It’s amazing how much more relaxed you can feel after downing enough tequila amongst friends while watching the sunset at a bar overlooking the ocean. Life has been good. I wish I didn’t have to go back to an 80 hour work week come Friday.

I am rereading Ursula K Le Guin’s rendition of the Tao Te Ching and come across a wonderful phrase: power that is not force.

This is the essence of the Way, but it is also the method of non-violent revolutionaries like Jesus Christ, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

I feel that it is what the colonized peoples of the world need to embrace. Instead of setting themselves up in opposition to the grasping, striving world of Global Capitalism, what we need to do is exert our innate power—this power that is not force. Instead of using the coercive means of violent insurrection, installing a new oppressive power hierarchy to replace the old, as most violent insurrections end up doing, we need to live lives dedicated to radical transformation, eroding the existing power structure from the bottom up. To use a trite Taoism image, this is exactly how water, drop by drop, ends up destroying an entire mountain.

My belief is that oppression cannot be overthrown, freedom cannot be won, until we immunize ourselves from hierarchical power structures. When all individuals can think for themselves and make their own decisions, when all individuals are able to do the calculus that weighs individual rights against the rights of the majority, when we no longer need to kill other people who disagree with us, then we can dispense outright with coercive laws.

Is this ever really going to happen? I doubt it, but I like to dream.

There is a meme floating about on the blogosphere that illustrates the stupidity of Jeff Goldstein AKA Protein Wisdom (Thersites also joins the fray.)

Now the bulk of what Goldstein talks about is, indeed, the antithesis of radical deconstructionism, but what marks him out as a fool is that he states that the Mona Lisa was painted by Michelangelo. Hmmm.

Perhaps what we have here is a case of mixing up the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I mean, without their color-coded masks, they are basically identical. Now, I’m not sure how you could exactly mix up Michelangelo with Leonardo, since Michelangelo wears orange and wields nunchakas while Leonardo wears blue and favors the katana, but perhaps Mr. Goldstein has a peculiar form of color-blindness. Myself, I tend to confuse Leonardo with Donatello because I am red-green color-blind and sometimes have difficulty telling blue from purple. The only thing that saves me is again the weaponry, since Donatello uses a bo staff.

But, again, the meat of his argument is the supremacy of radical intentionality: the meaning of the text is supposedly exclusively dependent on what the author meant, regardless of how the text can be interpreted.

This is dissonant with the (now) more favored method of deconstruction. In the aftermath of Derrida (whom I have yet to read), this has become the de facto standard for approaching a text. While critics are wont to demonize the strawman of radical deconstructionism, this isn’t what most sane people actually practice. Radical deconstructionism leads you to isogesis, really. Since the premise is that nothing has any inherent meaning, you can twist every word to mean whatever you want it to mean, and every text can be used to support whatever bizarre agenda you espouse. Now, isogesis has long been discredited as a form of literary criticism, so it is ridiculous that the critics of deconstructionism are intent on resurrecting it so that they have something they can kick around.

The more sane version of deconstructionism which is usual practice when writing critical analysis involves the moderately (then) revolutionary idea that texts do not exist in a vacuum. As is clear to any student of English when comparing Beowulf to The Canterbury Tales to The Wasteland to Neuromancer, the meaning of words change. This is the nature of living languages—meanings evolve, definitions split off, some words get radically modified, other words become obsolete. So from the purely historic linguistic point-of-view, it is crucial to contextualize a text.

Contextualization can be taken further, though. You can choose to get into the nitty-gritty of culture and subculture. This is the tack that post-colonialism basically takes. Through this lens, the sense of the text is only truly accessible when you decode the (frequently) racist and ultra-nationalistic subtext along with the text itself, whether from the point-of-view of the conqueror or the conquered.

In modern subcultures, contextualization is sometimes the only sensible way to derive meaning. For a trite example, how can you tell what the word “cool” means? Or maybe “bad”? Context (meaning historical context and context within the text itself) is not enough to decode this. It depends on who the author is, but it also depends on who the intended audience is. (And, frequently, it also depends on who the unintended audience is.) If I am writing directly about one high school kid talking to another high school kid, it may mean one thing. If, on the other hand, I am a grown adult writing about high school kids talking to one another, it can unintentionally mean something different. If I am writing about a high school kid talking to an adult, it probably will mean something entirely different as well (since you’ve got to start factoring in irony, sarcasm, and plain old misdirection.) This kind of subanalysis is only possible by deconstructing not only the text itself, but the context—historical, situational, cultural.

Now I am probably starting to mix terms together. (I was never good at taxonomy.) What I mean by context (unqualified), or by textual context, is simply the linguistic structure of the text. For example, how is “bear” used in the sentence? Is it a noun or is it a verb? This is basic grammar, and illustrates an oddity of English and similar languages which are very context-dependent. Most words tend to be extremely ambiguous without other words to back it up. The beauty of this is that, as an author, you don’t have to take the other contexts (historical, situational, cultural) into account—you can make it completely explicit when you need to. This is in stark contrast to something like Mandarin, in which words are not context-dependent, meaning that a single word can be readily decoded without any ambiguity without relying on its relationship to other elements in the text. Unfortunately, the downside is that you end up being heavily dependent on the other contexts in order to obtain unambiguous meaning (and sometimes this is the only way to obtain any meaning), and this is the main reason that people born outside of Chinese culture tend to get Chinese texts all fucked up.

So why is deconstructionism antithetical to intentionality? Intentionality presumes that the author’s intent is the only message worth analyzing, the only version of the text that has any legitimacy. I find this point of view nonsensical when you consider what language is actually used for: communication.

Few people with any background in information technology would gainsay the fact that when considering language (or, perhaps to make the metaphor more exact, when considering communication protocols), intentionality has zero usefulness except perhaps in debugging. When you are considering a computer, you are effectively trying to communicate to something that is completely unable to derive context and decode meaning from the incoming text. There is only one mode of interpretation: literal decoding.

Every programmer knows that if you don’t spell everything single damned thing out to the computer, the computer will not do what you intend it to do. By this simple fact, it is obvious that radical intentionalists would make terrible computer programmers.

What programmers and network specialists rely on is the fact that each fragment of “text” (if you deign to call a computer program a text) means roughly the same thing to every computer you send it to. There is a meaning to each word that exists independent of its context (although, realistically, each word is useless outside of its context—just see what a computer, or a person for that matter, thinks of the keyword for without any indices or counters or commands to run, for that matter.) There is, in essence, a universal glossary, and when you tell any sane computer that understands a sane computer language to “print,” it will print. (Now this is not without pitfalls, because you do have to specify context: do you mean the console display, or the printer, or the network, but we won’t get into technical details here.) But even with computers there are variances. For one thing, there are dialects of computer languages. For another thing, there are different architectures and while the higher level language defines the logic, some very arcane bugs occur at the compiler level, which will never be caught if you don’t accept the fact that there are variances in architecture. And if the language is high-level enough, you stop caring about actual implementation. The example of this lies in the famed buzzword of the moment AJAX. You can write your program the way you want it, but the actual implementation is tied to the receiver end. The client does all the interpretation, and good programmers need work in graceful degradations so that all the multifarious platforms out there can get most of the desired functionality.

Considering a computer is perhaps an exercise in reduction ad absurdum, but it illustrates an important point: deconstructionism takes into account the human equivalents of processor architecture and client platforms: context. And not just context as applies to the author, but context as applies to the reader.

The key thing to remember is that language is primarily for communication. Sure, we use language to create art, and we play with language without necessarily intending actual communication, but we must realize that these ends are subversions of the original intent of language. Just because you don’t intend something with the text you are creating doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a communicative aspect to it, in the same way that just because you are writing an actual poem in COBOL doesn’t mean that you can’t feed that poem into a compiler and actually have the computer do something with it (even if that something is to crash and burn horrendously.) Intent is easily separable from the text itself. Think of a deconstructionist as a computer that interprets a program. The big difference is that computers have no access to the author’s intention.

And given that the purpose of language is communication, it follows that all texts have both an author and a reader. Given the existence of an author and of a reader, it is clear that we end up dealing with multiple contexts. When I read Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, I can only contextualize it in terms of my 21st century mind. Clearly, Spenser could not have similarly written the text with a 21st century context in mind, and clearly, he did not write it for a 21st century context, since there is no way he could have conceived of such a thing. I think the existence of the passage of time in of itself makes the idea that intentionality is pre-eminent moot.

Now clearly there is a political agenda motivating the appeal to radical intentionality, in the same way that deconstructionism and post-modernism was readily channeled into post-colonialism. Intentionality reasserts fiat by pure authority. I say it’s this way, and that’s the only meaning worth talking about. This is a great tool for despots and tyrants. In contrast, deconstructionism democratizes text. Each reader takes his own particular set of contexts into the text, and is forced to be cognizant of the way his particular contexts interact with the text. In this way, nothing is taken for granted. In an ideal piece of literary criticism, all assumptions need to be laid bare.

As someone else noted in the rapidly proliferating comments on the sites cited above, deconstructionism does not destroy intentionality, it merely demotes it to simply another one of the assumptions that we must inspect.

Interestingly, a similar evolution is occurring in the IT world. We are moving from binary-only single platform applications (Windows-only programs) to open-source/platform independent applications (any open source project, but more spectacularly, the so-called Web 2.0) We have moved from a context-deprived, intention-only computing universe (bearing in mind that the only reason why context was irrelevant is that almost everyone ran Windows, so the application was the only thing that mattered) to a computing universe where the client platform does all the heavy lifting. What this means in practical terms is that the things a programmer can take for granted has diminished.

What the demise of intentionality means is that authors need to examine their texts from the lens of the reader. Interestingly, the very same person can sometimes experience the very same text completely differently if they do this exercise.

With the demise of intentionality, you cannot reasonably say something that can be construed offensive by saying that that’s not what you meant. What this simply reveals is that you did not (or you refused to) take into account the context in which such a comment would be received. It is context that makes the word “nigger” acceptable when black people say it to each other, but which makes it odious when a white person says it to a black person. I am tempted to say that this is common sense, but as has been well illustrated, common sense ain’t exactly common.

I am suddenly reminded of Borges’ story “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” where he brilliantly examines what radical intentionality would mean. In his story, Pierre Menard is a character who writes Don Quixote exactly as Cervantes had previously wrote, but Borges asserts that Menard’s work is completely different from Cervantes’ work.

And for my final feat of deconstructionism, I can’t help but examine Mr. Goldstein’s nickname “protein wisdom.” Now, radical intentionalist that he is, he probably has some private reason for this pseudonym that is likely very inane. But deconstructionist that I am, I can’t help but observe that this is very homoerotic. (Note that I don’t have the sense of decorum exhibited by my fellow commenters who have only obliquely alluded to this. I personally feel it necessary to make this explicit.) I am at once besieged by the imagery of Mr. Goldstein performing fellatio on some unspecified person or persons and drinking up their semen. And perhaps feeling enlightened after doing so. Hence, protein wisdom. So what I’m talking about here is basically bukkake. (Man, this is going to give me nightmares.)

Watching “Batman Begins” I am reminded of what struck me first about Chicago in 1998 (never knowing that I was actually end up there for a substantial portion of my life. Also interesting that they chose Chicago instead of NYC for their depiction of Gotham.) It’s the lower level of the city, reserved for truck shipments and serving as a quasi-expressway leading into the Loop. For the longest time, it was a haunted appearing place, since the intersection of Lower Wacker Dr and Lower Michigan Ave had been dismantled, in the process of retrofit. It reminded of the section of Midgar (from Final Fantasy VII) which lay completely underneath the “Plate,” which is the upscale downtown district overlying the slums.

There was something intriguing about those deserted corridors, perpetually lit by the awful neon orange of the sodium lights, seemingly now abandoned. This changed drastically when the reconstruction of Lower Wacker Dr was completed. Now you had a direct route just off of the Eisenhower Expressway that quickly took you to the Magnificent Mile, with very little cross traffic in between. (You will likely recognize Lower Wacker Dr if you watch one of the chase scenes in “Batman Begins.” It is also, apparently, the site of the famous “Blues Brothers” chase sequence which I never got to watch.)

The other part of Wacker Dr that I find interesting is that final elevation that dead ends right next to the Hilton. It reminds me of the unconstructed superhighways in Midgar, and it seems like Wacker Drive was supposed to connect with Lakeshore Drive, possibly as a full interchange rather than just an intersection. If you were to barrel down Upper Wacker Dr at, say, 100 mph, you would easily launch yourself, only to crash down on top of Lakeshore Drive traffic. Or you might actually end up in Lake Michigan.

The only other city that I can think of that has a multi-tiered downtown area is L.A. Because the modern central business district is built on top of Bunker Hill, there is a bizarre maze of bridges and tunnels, stairs, and funiculars, and it is not always clear where perpendicular streets actually intersect. For example, there is the 4th Street causeway that avoids most of the major north-south streets. Then there is the 2nd Street tunnel that does the same. The Grand Ave overpass meanwhile avoids many of the major east-west streets. If you watch enough car commercials, you will frequently see downtown L.A. (I think the Grand Ave overpass and the 4th Street causeway are popular streets to film, although the most interesting are the multifarious bridges that cross the L.A. River.)

