He's dancing with chicken slacks

I can't even explain how this train of thought came up, but I was sitting at my desk editing photos when I realized that Allen is the only long-term boyfriend I've had that never bought me a camera. My daughter's dad bought me one (and I still maintain that he was hoping I wouldn't want it and I would give it to him, but perhaps I'm wrong. It's possible that Chris had one or two decent moments in our farce of a relationship...perhaps the gift of a camera was one? Surely he couldn't have been all bad to me? Right? Is that right? Tell me that's right, because I don't remember him ever being anything other than a lecherous dick with fidelity issues and a disregard for the feelings of the fucking teenager he was dating as a man in his twenties). My first camera, actually. I remember the first time I thought I might really love photography, I had taken some photos of my daughter in the yard of the people who lived next door to us in Lucerne. Taking photos of Rhyann was my favorite thing to do, and she was such a little nature baby. These photos in particular was just her in a diaper, eating a dandelion, in the shade. I haven't seen the photos in a very long time, though I do remember they're on black and white film (of course!! What kind of girl with a camera would I be if I didn't shoot on B&W film in the early stages of my photography development???), and I also know that if I were to critique them NOW, I'd find a thousand things to fix about them (light, composition, angle, all my failings as a girl with a camera who didn't know what the fuck she was doing. Rhyann was perfect, of course, but the photos themselves could have been better had I known what I was doing. Rhyann was who I photographed non-stop. Rhyann and some truly awful selfies that make me cringe a lot. Oh oh oh, and landscapes. Which...man, I have just never had the eye for landscapes. Chris took me to this place once...I want to say it was called Hanging Rock, but I can't be sure...and the drive there I was totally fucking obsessed with the scenery. I remember taking so many pictures (on my black and white film, fucking bless) and then getting the washed out, boring ass photos back and being so fucking disappointed in myself. I wish I could remember what that fucking place was called. I googled Hanging Rock and a trail DID come up, but not the correct one. It was this gigantic rock that you could climb up and jump off of into the river below it. Which I didn't do, because I am a coward, as many historians have said. I don't even remember which way we traveled to get to it, so trying to drive my way through Google Maps Satellite View would take hours. Because I'd just have to click aimlessly in the hopes of seeing something familiar. I DO remember driving by a huge apiary, though. Surely that will narrow the area down!!

I took photos as often as I could, which wasn't nearly as often as I wanted. I couldn't get film whenever I wanted, but that made the pictures I DID take all the more special to me. Rhyann was about 85% of my subject matter. I wasn't even trying to take the kinds of photos I try and take now...I wasn't going to artistic photos of my daughter, I just wanted photos of her period. I was fucking OBSESSED with taking photos of her. My mom's favorite photo of her was a photo I took of her when Chris and I were moving into our apartment in Willits. Rhyann was wearing an outfit with flowers on it, I believe...a little periwinkle number with daisies...and she had her hand to her face as if she was making the universal "shush" motion. I took photos of her doing everything. On one of my good days with a nice reprieve from fucking debilitating postpartum depression, I took MY favorite photo of Rhyann. She was in her lilac purple dress with white lace edging. I loved that dress so much. Rhyann had grabbed my hat, a little angora number that looked kind of like a cloche hat, but not quite. She put it on, it was far too big for her, and she started somersaulting all around the yard, laughing the entire time. I got a photo of her mid-somersault, and even though you can't see her beautiful little face, it was my favorite photo of her for a really long time. Until I took the photo of her sitting on the stairs at Dave and Doreen's, drinking a Capri Sun. That day hadn't been nearly as good, Rhyann was a crabby cakes that day. I can't remember why, but she was a grump. I'm sure I hadn't helped matters. This is completely unrelated, but I really wish I had known about PPD back then. Maybe if I had been able to name what was going on with me, I could have gotten help, because I really needed it. Chris was part of what made me so miserable, and had been during my entire fucking pregnancy and I definitely needed to escape from that nonsense, but I was really in the clutches of PPD. I had days where I couldn't get out of bed, where I just couldn't fucking function as a mom, and making sure my daughter's most basic of needs was met was all I could force myself to do. I couldn't get dressed, I had a fucked up sleep schedule, I couldn't do anything but cry. Rhyann would lay with me and watch Brother Bear and The Emperor's New Groove, and I would just...cuddle her and cry as quietly as I could. Maybe that's part of why I love the photo memories of her so much...because those were good days. Days where I could actually be a mom and enjoy days where I could breathe like a person who didn't kinda want to die just because feeling nothing would surely feel better than the way I felt almost all of the time.

