3/20/2021

"start as you mean to go on." this is advice that salman rushdie says, concerning opening sentences. for him, the opening sentence is both an invitation (a promise) to the reader for what is to come, and permission for the writer to "pour forth the water" of the story...

*****

it is already friday. it is the last day of my spring break. i feel, in some senses, that i have wasted it. there were always matters to attend to... the disposal and delivery of items that had been cluttering the house. matters concerning a property that my mother and i are purchasing. stuff like that. because it has been raining every day of this break, i have found it very difficult to progress on the gardening. besides that, there is the looming, growing problem of the trees that i have to cut down and dispose of. as i may have mentioned, there have been idle thoughts of attempting biochar- which opens up its own "can of worms" (to mix composting imagery... never knew there was such a thing). there are proper ways to do biochar, and improper ways, i suppose. for me, it's mainly about disposing of the waste in an environmentally beneficial way. pure and simple. i may not recapture all of the carbon that i should be, but... what the heck. but yes, the trees are looming behind me, growing steadily by inches and pounds, reaching desperately for my second story window, and for the eaves of the house, so that, in one deadly windstorm, they may collapse and rain destruction upon our sleeping heads... i need to cut them. i have heard offers of chainsaws to borrow, but i have irrational fears of cutting off fingers or limbs due to my inexperience... oh well.

*****

today was a sort of good day in the sense that we went over to my father-in-law's house so that my son could ostensibly learn how to do an oil change. there were no disasters. i had some anxiety about the car suddenly rolling, and smashing either my head or my son's (as we were lying on the cardboard, staring up at the underside of the car). but nothing like that even remotely happened. i think the worst of it was when we removed the nut on the oilpan at the bottom of the car, and the stream of sludge was unexpectedly forceful... but even so, we caught most of it in the box of lint, as was supposed to happen... afterwards, the car ran as good as it's ever run. and that was a good feeling. it was also a good feeling, a kind of solid feeling, for us to have a nice conversation with my father-in-law, mother-in-law, and aunt. and to feel that my son was a decent person, good-hearted, good-natured.

*****

why do we do these things? am i really filling my life, or is it just an echo, a repetition of emptiness? i don't know. i like to think that if today were my last day on this earth, then i'd probably live it the same way as any other day. meaning, i'd defined the things that i was interested in, or the things that were important to me, and i was working towards them. i realize that a lot of them may be selfish... or seem selfish... they don't usually involve other people... but it's only because... why? i feel like we all just need our space. i spend time with my wife, with my kids, running little errands... but beyond that...

i feel, at times, that i've paid my dues (not true, of course). that, i "gave at the office." so i should be entitled to pursue these interests... i also find that most of my "interests" are more attempts to fulfill the promise of what my life should be. they are attempts to "better myself." of course, that sort of set up always makes me question things... like, why can't i just "collapse the distance," and just "be"? why do i always have to... ceaselessly... look for the next thing to do, and the next thing, and the next thing? is there a danger in drifting?

i think that that has always prevented me from, say, pursuing relationships... i always "filled my time" with business, so i didn't have to think about the loneliness. well, the loneliness intervened anyway. and i had always found it a waste of time to "feel", because most of the time, those feelings were so futile and vague and self-destructive. much better to pursue art or understanding. do something.

you can never resolve some of those feelings, some of those regrets. you can only move forward. so says i, even though i also believe in meditation, and "sitting with your shit." who knows. who cares.

*****

some day, i would like to be the kind of person who can just be the one whom people like to be around. that would be nice. sitting, talking with people, learning about their lives, helping them in little or big ways. i think that would be nice. to be relevant. a part of things... but of course, right now, i am a self-centered being. the one redeeming factor is that i am not down, and i seem engaged in the world, at least in the aspects that i have defined as beneficial for me...

*****

maybe i need to see a therapist. maybe i am working through a mid life crisis. i don't think i will ever break. i'm either too cowardly, or too complacent. i love my family too much. and the part of me that longed for something better... maybe it's a dying vibration, an echo that can no longer be made out. should i be sad at that, or happy?

