today was a pretty uneventful day. i woke up feeling alright. it felt as though i had dreamed, and dreamed a lot, but i couldn't quite remember what i had dreamed about. i felt that there were echoes of williams college in my head, but beyond that, i couldn't trace the thread back through the maze, as it were. maybe some of it had to do with the fact that i'd recalled a lot of faces clearly the other day, some names too, even. i don't know what the significance of any of that was, those images and sounds, because none of them related to any particular vignettes or narrative memories... they were just impressions of people who i once used to know- or rather, didn't know, and never really cared to know better. just empty echoes. eggshells.
in any case, i tried to move on to my routines, in between checking out my plants... with regards to the plants. i don't know if i'd mentioned it, but i found a lot of caterpillars on my cabbages, chewing tiny holes in the leaves. when i examined the undersides of all of the leaves, i found more and more caterpillars of various sizes. and when i tried to open up the very heart of the cabbage, i noticed all of these tiny green nodules- no doubt, more caterpillar eggs. so i doused the entire cabbage in the aquaponics water, and watched with some relief as the eggs fell away and sank into the grow bed, perhaps to drain to the fish below, where they would be breathed in as some kind of hors'douevre (sp?).
my life, i realize, is extremely boring. but that's okay, for the most part. i just work on stuff. i just try to improve myself. i know it seems so- constructivist (don't know if i'm using that term correctly). but, i don't know... i think i only experience life when i'm with people. in myself, i, for the most part, could care less. things only "turn on" if others are excited by it. i usually don't "feel" much of anything if i were alone. it reminds me of santa monica. it may have been a beautiful place, full of opportunities and experiences, but it was frankly wasted on me. i just felt incredibly alone there. it makes me feel alone and sad just thinking about it... about, for example, walking to the beach in the darkness, dressed in my blue monk pants and a semi-long beige overcoat, feeling clean (because i'd just showered BEFORE this outing), and then doing a taijiquan form in the sand, with the lights all orange from the lamps, surrounded by no one in particular to see me... moments like that, repeated ad nauseum. no one to see me.
it still seems interesting to me, a particular quirk of mine. i don't exist in and of myself. i think, almost from the beginning, that i was opportunistic in using the attentions of others to create a self "for myself." because outside of that attention, i literally (i know, not using that correctly) did not exist. i don't know how to explain what that means. it means that i wasn't a person, i was barely even a shell, with no opinions or memories or thoughts. that's what it means to be a non-person. someone who doesn't care about much of anything. but i guess deep down there is this despair or something. a feeling of drowning. of disappearing. like you are in darkness, complete darkness, and your edges and skin are getting erased and blurred out... until no one even sees you any more.
like a fish. in a forgotten fish tank.
you have no feelings. no one feels sorry for you, because you can't emote, and you don't particularly count.
(i periodically take the dead fish out of my aquaponics tank, and dump the corpse out into the field in back of my yard. no burial, no nothing. they fall like leaden lumps, or crash through the california grass... buried amidst all of those waxy, razored leaves, sweating and drying out to the sun... maybe stinking and getting eaten by mongooses or cats. yes, no one mourns them, least of all me. why?)
in buddhism, nothing has a "self." nothing exists in itself. everything is in relation to everything else. so in a sense, what i experience is buddhistic, and my quest for this identity or narrative "in itself" is completely in vain. but there must exist something, right? someone beneath all of this? who experiences it all and could tell the story of me? because if not, i am just a temporary collection of fragments, like leaves floating on a river, that gather in an apparent pattern, but which, in the very next moment, shifts and scatters...
if i have no self, how can i tell a story?
the attention of others, the embrace of the web of relations, creates me. i am a fly which did not exist before i entrapped myself in a web. i vibrate in struggles, against the stickiness that holds me fast, and in so doing, become "real," recognized. whether by spiders or other insects...
*****
look at me, look me in the eye. just long enough for me to feel seen. i guess that's the premise of my whole life.
