escaping a name is the color change i look for.

one day, my love will know the hardness of her teeth,

and she can whisper quietly, smiling, at my bones.

embrace the heavy-handedness of our dialogue,

either past or present; there is no such thing in love

because we only see each other's futures.

caring, in the hole, pushes me to find what i believe in.

you too.

you know, i was hoping to write something slightly up-beat

after the rather "wahwah"-esque horror show of that last thing,

but i think i ended up beginning with something not so nice.

if it comes off that way, do not fret, because, i mean,

it really is about my continuing quest to understand what love is.

in other actual news from my life,

sean came to visit, and i had a great week.

so i can walk around with my head up for a bit longer,

until i realize it truly is too cold in my room or that

i waste pretty much everything.

oh, i signed up for insurance.

they want proof of my citizenship.

future american wife, please apply here.

i have this bad habit of visiting LA and drinking way too much,

like more than i did even in undergrad/grad school,

like more than i really ought to,

like i make really horrendous decisions that half my friends are like

"that is too funny" and the other half are like

"may god have mercy on all our souls, because you are an actual human being

and you are speaking these words."

oh well, i only get drunk once or twice a month anyway,

so i might as well go all out, or whatever.

i currently have in possession some old home video tapes,

because apparently i am an historic loser and not just a spontaneous one;

if you care to check them out, well, you will have to come to irvine

because they are on these little cassette tapes that are ridiculously efficient

and can hold i believe infinite amounts of data.

Foster the People is better than you might think.

"I've been acting like I'm strong, but/

the truth is I've been losing ground-"

- 'Dismantling Summer' by The Wonder Years

First, I went to Starbucks to read.

I read approx. 10 pages of Infinite Jest;

it was the part where Hal describes Himself's suicide.

Second, I stopped by Petsmart to look at baby chameleons.

There was a dog adoption event going on,

and one particular dog in his little black cage was whimpering and shaking.

I left the store and got in my car.

On the drive home, I cried for the second time in a week.

I need some help.

so how am i supposed to kick a nicotine habit when

i go to work and feel like shit and i come home and feel like shit.

okay, it's not all bad. sometimes selena gomez songs come on the radio

and that gets me going pretty good or whatever.

fine attention to details: this is what bores the shit out of me.

i sat in an oozingly comfortable chair for an eternity during the hours of the day

when i know i am barely functioning and presentable,

attempting to care about all these ideas everyone around me threw out.

basically, subjecting me to a torture-thon in the trappings of an "office meeting".

my god, is this what people think about throughout the day?

really?

i found the anger, more like petulance, growing inside me

as discussions about the "patients' experience" vis a vis employee nitpicking

stretched on for literally minutes. as a "people person", this was fundamentally

reductive to the essential problem of making others happy.

or at least, as happy as they can be right before specialists

sit them down in an off-green chair to extract their disposable income

in hopes that the shittiness of their oral health would become less shitty.

at least, as efficiently as they could.

someone suggested comment cards for patients to fill out,

which would be tallied (and displayed, no less, on a bulletin board,

"which there is plenty of room for in the back" one person gloated);

at the end of the month, the employee with the most amount of feedback

would win an award.

my impatience suggested that there was most definitely enough floss

in the office to hang myself in the bathroom, with the plan being to mask

the gurgling noises from my lungs with the one-off coffee maker at the front office,

which does make coffee in the morning.

by this moment in my life, i have already decided that i am not great at living,

and the proof was that if this rabble was what made people great,

then my amateur hour stretched into years was justifiable.

the small picture never crosses my mind. period.

there are others out there that do it for me, and i am capable of genuflecting to them

in hopes that i can keep them around to sort through these challenges.

i feel no shame in this; some people are really good at certain things,

and others are really good at appointing the first ten minutes of the day to

"huddles, so that we can go over specific things for the day".

i imagine the latter never experience the thrill of living on cereal for dinner

for days on end.

