May 26-29

SATURDAY, MAY 26 - Port of Kaohsiung photostroll. Pentax ZX-5n, Kodak BW400CN.

I can't help but read the ship's name as "Sardonic Wave". And it says Panama, but I keep thinking it's Greek.

SUNDAY, MAY 27 - Morning photostroll through the Port of Kaohsiung rail yard.

There's a structure by the tracks in the upper left quadrant that I've photographed before up-close. I still don't know what it is.

Pedestrian tunnel drilled through the southern-most portion of the Shoushan mountain and leads to Nat'l Sun Yat-sen University and the Xiziwan beach area where my uncle goes for a swim in the sea every morning. He drives, though, and has to go a little further south to go around the mountain.

Afternoon photostroll along the various waterfronts.

Northern access to Port of Kaohsiung.

Robot 85 building and clouds.

Xiziwan ferry wharf to Cijin island. It's a very short ferry ride (less than 10 minutes) that crosses the north entrance of the Port of Kaohsiung.

1:19 p.m. - Xiziwan Bay. Sun Yat-sen University to the left. The beach area where my uncle swims every morning, a little to the right. And more to the right of that is the port entrance above that structure stretching out into the sea that leads ships in.

1:25 p.m. - Beautiful natural settings inspire temples.

1:45 p.m.

5:23 p.m. - The rail line that served the Port of Kaohsiung is being converted to recreational paths.

9:13 p.m. - My cousin Peter's children, Sunny and Bob, playing Nintendo Wii. His wife and one of my aunts (Peter's mother who has always been completely kind and hospitable towards me) present. Being completely kind and hospitable in family terms means simply I love and appreciate her.

MONDAY, MAY 28 - Photostroll north along the Love River that I've done in the recent past.

The temple that I've shot before where Audrey's mother is interred.

 I will just lazily call this the Zuoying area of Kaohsiung (and it very well may be) because of the tracks and the road that goes to the Zuoying HSR station when someone drives me.

Pagodas at Lotus Pond that I visited last year with classmates.

5:59 p.m. - Lotus Pond.

TUESDAY, MAY 29, 2:31 p.m. - Pagoda at Cheng Qing Lake, Kaohsiung.

2:36 p.m. - Kaohsiung skyline from aforementioned pagoda.

2:44 p.m. - Kaohsiung skyline detail utilizing the Ricoh Caplio R4's outstanding zoom.

3:15 p.m. - Nine corner bridge at Cheng Qing Lake with the Grand Hotel Kaohsiung in the background. I think it is related to the Grand Hotel Taipei with its similar architecture, but I'm not sure what the connection is. I have photos taken here from when I visited with my brothers when we were kids. In all my visits to Kaohsiung since then, this is the first time coming back here.

Cheng Qing Lake with the pagoda in the background.

4:32 p.m. - Relatives on my mother's side of the family took me to Cheng Qing Lake before, but this time it was 姿慧, my cousin and only family member I'm in contact with on my father's side, who took me there. She took me on her motor-scooter, which is the first time ever in Kaohsiung that I've ridden on a motor-scooter (bit of an adventure for me). We have some strange karma/mojo between us. She hasn't had the easiest of lives and she is Buddhist, associated with Taiwan's Tzu Chi organization, which I find curious but respect because they do very good work. 

4:33 p.m. - The view from her apartment balcony. She lives in a place with this kind of view, but she's not well-off and although it's not a dump, it's a little threadbare. Her father, my father's younger brother, died a long while back, and I remember hearing the news just as raw news, and I'm finding it hard to forgive my father for not making sure she and her siblings were alright. The funky karma I have with her I think is good, even if we can't plumb our relationship because of the language barrier. With my father, not so much. I'm shooting northwest towards where my uncle lives with Shoushan Mt. visible at the right. All these years I've been coming to visit Kaohsiung, she's been here. It took my uncle's second wife, Audrey's stepmom, to reconnect us. That's a KMRT station under construction down there. Like my uncle, she will live right on a KMRT line.

I had an unscheduled break from the internet when I went to Kaohsiung and my laptop couldn't connect to the wireless down there.