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Monday, June 15, 2020
story 6/15
when i was young, i used to be a pussy magnet.
i noticed it whenever we went to my ewa beach grandma’s house. there was a cat lady
who lived across the street, and so the area was always swarming with stray cats.
whenever i would walk outside, cats would come up to me, and rub themselves against
my legs. maybe i had some dry skin or something, and had a lot of static electricity.
but i didn’t think of any of that, at that age. i just thought i was special. i thought the cats
could sense something about my personality, and they just couldn’t help themselves. they
had to get as close as they could to me.
who lived across the street, and so the area was always swarming with stray cats.
whenever i would walk outside, cats would come up to me, and rub themselves against
my legs. maybe i had some dry skin or something, and had a lot of static electricity.
but i didn’t think of any of that, at that age. i just thought i was special. i thought the cats
could sense something about my personality, and they just couldn’t help themselves. they
had to get as close as they could to me.
i guess most people wouldn’t really think much of that. like, “cats like you, so what?” but
for a boy like me, who wasn’t much of anything to anybody, it meant a lot. to me, it meant
that there was some hidden secret buried within me that cats could recognize. it meant, in
short, that i had hope.
for a boy like me, who wasn’t much of anything to anybody, it meant a lot. to me, it meant
that there was some hidden secret buried within me that cats could recognize. it meant, in
short, that i had hope.
i had no idea what it was that they saw, but the fact that they swarmed around me meant
that it at least existed.
that it at least existed.
so one day, i was just standing in the middle of a cat-aclysm or cat-astrophe (haha).
i was actually reaching down and stroking some of the cats that rubbed against my
crouched legs, and enjoying the vibrations they made when they purred.
i was actually reaching down and stroking some of the cats that rubbed against my
crouched legs, and enjoying the vibrations they made when they purred.
and that’s when my brother came out.
he surveyed the unnatural gathering around me, but he didn’t say a word. his already
skinny eyes thinned further. i could tell what he was thinking. “what the hell do those cats
see in HIM?” and i could tell, as he approached, that he wanted to erase this little talent i
had, so i could return to being the runty nobody that he knew and loved.
skinny eyes thinned further. i could tell what he was thinking. “what the hell do those cats
see in HIM?” and i could tell, as he approached, that he wanted to erase this little talent i
had, so i could return to being the runty nobody that he knew and loved.
some of the cats that were smarter, or more aware, began to give him berth. but there was
one wiry tomcat, orange in color, that was so into rubbing the back of his head against my
calf, that he didn’t see what was coming. my brother, grinning, caught the end of the cat’s tail.
it immediately went stiff and yowled, as though my brother’s hand were filled with electricity.
one wiry tomcat, orange in color, that was so into rubbing the back of his head against my
calf, that he didn’t see what was coming. my brother, grinning, caught the end of the cat’s tail.
it immediately went stiff and yowled, as though my brother’s hand were filled with electricity.
i jumped up, and backed away.
my brother gripped the tail with both hands while the cat spasmed at scratched at empty air.
he looked at me pointedly as he began to swing the cat, first in slow awkward arcs, and then
faster and faster. the shrieks of the cat were unearthly, and almost human. it had become an
orange lillyhammer.
he looked at me pointedly as he began to swing the cat, first in slow awkward arcs, and then
faster and faster. the shrieks of the cat were unearthly, and almost human. it had become an
orange lillyhammer.
i didn’t even reach for the cat, but i guess i would have, if i weren’t already so helpless.
when he let go, the cat yowled and spun and tumbled through the air, crashing into some of
the nearby potted plants that formed a wall in my grandpa’s yard.
the nearby potted plants that formed a wall in my grandpa’s yard.
my brother walked over to one of the steel potted plants, and peered behind one of the white
trunks of a confined ficus. he looked over at me, who anxiously, hesitantly, approached too late.
he smiled.
trunks of a confined ficus. he looked over at me, who anxiously, hesitantly, approached too late.
he smiled.
“guess cats don’t always land on their feet.”
poem 6/15
the evening sky is one color of gray
it stretches out to the outlines of horizons
the roofs of houses and the shapes of trees
the negative space around this earthbound life
beneath it i wait-
minutes sweat and swell,
a swipe at the forehead
and a fluttering of the shirt
to keep things from sticking-
for some reason,
i can remember now clearly
faces i hadn’t seen in years
i can almost hear their voices
plaintive nasal whine of one
enthusiastic shout of another
but there are no words that they shape around
and no sentences to build a story
of note or significance to me.
faces and voices crowd
without touching the deeper me
dry and brittle eggshells
long absent of a yolk.
