There seems to be this alternate reality that I keep coming back to in my dreams. There is a transportation plaza in a place that makes me think of Pasadena, except it really seems to be the civic center of an alternate Southern California. There are several mass transit lines that meet here: blue, red, yellow, orange, and green. There is also a shopping mall with extensive underground parking. The blue line can get you to the airport and to the ocean, ending in a seaside town that should be San Pedro, except it is much more tourist oriented, complete with villas and white sand beaches. The yellow line takes you to the downtown of this place which, for the lack of a better name, I have dubbed Todos Santos. This downtown area is sort of a mish-mash of Universal Citywalk, Old Pasadena, and Disneyland. The red line will take you to a bohemian/rapidly gentrifying/hipster-infested neighborhood that actually kind of reminds me of Wicker Park, but which will also take you to a shopping district that reminds me of Sunset Blvd in Echo Park, except with taller buildings. The green line, in one of the dreams I had, was what I was waiting for get home (whereever that is in this dream world of mine) and the actual platform is separated from the other ones, and it’s not always open. (The red, blue, and yellow lines share the same platform; the orange line is accessible by climbing a faux-Spanish era tower.) The orange line climbs a huge hill and ends up in an area that reminds me simultaneously of New York City and San Diego. (Yeah, I know, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.) It also takes you to an area that sort of reminds me of Michigan Avenue combined with Berkeley (Scary thought, huh?) There is a university campus there that sort of reminds me of a gigantic version of my high school.

What would be awesome is if I could actually map out this mish-mashed geography of a hundred, thousand memories and impressions all muddled together.

I have been reading His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman, and it revisits a theme that I have been pondering over, which makes a lot of sense. The God that religious fundamentalists worship is not the actual God that runs the universe. The Gnostics (as Phillip K Dick interprets their text) have had this same thought long ago—the God that is overtly worshipped is actually the mad, blind God sometimes called Sammael who believes that he created the Universe, and Sammael is the God of the Old Testament, vengeful, and wrathful. The real God is the one who sent Jesus Christ and Muhammed and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi. The God who destroyed Richard Nixon, and the God who is plotting against the neocons, the ultra-Zionists, and the Wahabists. The real God is the one who transmits via Valis, and is the God who set the early Christians free from the Black Iron Prison, and who is sending the King Felix interstitials through the airwaves and across the Internet.

Maybe I’ve just been too brainwashed by the Catholic Church, but I find it hard to let go of the idea of a benevolent super-intelligence that is backing me up in this otherwise malevolent, maleficent world. My God is the God of the Underdogs, and I suspect he lost the big war already to Sammael and is reduced to fighting guerrilla warfare.

The people who worship Sammael find it easy to call my God the Adversary (and I guess he/she is Sammael’s adversary, but it’s not the same guy who decided to call it quits and take up residence in Hell. My God lives on this material plane somewhere.

I’ve also toyed with the idea that he/she is not so much a God but maybe a hyper-intelligent AI that lives in the interstices of the universe.

He/she is dark matter, is Dust.

I’ve always found it perplexing as to why the Nicene Creed has the line that differentiates between “God from God” and “True God from True God,” as if there is definitely a False God.

And then my thoughts hearken back to my Scripture class in freshman year of high school. Yahweh (the God who may be Sammael, or who may be my God) was at first called Elohim, which is plural. The Gods. And then there is the fact that all the angels are named {something}-el, where “El” means God.

And along the lines of Lord Asriel’s Republic of Heaven, I wonder if the angels actually took turns running the universe, like, maybe they were even elected and all, and then Sammael got greedy and power-mad, tossed Lucifer into Hell, and made the other angels either choose his way or the highway. (Are Michael and Gabriel just toadies? Or are they just misrepresented?)

And yeah, I think that Lucifer is pissed and would like nothing better than to see Sammael’s usurped Kingdom come crashing down, but my God has interceded, has lain low, and is playing a really complex game to keep the lesser beings of this world from being harmed in this zero-sum game between these two superpowers.

As I was driving down the I-15 to Mira Mesa, I stopped to think about the Big Bang and how the universe is rapidly blowing apart. The bigger it gets, the more spread out it gets, and I think of the opposing natures of dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is what seems to hold the universe together when it looks like it should fall apart. Dark energy is what breaks the universe apart when it looks like it should hold together.

And, injecting theology into physics, what if there was already sentience existing in the pre-Big Bang singularity? Like, maybe the Singularity was Eden, or even Heaven, and the angels at first decided to share power and run things democratically. But then the big players, like Sammael and Lucifer, got sick of each other and wanted to run things their own way, so they got everyone to agree to a Partition. Sammael would takes this part of the Universe, Lucifer would get some other part, and the other archangels would get their own piece of the pie. So they decided to sunder the Singularity, and hence the Big Bang.

But, like all well-made plans, things didn’t turn out so well. Instead of peacefully splitting the Singularity into equal parts, it simply exploded, and dark energy spread everything widely apart (hence, Inflation) and threatened to break everything into elementary particles. The single unified force broke into the four (and maybe more) forces that we understand as strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravity. And the only thing that kept everything from blowing away into quark and lepton dust was dark matter, sort of the husk of the Singularity, the dead and broken shell of the embryonic, seed-like universe.

Thermodynamics predicts that entropy will triumph, and likely dark energy will succeed in turning the entire universe into near-vacuum, with nothing but singular quarks and leptons floating in an enormous void, with the occasional virtual particle-pair popping in and out of existence.