The semester ended on Friday, good riddance, and I took the train to Kaohsiung in the afternoon. The reason I went immediately after classes ended was because there was a wedding reception of one of my cousins on my father's side that I had the opportunity to go to on Saturday.

Saturday, May 26, 5:56 p.m. - Home of a relative on my father's side who I can't name or place because of lack of familiarity. From the look of this I gather they are pretty well-off.

Mind you, until recently I've had very sparse knowledge of my father's side of the family. It was to the extent that when people asked me about relatives on my father's side, I said I didn't think there were any. I would further elaborate that I thought my father might have been grown in a test tube. It made sense to me.

Apparently the information blackout is one way, as most of the people I met at the reception had an idea who I was and where I was in the tree. Furthermore, there were people who had even visited my parents house in New Jersey, and at least one family of relatives who actually lived in New Jersey that I had no idea about.

May 26, 8:24 p.m. - Even though I say I don't know who they were, a lot of them were vaguely familiar. I couldn't place who they were, but I could remember having met them a long, long time ago.

The cause of the blackout can only be attributed to my parents' unwillingness to share or discuss facts, details, whereabouts, or even the existence of relatives on my father's side. The reason? I haven't the slightest, and have no feelings one way or the other about it.

At the reception, I asked the people I was sitting with whether there was a family tree anywhere. The response, "Oh yes, someone made it several years ago – oh wait, it was your father who made it." Information blackout. Come to think of it, that's as close as it gets to a father saying "fuck you" to his son without outright saying it (maybe he wasn't familiar enough with the English) – as far as he's concerned, I have no past, no context in respect relation to him. My father's side of the family is just this thing out there, hovering over or based in Kaohsiung, that I have no relationship with. If it was a boat tied to a pier, I'd have no feelings about chopping the rope and letting it drift off to sea.

The cousin that got married is probably the babiest of any that I could consider my "baby cousin" – cousins who were distinctly babies in my memory. There's only one other – Mimi, on my mother's side, who I knew as a kid since her family also immigrated to New Jersey. She eventually moved to San Francisco while I was there. Sweet kid.

This cousin was a wee baby when I first visited Taiwan, and I probably have a picture from that visit somewhere. All of these people might as well be strangers. "Hi, so you're my cousin. Nice to meet you. Congratulations on getting married." So what.

Negativity: part II
The negativity is here. I think I've plumbed the depths of it and found no bottom, no source of it, no reason for it. No glowing nugget of negativity to attest to its reality. It just arises as mirages in moments, reflections in the mirror. Ripples of karmic waves, distorting my perception.

Yes, what that person just did made me react negatively, angrily. Yes, he's a dumb-ass. But wait, would I think this way if it was my best friend, someone I know, someone I love? So this negative reaction isn't absolute. It's relative, it's conditional.

If it's not real, if it's not reality, then why cling to it? Why treat it like reality? Why treat it like it's real? Let the anger go, let the negativity subside, and . . . . . . . . . ok, ok, fine, he's not a dumb-ass, either. Sheesh, get off my back.

Along with the negativity is aggression. I notice the aggression mostly when I'm riding in traffic. It's tricky because the aggression is helpful in making me ride defensively. That's another story though – riding defensively by riding aggressively. Maybe to other people it looks like I'm on the offense, but to me it's being defensive. Oh God, W. Bush philosophy has pervaded my blog.

I've noticed the aggression as an entity, not unlike the negativity, more, and I've also noticed, for example, when I get to the relative safety of campus, I have to make an effort to turn it off, or find it hard to turn off.

I do have latent aggression in me, as well as violence. If I'm attacked, I will defend myself, aggressively or violently if need be. In my mind, I imagine becoming aggressive or violent with less! Even if I don't act out on it, it's here.

There's a scene in Tsai Ming Liang's latest movie, translated as "I Don't Want to Sleep Alone", where one character gets angry (uncharacteristically emotional in a Tsai Ming Liang film) at another character, and holds a sharp object to his throat.

