5/8/2020

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.

5/6/2020

sorry, skipped a day yesterday, because, well, i was tired.

i have included in my routines (don't really know why) the "reading" of manga. i read about 5 chapters of a couple of manga a day. i read "one piece" (don't really know why, except that it is one of the longest running manga in history, and it was consistently rated high in shonen jump, even higher than one of my favorites, naruto). i also read "berserk," which i find is a great story, filled with violence and darkness... i appreciate the pacing with which the author delivers his epic. i'm not sure if i could have that sort of patience, or if i have a vast space within me to imagine such a world from nothing...

***

i went to the food pantry today, which was at my school. i helped to pass out our little food offering, which was composed of a cabbage and onions, as well as some canned goods. it felt good to hand these things out to people. i wish it could've been something better. i worried that people would be disappointed at the offerings. but hey, food is food.

***

i know i was angry in my last postings. my brother is always a touchy subject with me. and as i've said countless times before, distance and absence only makes things worse for me. i start losing the capacity to appreciate things, to see things in perspective. i only see the negative contours. the shadows start swallowing up the form, until all i see is a blackness, and all i hear is mocking laughter.

i always think, in the end, that he is laughing at me. and by extension, god.

that's why i don't believe in it, that whole paternalistic, republican, white christian god. because it's fake. it's partial. it isn't the true god. the god i know is the one that hung out with the broken people. it's the god that was always broken himself, because only in knowing brokenness himself can he reach the broken. i hate perfection, because it is so false. nothing in the experience of man is ever, ever perfect. and to put that before us, that stinking perfection, is merely to push us away, to make us wallow in our self-disgust... i hate people who pretend that perfection. no, let me amend that, because i think it is natural to seek perfection, and perhaps it is noble and human to do so. but to pretend the arrival of it, or even the arrival of greater degrees of it, and to use that to judge the world. that is what i hate. watch fox news, and you'll see it in spades.

***

i hear the choppers, chopping the air. i feel a mild wind on my back, and wonder if it is from the ginsu knives of those helicopters.

the clouds won't give up their rain. i keep waiting for it, to fill my one constructed rain catchment system barrel. i keep waiting for it, to drown out and wash the world. but nowadays, the rain doesn't come. we just get this blaring sunshine that wilts some of my infant plants... it's just too brash and bright...

***

i like billy collins, although i feel his poems are a bit too- what's the word, clear? and too- folksy? i guess i prefer my poems to be either lyrical or obscure. to play with language to the point of breaking it. of course, i don't like my poems to be entirely obscure or mysterious. i found t.s. eliot to be completely unreadable. too many external references, too many foreign verses. i didn't get it. i mean, there were fragments of it that seemed sympathetic, what i mean by that is that i could resonate with them, like the hollow men part. but most of it? blech.

i think the danger of talking about poetry is that it can turn poetry into some sort of intellectual gimmick. and it isn't, it shouldn't be. it shouldn't just be a process. or rather, it shouldn't be a process that is coopted by the mechanistic rational mind. it should be a fracturing, or an exploration of the edge of a break... an incautious exploration that cuts the soles of your feet, and leaves you bleeding footprints- incautiously- over the landscape. it should be a- not knowing where you are going- that somehow ends up where you are supposed to be- but never giving the reader the expectant view of an arrival... i don't know.

poetry should shock. it should be the knife that impales your back. or the ice cold water that you fall into, when your weight becomes too much for the paper thin sheet...

***

sorry, that's all i have to say for today.

5/4/2020

today was a strange waste. i did a couple of calls with my students, but for the most part, i was running errands. i did some banking, and then wandered the stores looking for random items. the pearl city walmart was a waste of time, and filled me with a kind of despair. all these people, wandering around, looking for stuff. me included. desparate. disparate. whatever.

i felt tired when i returned home, but i had to go pick up my wife from town, and then take her shopping. i was happy to see her, and all, but i was still tired...

