1557 Noe Street, San Francisco

It’s just getting harder and harder. I’m trying to keep light about it, but the feelings creep up and overwhelm. Then I think that it’s alright, I want my life over anyway, so just lighten up and feel good about these feelings that are leading to my inevitable demise. But the feelings themselves are hard in each moment.

I find myself questioning my motives. Why do I want to go to therapy? If I want to leave, just leave. If I want to get better and live, face up to it. I tell myself I want more information; I’ll leave but I want to know what a professional thinks of my situation; I want validation. Isn’t that a crock, a load of crap?

Everyday is hard, that is the character of my life as it is. It is hard just to be here, to exist, to live in this skin, to feel, to have sensation, to see with declining eyesight, to hear with deteriorating hearing, to know and think with a deteriorating mind and grasp on existence and reality. To be cognizant when I can’t believe any of this is true and real.

1557 Noe Street, San Francisco

I’m suicidal but I’ve learned to live with it. What the hell does that mean? What is the bottom line of my existence? That I don’t want to be here? Am I going to tell that to anyone? How fast is that going to be misinterpreted?

We’re getting a new benefits package at work and they go into effect on June 1st. My first order of business is therapy (followed closely by new glasses and perhaps a dentist visit). What am I going to say? How am I going to approach it? Am I going to play games and make the therapist figure me out, or am I just going to let it all out and let him or her know what I think about my situation? It’s scary; I have no idea what I’m going to do. I scare myself.

1557 Noe Street, San Francisco

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is getting out of control. I don’t know how much longer I can hold this together. I read today that death is not an event, it’s a process. It is a process. When I die, it will not be an event, it will not be a moment. It will be the culmination of a process that began a long time ago. I’m starting to spiral out of control again.

Starting from June 1st, our benefits kick in and I will start going to therapy. I don’t want help. I don’t want to be “cured”. I just want to know what a professional thinks of me. I just want that opinion of what the medical establishment thinks of me.

1557 Noe St., San Francisco

I need to start looking for a therapist right away. I need to find out what's going on inside me. I no longer believe that the way I am is healthy. No, that's not it. I don't care about "healthy", I don't subscribe to normative definitions of what's "healthy". I need to find out what's going on inside me. I need help understanding why I do what I do.

I am evasive, I do bury my feelings. I need to find out why I'm evasive and what are the feelings I'm burying and why.

I got into a fender bender today. I don't know whose fault it was, but the guy smelled the gin on my breath so I had to take the blame, no questions asked. I can't seem to figure out what my feelings are. I was with Rosalie and we were meeting my friends for dinner and my immediate reaction was to not let anything show. But I know that something was going on, I knew that cracks were forming in the foundation, even if I couldn't feel them.

I don't believe anything will stop me from eventually ending my own life, I think that's ingrained. I still want to, I still think that's the only way for me to go. But I don't want to in complete ignorance of who and what I am about.

1557 Noe St., San Francisco

At the center of my existence is anger. It's something I haven't really touched or dealt with in a while. It's not denial, I just haven't had the need to. And more importantly, dealing with it probably would have been a really bad idea. Not dealing with it was a safety mechanism. If I grappled with it, I would probably have killed myself. I don't think I'm suppressing or repressing anything in any extreme, unhealthy way. It's always there and it's getting expressed some way or another, but I just can't grab it with both hands and deal with it because that would be too overwhelming.

But it's certainly not benign, and it certainly is keeping me from...I don't know what. Something. It's a great unknown. I don't know what to do with it. For now it's alright to acknowledge it and that it is having an adverse effect on my living my life.

1557 Noe St., San Francisco

I had a dream with Josephine in it this morning. I thought I was over her, but issues still linger. It doesn’t help that it touched on abandonment issues that I still have. It happened at a time that I normally would have been in a deeper sleep and wouldn’t have remembered it, but there was noise that brought me into a shallower sleep.

The dream was that I was in bed, on my loft, and I looked across the room at a calendar on the wall, where there isn’t one in reality, and noticed a post-it on a certain date, a post-it that I didn’t put up. Intuiting that it had something to do with Josephine, who was still in the country and staying in the house that I was in until she left, which changed from this apartment to a house, possibly my parent’s house, I jumped out of the loft taking blankets down with me and read the note. The note was from Josephine, it was a tender note saying that she was leaving on that date, the position of the post-it was probably August 31. The tenderness was in a quote from a musical that only existed in the dream and referred to an inside joke between us that also existed only in the dream, something about being a star. At that point I panicked and ran around the house looking for her, going to the rooms where I expected her to be sleeping. One was a couch and the sheet on the couch was undisturbed and neatly tucked in. I was trying to scream, “No!”, but my throat was thick and I could only manage a scratchy tone. The feeling of a loved one being gone was too much to bear.

