a personal communication

Hey,
M didn't really mention anything except that there was serious trouble between you and your wife because of another woman, in response to my prying about why you guys were moving. I think that's where the part about her being a bad parent slipped out.

As a parent, there are things that she should know or pry into or know when to get involved and how, and it just seemed par for the course that she couldn't answer any of the questions I was asking, so I finally told her I was going to email you, and she was surprised at that and reluctant because that would mean she talked about it to me, but said fine, and we got off the phone real fast, and needless to say, I don't expect her to be paying for anymore of my plane tickets.

Even if she knows more about what's going on, and for whatever reason felt she couldn't talk about it, that also goes to her inane parenting sense. Her idea of family dynamics is that you keep hush-hush about everything, and you don't help when that's the right thing to do. I don't think she has any conception of what it means to help out a family member, aside from sending over money. Wait, did she offer to send over money?

So I don't know any of the details or the dynamics.

It's good to hear that you're trying to work things out and are committed, there isn't a better starting point and it sounds like you're communicating, so that's excellent and keep it up. Obviously in a situation like this, repairing trust should also be number one on the agenda, so I encourage being vigilant and mindful about transparency. I don't mean you should divulge every little thing that's going on with you, I can see that getting annoying on her part, but if something needs to be said but you're not sure, lean towards saying it. Don't make assumptions about what she's thinking or feeling when you can clarify something on your part by just saying it or asking about it on her part.

It's good that it's foremost on your minds not to harm the kids. M's predictable mantra was that she hoped you guys would work things out for the sake of the kids, and that's fair. But I wouldn't make considering them a major part of the process. If you handle the process properly and well, the benefit to the kids will be automatic, you don't need to think or worry about them, aside from just raising and teaching them. If you can reach a place where you can look at yourself and say that you're alright, you fixed the marriage and B and the marriage is alright, then the kids will be fine. If you pay too much attention on not screwing up the kids, there's a risk that the process will be incomplete or flawed.

I think your focus should be on yourself and really look into yourself and why and how this happened. Go back through all of the stages that led up to this, and don't just focus on the drama after the shit hit the fan. You have to go back and ask what were your feelings and motivations, what was your analysis or lack of analysis. Locate that one moment when you did or felt or said something that should have tripped a wire indicating, "Oh shit, this is bad".

This idea isn't from the monastery but from a men's batterer program I trained in in San Francisco. We called that moment "fatal peril", it's the moment of decision where you reach the breaking point and you're going to do one thing or another. It's the danger point (peril) from where if you don't back down, there's no taking back what you do next. And it's going to be bad for everyone (fatal).

But it does relate to the monastic trainings in mindfulness and watching what our emotions are doing and what our thoughts are, and not just being caught up in the tide of emotions and other motivations.

I don't know if any of this is relevant, so I'm just going to throw out some ideas to consider, or to remind you if you've already considered them.

I think it's important to revisit the development of the events to understand yourself and what your motivations were. From my last visit there, you guys looked like you were doing great, I've gotten totally comfortable with B (and after seeing her sister in action, I thought you totally won out of the 3 sisters; T, too, but that's a different story), the kids were great, although I thought it may be time to instill C with some assertiveness and leadership skills and to be able to analyze things through and come up with his own opinion and enjoyment. S at this point has no problem with that as she knew what song she liked and she wanted to hear it over and over. And over and over. (I actually remember a similar memory, which I think may have been the start of my love of music (it was some Disney song while we were visiting Uncle Aki on a plastic record player and I couldn't get enough of it. If you have any insight on that memory, let me know)).

But then hearing this, it becomes apparent there was an underlying problem and it needs to be understood and addressed, and not brushed aside. A lot of people looking from the outside might look at a family and think that everything is perfect and they must be really happy. But maybe they're not.

So I also encourage you to do a happiness analysis. The Dalai Lama once observed that everyone says they want to be happy, but they keep doing things that lead to more suffering. And it's because many people's emotions are out of control or taken for granted as just being what they are. Their emotions just roam freely and they don't have the mindfulness to consider their actions and the consequences and ask, "will this make me happy, or will it likely lead to suffering?".

Instead of asking about happiness, we tend to just follow desire. Desire is the culprit that keeps us chasing after things which don't necessarily bring happiness, or ultimately brings about unhappiness and suffering for others. I think he's also pointing out that we all have the potential to be happy just as we are, but desire convinces us we're not happy and act in ways that bring about more unhappiness.

At the monastic mindfulness training level, this happiness analysis is brought all the way down to the smallest decisions we make any day that affect our emotions. Even if someone is walking too slow on the sidewalk in front of us and we can't get by and start feeling annoyed or angry, the analysis kicks in: "Is being annoyed and angry making me happy? They're not doing anything wrong, it's me that's being annoyed and angry. Can't I just pause and take a breath and be patient and walk slowly until I get an opportunity to pass and be happy with that?"

It's not easy, and I'll attest that it's a long, committed process, but I think it's fact that we can learn to control our emotions.

I'm not making any assumptions of what we're like now, but I do think you, T and me all have anger issues that we inherited from dad. M frequently talks about T's anger issues at the office, even with patients. I know that I have anger/negativity issues and dealing with them is part of the mindfulness practice I took from the monastery. It's a part of me now to identify anger/negativity the very moment they come up and to adjust myself away from them. By constantly doing this, I know I still experience anger and negativity, I'm not getting rid of them yet, but I'm training myself to be more peaceful by taking control of the emotions.

In general, anger is an important emotion to learn to be mindful of and control during difficult times since it's probably the easiest emotion to blind us and make us do something we otherwise wouldn't do. I recommend a book that's on my bookshelf by the window in New Jersey called "Anger" by Thich Nhat Hanh. At times he goes a little simplistic, but he's writing on a very basic level for an introductory audience. And even though he incorporates Buddhist elements and language in some passages, it's because that's his background but he's not trying to push Buddhism on anyone. The book is also good because his discourse on anger also includes the basic ideas and methods behind mindfulness training.

If there are any issues you want to get out or bounce off someone else, you can totally let me know. If B's willing and you're comfortable with it, you can also let her know she can contact me to discuss what's on her mind. Obviously I'm not taking sides, the best interests of both of you are in my interest, so I'm only hoping to help keep lines of communication open.

I'm confident that both of you are smart enough and capable enough to achieve your goal since you're committed and working on it, but recognize that outside help may be necessary to keep things clear because it's easy to get myopic about these kinds of situations. Even if you can achieve your goal of staying together because you're being smart and capable, I still encourage identifying and dealing with all of the underlying issues. If you don't do that, there still may be problems with the foundation of your relationship here on in that might come up later.

I think by doing it in this way, you can strive to be confident of what you want and what are the most important things to you and neither of you will have doubts that things ended up alright for the wrong reasons. Ideally, I think the hope is that you'll end up in a situation where you can look around and realize this is not at all bad and certainly could be a lot worse, and you can put your efforts into making things better. What can I do for the kids? What can I do for B? What can I do for myself that will make me happy without bringing future suffering?

I recently read Ozzy Osbourne's biography because for someone brought up on rock music, his memoir is like reading history. And when asked about how he's been able to maintain his marriage to Sharon despite the long list of outrageous incidents to his name, he said, "I never stopped telling her I love her and I never stopped doing the little things for her". All the little things he constantly did ultimately likely meant a lot more than a grand gesture every once in a while would've meant. That's wisdom from a simple man.

If you come across difficult parts, I hope both of you avail yourself of the available network – her sisters and me and T – to figure out what's best for everyone. I think everyone cares and everyone is willing to help without judgment, even if not everyone has the ability and may be uncomfortable getting involved. I haven't emailed T in months so I don't know what he knows, but I hope you don't mind if I ask him as a means of sharing information and creating the best situation where we can come up with ideas or problem solve if any major issues come up. I'm not sure of T's current emotional availability, but during the course of his engagement and marriage, I've seen him shine and really come through on things I had doubts about, so I think he's also an important resource.

take care,

NB: I'm sure he deleted this immediately and very probably didn't read the whole thing, at best skimmed it.