3/16/2021

it's another rainy day... i proceed through my routines, as usual. i think if nothing else i am cultivating a kind of stubbornness. another way of putting it is that i am building momentum. eventually, i will be so heavy and set upon proceeding on to the next thing and the next thing that i will be a juggernaut. maybe, in the process, i will destroy everything before me, instead of enjoying it or having it change me or open me up somehow... but alas, what alternatives?

i'm looking into biochar. the reason is because i have so much wood in my backyard. my huge project is to clear the trees that currently dominate the backyard. by big trees, i mean they are huge. they are ficuses, and if you know these trees, you understand why they can be so problematic. i mean, they grow nice foliage and everything... that's not the problem. or perhaps it is. they grow too well. they "blossom" nicely, to the point that they fill all space, and sent branches up and out. currently, there are branches that could reach the house if i don't trim them back...

so in any case, i have a problem with too much wood. and i need to dispose of it. but i also want to do so in an environmentally beneficial way... hence the perusal of biochar as an option. i'm also looking into something cheap. because i am not willing to break the bank to do this sort of thing. there are ways to do it for next to nothing. it's probably not the most efficient way to do it... like i might produce some potash in the process... but all in all, i think digging some sort of pit and doing some sort of slow burn of the wood would probably be the best thing to do.

anyway.

*****

i am listening to salman rushdie for the masterclass series. i appreciate his candidness. i understand (as with the previous author) that there is a lot of "mucking around" to figure out what you are doing when you write. as he says, the ultimate truth is whatever works. in terms of technique, i appreciate his idea of using "mirroring" or "echoes." i never knew it had a name, but i think that that's what i aspire to do in my writing... provide several conversations or situations that "mirror" or "echo" each other, definitely not in precisely the same way (because identical situations are merely repetitions that do not inform the audience in any way), but in ways that offer opportunities to see the same thing from different perspectives... but, in all, allow the reader to "glimpse the big picture." i think, of all haruki murakami's works, the best one in my experience was the first one i read: hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world... the reason i felt this novel was most successful was because it had a split narrative (actually representing the process in the protagonist's brain), with completely different settings, etc. yet as these two narratives occurred within the same individual, there were "ghost echoes," or little images that passed between the two like a ping pong ball... and that somewhat informed or hinted at the whole that was hopelessly fractured... i would like to write something like that...

*****

i get flashes of ideas on how to proceed with my never-ending story. one idea i recently had was to do a "bait and switch," to put in a dummy protagonist into the copper bowl to allow the real protagonist to be spared from the acts demanded of him... and to allow him to see or watch the process without fearing its consequences... not sure how that would work, but at least it would make the plot interesting... and it would make the character yagoro more consistent, in that he actually acted out on his merciful leanings...

*****

anyway, nothing much else to report. gray day. gray night.

3/14/2021

happy pi day everyone.

i'm feeling relatively okay. i sent a pdf of the story thus far (52 pages of it) to a friend on facebook, and while the feedback hasn't been elaborate, i did get a nice pat on the back. maybe it isn't so terrible after all. i had gotten the feeling that, as i describe it, i had gotten confused untangling/tangling a long roll of extension cord- or a lengthy green-snake garden hose. that was the feeling of my plot lines, which seem to have evolved with each 4 page entry that i wrote- maybe a good thing, maybe not...

other than that, not much to report... i work very very slowly in the yard/garden. i suppose it represents my attitude towards life nowadays... i fiddle with things gently around the edges. everything, i suppose, has its skin, and it is most comfortable to respect that skin. to act too aggressively, to not modify the edges of things gradually... there's too much violence, and more importantly, there's too much effort in that. so i like to keep things relatively clean and uninvolved. which means, in a certain sense, that everything remains a mess, in process. at the moment, the backyard is strewn with huge cut branches... branches that i have progressively cut from one of the ficus trees in the backyard... which it is my present goal to remove, that i no longer have something which can collapse and bludgeon my house in half... and so that there will be more sunlight in the backyard, which would allow crops to grow here...

the green leafy plants that i purchased from walmart, i have finally transplanted into the aquaponics growbeds. they seem to be doing nicely. finally, the fish all have something to clean their filthy water.

*****

right now, i'm listening to salman rushdie. he's the next "master" that i've selected to go through in my masterclass lessons. i like him so far. i've never read any of his work, although i do recall all that hullaballoo when he'd written his "satanic verses," something, i believe, about how he was a target for assassination by muslims for his portrayal (sacrilegious, blasphemous) of allah. at least that was my impression of things. i wasn't really up on current events back then. but i like him so far, and i would like to read more of his work...

