2017 mix CDs

It seems like there should have been a sea change in the K-pop girl group scene in 2017 with the epidemic I mentioned before of girl groups disbanding, losing members or falling into limbo with inactivity or no news to the point of potential irrelevance. It was shocking. Yet here I am with no problem still filling two CDs for 2017. New groups have emerged amidst new trends and new top groups. Same as it ever was.

All the extra video links are supplementary videos that I enjoy. The full stage "camcorders" are room sound quality (poor), but they capture the full choreography and the audience noise, and are the closest facsimile of what it might be like to actually be there. I started linking the unofficial stage mixes by a user whose editing skills are amazing in 2016 and continue here (they also serve as a terrific review of fashions and variations girl groups go through in the course of a promotion). And then other various and sundry videos that I like.

(updated 1/15/2019)
2017 mix CD, part one (zip download):
1. Girl Front (Odd Eye Circle (LOOΠΔ)) (music video)
2. Baby Face (Cosmic Girls (WJSN)) (official audio)
3. Rookie (Red Velvet) (full stage camcorder, stage mix)
4. I Don't Like Your Girlfriend (Weki Meki) (live version, full stage camcorder, funny relay version)
5. Excuse Me (AOA) (full stage camcorder, unofficial stage mix)
6. Irony (Park Bo Ram) (audio only)
7. Bippity Boppity Boo (Berry Good) (full stage camcorder, unofficial stage mix)
8. Yes I Am (Mamamoo) (full stage camcorder, ad-lib compilation stage mix (captions recommended), unofficial stage mix)
9. No Thanxxx (Epic High) (lyric video) (audio only)
10. The Weatherforecastors (All Day Sunny) (Grace) (audio only)
11. Aloha (Pristin)
12. Signal (Twice) (full stage camcorder, unofficial stage mix)
13. Gashina (Sunmi) (dancers gender reversed version)
14. Love Me (Lee Hyori) (audio only)
15. Jealousy (Baek Ah Yeon)
16. Night Rather Than Day (EXID) (full stage camcorder, live version)
17. Love Cherry Motion (Choerry (LOOΠΔ))
18. Some (Bolbbalgan4)
19. Listen to This Song (DIA) (official audio)
20. I Think I Love U (Sonamoo) (full stage camcorder, unofficial stage mix)
21. Nalari (S.E.T) (full stage camcorder)
22. Only U (Laboum) (full stage camcorder)
23. Roopretelcham (Elris)

2017 mix CD, part two:
1. WoW! (Lovelyz) (full stage camcorder, unofficial stage mix)
2. Happy (Cosmic Girls (WJSN)) (unofficial stage mix, full stage camcorder)
3. Heart Attack (Chuu (LOOΠΔ))
4. Bing Bing (AOA) (full stage camcorder)
5. Wee Woo (Pristin) (full stage camcorder, unofficial stage mix)
6. Will You Go Out With Me? (DIA) (full stage camcorder, live stage, Eunchae focus cam because super cute, unofficial stage mix)
7. Red Flavor (Red Velvet) (full stage camcorder, Seulgi focus cam, unofficial stage mix)
8. Dlwlma (IU)
9. Stars (Rothy)
10. In the Rain (Kisum)
11. Pow Pow (Elris) (full stage camcorder, unofficial stage mix)
12. Would You Like? (Tymee) (lyric video) (audio only)
13. Rolly (Good Day)
14. DDD (EXID) (full stage camcorder, funny parts switch version, even funnier parts switch audio over live version)
15. Last Carnival (Juniel)
16. Pastry (Nine Muses) (audio only)
17. Kiss on the Lips (Melody Day)
18. Love is Sudden (MIXX)
19. Everyday I Love You (feat. Haseul) (Vivi (LOOΠΔ))
20. Glass Shoes (fromis_9)
21. Twinkle (Lovelyz) (unofficial stage mix, full stage camcorder)
22. Hz (Hashtag) (audio only)
23. Heart Shaker (Twice) (live version, full stage camcorder, unofficial stage mix)
24. Hwi Hwi (Laboum) (full stage camcorder, unofficial stage mix)

2016 mix CDs

A Certain Kind of Death

(tip: watching documentaries at higher speeds saves time)

Charnel grounds, in some societies, used to be where unclaimed corpses were taken and left to the elements or to be consumed by vultures and wild animals. Certain types of yogins and adepts would go there to meditate and confront human death and decomposition. We don't have charnel grounds.

We have documentary filmmakers. This sort of documentary is certainly no equivalent to charnel grounds, but still has meditational value in contemplating the raw reality of one kind of death, especially since there's no censorship. So yea, *warning* graphic images of corpses. It's not intentionally gruesome and it's neither unduly respectful nor disrespectful. Just the facts, ma'am.

I'm glad they didn't censor anything. It's important to see death as it really is, not prettied up to be presentable and "alive looking" at funerals. That's just a way of being in denial about death, I think. When you see a dead body, there should be a visceral reaction. This is everyone, how we all essentially end up naturally. After a mortician gets done with a body, we can look at it and think, "It's not so bad". I call that a certain kind of denial.

Still, don't even consider watching this if you have any inkling it's something you don't want to see. And if you don't know and just want to "take a look", be prepared to stop as soon as you realize you don't want to go there. It's like at the first realization I'm hearing a Celine Dion or Justin Beaver song, I shut it down immediately by any means necessary short of murder (bodily harm is acceptable). Although I wouldn't know right away if it was a Justin Beaver song since I've never heard enough to recognize it. I've heard just enough to know I'd rather look at human corpses than listen to that. Unfortunately, I do know what Celine Dion's unspeakable devil-howling sounds like.

Mind you, the documentary is not about the dead bodies. The dead bodies are just part of the narrative of people who die without friends or family to check in on them. People who die and have to be discovered, rather than surrounded by loved ones or relatives at least. They become cases for the government to deal with. The fact that they died is just part of the cases and that aspect is shown.

I contemplate the possibility of ending up like this. It's my worst case scenario to die in my apartment of some medical or health failure and needing to be discovered after neighbors, strangers, are alerted by the foul smell. I won't go unclaimed, at least. Personally I don't care at all about that. I just don't like the inconvenience and disturbance to other people.

If I die outside of my apartment by some accident or health failure, then I'll likely go unclaimed and end up in Taiwan's version of this kind of fate. No one would be able to ID me and no one would notice me missing for a while. The first person to notice, I've mentioned before, would be my landlord after several months of missed rent and not posting the gas meter reading, which I have to do every other month.

In my ideal situation, I would disappear without leaving a body for anyone to deal with. After it's clear that I've disappeared and not coming back (this blog found?), there would just be my meager possessions for which I'll leave a holographic will instructing that my things be taken by anyone interested and otherwise donated if there's no interest. The rest will be disposed of and I'm sorry for the inconvenience that will cause. Hopefully someone can be hired, like in the documentary ("drayage" I think they called it), using my remaining funds to take care of that.

I have to remember to specifically state that if I leave bodily remains, control of them is absolutely, under no circumstances to be given to my mother. That's the only aspect of leaving a body that I care about. My final wish is that my complete cremated ashes be scattered in the ocean.

I doubt holographic wills exist legally in Taiwan, but for that reason they might be respected. There's probably little reason for holographic wills in Taiwan. A holographic will is one that's written by the decedent but not notarized nor legally overseen or represented. They're enforceable in California and other states where they are statutorily supported in cases where property disputes arise.

The last book I read off the stacks in the public library was The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: A True Story About the Birth of Tyranny in North Korea (2016) by Blaine Harden. It juxtaposes the stories of Kim Il-Sung's rise to power and North Korean air force pilot No Kum Sok (whoever came up with the romanization of his name should be shot) who defected to South Korea at the tail end of the Korean War, delivering a Russian-made MiG-15 fighter jet in the process.

The juxtaposition is a gimmick as No Kum Sok has already published his memoir and I'm sure more in-depth and scholarly works exist about Kim Il-Sung. It makes for a pretty light read and excellent as an introduction to North Korean history. There's not a whole lot to say about the book beyond that, either you're interested in the topic or not. The story-telling is good and contains a lot of information and history about that time and place that I imagine many aren't aware of aside from in broad strokes.

There are things that I consider mistakes which may be small but I personally found glaring and highlight the white, male author telling other peoples' stories. There's nothing wrong with that. Whoever wants to write stories is free to write them, it's just that there are consequences, and always have been consequences, when a dominant hegemony writes the stories of a perceived other. There's always a skewed perspective, if not being plain wrong.