-i sigh, and think:
tonight
it will not rain
and i will sit here
uncomfortable in a film
of only me.
6/14/2020
well, this morning was interesting. my wife called my son's phone (for some reason, i never seem to actually have my phone on me), and told me that she needed my help. she'd gone to walk the dog, and somewhere en route, had run into a loose pit bull. i suppose if it had been me, then i would have steered clear (especially having our hyperactive dog with me), but because my wife is so kind-hearted, she basically guided the dog up towards our house. but she was stuck at the culdesac at the bottom of our street because the dog would no longer follow her.
so i walked down to the bottom of the street, and tried to help her. for some reason, the dog kind of followed us. he was a big dog, at least for us and for me (our own dog is a pipsqueak, a chihuahua-terrier-pappion (sp?) mix). i could see his large jaws, and i noted in particular, the lower jaw with its spiky interlocking teeth... the dog, despite its large muscular appearance, and its menacing slobbering jaws, was actually very friendly and docile. it basically followed us home.
in the garage where we temporarily kept him, i kept rubbing the back of his neck, then his back, and then his belly (because he started to roll over on his back). my hands became greasy with his sweat and stink. but i actually enjoyed him. then, he started getting excited, and would try to hump me. i had to kept getting up, or making my legs wider than he could grasp with his forepaws, or he would be "doing his dance" on me, and i wasn't having any of it...
anyway, to make a long story short... i posted pictures of him on facebook. lynn and i then decided to walk over to the street where she'd found him, lehiwa, which is sort of a main drive in the area. we thought that if we just sort of parked ourselves on the side of that road, that eventually the owner (likely driving slow, and calling out) would pass by. in the meantime, i had gotten hold of some people via facebook who were really very interventionist about this sort of thing. one woman offered to come by and see if the dog had any chip implanted in him, and if so, she would find the owner.
anyway, lynn also got the help of this one talkative woman who lived on our street. she was kind enough to bring a bowl of water, some snacks, and some umbrellas (it was raining sporadically). the chip-reader lady eventually came down, read the chip, and was in contact with the owners right away (they said they'd come down in five minutes). meanwhile, the chip-reader lady and the talkative lady on our street started having a conversation about golden retrievers. the chip-reader lady was kind of a purist, who felt that she could not trust any local breeders because no one really did their due diligence, and had the right paperwork (outlining any possible genetic disorders, etc.)... the talkative lady from our street, on the other hand, had sort of a "whatevahs" attitude towards breeding. she wanted to get her own golden bred. the two exchanged numbers, though it was clear that the chip-reader lady was going to require a lot more paperwork and reassurances than the talkative lady was willing to give...
anyway, the true owners came in a hunting truck (a truck with a cage embedded into its rear bed), and they identified the dog as "bully." bully willingly went with them, and that was that...
*****
i went home, undressed, showered. i could smell the stink of bully on me. not entirely unpleasant, though with the rain and sweat, it probably wasn't going to make anyone (particularly my wife) happy.
then for some reason i got really tired. i tried to meditate, but i felt several times that i needed to rest. it wasn't that i was necessarily physically tired. but i notice that my eyes tend to wander, my vision blurs, and it seems as though there are so many thoughts crowding around in my head that i need to lie down with my eyes closed so that they can just sort of circulate... it almost feels as though my thoughts are like water, and my head is just full of this violent churning current... at such points, it almost seems impossible to meditate, because i will only be on the verge of nodding off.
it's funny how sleep can make my eyes feel burnt. like they are flashbulbs (from the old cameras) that have used up their luminescence in a brilliant burst. and now, there are fading afterimages on the insides of my eyelids...