Because the streets are so absurdly wide, and because of the King of Spain’s original decree that the city’s grid should be laid out on a 45° angle with respect to the cardinal directions of north, south, east, and west, the streets underneath the shadows of the skyscrapers never get quite as cold and gloomy as do the streets of, say, Manhattan, or the Loop, or of San Francisco. But downtown L.A. is a diurnal city, quickly emptying after rush hour, leaving only the denizens of Skid Row there. While better than the 1990’s, there still isn’t that much of a nightlife there, at least not compared to Hollywood just a few miles northwest, and definitely not compared to Chicago’s Mag Mile or to Manhattan. (Although, really, is there that much to do in the Downtown area?)

But I can’t help but wonder, as sprawl becomes more and more difficult to maintain and businesses find it once again more reasonable to return to the central city, as law enforcement becomes balkanized and more and more likely to be taken over by private companies because of economic reality, making it more useful to just patrol the commercial districts, and to let jungle law rule the suburbs, with the movements to revitalize central city districts and making them places not only to work, but to live as well, just how dense can places like Manhattan get? In NYC, will there someday be a part of town that literally never gets sunlight, because there is no sky above?

I understand I’s point about the Art of Not Wanting smacking of rationalization and sophistry, but I think there is some profound truthfullness to the Art. One, there is the fact that it is one of the central tenets of Buddhism—without desire, there is no suffering. Two, it also ungirds much of the philosophy of Taoism—desire can only lead to imbalance, but desire is unnecessary because all that you need has already been provided for. The Way is all you need. (I find it interesting that Jesus Christ sometimes refers to himself as the Way.)

The way I’ve looked at it is that God always manages to balance things out. (Or, if you prefer the atheistic approach, the universe always exists in equilibrium, because imbalance rapidly dissipates due to the Laws of Thermodynamics.) The example I think of is silly and does not really describe the real universe, but I find it a useful intellectual exercise.

I think of the city of Metropolis in the DC Universe of comics. All sorts of bizarre catastrophes happen in it, things that don’t really have realistic counterparts in the real world. If the frequency of disaster present in Metropolis were to occur in the real world, most cities would long ago have been obliterated. I think mostly of Superman II, where the criminals from Krypton somehow magically end up on Earth. If an ultra-powerful alien race ever landed on Earth in the real universe and they desired to dominate us, we’d be screwed. Not so in the movie. Superman is there to defend us.

So I tend to think (somewhat teleologically, I know) that God never forces us to face crises that we are unable to handle. If ultra-powerful aliens show up, they are balanced by Superman. Or, to think of an even more subtle sense of balance, the aliens are highly susceptible to viruses that we find benign. Somehow, there is always hope in all conflicts. Nothing is inexorable.

Now it might seem strange that someone like me in the throes of a deep crisis of faith will nonetheless still evoke a God that I may or may not believe in, and, in truth, I’m not so sure I’m as optimistic as all that. So my real take on things is a touch more cynical. I still do believe in the serendipitous balancing-out of everything, though. Not because there is necessarily a benign force operating in the background of the universe, but because the laws of physics simply dictate that it must be so.

With the Laws of Thermodynamics, imbalance rapidly dissipates. If imbalance exists, it’s because there is some sort of energy consuming process that maintains it. Imbalance requires the use of energy. It is equilibrium that is the natural state of things. The end of the universe will be governed by equilibrium, which is, in a convoluted way, another way to express entropy.

Entropy always wins in the end.

But, in a twisted way, Nietschze was right: “That which does not kill you only makes you stronger.” I tend to look at it a lot more pessimistically: “That which does not kill you only delays the inevitable.” We’re all going to die. That’s just fact. Call it the Laws of Thermodynamics, call it the Will of God, it amounts to the same thing.

In times of extreme crisis, like life-and-death situations, I can’t help observe that survivors survive no matter what the odds, no matter what obstacles lie in their path. Those who don’t survive die.

I find this sentiment evoked perfectly by Douglas Adams (of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame):

What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can’t move, with no hope of rescue: Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn’t been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won’t be troubling you much longer.

You either make it, or you don’t.

But, perhaps less cynically, and more healthily, it comes down to that prayer from Alcoholics Anonymous:

God, give me the serenity to accept the thing I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

The Art of Not Wanting isn’t just about surrender. It’s mostly about learning to not want the things that you can’t have.

I am currently watching Showtime where theye have Radiohead in concert (2004), and I am amazed at how the first few chords and guitar strums of their songs can evoke such vivid memories and even bring a smile to my face.

Now I’m sure everyone who was in their teens during the early ‘90’s is familiar with the (subtly parodic) song “Creep,” and both “High and Dry,” and “Fake Plastic Trees,” passed by consciousness thanks to KROQ, but it wasn’t really until OK Computer came out that I listened, really listened, to them.

I owe E to introducing me to the entirety of Pablo Honey, particularly the song “Thinking About You,” which itself is loaded with all sorts of murky memories and tangled history, but which mostly makes me think of barrelling down the I-5 at 80 mph, thinking of women, but I really owe M with making me listen to OK Computer repeatedly, over and over again.

I doubt that I would survived the trials and tribulations of my last year in college if not for the wondrous, anxious nihilism of Thom Yorke et al. OK Computer is a perfect soundtrack to a nervous breakdown.

I was probably destined to fall in love with the album just because of the title of one track, unarguably the best track on the album, and likely Radiohead’s magnum opus at least to date. I speak of “Paranoid Android,” which immediately evokes thoughts of Marvin from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, even though there is no real connection between the song and the character. (Naturally as I talk about it, Radiohead begins to play it on TV.) The evocation of angst-ridden ennui, simultaneous with the depiction of not-giving-a-fuck, alternating with sense of complete alienation and even a thin shred of redemption, this is easily the most epic of their songs. Probably the strongest memory associated with it is driving down the Pasadena Freeway towards Downtown L.A., as I threaded my way through rush hour traffic to try to get to San Diego. The sky was a perfect, featureless grey-white, not really that much different from the front cover of OK Computer itself, and the wondrous sense of—I don’t know—communal soullessness and the bizarre feeling of loneliness amidst the massing throngs that characterizes rush hour traffic really just washed over me.

The last three of their albums evoke memories of my time in Chicago. I note that for some reason, the memories are always those kinds of things that are extremely depressing, and yet I still look upon them with fondness. “Idioteque” from Kid A seemed to prophesy the Fall of the American Republic (and especially the specifics of September 11th itself), and it reminds me of driving my dilapidated 1988 Ford Taurus down the Eden’s Expressway trying to rendevous with J. The entirety of Amnesia evokes my personally imagined sense of T.S. Eliot’s Unreal City, which in simplified form is the amalgamated mess of memories involving mostly pre-9/11 New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, all rooted in Los Angeles, which is the city of my birth, and was nominally Home. “The National Anthem” reminds me of waiting for the Radiohead concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater in the Bay Area with B, J, and R, evoking an Orwellian atmosphere. I fantasized of CIA operatives, of NSA spooks. The Agents that police the Matrix. It also reminds me of staring at the vast ocean and the seagulls milling about as me and B sat silently in an empty parking lot off of the Great Highway in S.F. And “Sail to the Moon” from Hail to the Thief reminds me of that melancholy day I wandered the streets of Chicago all alone (once again smarting from the ache of romantic rejection), using public transport to navigate to the Tower Records in Lakeview/Lincoln Park. Naturally, as I walked down Clark Ave, it started pouring rain, and it was just so clichéd and pathetic that I couldn’t help but laugh.

I didn’t really appreciate The Bends until quite late, not really realizing what a great album it is. It is perhaps unfairly eclipsed by OK Computer. Clearly the sensibilities are different, but certainly The Bends is more than simply the unformed nidus of what catapulted Radiohead to greatness. Still, in retrospect, The Bends mostly evokes in me trite, teen-ager like angst, about love unrequited, love lost, and the sad emptiness that is the aftermath. However, the sense of absolute bereftness, emptiness, and near-insanity caused by grief, the brutal alienation from the well-adjusted that is the warp and woof of major depressive disorder, is absolutely lacerating to the soul in “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” and if I’m in the right mood when I listen to it, it can drive me to tears. (It would perhaps be one of the songs I’d like played at my funeral, maybe.)

The other thing I can’t help ponder is how many words, how many lines and stanzas, how many sentences and paragraphs I’ve spewed forth onto the electronic ether using Radiohead as a subliminal soundtrack. I wonder if it would be possible to comb through my blog(s) and figure out which ones I wrote while listening to them. It is interesting how other pieces of art almost force you into responding in kind. I think (rather nerdily) of the dialectic between electricity and magnetism, about alternating sine waves not quite in phase, about natural cycles in the ecosystem that are not clear cut but intuitively seem linked in some fashion. I can’t even begin to count the number of hours I’ve spent under the inadvertant tutelage of Thom Yorke et al.

It is odd that, despite the fact that their songs frequently evoke the sense of profound alienation, of giving shape to the vast abyss that lies between me and normal, happy people, it nonetheless makes me happy. I don’t know if it’s simply masochism, or if there is something really healing, cathartic, and redemptive, about giving form to this hollowness that circulates within me and around me, and around Western Civilization in general.

In this tired hour of spent beer cans and cigarette butts the chewed ragged ends of hoping for some sort of change waiting for the winds to turn aside the drifting course of the clouds for the sun to shine forth

I am forever dreaming of sunlight warm upon my face like a kiss imagined from some lost impulse some half-remembered thought from years running on end through my closed eyelids light seeps in, making the darkness a blurry pink-red

In this silent hour when the world still sleeps and dew drips down upon the closed buds of the pink and yellow roses in this darkling hour while the sun sits still behind the shadow of the world I circle and circle round an unwished-for thought trying to pretend that I had not dreamed of some simple happiness tried to fight this impending mania of trying to reach out and grasp the stars themselves of flying in that silken purple sky like fabric draped upon heaven’s mantle and like some Copernican madness in reverse I imagine it is not the world that spins on its axis only that my heart revolves like a gyring top

This thing kindled my soul catching fire regretting that this too shall pass evanescent, ephemeral when my heart turns to grey ash and the embers die and the life-giving warmth fades and even the taste of smoke drifts away leaving my soul once again senseless and numb

Is even this brief coruscating incandescence this brief piercing happiness worth the soot stained, ash filled aftermath? of my pondering what it was I wanted and why it is I forgot desire creeping on me like shadows dispelled by the faint rising of the dawn returning stirred from this dreamless sleep

My memories wear with each remembrance trying to cram this lingering feeling into the stoppered bottle that is my soul each thought becoming smooth with frequent handling until each detail is pared down into oblivion and all that is left is non-descript stone sinking into the vast abyss of my burned-through heart plunging into deep chasms sight unseen leaving only trace ripples upon the still water faint waves like concentric circles of light or a whisper travelling through the rarified air each crest leaving me tremulous each trough like mute, tranquil despair until I am still again unmoving dreamless silent hope at last quelled smothered anesthetized as I prepare to face the waking world

I am amused by how many times I’ve actually come to the conclusion this self-same conclusion, that right now, in of myself, I am sufficient for the tasks at hand. At this moment, everything I need is within my reach, and whatever is outside my reach doesn’t matter, no matter how much I might want it.

I hope against all hope that I remember this simple fact the next time I am faced with extreme crisis.

I think I probably wrote this somewhere else before, but I always find the month of May filled with possibilities. I have always identified it with the end of the academic year, with graduations, with confirmations, with Pentecost. The point of transition, the time when the old order slows down, and the hint of new beginnings tantalizes.

Much to my dismay, I found that this became completely literal when I wandered off to the Midwest, where apparently it’s fair game for snow until around the end of April. The weather really wouldn’t start feeling spring-like until sometime in mid-May, for all of five to seven days, and then all of the sudden it was summer, sticky and sweltering, with calamitous thunderstorms and tornado watches alternating every twenty minutes with pure, glorious sunlight.

So while I know that May is the Anglicized form of Latin Maia, and that it is frequently identified with Mary the mother of Jesus (which reminds me of the daily ceremonies in elementary school that we would have venerating the Blessed Mother), I can’t help but ponder the fact that “may” also means “to be able.” It is the modal auxillary verb that denotes the subjunctive mood in Modern English, which expresses conjecture, possibility, hypothesis. Maybe something good, maybe something bad. We just don’t know.

One of my favorite 10,000 Maniacs song “These are Days” has a line that forever haunts me: “When May comes rushing over you / with desire / to be part of the miracles you see / in every hour.”

I remember too many Mays where I was filled with hope, with that hope soon dashed, never coming to fruition.

Then again, one of my favorite songs by the Police “Message in a Bottle” has a line that has become something of a mantra for me: “Only hope can keep me together / Love can mend your life but love can break your heart.”

