it is friday of yet another week. the weeks blur after a while. i have my routine and my plants to anchor me. without them, i think time would disappear. or be one endless mess, a mixture of watercolor days, insubstantial, boundless... edgeless.
i don't know what i seek. i don't know how to seek it.
i appreciate what billy collins said today, about "holding the pen loosely." i had similar sentiments, when i spoke about zen in my religion class. it's not about the question, it's about how you hold the question. it's about enduring through a question... it's never about killing the question, for the question is life.
i don't know if i really recall or remember it in my bones, that feeling. if anything, i'm an impatient killer. i want to arrive. i want to feel a sense of accomplishment. and yet, i don't have the endurance to go beyond beginnings. because the middle country, the middle ages, it's a dark and terrible place. i get lost. and i turn against myself, again and again. and there's no progression through, it is just a slogging through shit and mud and stink. and that's why i cut time, and invent new beginnings, over and over again. it's my quantum leap play, where i pretend ignorance of my life and circumstances, and approach it "objectively." it's because i can't deal with life on its own terms, in its own immanence. there must be a transcendent vision, a bird's eye view, to untwist, and unlose myself. and to invent and believe in cleanliness and purity again...
is that the error? that i can't push through?
*****
i don't deal with my son, or my daughter, for that matter. i'm incredibly selfish. my days reduce to checking my plants, maybe fiddling with things, working with students, eating, and working on my own routines. i don't interact much with my kids or my wife. i just do. and i wonder why i feel guilty. i love my kids, i love my wife, but i feel compelled. why? i feel compelled to do something, to be something, to always always be striving. why? is the sense of progression necessary? why is it necessary? why is there never the contentment to just be here? to just enjoy, and let flow? why must i always feel dissatisfied, empty, and move on?
again... why is there this restlessness inside of me...
*****
i wish i were still working at waikiki joy hotel, and had a girlfriend, maybe the cute short haired one, japanese, who worked at the cafe... singing karaoke. it would have been nice. but there weren't tides for me to stay there. it was always a restlessness. and a properness. walls set up and maintained. sometimes, many times, i wish i didn't have eyes to see, or to judge, and just, for once, enjoyed the world. without need to go anywhere else, or become anything else. just an endless enjoyment.
*****
and yet... all of this is false. i have so much already. why can't i appreciate it? why can't we both see and live our lives? we need some distance to appreciate what we already have? we need to lose things to love them? why is that?
*****
striving, stretching, for what? for whom?
*****
i think i need to meditate more... i feel... stuck. or something. and there's a corner of my vision occupied by something monstrous and haunting and guilt-inducing. a calamity about to occur. there are no happy resting places... there is only- a falsity? a false peace.
i often idealize the past, but i know it was consumed with that haunting... consumption. like something was eating the past, restless to eat me from the inside out. and so i kept moving. kept trying to discover a clean, untouched place to live in peace.
i think things are much better here and now. i don't feel that consumption as much. i don't wander the night, filled with guilt. but sometimes i wonder whether it is because i have numbed myself to life. and maybe in burying the demon mouths, i have also buried my heart...
*****
memories of kihyon kim, eating sour soup, at some restaurant, day in and day out. the falsity of that life. how i want to forget all of those false and empty moments. my life is so full of places that had no meaning. my memory is overflowing with the blind moments. the deadend progressions. the hopes that ended up nowhere.
i always have good beginnings of stories. but they never got anywhere. i always quit in the middle.
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