I don't want to be happy.

If I wanted to be happy, I would be doing what it takes to be happy. I would go back to my old job, not because it made me happy, but because it supported me and would be necessary for the things that make me happy. It wasn't an unbearable job, it wasn't killing me.

And with that sustenance, I would be happy by:
- going cycling on weekends or riding on my trainer in the evenings while watching music DVDs;
- renting or buying and watching music or anime DVDs;
- maintaining and nourishing friendships, even getting long-distance phone service to stay in contact;
- asking people to go to movies or shows with me, or dinner, or just hang out;
- finding a better apartment in a better part of town and being open-minded about "what I can afford";
- playing music and hanging around people who like playing music;
- continuing home practice and going to SF Zen Center twice a week for Dharma Talks;
- being frequently aware of my happiness or unhappiness, and stop doing what makes me unhappy, and do what makes me happy.

But I don't do these things because happiness, in itself or in material pursuits, is not one of my wants.

- I want to understand the fabric of existence.
- I want to know what this all is and why.
- I want to test it with my own suicide (not someone else's - important).

Don't tell yourself that you want to be happy and then not be. Let's be honest about our happiness and unhappiness.

- If you're unhappy because your job sucks, tell yourself that you want to be unhappy because your job sucks.
- If you're unhappy because you don't get along with your family, tell yourself you want to be unhappy because you don't get along with your family.
- If you're unhappy because your health is bad, tell yourself you want to be unhappy because your health is bad.
- If you're unhappy because you have a mortgage and a ton of debt you're eating your way out of, tell yourself you want to be unhappy because you have a mortgage and a ton of debt.
- If you're unhappy because the dog keeps peeing on the couch, tell yourself that you want to be unhappy because the dog keeps peeing on the couch.
- If you're unhappy because you can't make a relationship work, then tell yourself that you want to be unhappy because you can't make a relationship work.
- If you're unhappy because the weather sucks and puts you in a bad mood, then tell yourself that you want to be unhappy because the weather sucks and puts you in a bad mood.
- If you're unhappy because (fill in the blanks...)

And importantly, tell yourself that if you think you want to be happy despite this that makes you unhappy or that that makes you unhappy, then you're a fool.

Suicide is my prize possession.

Plotting the arc
I brought a book, Mountain Record of Zen Talks, back from New Jersey that I had bought way back when I was in college. I forget if I read it all the way through, but I'm pretty sure that this book was one of the reasons why I had to get away from my Zen studies of the time, and wandered and reconnoitered down a "Sufi path" for a bit.

The frustration I was having with Zen was that you start coming across a set set of terms that, once you think about it, don't mean anything. There are catchwords and concepts that you have to intuit, but who knows and who is to say if your intuition is really getting it or just falling into granola-crunchy, New Age crap? The Sufi and Islamic readings I came across helped explain the mechanics of the metaphysical concepts that I was stuck on in Zen.

I kinda think of Sufism as being to Islam what Zen is to Buddhism. Mind you, I don't think any of these identifiers and terms mean anything, and I don't care what they "really" are. I don't wear Buddhism on my arm. I don't like saying, "I'm Buddhist" – that's meaningless. That has to do with ego and identity, relative to the outside world, but nothing to do with what I really am. I borrow ideas and concepts to add to my experience and vocabulary for what I believe, and to supplement and fill in the many blanks where appropriate.

Anyway, this book is fairly kicking my ass now. Nothing groundbreaking, nothing particularly new, but this book is really good with its explanations. I understand why I was frustrated with it ten years ago, and I'm thinking this book isn't for beginners. I needed elements of these past ten years to understand this, or read it without getting frustrated.

For me, I'd even say that I needed my recent monastic glimpse to get this material, and that it's more geared towards monks than lay practitioners. But I think that's just me, because of my own background, preferences, and leanings. I wish I could have been more focused and gotten back to this sooner.