Hansel and Gretel (South Korea, 2007)

I had seen this at Blockbusters, but it didn't appeal to me because of the creepy cover, but then decided to give it a go after I read that the main actor in Castaways on the Moon was in it, and that the movie had an interesting twist on the fairy tale idea.

Turns out it's in the dark fantasy/thriller/horror genre, of which I can't say I'm a huge fan, but my problem with the film was in the filmmaking and how poorly the visual narrative was handled. The story itself might actually work on paper, but the visual development of the story left a lot to be desired.

There are countless visual cues and clues that go no where. They're presented, suggesting something related will come out of it, and then nothing ever does. The film doesn't develop and build on what it presents and relies just on what's provided on the screen at the moment while just maintaining a basic, threadbare story arc.

It's not an intelligent film in that once you start thinking about all the narrative elements and try to put the parts together to figure the whole thing out, it makes absolutely no sense and thus wasn't satisfying. This film was made for fans of the genre who don't need the film to make narrative sense, and saying it that way it's an effective enough film. I would recommend it to fans of the genre. It's creepy and suspenseful, but that's all. It just makes no overall sense, and to be intelligent, it needs to make sense. If it doesn't make sense, it's a waste of my time.

Rotten 4 out 10 tomatoes.

I Saw The Devil (South Korea, 2010)

As far as I'm concerned, this was a slasher film in the guise of a revenge-thriller. It's not an incompetent film, it was just not to my taste. I give it a thumbs down 4 out of 10 rotten tomato rating for misogyny and unnecessary and unrelenting violence.

It's about a serial killer who ostensibly kills one victim that launches a vengeance crusade by the victim's boyfriend/fiance. There's a lot of unmitigated evil portrayed in the film, which perhaps is hinted at in the title.

There may be a morality play suggesting that revenge is not an answer to a wrongdoing, but the message pales alongside the portrayals of evils why-do-we-even-want-to-imagine? can possibly occur in this world.

Furthermore, the moral message is further diluted by the fact that the protagonist goes way beyond revenge. He doesn't know when to stop and just come to terms with his grief, and his actions create even more harm to people around him. And in his own sadism, he crosses the line over to evil himself.

Unlike most rental DVDs, I only needed to watch this once. It was not something I needed to experience twice, although I did review the final scenes before I returned it to remind myself how the vengeance played out.

For me, part of the value of a film is the ability or desire to watch it multiple times. There was nothing redeeming in this film that warranted a second viewing.

Like I said, it's not an incompetent film, and I would hypothetically recommend it to fans of the genre – people who like gore, don't mind misogyny, or don't mind seeing the depths of human nature that can be reached.

There are no words for how much I hate this Asus laptop. I'm not a computer person. I don't know the first thing about computers. Maybe a computer person could fix the things I have gripes about in 15 minutes, but I'm just an ordinary person who wants to be able to take a laptop out of the box and have the very basics work competently, if not flawlessly.

I used a Compaq laptop running Windows XP for 6 years with a hard drive upgrade after 4.5 of those years. When it finally died completely I bought this Asus K42J running Windows 7, and it's just loaded to the rafters with annoyances and inconveniences that someone in the developed world buying a brand new laptop shouldn't have to deal with.

Again, I can't really say anything since I don't know what the source of the problem is because I don't know computers. But if you also don't know computers and couldn't figure out a load of annoying behaviors if your computer displays them, then I would blanket stay away from Asus computers, if not all Taiwanese computers. Apparently they are good computer companies with good reputations, but if you don't know about computers and want to avoid frustration, look at other companies first. From one user's experience, I will be looking into getting rid of this in the long run and Asus gets the big donkey shaft from me.

I've been trying to email my brother for a while but it's the same as this blog, I open the draft and I got nothing. I just have nothing to say, nothing to express. That's not a negative statement. I'm just stuck. I'm not moving forward. But moving forward requires one thing first – next attempt. If the attempt fails, then I'll have to face whatever's next and presumably I'll have found whatever energy is required to go there.

I'm not sure "energy" is the right word there. Desperation maybe. And that is negative. But it's a numb desperation. Like when I left San Francisco after that attempt. I failed, plans to leave were already rolling so I just had to do it. Remembering that and the futility of everything since then points to how I really don't want to fail in the next attempt. It's what I hope to remind myself if I'm standing on the edge and having doubts whether this is going to happen or not.

My path has led me to this point and everything is in place again for a good attempt. What it boils down to is the only reason why I might balk is ego-attachment. This attachment to ME. I'M here. There is no 'no ME'. The universe is here because I'M here. Intellectually that's ridiculous, but perhaps here is where I'm really faced with my attachment to self, which is possibly the biggest obstacle towards true understanding, or liberation, or enlightenment. 

It's all process. Maybe what I'm doing can be described as balking, but maybe I'm just waiting for this understanding to ripen. I go back to what I've posted in the past few years and I have no idea what all that was about. It was process. There were a lot of things I was uncomfortable about regarding negativity that I was processing, and I think there was some degree of success there in that I can't relate to those posts at all now. Even though the karmic imprint is still recognizable, it's not an issue anymore.

And I go back to posts from way long ago, and I feel that this entire blog is unnecessary and irrelevant. But it's so irrelevant that it's not even worth deleting or making private. It's just what it was. I remember at one point in college, a few of my angsty and dramatic dormmates and I decided to ritually burn all our journals up to that point. But even in doing that there was a sense of self-importance. Even throwing our past thoughts and record into the fireplace was a big statement to ourselves. It was something worth it to us to burn it.

The value of maintaining this blog, or discontinuing it, or deleting it, is just . . . not. Nothing. And even that is fierce ego-clinging.

I've even gotten bored of blogging. Actually, a blog I was following and inspired by became private and blocked and I think that may be a reason I haven't felt like writing anything here. That blog made me want to get more stuff out earlier this year, although that mostly meant a lot more random nothing posts.

I know I shouldn't take it personally, but I sorta do. It was a slap in the face after turning the other cheek after the last post before going private, which was a slap in the face to her readership. She sounded like she was starting to melt down anyway, so maybe it's all for the better. 

Oh well, easy come, easy go. Little high, little low. Any way the wind blows, doesn't really matter to me. Tooo meeee. I can stop pretending and get back to my next attempt, which isn't forthcoming but I'm still convinced it's imminent.

My boredom of things I used to be passionate about has been systematic and feels like it's a part of my dying process. I have been dying slowly all along and this boredom may be a sign that it's seriously speeding up. The big thing was a few months ago when I realized I could no longer consider myself a musician. Part of me really felt like it had died. It was something alive or a life energy for my identity or something and then it was gone. And it's not the technique, the being able to pick up an instrument and make a joyful noise. It's still in my hands, but it's gone out of my heart. I get bored quick every time I try now.

My bike hasn't left the apartment for months. Every time I think of it, I just feel a withering emptiness. Physical activity used to represent survival. My mantra to keep going when I was suffering while running was, "you don't stop", á là rap records from the late 80s/early 90s.

My appetite's gone, too. I can only eat one modest meal a day and sometimes I'm not even hungry when I do. Also a lot of things I used to like aren't all that appealing anymore. A lot of this sounds like depression and I'm not going to try to refute that. It may be so. It may be a necessary part of the dying process when the death is a projected suicide. It's a prognosis. Even though depression is not a reason for suicide for me, the symptoms of it may be a necessary part of getting to it. Anyone wanna study me yet?

Morrie was a dying man. Truth to tell, a lot of the insights he offered as he was dying I felt were old hat to me. I think maybe because my goal of suicide means facing my mortality as a dying person would. My life has been a prolonged dying process. At least a facsimile. Truth to tell, I also thought that Morrie's insights would largely fall on deaf ears, despite maybe millions of people being touched by his story. He's right, but they're just pretty expressions about life that don't have any meaningful, long-term effect until you're finally in that position yourself. I hope I'm wrong about that.

Like a dying process, every day is pretty hard for me. Every day is a waste and each wasted day makes it even harder. Aside from watching Korean TV shows, I've been doing a lot of catching up and cramming of Tibetan death theory not only to review, but to see if I can eke out one little bit morsel of insight into what I believe. I'm actually pretty confident about my level of preparedness because when I think about the question of my confidence, there's no other way for me to be. I am what I am and I know what I know. I don't doubt, I'm not afraid.