finally, we are done with this sordid affair, and walk my deliberately

agitated body to the back of the office. as i pass a window,

i hear the sirens of an emergency vehicle on the street and think to myself

"Jesus Fucking Christ, we are talking about millimeters here".

here is a thing i have been pondering for a little while now:

the sheer amount of creative output a person can receive these days

is astounding (which may be an understatement).

even 10 years ago, the ease of which one could check out a new album

or find a particular book was far less than it is today.

we are so lucky to be living in a time where information and entertainment

are available essentially 24/7, as long as you have a bit of disposable income.

if you take the time to really think about this,

trust me, it will boggle your mind.

the next time you youtube a song you just heard on the radio,

stream a cult classic on netflix, etc.,

pause and reflect on how fucking easy it was to do so.

as much as people (read as: "grown ups") consider our generation to be

time wasters with social media and the internet,

the fact remains that we are inundated with stuff, basically.

just tons and tons and shit tons of stuff.

seriously, think about it.

if it does not blow your mind off its rusty hinges,

then you are not considering it hard enough.

as a way to use my considerably large amount of free time

in some credible way (although to whom i would receive credit from

i cannot fathom in the slightest)

i am attempting to write more.

here are the most glaring problems i have faced so far:

1. i am not a smart man. i have neither the training nor capacity

to take on a project the scale of which i will allow to get myself behind.

in essence, i do not wish to write something solely for the sake of it's existence,

or for my own satisfaction; i want to write something that actually means something

to other people who might venture to read it.

the issue inherent with that is that i am not a writer.

i do not possess the tools to flesh out my thoughts in a cohesive manner,

nor in a way that will make whatever i create meaningful on a level

comprehensible to literate adults

(as in not just some plot-driven flash in the pan

with no point and all show).

2. i cannot choose a topic concrete enough to write about.

i know i want to approach the subject of "the state of society"

a la DFW, but there are inherent issues with that as well.

for one, i have no idea what the state of society really is;

the concept itself is vague and encompasses such a large amount of subject matter

that i do not know who/what/when/where/how to approach it from/with/from/from/

(that actually works on its own).

also, even if i attempt to make some grand point about "society",

it will come from my incredibly sheltered view of it,

considering i am part of a privileged group that experiences things

very differently than others in the same country, state, and even city, no less.

i have no point-of-view that allows me any sort of "expertise"

in what the collective consciousness of the nation
(which is the largest population of people i feel like i can comment on

without being a complete ignoramus)

is at the moment, or how it has changed over the past decade,

or even the past year.

the only entrances i have to the masses are bits of pop culture,

the internet and its relevance on why i find myself surrounded by assholes (essentially),

a small amount of knowledge on the effect of the incredible

diversity of media available to just about everyone with some money,

and a cursory taste of california in all its golden glory.

3. my life. or, more specifically, my choices that have led

to me being who i am now.

i firmly believe that if i had stuck to my convictions,

i would have been drunkenly happy working at a shitty cafe

while going to school to learn how to properly write

and simultaneously keeping my parents' hearts deeply unsettled.

i am not saying i do not like where i am now.

i love my job, and i love the possibilities it has afforded me.

but really, i am a fairly simple creature in terms of needs,

and i would ultimately have been better off putting my sometimes fervent

energies into something creative rather than concrete.

obviously, 99% of those who read this might conclude that

i have, in fact, been the most covertly pretentious person you have ever known,

and that i mock more or less any writer that does not fit my standard

of writing as an attempt to convey ideas of great importance.

i understand your dismay, and in fact, i am frequently irritated at myself,

frustrated even, that i am so quick to dismiss most writing, and actually

most creative output, as "trivial" (anyone who has heard me rant about

bruno mars can chime in on this).

i realize the determination, courage, hard work, and strength of will

it takes to write even the lowliest of paperback romances,

and i commend completely anyone who does it.

the fact of the matter is, i have none of those;

i have always placed in high esteem those who have such traits,

whether it translates to writing, music, film, art, and even religion.

