Loosening things up ... this blog doesn't all have to be gloom and doom. Blog what I want. I don't want to attract any traffic here, which I know is a contradiction because, well, it's a fucking blog! I have a public blog on the internet to which I don't want people to come!

That's actually exactly right. I live in a thin, limbo space where I want to get things out, but I don't necessarily want them received.

I've been blog-surfing masochistically, finding myself on countless mind-numbing family blogs about Christians, kids and cooking, while also realizing the inordinate amount of incomparably boring running blogs on the web that make me want to put my fist through my laptop screen.

My blog isn't a running blog or a cycling blog, it's not a "theme" blog, but I run and ride, and I'll blog about runs and rides, knowing full well the subject matter might be incomparably boring to some.

One blog I found on its most recent pages looked like a running blog, detailing achievement and progress, but at first blush there were also posts that were frank, funny, and crude – instantly promising. I also found his running posts interesting, which gave me hope that maybe my running/cycling posts aren't total snoozers.

And ... I'm faster than him, hehe. At least over 3 miles, up to which we're comparable. Until I stopped running in May because of shin splints, I was pretty sure I could do a 10k at around 7:30 miles, or 45 minutes.

But reading back through his blog, he started it with a different and hilarious premise. It started with family memories based on quotes he and his two brothers remembered their father saying when they were growing up. Their father was no prince of the punks, either. He sounded like a foul-mouthed beer-swilling redneck Texas hick, but raised 3 incredibly sensible, observant and intelligent sons.

As he himself mentions, people seemed more interested in the back stories of the quotes, or his version of the back stories, than his own treatment of them, inserting them into Peanuts comics. And his brothers also offer their takes on his stories in the comments.

I guess the attraction for me is that I think it would be interesting to do that with my brothers. Or not. Because my parents weren't colorful characters, and many memories of growing up that we might have to share couldn't be spun in a humorous manner.

There wasn't anything between us and our parents, like "Don't get yerself killed, boy", that could later be interpreted as the best form of affectionate expression one's father could give. My father taught me to play pool, parallel park, and how to quickly memorize the 9s on the multiplication table. That's it.

And with me and my brothers, it would never be the three of us. I'll discuss the other brother with one of them, but that's it, and mostly to give some other third person a picture of what our upbringing was like, and rarely is there any hilarity involved.

That's also to be buffered by my oldest brother having turned out to be very good-natured, kind, conscientious and likable, and my older brother to previously have been the funniest among us. He could always find the funniest aspect of a story or find a funny way to express it. Not now so much, as he's become boring and complacent in normative family life, but he was naturally funny and that doesn't go away.

In the end, that's it for me. The stories we have, the stories we tell, our memories. Those are the blogs I'm looking for.

I just finished my second shift at work since leaving the newspaper in January. I went back for the first time last Tuesday after Eva – who through a bunch of circumstances over the past 10 months is pretty much the boss on the news floor now – explained to me that one of the full-time copy-editors just up and left one day. It sounded like an emergency.

Eva, mind you, is sick of this shit and recently handed in her resignation for the 3rd time this year, and after hearing that the response to it this time was, "Eva's stressed again, give her a few days off", she explained to them it was real this time and gave them her end date. The paper's management are still idiots.

But unlike my life over the past 10 months, a lot has changed at the Post. They actually found competent copy editors, who if they had found a year ago, I wouldn't have quit. Back then, I had one part-timer trying out who had to say to me, "I'm not stupid". If you have to tell me you're not stupid . . . you obviously haven't convinced me otherwise.

I'm being mean, I don't think she was necessarily stupid, she was just British. Just kidding. And I don't think I necessarily treated her like I thought she was stupid, but rushing to get out a newspaper every night, I wasn't in a position to give her a chance nor to communicate that I acknowledged she was not stupid. She was a stop-gap measure who did just enough work for me not to walk out myself.

She was eventually fired after I left.

The other person was clueless about time and deadlines, and he wasn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier. A nice enough bloke in Taiwan with his China doll, the usual stereotype, which is why he was there in the first place, but in the end he got fired, too.

He was also British, mind you, and they are pains in the ass for other reasons. The Post follows AP style and I always imagine these Brits seeing a British spelled word underlined in red by spell check and going, "that's not misspelled!" and ignoring it.

