I really wish I was Jewish right now. Also, post coming soon with Chinese subtitles.
April 11, 2012
April 2, 2012
I have worked 7 days straight this week and still they say the “real army” is much harder. I can hardly wait.
March 11, 2012
FACEBOOK. Holy shit. This is everyone of my old “Facebook friends.” I really need to find real human beings again. I’m sure some still exist…somewhere.
February 7, 2012
"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest."
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (via psychotherapy)
January 22, 2012
Give Into it, Give Into Us
“My life fell apart, except for my life at work. All the truth has ever done is hurt me. Maybe I should just wall it off and have some goddamn fun before my next dose of truth.” - James Frey, author of mostly fraudulent memoir A Million Little Pieces
“When you want some, they can sense it three feet around you,” says my dad.
“Sense what?”
“Your desperation.”
It is a curious sensation, necessarily precluded by moments, days, weeks of denial, but still ultimately undeniable - the realization that my home has outgrown me. I always expected it’d be the other way around. And not just the building, the neighborhood, or the city, but the idea of home, the family, the sibling, the friends, the general vibe and way of it. So then, here I am, sitting in the room that was once mine, using the computer table I put together here two years ago, carefully rearranging the books I had meticulously arranged here a year ago, in my pajamas, playing with my old action figures and sleeping in my old bed, generally haunting the place like some awkwardly lingering apparition.
Sure, the first time you come home after basic training, you’re wading knee deep in the oohs and ahhs, the pokes and prods, everyone amazed at “how much weight you’ve lost!” and “I never thought we’d see you again!” And after they’ve spent a weekend asking you to show them your dog tags and listening to your stretched, embellished basic training battle stories, you return to base, put the uniform back on, and play soldier again.
Meanwhile, while you were home over the weekend, your new soldier buddies, also fresh out of Basic, dressed in civies and long-suppressed libidos finally unleashed, have been busy. He went to this bar, pinched, dipped, and sipped for the first time in months, got drunk. She took him to a hotel and fucked his brains out. This hot Air Force chick flashed him some thigh and soon she was giving him head in the barracks day room, he fucked her on the pool table. Some of them hit the beach, went hiking, found the right spot and went cliff diving. The stories go on. You smile, laugh, and bask in the camaraderie, and pretend to play along.
But it’s a farce, still, isn’t it? You, who joined the Army because your life was going nowhere, because you wanted to change it, who started basic and thought maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, who refused to train, who became “he who shall not be named,” who hated Fort Leonard Wood, who decided to complete training just to get out of there, who came to terms with the terms of his contract, who is now back in California, still the same, still confused, still angry, still floating. Perhaps the change will still come, and in some sense, it has already, but damn if I won’t go through it kicking and screaming.
(A few months later…)
Metamorphoses are never easy. True, trust once lost is never easily regained, but what do you do when you’re too reliable, too predictable, when they trust too much that you are and will stay a certain way? Is it worth breaking their trust then? To remind them that there’s still so much, too fucking much, about you they don’t know? Fuck the narcissism, the teenage assumption of self-importance, I’m working on being human here. Even after graduation, after dad’s cancer, after the despair and lack of self-worth, after basic training, after nearly a year in the Army, that, no matter the speed, trajectory, intensity or duration of the curveballs life throws at you, you will be the same sweet, trustworthy, “good” guy you’ve always been. Or rather, that they’ve always seen.
All else upended, in their lives as well as mine, they want most for their friends, for the years of memories, to stay the same. The longer the party lasts, the longer we can prolong our imminent sobriety, our “adulthood”. But reality’s already begun to fracture, slightly at first - slower metabolisms, more time at the gym - but eventually more noticeably - no more whiling away a Saturday afternoon with friends at a coffee shop when there’s work to be done, there’s money to be made, obligations to be kept, budgets to be maintained, bedtimes to be re-instituted. Pragmatism refined.
I learn to diminish, sometimes outright kill, my capacity to enjoy certain distractions now - romance, love, consistently drunken nights, hours on video games, pointless conversations, sleep, fast food - in order that I may gain tremendously in the future. Retirement accounts, Roth IRA’s, multiple bank accounts, military accounts and international bank accounts, a stock portfolio, tracking investments, larger, more prodigious projects I can’t be talking about here. I’m brimming with excitement, no more melancholy, lest anyone suspect otherwise.
Some distractions are fun right now, the drink at the end of the week, the occasional drunken haze, sex and the occasional tryst when they come my way, whatever other things people do for fun - it satiates the id.
