I've been writing about suicide for a long time. You'd think that one of these times, I could go back and look at what I've written before, and look at where I am now, and say, "I'm sure glad I didn't off myself back then".

Nope.

It's all still valid, and having failed in the past has made no difference in my opinion or outlook. Nothing has come up that would make me regret in retrospect if I had succeeded.

Even all the writings when I was specifically pointing at that period in time as being perfect to do it. Still valid. Should have done it then. But being the optimist that I am, I am aware that all those things are still valid.

Am I waiting or hoping for something to change? Yikes, is all I have to say. I hope not. That would invite the "what if the life-changing thing would have come to me the day after I did it?" scenario. And I refuse to live my life like that.

Am I going to do it? Am I doing it now? No. So no, I'm not going to do it, no matter what I say.

But being in Taipei feels like I'm certainly going to give it another serious shot. The rain guarantees it. When it's nice out, I'm fine, but now when the rain starts, it's like I feel every drop I hear on my last nerves. It's not a reason to do it, it's just a trigger. I have the reasons lined up like a slam-dunk lawsuit. So now it's just about staying mentally there for the right moment, when I ask "am I doing it now?" and the answer is yes. And it won't be blogged.

Tour de Taiwan, Stage 7, the final criterium stage of the tour. Pentax ZX-5n, Kodak BW400CN.

10:36-10:37 a.m.

They're going one way in color, but the other way in black & white. If I knew I was going to be juxtaposing the pictures, I might have opted not to flip the black & whites, which I always do unless there's something glaring in the photo that brings attention to the fact that it's flipped. I guess this isn't glaring, just maybe curious for the overly observant. 

10:46 a.m. - Vesak cyclist. From the heavens above to the earth below, there is no cyclist comparable to me. That's the pose the Buddha took in the fairy tale story of his birth (Christians did the same thing with Jesus, but curiously take it literally), uttering similar words (which any newborn would utter if they could speak).

10:49 a.m. - Taipei City Hall. I commented before how it's among the ugliest city hall buildings in the world. This is the front in all its lack of glory. There is logic to its design. From above, it makes out the characters 十十, which is 10-10 or October 10, Taiwan's founding day. Until Taipei 101 was built next door, only birds, helicopters and Chinese spy satellites could appreciate that.

City hall with some more aesthetic geometry, maybe.

I worked on a meditation/exercise today that I don't know if it's new or not, it might not be, working against negativity and hostility.

Basically everyone I see, I not only consider a friend, see as a friend, but I put it on my face that I'm about to react to seeing a friend. This is an extension of another exercise I've been trying to implement – practicing a pleasant face.

I've been growing more and more aware that what I'm carrying on my face out into the world is not good. Years and years ago I used to test my mental state in the worst of times by seeing if I could put a credible, genuine smile on my face, and if I could, I knew I was alright. Back then, I was always able to.

Now when I tried it – totally forced, fake. That realization hurt like hell. So now trying to be more aware of the face I'm taking out in the world, I try to practice in a mirror putting pleasant back on my face, get it back into muscle memory. Not easy, and I realize that what I'm taking out into the world on my face is unpleasant, heavy, who wants that?

So I focus on people who come into my field of vision and visualize them as a friend that I'm really happy to see, and I try to put on my face the feeling like I'm just about to greet them, and they're going to respond.

Of course I don't manifest it because it would likely start freaking people out, 'who is this person?', but if the person does happen to look at me, I would want them to have the feeling that something pleasant might have just happened if this person wasn't a stranger. That the look on my face was something warm and familiar, but only almost. Realize it's a stranger, and just pass on by.

Not the heaviness and hostility I'm carrying around these days. But it's become habit, and it's hard to kick. I encounter people and visualize them as friends, imagine them as friends, and then I have the type of encounter which makes me think "why do I have such stupid friends?"

Photos sometimes outline a day's rough movements. Pentax ZX-5n, Kodak BW400CN:

Rode north into Taipei on the riverside bikeway.

Crossed Roosevelt Rd in Gongguang to the Taida campus.