I run through the trainings, visualizations and meditations and work on insight into the nature of mind and consciousness in a state where there are no physical senses to feed sensory perception for the mind to form concepts, and no physical brain structure to organize the information into the cohesive, ordinary reality we experience every day.

I reject the idea that if there is anything after death, that our consciousness and perception is just like it is when we're alive. Once the physical structures are dead, whatever intangible essence of what we naturally are is unleashed in what I imagine to be quite a storm. But it's a storm that can be prepared for á là the Tibetan teachings and theory.

And if I fail at the attempt? I said before that it looks bad, and it still looks bad. But I'll probably have to decide to head back to New Jersey. New Jersey where my parents will no doubt continue to test my mindfulness training. The optimist in me tells me that I can participate in raising my nephews and nieces and help avoid them getting screwed up. It also sounds like both of my brothers are having issues now. So the sooner this next attempt, the better.

Maybe I should enter a doctoral program in psychiatry and study myself for my thesis.

Not a dry eye in the house. The last section of the last episode of Invincible Youth.

It was hard when three of the original members left in episode 32, but this was the end of the series, after only one season – a little over a year, starting in autumn 2009 and ending in December 2010. The TV company has said that it wants to continue the series, but since then there hasn't been any news of a second season.

One of the reasons I love this show is because it shows transition and transformation. It shows growth that is part of the natural cycle in our lives. If we don't grow, if we don't learn, if we don't challenge ourselves, then what the hell are we doing? I don't think there are many variety/reality shows that express that.

It's no surprise the TV company hasn't been able to start a second season, ostensibly with a new group of 7 girl group members. This program was unique and special and it demanded a lot from its participants. There aren't a lot of members of K-pop girl groups that can put this sort of commitment to a TV series now, despite the personal and emotional rewards.

It impresses me how hard celebrities have to work in the South Korean entertainment industry. If celebrities in the West can be viewed as pampered (being valued for their talent), South Korean celebrities might be viewed as slave labor (being valued for their dedication and training).

These girls and the hosts had to devote a day or more of hard labor and entertainment each week to the filming of this show, and still had to maintain their schedules of recording and promotion by their respective groups. And no matter how tired they were from this show, they still had to perform during their promotions.

I'm glad to have come across this show. It has a lot of heart and embodies many values that I also hold dear. It also pinpoints values that we should also value, such as organic farming and community, and that the survival of the human species depends on these things.

I'm about halfway through watching the Invincible Youth series I mentioned. I started watching the series on Taiwan TV with Chinese subs at around episode 10 and I watched until Taiwan stopped airing it one episode after 3 of the 7 original members left (SNSD's Yuri and Sunny and 4minute's Hyuna). Their replacements were introduced in that episode.

It's really great watching the series with English subs. I remember all of the episodes, and I was pretty good at guessing what was going on, maybe I'm underestimating my ability to catch on to the Chinese subs, but there is also a lot of dialogue that I totally missed.

I remember the final episode with those three members came suddenly, and even more so because it was the second half of an episode, the first half of which was fun and games as usual. The farewell scenes aren't representative of the show, but they do capture what I think is important about human connections.

I've spent my life burning bridges and cutting connections, so it's no wonder the state of my human relations is so negative. It's no wonder that I have no human relations that are playing any role in my wanting to leave.

But that's not to say I don't value human relations and promote good relations between people. If you love someone, tell them you love them. Ozzy said that about his long-lasting marriage with Sharon. He said that he never stopped telling her he loves her and buying her little gifts and doing small things for her. The value of those little things add up to more than big gestures only once in a while.

And yes I'm admitting my human relations are negative, despite my saying that I'm trying to keep a positive spin on everything. I am trying to keep my mindset and outlook positive, or at least not down, but I have to look around me at my life's landscape, and it would be denial for me to say it's not negative.

But despite the negativity of my experience with human relations, I don't want that to be part of my karma. I don't want to be carrying that around like luggage. So again, that's why I'm watching this series through, because it's an expression of what I think is important. It's OK to want such connection. If I can keep the feelings I get out of this show, it's certainly better than what I have now.

Confession time, and more evidence that this next attempt is going to come to naught (even though it has to be a real attempt). Even though a window of opportunity has opened and any day now would be just fine and everyday now has been feeling right for a go, even compelling, I've been putting it off for . . . a TV show.

A Korean TV show.

A Korean variety/reality TV show.

It's called Invincible Youth. The premise of the show is 7 members of the top K-pop girl groups at the time (2009) are sent out to a rural farming village and experience and learn what life is like out there.

Roughly the first half of the show was aired in Taiwan and I got hooked on it, because, well, I'm into K-pop girl groups (Ozzy would not approve).

The important thing for me in watching the show is that, although I might describe the appearance of my living life as having fallen apart, and that I'm not focusing on the negativity, the show has more of the emotional space I'm angling for.

Unlike other Korean variety shows which are solely about self-promotion and entertainment, this show has a lot of heart. On other shows, you don't get to know the celebrities because they're being celebrities on the show.

On this show, they have to be down-to-earth because it's unscripted and very loosely structured. They know they still have to self-promote and entertain and they're constantly poking fun about getting screen time and not being edited out, but their tasks, games and competitions are all impromptu so you get to the heart of their talent and personalities and short-comings. Even their celebrity pretense is presented without pretense.

There are a lot of the warm and fuzzies about the show, tearing up or grinning like an idiot from being touched is common – it's not a show for the cynical and hardened-by-life – but it's also killer funny and they don't hold back when they rip on one another.

The show also uses a still photographer to get the intended effect. The still photographs are notably used during the end credits, and they really capture the feeling and feelings of the show. Really good photography.

I love the show because of the values it presents. It's very resonant to me because it seems to suggest a lot of the meaning of life is about community. Our tribes. You find your tribe and you stick with them through thick and thin to get things done. You work together towards goals and you have fun with it. And winners win and losers lose and it's all good.

It's a lesson I haven't learned and that's why I'm alone in this cave with a plan to abort this life because whatever awaits in my next life, it's gotta be better than this. Ugh, I don't mean that in a negative way, I just don't have the words to express it in the positive way that it's meant. There are plenty of ways my life could be worse than what it is.

There's a lot of love on the show, and even though they were awkward in the beginning, and they're competing, and they rip on each other, you get the sense that lifelong friendships are being formed on the show.

Another aspect of the show that is important to me is the "future life resonance" thing I mentioned before. This recent infatuation with Korean culture is really unexpected and inexplicable. It's not like I've been ignorant about Korea prior, it just never resonated until recently, and now I'm convinced my next life will be in South Korea, inshah'allah.

So I'm filling what I hope will be my last days in this life with indications of where I'm going and what I might strive to learn in my next life.

Again I'm back at the stage where I'm trying to start wrapping things up. I have to decide whether to go back to work or whatever, and before I make that decision, I have to see if I can even stand being here anymore. Perplexed. Not easy.

Again I'm back at this wall. Again I keep stepping back away. But a very loud voice inside me is telling me it's not a choice anymore. I must do this. I have to do this. There is no or. There is no delineating reasons, no justification. I've lived my life, I know my life, and I simply have to do this.

It's my duty, it's my responsibility, it's my sacrifice, it's my destiny, I have to do this, I have to let go, I have to not cling to this ego-perspective by making the ultimate sacrifice for my soul, my karma, and my future.

If I entered the monastery, I could be doing good, improving my karma, but I would still be clinging to this ego-perspective. I would because I would know it. When I was at the monastery before, I could talk the talk and walk the walk; I could fool anyone but myself that I was still clinging to this ego-perspective.

I am really facing it, often staring at the wall and realizing there's no reason why not right now. Right now, shut up, go! And I answer back, "Wait!"

And I know it might as well be right now. I could be making the decision right now. It's a wrap. Wrap up those last few things and go. Wait!

If I don't? Yea, it's bad. Really bad. Everything is bad if I don't do it. It'll be dire if I don't put in a good attempt. I'll have to do something absolutely crazy. If I don't do it, it has to get bad.