*****

sometimes, in retrospect, i think that my brother really wasn't so bad... and that i'm making much ado about nothing... and that writing is precisely a making much ado about nothing... so writers have as much to do with objective truth as... well, i can't think of anything at the moment, but they really don't have much to do with each other at all... that's why it's probably hard to be a zen master and a good storyteller. because the words get in the way.

*****

my life is just tasks. maybe the tasks insulate me. but i feel like they give my life the illusion of progression, and that illusion is essential. there is something dangerous about staying still. there's this quant notion of staying still that if you do it enough, then everything just settles into its own skin. the only problem with that is that it overlooks the fact that there's also something perpetually pursuing us. and staying still will only get us eaten by the wolves: skalli and hati. and even without those external wolves, there are the internal ones... the worms of our death, prematurely intruding into our lives, because they suddenly think it's their time and their age for feasting, because we haven't stirred in a few hours...

stillness is death.

(it can also be enlightenment, but how many times have we mistaken death for enlightenment, or enlightenment for death? it's a gamble which you'll end up with.)

dream: 3/11/2021

don't think there is much to report, aside from: i was walking up a set of vast wooden stairs, the kind you find in old hotels... i had gone up to the 7th floor, but needed to go up 3 more flights. this, apparently, was at williams (again). my need to go up the stairs had something to do with my laundry, something about needing everything to dry. it was a strange thing, yes...

i at the moment can't recall much else... but i do remember the detail about the staircase, things like how the railings had these elaborate horizontal spirals, and also, how the wood had been polished to a high glaze... things like that. also, the sounds within the staircase...

as i reported in my previous posting (3/10), which i don't think i entirely finished... i got vaccinated on monday (3/7), and really felt the effects of it. while i tried to have a restful sleep on this, my third night after the shot, i did have to take an advil in the evening, and i was feeling overly exhausted, considering i had done very little the day before...

in any case, here i am. incredibly lazy. i mean, i wish i had had enough energy to take advantage of this situation, and do things during these days off. but i suppose these absences were legitimate, in the sense of having to recover from the second vaccination shots... oh well. 

3/10/2021

i received the second shot of the pfizer vaccine on monday afternoon. it is now wednesday morning, and i am still feeling the residual effects of that dosage. i basically have been lying on the sofa since monday evening, and with small interruptions in that (like making breakfast for me and my son, or washing the dishes), i pretty much have not moved much. i had a fever and chills, and felt very lethargic and stiff. there was a bit of congestion happening around my throat and nose, so my voice started to get this resonant sound, and i often had an itch that forced me to cough a dry cough...

...somehow, i had hoped that i could use these two days to catch up on things, but instead, they have been a legitimate absence from work due to incapacitation... well, it's a good thing that i did request these two days in advance. i can't imagine working through some of these symptoms...

*****

i don't know if i mentioned it earlier... on friday evening, our family had gone over to waikele, to their food truck thing, and ordered stuff from rinka. on the way back, i think i started a discussion about the whole dr. seuss fiasco going on. i wanted to hear my daughter's take on the issue, since she just did a national history day project on dr. seuss, and his racist caricatures of the japanese before and during world war ii. i guess (as always) i got too impassioned about my perspective. i mean, i wanted to clarify that, in certain instances, i felt that it was not necessarily good to attempt to "erase" the past, and that, instead, we should contextualize it, meaning, we should release the original material, but perhaps add some sort of marginalia or other notation to educate the public about why something is problematic in our current perspective... BUT i wanted to qualify that this didn't apply to things like confederate flags, because those were purely about racism, and had no other culturally redeeming value about them. they were basically symbols of racism writ large. i guess when i brought in the confederate flag thing, i could feel my daughter rolling her eyes, and my wife cautioned me to stop... that's when i went on this whole tirade about how, yes, i got the hint, and that i would shut up and not share my views from here on out. it was really very childish... i don't know if it's happened to you, but i kind of watched myself, knowing it was immature and babyish for me to go on this tirade. i knew this, but i couldn't stop myself. i kept digging myself further and further into a hole. i said something about how i didn't even manage to talk to my daughter very much in a week (i think i said that i could count the times and even the words i spoke to her on one hand), but that i would endeavor to shut up and self-censor my views even more... i also talked about canceling the birthday party thing my wife was planning for me the next day. again, really stupid, babyish behavior...