Taida campus outside the language center. Those three buildings on the right have figured in my shots before.

For some reason I was in the Liberty Square area a couple miles northwest of campus.

4:35 p.m. - Ending up in the Taipei 101/Vieshow area in Xinyi District three miles due east of Liberty Square.

Struggling against negativity. It has reached new epic levels at the same time as I try to cultivate a new calm. Like I said, something snapped, something's different.

I wake up and sit, but I've been having the "worst" sittings ever. I don't want to put a judgment on that, that it's bad. It's been the worst sitting, but I don't want to imply that it's been bad... You figure it out.

My classroom experience, very negative. And sets the stage for the rest of the day. Although today wasn't as bad. I left my apartment early and relaxed over breakfast on campus, so perhaps the morning ride to class has had something to do with my morning negativity. Taipei traffic, no time to relax, straight to class.

Vast emptiness.

Yesterday I didn't want to commit suicide. It sucks when that happens, I hate that feeling. It makes me doubt myself, like I shouldn't do it just in case there's something to it. But I've been through that line of thinking already. It's valid only if I took stock in life as reality and reality as real.

I got it backwards somewhere along the line. The drive towards suicide is the norm, the pangs of continuing are the exception. I think normally people want to commit suicide because of certain conditions that arise in their lives, if it weren't for those conditions, they wouldn't want to commit suicide.

The argument against suicide is if they could change those conditions, which is at least a possibility within our abilities, then they wouldn't want to commit suicide. So it's better to work on changing those conditions than to resort to something as permanent as suicide, because the basic desire is still to live, and the basic paradigm is still to be happy. OK, whatever.

But it's the temporary conditions that make me want to live. How does the same logic apply? OK, I'm being facetious, twisting things around. Like suicide being an affirmative, proactive thing for me. The idea of suicide is what is keeping me alive. If I didn't have suicide somewhere in the future, life certainly wouldn't be worth living.

But now it's just getting ridiculous. There was a time when "hope" meant something. "Hope" without the moralistic judgments of something better. But there was a time when not committing suicide could have meant something; could have meant something else.

But at my age, not committing suicide comes with the realization that I'm going to die anyway. My bodily functions are going to decline anyway. What I'm preserving by not committing suicide becomes less of something worth preserving. Not committing suicide is no longer accompanied by the fact that I would otherwise live forever.

There was a time when I could accept that my suicide could be perceived as sad, or tragic, or unfortunate, suggesting that my living includes all these wonderful things, opportunities, contributions, interactions...

Now it's accompanied by a big "so what?". If I don't commit suicide, "so what?" If I don't commit suicide, how is it going to impact who? I'm in no one's life now, and no one expects me in their lives.

And wouldn't committing suicide be a great way of getting revenge on them?!

I dunno, something's changed since that last nasty rain. Mind you, the rain has continued, but I don't care. Something in me snapped. Something minor in me snapped, that was attached to something major.

A mold situation developed in my apartment. There was that leak. There was that dead rat. There was that other choice of an apartment that I didn't take, reaffirming the fallacy that I always make the wrong decision. It's a fallacy, but it feels true.

God, karma, coincidence, chance has removed all semblance of female presence from my life as all my classmates and neighbors are now male. Apparently not only do I relate better to women, which I knew, but I stop responding in their absence, which I didn't know.

My teacher is female, but I'm so unresponsive to her in class she treats me like dirt and does her best to ignore me without falling below the level of professionality. I actually like the classroom setting without women, because since I relate and respond to them, I also get distracted by them. I like all my classmates, I like the dynamic, but they wouldn't know it because I just don't respond to them.

It's either that, or it's what I think is the real reason – which is my problem with languages. Even though my new teacher is much better than my previous teacher, my listening comprehension is still far below everyone else, and I'm often left out of discussions. I can catch up if I'm spoon-fed the topic, but my unresponsiveness doesn't motivate anyone, including the teacher, to bother spoon-feeding me.

Take your pick as to what you think is the real underlying reason. I actually don't think one or the other is real, I'm just throwing them out.

