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

I've taken to sleeping on the floor like Adrienne Shelly in the movie Trust. Why? Because I'm hardcore, dude! No, I'm not sure why. Actually, I remember in my last few weeks in San Francisco, I also stopped sleeping in my bed. So I think this is a pattern, and I think it means something, yo.

Truth to tell, sleeping on the floor at my parents' house is still hella more comfortable than where many Katrina victims are sleeping.

I ordered a scanner. I figure that gives me until it is delivered to decide whether I really want and "need" it, and if I don't I can just send it back. You know the financial ice I'm standing on? I just poured a bucket of hot water onto it.

I'm still a mouse click away from taking an online TEFL course. There's no more deliberation involved, and I might as well do this. The same old motivation and moving forward issues prevent.

You know how I set up my drums last week? Today I put my road bike back into commission. Falling back into same old habits, same old patterns. I will need to ask myself shortly what has changed. I realize that wherever I go next, drums or bikes don't come with me, though. I'm just making the most of the luxuries I have here.

World Financial Center, NYC.

September 18, 2005; 4:20 P.M. - Inside the World Financial Center building, overlooking the World Trade Center site.

Living is fine. Living is easy. I can live no problem. 

I can live so well in such a way that when death comes, I'll have no problems with it and welcome it. 

If I can just make sense out of existence and what that's all about, I'll be set with this non-suicide thing. 

I don't care about the why of existence. I don't care why we're here, it's a moot point, we're here. Or at least I am, I don't know about you. I'm more concerned about the what of existence beyond molecules and atoms and matter. What is this eyeball? What is this step I walk? And it's not rhetorical. It's not even an answer I'm necessarily looking for.

The mystery roll of Tri-X turned out to not be Josephine's from 1998, but shots from September 4, 2000 at the West Indian Labor Day Parade in Brooklyn. I went with an old high school ex, Liz Rusch. We took the subway to Brooklyn. I went to see steel drums, but saw woeful few. It rained on us. I got a sticker saying "Mean People Suck" which got torn from getting wet, and now there's a sticker on my bass guitar, "People Suck".

August 28, 2005, 2:55 p.m.

The film switch from the Fujica to the Pentax was near perfect. No frames lost at the beginning, and I managed to not overlap the last frame taken with the Fujica when I advanced the film in the Pentax to finish the roll. There was just a slight gap – as perfect as I could hope for.

It's a trick you can only do with manual rewind cameras. You note the last frame shot in the first camera, then rewind the film until you feel it give and stop immediately so you don't rewind the film into the canister. If you're nervous about it, you should do it in complete darkness so you can open the camera without exposing any of the film. Then load the film into the second camera and advance the film by shooting with the lens cap on until you get to the same frame where it left off.

September 4, 2000 - Brooklyn, West Indian Labor Day Parade, Fujica ST605n, Kodak Tri-X.

September 12, 2005 - Same roll of film, Englewood Cemetery, Pentax K2, Tri-X (ISO 800).

Existence is still the hard thing for me. Not living. Living is easy. It's easy to enjoy living here, this wonderful planet, this wonderful world, even with all the crap and misery and frustrations. That's why in the end, in the worst of situations, people are just glad to be alive.

It might feel good to have some stability, some maturity. Have a job and make money and spend it, and go to bars with people and drink lovely beer. To shoot film and share photography online, play shakuhachi in cemeteries, play guitar in the corner of my room, bass with other people, drums if I were really lucky. Ride my bike,

I found another mystery roll of black and white Tri-X film. It was in the first SLR I started using back in 1995, an ancient (ca. late 1970s) Fujica ST605n that I found in my brother's room at my parent's house.

When I confessed to my brother that I nabbed the camera from his room, he told me I should have taken the other camera that was there, the Pentax K2, which is a better camera and was in perfect working order (I had to get the Fujica's light meter repaired).

The next time I came back to New Jersey, I did take the Pentax K2, which was the older brother of the workhorse Pentax K1000 that just about every photography student uses at one point or another, and the flagship camera of that line.

Anyway, after I took the K2, I didn't use the Fujica, so when Josephine wanted to get into photography, I lent her the Fujica. That's what's intriguing me about this roll of film, it might be hers! From seven years ago!

I'll see when the roll comes back from the lab on Friday. The Fujica isn't working again, so I had to switch the roll out to the K2 to finish it off. I hope I didn't expose any of the frames that were on the roll.

The only thing that makes me doubt that this is Josephine's film is that she kept a lot of my stuff in the break-up. How did this camera get back to me if it was in her possession at the break-up?


