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