PADI Cake, PADI Cake

     The first day I met Steve I was checking out some of the tourist shops on Alli Drive in the downtown area. I had just purchased some jewelry, a sterling silver chain and shark pendant that I wore for many years before finally losing. I miss that shark. It was a crescent shaped great white, jaws open and body twisted, as though surging back to devour its mortally wounded prey.

     I'm not sure what made me walk into Steve's shop. Maybe I wanted to see if they sold any diver's watches, which was always fun to do. After a few minutes on my own, and with no diving watches in sight, I was about to bolt when Steve came up to me with a sly grin on his handsomely proportioned face.

     "Hey," is all he said, giving me a nod of recognition.

     I nodded back without speaking.

     "Are you a diver?" Steve asked, eyeing me with genuine bemusement.

     "Diver in training," I said. 

     "Oh, one of those, huh?" Steve replied, smiling at his choice of words. "We get a lot of those in here. Looking for anything in particular?"

     "Not really. Just killing time. But I might be in the market for some gear later down the road."

     "Which dive shop?" Steve asked friendlily. He was good at keeping the conversation going.

     "Eco adventures."

     "Oh, yeah. We get a lot of divers from there. Dave and Elsa, right? I run into them once in a while at Kona Coffee. Nice people."

     Steve was looking right at me, giving me good eye contact. He appeared completely at ease and engaged at the same time, as though the customer interaction part of his job came easy to him. He was just being himself and having fun at work. People fun.

     Steve was a people person, and people were naturally attracted to him. He once told me about the time he ran into the American actor Woody Harrelson in a Kona Town watering hole, where they hung out together for a few hours drinking shots and kibitzing. Steve said Woody pounded a lot of beers and shots, but that he was a happy drunk.

     Another famous American actor, Christina Ricci, also spent some tavern time with Steve one night, telling him among other things that she liked having sex on coke. Steve said they drank together for several hours and that he kept hitting on her until she politely excused herself, saying she had to wake up early the next day.

     I didn't see Steve for a while after we first met. I was busy with my training, which was going surprisingly well. Dave had invited me to join him and Gary for some early morning workouts at a local gym, starting at 4:45 A.M., and I was getting in some much-needed stationary cycling before the sun came up.

     I had game, at least for a little while. In between the madness, I stayed as on track as I could, rarely going out, eating cheap, healthy food, and going to bed, tuckered out, pretty early. At some point, as my training drew to a close, I started to see my divemaster dream as something that might actually come true, just as long as I wanted it to. 

     The truth is, perhaps I never wanted any of my goals and aspirations in life to pan out. Maybe I wanted to fail. My father once came up with the idea of having a personalized license plate spelling the word FAILURE. How funny is that? For most people failure is a dirty word, exposing a deficient lack of success. While we can learn from our defeats, most people prefer to lay their eggs privately rather than publicly.

     Being seen as a failure in the public eye is probably one of our worst fears, and being unabashedly fearless of our fizzles to the point of being openly unafraid to admit our nonsuccess makes a mockery of the word by taking away its power over us.

     For me, crashing and burning was easier and also more gut-wrenching, which made me feel more in touch with the acute poignancy of life. As a born loser, my goals and aspirations were always part of an unreachable dream in which doing what was expected of me or considered the right move for me constantly felt like the wrong thing to do.

     Thus, my choices in life continued to spiral out of control, creating make-it-up-as-you-go-along scenarios and spur-of-the-moment energies which perdured my addictive going-against-the-grain adrenalin rushes. As my father used to say, I was up shit creek without a paddle. I was a bends test diver, and my life was a crash course in decompression sickness.

     Truth be told, I've lived most of my life in a kind of stupor, a trancelike row, row, row your boat feeling in the pit of my gut or back of my brain which makes me think or feel that the people and things around me are never quite what they're supposed to be.

     This is a form of madness, of course. Madness from the past, madness in the moment, madness for the future. I was hook, line, and sinker for the habit-forming loop the loop of stinking-thinking thoughts inside my head. Confused and misled, I've lived with the curse of overthinking my entire adult life.

     But at least I'm still here, putting something down about me in print. My words will live on after I'm gone. Maybe no one will ever read them, but at that point it won't matter. At least not to me. I'll be dead.

     You might read these words one day and wonder what kind of a man I really was. I was a good man with a bad moral compass. I was a thinking man with the heart of a lion and the mind of a weasel. It was always hard for me to tell the difference between doing good or bad and being smart or stupid. Although I had some good qualities, such as compassion for others, there were more jokers in my deck of cards than aces.

     As my mother used to say, I was often a day late and a dollar short in the decision department. Since early adulthood, the life I inhabited had always been slightly off kilter, as though lacking or missing key pieces or elements of an unsolvable puzzle or unanswerable riddle that would one day teach me how to take life by the horns and measure up to my capabilities. To suddenly become the best version of myself.

     What if everything that happens to us in life was going to happen anyway? That no matter how much we wanted or how hard we tried we were powerless to control the fateful trajectories of our lives? And despite any of the choices we make and actions we take the twists and turns of our predestined lifetimes always lead us to the same outcome? So that every curve in the road of life takes us strangely and continually forward to the exact place we're supposed to be?

     Ultimately, no matter how much we trick ourselves into believing we can control what happens to us in our lives, we cannot stop or alter the predetermined paths our lifetimes take because all roads lead ineluctably to the same futuristic result. In the hapless here-and-now moments of our lives any and all decisions we make and moves we take bring us constantly closer to the precise places we were always going to be. And in the end, we wind up exactly where we were always meant to be.