Now, or soon, because the time is perfect. It doesn't matter that I still have enough in my bank account to last a bit longer. Part of now is about the unbearable; part is about not wanting to continue languishing, lingering. Mostly it's because the time is perfect. Again. I know I've been here before.

The truly pathetic part of all this is that all of the above, I cut and pasted from what I wrote exactly one year ago :p I haven't moved an inch. I'm in the exact same position as I was a year ago.

I'd like to say there is a difference, that even though the words are still fairly accurate, the feeling isn't. I'd like to say that although it sounds like I was still trying to convince myself, and I maybe still am, it's to a lesser extent. I'd like to say that there's a much more prevalent feeling of conflict back then that doesn't exist now.

But, no, since I can't place myself in the exact space I was in a year ago and make a comparison, it's very possible that everything is exactly the same. Even worse. And not.

This has been a difficulty about writing about these topics lately, because when I say things like "even worse", it sounds negative, but the negative aspect doesn't describe it accurately.

It may be because I've been training my mind to diffuse negativity once it occurs that I don't like describing my reality in negative terms, but the only words available to me to describe my reality are the ones that sound negative.

There must be a psychologist somewhere in the world that wants to study me.

Like, yes, "even worse", but I don't want that understood as being qualitatively worse, just descriptively worse. My view and assessment of reality that I've chosen precludes taking a negative view of it as something real.

However, I can describe aspects of my daily life now that describe "worse than a year ago". Such as back then, I was still able to maintain morning sitting and being active and going for long bike rides. My sitting routine fell apart a couple months ago, and I haven't taken my bike out in weeks. Photography bores me now. I pick up my guitar or bass and I get bored very quickly. No joy there anymore. I stopped going to the drum practice rooms sometime last fall.

My active participation in living life has fallen apart. I only go out once a day to eat, and I don't have much of an appetite anymore and even that one meal a day is sometimes too much. I go out for about 3 or 4 hours, often ending up in the library, and part of my going out is to make a neurotic show that I'm not stuck in my room all day. I usually head out just before my neighbors start coming home. I still routinely buy a bottle of liquor every 2 days, sometimes less.

My isolation is about the same, but now it's been another added year of this isolation. How much of this can I take? On the rare occasion I do meet up with someone, I get antsy very quickly and hastily bail.

It sounds bad, but I don't want negativity to be a part of my reality. I decide that, not my circumstances. Any sense that any of this is negative, I diffuse it, I deflect it. Denial? Maybe. Would I want things any other way?

See, that's another hard question. Why would I want it to be this way? But if I say I would want it different, then that's admitting dissatisfaction and negativity. There's also the point that I created and drove my current life to be this way. So actually, no, I don't want things to be any other way. I should accept it the way I created it.

I don't want things to be any other way, and a new window of opportunity just opened. I'm dying to know what's going to happen.

In the library, before Ozzy, I found and read another book recommended to me, Tuesdays With Morrie. It's a real-life account of a former college student who learns his former professor is dying of ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease – the very same disease with which Stephen Hawkings is afflicted).

The book is the account of the months the author would visit him every Tuesday and discuss various topics about life from the point of view of a dying man. The book has been the inspiration to many because of Morrie's positive attitude and affirmation of Life in the face of death.

The book mentions three interviews by Ted Koppel during this period that were aired on U.S. network TV's "Nightline", and Koppel was so impacted by these meetings that he apparently got permission from the network to compile the footage into a separate documentary about him, entitled Lessons on Living.

I guess the book was interesting to me because Morrie was an ordinary person, who lived an ordinary, normative life, and then had to confront his mortality. He was Jewish, but wasn't particularly spiritual.

So my point of view in reading the book was of someone who has taken Tibetan methodology to heart, where understanding, if not pursuit, of death is just as important as an understanding of life. Not "just as important", but central.

On one hand, many of Morrie's reflections and revelations are philosophically old hat. On the other hand, he was actually going through the process in real time, in this lifetime, in a way that I can't identify as having experienced.

With a belief in reincarnation, I can reflect that I've been through this many times before, studied it, processed it, played with it, but I don't know the feeling of actually facing it definitively beyond my own choice.

Hm, my own choice. Actually, that's my key point. I have absolutely no doubt that if faced with death that was not my own choice, I'd have absolutely no problem with it, I'd be happy as a proverbial clam. My own choice is the dilemma in this lifetime, not death itself.

Morrie deals with issues only a person facing mortality can process. The people his story has touched are the multitude of people who wonder and worry about death and mortality, but, I shouldn't wonder, are people who don't have the will or the means to affect change in their own lives based on what are essentially his teachings, but hopefully do.

And the issues Morrie deals with are the same ones I've touched on for myself, and I've come to my own conclusions and made my own peace, and also will not affect any change in my own life because he has actually affirmed my direction to also go there.

With my lifelong striving towards suicide, I've always felt like a dying person. This impulse saying I will commit suicide, I must commit suicide, is arguably not different from a disease. Ergo, I've dealt with the issues that Morrie also confronted. When suicide is your reality, you are confronting your mortality.

There was a time when suicide could be avoided. There was still the possibility of another path. And the analysis could have been broken down between positive (live) and negative (suicide), but it's not that way anymore, and hasn't been for quite some time.

That another path is the negative path now. Finding something to latch onto to continue living is not something positive because it's attachment. It's a fundamental lack of understanding of the foundation of being.

Morrie's story, in my opinion, is presented in a way that shouldn't evoke pity. Sympathy, perhaps. My story, I shouldn't wonder, wouldn't evoke pity or sympathy in anyone. And that's the way it should be in our attitudes about death if we really understand life and death as a part of life, not as an end.

Whether or not you believe in reincarnation, you live on by the impact you have on other people, and you don't impact other people by evoking pity in your passing. Suicide I'm hoping is the way I die, and in following this path, I definitely do not hope to have any impact on anyone else's life, which is why I've worked so hard on making myself a low-impact soul.

No matter how I die, the impact will be very minimal, and if I died of renal failure because of alcoholism or got hit by a bus while riding my bike, the impact would still be more, and more than I would want, than if I simply disappeared in a suicide about which no one had any evidence.

I go to the public library to study, but lately I've instead been reading Ozzy Osbourne's memoir "I Am Ozzy" off the shelves (I know, wtf?). It's perhaps a bit of a respite from the other stuff I've been reading . . .

I like Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath, but I can't say I'm a huge fan of either. I have both in my collection, but hardly extensive collections.

I was introduced to Ozzy Osbourne before Black Sabbath. In sixth grade, our music teacher allowed on one day per week for a student to bring in music from his or her music collection to introduce to the class.

Even though she herself was a big fat opera singer wannabe, I think this was also her way of keeping in touch with what kids were listening to. In retrospect, that, to me, along with my respect for public school teachers, is awesome. She did not get a lot of respect from us as students, but in retrospect, she was awesome.

Anyway, one day a classmate brought in Ozzy Osbourne's first solo album after he was fired from Black Sabbath, "Blizzard of Ozz", and Randy Rhoads' guitar playing on I Don't Know fucking blew me away.

It was the first shredding I ever heard. The term didn't even exist yet I shouldn't wonder, and it was still more or less a school year before I was exposed to Eddie Van Halen, who arguably invented shredding, or at least popularized it and redefined virtuosic lead guitar solos away from their blues roots.

I bought that LP as well as its follow-up "Diary of a Madman", but lost interest after Randy heart-breakingly died. Sounds like I was more of a Randy Rhoads fan, and maybe so. Ozzy never attracted me as a singer, per se, but had other qualities I liked from radio interviews, such as being passionate, anti-establishment and misunderstood by the mainstream.

This memoir should be a lot funnier than it is, considering Ozzy's manic, ironic life. I'm sure the story as he told it would be hilarious, and it's too bad the co-writer wasn't someone who could translate the ridiculousness of the raw material Ozzy went through. I really do wish this blog were funnier. What the fuck happened to my sense of humor?