Maybe the Big Bang was the war, and my side, the side of life and creativity, has already lost.

The forces that break things apart—that which is dark energy—have won, or will win, and the survivors of this calamity eke out their existence in the pathetic remnants of the Singularity (what we might term ordinary matter) which wil slowly decay into nothingness, into randomness. Despite having lost, life still tries to self-organize, tries to bind itself together into complexities that were common place in the Singularity. Despite adversity and knowing that we will fall victim to the voracious emptiness of the dark energy void of entropy, life and my God carry-on. I think of the warriors of Maldan, the soldiers of Corregidor, fighting battles that they know are futile, and yet they fight anyway, because this is what we have left, this is what we crave—connection in a world that blows everything apart.

But Jesus Christ himself said that the most conspicuous worshippers are the ones who aren’t true to his Father. These guys, the Pharisees and the Sadducees of his time, and the Christian, Islamic, or Jewish fundamentalists of ours, probably worship someone like Sammael, and not the True Way, hungry for power.

I remember a metaphor. It’s a little like bald men fighting over a comb. The universe was lost a long time ago, before Adam and Eve were even created. Religion has become a mere tool for the powerful to hold sway over the weak. And knowledge of the True God who wants us to live and be happy and stay connected has practically all but disappeared into the interstices, into the dark voids of the universe occupied by only dark matter or dark energy.

In that Scripture class, I learned an elegant definition of Sin: that which sunders. Specifically, that which damages or breaks one’s relationship with one’s self, with other sentient beings, with Nature, or with the True God. (Whether it merely damages or whether it actually completely breaks is the distinction between venal and mortal sin.) So in this moral framework, it is obvious that hatred of any kind, intolerance of any kind, is Sin. So all you racists and gay-bashers and misogynists, all you haters out there, no matter how many times you go to Church or pray the rosary or whatever other stupid ritual of Sammael you perform, without actually facing your wounded relationship with the universe, everything you do is Sin. So there.

Then again, maybe this is all random, and we do live in successive illusory worlds where there is a false memory of the universe persisting, powered by nothing more than statistical chance and the laws of thermodynamics.

The most I can say is that I am an agnostic who is trying to master the Way.

I’ve been experimenting with other blog engines, namely, Blogger and Typo. I really dig Typo, but unfortunately, I can’t get it to run on my Dreamhost account. There are instructions on how to get it to work but the code gods are not with me, I guess. And since today is my last day of vacation, it’s pretty unlikely that I’ll get it running any time soon.

I also toyed with the idea of going back to blosxom, or trying another blog engine that uses flat-files like blosxonomy or blogtari, which then led to the idea of working on my own blog engine once again.

This also obviously led nowhere.

In any case, today is the last day of my vacation and nothing I planned to do today really panned out: I misremembered when my appointment with my psychiatrist was (it was actually yesterday) and I didn’t get the apartment I wanted. Instead I threw down $300 at Fry’s for no good reason. (Well, OK, there is a rationale, but even I am the first to admit that it’s basically bald sophistry.)

My psychiatrist is based in La Jolla, and upon figuring out she isn’t in today, I decided to go to the Fry’s in San Marcos instead of in San Diego. The reason is that I apparently fried my Linux box last night just by turning it on. I pressed a button and I saw a few sparks, and then poof, a curious burning smell. This is unfortunate, because I had been planning to install Darwin x86 on it and turn it into a dedicated file server. I have four external Firewire enclosures, and they all run ridiculously hot, and they are also likely sucking down serious power from my dangerously overloaded wall socket, so I figured I’d try to consolidate. And since nothing supports HFS+ decently except for MacOS X and Darwin, I kind of don’t have any choice. (I’m not brave enough to deal with Linux’s HFS module, particularly since it would involve screwing around with kernel source code—writing to journaled volumes is currently not supported and only possibly with some kludgery.)

In any case, since the I-5 crawled to a complete stop near the Del Mar racetrack, I decided to go off the beaten path and ended up in the backwoods of North County, wending my way through two-laned roads until I unexpectedly ended up in Escondido. That burned a good hour or so. At Fry’s, I picked up the equipment I figure I would need to build a file server, and then proceeded to go RSS/Atom feed crazy.

Let me explain. So I recently discovered the power of using an RSS/Atom newsreader. You can flip through blogs and figure out when the people you stalk read have posted a lot easier than using a web browser. The two free newsreaders I found for MacOS X are Vienna and Shrook. Both of them have their highlights and their flaws. I like Vienna because it automatically puts whatever you have in the clipboard in the URL field when you create a new feed, cutting the number of keystrokes. But if I browse in the “new items” section, it lumps all the new posts together without a good indication of which blog posts are actually from. I like Shrook because I know exactly what I’m looking at. However, it requires me to do the whole Option-N Option-A Option-V finger dance in order to create a new feed. (OK, so I haven’t clicked on the RSS icon in Safari to see what happens in Shrook yet. In Vienna, it works as you would expect it, though.)

The problem with RSS, however, is that it’s like drinking from a firehose of information. Much like e-mail (although less so now that spam-monkeys have taken over my main e-mail account), I feel compelled to read every post to nullify the little counter on the Dock. (I know I should just turn it off.) I’ve gotten stuck just idly browsing for hours which is totally ridiculous.

I finally wrested myself away from my computer at 4 pm, because I was faint from hunger. I managed to get to Einstein’s Bagels before they closed, got a salad and a cookie, and then drove to Mission Bay.