All day today I was thinking of the tender moments between Josephine and me, the fun times, the way she laughed and was so full of life, and it hurt to try to reconcile that with the selfishness I sense from her now.

My recent thoughts on having abandonment issues, along with this dream, reminded me that the earliest dream I can remember was an abandonment dream. I’m not exactly sure when I had the dream, it was probably in the old house in Englewood Cliffs, and I’m not sure how old I was, but my arbitrary guess would be between seven and nine years old.

I mostly just remember the feeling of being abandoned. There are two actual images I remember. One is a God’s Eye view of a boat like a yacht sailing on the Hudson River on a sunny day and the feeling that I wasn’t on it and was supposed to be. The other image is me on the banks of the Hudson River, one foot upon a rock looking out over the water. The view is from the ground up at me, the George Washington Bridge may have been in the image. The feeling was that I was alone and that I had been left behind.

And this all led me to a real memory that may have contributed to these abandonment issues. I think my age was in the same range as the dream. Parents were visiting someone on Virginia Ct. in Englewood Cliffs, a few doors down from a classmate of mine. I was playing in the backyard, probably with Tom and Bob, and they all got in the car and started to leave without me. I think I remember running after the car for I don’t know how far until they noticed I wasn’t in the car. It may not have been too far, several houses. I was crying but they were all laughing about it. I don’t know if the memory is real, though.

198 Shakespeare St., S.F.

December 1996

There is nothing keeping me alive. There hasn’t been anything keeping me alive for two weeks. I’m still alive. I feel that I’ve entered a new period in my life where there is nothing to keep me alive, I can die at any time, but I won’t.

Opportunities have been many, I just haven’t taken any of them and I’m not sure why. I’m afraid that I may have chickened out, which is the last reason I thought would prevent me. I know I still can. I just have to figure out why not.

Maybe I should start accepting myself as an ordinary human being. What happened was that I reached a point of desperation, beyond which was the point of no return. Instead of plowing right through like I thought I would, I grabbed onto something - desperate lunge for the dead branch to keep me falling off the cliff. I started looking at the bright side of life, thinking that there might be something to live for, thinking that there is a way for me to make it through if I just tried.

How pathetic.

So.

There is no reason why I should be alive now and there is no reason keeping me alive. Yet I’m still here.

Why?

It looks like my problems and my life weren’t as simple as I had thought. It isn’t so easy to die after all. But I still can’t commit to living. It’s still in my mind that I can do it today, tomorrow, any time in the near future. But something is stopping me. I don’t know what. There is much more surging under the surface than I had ever imagined. What’s going on in this little mind of mine?

***********************************

I’ve started to be nice to the ‘rents. I’ve stopped harboring negative feelings towards everyone I encounter on the street. A long time ago Diem told me I was arrogant. Only now have I been able to accept that and begin dealing with that. I don’t like the idea of being arrogant and I don’t want to be. I guess I can’t deny that I’ve always been pretty condescending. It’s only a natural step to admit that I’m arrogant. How to deal with that?

I don’t even know where to begin to figure out what’s wrong with me. I don’t know how to reach out. I don’t know how to accept help. I don’t know how to be vulnerable without having a complete breakdown. No one has ever been responsive to my problems, not even professionals. Look what happened then - got tossed into mental institutions. Psychiatrists patted themselves on the back for coming up with some diagnosis or explanation but didn’t do anything to treat it.

It has gotten harder and harder to reach out and speak out. I couldn’t tell my feelings to another person anymore. It has become second nature to take my feelings and quickly bury them under the surface. Anything I want to express about myself I do it with a blade.

I want to smash things, destroy my room, hurt myself, let go, cry, scream, drink myself stupid, throw shit out the window, but then I always step back into this world, this reality, with composure, with frankness, arrogance.

I can still enjoy things, there are things that still make me feel good, but do they outweigh the problems I’m having with existing, of simply being here?

Earlier this month, for the first time in a long while, I actually felt the air against my skin, not even wind, and appreciated it. It felt good. Life as a good thing. Being alive is a good thing, but it’s not so good when my insides have rotted through to nothingness.

