198 Shakespeare Street, S.F.

February 1997

OK, I’m starting to get back the feeling that I really don’t want to be here anymore and that I’m willing to do something about it. But typically, I’m thinking that I should hold out for another month so I can visit Madoka in Japan during Spring Break. Is that just another excuse to put it off? Probably, but it doesn’t matter, Madoka is the exception to any rules anyway.

I’ve been trying to be more positive about my life and to be less hostile to the people in the world around me. It wears thin sometimes. I get wrapped up in the nightmare of my own existence, and I just don’t want to be here. I don’t feel like I am here. Physical existence is only one level of existence and it’s frustrating as hell when it’s the only one we can recognize in our human form.

When I do focus on my undeniable physical existence, it’s pretty miserable. I have problems with my skin, of being in my skin; I hate this well-defined border of my physical existence. It does not reflect the feeling that my non-physical existence tapers off asymptotically, disappearing into infinity.

But I have skin, this flesh-bag that can be the source of pleasure or pain. Pain, which I’ve already negated as most people understand it. Pain for me is just another sensation, there is no qualitative value to place on it. It is not something to avoid or something bad. So when people ask if it hurts to cut myself - no. Of course I’ve never had smoldering slivers forced under my fingernails, so it’s not like I’ve experienced the outer limits of my pain threshold. As for pleasure, in regard to physical intimacy, I’m just not interested anymore. I can’t imagine that in my physical reality anymore.

I don’t like breathing. I don’t like air. I don’t like moving. I don’t like being. I don’t like the ground below my feet, the light and color of the world around me. I don’t like the physical world around me. I don’t like anything about my existence. Is there anything I do like?

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I was in the law library the other day and I experienced a very strange sensation. I don’t think I’d quite call it an epiphany. No, it wasn’t an epiphany. It was just a sensation.

I had this feeling that it was possible to convince myself that it is totally possible to transform the world around me and go back into my past; to use and focus imagination and it would actually transform reality. I imagined with all my might it possible to go back to my first year of college, knowing that I just switched dimensions and realities. Not being constrained by time and space. Not just a game of imagining what I would do different, but to actually make that leap. It wasn’t a hypothetical, it was completely transcendental.

Maybe I’m just crazy. Maybe this is all just pathological. When I kill myself, it will all be within the normativeness of this reality. They, whoever, will explain my death or disappearance according to only what they know, put pieces together as they logically fit. Can’t be helped.

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I need to get serious about dying again. All this putting it off is making it a joke. I just want to do it. There are no more considerations. It’s a personal given that I’m going to do it sooner or later. I don’t really feel the “bad” days too intensely, and the “good” days make me really uncomfortable. The discomfort is because they just don’t feel like they fit. They don’t feel real or concrete, I know that they are impermanent and transient.

Out shooting:

Series V, Roll 2 (Pentax K2, Tri-X):


Frame 34 - Stonestown Mall, San Francisco.

Series V, Roll 3 (Pentax K2, Ilford HP5):


Frame 4 - Mission District. Valencia and 17th Street. These dogs were staring intently into a taqueria, probably where their owner was grubbing.

Series V, Roll 2 (Pentax K2, Tri-X):

Frame 15 - Market Street at Guerrero. Clever shot, too bad the negative was so hard to work with.

Series V, Roll 2 (Pentax K2, Tri-X):

Frame 12 - Display cases are great to shoot at night because of the perfect lighting.

Series V, Roll 1 (Pentax K2, Tri-X):

Twin Peaks:


Frame 16 - Diamond Heights


Frame 17 - Shooting south at the little boxes on the hillside, made of ticky-tacky, all the same


Frame 20 - Strangers, but they made me happy.

Someone Else's Tourist Shot Series:

Frame 23

Series V, Roll 1 (Pentax K2, Tri-X):

Frame 4 - Marin Headlands

Series IV, Roll 10 (Pentax K2, Ilford XP2):

Lake Merced, San Francisco:


Frame 33 - Lake Merced is in the southwest area of San Francisco, not far from the Pacific Ocean.

Series IV, Roll 10 (Pentax K2, Ilford XP2):

Justin Herman Plaza ice rink: Embarcadero Center


Frame 27 - I flip all my black and white negatives unless there are words that would draw too much attention to the negative being flipped. In this case, the "San Francisco" on the Ferry Building doesn't draw attention at all that the negative is flipped.