But, on the contrary, my game’s only begun, my second childhood. As Joyce said it, we’ve all got to grow up eventually, but somehow I doubt that means becoming boring. It does mean broadening my scope beyond the confines of Fremont, stretching my social reach beyond California and beyond the swath of other 20-somethings I’ve befriended over the years, physically pushing myself beyond what was my pre-Army prime, and not falling prey to the traps of youth - hubris and lovesickness.
The world is no longer scary and shrouded, no longer too big to handle, no longer too complicated to overcome, rather it’s now like any other game, with its rules, its penalties, and its rewards. I don’t know if all this is just hot air out my ass or if this actually makes any sense, and I really do not care. I’m finally free from my old self-imposed restrictions. I’m in the building and I’m feelin’ myself. I don’t ever want to be bored.
November 22, 2011
"Cad:
A rogue, or bounder. A cad is a man who is aware of the codes of conduct which seperate a gentleman from a ruffian, but finds himself unable to quite live up to them. Cads are quite capable of disguising themselves as good chaps for some time, only revealing their true nature in circumstances of particular stress or temptation."
A rogue, or bounder. A cad is a man who is aware of the codes of conduct which seperate a gentleman from a ruffian, but finds himself unable to quite live up to them. Cads are quite capable of disguising themselves as good chaps for some time, only revealing their true nature in circumstances of particular stress or temptation."
— (via jazzmayne)
真的:
(via krs10vray)
November 20, 2011
The Queen of the Underworld
It’s around 12:20 A.M. on some given Saturday night when Andrew, Kyle, Persephone and I find ourselves in a dark corner of the Cinnebar in San Jose, freshly wet, walking in from the unrelenting drizzle outside. We’re all wet, but Persephone’s the only one who had an umbrella that stood any chance. Mine was $4.00 and I got it with Andrew when we got crazy as bargain-driven Asians in a Daiso at the Great Mall only a couple hours before. And only an hour ago, we’d all gathered in front of Single Barrel, a hipster haunt, and stood in line for an hour in the rain, in the cold, freezing our asses off, me in flipflops, waiting to get into the 70-people-only “bar.” Once we got to the front, Persephone tried to front her immigration ID only to be denied, and that’s when she realized she’d forgotten her driver’s license, though she’d somehow driven there to meet us. So we left the line and walked to Cinnebar, in the rain, in the wet, amongst the riff-raff, cigarettes loaded and lost in a cloud of sardonic laughter. Of course this was the outcome, this could’ve been the only outcome.
So we get to Cinnebar and Andrew orders us, him and me, a pair of Whiskey Sours and we drink up. I don’t really know what a Whiskey Sour contains, but I don’t really care. It’s Andrew, he knows what he’s doing, right? I walk away and to the pool table to assess the players there, to gawk a bit, and gander at the curves and stockinged legs of billiard table female hangers-on. They look good, but uninterested, eyes glazed from the night, the weed, the liquor, the attention of every lonely, buzzed man in the joint. Whatever. I put my name down on the list to play: Isaac, my pseudonym when I don’t want to be known. I never play.
I get bored people-watching, picking out everyone’s insecurities, making bets with myself, and walk back to Andrew, Kyle and Persephone. Kyle drinks like the German he is, unfeeling anything before his 3rd hard and heavy drink. Persephone gets a PBR, but she isn’t really feeling it, hasn’t really been feeling much of anything since she lost her appetite for everything. She wears no make-up, no heels tonight, and her hair is as natural as it was when she was a child, so she feels as clear as the expression on her face but is as hard to read as the Mona Lisa smile she wears. I chock it up to immigrant awkwardness with our drunken overly American sardonics, but it seems more than that. I’m too drunk. I don’t want to care, but it lingers.
I walk back to the pool table, to see if my number’s up, to gawk a bit more. The white women look good tonight, oh well. Not tonight, not for me, not right now. I walk back to my crew, back to our corner, they’re still drinking. Persephone’s sitting at the bar, talking to Andrew, she’s handed me her drink at some point. I drink it because she can’t stomach it. I’m three drinks in, Persephone’s beer in my left hand and my rum-n-coke in my right, things get numb, life gets tolerable, energy abounds, thoughts race. Persephone is sitting, 坐着不快乐, contemplating something. Like Andrew would, I ask her “what are you about?” Actually, no. Actually, I ask her what her major is and when she tells me it’s psychology, I ask her what her psychological dysfunction is because every psych major I know has more than a few skeletons in the closet. Nary a blink, she says “depression.”