I ran that camera into the fucking ground, man. When I finally left Chris and had to leave my daughter behind, I lost interest in photography for a really long time. I fell into a stranger kind of depression, but I could kind of function again. I was working toward getting my daughter back, that fell apart (and man, I could write a god damn novel about that disaster. I wonder a lot how Chris remembers that going...if he remembers how fucking hard he stonewalled me from access to my daughter. If he remembers breaking promise after promise to me. I know I thought maybe I should lie and behave like I wanted to be with him still, and that he should come to be with me, which I think kinda blew up in my face. I had no interest in being with Chris again, I just wanted my daughter back and he was pretty fucking flatly refusing to make good on the arrangement we had made...I really wonder if he remembers any of that. If he remembers my mom and I arranging flights for him and Rhyann that he just never bothered with, if he remembers telling me that he had changed his mind and didn't want to have joint custody any more...despite the fact that he had asked me to be left off of her birth certificate and he had approximately zero legal claim to her...that I would have to come get Rhyann from him. I wonder if he remembers that I gave up a fantastic government recruiting position to move to Vegas so I wouldn't be as far from him and we could both have equal access to our daughter...if he remembers setting me up to live with his friend Matt, who stole thousands of dollars from me and then left me fucking homeless....if he remembers any of this, or if he's willfully forgotten? Or if maybe he tells it differently because he really looks like a fucking heartless prick if you tell it the way I remember it, and he knows it. I don't even think he told Shila the truth about our relationship. I didn't always think Shila was the worst...I remember one time, I tried to warn Shila about being with Chris. She was pregnant with their son, and Chris had been trying to tell me that he couldn't bring Rhyann to see me, because if he saw me, he'd have to fuck me. I told her about it, the conversation didn't go well. That isn't even when I began to despise her, I just felt bad for her, because seeing even a glimpse of Chris on the other side of being with him felt AWFUL. Matt had filled me in on a lot of Chris's behavior from when we were together...I had only suspected the things Matt told me about, and it was upsetting but gratifying to know I wasn't just imagining the worst for no fucking reason. When I still lived in California, Shila had never been anything but nice to me, I had no real reason to hate her yet and I just wanted to let her know what Chris was saying behind her back. She told me she didn't believe me, so I didn't tell her any of the other shit Chris went on to tell me that just WAY crossed the lines of what a person in a monogamous relationship should be saying to a person that isn't their partner. Shila would definitely earn my malice later, though I did spit a LOT of venom her way that I kind of wish I hadn't. Some of the things I said to her...some of the names I called her...I hate myself for. Kind of wish I could apologize for them, I was only in my very early twenties, and she had my daughter and was helping people keep her from me. She helped get my pages that I had put up for my daughter taken down, she stole my photos of my daughter and acted like they were hers, she helped perpetuate the idea that Rhyann should be afraid of me because I was going to steal her...what kind of person does that? I'm quite sure we misunderstand each other on several levels, and it's not just possible but PLAUSIBLE that Chris sold Shila a monstrous version of me that never existed and Shila was just trying to be a protective momma bear. Which in a way, I can respect, and I respect Shila for adopting Rhyann and taking care of her and loving her and being her mom her entire life. I just wish Shila had maybe had the foresight to figure me out and make up her own mind about me. Like...maybe refusing to even let me see photos of my daughter was the wrong turn to take? Blocking me from even LOOKING at my kid? I will never ever ever forget how fucking brutally angry I was the day my mom got an email from Dave saying that Chris and Shila had found out he was sending her photos of Rhyann...that she was of course forwarding to me...and he was no longer invited in their home. I have just...I have pounds of emails I printed out and kept for when I eventually took Chris to court for shared custody of our