I won't feel bad about not contacting Madoka more while she's in the U.S. Once Madoka and I feel that we want to tell each other about ourselves and be more involved with each others' happenings, then we will resume our old type of communication. It may never happen again, it may never have gone away, but there's no point in forcing anything when I know there is trust and respect between us no matter what happens.

We've never forced anything before, I don't think, and right now it's just not clicking, so I won't feel bad about it.

So I kinda mentioned in passing that the historical Jesus's birth date was not on December 25; a risky bit, as hardcore Christians and Born Agains tend to get their panties and jocks all up in a bunch with any suggestion that anything about Christianity is less than historical, actual, and universal fact.

I mean, really, think about it – all these kids are raised believing that the holiday season is a special time of year, that the sentimentality and mood of the season is connected to this great historic chain of events that led to angels proclaiming the birth of our Saviour and King, and December 25 was the big day, away in a snow-covered manger somewhere out in rural New Jersey (or at least that's where it was in my memory). And now these revisionists are trying to revise the revisions that are the source of our most cherished childhood memories!

We won't have none of that.

But that's not my point.

I don't care for debunking Christianity. A) Other people do it better; B) it isn't going to change 2000 years of Christian history and its impact on the world (negative impact, that is, no one would be trying to debunk it if it weren't for the negative impact); and C) it's counter-productive in discrediting many great teachings in Christianity.

Well, for what it's worth, I found this, searching for something else, about the relationship between the Winter Solstice and Christmas. Of course, anyone can post anything on the internet, and that page includes no sources of corroborating information, so take it or leave it.

But that's basically what I heard, too, so when it comes to Christmas celebrating Jesus's birthday, I have trouble getting into it. I can celebrate friends celebrating the holiday, or Christian culture celebrating what they call Jesus's birthday, but I can't personally celebrate Christmas on the grounds it was the day Jesus was born.

My family doesn't celebrate Christmas. The way I imagine it, my parents immigrated to this country and someone had to explain to them why so many people didn't have to work (earn money) on this day. By the time I reached an age of consciousness/memory, the gift giving idea had sunk in.

My childhood memories include plastic Christmas trees with lights, ornaments, and a flashing star on top, and yes, presents under the tree to be opened on Christmas morning. I don't remember the gifts coming from parents. The extent that my parents gave us gifts was in the form of money, but at that young age, I doubt they were putting cold hard cash in our hands to any appreciable appreciation.

The vague fuzzy memories I do have are of me and my brothers buying gifts for each other. Family excursions to the malls (this was New Jersey, folks), getting money from "mom", and buying toys or games or whatever kids like for each other and trying to keep from seeing what we were getting each other.

We would wrap the gifts in wrapping paper or Sunday comics and put them under the tree. Yea, an inexplicably touching scene, considering that we fought like dogs the rest of the year round. No, we fought, but we had the seeds of tight sibling . . . appreciation.

These are childhood memories, so I'm sure they're not accurate, and I'm even more sure they would conflict with my brothers' memories. I'm thinking that Christmases were the primary source of our games and toys and I'm thinking my parents used Christmas as an excuse not to buy us games or toys for the rest of the year, after all, we knew better what we wanted, right?

So it was all there. My parents provided and we had the tree, we had the gifts, we had the anticipation, and we had the waking up early for the reward on Christmas morning. The only specific Christmas I remember was one when I was really sick, it may have been asthma, and my brother Bob doing something to take care of me, but I can't remember what.

I don't remember when it stopped. I don't think I've even been in New Jersey for Christmas for the past 10 years. I have no recollection what Christmas was about with family through high school and college. It was more about friends then. Again, I might be wrong.

And now?

I'm sorry, but Christmas for me is a day of reflection, mostly cynical about much of what's wrong with the world. A day to hunker down and silently endure. The rampant commercialization and hypocrisy is just sickening.

I appreciate the significance of Jesus's birth . . . except that no one has refuted to my satisfaction the assertion that the historical Jesus was born sometime during the late Summer, and that Jesus having been born on December 25 is a bit of revisionist history performed to correspond with mid-Winters festivals of northern latitude countries.

