Reading sites like this make me feel like I'm not suicidal at all. That shit is really twisted and tragic. Well, I don't think I'm twisted, and I'm certainly not tragic. I'm a fricking poseur.

It made me realize that my attitude towards death, including suicide, is that it is sacred. It's a sacred space. It should be meditated upon and approached and appreciated with reverence. Very much like life. Being mindful of death is being mindful of life. With a healthy attitude, the opposite is true.

Of course what's written up on a web page is not the real thing and doesn't reflect anything about what an individual went through. If the suicides seemed cavalier and disaffected, that could be the result of the writer's subjective bias or reporting style.

And reading about people succeeding in what I've failed at over and over again won't distract me from my path. . . whether to do it or not do it.


June 9, 1997 - Monks on the Beach, Thailand

Holy shit, Kristin Hersh sent me an email! On the ThrowingMusic site she invites anyone to send them an email, so I sent her some pics of herself:

KLi to kristin

Hi Kristin,
Just sending some shots from a while ago. no need to reply. The Cafe DuNord was on April 17, 2004, and the Slim's shot was on May 9, 2003. All rights and permission for these shots are given to you to do as you please.
much love,
KLi



And she replied:

Kristin Hersh to me

Thank you for sending these!! I don't have any of us opening for X and that was such a cool night for me.

Love,
Kristin

a few minutes later, she wrote again:

Kristin Hersh to me

Oops, I thought the Muses @ Slims shot was 50FootWave at Slim's - which was the X show - my mistake. But STILL awfully nice of you to send shots to me!

Love,
K

I don't know about you, but I was tickled pink. Gawd, I love that woman. No wonder the Throwing Muses fan base is so family-like. And Kristin is like . . . mom.

I need to do something. I need to get angry. I need to get aggressive. I need to be motivated. Enough to kill myself. Enough to go to Japan for three months. Enough to request aspirancy and go to the root monastery and ordain. Enough to go to Taiwan and get a job. Enough to make friends. Enough to fall in love. Enough to play music again.

In meditation, I visualize myself as perfected, mind calm, unattached, not attached to self, empty of attachments, not fooled by appearances, not fooled by a conceiving mind, not fooled by anything generated by "self" and its relativistic associations.

In the form realm, I visualize my skin unblemished, no scars, smooth, bronze, well-toned, nothing extraneous, hair full and healthy, eyes clear and calm, half-smile on my lips, all muscles relaxed.

In meditation, I recall every little stabbing unknown pain I've experienced in random places in my body and increase it by a hundred and call it the first pangs of dying. I die 84,000 times a day.

I need to want something. I need to care. I need to feel.


January 1, 1997 - Grandfather's grave, Taiwan

You'd think with my history with alcohol and sleeping pills, it wouldn't take much to push my liver and/or kidneys over the edge. *sigh*

I'm *this* close to start looking into those links that Madoka sent for Nagasaki. I'm *this* close to cutting myself off at the knees and looking into teaching English in Taipei *bleah*. I'm *this* close to taking what looks like TK's bait to inquire if there are any part-time employment ops at his firm back in San Francisco. I'm gnawing at my knuckles, waiting for it to rain. I hear train engines and waves breaking against the shore. I am no where near train tracks or water.


January 23, 1998 - The Speedway, Death Valley

I've lost the plot again. What am I even doing on these pages anyway? Do I really think I'm explaining something? Do I really think what I'm expressing is even vaguely comprehensible?

What was that crap in my last post? We all, more or less, think our lives are meaningful whatever we're doing. For people who don't think of those things, such judgments are irrelevant. Who am I to judge? Shut up, me. Who sits around thinking their lives are meaningless and then just continue that way?

I've been immersing myself too much in Tibetan stuff. There's a lot of good stuff, but I'm getting sucked into the dogma. When writings start getting too forceful about concepts that are counter-intuitive and assume conclusions in the arguments, my dogma alert goes off. This is hardcore Buddhism, requiring a Buddhist to really get into it the way it's presented. I don't want to be a "Buddhist". I'm looking for what's true to me.

I've started cutting again after two years. Now there's something that will never be understood properly. Whatever anyone thinks upon reading that is wrong. I started again because I can without harming myself, without thinking of it as harm. There was a point in time when it stopped being harm and became habit. Then I stopped to break the habit. And now, my ability to do it without harm is too much of an opportunity to waste. It's confounding, it's an investigation, it's a, yes, meditation.