In a world full of nothing true, hope is the only thing that keeps me going. That faint silver thread leading from the center of my soul off into the great unknown. Into destiny itself.

It is always important to acknowledge the gifts given to you, however. C at last made me realize the beauty of solitude. There is something comforting knowing that there is at least one other person like me who actually likes spending time by themself. That idea is sort of transforming the way I look at my own narrative. In a burst of synchronicity, I had decided to finally pick up the book entitled Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto a couple of days ago, and came to realize that maybe that really is me. Exploration, by it’s nature, frequently requires solitude. It’s easier to just wander around looking for inspiration when you don’t have to worry about other people’s timetables and agenda. When you don’t have to deal with their lack of interest, when you don’t have to cajole someone else into going with you to take that path less taken. Apparently I’m in good company: Albert Einstein, John Lennon, Franz Kafka, to name a few cited by Anneli Rufus. It is interesting how their official biographies revolve around the other people involved in their lives. Much is made about Einstein’s marriages and the implicit support that Mileva Maric and Elsa Einstein must have provided. Lennon was part of one of the most famous bands in rock-and-roll history, and his legendary marriage with Yoko Ono has become a solidified part of his mystique. But I can’t help but wonder, perhaps projecting my own life onto their narratives, when Einstein pondered the entire universe and the vast forces that move the stars and galaxies, when he imagined how matter causes space to curve, and how light follows these twisted paths, could he really take either of them with him on his flights of fancy? Could they relish in his sense of discovery? While Mileva Maric was also an aspiring physicist (and some hypothesize that she contributed in a concrete manner to Einstein’s theories), I can’t help but wonder if the dissolution of his marriage didn’t start when Einstein went off on his explorations of the workings of the universe.

In the same vein, Lennon’s anti-social personality is not often discussed, and I imagine that when he wrote his music, he would do it by himself, much to the chagrin of his bandmates who would prefer a more collaborative endeavor.

I suppose I have fallen prey to the idea that being alone is pathological. I have succumbed to sentiment that experiences that aren’t shared aren’t real. But, for good or for ill, the majority of my life has been spent in solitude. In retrospect, I realize that I have had difficulties juggling my solitary interests with social events and obligations. In my few extant relationships, there have always been concepts, thoughts, ideas that I have found difficult to share. Not just because of the fear of being misunderstood, although that is certainly there, but there is the basic problem of frequently not even being able to articulate what goes through my mind at times.

There was a time, perhaps, that I could lose myself in my work, in my thoughts and musings, in the hidden and secret paths that I would find myself treading, never worrying that someone would demand of me the question of, “What have you been doing with your life?” There was a time when the activity itself would provide me with satisfaction, and I didn’t need to please anyone else, I didn’t need to inspire other people’s interest, in order to be happy with what I’ve done.

For people like me, society’s disdain of loners is poisonous.

For the longest time, I have known that I am an introvert, even before Meyers-Briggs confirmed it for me. What I didn’t know until relatively recently is that introverts are a minority. I had imagined a world that was roughly 50-50, but in reality, it’s more like every 1 in 3. Society is all about extroverts, about making friends easily, about continuous conversation and sharing of thoughts. This is the generative engine that makes most of the world go round.

I am suddenly struck by a metaphor drawn from imagery from China Miéville’s The Scar which describes the fictional city of Armada, which is a tangle of decommissioned seacraft of various shapes and sizes from different parts of the world clumped up together to form the foundation of a city that is at least one square mile in area. Upon this floating artificial island are roads and buildings, markets and libraries, much like any other city. For the most part, the city will drift listlessly on the endless sea, but sometimes the rulers of the city will have the tugboats at the periphery pull them in a certain direction. But in addition to these, there are singular pirate ships that leave the city and scout the surrounding area, obtaining raw materials and prisoners.

The extroverts are the core of the city, the ships that make up the foundation. The introverts are both the tugboats and the pirate ships, responsible for actually giving the city direction. Not all introverts are necessarily loners, however—these are the tugboats, who sit on the periphery of society and gaze out into the dark unknown of the sea, but who are still exist as integral parts of the city. The loners are the pirate ships who go their own way, occasionally making port at the city, but never becoming a permanent part of it.

Clearly, civilization as we know it need both the core and the periphery.

It is telling that in college, I was part of a loosely associated group (that really wasn’t a group, which is very symptomatic of people who like to go their own way) which we sardonically named POPS, which stands for Pilipinos on the Periphery. Kasama-sama feels like an integral part of Filipino and Filipino American culture, something that repelled me on a visceral level, and college was no different. The sanctioned culture-based student groups were primarily of a social nature (which was a far cry from their origins of political activism well esconced within the tumult of the Free Speech Movement which erupted out of Berkeley amidst the general unrest embodied by the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement.) Being Berkeley, there were sops and scraps of meat thrown to the militant, but the function of the Pilipino American Alliance was pretty clear in retrospect.

Then there are those who simply didn’t identify at all with their ethnic subculture, truly going their own way.

I’ve always thought of myself as a minority embedded within a minority embedded within a minority. In some ways, I do think of myself as a subculture that has exactly one member. Oh, I have my close friendships (many of them extant for more than a decade, and a few surpassing a full score of years) and I have my alliances to various groups, but I begin to see clearly that many of the most momentous moments of my life have occurred in solitude. True, at times, it is that curious solitude that one can feel even while embedded within a clamorous throng, but it is solitude nonetheless.

I have forgotten who it was exactly who once told me that I just see things differently, which was a trait that they found valuable. At the time I fretted that this ability was the source of my constant sense of alienation, but in the end I see the true value of it.

I have often had this fantasy, this vision, that despite being alone most of the time, I still walk among this shadow company of people who wander the world following their own bliss, finding their own niches and caches filled with wonder. Some of their finds will rarely filter through the discourse of general society, transforming it in subtle, though at times revolutionary, ways, and maybe for the most part I will never share in their specific awe and joy, but it is a good feeling that despite being by myself, there are others out there like me.

a vision as I stare into the western sky clouds looming up like a great wall impenetrable marking the boundary between the land—what must be and the sea—what is possible

the horizon looks so close I can touch it as if the end of the world were so nigh the thousands and thousands of miles of windswept waves I dream incomprehending of those distant shores

the waves crash together and tear at the sand and the thousand-fold endless war between earth and sea rages and bit by bit the water that is rain that is tears that is blood that we lay dreaming in within our mothers’ wombs in millenia unceasing what must be always crumbles but what is possible is all but infinite

I dream of those islands lying untended upon the horizon like Fata Morgana like the sirens’ song drawing sailors to their doom and the arc of land and the mountains in the distance and like I bird I soar upon that twisted span that stark concrete line that vivisects the sky

in my heart is hope not of impossibilities not of dreaming of what can never be mine not of love unrequited not of the inevitable plummeting through the sky as death takes all things that take wing

in my heart burns hope that my little flame is brightness enough to lead me through the secret paths in the wilderness these twisted, braiding paths made of flashing light and silken cloud not the clouds of darkness, the brooding black storm but the light clouds of rain ended the storm weathered Noah’s Ark alighting upon land clouds illumined by the rising sun turning the sky brilliant gold like honey, like amber like warmth incarnate

These paths like ribbons burst from my heart these endless lines leading hither and thither not knowing where each colored braid might end they tug and they pull With courage she armed me I can set my sight upon that silver string that penetrates my very soul upon this silver string lies my path across the infinite waves alone as needs be

I don’t know why I worry so much about things that haven’t happened yet, and aren’t going to happen any time soon. It’s not like I can do anything now to mitigate whatever will happen.

The interesting thing about medical training is the emphasis on the teaching aspect. I mean, most of medicine (at least if you’re not a surgeon) is about teaching—educating people about their diagnoses, about possible treatment plans, about the natural course of their condition, about what things to expect, what things to be concerned about, what things they need to call about, or head to the emergency department for. In peds most of all, a lot of the teaching is about what is normal, what not to worry about. This is no surprise. After all, the word “doctor” is simply Latin for “teacher.”

The more immediate aspect is the fact that I will have my first real supervisory month in a little more than a week. I’m not worried about not knowing my medical knowledge, about looking like an idiot in front of my interns and medical students. I’m humble enough to know that the sum of my ignorance far exceeds the sum of my knowledge. What I worry about is that I don’t want to infect them with my pervasive sense of cynicism. It’s one thing if they’re already cynical (which would not be all that surprising since it is the end of the academic year), but as much as I sometimes detest optimists and their naivete, I don’t want to be the one to tear their world down. If they’re still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, who am I to put a monkey-wrench in their universe?

Still, I suppose it is much like dealing with patients. Especially when the diagnosis is something awful like metastatic cancer, or anoxic brain injury, where the prognosis is hopeless. Sometimes you have the unenviable role of forcing them (or their loved ones) to face reality.

I have been perhaps lucky in that all my patients and their loved ones in such dire straits thus far have been extraordinarily brave. As the end comes closer, I’ve found that people become more sober and realistic. I have never sensed any opposition when the question finally came down to actually pulling the plug. There is always wailing and gnashing of teeth, but, as has been said, not all tears are an evil.

So if I’m cynical, then so be it. Seeing death too many times forces one to adapt extreme forms of coping, and ultimately, you’ve got to protect yourself. Because if you can’t take care of yourself, how can you take care of other people?

In retrospect, I think of one of my favorite residents, who is also one of my heroes, and she is equal parts hardened cynicism and daring hope. If she were simply just cynical, there is no way she would want to perform the extraordinary life-saving measures that she excels at. But if she were just naievely hopeful, there is no way she could survive the onslaught of tragedy that is part and parcel of dealing with the very sick. I’m really glad that I got to work with her. She taught me a lot about being a good doctor, and hopefully I can manage to be at least a tenth as good as she is.

Times like this, I’m tempted to echo Charles Barkley and say that I’m no role model. But these things are rarely choices. For the most part, they get foisted on you. Now that I think about it, I’ve been a role model from the start, as unwitting as I was. This is the plain consequence of being the eldest child. I like to hope that I’ve been a decent older brother to my sibs. And I know that for better or for worse, at least during their childhood, they’ve used me as some kind of measuring stick (undoubtedly leading to all sorts of psychological trauma.) I hope that I’ve been more forgiving than my mother, who is a woman who is impossible to please and who needs to always be in control, even of things that no sane human being could be in control of. I hope that I’ve been more engaged than my father, who has such a devil-may-care attitude to life, and who often comes across very convincingly as someone who doesn’t gives a rat’s ass.

Despite my rather unflattering portrayal of my parents, from wisdom obtained from distance and from trying to carve my own niche in this world, I have grown to truly love them for who they are, in a manner more closely approximating parity (I say approximating, because they will always and forever be my parents.) I’m not saying that I’m a successfully independent human being, but what I do know is that it’s been a long time since they’ve been able to successfully protect me from the trials and tribulations of the world, and well into my childhood, they would actually sometimes look to me to make important decisions and to provide needed knowledge to situations. Maybe it’s just the archetypal role of the eldest child of immigrant parents. I even wrote this in my personal statement when I was applying for medical school: in many ways, I’ve felt like I’ve been a conduit, a bridge, a mediator, forever translating different weltanschaungs to try to get people into agreement. That’s frequently the role of the primary care physician as well: to get the patients to understand all the medical gobbledygook handed to them by specialists, and to get the specialists to understand the idiosyncracies of your patients, because you will the one who knows them best. I am but a messenger, a mountebank. So be it.

But I ramble endlessly on and on.

Despite my rhetoric of never wanting to fit in, of always wanting to be strikingly unique, of striving to stand out, to make my own unique mark on the world, I am burdened by evolutionary baggage. Like it or not, human beings long to belong. To be one of the tribe.

I suppose this is what drew us so close to dogs (or their ancestors, wolves.) They can only really exist in packs, with a strict hierarchy in place. (Which, incidentally, is something that dogs have not really escaped. Even if you only have one dog. He or she will identify themself as part of your pack.)

Many philosophers decry this instinct foisted upon us by evolution. It is our nature to trust to hierarchy. It’s the reason why someone, with enough treachery, can get us to trust in their ability to lead, even if they don’t really have that ability. It’s also the reason why people are loathe to expel such leaders, because, regardless of everything else, they are on the superior pole of the hierarchy. It explains why otherwise reasonable people followed the Nazis and committed atrocities, as they were “only following order.” It also explains the neocon death cult which currently grips the Republican Party and holds the entire country hostage.

Better minds than mine have pointed out the intrinsic tension in all human beings. It can be simplified, reified, into the opposition of the desire for freedom and liberty, and the desire for security and stability. Individuality, uniqueness, striking out on your own—these things belong to the former. Hierarchy and trust in authority belong to the latter. And everyone falls somewhere along that spectrum.