As far as I'm concerned Asians are a race. White people are a race, black people are a race. Differences between races are why we have the word "racism". Therefore only under specifically proscribed circumstances can Asians be racist against other Asians. Chinese and Japanese can't be "racist" against Koreans, as the author tells it, any more than Germans can be racist against the British. Calling the French "frogs" is not racist. It's funny. Even the French condescendingly find it amusing (<French accent> Ah, you styupit Americans are trying to insult me, how amusing </French accent>). Self-hating Asian American kids trying to fit into racist white society by making fun of other Asians is Asians being racist against other Asians. That was me in elementary school, by the way.

He also writes that leaflets were dropped by U.S. forces over MiG Alley on the North Korean and Chinese border that were written in Korean, Russian, Mandarin and Cantonese. So the author doesn't understand how the Chinese language works. You can speak Mandarin or Cantonese, but you don't write Mandarin or Cantonese. Irregardless of what dialect of Chinese is spoken, there is only one written Chinese language, simplified and traditional characters notwithstanding.

The simplified Chinese characters that Mainland China created was to promote literacy because the modern, common, Communist Chinese presumably lack the brain power to handle the rich meaning and art involved in traditional writing. Sounds about right. It likely wasn't in place yet during the Korean War, and even if it was, the U.S., as ignorant and racist as it was at the time, likely wouldn't have known about it.

Wow, I'm just insulting everyone today, ain't I?

WordsCharactersReading time

I had to go down to Kaohsiung yesterday for some family bullshit issue. It falls under the category of "none of my business" and was at worst an inconvenience pulling me away from my dearly held daily routine. It wasn't the type of family chaos my mother embodies. It's the kind of thing likely many people have to go through at some point, so I'm not complaining.

I was just a pawn. I, along with other grandchildren, inherited property from our grandfather many moons ago for some legal reason, probably to avoid taxes. Now our parents, who have the real interest in the real estate, need us to sign over power of attorney to them. None of my business, of course I'll do what needs to be done, even if it means departing from my dearly held daily routine.

However, the inconvenience was an opportunity to activate mindfulness practice outside of my dearly held daily routine. I was actually surprised how good I was at identifying everything I was feeling moment to moment and what was going on all throughout my body as energies and applying the practice. All of it illusory and easily brushed aside.

Stress? Nope, it's unreasonable (or I'm aware of it and allowing it). Worst case scenarios? Nope, wrong attitude. Just do the right thing given any situation. The one thing I had to be insistent upon was that I was returning to Taipei the same day, and I did the smart thing in buying a non-reserved seating return ticket as soon as I arrived in Kaohsiung. I could take any train home, but it had to be that day. I don't know why anyone would think I was staying for more than one day.

Watching energies is, I think, a Tibetan Vajrayana practice which requires a teacher and initiation, so I make no claim that I'm doing it right. I'm just going by intuition with a vague belief that I've received initiations in previous lives. All I'm doing in this life is trying to review and maintain them without screwing anything up until I go back to accepting the idea of a teacher.

Every experience, sensation and bodily/mental function is an energy that should not be assumed to just happen because we're human. Even hunger or lack of hunger, or digestion and waste excretion are all energies. Sexual impulse and reaction are among the strongest of energies. All of them should be vigilantly observed as they occur with an understanding of their empty and enlightened nature. That is definitely something I'm going on intuition since I can't explain what that means at all.

There's one important mantra that has been said to encapsulate the entirety of the Buddha's teaching: "Nothing whatsoever should be clung to (as me or mine)". An extension of that I use most often during sitting is, "No thought whatsoever is worth dwelling upon". Thoughts constantly arise, I can't help it with my monkey mind, but I can constantly remind myself that none of them are worth anything.

Now it's "May all enlightened energies embodied in each and every experience be ignited like a fire". Alliteration. The refuge of the destitute (Sondheim). It's ironic Sondheim calling alliteration the refuge of the destitute since his lyrics are literally littered with alliteration. And he's brilliant at it, no destitution there!

That they be ignited like a fire is to emphasize the active and potent nature of the energies, like a volatile gas. The fire of transformation. No idea. The fire leads to transformation? Transformation is somewhere in there. I just wanted to say the word because it sounds like it belongs somewhere in the equation.

It was a low-key, day-trip visit. My uncle and I took care of the legal stuff and we visited another aunt and uncle briefly. Then my uncle and aunt took me on the new Kaohsiung light rail to show me some of the many changes happening in the fast-developing city. I'm not sure how accurate it would be to say it's like Taipei years ago, but I hardly recognize Kaohsiung now, aside from the heat. Taipei, too, is now very, very different from what it was when I first got here.

A cousin, the son of the aunt and uncle we visited in the afternoon, showed up at the last moment and took me to the High Speed Rail station to return to Taipei. I also spoke on the phone with two other cousins who speak English reasonably well.

And that was Kaohsiung; the first I've been out of Taipei since my father died in Dec. 2016. First "disruption" to my dearly held daily routine in that time. During that time, in total, I've met up with my old Mandarin teacher once; a classmate from my first Mandarin language class, with whom I'm unusually still in touch, twice; and I saw my uncle twice in 2017 when he came up for two of my landlord's (a distant relative) children's weddings.

That's the story of all my personal contacts. I have nothing to do with them, and they have nothing to do with me. As they know nothing about me or what I'm doing or not doing with my life, I also have no idea what any of them has had to deal with in the past few years. One of my uncles died recently, the father of one of the cousins I spoke with on the phone, maybe even in the past year, and it was just information. I wasn't prompted to attend any funeral.

It's the worst kind of small talk when you know nothing about each other but have to force interest in their lives. Certainly they've had difficulties and other worries occupying their minds. I wouldn't be surprised if any of them has contemplated suicide. But that's not something that comes up in the small talk relationships I have with these people.

WordsCharactersReading time

There are two chapters of the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead (2005 complete translation) that I've mentioned before as chapters I regularly skip when reading through the cycle. Chapter 8 (Signs of Death) and Chapter 9 (Ritual Deception of Death).

I think I may have been diplomatic about them before saying they have dubious relevance in light of modern medicine and understanding of life processes. A lot sounds superstitious and/or based on folk belief. The truth is I found them downright ridiculous. Here's an example that demonstrates what these chapters are like: . . . if one urinates, defecates and sneezes simultaneously, this too is an indication of death. (p. 157, paperback).

You can make that stuff up. I can't, but someone did unless it's true, but much of it defies verification, and there are hundreds of statements like this. Line after line of brow-furrowing "how can anyone have written or believed this?". And how was this included in a cycle of what are sometimes considered sacred texts?

Anyway, I'm reading through the cycle and got to these chapters and decided to give them a shot, and no difference in my reaction really. Reading quickly, eyes rolling, pained expressions, face palming my way through it. And then it hit me. This might be something like what's considered a "hidden text".

I read it, but I can't understand it because I haven't been initiated into practices that might open up the meaning to me. Someone who has been initiated might read the chapters and know exactly what they're talking about and it has nothing to do with the literal words on the page.

And mind you, I love the preceding chapters, I have no problem with them. Chapters 4 and 7 at times I find quite soul-stirring, but not everyone would. And Chapters 5 and 6 might very easily elicit the same reaction I had towards 8 and 9. What the hell is this shit?! That, I would say, is a reasonable outsider reaction without an understanding brought by a guide or intuition. I had no problem with those chapters because I had already been exposed to them numerous times from reading Chapter 11 (Natural Liberation Through Hearing), what before this complete translation westerners thought to be the whole Tibetan Book of the Dead. And yes I was confounded at first, but then figured out how I can interpret them personally to not have a problem with them.

I think there might be a whole tradition of hidden texts, but I know next to nothing about it. I never looked into it specifically and just sort of accepted it as a Tibetan thing. I had no problem with the basic idea. As the story goes, the Tibetan Book of the Dead itself was a hidden text. Padmasambhava wrote it in the 7th or 8th century and hid it until the 12th or 13th century when it was discovered by Karma Lingpa. Some say the physical texts were hidden around the country in monasteries or out in nature or shrines like geocaches. Some say the texts were telepathically embedded in objects or received as revelations in dreams.

OK, maybe I've absorbed more than I thought about hidden texts. It's not a dear topic, though. Or maybe all the magical mythology is something more mundane and Padmasambhava's writings were never really lost, but were limited and the few people who had access to them had no idea what he was talking about, similar to my reaction to 8 and 9. It took centuries of spiritual development and finally when Karma Lingpa came across the writings, he could understand and interpret them.

My experience with these chapters seems extreme where there's nothing unclear about the literal words, and any interpretation into something profound or meaningful would need to make quite a stretch. It might be like reading a cookbook recipe and making a dish that turns out terrible and not knowing why it tastes so bad. But then later returning to the recipe and realizing, "Oh, so that's how you change your car's motor oil". wut?

