Butter-grilled bananas, I like the sound of that. Along with two eggs, corned beef hash and hash browns I’ve got a little Hawai’ian Heart Attack breakfast going on here. Killer coffee to boot.

I’m sitting in what feels like an honest-to-god diner, but local Hawai’ian style. (Maybe I’m fooling myself, you’ll have to ask a local.) The Wailana Coffee House, on Ala Moana Boulevard. I’m sure locals and tourists alike would consider the place nothing special but that’s exactly why I like it. I rarely find what’s special in tour books special in real life.

Coffee just the way I like it. Fresh, unsophisticated diner java that comes out of a big silver machine.

Surprise: The service in Hawai’i ain’t bad! Since service speed in even New York has declined (waitresses, once snappy, now take fucking forever) I’ve assumed and often confirmed that service elsewhere is even slower.

But laid back as Hawai’i is, the waitresses both here and at Zippy’s come ‘round offering refills within 30 seconds of me draining the joe. Only difference is the coffee at Wailana’s is great, and it sucks at Zippy’s. Though I like both places.

Zippy’s is the Hawai’ian version of a Denny’s, we went there last night. In addition to serving American-style fast food they serve Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Hawaiian, and Korean chow. Open twenty-four hours, it’s the place you go at the end of the night to sober up for the drive home and top off the stomach tank.

Where else can you get Sloppy Joe’s and soba noodles, bacon cheeseburgers and kimchi-fried rice? They need to open one of these joints in New York.

After seeing Band of Brothers last year I read up on World War II, and facts from the conflict still occasionally pop into my head. So when I see the hordes of Japanese shoppers in Waikiki, I can’t help but find it striking. Because 60 years ago there were also scores of Japanese flying towards this island, with a decidedly different payload.

I wonder if that first batch of pilots could have imagined that later in the century we’d be at peace, and their granddaughters would be retracing their flight route in search of tans and shopping centers.

So maybe someday my civilian ass will go to Iraq and shoot things with a camera, not a gun; I’ll enter one of their households by invitation, not force; I’ll rent a convertible and drive freely down unmined streets, and I will be there to relax.

Of course it may take sixty years before that’s possible, and who knows if I’ll actually live to be 93. I don’t take great care of myself, so it looks unlikely. Say, I wonder what age I’ll die at? Will I reach my sixties, or will it be next week? I wonder what day of the week--

--Oh no you don’t, don’t you fucking do this. You can think about death and mortality all you want back in New York, but right now you are in Hawai’i, young man, and I forbid you to think about such things. I FORBID IT.

The sun is shining, the showers are showering and there are more rainbows outside than at a gay leprechaun convention sponsored by Pantone. Now get out there and enjoy yourself before you have to get in that goddamn plane in a couple days.

Swimming at the beach. As a reminder of how long it’s been since I’ve gone swimming, every time I resurface, my hands automatically try to wipe my hair out of my eyes. Man I haven’t had hair since the Clinton years.

I’m relatively close to shore but off in the distance, surfers silently carve across waves. Further off, silhouetted against the horizon I see an enormous freighter ship loaded with containers. Hard to believe we’re all in the same body of water.

I lie on my back, relaxing, drinking fresh mouthfuls of delicious sea water.

The seawater wasn’t sitting quite right, so back on shore I scooped huge handfuls of sand into my mouth and started chewing.

A relaxed-looking, shirtless black man and his eager son were building a sandcastle by the water’s edge. The enormous structure they’d rendered with buckets was so architecturally complex I was sure they had blueprints tucked away someplace. Nearby a big-ass, roly-poly Hawai’ian cat and his son were running into the waves and laughing. I looked at both in envy, then returned to the water to float on my back some more.

On a random note, I stopped into a Borders bookstore and of all things, there was a bunch of Stormtroopers walking around. They had the rifles and everything. I wanted to approach them and try the Jedi mind trick.