It’s good to know some things you ignore will go away. Mosquito bites are a good example. Hallmark holidays not so much, but don’t think I didn’t try. My cynicism had me a little surprised. It’s my third year without a valentine, and to be honest I never thought I was the kind of person that could get cynical (in public at least) about anything. Do couples really need a holiday? Isn’t that what anniversaries are for? Do we need a day where everyone gets to see who has love, thinks they have love and definitely does not have love? I guess so. Rad. Well don’t think I stayed home. It was one of those weekends where everything was a blur, and after a few drinks, ignoring couples definitely made them go away. There was one exception at Manifest, where I saw a young couple sitting at the bar. They looked like the coolest people in the world, the girl with white-blonde hair tied up with a vintage scarf and the guy with tattoos even under his fingernails and a greaser hair-do. I noticed that they had been sitting at the bar as long as I was, and were still there even after I got back from my diner break. I found out that they were visiting Hawaiʻi from Australia and had just gotten married. I would have excused myself to puke but the fact that they had found their way to Chinatown on a Saturday night got me excited and I insisted that they come with me to see the rest of area. We went for a walk around.

It seems as though there’s a lot of people that either love or hate SoHo. I personally love it. There is zero pretentiousness when you walk in that door everyone is ready to go totally nuts, including owner Daniel Gray. He was already shirtless and covered in soap when we stopped by. It’s hard not to love that guy; he’s like a grown-up kid with his own club. The place was packed with a nice crowd of dance-oriented hip-hop stylies dancing the way I always want to but never can to people like Juvenile and Bone Thugs for the ’90s music monthly Holaaa!. That was just the first room. When we walked in to the second room, there were even more shirtless dudes, girls in bikinis and some people fully dressed playing around in a huge inner-tube-lined box of soap. It was like a giant sandbox for adults. Only with foam. This was definitely something that would only work at certain clubs. Nobody wants to get wet when they go out, save for the people in this room, and they were having a friggin blast.

I was also so happy that this was the night that thirtyninehotel does their own monthly party Space Truckin, because if I ever wanted to show someone who has never seen Honolulu that place, it would be this night. DJ Thomas from Rub & Tug (in Brooklyn) isn’t a name I’ve heard before, but bringing them up there while he was playing his industrial sort of deep house disco music had me so proud I was beaming from ear to ear. They were beyond impressed with the music, as were the rest of us. It had me somewhat surprised that there is still stuff I have not been exposed to, especially as a regular at this place. If there’s a way to describe this venue as music-snobs with it sounding like a compliment, then hey, they are music-snobs. After a few hours my friends politely retired back to their hotel, probably to bone. At that point I might have felt a tiny pang of contempt, but the music was already so far into my brain that they could have made out in my lap and it wouldn’t have mattered. Thank God for music, at least this year.

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