Excerpt from mail sent 1998
I went for a walk on Saturday morning.
On Judah Street, way out in the boonies, I stopped in at the Hawai'i store. Curtis Yarvin, one of my co-workers, had once told me about his experience with scarlet fever. He'd caught it; had got over it; had relapsed; recovered again; experienced another relapse. He had looked at his daily routine, trying to figure out why the disease kept coming back whenever he tried to resume his normal life. He thought of his wooden tiki cup, which he used as a coffee mug. He thought of all those little wooden nooks crannies, pores which might shelter all kinds of things. He had wrapped up his tiki mug and tossed it out.
So I entered the Hawai'i store for the first time, keeping an eye out for wooden tiki mugs, preferably fever-free. I saw Hawai'ian foodstuffs, but paid them little heed. There were gorgeous shirts, decorative hanging gourds, many tapes of music. All this stuff had the air of authenticity about it; there was a distinct lack of tacky tourist bric-a-brac. I imagined asking the clerk about good places to acquire a tiki coffee mug in the area. Hi, your establishment appears to have a great deal of respect for Hawai'ian culture--could you tell me how I might go about procuring an item which perhaps demeans that culture, and many other Polynesian cultures? It's not for me--it's for a friend.
I walked out.