to get him on the boat with relatively light line and tackle, but I had a frigging Marlin on the line and it was rad as hell.

He took off and stripped all but about 100 feet of line off the spool, at which time I guessed a more experienced fisherman might have better luck. Really I thought he was going to get to the end of the line and jerk me and (more importantly) the fishing rod into the ocean and I’d be eaten by a shark. So after he jumped a couple more times (yes, I squirted each time), I handed the hardware to Dave the deckhand. He fought the beast for a few more minutes and it finally unhooked itself, leading to a rather anti-climactic ending to the best fishing story of my life.

The book version will involve me being skewered through the abdomen by the fish’s long nose, punching the marlin in the face, and drinking a half gallon of our intermingled blood before having a raw swordfish sandwich and stitching my own entrails back together with the remainder of the fishing line. Then when we get back to land I might have sex with a vending machine or something macho like that. It’s still a rough draft.

Fishing will never be the same to me after that one.

Throughout the week I sent pictures to people at work and friends who weren’t enjoying the same good fortune I was and were therefore deserving of my pokefunnery. Here are my favorites…

I don’t tan, I poach. Just on the other side of the bushes, Greenpeace was waiting to push me back in.

Did you know you could flex fat? You can’t, but you can look stupid trying.

When I returned home, I had 313 messages in my inbox and 192 in my junk mail.

Why would you go on vacation only to come home to the task of answering two weeks’ worth of e-mails? Sort of negates the whole vacation premise, doesn’t it?

The answer is a two step program: “select all” and “delete”. Works well with voice mail, too.

So if you wrote me an e-mail or left a voice message between September 21 and October 9 of 2005, it is gone. If it’s important, try again.

In closing I would like to provide tasty linkage and thanks to the following people/businesses for helping make this the best vacation ever-

North Shore Beach house for lodging and proximity to all of the best people and things.

Chupu Charters, Captain Jesse, and The Foxy Lady, for simultaneously changing the way I look at the sport of fishing and ruining a pair of my underwear.

Haleiwa Joe’s restaurant. For having kickass food and letting us eat it. Twice.

Jeff Lee for being an artist whose work I can respect and admire, and knowing how to clean and prepare Mahi Mahi for fish tacos when I stood there staring at a wet piece of dolphin, crying. Also thanks for selling me some of your stock so I’d have gifts for people when I got home.

Photographer and Friend Russ Coover, of Digital Blue Photography, for taking great pictures and being the funniest jerk on the island. I’ve known the guy for over 15 years, and he’s finally found something he’s good at besides sleeping with underage women and publicly exposing himself. So support him. Please. Don’t let another child suffer.

Aside from that, I just finished the single largest pencil portrait commission I have ever gotten. She said she wanted a family tree portrait done for her parents’ 50th anniversary. She handed me 22 photographs that had been taken between 1955 and 2005. 30 subjects on one sheet of paper that I had to special order because they “don’t typically sell paper that size”. Oh, I also had less than 6 weeks to have it drawn, scanned, framed, and delivered.

I am pretty happy with the way it turned out, and hopefully they will be too.

So yeah, I’ve been busy. What have you been up to?

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