1347 La Loma, Berkeley

June 1996

It has become harder and harder to face the reality of my existence, that I’m here, a living being.

I have such trouble expressing myself and my feelings. I have such trouble even recognizing them. I bottle them up and it showed recently when Nobuko moved out.

I’ve been acting like I don’t care and that it’s good riddance, but some part of me hurts because she left one month before the lease was up. She couldn’t stand living here anymore.

There is a sense of abandonment that I’m having trouble admitting to myself; partly due to the irrationality of the idea. Pride is present as well, she was the one who left first, even though I also stopped liking living with Nobuko. You find things out about people when you live with them, and some things are better left unknown between friends. Like that they’re slobs or inconsiderate. I don’t know what my feelings are. I don’t know how to approach them.

I let go of people easily because there always is a point where I stop caring, or I think I stop caring.

When I value their friendship, I always think that if problems arise, it should be no problem to confront the issues and talk them through. But the first thing that happens when problems arise is that they lose their value as a friend and it’s no longer worth the effort to confront them to work out the problems.

Something still hurts. I ended up not even liking Nobuko. I can make a list. But still I have these feelings of hurt, and I don’t know what and I don’t know why.

So can I make a list of all the other real feelings I have but have repressed? Is there a lifetime’s worth of them? All this bottling in has been debilitating. It can only lead to an implosion. It makes me want to die; the ultimate cop-out. I devalue my life so much that I don’t even want to do anything to remedy my situation because it’s not worth it.

The logical solution is to leave my life. But every once in a while I think I don’t want to, I want to live. I think I do. The will to live may be a repressed feeling. When I had food poisoning and was gripped in that pain, I didn’t want to die miserably. When I brought myself way down with sleeping pills, I didn’t want to die.

I’ve gotten so good at hiding my own feelings. It started as a practice and has since become a perfected habit, an art. I remember hiding my feelings way early in my life, but at least back then I knew what my real feelings were. Now I have a pretty good idea when I’m hiding my feelings, but I’ve gotten to hide them from myself as well. I have no idea what my real feelings are anymore.

It’s pretty schizo. The act of hiding something suggests that you know what it is and where it is being hidden. I don’t have the slightest. I’m probably very confused. I can understand that, but I don’t feel it. And then it manifests itself in cutting and killing myself. At least it’s logical. We live for logic, don’t we now?

It makes me feel better about killing myself. I wouldn’t do it because of some trivial passing emotion caused by a speck of a moment in a lifetime. There is a huge ocean of an underlying problem that’s been simmering and boiling and to which suicide is a logical and inevitable end. It has been a long-running and difficult problem to deal with myself and my life. It sure has. It has been miserable and like a pot of boiling water, eventually there is nothing left.

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The band has been coming along. I still don’t feel like I’m a member and they’re doing nothing to make me feel any more than a ringer. My feeling is that they will replace me once they find someone who fits their image better. They’re image oriented. Rock and roll. There might be something special about this band. I do think the writing is excellent. I won’t know until we record and gig and see how audiences respond.

It’s not terribly original music. It may even be outdated. Three or four years ago people might have eaten it up. The writing is the strong point of the band. I think they think their attitude is the strong point. As far as drummers go, Pete has his own style, and that’s good. He’s got good time and he’s steady, if not solid.

There’s nothing distinct about Dre’s rig. It’s probably no coincidence that his main axe is a Fender Jaguar. He also splits his channel to run into two different sounding amps to make it sound like two guitars. I don’t know for sure, but it sounds like teen spirit to me. If we get tagged as an Asian American Nirvana, Dre doesn’t give a strong argument against it.

I try to be distinct on bass and I don’t know how much they like that. I think their conception of a bass player is someone that just follows guitar riffs and looks good and has attitude, lowest common denominator functionality. Not the kind of bass player I am. My Riverhead bass and Trace-Elliott rig are also not in vogue with this type of music, and I think that gives me minus points in the image department. I mean, what is a bass player if fans aren’t looking at the equipment, going “cool rig”.

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Have you ever felt like crying because you knew you felt something, but had no idea what it was or what to do about it? Dre and Pete bailed on rehearsal and didn’t call me until after I had left for rehearsal. They still haven’t gotten me keys to the space and I ended up waiting for two hours. I think I was really pissed, but my feelings were really obscure and ambiguous, so I really don’t know. I couldn’t pinpoint why I was pissed or who or what I was pissed at.

They haven’t gotten me a key yet. That’s an issue. I tried justifying everything by telling myself that this won’t happen after I get a key; a problem easily remedied. Get me the damn keys or I don’t show up until they do.

My feelings were obviously churning underneath and I was doing my best to keep them down and cover them up and come up with excuses to not face them. I picked up a bottle of tequila on the way home, driving wildly, I felt no loyalty to the band in terms of staying alive for it.

What were my alternatives? Get angry? Lash out? At whom? What could I do but take it out on myself? I tend to direct my negative feelings at myself.

I was trying hard to avoid being passive-aggressive, but I kept running into it when I was deciding what to do. Should I call them and tell them that I was really pissed, but that it was OK since it wouldn’t happen again because they would get me the key by Friday? Demand that they have the key by next rehearsal or I don’t show? Demand some assurance that this wouldn’t happen again? Ignore it completely and pretend nothing happened? Quit? I am passive-aggressive, but it gets misdirected. It gets directed all over the place. Mostly at myself.

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I thought that I was simply anti-social all this time. I’m starting to think that it has more to do with not dealing with myself and my emotions. I’ve stopped feeling or I’ve repressed feelings to such an extent that I don’t recognize anything as feelings. Feelings are completely visceral and sublimated, I can’t even begin to process them intellectually. I thought that I just roll with the punches, that I take life as it comes, but really every bit of life I encounter sticks to me and stays with me and gets sublimated and squeezes the life out of me.

I don’t even know if I want to live or not. If I do, I need help. Or else I’ll keep taking life out on myself, I’ll keep cutting, keep drinking, keep dying, keep destroying myself.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that I’ve reached the end of my rope. I reached it a long time ago and since then I’ve just been hanging on to strands, just barely being able to grasp another one as each one breaks. I don’t know how to get a hold of the rope even I wanted to. I don’t know how many strands I have left. I feel like I’ve hit rock bottom, no where I want to go. I have no friends, no feelings, no desire, just nothing.

Series III, Roll 2 (Fujica ST605n, Tri-X):

Frame 32 - Shooting west at Sutro Tower and into the sun from the roof of Downtown Studios off 3rd Street in Bayview-Hunters Point, San Francisco.

The rehearsal space closed several years later, displacing hundreds of musicians and bands, during the dot-com boom. The owners were hoping to cash-in and make a killing converting the space into housing, but then the dot com crash happened. I don't know what happened to the space, but I hope the owner got as screwed as he deserved to be. I was out of there by then, but the space was huge, and every rock musician in San Francisco knew someone personally who was kicked out.

Series III, Roll 2 (Fujica ST605n, Tri-X):

Frame 12 - Embarcadero Center, San Francisco. Shot through glass.