But I certainly don't think it's in the realm of the impossible. Even recently I've mentioned re-reading books that I've gotten before and was even inspired by, but having a tough slog at them this time around, going sentence by sentence and having trouble getting any of it.

This isn't intellectual understanding. If I could switch into intellectual mode I might be able to just read through them and get the gist just fine. For a heart understanding, they're not just words on a page and information. The heart must be open to understand it, and if it's not I'm not going to be able to fool myself that I'm understanding it, even if I've understood it before when I read it when my heart was open.

There's another curiosity about Chapter 8. In a section entitled "Signs of Extremely Near Death", on pp. 174-176/7, the description is not signs of extremely near death, but from everything I've read, it's literally describing the "death point" bardo/between. This is what everywhere else describes as happening once a person dies.

I've mentioned before that I think this belongs in Chapter 11 as part of the recitation for the recently deceased, and in my copy I've written in where to jump back to these pages of Chapter 8 to be recited repeatedly during the first few days after death because it seems important. It confounds me because it's such a glaring discrepancy and it's not mentioned in any of the commentary.

Those passages are also the only descriptions that aren't totally outrageous. If you're willing to have faith in these teachings, this describes what happens. It's not if such-and-such happens you'll die in 9 months, or if this happens you'll die in 5 months, or that happens you'll die in 1 month. Or if you stand naked in a field in the morning and do prostrations to the east and press your palms deeply into your eyes and then look into the sky and see an image of yourself missing a head or a leg or peeing in forking streams while doing the hokey pokey and farting, then you're already dead.

I'm gonna burn in hell.

Watching every day. Watching every day go by since the reality of the limited funds, and therefore time I have left manifested. Man, did March blow by in a hurry. Not really. If I was trying to be dramatic, it went by in a hurry, but actually days went by as they always did. I just paid more attention to them begin and end.

On principle, I'm not changing how I go about my days. I don't know why I have that principle, it's just what I always told myself to do. Actually, I imagine many suicides are like that. Once the mental decision is made, nothing is particularly different externally until doing it. The decision is faced and the plan is made without trying to project "warning signs" unless they're trying to be saved or stopped.

"Once the decision is made", I kid myself. Even though the depletion of funds is concrete and unavoidable, why am I even waiting? Why not now? That's the question that has characterized my pathetic pathology, and in the past has always indicated I wasn't going to do it. Why not now? Because I don't have to. Hopefully, in a few months I'll have to, but only then can I tell myself that my decision is made.

I wonder if there's anything about my life I wish I had done differently or better.

Not really. Aside from perhaps having suicide as my dream, my goal and aspiration in life. Given that, I think I've absolutely excelled in that regard by distancing myself from people who may be affected and minimizing any impact on them. I'm a very considerate and thoughtful suicide.

So no, there's nothing I could have done differently or better. Anything that qualifies to be in that category would be being more social and present in other people's lives, ego-affirming acts or being. Making connections, contributing to the betterment and well-being of others. Just making someone laugh over drinks. I think I used to be considered funny at some point.

Worthy enough things to do and be, but when you know you're suicidal, when your end goal is suicide, and you design all the little bits of your life to make sure it ends with suicide, then not so much. It just creates attachment and sentimentality. I think I did it right.

Regrets? I can't possibly say I have no regrets. No, I have regrets. I wish I could have practiced better. The Dalai Lama once described himself as a "lazy monk". He was being humble, the point being practice can often, if not always, be better. But we practice to our ability or else we might do more damage than benefit. I just wish I could have practiced better, that doesn't mean I could have. Given more time, I still wouldn't have practiced better.

I regret being born to my parents. Yeesh, what a monkey wrench that was. I still can't make heads or tails of why I was born to them. It happened. I can't just brush it aside as a mistake, even if it might have been. I have to examine whether there was any substance in that relationship and it's a cold trail.

But no, they were the perfect parents for what I want to do. No attachments, no sentimentality. If suicide is something I need to do to advance spiritually, they were the perfect parents. Practically inspirations. Actually inspirations. I don't remember when I was first introduced to the idea of suicide, but I think it was a bit of a revelation of, "you can do that?". And it was a response grounded in being a miserable child of my parents. I was probably in the 8-11 age range, I'm not sure. It was pretty early, I shouldn't wonder.

When it comes right down to it, my only theoretical regret is being this way, what Sadie said she hated about me. It theoretically would have been nice to not have suicide as a goal and have been some positive influence to someone else. It just wasn't going to happen in this lifetime. And I hope that regret is something I can carry over as karma to push for in future lifetimes. But in this lifetime, the big spiritual challenge is to voluntarily give up the attachment to that which is so dear and precious to me: my ego, my subjective perspective, my life.

I don't know what came over me, but I recently read a flurry of WWII books. I guess I have a predilection for reading about harrowing ordeals and a fascination with the unimaginable extremes of the human experience. In this case during wartime. I've always thought it bonkers that we created these beautiful, graceful, elegant, powerful machines like planes and ships and then used them for destruction and killing and to get attacked and destroyed by some construct of "enemy". Well, no, not "and then used them for", but for the purpose of.

Ironically, the first book I read, Flyboys (2003) by James Bradley, is the one about which I'm most lukewarm. The premise was intriguing with the first chapter mentioning a recently declassified case regarding navy pilots who were shot down near a Pacific island not far from Iwo Jima and captured by the Japanese and executed. George H.W. Bush was shot down but was rescued by a U.S. sub before being captured.

It turns out it wasn't that extraordinary a story. It was just another incident of a wartime atrocity. Not to trivialize it, maybe all such stories should be told, but not all of them need an entire book for the telling. What was special about this story? What's the emotional take? Is anyone going to make a movie out of this story like Bradley's first book, Flags of Our Fathers? I doubt it.

Nothing really stands out except a future U.S. president participated in the mission and if he was captured and killed our history would be slightly different (he was a one-term president). This book would still have been written, with one less interview subject and his story as a victim would have been told in it, but we wouldn't know that he would become president, albeit one term, if he lived. I'm being snarky, as a navy flyer defending our country, I'm glad he survived.

(Holy shit! No, our history would be radically different because he wouldn't have spawned that idiot other Bush president who was probably the worst U.S. president ever at the time. Second worst now. Not only that, but I've always said that without Bush junior, there would be no Obama presidency. I had serious doubts that Obama could win because I knew how racist the U.S. is (NB: turns out it's even more racist than I thought it was), and I had trouble believing we'd elect a black man for president. But we did! That's how bad junior was!*)

To compensate for the lack of a book-length worthy story that tells itself, he writes about everything else he can to pad the book. He writes about the history of Japan-U.S. relations, Japan's modern history and militarization, the development of the U.S. air corp, U.S. aggression and racism, and more. It goes beyond just setting up context, but covers things only related with a huge stretch. I was waiting for a chapter on the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during the war. It never came, but considering everything he writes about, it was fair game.

The way he writes had me leaving the library always in a sour mood. I'll give him benefit of the doubt that everything he writes is sourced, but I felt he shaded the facts in a way that emphasized the worst, the most negative, unredeeming, gory aspects of war. Maybe he's antiwar, which I have no problem with. If I had to take a stance I'd probably be antiwar, but this book didn't make me feel antiwar. It just filled me with disgust in general, and not at anything.

I have no great love for FDR. I agree that he was among the greatest U.S. presidents, but he's also the one who signed the order to imprison all Japanese Americans on the west coast during the war, a clearly racist act as German Americans weren't subjected to similar treatment and Hawaiian Japanese were exempted because they were too many and it would have been "impracticable". But Bradley's referring to him as "the Dutchman" definitely betrays something about his attitude towards the wartime president. That is not a term of respect. It's like writing a book about killing Osama bin Laden and constantly referring to Obama as "the Muslim" (even if FDR is of Dutch descent (I personally don't know), he was, I imagine, as Dutch as Obama is Muslim, i.e., not at all).


Left For Dead (2003) interested me because it's about the U.S.S. Indianapolis, which I knew about already and many people recall from the movie "Jaws", which is mentioned in the book as a key inspiration for part of the story. One part of the story is, of course, what happened to the Indianapolis and how it was entrusted to deliver the Little Boy atomic bomb to Tinian Island and afterwards was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on its way to its next assignment. The tragedy was that no one came to rescue the survivors who floated three or four days, suffering death from exposure, shark attacks and hallucinations and delirium. Now that's a story that tells itself. No matter how you write it, it's harrowing and emotional.

The other part of the story is the redemption of Captain McVay who was court-martialed for the sinking and blamed for the deaths of his crew and committed suicide in 1968. His court-martial can be viewed as a big black eye on the face of the integrity of the U.S. Navy. It was the classic sacrificing a "lowly" captain to save the careers and egos of higher up generals. It shows the disgusting, shameful, cowardly effect of hubris of those in power who don't want to admit responsibility.