But it's still a good read to me, just because it's the whole rock 'n' roll thing that is a part of my bedrock. Things you obsess about during childhood and adolescence have a way of staying with you for the rest of your life in a way that other things don't. And when rock music is part of your history, reading stuff like this is like reading . . . history. Except interesting.

07. Diving
The last song! Finally, I can get back to blogging about whatever it is I usually blog about. The entire collection fit on one side of a 60-minute tape. Do you even know what a tape is? Jesus.

And for the big ending, the song itself was a full-on, pants-down confessional. Very simply this song was my suicide note, describing why and how, more or less, and I think I even considered that as a title, but opted for subtlety instead, borrowing the title from Nirvana's song Dive.

The bass part and the guitar part in the intro started as two completely separate snippets. At some point, I think I was like, "Hmm, I wonder..." and tried playing them together and they happened to fit together really well, so I kept it like that.

I think both bass and guitar are going through the Super Phaser in the intro. I was also pleased with myself by how that intro bass motif became a vocal line later in the song, I think that worked rather well, flatter myself not.

The bass part in the verses is a full-on slap bass part and I think I ran it through both Auto-Wah and Super Phaser, which was risky because of the possibility of effects overload, but I think I was going for "bombastic" in regards to sound for this song.

I think the Compression effect also helped keeping those two effects from totally blowing up. I think Auto-Wah and Super Phaser are about frequency sweeps, and if certain frequencies come together and peak at the wrong point, it gets ugly. The Compression keeps everything contained.

The drum part in the B sections I want to comment on, but unfortunately I'm just geeking out and this will probably make no sense to anyone. It was actually a pretty technically tricky part, based on a 16th note hand pattern on the hi-hat with alternate strokes of both left and right hands hitting the ride (right hand) and crash bell (left hand) in a crazy pattern that I was only able to come up with due to practicing steel drum music grooves from my time with the steel drum band in college. The snare drum hits kinda, sorta reveal the latin influence of the pattern.

And oh, also in the B sections, I had trouble coming up with a bass line that I liked, and what I settled for was a direct, conscious rip-off of Paul McCartney's amazing bass line of Hey Bulldog. They're played a little differently and with different roots, but the relative tones and rhythm are directly from "Hey Bulldog".

I think the lyrics are pretty self-explanatory. As for the narration recitation in the background at the beginning and the end, it's taken from Jeanette Winterson's book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. The full passage is as below, the bold sections are what I'm reciting underneath the song:

(excerpt from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson, pp. 170-171)
". . . But where was God now, with heaven full of astronoughts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup. As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never the destroyed. That is why they are unfit for romantic love. There are exceptions and I hope they are happy.

The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met. If you want to find out the circumference of an oil drop, you can use lycopodium powder. That's what I'll find. A tub of lycopodium powder, and I will sprinkle it on to my needs and find out how large they are. Then when I meet someone I can write up the experiment and show them what they have to take on. Except they might have a growth rate I can't measure, or they might mutate, or even disappear. One thing I am certain of; I do not want to be betrayed, but that's quite hard to say, casually, at the beginning of a relationship. It's not a word people use very often, which confuses me, because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else's."

Mind you, this passage I had posted elsewhere and had to dig for a while to find. I'm not that narcissistic that I dug this out for this post.

The file is over 5 and a half minutes long, but the song is less than five minutes. The tag at the end is the end of the recording of the Ode to a Sinkhole track. With songs that fade out, do you ever wonder what went on in the studio on the master tape? I think it's something like this. The recording goes on until it falls apart. And apparently there was a finger-snapping part in that song.

Clean the slate, try to clear my mind

Find a way to start over from the star...

The starting line

Leave behind what I've built thus far

Finally resolved to end this game of love charades

Back to the cave

And pull out the plug from the VCR and the TV screen

Leave my socks on the sand below the stars

And look around to see where the fires are

The sound of waves plead for me

The swim that never ends begins here on the beach

Clean the slate, clear my mind

Sound of waves, leave behind

Hold my breath, close my eyes

The shock of the first chill will only last until mourning

Opting out, cash in my dying deed

It's just a simple trade off between distinct realities

Body parts, functions and feelings

Everything reeling and fading out from here and now and I know how

To pull out the plug and watch the water go round and down the drain

Don't look back, don't think of crying now

With a ziplock bag around my neck to weigh me down

All I love is here with me

The stars, the sound, a gun and all my memories

Running start, take a dive

No one here gets out alive

Racing back, my whole life

Flashing before my eyes

For weeks it's been driving me crazy

I want to find some way to trust another lie

Nothing romantic that could be believed and I

Keep in the feeling that's rotting me from inside

She'll rest in peace with the newly deceased and cross my mind

Sometimes I think this is one big joke

And god knows that I've been at the end of my rope

For seven years it took to figure this out

She's laughing at my train of doubt about

Being found and being unidentified

Still concerned with all the details left behind

When I leave to find you

You'll know me when you see me, you'll see the signs

06. Quicksand Box
I actually like this song. In fact, years and years after I completed this tape and had forgotten how the songs went, I was still able to easily figure out the guitar part and played it for a few friends because I like the sound of crickets. The sound of crickets is so much more prevalent after I play a song for people.

I had the chords for the A and B sections and the first verse kicking around for years before I finally decided to try to complete the song for this collection.

And it kinda shows, the first verse is existential angst (with theatrical and angel references) and tries to have some clever (sometimes called 'pretentious') turns of phrase or plays on words, characteristic of influences from Marillion and Genesis (I would maintain that the chameleon reference has nothing to do with the Marillion song "She Chameleon", because it doesn't).

The inspiration for the verse was from the idea that our lives are like plays on a stage, and dying is nothing more than walking off stage and then we change characters and that's reincarnation. Sometimes we're not thrilled by the roles we take.

Then the second A/B section is straight-forward about Amina :p (the "means lead to ends" was not-so-cleverly derived from the sound of her name, believe it or not. It's a hidden MEANing, hahaha! not).

The first of the break verses wasn't targeted at anyone but was supposed to, I suppose, characterize a dichotomy between Amina and me. It started with the "there was a death in the family" line that I think I also had been wanting to use for a long time and once I had the chords, the rest of the verse fell into place. The second break verse reverts to Amina. No mystery there.

The final B verse references an idea I had about reincarnation and how I may have been aiming to be reborn in Japan and ended up in a womb that would within 9 months be taken to the U.S., and also a reference to how my parents used to tell me that I wasn't theirs and they had found me on a rock in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was a joke. I thought they were serious. I was very disappointed when I found out it was supposed to be a joke. I did not find it very funny.

The main rhythm guitar part was my Takamine run through the Small Clone and with a capo on the 2nd fret. I had a rough relationship with the bass line. The final bass line is the same or very similar to the initial one I came up with, but for a long time I didn't think it was right.

I dunno, it was too distinct? Distracting? After vacillating for a long time and trying other ideas, I decided I liked the original idea. Or I had just gotten used to hearing it like that. These are the pitfalls of working alone. I didn't have anyone else to give me an opinion either way.

The guitar solo was my Peavey run prominently through a Boss Super Phaser (I love that box), and I think was recorded pretty late in the process, and I wasn't trying for anything elaborate or sounding very "solo-ish", so it's a more textural solo with not a lot of notes.

No audition, typecast in doubt

In a strange role-reversal, costume inside-out

Red lights, dead ends, I try to forget my lines again

Step into wings to change what my character has been

Up to my knees, concrete conformity

Chameleon fit to what's surrounding me

And chameleon fit to what I would never dream

Chameleon dropped in a quicksand box

Let my guard down, let you too far in

Didn't know you didn't know me and means lead to ends

I could have laughed at how you tried to sound sincere

Using all the same excuses that I used for years

Your family, models of chemistry

Chameleon fit to what you're supposed to be

And chameleon fit to how people want to see

Chameleon dropped in a quicksand box

There was a death in the family that you never knew about

A crime of principle that you never cared about

A breach of confession that you never told about

A death that no one knew, no one cared, no one came to tell me

I couldn't do a thing that you ask

You ask too much of my limited past

I can't make much sense of what you made us to be

Or how you made it to depend on me

So me I'm faced with what I could never have been

Never have hoped and never could believe in

The ground dissolves, look to the clouds above

Chameleon dragged by its tail across the sea

And chameleon found on a rock right next to me

Chameleon dropped in a quicksand box

05. Track 5
The reason why this song isn't titled is because at some point I thought of the perfect title for it and then forgot what it was. In self-protest, I refused to settle on some other title. Either I remembered that perfect title, or it would remain untitled. Guess what came to pass.