Actually, one of the current copy editors who is very good and professional and impressed me greatly when I worked with him last week is from Scotland, but his only fault is that I don't think he even knows what words are spelled differently between English and American. He had to ask about 'apologize', and I saw that 'defence' went to print this past week. Small fault, really. Definitely excusable. Unless he persists. 

However, I still don't want to go back to work. Still no reason to. Still have to get through my parents' visit in December, then attempt #2, and failing at that, then we'll see where I am.

I actually didn't even want to go in today. I contacted Eva yesterday ostensibly to confirm today (also to let her know I remembered so she wouldn't have to worry about that since she was off today), hoping she'd tell me they'd found a new hire and I didn't have to come in if I didn't want to. No such luck, and she got me to agree to at least one other shift later in the week.

Getting from day-to-day is hard. Moments are hard. Work is actually easy. The day ahead of a work shift is dread.

When I started blogging, it was so easy to find people who wrote about their lives and ideas and thoughts. They expressed themselves and found a voice in themselves. But apparently it's gotten too risky to do that, basically putting your diary online. But those blogs were also life stories people were writing. At least slices of life stories. It's telling that despite being interesting, that was too risky. But that's also why teenage girls' diaries had locks on them.

Now people just post family or trip pictures or family trip pictures and boring safe stuff to share only with close friends and family – the only people who might (barely) care about the most boring, superficial aspect of their lives.

Now the internet is full of "how to" blogs and theme blogs and the only time blogs are mentioned in media or conversation is when referring to the handful of "professional bloggers" – political commentators, mostly.

That's one reason I've kept this a heart-on-sleeve personal blog – just because everyone else has run away from doing this sort of thing. But everyone has to do their own risk assessment, and my risk is very low. Even people who've known me in the past who inadvertently find this get too freaked out to stay.

For some time now, this has been a pretty internal, navel-gazing blog. I do think that can be attributed to the loss of having a "community" of bloggers, just people doing the same thing that served as an inspiration. There's an analogy to life somewhere in here, I just know it.

I am waiting. I've decided. But I'm waiting for a reason. And while I'm waiting for my parents' December visit to Taiwan to come and go, I continue to ask myself what I would do if their visit wasn't forthcoming and there were no advantages to waiting.

In that case, I would be on a day-to-day basis as before, and I can't say that a second attempt wouldn't have already occurred. And I dare say that I couldn't anticipate lasting as long as until the time period of their visit. All conditions being what they are, the wait approaches excruciating levels.

There's still a little bit of element of my previous paradigm, which is that no matter what I'm planning, if I'm not doing it right now, I'm not going to do it. Putting suicide in the future is always a pattern of perpetual deferment. But it's less so this time; I'm being kinder to myself and not so cynical.

I'm certain another attempt is necessary at this time, and living a little while longer is not putting any doubt upon that necessity. And therefore there's nothing wrong with living a little while longer.

Weather has been horrible in Taipei, but it hasn't been getting to me like it has before. My first 2 years in Taipei it got to me because I thought that was the norm. But then for the following 2 years, the weather was . . . fine.

I hear it has something to do with La Niña patterns, and this year is a La Niña year, which is the reason for the near-constant drear with the few and far between appearances by the sun coming for mere hours at a stretch. Or a walk at night admiring the days-past-full moon and seeing Orion to remind me it's almost winter, and then hearing it pouring rain by the time I go to bed.

No, it's just not bothering me this time. In fact, if I wake up and there's not the slightest hint that the sky won't open up in short time, I'm perfectly happy just staying in bed. I'm pretty sure I'm clinically depressed, but this sort of terminology or definition doesn't mean anything to someone like me anymore. Years ago, that would be my way of saying it's bad, very, very bad. Now my meaning is that I'm way beyond it. In my world, I'm not depressed at all.

Tibet trip done and documented with nearly every damn detail; the two weeks waiting between the end of the Tibet trip and my parents' arrival was eased when my aunt called asking me to take her place on a bus tour of Taiwan's east coast with my uncle. She recently had surgery on her foot and couldn't go.