I think I've really found a new level of dispassionate not caring. I see that as a good thing, a motivating thing. I'm still trying to balance the negative thing, but I also have the suicide thing keeping things in perspective and pushing me to the positive. Constantly asking myself am I ready to go now? (Yes) Am I going to go now? (Not quite yet). But that "almost" feels good.

I want the next attempt to be pretty spontaneous with a realization that I'm not attached to anything and I'm not afraid of anything. It's becoming clearer what stopped me that last time in San Francisco. Everything I had developed in San Francisco created a huge attachment. In Taiwan, I have nothing, no one. Fuckin' A.

March 14-17

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 14 - Taida campus. All Pentax ZX-5n, Kodak BW400CN.

Chaos in bicycle parking. Taida campus.

Taida main library.

Alley, location unknown.

Chaos in iron and straight lines. Location unknown.

Taipei Zhongshan Hall with Taipei City Police Dept. next to it near Yanping S. Rd.

MARCH 17 - View from the rooftop deck on my new building, Xindian.

Xianjiyan hiking trails, Taipei. I've been on the Xianjiyan hiking trails before! I found them by accident last year while exploring, but it turns out they extend from where I was before to where I live now. The trailhead is not far from Jingmei night market. Faint silhouette of Taipei 101 in the top picture. Any adjustment to contrast or brightness degraded it, so this is the straight CD-R scan. Actually a lot of frames on this roll turned out so well that no or just the slightest adjustment was made.

Very old grave markers/tombs. My impression is that they are so old that no one tends to them and in modern times when hiking trails were created, they were just left well enough alone.

Hiking in the morning. Dharma Drum Mountain Int'l Meditation Group session in the afternoon. Beitou District, Taipei.

It stopped raining today. I'm in a sort of post-S.A.D. shock. It's like my entire world changed this past week. I was trying to re-establish suicide in my life, and the rain made sure that was easy. Now that I have it back, I just have to maintain it as dharma, and not get distracted with . . . whatever was distracting me from it before.

Suicide as dharma? Why not? It's extreme and should be rigorously scrutinized and questioned, but theoretically, there's no inherent problem with it. Theoretically, anything is possible as dharma.

Suicide as part of my identity. It's part of what makes me me. Without it in my personal description, the picture of me is not complete. I guess what happened for a while is that doing it became unnecessary. Doing it wasn't as important as the philosophical and existential basis it suggested. And it still isn't necessary, but the calling is back.

At the same time, I have to keep working on decreasing the role of negativity in the equation, continue cultivating wisdom, altruistic intention, lightness. Whatever.

I've been having trouble sleeping all week. I don't get worked up as much as I used to about not being able to get to sleep. My attitude now is that if I can't get to sleep by the time my 30 minute radio sleep timer turns off, I get up and sit or study or read. Eventually the need for sleep will catch up.

So last night was a shit night, which is not to be distinguished from the rest of the shit week, or today's shit day as it continues to rain, exacerbating the leak in my ceiling. My hopes for last night being my sleep catch-up night were fading as anxiety and despair over my situation grew.

My blood was turning to ice, freezing, numbing, then cracking as every few minutes I would hear a drop of water hit the trash bin I had placed under the leak, for which I had to move my mattress. I thought I had better just get up and write basically what I'm going to write below, but I also knew if I did that, I would be hitting a tipping point because I would be running on pure negative emotions by that point.

I don't know what I did besides just staying in bed, but I fell asleep.

The tipping point thing was important, because as I'm trying to re-establish my aspiration to suicide, I realized a few days ago that I was still thinking of it months in advance. That had to change, I had to make it now, whenever that would be.

Whenever suicide comes up, it can't be months in advanced or even days in advanced. If it's not now, stop thinking about it. If something tells me, yes, I'm ready now, then make the decision and go, or when the MRT starts running in the morning.

As a mental exercise, that has been great. Forcing myself to make it immediate helps put it back into perspective whether it's something I want to do. Mostly it is. It just befits all the patterns in my life. I just keep coming back to it. I dunno, it's just different.