in many ways, i find writing to be analogous to practicing religion

in that one must have a fervent belief in something,

and not be afraid to put their own existence on the backburner

for something greater than themselves.

this is the part where i could delve deeper into what religion means to me

and why i use it as an example here, but that would require a level of effort

i seem to have misplaced last night around 2am when i could not sleep.

maybe one day, i will be able to translate my observations about the

world that i fight to exist in comfortably into some print on paper,

but i fear that day is not now.

the only thing i suppose i could do is to work at it little by little.

and that is what i intend to do.

if you take the chance to trust me,

i will not fear what i can build in your world.

i worry too often, or at least for someone who has most of their lives sorted.

i worry about my family.

i worry about my friends.

i worry about tomorrow, and the day before.

i worry about drinking too much coffee.

i worry about sleeping.

i worry about how my shirt looks at the end of the day,

when all the worried wrinkles show.

i worry about the lack of experience in my fingers

when i try to play my guitar.

i worry about my phone.

i worry about recycling.

i worry about people liking me,

then i turn around and worry about worrying about people liking me too much.

mostly, i worry about myself.

i worry about when i will get there.

i worry about how i will get there.

i worry if i will find what it is that escapes me.

some days i notice myself making a list obsessively,

and i wonder why a 24 year old guy with an entire life to live

worries so much about everything.

i become tangled inside, a knot of anxiety

and fear of not knowing about most things.

"when i was young, i didn't know too much/

i used to think that i could rule the world.

then i grew up and found out life was hard/

harder than stone."

i think the reason why i find myself attracted to grounded people

is that i envy them, and i wish that i could stick myself firmly to this world

like they do. i suppose more than anything i need someone to count on

when i find that i am too confused about life.

the only problem is, i find stability to be awfully dull.

two things;

i will start with the shorter, more recent one.

the drive back from work usually sees me on the road around sunset.

more often than not, the last wisp of color keeps me company

between the sky and costa mesa, at least until i leave the city

and delve into irvine proper.

there has been a stretch of evenings where i believe

(although being wholly new to ocean-side living,

i am not an amateur meteorologist as everyone seems to be

around these parts)

the pacific brought in a tiny amount of weather and fog;

so small in increment, almost like an afterthought stroke

to signify a hint of texture on canvas.

my car cuts through this mist, and the light fades cheerfully away,

and it is the end of the work day.

everything comes together to put my consciousness in an

"overly-relaxed" state, and i pass out before 7pm peacefully.

i doubt i have seen true love more than a handful of times

in my life, let alone experienced it.

i feel true love every time i am home, usually around 10-11pm.

my parents finish watching television,

and sometimes go into their room leaving me to deal with nala and mint.

i tell them to wake up and go outside to pee,

usually in korean, and mint gets up like the four year old

hyperactive, eager-to-please, near-zealot that she is.

nala carries nearly a decade of domesticity on her shaggy face;

a life filled with spurts of excessive joy,

throes of sloth, and an overall simple, dog-minded pursuit of leisure.

i was a part of all those things for her, and every time

we interact in any way, there is a history behind it.

she looks up at me from the couch, sees that mint has already

found her position in front of the door,

and does what any late-aged organism would do to will themselves into action:

sigh, prop up two limbs at a time, stretch for maintenance's sake,

and trundle along to the next second.

she reaches mint (who is all tail and tongue, by the way)

and finds her annoying, most likely, although i can never truly tell

if her whisker twitches signify petulance or affection.

i unlock the backyard door, and mint bursts forth without hesitation.

nala usually looks at me once in the eyes,

then slowly makes her way past the door frame,

just as she has done for the last ten years.

this is where i believe the unconditional love part comes in:

a creature barely a foot tall, maybe weighing 15 pounds,

closing in on the end of her existence, terrified of anything that makes a sound

she does not hear on a regular basis,

gives not a moment's hesitation as she leaves my presence and ventures

into the pitch black of the backyard, a place where anything can happen,

where nothing can be seen and everything heard clearly in the night.