I felt the air as I breathed it in and it felt good. It felt life; alive. And still I want to stop doing it. I’ve had asthma, I know what it’s like to not be able to breathe. I’m not taking it for granted.

***********************************

I am guided by God, totally open to definition, in whatever I choose to do. That’s not arrogance, I think it’s just fact. God’s presence makes itself apparent every once in a while. A sign is sent.

I was typing what could have easily been my last entry. I had a flash of inspiration and I was writing the whole truth about my existence, my understanding of myself and my role in the world around me. It became so obvious, and what I was writing was exactly how I wanted to express it.

Then Microsoft Word suddenly quit. It didn’t even try saving something like it usually does. It usually fails to save anything when it crashes, but at least there is something in the trash to indicate it tried to save something. This time, nothing.

And usually everything cuts out and the computer jams and I have to restart it. This time, it was just Word - I got a message box saying the program had unexpectedly quit. I clicked OK and cleared the desktop, but it was still active. Except for remnants of the dead Word screen, it was like the computer wasn’t even registering that the program had been running at all. I booted up Word again with no problem, like nothing had happened.

No indication that what I wrote about my existence existed at all. It was like I hit it right on the nose and that information, the way I put it, was too precious for me to keep. Yoink. There was no question about whether I should try to re-write it - it would be impossible. The best I can do now is re-visit the ideas doing my best not to butcher them.

Basically, I don’t know anything about myself anymore. I don’t know who I am or what comprises my identity. I have nothing grounding my being to which I can definitively say, “I am this”.

The world exists as the limit of our knowledge and the world exists only to the extent that we know. My world doesn’t exist because I have no idea what I am or what my knowledge is. I don’t have any knowledge that is concrete enough to say, “Yes, this is my world”. It’s like my friends and the people I meet, in and out of whose lives I pass with hardly any impact at all.

There are times when I walk down the street and no one gets out of my way, no matter how aggressively I’m walking. I’m always getting out of everyone else’s way. It’s as if I didn’t exist at all, and there are times I want to turn around and shout, “What?! I don’t exist?!” It’s crazy.

Then part of me is thinking, no, maybe I don’t exist. Not to them. Maybe I’m not there and they really don’t see me. It’s as if I’m a ghost or practicing to be one of my own conceptualized angels. Theoretically, if I didn’t get out of the way, they should be able to pass right through me, but that would never happen because of the limitations of my belief and knowledge. At the last split second, right at the contact point, at the point when they should pass right through me, I have a doubt, and with that one bit of doubt comes down a torrent of my firm belief in my physical existence here on earth and that gives me substance. The person will bump into me accidentally and he or she will say “sorry”.

Conversely, at the last split second, right at the contact point, I do not have the requisite doubt about my physical existence to experience the truth of my existence. I always say I doubt my physical existence, but at that moment of contact, the test, I don’t have the requisite doubt to pass through.

I’m stuck between those doubts. Because I doubt my existence being able to exceed my knowledge, my existence has substance in this world and I’m confined by it. But because I don’t have the requisite doubt to stop knowing the world as I see and feel it, I can’t escape the suggestion of my physical existence into which I’m confined. I’m in that twilight region between the daylight, where light illuminates the physical world and we don’t doubt what we see, and the nighttime where we can’t see what is there because it’s not illuminated. I can see the world, but I’m not really there, but I’m too much there to be in pure nighttime.

I have no identity in either daylight or nighttime. I don’t know what I am or where I stand in either. I have no knowledge of myself to project onto the world to give it or me substance. I don’t exist to people because of me, and they don’t exist to me because of me.

Reality depends on our subjective knowledge. Without that knowledge, there is no existence. There is more to existence than this three dimensional physical reality. There is a lot more going on. How do I know? Because this, what we’re living, is so insubstantial, it is nothing, we are just Plato’s shadows. If this is all there is, I’d really might as well be dead. So another paradox, either I don’t exist or else I may as well be dead. I’d rather be alive and not exist, than be not real and just as well be dead.

***********************************

If someone came up to me with a gun and told me to give up my wallet or else he or she was going to shoot me, I would say, “why should I do you a favor and give you my wallet? Shoot me and take it yourself”. That’s a reflection of my existence. If there was anything in this world onto which I could find a projection of myself, I might feel some concern when faced with someone about to blow my head off. I don’t exist enough to have any considerable concern about my forced demise. I don’t exist because I don’t care.