*****

sleep comes like a drug in god's country...

*****

there is sometimes an anxiety, like something is wrong. and it disturbs me, it ripples me, it prevents me from being comfortable within myself, and able to express the true art, the smooth and the calm. but then again, is art created by disturbance? is disturbance the motivation?

*****

i heard from my wife that my mother sees my brother every week. that's more than i see her. i don't know. maybe he and his wife are trying to get in the good graces of my parents, so that it won't seem strange when they claim the entirety of the inheritance. i'm sorry, but that's how i view them nowadays. strangers. greedy, manipulative, conniving strangers. i mean, they judge my parents, they wouldn't even allow them in their own home when they took the trouble to drive over to drop off christmas presents... but on their own terms, and in their own clutches, they are friendly, friendly, friendly. it's all bullshit. all selfishness and pretense. that's what i think in this moment, in this moment when i am stuck in my pride and judgment, locked in this perspective of rage and hate...

yes, i hate them. i'll admit it. and while i'm at it, i'll say i hate everyone who was ever duped by them (which includes myself). how the world loves a trump. it's the same with them. they can see the injustice of them bald in the face, and yet, oh, how convincing his drama and woes are! how everyone sympathizes with the noisemakers!

*****

i will bear my pain in silence. and no one will know i ever existed.

and when i speak, in my bleating way, muffled by my own clenched jaws, no one will listen.

no one ever does.

them that's gots, will get. them that don't, will lose.

i will always be the loser.

and i will glower with hatred for that, even as i can never change the law of the universe. the fact that the firstborn son is always beloved by heaven.

fuck that.

fuck him.

*****

in the darkness, in the darkness... i will always serve humbly.

my path is one of continual and continuous effacement.

because the alternative is rage.

and i am capable of infinite rage.

i am capable of black hatred and fire, and the gnashing of teeth, the smashing of objects... i can be rage and hate unto destruction.

they can laugh at me, as i shout, but i am capable of killing- if only that law that was set upon me, the constraint of the second born, was not always in effect.

i am reluctant to befriend anyone, to be grouped, because to do so betrays the pure loneliness, the lonely purity. i know what it is like to be an outsider, and to sympathize and understand the hypocrisy they judge the world with, i need to always be an outsider.

so i don't care about you. i don't care if you see me or not. i know what the right path is. i know what it is to serve. and i will serve in continually increasing obscurity.

i will disappear right before your eyes.

*****

i don't know how to release this anger. this hatred.

*****

i like growing things. i like checking them, caring for them, making little changes to support them. i suppose i inherited something of my grandfather in this. i like to think there is something positive in this instinct to grow. i hope there is. maybe it makes me seem kinder than i am.

because in truth, i don't- i'm a vegetable heart. something unfeeling.

i wish i could, but maybe i've numbed myself to the hatred so much that i can't really feel love either.

i would die for someone. because it would pretend at love. i can't feel it, but i could give myself up in its name. and maybe then people would suspect that i was a human being for once.

dream

just a brief dream. or rather, the memories that returned to me were brief. i remember some sort of call for someone named ayumi, and i kept wandering trying to find this person. like in the williams dream, i was unfamiliar with anyone, i didn't know who anyone was. i didn't know the deal, what the whole story was. i passed by a glass walled room, the office of grant. and i saw rows upon rows of materials waiting to be deployed, labeled in grant's distinctive handwriting... i seem to recall some sort of sense of disappointment that he felt with regards to me... as though i didn't "get with the program."