Oh, so this conversation’s going to go there. Where it always goes. Girls with “feelings,” girls with unfulfilled “emotions.” Boo-hoo, sad story. Another woman the world has spurned, or so I think. Can you blame me? I’ve met a lot of them lately. I’ve been the leanable shoulder, the listening ear too often lately, too many secrets tucked deep into my psyche, too much emotional intimacy in a short span of time. Maybe I should zone out? But I don’t. I couldn’t. She speaks and I listen. She’s like me, lost, in a word. What’s left to live for? I tell her I know about her probation from school and why she’s no longer there. Journalism and nosiness are habits hard lost. I ask her what she thinks about when she’s depressed, what gets her down and why shit’s all fucked up. She says “nothing,” none of it makes any sense, and no one really ever truly matters. Again, the potential makings of a Fall Out Boy hit single on the teenage charts, but I listen closer. There’s emptiness, there’s ennui.
“There in the dim light, staring at the shadow on the wall, I poured out the story of my life. It had been so long, but slowly like melting ice, I released each circumstance. How I managed to support myself. Yet never managed to go anywhere, but aged all the same. How nothing touched me. And I touched nothing. How I’d lost track of what mattered. How I worked like a fool for things that didn’t. How it didn’t make a difference either way. How I was losing form. The tissues, hardening, stiffening from within. Terrifying me. How I barely made the connection to this place. This place I didn’t know, but had this feeling that I was part of…this place that maybe I knew instinctively I belonged to…” (Murakami)
I used to think life was nothing but change, and the only way to stave off its effects were to remain detached from everything, to disallow everything from ever truly touching me. Then my impending military enlistment loomed over me, and they convinced me to embrace my connections in life, my physical anchors and bridge them all, to give up my privacy, my aloofness and allow it all to slam and meld and melt together, to feel wildly and openly and raw. I did, and it killed me. It made me weaker, more vulnerable, more dependent on inconstant people and circumstances and places. It attached me to things and lifestyles and habits I did not need to be attached to. Sentimentality became necessity, became a prerequisite for humanity. Fuck that.
Persephone is angry, she is upset. And I am a writer, merely writing about what I think her emotions are, about who she is. I have no fucking idea what goes on in her mind. I am only grateful for the conversation we had. Writers are arrogant about their feigned familiarity. Don’t believe any of it for a second. We’re nothing but frauds, perpetually vicarious, but for the most part, too pussy to live the lives we write about. But forgive us, it’s all we’re really good at.
Anyway, enough with the sob story. Back to Persephone. Her expression never changed, that’s what stuck with me. She very plainly told me about how nothing felt satisfying, and I told her about the wisdom I’d gained over the years. Give yourself to something, anything, and go to town, just kill it and laugh about it at all later. Life is absurd. Just kill it, come home, have a drink, smoke a stoag, go to bed, and forget about it. Live for each moment, what Joyce had told me earlier in the day. Live for the things you enjoy, the brief bits of happiness you find day to day, the things that make you happy, the things that give tomorrow even a little bit of promise, what Brian told me almost a year ago.
Persephone told me how every doctor, every shrink, every friend listened to her, told her they understood her - “nigga, I feeeel you!” - and yet nothing ever changed. She told me how she wanted to be truly good at something, how she wanted to dream big, despite the odds and to truly accomplish something great despite herself, how she wanted to go to med school. How, though she was good at music and making it, how though I was good at writing, we needed to do something greater than that, greater than ourselves and make something greater. Neither of us lives up to our own expectations, neither of us is satisfied with the people we are, neither of us is happy with the choices we’ve made, or at least that’s the vibe I got. That “kindred soul” vibe.
Around 1:42 I got sober enough to drive us back, to drive Persephone back and then take Andrew and Kyle back home. We’d gotten to La Vic’s by then, I’d killed a burrito and Andrew had just puked his guts out on the restaurant’s lawn. The security guards, former Airmen, we’re gentlemen about it all. I drank some water, helped Andrew puke, and sobered up somewhere along the way. After he’s done, we walk back to the parking lot.
I drive Persephone back to her car and the remaining three of us drive back to Milpitas, to Andrew’s place. Andrew pukes up on his lawn again, I’ve never seen him this drunk or at least as this much of a lightweight. We really are getting old. Poor guy. I drop Kyle off back at his place and peep the bike I’m going to buy, or at least I think I am. It looks nice, and I liked the feel. And hell, why the fuck not?