daughter. That was one of them. I had started to hate Shila LONG before that, but it isn't for nothing that I will not hesitate to think of her as one of the worst human beings I've ever known. She clearly doesn't think much of me, either, but all of that being said, she didn't deserve the low blows I lobbed at her because I just wanted to hurt the people obstructing me. I could have insulted her based on her actions rather than, say, her intelligence [which was my favorite way to dig at her], or her being on welfare [which....number one, fucking HYPOCRITE, man, I was on that shit for years at Chris's behest, and even WORSE, needing assistance to fucking survive isn't at ALL something that should be insulted. I was a deeply disgusting person, it was a really dark time in my life. Yucky. I am a yucky human sometimes]...I wish I could justify all of that shit better. I understand why I said the things I did, and I think most people would soften their view of the things I said, given the proper context...but it doesn't make any of them right. Especially when I could have easily stayed away from low blows and been completely correct in calling her a bad person in whatever creative ways I wanted to without digging into digs based on education or economic status. Not fucking cool of me. I have...I have really strayed from the point. Anyway, Chris is a horrible human being, I am not a fan of Shila's, but from my far away perch, Rhyann looks like she's been completely loved and has had a wealth of experiences in her young life, and I can at least rest easier knowing that Rhyann has good parents. They may not be good people to everybody, but they look like they've been mostly good one of the people who matters most to me. Even though I don't know her, I still fiercely love my kid. I wish I had been allowed to love her a bit better, but I didn't walk myself into that situation by myself. I take some responsibility, I dole some out to my parents, and I dole a lot more out to Chris and Shila. Maybe they've both forgotten about who they were to me and it's...it's just easier to make me out as an uncaring monster. Maybe Shila was more like me than I could have imagined, maybe she only aided Chris in denying me access to my daughter because he made her. He very successfully made me do a lot of shit I didn't want to do, and I wish I could explain why with something other than desperation on my end to not be turned out and have my daughter taken from me...something Chris loved to threaten me with when I told him I wanted to leave him. I really fucking lost my story here, but the moral is Chris is trash and I fucking hate him. I hate him with a god damn passion, and more than a little of me hopes that part of him hates how much Rhyann looks like me. Shila can suck a butt, too, but I'm a bit more inclined to be forgiving of her, even though she's pretty god damn complicit in Chris's bullshit. So is his mom and Dave and while Dave gets a bit of a bye for sneaking us photos, and for at least being civil with me, they can all die in a god damn fire. I shouldn't have been villainized for having postpartum depression, I shouldn't have been villainized for hating living in a small city, I shouldn't have been villainized for not wanting to be with Chris anymore, and for taking the only option open to me to get out from under someone who completely and fucking TOTALLY abused me in every single way he could, I shouldn't have been villainized for being young and stupid, I shouldn't have been villainized for wanting access to my daughter, or for wanting photos of my daughter, or updates on my daughter...I shouldn't have been an object used to terrify my daughter to help her hate me any more than a kid too young to understand the nuances of why parents leave would hate the parent that wasn't around...but I was. And every last one of them helped perpetuate that shit, and that's vile. It's awful. I wish I could make Rhyann understand. I wish I had confidence that maybe her family figured out what they did, and that they were more than a little wrong in how they handled the situation...I suppose none of that matters. I mean, it all matters to me, and I know I fucked some things up, and I wish I could tell my daughter I am so sorry, and that I've loved her from the very second I saw her, but that counts for next to nothing. I would spend the entire 10 grand on lawyers fees trying to get shared custody of her all over again, even knowing what I know now about how it was going to end, because I think I'll always hope that it turned out differently. In an infinite multiverse, there's no such thing as fiction.

