i have been watching mad max beyond thunderdome for the past half hour... funny. has it been two years? yes, during one of my early blog entries, i recall typing as i looked over my shoulder at the second floor television playing this very movie. and in that entry, i remarked about how nostalgic the movie was, and how it reminded me of my 13th birthday, when we rented it and showed it at my party... time is funny in that way. it keeps winking deja vus at us, but to what purpose? is it to wake us up, or is it to give us the feeling that everything, every so-called waking moment, is just another spin on the turntable?

lightning is flashing in the distance, like periodic flash photography, or a broken intermittent strobe light. now, lying on the second floor bed, with the windows open, the air hangs still. and i can hear a low rumbling in the distance that seems to shake my very gut, the thundering of something unsettled...

are you listening to it too?

i wander the dark unlit hallways of my home, creep into the bedrooms, listen to the even snores, trace the expressions of peace in the sleepers into my mind. i am so thankful, so very thankful, for my wife and my children. they are my tether to this world. i think that, without them, i would have floated off so long ago, a bubble boy adrift in a solipsistic heady ufo-shaped balloon... with no one knowing that i was trapped in the attic...

***

lately, i have nothing to write, nothing to say. i am so beyond lacking motivation. i am drifting over my world, tracing its forms.

i listen to music, the same old radiohead songs, but now i am no longer passive as a listener, i deconstruct everything, i wonder where thom yorke sings from, i piece out the bass from the piano from the guitar, i try to analyze how the synthesizers produce the sounds that they do...

there is no innocence in art. everything has a purpose and an intent. when you get to understanding this, there's wonder, yes, but there's also a kind of grim awareness. it's as though you've seen what's in the magician's hat. magic still exists, there is still the illusion, and the intake of breath of the audience... but behind it all is a machine.

do you understand this?

***

the rumbling is getting closer, and louder. i can feel it within me now. i am hoping that it will summon rain, that the heavens will fall so loud that this empty hanging silence will be replaced by white noise, comforting white noise, the voice of billions of raindrops all shouting at me "SHHHH!" to be quiet...

***

someone next door is talking loud.

***

we found an envelope sent by my grandmother to willow for her birthday. strange, we never got around to opening it. it contains $70, and although my mom wrote the bland "happy birthday" message, i almost felt touched from wherever she is... it's strange, my grandmother was so much a part of my life, and now that she's gone, i continue to function. why is that? why is it that i only think of her in odd moments nowadays?

i haven't gone to her house in ewa beach. i've no reason to. and besides, i couldn't get in if i could... what would i find there, i wonder? an old house thick with dust and memories... a voice that i would long to hear. perhaps i would walk in the door and find myself following old patterns, like a ghost. i'd walk over to the refrigerator, peruse the contents, withdraw a coke, sit at the dining room table... maybe hear the tinny strains coming from the radio, some stupid show about "sokka gakkai." and i'd watch my grandma's back as she chopped something at the cutting board, the hot clean air coming in through the slants of the window louvers... and there would be a face turning to look at me, a face so warm and comforting that i would take it for granted.

would take it for granted.

***

why am i like this? i am immiscible. i could probably survive anything. like a cockroach. nothing breaks me up, shatters me. i only contain nostalgia like dead echoes in steel.

i once remarked that that was how my name originated. "rand" means "shield," and perhaps came from the sound of metal ringing on metal... i have a name, and i am someone, only when i impact/touch the world... but when "left to my own devices," i will sleep and dream the reverberations of purposeless steel...

steel an identity...