I survived Christmas alright, although this is probably the first one I've spent on the East Coast in over 12 years or longer. I think I made it a point never to be here for Christmas, and no one ever pressed the point. We are not a Christmas-y family. We're not a holiday-y family. So spending a single Christmas with family couldn't be that bad. Especially since it'll never happen again.

I'm still trying to gauge my progress. I want to die, but I'm not pushing anything. I also don't want to die, which is different from before – I won't call it an improvement – that is, I can see advantages in not rushing into dying. Balanced perspectives.

I read an article today that I read as encouraging towards a hermit ideal, barring suicide or entering a monastery. It was about being isolated from the world as the ideal for practice. That means isolating one's mind from the attachments to the world that cultivate habits that take physical reality as absolute fact and given.

It's about mental discipline. I could enter a monastery and still be completely attached to my worldly existence and cultivate those attached habit energies. On the other hand it's possible to be engaged in the world while remaining unattached and cultivating a mind that breaks down the habit of thinking of this table as a table.

But, there is a middle path that God takes because He's Buddhist.

Without going to extremes, an image that can be used as a constant meditation or concentration practice is a candle flame at the center of my mind, and only my concentration on it keeps it lit. Lose concentration, stop visualizing it, and it starts to flicker in the wind.

Still, the idea of getting this TEFL certification to go to Taiwan or Japan to teach English just to support myself while I otherwise live a quasi-hermit-like existence still seems ludicrous. What's the point? And it makes me want to push my exploration of dying.

I found a bottle of 151 proof rum in the house, and I've been drinking it because I don't think anyone will miss it. I haven't drunk a bottle of this stuff in over 10 years. And every time I take a shot, I remember why.

It's harder to drink a shot of 151 rum than it is to cut. That also makes it better than regular 80 proof liquors because it forces moderation. One shot of 151 rum and you don't want to touch the stuff again anytime soon. It will fu** you u*. You will feel like you're breathing fire. Two shots in an evening tops. Three per day tops.

current soundtrack:
1. Get Off the Internet (Le Tigre)
2. Sometimes I Make You Sad (Supergrass)
3. Like the Weather (10,000 Maniacs)
4. Sunday Bloody Sunday (live) (U2)
5. See My Friends (live) (The Kinks)
6. Martha My Dear (The Beatles)
7. Rebel Rebel (single) (David Bowie)
8. You Could Drive a Person Crazy ("Company" - Sondheim)
9. The Field (Throwing Muses)
10. Terminator X Speaks With His Hands (Public Enemy)

Christmas loot:
1. Muppet Show, Season One DVD
2. Cowboy Bebop complete sessions
3. Genesis: Platinum Collection
4. The Art of Living by the Dalai Lama
5. Lonely Planet: Taiwan

You see, folks, this is what I call newsworthy, certainly more so than the incessant story after story after story of sensational, 15 seconds of fame worth of paranoia/cynicism inducing bad news fed to us night after night on the television.

In short, a worker in a candy store in California was bagging the purchases of a customer and her diamond ring fell off into the bag. That made the news a few days ago. The person who found the ring returned it.

Having been well-trained in media cynicism, I can dig up a few points to be critical about, but no, the story is all we need to know. And if the news aired more stories like this, our realities wouldn't be such that petty criticisms can take down the point of a happy ending.

I just want to be prepared for death.

Death is inevitable, it is something that is going to happen, it is definitely coming. We all go out in different ways, but we all go out. Five to one, baby, one in five, no one here gets out alive.

That's fine when people say sure, it's coming, but it isn't here now, so why be bothered by it now? Life is for living. That's valid. I'm not trying to be universal about this.

I don't know why it occurs to me to be bothered by being "unprepared for death". It has something to do with recognizing the impermanance of moments, and being unsettled by that impermanence. Youth passes, friends and acquaintances pass, events pass. Seasons pass, years pass, eras pass. Now passes, and the future will come to pass. And then we die. Our lives pass.

It unsettles me to treat life as permanent when it's not. It's not true, it's not real, and I'm striving for something true, something real. Something unaffected by death. Whatever it is, it's intangible, nothing physical or material stands up against death.

But it has to make sense to me, not just because someone said something about it however many hundreds of years ago. Even if it was the result of an exploration similar to mine. Even if it may have been my exploration way back when. In this lifetime, or these lifetimes, I need to explore it and experience it myself. Same as it ever was.

So I try to prepare for death without being obsessive about it. Meditations on death and the death process, visualizations using existing literature and intuition as a guide, meditations on life and existence, breaking it down to try to get a sense what it really is. Meditations on biology, human functions and feelings. Using falling asleep as a rehearsal for dying.

And even death passes. The cycling of life is what makes sense to me, because I see cycles all around me in nature, from water, to leaves on the trees, to seasons, to stars, to galaxies. Nothing dies into nothingness. Nothing dies into a dead end heaven.

I look around me and see things transform and recycle. Every molecule came from somewhere and was something else before. Every molecule will cease being what it looks like now and become something else. And along with the conservation of energy theory applied to all physical phenomena, I stretch it and apply it to spiritual energy, and allow it to follow the same cycles.

I've started noticing how song titles in these song lists sometimes match what I'm writing about. With over 9000 songs being shuffled, I'm not really reading anything into it aside from coincidence, but it amuses me.

current soundtrack:
1. Kecak (Sekaha Ganda Sari, Bona) Indonesian traditional.
2. When You Sleep (My Bloody Valentine)
3. Let It Be Me (Indigo Girls)
4. Circles (Chick Corea Akoustic Band)
5. Los Endos (Genesis) < --haha
6. Isolation (Joy Division)
7. Dusk (Duke Ellington)
8. We Work the Black Seam (live) (Sting)
9. Don't Give Up (Peter Gabriel)
10. Guide Vocal (Genesis)

Still thinking about death. I almost stopped when I caught the first few minutes of some Barbara Walters crap on primetime TV about Heaven (and likewise death and the afterlife). If it was any indication of popular perception, what a worldly heaven people believe in. It made death so unattractive.  

Fortunately, PBS was re-broadcasting an incredible documentary called From Jesus to Christ, a scholarly piece about the development of the early Jesus movement and how it developed into Pauline Christianity, so I watched that and avoided offending myself further by watching that Baba Wawa drivel. 

I wonder if people really think about death. I lean towards thinking they don't. I wonder if people think about what it means to really think about death. Do they just believe what they're told in church? Do they look deeply into themselves and ask what they really believe? Does what they're told really make sense to them on a deep intuitive level? Does thinking about death relate to why they're writing that check to pay the bill, driving their car, eating dinner? Because it should. 

I have to watch myself, though. I've been recently grappling with the realization that any belief system that distinguishes between right and wrong, meaning my belief system is right and that other belief system is wrong, is automatically rendered...wrong. 

It's hard because I have my thoughts and I think they're right, but as soon as I think they're right, someone else's thoughts and ideas are wrong, and that renders what I'm thinking wrong. And I do think that approach is right. I am trying to suppress an ego-habit of some self rightness granted to my thoughts just because I had them and they make sense to me. 

And really there are so many people out there who are just dead wrong. Doh!

I wish I had been writing about sitting and meditation all these years to maybe somehow track the process and progress. But for some reason I've always felt it was this very private thing, and talking about it would be like a touchy-feely, hippie thing.

I hate people talking about meditation, and even guided meditations, at the monastery, whenever I knew morning sitting would be a guided meditation (retreats usually), I sat on my own in the small hall.

