This is the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching I ever read, and it totally blew my mind.

Thirty spokes join to form the hub of the wheel, but it is the emptiness in the center that makes the wheel useful, where you may fit the axle.

Clay can be shaped to form a pot, but it is the emptiness of the pot that is of use.

Doors and windows are cut into the walls of a house, for it is the open emptiness that lets you dwell therein.

I’m still pondering its applicability to my current state. I feel like there’s something I’m supposed to learn from this that I haven’t yet learned.

The first time I encountered the clinical aspects of child abuse was when I was a third year medical student doing my pediatrics rotation. The outpatient portion of my rotation had me going through all the various subspecialty clinics. One of these subspecialties was child abuse.

I would shadow the attending for one morning every week. Unsurprisingly, it was an eye-opening, heart-wrenching experience. One of the more horrifying cases I remembered was a child whose face and chest had been deliberately scalded by her mother with boiling water, because the child had angered her somehow. After each clinic session, I would go to lunch, and sit by myself in silence and brood, thinking to myself what an awful world we live in, and how so many people truly suck.

In my third year of residency while I was in the pediatric ICU, we had a two year old come in comatose, with his skull and his ribs fractured, having beaten to an inch of his life, and even bitten on the face, too. The assailant was the mother’s boyfriend. His arrest was pretty dramatic. The police basically rushed into the unit with guns drawn and handcuffed him in front of the child’s family.

But the first time I had to call DCFS myself wasn’t until my fourth year in residency. I was just covering for 24 hours over the weekend, and one of the cases the overnight moonlighter signed out to me was a baby who had come in vomiting blood, with a distended belly. The x-rays weren’t particularly revealing, but a CT scan was still pending. All the moonlighter could tell me was that the mother said that the baby “fell” from a workout bench in the garage (what the hell was the baby doing on a workout bench in the garage?) The moonlighter was distinctly uneasy about it, telling me that everyone in the room seemed a little “squirrely.” I didn’t dwell on it too much, since I had about twenty other patients to figure out, but then the CT scan report came in.

The baby’s liver was essentially shattered, the only thing keeping the child from bleeding out was the capsule of connective tissue that encases the liver. First, I had to call the surgeon. But this clearly wasn’t the type of injury you would get from falling from a height of two feet, even if it was onto cement. I talked to the CPS attending on-call, and they took care of everything.

Since then, I’ve had to call DCFS twice more, perhaps in far less dramatic circumstances, although no less terrible. I hate that we live in a world where there has to be a system to handle this kind of problem. Don’t get me wrong. I’m very glad DCFS exists. But I hate that it has to, that there are people out there who deliberately harm and exploit children.

The other thing I hate is that it destroys my trust in everyone. I can’t trust teachers. I can’t trust child care providers. I can’t even trust the child’s parents. I start thinking everyone has a motive for filing a false claim. Is the child just an unwitting pawn in some awful game being played by parents in the midst of an ugly divorce? Is this just a manifestation of some irrational hatred between the people involved? Is the person abusing the child the very person who called in the report in the first place?

The Calvinists, the Hobbesians, the Social Darwinists, the Randians would have us believe this is human nature. It happens. Get used to it. Everyone out there is out to destroy everyone else to try and gain an advantage. Humanity is inherently depraved. No one is innocent, not even children. I find such a worldview bereft of any redeeming qualities. If it’s true, what’s the point? But at times like this, I can’t help wonder if I’m just deluding myself and refusing to listen to the truth.

You remember how Ray Bradbury sued Michael Moore for just using the title “Fahrenheit 911”? Well, I hope Ray Bradbury doesn’t sue the Hughes Brothers for stealing a major conceit from the book.

So I’ve got this pain in my right foot that’s been bugging me for the past couple of days. It’s not terrible pain, it’s just annoying. Over the years, it’s come and gone, and it’s never really lasted long enough that I’ve thought much of it. What it probably is is just run-of-the-mill plantar fasciitis. I should probably just take some NSAIDs and do some calf stretching exercises.

But what also comes to mind is that time when I was 7 or 8 and stepped on a pencil with my right foot. I swear it went in pretty deep. It required a little bit of force to actually extract it. And there was a lot of blood. I remember screaming and crying at the top of my lungs, and almost fainting. I actually kind of shudder every time I think of it.