Clearly, I lie somewhere closer to the former. I have met very few people who have such an innate distrust of authority as I do, and often fear that I am completely unreasonable in my unrelenting suspicion. I like to blame my father, who is basically an anarchist. He has never claimed any political label, although he is registered to no party. His stories speak for themselves. He never says so outright, but it is clear that he has utter contempt for hierarchy and does his best to avoid the scrutiny of the power structure. I wonder how he developed this sensibility. I wonder if it’s simply the fact that he was a poor person living amidst the rich, in a country where the rich habitually victimized the poor. The political system in the Philippines is frequently described, even in the 21st century, as semi-feudal. The rich own all the land. The poor only rent, and thus they are really basically serfs. The middle class scarcely exists. And there really has never been any momentum for revolution, partly because the CIA has always interfered so strongly because of the fear of a Communist uprising, and partly because there is the escape valve of emigration and overseas contract work. The people who would be the middle class leave for richer pastures like the U.S. and Europe. Scholars of Asian American Studies speak of the brain-drain generation of the 1960’s, when scientists, engineers, physicians, and nurses left the Philippines in droves, seeking that vaunted better life elsewhere. There has never been any incentive to pull the Philippines out of the Middle Ages.

That’s my theory about my dad’s anarchist tendencies. I’ve never called him on it, although we talk a lot about politics. He is basically extremely cynical about human nature, and is not surprised about the extent of the corruption gnawing away at the fabric of the United States. It’s all par for the course. Especially coming from a developing country where corruption was a basic fact of life.

That said: being an anarchist is a difficult lifestyle to lead. Realistically, I’m more of a democratic socialist in terms of my political stances, but if I could choose my ideal political system, it would be utopian anarchy. What this means is not outright chaos and jungle law, but a world where laws were unnecessary because they were redundant. Every person is able to do the calculus that balances their own wants with the wants of others, and every conflict is managed in a case by case manner by people who are peers. Hierarchy would not exist in my fantasy world.

Human nature being what it is, this is extremely improbably, and possibly simply absurd and insane. But deep down inside, I like to believe that people are mostly good. Although I know it’s not true. Like most things, I tend to hope for the best, but prepare to expect the worst.

To parse it out, what this means is that I wouldn’t be a staunch ally to insurrectionists when the revolution actually hits. I’m not a big fan of destroying one hierarchy simply to install a different one, and that’s what previous revolutions have typically involved. I have, for some reason, taken Douglas Adam’s admonition about power and leadership to heart, even though he probably meant it tongue-in-cheek. I really believe that the people who seek power are exactly the people who should be prevented from ever achieving power. If we could somehow conscript people who have good leadership qualities but aren’t power hungry. Fantasy, I know.

But I have digressed quite far from my original intent for this post. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve always striven to be outside of the statistical mean. But the problem is that most sensible people don’t trust the outliers. People with my mindset naturally become loners, traversing the places that other people would rather never see. Except that I’m not a very good loner. I have not been able to completely supress my desire to belong.

It would probably help if I had more orthodox views about life, the universe, and everything, but I am who I am, for better or for worse, and it would be quite difficult and probably undesirable for me to compromise my beliefs (however wild and impossible they may be.) But I can’t help but feel that outliers have a hard time meeting other people, by definition. To put it baldly, outliers don’t get very many dates.

I suppose my only hope is to find someone who shares the same delusions and wacky fantasies as I do. (I must say that I have actually met at least one candidate, but there is the thorny predicament of needing her to actually be interested in me in That Way™) This, by very definition, is tough to do as an outlier. This means that you are not part of the 66.7% of the population that cluster around the mean. (With that percentage in mind, it should not surprise you that I am an introvert, who, as a group, only make up one-third of the general population.) So at best I’ve got a 16.67% chance (assuming that genders are divided roughly 50-50, and that I’m not going to become bisexual. I know that statistically speaking, there are more women than men, but it seems I’ve never been able to take advantage of that disparity.) And then you start adding in all sorts of confounding factors like distance and language-barriers and culturally-bound prejudices, and it’s clear that the actual chances are less than that 16.67%.

From a purely statistical standpoint, my chances of meeting the right woman don’t seem very favorable from the outset.

Why do I even think about these ridiculous things?

I ran across this phrase on a random blog, and this phrase happens to be a major tenet of Buddhism. I have waxed philosophically much about the Art of Not Wanting [1][2][3][4] and it is such a tricky thing. As I’ve noted, this particular state of bliss has nothing to do with the avolitional state which undergirds atypical depression and schizophrenia. Instead of a lack, an emptiness, the Art of Not Wanting is a sense of completion.

To put it another way: “What I am is sufficient for this moment.”

I’ve gotten a hang of avolition. There are days where, if I don’t just sit in front of this cursed lcd panel typing random search queries into Google, I will instead lie in bed and hope that I fall asleep.

I realize that this is incredibly pathetic, and what’s more, a good sign that I am, in fact, still depressed. It’s no longer the horrific aching that is the beginning of the dark road to suicidal ideation. It’s just this dull emptiness, this sense of not giving a crap about myself, and knowing that no one else cares about me either. OK, objectively speaking, I know this is a lie. I’m pretty sure my mom would be upset if I offed myself. And my friends would hate me for such cowardly selfishness. But the fact of the matter is that I don’t care enough about myself to take good care of myself, and as we all know, if you don’t love yourself, how can you love anyone else?

So it all comes together. The Art of Not Wanting is all about learning to love yourself (which is The Greatest Love of All™) What I am is sufficient for this moment. Right now, I will be enough.

This does not mean that I shouldn’t grow and change. (If anything, mastering the Art of Not Wanting should lead to extensive growth and extreme changes.) What it means is that self-loathing is useless. Whatever it is that I need to face, I will face it with courage, using all that I am to fight my way through. This is not to say that I cannot fail. But failure is a symptom that I am not envisioning the world rightly and I need to try something different. Failure cannot define who I am unless I let it. I can try and fail and not be a failure.

The first step, I guess, is to not be afraid of failing. Because what I am now will be enough. Maybe I won’t succeed, but it will probably be because I’ll be trying to solve the wrong problem and not because I am stupid, insane, and worthless.

In this vein, I recognize the value of religion. Whatever faith you believe in, it allows you to recognize your intrinsic self-worth. In Catholicism, you can say to yourself that you are a child of God, meaning, no matter what, you have value. To put it more tritely than that, I am special. (Just like everyone else.)

So: (1) What I am is sufficient for this moment. (2) Failing is a method that will help me recognize that I am looking at the situation wrongly. It is a way to lift the veil off my eyes. It cannot define my worth, because my value is intrinsic in my existence.

If I can just pound these things into my soft, mushy brain, I just may have a shot at life.

The possibility of time travel is actually still an open question. There is nothing in Einstein’s theory of Relativity that prevents it from happening, although the conditions that would be required to allow it to happen seem pretty insurmountable. (For example, you would need a rotating universe, or a nearby cosmic string, or some exotic material that exerts anti-gravity which could keep a wormhole conduit stable and open, none of which are within the technological abilities of humanity at this time.) Still, I am hopeful.

There is the question that, if time machines are possible, how come we haven’t run into a time traveller yet? Where are all the tourists? Well, one is the possibility that time tourism is forbidden, and this is strictly enforced by Time Police. Then there is the possibility that maybe there are time tourists, we just don’t know it. Or we do know it, but we refuse to believe them. (For example, John Titor. I myself am agnostic on the issue thus far.) Then there’s the technical consideration that maybe you can’t travel back to a time where time machines haven’t been invented yet. For example, this would be the limitation of a wormhole conduit—you can only travel to a time when the wormhole already existed.

Maybe it’s because I was weaned on “Back to the Future.” Maybe it’s because I’m a geeky nerd who has watched a few too many Star Trek episodes that involve way too many time paradoxes. Then there is the cult classic video game Chronotrigger. For too many reasons to list, I am obsessed with the idea of time travel.

There is also Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. I have probably internalized some of his philosophy regarding time. He postulates the existence of extraterrestial life that has the ability to see in four dimension instead of just our limited three. To them, time doesn’t really exist, it’s just another spatial dimension like up-and-down, left-and-right, forward-and-backward. It’s possible. There is a mindset that believes the universe already exists in its final form, that the universe is static (when considered four-dimensionally) and the passage of time is merely an illusion promulgated by our brains. To paraphrase the words of the Oracle from “The Matrix,” you’ve already made your decisions, what you’re trying to figure out is why you made them.

Maybe it’s the fact that one of my most favorite songs (and apparently, one of the most covered songs in all history) is “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper. I have various memories attached to the cover version done by INOJ, and I find the version done by Everything But the Girl particularly haunting (particularly when juxtaposed with their song “Mirrorball”)

The other romantic notion I have about time travel is that perhaps the theory of many worlds describes reality. Every decision that could be made has been made, so that each breaking point splits off into different splinter universes. There are universes where there was no Big Bang. There are universes where the Roman Empire never fell. There are universes where Al Gore took up his rightful position as President of the United States and the rest of the world still looked up to us and perhaps the tragedy of 9/11 never happened.

Mostly, I like to fantasize that there are universes where a particular woman I think about a lot actually reciprocated my feelings for her, which is a universe that is far different from the one I am typing this blog entry from, one in which my life is far fuller, and far happier.

Maybe the time tourists are what we think of as ghosts. That is another fantasy of mine: to travel back in time and watch an alternate scenario to my life, see what would happen if I made certain other decisions, took certain other risks.

Sometimes in my darkest moments, I imagine that seeing a happier version of myself would be enough to let me go on living. Even though that life would never be actually mine, it would be something to know that once upon a time, if I had made the right decision, things might have gone well.

Of course, there is always the possibility that there are no right decisions.

Sometimes it’s just the flip of the coin. A butterfly effect, if you will. If a butterfly flaps its wings in Molucca, what will the weather in San Diego be like?

Like Douglas Adams’ universe where a stray photon made four-leaf clovers the common variety, so that three-leaf clovers are the ones considered good luck.

Or imagine a world where FDR wasn’t infected with polio and didn’t end up paraplegic.

Or Phillip K Dick’s nightmarish world where the Axis won World War II.

My troubles are small compared to the trials and tribulations of history, I suppose.

It’s all about perspective.

Still, I wish I could figure out how to traverse the fourth dimension at will. Maybe somehow slink through hyperspace, or travel through imaginary coordinate systems.

Maybe there are worlds where my dreams are reality, my reality my dreams (or nightmares.)

What if, what if? My plague, my downfall. What I’ve got to learn to do is focus on what is, not what might be, I guess.

On the other hand, maybe there is only Now, and the past and the future are the illusions promulgated by the brain.

God help me.

I don’t know. Maybe I just like misery. Lest my last post mislead you, nothing terrible is happening right now. It’s just this feeling of evanescence that is haunting me. I’m too content these days, and I worry that there’s something horrific awaiting me in the days to come.

Now, part of it is probably justified anxiety in the fact that I only have another ten days living this kind of chill lifestyle, and then I’m going to be back to the grind of an 80 hour work week and sleepless nights.

But there’s a part of my soul that cannot rest, cannot learn how to be content, how to revel in the moment, and not fear the future.

There’s a part of me that keeps thinking, something wicked this way comes.

What I am trying to learn is that the universe has it’s natural ebbs and flows, and just because I’m happy now doesn’t mean that I will have to pay dearly later for this happiness.

At least that’s how I console myself.

Please, please, please let me, let me, let me get what I want.

I just don’t want things to fall apart like they usually do.

Things have got to be different.

I’m trying to train myself to expect each day to be better than the last. That seems to be the key to keep me from falling back into despair, to realize that every moment has no only the potential, but the reality of being better than the last.

I just don’t know what I’m trying to say.

The problem with all this is that all good things must come to an end. At least for me. I feel like for normal, well adjusted souls, they are able to weather the changing tide. Me, I get sucked into the riptide, then spat up again onto the rocky, unforgiving beach.

As my friends have told me in some long-gone era, I favor extremes too much.

Is there a way to hope without risking disappointment? No, I guess not, because that doesn’t make any sense. If there was no risk, it wouldn’t be hope. It would be inevitable. Predestined.

Although, I’ve got to tell you, sometimes I can’t help but wish that some supernatural force could tell me that some day, everything will be all right. Or, alternatively, it could also tell me that I’m utterly doomed, and I might as well enjoy the ride while I still can.

The problem with existentialism is that there is no rest for the weary.

I don’t know. I don’t know. What is it I want? What thing is there in the world that is within my reach that can grant me lasting contentment? Is all happiness horrifically effervescent? Is there no way to hang on to this feeling of hope and well-being? Does the darkness have to always come so soon?

An echo reverberates across the stream of time, the words come to me compounded, like waves of harmonics piling on top of each other: Why can’t I set my heart on a possible thing?

I don’t know why I’m thinking about this now. I suppose I am reacting mostly to this blog entry by a 4th year medical student somewhere out in the Midwest discussing his current situation vis-a-vis women (in general, as a demographic constituency, rather than specifically.)