It's just not something I can write about, it's so intangible and big, but...I dunno, something. I know it started as something. How did it get to where it is now? How is it so different now from when I started? The only big benchmark is when I first went to the monastery and found I could sit for 45 minutes, which is now the ideal length of time.

At this point, it is emotionally and mentally involving, if not draining. In a good way. Sometimes right before a session I'd have to brace myself mentally, a little anxious about where my mind will go this session.

I still think sometimes (grasping at thoughts), but not often. And it took a long time to get to the point where I don't think. I'd say after almost 15 years, it has only been recently that I'm not "chasing after thoughts", having something come to my mind and attaching to it by thinking it through.

The mental flow is always there, and it may be a very subtle difference between attaching to thoughts and not attaching to thoughts. Sometimes I will follow a thought, but I won't be attached to it, I won't be thinking about it. I'll just be "riding" it. It's hard to describe.

Random mental images come and go, and I pay attention to them in that they are manifestations of my mind and thoughts; "what is this and where is it coming from?". Again, I don't attach to them. When some mental formation forms, not even an image, sometimes just abstract colors and shapes coming together, I don't stay with it, just observe and when it dissolves or changes, I just let it. No control.

As far as I know at this point, I'm not committing suicide. I'm also not entering a monastery. I think the path left to me is a solitary hermit path. Go to Taiwan to teach English, but live simply, don't save any money, continue practicing and cultivating.

Take the middle path like God says he does in "South Park" because he's Buddhist (shit, that was so funny I nearly crapped myself. That and that "the Mormons" was the right answer (to get into heaven), in the same episode). I won't practice asceticism. I won't be miserable, just try to find what true freedom means to me.

The Palisades from the Alpine Lookout off the Palisades Parkway:

There are two lookouts between Exits 1 and 2 on the Palisades Parkway. This is closer to Exit 2. I used to come to these lookouts a lot when I was in high school just to get out of the house, away from the 'rents. I even wrote a song about hanging out there. Or more accurately it's a song that was inspired by hanging out there.

The river is, of course, the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York. The road down below is the Hudson River Drive, a scenic drive frequented by cyclists, including myself.

Death on my mind these days. Well, maybe death on my mind as usual. Not morbidly. 

PBS re-aired the last "American Experience" about New York which focused solely on September 11. That was one heavy day. If we could have held onto that feeling, if it had lasted, would we be better people? Would we be a better country? The sentiments of compassion and understanding people expressed, the philosophical depths that people reached about how quickly and easily our lives could end. How quickly and easily we could become sad. 

Needless to say, it didn't last, and the vast majority of people were ultimately unaffected in their hearts, in my opinion. I don't know what's in other people's hearts.

And the execution in California of the founder of the Crips gang, who started writing children's books on Death Row, warning kids about the dangers of gangs and drugs. Here was someone who was doing good, and it resonated when I read someone say if he isn't a candidate for redemption (clemency), who is? And another who asked would Arnold now go into the inner cities and try to keep kids out of gangs? 

And on the other side, there were people outside San Quentin yelling "Kill him!" Damn. Kill him. Kill. Who has that right? He doesn't, and the courts found that he had killed. And the response now is to kill him. But I think his killing people was not just about something innate about this human being that should now be snuffed out, over and done with. 

His killing people was him wrapped up in the totality of the circumstances of his upbringing and situation. What does killing the human being accomplish if the circumstances are still out there? 

And I don't know, but the circumstances surrounding a government killing a person doesn't compare to the circumstances surrounding a black, inner city kid with no prospects, no advantages growing up in a disempowering system and social fabric that ultimately has him making a horrid choice of killing people, maybe even enjoying it by some accounts. 

I'm just thinking this through. I'm not hardcore anti-death penalty, I'm generally against it for fuzzy reasons, but the issue is too messy for me to argue one side or another. I'm thinking of this one person, I think his name was Tookie Williams. Stanley "Tookie" Williams, I think. 

Williams suffered because of his circumstances, and he caused suffering to other people, the victims and the victims' families. Then his surrounding circumstances changed again, including about six years of solitary confinement, and he started writing books that got him nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Is it unrealistic to think that Williams's writings might save lives from stopping kids from joining gangs and entering a life of violence? 

Might he have saved one life by changing the circumstances of an inner city kid so that he doesn't become a murderer? So that another family doesn't suffer like the families of Williams's victims? Is it so far-fetched to think that because the victims' families lost a loved one, there is this person now with great street-cred writing books that might prevent another family from suffering like they are? Is there no solace in that? 

Maybe not, I'm just thinking, no conclusions. 

I moved to California not long after the death penalty was reinstated in the 90s. I didn't pay too much attention to death penalty cases because the issue is so polarized black and white, and life and death to me are very gray. But Williams' execution made me quite sad, and when I went to sleep at 2 o'clock EST Tuesday morning, I knew that we would be executed in an hour, midnight PST. I knew when I woke up, he'd be dead. I went to bed like I always do, like we all do. 

There is a visualization meditation of being on Death Row. I've never been guided through it, but I've done something like it on my own while sitting. Waiting to die. Like the night before you're going to take an overseas flight, you're counting down. Like the day before an important job interview, you're counting down. You do things while you're counting down, you eat, you pack, you prepare. And time will pass and you'll go and catch your flight and go to your destination, or you'll get ready and go to your job interview and get it or not. Or you count down and you die. You're dead. It's all over. This is all over.

It sucks going through old photographs and seeing someone and wanting to reach out to and say "hi" because of all those memories you shared together, but you can't because you just cut contact with her.

It sucks cutting contact with someone and coming across an old photograph of her, and realizing that you've both changed and the old feeling isn't there anymore and communications have become frustrated and strained.

It sucks not being able to cut contact with someone because you're waiting for her to contact you so you can cut contact with her.


July 23, 1997 - a lighter moment at the Burmese Refugee Camp

Maybe it's that my focus shouldn't be on committing suicide. When the right time and certitude fall upon me, the option is always there. As long as I'm alive, I can always commit suicide, that's the wonderful thing about a goal like that.

Maybe it's not the committing suicide, but the wanting to. Always. That's partly really horrid, partly completely right on. And it's still much better than resigning myself to living, which always seems to translate in my head as 'living an ordinary life', i.e., not striving to move beyond the stagnant form of ordinary existence, and taking manifested physical reality as actual reality.

As I feared, after I finished scanning my black and white negatives, I've been working on a project to scan all my color negatives. It was really something going back to all these negatives and piecing together my past through film. It's an incomplete document, considering the negatives that got lost or thrown away.

I learned the hard way to never throw away negatives. If you're mad at someone, if you want to cut them out of your life, forget about them for dumping you to marry the person you always made fun of together, burn the pictures, toss them off the Golden Gate Bridge, feed them to your neighbor's ferret, but don't get rid of the negatives. Hide them, store them somewhere out of sight, out of mind. But if that person really did mean something to you, despite what they did to you, you will regret destroying the negatives.

It's difficult going through my past like this. What happened to all these people? What went wrong? How did I get here from there? It must all fit together with what I am now. And the only constant is that I don't belong here, I don't want to be here, my goal in life is to drop this kind of attachment to life in order to move on. Prove it to myself in the most drastic way.

My parents get back from vacation tomorrow. They've been gone for the past week and a half. I really need to get out of here.

What's the entry I want to be brave enough to write?

I don't think it exists. It would require some truth, some realization, and I have neither. Even just a solid feeling, just to be able to be depressed enough to take some action, even if it's suicide. And write that entry.

Suicide is supposed to be feeling-driven. It's not supposed to be an examination, an exploration, part of a journey. It's not supposed to be a paradigm or a philosophy. I'm supposed to feel really, really bad. Inconsolable, is the word I read elsewhere tonight. The distortions around the edge of my reality are supposed to be madness, not . . . curious.