It’s probably pretty unlikely that this pain in my foot is due to this incident, but then again, maybe the fascia healed in a totally jacked-up way, and there’s probably some scar tissue snagging the fibers of connective tissue. Of course, this particular bit of history doesn’t change management one bit, so it’s kind of silly of me to mention it.

I realize how pathetic it is that I grew up in L.A. and I don’t have any idea where to find a place that makes chilaquiles. I never even had chilaquiles until I moved to Chicago, and found this place within walking distance from my apartment that I would go to as often as feasible. In San Diego it was pretty much a Sunday morning routine (at least, on the Sundays I would actually wake up at a reasonable hour before all the breakfast places were mobbed.)

But in L.A., I don’t even really know where to get a decent breakfast, much less a decent Mexican breakfast.

So by 10:30 am, I managed to drag myself out of the house and wound myself to York Boulevard. I figured out where Café de Leche is, which was packed full of people. It’s right next to The York, which is another place I’ve been meaning to check out. But I drove on by, made a right on Figueroa, still trying to find a likely place. Eventually, I made a big circle through Cypress Park to Glassell Park and back up to Eagle Rock, not finding anything promising. I then drove east on Colorado, past The Coffee Table, which is sort of my default place when I can’t figure out anywhere else to go, and when I’m not going to Denny’s with my parents. Eventually, I stopped at Cindy’s and had a Monte Cristo. (While Yelp gives a bunch of bad reviews, I’m not that picky about my food, and the key attraction for me was the fact that there was no waiting for a seat and no waiting to give my order.) But still no chilaquiles. I’ll have to keep trying.

I am trying to blog again. It used to be such an important thing for me. In past nine years, it has helped me crystallize a lot of my thoughts. It has helped me tease out a lot of recurrent themes in my life. It has made it easier to isolate a lot of my self-destructive behaviors and thoughts. (Whether or not it has actually helped me deal with them is another matter entirely, but, as they say, knowing is half the battle.)

It’s been four months since I’ve blogged with any sort of regularity, and I kind of worry what sorts of things I’ve been avoiding thinking about. I’m not really all that enthusiastic about dredge through the muck and mire of my subconscious. Maybe there really are things better left undisturbed. And yet I know that can’t possibly be right. Just because you can’t see it, feel it, hear it, smell it, taste it, doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you.

Still, I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions. For one thing, I’ve never succeeded in keeping a single resolution past January 31st. For another thing, I have a feeling that the purpose of a resolution isn’t merely to vow to do something you should already be doing. So I’m going to try to do all the things I’ve been meaning to do these past years and decades, and I’m not going to beat myself up for failing to continue to do them. What’s the point of beating yourself up, when life is quite able and willing to do it all for you anyway.

I would like to be a little more positive about things, but this is hard to do after years and years of practicing objectivity unmitigated pessimism. I don’t want to be one of those Pollyanas constantly talking about how getting shit on is somehow a positive life event that is crucial to my personal success. But, admittedly, just because life tends to suck doesn’t mean there aren’t moments, fragments that are pure gold. In the end, all you’ve got is memories, and even though there’s a lot of bleakness and bellyaching in the past nine years of my blogging, and even though most of the things I’ve documented are quite mundane and insipid, they’re my memories. You can laugh happily about anything (assuming you managed to survive the experience) given enough time.

But it’s January and it’s 75°F, and even though it’s never even come close to snowing here, the 20° swings are starting to drive me loopy. I suppose I should be glad it’s not 20° in the other way. Things can always be worse. What I’ve realized is that I haven’t seen the sea in 7 months. It may be time to make a quick trip.

We’ll see how many other non-binding resolutions I can come up with.

Truth be told, I’m just trying to figure out something to write before this year and this decade come to a close. The last time I logged into this blog, it was still the height of summer, although fire season was at hand. It’s easy to lose track of time in this land of no seasons. In Southern California, not very many leaves turn color in the fall, and the first snow falls only on the mountain tops.

It’s been nine years since I started this blogging adventure, and for a short while, it seemed like I really didn’t have anything left to say. I’d sort of gone over the same territory over and over again, doing and undoing, trying to find answers to same damn questions.

Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Now I’m willing to admit I might be afflicted by a touch of madness, but just because you’re crazy doesn’t make it any less futile.

But sometimes you have to start again. Just because you start off the same way doesn’t mean you can’t change directions mid-course. We don’t live in a deterministic universe, and so far in my life, serendipity has been more important than fate. It’s all about adapting to change. (The only thing sure about luck is that it will change.)

Here’s to another roll of the dice, another shuffle of the deck.

I’m not really one for New Year’s resolutions, but I do plan to face the new year, the new decade with cautious optimism, with wary hope.

When is the right time to write? It never seems the right time when the words come. Paper, pen, or even keyboard, touchscreen are never in reach when the words bubble up, unlooked for, unheralded. And before I can write them down, they evaporate, like a single cup of water spilled heedlessly upon the cracked, dry earth as the sun beats down mercilessly.

I woke up this morning to finish reading a tale of woman who turns into a dragon. I’ve read it several times before, but the story always haunts me. It was in this fey-inspired mood that I trudged off to work today with dread. Dreading what, I’m not certain.

Today is my mother’s birthday, so my brother and my sister decided to take her and my dad to Disneyland. When I finished up at 6 pm, they were still there, so I told them I would meet them at Downtown Disney.

I headed out staring at the brooding clouds of smoke billowing from the San Gabriel Mountains to the north. Yesterday, with the winds completely still, the smoke climbed straight up, looking like a stack of sullen thunder clouds. This morning, the smoke had diffused throughout the entire basin, filling the SGV, contaminating everything with taste of charred ash, of burning, of fire season in Southern California. Quickly I made a 180̂°, climbing up into the Puente Hills. The broad parkway narrows suddenly into a windy mountain road, and it’s easy to forget you’re still deep in the bowels of the vast conurbation known as Southern California. Cresting the hill, you can see downtown Santa Ana and the whole of the OC opening up before you.

I’ve always been obsessed with roads. I still see the ancient tracks crisscrossing the valleys and the basin, even thought they’ve been paved over and turned into Interstate highways. A lot of these roads were here before the Spaniards ever set foot on this distant land, coming together in a twisted knot in the Place of Smoke, Yang-na, the Tongvan village that eventually became Pueblo del Rio de Nuestra Señora la Reyna de los Angeles de Porciuncula. One of these roads the Spaniards eventually called the King’s Highway, El Camino Real, going up and down the Californian coast. That’s where the road out of the hills eventually intersects, that ancient track, miles inland. Before the Interstate Highway System bypassed it once and for all, it used to be the US 101. Now it’s only known as Whittier Boulevard, as it threads its way to Fullerton, and then swings south as Harbor Blvd. The road, buried under concrete, steel, and asphalt, heads all the way down to San Diego and into Baja California.

It also happens to pass by Disneyland. I took me about 45 minutes driving surface streets from the City of Industry to Anaheim, and I wound my way through the streets of the Magic Kingdom, where my memory fails me. There was a time in my life where my parents took me to this place every year, and now, none of it looks familiar. I met them in Downtown Disney, an ersatz urban center, the likes of which proliferate throughout all of Southern California (There’s Universal City Walk, The Grove, The Block at Orange, The Americana in Glendale, etc., etc.) The walkways were filled with throngs of people, and there were musicians performing in the plazas.

On my way back to my car I stopped and watched a group of musicians playing a cover of Muse’s “Starlight”, with a reggae feel to it. And then I drove off onto the I-5, heading back to the heart of the city, and I thought about the hundreds of times I’ve taken this freeway up from San Diego, and all the possibilities I never had the courage to explore. Time never waits. You’d think I’d know that by now.

Despite the raging brush fires and all the light pollution of Hollywood, you could still see the brightest stars glimmering in night sky, and the helicopters patrolling the city, flaring bright as they made their turns. The words really never come very easily. I have to scrape them from my brain, like the splattered droppings of an insane bird trapped in a cage much too small, and it’s only the rearranged remnants that end up written down. Well, I tried.