I've also been running through every aspect of it I can possibly think of during sitting. Including the difficulty I will cause when the news reaches my family. Not easy stuff. How the news reaches them is a whole nother story, but also goes to why they are still not a reason not to do it.

I look at my life, all it's been and what it looks like in the future, and my present bloody butt-fucking circumstances, and I'm supposed to tolerate this so they don't have to go through that? What they go through or not go through is not my responsibility, just as how I got here and the desolate wasteland exile I've found myself in Taiwan is not their responsibility.

Of course, we are each others' responsibility, as our mutual emotional bond depends on it, but apparently somebody didn't get the memo. I'm pretending I didn't see it.

But I managed to get to sleep, and I woke up this morning and it was still raining. I studied for my test today, took my test today, bombed my test today leaving one section pretty much blank.

But I walk and appreciate my two legs and that I'm in good health. I feel my breath and feel its life, my contact with the world, it penetrating me and delivering itself to me. I thank it, I thank me, I thank all that makes it possible. However, the result of that gratitude is not necessarily what you might think it should be.

But if I give up and decide I can't stand it anymore and go back to the U.S., I will try to find someone to take over my lease, but if I can't and lose the deposit, so fucking what?! If I feel I can't stand it anymore, what the fuck is $600? Why care about the lost tuition money?

Money is not supposed to be an issue in this lifetime. With all the unlubricated butt-fucking karma I have, that is not an issue. Maybe I've dealt with it before, maybe I'll deal with it later, but it's just not my problem issue in this lifetime.

I guess that's all. I'm just glad I waited until now to write this. Maybe it doesn't sound reasoned and calm (maybe it does), but I feel more comfortable getting this out like this, than I would have if I tried to last night.

4:14 p.m. - Taipei 101

5:34 p.m. - lights turning on. Indeed, office lights were on all day.

5:35 p.m. - Taipei City Hall. A candidate for ugliest city hall building ever. The Chinese characters literally translated say Taipei City Government. Because I understand that much (and not much more).

And by the way, it has been raining for four days straight without any sign of letting up, nor any let up forecast. My roof is now leaking, and I just felt a small earthquake, and you know what? I didn't give a shit.

We're approaching scary clown mask.

So, you know, if life was, like, my Master, when I was a kid, he would punish me if I did something wrong, give me a stern spanking. And then as I got older, he would ridicule me and slap me around to toughen me up, preparing me for life.

Then as an adult, he would start playing hardball and we'd have it out, one-on-one, but he would always best me since he's the Master, all in the name of continued learning. At this point, if my Master was normal, he would start laying off of me as I got my own feet on the ground and setting out on my own way.

But my Master didn't set me off on my own way, he stuck with me, and started playing nasty, mean-spirited practical jokes on me. He would trip and then kick me when I was down. He would pull my pants down in public and humiliate me. wtf? And now? Now?!

He's not just kicking or humiliating me anymore. He trips me and then continues to pummel my face into the concrete, screaming obscenities at me. He's not trying to terrorize me. He's a Master. Masters don't terrorize, they don't have a need to terrorize. All he's doing is pummelling my face into the concrete and screaming obscenities at me. Zen fashion.

What the hell kind of Master is that? You'd get rid of him, wouldn't you? And I'm serious, when he starts doing this wearing a scary clown mask, that's when I'll know for sure it's time to check out.

I'm starting to struggle again. I'm starting to flounder. It's an old, old feeling. I don't remember it directly, more out of probability. That I've done this before. That I've felt this way before. Then something covered it up for the longest time. Probably the realization that I wasn't going to commit suicide.

The old paradigm still applies, if I'm not committing suicide right now, then I'm not committing suicide, no matter what I say, no matter what I plan.

But Taiwan would be the place to do it. Far away from everyone, not that there is anyone. I don't have a lot of crap that someone will have to deal with, and I don't give a crap about anyone here having to deal with it. And the water is warm.

For some reason it feels a lot more comfortable doing it here than in San Francisco, maybe because I did have roots in San Francisco, maybe because I still had some semblance of connection in San Francisco, distractions and attachments. In Taiwan, this is exile.

