It's time to start winding this blog down. Not many blogs like this anymore anyway. Maybe I'll try to update as least as possible, rather than most; only when there's something to update, otherwise just mark time passing, to mark that I'm still here.

I'm thinking I should affirmatively put suicide back on the agenda. I was thinking that I want control over this, I don't want to succumb to whatever – liver, kidney failure or whatever – and if I'm not doing it now, then I'm not taking control over it, because at any time I can get run over by a car or bus, especially the way I ride my bike.

Maybe it's the insomnia talking, but from what I hear, there are direct correlations between sleeplessness and suicide. There's a reason sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture, and I've never been one to say I could hold up to torture. I've always been weak that way. And maybe there's a reason for my insomnia. My unconscious is telling me something. Me and my unconscious need a better way of communicating. But I get the message loud and clear. If you can't sleep, you can't live.

So I can't sleep. I need a new paradigm. Maybe this is a breaking through to something else. Even realizing I can't work anymore because of this, which is another reason towards suicide. If I can't make my own way in the world, what right do I have being in it?

I've said all I've wanted to say here. All entries for however long have just been marking time. I don't need to do it that often anymore. Just superficial shit maybe. Otherwise, just move forward. Forward in an only way that I know and have always known. Just a few months more at most. I'm not looking through another winter.

Around my work area in Datong District. Nikon N70, Ilford XP2 Super.

I don't know if freaked out is the word. Maybe perplexing would be more neutral and indicative of the lack of real emotional response I'm having towards Facebook. People with photos of their babies or having gotten married, blah, blah, blah, bores me to death. If only it were that easy. God how I want nothing to do with those people and their perceived boring, normative lives. I'd rather die. Death would be a much more worthwhile experience. Unfortunately, as conscious memory goes, it's a one-time deal, with not a lot of memory.

Maybe that's what adulthood is all about. When you make the decision that whatever teenage/college-aged paradigm that used to make life interesting gets buried in favor of the lifetime partner, procreation, nesting, settling down. Why did you get married? Why did you start a family? Did you think you were buying safety when you bought that piece of ground? She said all the best freaks are here, please stop staring at me.

All I have are reasons why not, and few are the people I want to hear the answers from. Luyen I'd want to hear. Diem I would not. Ed I would not. Dong I would not. Madoka I would not. Amina I would not. Nobuko I would. Vikki I would . . . not. Maybe it's the insomnia talking. It's in full swing, and I felt I was pre-meltdown at work today. I flipped the calendar a page forward at work today for a look-see and August . . . why am I doing this to myself. How much longer can this go on? I'm convinced that it won't. My health has to collapse sooner rather than later, and insomnia is only weakening my system.

I was supposed to meet a friend on Wednesday, but didn't hear back from him until later in the evening. He was in the hospital with appendicitis. He had just gotten back to Taiwan to start a new job when this happened. He was supposed to sign a new lease that day. When I went to visit him in the hospital the next day, he had people there with him. He was hardly waiting for me to show up. Afterwards, I thought that if my appendix broke, I'd probably die. If I had excruciating, debilitating pain, I wouldn't think of getting myself to the hospital or ER, as he had. I'd just suffer it in my apartment, maybe crawl to the Keelung riverbank in a protracted nightmare, but from what I hear, if you don't get your appendix operated on, you die.

And I wouldn't have peeps attending to me.

I'm just preparing to enjoy the dying process. Clear the thoughts, calm the mind, relax the body, let it happen. Smile. Even times when depression or depressive thoughts come to mind, I just mentally put my fingertips on it, and move it to a physical space outside of me and it's not depressing. It has no reality, it's plastic, malleable. Pre-meltdown at work, move it away from me. Feelings that used to attack me aren't me anymore, aren't mine. Pain and pleasure actually are the same thing, just different degrees of that thing. I was trying to explain that to a co-worker today with the mosquito bite meditation, and she wasn't getting it. She will, but not today.

Truth to tell, much of my perceived discontent has gone under meditation. Why discontent? Discontent is desire unfulfilled. What's the desire? Is it something to be fulfilled? Is it something fulfillable? Under scrutiny for what it really is, discontent also goes away. Breathe, and satisfaction is right here. Desire itself is unfulfillable. If I have desire, it's an affliction. Satisfying the desire doesn't cure the affliction.

I'm gonna try to go to sleep. I'll be awake in 3 hours and struggling to get enough rest for another full-time shift tomorrow. Saturday night is the easiest shift, which is why I took it, my 3rd full-time shift in a row.

Been spending much of my online time with a new Facebook account. Social networking? Fuckall.