But that's what it is. And maybe that's what has prevented execution. And now, recently, it has become ambiguous. No, it's not an answer, I've never seen it as an answer. But now with ambiguity comes thoughts of not doing it – not seriously, I don't think it will ever be seriously completely gone – and that means living and continuing my exploration in this lifetime instead of switching to another one. It's a decision, is it an "answer"? If it is, I reject it.

It's rhetorical anyway, I wouldn't want to hear anyone's rhetorical answer anyway.

I look back at the elements and occurrences in my life that posed and presented the questions, the dilemmas. I think them through, I create a logic, I follow my feelings, and there are no answers. They lead to paradoxes. Now even suicide is one. It never was before. When I tried to explain it to other people, it would transform in my throat and the words would come out in the shape of a paradox, but they didn't start off that way in me.

So I'm taking this online certification course to teach English overseas, which still seems a boneheaded idea to me. I'm going to cut communications with the remaining few people left, since I might as well. I've got this bottle of expired Target sleeping pills that I want to take, just because it's about time I did something like that. Nothing life-threatening, just something to push me way down for a day. And through this all, I still try to maintain the monastic training.

I watch my critical mind. Sometimes it gets out of hand, and my mind goes on a lengthy critical discourse about someone until I hold out a mirror and force myself to apply the discourse to myself. I deny it, it's about this other person. They're the source of these thoughts. I observe them, I process my observations of their behavior.

But no, this mirror says, it applies to me, it is me. How can the source of my thoughts be outside of my own mind? "My" observations, also me. "Of them", what do I really know of them? Is this "them" fact? No, if they don't agree with my criticism, obviously it isn't them. I'm projecting, they're reflecting.

It is me, that is the benefit of generating positive thoughts, and the detriment of allowing negative thoughts. Either can become habit, neither is a permanent characteristic. Positive thoughts create a positive mind, not the other way around.

I don't have critical, negative thoughts because I naturally or circumstantially have a critical, negative mind. That's a tough one because I think my circumstances have created my critical, negative mind which leads to the critical, negative thoughts. But I don't think that's right, because I do believe that generating positive thoughts and habitualizing that process can create a positive mind or outlook.

I'm very attached to the negative aspects of my circumstances. I want to think they are the reason for my negative mind. In effect, blame them. They lead to negative, critical thinking, but really that is just an excuse to cultivate or habitualize a negative mind.

Alrighty then, I've enrolled in the TEFL course. Moving on with my future. What finally pushed me over the edge to enroll was my sister-in-law asking me how the course was going and not answering (um...er...good?) because I hadn't enrolled yet. The same thing happened two months ago.

But also in the same conversation, she mentioned that she had a distant relative in Taipei who has an English tutoring service and is looking for people! I call that a score. She says she'll get in touch with her and hook me up. That would land me right where I'm aiming and doing the only thing I'd be qualified for doing there. And an actual human contact.

As a reward for finally getting moving on this, I slept in my bed last night instead of on the floor. I think I like sleeping on the floor better. The bed was...I dunno, "too comfortable"? Not sure what I mean by that. Soft. Warm. Deeper sleep. What's not to like? Maybe I'll get used to it. I think I'll keep doing that for a while. Like the rest of you weirdos who sleep in beds. Pfft.

My target time for moving on is in mid-to-late January, after plane fares go down post-holiday. I hope I'm ready to move on by then, I'm sure not now. The idea of relocating again is a serious downer. Don't want to move. Entropy. Want to sink to the bottom. Belly up.

Haven't done one of these in a long while. Wow, look at that love rating! Unloving or unlovable? My life is 5.9? On a rotten tomato tomatometer, my life movie is rotten and gets tomatoes thrown at it (the good news is that it is only rotten by .1):

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	5.9
Mind:	7
Body:	7.3
Spirit:	7.5
Friends/Family:	2.3
Love:	0
Finance:	5
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

Your Life Analysis:

Life: Your life rating is a score of the sum total of your life, and accounts for how satisfied, successful, balanced, capable, valuable, and happy you are. The quiz attempts to put a number on the summation of all of these things, based on your answers. Your life score leaves room for improvement. You can make changes to improve your trouble areas, and this will bring you greater satisfaction. Focus on your weakest points and set about to change them. Do not delay your happiness and success.

Mind: Your mind rating is a score of your mind's clarity, ability, and health. Higher scores indicate an advancement in knowledge, clear and capable thinking, high mental health, and pure thought free of interference. Your mind score is not bad, but could be improved upon. Your mental health is not weak, but you are not achieving full mental clarity and function. Learn how to unclutter your mind. Keep learning, keep improving, continue moving forward.

Body: Your body rating measures your body's health, fitness, and general wellness. A healthy body contributes to a happy life, however many of us are lacking in this area. You have a rather good body score, which is an indication that you take care of yourself. There is room for improvement, however. Please keep doing what works. Eat right, exercise, reduce your stress, treat any illness. Doing these things will help ensure your body will be in good working order for a long time to come.

Spirit: Your spirit rating seeks to capture in a number that elusive quality which is found in your faith, your attitude, and your philosophy on life. A higher score indicates a greater sense of inner peace and balance. Your spirit score is relatively high, which means you are rewarded by your beliefs. Spirituality is clearly important to do. Never let it slip, and continue to learn and grow.

Friends/Family: Your friends and family rating measures your relationships with those around you, and is based on how large, healthy, and dependable your social network is. You scored at the very low end for friends and family. This means that your social network is weak and not functioning. Consider re-establishing old bonds as you work on forging new ones. You will be greatly rewarded in return.

Love: Your love rating is a measure of your current romantic situation. Sharing your heart with another person is one of life's most glorious, terrifying, rewarding experiences. Your love score is very low, indicating trouble. There is love out there for you. Seek the advice of wise people on how to go about finding it. Do not lose hope.

Finance: Your finance rating is a score that rates your current financial health and stability. Your finances are somewhat in the middle, neither bad or exceptional. Keep doing what works for you, and improve what doesn't. Focus on long-term financial stability as your goal.

current sounds (last 10 songs shuffled on iTunes):
1. With Every Breath I Take - Duet ("City of Angels")
2. Here Comes the Big Rush (Echobelly)
3. The Sinking Feeling (The The)
4. Dazed and Confused (live) (Led Zeppelin)
5. Very Ape (Nirvana)
6. Bring the Boys Back Home (live) (Pink Floyd)
7. Prophet 15 (Supergrass)
8. Innuendo (Queen)
9. Love and War (11/11/46) (Rilo Kiley)
10. Song of Complaint (Askarian & Khatchaturian)

There has only been one person who was even vaguely close to me who has died. She was my boss, but she was also a friend of a friend, and we went out for drinks after work almost regularly. She was an alcoholic, pretty fucked up, and emotionally abusive. She was also drop-dead gorgeous and brilliantly smart. We liked a lot of the same things in popular culture and she intimidated me.

She died in 2000 after an emotional meltdown triggered by her boyfriend breaking up with her. Her family said her kidneys and liver failed, but I know that she caused her kidneys and liver to fail. I wrote about my perspective of the events leading up to her death, and I was less than sympathetic. I was callous.

It's hard reading what I wrote. I was no friend. All I can do now is whisper "I'm sorry, Ritu," as I read. I read back, and I see signs that look like guidance, things that happened, that make me think I was supposed to be more active in helping her out.