What I'm not so sure about is when old feelings associated with leading up to cutting occur afterwards. The connection is obvious and it might just be simple memory association, but I won't write off that it might mean something.

In contrast, I'm not so delusional to believe that suicide is not harm. Cutting is not harm if it's just physical, lines. If there's a mental, emotional component, then it is harmful, and most kids involved in cutting are harming themselves, for better or worse. In my conception of suicide, the bar is much higher. It needs to transcend mental and physical and become spiritual to not be harm, and I make no claims of being there yet, even though that's my main motivation.

God, who the hell cares.

because I can:

I had a wonderful time in a nearby cemetery today. I used to hang out in cemeteries all the time. Today was sort of a meditation on life and death, as if I don't do that enough in my spare time.

A lot of calculating ages. Reading epitaphs. Wondering about or imagining people's stories when loved ones died. Noting people who were born in the late 1860s and when they died, relating that to myself having been born in the late 1960s, and calculating up a hundred years and considering all these various years I might die, given a natural death. 2018, 2037, 2055.

Spending time with entire families buried together and just being fascinated by the past-and-gone existence of these whole families, noting how old the mothers were when they gave birth to each of the children, how old were the children when the parents died, how long spouses outlived each other, and if they didn't have spouses, did they not get married or were the spouses buried with their own families?

All of this information, and relating it to people I know in the very midst of the life cycle. I know people of all different ages, getting married, having children, parents and relatives dying, and life goes wonderfully and tragically on and on.

Life really is more lovely when you accept death as part of it. Instead, we do our best to ignore death and put it off. When we're barraged by ridiculous pharmaceutical commercials at dinner time, we never think where death fits in the picture. They shill conjured notions of health and prolonging life (nevermind quality, which is an assumed by-product of getting doped up on whatever they're selling), and the subtext of death is completely sublimated.

But no, we avoid it, it's depressing. We're trying to live our lives and meditations on death dampen that, not enrich it. God forbid we think too deeply on what's the point of all we're doing and striving for.

Maybe if we think about death, we think about how we're going to lose everything when we die, and that's too depressing, too dysfunctional. We're not taught or trained to think of death and use those thoughts to make our moments alive now meaningful.

The Tibetan path to enlightenment starts with meditations on death, right up front. Well, right after meditating on our wonderful, blessed human existence, endowed with opportunity and freedom to transform ourselves spiritually. Right after that, you meditate on the absolute certainty of death, really confront it, and the absolute uncertainty of when death will come. I'm under the impression that Tibetans, as a society, handle that quite well. Americans, I shouldn't wonder, find that horribly morbid.

Being philosophically suicidal for as long as I've been, I had a leg up when introduced to those meditations. Old hat. Been there, done that. But today's time in the cemetery had the curious effect of both making me really glad that I'm suicidal – not striving for the things everyone else seems to be striving for, and loving life and our planet and everything on it – being glad to be alive.


December 13, 1996 - Colma, CA

I've been enjoying these days. Days that I know can't last. How I move on from here is still a mystery to me. I don't want to "move on". I want done. I am done. I'm affirmatively done. I've been done for a long time now. The question is what I'm doing to get done. And when.

The monastery didn't work out. That was that. It's interesting how a few months ago, it was truth to me that they had rejected my aspirancy. Then that truth became an interpretation as a tool to justify leaving without any commitment to return. Now the truth, looking back, is that it was completely my decision to leave and not follow the monastic path. Truth changes.

Removing the monastic option, I go back two years in time and I'm done with this life. It is again my goal, a part of my path, to succeed in voluntarily giving up this wonderful, blessed life endowned with opportunity and freedom for no other reason than to come to terms with my understanding of self(lessness), emptiness (which is not nothing), and non-attachment to the form of this life.

I'm not arguing anything, I don't feel I need to argue anything, and I don't have foolproof or faultless logic in my train of thought, even though it makes perfect internal sense to me. More importantly, I believe in myself and the decisions I make. My reality is my own, and no one else's.

Killing myself is not killing myself. I don't believe in killing myself, but it's a matter of semantics...