The book also dispelled a myth I held about the Indianapolis that the failure to be rescued was related to its top secret mission to deliver the atom bomb to Tinian. It simply was unrelated. That mission was completed and its next mission was just its next mission.


I found two books at one library that I ended up reading in tandem because they both involved B-17 raids in Europe in the second half of 1943. They sort of complemented each other, although one book was about a single mission involving many flight crews and its aftermath, and the other was about a single incident with the story surrounding one flight crew and one German fighter pilot.

To Kingdom Come (2011) is about the September 6, 1943 deep-penetration, daylight bombing mission on Stuttgart, Germany without fighter escort that one general thought was the road to winning the war. It was basically a "test of concept" mission. He was wrong, the mission was statistically a disaster and such missions would soon be abandoned until the development of the P-51 Mustang long-range fighter could be completed to provide escort all the way to targets and back.

The book is about the mission so it focuses on several crews who flew the mission and survived to tell the story, including crews that were downed and aided by the French Underground to get back to England. Extraordinary stories.

A Higher Call (2012) is centered on a bombing raid three months later in December 1943, so there is overlap between the stories of the two books (crews from To Kingdom Come were still trying to get back to England) as well as mention of same bomber groups. Some descriptions, such as bomber groups taking off and mustering in the sky, are virtually identical.

The subject incident in the book, the purpose for the book, is very simple. The subject B-17 was badly damaged in the bombing raid and against all odds managed to stay in flight. One German pilot was the last chance to make sure the enemy didn't get away, but he ended up deciding not to shoot them down and let them go over the English Channel, albeit certain they wouldn't make it all the way back to England. If the crew were able to see the damage that the German pilot saw, maybe they wouldn't have made it!

The rest of the book is all back story and aftermath, and like To Kingdom Come, which jumps from story to story, so does this book which made reading them in tandem feel perfect. And I have to admit I wasn't sure what to make of the author and his background, but it's a well-written book. Towards the beginning of the book he describes an incident of the German fighter pilot trying to find work after the war and then cuts it off to go into the back story. When he goes back to finish the incident much later in the book, I didn't need to go back and refresh myself what had happened. I remembered exactly what was happening and I attribute that to good writing.

The emotional take from this book was huge and profound. The pilots and surviving crew met decades later and it was amazing the gratitude of the descendants realizing if it weren't for this former Luftwaffe fighter pilot standing before them and his one act of mercy, none of them would be here.

No one forgets who they owe for their survival for generations. Even in To Kingdom Come, the B-17 crews remembered the brave French citizens who helped them survive, some of whom were later caught and executed by the Nazis. All of them doing their jobs and what they believe in. The German pilot didn't do his job, but did what he believed in, which is that you don't shoot a crippled, defenseless plane out of the sky.

This actually hearkens back to the book on the Armenian Genocide I read a few months ago. The granddaughter of the genocide survivor travels to Syria during her research to find the descendants of the Bedouin sheikh who saved her grandfather's life to thank them. They ask her how many people their father saved by saving her grandfather. She counts her relatives and replies 15, much to their dismay. Only 15? That's plenty for a U.S. lineage, but the sheikh's lineage was in the hundreds! It's still a funny anecdote.

It's crazy. The lives we lead are crazy. The world we live in is crazy. Who knows the effects of our actions? The Japanese narrowly missed killing two future U.S. presidents. But they illegally executed POWs whose future effect we'll never know. There's no way to judge it. It just is what it is. I say I'm glad Bush senior survived, but what if his spawn wasn't just a bungling moron and was a Hitler or a Trump? Then it becomes hard to say I wouldn't be glad he didn't survive. It's a conundrum that defies logic or morality. And that's the world we live in.


* more of my hare-brained political theory (a.k.a., the Busherfly Effect, yea I just made that up):

I finally went to the ATM and found that the injection did not go through last month, so no buffer. I'm just mentioning it to mark when I learned I have a few months left in my bank account. I've been in this position before of counting down months, but all those times something happened to keep me afloat. I don't foresee anything this time.

Well, I said I need it to LOOM, and here it is now looming. I've always told myself I wouldn't do anything different ahead of a next attempt. I still hold to that in principle, but if I want to waste my time differently from what has been my routine, I'll allow it. I'll be more economical about how I waste my time. I have a few books I'm reading in the libraries that I'll finish up, but then I'm going to focus on the books that I have on Buddhist practice.

It's fine, but I feel it. It's not nothing. It's not something I can ignore. But it's something I suppose will evolve.

I finished reading Janna Levin's Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space (2016), about the history of gravity wave detection and the development of LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravity wave Observatory).

I've had a lifelong love for astronomy. This is totally boring and no one knows about it, but for that very reason why not mention it? Nothing hardcore. I never owned a telescope although at one point had getting one on my wishlist. I've had binoculars with a tripod mount that I used for stargazing. Mostly it's been naked eye observing and identifying constellations; contemplating the beauty and profundity of the vastness of the cosmos.

I've rarely lived in places that were amenable to stargazing. College at Oberlin was OK out there in farm country, and it was there that I first spotted the Andromeda galaxy naked eye and through binoculars. It's exciting stuff for people who get a kick out of that sort of thing. Deer Park Monastery also had fairly dark skies.

The darkest skies I've seen were in rural western Massachusetts where my brother was living one summer with his girlfriend and some college friends. 1986, I think. I was still in high school. Town called Monterey. It was a lakeside property and once when I visited, some of us took a boat out on the lake at night. It was the first time I realized why the Greeks named it the "Milky Way". Seeing it under such dark skies it dawned on me why the ancient Greeks might imagine milk squirting wantonly from a beautiful, young maiden's voluminous naked breasts across the night heavens. Or a cup of goat's milk spilled on the breakfast table, take your pick. Profundity of the cosmos.

I had a subscription to Astronomy magazine in the early 80s and that's where I first read about the LIGO/LISA gravity wave detectors. I likely didn't really understand any of it but pretended I did. I do remember reading about the L-shaped arm configuration of the detectors, and that's probably all that I really understood; I knew what an L looks like. And what I certainly didn't understand is that those articles were reporting on a massive undertaking that was actively being developed and people were working very hard to get money from Congress to fund it.

The distant background of the book is that Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted gravity waves, but even he wasn't confident whether they really existed. The accepted belief developed that even if they existed, they were impossible to detect, being all sorts of non-hyperbolic descriptions of really, really, really infinitesimally small. The book covers the scientists involved and their backgrounds and the decades that saw inspiration, theory, experimentation, failure, and interpersonal friction and drama that eventually led to LIGO getting the green light per my Astronomy magazines. I had no idea what was going on.

Until Levin's book. Fantastic read, I think, for anyone interested in the topic. Very well written with Levin being a physics and math professor herself, so a science insider. As an aspiring writer, this book is very readable (her prior book, which I also found in the libraries, not so much) and even has some Sagan-esque moments in inspiring awe at what's going on in the universe.

It was a timely read, too, as two of the principal scientists, Rai Weiss and Kip Thorne, won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on LIGO and the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015. Oh whoops, damn! *spoiler alert*. A third principal, Ron Drever, who should have shared in the Nobel, despite being fired from the project, sadly died in March 2017 and thus became ineligible. I think no one doubts that, despite his being delusional and living in his own world and impossible to work with, that he was a genius and would have shared in the honors.

Timely, further, in that LIGO made headlines again in September 2017 with a gravity wave detection that immediately alerted other telescopes and led to corresponding radio and light observations of the event, making a pioneer, so-called "multi-messenger" observation of an event.

As long as I mentioned Kip Thorne, I watched the movie "Interstellar", on which Thorne acted as science advisor, multiple times when it aired on HBO. I also read Thorne's book on the relevant science of "Interstellar", as well as filmmaker Chris Nolan's book on the making of the film. I think the movie has a berth on my top ten favorite films of all time (there are probably more than 50 films on that list). Kip Thorne's book was particularly illuminating as even I started to be able to envision the physics involved. Certainly not anywhere near full comprehension, but a lot of "oh wow!" moments.

And as long as I'm mentioning astronomy, several years ago I read How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had it Coming by astronomer Mike Brown. I also recommend it for anyone interested in astronomy with the caveat that Mike Brown, although readable, writes more like a scientist. He writes about his own research and role in Pluto's demotion from a planet, but in no way is he trying to be an aspiring writer. He has no intention of giving up his day job.

Both books convey what a cutthroat world academic science is with competition as emotionally charged as any sports event, just in longer time spans, and with dramas that could put Hollywood tabloids to shame if only they involved more breasts and vapid, vacant personalities saying and doing dumb things.

