11/22/2025

wow. i suppose it's been over a year and a half since i last posted... apologies.

i guess i should update the maybe one reader that occasionally checks this blog out (me?).

this past summer was incredibly trying. my mother had been exhibiting signs of dementia for a while, but i guess things really came to a head when she slipped and fell at a pool. she had to be hospitalized for a knee fracture. the environment of the hospital (and later, the rehab center), the relative isolation, the inability to use a phone or computer regularly, and other complicating health factors (like a recurrent and very serious uti) all exacerbated her dementia. there were actually periods where she was almost incoherent...

in any case, this led to me taking a far more active role in my parents' care. i gave their home a serious cleaning, and tried my best to safety proof everything; rails in the bathroom, a bidet, and an ingenious (if i do say so myself) method of using the laundry room sink in the garage to supply warm water to give my mother a shower (since she could no longer walk upstairs to take a shower there). i was staying at my parents' house overnight, to ensure that nothing bad happened... although my father lives with my mother, he was getting verbally (and sometimes physically) abusive to her, and i decided that i couldn't just leave her alone with him...

my siblings and i had a disastrous meeting. i guess i had a lot of suspicions about my brother's intentions. he had been having weekly meetings with my mother for some time to go over finances, in the event that she became incapacitated. that seemed to be his only and primary interest. i felt that it was odd that in all of that time, my parents didn't get an opportunity to see my brother's two kids. if family was a priority, then shouldn't he have allowed my parents to establish a relationship with their grandchildren? but no. he was able to make time to go over real estate properties, but not to share time with his own children...

in any case... at this meeting, my brother initiated by saying that his lawyer felt it was unfair that his own children were left out of the will. keep in mind that my mother was in hospital, and there were concerns about how we were to maintain her care- 

dreams - 3/26/2025

hi,

it's been a while... i'm currently on a work trip to philadelphia. never been here before... but aside from the location, what i've really been contemplating is how old i am, and how incompatible i am with the living world... i periodically (perenially?) have this feeling... i want to express it in a story, maybe something where i am either made of stone, or am some kind of ravenous beast... or maybe even both.

anyway, i've more often taken to documenting my dreams here... so here goes. last night, among other dreams, i had one where- and i'm backtracking as far as i can remember- i was visiting some old local waipahu restaurants on a hill... and recall something about certain specials... i remember some of the signs, which were so tall that parts of the bottom had to be cut out to accommodate chairs or pipes from the floor. anyway, i remember something about fish cake or something. i must have been pretty hungry... there was something about my brother... but i can't recall.

later on in the dream, i recall a kind of treacherous path from a park. it was a dirt path, made of hard-packed red dirt. and it cycled down, zig-zagged... and at certain points, it led to abysses, edges going down to nowhere. and somehow you had to drive these vehicles over the paths... anyway, i managed to get down the path until i found this strange oasis. there were some mazes and other things carved into the hard red clay. i realized that myself and maybe some other young student had made these a while ago, and they were still up. it was actually a pretty amazing thing, a recreation of some computer game or something. there were a lot of displays... then at one point, i saw a hard basketball court, with all of these tall glass vases (again, a part of the game)... a strong wind kicked up, and it started to blow some of the vases over. i was concerned, because all of the vases were made of glass. sure enough, one of them tumbled, and cracked...

there are other ghosts of dreams, like of a classroom... my old school that i taught at... things like that. but i can't reach them.