Once I was avoiding her, but another friend had to call me. So I told the friend a signal so I would know it was her calling and not Ritu. Later in the day, I got the signal and picked up the phone. It was Ritu. I think that call ended in frustration and her hanging up on me, and then trying to call me back for the next 20 minutes.

That was a long time ago. I can't regret how I treated her. But I still think about it. But it's not about her anymore, she's moved on, it's only about me and what I've learned about my behaviors, my habit energies, and what I want to do to transform them.

Her death is still reaching me, and I wasn't even that close to her. Our deaths, any deaths may have far reaching effects. It doesn't matter if it was a suicide or not. If she chose to go is not a consideration at all, just that she's gone. That she's still affecting me means to me that she is a part of me. The reality of her is gone, whatever reality of her that is left is me, my reality.

That's why we live. Maybe my suicide will have far reaching effects that I'm not anticipating. I am expecting of anyone who knows me that they will not be affected by my suicide. My death, sure, fine, OK, whatever, but not my suicide. Hey, we all die. Don't single me out because I chose it. People never did live up to my expectations.

So I say, "I'm sorry, Ritu," but I'm saying that to myself. I'm not saying it to Ritu "out there" somewhere. I think back to what I did and think what I would do different, but that's not reality. How I treated her was me, my habit energies, my karma. And I will never treat anyone that way again.

Ugh, what the hell was that last entry? Maybe I was a little drunk. The truth of the matter is that there really is no one else in my life. Those people out there I was referring to don't matter, they don't mean anything. That is, they're not subject to be considered in my life or out of my life. It's moot.

Or rather, they have to be in my life first for me to be able to consider them out of it. What I wrote just seems silly in that light. :) Oh, but that makes my life all that more pathetic :(

That they're not subject to be considered in my life or out of my life is not a comment on their worth to me. Their worth is very high. Hm, the value of the people who I can't consider enough a part of my life to eject from my life is very high. I swear to god, there is not a contradiction in there somewhere.

I think I'm drunk.

I want to bring more attention to how pathetic I am by whining like a teenager how I have no friends. The realization just came matter-of-fact like out of the blue, so it doesn't have the self-pitying angst of a teenager, but I can try.

Actually, it was more of a realization how my primary "social interaction" is the internet. I don't know anyone here in New Jersey. I don't count family as "social interaction", anything that goes on between us qualifies more as "family dysfunction". Really, we can say "hello" to each other and it would be dysfunctional.

As for people I know who are elsewhere, it is getting so old and over. I used to purge people from my life every once in a while. That happened naturally. Things got old and over and I dispatched myself from their lives.

After a while, I started appreciating people in retrospect and re-considering my tactic. I started thinking that when you find "your people", your tribe, hold onto them as if your life depended upon it. It just might.

So I held onto some people, maybe I can consider them test subjects, and you know what? In the natural course of things, the dynamic with these people is still following the same old patterns, and we should have parted ways in natural order.

I examine the dynamic and my interactions with them, and it's become so substanceless and undependable. It's become frustrating and aggravating. Who are these people? What are they doing in my life? Bring the reality closer to the feeling I get from them.

I know it's me. No one else has these issues. I make my friends into my own image and that sets up the dynamic that eventually brings frustration and aggravation and the parting of ways.

It's uncanny, though. With one person I lost contact with earlier this year, our last conversation was basically her asking me why I couldn't be the person she wanted me to be. *blink, blink*. That wasn't uncanny. That was just nuts. Clean the slate, try to clear my mind. Whatever.

I didn't think there was anything specific behind my reluctance to enroll in the TEFL course. To get my life moving, that is. Indecision is nothing new to me. Procrastination is one of my hobbies.

But I started reflecting on teaching English in Taiwan, visualizing doing it and all the things I will need to do and experience to make it happen, and I realized that...I don't see it happening. Am I on drugs? Wow. How much would I hate doing that?

It sends my mind into overdrive.

It's only because of momentum, a chance push in the weightlessness of space, that I even consider it. I'd rather be pushed into a black hole.

And it frightens the bejeezus out of me, the idea of planning on doing something that looks like...living; doing something that doesn't have dying somewhere in the plan. Folks, this may be a first!

I have an un-opened bottle of expired Target sleeping pills that I'm gonna take one of these days. Not a suicide attempt, I've taken enough bottles of sleeping pills in my life to know that over-the-counter sleeping pills won't kill me. Just a suicide gesture that no one has to know about, something to push me down, way down, so that when I come back up there will be that momentum to move forward.

But it makes me think of the abuse I've wreaked on my body, especially my liver. Another bottle of sleeping pills isn't going to kill me, but my liver sure won't be happy about it. At worst, more damage done. More damage done in furtherance of some fatal internal failure. Which would be great, fine, if I was still living with a plan for dying.

I currently don't have one, gave it up not long ago, and I'm planning on going to Taiwan to teach English. Living. Not that I wouldn't be good at it. I'm afraid of losing sight that living is not what my life is about, and my investigation in this lifetime is on dying, and I always need to keep that in sight, or else what's the point of living?

At least the water's warm in Taiwan.

Oradell Avenue overpass from keauxgeigh on Vimeo.
Oradell Avenue overpass over the Garden State Parkway in Ridgewood, NJ.

Booth Avenue, Englewood, NJ

Probably the most important thing I discovered at the monastery was the intensely negative mind that I've cultivated and habitualized through my life, and that it doesn't have to be that way. It's an artifice, it's not just "what I am" or the way I think.

So probably the most important idea to practice that I took away from the monastery is to be mindful of my negative mind and cultivate positive thinking. It's tricky when it gets to me, because suicide is not necessarily negative for me, but that's not my point here.

It's also tricky in my interpretation because positive thinking that leads to a general feeling of well-being that then becomes an attachment is also not a goal, nor necessarily a good thing. Being positive and happy is fine, but being attached to it inevitably brings suffering since it inevitably ends. Neither is this my point here.

Being negative and critical is fine because it can be useful, but not being mindful of it runs the risk of cultivating it and it becoming habitualized to the point where it becomes an attachment. With positive, happy, well-being, the risk is becoming attached to it. With negative and critical mind, the risk is of it becoming attached to us.

This is important in my belief system because what is at the very core of our being, on the subtlest levels of mind, is what shapes our reality around us. And more importantly, at death when physical and material reality melts away, all that's left is that core being, that subtlest level of mind, and that's what guides us to our next life.

In the most general descriptive, if we are negative and have cultivated a negative mind, that's what we are attracted to in the between process, and we are born in circumstances that result from that. That's neither good nor bad, just karma. You can be born in negative circumstances, but that might also be the set up to overcome obstacles and end up positive. None of this is moral in human terms.

None of this was my point, though.

All I wanted to do was point at my last entry and acknowledge the negative mind that was manifested towards my parents and my cousin. So my parents don't know what my highest level of education was. Yes, I'm angry that they don't know me any better and make no effort to involve themselves in the simplest ways. Being negative about it and making snippy comments isn't going to change anything, so it's better to accept it and cultivate transformation in myself so that I'm not impacted negatively.

With my cousin, we've always had an intensely love-hate relationship where either we really love each other, or we're really disinterested in each other and want nothing to do with each other. I can suffer by allowing this "natural" dynamic to bat my feelings around, or I can cultivate patience and wisdom.

If she's deliberately ignoring me by not checking her gmail account, if I really need to contact her, I can send the same message to her main account. I don't know why she's avoiding and ignoring me, that's her business, and my feelings about it need to realize I'm not her. She does things and she has her reasons. I don't need to judge them, since I do things and I have my reasons that other people don't understand, and I don't like to be judged on them either.