she makes no motion to stop and think,

because she trusts completely that i am there to save her from anything

that might cause her harm, because she knows in her

beautiful, unobtainable, lovable mind that i love her and

will always love her no matter what.

and so she can dirty her legs on the wet grass as she walks back in

nonchalantly, giving me another look when mint squeezes in by her

instead of just waiting to come in after,

and i know that if the world ended in my backyard at that very moment,

i would throw myself at her (and hopefully be able to scoop up

the appropriately-shaped mint-tube from the tile floor with one hand)

and hope that nothing bad has happened, or will ever happen,

to this dog that i love.

i really am bursting to my skin with things to say;

i find it hard to line up a right time and the right words to do so.

another brilliant year gone by, and i finally have things to show for it.

i am surprisingly, and perhaps uncomfortably, proud of myself

for getting to today, despite what my nonchalance suggests.

yesterdays were the ones that held secrets, but now they are laid bare,

singing some quantifiable map that i can finally understand.

tomorrows will now shake in delight for being the secret-keepers

i chase to catch each day.

besides the annual whipping boy resolution

of being kinder to myself, i realized a few days ago

that i would rather choose not to lock myself in with any others.

i shudder to think of a situation where life does away with

all citrus plants on earth when i absolve to make a better lemonade;

who knows what may happen even a breath from now?

as long as i can be happy i will choose to do the things that i

inevitably want to do.

this is a vision i keep having:

standing in between the trees that are my neighbors now,

creating through my legendary and celebrated thought-alchemy

a miniature version of myself.

maybe about a foot tall.

wearing the clothes that i am wearing.

i stare at him as he jumps from the ground and begins to float

in midair (maybe a tribute to my continued

flabbergasted attitude towards gravity and all its mindcrushing implications).

then i point to him with my right index finger,

slowly making bigger and bigger circles around

that messy hair of his;

he begins to revolve slowly with my determination.

one by one, things start appearing from the tip of my finger,

things that i attribute to my ephemeral version of love:

a blanket, my guitar, bottles of water,

books, all the jumbled livery of my attempts at writing,

some favorite clothes of mine that i resign to share, etc.

then i realize this is me that i am seeing.

this is me surrounded by every single thing i want to give to someone,

me that is impatient to be a part of something more again.

when i see me floating there,

i muster up every ounce of energy i have and prepare myself

to throw this "all-laid-out" me at someone.

then i come to my sense, and the leaves on the ground

smell in their wonderful damp, wintry way,

the traffic noise hits my face in waves,

the reality of the moment tunes in with a blip.

what i am saying is that i am overflowing right now.

i feel uneven, although in a good way of sorts,

and i have this urgent need to go full force

straight into someone else.

yes, i speak like a madman. i feel like a madman.

more than anything, i want to prove again that i really do

have something wonderful to give to someone else,

as long as i get a chance.

i hope i can find someone brave enough to accept that.

you know, dear readers, i write this quite a lot here:

dum spiro spero.

when i first read that phrase, i fell in love with it more so than

i fell in love with many things.

i fell in love with it because this phrase, more than any others,

represents how i feel about life,

during the best times and the worst.

i like to imagine some ancient person in some ancient land,

looking up at the night sky,

feeling that same feeling i have of being so purely happy that we are alive,

able to see the glory that is the existence of each speck of light we see

against the backdrop of infinity.

maybe thousands of years separate us,

and the soundtrack to this moment is most assuredly different,

and we probably do not look much alike

(although i have been told i have greco-like features

by my mother, which means it must be true).

but when this person bravely put into words what countless people

believed before them, and will continue to believe far past

the days when their bones dissolve into molecules,

they made this idea ageless, perhaps even transcendent.

i know i am a resigned romantic,

but i fell in love with that vision, and i fell in love with that phrase,

that phrase so perfect in my eyes.

so happy new year, everyone,

and i sincerely wish nothing but the best for you all;

if nothing else, while you breath, you hope as well.

as i transition from this life to the next,

i am incessantly wondering what is to come.