These kinds of reads make me realize that I could never had made it in the academic world. I'm not that competitive or ambitious. Or smart.

I didn't have TV since the beginning of December. The provider is bbtv in Taiwan. Their internet is fine, but their cable TV service is wanting. Actually, to be fair I didn't even try to notify anyone there was a problem. I left it to other people on the floor who apparently didn't mind not having TV as much as I didn't mind. It's totally possible bbtv would have responded immediately and had service back up pronto.

Internet did go out at the end of December, the same day I killed that spider in fact. I knew someone would call the landlord for that and internet was back up two days later, but for some reason no one mentioned TV and the person who fixed the internet didn't realize TV service was out, too.

No internet was not fun. A little lonely maybe? When it was back up I wanted to run to the internet and say oh my god, i have so much to tell you! I didn't have anything to tell. That was just the weird feeling. And not to anyone, mind you, but to the internet itself. I watched three movies on my computer in those two days.

I adapted to no TV, even though it disrupted shows I was watching, notably season 4 of Fresh Off the Boat, Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown, and Discovery Channel shows How the Universe Works and How the Earth was Made. I'll watch anything on astronomy or cosmology, geology, earth sciences, earth history, archaeology. Things that span and give insight on how this all came to be.

After TV went dark, I checked every few days to see if it was back up, and after a few weeks I stopped doing that. I found new ways to completely fill up my time to the point that I felt I didn't have enough time. I started spending a lot more time with my bass as well as watching YouTube videos voraciously.

Today, after maybe a month I checked the TV not expecting anything and it was back up. Only Fresh Off the Boat is still airing. I missed a bunch of episodes, but they'll probably re-run them.

On one hand, two months without TV, I think, really did break my TV addiction. I don't even want it, I don't want it on all the time even in the background as I had it before. I'm sick of channel surfing when there's nothing on. On the other hand, it's February leading up to the Oscars in March and HBO is cramming Oscar classics and there's a lot I know I'm too weak to miss.

Another unexpected side effect, I think, was that what little of my Mandarin speaking ability went completely out the door. Even watching English language TV, Mandarin entered my ears through commercials. And at times I would have local news on as background noise. Without that I was completely in a non-Mandarin environment unless a Mandarin language song came up on my iPod and I long stopped trying to understand lyrics while listening.

As it is, my flatscreen is default connected to my laptop, not TV. I'll peek at TV schedules to see if there's anything of interest coming up, but I see breaking with TV as a good thing.

I went to the bank recently to add some buffer to time I have left in the form of an undated check. Currently the amount in my account will last me until June, and then I have some emergency reserves I keep in house. This injection would give me about seven months. Buffer.

Lots of psychology going on here. I don't need or want a seven month buffer, I'm hoping I don't even need until June. But there I was in the bank trying to implement this injection only to find it might not even work. Why? Because it involves my parents (even after my father died, I still can't refer to my mother as a singular individual entity). If it involves my parents, it involves chaos. It's natural law, you throw something up, it comes down. OK, maybe there's a tinge of subjective interpretation going on, but I'm working with empirical evidence.

I totally regret going to the bank. It wasn't worth the chaos and I had to implement full mindfulness practice to maintain homeostasis, giving off a general air that I couldn't care less what ultimately happens, which is true. I had prepared everything thoroughly for it to be pretty routine, but because of the chaos caused, I have no idea what's going to happen.

I'm bracing for the consequences. There weren't supposed to be "consequences". The injection was just supposed to happen as calmly as two ships passing in the night. Now there's the threat that people will try to contact me, which may sound like a "poor baby" moment, but is still disturbing and distracting. My strategy will be to smother any consequences and cut off anything anyone might try to do. The worst is anyone thinking I need money, so that's what I'll have to emphatically shut down. Fuggedaboudit, I don't need it.

I'm just really annoyed and disappointed in myself for even trying for the injection. I've been complaining about the day-to-day conveyor belt of my life and its uselessness and banality, and here I go trying to extend it? This is me mocking and making a joke of my own life. This is me insulting everything about me and myself and ascribing me to a new low level of pathetic below rock bottom. That might be magma, but that sounds too cool.

What was I even thinking? It was just a bunch of ordinary factors that fell on one day that made it seem the perfect convenient day. But not knowing there was going to be a problem, I probably would have gone eventually anyway as I watched my account decline every month. So what is the psychology of this adding buffer?

OK, even while I'm saying I "hope I don't even need until June", clearly clearly clearly if the injection went without a hitch, I would have kept on through the seven months because that's how lame I am. I have to accept that as it is. And this check isn't the only undated check I have so I have to assume I would have continued to add buffer if the option was there (they all have the same defect, so the option is gone even if this one injection works). Because that's how lame I am. That's what all the evidence of my behavior suggests. That's how I've even gotten this far in years. It sure hasn't been through hard work and ambition.

If I had known there was going to be a problem, would I have gone to the bank? Giving it a good deal of thought, I'm gonna say probably not. I could take that as a sign and resign myself that what I have left is all I have left. And if this injection doesn't go through and really all I have is until June and change, I'm not going to do anything and accept that this is it. I hope I'll accept that this is it. There is no evidence in my behavior to suggest confidence in that.

I think my hand will need to be "forced", and only then will the suicide option become a reality. This is what I mean when I keep saying I've designed my life with suicide as an end. No matter how much "buffer" I'm able to keep adding to my life, eventually there will be no more and since I don't have the ambition to find independent means to maintain my life (get a job), and do have the idealized goal to commit suicide, well then voilà.

I need to face having no option. I need that experience just as much as I need to actually commit suicide. I need it to LOOM. I need to have the train bearing down on me. I need to be in the death zone on Mt. Everest and realize I'm in serious trouble and not going to make it down. I need to be force marched into the desert by government soldiers who hold more value in toilet paper than in my life. I've pretended to be totally committed to doing it in the past, but there always was the option of coming home. I always had my house keys. Come to think of it, that's not total commitment. This time it won't matter if I take my house keys, there still will be no money if I fail. And then what? I don't even want to think of it. The alternatives in that situation are just as bad or even worse than suicide.

I Dream of Jinn

So I was reading an article in National Geographic magazine. Something about the Silk Road. Something about China developing a modern "Silk Road". Something about the reporter/writer traveling it on foot. It was a casual read, killing time, being lazy not reading things of real interest. The Silk Road is of casual interest to me for what it represents and has to say about human development; anthropology and archaeology. Basically I'm saying I have no concrete context for writing this.

But I came across this passage:

In "The Exhaustive Treatise on Shadows", central Asian polymath Al-Biruni observed that jinn were "the impure parts of the erring souls, after they have been separated from their bodies, who [the souls] are prevented from reaching their primal origin, because they did not find the knowledge of the truth, but were living in confusion and stupefaction."

and a little later this:

What to do if approached by jinn on the Silk Road: "No matter what it does, no matter how frightening it is, don't panic or show emotion. Just sit down on a rock and wait. It will lose interest. It will go away".

Jinn is the origin of the word "genie", so can be broadly understood to be supernatural in nature. Even superstitious, fine. Possible phenomena beyond normal human perception, I would put it.

The author projected some of his ideas of jinn in his writing, noting certain circumstances and wondering if they were jinn at work. In another encounter mentioning that he was likely the jinn in that situation. He was interpreting jinn in his own way that he could understand, and he was open-minded about them.

"Impure parts of erring souls" I don't read as judgments but descriptions. The parts that are impure aren't necessarily good or bad, the souls that have erred aren't necessarily good or bad. They are just descriptively impure or erring, as well as possibly actually being either.

"Primal origin" is from whence we came and . . . whernce we go (the word I believe you're looking for is "whither", you idiot. -ed.). I think the more sophisticated understanding is that they are the same place or state. The more ridiculous understanding is that we come from our parents bumping uglies and go to places called heaven or hell based on external judgment of our behavior.

The Buddhist-based description that I'm familiar with suggests the primal origin is a primordial energy state that's part of the cycle of reincarnation. A well-defined and self-identified drop of water falls into the sea and disappears until natural process create another drop of water out of the same molecules. A different drop of water made of the same stuff. Reincarnation is literally the recycling of souls. It's very green.

"Knowledge of the truth" a Buddhist might interpret is the truth of impermanence, an extension perhaps of one of its four noble truths of suffering. It's an easy lesson because we all ultimately experience it in death. When we die there is no greater expression that nothing stays the same, everything changes. But there are people whose attachments are so strong that they try to defy death and cling to some aspect of their life so much that they miss the lesson, even as they die.