*****
i listened to the song "king of pain" by sting. for some reason, i had a feeling of nostalgia when i thought of that song (that is, the song spontaneously came up, and the feeling of nostalgia accompanied it). i had never known the lyrics for some parts of the song, notably that rejoinder (?). for example, sting would sing "there's a little black spot on the sun today..." and then there's a part where sting sings a sort of response. it turns out that that response is always "that's my soul up there." and that made the song seem even more poignant for me... that pain is the distance and separation from the soul. maybe as king of pain he observes it, and maybe has a kind of objective distance from it, but it is pain nonetheless to- maybe even not be capable of feeling that pain. i don't know.
i sang some karaoke (alone) tonight, trying out a new speaker that my wife bought me for father's day. i was trying to target songs that would make me feel. feel something. usually, those songs ended up being somewhat poignant. for example, "king of pain." or "the crying scene" (aztec camera). or "best i ever had" (vertical horizon). or "something's always wrong" (toad the wet sprocket). or "black balloon" (goo goo dolls). and, as always, i had flashes of other people i'd like to impress with my singing. and i had thoughts about the performative aspect of life... and how we always seek to live through the attentions of others... for without that, what is there?
i thought of how cats used to rub themselves on my legs, constantly, like i was some source of static electricity or something. it used to make me feel special. it used to make me feel like- i don't know- i had some sort of power, or attraction, or something. and i think that that's what my life has always been about... this secret yearning for attention. because without it, i would drown in this... i don't know, oblivion. that's why, upon reflection, i have always questioned why i need people to pay attention, and why i can't be "my own person." it's such a puzzle. is there life outside of attention? if no one saw me, would i exist?
so i walked down to the bottom of the street, and tried to help her. for some reason, the dog kind of followed us. he was a big dog, at least for us and for me (our own dog is a pipsqueak, a chihuahua-terrier-pappion (sp?) mix). i could see his large jaws, and i noted in particular, the lower jaw with its spiky interlocking teeth... the dog, despite its large muscular appearance, and its menacing slobbering jaws, was actually very friendly and docile. it basically followed us home.
in the garage where we temporarily kept him, i kept rubbing the back of his neck, then his back, and then his belly (because he started to roll over on his back). my hands became greasy with his sweat and stink. but i actually enjoyed him. then, he started getting excited, and would try to hump me. i had to kept getting up, or making my legs wider than he could grasp with his forepaws, or he would be "doing his dance" on me, and i wasn't having any of it...
anyway, to make a long story short... i posted pictures of him on facebook. lynn and i then decided to walk over to the street where she'd found him, lehiwa, which is sort of a main drive in the area. we thought that if we just sort of parked ourselves on the side of that road, that eventually the owner (likely driving slow, and calling out) would pass by. in the meantime, i had gotten hold of some people via facebook who were really very interventionist about this sort of thing. one woman offered to come by and see if the dog had any chip implanted in him, and if so, she would find the owner.
anyway, lynn also got the help of this one talkative woman who lived on our street. she was kind enough to bring a bowl of water, some snacks, and some umbrellas (it was raining sporadically). the chip-reader lady eventually came down, read the chip, and was in contact with the owners right away (they said they'd come down in five minutes). meanwhile, the chip-reader lady and the talkative lady on our street started having a conversation about golden retrievers. the chip-reader lady was kind of a purist, who felt that she could not trust any local breeders because no one really did their due diligence, and had the right paperwork (outlining any possible genetic disorders, etc.)... the talkative lady from our street, on the other hand, had sort of a "whatevahs" attitude towards breeding. she wanted to get her own golden bred. the two exchanged numbers, though it was clear that the chip-reader lady was going to require a lot more paperwork and reassurances than the talkative lady was willing to give...
anyway, the true owners came in a hunting truck (a truck with a cage embedded into its rear bed), and they identified the dog as "bully." bully willingly went with them, and that was that...
*****
i went home, undressed, showered. i could smell the stink of bully on me. not entirely unpleasant, though with the rain and sweat, it probably wasn't going to make anyone (particularly my wife) happy.
then for some reason i got really tired. i tried to meditate, but i felt several times that i needed to rest. it wasn't that i was necessarily physically tired. but i notice that my eyes tend to wander, my vision blurs, and it seems as though there are so many thoughts crowding around in my head that i need to lie down with my eyes closed so that they can just sort of circulate... it almost feels as though my thoughts are like water, and my head is just full of this violent churning current... at such points, it almost seems impossible to meditate, because i will only be on the verge of nodding off.
it's funny how sleep can make my eyes feel burnt. like they are flashbulbs (from the old cameras) that have used up their luminescence in a brilliant burst. and now, there are fading afterimages on the insides of my eyelids...