“It’s like ‘06 in your backyard and I’m in love with Jade
And I’m still in love, cause when it’s that real, it’s when it doesn’t fade
And my father living in Memphis now he can’t come this way
Over some minor charges and child support that just wasn’t paid
Damn, boo-hoo, sad story, black American dad story
Know that I’m your sister’s kid but
That still don’t explain the love that you have for me
I remember sneaking in your pool after school dances
Damn your house feel like the Hamptons
For all of my summer romances
I never really had no one like you man this all new shit
Made the world I know bigger, changed the way that I viewed it
Had all this fighting going on at the crib
You would calm me down when I lose it
Told you I think I’m done acting, I’m more in touch with the music
You said either way I’ll be a star, I could go so far
Talked to me, you got to me
You tossed the keys and loaned me your car
Yeah, just a young kid in a drop-top Lexus
Hopin’ that I don’t get arrested
Just another kid that’s goin’ through life
So worried that I won’t be accepted”
Driving back, I take Paseo Padre, for no other reason than to purposely drive past Grace’s house like I have so many times over the years since I was seventeen. She was my very first and yet in my youth, in my excitement over finally being understood, it all went wrong. I guess I still miss her. I drive by, wondering what her life is like now, what she does and how she’s been. Would she and I still have anything in common? Anything to talk about? Where has she been and where has life taken her? What would she think of me now?
January 20, 2011
December 29, 2010
“The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert surrounding the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as opposed to the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it also has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert - a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.”
- Baudrillard on Las Vegas, Hyperreality
November 23, 2010
“Take Me Out of This Psycho Diarrhea!”
Berkeley’s homeless are scruffy, unwashed kamikazes of intellect meandering the streets in search of a target. Almost every homeless person I have spoken to – and I’ve talked to a lot – has had a lot to say about the most obscure topics. Dozens of Cal students sullenly shuffle past these grungy gurus in that madly determined way that Cal students do - never stopping to smell the ros…hobos.
Take Rufus, for example. He has a weird tick and he can’t quite maneuver his hands the right way, but he will talk your ear off if you let him. I had just bought myself a panini from Crepes-A-Go-Go on Telegraph and brought it to a bench by Sather Gate. It was a shitty day and I should not have gotten out of bed, but I was there regardless. So I decided to sit on a bench, and eat my sandwich as I leer at passers-by like a sexual deviant. But Rufus takes a seat near me, yammering on about something, stuttering with every second word. He goes on for about three minutes, shooting glances at me, and then he yells something:
“Oh Big Mac, please give me a heart attack, take me out of this psycho diarrhea!”
When he yells, he raises his hand like a palsy patient throwing up a gang sign. It isn’t often I get to indulge the truly strange, so why not? I ask him about it.
“God is like my Big Mac, because the secret sauce comes in many flavors,” he says. And therein begins one of the most fascinating conversations I have had in a while.
To Rufus, God is the Big Mac, the grandest item on the menu, but really an anonymous, generic, easily affordable sustenance for the masses. The secret sauce is then religion – everyone claims theirs is the best, the most exclusive, when really it’s all the same shit going into the same burger. Rufus contends that he is both a Christian agnostic and an apathetic atheist, something akin to Mark Twain, the man who brought him to Berkeley in the first place.
Berkeley’s Bancroft library currently holds the largest collection of Mark Twain’s writings in the world, and this year released his autobiography, 100 years after his death, just like he’d asked. Rufus had spent much of the ‘70s hitchhiking and had come to Berkeley because he wanted to read more and learn more about Twain. Oh, and one more reason:
“This is the only place I can be a successful failure.”
Twain isn’t the only author Rufus has read. He has read the Bible, the E Ching, the Torah, the Book of Mormon, the Tao Te Ching, the Koran…and a lot of really random literature. At one point, his machine gun rant slows a smidge and he spouts off a quote:
“Before the eyes can see, they must be incapable of tears. Before the ear can hear, it must have lost its sensitiveness. Before the voice can speak in the presence of the Masters it must have lost the power to wound. Before the soul can stand in the presence of the Masters its feet must be washed in the blood of the heart.”
Mabel Collins, a 19th century theosopher and writer, published that in 1888 in her work Light on the Path. A little Googling afterwards told me he wasn’t just eloquently full of shit. Collins was legit.
Apparently, Rufus is originally from Florida, but graduated from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He might have lived a different life after that had he not suffered a traumatic car accident in his ‘20s that hemorrhaged his brain. Like he says, he’s been “dog-paddling through the abyss” ever since, which I reckon is the same as his “psycho diarrhea.”
About a week later, I meet the Hate Man…
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natasha aftandilians is the fucking best oh wow
also everyone should touch my butt
EDIT FROM THE OWNER OF THIS TUMBLR: this is factual in every way.
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Orbit by Tor Dahlin | Photography Served
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