Jasper had a plan. That's always where the trouble starts. Not with chaos, not with forgetting — with Jasper having a plan so thoroughly developed that by the time he tells you about it, it's already too late to do anything except participate.
The plan was this: we would arrive at the Spam Jam early. Not a little early. Strategic early. He had, and I want to be precise here, identified a window.
"The window," he explained, somewhere around 7:15 in the morning, is the forty-five minutes before the crowds hit Kalākaua but after the vendors have their setups running. He knew about the drone show. He knew about the anime festival running parallel. He had opinions about both. He had drawn, on the back of an envelope, what I can only describe as a festival heat map, with arrows.
I looked at the heat map. I looked at Jasper. The window was six hours away.
He said we should leave soon, though, because of the rail work near the Chinatown area — construction on the new station, detours, the whole thing — and he did not want to get caught in the reroutes. This was actually reasonable. This is what makes Jasper so difficult to argue with. Fifteen percent of what he says is completely correct, and it's load-bearing.
So we left early. It was maybe 71 degrees when we stepped outside, which on a late April morning in Honolulu is the kind of cool that makes you feel like a person again, and I almost said something nice about being awake before eight. I was wearing a light jacket. Jasper looked at my jacket and said "you'll regret that," with the confidence of a man who had consulted a weather source.
He was right. I did regret the jacket. This is not the point.
We navigated around the construction zone, which Jasper had pre-studied using what he called "street intuition" and what I would call "Google Maps plus a memory of one previous detour." We found parking with a genuinely impressive efficiency that I will give him full credit for. We parked. It was 8:42 AM.
The Spam Jam started at four.
We sat in the car for a moment.
Jasper said we could get breakfast. There was a place he'd been meaning to try — some newer spot he'd clocked in a local food roundup, one of those pop-up-turned-permanent situations that had been showing up in the Honolulu food coverage he follows with the dedication of a beat reporter. He was pretty sure it was walkable.
It was walkable. It was also cash only, which he had not retained from the roundup, and neither of us had cash. We stood outside it for a while, squinting in the increasingly bright morning, my jacket now very much a liability.
He found an ATM. The ATM had a fee. He paid the fee without mentioning it, which I think means he knew.
Breakfast was good. Genuinely good. The kind of good that makes you understand why someone writes about a place. We sat by a window and I watched him read more about the drone show on his phone, muttering approving things under his breath. Someone near us was talking about Spam Jam traffic. Jasper made brief eye contact with them and nodded like a colleague.
By noon we'd walked most of what would be the festival corridor, and Jasper had identified where the best viewing angle for the drone show would be, based on the building heights and his general read of the airspace. I did not ask him to justify this. You learn.
When the actual festival started — when Kalākaua lit up and the smells arrived and people were everywhere eating Spam musubi and taking photos and just fully committing to a beautiful stupid Saturday — Jasper looked around with this expression he gets, satisfied and a little surprised, like reality had agreed to cooperate.
He turned to me and said, "See. Window."
The thing is, we had a great day. We really did. I found a Spam preparation I want to try at home. We saw the drones. My jacket was tied around my waist by 10 AM and I carried it for six hours and I would do it again, probably.
I just want it on record that I was not consulted about the window.