*****
i listened to the song "king of pain" by sting. for some reason, i had a feeling of nostalgia when i thought of that song (that is, the song spontaneously came up, and the feeling of nostalgia accompanied it). i had never known the lyrics for some parts of the song, notably that rejoinder (?). for example, sting would sing "there's a little black spot on the sun today..." and then there's a part where sting sings a sort of response. it turns out that that response is always "that's my soul up there." and that made the song seem even more poignant for me... that pain is the distance and separation from the soul. maybe as king of pain he observes it, and maybe has a kind of objective distance from it, but it is pain nonetheless to- maybe even not be capable of feeling that pain. i don't know.
i sang some karaoke (alone) tonight, trying out a new speaker that my wife bought me for father's day. i was trying to target songs that would make me feel. feel something. usually, those songs ended up being somewhat poignant. for example, "king of pain." or "the crying scene" (aztec camera). or "best i ever had" (vertical horizon). or "something's always wrong" (toad the wet sprocket). or "black balloon" (goo goo dolls). and, as always, i had flashes of other people i'd like to impress with my singing. and i had thoughts about the performative aspect of life... and how we always seek to live through the attentions of others... for without that, what is there?
i thought of how cats used to rub themselves on my legs, constantly, like i was some source of static electricity or something. it used to make me feel special. it used to make me feel like- i don't know- i had some sort of power, or attraction, or something. and i think that that's what my life has always been about... this secret yearning for attention. because without it, i would drown in this... i don't know, oblivion. that's why, upon reflection, i have always questioned why i need people to pay attention, and why i can't be "my own person." it's such a puzzle. is there life outside of attention? if no one saw me, would i exist?
Saturday, June 13, 2020
6/13/2020
it seemed like a pretty uneventful day, until lynn called (it was probably about 1 or 2 in the afternoon) and told me that she had a flat tire. she was on kilhau (later, she corrected to kilihau) street. i looked it up; it was somewhere near nimitz, somewhere near the airport.
so i took aiden with me, and a cross bar, and a jack, and drove off to find my wife. all along the way, i started cursing. i'm not sure why. maybe i was irritated with this event, even though it was nobody's fault, really. maybe i was stressed that my gas was so low, and getting lower. there seemed an inordinate amount of traffic for this time of day, and maybe that was irritating me too. at one point, i almost wound up at hickam afb. let me tell you, i HATE going to military bases. i had this one incident where i headed into a base by mistake. i tried to tell the guard there that i had made a mistake, and that i just wanted to make a u turn to exit the base. but he asked for my safety and registration anyway (my registration was expired). he actually held me, and was going to call the cops on me because my registration was expired, even though i didn't even want to enter the base.
so anyway, i absolutely didn't want to go into hickam (i happen to have an expired driver's license, which i would have taken care of, had covid-19 not come along and force the closure of all the dmvs, and cancel my appointments). i could just picture the freaking guard announcing that my license was expired, and to pull over to the side so that he could issue a citation or call the cops on me...
fortunately, i noticed that there was a turn off to the right. at first, i thought that it was just a visitor center for civilians. but then i realized that it was an actual road. and as i turned down it, i found, to my great relief, that it was a familiar road. it was the same road that went to pearl harbor kai elementary, where we had practiced taiko. it occupied this kind of liminal space between the gated and fenced military base, and the surrounding community...
so, anyway, i wound up avoiding going into hickam... still swearing up a storm. past the destination, and had to circle around, going onto king. there was so much construction, that it made progress difficult. at a lot of places, i wasn't able to make the left turns i needed to. and as so many lanes were closed, well, it just dragged my progression through the area...
suffice to say, i eventually made it. kilihau is a run down street in an industrial area near the airport. the good thing was that it was a quiet street, with little traffic, so it was pretty safe (at least in terms of cars) to change the tire. i did so with great dispatch (i'm not sure if that's the right way to say it)... one strange aside-thing i noticed, was that in the puddles beside the road, there were tiny fish swimming. i'm not sure where those fish must have come from, or how they survived when the hot summer sun evaporated all of that water... but they were there nonetheless, casting little shadows.