"Living in confusion and stupefaction" is the way they lived their lives or their karma that preconditioned them to not be able to come to terms with death and the impermanence it reveals. That aspect of them gets stuck here as jinn. Basically ghosts.

"No matter how frightening it is, don't panic or show emotion" can be cut and pasted into parts of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and no one would even notice. In fact that's exactly what it says about the death bardos. I extend that to the living bardos. Except where large spiders are involved.

"Just sit down on a rock", well that's just meditation. "It will lose interest. It will go away".

That's great advice, I'm gonna start doing that. When negativity starts to overwhelm and I let myself get annoyed and aggravated by other people, I'm just gonna stop, get out of anyone's way and wait until my bad attitude loses interest and goes away. Jinn, ghosts, in us, out of us, as us. Discuss.

The book I mentioned before about the Armenian genocide is The Hundred Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey (2016). I peeked at it at the library because of the Armenia mention, still fresh in my mind from reading about World War I. Turns out it was exactly kind of what I would be looking for in wanting to know more about the Armenian genocide, often treated as a side note.

The book is written by the granddaughter of a survivor of the genocide who had committed his experience to writing in hopes that the story would not be forgotten. The book also tells her own story of discovering her family history and re-tracing her grandfather's path during the genocide, which started in 1915 and continued even after the war's end and her grandfather's escape.

The book goes back and forth between the past and present, not unlike how Godfather 2 went back and forth from Michael's main story and Vito Corleone's past story. It's a narrative gimmick which may not be for everyone but I was sympathetic to it. People telling personal stories delving into their past can be stories unto themselves, and there is a lot to be taken from the author's own odyssey. The hundred years in the title connects her with her grandfather, and the odyssey applies to both as well.

The book apparently took a long time to write, about 10 years of research and travel. Her own journey was likely the easier part as it is a first-hand account. For her grandfather's story, she needed his memoir to be translated for her, and then further research and historical corroboration to put it in context and flesh it out into a broader context and experience.

She doesn't include a translation of the memoir as a primary source even in appendix. Her presentation of his story is an interpretation and possibly enhancement, even embellishment, using whatever artistic or narrative license that was her prerogative. It's enough that her mother was a catalyst and involved in the endeavor to accept that the final product is a reasonably accurate representation of what happened.

I was riveted by the book. I even thought that maybe it might be worthy of being made into a movie. Lord knows people should know about the Armenian genocide, especially since the Turks continue to deny or try to justify it. As the book points out, you can't even mention it in Turkey under the current administration without great personal risk. In a relatively recent episode of Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" in Turkey, he asks questions of people he knows from past visits, and whereas they talked freely before, this time they politely plainly stated that they preferred not to respond to particular questions. The official Turkish denial of the genocide is ostensibly among the reasons the EU won't even consider admitting Turkey as a member.

Personally, it was a meditation on suffering and the human capacity to endure. Not me, mind you, any upset to my world and I'd be among the first to die; natural selection. Unless we're talking about my capacity to endure the pointless banality of my life. As to suffering it made me very grateful for my circumstances and how much I don't have to complain about. Like I'm not going to complain about the cold, look at what he went through! Cold? Bring it on, I'm not even going to wear a jacket.

(One last aside on the Armenian genocide. People have linked the genocide as having inspired Hitler's final solution with his quote on the lines of, "Who, after all, remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?" It's possible that when he decided to eradicate the Jewish population from Europe, his inspiration was the Turks, but a little internet fact-checking, because the internet never lies, shows that quote was made in regard to Poland at the start of WWII. 

Still, though, while reading the book, there are many mentions of Germans observing the genocide occurring and being disturbed, but unwilling to interfere since the Ottomans were their allies. I kept imagining the Germans thinking, "How inefficient, ve Germans can surely do a better job".)

Future life resonance. I've been eating Korean food almost every day since about the beginning of December. I have just about every Korean restaurant within a two miles radius mapped out in my head and continue to note and target the few that I've missed.

Truth to tell, I've never been this way about Korean food. Not like I am with Mexican or Italian. Two of the Korean restaurants were around when I first moved to this neighborhood almost 10 years ago and quite honestly I went years without going to either.

Now, I inexplicably melt at how good they all are. My knowledge and palette for Korean food isn't that sophisticated and I end up ordering the same things, but it demonstrates what I've heard from Korean food shows about local cuisines all around Korea being different. It's reflected in restaurants in Taiwan. You can order bibimbap at 12 different restaurants, and they'll all be different.

There are Korean restaurants who now recognize me as a loyal regular, coming in reliably at least every week or other, but they don't know they're just one of a veritable revolving door of Korean restaurants who all recognize me as a loyal regular. I feel like a cheap whore. Well, the opposite. I'm a cheap Korean restaurant John.

It confounds me. You eat so much of any cuisine, you're gonna get tired of it. And it's not happening with a cuisine towards which I've never shown any particular affinity. That's why I attribute it to a future life resonance. It's like "where is this coming from?".

Also since the beginning of December have been winter weather patterns; this year they've fluctuated quite a lot. When it got really cold right from the start, I feared it was going to be a long winter. Previous years' temperatures were mild until late January. But so far this season there have been very nice short stretches of warm temperatures in the 70s. Short stretches of rain, some hard, but not constant rain like in previous years. And stretches of low to mid-50s, brittle cold in a country where homes don't have heating. Very variable, not at all brutal. Yet.

Oh, you know, there may have been a trigger for the Korean food frenzy. Several months ago I watched a "behind the scenes" video of a rookie K-pop girl group and they were eating throughout it. At the very end, Lucy lifts the yellow box and I could see the name on it, Bobby Box. Just for shits and giggles, I searched it on google maps because I'm a google maps geek. I expected locations in Korea, but was surprised to get a hit in Taipei! I went there the very next day and have been going there once or twice a week since.



There's this thing in Korea called 'mukbang' (Japan too, I think, but I don't know what they call it) which are videos of people eating. They're popular because apparently it's very pleasing to watch people enjoying good food. I can't argue with that. This video qualifies as mukbang.

My initial reaction to Jonghyun's suicide may have been typical and normative, but those weren't the first thoughts I had about it. He died in the evening. Taiwan is an hour behind Korea, so I read the news after I got home for the evening, very soon after it broke in Korea. My first independent thought was a sadness-tinged, "He won't be going to sleep in his own bed tonight".

As news broke and sent shockwaves through the K-pop world in Korea and beyond, he was probably already lying in a hospital morgue covered with a sheet, not yet cold, rigor mortis yet to set in. No, he wouldn't be climbing into his own bed tonight with whatever he did and accomplished that day, with whatever demons he carried, with tomorrow's schedules and responsibilities still a night's sleep away.

He won't be going to sleep in his own bed tonight, like I will.

There's this word that has a common meaning, but my exposure to it is in the psychiatric field as, I think, a term of art. Ideation. All it means is the creation of an idea, really just a fancy, fairly useless word for thinking, but in regard to suicide it signifies a whole envisioning and fulfillment of the act. Ideation is a necessary step towards suicide.

A fundamental flaw in my ideation is that there isn't any not crawling into bed at night. Getting to bed every night has been an unconscious existential ordeal in its own way for I don't know how long. It only appears as such when I look hard at it. Every day the conveyor belt of getting from day to day culminates in going to sleep in my own bed every night.

The conveyor belt is a list of useless things I'll plan to do any day, blocks of time when I'll uselessly go where to uselessly do what, rinse and repeat, ultimately with the ideation of my bed at the end of the day. It doesn't serve committing suicide very well, does it? It just perpetuates uselessness.

I need to get rid of the idea of the conveyor belt even as I'm carried along on it. No idea how, that was reasonably zen. I have to get it out of my mind that crawling into my own bed as an ideated goal is necessarily desirable. At the root of the problem is being a creature of habit as long as things aren't going wrong. Doing the same things day after day because they're tried, true and safe. That's complacency. There is no value in that. I'm stuck in it.

It's done. It's over. It's dead. Finally.

It was a spider the size of which warrants burning the place down if in the U.S. How big? If I spread out my fingers and then clench the middle knuckles, that's about how big. Now I don't have huge hands, but never mind, if you're comparing the size of a spider to your hand, it's fucking big. An Australian might have thought it cute ("You call that a spider, mate? 'At's more like a pet, give it a name" Sorry, my Australian accent is terrible. I hope yours in your head is better).

Taiwan? I haven't heard of anything this big showing up in anyone's home, but I have seen larger in the great outdoors on hikes and thought, "I'd hate to find one of those in my room". How does a spider that size even get around in the city? Uber? And if they can get around in the city, why have I never seen one outside. Then it somehow just shows up in my apartment?

It was the stuff of nightmares or horror films. It made its first appearance back in August, more than four months ago. I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and when I turned the corner and could see into the bathroom with the faint ambient light coming from out the window, I noticed the dark splotch on the floor that wasn't supposed to be there.