It's just my decision. It's my path that I've been laying out for years and years and years, following the topography of the specific circumstances of my life and personality. Suicide really has been my starting point. It resonated from the very beginning when I first learned what it was. With that as a given, it's interesting how the edifice of it has metamorphosed.

Wow. I could have killed myself 20 years ago just because I was angry; a bad reason by my current standards. Now it's a whole philosophical edifice surrounding me, a web, a fortress, a thicket, a treatise. A machine. It covers existentialism, existence, reality, agency, self, inner spiritual sciences, philosophy, psychology, karma, madness. There's probably some cosmology tucked away in some corner for good measure. No Western philosophy though, pompous field of well-fed blowhard European men that is.

It is such that I don't even have to do it. I'm not compelled to do it. I will if it feels right, and to me it would be a completely logical, rational next step along my path, albeit risky. I may be giving myself more credit than I deserve, but I think I'm prepared for it and for any repercussions, spiritually speaking.

All said, it's a good thing I'm enjoying my days.


January 23, 1998 - Nevada

March 4, 1997, Ocean Beach, San Francisco

Anger, not quite so easy to get back under control. Think heroin. Think crack. ??? Addiction? Maybe not the best analogy, just something you want to get rid of or stop and find it not so easy. The difference is why.

But as it is possible to kick an addiction, I think it's possible to tame anger. I think anger is a conditioned response, and it can be re-conditioned with effort, mindfulness, and introspection. And commitment.

It's fascinating seeing what anger really is when you're trying to get rid of it. It becomes something totally different from what you thought it was. You receive anger-stimulus, you get angry, but instead of reacting or responding, you watch it. Try locating it in your body – is it in your heart, your head, your arms, your eyeballs. What is it? Is it moving around? Is it you?

You're looking at the anger and you're looking in the mirror. But that's not you. You're wondering who the hell that is trying to get away with something. It's a raw version of you, a conditioned, habitualized version of you. That's as far as I've gotten. Stalement. External situation not made any worse, internal situation not fully defused.

As an intellectual exercise, I consider that my parents are a result of my karma. It would be petty to think about what might have happened in the past for me to end up with this karma, because the possibilities are literally endless.

Everything is a karmic manifestation, meaning that everything is a result of numerous causes and conditions coming to fruition. And to turn it around, every moment is a karma creating event to be borne out in the future when all causes and conditions are ripe.

So the parents I have are the result of some past karma, and I don't know what it is, but if I think of it that way, I can take some personal responsibility for my present situation. I can think that the connection with them isn't completely random and cosmically unfair. That allows me to try to look at it more deeply, instead of just being angry.

At the same time, I can think about how I deal with this manifested karma, and how I deal with it is creating karma for the future. I can be angry and perpetuate the conditioning of my mind to be angry, and 50 years from now, I can still have this unresolved anger. Karma manifested to karma creation to karma manifestation.

Or I can re-condition my mind to not be angry by really investigating it and taking it apart and that creates different karma. Karma manifested in a situation to make me angry, instead of creating new karma by getting angry, creating new karma that is patient and compassionate, training my mind to be more peaceful, manifesting karmically later by being a person who doesn't get uncontrollably angry.

You can go through all of this and remove all mention of karma and re-word it in psychological terms. After all, as I've mentioned, the buddhadharma doesn't exist, and that's one of the best things about it.

I scanned a bunch of black and white negatives, so I'm going to start subjecting my blog to my past photographic efforts.


February 2, 1997, Lake Merced, San Francisco

I'm just about done with this experiment and exercise in getting back in touch with my anger and hatred towards my parents. Not quite done, though. I think in my mind, I can start reeling it back. Playing with anger certainly is playing with fire, and there definitely is a nasty risk of burning myself if I get too cavalier or cocky, calling it just an "experiment and exercise".

What I'm not done with yet is . . . the part of the anger that is not in my mind – the expression, the externalization, the manifestation of it. I'm not satisfied yet with how I've responded to anger stimuli. I haven't been succinct or forceful enough, I've been too restrained and elusive, subtle – too subtle for them, they don't get subtlety. I still get flustered.

I would like to hone in on exactly what the issue is and express clearly what the problem was with what they said. Lock and load. This is something that might be good for them, too. The part that is still the experiment and exercise is for me to make it seem that what I'm saying is coming from a place of anger, cold and venom-ous.