*****
other than that, nothing much to report...
well... as i said, i was angry when i was driving to help my wife. i'm not sure why. i suppose, as i may have mentioned before, that i have a great deal of rage concealed within me. i'm extremely impatient with reality... i often feel, when things are taking too long, that- and this is weird, kind of a quirk of my psychology- that i'm somehow being left behind, and that i'm wasting my time, and that someone somewhere is laughing at me...
for some reason, i recall having this thought: what if my wife's flat tire had been a blow out, and what if she and my daughter had spun out and gotten killed in an accident? i don't know why or where the thought came from... but do you know what i thought about, irritated as i was? i thought about how angry i would be with god for allowing it to happen. and i thought about how angry i would be with my brother and his family, for shutting my family out... and how he would be trying to console me, and all i would do is shout at him, and shout out all his dirty secrets for his children and the world to know, because it was too late, too late. i would be spouting off all about how lynn had tried to reconcile, out of the kindness of her heart, but that my brother and his wife would repeatedly just give us the cold shoulder... and now (in my head) that she and my daughter were gone, it was just too late for my brother to come in and pretend as though he cared for my loss...
that's the kind of crazy, vengeful thinking that filled my head.
i realize that i wasn't being very buddha-like. in fact, i'm not really sure where all that rage came from. it certainly wasn't justified. but i guess it's there. and i let it just burn me up.
i know my son probably felt pretty- i don't know- embarassed? disappointed? at my lack of peace and composure...
but as i thought about that, i imagined my brother, and all the rest of the world, laughing at me, because of my attachment to my rage. and it just made me even more angry...
what is wrong with me!?
*****
well, i know i've got to meditate more. of all the things i do in my routine, i think i skip meditation the most. it's just not feasible most of the time... but as today sort of pointed out, i sorely need it.
so i took aiden with me, and a cross bar, and a jack, and drove off to find my wife. all along the way, i started cursing. i'm not sure why. maybe i was irritated with this event, even though it was nobody's fault, really. maybe i was stressed that my gas was so low, and getting lower. there seemed an inordinate amount of traffic for this time of day, and maybe that was irritating me too. at one point, i almost wound up at hickam afb. let me tell you, i HATE going to military bases. i had this one incident where i headed into a base by mistake. i tried to tell the guard there that i had made a mistake, and that i just wanted to make a u turn to exit the base. but he asked for my safety and registration anyway (my registration was expired). he actually held me, and was going to call the cops on me because my registration was expired, even though i didn't even want to enter the base.
so anyway, i absolutely didn't want to go into hickam (i happen to have an expired driver's license, which i would have taken care of, had covid-19 not come along and force the closure of all the dmvs, and cancel my appointments). i could just picture the freaking guard announcing that my license was expired, and to pull over to the side so that he could issue a citation or call the cops on me...
fortunately, i noticed that there was a turn off to the right. at first, i thought that it was just a visitor center for civilians. but then i realized that it was an actual road. and as i turned down it, i found, to my great relief, that it was a familiar road. it was the same road that went to pearl harbor kai elementary, where we had practiced taiko. it occupied this kind of liminal space between the gated and fenced military base, and the surrounding community...
so, anyway, i wound up avoiding going into hickam... still swearing up a storm. past the destination, and had to circle around, going onto king. there was so much construction, that it made progress difficult. at a lot of places, i wasn't able to make the left turns i needed to. and as so many lanes were closed, well, it just dragged my progression through the area...
suffice to say, i eventually made it. kilihau is a run down street in an industrial area near the airport. the good thing was that it was a quiet street, with little traffic, so it was pretty safe (at least in terms of cars) to change the tire. i did so with great dispatch (i'm not sure if that's the right way to say it)... one strange aside-thing i noticed, was that in the puddles beside the road, there were tiny fish swimming. i'm not sure where those fish must have come from, or how they survived when the hot summer sun evaporated all of that water... but they were there nonetheless, casting little shadows.