None of this is getting rid of the negativity. It's just cultivating mindfulness of it, so if I ever get the mental tools to transform it, I can be aware of it.

Basically, I'm trying to kick start my life. I tend towards entropy. If my life is allowed to run out of momentum and stop moving, it will. I will let it. Without some external push, I'll just stop moving and sink to the bottom.

So I'm at my parents' house, sinking to the bottom. My parents are no help, they're totally hands off, no questions asked. When they ask questions and find the answers too difficult, they just drop them. But now even they are getting pushed to extremes, and they've recently dropped hints and given some aid to get me moving.

Ordinarily, my life is none of their business, and any help, aid, suggestions, feedback, encouragement, hints. . . talking. . . is not welcome, but even I'm realizing how pathetic this is getting, and I allowed it. Some movement has been made to reinstate my Taiwanese passport, so that if I go there, I won't have to worry about my visa constantly expiring.

They filled out the passport application because it's all in Chinese. They don't even know what my highest degree of education is. I don't have a doctorate.

The next step is what I've been saying I'll do for the past three months – take an online course to get certification to teach English as a foreign language. This is all me, I need to do it, no outside encouragement, no one else involved. All I have to do is click the mouse a few times, but, man, entropy.

The momentum that I'm trying to pick up is for going to Taiwan and teaching English. Although it recently occurred to me to find out if there are bike messengers in Taipei. If so, that's what I want to do. Imagine that, at my age.

My cousin in Kaohsiung has gone radio silent. There have been long stretches that I haven't been able to write to her because of lack of inspiration, but my last message to her was asking if she knew anything about housing in Taipei. Pretty straight forward. No response. I don't think she's checking my messages, she has a dedicated gmail account just for my communications.

And leading up to this, she stopped responding to my messages. Her last few messages were all one-sided and made no mention of anything I wrote. In fact, she mostly wrote about Buddhism, but her tone was a little like her last foray into Buddhism, when she joined what turned out to be the Buddhist equivalent of a cult. Brainwashed and too easily impressed by "magical" aspects of Buddhism and attributing reality to them.

The magical aspects of Buddhism, fine, I have nothing to say about that. There's a wide range of Buddhists including ardent Zen skeptics to total crackpots, and I, myself, am at neither extreme. However, I don't think anyone should ever be impressed by any "magical" aspect of Buddhism, and any reality attributed to it must keep in mind that all reality is subjective.

I sent her something for her birthday, and her response to that was, "Thanks for the gift", then launching into the one-sided Buddhist thing.

I'm trying not to be upset at her until I know more, but when things aren't going well between us, when communication falls apart, we tend to repel each other, tethered together only by the nominal tie of blood which will still eventually bring us together again.

Getting this journal back on track.

To make it say what I want it to say.

This is a journal. A record. Not a fucking blog. I don't care who reads this, I don't care how pathetic or petty I sound, I don't care who I offend or alienate, I don't care who I bore...

Even forcing this is being self-conscious, but it's a necessary step for it get less self-conscious.

Fuck, my blog is in therapy.

Stagnant weblog. It's not going anywhere, though. I like it too much. Even with the anti-social url that begs to be misunderstood, and says too much for me to disclose cavalierly to acquaintances. Or not.

I was going through old journals from before blog, and I kinda want to be more like that again. Unself-conscious, raw, writing things that really mean something to me. But then again, that was then, and things need to move on. This is blog.

I do want to be less self-conscious, though. I've been feeling like I've been pigeon-holing myself, thinking of only writing things that are "in the tone" of this blog. Fuck that. That's so dumb.

I can write about being glad Corzine won the New Jersey governor election because Forrester just seemed kinda scary, but wasn't Corzine part of the previous administration that was wracked and riddled by corruption and scandal?

I can write about watching the entire only season of Firefly that my brother got on DVD, and it sucks donkey balls that the show got cancelled because Joss Whedon is brilliant and intelligent and the executives at Fox have donkey balls for brains.

I can write about watching "South Park" twice a day, six days a week. That show offends every moral fiber in the liberal arts weave of my education, but shit is funny!

I can write about still sleeping on the floor.

I can write about my daily 20-mile bike rides.

I can write about the grand unification theory in Buddhism.

Shit but my life is so boring. Don't matter, as long as I'm not being self-conscious. Raw it down.

What am I doing with this blog again? I guess it's a continuation of said past journals. OK, so why those past journals (and why are they going online as well?)? Record. Not for anyone now. For me, too, but not for me. For me, present ego, but not for me that is not a me.

Oh right, I write for a family descendent 200 years from now. That's the ideal, that's the guideline. Who knows if that descendent will exist, who knows if the internet will exist? It's a present ideal. Convey who I was, how I lived. That's kinda dumb, too.

I don't even care anymore why I'm gonna commit suicide eventually one of these days. I don't even care that I'm leaving my entire past personal history to explain it, because I don't care about who would receive such an explanation. My suicide and my reasons just really don't matter anymore. Everyone else doesn't matter anymore! BUT. At some point it all did. And I wrote it down then. Huzzah.

I write this with no foreseeable expectation or intention of doing it, but I'm sure it will come up again. I don't think there is any avoiding it. I need to do it, whether I like it or not.

Fuck, why am I writing about suicide again?

I think school districts that want to teach "'Intelligent' Design" along with science should be allowed to. I believe science shouldn't be dogmatic, and fighting bone-headed, not-quite-alternative theories just makes sciences look bad. I'm actually really curious about how children who are taught "'Intelligent' Design" turn out. Could be a scientific study. More important, could be hilarious.

Clean the slate, try to clear my mind.

In real life, my pattern has been to purge people out of my life. Why not here? I think it's time to clear my links, delete them and see who remains. I'm sure there are people who have linked me only to find that this blog is not what they linked it for. This will be the opportunity for them to get me off their blog rolls.

Funny, but I never gave much thought about, like, a grave and a tombstone and an epitaph. A marker. I never much cared what anyone did after I killed myself, and I always assumed that I wouldn't leave a body. Or at least I lived in a way that assumed I wouldn't leave a body, no guarantees about that, though.

If I did leave a body, though, I would definitely want to be cremated. Don't care what happens to the ashes, that's for the living. But I was thinking a tombstone would be nice. Hunk o' granite. I wonder if I could just get a tombstone without the whole plot, but no, that feels like cheating.

When I walk through a cemetery, I want the embalmed remains to actually be there.

It only occurs to me because I thought if I had a tombstone, I would want my blog url on it. Wouldn't that be cute. I wonder who's gonna be the first person to have an url on their headstone. How fabulously tacky. I wonder how long it will be until new technology renders weblogs obsolete.


November 14, 1998 - Colma, CA

Gah! I got tagged to confess my idiosyncrasies. I realize upon calling up my own idiosyncrasies that it is funner to read about other people's, but here goes. My personal definition of an idiosyncrasy is a repeated or patterned action or personality trait, almost ritual, that makes other people go, "OK, that's weird, dude".

• There are times when I get concerned about getting too comfortable in a situation and intentionally subvert my comfort by doing things like sleeping on the floor or not dressing warmly enough for the weather.


• I make arcane little rules for myself like if I eat meat on one day, I can't order meat the following day if eating out. I can eat meat anytime if someone else orders it or serves it, but if I had eaten meat the day before, I can't order it myself. If I don't eat meat on one day, on the following day, and only the following day, I can order meat.


• I often make decisions, even big ones (especially big ones) based on other factors that are not in my control (if this happens, I'll do this, but if that happens, I'll do that). I call it "leaving it to fate".