5/3/2020

i finished margaret atwood's masterclass. i find her extremely insightful and funny. i hope i have that sort of frank sense of humor (some would say dark, but i call it realistic) when i grow up. for that matter, i'm already grown up; i hope i can cultivate something like that at my advanced age... that sort of humor is not for everyone. it's not gentle. and it assumes a certain level of intelligence, i suppose...

now, i'm listening to billy collins, a poet. i like his take on how poetry is the history of the heart, and how it is basically passionate about (diminishing) time, and how most poetry is a call to action, to "live a little." i wish i could live a little. i feel, after my earlier dream, that i have always been constrained by things. constrained by this need to prepare for something. but never quite to enact, or spend. why?

i've always wondered at that. where did that come from? the moralistic sensibilities? was it something innate in me, from the start? or did it come from somewhere? i suppose we wrestled with the idea of an implicit (dis)order in religion class. that's why i wrote about the image of crystallization, and how one could initiate a crystal "wave" as it were by either adding a seed crystal (i.e., introduction of an order from the outside), or by scratching the surface of the container (i.e., the "deed" or original act of creation). but these debates led me no closer to extricating myself from my prison.

i often wonder what things would have been like had i been- i don't know- more open and sharing of myself. but i'm not sure what that would have meant. i mean, i do struggle to share in my own way. most of what i do is FOR something or someone. it is all preparation for some invisible guest. like putting on some tremendous production or something. so in that sense, i suppose i am trying to be generous of myself. in fact, i often feel that i am compelled to be so... but i suppose that's not what it really means. i suppose that's not quite way the advice (for it always was advice) was intended. i think people wanted to see the "real" me. whatever that meant. but all i could give was the prepared me. the produced me. the edited for television me.

deep down, there is incredible anger, and incredible lust. i wrestle with it all the time. but i can never bring it to the surface. it is so buried within me. so there is this inevitable lag, always this inevitable lag. there are times when people slight me, and i don't feel it. at least, not in the moment. maybe that's good, or i would be reacting to everything; and maybe it makes it seem like i'm super mellow, that nothing can get to me. but it's not really that; it's more that it takes a while for the lash to be felt, and by the time i'm ready to scream out, the moment has passed. it's sort of like a punchline... and i get the joke way too late.

and there have been a few moments when- well, i guess, i was being seduced... but i didn't feel it. not until it was too late. and now, i have all of these regrets, and nothing to do with it. i can't process any of it. it is like energy that curls in on itself in frustration. released too late... i don't know how to peel away the layers of skin between myself and the world. don't know if it would be wise to, anyway.

is meditation, poetry, etc. a form of control? or release? would they still say that if they knew what monsters would be let loose upon the world?

... as it is, maybe i already am a monster. not the wild sort. but the unfeeling, insensitive sort. i used to pride myself upon being sort of empathic. but now, i can hardly feel sympathy for most people. teachers, for example. i am one. and there are teachers leaving my school, but i could care less. or i couldn't care less. all i think about are the many moments when a certain teacher betrayed her oaths... put her own interests in front of those of her students. and i think that i'm not going to miss her very much. and i'm being truthful too. maybe it was because i felt betrayed by some of her antics... by some of her partiality. and if there's one thing i realize, i can't forgive people. there's a switch that is hard to reach, but perhaps because of that, once it flips, i can't flip it back...

*****

i suppose dreams are compelling because it feels like it is a truth, a felt truth. nowadays, i realize, i don't feel much of anything any more. i say i care about things, like my children, or my sister, but when push comes to shove, i don't do enough for them. i don't go out of my way for them. why is that? it's kind of a weariness, i suppose. it's also a kind of fatalism.

i'm also not gentle. i don't say things in cheery or encouraging ways. why am i so cruel? i just talked to my daughter about college, and made her cry. why did i do that? why do i do that? why do i feel that is necessary? is it really the truth, or is it that i feel she needs to be scared? does it even work, anyway? i don't know. i did mean what i said, about attention. you need to devote your full attention to each thing you do. (even i don't live up to that standard) maybe i'm being a hypocrit, because i don't do that. i don't talk to my son, or my daughter, or my wife, in a meaningful way. only to scold, i suppose. and i get into this mode where i- where it seems as though i am adrift in some current, and i can't swim against it. we are being pulled in different directions, being pulled apart. and maybe i'll claim i love them, when it's all too late- when i didn't do something about things when i could.