*****
other than that, nothing much to report...
well... as i said, i was angry when i was driving to help my wife. i'm not sure why. i suppose, as i may have mentioned before, that i have a great deal of rage concealed within me. i'm extremely impatient with reality... i often feel, when things are taking too long, that- and this is weird, kind of a quirk of my psychology- that i'm somehow being left behind, and that i'm wasting my time, and that someone somewhere is laughing at me...
for some reason, i recall having this thought: what if my wife's flat tire had been a blow out, and what if she and my daughter had spun out and gotten killed in an accident? i don't know why or where the thought came from... but do you know what i thought about, irritated as i was? i thought about how angry i would be with god for allowing it to happen. and i thought about how angry i would be with my brother and his family, for shutting my family out... and how he would be trying to console me, and all i would do is shout at him, and shout out all his dirty secrets for his children and the world to know, because it was too late, too late. i would be spouting off all about how lynn had tried to reconcile, out of the kindness of her heart, but that my brother and his wife would repeatedly just give us the cold shoulder... and now (in my head) that she and my daughter were gone, it was just too late for my brother to come in and pretend as though he cared for my loss...
that's the kind of crazy, vengeful thinking that filled my head.
i realize that i wasn't being very buddha-like. in fact, i'm not really sure where all that rage came from. it certainly wasn't justified. but i guess it's there. and i let it just burn me up.
i know my son probably felt pretty- i don't know- embarassed? disappointed? at my lack of peace and composure...
but as i thought about that, i imagined my brother, and all the rest of the world, laughing at me, because of my attachment to my rage. and it just made me even more angry...
what is wrong with me!?
*****
well, i know i've got to meditate more. of all the things i do in my routine, i think i skip meditation the most. it's just not feasible most of the time... but as today sort of pointed out, i sorely need it.
Thursday, June 11, 2020
6/11/2020
today is 6/11. it's a day after my sister's birthday. yesterday, my son and i attended an online virtual meeting about agcurious. it's an "interest" session for gofarm hawaii's agricultural program. i must say, i am definitely interested, although it will be a commitment if i happen to be accepted. i think my son is much more half-hearted about it. but as i explained, you can't say you don't really want to try something if you don't know what you're missing. and at this point, my son is pretty much reluctant to try anything.
*****
i think today, i've been feeling kind of blah. the weather has been gray and windy, but still, at times, ridiculously humid.
i've kind of matched the weather, i suppose: meandering, and inconclusive.
maybe there's a point where the routines that you push on yourself don't really have much of a point.
*****
i guess i've been feeling pretty drowsy. i close my eyes, and all of these images and thoughts float up to the surface, swimming on the underside of my eyelids... i wish that i made more sense. that whatever's in me could be directed to some purpose... that i could essentially flow. but i am a random assemblage of spare parts, that don't really add up to anything.
*****
i don't know if i'm really designed for prose, or poetry. i like to think of bassho, wandering the countryside, and, at moments, composing haiku. could i ever be like that, to feel so free and liberated, and trust in the art within me? i wish.
*****
sorry, i really don't have much to contribute today. i already gave at the office.
*****
i think today, i've been feeling kind of blah. the weather has been gray and windy, but still, at times, ridiculously humid.
i've kind of matched the weather, i suppose: meandering, and inconclusive.
maybe there's a point where the routines that you push on yourself don't really have much of a point.
*****
i guess i've been feeling pretty drowsy. i close my eyes, and all of these images and thoughts float up to the surface, swimming on the underside of my eyelids... i wish that i made more sense. that whatever's in me could be directed to some purpose... that i could essentially flow. but i am a random assemblage of spare parts, that don't really add up to anything.
*****
i don't know if i'm really designed for prose, or poetry. i like to think of bassho, wandering the countryside, and, at moments, composing haiku. could i ever be like that, to feel so free and liberated, and trust in the art within me? i wish.
*****
sorry, i really don't have much to contribute today. i already gave at the office.
Tuesday, June 9, 2020
6/9/2020
it's another day... i got some more fish yesterday for my aquaponics setups. i don't know if i mentioned it, but i transported them all inside because i was panicking about the way that moth larvae were eating up and destroying my cucumber and zucchini plants. i have always been paranoid about pest pressures. but real authentic sunlight is a big thing too. i had been trying to prevent pests from attacking my plants by spraying neem oil on them... but honestly, that's not a good solution. it's not good because, no matter what, you're putting a chemical onto the plant, and that may have untoward consequences for the other organisms in the system (the fish, the bacteria). also, you end up quickly consuming it all. i was spraying only a few plants when i could, and in no time, i ran out of a couple of bottles... so ultimately, i felt the best solution was to bring them into the garage. for the remaining plants outside (the ones in the planter boxes), i am considering using some kind of netting to prevent them from being attacked. we'll see how that works...
so... yes, yesterday, i got more fish. i also bought tulle from walmart to use as the netting around my plants. we had intended on going to masa and ___?, a local food place in kaneohe that sells poke, and hawaiian food, and okinawan food... but they were closed. so instead we went to burger king. i swear, that was the best whopper i've eaten in a long time. maybe it's because i never go to burger king...
other than that, not much to report. the fish seem to be doing alright, but we'll see what happens. i always suspect that some fish are bullies, and they stress out other fish so much that they eventually die. the paradoxical solution is to put MORE fish into the tank with the bullies... when there are too many other fish, the bully fish usually return to just swimming harmlessly along...