I actually had a Facebook account before, but didn't see much point to it, so I deleted it. This time I had a reason, though. Got a few emails from people wanting to add me, then a co-worker was heading back to the U.S. and his main web presence was his Facebook page, and then I saw another local co-worker on her Facebook page, so I created another one. Now it's a fast-fading obsession.

Got bombarded by people who I never wanted to hear from again to add as friends, and I did just to be polite, and to prove I'm not the bitter prick that I really am. And then again I hunted down a few people and was glad to touch base with them. The high school people I'm the most what-the-fuck about. No one from college is coming near me. Fuckers. And then a random assortment of people I've run into over the years, or current acquaintances. It's a safe space, unlike this blog, which is toxic and I don't want to know who knows about it. Except for Luyen who was pretty straightforward about finding it. Although I'm not ruling out participating in blog-stalker outing day, whenever that is.

My friggin' brother even emailed about my Facebook presence, and I'm hoping my non-response will be a sufficient answer. Both my brother and sister-in-law have sent me emails since I came back to Taiwan to which I haven't replied. My other brother's birthday just passed and I didn't send him an email. This is supposed to mean something, yo'.

Insomnia is still in my news. Let's see, so I had Saturday off, so after work on Friday I took a sleeping pill, expecting nothing to come out of Saturday, and yea, Saturday was a total wash. I slept nine hours, on a Target brand sleeping pill that expired in 2005, and then some. Was groggy for the rest of the time. Then without a sleeping pill on Saturday night I slept another 9 hours+ and stumbled my way through a full-time shift at work on Sunday. Then Sunday night I couldn't sleep at all and immediately went into twilight sleep, emerging well enough 10 hours later and got through a part-time shift no problem.

Serious lower back ache, perhaps from the sleeping pills. It's that more than anything else that reminds me something's gotta give.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 15, 1:22 p.m. - My desk at home. At least it'll be curious to me to see this years from now.

Back in Taiwan. Taking stock in things, but constantly taking stock in life is not what life's about.

Insomnia's back with a vengeance, work may be mellowing out. Or maybe I'm mellowing out. I'm trying not to let the insomnia get to me like it did before. It became a nightmare last year. Or I let it become a nightmare. Well, I'm sure there's a better word, since sleep with nightmares is better than no or not enough sleep.

And I have had a few nightmares during the twilight sections of insomnia. One involving my apartment – particularly the floor – slowly dissolving, and one involving spiders, but I wasn't fearing them, just killing them. And they were big, stringy ones in the Taiwan wild, not the subtle slips of spiders that have actually been invading my apartment. And which I've been killing because there have just been too many of them. I tried letting them be.

I'm trying to have a better attitude towards it: I got 4 hours of sleep last night – Yay! OK, it doesn't really work. Afternoon naps before work are key to getting through shifts, but I don't know where things are going with the accumulated loss of sleep, since 2-3 hours of sleep at night and a couple hours nap in the afternoon in a 24 hour cycle is arguably not enough. Bring on the psychotic episodes, I haven't hallucinated in quite a while. Not since . . . last year. And zero jetlag coming back to Taiwan, btw. I forget if I had insomnia right away, but it couldn't have been more than a day or two.

Well, I got going to the U.S. out of my system.

My oldest brother and sister-in-law did an awful lot for me while I was there. They were gracious hosts to say the least and my brother did the whole switching out hard drives thing for my laptop, which doesn't take a genius to do, but I'm an idiot with zero computer know-how. But now I have zero compunction to go back there. They were too polite to me, and they refused my gestures of thanks. All they did was give to me and didn't take.

I decided to axe the idea of ever moving to Kaohsiung because I have nothing to do with the lives of my extended family down there. They wouldn't be taking me in and taking from me. I'd just be a burden of a guest that they think they would have to take care of. I don't blame them for that, it's mostly my own doing. I'm a porcupine and people approach me only when I let them. I project that I don't want to be imposed upon and I work on my own agenda.

And in New Jersey, if all I'm doing is taking and if I even try to give it's rejected, then I'm just a guest and will never be a part of their lives. This is a lesson in giving and taking, I suppose. Moralists expound the virtues of giving, but part of giving is knowing when to take, too. Taking is an important part of giving, because if you're not taking, you're not allowing giving. Arguably selfish.

The last time I went to Kaohsiung, ahead of my trip to the U.S., my aunt gave me something to give to my parents – dried fish egg or something I wouldn't ever eat. She gave it to me several weeks in advance of my trip, and I took several precautions to remember to bring it. Ultimately, I forgot it in the common refrigerator on the floor of my building, even though I reminded myself to pack it the day that I left. Ultimately, I'm just not in the habit of thinking of anyone else or doing anything for anyone else. Here in Taipei, all I've had to think about for the past year and a half was myself, and that's become ingrained habit.