Destiny as simple as booking a one-way trip
on a train winding through the canyons and passes of decision
along the lonely gray strand of time
where the waves crash and break into quantum foam
chances realized then dematerialized
and not even a scrap of hope remains

Looking back, it was never a single wrong choice
not even a failed gambit, a collapsed strategy
rather the unrelenting summation of a hundred thousand moments
fate, like a gusty wind, a torrid sea, buffeting me this way and that
still, in the loneliness of the utter darkness
in those aching moments before blessed sleep
I search my memory, sifting through the wrack and ruin
trying to find that one moment I can pin my despair onto
where it was guaranteed to go wrong from there on out
a monument to the end of daydreams, where fantasy died.

Betrayal? What was there to betray? Abandonment? But what claim did I have, what duty did she have?

Just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there. What choice is there but to go forward?

I suppose it’s no accident that I ended up in the profession I’m in. From the beginning, my mind has been tuned to look for patterns. The finding of patterns is actually quite easy: everything has a pattern, every bit of data, every tiny stimulus can be fitted to a scheme. The big trick, the thing that they pay you big bucks for, is figuring which of these patterns actually match reality.

And it’s not just a peculiarity of my own mind. Some have argued that that’s basically the reason why that roughly 3-pound, metabolically costly, incredibly convoluted, quivering mass of neural tissue that sits in the vault of your cranium came into existence. What we call intelligence is nothing more than assiduous pattern-matching. (Which is why it’s not a huge reach to believe that the first true artificial intelligences will evolve from something like a search engine, but I digress.)

In any case, while my job is really nothing more than teasing out patterns, recognizing them, and then acting upon them, I haven’t recently been trying to apply this method to my life in general. Mostly, I’ve really just been trying to keep my head above water. I’m still really quite at the bottom of the steep learning curve as far as my (still relatively) new job is concerned. Every day is a learning experience. And for a while my main task had been to keep the feeling of being completely overwhelmed at bay.

This has not been anywhere as easy as I had hoped, although I have been known to hope for too much, and a little struggle never hurt anybody, but a lot of this is because my body really is in terrible shape.

I marvel at what a few years can do to a person. Somehow, despite the abuse of recurring episodes of 30+ hours of work straight through, and 80-hour work weeks, I managed to stay (relatively) healthy over the past four years. I only called in sick once or twice at the most, and only really needed parenteral antibiotics once. All told, there were probably a total of three or four episodes during my whole residency where I was, at most, moderately ill. None of these episodes would’ve required admission to the hospital. In retrospect, though, for the sake of the patients I saw, I should’ve probably just called in sick after all, but unless I was on an elective where they didn’t really need me to be there, I always got the feeling that the only reason I should call in is if I were intubated.

Be that as it may, so far, in working for two and a half months, I’ve been sick twice. I blame the swine flu. A few weeks ago I came down with fever and a cough, accompanied by diffuse body aches and shaking chills. It really didn’t even last the whole seven days. While I felt like I was going to die that Monday, and still felt like crap on Tuesday, and didn’t think I was going to survive at all on Wednesday, on Thursday I stopped running fevers, and by the weekend I was OK.

Then, just a couple of days ago, on Saturday, I started feeling like ass that night. By Sunday I was febrile and rigoring. On Monday, I still felt crappy, and had an annoying cough to boot, but I didn’t feel quite as terrible as I did on Sunday. Tuesday was a little better. Today was fine. Not 100%, but pretty much asymptomatic.

I’m not sure what’s going on with my immune system lately.

Well, as Count Rugen from “The Princess Bride” says, “If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything,” and, really, the past few months have been all about trying to successfully maintain my mental health, and, at times, my physical health. I can’t claim success quite yet, but leave it to me to start thinking too far ahead as usual.

This, naturally, leads me to a rather bleak vision.

I can’t really see beyond the endless rotation of days at work. I’m not going to say that every day is exactly the same, but each day has a disturbing symmetry with the day preceding it. I can usually keep the days of the week in order, but the sensation of being on a giant, metaphysical treadmill is starting to creep up on me.

But the part of me that always worries keeps worrying that this can’t possibly be sustainable. I *am* hoping that things will settle down, and I won’t have to worry about being overwhelmed all the time, but given my general lack of optimism, this is a difficult hope to hang on to.

What I need is something to look forward to.

What that something is, I have no idea.

