I’m at zero. Or 100, depending on how you look at it.

Complete, total peace.

I’m floating on my back, unconnected to anything except the Pacific Ocean. Lying in the crucifix position and submerged entirely except for my face, which sticks out of the water like a small Gilligan’s Island.

The only thing I can see is the sky. The only sound I hear is my own breathing. I can’t feel my body but I can feel the wind moving across my face. The shore is somewhere off in the distance.

I never understood the virtues of a beach vacation, it always sounded so boring to me. Friends would get time off from work and buy tickets to the Caribbean, full of excitement in the days preceding. “I don’t get it,” I’d say to them. “What do you do out there?”

“Just lie out on the beach,” they’d say.

“Anhhh,” I’d say dismissively, and make that gesture that looks like you’re slapping a fly out of midair. To me a vacation meant going to another city and discovering what its brand of urbanity tasted like. Los Angeles, Hanoi, Tokyo, now those are vacations.

But now I get it, this lying out thing. The trick is you have to be completely spent. Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually just wiped the fuck out. Back in New York I’d been running on fumes and didn’t even know it. Now the tank’s bone-dry and it doesn’t matter. Looking up at the sky like this, slowly being rocked by the repercussions of waves while the current carries me further from shore, nothing matters. There is nothing except sky and water. Complete and total peace.

After paddling back to shore and stepping onto the sand, I realize complete and total peace is an entirely foreign concept to me. It almost feels like realizing you’re gay as a teenager in an after-school special: “What are these strange feelings coming over me....”

Back in the hotel, on the laptop, finishing up work for The Corporation. I’d worked on it all morning, then forced myself to go the beach because I felt pathetic, and now I was back at it. This assignment is a complete and total piece of shit.

I finish by evening, and now must find an internet connection to dump the files onto The Corporation’s server.

I hop in the whip and cruise over to Waikiki’s main drag, figuring there’s gotta be an internet café for sure. Can’t find one though. What I do find is hordes of tourists shopping. Every name-brand store you can think of, and ten you can’t.

No matter what city you go to in the world, some things are always the same: People trading coin for trinkets and T-shirts. It seems pointless to me, but maybe it’d look different if I actually had some scratch.

I park in a structure and conduct the rest of my search on foot.

“Izzeran internet café around here?” I ask the clerk at the ABC store. (ABC is like their 7-11. Though they have 7-11s too. It’s like their 7-12.)

“There’s one right around the corner,” he says. “You’ll see a bunch of stalls selling stuff, it’s right in there. Outdoors.”

Outdoors!

Around the corner I see what he means. There’s a night market of sorts, with vendors selling jewelry and Tiki dolls and whatnot. I’d only buy a Tiki doll if it was heavily cursed, so I could give it to a friend.

Amidst the Tiki vendors, I spy the “internet café”--an old Japanese cat reading a newspaper in front of a table with three PCs on it. Despite the fact it’s outdoors, Moneylove somehow has DSL on all these bitches.

It’s eight bucks an hour in fifteen-minute increments, so two dollars later I’ve done my business. Ones and zeros fly back towards New York, in cables laid across the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Fucking amazing, this internet thing. Ten years ago I’da been standing on line at Fed Ex with a stack of papers and an anxious expression.

Finally, chowtime. Walking down the glitzy sidewalk I pass assloads of high-class restaurants, but I head straight for the first mom-and-pop hole-in-the-wall I find; I want to see what kind of food I’d be eating if I actually lived here. Meaning culinary delights in the sub-ten-dollar range.

I get a mahi-mahi (fried fish) sandwich for like five bucks. Unsurprisingly it sucks, but I know I could get used to it, like I have with Subway. I don’t mind eating poorly now because one day I’m gonna have money, and then I’m gonna eat whatever I goddamn please. Panda, bald eagle, komodo dragon, you name it. I’ll go to the Museum of Natural History to look at dioramas of endangered species, and then I will go out and eat them.

Dudes here call each other “bra,” which is how they say “bro.”

I’m in the packed parking garage, sitting in the whip, top down. Futzing with the iPod FM transmitter, so I don’t notice the waiting car idling behind me.

“Leavenbra?” I hear someone yell. Takes me a minute to figure out the guy’s asking me if I’m leaving and not, as I’d initially thought, randomly yelling out the name of some Scottish village.

“Leaving,” I say, backing it into reverse. The pasty-skinned New Yorker vacates the spot, and two tanned Hawai’ians fill it.