January 5, 1998 - Ocean Beach, San Francisco (yep, that's the Fujica, click and check it out)

I spent this morning in the photography section at Borders, reacquainting myself with the art and aesthetic. I don't fool myself that I'm a good photographer. I don't have a good eye. So many people I've known are just naturals. They point a camera and shoot and they come out with great shots. I'm not one of them. I just enjoy it and get some lucky shots once in a while.

I think there's an argument that art fits in with mindfulness practice, although there is the possibility of ego-attachment. It's important to focus on the process as mindfulness practice, and not on any ego enhancing sense of creating "art".

With black and white photography, you have to be mindful of the light, and be discerning of its qualities. You have to be equally mindful of the shadows, because if you're not paying attention to the shadows, why the hell are you shooting the light?

Composition is all-important. Even if you're shooting nothing, at least practice composition. A well-composed shot of nothing is more aesthetically pleasing than a great subject that is poorly composed. But if you find a good subject matter, that's better, paying attention to foreground and background.

And texture, but that's something I'm still trying to figure out. Anything else?


January 16, 2003 - Ocean Beach, San Francisco

I'm still trying to figure out my relationship with my parents. Living at their house is definitely the worst thing I could possibly be doing to myself. I'm still trying to hate them like I'm supposed to, I'm trying to rage, but on the other hand I'm just so sick of that. Anger is so 20 years ago. I have better things to do with my time and energy.

While I'm staying at their house, little contact is the best contact. I avoid them as much as possible, going out of my way and holing myself in my old room to avoid them. They put as little effort as possible to be in contact with me as well, which is actually quite offensive considering last month they wanted me to go to psychiatrist so that they could "understand" me.

This is how it's always been. When things aren't going the way they expect things to go, the way they've paid for things to go by raising us, they go into radio silence mode. So what was that shit about wanting to "understand" me? Baka. Idiots.

They're part of the black hole I've found myself in. I don't want to do anything. I have no motivation to move in my life. The closest people to me now are my parents, so that's a large part of the issue, the 'problem', maybe. I also feel I have no support to do anything. I certainly couldn't expect any support from anyone I know.

What the hell is this anyway about "support"? We're human beings, we're expected to pull ourselves out of the mud by our own bootstraps. Fuck support, how many people in the world move their lives without "support"? I'm such a weenie. I should just kill myself. Hahaha, which was my starting point all along until I recently gave it up. I crack myself up. I slay me.


December 26, 1997 - Josephine in Central Park

I woke up this morning knowing they were doing the September 11 thing in New York, so I switched on the TV and they were reading off the names. I ended up doing my morning sitting with the TV on and the names contributing to the stream of consciousness.

I tried to visualize what it might have been like in the North Tower above the impact zone. No one in the North Tower above the impact zone got out because all the elevators and stairwells were destroyed by the impact, unlike in the South Tower where one stairwell remained intact and passable from top to bottom.

I imagine very few people noticed the first plane approaching, but if they did and watched it, the feeling that this was very, very bad and something was about to go very wrong. I imagine that it was bad from the moment of the first impact.

Everyone would have heard the thunderous sound of the jet approaching seconds before impact, everyone would have felt the impact and explosion, everyone would have felt the building sway. The glass would have shattered and the scene would have immediately been chaotic and panicked. After that, it progressively got worse as smoke and fumes filled the upper floors, and for many people the situation was so literally and absolutely unbearable that it was a better decision to jump.

The reading of the names was very emotional, and I empathized and sympathized with the family and friends of victims. But I have to expand the scope of my sympathy beyond the sorrow of the people on TV who have the privilege of living in the wealthiest nation to have their sorrow broadcast publicly.

My sympathy goes around the world to the countless people who also grieve for brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, victims of U.S. policies and international government and corporate actions that indirectly contribute to the rage that led to September 11.

I don't mean to open myself up to accusations that I'm blaming the U.S. itself for September 11, or belittling anyone's grief. I'm just extending my sympathy to where I feel it properly belongs. We can selfishly own our grief and believe we are the only ones affected, but I can't listen exclusively to the grief over loved ones in New York without also feeling the grief of thousands more around the world who I don't hear in memorium on the TV. They also have brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons.

Still, the world changed that day, that's for sure. Historically speaking, it was easily the worst day of my life.

I finally got to see Wang Kar-Wai's 2046 at a predominantly Indian theater in North Bergen – a ratty, basement-like multiplex in a ratty, industrialized town with cracked, overgrown sidewalks covered with litter. Going there is always a sketchy proposition. I have to drive.