But you can always count on dreams to unearth extremely disturbing things about your psychologic state. For some reason, I dreamt randomly of a person I haven’t talked to in quite a while, whom I only really knew from working together for about a week.

Naturally, this person is on Facebook, so the first thing I did in the morning was look up their Facebook profile.

Interestingly enough, their profile description is a single quote from a Radiohead song that I’ve been obsessed with lately—”There There”

in pitch dark i go walking in your landscape.
broken branches trip me as i speak.
just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.
just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.

The part of my brain that strains for meaning and pattern demands that I make something out of these random coincidences. The rational part of me recognizes that this is just a symptom of a greater malaise. There is a single question that troubles me, and I cannot answer at this time, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever be able to answer it before it’s too late. The question is this: “What do I do with my life?”

I just finished reading The City and the City by China Miéville, the first book of his that I’ve read that wasn’t set in New Crobuzon and his Secondary World of Bas-Lag.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

As with New Crobuzon and the city of Armada in The Scar, Miéville once again displays his penchant for creating bizarre and memorable settings. The subject of the title are the fictional cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, which are supposed to be in the Real World somewhere in the southeast of Europe.

The City and the City is ostensibly a detective story, about the investigation of a murder, which rapidly spirals into an international incident. But the part of it that really blew my mind was the central conceit: Beszel and Ul Qoma occupy the same space. There are areas that are “total”, meaning that they are entirely in one city or the other, but there are a lot of spaces that are “cross-hatched”, literally overlapping areas in the city that are simultaneously in Beszel and Ul Qoma. But the even crazier thing is that the populace has been trained over the centuries to ignore one another. While citizens of Beszel and Ul Qoma walk the same streets, they deliberately “unsee” each other, and even do so with the buildings and transit ways that are not in their reality. They even “unhear” sounds from foreign cars and “unsmell” the non-local food.

In fact, to acknowledge the presence and existence of the other city is considered the greatest of crimes, known as “breaching”. If committed, you forfeit your rights to the mysterious agency known as Breach, which is the hidden force that maintains this bizarre division.

What blows my mind about this is precisely because it *is* plausible. Never mind that there are lots of divided cities in the world: East and West Berlin prior to unification, Jerusalem, the cities straddling the U.S.-Mexico border. The one real world city that Beszel and Ul Qoma perhaps brings to mind is Kosovo, which itself exists in a sort-of existential limbo. But the Orwellian process of unseeing is even more mundane than that. Many reviewers use the example of how lots of people unsee the homeless. But there are other circumstances as well. On public transit, it seems that people readily unsee and unhear each other. Motorists have a tendency to unsee pedestrians in L.A.

And there are the more insidious, institutional forms of unseeing: for example, how people tend to unsee ghettos, which police forces appear to selectively see and unsee. This was made manifest to me during the L.A. Riots in 1992: whatever the reality, it seemed at the time that the police had decided to unsee the violence going on between blacks and Koreans, instead focusing on defending the more affluent parts of the city.

If anything, the brain is designed to unsee that which we do not wish to see. It is the reason why eyewitness accounts are so unreliable. If you weren’t looking for it, you’re probably not going to see it, never mind that the photons actually did hit your retina, and an electrical signal did get transmitted to your visual cortex. Unseeing is the way we make the stimulus-laden world bearable. Without this selectivity, we’d be constantly overwhelmed.

But this selectivity also leads to neglect, and this allows us to believe ridiculous things, like the idea that racism and sexism no longer exist, for example.

It is in this mind set that I think about the recent debates about the definition of the Eastside of L.A.

I’ve had my own thoughts about the geography of L.A. myself, and I don’t ever remember thinking of L.A. as a city with an obvious axis. NYC has uptown, downtown, and the boroughs. Chicago has the Northside and the Southside (and the Westside). Talking about the Eastside never occurred to me. There were districts: Silver Lake, Echo Park, Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Glassell Park, Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, etc. On the opposite side of the city, there is a district known as West L.A. It’s only in the last decade or so that I became aware that you could think of the Westside as a single monolithic entity, so the idea of imagining a monolithic Eastside was even more foreign.

But obviously, a sample size of one is almost worthless, and there are lots of long-time Angelenos who think and have always thought of the Eastside as east of downtown.