In Tsai Ming Liang style, of course nothing happens. He holds the scene and lets the raw scene convey the emotion without any movement. Ultimately, the character backs off.

What I saw were two non-violent people, perhaps a suggestion of a society that is non-violent. The character gets angry and behaves violently, but ultimately can't go any farther. Furthermore, the person who is being threatened doesn't react or defend himself violently.

I forget what happens next, but I wouldn't be surprised if they just rolled over and went to sleep – to give you an idea of what a Tsai Ming Liang film is like.

I wouldn't mind getting rid of the latent aggression and violence in my mind, but that's way down the line for me. My current mind practices being sharp, being responsive, being aware as a means of reacting.

I do have practices to work on it, but I'm not fooling myself thinking that I'm really changing my nature in any fundamental way, as I think it is possible with the negativity. An example of a practice is when walking in public, people get in my way and my natural reaction is to feel a flare of anger or defensiveness.

The practice is to take the fault upon myself and mentally send out an apology whenever such an encounter occurs, which is near constant when in public in Taipei. Sometimes even actually apologizing when my mind is thinking "what the fuck? get out of my way". Yup, long way to go.

SUNDAY, MAY 20, 6:40 p.m. - Shots from my new apartment window. Xindian skyline detail, long zoom.

TUESDAY, MAY 22, 7:48 a.m. - Crossing the Jingmei River on the way to school.

Negativity: part I
Through all the negativity of mine that I've been harping about for the past year or more, I think I've actually been positive about it. Really, the worse thing would be to be caught up in the negativity without any self-awareness about it – to just react to external stimuli and become a negative being for however long it lasts.

That's what negativity is – a being. It's like a flash with all of the molecules in my body, maybe just the energy related ones, polarizing and I become the negativity itself. The negativity is here, it's a latent part of my being. I'm not trying to get rid of it anymore. I look at it as a possible karmic result; past actions manifesting.

The theory would be that previously I acted negatively and that became part of my being, part of the habit of my being. It's here now because I cultivated it before in a deep and intense way, without any self-awareness or self-reflection. Actions now become seeds for later. Seeds before manifest as action now, given the right circumstances and conditions. Actions now used to be actions before.

In this lifetime, other karma, as well as causes and conditions, have allowed me to be self-aware of the negativity. It's here, but I'm aware that I don't like it, I don't like the way it makes me act, I don't like the way it makes me think, I don't like the way it makes me feel, and I can change it. It doesn't have to be this way. I have the tools to counter it.

The action now is to cultivate countering it, and step by step, it's removed completely. Even in a near-future lifetime, the negativity may continue to exist depending on how deeply it was cultivated before, but by cultivating countering it, the hope is that will be more natural and habitual to counter it, or for the positive to exist and grow and be cultivated.

Little weird. It's fair to say that I've always been, more or less, a heavy drinker. But I never considered it a problem. I was never physically addicted. It didn't really get in the way of things I had to do, it was rarely debilitating, if ever, it didn't really affect the way I dealt with other people. It wasn't a problem. I just drank a lot.

Then just last week I was feeling a little worried that it was getting out of hand. Part of me was telling me to rein it in, and the other part of me responsible for actually reining it in . . . wasn't doing its job.

There were times before I left my apartment that I told myself if I had a drink before I left, I would have to admit having a problem. And even though I could get through that, I consider that behavior extreme. The pangs were still there. The key word in my mind in telling myself to not drink was "drink", yo'm say'n?

I was thinking, OK, this is bad, it may be time to submit that I'm an alcoholic . . . with a problem. And then I suddenly stopped drinking for the entire week without even thinking about it, with less than two shots left in a bottle of a vile local liquor that is 116 proof, 58% alcohol.

I was exposed to this liquor soon after I got here. My uncle comes to Taipei fairly often for meetings with a bus association, and when they have dinners, he often invites me along. The first time he invited me, they had this stuff, Kinmen Kaoliang 58 or something. Tasted awful. And seemed particularly strong, but I couldn't tell if it really was particularly strong, or if it just tasted particularly awful.