But not in my mind, because I realize that there is no reason to be angry. My parents are coming from a place of great suffering and ignorance. My father has this problem with communicating with other human beings. That's no exaggeration, no hyperbole, it's literal.

When he has to communicate non-professionally in English, he's a regular Forrest Gump. No condescenion intended. He has trouble saying things to me that don't sound like he's trying to insult me, but are so flawed and devoid of reality or logic that he just looks like an idiot in my eyes.

I don't view any of it as their fault, or that it is a fault of theirs. I don't know if anything they say is sourced in malice or anger, but if it's not clear, and if there isn't anything for me to learn without offending my own beliefs and values, then what does what they say or do matter to me?

Their ignorance and inability to see the world from any other point of view but their own is so incredible that no one at the monastery would believe me, and they would think my descriptions were coming from a place of childhood anger, resentment, and bitterness.

And maybe you would, too, but OH MY GAWD. You really have no idea.

So I sit and I calm my mind, and I consider their beings and their circumstances in the best light, and there is no reason to be angry. There's also nothing for them to learn, no way for them to learn, certainly not from me, so this anger experiment is just for me.

Once it ends, they won't even notice that something happened for those 2-3 weeks. Just suddenly, there will be cordial and polite conversations again with no coldness or venom. Their purpose on this planet is not to learn or understand things, especially things in the abstract.

I think I've done my part through the years, and I can't fault myself for giving up, because they don't care one way or another whether I give up or not. They don't understand this "giving up". Giving up on what? So I can just accept them and the important thing for me is to protect my mind from the anger stimuli, not cultivate anger in my mind, and establish a foundation of peace in my mind and not let them disturb it. And not even do that from a place of anger. Tricky stuff.

The practice at the monastery was big on the ancestral "continuation" thing. I didn't like how I felt they posited it as a universal truth, as if it was supposed to mean something to me. Mind you, I'm not big on universal truths.

Well, maybe they didn't intend it as a dogmatic universal truth, but just as a personal meditation. The idea being that we meditate upon our own beings as a continuation of our parents and grandparents, and so on and so on and so on.

There's probably something deep there, but not looking at it as meditation, the idea is a pretty big turn off. Thinking that I'm a continuation of my particular ancestors, and that my hypothetical descendents would also be a continuation of them makes me want to end the line right here. It's not something I want "continued".

Fortunately, or not, "spiritual genes" have little to nothing to do with accidents of biology. For those who believe in reincarnation, spiritual genes are what are carried over from lifetime to lifetime that shape our spiritual personalities, psychologies, and "aptitude".

They get right down to the very core of our being, our deepest habit patterns that make us what we truly are. We can get a glimpse of our spiritual genetics just by basic meditation and extending the introspection of meditation to our daily lives by being mindfully aware of ourselves throughout our days.

We watch our minds, our thoughts, our patterns, our feelings, and eventually we can notice what is hard-written into our personalities. Unlike biological genes, we can re-write them! For example, an easy one, my fear of spiders.

My theory, perhaps just as example, is that my fear is sourced in past lives, and whatever happened then had such an impact that the fear was written into my spiritual genes. Recognizing that, I've worked on re-writing the fear out of the code by facing it and seeing it as irrational.

The benefit of doing so is that in future lives, hundreds or thousands of spiders won't lose their lives. But that's a big "eh", since life is a crapshoot, there is no hard and fast objective good or bad in the loss or preservation of life. Everything flows, everything transforms, and everything biologically living will die.

A more definite benefit is in my mind. Whenever I kill a spider out of fear, that reinforces that negative spiritual gene and disrespect for life, whether or not it is a crapshoot. The focus is on the disrespect. As it happened, I feared a spider and I killed it. The next time I saw a spider, I killed it. And so on and so on.

For me, something started bothering me about it. Even if I didn't mind the killing, I did mind the fear and I wanted to know what that was about. What I hope is that I've re-written the gene so that it is not fear that I feel, but compassion, and that's what I'm practicing in this life. And actually, now I do mind the killing. I find it abhorrent for me to want to kill even an insect.

