dream: 1/23/2022

this was a dream (of sorts). the trigger to remember it was the moon knight, because a lot of these so-called phase 4 marvel characters were in it, supposedly. what i can recall is that there was this weird character who sort of wore this red dead-poolish thing over his head, along with a backwards tie... and at the same time, there was this youngish korean/japanese girl who kept following him, and trying to communicate with him. there was some kind of connection between the two... and they kept meeting each other at "events," like massacres or odd phenomenon (like some kind of interdimensional portal)... there were other characters, it seems, but for some reason, i can only remember those two clearly...

this dream sort of occurred to me as i was rolling on the carpet beside my wife, who was lying on the downstairs sofa... it wasn't exactly comfortable, although i had once prided myself on the ability to sleep on a hard floor... it required me changing positions periodically in order to "balance out" the bruises, so to speak (no, there were no bruises to speak of)...

i'm kind of in a limbo with regards to writing, and other things. it feels like everything "real"- work particularly- is coming to a head. i don't know how else to describe it... i am incredibly tired at it all. the way the world doesn't work. the way that each little incremental step forward is accompanied by failure of yet another joint in the machinery... if entropy is so all-encompassing, why fight it? why not just let it all fall to shit? that's what i ask myself, in my more weary moments...

dream: 1/17/2022

there were fragments of a dream. over all, it seemed a happy one. there was some posting or something put out by the mililani high school track/cross country team, and there were a few photos/videos with me in it (i ran track in my freshman year, cross country in my sophomore year, and quit - dramatically - from track in my sophomore year). some of them were absurd. like there was one where the entire team of runners was hooked up like horses to some roman chariot, and horace (our coach) was kind of whipping us all along... things like that. anyway, i decided to share some of this with my friends on facebook. only, i was somehow able to enter into their real lives to do this. i may have attempted to share this with people like clifton, but what i remember was visiting greg fastabend. for some reason, he was in the middle of college, perhaps into his sophomore year (whereas i had not started college yet, for some reason). i was giving him perspective- strange, because in the dream, i was the same age- something about how quick college went, and asked him questions about where he was going to in the future. he made some comments about how he was going to be some sort of engineer, and work with [blank] (i can't remember). anyway, i showed him the pictures/videos, and he smiled for a time. then he started to get some things together to give to me, a whole bunch of old robotics stuff, and a bandolier (sp?) of tiny computer cameras...

that was it.

i've been kind of mopey lately. not really working hard at anything. trying to fall asleep a lot of the time. i think i'm still recovering from my stupid illness last week at work, as well as just trying to keep up with the incredible complexities of my work... i'd like to write, secretly, but i want it to be on my terms- like this cute detective work sort of thing, where i keep various notebooks, and write things that can always be considered progress, no matter what- no writing complete dead ends, or dead prose, or anything... always on the up and up. happy thoughts.

i love my wife, but i am so pathetic at planning anything for her. it was her birthday yesterday. tonight, we took her swimming and then we ate hot pot. simple stuff, but she seemed happy. i told her, as she was half asleep, that i wanted to be with her forever... that she was my best friend... and she murmured in her sleep happily. i was telling the truth. i cannot conceive of life without her. she is - i don't know- the river that flows my life along. without it, without her, i would dry up and die.

1/8/2022

i came upon an epiphany of sorts... first of all, let me say it's been a crazy couple of days. immediately after my first day with students, i developed a fever with chills and bodyaches. i got tested. it took them about 24 hours to get my result, which was negative. but in the meantime, i was practically delirious with fever dreams. it felt like my brain was boiling, and thoughts were seething upwards in meaningless repetitive cycles. i know i was mouthing off a lot of it, as though i were trying to let the "steam" escape...

so one of the things i thought about was, of course, how much i hate my brother. and i still do. but i realized something. whenever you hate someone you split the universe in half. and that universe includes you. the way it works is this. you start to look at the qualities of the person you hate. for example, for my brother, it is his selfishness, his greed, his arrogance... basically, the way that his feelings take up all of the air in the room... some of those qualities exist in everyone, including myself. so when i "hate" him, i also split away those aspects within myself, because i find them unacceptable...

what that led to, in me, was this sort of split current. on the one hand, there was the life that i wanted, with all the beautiful people... and on the other hand, there was this lesser place that i inhabited, playing the helpless, hapless "nice guy," who cannot for the life of himself admit his inner wants or desires- he would literally disappear in a puff of smoke if he ever dared mention anything relating to these things... this in turn led to this mentality that the only way "in" to that other world, that beautiful world that he so "deserved" (this, too, is a construct; there is no deserving anything) was for someone to see in him the value that he could not advertise himself. in other words, for me, a woman was someone who could "see" me, who would work to "translate" my own inscrutable heart, and would liberate me... somehow it had to be a woman. maybe it has to do with mother figures, etc., but in the world of men, and "brotherly" friendship, you earned respect through silence and what you did. so i had no problems getting by there. sure, i wasn't the braggart and blowhard that my brother was, but i could survive in that world...

it's a trap, of course. you cannot adopt that role, you cannot disallow yourself from being selfish and acting on your own wants, and be whole. the "nice guy" always lives frustrated, because he cannot break beyond the bounds of his own self-constrained "niceness." no one, not even angels, have the temerity and perseverance to "love" such a person. why bother, when he will never see himself truly, because he has always already blinded himself to himself?

it becomes like a koan. you have an irreconcilable difference. a conceptual gap that you are straddling. what is there to do?

