DAY 78 - High Energies

The morning's work was the regular preparation of rooms and doing the laundry - I felt like I should at some point draw the laundry area that Sarah and I spend so many hours gossiping in and that of course houses the world's loneliest and most annoying cat.

It would benefit greatly from getting a life.

After work we made our way to Pahoa again to get some groceries that we’d run out of and maybe to get some lunch. Being offered some pakalolo again on the way there ensured that we were thoroughly amused and confused when entering the Malama supermarket again, making straight for the vegetable aisle since we’d decided to eat healthily again for our remaining time here. Unfortunately the prices were extortionate, and after much flapping the bundles of greens about we decided to get a tiny bunch of kale (we never appreciated it enough when it was for free at Judy’s) for nearly five dollars. At this point however Sarah had a desperate need to go to the toilet, which led to us abandoning our sad little bundle of kale in the shopping cart, telling some employee there that’d we’d be back soon and fleeing from the scene. Getting the key to the bathroom from a Chinese restaurant proved to be a bit of a hassle but it all worked out, except that now that we’d been looking at all the pictures of food while waiting in line, had developed quite the appetite and decided to eat lunch first before attempting to do any more shopping. 

The decision of whether to stay in the Chinese place or go to the next-door subway was quickly solved with a game of rock-paper-scissors and so soon we were sat in Subway gorging our faces with meatball footlongs (the vegetarianism (and the eating healthily) is definitely going down the hill), talking about stupid things and giggling a LOT. Of course drinks in Subway are refillable which meant that somehow we ended up sitting there for multiple hours getting about seven refills of coke and slowly ascending into quite a caffeine-high before suddenly realizing that we were supposed to get back to KMEC for 5 o’clock to assist in some waitressing for some sort of dinner that Stephen was hosting there. So the kale we’d left in the supermarket was abandoned indefinitely and we hitchhiked home, only to find that Stephen had decided that he didn’t need our help anymore but invited us to join the dinner anyway. This turned out to be a promotional potluck for this guy Tiger’s (or ‘Tigmonk’s’) spiritual program (‘Tigmonk’s School of Blooming’) which meant that a lot of our spiritual friends had ended up coming as well – Billy was there (constantly in tears from all the spiritual awakening he’d been going through), Van the hobbit man and Bonnaville with his charming girlfriend. The dinner was delicious (even though we definitely did not need any more food) and was followed by a short lecture by Tigmonk about his general manifesto, before everyone disbanded again – I got involved somehow in smoking a joint out in the orchards with some people, being a complete kill-joy with my constant insistence to be careful not to get caught on the property. After that however everyone left to go to the Kava bar in Pahoa and even though we contemplated joining them for a while, we spent quite a quiet evening in the kitchen with the gang instead.