I agreed only because I wasn't thinking. Well, I was thinking that I had been thinking of going on a solo trip down the east coast, and that even though this was another package tour with a fixed schedule, the kind made for older folk and people who are lazy about traveling, it would at least give me the opportunity to scope things out and see where I could go on a solo excursion.

Where I wasn't thinking was that I had gone on one of these tour bus packages before with my aunt a couple of years ago (taking the place of my uncle that time who couldn't go), and I think I must have thought afterwards, "Never again".

Again.

I don't know if I had written about the previous bus tour in central Taiwan, but if I did, I wish I had re-read that entry before going on this tour, which was only 3 days, which didn't seem like a lot compared to 10 days in Tibet.

If I had to do the ordeal of 10 days in Tibet over again or the 3 days on the east coast of Taiwan, I would easily choose the 10 days in Tibet again. At least on that trip, everyone left me alone and I could listen to my iPod in peace.

Tour bus package in Taiwan means on-board karaoke, so there was no retreating to the comfort of my iPod as karaoke volumes are preventive. And there was my clueless, nagging uncle, who thinking I was bored or lonely tried to get other people, who knew as little English as he does, if that's possible, to talk to me.

I always try to be at least polite, but I had no problem being rude to these people and blowing them off, as I knew their efforts were coerced and artifice, and ultimately patronizing. I have no more patience for small talk with older people who don't speak English and mean nothing to me.

After those three days, we got back to Kaohsiung, and despite my uncle telling my aunt that I wasn't happy, I told her the trip was pretty cool, because I love my aunt and I didn't want her to feel bad if I had a bad experience, and she'll believe me before she believes her doofus husband. I did insist, however, on leaving immediately to return to Taipei, which I had determined on the trip because I just had to get away.

Then my parents visited the following week, also a bit of a disaster. But that was, at least, expected.

OK, it wasn't a disaster. It just wasn't anything.

What I didn't expect was that they had gotten a reference for a fortune teller in Taipei and I helped them go to him because, well, I didn't care, whatever they wanted to do, I'd help them. But they ended up getting my fortune told and I guess the guy actually did me a favor by putting them on notice, indicating that something was seriously wrong.

Now, I don't have a firm stance on fortune tellers. This blog started with an impromptu street fortune telling. I don't discount them in a wholesale way, but I'm highly suspicious of them. I do think there is some sort of science about what many of these people do, but I also think there are some people who really do have insight into the workings of things that aren't apparent.

Apparently this guy was totally accurate about me, but mind you everything was in Taiwanese, I didn't hear anything directly from him, but only through the filter of my parents, who don't know me nearly as much as they think they do – they're delusional like that, they also think their English is better than it is, so that's another filter.

However, among all the "accurate" things he said, I didn't hear that he said anything about alcohol, and that's a big strike against him. Even my chiropractor in San Francisco, who was certified in Chinese holistic practices, tactfully told me to avoid alcohol, which is a polite way of saying I drink too much. Someone supposedly clairvoyant and able to pick up all these details about me should be able to figure out what a major part of my life alcohol is.

Anyway, he conveniently put my parents on notice that something's wrong, so when something does go wrong, they'll be able to go back to what this fortune teller said and feel some sort of affirmation. It will, I'm pretty sure, make them feel better because in their world it would at least make sense. It won't be a complete surprise that they can't figure out. The fortune teller said so.

They didn't listen to me when I was asking for help for my sleeping problems two years ago (I never ask anyone in my family for help, that's how bad it was). It's in remission now, but because the fortune teller pointed it out, suddenly I have to go see a doctor, I have to go to therapy to deal with the sleeping problem, because a sleeping problem is such a big problem. I'm being sarcastic, yo.

My parents are coming again in December and I can probably make it that long I shouldn't wonder. Another attempt is still definite, though. These days are getting harder and harder in the moments, but I'm working on happiness meditations and stabilizing my mindset into positive or neutral spaces.

Reminding myself of the value of nothing whatsoever should be clung to, and that I don't believe in the substance of physical reality as it is. All things by nature are conditional and impermanent. And the value of my life, although great, has run its course as far as I can discern. And it's my discernment that is important, no one else's.

First frames of the last roll of black & white film photography. Nikon N70, Ilford XP2 Super.

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2 - Xindian River bikeway near Gongguan approaching twilight on an overcast day.