My understanding is that festivals and celebrations occured around the Winter Solstice to help people get through dark, depressing Winter months. Holiday depression and suicide? It has little to do with the holidays, but has everything to do with the weather.

I also appreciate the season of goodwill and harmony, but then I find myself disheartened by why that doesn't exist all year round. Goodwill and harmony? Have you been in the feeding frenzy of holiday shoppers recently?

I know my feelings are out of step with most people. It's probably why I don't have any friends. But it doesn't stop me from wishing well for all humankind. It doesn't stop certain Christmas melodies from getting to me (some brilliant songwriting there).

It doesn't stop me from looking out my window, my imagination taking me across the bleak, barren Winter landscapes on this silent night to homes of families, friends, and gatherings, through cities, suburbia, through country, through people being together and being happy, through children having the most precious memories of their lives created, and despite all that's wrong with the world, at least there is this one night that the Christian world shines with hope, peace, and love.

The more I talk about suicide, the less inclined I am to act or do anything. When I start talking about a future and living a long life and what I'm gonna be doing with my life, that's when people should start worrying.

You see what people have to put up with?

If my understanding is right, then I can kill myself, or I might as well kill myself. There's nothing wrong with it.

If my understanding is wrong, then my existence is a complete sham, my purpose for being here is completely misdirected, and I will never come to a proper understanding, and . . . I might as well kill myself.

You see what I have to put up with?!

Haha, well I hope this broke the funk I was in.

I did buy a bike used, but wasn't so happy with it, so I ended up "giving it away", within three days of acquiring it.

I'm really not one to regret decisions and I regretted buying this bike, and for things I acquire, I really have to love. Like my guitars, my A bike, my drums, and even my ex-car when it came right down to it, I'm not sure what I mean, but I "loved" those things.

I did regret buying this bike, and I didn't think I would ever grow to love it for one reason or another. I have nothing negative about the person who has it now, I hope he's happy with whatever he does with it. I feel lighter, so I thank him.

I read an interesting passage today on compassion and the Buddhist conception of the relationship between people, using an analogy of our hands.

When our left hand receives money, the right hand doesn't feel jealous, envious, or angry. If our left hand is on fire, the right hand doesn't hesitate to act to put it out, it doesn't think of the danger to itself, the left hand is itself.

It's a hard one, but I sort of get it. Even harder to put into practice since I have an aversion to physical contact with other people, but making physical contact with any other human being should be easy as holding one hand in the other. Depending on the circumstance, I'm sure I can overcome my aversion. Perhaps I wouldn't even think about it.

That was it; gone. Like a door opening and a door closing were my bookend visits to Deer Park Monastery. It was just a glimpse for me, just a glance, just a sample, something to strive for more concretely in a future life perhaps. But in this one? It was very real, and I won't forget it, but something just doesn't feel right. 

My mind is baffled trying to conceive dimensions it is physically uncapable of conceiving. It stretches and is torn apart falling into black holes. It floats in amorphous wisps at the edges of the universe. I envision the compact physicality of the grey matter of my brain in my skull and at the very center is an endless, dark abyss. Like a jelly donut, but more sinister. 

My physical reality flakes and distorts, parts of it crumble if I'm not careful. Strange being. Calm and collected facade, living a pretty easy physical life, but my psyche feels assaulted and brutalized by an alter ego in another dimension, just a thin membrain away. 

And this goes on for . . . how much longer?

I've been continuing my home practice, but it's been a struggle. The revitalizing energy I had between my Deer Park trips was gone after I got back from New Jersey, and I consider that a good thing, even if it puts entering the monastery in question and doubt. A good thing? What's a good thing?

I'm working with a dichotomy. I tell people I'm entering a monastery, and they say, 'great', and I find that a little patronizing, as they have little idea or interest in what's driving that decision, but that's OK since I have no desire to explain it to those people either.

I tell people I'm committing suicide, and they say, 'boo!', and that makes me feel a little defensive, and my life isn't about defending my decisions. They don't impact enough people to warrant defending (the few people it impacts deserve explanation, and I've done my best).