I am also, I suppose, reacting to a very morose and excruciatingly painful journal entry I wrote almost 6 years ago when I was submerged in the abyssmal depths of horrific major depression. (I think I will hold off on posting the actual text until some time I’m feeling a little a lot more masochistic. In some ways it is actually quite entertaining—the way mindless violence and gore can be entertaining—and if I don’t say so myself, I think it’s actually pretty decent writing.)

The thing about me that is verging on frank pathology (that is, if it hasn’t already crossed that particular line) is that I haven’t had a date in about ten years. (At least a date where both parties involved realized that it was in fact a date. Never you mind the details.)

Now, sure, there are real forty year old virgin men out there, and I am not one of them, mainly because I am not forty, but also because I am (perhaps surprisingly) not a virgin. Although I tend to think of myself as a born-again virgin. I mean, ten years of involuntary celibacy has got to be some sort of painful torture to the average 20-something male, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t manifest itself as severe psychologic damage. (OK, so maybe it already has.)

The other thing that got me thinking along these somewhat macabre lines are two superficially unconnected things I watched (partially) on TV last night. One was that Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart movie “The Butterfly Effect” of which I could only stand about ten minutes of before I wanted to inflict self-harm. I mean, I know it’s a bad movie, but I thought the premise was fascinating. Alas, the badness of the movie proved to be too daunting to overcome. But, for those of you who have had the fortune of avoiding the mere mention of this movie, it is about this guy with apparently magical powers to travel back in time and change events in a sort-of Quantum Leap-ish kind of way. (He basically jumps back into his own body at various points in the timeline, instead of possessing other people’s bodies like how Scott Bakula would do it.) Naturally, (much like Homer Simpson’s misadventures with a time travelling toaster) Ashton Kutcher manages to screw things up badly every time he jumps back. (Again, I couldn’t make it past ten minutes, so I really don’t know how it ends.) Amy Smart’s character is basically the person whom Ashton Kutcher’s character seems to revolve around, and sadly, he seems to be forever screwing up her life (particularly by getting her killed). Apparently (I gleaned this from reading spoilers in Wikipedia) he eventually saves her by taking himself out of her life forever.

The other was the season finale of “The Family Guy,” which, among other things, involves Stewie meeting his future self, who happens to be a 35 year old virgin working retail at a Radio Shack-like store.

Sure, the time travelling concept has always enamored me, but the weird connections between “The Butterfly Effect” and “The Family Guy” episode are as follows: (1) time travel (as already noted) (2) there seems to be a theme of pedophilia—Amy Smart’s character gets molested by her father, and there is a scene where Stewie wakes up in Hell, which is a cheap and tawdry hotel room. Steve Allen shows up and takes off his shirt as he says “Let’s do this,” leaving Stewie screaming in horror. (3) there are actors from “That ‘70’s Show” in both—Ashton Kutcher in “The Butterfly Effect” and Mila Kunis in “The Family Guy”

Anyway, back to 35 year old virgins. I mean, in all honesty, it really isn’t the sex. I could certainly buy it if I really needed it. It’s simply the fact that I haven’t had a healthy relationship with a woman in a long time.

I suppose, though, that in some ways, this is an effective defense mechanism. I seem to have the penchant for women who are either high-maintenance or high-drama, or both, and, given the fragility of my self-esteem, this behavior surely puts me in the candidacy for the Darwin Award. So it’s probably for the best that I haven’t thrown myself into the fire. A man could do far worse than having platonic female friends, I suppose.

But I don’t know. It just seems emblematic of something deficient within me. Something I lack. Something that makes me feel less than human.

As I rapidly approach the completion of my thirtieth revolution around this rather unremarkable yellow star we call the Sun, I can’t help that I have become some kind of aberration.

I can’t help but feel like there is some line that, once crossed, precludes returning to the realm of normalcy. (And I don’t know why I am obsessed with normalcy. Who needs it? It’s all bullshit anyway.)

OK, OK, maybe I have crossed that particular line a long time ago.

So I’m a weirdo. No one’s perfect.

I just watched “The Da Vinci Code” and while the idea that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were married or at least were lovers is a popular one that has made it to the big screen on more than one occasion, it made me think of another unorthodox (and actually quite heretical) idea that I remember hearing sometime ago (although for the life of me I can’t find it on Google.)

Now some scholars believe that the historical Christ was an amalgamation of various Jewish holy men whose stories became the basis for the original Q source of the Gospels. It is questionable as to whether there really was one guy named Yeshu’a bar-Yosef. But even more interesting, what if the Christ were a woman?

Now, you would think something like this would be easy to spot. If Christ were a woman, you think it would’ve been obvious. However, maybe we’re just projecting our 21st century sensibilities to the ancient era. In a society where women were little more than property, it would’ve been impossible for a woman to be taken seriously. When one reads the Gospel of Mary, the misogyny present in Jewish (and Roman) culture at the time is hardly invisible.

I wish I had the actual source to this, but I think it might’ve actually been a Roman Catholic priest (naturally, a Jesuit) who once mentioned to me the theory that Jesus was in fact a woman (which actually makes a lot of sense if you want to literally believe in virgin birth—parthenogenesis can result only female offspring.) Naturally, in the misogynist society of the ancient era, this would never have become a popular religion, so the Church fathers decided to change things around a bit. I guess the rest of the idea is merely quibbling over details. One idea is that Mary of Magdala herself was the actual Christ; the other is that the reason why Mary of Magdala was so close to the Savior was because he was actually a she.

Now I know the historical basis of misogyny, but the more I think about it, the more I am saddened by the Roman Catholic Church’s refusal to let all of humanity participate fully in the mysteries of God. It is clear in the Gospels, after all, that there were many women who were involved in Jesus’ ministry (although confusingly too many of them are named Mary) and it is clear that there were many female disciples. I think it fits well with Jesus’ tradition-challenging teachings that he tended to be very inclusive. After all, he hung out with the drunkards, thieves, and prostitutes, and the Apostles mostly proselytized among the heathen Gentiles. Also telling is that, if Jesus wasn’t an Essene, he certainly had many teachings in common to this particular sect of Judaism, and one of the things they believed in was that the Divinity had a distinctly female aspect to it (sometimes associated with the term Shekinah, which is a concept that seems to closely resemble the formulation of the Holy Spirit.)

So there is something appealing about the idea that the early Church actively suppressed the teachings of women. But the more likely story is that they simply acted out their ingrained prejudices, and those they preached to reacted to their stories with their own ingrained prejudices, and even if there were truth-sayers in that time, it is likely that very few actually took them seriously.

Bah, I am reminded of the reasons why I am wary of organized religion in the first place.

I’m sure this idea is already somewhere in someone’s book, but I was thinking how there are imaginary numbers which describe an axis of numbers perpendicular to the real numbers we are used to. The other thing that is interesting is that, despite the name, imaginary numbers actually express properties in the physical universe. The equations are, I think, related to Maxwell’s laws of electromagnetism, things which I never really learned in my Intro to Physics class as an undergrad. I’ve really only seen imaginary numbers and real numbers used on a 2 dimensional surface. But what happens if there are two or three dimensions of real numbers and two or three dimensions of imaginary numbers? Does this have any actual physical meaning?

So I thought about another variation of FTL (faster-than-light) travel. What if the imaginary dimensions are the rolled-up dimensions of M-theory? What if you could somehow move in imaginary space, letting you skip through real space in a non-intuitive manner?

In my fictional universe, imaginary space is essentially one dimensional. A spaceship would have to generate an inflaton field (akin to the first moments of the Big Bang) to traverse the pathway. In retrospect, this is simply just like traveling through a worm hole, where you would have to expand the wormhole with exotic material that exerts negative pressure/anti-gravity to prevent it from collapsing on you. I guess the only difference is that you could (in theory) initiate travel from anywhere instead of have to find (or generate) a wormhole.

The weird things I think of before I drift off to sleep.

In the aftermath of September 11, I actually don’t think I was as afraid of world destruction as I was when the Cold War was still going on. I remember having recurring nightmares about nuclear holocaust. What has especially haunted me since I was a little kid is that image of Hiroshima where people’s shadows were blasted permanently into the walls, the only thing really left of them. It gives me the willies.

But what I was afraid of after September 11 was that the idiot cowboy was going to somehow screw it up totally and squander the world’s good will. I remember the hope that I had amidst those dark, awful days when the rest of the world expressed their solidarity with us. As one commentator noted, “We are all Americans now.” Boy, do I regret how right I was going to turn out.

I remember one of the funniest signs I saw at one of those international anti-Iraq-war rallies, held up by an American: “We’ve succeeded in uniting the world! Against us!”

Somehow, we have become the Evil Empire™ and believe you me, it ain’t just the Islamic extremists who are plotting our downfall. Clearly our American neighbors down South have had enough of our imperialistic bullshit, and, as a side effect, they will likely succeed where Simon Bolivar failed and manage to unite Latin America. Nothing unites people like a common enemy.

And this further escalation to a stand-off with Iran is completely absurd. Iraq was one thing. No one liked Saddam Hussein. We were really the only ones rooting for him, and once we turned on him, he was painted tight into a corner. Iran is another thing entirely. For one thing, it is a wealthier country than Iraq, not having been completely plunder by a pro-American dictator in the guise of staving off Communism. For another thing, both Russia and China like Iran, and I have feeling that neither of them will be very happy with us starting yet another war not too far from their borders. I also have a feeling that they will be extremely unhappy if we start setting off nuclear bombs, not least because fallout is unlikely to respect national boundaries.

So I guess my nihilistic fantasy occurs on a less immediate timescale than my nuked-to-death scenario. (The movie that captured my angst the best was probably “Terminator II,” what with that dramatic dream sequence where L.A. gets hit with a nuclear missile.) It’s an open question whether or not American democracy will remain intact within my lifetime, or whether we will devolve into tyrannical Empire a la Rome, but, remember, things happen a lot quicker these days, and we probably don’t have another five hundred years before the barbarians come knocking at our gates. God knows we’re already enraptured with bread and circuses tax cuts and TV. It’s only a matter of time unless someone can right our course.

What I fear is that John Titor will be right, and we’ll nuke ourselves into the Stone Age.

What I fear is that the end of Capitalism will occur in a very uncontrolled and destructive fashion, and I’m pretty sure that American-style Capitalism is soon going to come to an end. We will soon be leaving the log phase of unfettered growth, and entering the steady-state phase, where we are at a decided disadvantage given that we have such a massive debt to the rest of the world, and we also have such a massive trade deficit. Now I’m not saying that Capitalism is going to implode and leave us in a Communist paradise, but I’m thinking something more along the lines of the increasing success of planned economies, like how it works in Japan or in many parts of Europe. Unwarranted speculation on pipedreams and pies-in-the-sky, once the source of vast amounts of income in the log phase of American-style Capitalism (note the tech bubble of the late 1990s or the real-estate bubbles that effervesce every so often here in sunny Southern California), will be answered by a harsh smack-down from the Invisible Hand.

When Americans were all gung-ho about the Iraq War, when W kept egging both North Korea and Iran on (especially North Korea, man, maybe my nuclear annihilation nightmares can still come true), I thought we were heading fast into the cesspool. My mood worsened greatly when W managed to snag a second term. That really diminished what little faith in humanity I had left.

But, rightly or wrongly, I’ve become a little more optimistic now that W’s poll numbers have entered Nixonian territory. Sure, all it may be doing is speeding up the time frame at which we will transform into a tyrannical dictatorship, but when someone whips out that martial law declaration, I’m out of here for sure, even if I have to burrow under the border, or if I have swim out to sea. Being-brown skinned and liberal will surely not be a winning combination when that time comes, and I’d rather not get rounded up and sent to Gitmo or some other CIA secret torture camp. (Yes, I know the NSA is reading this as I type it, but, well, despite W’s depradations, no one has officially declared the Constitution null and void yet, and I know a bunch of lawyers who are ready to come out with guns blazing, figuratively speaking, so there.)

And so I get to the point of this rambling diatribe: now that I don’t feel like the world is necessarily going to end tomorrow or that I’m going to be imprisoned at Gitmo the next day, I’ve been thinking about the future.

What looms quite hugely is the enormous amount of educational and consumer debt I have managed to rack up. While the numbers register in an abstract manner, I really don’t have a good conception of just how much money $200,000 (give or take a few thousand) is. To put it mildly, the mind boggles.

The worse problem is that I have no concept of how to manage money, either. Strangely, I don’t have this problem when I’m playing a game that requires management of a money-like quantity (although I do tend to be a deficit-spender when I play Civilization.) Or when I’m managing the fluid status of a teeny-weenie 800 gram baby, where every milliliter counts. But for the life of me, when it comes to money, real, honest-to-goodness filthy lucre, I can’t seem to understand that what comes out needs to be less than what comes in.

