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

I give up. I won't commit suicide. Doesn't mean, though, that I can't keep hoping for, and meditating on, an untimely demise. But now I go on with my life, defeated, triumphant, dejected, happy. Keep practicing, keep following my heart, keep trying to open it up, keep trying to let it go.


July 25, 1997

So let's see. There's an intellectual meditative practice to help look beyond our causes of suffering. For example, if someone hits us with a stick, we don't get mad at the stick, but we get mad at the person holding the stick. 

The practice encourages us to look farther, and as the person controlled the stick to hit us, anger controlled the person to control the stick to hit us. Therefore (this is just thought experiment, mind you), we should think of the person as being no more unaccountable than the stick. Our energy should be used against the person's anger, the real enemy, and to assuage it by understanding it and acting according to that understanding. 

So when I think of the ways my parents cause me suffering, I need to look at what is causing them to act in a way that is causing me suffering. They aren't my enemy, I acknowledge that they don't intend to maliciously cause me suffering. But they act the way they do because of their own suffering. 

When I look at it that way, I see their deep suffering. They have money, but they aren't free. They are slaves to their own greed, their ideas of status, of success and failure, and what they think their children should be and do. They are oppressed by their own ultra-normative, narrow-minded way of looking at the world. 

They suffer because their happiness depends on what I do with my life – which is that they want me to live a superficial and normative life as they, an impossibility. If anything, they are the tragic figures. In my worldview, it's always a tragedy when happiness is dependent upon something outside of ourselves. Tragic world I live in. 

Of course, I'm a cause of suffering to them. So if they applied the same meditation, they should look at the causes of my suffering which causes me to act in a way that causes them suffering. Um, isn't it . . . them? 

If I'm suffering because of them, am I not looking for happiness outside of myself? Yay, I am tragic! not

 

Bangkok, Thailand - July 19, 1998

Remember, always look on the bright side of life.

This blog is really taking itself way too seriously.