And thank you also for the kind words regarding staying away from the kapakai photographs. I’d no idea my decision to highlight and link to photographs of others I considered far superior to mine, in the spirit of Web 2.0 and Creative Commons sharing, would be considered such a negative by certain readers, so I am happy that you did not mind it.

Thanks again for your comment, and for stopping by!

A constructive suggestion would have been, “I know a lot of people don’t carry cameras when they hike and if they do, don’t always take the best photos, but this post would have been better if you had shared what you saw of these locations that touched you so deeply, even if they aren’t professional quality.” That’s constructive. That’s helpful.

Instead, you scold the author who has taken time to put this together for not using his own images and then insinuate that he has never been to these places. You call the contents on the list an “spastic and obscure aggregation” and mention laughing (why are you surprised when the author is defensive?). Of course they are obscure–they’re the lesser known places and the whole point is to bring them to light. What’s so wrong about that?

When I visited with Mr. Bartelby in April, I had the fortune of being shown a couple of these places. But even if the author had never been, aren’t you nevertheless glad that someone is showcasing these locales which are sadly often overlooked? Why can’t you take a moment to appreciate the effort instead of damning the one who undertook it for something trivial?

You’re unkind. And you’re a coward. You have no problem responding, but you don’t give any contact information so you can be held accountable. That’s not how WE interact on the internet. WE make conversation. WE want a better user experience and WE make an effort to help those whose blogs we enjoy provide better content. WE do this with firm words but WE never lose sight of the effort they have put forth.

But okay, Atherton. I feel your anger and loathing. And I forgive you for it. I shall, as you ask, “Fuck Off.”

Despite your excessive and narcissistic reply, I don’t deride your ‘personal’ blog. Quite the contrary. I enjoy it. It’s a fascinating study of the human condition. And quite funny.

If you could get past your victim complex for a minute, I think you’d understand more clearly. I don’t pretend to understand why you suddenly loathe where you live at the moment, but it seemed odd that a piece about the places you hold in high regard would not be seen through your own eyes. Granted, I haven’t had time (or known your blog long enough) to hear about lost cameras or whatever. But to a new visitor to the World of Atherton Bartleby, it’s as if someone wrote a love letter full of cribbed quotes.

I know you won’t get it, because you have stooped to that time honored tactic of the snobby elite. If by “people like yourself” and “people like you” you mean swarthy Oregon expatriates who prefer shine rather than rain, I’m somewhat offended.

But, if what you mean by people “like me” are those who, despite their non-elite status and cultural ignorance know that punctuation marks like commas and periods belong inside quotation marks and not beyond them, I won’t be offended at all.

I’m sorry. I tried not to be pithy but being lectured by you for having an opinion that isn’t fawning is something “people like me” evidently don’t take very well.

-C

If you have followed this blog as closely as your comment certainly suggests, then (one would hope) you have already read my more personal accounts of each of these places and events; I did not want to revisit the emotional landscapes of those personal experiences and the people with whom I shared them in this post. My intent in this piece was not to revive old personal ghosts, but to provide in a hopefully lighthearted manner information regarding my favorite experiences here for others to share.

As for your critiques regarding my “spastic and deliberately obscure aggregation of ‘bests’ from travel blogs or hiking trail sites”, I should have noted, I suppose, that I experienced each of these places and events well in advance of finding them on HawaiiWeb, whose links were supplied only as a way for interested readers to obtain more information about each, directions to get to each, etc. And in regard to your critique regarding the images, yes, only two of them are mine, and yes, for this post I deliberately chose to highlight the photographs from others’ particularly impressive Flickr photostreams as illustrative elements for each item. I won’t go into (although even though this is a personal blog you seem to want me to) the lurid details of all of the hardware, data, and images that I have lost over the past two years, nor for what reasons, nor to defend myself for at times living the experiences instead of also thinking, “Wow, now how am I going to photograph this for my blog?” I don’t live my life that way. Besides, my photographic memories are already well-documented here and in my own Flickr, so I don’t think I need to justify my creative choices to a “random stranger” who so clearly views both this post and this blog with derision.

I apologize that this entry did not meet your shockingly lofty expectations of it. But I’m not sorry that I wrote it in the way that I did, “travelogue” or not. And incidentally, I had intended to conclude my time here in Hawaii with a final “love letter”, as you put it, to this place, to be posted while waiting for my departing flight at HNL. If it never makes its way onto this blog, however, you’ll have people like yourself to thank for that. Because, to respond to your final pithy remark: No. My flight to NYC cannot come soon enough.

And it’s things like this and people like you that have made that so.

So, thank you for that rather “needful reminder”.