• I'm a shameless archivist of my own life with 6 online journals for different things (although not all active), including one that goes back to 1989.


• When eating, if I have a bunch of stuff on my plate or bowl, I will eat each item separately and finish it before moving on. A monk noticed that and thought it was weird ("Do you always do that?")


• I go to sleep listening to chanting by the Gyuto monks, they chant in ultra low voices and can resonate upper harmonics so it sounds like they're hitting more than one note.


• I'm a musician, but I don't like people listening to me play or practice, and I'll stop if I realize someone can hear me.


• I carry three cameras if I go out thinking there will be a photo op – black and white SLR for "serious" photography, fisheye lomo for artsy tricked out shots, and digital point and shoot for the quickie. If I leave a camera behind for non-practical reasons, it's a huge decision.


• When I'm looking for something while driving, I will start reading every sign that comes into sight.


• I thank my car whenever it gets me through a long-distance drive.

Wow, I'm good.

I just watched Chen Kaige's The Emperor and the Assassin, and one of the images that stuck with me is the one of the blind girl stabbing herself. She's not a main character and has maybe two or three minutes of screen time.

But the image stuck with me and stuck with me, and then on a hunch I looked up Suzhou River. Suzhou River is one of my favorite movies even though I've only seen it once and could hardly tell you anything about it, except something about mermaids, and one quotable line that I thought would be good for an epitaph. There was just something about it that I got lost in.

It's also a relatively rare film, and I judge movie databases and internet rental services by whether they have this movie or not. I recommended the film to Netflix several times and was delighted when they finally got it.

To my surprise, or not, the blind girl is the same actress that plays the lead in Suzhou River. Can I nail my obsessions or can I nail my obsessions?

Huh-huh, huh-huh, I said "chicks".

Actually that felt kinda liberating, but not to be repeated.

I finished scanning all my black and white negatives. That was an ordeal. And as predicted, I've started in on my color negatives, although not as obsessively. Very selectively.

You know, it occurs to me that I've gone out with some seriously cute chicks in the past.

*kicking myself*

repeatedly.

I've been putting a concerted effort into getting my head around the earthquake in Pakistan and the 20,000+ dead, and the suffering involved.

The tsunami last December in the Indian Ocean ultimately claimed some 220,000 lives!

The tag team of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita amounted to one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, and claimed...just a little over a thousand lives?

Still, media images of the suffering on the U.S. Gulf Coast and the suffering in Pakistan are virtually identical. The numbers say something bizarre, but aim a camera at the individuals directly affected and there is no difference in the looks on their faces.

But then looking at things in the big picture, scientists are warning of a global flu pandemic that might mimic the one in 1918 that claimed over 50 million lives worldwide. 50 million! Holy shit!

But quite honestly, I never heard of the 1918 flu pandemic until scientists recently re-created that strain of the virus. 50 million lives within a century of my time, and I'd never heard of it.

News reports are warning that we're not ready for a huge flu pandemic, there's not enough vaccine going around, not enough vaccine being created. If the virus mutates to be able to be transmitted from human to human, that's it, boom.

What are we supposed to do? Be paranoid? What are we supposed to do if it starts? My thinking is if 50 million people are going to die, 50 million people are going to die. It might be horrible, it might be a tragedy, but in the big picture, who cares? Big deal.

So I don't see it as this horrible looming tragedy waiting to happen. How did my life or attitude change from before I recently heard about the 50 million dead in 1918 and after? Quite honestly, it didn't.

We are human beings, we are of the nature to get sick, we can't avoid getting sick. We are of the nature to die, we can't avoid dying. People who weren't one of the 50 million who died in 1918 still eventually died.

What are we ultimately doing worried about protecting and preserving a thousand lives, 20,000 lives, 220,000 lives, 50 million lives? What is this modern day obsession with protecting and preserving each and every little human life on this planet? On the individual level, I understand it, you act to help yourself and your loved ones and people in need, but once you start talking about abstractions and numbers, I lose it in the big picture.

Maybe I'm just out of touch. My opinion can't amount to much since I'm looking forward to the experience of dying. But then I don't believe that dying is an end, not even an end of life on this planet, in fact, life on this planet is a trap, not necessarily a good thing.

People who think that this one life on earth is the only shot they have, I can see why they might be all uptight about death. Sucks to be them. Same with people who have a strong attachment to it.

I don't think there's any need to explain my anti-social tendencies – asocial if you want to get technical. I'm not malicious or misanthropic as some definitions of anti-social proclaim. As such, I have a lot of rules and random weirdnesses that go along with my social interactions.

One is that if I go with someone with whom I'm still in the "getting to know" phase to a movie, doesn't matter if it's just as friends or whatever, and the movie ends up sucking, I take that as a sign that this is going no where, drop it, give it up, don't even try, wipe the egg off my face.

Movie in point: Thumbsuckers, easily in my bottom ten films of all-time sucky films. I had trouble breathing afterwards it was so bottom of the barrel bad. I don't even know where to begin about how bad it was. The writing was juvenile, the direction pathetic, the camera work laughably pretentious, and there was this weird thing with the lighting that looked like it might have been intentional but came off as insultingly amateurish. Like someone was adjusting the lights during shooting.

It was Garden State 2005. At least that movie had a decent soundtrack. But that movie was just self-indulgent and lacked credibility on top of trying to pretentiously look and act "indie". The form was pretty good for a completely substanceless film. Thumbsuckers will insult and infuriate you in its badness.


April 12, 1997 - West Portal, San Francisco

My parents are gone on vacation for two weeks. I have their house all to myself for two whole weeks! My routine changed almost immediately, aside from having to bring them to the airport at 4:30 in the morning yesterday.

My daily routine is mindfully aware of and loosely based on their schedule. There are things I do when they are not around and things I do when they are around, and the general principle is that they know as little as possible what I'm doing.

It's irrational, neurotic, and a little sick and twisted.

For example, I usually don't go out in the evening. Not because they don't want me to, they have no opinion at all on what I do, and if there is something I really want to do, I'll do it. It's just the idea of them being aware of my movements, or that there is something I'm doing. I don't want them to know. I don't want them to think about it.

I sneak from one room to another. I repress myself, it's the price of having moved back into their house and not having a job, a temporary situation, inshah'allah, and I can't tell you how good it feels to have them not here, and having this total freedom, this luxury. I'm sleeping in my bed for these two weeks.


August 4, 1998 - Taipei, Taiwan

From nytimes.com, September 27, 2005 (I don't link nytimes articles because once the story goes into archives, the link just goes to a pitiful abstract):

At a distance of about 50 million light-years, the Virgo cluster is next door, cosmically speaking, to our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and its gravity is strong enough to have retarded slightly the expansion of the universe in our neighborhood.

As a result, sometime, perhaps billions of years from now, astronomers say, depending on the evolution of the dark energy pushing space-time apart, it is possible that our galaxy will succumb to Virgo's pull and go crashing through the fat galaxies sitting like spiders at its center. Then the Milky Way's contents, including whatever remains of our Sun and its innocent retinue, would be left splashed and smeared like pale graffiti across some alien sky.

I think that's just lovely. Poetic. And, of course, subject to meditation on impermanence on the grandest of scales. The Milky Way galaxy "smashed and smeared". It's not violence, it's nature, it's art, it's a painting.

In meditation, billions of years from now is irrelevant. In the depths of meditation, probing subtle, albeit not the subtlest, and intangible essences of being stimulates the formation of mental structures that might as well be cosmic in nature. Mandalas, grains of existence, molecules, material, matter, colorful and sparkly, beginning in the mind and then spreading out through all physical manifestation that we recognize as familiar. Once the outside world becomes the same as the inside mandala, illusory and mental, let it dissolve, grains of color coming apart – Seurat's dots, color by color, removed from the canvas, smashed and smeared like pale graffiti across some alien sky.