Three long months ago, when I was doing a really cake rotation, with 2 hour lunch breaks and weekends off, I would spend a lot of time here, just sitting in my car, watching the people walk/jog/bike/blade by. And I would just read until I had to get back to clinic.

May seems like an awfully long time ago.

Then again, it’s almost September.

So much for summer.

It seems odd, that despite the raging insanity roiling through my brain which is likely unchanged from the years gone by, I feel different today. I am aware that I have changed, that time has moved on, and that things are inevitably different. Maybe it’s simply the way the sun glints off of things this late in the summer, compared to when it was still spring/eary summer. There is an oldness to August, particularly as the month runs out. It always makes me think of things waning.

I suppose this is unavoidable since I’ve lived on an academic (August to June) year schedule for the past 20 years.

In any case, I can definitely tell that the sun sets a lot earlier than it did.

So it’s back to work tomorrow. We’ll see where any of this leads, if anywhere. I dread the feeling that I’m going to end up in the same old dead ends, but I hope to God that I’m wrong.

Let’s see if Blogger eats my post again.

I am obsessed with Muse’s new album Black Holes and Revelations, particularly the song “Starlight.”

Muse reminds me of a strange cross between Radiohead and Queen. Thom Yorke meets Freddy Mercury. Muse’s front man captures Yorke’s angst ridden fever-pitch, but the epic dynamics of the instrumentation recall Queen at its campiest. Some tracks make me think immediately of Queen’s rendition of the Flash Gordon soundtrack, with Ming the Merciless glaring down at me.

But “Starlight”—as cheesy and pop-commercial as it is—wonderfully evokes the existential torment of unrequited love. Here I am in a spaceship, chasing the evanescent light left behind by a woman who is forever beyond my reach. Who says astrophysics and romance don’t mix?

And the final “I just wanted to hold…” is kind of haunting, an unfinished thought perhaps exstinguished by anoxia, as the on-board oxygen supply runs out. And yet somehow I don’t find this song depressing at all.

I was driving down the freeway feeling like all-out crap, and then I dialed up “Starlight” on my iPod and sang along, all but shouting the lyrics, and I felt a lot better.

So what if I die all alone in the midst of the interstellar vacuum, trillions of miles away from anyone who ever cared about me, never catching up with the brilliant, beautiful woman of my dreams? I suspect it won’t ever happen anyway, at least I learn to travel faster than light.

Bleh, this beta version of Blogger is eating my posts. This sucks.

But my apartment is a shambles. There is basically trash everywhere, my living room is a massive tangle of wires and cords. I’m completely paralyzed by all this.

This is not a viable existence.

I also wonder if there is a chance I’m manic, or at least hypomanic. You know how one of those cardinal symptoms of mania is going on massive shopping sprees. I guess the only thing that keeps me from admitting to suffering from bipolar disorder is the fact that I never seem to be happy. Sure, I do have those nights where I can’t sleep at all because there are way too many thoughts in my head, and despite not sleeping, I wake up at the normal hour, or maybe even earlier.

I guess that’s what’s different this time.

My brain is totally spinning. Like a million and one ideas are racing in and out, half-formed, barely explicated.

Is this what it feels to go totally insane?

Maybe I have a problem. I like to joke that no one really leaves Berkeley without a substance problem.

This is the first time I have been injured after getting horrifically drunk. (Somehow I managed to avoid giving homage to the porcelain god.)

One, there is a 2.5 cm diameter ugly purple bruise on my right bicep. Two, I think I may have broken my left thumb. There is a huge bruise over the thenar muscles and there is also brusing on the dorsal side, and I can’t hyperextend at the MCP without terrible, incapacitating pain.

It’s probably just badly sprained (although I’m of course being a hypochondriac and wonder if I didn’t lacerate the radial artery somehow—at least it’s not a snuffbox injury)

I should just get a splint.

Instead, I’m probably just going to wait a year or two when it doesn’t heal and all my hand muscles have atrophied.

At least I can still type.

What I’m not so sure is if I can still play guitar.

Anyway, the thing that is a little scary is that I don’t remember how I sustained these injuries. Sure, there was this unexplicable urge to go running up the hill, and most likely I fell and slammed my hand on the concrete, but the etiology of the bruise over my bicep escapes me.

What sucks is that I can’t do this vacation thing at all. I can’t fucking relax. It’s like all of the sudden all the thoughts and feelings I’ve been avoiding for the past ten years or so have come out to attack me.

It’s all clear to me now. I really have been burying myself in my work. When I’m busy, I don’t have to think about how the rest of my life sucks, and how I’m lonely, and how I’m fat and getting old and how horrifically in debt I am.

I had hoped that this one organizing principle, the fact that I like my work, would be enough to get my ass in gear, to fix up the rest of my life. But it isn’t happening.

So here I am twiddling my thumbs, freaking out about God knows what, but not having anywhere to go. I mean, sure, I could just hop in my car and drive up and down California, but where will that really get me?

I’m all over the place.

I can’t even organize my thoughts.

How the hell am I suppose to make order out of the chaos that is my life?

The real reason I grew confused and insane is that I realized that I still like someone else a lot, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. (And this is probably unwise and stupid to post here, but I really don’t care anymore. I’m like a tagger with a spraypaint can, leaving “Kilroy was here” all over the place, like a dog pissing on trees. If you can figure out who I am, and who I’m talking about, well, good for you, it doesn’t change a goddamn thing.)

Amidst the waves and the cake and the gin, I once again realized how royally screwed I was, and this sent my mind reeling.

Is there any hope? If there isn’t, what the hell do I do now?

