“A flippin’ flannel shirt, dude?!?”
“Put it in tha box wit’ tha rest a ’em, dude.”
“‘Tha rest a …’ Dude, this is Hawaiʻi! Where a dude c’n roast at midnight wearin’ skivvies! Where did this come from, an’, like, fer why?”
“It came from tha closet, dude, where OC an’ Quilly put it when we got here, a decade ago. They kept it, along wit’ their otha ‘warm clothes’ stuff, thinkin’ they might need it, ’cause they’d be goin’ back ta where they came from. A’most like they knew what they wuz doin’.”
“[…] OC knowin’ what he’s doin’?”
“Ain’t that whut I just said, dude?”
“It wuz a accident.”
“Riiiight. Don’ set up shop as no fortune tella, dude, ya’ll go broke.”
“An’ this is diff’ from now, like, how, dude?”
“[…] Dude?”
“Yeah?”
“Shaddap. Ya gonna help pack, ‘r whut? If’n you an’ yer skivvies ‘r gonna try ta keep warm by yappin’ alla tha time once we get where we’re goin’, yer gonna get flippin’ tired and ya’ll still be cold.”
“Oh OK, all right. But it burns me, yeah? All that work, all year long, so’s we c’n stay Hawaiʻi, an’ at tha enda it all we’re leavin’ ennyways.”
“You? Work? Whut work??”
“Bein’ quiet an’ respectful! Dude!!”
Links lead to cited blog posts or associated Wikipedia articles.
8 January: She laments to He that she doesn’t have the correct fabric on hand to make him a nice Hawaiian shirt.
15 February: In an alternate timeline, microbiologist Alexander Fleming contemplates the failure of penicillin, and is acclaimed as a hero by Alexa Health Services, which engineered the failure.
19 February: Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba cain’t get no grocery action.
14 March: On the world’s most famous, and punniest, irrational number, and the consequences of its mispronunciation.
29 March: Commemorators of Vietnam War Veterans Day gather at the West Hawaiʻi Veterans Cemetery and, in a solemn ceremony, unveil a memorial to the war that never was. YFNA, a not-so-proud inhabitant of Generation Jones, played in the band and reflected on the history.
5 May: The World Health Organization declares that COVID-19 is no longer a global health emergency, four months earlier than YFNA predicted in April 2020. Meanwhile, banks fail, supply chain issues continue unabated (see 19 February), and governments hike interest rates to contain inflation and play chicken with economic recession.
21 May: Memo to Lenny Kravitz: flying like a dragonfly could be a little more complicated than you think.
28 May: “Flowers”, the teacher sniffed. “Maybe you can get a slave-labor tech job with Megazon or TesX or any of the half-dozen other commercial empires that run things in this country now. Megazon is hiring. This week. Maybe.”
5 July: “The ones who do what they are called to do, and seek no selfish gain from the doing, will be forever at peace. Such ones will be untouched by sin, as the lotus leaf is untouched by the water on which it floats.” Not.
9 July: The staff are still working up the nerve to present their case for wages and retirement benefits.
22 July: In which a civilization spends extraordinary amounts of sucroot on a search for intelligence in its galaxy, and fails.
8 August: A wildfire on the leeward slopes of the Hawaiian island, Maui, obliterates the historic town of Lahaina. Just as they did five years prior, during the 2018 eruption of Kilauea volcano, YFNA and Quilly spend the next several days correcting erroneous news reports and assuring friends and colleagues that they – unlike the 100 dead and thousands homeless on Maui – were out of harmʻs way.
3 October: Speaker of the US House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy is voted out of office, leaving the House without a leader for the next three weeks. Chaos ensues, despite the de jure irrelevance of the House of Representatives, because only twenty-seven of its alleged 435 members actually won election to their posts.
7 October: The nation, Israel, experiences its very own 9-11. It is warned against repeating the mistakes made after the 2001 event, so far without obvious avail.
22 October: The Dudes go into survivalist mode.
6 November: “I’d like ta see ya try ta make that sandwich wit’ bread made from imaginary ingredients, dude.”
16 December: Just days before the annual Christmas mission, Santaworks LLC is threatened with a calamitous work disruption, because the hundreds of thousands of reindeer needed to move Santa’s sleigh, at serious risk to life and limb, are all working without a formal contract.
For OC and Quilly, January and February 2024 will be transition months, as they change islands and jobs. Have patience with us. We will miss friends in Hawaiʻi, and citrus from our own trees, but we will welcome old friends in the San Juan Islands of Washington State, and apples that are worth eating. And we may even survive the move.
Be safe, be well in 2024, and may your Congressional representatives be worthy of the elections that they didn’t win.
Aloha and ahui hou my friends