*****

i still hate my brother, of course, for the things he did to my sister. one day, i will sit with my sister and have her recount exactly what he did to her. and i will try to learn from her how she goes through her life, day by day. maybe if i understood that, then i wouldn't feel so angry. or maybe i would feel more angry, who knows... but at least i can see that the qualities i paint my brother with, well, they also paint me, so i shouldn't be so absolutist in my strokes.

1/4/2022

today was the second day of work since winter break. our school was lucky in that we haven't had any kids yet. it's tomorrow that the shit hits the fan, so to speak. it goes without saying that i'm frustrated, both with our "independent" (read: republican) mayor and the impotent, no-good superintendent. both of them are just looking the other way, and telling everyone to go about their business as though nothing is wrong. news flash: we are doubling our cases about once every 3 or 4 days. we are in the steepest rise we have ever been, even when we shut everything down, even when we went to distance... and now, we are to do nothing?

okay, enough about that...

i've been going through my routines, and have just about got things to where they were before i stopped due to impossible work demands... and, of course, work is about to start again. maybe it's a losing proposition, this ideal i have, these goals i have... but whatever... i'm thinking that writing should be more than just a part of my routine, it has to get deeper in my blood if i'm to progress at it. i've been thinking that i need to keep little notebooks with me all the time so i can write down my ideas. i've been thinking that i need to just sit and write, even or especially when i am snarled into a narrative corner (which i feel i have been)... liberation comes at odd moments. like, for the kipapa story, this idea of writing from the perspective of dead people, not dead as in the ancient hawaiians dead, but dead as in recent dead, sort of trapped in limbo, making odd comments about the living, with a quiet desperation to get out of their predicament, to go somewhere... else. this is possibly a good idea, because the way i was trying to write it, with the living, and some inane story about ophelia and so on, was just getting too ridiculous... the dead can make fun of the living. the living take themselves too seriously...

and for the kappa story (hey, i just realized, kipapa is just kappa with an extra i in it)... i had this idea of the fish boy. something about why fish never have names. it's because no one really considers fish to be living beings. they are somewhere above plants, but only very slightly above plants. and we don't really name plants, do we? fish basically exist. they don't "do" anything. and so we consider that they don't have souls or spirits, in the same sense that dogs or bunny rabbits or rats do. even lizards have it better. i'd even say some arachnids have the privilege of a name... but anyway, i wanted to tie this into the boy, who feels like a fish in that sense... and something about how he IS like a fish, in that he is a natural swimmer. not a great swimmer, not a fast swimmer, like his stinking brother. after all, his brother "makes a big splash" in the water, he punishes the water, he makes it his bitch, and therefore he moves through it. there is little art in what he does. it is force and subjugation...

i think i got the idea of a swimming scene. i got the idea from "march comes in like a lion," i believe the 10th episode, wherein the main character talks about swimming, and swimming, and swimming, and swimming... a metaphor for his lonely and solitary struggle to progress through life, to find some land upon which to rest. that was very moving for me, to see him struggle, the repetition of the lines "and swimming..." i could feel the exhaustion. the longing for something solid. it somehow resonated with what i intended to write, about a person who needs to find a place for himself, a place to rest...

*****

i think, in my good moments, that i have faith in the process. the process means you just stick with it. and it means doing other things. it means sometimes just cleaning up. but all the time, a part of you is thinking about it, a part of you is mulling it over, turning things over in your head. and the process means that you are not escaping from it by doing other tasks, it means that you are constantly invested in it... your soul is tied to it, in a way. not in a serious way, not in a forceful way. but in a way that is abiding. it is, in a sense, like zen. because zazen is all about sitting, and abiding, with questions. holding questions, becoming questions, breathing questions... desperate for completion, but not desperate enough to lose hold of the question...

which reminds me: i need to meditate. i said so earlier, because i do have issues. anger issues. rage issues. forgiveness issues... unhealthy thoughts... 

dream - 1/2/2022

i had a few dreams this early morning.

in one of them, i was a newbie police officer. i was walking through some sort of encampment on a beach. one of the first things i saw were two white teens (not just white but literally pasty white). they were throwing rocks at other people right in front of me. i decided i couldn't let that slide, so i arrested one of them. i put his arms behind his back and tried to handcuff him. at one point during this struggle, this woman in lawyerly clothes came up to me, and, shoving a paper in my face, basically stated that the boy had some kind of disability, and that i had just done significant damage to his self-esteem by arresting him in front of all of his peers... i apologized, and let the boy go. i think i explained that it was the first thing i had seen that day, and that i acted based only on what i saw... i walked through the rest of that encampment feeling a bit wounded. in the darkness of the tent, i saw a boy sitting on a recliner upside down. it wasn't anything to make any sort of fuss about, but i felt that there was some kind of erosion of respect around me, that people felt that they could now do any and everything around me...

in another part of the dream, which was a mere fragment, i was sitting watching some sort of star wars related film with jw- a person who i had discovered, over the past few years, is a rabid trump supporter. in any case, i just sat there watching, as she made educated comments or anticipated the dialogue word for word,..

i am struggling to, but can't recall much of the third portion of the dream.

it is a grey rainy morning... not a good day for gardening...