This is when depression sets in. Big-time.

It didn’t help at all that one of my cousins, a guy I grew up with, just got married to his on-again, off-again girlfriend for the last eight years, and they are so disgustingly happy that I wanted to commit suicide that very night, and pretty much tried to drink myself to death.

The thing that really wreaked havoc on my soul is that I’ve known this woman who is everything I could ever want and far more than I deserve for about that long, and really, I’ve had a crush on her before that (non-withstanding my disastrous obsession with you-know-who who is now married and has two kids)

And beside the fact that I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Satan’s asshole in the first place, I couldn’t’ve done more to be as far away as possible from her.

Good one, dude. That’s how you let people know you like them. Run away as far as possible.

And here I am, doing it all over again.

This has got to stop, one way or another.

Seriously.

Help.

I feel like I’m completely losing my mind. There are like ten trillion ideas whizzing around my brain. This can’t be good for me.

I feel so fucking hopeless.

This song reminds me of this poem

Far away
This ship is taking me far away
Far away from the memories
of the people who care if I live or die

Starlight
I will be chasing your starlight
until the end of my life
I don’t know if it’s worth it anymore

And hold you in my arms
I just wanted to hold
you in my arms

My life
You electrify my life
Let’s conspire to re-ignite
all the souls that would die just to feel alive

But I’ll never let you go
if you promise not to fade away
Never fade away

Our hopes and expectations
Black holes and revelations
Our hopes and expectations
Black holes and revelations

Hold you in my arms
I just wanted to hold
you in my arms

Far away
The ship is taking me far away
Far away from the memories
of the people who care if I live or die

I’ll never let you go
If you promise not to fade away
Never fade away

Our hopes and expectations
Black holes and revelations
Yeah
Our hopes and expectations
Black holes and revelations

Hold you in my arms
I just wanted to hold
You in my arms

I just wanted to hold

I don’t know why
but I cant seem to find the right melody today
I can’t make the words fit how I feel
I don’t know when
was the last time that I slept the whole night through
and when morning comes around I feel tired

I woke up from the strangest dream
with a dancing dog and a beauty queen
they said nothing, nada, niente
I’m empty

But you’re here and I’m here
so I stop complaining. It could be raining
and I see the answer in your eyes.
You’re here and I’m here
I keep on singing, just keep on singing
Singing

Do you know why
I can’t seem to find the right melody today?
Can’t make the words fit how I feel
Do you know when
was the last time that I slept the whole night through?
Another morning comes around, I feel tired

I drive down to the rodeo
Gonna ride a bull in a video
But nothing, nada, niente.
I’m still empty

But you’re here and I’m here
so I stop complaining. It could be raining
and I see the answer in your eyes
You’re here and I’m here
I keep on singing just keep on singing
Singing singing singing

I guess I’m addicted. I told myself that I would stop blogging, that all I’ve been spewing is angst, guilt-ridden, self-pitying, depressing, angst, and no one wants to hear it.

I am so alone in this world that I wonder if anyone except my mother will show up at my funeral.

But, as I’ve said before, the music helps.

Everything will be OK. I really believe that.

Guy Kawasaki, whom I first heard of because of his association with Apple, and who is apparently a Silicon Valley guru or some such, has a blog called ”Signum sine tinnitu,” which is frequently cited in the blogosphere, showing up on Technorati, del.icio.us, and digg quite often as of late.

Now, having studied Latin (somewhat inadvertantly) in high school and being dementedly obsessed with the all things from the Roman Empire, including their literature, I felt the need to deconstruct the blog’s title. I gather it’s supposed to be related to the phrase “signal to noise,” with the idea I think he is trying to convey being “signal without noise,” signum being the word for “sign,” sine meaning “without.” Tinnitus, however, means ringing, and was incorporated directly into English as a specific medical term describing ringing in one’s ears. I’m not sure there is a specific Latin word for non-descript noise—the closest is probably sonitus, which is just the word for “sound.”

Interestingly, “noise” is supposedly derived from the same root as “nausea”, which immediately gives me the imagery of sea, and the roaring of the waves.

Which, I suppose, interestingly, is what tinnitus is supposed to sound like—the roaring of the waves. Perhaps the same sound you hear when you listen to a seashell. Which makes it then not surprising at all, since tinnitus arises from the random firing of damaged nerve endings sitting in your cochlea, the organ that transduces sound into electrical signals, and which shaped like a tiny seashell. But as usual, I digress.

But if I were to try to back-translate “signal without noise,” I would try to preserve some poetry to it, particularly the nautical etymology of the word “noise,” so I’d say signum super fragendo undi, meaning “sign above the roaring/crashing waves.” Or perhaps more simply, signum super undisono, meaning the same thing. Undisonus specifically means the sound of waves, derived, as you can see, from undus “wave” and sonus “sound”

I also like using “waves” because of how it relates to how we typically transmit signals these days—as electromagnetic waves.

One of my cousins whom I grew up with just got married today, and I remember sort of zoning out, thinking about the possibility of someday getting married, which I find utterly ridiculous since I’m not in a relationship.

I also randomly thought of Sidney Carton, the doomed, damned sad-sack who is the ultimate hero of A Tale of Two Cities. I’ve been told by two different women that I remind them of him. (I’ve also been told by others that I remind them of Miles from “Sideways,” but anyway.)

I’m not sure what it is about Carton that is congruent with me. I suppose it could be the pessimistic fatalism, or maybe the aura of wasted potential. (I do sometimes wonder what I could’ve accomplished with my life if I didn’t have the weaknesses that I do. Not that I’m doing terribly now, but I still wonder.)