regardless of the bold proclamations i make for my future self,

i am just as clued in to next week as the electric blue

lint spouting off my new holiday sweater.

another xmas gone by in a flash,
and the pressing needs of every day life start up slowly.

it has been a while since i wrote here last.
i have been more withdrawn, selfish even,
with my thoughts, going so far as to keep them hidden in ink,
folded over closely in recycled paper.

i have actually written a great deal in the past couple of months;
really i have been building a collection of non sequiturs
in hopes that i can actually pen something that beckons closer inspection.
for a while i re-created moments from a very specific timeframe
of my past, and i actually had fun doing so, although the subject matter
was moderately serious, or as serious as any parts of my life can get.

i am chuckling to myself as i read over what i have managed
to put down just now, because i really have no idea how to say
what i want to say, or perhaps even what it is that i want to say.

i cherish the moments when i am not so disjointed,
when i can just sit down, tweak my mind,
and let things come freely without feeling so...forced.
but as we all know, dear readers, that will happen again at some point
and so neither you nor i should worry so much about it.
until then, all you have to read is this babbling
and nonsense, which does get tiresome after a while.
just stick it out with me. 

i admit i was lackadaisical this thanksgiving,

at least re: my usual account of what i am thankful for.

several excuses include me being busy with my friends,

whom i have not seen in sundry years,

and overloading on things that i should not have eaten

that i should not have eaten

(i.e. the point past the point where i should have kept my

overreaching mouth shut and not eaten any more.

i conceded approximately 4-5 lbs this thanksgiving

on phil and clare's mac and cheese alone.).

regardless, i do have some things in mind

which i should directly thank for making my life liveable.

first, and most importantly, are my friends.

without my friends, these last couple of months would have been

disastrous, to say the least.

i have enumerated countless times how shitty my life

has been in the recent past, and without the support

of people who care about me deep in my brainspot,

i would have been far more miserable,

perhaps even intolerable to myself.

i rarely admit in public that i need the help of others,

but i feel safe enough here to say that

i do rely on those who know so;

they know who they are, even if i am bombastic enough

to say so about 2% of the time.

second, i am thankful for routines.
as much as i love unpredicability and spontaneous
gun fires/death dealing robots/encounters with strange animals,
i feel so comfortable doing things the same way
day in and day out.
i know this is an odd thing to be thankful for,
but i can easily imagine myself going crazy
if i had to do a bunch of different things every day.

now that i have dealt with those clerical duties,
time to discuss things more important.

lately i have been having some bizarre dreams.
i actually believe all my dreams for the past several weeks
have somehow seeped onto one another,
creating a world that is parallel to reality
except for one theme between them that is slightly,
yet essentially, different than my actual life.
in all of these hyper-vivid dreams,
i never get what i want.
i see whatever it is i want right in front of me,
but i always end up with something else
or nothing at all.
i would not go so far as to say they are nightmares,
but being denied night after night in my dreams
is quite tiresome, not to mention a bit
disheartening once i mull it over a bit with my dogs
when i wake up
(unsurprisingly, they are apathetic to my misgivings
and generally have nothing to contribute to my psyche;
i am beginning to suspect that dogs are
actually sociopaths, but because of their cute faces
and petite bodies, we are unable to distinguish this fact.
of course, not having humanistic vocal cords
might contribute to the sequelae of this psychiatric condition.).

then again, i am realizing that i am delving deeper
and deeper into the inner circles of my local tautology club.
does what i want in real life matter to myself in my dreams?

disclaimer:

i realize i have been talking about 'reading' and 'books'

far too often for the past month or so.

my thoughts on this subject:

a. i am in charge of this bitch, so i can do as i please;

b. what else am i supposed to do but read during this dead time;

c. as i read, i realize there are more things i want to read,

which lead to even more things i want to read,

which, ultimately, might result in some overdue fines.

i put down Every Love Story is a Ghost Story

not five minutes ago, and i wanted to reflect on it

while its "heartthrobbing" effects have yet to mellow.