Quickly assessing it was some sort of bug, I sucked it up that I would just have to deal with it. I didn't fetch my glasses because . . . why? I didn't want a clear look at whatever it was I was likely going to have to squash. I stepped into the bathroom and closed the door to keep it from escaping, entering the field of battle. Then the fucking thing took off! Holy shit, it was fast. I realized it was a spider and faster'n you could yell "fuck me in the ass!" it had scampered a bit up the wall and back down and out of the bathroom through the crack at the bottom of the door. I threw open the door freaked out at how fast it moved.

It disappeared behind the large cabinets that line one wall of my apartment. There was nothing I could do, it was safe there. I probably waited a bit to see if it might come out but knew it probably wouldn't. It ran scared and was going to stay where it was safe. Aside from lightning speed, things I noted before peeing and going back to bed include: 1) It had excellent eyesight; 2) It's strongest instinct was fear; 3) Did I mention it was fucking fast?

Yea, I went back to sleep. Long time ago, lesser spiders in the room would've kept me awake. But I've actively worked on minimizing irrational fears such as those of spiders, and there was no point in literally losing sleep about a situation where I couldn't do anything.

Thing is, I knew it was there. I knew it wasn't just going to disappear, find its own way out. I knew it was still there when I woke up, and over the course of weeks that fact became manifest.

Furniture lines that wall of my apartment. Three large closet cabinets with my desk and a steel frame shelf, where the wall behind it can be seen, between them. The spider could move freely out of sight under and behind the furniture. If it moved on the wall behind the shelf, I could see it but there are too many obstructions to do anything except note it and shudder.

It did make appearances over the course of weeks. I kept a sneaker handy to hurl at it if I got the chance, and once did but more to scare it. I knew there was no chance of hitting it and there's still a sneaker mark on the wall. The miracle was that I didn't create my own disaster by knocking a bunch of shit over, which with my luck I would've expected to happen. There were several ghost appearances where I swore I saw it in dim light but wasn't 100% certain. 99% when it was right under me while at my desk and ran back under the closet. 1% chance it was my imagination.

It stopped making appearances sometime in October. I optimistically hoped it had escaped, but knew that was unlikely. More realistically it had starved to death. I mean, what was it eating? I continued to terrorize myself over it and stayed vigilant; frequent visual room scans, not only left and right but up and down, especially going to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

It met its sad end tonight after over two months without a sighting. I came home, turned on the lights, took my shoes off and did a room scan (that's something I routinely do after coming home, not because of the spider. I don't know what's my childhood trauma that justifies being so paranoid. I just don't like surprises and anything can happen in this world). Then I turned around and there it was on the wall right by the door.

Of course I hesitated. I froze. That gave it a chance to get behind the open closet door against the wall by the door. Note that I saw it and that it hadn't bolted. It was probably a good 15 seconds from when I entered the room and spotted it and it was just sitting on the wall. As scary and huge as it still looked, this thing was tired and likely emaciated. I kicked at the closet door but knew the gap to the wall was enough not to crush it.

I picked up a sneaker I had just taken off and pulled the door away from the wall and there it still was. It hadn't run to safety in the gap between the closet and wall. I took a thwack at it and missed and it reacted but didn't run. I followed up with a solid bonk and that knocked it wounded off the wall and to the ground. The coup de grace was easy and undramatic. You don't want to squash something that big. Kill it with blows. Blunt force trauma. And I could because it was already almost starved to death. If it was healthy and vital, any shot I might have would've been a frenzied, scream-like-a-girl, splatter-force blow and the clean-up would be even more disgusting and traumatic.

I did feel bad for it. Partly because of a book I had just finished at the library about the Armenian Genocide. When I first struck and missed the spider, it didn't run; likely too tired, too incapacitated for instincts to fully kick in, not unlike the starved, skeletal Armenians who were force marched by the Turks into the Syrian desert to their deaths. With the second blow it seemed to be like "why are you doing this to me?", not unlike when the Turks rounded up Armenian men and marched them away from their homes and villages and massacred them without mercy. Could I show it no mercy? At least now I know it's gone. That's the way it had to go. That's not how the Turks felt about the mass murder of Armenians after the WWI effort, allied with the Germans, failed. If I was a Turk, I'd be like "Spider? What spider? It was coming right at me" and then gone on killing spiders for the next five years.

Postmortem, I did as the Australian in my head said and named it Gonzalez. Speedy Gonzalez.

Had this facebook messenger exchange with my cousin Audrey over the course of a few days:

Audrey: Merry Christmas and happy new year.
Me: You too, and the kids! But we're not Christian. And we celebrate Lunar New Year and that's not for a month.
Audrey: You celebrate no holiday.
Me: I have nothing to celebrate.
Audrey: Celebrate that you are still here. (emphasis mine)

Gob-smacked. Wow, was that a stunner. Celebrate that I'm still here? Why? Who would say that to me? I just can't get my mind around anyone saying that to me whether they know me better or not. OK, it's more understandable from someone who doesn't, but from my cousin it near took my legs out from under me.

It's hard to describe the feeling. Wanting to punch her in the face? No that's unimaginable. Punch someone else in the face? Yea, something like that. Undirected aggression without anger. I almost felt insulted. So insulted that it almost amused me. Like I said, hard to describe. Disgust in there, too, a bit. Bitter, bad taste in my mouth. Celebrate that I'm still here. *smack* *smack* *bleah*

I'm still sifting through the layers of possible meaning and reason. Was she being characteristically tone deaf about an issue that should be lightly trod or was she  joking? This is the mind of a suicide, folks (often frustratingly unreadable, double entendre intended).

My cousin and I do that simple verbal sparring thing where some nonsense is said that's sort of a challenge to the other how to respond. That's what my first response was, not that I meant it to be. So then her reply follows in that same vein and is also a joke and a challenge. My reply as well, with glib hyperbole and faux dark tones that "people who know me" might wonder if I was being half serious and roll their eyes and ignore it as a result.

So was her last line joking or earnest? Logic suggests it's a joke. And if it was a challenge of 'let's see how you respond to this', she clearly won. I haven't responded. If it were a face-to-face exchange, and more clearly joking around, I likewise would have lost with no way to respond. And that's the point of the game.

Ah yes, it's actually a game in Korea, I've seen it on TV. Two people take turns trading taunts trying to trigger the other person. I've seen it in Chinese movies, too, where it's like a poetry duel using verses instead of taunts. They can range from the non-sequitur and absurd to pure zen. People everywhere engage in it with friends as a matter of conversation.

So I was successfully triggered. I can let it go. Did she mean to go too far? Well, that's the point of the game. Did she know she was going to far? Never mind the mind of a suicide, how about the mind of an acquaintance?

Short answer is that she has no idea about me and has stated as much ("of course you'd never commit suicide" were her approximate words and then going on without waiting or looking for how I'd respond). The longer answer is that she should at least have some sort of awareness and may be in denial. She has been exposed to ample evidence that something is not right with this picture and it wouldn't take much to put the pieces together to not brush any possibility aside (like she did).

Of course I would never commit suicide? Why? What gave her that idea? Buddhism probably. It's the perfect excuse to not deal with something she knows she can't deal with.

It is also totally possible that her final response was purely sarcastic. I was being sarcastic. Do you know what sarcasm is?

I kinda feel it would be remiss to not mention Shinee's Jonghyun committing suicide at age 27 last week. I'm not a fan of K-pop boy groups, but I am aware of them and respect a bunch, especially one of the original top groups of the second Hallyu wave.

I am familiar with the names of all five Shinee members. I have seen their promotion performances on music shows and acknowledge they are amazing, charismatic and talented. I knew Jonghyun also wrote songs for Shinee and other singers. It's a short list of K-pop idols who also write. When I find that an idol also writes, they get a gold star next to their name for creativity. They create.

My reaction to the news was probably very typical and of normative nature. Disbelief, terrible loss, tragic. He was young, famous, adored, talented. He had it made. He had made it. His suicide was felt far and wide, and more than he could likely contemplate. He was a public figure. He had responsibilities. Why?!

Since then it has come to light that he had been fighting depression his entire life and it finally overwhelmed him. There was nothing vain, cavalier or impulsive about his suicide. It wasn't the result of life circumstances that would likely have changed if he just lived on. He wasn't distraught over some tangible thing and went home and hanged himself like others have. He was and always has been in the middle of a dark storm that few people can even imagine. And it wasn't going to go away. Ever. He would eventually have been consumed by it.

Usually I hate the cliche platitude the living use to comfort themselves saying the dead have gone to a "better place". Not that anyone has said that about Jonghyun, but I would be alright with it if they did. It is a good description. He has gone to a better place: Not here.