I don't know which path I'm on, or what I will find standing in front of me as the decision I made. Right now, I'm just walking down a path towards neither, but trying to find the middle of the false encouragement of entering Deer Park and the dark voices of condemnation over suicide.

As the negativity needs to be stripped away from suicide, so does the positivity of entering the monastery, with a recognition that none of it is "real". I can be sad about leaving or happy about arriving, but there can't be any attachments to either.

Delphine's birthday

December 13, 2003; 8:12 P.M. - I forget where, but I think it was an Italian restaurant in North Beach.

After three not-so-great days of pre-Deer Park thinking/mindset, thought upon thought progressed as I walked in the rain to the Lower Haight, until I got to: 

The sources of these negative thoughts aren't the problem. what I've done with my life and the directions I've taken to whatever inevitable conclusion are not the problem. the negative thoughts themselves are the problem. Things got better immediately after that. 

Or is that something I've known all along? 

But it's true, the thoughts and mindset I've been in have just been rehashing the same old crap I've gone over and over ad nauseum and leads no where: What I'm doing or not doing with my life; what expectations I'm not living up to; the little I've done in my life and the little worth it adds up to; feeling guilty about not having the problems everyone else is going through; feeling guilty about not feeling problems everyone has and not doing anything to help other people like Madoka and her friends do (actually they have the problems and do things that help other people, so fuck me even harder). Hm, maybe that's why I haven't called her back like I said I would. 

But really, I've run all that through my movie projector, and none of that matters. Not in a nihilistic way, but the negative weight of those thoughts aren't because of the substance of those thoughts. The negative weight is just from negativity – maybe it's S.A.D., maybe it's the holiday season, maybe it's the not being able to maintain friends, maybe it's the stress of shopping for a new bike, maybe it's the suicide chip in my head – but skim the fat of negativity off the surface and the thoughts turn out to be not-so-oppressive. 

A lot of people probably can't separate the negativity from the thoughts – if the thoughts are there and they are negative, then you can't have the thoughts without the negativity. Period. As long as I can, lucky me, might as well run that program.

OK, much better. I went to sleep in my own bed and woke up in my own bed.

I woke up feeling like I had left a trail of parts of me strewn down the block to the 18th and Potrero bus stop, on the MUNI back to 16th and Mission, on the BART back to the airport, on the plane back to New Jersey, up the New Jersey Turnpike in what is now my brother's car.

But I got out of bed after less than six hours of sleep and the moment I pulled off the warm covers (chilly San Francisco morn) and my foot touched the ground, I felt a wave of "real". And that's what I want to do, to find what's real to me, to find my personal truths.

The feelings of negativity slid away, the positive feelings also held in stasis; look at where I've taken my life (negativity), consider where my core beliefs lie (positive), and proceed on my path giving no automatic validity to either.

Madoka called this morning. Yes, I definitely love her, I wonder what better person I could be blessed with for 10 years of friendship, but the connection we used to have is definitely gone. Our minds and feelings aren't synched the way they used to be.

It's no tragedy, it might even have been natural, expected. We probably won't get a chance to meet up during her time in the U.S., and that's OK. We don't need to prove to each other that our paths have already vastly diverged. We don't need to prove that our paths may not ever even have crossed.

The day flying back to San Francisco from New Jersey was far more arduous than the week driving to New Jersey from San Francisco. The day was broken up into mini-ordeals to get through, each one in anticipation of the next one until I was finally walking that final block to my apartment. I took public transpo from the airport even though Sadie offered a ride. I realized I'm not the kind of friend who has someone pick them up from the airport, I decided.

A week in New Jersey was too long. I came back distracted and with more negative thoughts than I care for. As the plane landed, I just thought about how much I hated the San Francisco Bay Area. Tomorrow I need to focus and cleanse and filter out the negativity; figure out what and why they were. I need to re-align what I think of the monastery idea, too, as I've been accumulating doubts and need to consider if they are valid or not.