We have our lives now, we must live them. But our molecules spread across space in the future Virgo cluster is our nature. Living our lives true to our nature is key.


March 15, 1997 - San Francisco

October 7, 1997 - Abstract of Maam at SFMoma

NOT in line with my endeavor to cut down on distractions and trying to simplify my life is pulling out my road bike and starting to go on rides. I can't tell you how sweet it felt to get back on that Peugeot which hasn't been ridden in probably exactly a year. The derailleurs are still aligned and shifting is smooth as a baby's arse.

I get on that bike and it feels so good I swear I must've really lucked out on that purchase. I think I got it for $700, maybe $600, I don't remember, from a shady bike shop on Stanyan St. in San Francisco that went out of business within months. The guy selling the bike to me was either a professional con artist or a bike sage.

I theoretically could have shelled out $500 more dollars, pushing into the "high end" range, and gotten a more respectable name-brand bike, and I just can't imagine being more satisfied than with this little red Peugeot.

Anyway, with all this scanning, I need to make sure I get out of the house, ergo these rides. I have a fixed 19 mile course, designed not to require any thinking and allowing me to try to focus on breathing and Zenning out, making mind, body, bike, and road as one. Whatever.

Cycling as meditation?

Holy cow, the new scanner is a real time sucker! If I had a scanner, I'd scanner in the morning, I'd scanner in the evening, all over this land! Alright, I know I can't sing, sorry.

I keep telling myself it's alright to spend so many hours per day scanning, I have a finite number of negatives, this can go on for at most another week or two, right? Then I think, 'hey, I have color negatives, too!', and I know I'm in big trouble.

I got the scanner a week ago, right when I was about to enroll in the online TEFL course. Guess what I haven't done yet.

I really have to reign in my hobbies and interests and decide what I really want to be doing at this point. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking the Yamaha drums get packed away today. I'm really not that good at it, it's only really fun playing with other people, and practicing drums is not serving any future plans.

I need to prioritize the training I got at the monastery. I'm still comfortable with the decision not to join that monastery. That being the case, I've changed my opinion about my mentor there, and I've gone back to appreciating him, even though I doubt his role in my eventual decision to leave and not return was conscious or intentional.

He is my brother in more ways than one, including that I don't want to be close to him. His volatile, moody personality was too unpredictable. But, even though he might not believe in this, our karma clicked. They complemented each other, and I think the unintentional, intangible push he gave me away from the monastery was something at work. I'm flattering myself, because I'm saying that I was at his level, where most of the monks there were not (or not, that doesn't mean anything). Eh, why not?

My personal exploration into the essence of being is not to be done at the monastery. At least not in this lifetime or at this point in this lifetime. At a point where I need to stop to go on, then the monastery is the place to do it, but for now I have to keep moving. Moving means staying in the material world, even dying.

But in the material world, I do need to maintain what I learned at the monastery. For me that exploration is the most important thing in life. More than taking pictures, or playing in a band, or getting laid, or making money, or drinking alcohol, or buying a house, or raising a family, etc.

And the cornerstone of the practice is sitting, the Zen tool, the Zen contribution to the enlightenment panacea. There were brief moments after deciding not to enter the monastery when I was wondering why I was continuing sitting. Those moments were weird because I was sitting long before I visited the monastery. The benefits I found in the practice of sitting were not at all conditioned upon any monastic aspiration. All the monastery did was help. The monastery helped tighten up the regimen, let me know what I was doing right and what I could do better.


February 23, 1997 - Diamond Heights, San Francisco

I've taken to sleeping on the floor like Adrienne Shelly in the movie Trust. Why? Because I'm hardcore, dude! No, I'm not sure why. Actually, I remember in my last few weeks in San Francisco, I also stopped sleeping in my bed. So I think this is a pattern, and I think it means something, yo.

Truth to tell, sleeping on the floor at my parents' house is still hella more comfortable than where many Katrina victims are sleeping.

I ordered a scanner. I figure that gives me until it is delivered to decide whether I really want and "need" it, and if I don't I can just send it back. You know the financial ice I'm standing on? I just poured a bucket of hot water onto it.

I'm still a mouse click away from taking an online TEFL course. There's no more deliberation involved, and I might as well do this. The same old motivation and moving forward issues prevent.

You know how I set up my drums last week? Today I put my road bike back into commission. Falling back into same old habits, same old patterns. I will need to ask myself shortly what has changed. I realize that wherever I go next, drums or bikes don't come with me, though. I'm just making the most of the luxuries I have here.

World Financial Center, NYC.

September 18, 2005; 4:20 P.M. - Inside the World Financial Center building, overlooking the World Trade Center site.

Living is fine. Living is easy. I can live no problem. 

I can live so well in such a way that when death comes, I'll have no problems with it and welcome it. 

If I can just make sense out of existence and what that's all about, I'll be set with this non-suicide thing. 

I don't care about the why of existence. I don't care why we're here, it's a moot point, we're here. Or at least I am, I don't know about you. I'm more concerned about the what of existence beyond molecules and atoms and matter. What is this eyeball? What is this step I walk? And it's not rhetorical. It's not even an answer I'm necessarily looking for.

The mystery roll of Tri-X turned out to not be Josephine's from 1998, but shots from September 4, 2000 at the West Indian Labor Day Parade in Brooklyn. I went with an old high school ex, Liz Rusch. We took the subway to Brooklyn. I went to see steel drums, but saw woeful few. It rained on us. I got a sticker saying "Mean People Suck" which got torn from getting wet, and now there's a sticker on my bass guitar, "People Suck".

August 28, 2005, 2:55 p.m.

The film switch from the Fujica to the Pentax was near perfect. No frames lost at the beginning, and I managed to not overlap the last frame taken with the Fujica when I advanced the film in the Pentax to finish the roll. There was just a slight gap – as perfect as I could hope for.

It's a trick you can only do with manual rewind cameras. You note the last frame shot in the first camera, then rewind the film until you feel it give and stop immediately so you don't rewind the film into the canister. If you're nervous about it, you should do it in complete darkness so you can open the camera without exposing any of the film. Then load the film into the second camera and advance the film by shooting with the lens cap on until you get to the same frame where it left off.

September 4, 2000 - Brooklyn, West Indian Labor Day Parade, Fujica ST605n, Kodak Tri-X.

September 12, 2005 - Same roll of film, Englewood Cemetery, Pentax K2, Tri-X (ISO 800).

Existence is still the hard thing for me. Not living. Living is easy. It's easy to enjoy living here, this wonderful planet, this wonderful world, even with all the crap and misery and frustrations. That's why in the end, in the worst of situations, people are just glad to be alive.

It might feel good to have some stability, some maturity. Have a job and make money and spend it, and go to bars with people and drink lovely beer. To shoot film and share photography online, play shakuhachi in cemeteries, play guitar in the corner of my room, bass with other people, drums if I were really lucky. Ride my bike,

I found another mystery roll of black and white Tri-X film. It was in the first SLR I started using back in 1995, an ancient (ca. late 1970s) Fujica ST605n that I found in my brother's room at my parent's house.

When I confessed to my brother that I nabbed the camera from his room, he told me I should have taken the other camera that was there, the Pentax K2, which is a better camera and was in perfect working order (I had to get the Fujica's light meter repaired).

The next time I came back to New Jersey, I did take the Pentax K2, which was the older brother of the workhorse Pentax K1000 that just about every photography student uses at one point or another, and the flagship camera of that line.