(Actually, there is a precedent for this. On the first collection of songs I recorded, there were two songs that were unrelated and lacking titles. Then I came up with a good title for one and realized it could be applied to the other and so I gave them both the same title, part one and part two. Then I forgot the title and refused to try to come up with alternate titles, but that time I eventually did remember the title I wanted).

It's also the song I like least among this collection. I don't know what I was doing with it or where I was going with it. The music started with the uninspired opening rhythm guitar part, upon which I formed the bass line, which I do like, and then the keyboard melody, which I don't. It's kinda sterile and contrived. The drums, I think, are OK except for the break which sounds awkward and is only there because I couldn't figure out how to get back to the main riff musically. Lame.

The song ostensibly is about memory and its reliability, but is a patchwork of sources and not very successful. A part of the concept was sourced in a coffee table book I had of black and white photos shot by Ansel Adams of the Manzanar Japanese American concentration camp during World War II.

And I'm pretty sure that part of the inspiration was my friend's song about the Japanese American experience in the early 20th century that I posted earlier. I wasn't trying to add anything, but his song was so good and I had these ideas from the Ansel Adams book, that it seemed OK to borrow his basic idea as a starting point.

In his song, the protagonist ends up stuck, unable to leave, perhaps metaphorically, in the desert heat of the concentration camp after being betrayed by his adopted country, after betraying himself and his original country. In my song, the idea is of a former Japanese American concentration camp prisoner decades later looking at pictures of the camps and thinking, "that's not what it was like".

Another source was a pile of 8mm home movies from my childhood that I had no idea existed and found by accident in my brother's room. And curiously, I have absolutely no recollection of when it was that I found them. With incidents such as this, I can usually place somewhere in the timeline of my life, but not this one. Selective memory clearly engaged.

Also curiously, I have no idea where those 8mm reels are now. I'm even doubting their existence or whether my finding them ever really happened, because not only was there the film, but also . . . it wasn't a projector, but a machine that I watched them on where you set up the reels and spooled the film through a mechanism that lit the film onto a screen. Yea, sounds suspicious to me, too.

This is weird because the more I describe it, the more I'm doubting this ever happened. A machine like that just doesn't go missing. The film is real, actually. I do remember my father did have a projector, and when he got back a reel of film from being developed, the family would get together and watch it.

What I remember about finding and watching the film, whether that happened or not, is seeing my parents in a light that I never knew. They were acting as parents. There was footage of my oldest brother's kindergarten graduation. Seeing my parents acting like parents was very conflicting for me, and it was hard for me to reconcile that it happened like that. I think I even actually felt guilty for a while about hating them.

The film is fact, the pictures don't lie, but if our subjective memory and reality are in conflict with them, then what's the truth? Here was physical evidence of my parents acting like parents, but in my memory and reality, my parents were merely a bank. They provided funds, but were uninvolved and emotionally unavailable.

So what I was trying to get at was, whether it's historical or personal, does the documentary evidence contain actual truth. No, it contains a record, but the truth is subjective.

I used to be a pyromaniac when I was a kid and used to light fires in a small set of woods near my elementary school. Nothing major, but at one point the fire department was called. And shit, it seems harmless in retrospect and I never thought anything of it, but that's clear evidence that I was already one fucked up, sociopath of a kid. Or I was trying to get attention. But you have to get caught to get attention. I was 8 or 9 years old.

And then the lyrics get further muddy because I start reflecting on my relationship with Amina and start ranting on about her. Real mature. So many things to dislike about this song. And at 5 minutes long, it was a failure at the short and concise concept (most of the songs from my first collection were ridiculously long, most over 5 minutes).

Force a pause

Pass under lighted tracks of memories hung up in galleries

Desert sand still seems to fall from my hands

Black and white photographs, but it never looked like that

Lost in my thoughts

Lots to be guilty of when history haunts me in home movies

The pictures lie, they can't testify to facts

Childhood reality check, it didn't happen quite like that

Thirty years between being the same age

Through my eyes not much has changed

From the forest fire and the match I found

On the cold barren ground

To decide from a yes to a no

Have to stay, no way that I'm gonna go

Under desert rocks froze in snow

My confession, little forgiveness for the un- or underblessed

Trapped in the mess of burned barracks, government shacks

I recall a last night on the phone

Triggered something from a long time ago

Losing you was really no loss at all

It seemed so much better than it actually was

From a point of view it was nothing new

It should have come as no surprise

And as it goes around, it still comes around

I could have read between the lines

You, your glazed ceramic smile

Made of mud and blazed in fire so cold

The wrong shade of red lipstick

Little too brown, too bright

In the sun it made you look too white-eyed

Burned to brown like a native skin, tattooed Indian

Give me control over what I know

I only doubt what I found when I find none of it sound

I have no memory and no feelings and I'm free to leave

04. Ode to a Sinkhole
I'm pretty sure this song started with the main 4-chord, descending rhythm guitar motif in the intro and verses, and I think I had those chords kicking around for quite a while.

Like years, maybe. I forget if the keyboard melody or the bass line came next, but if it was years in the making, it may well have been a snippet with the keyboard melody laying around for years.

I always had a "snippet" tape ready to go in the 4-track, on which I recorded ideas and then may have put other parts on top of to see if I thought there was any potential. I don't know if any of those snippet tapes are extant, but there can't be too many of them. I wasn't all that prolific. Not that I'm terribly interested in what's on them.

The acoustic rhythm guitar sounds like it's running through a Small Clone chorus box, one of the first stomp boxes I ever bought when I was in high school, and it's the same one Kurt Cobain uses on songs like "Come As You Are". And reverb.

Oh, and reverb! When Boss released its first reverb stomp box, that was a huge thing for me. Almost every vocal and guitar part is going through reverb. And compression. I neglect to mention these effects because they are more subtle; assumed even. All voice, guitar and bass parts are running through a Boss Compression/Sustain pedal.

With the first collection of songs I recorded during college, I remember I ended up re-recording all the vocal parts and some guitar parts one semester, and now I remember why: the reverb pedal came out. As bad as my vocals are, without reverb and compression, they were even more excruciating to listen to.

It may be hard to appreciate now because all these effects are readily available now, included with multi-track recording software, I shouldn't wonder. But back then 4-track tape recorders didn't have built-in effects, digital processors were unheard of, and pro reverb processors were expensive. So it was a godsend when Boss created their reverb stomp box, which I remember was still really expensive at US$300, but worth it.

I think this is the only song whose drum part wasn't recorded with the "Phil Collins" patch. It's similarly big sounding, but the patch I used had a mechanical tinge to it. I think there were multiple tracks for the TD-7 because there's a quica sound in there that I don't think was recorded with the main drum part.

This is also the only song that I didn't record the bass with my solid-body Riverhead, but a hollow-body Washburn AB-40 acoustic-electric. That was a great bass with a Fishman pre-amp/EQ and a piezo pickup mounted under the bridge which picked up the full sound of the wood body which is why it sounds so woof-y. It's going through a Boss Auto-wah in the instrumental sections. I gave that bass away to Meghan during one round of "I'm not gonna be around much longer anyway".

I think the keyboard sound was created with a keyboard controller and a sound module which I bought to replace a Roland Juno-106 analog synthesizer that I foolishly sold around this time. That was an amazing keyboard and one of the last of its kind before digital synthesizers became the rage with the Yamaha DX-7. They're considered vintage now. Part of me regrets selling it, but I also remember it was an exercise in non-attachment and that part of me doesn't regret it.

The song has three instrumental sections, the first being just the background rhythm track, the second time there's an added crunchy guitar part on top – my Takamine run through distortion and no reverb – and the third time has a guitar solo played on the Peavey electric to fade out the song.