considering my last impression of it will come from the very end,

let me attack it from there, which is, i think,

a major point to consider, anyhow.

i cannot be sure if DT Max deliberately used

frequent footnotes (ugh, i am beginning to hate alliteration

more and more, although from where this hate

stems from, i have no idea)

to parallel David Foster Wallace's writing,

or he did so because it was the most convenient method

to relay the information at hand.

regardless, i used two bookmarks while attempting to

devour this "325 page behemoth"

(trust me, i did not at first realize that

it would take me four separate days to read this thing,

and Max makes you work for these 325 measly pages;

i do not like to boast, but this is coming from the guy

that read the final Harry Potter in under 10 hours.

then again, quis est Harry Potter?)

one for the place i was in the biography,

and one for the place i was in the footnotes.

all of my feeble-minded troubles aside,

it seemed very much like being the co-pilot

of an airplane you knew was about to crash,

but the other pilot did not,

because you were the only one with the fuel gauge

on the instrument panel.

as the footnotes plummeted in number,

finally whittling down to none in the last chapter,

i had not even the chance to come to terms with

what i knew was inevitable.

that in itself is quite a "chicken or the egg" conundrum:

even though i knew the whole time reading

what the end was going to be,

the tale kept me entranced just enough to float me,

a loan shark digging his claws ever deeper into

my emotional bank, knowing the final balance would go his way.

that was why the end felt so abrupt and two-sided,

the biography portion finally merging unceremoniously

with the footnote portion at the end of Wallace's life.

another intriguing aspect of the narrative

was how vast and giants-trampling-little-villages-esque

the preceding years of Wallace's life were treated as,

and how it compared to the little last-breath

of his death in the final four pages or so.

it may have been that Max knew,

along with Wallace, The Pale King was stagnant

in the way that only Wallace could stagnate himself;

although Wallace's depression was what ultimately

drove him to suicide, there was no progression for him

with his novel, and that made it difficult for Max

to progress the narrative as well,
effectively forcing him to end at the grotesquely,
paradoxically organic end.

Wallace went off of his medication and barely gave himself

a chance to cope, instead withdrawing

and focusing on the chasm his unfinished novel brought into his life

(that is not to say that there was a reason for his death;

depression, and its symptoms, manifestations, etc., is something

no person ever feels the same as another,

and especially at the level that Wallace felt,

no one could ever begin to imagine.

therefore, to attribute blame to his inability to work

would be misguided.

i am hesitant to say that i have experienced

this kind of depression, but i have experienced

a pain so immobile and disruptive that

the ending of my life seemed to me a rational solution.

i realize i digress, but i cannot stress enough

how important this point is:

even if the pain of his absence lingers in the heart

of those who loved him, and even those remotely grazed

by his writing, which could be seen as the ultimate

extension of himself as a person,

no one can truly step into his world and realize

why he did what he did, and we can never begin

to fully comprehend the darkness that took him).

in this cycle of self-agony, Max really had nothing

to show the reader, because ultimately, he cannot feel

as Wallace did, and thus he cannot analyze,

let alone empathize, for the reader.

picture the mother snake

of the famous ouroboros:

she knows her child is destined to devour itself,

and so cannot attempt to feed it any further,

allowing the facts of her universe to plant even further.

i write late into the night,

and i have so many things on my mind regarding this book.

i am unsure as to whether or not i will ever get to

a full analysis of everything else that i have gleaned from

studying a facet of Wallace's life.

all i can say is that it made me look hard at myself,

and question the feelings and motive for feelings

that i find myself having constantly.

i, as Wallace did, fear the recursive nature

of trying to be a good person,

and trying more than that to be a whole person.

i am not saying that he and i were very alike,

but that there are similarities that made me

feel an aching connection with his troubled life

(that is literal, by the way, that aching connection.

sometimes my body manifests emotions physically,

making my heart press and my stomach twist,

beads of sweat gathering by my unreadable palm lines.

it is not something i can control, trust me,

but sometimes it can be interesting).