Most of the films there are Bollywood imports, and the clientele is largely South Asian, but I go there because they occasionally get indie and foreign films that are otherwise obscure in northern New Jersey. I always feel like an outsider there. I don't linger, just get to the theater, watch the film, and get out. And every time I've seen a film there, there hasn't been more than 10 people in the audience (the huge crowds waiting in the lobby are no doubt waiting for some Bollywood film or another).

I don't know if it's something about the Indian management, but I've never had trouble bringing a 35mm SLR camera into a theater before. They were rude and uncompromising, so I had to go back to my brother's car and leave it there. So I left my SLR, but took out my digital and tucked it into my pocket and walked back into the theater.

Rebel without a cause, I felt compelled to go into the theater and take pictures, which ordinarily would never have even crossed my mind:




The film itself was great, incredible. Signature Wang Kar-Wai. Visually sumptuous and the details of a scene he chooses to film are exquisite. Almost meditative. Definitely melancholy. His stories have very little plot, very train of thought storyline. He's a true artist with film. He uses shots and scenes to make you feel something or react, and the overlying plot or story is almost incidental. Like there might be the storyline going on, but I'd get lost in a shot and the feeling it evoked, not wanting to move on just yet.

I want to see it again, but I can wait for the DVD. I think Wang Kar-Wai films are best initially seen on a big screen, but then requisite follow-up viewings can be on small screen. You can't watch a Wang Kar-Wai film only once and claim to have seen it. I saw "In the Mood for Love" only once, and I can't make any claims to have seen it.

Probably no one but me would have thought how bleak life would become upon making a declaration of not committing suicide. And I did. I always considered it a fate worst than death to want to live. I'm such a barrel of laughs.

In any case, somehow I'm continuing to cultivate a positive mind. Maybe I'm deluding myself. Maybe it's the best I can do, and that's alright.

Continuing on the path of practice for whatever insight I might have on what I really believe this life and reality to be. Keep processing the elements I've brought into my life and look at what they are and what they mean to me.

The starting point is the same as it always has been as far back as I can remember (which says more about faults in my memory than any grand length of time), which is that physical reality is illusory, dream-like, a 3-D film screen that I can conceptually reach over and pull off.

It's real, no doubt, but the idea of "real" is subject to deconstruction. It's real in that it's here, but not real in terms of any inherent permanence or permanent agency. It's real in that we should live our lives, but not real as something to be attached to, or living it in a way not recognizing that it's a constantly changing flow.


November 10, 1996 - Market St., San Francisco

I give up. I won't commit suicide. Doesn't mean, though, that I can't keep hoping for, and meditating on, an untimely demise. But now I go on with my life, defeated, triumphant, dejected, happy. Keep practicing, keep following my heart, keep trying to open it up, keep trying to let it go.


July 25, 1997

So let's see. There's an intellectual meditative practice to help look beyond our causes of suffering. For example, if someone hits us with a stick, we don't get mad at the stick, but we get mad at the person holding the stick. 

The practice encourages us to look farther, and as the person controlled the stick to hit us, anger controlled the person to control the stick to hit us. Therefore (this is just thought experiment, mind you), we should think of the person as being no more unaccountable than the stick. Our energy should be used against the person's anger, the real enemy, and to assuage it by understanding it and acting according to that understanding. 

So when I think of the ways my parents cause me suffering, I need to look at what is causing them to act in a way that is causing me suffering. They aren't my enemy, I acknowledge that they don't intend to maliciously cause me suffering. But they act the way they do because of their own suffering. 

When I look at it that way, I see their deep suffering. They have money, but they aren't free. They are slaves to their own greed, their ideas of status, of success and failure, and what they think their children should be and do. They are oppressed by their own ultra-normative, narrow-minded way of looking at the world. 

They suffer because their happiness depends on what I do with my life – which is that they want me to live a superficial and normative life as they, an impossibility. If anything, they are the tragic figures. In my worldview, it's always a tragedy when happiness is dependent upon something outside of ourselves. Tragic world I live in. 

Of course, I'm a cause of suffering to them. So if they applied the same meditation, they should look at the causes of my suffering which causes me to act in a way that causes them suffering. Um, isn't it . . . them? 

If I'm suffering because of them, am I not looking for happiness outside of myself? Yay, I am tragic! not

 

Bangkok, Thailand - July 19, 1998

Remember, always look on the bright side of life.

This blog is really taking itself way too seriously.