I guess the theme behind the lyrics is isolation, sort of feeling like I was at the bottom of a well and the view of the world from there. The "feels like I'm in a well...-kept dungeon cell" is a cheap literary trick, attempting to be clever.

There's an element in the lyrics that's a reference to Plato's cave and how our lives are like shadows of a reality cast by a divine light coming from outside the cave that we have no concept of. And there's a reference to an analogy between Plato's cave and movie-making. Movies are just light and shadow manipulated upon a screen, but we often ascribe a certain reality to them and let ourselves be drawn into it.

I think this song is the second reference in this collection of the back of my eyes, and the imagery was supposed to evoke looking at the back of my eyeball – my eyes being the view of the world and with eyes being the window to the soul for other people, the real me was actually one step further withdrawn, not engaging or interfacing with the world, but just contemplating what was falling on the back of my eyes.

More reference to angels with the "she with wings" line, and I guess I was getting out some feelings about a previous relationship in college, Luyen. She was from Florida, so I was obviously thinking about her for that line, but that's the extent of what I remember. We had discussed angels in a theoretical, conceptual sense, but she was no angel. And neither was I.

I was living in San Francisco at this point, going to law school in downtown S.F. everyday. I remember having existential problems being in an urban setting and all the concrete and all the people, and for a time I dealt with it by keeping my line of sight over people's heads trying to avoid acknowledging their existence. Pretty pathetic.

I'm scared of heights, or at least I used to be, and I was referencing that in opposition to the metaphor of digging my own grave. Dreamscapes, death states, I think they're fairly envisioned as being above, rather than below, and my lifescapes I was definitely feeling as below.

Actually, I think the concept for the opening line was digging my own grave and then by accident digging too deep and finding myself trapped. Story of my life. And then there are the obligatory references to death and choosing to die.

Dug this hole too deep to find sleep

Just a pinpoint shaft of light out of which I can see

Feels like I'm in a well-kept dungeon cell

Faint rose smell and the sky looks like the back of my eyes

Shadows move on rocks below me

Suspended here in the glare, in the glow of silver screens

I walk while she with wings tugs my puppet strings

Was she from Hollywood, moved to Florida?

With the camera focused far above the heads of the crowd

To avoid them now

From my height I'm deep in a dream

Don't know what they mean, or where they lead

Or where they have been

I'm scared of higher places where I can't see people's faces

No big deal to not know how I feel about my life

If there's something missed, choice to leave

Dismiss the world as it is

Dug this hole too deep under me

Drank myself to sleep, what I really need

Is time to rest in peace

I know that there can be no coincidences

Nothing happens that doesn't show through the cracks

03. Withdrawal
Hm, I thought the title of this song was "Wishlist". Not sure how it got changed. It might be a mistake. Or not. I have no idea.

I'm pretty sure this song started with the opening lyric which then got slapped on top of the bass verse riff, which I'm pretty sure is the origin of the music. The guitar part was just what fit over the bass part and then used to develop the other portions.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that for this collection, the music writing and lyric writing were very separate processes. So while I was developing and recording the music over here, lyric ideas were being scrawled down over there, and the two were mashed together at a later point.

I'm a little embarrassed by both the confessional and meltdown nature of the lyrics. There is little hiding my preoccupation with various ways of dying and self-destruction and my inability to bring anything to fruition in that regard, story of my life. But I did try to have a little fun with it, too. I mean what's death and self-destruction if you're not having at least a little bit of fun? Just morbid. And I am not morbid.

At the time I had recently broken up with the purported "love of my life" Amina, and some reference to her crops up in a few of these songs, and they are immature, snide jabs at her. She's Pakistani and had a Caucasian nose that I always felt was poking me when we kissed. There's more in other songs.

The Simpsons impression in the repeated verse may be related via the South Asia connection, but her mother being English, she spoke with a British Indian accent, and not a full-on Apu Indian accent. It's indirect, but it was conscious.

I forget what all the different "voices" for the repeated verse were supposed to be. Aside from Apu, one of them was "Tom Waits". Another was "meltdown". I think one I wrote down as "about-to-crack". One sounds like it should've been labeled "constipated".

Other lyric elements came from various sources. "Four and twenty bishops" was an expression from my Contracts professor that I liked, used to emphasize the importance of evidence versus innuendo attested to by "four and twenty bishops".

There's a reference to angels which was a thing for me late in college. One of my favorite films at the time was Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire" and I think I even wrote a paper on angels for a religion seminar. How flaky is that? (not as flaky as the field "angelology"). There's more in other songs.

The internet is an assumed part of modern life now, but back then it was just coming into wider use, being touted in the media with the catchphrase "information superhighway". I was being topical! Imagine how much lamer it would be if I had mentioned Infoseek or Lycos. Or Alta Vista. All pre-Google search engines. All had to be used to find the optimum result.

The line about being allergic to myself was about an elusive skin condition I have. It's nothing major, just an oddity as far as I can tell, and unlike other physical anomalies, this one has never gone away.

My skin is sensitive and if I scratch it even lightly it turns red and leads to more itching. If I scratch it because of itching, it leads to prominent, unsightly welts wherever I scratch it. So the reference was a joke about being allergic to just being myself.

The reference to being "discharged" was simply in my mind about being discharged from mental institutions, which I have been twice in my life, so this was referencing that deranged period of my life.

I don't want to be too harsh against the people who had me committed, nor about how they were just doing their jobs and had no clue what was going on. Looking at the scenes objectively, I think they were justified, but ultimately my case was beyond their psychiatric analysis, and kudos for them for realizing it. Something was clearly "wrong" (from their point of view), but it was beyond their purview of what they could understand, much less treat. So they let me go.

The guitar part was played on my acoustic Takamine running through an auto-wah and the bass line in the verses is slapped on my Riverhead. I'm not a slap bassist, but it's a lot of fun, and at the time I was experimenting with slapping without a lot of popping, or at least not popping in a higher register on a higher string. The electric drums are on the Phil Collins setting and there's also a second distorted guitar part that was done on the Takamine. Meaning this song was likely recorded before I bought the Peavey Predator.

I want to die a bloody, violent death

Smashed against the rocks below the cliffs, amidst the surf
But the hands around my neck keep stopping me

Surf to servant, lifted up by wings that never worked

And I owe my whole likeness to the kindness

Of the winds that blew me kisses from a lotus flower

Stood around me by some four and twenty bishops 

Giving me the finger with a sneer they said, "You wish"

My number one priority

Is finding the only wish I had left

As I'm flipping through my filofax

For that wish I have left

I wish I could find a way to decide

I wish there was a way I could survive

I wish I could be buried alive

I wish everyone would leave me alone

Seems to me to be one more life decision

Every heartbeat murmurs secrets only time can tell me

Met Jesus on my path, nearly stepped on him

Searched for God on the information interstate

She crowned me in a romantic bravado

It's your classic fairy tale scenario we all know

Bring me to a better understanding

Bring me people who would never ever leave me

My number one priority

Is to not stand stupid in some idiot's pose

Kissing ass, distracted by your pointed nose

I don't think I would want to be that wise

I don't want to live just to survive

I don't want to find what's behind my eyes

I don't think I should be thinking these things

Someday I'll drown in my own sense of privacy 

Where no one can help me to be who I want to be

Eggshell exiles scrambled in cups of tea

Porcelain lips kiss my grasp on reality

(repeat 5x)

Why am I allergic to myself?

I get a rash everytime I come down and try to be real

Ask me about my drinking problem

That's one way to get a prime example of denial

I smeared myself with 80 proof holy water

I'm a failure of religious guidance, social science

I'm next in line to be discharged and I feel better

On my way home gotta make it look like an accident

02. Just for the Record (Marillion cover)
This song is on the last studio album that original singer Fish recorded with neo-prog rock band Marillion, "Clutching at Straws" (1987). It is one of my desert island discs – I'll never get sick of listening to this album or stop being amazed at Fish's lyrics.

It's not my fave song on the album. In fact, if there were a song I like least, this would be a runner-up, not that there is a song I like least on the album. No, the reason I chose this song to record was that the chords were easy enough to figure out on guitar, and the song itself was short and concise, which is what I was going for on this collection of songs.