Anyway, after I took the K2, I didn't use the Fujica, so when Josephine wanted to get into photography, I lent her the Fujica. That's what's intriguing me about this roll of film, it might be hers! From seven years ago!

I'll see when the roll comes back from the lab on Friday. The Fujica isn't working again, so I had to switch the roll out to the K2 to finish it off. I hope I didn't expose any of the frames that were on the roll.

The only thing that makes me doubt that this is Josephine's film is that she kept a lot of my stuff in the break-up. How did this camera get back to me if it was in her possession at the break-up?


January 5, 1998 - Ocean Beach, San Francisco (yep, that's the Fujica, click and check it out)

I spent this morning in the photography section at Borders, reacquainting myself with the art and aesthetic. I don't fool myself that I'm a good photographer. I don't have a good eye. So many people I've known are just naturals. They point a camera and shoot and they come out with great shots. I'm not one of them. I just enjoy it and get some lucky shots once in a while.

I think there's an argument that art fits in with mindfulness practice, although there is the possibility of ego-attachment. It's important to focus on the process as mindfulness practice, and not on any ego enhancing sense of creating "art".

With black and white photography, you have to be mindful of the light, and be discerning of its qualities. You have to be equally mindful of the shadows, because if you're not paying attention to the shadows, why the hell are you shooting the light?

Composition is all-important. Even if you're shooting nothing, at least practice composition. A well-composed shot of nothing is more aesthetically pleasing than a great subject that is poorly composed. But if you find a good subject matter, that's better, paying attention to foreground and background.

And texture, but that's something I'm still trying to figure out. Anything else?


January 16, 2003 - Ocean Beach, San Francisco

I'm still trying to figure out my relationship with my parents. Living at their house is definitely the worst thing I could possibly be doing to myself. I'm still trying to hate them like I'm supposed to, I'm trying to rage, but on the other hand I'm just so sick of that. Anger is so 20 years ago. I have better things to do with my time and energy.

While I'm staying at their house, little contact is the best contact. I avoid them as much as possible, going out of my way and holing myself in my old room to avoid them. They put as little effort as possible to be in contact with me as well, which is actually quite offensive considering last month they wanted me to go to psychiatrist so that they could "understand" me.

This is how it's always been. When things aren't going the way they expect things to go, the way they've paid for things to go by raising us, they go into radio silence mode. So what was that shit about wanting to "understand" me? Baka. Idiots.

They're part of the black hole I've found myself in. I don't want to do anything. I have no motivation to move in my life. The closest people to me now are my parents, so that's a large part of the issue, the 'problem', maybe. I also feel I have no support to do anything. I certainly couldn't expect any support from anyone I know.

What the hell is this anyway about "support"? We're human beings, we're expected to pull ourselves out of the mud by our own bootstraps. Fuck support, how many people in the world move their lives without "support"? I'm such a weenie. I should just kill myself. Hahaha, which was my starting point all along until I recently gave it up. I crack myself up. I slay me.


December 26, 1997 - Josephine in Central Park

I woke up this morning knowing they were doing the September 11 thing in New York, so I switched on the TV and they were reading off the names. I ended up doing my morning sitting with the TV on and the names contributing to the stream of consciousness.

I tried to visualize what it might have been like in the North Tower above the impact zone. No one in the North Tower above the impact zone got out because all the elevators and stairwells were destroyed by the impact, unlike in the South Tower where one stairwell remained intact and passable from top to bottom.

I imagine very few people noticed the first plane approaching, but if they did and watched it, the feeling that this was very, very bad and something was about to go very wrong. I imagine that it was bad from the moment of the first impact.

Everyone would have heard the thunderous sound of the jet approaching seconds before impact, everyone would have felt the impact and explosion, everyone would have felt the building sway. The glass would have shattered and the scene would have immediately been chaotic and panicked. After that, it progressively got worse as smoke and fumes filled the upper floors, and for many people the situation was so literally and absolutely unbearable that it was a better decision to jump.

The reading of the names was very emotional, and I empathized and sympathized with the family and friends of victims. But I have to expand the scope of my sympathy beyond the sorrow of the people on TV who have the privilege of living in the wealthiest nation to have their sorrow broadcast publicly.

My sympathy goes around the world to the countless people who also grieve for brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, victims of U.S. policies and international government and corporate actions that indirectly contribute to the rage that led to September 11.

I don't mean to open myself up to accusations that I'm blaming the U.S. itself for September 11, or belittling anyone's grief. I'm just extending my sympathy to where I feel it properly belongs. We can selfishly own our grief and believe we are the only ones affected, but I can't listen exclusively to the grief over loved ones in New York without also feeling the grief of thousands more around the world who I don't hear in memorium on the TV. They also have brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons.

Still, the world changed that day, that's for sure. Historically speaking, it was easily the worst day of my life.

I finally got to see Wang Kar-Wai's 2046 at a predominantly Indian theater in North Bergen – a ratty, basement-like multiplex in a ratty, industrialized town with cracked, overgrown sidewalks covered with litter. Going there is always a sketchy proposition. I have to drive.

Most of the films there are Bollywood imports, and the clientele is largely South Asian, but I go there because they occasionally get indie and foreign films that are otherwise obscure in northern New Jersey. I always feel like an outsider there. I don't linger, just get to the theater, watch the film, and get out. And every time I've seen a film there, there hasn't been more than 10 people in the audience (the huge crowds waiting in the lobby are no doubt waiting for some Bollywood film or another).

I don't know if it's something about the Indian management, but I've never had trouble bringing a 35mm SLR camera into a theater before. They were rude and uncompromising, so I had to go back to my brother's car and leave it there. So I left my SLR, but took out my digital and tucked it into my pocket and walked back into the theater.

Rebel without a cause, I felt compelled to go into the theater and take pictures, which ordinarily would never have even crossed my mind:




The film itself was great, incredible. Signature Wang Kar-Wai. Visually sumptuous and the details of a scene he chooses to film are exquisite. Almost meditative. Definitely melancholy. His stories have very little plot, very train of thought storyline. He's a true artist with film. He uses shots and scenes to make you feel something or react, and the overlying plot or story is almost incidental. Like there might be the storyline going on, but I'd get lost in a shot and the feeling it evoked, not wanting to move on just yet.

I want to see it again, but I can wait for the DVD. I think Wang Kar-Wai films are best initially seen on a big screen, but then requisite follow-up viewings can be on small screen. You can't watch a Wang Kar-Wai film only once and claim to have seen it. I saw "In the Mood for Love" only once, and I can't make any claims to have seen it.

Probably no one but me would have thought how bleak life would become upon making a declaration of not committing suicide. And I did. I always considered it a fate worst than death to want to live. I'm such a barrel of laughs.

In any case, somehow I'm continuing to cultivate a positive mind. Maybe I'm deluding myself. Maybe it's the best I can do, and that's alright.

Continuing on the path of practice for whatever insight I might have on what I really believe this life and reality to be. Keep processing the elements I've brought into my life and look at what they are and what they mean to me.

The starting point is the same as it always has been as far back as I can remember (which says more about faults in my memory than any grand length of time), which is that physical reality is illusory, dream-like, a 3-D film screen that I can conceptually reach over and pull off.

It's real, no doubt, but the idea of "real" is subject to deconstruction. It's real in that it's here, but not real in terms of any inherent permanence or permanent agency. It's real in that we should live our lives, but not real as something to be attached to, or living it in a way not recognizing that it's a constantly changing flow.


November 10, 1996 - Market St., San Francisco