I've been having karmic problems with giving.

On the other hand, when I came back to Taiwan, I brought a box of cookies I bought at the airport in Vancouver for my co-workers. I anonymously left them at the entrance with the pile of today's newspapers that everyone is supposed to pick up to review the previous day's work. I expected no one to be interested, but to my surprise, they were all gone way before the end of the shift, and people wanted to know where they came from and called out thanks to me to my embarrassment. Now that felt like home. And marks a shift in my attitude towards my workplace.

Also, I just heard from my mentor in high school. He was my Junior year physics teacher, but he was also a musician, and that was the way in which he mentored me. When we parted ways way back when, I gave him my elementary school trombone. I don't remember the circumstances in which I gave it to him, but he was a true musician to the core. It didn't matter what instrument he was playing, he could make music come out of it. I met up with him in Tucson in 2003 or 2004 and he gave me a CD of his that he made, on which he played all the instruments. It just blew me away. He's a professional astrophysicist, but I don't know if that gives or takes away from what an amazing musician he is.

Anyway, back when I was in high school, there was a time when I told him my first instrument was trombone and I pulled it out for him, and he just picked it up and just started blowing like he'd been playing for years. I think it was because of that I gave it to him. Anyway, I just found him on FaceBook recently, and he told me he had recently thought of me because he had given the trombone to an 11-year-old from Scotland who had come to Tucson, but had to leave his trombone behind. I told him nothing could please me better than to know that an act of giving I made years ago could still be giving now. Good giving karma all-around, as he put it.

SATURDAY, JULY 11, 5:57-6:33 p.m. - Taiwan supporting Tibet, Xinyi District.

Keelung Road. Nikon N70, Ilford XP2 Super.

Keelung Rd. and Zhongxiao E. Rd. intersection, Xinyi District.

Xinyi District

SUNDAY, JULY 12 - Xing Tian Kong temple. Minquan E. Rd, Sec. 2 and Songjiang Rd. Rainbow V 22mm lens toy camera, Kodak BW400CN.

Fuxing S. Rd. and Ren Ai Rd.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

I don't know why I should be so surprised, but I didn't expect to be so coldly indifferent to my parents during this visit. Recently I've been able to maintain an impressively high level of courtesy, and whenever I met them in Taiwan during their passing-through visits, I did my best to be helpful in getting them around. But this time, I just had no patience for them and just did my best to control myself not to be rude.

It's possible that because of my negative experience in a foreign country, their country, I may be childishly lashing out at them in response. They represent Taiwan to me, and all the crap I've been going through has not, at least, been mitigated by them. I'm an island unto myself on that island and it means diddly that my ancestry comes from there or that I have relatives there.

Backlashing against Taiwan, I'm in the U.S. now, my home country, and unlike in Taiwan, when I say something I expect people to understand the words that are coming out of my mouth, and when other people speak, I expect to understand with no interpretation of language in the way. My parents don't fit that bill.

After I got off the plane in San Francisco on the way here, I found myself engaging in whatever little conversation I could with whoever, just because I could.

In any moment they're completely innocent, of course, but considering the whole parent-child relationship spanning the years, if I'm looking for a reason to blame them for my woes, their deficiencies get magnified by the smallest thing; a wrong look, a tone of voice I don't like.

It doesn't help that I know better, that blame doesn't do any good, nor does anger or thinking I can be happy by something they do. It doesn't help that I know this thinking is negative and unreasonable. All I hope for is that no expression of the negativity or anger is expressed, and that I can just keep working at it to transform it into something else.

So my three weeks in the U.S. are just about up. I'm not caring much to go back to Taiwan. I'm just going to float. I'm just going to work on not caring. Did I care before? What's going to be different? Am I just going to fall back into the same repetitive dysfunctional habits?

I want things to be different. I want to proactively be more productive and positive, but I'm just not like that. So I can't be caring about such things.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 1 - Baby Zayden. Bottom pic 12:21 p.m. All black & whites Nikon N70, Ilford XP2 Super.

FRIDAY, JULY 3 - Taking the train to Philadelphia, transferring systems (NJ Transit to Septa) at Trenton.

Philadelphia

Sarah Rebecca

7:01 p.m. - Christopher getting creative about being photographed.

SATURDAY, JULY 4 - Philadelphia street shooting.

MONDAY, JULY 6 - Paramus Park shopping mall, New Jersey.

Edgewater, New Jersey

Grant's Tomb and Riverside Church across the Hudson.