But I have to deal with this weight of negativity. The old paradigm still applies that I won't commit suicide because of negative emotions. Negative emotions are different from negativity, but the sheer force of the negativity that has been arising in me in Taiwan has been leading to negative emotions.

Negative emotions can be controlled. Negativity is the results of past causes and conditions. All I can hope for is to work on the negativity, but I can't get rid of it. It's too manifest. It's too perpetuate. I just created a new adjectival out of a verb form.

I got desperate for connection the other day and went to Eslite bookstore and, not finding any of the offerings by Thich Nhat Hanh appealing, I bought a book by the Dalai Lama. It's very good and has been stirring up positive sediments. That's what I need, while also re-establishing an aspiration to commit suicide.

First get rid of this churning, growing, acid, eating hatred, anger, frustration, isolation, hostility.

No more setting dates. Just keeping a finger on the pulse of readiness. And when ready, go. Same as it ever was.

SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 12:58 p.m. - Never seen this kind of bird before, but it's beautiful. I wonder how it tastes.

Damn, that was quite an impact. Pentax ZX-5n, Kodak BW400CN.

MONDAY, MARCH 5, 7:41 a.m. - On the way to school crossing a very full Jingmei River.

MARCH 7, 4:12 p.m. - New art installation on the south plaza of Taipei 101.

4:32 p.m. - Lantern festival at Liberty Square with the National Concert Hall visible and the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi landmark building in the background.

4:36 p.m. - Year of the Pig.

5:01 p.m. - Glass blower.

101 and moon:

Pentax ZX-5n, Kodak BW400CN, frames 5 and 6. Same subject, different composition, which is better?

The first thing I have to do is stop saying that Taipei sucks and that the Chinese are stupid. The fact is that my life sucks and I'm stupid. Taipei is a really interesting place, and Chinese culture, Taiwanese style, has its merits and shortcomings just like any other. It's only because I'm unhappy that I feel this way.

I left my job because I was unhappy with the job. But no, the reason why I was miserable at the job was because I was unhappy with myself. I think about the job, I think about my attitude, and I'm pretty sure I was more unhappy with myself than I was with the job.

Then I left San Francisco. Yes, I was unhappy with San Francisco. There were a lot of good things, but I didn't like the weather, the cold, the fog, and it never got hot, and I couldn't get anything going in San Francisco. Oh, I guess I was unhappy with myself. I was just in a holding pattern, going around in circles.

Which in of itself isn't a bad thing. The reason why I like the idea of reincarnation is that all around me in nature I see cycles. So it makes sense to me that as natural beings, our lives exist in cycles.

Money, however, is linear. It comes in from one source, and goes out through another way. Like food comes in one end, and goes out another way. I hope the metaphor here isn't being missed, but that was a prime mover, too, in my leaving San Francisco. Money wasn't renewing itself in cycles. Capitalist economics are not natural.

Then I left the monastery, the happiest, most peaceful place I've ever found. I was unhappy with the monastery? I'm not sure I can say that. I pointed to things that was unhappy with as an excuse to leave and not go back, but if I'm not happy with myself, I'm not going to be happy wherever I go.

Then I left New Jersey, which needs no unhappiness discussion, and default ended up in Taiwan. Just because that's where my parents are from. And I have extended family here, who have all been fabulously useless to me in just about every respect.

Now I'm thinking of going to Tucson? Guess what's going to happen in Tucson.

If I can't get away from unhappiness because of the causes and conditions created by karma and this current life, and I'm not sure I believe in happiness anymore, I might as well be unhappy at the monastery. At least I won't be a burden to my family. Not that I'm a burden now, but it's the principle.

Accepting unhappiness to end up at the happiest place I've found thus far. Hmm.

But really, monastery needs to be placed back in the equation. Didn't I just say suicide needs to be placed back in the equation?

Pentax ZX-5n, Kodak BW400CN:

College baseball, Taida campus.

The most familiar stretch of my commute to school - Xindian riverside bikeway along the double-decker elevated freeway.