I have no idea what is going on in my mind. I’m not honest with myself. This is what my rumination started with, the one that disappeared. Nobody knows who I am because I haven’t painted an accurate picture of myself to anybody, and I don’t know who I am because I haven’t painted an accurate picture of myself to me, either. I don’t know what I feel, I don’t know what’s going on in my head. I obviously can’t know what is real. All I know is that I have nothing in this world to ground myself or my existence.

There is nothing in the world that I can look at and identify some part of me. People can look at their friends and say, yes, this person or these people are a part of my existence; they are a part of affirming who I am. Families are classic examples; families that don’t get along, but stick to each other because they can’t do without each other.

Maybe that was what was behind that assignment in Professor Morris’s seminar in 1992, when he asked us to bring in an object that made us feel close to God. Stupid assignment, I thought. I didn’t bring anything in. I couldn’t bring myself to distill my relationship with God into some object. So I just mentioned a tree outside Spanish House that I passed every day, frequently wondering to myself what my relationship to that tree was. Tree. Me. Why?

There is no object on earth in which I feel some sort of my identity, something to affirm my existence, some relationship to God, the Real, the omnipresent and omniscient, God who is everything and who cannot not be anything. Nothing, as if I didn’t exist. I don’t exist and never will. If I was supposed to, I would already. That’s good enough proof for me. I have to live my life for right now, not for future possibilities. If someone protested and told me that I exist to them, that just means that they exist, not me.

***********************************

Is reincarnation linear through time, one lifetime succeeding another after another? You live a lifetime and you die and you get re-born in the chronological future - a few days later, a few months later, a few years later? Once I think about it, it doesn’t make sense anymore; why should linear time be universal law? I think any idea that reincarnation is linear through time is only a projection of our knowledge of our own linear lives and linear experience onto something much larger.

So if reincarnation isn’t linear through time, one can be re-born into the relative past or future. Hm, but this is problematic. If one is born into the relative past, is the future already written or can it be changed? Being born into the relative future doesn’t pose that big of a problem, but being born into the relative past is sticky because theoretically the “future” has already been done. Actually being born into the relative future can also be problematic because any point in the future is already history to some other point in the future.

OK, conundrum; rewind.

Why can’t the future, i.e. a relative history, be changed once a person is re-born into the chronological past? Actually, that could help explain the transmission of knowledge and human development. Isn’t it possible that the automobile was developed in this timeline because someone from the future with the technical knowledge to develop the components of the automobile was re-born into this timeline? In other timelines, perhaps the automobile wasn’t developed, perhaps something else was.

It’s all possible. Isn’t there some theory in physics that states all timelines that could possibly occur actually do occur. If so, then it works that any timeline can be affected by the knowledge/karmic transfer of someone from the future being re-born into the past. Likewise, someone from the past can be re-born into the future. Even more tricky, someone from the past from a different timeline can be re-born into the future into any timeline. That’s too tricky for me, I don’t even want to go there. The idea of being re-born into a world with a history vastly different from what I know is beyond my conception.

Rewind again, avoid the conundrum.

Perhaps Martin Luther King, Jr. was a ‘past’ re-incarnation of someone from the future, someone who already lived a different ‘history’ in which the Civil Rights Movement either didn’t happen at all or happened in a vastly different way. It could have been anybody at any time, but in this particular timeline, Martin Luther King, Jr. was born with seeds from his experience in some other future, completely unbeknownst to him, that affected what he did in this lifetime.

This history of the Civil Rights Movement, or any historical event for that matter, is not written in stone. Furthermore, the outcome of the Civil Rights Movement isn’t necessarily satisfactory. It did a lot, but it never achieved the equality it strove for. So it’s possible for someone from this timeline, at any point in the future, to be re-born into that time period and affect things differently. In some timeline, America got it right.

I’ve thought this before that it is possible to be re-born into the past, but not in a way as to be able to change history. I thought the major events of history are pretty much fixed, and any reincarnation into the past is restricted by those historical frameworks. You can be re-born into the Holocaust, perhaps as punishment in some level of hell, but you can’t do anything that changes history. I don’t think so. I think history can be changed by an individual’s reincarnation into the relative past.

Considering how many people there are, this theory is mind-boggling to the point of irrelevance. But it’s possible. And possibly relevant if you don’t look at it in the big picture.