He meant to do it. It wasn't what I call a "suicidal gesture" whereby a door is left open to be rescued. He meant to do it despite a final text message to his sister who did promptly inform the police.

Usually I would consider that kind of act a call for help with an unconscious half-expectation to be saved. His final text wasn't that. I believe he had no expectation or desire to be rescued.

It was partly a definitive good-bye, but it may have also served a practical purpose given the way he did it. He burned charcoal in a frying pan releasing deadly concentrations of carbon monoxide. The text also served as an alert so that someone would arrive, not to save him, but to turn off the burner and air out the CO so that no one else would be harmed.

It's anyone's guess whether he actually thought of that. Considering the information reported, I would bet that he did. He would have run the scenario in his mind and noticed the danger to other people and taken measures so that others weren't harmed. That fits with the profile of the type of person he was.

That would also answer a question I had about how his sister knew where to send the police. He didn't do it at home, he had rented a short-term apartment for the purpose.

Renting the apartment wouldn't have raised bells. On a most simplistic level he could just tell people he needed a fresh space to write. But then why give his sister the address? Anyone could contact him by phone. The only reason would be the expectation that someone would need to go there.

There are actually plenty of other reasons why she would've known, maybe she had even been there, but basically, dispelling all suspicion, she had it because he gave it to her. It could've been a totally innocuous message saying that he was renting a place so he could write, here's the address if anyone needs me. She would have read it and not thought it suspicious that he was including an address, but there it is planted. It is in the range of suicides to think like that.

Why he rented a place to do it and didn't do it at home is also something we will never know but also goes into the mind of a suicide. It suggests this wasn't spontaneous but planned over a period. There may be an element of separating and getting away from his familiar life. Suicidal thoughts was probably something he lived with, but renting the apartment was a definitive indication that he knew or decided now was the time. Specific reasons of his own we can't know.

Fans have noted other clues that could only be noticed as meaning anything in retrospect. He had a visible tattoo of a black dog that is a symbol for depression? That's news to me, but OK, the article explained it. Fans noted that at a recent broadcast he skipped a sentence that they could see displayed on his teleprompter mentioning his comeback in January. There are other possible reasons for it, but now it looks like he didn't mention it because he didn't expect to be around in January.

My going on and on about this displays the truism about suicide that it leaves more questions than answers. Details can be pondered, contemplated, analyzed, speculated upon, rocks thrown at, poetry written, statistics cited, Broadway shows composed, but we'll never know for sure.

I sympathize with Jonghyun. And I'm glad there has been a lack of public condemnation or judgment regarding his suicide. People seemed to grasp the true tragedy quite quickly, which is not merely that he committed suicide, but that he suffered so much to the point of committing suicide.

I can't say I was a fan, I don't have any Shinee in my music collection*, but I respected him and joined as one of the silent mourners around the world.

In that final text message Jonghyun sent to his sister, there is a phrase that has been translated in two different ways. Fans have latched onto the translation of him saying to his sister, "Tell me I did well". I think there's a very Korean nuance to it that I can't explain. Fans have responded en masse in their condolences telling him he did well. Same as me, it was probably the first thing they thought when they read that message in the news. You did well, Jonghyun.

* I do have several songs that Jonghyun penned for female singers in my collection. In fact, the day after he died, IU's "Gloomy Clock" written by and featuring him came up on my iPod Shuffle. The iPod was loaded the day before he died. That's a 2GB capacity iPod randomly selecting from a 100GB collection. That was one hell of a coincidence.

I don't know what came over me, it's probably another obsessive distraction, but I've started reading about World War I. While my childhood included World War II as a hobby, I never had any particular interest in WWI. My knowledge consists of scattered cursory bits of associated information like trench warfare, gas warfare, the first tanks, pointy German helmets, etc. I knew Franz Ferdinand was not the lead singer of the band (apparently there were fans who thought that).

I'm reading The First World War (1999) by John Keegan. As a supplement I also found at the library a rather massive photo book, The Great War, by Imperial War Museums (U.K.). Fortunate for me, since it's a visual reference to help picture how bleak and harrowing what I'm reading was. Fortunate also because it's not a reference that I'd otherwise come by casually. Only people really interested in the war would have it on their bookshelves, I shouldn't wonder.

I think anyone who doesn't know much about WWI but has any hint of interest in it or related subjects (and there are many) should read up on it. On one hand, it's very simple to describe and understand the contours of what happened and what led up to it. On another hand, it's an historical enigma that scholars are still debating about. You can point out all the various factors that contributed to the war, but adding them all up doesn't amount to the sheer magnitude of the horror and suffering caused and endured. You look at results and wonder why combatants weren't smacking themselves in the forehead asking what was going on and how it happened and why they didn't just yell "Stop! Wait a minute. What are we doing?". There were reasons. Many, many reasons, and none of them counters the insanity or incredulity of it.

Having nothing to compare it to, I found Keegan's book quite adequate and engaging. I felt I got a decent grasp of the contours of the conflict, but I would definitely look at other books for comparison if I find them. My major complaint was "white noise" information of troop movements which didn't help illustrate anything or mean anything in terms of strategy or intent. Same with eastern front fighting after the Russians withdrew. Oops, was I supposed to say *spoiler alert*?

I skimmed over those parts not feeling they were important, interesting or compelling to the narrative or knowledge of the war. Similarly, the Russian Revolution is covered so quickly it's almost laughable. That's not necessarily a problem or criticism. In a volume such as this, that's all that could be expected for a topic that deserves its own book. And I did laugh at the description of the Bolsheviks' frantic instruction to sign a peace treaty "at German dictation" when their delay tactics failed and Germany started invading.

Reading about the causes of WWI, it's easy and tempting, if not blindingly obvious, to draw parallels with the current world situation and whether a third world war is in the making. A lot of the debate over WWI is whether it was preventable or was it inevitable. Trying to answer that is to enter the quagmire.

I think the strongest argument today that WWIII is inevitable is the fact that WWI happened. The question whether it is preventable or inevitable is equally uncertain today and as much of a quagmire, and once you draw all the parallels of the fragile relations, belligerent stances and war readiness, the likelihood of a WWI situation goes way up. The scenario of a side conflict leading to an international crisis that no one will check because of self-interest, distractions, basic stupidity or any number of factors, then escalating into a worldwide conflagration is not so hard to imagine when reading about WWI.

Only the over-optimistic would doubt the world situation today is a powder keg waiting to blow. A pot coming to a boil. A powder keg in a pot coming to a boil. No wait, the boiling water would neutralize the powder. But seriously, with the presumptive main combatants being the U.S. and China or India and China or China and anyone but Russia, and non-presumptive but potential flashpoints of North Korea or Taiwan, that shit's gonna be hard to contain.

This is the dashcam of South Korean actor Kim Joo Hyuk in late October in the moments before he suffered some medical problem and crashed, dying later at the hospital. The full clip starts at 0:21.

After traffic goes through the intersection, pay attention to the black SUV to the right and then the black sedan that passes on the right. That's when Kim starts having (or noticing) problems and is either trying to get to the side of the road or has already started losing control of his functioning. It looks like he probably sideswipes the black sedan (not caught on the dashcam), who is probably honking like mad (no audio), alerting the SUV in front, who presumably seeing the collision in his mirror, steps on the gas and speeds away to not get involved.

As Kim's control further deteriorates, the cam shows a black sedan (presumably the one he hit) come up on the left, partially blocking Kim's car. Presumably, logically, the sedan driver only knows that he's been hit and Kim's car didn't show any sign of stopping because of the accident, and therefore he wants to prevent Kim from leaving the scene. That's when Kim loses all control of his functions and presumably his foot falls heavy on the accelerator leading him to hit the sedan again, careen towards the sidewalk and crashing. The last image before cutting off is Kim's vehicle flipping over. He had to be extracted before being sent to the hospital. From my very limited layman's experience and knowledge, I might profer he suffered either a seizure, heart attack or stroke. The autopsy was inconclusive.

What's sad and profound to me is that the dashcam includes the last things Kim Joo Hyuk saw of this world. He probably didn't wake up that morning and consider he might die that day. He may have, but I daresay most of us don't. He certainly didn't get into his car thinking he was about to die.

Everything was going normal until it wasn't. A late afternoon commute, driving from one place to another as he does every day. That's the profound part of the clip, not the accident but the normalcy leading up to it.

Death is a universal experience, but so are the moments of each of our lives leading up to dying that the dashcam so poignantly captures. And since we generally don't know when or how death comes, we don't know when those last moments of normalcy are being experienced. So breathe.

Then again, there was Elvis who died on the crapper.