Well, I finally made it to St. Louis, and, I must say, it was a very eventful trip.  My Hawaiian odyssey was short, but I can now check Hawaii off my list of places to see.  To tell you the truth, it wasn’t as interesting as I thought it would be.  Waikiki is just hotels on top of hotels and stores on top of stores.  In fact, unless you really like the beach, surfing, or spending money, there’s just not a whole lot to do.  That’s just my opinion, and I did only spend three days there, so I won’t argue with you if your experience was different.

The highlight of my trip was a visit to the Pearl Harbor Memorial at Pearl Harbor, where the “date that will live in infamy” happened on December 7, 1941.  Again, I was somewhat disappointed.  I was even a little angry when I considered the fantastic loss of life that occurred there that day, supposedly because someone failed to take seriously the attack planes that appeared on the radar, saying, “Don’t worry about it.”  It’s a good thing, I suppose, that the men who died that day have been memorialized, but, to me, it has turned into a house of merchandise, as several tours are offered ranging in price from free to 65 dollars a head and higher.  As Forrest Gump would say, “That’s all I got to say about that.”

I regret that on my last day there, I found out that one of the tours offered by several companies included a visit to the Mormon Temple.  I didn’t even know that Hawaii had a Mormon Temple.  But I should have, shouldn’t I?  When I found out, I had to decide if I wanted to hang around another day just to see the Temple, or leave.  I decided to leave.  Hawaii is just to doggone expensive.

One thing that I just have to mention right now.  I was in Hawaii for three days in early April.  And the place was full of tourists.  Granted, it’s Hawaii.  But who goes to Hawaii in April (besides me)? If you know anything about Hawaii, maybe you could answer that question for me.  Considering what I saw most of these tourists doing, I’m not surprised at all.  They were light workers.  

Don’t believe me?  Well, as I relate in the article, God is in Control, noise plays a special role in my persecution.  Wherever I go, whenever I go, the noise goes up considerably once I get there.  My apartment in Munich is assaulted by noise continually.  There are three stairwells in my building, but only mine has some sort of construction going on all the time: at least three days out of practically every week.  When a hammer is not being used, a jack hammer is the weapon of choice.  Now, I spent the first eight years of my military career as a combat engineer, so I know something about tools.  Moreover, my father was a contractor and my grandfather was a mechanic.  You can therefore believe me when I say that I am used to being around all kinds of tools, both manual and power.  So, I can say with a degree of certainty that very seldom will a jackhammer be used inside a residential building unless the floors are made of concrete and the concrete needs to be broken up for some reason.  And, if a jackhammer is used, it will definitely not be used more that a couple of times.  Believe me when I say that there have been days when a jackhammer has been used in the apartments above ours several days in a row.

Now, knowing this, imagine my reaction when I checked into my hotel room and saw the following notice on the desk beside my bed:

Did you get that?  Now what kind of “unforeseen circumstances” besides serious hail, multiple lightning strikes on the same area of roof, or Santa Claus landing on the roof after a couple of visits to Denny’s, would make it necessary to make an emergency repair requiring three weeks of jackhammering from 9 a.m to 4 p.m.?  I can assure you that none of these things happened.  Also consider that my hotel room was on the 10th floor.  The Courtyard Marriott hotel has fourteen floors, and each floor has at least thirty rooms.  That means that at least 120 rooms from the tenth to the fourteenth would be affected.  Assuming every room from the 10th to the 14th received the same notice, where on earth would all these people go when, as I said earlier, the place was packed with tourists?  Do you see how implausible this is?

As I related a couple of days ago, and in other posts on this subject, operant conditioning is used against me 24 hours a day.  The goal of operant conditioning is to affect behavior by manipulating one’s environment.  Because noise is used against me so often, I believe it was hoped that I would see this notice and relocate to another room.  But I stayed right there.  As it turned out, whatever noise there was was barely audible.  Go figure.

Incidentally, this hotel was suggested to me by a gentleman, whom I met on the flight over from California.  The enemy had conveniently left a seat open next to him, and I played along, knowing that this was already planned in advance.  He pretended to be asleep for the first three hours of the flight, and, once he awoke, immediately sparked a conversation with the statement, “Are you a very religious person?”  Somewhere along the line, I gave him the gospel.  I spoke loudly enough so that anyone in my immediate vicinity would hear it, because, though I knew this man didn’t really want to hear it, I was hoping against hope that someone else did.  Once we arrived in Hawaii, the man, who said he was a Marine, suggested we stay at the Courtyard Marriott.  I told him that I already had a reservation elsewhere, but he insisted that the Marriott was the better deal.  Oddly enough (or not, depending on your life) even the cab driver agreed with him.  Because it was 20 dollars less than the hotel where I had the reservation, I acquiesced.  But I knew something was afoot.  It only remained to wait and see what it was.

Same stuff, different day ‘s all.

The Still Man