I've been having these intense pangs and impulses to leave, moments of revelatory clarity pointing to leaving as still the right thing to do, the proper path to take; it's right.

I don't know if it's my imagination, but I've also been having weird moments of intimacy with something that's clearly not here.

And no one has told me yet that life is not a movie, and all these disparate elements won't follow a dramatic arc and come together in some conclusion and resolution that will make sense as a whole.

Yay! It's snowing! I don't remember the last time I was in a snow storm or been in New Jersey when there was snow on the ground that was going to stay. This snow, so early in the season, probably won't stay, but it won't melt away before I leave on Sunday. Snow that stays for weeks or months doesn't happen until January.

It started flurrying around noon, but by 4 o'clock there was 3-4 inches accumulation. I went for a walk on the unplowed roads, walking in tire tracks, snow crunching beneath my feet. The hush, the cars creeping along slowly, carefully. Those small SUVs suck in this weather. Their center of gravity is so high and wheel base so close, I saw one (slowly) sliding down a hill, just barely able to stop at a stop sign.

I trudged around a bit, and getting back to my parents' house, stomped the snow from my shoes. The things we never do in San Francisco. There was snow on my hood and all in the creases of my coat. I have to stop thinking that moving to San Francisco was the worst decision I've made in my life, but it's hard to convince myself.

I set up my full drumset for the first time in almost two years, probably the last time for a long while. I'm rusty, but it felt and sounded so good. It made me wonder why I haven't been doing this, but, no, I suck, and San Francisco sucks, and I'm not going back to this.

I appreciate and feel blessed to have experienced the feeling I have when I play, but I don't have to do it. I took pictures of the set-up with my digi, and I'll leave the memory stick with the set just in case someone in the future (my brother and his wife are going to have a boy, they found out this week), needs to see how to set it up. Or to at least encourage anyone to set it up the way I set it up.

It's been nice being here, but it gets too comfortable. I forgot that's one of the reasons that I should keep my visits here short, 3-4 days max. This is not my reality, and I start to lose touch with what I need to be doing.

On the other hand, it makes me think that entering Deer Park will mostly be a change in environment, not my being. I start doing what I naturally do when I'm here (ADD around), which is different from what I "do" in San Francisco (try to keep to a schedule), but whether I'm here or in San Francisco or Deer Park, there are only slight variations in my "being". Or so I think. There is no basis why I think I know what it would be like at the monastery for a long period.

I was walking in downtown Englewood, and caught a snippet of a conversation between a mother and adult daughter. It crossed my mind, "Did she really need to say that in that tone of voice?" Among other things I thought of, like the upper middle class suburban cultural context, I thought, yes, she probably did.

We're trying to communicate and based on our background and knowledge of our family members, we take into consideration what we feel is the most effective way to get a point across. Antagonistic, patronizing, sarcastic, exasperated – whatever we feel will work. I use a matter-of-fact, glib, neutral tone of voice with my family for any number of reasons, the least not being that I don't show emotion to these people, as emotions are not a part of our family vocabulary.

Actually, my mother was getting naggy about something (probably about me needing warm clothes (I don't)), and I ended the discussion with a sentence with a slightly forceful tone, and my father and brother turned and noticed.

It's been a long, long time that I've expressed anything but neutral emotions here, even that slight bit of antagonism was a surprise. This family has made me a master of letting things slide.

I *heart* my Yamaha Beech Customs:

December 6, 2003; 12:06 A.M.

December 5, 2003; 1:26 P.M. - Out the front door (which no one uses) of my parents house at 361 Mauro Rd.

Being in New Jersey in December is bringing back memories; the cold, the darkness, the angle of the sun, the leafless trees, the brittle ground. I feel like a drug-addict trying to get clean, but once back into the ol' hood, it's hard not to revert.

What and who I am now in San Francisco is different from what and who I am now in New Jersey, which is permeated by what and who I was all those years ago. I'm not crazy or screwed up as I was and I don't hate my parents anymore, but there is a dampener over what and who I really am now, which is what and who I am now in San Francisco. That and those decisions are reality. Being here is a womb; not reality.