i don't know. i MEAN well. i always MEAN well. but maybe it's like all my teachers told me. i need to share of myself. if only i could figure out how. if only i could get myself to come out from beneath all of these cogitations and moralistic imprisonment. but as a child, i never got to play. i never relaxed enough to play, and be happy...

dream

i'm off cycle here, but i thought i would record a vivid dream i had last night. vivid dreams are extremely rare for me nowadays.

in this dream, i was back at williams, only it was a very different place. none of the landmarks were recognizable to me. at one point, i was getting ready to go to my first class, which, i believe, was a japanese language class held in "sawyer" (upon reflection, sawyer was the library, i believe). i headed in the general direction of where i believed that class was, but i got hopelessly lost. instead, i ended up in some sort of mall/class area. apparently, they had modernized to the point where a lot of classes were held in shops. for example, a store selling brass instruments also served as the music class. in fact, i seemed to have ended up in the music department or something. i remember thinking/feeling this sense that i had long lost, of this drive for perfection in everything... i felt it when i looked at the clear glass walls of this "music class" with some latin title... the sense of auditions... i don't know. in any case, i shyly asked someone, whom i assumed was some sort of professor- this sort of chubby mayan looking fellow- how i could get to the class i was looking for. he made some sort of comment that wasn't particularly helpful, and his boyfriend? and his wife? not sure, started piggybacking on him jovially...

in any case, i never made it to the class. i was feeling mildly panicked and tired by that point. it wasn't a great start for my year. i was already thinking of some sort of excuse, that i had only arrived on campus the day before, and wasn't particularly adjusted yet. i was thinking that i should have used my time before to scope out and search for my classes so that this calamity wouldn't have occurred...

i was walking back to my dorm. there was this open area in a park, kind of fenced off, and i noticed all these young college students (of which, supposedly, i was one) breaking out their cameras and taking pictures of something. when i looked, i noticed that this squirrel happened to be putting on some sort of show. it was munching on some nuts, and for some reason, looking mildly human or something. i'm not sure. but he was a sensation. i realized then that that entire fenced off area of the park was sort of an artistic installment or something, with shows occurring throughout the day. i even saw a buddhist monk- or a white guy dressed in monk's robes- pretending to act like the squirrel, aping after nuts or something... meanwhile, i was walking on an icy sidewalk to get back home, and periodically slipping whenever i stepped on a sloped part of the sidewalk. i was consciously thinking about the angle to place my foot to prevent myself from sliding, but it kept happening anyway.

i remember feeling acutely alone- different. it was, perhaps, the same feeling i had when i actually attended. always alone. why could i never enjoy life as those other students did? why did i not have friends (okay, i did have friends, but it wasn't easy for me to find or make them). i felt- sad.

i guess there was one other portion of the dream. i went to some sort of house. there were stairs leading up to rooms. only, there was some sort of strange arrangement. when i went up one set of stairs they ended in a wall? or a closed ceiling? then, when i went up the left set (for the stairs were paired), there was this strange arrangement, where when the door opened, a cloth? ceiling also lifted, but if the door closed, then the ceiling dropped. fortunately, i figured out that arrangement and walked into a darkened room. there was this female professor, black, with closely trimmed hair, almost bald. i mentioned something to her (i don't quite remember) and she brought out what looked like a box of macadamia nuts. when she opened the lid, she produced a drawing from willow, as well as one from me. apparently, willow had gifted her with this when she came earlier... i'm not sure. and she wanted to express her appreciation at this. i had this feeling, i don't know why, that the gift did not guarantee anything, and that this professor was just being gracious...

in any case, i also remember this moment where i saw all these people walking out of a building, this obviously gay man, bald, with a mustache, and bared arms, and other people. and i remember having this feeling of regret, that i could never have relationships with any of them, because- even here, in a dream, as a purported college student- i was married, and faithful. it's funny how there was that juxtaposition, that i was a young college student, but elements of my present, most notably my marriage and my daughter, still chained me to the future...

anyway, that's most of what i remember. it's impossible to capture all the details, because there were so many, but those were some of the most significant elements. no matter what, vivid dreams make me feel vast... like there are worlds within me. i don't really care what they mean or anything.