I suppose there is also that sense that whatever could’ve made me happy was in the past, and long gone. I missed whatever chance I had, and there’s pretty much nothing else to look forward to at this point.

No, I am not a cheerful person.

But I watched my cousin and his (now) wife, and I just laughed to myself. It’s absurd to even think about having to make those kinds of decisions, when there are so many, many barriers in the way. I think I’ve been fooling myself for too long, that I was going to live a conventional life, married, with kids, buying a house, and all that. I’ve been wandering terra incognita for a long time now, and I’ve long strayed from the beaten path, I think.

Which leads me to the idea of being lost. It occurred to me that if you’re in the middle of nowhere, but you have no intention of going back to whereever you came from, that’s not really being lost. “Lost” only makes sense in the context of not being able to go back to where you’ve been.

At least that’s what the definition of wayfinding would seem to imply, since wayfinding involves the process of (1) knowing where you are (2) knowing where you want to go (3) figuring out the best way to get there and back. So if you have no intention of going back, then you can’t really be lost.

I feel very much like John the Baptist these days, wandering around like a madman in the desert wearing nothing but a loincloth. (I’ve no aspirations for sainthood, although I do have this awful premonition that I will someday be killed in terrible way for no good reason.)

I should just go insane, and get it over with. At least then I won’t be lonely. There’ll always be the voices in my head.

Neuron by neuron, we are taking the centers out. What I would give to have this as permanent, this not giving a shit about the world. OK, maybe I exaggerate. Even as drunk as I am, I have misgivings.

But this is my life. Trying to forget about how complexly fucked up the entire world is. How evil people run the show, leaving all of us as pawns, sacrificed to their whims.

There is love, though.

The pressure mounts. R^v, my cousin how is a year younger than me, is getting married. My mom really wants grandkids. I’ve got nothing.

Nothing except fantasy and wishes. The woman that I have been in love with, the woman who defined my universe for years, sends me pictures of her beautiful daughter, and I just choke. How did I even dare? I am like a speck of dust, blown out into the wind.

There is, also, the woman who is basically the living expression of my ideal. Beautiful, intelligent, artistic and creative, who understands the “good” kind of crazy. She is everything I’ve ever wanted. And I’ve got nothing. Empty pockets. I am just lame, standing there like a retard. I’m embarrassed by my stupidity. I’ve found the one, and there’s no good reason in all of heaven and hell that she’d ever think about me.

And then, the woman who took brief notice of me, whom I’m harrassing with ridiculous phone calls for no reason, and because of her kindness, she is condemned to know me, know of me. From an objective standpoint, I feel sorry for her, for having befriended someone as pathetic and lame as me. I don’t know why I just don’t stop, why I just stop bothering her, and disappear, and maybe even just die.

I half-joke, maybe I’ll die soon, before I turn 40. It’s seriously sad and pathetic that that’s my dearest hope.

My closest friends always admonish me that I think way too much, which is most certainly true. If I had the knack for shutting off my brain at least partially, I would probably enjoy life a whole hell of a lot more. Unfortunately, when I give it a try, it seems like my brain shuts off completely, and a lot of untoward and sometimes disastrous things tend to happen.

But I was just driving down the freeway, and I realized that, yes, I am happy right now. I’m sure that it’s probably just because I am on vacation (as of 2pm this afternoon) Not that work has been all that demanding these past few weeks, but the fact that I don’t have to be anywhere at all tomorrow is pretty exciting. And then it struck me. Why is it that I have to analyze everything to death? Why can’t I just be?

On another note, I think I’ve discovered (or re-discovered) what it is I want to do with my life, career-wise. I did write way back when in my personal statement that what interested me was the care of chronically ill patients, and that I was interested in the problem of Transition™, which is the short buzzword for the process of signing out pediatric patients to internal medicine physicians. Some of the more prominent patient populations where this is important is with children with chronic lung disease, including asthma, but even more impressive with cystic fibrosis patients. There are also the type I diabetics, inflammatory bowel disease, connective tissue disorders, the transplant patients, and, almost fantastically, the children born with congenital heart defects who have been surgically-repaired. In previous eras, a lot of these patients would never even come close to adulthood, but they are now knocking on internal medicine doctor’s doors, with issues that aren’t typically covered in traditional internal medicine training programs.

This is the patient population that for some reason I have been drawn to. And today one of my attendings brought up the fact that she is looking closely at this, and was wondering if I would be interested in being involved in a study.

So my first conception is to become a med-peds primary care physician who follows kids through Transition, trying to maintain some semblance of continuity of care. Because of the way that our insurance reimbursement system is structured, you get arbitrarily cut off from your pediatric specialist at age 21, and you’re forced to transition to an adult specialist, which frankly makes no sense whatsoever. (Here’s another argument for universal health care.)

So we’ll see, I guess, is all I can say. Two weeks of no responsibility, and then I’m turning thirty in a month, and I’ve got less than two years of residency left. Things will be changing fast, whether I want them to or not. It’s kind of exciting, actually. I hope I can hang on to this optimistic feeling for at least a little while. I’ve unfortunately been conditioned to hope for the best but to expect the worst. But if you expect the worst all the time, sometimes it seems like that’s all that you ever get.

I don’t know why, but I’ve dreamt of my ex lately. Nothing disturbing, just brief snippets and vignettes.