***
i was feeling cold and tired, so i just turned off the fan. there's a breeze kind of sloughing (don't know if that's the appropriate use of the word), and some light rain is falling. it's a kind of watercolorish gray day. i sort of like it. it's better than those blaring blue sky days where the shadows are hard, and you feel like you are always dirty and sweaty...
to be honest, i'm not sure what all this blogging and writing is supposed to do for me. i have always been so goal-directed... like, i wanted to finish writing this book and that poem, etc. but like most of the truest things in life, at least to me, it's not about what i want. it's not a clear progression from here to there. or at least, that's how it seems. art is kind of a form of trickery. like you have to trick yourself into accomplishing something, but because it has to seem like a discovery, you can't know where you are heading beforehand... it's like you put a blindfold on yourself, and walk on the same street, handicapped... i guess that's what it's like.
it's also like just vomiting a stream of your innards out... in the hopes that you will somehow find some diamonds amongst the half-digested chunks of food... gross, but i think it is true.
...well, maybe that's not quite so apt. maybe it's more like you exhaust your cognitive processes so much through writing that, in the afterglow, in that moment of forced relaxation, something- a truth, a voice, something- comes in. that's what marione howe was talking about, i think...
***
okay, now when i close my eyes, all of these images come unbidden... i think my mind is like this plenitude... i just wish. i just wish it would quiet sometime, and some sort of true voice would remain. and it would just be a matter of listening to that voice, that single, solitary voice... that's how i'd hope it would work out for me (but it never really does).
okay, nuff said for today.
so... yes, yesterday, i got more fish. i also bought tulle from walmart to use as the netting around my plants. we had intended on going to masa and ___?, a local food place in kaneohe that sells poke, and hawaiian food, and okinawan food... but they were closed. so instead we went to burger king. i swear, that was the best whopper i've eaten in a long time. maybe it's because i never go to burger king...
other than that, not much to report. the fish seem to be doing alright, but we'll see what happens. i always suspect that some fish are bullies, and they stress out other fish so much that they eventually die. the paradoxical solution is to put MORE fish into the tank with the bullies... when there are too many other fish, the bully fish usually return to just swimming harmlessly along...
***
i was feeling cold and tired, so i just turned off the fan. there's a breeze kind of sloughing (don't know if that's the appropriate use of the word), and some light rain is falling. it's a kind of watercolorish gray day. i sort of like it. it's better than those blaring blue sky days where the shadows are hard, and you feel like you are always dirty and sweaty...
to be honest, i'm not sure what all this blogging and writing is supposed to do for me. i have always been so goal-directed... like, i wanted to finish writing this book and that poem, etc. but like most of the truest things in life, at least to me, it's not about what i want. it's not a clear progression from here to there. or at least, that's how it seems. art is kind of a form of trickery. like you have to trick yourself into accomplishing something, but because it has to seem like a discovery, you can't know where you are heading beforehand... it's like you put a blindfold on yourself, and walk on the same street, handicapped... i guess that's what it's like.
it's also like just vomiting a stream of your innards out... in the hopes that you will somehow find some diamonds amongst the half-digested chunks of food... gross, but i think it is true.
...well, maybe that's not quite so apt. maybe it's more like you exhaust your cognitive processes so much through writing that, in the afterglow, in that moment of forced relaxation, something- a truth, a voice, something- comes in. that's what marione howe was talking about, i think...
***
okay, now when i close my eyes, all of these images come unbidden... i think my mind is like this plenitude... i just wish. i just wish it would quiet sometime, and some sort of true voice would remain. and it would just be a matter of listening to that voice, that single, solitary voice... that's how i'd hope it would work out for me (but it never really does).
okay, nuff said for today.
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