Eventually I did find out that the 58 is in reference to the alcohol content, considerably stronger than 40-46% I'm used to (although not nearly as strong as the 151 rum I killed my vocal chords with). And I learned to take the taste in stride.

Several months ago, they invited a bunch of bus operators from South Korea for some reason. South Koreans are notorious heavy drinkers, of course, and proud of it, of course. They served Kinmen Kaoliang 58, and it was really hilarious seeing them take their first shot of this stuff.

You don't need a common language to understand what is this vile, disgusting stuff? on someone's face. Of course, they were pounding the stuff back by night's end. But they made that face everytime they drank it. It's quality liquor, just really harsh.

So I think I can give myself a clean bill of substance abuse health.

I just haven't wanted to finish off that bottle. I get into grooves. If I stop drinking for a while, I lose all desire to have a drink. Even the thought of it sometimes makes me queasy. I just don't want to feel that way.

And even if I go out and have a drink with other people, nothing stronger than beer or wine, when I get home, I won't want to continue. But once I decide to finish this bottle off, I'm pretty sure I'll buy another bottle within days, if not the next day, if not that day.

And I will eventually finish this bottle off. If not tonight, tomorrow, or the next day, or the next, or the next. . .

May 6-12

Pentax ZX-5n, Kodak BW400CN. I don't know what it was about developing this roll of chromogenic (C-41) black & white film. Exposures came out surprisingly satisfying, but they don't seem to be true black & white even when all the chroma has been removed. They originally came back with a brownish/sepia tint, but when chroma was removed they then seem to have a blue-ish hue. Usually I expect them to come back with one tint or another, as it's typical with this kind of film, but then the tint is removable. Not this time.

SUNDAY, MAY 6 - Crossing the Fuhe Bridge from Taipei to explore the left bank of the Xindian River to see how far the bikeway went. 

 The left bank bikeway goes quite far - to the end of the Xindian River where it drains into the Danshui River - but construction blocked further advance.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 9 - Telephoto zoom from my apartment window, shooting west on Fuxing Rd., Xindian. Taiwan is littered with shrines and temples embodying local deities. On special days to particular temples, processions head out on the streets making a grand cacophony and display in honor of their resident deity.

5:28 p.m. - I've been experimenting pushing the limits of the Ricoh Caplio R4's digital zoom. Quality-wise the results aren't impressive, but it is impressive how close it can get to things far away.

THURSDAY, MAY 10 - Xindian high-rise skyline detail from my window, telephoto zoom.

MAY 12 - Photostroll around my neighborhood.

Recreation under Roosevelt Rd. along the Jingmei River that I've shot a few times before. This time with doggo!

10:21 a.m. - Digi provides timestamps for film.

10:33 a.m. - The bridge I cross everyday to get to Taipei. Its days years are numbered.

It's always nice when there's a lull in the nightmare.

After a noose-tying stretch of rain in early April, I think the rest of April can be considered not quite as bad. It's as if the rain knew I had beaten it by having moved into the new apartment with a view of the outside world and privacy (I had!), and decided to lay off. And my master begrudgingly put away the unused clown mask.

I know it's just a lull, though, it's just superficial.

At this point I'm considering going to the U.S. for a visit in late May. I'm leaning towards going. That's usually the case, isn't it? Once I get the idea, momentum starts building and there's no stopping it.

This time, though, it's legitimate, practical reasons making it better to go now – visa, plane ticket, hopefully being able to buy a one-way ticket back to Taiwan so I don't always have these deadlines every year to go back.

So I don't have these deadlines every year to go back?

Wasn't I just recently thinking about going back for good? I'm so easy to please, it's shameless. A little spate of good weather, an apartment that isn't reminiscent of a cave, and now I'm thinking of staying in Taiwan indefinitely?

And yet it can't be indefinite. That I know.

TUESDAY, MAY 1, 12:45 p.m. - Visiting Hyun Ae in Dazhi. She's checking out my new electronic dictionary.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 4:16-4:20 p.m. - Fuhe Bridge crossing the Xindian River into Yonghe township, with the double-decker expressway in the background.

MAY 3, 2:36 p.m. - Near Yongkang "foodie" St.