It’s been a good ten years since we were dating, and she’s married now, and we still speak/e-mail each other now and again, although I suppose not really that often. The relationship ended rather disastrously, what with her cheating on me and all. It was a good three years or so before I would even talk to her again—she was pretty distraught with me disappearing from her life like that, and she was pretty persistent in trying to re-establish contact. The thought of getting back together with her did enter my mind once or twice, but quickly went back out again. Sure, she had changed, she wasn’t the same person who had ruined my heart, but after getting burned pretty badly, it’s hard to trust fire again.

In any case, she met other people, hooked up, fell in love, whatever, and then met the man she was going to marry. I think I may very well have been one of the people who convinced her that the guy really deeply loved her. I even showed up to their wedding reception. I was a little surreal, but whatever. I ran into people I hadn’t seen in forever, and my oldest friend in all the world was there as well.

But, looking back at these past ten years, I can’t help but feel like the experience wrecked me pretty badly emotionally. It would be unfair to blame her. In retrospect, we were just kids, and shit like this happens all the time. Thems is the breaks.

But I think I have a pretty hard time trusting people. I often unfairly assume that they are going to let me down, so I prepare for it, and don’t expect things from others. It keeps me emotionally safe, but it also has kept me kind of excruciatingly lonely.

How does one learn to trust again, I wonder?

I think the answer is to just take a chance. There’s that quote that I like from Henry Stimson, FDR’s Secretary of War, that goes something like, the only way to make someone trustworthy is to trust them.

Sadly, however, this is not very unlike telling a near-drowning victim that the only way to get over their fear of water is to jump right into the deep end.

Damn. Ten years is a long time. And it’s only getting longer. Ah well, there are worse things in life than being alone.

It’s the little things that I remember with the greatest poignancy, most of them existing only in my mind. She would likely be shocked and disturbed by things running through my crazed brain.

The first time I saw her, sitting at the far end of the table, I remember my breath catching. We were introduced briefly, but I didn’t say a single word to her that night. It was unlikely that she would ever notice me, and I did not think of her, at least not deliberately. She was, and is still, perhaps the most beautiful woman I have ever met, and as I got to know her from afar, I realize that her inner beauty outshines her appearances, if you can believe such a thing.

There was the time I found myself unexpectedly facing her on the dance floor, her friends having inexplicably flanked her, and I still cannot bring myself to believe it was deliberate. I do not even remember the song that was playing. I can only recall my sense of astonishment. Maybe I did just dream it.

And then that small little note, just one sentence, that she once left me letting me know that she did know that I existed.

The time we sang a love song together for fun, in jest, me trying to keep my voice from quavering.

These memories of driving, just shooting the shit, about anything and everything.

But it was her kindness and her tenderness that struck me deep in my heart, like a barbed wire, sharp and fine, yet catching and pulling, and I think I have wriggled helplessly, haplessly, like a plinthed fish all this time.

This woman, beautiful and brilliant and funny, no one’s fool, and yet despite her strength, despite her will to defy the world, she still remembers child-like glee. Her smile, her laughter can always chase the darkness from my heart. I am always reminded of the sun.

There were those days of my exile, in that dark land where I was cold and more alone than I have ever been, and I thought of her much, knowing with dark despair that there was nothing I could do, as she fell in and out of love with other men, and I cursed my folly for falling for one such as she, wondering what the hell I was thinking. It was better that I forget, and dream no more.

But in quiet moments, her face will flicker in my mind’s eye, overwhelming me, and I can’t help but feel that I am cursed, to have known someone such as she, and to yet know that there is no way save selling my soul to the devil or miraculous, divine intervention that my vain hopes might come true.

Making that familiar drive back down to San Diego, I found myself in a very sullen, sulky, and brooding mood. Maybe it’s just the fact that I have to go to work tomorrow. Back to reality, I guess. No use crying over impossibilities.

Paradoxically, the one thing that cheered me up a bit was a rather depressing Cure song: “Untitled” from Disintegration, which incidentally was a song I remember listening to repeatedly as I lay on the beach back in 2002 [1][2]

never quite said what i wanted to say to you never quite managed the words to explain to you never quite knew how to make them beleivable and now the time has gone another time undone

Related posts: Without Rhyme or Reason 21 Feb 2001

(I was thinking of the city of Lhasa this morning as I contemplated my dog, who is a Lhasa Apso-something else. I also thought of the cheery thought my sister shared with me a while ago: you know how we’re fighting wars for oil these days? She predicts that the next natural resource we’ll be fighting wars for will be water. Specifically, as the Himalayan snowpack starts to melt because of global warming, India and China will be forced into a standoff over water rights. I also think that contention over water rights will be the single most important factor driving the politics of California in the next few years. But that is neither here nor there.)

As the big 3-0 looms ominously (with 30 days remaining on the clock), I can’t help but think about the ridiculous trajectory of my life thus far. Seven years ago, having graduated from college, I had spent a year living at home, jobless, and directionless, having given up on my career plans, and stewing in probably one of the worst depressive episodes of my life. In those dark days, a lot of serendipity manifest itself, and it’s interesting how little things can change your life so much.

(What brings this particular time frame to mind was a brief discussion of how terrible “The Phantom Menace” was, which was in fact released in 1999.)

In some ways, it seems like an absurdly long time ago. I was 22, and in theory, my life was supposed to be ahead of me, although, at the time, I felt like I was a total loser who was completely screwed. Time hasn’t done much to change my emotional perspective, it’s true, but I guess have accomplished something. I’m not sure it sufficiently compensates for the emotional torture and loneliness I endured—in many ways only to get back to where I started from seven years ago.

