WHAT ON EARTH IS CHOKEFISH™?
The Background
The History of Chokefish™ is Dedicated to Nash Miller, the G.O.A.T. OG. Nash changed the lives of everyone he came in contact with. I am certainly one of them. A Hui Hou, my brother.
In order to bring the story of Chokefish™ to light, where it radiates today for all of our Heroes out there; I’m going to start from the very beginning, on a dark night, and a tragic accident.
It’s March 7th, 2001, when 4 young men leave a beach bar at roughly 1:30am. A bar fight had broken out, and the 4 winners of that fight were drunk and full of adrenaline. They had left just in time before any lights or sirens could be heard down the only road, in or out of Ft. Myers Beach. The group of young men consisted of 3 Hawaiians and one Floridian. They were out that Tuesday night celebrating the arrival of two of the Hawaiians, the third having already lived in Naples, Florida for several years and was roommates with the one Floridian in the car, me.
Behind the wheel of my rental car, pumped full of excitement, and driving over 100 mph, was my best friend and roommate. In the back seat, the only one not wearing a seat belt, and just as heated as everyone else, was yours truly, excitedly talking about how much ass we just kicked. Neither one of us were paying attention to how close we were getting to “The Peg Grinder”. The Peg Grinder is the last corner of the road where Hickory Blvd. turns into Bonita Beach Rd. It’s a 90-degree turn that gets its name from grinding the foot pegs of our sport bikes when we lean into the steep turn.
Too late, we all discovered that night/morning that my rental, a four door Chevy Impala sedan, only continues to drive straight when trying to turn the wheel at 100 mph. The car hit the sidewalk curb and flipped forward, nose first, and landed upside down on top of two palm trees. As this happened, I launched out the back window like a cannon ball and landed 100 ft away from the awful carnage. To this day, my hip still goes out every few months and aches when it’s cold outside. Like a newborn baby the stork just dropped out of the sky, I sat there looking around, trying to figure out what on earth just happened. I heard screaming in the distance, and once I managed to stand up, seeing the upside-down car cleared up my memory.
Limping to the car as fast as I could, I managed to get two guys, who were trapped by their seatbelts, free and out of the car. The driver, to my most horrifying dismay, did not survive. Nash Miller, the wild child from the back woods of the Big Island, a man so popular that the band Pepper™ even dedicated their first album, Kona Town, was dead.
I had to pull a fire alarm across the street to get any help that night. I can still hear the people screaming and yelling from the patios of their high-rise condos while that alarm was going off. As soon as I heard sirens, I laid down on the sidewalk, closed my eyes, and passed out.
The Funeral and Kona Town - "We Caught Chokefish Brah"
There are few things cooler than arriving on the Big Island of Hawaii and being welcomed with open arms by the locals in Kona, except finding out that your roommate was known to every single person on the whole Island. Rock Star Statis!
Though I haven’t been visiting the big Volcano as often as I’d like lately, keeping in touch with my choke brothers and sisters has never been easier than it is today; enabling me to keep my butt on the ground, work on designs, and still say aloha to everyone. Even with social media, it’s still hard to reach everyone sometimes. Hawaiians are adventurers, and they are always scattered around the world. Every so often though, a great event happens and brings everyone home, and when that happens, look out man!
Little did I know, The Funeral of Nash Miller in April of 2021 was going to be one of those great events. I had no idea that the next two weeks of my life were already planned out for me. I didn’t have to make one single decision for two whole weeks. It was nice, my stress was totally liberated for my entire stay there, which was in a pretty awesome house on Princess P overlooking Magic Beach.
“Yeah man, we caught choke fish, brah!”, Analu said to me after I asked him how their last Yellow Fin haul was when he stepped off the boat. Analu was the first local I met and we hit it off right from the get-go, like we’d been friends for years. This fantastic feeling of camaraderie became quit the epidemic with just about every single person I met on the Big Island, which was no surprise to me because the very same thing had happened when I first met Nash.
“Choke Fish”; I found this truly fascinating. A few days went by, and every once in a while, I would hear that word again, but what seemed like a different context: “Dinner was choke tonight brah”, or “Try dis brewery over der brah, dey gotta choke selection of bares”. It was the coolest word I had ever heard.
Finally, I said, “Guys, I know you are all kamaʻāina (Locals) and I’m just some
blonde haired, blue eyed haole, but what on earth is the deal with choke”?
They explained to me that its roots went back further than their fathers and
was a lot like the word “Choice” Ferris Bueller uses describing the Ferrari. The
exception was that “Choke” was a little more versatile in its use and was more
often used to describe a combination of quality and quantity. That’s
awesome! One word, (that most people would take for a lodge in the throat or
not breathing) combining two things perfectly. I told everyone I was taking that
word home with me, one, because I love things that are unique and different
than anything else of its kind, and two, because I could not stop saying it by
the end of our last week. Try it out for a day, it’s actually a lot of fun to use in
sentences. I swear.
After that everything was “Choke” for the next 25 years of my life. But
“Chokefish” always stayed with me the most. If I had a character in an online
game, yep, that’s me, chokefish. If I needed a witty email address because
every possible thing you can think of is already taken, chokefish@...(Chokefish@gmail was stolen by some Chinese hacker, so use Chokefish1@gmail.com). It is also a great conversation starter; “Excuse me, did you say choke fish? Choke?”, I would get asked all the time.
So, there you go guys and gals and all my peeps sporting Chokefish™ gear, that
is the why, what, where, and when, about Chokefish™. Twenty-five years later
and in all that time, I never dreamed it would turn into Chokefish, LLC™, and I
couldn’t be more excited to bring you the very best designs, sublimated on the
best garments, for the best heroes out there, all of you!
Mahalo.
With my up most Sincerity,
John Halsted
Chokefish™