This seems to be a sane definition of the Eastside. Regardless of how much Westsiders ignore Downtown L.A., it is still functionally the center of the city. The major freeways all converge in downtown, which can be considered their point of origin, and they are named for their distant destination: The San Bernardino Freeway, the Pomona Freeway, the Santa Monica Freeway, the Hollywood Freeway, the Pasadena Freeway, the Harbor Freeway. And while lots of people commute away from the city, the flows of rush hour (or hours) are still mostly recognizable: in the morning, the heaviest flow is towards downtown and in the evening, the heaviest flow is away from downtown. The light rail, subway, and commuter rail systems are centered on downtown. Dodger Stadium and Staples Center are in sight of downtown. Naturally, the seat of political power—City Hall—is in downtown.

To ignore downtown is to ignore history: this is where the city was founded, where it was first named El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula. But even before this, this is the place the Tongva people called Yangna, the Place of Smoke.

The reason why calling Echo Park and Silver Lake part of the Eastside is problematic is because it is a form of unseeing. It ignores the true Eastside, the people who live there, and their history. And it ignores the centrality of downtown L.A. If Echo Park and Silver Lake is on the Eastside, what are they east of?

L.A. does have Cartesian axes in practice, even if they aren’t really acknowledged. Broadway and 1st Street is origin. Addresses are numbered from here. The y-axis is Broadway, and it runs all the way from Lincoln Heights to Carson. The x-axis is 1st Street, which extends from the unincorporated area of East L.A. to just east of Beverly Hills (although not quite continuously.)

Of note, once Broadway crosses the L.A River, it no longer serves as the y-axis—east and west is delineated first by Pasadena Avenue, and north of that, by Figueroa Street—oddly enough, this puts Northeast L.A. in the northwest quadrant of L.A. Also, west of Beverly Hills, Sunset Boulevard serves as the x-axis from which addresses are numbered. San Pedro has its own Cartesian axes, implemented before it was annexed by L.A.

Using address numbering alone, it doesn’t make much sense to consider areas west of origin to be the Eastside (although there is that quirk with Northeast L.A. that I mentioned above.)

But what seems to be the best geographic feature to delineate the Eastside is the L.A River. Everything east of the river is the Eastside. What separates Northeast L.A. from the true Eastside is the Arroyo Seco.

He found it strange how an old song that his dad always used to listen to on his cassette player had embedded itself so deeply into his brain that when he heard it again, it instantly took him to a time and place he could scarcely remember, a past that never was, memories that had faded into a story, into lore, more akin to fantastic fiction than to anything he had actually lived through.

Where was I? Where had I been? How did I get here? It wasn’t that he didn’t know the narrative of his life story. It was just that every time he rehearsed it in his mind, it sounded more and more like something that had happened to someone else, to someone perhaps who had never existed, just another character in some novel, existing only in his mind. He remembered the admonition of Jose Rizal, the martyred revolutionary who had stated that if you didn’t know where you came from, then you’d never figure out where you were going. It wasn’t that he didn’t remember, exactly. But he wondered if these were his memories, and even if they were, were they really memories, or just idealized narratives of events long passed, long ago divorced from any modicum of authenticity? And he started thinking, maybe I don’t want to know where I’m going, anyway, except that he knew, and of course, everyone knew. The end was obvious. Sooner or later, he would die. It was the getting there that was the complication, the thing that would remain mysterious and opaque so long as his memories continued to feel fake, as if they had been implanted all at once by some sinister band of conspirators.

That’s just paranoia. Everyone has that, he paraphrased a line from a book he had once read, a line that he repeated often, each time being amused by it, even though he didn’t actually remember the exact phrasing. My brain is just full of holes, that’s all, he told himself, as if somehow such a statement should be soothing. He was too young to be having these kinds of bouts of forgetfulness. But he didn’t want to look at it too closely. Because then he’d be stuck between two unpleasant possibilities. Either there really was an evil cabal deliberately falsifying and obscuring his memory, or he had actually done it to himself.

This blog post by S hits close to the mark with regards to my fears of dying completely alone, of dying and being quickly forgotten, although I’ve sort of become more and more resigned to the idea.