How about a twist: say I’m driving along and there are two possible routes I can take to where I want to go. I arbitrarily choose one for whatever reason and I get into an accident and I’m killed. If I had taken the other route, I would have avoided the accident and would have survived. In an alternative reality, another branch of reality, I did take that route and continued to live a long productive life.

So when I died in the car crash, that ‘me’ got re-born somewhere. If reincarnation can cross alternate realities, can I be re-born into the timeline in which the other ‘me’ survived? It’s another conundrum, because considering the multiplicity of alternative realities in which I could have and therefore did die, is it possible for all of those ‘me’s to be re-born in the same timeline as different people, but who have a bizarre affinity for each other? Assuming they even meet. What a mess!

Forget it. It’s all useless theory. It doesn’t mean a thing.

198 Shakespeare St., S.F.

November 1996

Jen approached me during class break during a night class. I was sitting out on a table in the hall and she came up to me and we just started chatting. She’s originally from Long Island and she started going to law school in New York, but then she transferred out here.

She intrigues me. I’m still not sure what I think of her or whether I like her or not. I’m leaning towards the not, but she is a character. She plays bass. I don’t expect our acquaintance to last very long, she’s just not my type.

***********************************

Forget it. I’m conceding. My life is not going to get any better, and even if it did I can’t bring myself to convince myself that I would care. Everything is wrong and I’m just simply sick of it. Everything went wrong, every path I’ve taken has been wrong, the road that I’m on is wrong. I don’t like anything about me and my life, and any reason I can think of for staying is bullshit. Fear of death, fear of what comes next, fear of missing something? Enjoyment, music, living, breathing, seeing, photographing? This is pathetic.

My life is pathetic and living it is pathetic. I’ve been waiting so long for something to change. Not even something in my life, just me. I’ve been waiting for me to change and it just isn’t happening. I still don’t like myself. I don’t like how I am in this world. I don’t like anything I do. I don’t like being in this skin. I don’t like thinking my thoughts or seeing through my eyes. I don’t like eating, sleeping, showering, shitting, peeing, thinking, being. I don’t like this world. Everything I like about life and this world is ruined by human beings. I hate people, I hate my relations with people, I hate my interactions with people. That’s why I keep disappearing from people’s lives.

I used to worry about what’s going to happen to my stuff, what people around me are going to do, how they’re going to react, and what they’re going to have to go through. Fuck it. Why should I care? What about what I have to go through? Do they think suicide is fucking easy? Let them deal with it. It happens. Shit happens. Let them throw all of my shit away, send it back to the ‘rents. Whatever. That last barrier that has kept me alive is finally down. There is nothing to stop me now. Nothing that will change.

Tomorrow, why not?

***********************************

Damn! The feeling didn’t last. I hate missing a moment. I don’t think I’ll set these dates anymore. All they are anyway are time outs; buffer time to allow me to cool off. When I decide to die, it’ll be in one of those moments, but it will be real with no waiting for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. If I can’t do it right at the moment, then I’m obviously not going to do it. What I do know for sure is that it’s been a long, long time since I’ve had a day worth living.

It was Pete’s birthday, and I thought it would be a nice gesture to go out with them after rehearsal. After rehearsal, I told them I had to deliver an amp to a friend, so I had to meet them at the bar later.

So I went to Jen’s to deliver her amp, she came along with me to the bar, and afterwards I drove her home and she asked me to come in. So I ended up at her place and was slightly drunk so I crashed at her place. But by then I pretty much knew what I thought of Jen and then left first thing in the morning.

I’ll stay in touch with Jen for a little while longer. She is fun and social. But I can’t say I’m impressed by much else about her. I can see her getting annoying after a while. But the main thing that sets things in stone between us is that she voted yes on Prop. 209, to ban affirmative action:

Paper for Jurisprudence class which I handed in the day after Election Day after it was known that 209 had passed:

“Recently, in two separate Southern cities, race riots were ignited when white police officers shot and killed black motorists. In the St. Petersburg, Florida incident, the mayor said that he was surprised that it had occurred and that he did not believe that St. Petersburg had a problem with racial tensions. Race riots, however, rarely are the result of a single, isolated, anomalous incident. They are usually catalyzed by a single event that serves as a flashpoint after years of racial tension, discrimination, and neglect. It is far more likely that the mayor’s lack of awareness of racial tensions is an example of precisely why the riot occurred at all.