dream: 3/7/2021

this part of the dream started with this woman, terri ryan (? the seven of nine actress) looking panicked and practically nude, in the snow. she was backing into this crevice in the snow, apparently horrified by something that she had seen. later, she approached the thing that scared her... it was this alien, an old cronish woman, with a jagged mouth down the length of her midline, filled with teeth. she was at that time lying down, looking at the terri ryan character cruelly... apparently, she had pursued terri ryan even to this remote place, to this remote community... and she (terri) knew that this time, the end was inevitable. there was no defeating these things, there was no escape... so that feeling of inevitability colored everything else.

so, there was this part, in a large field or something, where we were being pursued. no snow. no terri ryan. and we, unsuspecting, attempted to kill one of those jagged mouthed creatures... only, a bit after we had thought that we had killed it, it actually multiplied, and split into three of those creatures... and then, the pursuit was on.

later, it seemed we were in a big auditorium or cafeteria or church or something. something with many chairs, and large glass windows... there was no terri ryan. there was no apparent snow. but the aliens were coming to get us. and we had all decided that this would be the last stand... i remember this cat like alien attacking this woman on the back of her neck, and how i carefully stabbed it through its side until it released itself and died. i remember speaking to willow (who apparently was the inexperienced leader of this contingent in the room) about how the moment had come, that cruel woman was here, and it was the end. i told her (somewhat with a grim fatalism, an almost relieved happiness) that it was time to tell everyone that this was it. i saw the "wobbliness" of my daughter, and wished i could convey this sense of peace upon her, and upon everything else, that there was nothing else, and therefore, there was nothing to worry about. it was only up to us to give a good fight... but i couldn't convey that feeling...

i think the dream ended at that point, before the final stand really started.

3/2/2021

it's my birthday today. thank you. i'd rather not dwell on it, alright? i'm just mentioning it now so you don't bring it up later.

*****

people are nice. my ea bought me breakfast, and my other ea got my a present. and then, when the kids found out that it was my birthday, then they (or a few of them anyway) tried to draw birthday cards or birthday pictures. one of them said "happy birthday mr. otaka, the best teacher EVER!" i joked (not to the student, of course) that the candles of the birthday cake were actually the hands of the teachers i had killed to become the best... okay, that was rude... but really, those candles really did look like hands! in any case, it was touching. a kind of validation, if nothing else.

*****

nobody really likes to listen to my writing. at least no one in my vicinity. my wife doesn't like to sit and listen to it. it's okay, she's really stressed with a lot of other things anyway. i guess the problem i have is that i'm starting to struggle with the plot, and at such times, i feel like it would be nice to hear some feedback, as my perspective is so myopic and detail-oriented, that i can no longer understand the perspective of a reader...

at times, i feel like fat charlie in neil gaiman's anansi boys, which i am currently reading. he has a brother spider who can charm the pants off (literally) anyone. but when fat charlie speaks, in less than a sentence, people tune him out. nobody's listening. i feel like that at times. i often wonder how my students tolerate me, if i have this effect on everyone, of turning off their interest so dramatically...

i think maybe my only redeeming factor is that i try to care. i'll do whatever i need to to support my students... i went out to the basketball courts twice today, with the metal hoop, and the thing to put the hoop on, so that my restless adhd students, who had finished the work i had set out for them, could stop bouncing off the walls... they had already tried (and exhausted) the bored games i had brought to school for them... so i played "pig" and then "horse" with one of my students... little moments like that, i enjoy. and i hope the kids enjoy that too. and maybe those little things are what redeem me.

i care deeply about "moving" or "pushing" my students. i wish that they could master the skills i teach them, so that they can see the world with clearer eyes. i wish to change the trajectory of their lives for the better... maybe i fail at that, gravity is so powerful, but if nothing else, i want them to have enjoyed their upper elementary years, i want them to have felt as though they were validated as people, and that someone cared for their futures...

*****

i really enjoy chopin's fantasie impromptu. it's the piece i'm learning to play. i'm at the end of the fourth page, where it changes from this "agitato" frantic thing into something more loping and beautiful...

*****

okay, i'm fading into oblivion. i need to do a lot of work tonight, work that i'm so putting off. i have a big day tomorrow. at the end of tomorrow, i'll have done all my reevals... and then all i have left for the year are a couple of ieps, and a couple of transition meetings... and this long year will be over as far as my legal responsibilities... then it will just be the daily grind of the teaching... so, i've got to get on to other forms of procrastination... seeya!