Cameras? Back to cameras.

I kept that camera Chris gave me, and when I moved back out to Vegas to try and make dual parenting work, I starting taking photos of the desert. They weren't wholly awful, in fact I remember one photo of the wooden walkway at Red Springs being one I liked quite a bit (I think I'd hate it now, though). I turned back to landscapes without my daughter around, though I did take a few photos of me and Allen, and one great photo of Allen under the covers where he looks like the world's most gentle pugilist. But my camera stopped working, and I didn't know how to fix it, and we were pretty fucking homeless and in need of cash, so...I pawned it. I got thirty dollars for that camera, which was staggering, since it was god damn broken. And then I went without a camera for years. I didn't really think about it, I guess. I liked photography, and I had a vague idea about being somewhat decent at it (the three or four photos of my daughter don't count. Those are sentimental photos to my, but I do not think they would be something I delivered to a client. Do I sound highly disengaged with that remark? I may never be able to answer that accurately), but I didn't need a camera. Perhaps that's why Allen is the only boyfriend I've had that didn't buy me a camera. Which is literally what I set out to joke about with this blog, and instead I WAY derailed. I pointed this out to Allen today, and here's what he said to me:

Vintage Allen. 

Dan is the next boyfriend I had that bought me a camera. He had deployed, and my webcam just wasn't cutting it for his UNSLAKABLE THIRST FOR VAGINA SHOTS. I'm only kind of kidding. Dan wasn't gross about demanding that shit, though....I just don't understand pictures of genitals. Don't get me wrong, people having an interest in staring at my vagina has made me a fuck ton of money, but I just can't get my head around wanting that shit to get off. Like...have you ever seen a genital region? Ew. Fun to play with and all, but like, so is a squishy bowl of grapes. I just don't wanna stare at it. Anyway. Dan just wanted like, super crisp images of me, and he asked me if I'd get more utility out of a webcam, or an actual camera. I told him I used to really like photography, and I'd use an actual camera a lot. So he got me a Nikon D3200 with the standard kit lens, and a zoom lens. Nothing fancy, but I'm not snob. It was a great starter camera. And I took photos of EVERYTHING. Comically, everything but my vagina. Oh irony! You so silly. 

And those photos were BAD. And I thought they were so fucking good. I reverted a lot of the entries in this blog to drafts after Dan and I stopped speaking...mostly because I was extremely embarrassed by the sentimentality toward him, because I thought it made me look bad. It didn't, I just looked like a girl in a relationship who was devastated when it ended. But I judge my feelings toward Dan with exceptional harshness, because hindsight is 20/20, and I never should have stayed for the amount of time that I did. Anyway. The photos were more than bad. They were stink, stank, stunk. Oversaturated, without intention, pointless, and stupid. And I ran around the Springs thinking I was such hot shit with my dumb little Nikon and my tiny little Gorilla pod and my ripped version of Lightroom Classic. I taught myself a lot, but I was worse than an amateur. 

That Nikon kept me creatively busy for a couple of years, and then in 2014, Derek and I started dating, and he was having none of my Nikon's shit. He bought me a Canon 50D and made me pitch my Nikon. Well, he didn't MAKE me, I just didn't mind pitching it. It was a symbolic way to put my relationship with Dan in the trash can. Derek has bought me other, better cameras, and I've gotten so much better at photography that I definitely feel like I deserve the cameras he buys me now (the last of which was a 5Dmkiii for my birthday two years ago, and then this year he bought me a 5D S and I fucking LOVE IT). 

But the entire stupid point of this is I would probably be a much more accomplished photographer if Allen had followed trend and gotten me a camera, too. I maintain that the man is inconsiderate. 

I want to go commit meat fraud

Alright! So Saturdays are for hikes that are either too long to drag Alex along for, too dangerous to drag Alex along for, or we have to wake up way too fucking early to drag Alex along for. Or all three. Sundays are for family hikes!

Our first family hike as we whittle down our "to do before we leave" list was Aiea Loop. And you know...I JUST realized that we didn't do a Sunday hike after Lulumahu. We did this hike after Wiliwilinui, the next weekend after Lulumahu. I feel like we definitely did do a hike on the Lulumahu weekend, I just...cannot recall what it was. And there is no photo evidence of it. So uh, habeus corpus or something.