I do, however, understand the concept of compound interest all too well, and I do recognize that it is governed by the awful constant e, meaning that exponential growth is involved in the process. The payments I make every month simply feel like I’m pissing in the wind, but there’s no way I can make more money at this time without jeopardizing my medical license by writing interested parties prescriptions for controlled substances, something which I’m not really eager to do considering that I just literally got my medical license a few days ago. I’m also leery of the whole moonlighting bugaboo, considering that what you tend to end up doing is paying a shitload of taxes instead of actually making any money.

Anyway, the other thing that has sort of gotten me on edge is that my landlord has decided to raise my rent a $100 a month, which I feel just borders on this side of highway robbery. I’m not sure how I’m going to find time to find some new digs, but I’m thinking that that might be the prudent way to go.

And the idea of moving reminds me of all the crap I own, and all the crap I own reminds me of how much debt I’m in, and so on, so on into this ravening whirlpool of outright despair.

Maybe it was better when I was depressed about being lonely, instead of now being depressed about being excruciatingly broke. Bah.

And now that I think I understand Capitalism a little better, I don’t think things will be getting better for me once we hit the steady-state phase. If anything, thing are likely to get worse, as we start experiencing inflation and escalating interest rates. Unfortunately, from an economic stand-point, the only way things are going to get better is either we reach the economic singularity some time soon (which isn’t going to happen very easily given Marx’s crisis theory, meaning that said singularity is divergent rather than convergent, and the closer we get to it, the harder it will be to actually reach it), or the U.S. will successfully plunge the world into Global War (which would bump us back down into the log phase of economic growth, what with the suddenly huge demand for bigger and better bombs and such.) Neither scenario is very pretty.

What I need to do is find some country where the U.S. won’t be able to extradite me for defaulting on my loans. (Just kidding, Mr. Negroponte!)

Another concept that definitely informed my conception of the imaginary city of Cantral Araban is the metropole-province axis, which is basically the dialectic between the central city of a region and the surrounding countryside. This dialectic is especially characteristic of ex-colonies. I learned about this paradigm from Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson, which was one of the required texts in the Southeast Asian Studies survey class I took as an undergrad, and analyzing Manila through this particular lens was very enlightening.

Both my parents are provincianos, my mom from Ilocos Norte in the north of the Philippines, and my dad from Leyte in the southeast of the Philippines, and the paradigm of the metropole vs the province gave me added insight to their stories of alienation during their respective times in Manila. (They actually didn’t meet each other until they were both in the U.S., though.)

Multiple trips to Ilocos Norte, and indeed, trips to more remote regions like Romblon illustrated to me the dichotomy inherent in this paradigm. Manila shares a culture that is characteristic of any major cosmopolitan city, and in my mind Manila has more in common with NYC than it does with other parts of the Philippines. There is, along with this culture, a sense of superiority in the metropole that sort of poisons its relationship with the rest of the country (and I think that maybe Redstaters can understand this in their own perceptions of NYC.)

But the thing that is most striking about a metropole in a developing nation like the Philippines is the technological dichotomy between the metropole and the provinces. In some provinces, running water and paved roads are unheard of luxuries. In contrast, in Manila, it is quite possible to live entirely almost as if you were still in the United States.

I remember in Final Fantasy VII, one of the things that I found kind of haunting was the fact that Midgar had all the accoutrements of a modern (if not futuristic) city, including superhighways and railways. However, none of these amenities really existed outside of the city. One of the scenes that intrigued me was when the main characters escaped the city by taking one of the superhighways to the city edge. However, the highway didn’t actually leave the city, and actually remained unconstructed outside of the bounds of Midgar itself, so the characters were forced to jump off the unfinished highway into the void beyond. Having lived in the U.S. all my life, this was hard to comprehend as realistic, since the entire nation is crisscrossed with railways, and the interstate highway system ties together every city in the lower 48. But then I think about Manila and how the only freeways (at least in 1999) were the ones that led north of the city and south of the city, and how both terminated only a few miles outside the city limits. The northern highway narrowed to a two lane (and sometimes narrower) road that wound itself passed the lahar-strewn fields of Pampanga, north to the Gulf of Lingayen and then along the western coast of Luzon, through rugged terrain, utilizing switchbacks and sometimes unreliable bridges. The southern highway ends in a final half-cloverleaf junction practically at the foot of the mythical Mt. Makiling, leaving you on a narrow road that leads to the hometown of the national hero Jose Rizal.

The provinces are palpably different from the city. While Manila is indeed another world (as all cities, as I’ve said, are their own microcosms), the surrounding countryside is another world yet even more removed from my developed world sensibilities. It is easy to wax poetic about this and romanticize the experience, but I will spare you such naivete.

So the highways of Cantral Araban likewise end before the city limits, turning into simple paved roads that go off into the wild in all directions, leading into lost feudal kingdoms, elven forests, dwarven mines, and wizard’s towers (and all that Tolkienesque drek.)

I definitely don’t have quite as radical an agenda as Miéville does in terms of redefining fantasy. I am still quite enamored with Tolkien’s world-building and language-building proclivities and am loathe to discard such well-worn bricolage. Whereas Miéville achieves an entirely unique sensibility in his Torque-stricken world of Bas-lag, what I really wanted to see was the Fourth or maybe Fifth Age of Middle Earth, like, what happens when Adam Smith comes to Gondor and corporations come into existence. What happens when the steam engine gets invented and someone decides to build a railroad from Minas Tirith to Annuminas? What happens when some humans decide that it isn’t right to kill Orcs because they are sentient beings too? Or when someone comes up with the Dunedain equivalent of the Magna Carta. What happens when the Gondorian John Locke or the Rohirric Jean Rousseau comes to town? What happens when someone decides that representative government is much better than a hereditary monarchy? (And I find it interesting that fantasies are never written with representative governments or quasi-representative governments like Mi&eville’s mayorship and parliament, despite the fact that in the real world, Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic long predated the feudal monarchies on which most fantasy worlds are based on.)

So maybe it depends on what exactly you mean by radical.

The other thing I want to explore is the fact that there practically no people of color in the fantasy genre. Why is this important, you ask? Well, better minds than mine have answered this question, and I think it is something worth pursuing. I am not one of those people who think fantasy is only for escape. Speculative fiction—the collective domain inhabited by science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction (of which Miéville is only one example out of many)—is an interesting metaspace where we can view real world situations without attaching too much cultural baggage. Or, as more often than not, where we end up attaching different kinds of cultural baggage to otherwise real world-like situations. It is by mixing and matching pieces of culture, by atomizing assumptions that we thought were axiomatic, that we can possibly come up with workable protocols by which to approach the problems of race, religion, and class that so plague our modern society, and speculative fiction certainly facilitates this kind of gedanken experiment.

Odd that parts of The Octopus by Frank Norris (sighted on makeweight) makes me think immediately of The Iron Council by China Miéville, although I suppose this is not surprising considering Miéville’s political sympathies and literary background.

Interesting that the train is such an omnipresent object, both concretely and abstractly, inhabiting all sorts of spheres of thought. My mind strays to the prominence it has in various works of anime such as Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” (and again, the railroad crossing tracks that are flooded seem to be a recurrent symbol that I’ve run across multiple times in my life—this particular manifestation is echoed in the Japanese-flavored cRPG Final Fantasy VIII where one of the opening scenes involves taking a train that crosses over wide expanses of water. The other thing it makes me think of is Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle—or maybe it was The Hammer of God by Arthur C. Clarke—I get my asteroids/comets-crashing-into-Earth stories mixed up a lot. Anyway, there is a scene where the entire Central Valley of California (the San Joaquin Valley) is completely flooded, and the only way to really traverse it is to follow the railroad tracks that are still above water. Bizarrely, when I was in elementary school, long before I read either of these books, I had a dream mimicking this exact scene, where I had to get up to the Bay Area following flooded railroad tracks. Even more bizarrely, the dream had a soundtrack to it: “Moonlight Dancing” by Julio Iglesias. Yes I was a warped child. And things like this make me think we really live in a static four-dimensional world that is made dynamic and three-dimensional by an illusion fomented by the mind. It is only in dreams that we can somehow escape the linearity of it all, remembering things that haven’t happened yet. Anyway.)

Then, of course, there is Disneyland itself, literally encircled by two very different types of train: one firmly ensconced in the imagery of the by-gone era of Industrial Revolution, wrought by iron and steam, the train that encircles Disneyland and takes you to the different realms of abstraction: Main Street, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, Frontierland, Adventureland. The other is the retro-futuristic monorail, which used to be something you rode on because you were tired of waiting in line for everything else, unless you happened to stay at the Disneyland Hotel, which tends to be almost never if you happen to live in Southern California. (And now I have the Monorail song from “The Simpsons” in my head.)

Sadly, Miéville has beaten me soundly to the punch with regards to publishing a book based on a steam-punk fantasy world. I had been initially inspired in 1997 by both Final Fantasy VII and my second trip to New York City. Final Fantasy VII features the techno-dystopian city of Midgar controlled by a ruthless evil corporation armed with ultra-futuristic weaponry trying to maintain oppressive control over a countryside that is riddled with fantastic creatures and infused with magic. The very first scene involves an old-school looking train arriving at the faux-Victorian (or perhaps, neo-Victorian) station in Midgar. And the following scenes involve travelling on a more grungy, more contemporary looking subway and elevated train.

In retrospect, I’m not so sure that Final Fantasy VII really fits the term steam-punk, at least if you use the older, stricter definition (fiction set in the Victorian era, except that technological advances arrived much earlier, and something akin to a Turing/von Neumann style computer would already be in existence.) FF7 does fit the subgenre definition of fantasy steampunk, with its juxtaposition of advanced technology existing alongside magic. (Final Fantasy VI also does this, but I guess my mind wasn’t developed enough and attuned to appreciate this sensibility at the time I played it.)

But what really captured my imagination was my trip to NYC that summer. Since that trip, I have come to reify NYC as the American equivalent of Rome—all roads lead to it. In many ways, it really is the cultural capital of our nation. It becomes an exemplar simply because it is the largest city in our nation—all cities become based on and compared to NYC somehow. And even though I grew up in (at least what is now) the second largest city in the nation (to continue the Roman paradigm, I think of L.A. as the American equivalent of Byzantium/Constantinople, which is fitting. Just as Byzantium was originally a Greek city until the Greeks became assimilated into the Roman Empire, L.A. was a Spanish and then a Mexican city until California became part of the U.S.), L.A. is such an alien place when compared to NYC, other cities on the Eastern Seaboard, and Chicago (which is still fittingly thought of as the Second City. Again to continue the Roman paradigm, Chicago is the American equivalent of Ravenna, which became the second Western Roman capital late in the Empire.)

Here, the Roman paradigm comes in handy for me. (Although I suppose it is worthless and confusing if you aren’t familiar with the history of the Roman Empire.) Whereas Byzantium is sort of (or at least has the reputation of being) an alien city, Ravenna is prototyped on Rome itself. In the same way, L.A. is quite alien when compared to NYC, but Chicago seems quite obviously patterned after NYC itself. (Still, analogies always tend to break down. It becomes apparent that just as Chicago inherits a lot from NYC, L.A. nevertheless inherits much from Chicago, namely suburban sprawl and de facto geographic segregation, something that seems implausible in the absurd density of NYC, at least in Manhattan.)

Anyway, I have come to think of NYC as the exemplar of the American city (nevermind that most of the newer cities are in fact patterned more after L.A. than NYC—just have a look at all those sunbelt cities. I swear they are more L.A. than L.A. itself, with their nauseatingly sprawled out, out-of-control tract housing and big box commercial regions and their thousands of miles of disgustingly congested freeways.) L.A., despite having existed since 1781 (and much, much earlier than that as the Tongvan village of Yangna, prophetically known as the Place of Smoke), always has this veneer of being no more than 20-30 years old, something that is facilitated in a sustained fashion by Hollywood, which tries to peddle this illusion of agelessness. However, the movie studios have also been aided and abetted by downtown building owners and developers who are hell-bent on perpetually bulldozing the city to build and rebuild. One of the most tragic of these is probably the destruction of the lively neighborhood of Bunker Hill to create the somewhat sterile and notably depopulated Central Business District. Another that comes to mind is the destruction of the community of Chavez Ravine to make way for Dodger Stadium. And then there are all those communities that have been vivisected and mutilated by the freeways. But this constant reinvention was something that I definitely grew up with and these build-tear down-rebuild cycles would occur in real-time. First they bulldozed sites to create strip malls, and now they are razing buildings to build condos and arcology-like residential/commercial complexes (see, for example, the Paseo Colorado in Pasadena.) And while this is probably not unfamiliar to most city dwellers, and seems to be the normal pattern of gentrification, I can’t but help feel that the pace is accelerated in L.A. There are no old buildings here, because even the old buildings get remade from time to time (witness the remodeling of City Hall and Union Station, for example.) L.A. feels like a city that is desperate to forget its history.