And here I am, at home. My future is exactly as murky as it was. So in other ways, it seems like it was just yesterday that all this shit went down. A lot of memories from that almost completely wasted year are still pretty damn sharp, and a lot of things I despise about myself haven’t changed a damn bit.

And I can’t help but whine about it. What do I do next? How do I continue to adapt and grow? How do I expand the scope of my life? Society has plenty of suggestions: buy a house, get married. Hah. Do I want these things because I really want these things, or have I just heard it so many times I’ve been completely brainwashed? (I pretty much suspect the latter.)

So then what? Professional advancement, i.e., climbing the corporate/academic/political ladder? Bah.

The refrain from a Ben Folds Five song suddenly wafts through my brain:

Here I am, sad and free I can’t cry, I can’t see what I’ve done Oh God, what have I done?

Feh. There’s just this terrible sense of the ever-ticking clock, and I’m chasing the stupid White Rabbit down this rabbithole of despair, worried that “I’m late! I’m late!”

Which naturally leads to thinking about this exchange from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Slartibartfast: You must come with me, quickly or, or you’ll be late! Arthur: Late for what? Slartibartfast: What? Oh, no…. What is your name, Earthman? Arthur: Dent. Arthur Dent. Slartibartfast: Late, as in the late Dentarthurdent. It’s a kind of threat, you see. Never been particularly good at them myself but I’m told they can be quite effective.

Which then makes me think about this Calvin and Hobbes strip¹:

Calvin: You’ll never get anywhere lying around, you know. Hobbes: Who are we racing? Calvin: Obviously, we’re…um…well…uh…. I’m too busy to explain this stuff! I’ve got important work to do! VERY important! Hobbes: Let me know if you win. —from There’s Treasure Everywhere by Bill Watterson

Spinning around ever which way, and idly spinning my wheels. Fuck it.

As I sit here typing this early morning—it’s just me and my ever-faithful dog awake—I think I’ve figured out one of the key components of my ongoing depression. The fact of the matter is that I don’t have much hope for the future. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you all the fucked up shit going on in America today—the country that I live in seems to be the greatest force of evil these days.

I write this reflection on the anniversary of terrible day, the day that the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and I can’t help but think that this really fucked everything up. I remember reading a science fiction short story discussing the nature of Evil in the world, linking the existence of God with quantum mechanics. The whole essence of modern physics lies in the concept that the observer must be taken into account, and one of the popular laymen ideas is that maybe the observer which makes reality real is God. The story discusses the age old question: if God is omnipotent, why is there Evil in the world? And the author makes the case that one of the most Evil things that happened in the 20th century was the dropping of atomic bombs on civilian populations. And he figures that God must have blinked—otherwise these atrocities should never have happened.

But as rampant global capitalism continues to desecrate the planet, and as the neverending War on Terror™ rages in Iraq and on the border between Israel and Lebanon, I can’t help but feel that I am inexorably doomed. Whether it will be by drowning because of global warming and rising sea levels, or whether it will be because of nuclear holocaust, that really is the question. (And macabrely, I realize that a nuclear holocaust—by bringing about a nuclear winter—would actually neutralize global warming.)

So it is with a heavy heart that I gaze upon children, and especially infants, wondering if there is any future for them to build upon, or if the human race is hell-bent on self-extinction.

I want to be hopeful, but it’s pretty damn hard.

I keep telling myself that the end doesn’t matter, it’s how I get there that does. So even if the world as we know it is destined to end, the little things I do in life still matter. But with such a gloomy big picture as the backdrop, I’m seriously struggling.

I don’t necessarily need someone to tell me that it’s all going to be OK, that there is some kind of solution to the problem of Evil in the world. All I need is something to hope in, something to look forward to. Without that, however tiny that thing may be, without hope, without the possibility of things getting better instead of getting worse—even if I don’t have a clue what is going to happen next—without hope, then I might as well be dead already.

What I have forgotten is how important it is to actually go in the water when you go to the beach. [1][2] I haven’t gone in the water for three years, ever since that time I went by myself to Puerco Beach and let the massive waves pummel me, leaving me gasping and breathless. Contemplating the infinite ocean and its instrinsic power just seems to put everything into perspective. I guess I’ll figure out all this bullshit someday, even though that day is not likely to be today.

Don’t ask me why. I decided to drink a four pack of Red Bull. Hence, I am finding it extremely difficult to sleep.

And now for something even more cryptic: how is it that I can have so many opportunities, but not even a smidgen of hope?

This song just lacerates my soul. It is the epitome of the anomie of post-modern existence. We are force fed lies, sanitized versions of tragedy, white-washed and censored versions of obscene truths, and we are made to choose between two different, polarized existences. Either you accept all the bullshit as fact, live your happy-go-lucky senseless life as a consumer of goods, or as cannon fodder for the state, nothing more than a replaceable cog in the machine, or you refuse to bow down, and earn ostracization or excommunication, indeed forcing you to fade-out from the consensual hallucination known as Reality™.

I love how Thom Yorke et al capture the sensation of being completely alone and isolated despite being surrounded by people who are living their lives. Radiohead successfully illustrates how the banality and mundanity of post-modern living is excruciatingly oppressive, how the homogeneity of suburbia—tract housing, big-box anchor stores, miles and miles of sprawl—are soul-destroying and emotionally eviscerating.

This is the song I would commit suicide to.

The sense of despair is wonderfully overpowering. I suppose it’s the same sense of insane euphoria that you get from asphyxiation. It feels good in a terrible way, and you know it might kill you if you let it, and you might very well let it.