Exactly 20 years ago, I was a freshman in high school. We were on a trimester system, so now would have been towards the end of one trimester or the beginning of the next. Just a few months prior, I was on the X-Country team, but had to quit after "passing out" during a race in a park somewhere in the Bronx.

No one knows what really happened, but I think it was emotional strain. Also in that first trimester of high school, I had been suspended for a week for psychiatric evaluation, and a prominent gash on my forearm was healing.

I don't think I was dating a Hong Kong girl named Nancy yet, I'm pretty sure that came later, and I also don't think I had actually met Shiho Nakai yet, although I had seen her 7th or 8th grade picture in my older brother's yearbook.

10 years ago I was completing my first semester of law school in San Francisco. I was living in Oakland, CA, and was about to experience my first Bay Area rainy season. It was cloudy and rainy for three weeks straight in December. By the end of the month, I would have seen the purported "love of my life", Amina, for the last time.

And today, I got an email from Madoka, who is now in the U.S. for two months, first in L.A., then in Salt Lake City. Email communications between us have been spotty at best, but I will trust that all the heart is still there. We will try to meet up at some point, I shouldn't wonder, but it's not a sure thing now that I won't have a car.

I know I still love her, even though our communication and information between us is spotty. Maybe I love her more now after realizing our communication and information is spotty. Go fig. It's the classic push and the pull.

That was one hard discussion Meghan and I had on Saturday night, while at the same time I felt it was a sort of "exposition" of various ideas and thoughts that have been cropping up and bouncing around in my head recently.

I don't get many chances to glue the pieces together in front of another person, and that's what it felt like I was given an opportunity to try to do. Not for her necessarily, mind you, or at least not to convince her of anything. More for me to get my explanations and understandings straight, and if some residue rubs off on her, great. I couldn't ask for a better sounding-board than Meghan. But it's always hard, since my views are pretty unorthodox.

With this weblog, it feels like there was a sudden left turn from suicide to monastic possibility, but for me, the underlying motivations towards either are very closely aligned. If anything, they're complementary. It's with horror that I realize that they look contradictory!

The important thing is that both of those "options" have been inside me for quite a long time, but whereas suicide has been constant and recurring, the idea of entering a monastery went underground for long stretches, which is why it had to kick me in the butt this time around to realize its possibility.

And as the possibility has taken serious root, I'm giving it a lot of attention and energy to figure out if it's something I can consider "real", or if it's a cop-out. It's funny, though, how I never need to explain the monastery thing very much to people. Either they accept it or it's . . . quirky. People don't take me very seriously, and that's fine, great, faboo. But suicide, there's more chance that people take it seriously and demand my explanation.

An important linchpin in my explanation is that it's something that's always been around, something that's been mulled and contemplated, and turned around and inside out in every direction and dimension I can think of. Before this recent monasteric binge, I had already been saying that my reason was just my being, the way I am, that what I consider a "good reason" to go is having no reason at all. Once I have a reason, it's not a good enough reason to go. Fabulously zen! So suicide rolled into spiritual quite smoothly.

But then the reminder that I have been dealing with this for such a long time like a disease, like a mental illness, and that instantly blew away the calm veneer that I've been trying to cultivate under the banner of non-form/non-attachment, and yes, suicide has always been in me like a primal calling, but also yes, it has been maintained and reinforced through the years by actual events and experience, of failures and frustrations and fragility.

It doesn't change a thing. Not yet, at least. It's just a mix in the pot, and what a mix! But even mixing in actual events and experience, which might clearly put the whole shebang into the mental health field, which is precisely what I had been doing here by considering this, above all, a mental health blog, non-form/non-attachment trumps all of that. The Dharma is pretty powerful shit. Just an eye-dropper full dilutes an ocean of mental health attachment.

We talked until almost five in the morning. How did that happen?


November 30, 2003; 12:54 P.M. - Alexandria, VA.