I also fancied doing a full-on cover, rather than just acoustic covers of songs I liked, since I hadn't done that since I first owned my first 4-track tape recorder and recorded covers to learn the process of 4-track recording.

The funnest part was coming up with a bass part that was my own. I did away with copying the guitar hook on the original track because I would've sucked trying to do that, and instead incorporated elements of that hook in the bass line.

The bass is the Riverhead run through a Boss Super Phaser and Bass EQ. All the other parts are pro forma, just doing what I could figure out to do. I even changed the meter in the verses from 7 to an even 8, more because it fit the bass line I wanted to play and not that I couldn't play in 7, mind you, but it did make recording the song track-by-track easier.

Aside from the bass, there's an acoustic rhythm guitar track, electronic drumset on the Phil Collins sound, two vocal tracks and I'm pretty sure the solo is recorded with the Peavey electric and not my acoustic run through distortion. Hehe, me playing a "solo". It just sounds funny (and it does sound funny, the first notes of the solo remind me of a baby deer trying to get its legs).

The lyrics, of course, I found very relevant, dealing with alcoholism and derangement. Fish's line "It's only when I'm out of it I make sense of this" probably refers to only being able to make sense when drunk, but in my mind, "out of it" meant out of life, and I sang a future tense "I'll".

Fish obviously uses a pseudonym (you might too if your given name was Derek William Dick), as arguably do I. But I don't consider my name a pseudonym. It's the difference between my "real" name and my "legal" name, and as I consider it my real name, it can't be a pseudonym. But, no, it's not my legal name, which I hold in disdain. Look, I rhymed!

Where he says, "When you say I got a problem, that's a certainty", that resonated for me because in my first collection of songs, I had an opening line, "I guess you got a problem if you're only happy hurting yourself/But who am I to say it's a problem, after all, you're happy". Always people telling us we got a problem.

And of course the classic alcoholic response, "Just for the record, I can stop any day". No, really, I can.

(D. Dick/S. Rothery/M. Kelly/P. Trewavas/I. Mosley)

Many's the time I've been thinking about changing my ways

But when it gets right down to it it's the same drunken haze

I'm serving a sentence to write life sentences

It's only when I'm out of it I make sense of this

Just for the record, I'm gonna put it down

Just for the record, I'm gonna change my life around

Just a revolutionary with a pseudonym

Just a barroom dancer on my final fling

Just another writer paying off my dues

Just finding an inspiration, well, that's my excuse

Just for the record, I'm gonna put it down

Just for the record, I'm gonna change my life around

Just another empty gesture with an empty glass

Just a comic actor behind a tragic mask

But I got no discipline, got no self-control

Just a little less painful here where my back's against the wall

It's too late, I found it's too hard

I'm in two minds, both of them are out of it at the bar

When you say I got a problem, that's a certainty

But I can put it all down to eccentricity

It's just for the record, it's just a passing phase

Just for the record, I can stop any day

And if I haven't geeked out enough, to go full-on maximus geekus, the whole album is full of quotes that resonate for me, including the closing verse of the album:

And if you ever come across us, don't give us your sympathy

You can buy us a drink, and just shake our hands

And you'll recognize by the reflection in our eyes

That deep down inside, we're all one and the same:

We're clutching at straws, we're still drowning

Clutching at straws, we're still drowning

- The Last Straw

And just for the record, I'm so not impressed by Windows 7 as an improvement over XP.

I've found a website that allows me to upload simple sound files, and I've had to decide whether to do what I always wondered whether I would do if given the opportunity: post my own songs from my past. And in what manner?

On one hand, from a music perspective, I don't think it's any good. I don't recall anyone to whom I gave the cassette giving more than a polite positive response. To be fair, I don't recall anyone having the same music tastes as me, either, go fig.

And even though the results sound like a final product, the purpose of the recording was to shop it around through my network of friends to find other musicians to play with. I finally accepted my writing process was too excruciating and results too poor to want to be a primary songwriter, but I was hoping to find people interested in the sound and forming a band. I just wanted to be the bass player.

On the other hand, I am trying to wrap things up and wind things down, and this is a significant part of my past, albeit small and very private and at times embarrassing. This is part of my history and past expression.

I've said before I'm glad I have these recordings because no matter how embarrassing, they are a record of what was going on at the time (actually that was about a previous collection I had recorded during college; this collection I'm personally not so embarrassed about).

It's not out of ego, it's not that I want anyone listening to the stuff, but it's fact, it's record. It's confessional, and that's part of what this blog is supposed to be doing. I keep myself completely hidden from people who know me, but this is the place where it all comes out. Anything anyone ever wondered about me can probably be found somewhere in here.

And I think I'll go full-on confessional here. When someone creates something, they don't know how other people will take it or interpret it. I'm removing that by saying what everything was about. I'm not pretending this is art for a listener to enjoy or interpret or figure out. This is an artifact of expression that I'm explaining for the record.

As for manner, the track order matters to me, so I think I'll post track by track in sequence, but then I'll see about combining it all into one ridiculously long post so it's all in sequence for the archives once I'm done.

01. Son of Solomon
So this first song is obviously inspired by my parents who I hated at the time, putting it mildly. Who woulda thunk?, I just admitted my parents were an inspiration to me. I don't think most individual lyrics meant anything specific. It was just general anger upon which lines were built. Suicide is, of course, alluded to in the song, and I think it's alluded to in every song.

The title doesn't mean anything either. I realized as an afterthought that I had to coax out titles for these songs. This phrase came to me in a quick little flash and stuck.

There is a line referencing when I went to Japan after college to find my way and stayed with a great aunt in Osaka for some months. My parents did arrange that, but beyond that I think every effort was made to discourage anything I was attempting to do, certainly not encouraging or supporting it. In the end, it worked and it was like they scooped a wandering child off its feet and put it back where they wanted it to be.

The song idea started with the bass line which then defined the guitar chords, and probably after I established what the guitar was doing in the verse, that led to the chorus and break sections written on guitar. The bass, a Japanese-made Riverhead Unicorn headless design, sounds like it's going through a Boss Auto-Wah pedal with the lows boosted with a Bass EQ pedal.

I only had an acoustic guitar up to this point since I never took guitar seriously, but I think at this point I decided I needed to include guitar solos and bought a first generation Peavey Predator which was a strat-copy. Later models were a totally different design, but I love the strat-copy version and still have it.

No solos on this song, but I think I used it to get used to playing electric guitar, with two tracks of electric guitar, one clean, one distorted. I think any guitarist will tell you that acoustic and electric are totally different beasts.

All the drums on this collection were played on what was then a state-of-the-art, 2nd generation consumer electronic drumset, a Roland TD-7. Being a huge Phil Collins fan, I gravitated towards the sound that was closest to his sound – very big with lots of reverb.

I was doing the best I could on drums, having worked on keeping a groove while I was in a steel drum band in college. I had a horrible sense of rhythm until then and I spent hours on practicing "groove" with a metronome.

I didn't consider myself a drummer at this point. It wasn't until several years later when I heard Jimmy Chamberlin with the Smashing Pumpkins that I was really inspired about being able to express on drums. Bash the fuck out of those things, I mean.

(Can I ask you something personal?)

Mom and dad could never have a baby

Mom and dad they never had a chance

Though they only needed dope to save me

They traded the hope for circumstance

It was never my responsibility to live past 20

It was never my intention to live through them

The psycho path has been my way out of the halls of plenty

Took my hand to lead me back again

Being pushed was just my way of learning

Pushed to suicide don't make it a crime

Found the agents they were sent as earning

Made me hate and made me do the time, made me survive

It was never my intention to live past 30

It was never my responsibility to be fool-proof

And the only way to pave my grave was to make it dirty

Make it up and make it be the truth

In the guise of a friend she came as a complete surprise

Said there's no worse than the will to live, may it be your curse

In return I wished upon her a real long, long life . . .

Mom and dad were just imagination

Nothing they could do could make me real

Just as they could make their own creation

They could make their DNA congeal

The nightmare grows like ivy climbing up my body

Year by year I never even noticed it being there

It make me realize somewhere implied I should feel sorry

It's all been wrong and gotten me nowhere