In contrast, despite the waves of gentrification, NYC holds tightly to its history. Never mind just the architecture, graced by titanic buildings built in the Gilded Age of the 1920’s and in the wake of Carnegie’s (and Bessemer’s) Steel Revolution. It seems that most of American History can be viewed through the lens of New York, starting with its pivotal role in the American War for Independence, and continuing onward to the Civil War, the World Wars, the social unrest and revolution of the 1960’s, the era of greed embodied in Wall Street in the 1980’s, winding all the way through September 11, 2001, horrifically underscoring the fact that NYC is in many ways not only a symbol, but the supreme representation, of our nation, something understood very well by our enemies. Each of these eras have left their own specific mark on the city, and at times I felt like all these eras existed simultaneously in the same place.

Tying together T.S. Eliot’s evocation of Unreal City in “The Wasteland,” with NYC and Midgar seemed to naturally evolve into a steam-punkish city which in retrospect is very similar to Miéville’s New Crobuzon. What sort of cemented this imagery was my trip in 1999 to Manila. Now I had been to Manila in 1995 and 1997 as well, but it wasn’t until I could compare and contrast Manila with NYC in my mind that I came to a deeper, but more abstract, understanding of what a city is. A city is an organism, a self-contained ecosystem, the basis of modern nations. It is no accident that the etymology of the word “civilization” leads one quickly to the word “city.” Without cities, there is no civilization, almost by definition.

What I have been enamoured with the most, however, are a city’s circulatory system: roads and rails. I have always been obsessed with roads and its polymorphisms: freeways, highways, boulevards, avenues, streets, parkways, drives, courts, places, and even caminos, avenidas, and calles. You can ask my parents the insane degree to which I have been obsessed with them, even as a small child. If I had known such a profession existed, I probably would’ve become a transportation engineer. Truth be told, it really wasn’t until I visited NYC that rails captured my imagination. Sure, I was a big fan of BART when I lived in the Bay Area, but it certainly didn’t have the 24 hour dependability that the NYC subway does. (OK, 24 hour dependability is perhaps absurd hyperbole, but the fact of the matter is that I once got stranded in Oakland at 10 pm on a Friday night because I didn’t make it to the BART station in time. In contrast, while it did take me 3 hours to get from Brooklyn to Queens, I was nevertheless able to at least attempt such a ridiculous journey at 3:30 am.) Once I got a taste of the ultra-mobility afforded by the NYC subway system, I was hooked. Here was a system that was more efficient than driving (and maybe you have to be an Angeleno to understand the profundity of this statement. Just let it be said that most Angelenos consider their car more as an extension of their body, like an exoskeleton, rather than as a mere conveyance.) I’ve foolishly braved the light-rail transit in Manila, have depended greatly on the CTA in Chicago (more colloquially known as “the El”), and have even traversed the anemic (but hopeful) railways of L.A. And one of my favorite pleasures is the train ride from Union Station in L.A. to San Diego, which is a thousand times more enjoyable than driving down the morass known as Interstate 5.

So the imaginary cities of Mieris Amiras and Cantral Araban were born, both of them sporting subway and elevated railways amidst a ruined medieval-style city and a bustling imperial Roman-style city, respectively.

Before I completely lose sight of this thought, I wanted to talk about this post on crisis theory and this post on the world of 1984. I think crisis theory does make useful analogic predictions about the future. (OK, I don’t for a moment purport to truly understand crisis theory, but I think I have some gist of it.)

I think that crisis theory can be mathematically explicated as a divergent singularity (as opposed to a convergent one.) In physics, singularities give rise to the phenomena we know as black holes (and conversely, although I don’t think we have any data that they exist, they should also give rise to white holes). A black hole would be an example of a convergent singularity—as you approach you will get closer and closer to the actual singularity itself, although you will actually never reach the singularity—this can also be thought of as an example of Zeno’s paradox—you start infinitely dividing the distance to the singularity in half and then half again and then half again and if you discount the fact that tidal forces would have long ago spaghettified you, and if you completely ignore the possibility of superluminal travel, you will really never, ever reach the singularity.

The divergent singularity is the antithesis of a black hole. This theoretical counterpart is known as a white hole, which would “blow” instead of “suck” But the weird thing about a white hole would be that the harder you tried to reach the singularity, the harder it would repel you. I think this is ultimately the basis of crisis theory—the more capital you burn trying to develop a non-sustainable endeavor, the quicker you will actually cause it to fail.

In other words, the anti-global capitalists can rely on the physics of capitalism itself to aid them, in keeping with some of Marx’s ideas. I mean, Marxism in toto is not a scientific theory, in the sense that you could falsify it (and yes, I am geek because I took a philosophy of science class, and there is a technical definition for falsification in this context.) It was more along the lines of Freud, in that, when considered with its ad hoc hypotheses, it was unfalsifiable, and that it is more of a philosophy than an actual theory.

But I guess we could all be wrong. Maybe we are only now seeing the end-stages of capitalism, which kind of makes sense. Prior to our century, capitalism could function rather easily because of the trade and technology gradients that existed between different cities, and later, different countries, and then between colonies and homelands. Capitalism’s starting conditions require a sort of inequality at the outset, a free-energy gradient, if you will, for capital flow down. (Yes, here we go again with the trickle-down mumbo-jumbo.) If there is no scarcity or abundance, then economies stagnate. This is easy to maintain when there are obvious trade and technological gradients between different nations and cultures, and even easier to do when there are barriers to contact and transportation, but the thing that globalism will do is that it will eventually homogenize everything. I mean, we’re already at the stage where aboriginal people are wearing T-shirts with Nike swooshes on them instead of their traditional garb. You can get CNN and MTV from pretty much anywhere in the world, whether or not you even have running water in your house. The most technologically disadvantaged cultures will simply leap-frog to the gooey, chocolatey creamed-filled consumerist center, facilitated by the fact that businesses are trying to capture larger and larger markets, even if they have to create the markets themselves brick by brick.

No one has ever yet had to think about what happens when the market can’t get any bigger (except for maybe the normal birth rate, offset by the normal death rate.) Maybe it won’t happen in my lifetime, but it will probably start becoming a consideration in about a generation or so. (Man, isn’t exponential growth absolutely astounding? And people wonder how they can die from flesh-eating bacteria…)

And no one has ever had to think about what happens when innovation doesn’t happen fast enough to keep consumption going. In a fully globalized economy, we will end up in situations where people will stop buying stuff because nothing catches their interest. I mean, sure, one plasma screen TV is pretty neat, one iPod is nice, but you start running out of reasons for buying more than one pretty soon. People can only add so many rooms to their houses, and ultimately they’ll only have so many walls to cover with plasma screens. And even the most voracious music-consumer will probably need at most four or five iPods, even if they have one for home, one for the office, one for the morning jog, one for the car, and one for the other car.

And the fact of the matter is that poor people can’t buy stuff, so it is ultimately in the best interest of capitalism for rich people to give them some cash. But this only further degrades the gradient of scarcity and abundance.

One day, Walmart will have everything priced at the lowest possible denomination they can go without simply giving things away for free.

OK, maybe this are all wacko scenarios, but I think they’re the logical conclusion if global capitalism continues to run full-tilt, without any contingency plans. If anything, capitalism needs to start entering the second stage. You know how forests have primary stages and then secondary stages? Something like that. Or maybe we can talk about Saturn V rockets and their boosters.

But my point is that we are actually entering an era where Marxist scientific theory can actually be tested. When the stage I engine of capitalism has exhausted the fuel provided by the gradient of scarcity and abundance, jettisoning the empty husk of the fuel canister to burn up in the atmosphere, what form of propulsion will stage II be comprised of? Science fiction writers have come up with some ideas, the most appealing and probably most logical in these security-obsessed times of ours is the currency of reputation. When everybody has money, and everybody can buy the same old shit, what else will there be to trade but trust itself?

Now, my own personal theory of capitalism is pretty fatalistic and Darwinistic. My prediction is that if it continues at full-speed like it is, the reason why poor people won’t exist is that they will probably get wiped off the face of the earth. My sister wrote an interesting paper about Glamis Gold Ltd.’s disregard for the environmental rights of the indigenous people in Guatemala (which I might post someday if I feel inclined to translate a Word document to HTML) and it looks like a typical David and Goliath situation, except that we seem to live in a world where Goliath typically wins about 9 times out of 10, or better. Be it as it may how global capitalism achieves this homogenization, I think it will happen, although I can see how perpetual war could keep the Stage I engine running (almost) forever. (Bear in mind that the more times you bomb something, the less it will be worth bombing the next time around.)

Anyway, the other thing that crisis energy makes me think of is a neurological phenomenon known as intention tremor. It is actually a manifestation of cerebellar disease, and is the phenomenon where someone’s tremor gets worse as he/she gets closer to his/her target. You can elicit this by asking someone to touch your finger with one of their fingers, and if they have this problem, you’ll see how they have to keep correcting their trajectory as they get closer to your finger, because they keep overshooting.

Like dysmetria and intention tremor, divergent singularities are destabilizing. They basically graph out into what looks like seismographs, as the values wildly fluctuate between the two sides of the asymptote, and I mean wildly. As much as Vernon Vinge believes that there will be an AI singularity approaching, I really do think we will also be soon approaching an economic singularity as well, and the descent into hell is going to be absolute madness.

I just thought about an imaginary society that decided that it was a bad idea for the wealthy to become powerful, and for the powerful to become wealthy. I think this idea came forth when I heard how former Governor Jerry Brown (now mayor of Oakland) was decried as a hippy for not wanting to live in a mansion and driving an expensive car.

So basically all their public officials would be stripped of their property and other assets, living entirely off of the state. And the richer you were, the less you were allowed to have influence on politics. Like maybe even how much your vote weighed was inverse to how much income you made. This wouldn’t be a communist/socialist society per se, it could still be rabidly capitalist, it’s just that there would be a strict separation between money and power. And I don’t think this would destroy the incentive to be rich. After all, with all that money, you could still buy all the stuff you wanted, you could live comfortably in a big house with a fancy car, with servants and assistants and valets. You just wouldn’t be able to parlay all that wealth into political power.

And if politicians were forced into a vow of poverty, essentially giving away everything they own to either their supporters or to the state itself, it would be less meaningful to bribe them. You would have to either bribe all of his/her supporters (which would be rather difficult to keep secret), or at most, you could be a puppeteer, manipulating your penniless politico with promises of favors after their term expired. A rather tenuous proposition, if you ask me.

Do I think such a society could exist? I am doubtful. But it would be an interesting basis for a story.

Ursula K. Le Guin, in her fantasy world of Earthsea, comes up with a brilliant system of magic, one predicated on, essentially, words.

The dynamics of magic in this world, just like the dynamics of human nature in this world, is based on the gradient between what-is, and what-is-not-but-could-be. The power of the word makes what-is and what-is-not-but-could-be congruent.

In a way, it’s not really all that different in our world. While we can’t (quite yet) conjure up balls of flame out of nowhere or summon dragons, we are able to very powerfully alter the nature of our environment. If you have any doubts, just think about the billions of dollars churning through advertising and marketing. Think about how financial empires rise and fall just on the rumor of change.

And think of how the American media has successfully co-opted the truth and spun it into a mythical yarn about “the new American century.” On the basis of words alone, our very own tin-pot dictator has managed to remain esconced on his throne, despite the very real and ominous grumbling that gathers over the land like a storm cloud. (And at times like this, I can’t help but think of John Titor and his prophesy of a new American Civil War.) If he lived in Earthsea, Rupert Murdoch and his ilk would be magi non pareil.

But the interesting thing is that the Rebel Alliance pretty much exists mostly in the form of words. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, it was hard to find people who were still willing to defend freedom. Neocons say what they will about their opponents, but some of us refuse to be surrender-monkeys. It is absolutely no accident that (despite their outright racism and elitism) the Founding Fathers decried the idea of surrendering freedom in the name of security. Every sane person knows that total security is impossible in this world, and living under martial law is not an acceptable sacrifice. But as the sheer terror of an attack on American soil waned, sanity actually held sway. People seemed to regain their senses pretty quickly, and despite the rapid run-up to the nonsensical war on Iraq, and the rabid, insane cheerleading by the so-called liberal media, the blogs ran bright with photons, but more importantly, the defense of the Republic seemed to exist at least in words, thousands upon thousands spewed upon the wondrous creation known as the Internet. (Is Al Gore our savior or what?)

It is fitting that today’s battles revolve around the flow of information and who gets to control what story gets told, as this government begins its crackdown on leaks (that they don’t sanction, at least. Can anyone say Valerie Plame?) As you start connecting the dots, it becomes clear why the NSA and this corrupt, morally bankrupt administration wants to eavesdrop on every single call. I really think they want to control every single bit of this narrative. And if they can whittle away at our lines of communication, literally one bit at a time, if they can somehow manage to keep us who still faithfully defend this Republic and its Constitution from staying in touch with one another, then we are just that one step closer to the new Dark Ages.

