12/28/2022

i just finished reading "klara and the sun" by kazuo ishiguro. it's a wonderful and sad story. i have many thoughts about it, but essentially i think mainly about the things we take for granted... and the purity of a love so unconditional that it completely disregards the self... somewhat like sunlight.

yesterday i struggled to progress on "kappa noodle." but i realized that what i was writing was getting far too complex... characters with the same name, and what that was supposed to signify, etc... i was losing the point of the story. i really made a concerted effort to map out the plot, in my own messy way... i had this idea of having at least two plot lines, and make them each progress naturally, while resonating and echoing each other... somewhat akin to what haruki murakami tried to accomplish in "hard boiled wonderland." but i was having so much trouble... on the one hand, i wasn't sure what the point of either plotline was... and to make them resonate seemed to compromise the plotlines, make them contrived. so i gave up.

i now have another idea, a much simpler one. well, it's still complex, in the sense that there are still two plot lines. but i think if i incorporate my brother in the second plotline, then there would be a kind of collapse, a directness about things... after all, the story is largely about my ambiguous feelings towards my brother- so why not incorporate him directly, and have him speak for himself? maybe it would make him more sympathetic, rather than this effigy that i complain about and burn in my mind... the trick is this. on the one hand, i want to make his position understandable... but there is something that i want to hint at in this story, something unspeakable, that is the present source of all my rage towards him. it is unspeakable, and yet, i want to hint at it, perhaps through metaphor, perhaps through some apocalyptic event that occurred (or will occur?) in the kappa world... but i don't, frankly, have the subtlety for that. and i fear that incorporating this will simply muddy up the plot...

there's a point where you have to negotiate between truth and whether an artistic piece "works." life in itself, "truth" so to speak, is messy. art demands a kind of distance, an abstraction... a piecing out of what's essential... and therein lies the tension... we don't want to simplify an artistic work to the point where it "loses the baby" (bathwater-baby)... but we also don't want to supply the entire ocean, with all of its vagueness and depth, for our readers will simply drown in it, and not know what the point or purpose of it all was...

***

i am tired.

every day, i find, i am wrestling with trying to find a way to feel. a stance to take. a symbol to believe in. something to feel. i suppose it is in my nature to require something like that... and maybe this is what it means to be old. it is this struggle to continue life, when all of its fictions seem to no longer hold any more...

i continue to serve. i suppose that's life's one redeeming factor, is reinforcing other people, making other people feel more solid in their lives... but for myself?

dream, 12/27/2022

i hate some really weird nightmare type dreams...

in the first segment, i was with my wife/girlfriend. during the day, we had driven our car into some very dangerous landscape full of cliffs. muddy pink cliffs... somehow we woke up and had to leave. i'm not certain why at this point, but there was a high degree of fear involved, like maybe something was there in the night that didn't want us there. so we drove on those treacherous cliffs. and somehow i found a way, a path of sorts, that would navigate us on the least treacherous route through the cliffs. it would take us close to the muddy waters of a raging river. so i went down the slope, practically riding on the underside of the car. then, the waters took us and carried us, and somehow everything tumbled into darkness. when we came to rest, i realized that we were under water, and needed to get out. there was some blanket that had ballooned out above the car, and as i somehow made my way out of the driver's side window to see where we were (not sure where the water went)... well, i stuck my head out of the window, and i saw that we were on the edge of a high cliff, teetering on the edge of it, and my action of breaking myself out had already caused the car to teeter more towards falling falling, and i remember actually having a debate (terrible debate) with myself, of saving myself or staying in the car and dying, but fortunately the choice was stolen from me, because we fell...

at least i think we did...

next, i was with eugene, a friend from college. we were riding some crazy ride, like a roller coaster, only it wasn't a roller coaster. it was supposed to be something routine, like a baggage claim or a food service place or something... anyway, we were riding on this thing, with seats that swung upon some sort of pole. the chairs kept ramping upwards and upwards at increasingly incongrous angles... and then, at one point, i felt something give. i realized that things were not going routinely, that this was not right, and, just as i thought, the whole thing started going backwards. somehow i reached the pole and got myself to safety, just as the whole mess started careening backwards into a crash, and a dirty mess of food and people...

we (eugene and i, or a pseudo eugene, some nameless faceless companion) went to our car to leave this godforsaken place. we needed to eat. but as we tried to start the car (now, some huge truck), there was something wrong. i went outside to check, and realized that when we had parked our car (i don't recall us ever actually parking it), we had impacted some wall. so i was searching the ground for scattered parts, like a part of the grill. actually, there were a lot of parts from a lot of cars that had hit things... anyway, i couldn't find what we needed...

i realized that a part of the reason we couldn't leave (yes, and our car suddenly had no bottom... it was just seats and a floorless car with all the moving parts showing) was that our car had no tires/wheels. only bare axles. so some friendly person showed up and started putting these baby tires all over our axles... and then it was at this point that the car started turning into this crazy restaurant show...

have you ever watched a movie where you know it is disgusting and evil, but you're trapped? well, that's kind of what happened. it was like this crazy family of mutants (like texas chainsaw massacre) ran the car/restaurant/show. they asked us if we wanted food, and my partner (unwittingly) asked for a hot dog. so one of the people, a long limbed, skinny boy, with a face and hair like the saw puppet, gave him one in a plastic bag/balloon that he had clearly defecated in... when they asked me if i wanted anything, i said no, i had already eaten...

then there was some crazy show that they tried to display to us on some makeshift television. at the moment, i can't recall what it was...

i woke with a bad taste in my mouth... and a feeling of desperation and spinning uselessness, a dark mirror to my waking life...

dreams 12/20/22

so there were many dreams during this winter storm, all brimming over. all i can recall are fragments or sentiments from each.

in one, there was a woman recalling an affair with a confederate soldier, which happened when both were in new york (incongruous). she said that his kisses tasted like "brooklyn and rain."

in another, there was a shipping container with faded mountains painted on its side parked in the middle of a street. this was an obstacle in the way of the construction of someone's home. so i went on a journey up into the mountains, and found a middle aged chamorro man, disillusioned with life, and dangerously apathetic about mine. in any case, he listened to what i had to say. perhaps he was related to the person whose home was in jeopardy. he took me to an aging wwii bomber, and flew it down from the mountain. i recall him barely clearing the peaks of mountains, and, later, buildings, until we approached the shipping container, and it became certain that he intended to crash the plane directly into the shipping container...

[i think i was awake for this part... lynn said there were no blankets behind her, so i reached around her to pull them up, and found musubi there. "there's something warm and furry here. and it vibrates." i demonstrated by rubbing musubi's neck. "you're getting a call on your pager."]

and i had a thought, perhaps the uniting element of all these fragments, that chatgpt was somehow tapped into the collective unconsciousness, and was filling it with pseudo-gibberish or pseudo-sense (depending on your perspective), like some vast silicon iceberg melting its circuitry into the oceans, causing its levels to rise up and drown everyone in unsettling dreams.