Anyway, Aiea Loop! Derek has been wanting to do this one for a long time. He said it was one he remembers fondly from when he lived here as a child, and while bossy me is never happy to do what other people suggest because the party should be all me, all the time, the sliver of me that is all too happy to accommodate was thrilled to do the loop. Derek said it was a pretty easy 5 mile trip, pretty flat, just a jaunt around an overlook area through a beautiful forest. He wasn't entirely wrong, though my legs were sore from a hike that has not yet been blogged about.

HE ALSO NEGLECTED TO MENTION THAT IF YOU PARK AT THE BOTTOM IT IS A STRAIGHT INCLINE TO THE TRAILHEAD, FOR A FUCKING HALF A MILE.

I am so out of shape. Let this be a reminder that people who are not obviously obese? Are in no way healthy. Don't judge fat people. I look pretty god damn fit now, but uh, fit aint me, chief. I'm a blubbery little cry baby that hates an incline and cries when she has to go upstairs to her own room, and can't she just sleep on the couch? Stairs are hard, you guys.

Alex slept the entire way to the trail, and she was a bit of a grouch on the way up, but because I far outwhined her, she was in a pretty good mood by the time we got to the trailhead.

Behold! A child:

Here we all are, getting ready to trek our way through Aiea Loop. Look! Alex looks genuinely happy to be there!!!!

Wait. Just kidding.

Here's the beginning of the trail, and my thighs and I felt fairly hopeful that there wouldn't be much up and down bits, as promised.

No. Just right out of the gate. I whined. Derek laughed.

The trail evened out, though, and it stayed fairly level for pretty much the entire five miles.

This is a bench maybe...a quarter mile in? And Alex already needed a rest. We denied her request, and her good mood deflated a bit.

She was definitely being kinda salty, but then this incline appeared:

I thought we had to go up that way, and I was ready to pack it in and either go back to the car, or move into that precise area of the forest so I didn't have to go up anything. But Derek assured me the way forward was not straight up, and even better, Alex took that incline as a challenge, it improved her mood, and up she went. Check her out, doing what my quads were screaming about.

Derek was right! Smooth walking. A welcome change of pace from the hike we did the day before, which was all incline, all the time, and my lower body was still pretty fucking thrashed.

The views were very nice, truly, but I was starting to notice an uphill turn in them. I uh...well, I wasn't pleased. Looks are usually deceiving, though, and the trail barely inched upward. IT was flat, and the view was divinity: 

At this section of the trail, Derek and I heard a lovely, new to us birdsong We stopped for a solid forty minutes trying to catch sight of the bird so we could photograph it and identify it later, and as we were quietly trying to bird in the O'ahu bushes, a man walked by with his child, casually smoking a cigarette. Now, I quit smoking 6 years ago. I have smoked MAYBE 15 cigarettes since I quit. I do not judge people who smoke, it just isn't for me anymore. I DO, however, wonder about the iron fitness of people who smoke whilst hiking. What the fuck are their lungs made of??? I think the same thing about people who do a perfect face of makeup to take selfies when they hike, and don't sweat it off. I am just...I am more in awe than anything else. 

My dad used to read me The Hobbit when I was little, and the thing I remember the most were the riddles that Bilbo and Gollum told each other. In retrospect, this next tree makes me think of a riddle that Bilbo tells Gollum. The riddle goes:

A box without hinges, key, or lid

Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

The answer is an egg. While this tree is not hiding an egg, it is hiding a treasure. I initially sat under this tree and busted out my macro to get photos of the gorgeous chartreuse algae/mold/fungus growing on the side of it. Derek and Alex wandered off to take photos of other stuff and to leave me to my macro devices, and I looked all around the tree, trying to find the best way to photograph the growth.

And then this fucking husk scared the fucking tits clean off of my chest. I thought it was alive, and Jackson's Chameleons are invasive little shitheels, and do not belong in the O'ahu ecosystem. I was worried I was going to have to cut our trip short, catch the chameleon, and bring it to the park rangers. But no! It was already long fuckin' dead. Phew! What a load off. 

Neat!!! I was super excited, and I hustled over to Derek and Alex and made them come see it, too. And Derek and I fussed and broke out lights and tried to get good photos on our really real cameras (a reminder that these are all cell phone photos). I will post all of the "real" photos I took at the end of the blog, but cell phone photos of anything are just...not in my wheelhouse of things I do well. 