I can’t help but think that these nefarious plans have been a long time in the offing. Perhaps it is merely a continuation of the evil machinations of Richard Nixon, which were oh-so inconveniently interrupted by—surprise, surprise—the Truth™. But Reagan, Bush the Elder, and Bush the Younger have readily carried out this hell-bent mission, and we are on the verge of becoming the very Evil Empire that we had claimed we were out to vanquish.

We have glimmerings of their perfidy in the jungles of South and Central America, and I know what sort of poison they sowed in the homeland of my ancestors (and still somehow, for at least that brief moment, the People managed to triumph), and it becomes all too clear what these people are all about when you look at Abu-Ghraib, when you hear about the secret torture camps in Europe, and the prisoner abuses at Guantanamo.

But I am going off on my screed here. What I wanted to mention was this powerful, moving keynote address given by Rebecca Solnit, a writer and activist who gave this address to U.C. Berkeley’s Department of English Commencement this year (first sighted off of Parallax) In it she mentions very strikingly the starkness of Orwell’s vision of 1984, alluding painfully to the Doublespeak-infected world we now currently live in. Somehow it turns out that Orwell got everything right except for the economic and political system. Instead of communism and socialism, the enemies of most people in this world are the unfettered malice of global capitalism and so-called “American style” democracy (of which, I suppose, George W Bush is the prototype, although I’m also familiar with the CIA-backed Ferdinand Marcos and likely many people from South and Central America will also recognize similar counterparts, not to mention Saddam Hussein himself.)

And 1984 is pretty much a story bereft of hope, except that Orwell probably knew that certain things about history are inevitable, and one of them is decay. The Cold War really was supposed to be the perfect, unwinnable, unendable war, the perpetual motion machine of the war industry, but it takes two to make a fight.

Which brings me back (rather randomly) to my main point: human beings of all animals are probably the only ones who can see the world not as how it is, but as how we want it to be. This is probably the immediate cause of why we became such facile tool users.

And while some of us are for some reason enamored with death and destruction and the weapons of war, others of us are interested in life, and dreaming up of those impossible things that no one has ever heard of.

These days are the point of some kind of fulcrum, and I guess it isn’t just me that has this sense that the future, even the immediate future, is completely unpredictable.

So, yeah, I clearly have my issues with regards to how things in the past have (and, more relevant) have not gone. I mean, we’re talking a good eight or nine years now of what-never-was and what-cannot-be, and I really can’t think about these things without getting disordered. Er, more disordered than I already am.

It being Mother’s Day, I suppose it makes sense that my mind turns to the abstract concepts of Home and Family, and how certain people I know seem to have it all together. They’ve got it all right there. This many years out, it isn’t so much that I wish I were married to the most perfect woman in the world (I mean, we all have insane fantasies that we realize will never come true, right?) It’s more like I wish I could just be part of their family, watch their kids grow up, I don’t know, just see how that kind of life works. (Don’t you love how I start using pronouns without even once mentioning their antecedents?)

Not that I didn’t have a good childhood. Of course I’ve had my ups and downs with my parents. Even to this day, my mom can drive me insane, but I doubt this is unique to me and my mom. And me and my dad had our definitive stand-off one spring day when I was in high school. But, as is expected, things get better when you’re all grown-up (or as close to it as I’m likely to get.) But even those fights and angry words and tears and anguish never (in retrospect) caused anything permanent.

And, sure, me, my brother, and my sister always had shifting alliances against each other, trying to monopolize favor, or at least prevent someone from getting their way unilaterally, and there was physical contact at times, and even things thrown at each other, axes brandished (OK, so maybe my childhood wasn’t exactly run-of-the-mill, but it certainly wasn’t a bad one), small amounts of blood spilt. But I think we’re pretty close, as far as siblings go. I will probably regret actually writing this down (because my sister has always, always pushed the envelope when it comes to asking favors, and worse, she is going to be a lawyer fairly soon and will likely hold me to my word and consider this a binding contract or something) but I would probably do most anything for those two. (Within reason! Just remember that part, huh?)

But, I mean, my sister is the youngest in the family, and she’s fast approaching 25. I can tell you, Christmas kind of sucks without any little kids around.

At this point in time, all that’s kind of left to me is to reminisce.

And I guess, in the end, I’ve been my worst enemy in a lot of ways. I’ve spent a good part of my life wallowing in self-pity and depression, and I can’t really articulate good reasons for it. I mean, maybe I can, except I don’t like dwelling on it. I’d rather not give name to my demons at this time, if you know what I mean. In any case, the demons lurk amidst some of the tortured words in the five and a half years I’ve been writing this blog. And, even if you balance out all the shit that I’ve been through with all the things I’ve been blessed with, objectively speaking, the blessings outweight the excrement.

I spent some time digging through old photo albums of when I was a baby up until I was three years old, and it’s kind of amazing to imagine that I evolved from that small creature staring dazedly at the camera, and it’s kind of neat to think how kids don’t really know sadness. I mean, sure they cry a lot, and they can perceive the most trivial of things as the utmost tragedy, but it usually goes away after a little while. You give them a new toy, or even just point out a new thing, and they get all happy with wonder.

I don’t really know which one I miss the most: the happiness or the wonder, although maybe you really can’t have one without the other.

You get older, and you start accumulating baggage. Or layers of strata, maybe. That simple pleasure of wonder becomes more nuanced, more tinged with memories, and then memories start getting worn down with repetition. I realize that that sense that time is speeding up once you pass the age of 25 is really the fact that very little of your life is spent contemplating the unique. We get consumed in routine, day-in, day-out, and in this information-saturated world of ours, it’s probably the only way to survive without going completely insane. But we lose that sense of wonder, I think. Well, a lot of us do, at least. I suppose there are some creative spirits out there who never do. That’s probably what makes them creative.

But I guess the hopeful thing I learned by flipping through those pictures is that, once upon a time, I knew what it was to be happy. That guileless, completely free smile of a child is absolute gold.

I think that’s what I’m looking for.

I was totally enamored by my friends’ 2 month old son and their just over 2 year old daughter. Now, I’ve seen a lot of babies. A lot of babies. We’re probably talking about a few hundred at least, just counting newborns. But it’s so different when they’re not your patient. When you look at them with non-clinical eyes. No matter the fact that I’ve literally picked up, carried, swaddled, changed the diapers of maybe 300+ babies, no matter the fact that when I’m at work, I do kind of find it boring in a way, I still can’t get over how wonderful their sense of newness is.

How does that little creature turn into something as obtusely complex and maddeningly convoluted as you or me?

And their little girl is amazing. The last time I saw her, she wasn’t even walking, and now she’s walking and talking, and she can even recognize letters of the alphabet and draw faces.

And the weird thing is, I think I envy them. The sense of Home and Family they are going to have, being lucky to be the kids of my friends. Not that my parents weren’t decently good parents in their own right (although there were definitely some rough spots) but the fact of the matter is that I’m a long way out from being 2 years old, and it’s been one hell of a journey, and in a lot of parts, I really do mean one (and probably more than one, many more than one) hell of a journey.

Still, as I’ve been admonished once before, I’ve never been imprisoned, I’ve never starved, I’ve never been beaten or raped, I’ve never had to live in the street. I am probably going to be employable for a good long while, and I’ll be able to make ends meet. I have good parents and good siblings, and while it’s terribly true that you can’t ever go Home again, at least everyone is still around.

I do miss my sister, who is currently on the other side of the continent these days. But what’re you gonna do? The world is a big place.

But the thing that all this meandering rumination has lead me to is the fact that I am faced with something rather unique these days. Up until recently, my life had been pretty well tracked, frequently by forces not under my control. By sheer fate and circumstance, I ended up traipsing up and around the country in four to five year intervals, and always that carrot and stick would get yanked another four or five years beyond my grasp. But now, that carrot and stick is kind of stationary. The clock is counting down. In two years, one month, and two weeks, I will be, for all intents and purposes, the master of my own destiny. A part of me certainly quails at the idea of such massive freedom and responsibility resting on my shoulder. (Don’t screw this one up like you did with all the others!) But another part of me is sort of waking up, bewildered, almost aghast that this is actually going to be real one day in the future.

For once I have no idea what the future will bring, and that actually feels pretty good.

Weird, huh?

But, yeah, I found that one technique that seems to work with improving my mood is to tell myself that tomorrow is going to be better than today. It doesn’t matter if it’s not really true (because, after all, how can we predict the future?) What matters is that I believe that tomorrow is going to be different from today. And you know what they say about change and goodness and all that.

But I think a lot of my insanity rests in this idea that I’m going to be stuck where I am forever, trapped in this gray mist of indeterminancy and solitude for the rest of my life. Which, objectively speaking, makes no sense. Whatever I do, I’m going to go somewhere. It may not necessarily be a good place to go, but I can guarantee it’s going to be different. But I guess that’s a good part of my pathology: this delusion that everything is going to remain horribly the same, that no matter what I do, it’s all going to end tragically.

Sure, it could all end tragically anyway, but the important thing is that I don’t know that for sure.

let this not end, I thought to myself as the children yawned and the conversation died and I thought of the moon shining only because of reflected sunlight otherwise it is a dark, lifeless place Fled out into the darkness and the mist of the ocean air and the songs and the memories and the years gone by cacophonous the voice my hopeless madness the vomitus of my mind

And I remembered that I had scoured the cold, sullen, snow-filled Northern Wastes and it was not there and tracked the great burning, wind-scoured Western Deserts and I could not find it and trod up and down the grimed and mired streets of that vast City upon the Two Rivers in the East and still it eluded me

So I am here again in this Southland by the mesmerizing Sea as it was in the beginning tying a knot in the silver thread that runs through everything and its seeming endlessness sometimes feels like a curse and like a man on the wrong ship or the wrong train I watch the destiny that was not meant to be glide out to the sunset leaving me with only what might-have-beens

I’ve thought once or twice about how pretentious it is to quote yourself, but I like these paragraphs I wrote a few years back:

Too far out and you spread yourself too thin, the world, the universe, becomes a vacuous, empty place and it seems that every road runs to nowhere, and you’re moving but it seems you’re still in the same place no matter how fast you run, how hard you punch the accelerator. There is a deadening sameness to everything that happens, and you wonder what the point of it is all, why you should even bother.

Too close in and you may very well implode. Every single moment becomes a decision of tantamount importance, every act becomes a battle between life and death. This is when a single look can kill you, a moment of neglect can suck all the life out of you, a misspoken word can send you reeling, heart stopped, vision blurring. The most minor mistake is like setting off a grenade, a nuclear bomb, and the fear of meltdown and fallout looms like a suffocating cloud obscuring the sun. You know that there’s no way to keep going on like this, and yet it doesn’t seem like it’ll ever end.

These days are closer to the former than the latter, which is, I suppose, when comparing the two head-to-head, preferrable.

Still, I find it a little sad.

Just as one of the cardinal symptoms of depression puts it, I have lost my ability to feel pleasure in things that used to feel pleasureable. Simple, lazy pleasures like reading, drawing my useless maps, watching TV. Staring at the sea, driving to random places, walking up and down the city streets.

And I have no sex drive whatsoever. (I know, way too much information.) Instead of being frustrated by the fact that there is no one out there who’ll have sex with me (without being enticed by money or drugs), I just don’t care any more, in an empty sort of vacuous way. Intellectually, I know that it’s either the depression itself, or maybe it’s the anti-depressants, but sometimes I can’t help but wonder if maybe I’m just burnt-out from rejection.

Most of the time, it’s OK. Like one of my patients recently put it, he takes his antidepressants not because it makes him happy, but because he doesn’t have madness-inducing highs and lows anymore. While he states that his life still kind of sucks, he’d rather have this flatline existence than the roller-coaster-like insanity that alternates between white-hot anger and inconsolable sadness.

So, similarly, I’d rather not feel at all, instead of having these alternating waves of feeling like wanting to kill myself followed by feeling like wanting to kill other people.

But in quiet moments, when I’m left to the dark silence, I can’t help but wonder what it is like to have a normal spectrum of emotions. To be able to feel happy, for one thing, although in all perfect, pathetic honesty, I don’t remember the last time I felt this way. To be able to feel sad, I mean, to really feel empathetically sad. Not just for myself. Not this dispiriting, lead-weight of self-pity that I’ve been carrying around for years, but to be able to feel truly sad for other people. And then to be able to feel passion, drive. That’s probably what I miss the most. Inspiration. Magic.

But I tried getting off of the medications, and while it was OK for a while, for almost a good month, I started wearing down (in retrospect), and then the darkness damn near suffocated me one bleak March morning and it took me a while to right myself again.

So here we are back on the (metaphoric) barren plain, staring at the miles of empty space. While I’d rather have this than the goddamned pits and chasms that I’ve struggled to barely climb out of, I would, just once in a while, maybe even just once, just once, I would like to see some mountains.

Once upon a time, I randomly blogged about NASA’s study about the effects of prolonged bedrest, something I would’ve totally participated in if I hadn’t been in med school at the time, but apparently one of the test subjects has her own blog.

(Inspired by my cousin J)

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This actually matches up well to the enneagram test I took previously.