When I see a spider, I think compassion and I don't kill it. It has a right to live, it has a right to exist. Like all living beings, its instinct is to survive, it doesn't want to die. The benefit is what that is doing in my mind. It's watering a seed of compassion. Instead of fear and killing, it's tolerance and understanding. Successfully writing that into my spiritual genetics theoretically gets carried over into my next life, hopefully not just towards spiders.

And even if you don't believe in reincarnation, it certainly doesn't hurt to cultivate those things in one's life now.

My parents have been really helpful in my efforts to get back in touch with my anger and hatred towards them. I've had ample opportunity for a feeling to float up like a clay skeet target, and for me to shoot at it identifying the feeling as hatred or anger.

And man, these feelings are really difficult to deal with! No wonder I had them under wraps for almost 10 years. Not really suppressing them so that they'd blow up one day, but just dressing them up as something else. That was pretty smart I must pat myself on the back.

Similarly, I really feel how difficult it is to live a "spiritual" life in the material world. It's difficult trying to maintain a practice independently. It's important to have a community, but I don't like lay communities because of various prejudices I hold against them.

I don't like compartmentalizing it by calling it a "spiritual life". Everything is relative. It's just my life that I'm trying to live. I don't think of it as spiritual, but relative to perhaps other people, maybe it is.

But no, I think our existences are spiritual by nature, that's the way I look at it. Even the most money-grubbing, greedy, materialistic capitalist pig is still living within a spiritual framework. Or not.

The old battle lines are re-emerging and the old coldness is also setting in. Most of the small talk of the past 10 years is gone, and although I'm cordial and courteous where appropriate, prying or probing questions are met with unfinessed responses and no effort at suppressing any venom. All the while I watch my mind and watch the feelings.

These are the people who I'm going to shamelessly ask to pay for three months in Japan if I'm still alive in the next few weeks. I'm still holding my trump card of entering the monastery. They don't know that it's not really an option anymore. Only if I'm desperate.

I don't like peeing. I don't like pooping. Or eating for that matter. I have trouble reconciling myself as a metabolizing being with being a "self". It just doesn't make sense to me. If I exist, why do I have to do these mundane things as a requirement?

I don't like breathing. As an eternal and infinite being, why am I hypothetically constrained from moving about the universe by this tiny, thin sliver of oxygen atmosphere clinging to this planet? It's just a few miles thick, and negligible in cosmological terms.

I am not this eating, peeing, pooping organic machine. That isn't what defines me or my "self". It's a biological marker, a flag planted to claim territory – this immediate space I currently happen to occupy.

Remove the eating, the drinking, the pooping, the peeing, the breathing, the heart beating, the neurons firing, the blood pumping, the sweating, the cells metabolizing, the muscle, the bone, the skin, and that's one step closer to my true self.

The danger, however, is thinking that in all this non-existence is the goal. My true self certainly exists. I don't deny my existence or my continued existence whether I'm here or not. Just that this 'I' that is here now doesn't define my existence nor is the outer limit of it.

Right alright, mystically speaking, I process my family as part of some spiritual challenge I've set for myself that was in line with my karma. How I was born into a family so removed from anything resembling Dharma is beyond me, and that I've discovered it as my resonant belief system is nothing short of a miracle.

Therefore.

I should not be positing my family in opposition to myself, that there can be a winner or loser, but as a personal challenge to find common ground in our differing value systems, whereby the "truths" that I'm utilizing don't contradict or offend the truths of their values and belief systems. This is to show to myself that I really have learned something about "truths" that are really applicable.

Who the fuck do I think I'm kidding?

I need to work with a "truth" that I call Dharma, and mesh it with values and beliefs that don't resemble Dharma, that reject "Dharma", and do it in a way that doesn't look like I'm working with Dharma at all (principle of non-prosyletizing, not exposing Dharma to those who aren't ready for or open to it).

And I'm doing this for the sole reason that these people are blood relatives. They are not my spiritual family, I did not inherit their spiritual genes, I am in no way a "continuation" of them. Their ancestors are not my ancestors. My descendents are not their descendents.

I'd rather shove my head up a constipated donkey's ass.

I think suicide would be the best way to get through to these people. A close unexpected death is the only thing I can think of that might shock them into realizing the impermanence of life in a visceral way. It's wishful thinking.

