One of the funnier conversations I've had recently.

I eat by working at a bar.  I can't state that any more simply or literally.  I help out at a local bar in order to have the cash in my hand on a daily basis to be able to put food in my stomach.  This may strike you as an odd choice of jobs for someone like me to have.  I'm not sure I could agree more.  Drinkers can be flaky, shallow and dishonest as all hell.  Irrational as motherfuckers, too.  It's not a trait-set that goes well with an autistic mindset.

Regardless, I had a conversation the other night that drives home a lot of how this world seems to me (my cousin says I speak in stories.  Stories encapsulate truth for me.)

One of the bartenders at the bar where I work is a surfer.  Pretty nice guy, for what it's worth. But A. was talking to a friend of his the other night about me.  A,'s friend is a surfer, too.  The friend was in town to paddle out after Andy Irons died.  But something about me happened to rub A's friend the wrong way.  I'm told that I can come off as rather brusque or aloof.  I'm about as far from a surfer as one can get.  If I'm laid back about something, I may as well not even be in the room.

A.'s friend decided that he was going to start bagging on me.  A. stepped in and told his friend to let it ride.  By way of explanation, he explained that I don't "have aloha."  As I mentioned earlier, I'm not a surfer.  I'm not even sure what it means to "have aloha."  (I had a pretty good idea what was meant by that when it was uttered.  I've spent enough time hanging around places where I'm out of place (read:  this world) to know when I'm being called an uptight peckerwood.)  But I didn't disagree with A. when he said this about me...

I turned to A. and told him that he was right.  I don't have aloha.  I don't know the first fucking thing about aloha spirit.  I'm a mildly autistic haole from the East Coast.  What the fuck would you expect me to know of aloha?

After this went on for a couple of minutes, I turned to A. and said "Hey, man, rather than complain that I don't know aloha, why not fill a brother in?"

A. told me that if I wanted to learn about aloha, I just needed to go hang out at the beach.  "You'll pick up some aloha down there," he said.

"That sounds like it could be cool," I said, "What say you run me down?  Take me over to the beach.  Introduce me to the scene. Start showing me the ropes."

"Fuck that," he said.

Explain to me again how this haole is supposed to know aloha.