5/2/2020

my apologies. i got slammed with correcting the acupoints final, and like a massive turd, it clogged up my system for a few days straight. it was frustrating because this year all the finals were submitted in electronic form- and some were out of order, or seemed to be missing pages, or... whatever. i have a billion excuses. fact is, i wasn't looking forward to doing it, it tends to be very mundane stuff... so i had to just sit (or lie down) and do it.

in any case, i have moved forward on a couple of things. i set up my first hydroponics station. we'll see how that works out. i also planted a bunch of seedlings, in preparation for planting to the left planter box section, as well as for future hydroponics stations. and, i purchased pretty much everything i need to set up the rain catchment system. so i guess you could say i am progressing towards... something.

every now and then, i play minecraft. i don't know what really endears me about minecraft. i mean, some of it is nostalgia. it's from a time when i used to play the game with my kids. and we started off the spring break doing that... but after they got animal crossing, that's the last i've heard of them. instead, i've been playing on my own. i must have started a few different worlds now. and i gleaned a few insights as to how i work. i like beginnings. i like getting thrown into situations where there is a kind of clarity as to the actions that need to be taken. people like to idealize beginnings, they like to say that beginnings are full of possibilities. it's true, in a sense, but in another, it's not true. actually, at the beginning, you are limited in what you can do, so there is a relatively clear path of progression. you need to do this to do that, and you need to do things in a particular order. and i guess i like that. i like the clarity (or rather the pressure) of doing things in a set order. the problem gets to be, ironically, in the "middle kingdom," where you start accomplishing things. then, there ARE open possibilities, there ARE things to do next, but there's no real compulsion any more. i mean, you have some food, you have some armor, you have what you need to survive... so why bother, and go further? there are arguments about what you can build next, or all these elaborate things you could do. but all of them have a cost... and not all of them have a... what's the word, necessity? for that matter, it's at that point, usually, that i wonder, "what is the point of this?" and then i start asking that fatal question: "why am i wasting my time here?" and then there is a simultaneous lack of motivation, and a feeling of mild disgust...

perhaps this is how things are in life too.

i once thought of things in terms of pressure. like water pressure. like, how there is a kind of clarity and flow when you have clear walls around you that contain you, and basically force you in one direction. and then, often, when you accomplish whatever it was you were driven to do, there is a loss of clarity, and an indecisiveness of flow... and you get lost. i suppose that's the dilemma of life, of always maintaining that pressure, that flow, even when the intial impetuses for things are lost... either that, or, well, things just get too difficult, it's too difficult to penetrate and proceed, and so you get a backflow... and again, there is this indecisiveness, this lack of clarity...

***

apologies... i kind of passed out in the midst of writing. i have been kind of tired today.

the world upsets me. let's just put that out there. i am disgusted by the daily news, and by the fact that a society that should be rational is letting the lowest common denominator rule. republicans, that means you... nuff said, before i go on another rant.

my wife is intending to volunteer to work for a friend. i guess it's the best thing right now. it keeps her busy... and she is worried about being cut after whenever this whole social isolation period is over (which seems indefinite)... i'm not sure if i'll be happy or sad when the world goes back to whatever it returns to... in a different form, no doubt. i've been okay with the way things are. honestly. of course, not the deaths, not the hit to the economy, not all the losses of opportunities, the risks to the essential workers, etc. but i mean this state of suspended animation, where we are expected to stay at home. that is what i sort of like. i mean, it has given me time to work on things. it has given me time to reflect a bit. and what's wrong with that?