And yet, the end of the song is somehow a paean to keep hoping and believing. “Immerse your soul in love,” Yorke desparately implores, knowing that this is a horrifically difficult thing to do, and yet also knowing that this is the only way not to succumb to the overpowering emptiness of life, the only way to not fade out.

So I’m still holding on, trying not to fade out, but it ain’t easy, and it ain’t getting no easier, either, and there ain’t that much love out there for me to immerse myself in.

the lost one wandering down the shadowed path 2 days since I’d seen the sun panic, and then peace

they call it the tranquility of the damned certain of catastrophe awaiting apocalypse expecting the eschaton

numbness floating on the sea of nepenthe and morphine lots and lots of morphine to remember to forget to sleep to dream

The lost one heedless as a lamb tangled in the wrack and bramble wolfhound hunting darkness creeping

with sheep-like disdain I am silent not so much accepting but just dead inside a psychic miscarriage, perhaps an aborted soul if there is such a thing

oblivion

is it such a terrible thing to not know that you don’t know to not know pain or sorrow to be senseless and unheeding?

sure, joy and happiness may pass me by but how is it different from this life? I watch the triumphs of others love and hope nothing more than sitcoms or staged drama this feeling like hydrofluoric acid etching the insides of my harrowed heart cauterized sterilized half-baked and burned

a one-winged dragon with decaying memories of the wind and the sun there are worse things than being dead

the lost one keening in the darkness singing a silly song to myself waiting for fangs or the scythe there is waiting this endless waiting as photons streak across the neverending intergalactic void I am waiting for God to decide to glance this Way

just for a microsecond, maybe

one thing I ask for one thing to weigh against the millions of things I have lost to thieving despair

one thing and maybe I might yet be found

My brain is on fire.

There is violence in my soul.

I stumbled upon this book entitled Cultivating Stillness in the Eastern Religions section of Borders and immediately felt peace descend upon me before I even opened it up. It is a Taoist text, but with a little more mysticism about it.

I don’t know if it’s because I’ve managed to imbibe some of the tenets of Taoism, and perhaps the principles are somewhere embedded in my mind amidst the tumult and chaos. It felt like all the little niggling doubts dancing around my brain were suddenly put into perspective. Sure, they’re still there, but it’s like the volume was muted a little bit.

But back to the chaos, at least for a little while: I need to remind myself to be careful about trying to read in between the lines. I’m apt to find something there that isn’t actually there, which is certain to drag me into a vortex.

As they say, you can’t put the shit back into the horse.

I guess I need to start entertaining the possibility that I may very well be going insane.

I can’t say that I’ve never experienced this before, although the moments are few and far between. I can’t exactly pinpoint the last time I’ve actually felt like this.

What seems to be happening is that I am fluctuating between complete and utter desolation and totally bewildering mania.

One moment I just want to lie in bed until I rot. The next moment I’m pacing my room like a psychopath, with all sorts of crazy thoughts swirling through my addled brain.

Fun times.

Man, all that caffeine was a serious mistake.

What I probably shouldn’t have done was drink three shots of espresso in addition to the Extreme Black Forest ice-blended caffeinated drink from Coffee Bean. This makes it highly unlikely that I will be sleeping any time within the next twelve hours.

What was probably an even bigger mistake was to take 800 mg of ibuprofen on an empty stomach. What is even worse is that it had absolutely no effect on the pain in my right foot. Hopefully I won’t start shitting blood.

After work today, I went to the Coffee Bean to get some caffeine because of my impending caffeine-withdrawal headache. I basically spent the time sipping on my ice-blended caffeine drink and scrawling depressing passages into my notebook. Man, I’m on fire these days.

I don’t know why the hell I am in the midst of a turbulent depression right now. As far as work is concerned, things are going pretty well. I have a pretty easy schedule, and I have a lot of free time.

Which is, I suppose, the root of the problem. We all know that idle hands are the playground of the Devil.

Still, I had as much free time if not more a few months ago, and while I wasn’t exactly Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky, I wasn’t fucking depressed and despondent either. As far as I can remember, I was actually having somewhat of a good time, successfully entertaining myself with simple pleasures.

Or maybe not. Maybe free time is just bad for me, I guess.

But I couldn’t help but ponder the idea that sadness is simply a somatic marker for something not going right in your life. It’s like a warning light on your dashboard. For example, the gas tank is empty, or you need to check your engine, or maybe your emergency brake is on. While it might same patently obvious to saner people, I can’t help but feel that it’s also useless. Clearly, there is something wrong with my life. The million-dollar question is, just exactly what, and even better, what can I do about it?

The easy answer is novelty. I need something new and original in my life. I need a good hobby.

Given that I am almost 30, maybe I should do something crazy. Like sky-diving. Maybe I should give it a shot.

You only live once, after all.

The more complicated answer is something that B^s, B^d, J^dG, and C^m have all touched upon and admonished me about: I need to learn how to be more social. I need to learn how to meet people. What is lacking from my life are human relationships. I’m not talking about dating and romantic relationships (or, at least, I’m not limiting the discussion to just these things.) I mean relationships in general. Friendships, acquaintances. Family. Except for work, I basically spend most of my time holed up in what may as well be a steel-enforced bunker, peering through the warped prism of the Internet.

A random thought whizzed through my head just now: is it really so bad to be just a friend?

What will be, will be, and what won’t, won’t, I suppose.

Feh. For some reason, that leaves me very dissatisfied. You take what you can get, I suppose.