It's even more wishful thinking that they might then realize the impermanence of their lives and to focus on doing something meaningful, within their own value systems, not mine, with their lives. Not likely, suicides almost never impact people in a positive, constructive way. But hey, don't blame the suicides for that.

Mind you, this isn't a reason for me to commit suicide, it's not a justification. It's just looking at the bright side, optimist that I am, of something I've independently decided to do (not saying I'll succeed in doing it).

The first shot's been fired. They asked for a "favor". They asked me to see the same psychiatrist from over 20 years ago because they don't understand me. They condescendingly asked for a "favor". I reciprocated in kind. I took the three-pronged grappling hooks I had by my side and raked them into their sides. They won't be asking for any more "favors" any time soon.

Really, I was kinder than that, but not by much. Looking them straight in the eye (not reciprocated), I explained if they wanted to understand me, they needed to go see a Chinese-speaking shrink and ask what was wrong with them that they don't understand me. Their not understanding me is not about me, and throwing money at a white psychiatrist to make up words about me to make them feel better is not a solution, and not a waste of time I was about to concede to.

To understand me, they had to look into themselves and see beyond their narrowly-defined worldview, one where not everything is about making money and spending money.

That was effectively the end of the discussion. I attacked their precious money and all they could do was blither about how money is good and sometimes you need money. I made one or two half-hearted efforts to get them back on track, pointing out how now they were completely off the topic, but it was no use. They couldn't see the difference.

They let it go.

I won, and we both lost.

Northern Exposure Quote of the Day:
Joel: It's a clear cut case of damages as far as I'm concerned.
Maggie: You want damages? OK, Fleischman, let's get this over with once and for all. Come on, damage this, Fleischman, come on!
Joel: O'Connell, you're making a fool of yourself.
Maggie: C'mon, Fleischman, give it your best shot!
Bystander: Hit her, doc.
Joel: Do you mind?

I'm living a pretty luxurious lifestyle here at my parents' house. It's even better than the monastery. I can continue my studies and practice at my leisure, the only downside-which-is-not-really-a-downside is that I have to maintain my own discipline. The annoyances of living in a community are replaced by the annoyances of living with the 'rents, but my gratitude towards them for shelter and occasional food far outweigh those.

The biggest downside is that this can't go on for much longer.

I have to move on, figure out my next bold move. I haven't gotten any further on researching Nagasaki, nor have I contacted Madoka since leaving the monastery. I have some great resources for Taiwan that I haven't perused yet. And to get to the point of moving on, I need or want to re-visit my perennial suicide ideal – the euphemistic "leaving".

I know that after the last time I said I would buckle down and just accept living. That was really naive, and at no point did I really think that would happen. I also said that entering a monastery was my only living option. I still feel that way, which is why leaving is again at the forefront of my thoughts. But after years of holding this ideal and never being successful in executing it, I'm not dogmatic about it. And same deal as last time: I'll plan it, talk about it, say that I'm going to do it, but until I succeed, no one should take me seriously.

Again, if I'm serious about doing it, then I should be able to walk out the door and execute the plan right now, and I'm not. I'm blogging. Furthermore, I tell myself I'm waiting until my brother and his wife get back from their honeymoon since I'm picking them up from the airport. What? If I leave before they come back, they'll be stranded at the airport? It wouldn't be nice news to come home to, but when will it ever be nice news? Stupid.

I'm looking at the original planned date from two years ago. Right before they left for their honeymoon, they were trying to convince me to take sailing lessons with my sister-in-law, the first one being the day before that date, two more on the following weekend. My impulse was that agreeing would interfere with my plans, but that's also stupid. If I go for a sailing lesson on one day and leave the next, that's fine with me.

I'm obviously not going to do it.

My brother's marriage was in crisis mode even before they got married. These sailing lessons are an attempt to form a bond between them, something they can do together. First she lets him pull her into his hobby, then hopefully something reciprocal occurs in the future.

The idea for me to take lessons with her is to keep her company (no, I'm not interested in learning how to sail). I asked why didn't he go with her to the lessons, and the response was that would mean paying x amount of money for him to just sit on a boat, hearing what he already knows.

It doesn't enter his thinking that the money would be a small amount to pay to build up a much-needed bond between them. The idea is for them to do these things together. I'll try to explain this to him in simple, non-offensive language after they get back, but his habit-patterns of selfishness will make it a hard argument.