We spent about 45 minutes with that husk of a lizard before Alex demanded that we press forward. Which...fair. Photo hikes are crazy boring for her, she really could not spare two fucks to rub together about photography. Or posterity, for that matter. She does love to dig around and find other things that interest her, but when Derek and I are too busy to ooooh and aaaah over the things she finds with the fervor she requires, she loses interest. 

The trail wasn't get more difficult per se, but it was getting less flat. The incline was so gradual as to not be a bother, though. The fallen trees everywhere made me kind of wary. Derek and I had recently started watching Alone and they talk a lot about deadfall. And...no thanks. 

Not today, tree. Not today.

Even this little incline didn't feel so bad on my thighs, and it went right back to being flat as soon as we crested it. So considerate!!!

I thought this tree was so fucking cool. I tried to get a good, really real photo of the bark, and then one of these trees just being itself, but I couldn't figure out was I was trying to capture, so I gave up. 

I just cannot with how verdant and gorgeous Hawai'i is as a general rule. It should be mentioned that I started writing this on May 5th, 2020, and it is currently February 24th, 2021. To say that I procrastinate is being generous, but I also just desperately miss O'ahu. Looking at these pictures from Missouri makes my heart sad. 

I do love a knobby, gnarled old tree. It isn't for nothing that I have one tattooed on my left forearm. 

If I were on Alone, I would sleep in the water to avoid the deadfall.

But the loop continued to be what Derek promised: easy. 

Even in this photo, where you can see the upward grade, it barely felt like anything. When I was still an undergrad at the university of Hawai'i, I biked 6 miles to school, 6 miles back, every day. The first 4 miles were very flat, super easy, I did them in about 10 minutes. The last two miles were a horrible, wicked false flat. It LOOKED flat as some smooth, warm balls, but in reality it was a terrible ascent, and it took me somewhere between 10-15 minutes to manage those two miles, sometimes on a horribly hot day, it would take me twenty. The way home was a breeze, though, because I could just pick up speed leaving campus, and then coast downhill for two miles and catch the wind. These inclines were not like that, they were super gentle. 

My favorite thing about Hawai'i was how any given place did not look like a lush, tropical rainforest. Sometimes I really thought I was in the Pacific Northwest. 

Derek sold this hike to Alex (who, it must be stated, was fucking MISERABLE by mile 3) by saying that there is a downed airplane here. And there is. Derek and I didn't realize the hike to the airplane was pretty much rolling downhill for a quarter mile, so we just admired the wreckage from afar. 

There's a little piece!

That was all we could see from the trail, since hiking down wasn't in the cards that day. Here is a link with a tiny bit of info about the plane crash (I didn't know there were ten people on board, I thought it was a one man mission! But no! Ten people. All of them died). 

And here we go, at the end of our journey. What I did NOT take a picture of was me coming to the rescue of a dog in a shitload of distress. Overheating, miserable, and its owner was beside herself, on the phone with her boyfriend about where she was on the trail, he needed to bring water, just understandably upset. We initially walked by her, but I couldn't just do that. I had water left. So I walked back, asked if she wanted the rest of my water for her dog, and she tearfully thanked me, and I got to give a puppers some water. My good deed for the day freed me up to kick babies later on. The universe is balanced. 

There we are! 7 miles total done that day, Two of us obviously had a wonderful time and were in fantastic spirits. The other of us is Alex. 

As promised, here are the actual photos I took during the Aiea loop hike.

Here is the chartreuse algae or lichen or mold or whatever it is that I was photographing before I found that husk of a chameleon. 

Here's that chameleon husk! But with much better lighting. I'm just horrible with my cell phones, as many historians have said. 

And then more algae, because why not?

I was kind of rushed away from doing these macros properly, because my big ass was in the middle of the trail, and people wanted to get by. 

My favorite view from the loop. 

There are not words for how much I loved this tree. I really wanted to try other things with these photos, but this area was SUPER popular. A really good spot to take a rest. So I had to fire off these two shots, and then move along, because I am polite.