“In her essay, “The Obliging Shell: An Informal Essay on Formal Equal Opportunity,” Patricia Williams discusses the rhetorical ways that race is (not) dealt with in the law and society. Although equal treatment is the proclaimed goal and ideal for society, the law uses the concept and language of ‘equality’ to either maintain or ignore the reality of continuing inequality. Liberalism, which may claim to be an instrument of equal opportunity and equal treatment through positive law and personal rights, fails to perform those functions in a dynamic where past racial inequality and its continuing repercussions are inadequately redressed.

“The effectuation of the principles of liberalism is necessarily biased and curtailed, even when the word of law is remedied, when a society was based and then developed on principles of racial inequality. Williams argues that racial omission was a literal part of the original intent of the Founding Fathers (Williams, p. 10). The Constitutional omission of other races was not based on mere ignorance or oversight, but was assumed and incorporated into the structure of law. There was no question that “all men created equal” meant white men. The American consciousness of race was defined by the assumed inferiority and underclass status of blacks.

“Through most of this country’s history and development, blacks had little, if any, effective recourse to the law. It was not until the 1950's and 1960's that the Supreme Court realized the slippery nature of the word “equality” when it found Plessy’s “separate but equal” doctrine, which had been enforced for over fifty years, untenable. By that time, the U.S. had completed its westward expansion, underwent the industrial revolution, and was well into modernization.

“Affirmative action plans were an attempt to affirmatively re-place blacks, women, and other minorities into the law and to uplift and equalize their position in society. Affirmative action was also an affirmation of historical inequality and a recognition that true equality under the function of liberalism was only possible if those inequalities were remedied and redressed. “Action” meant that something had to actively be done. Equality was not possible through passive, indirect action; by merely altering the rules and to start treating people equally.

“Yet less than fifty years later, affirmative action is under attack and the Supreme Court has once again revealed the elusive nature of equality and the shifting dynamic of race analysis. Williams discusses the Supreme Court’s decision in City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson, 109 S.Ct. 706 (1989) to demonstrate the Supreme Court’s manipulation of language and logic to accomplish a holding which is no less than astonishing and has the potential of undermining affirmative action in its entirety.

“Very simply, the Court found that there was no evidence of racial discrimination just because a city has a population of more the 50% African Americans and awards less than 1% of municipal contracts to minority-owned businesses. The Court accomplished this holding by using a host of adjectives to diminish the relevance of facts and statistical data and “conjured mythic dangers” to diminish the Court’s role and ability to deal with racial issues in general (Williams, p. 1-2).

“The Court used the narrowest possible interpretation of “equality” to guide their decision. It referred to the Constitutional ideal of “equality” where race is “irrelevant to personal opportunity and achievement” (Croson at 727). The Court’s interpretation of the Constitutional ideal of “equality” is now correct, regardless of the intent of the Framers, but it conveniently forgets that the intent of the Framers had a direct social and historical impact that was maintained for almost 200 years. The fallacy of the Court is in its faith that the effects of almost 200 years of injustice and inequality can be reversed and remedied in thirty years of affirmative action and the subsequent removal of race from the consideration of the law.

“Equality, even with thirty years of affirmative action, has never been reached. It has only revealed how pervasive and ingrained racism is into the fabric of the U.S. social structure. The Supreme Court has held that the government and the courts are not responsible for remedying societal discrimination; only for governmental discrimination. Unfortunately, the effects of the original Constitutional omission of African Americans has directly contributed to societal discrimination. Instead of taking responsibility for the effects of past discrimination by upholding affirmative action as a way of acknowledging the continuing existence of racism and inequality while continuing to proclaim the Constitutional goal of true equality, the Court has chosen to adhere to the Constitutional proclamation of equality and ignore any effects from the past.

“The position that the Court has chosen in the Croson opinion is a positivist one. They interpreted the word “equality” strictly and narrowly and decided that any program based on race which is not remedial of actual, provable, intended discrimination is contrary to the Constitution proclamation of equality. The disparity in a group comprising half the population of Richmond getting less than 1% of municipal contracts, absent proof of intent to discriminate, means absolutely nothing in the eyes of the law.

“The Court chose to emphasize what was not there (proof of intent to discriminate), rather than what was there (a statistic that Justice O’Connor once might have called ‘prima facie evidence of discrimination’). Williams compares this technique with the Parol Evidence Rule which seeks to exclude, as “extrinsic”, evidence that is not probative of the meaning of a document or the intent of the writers.

“The Croson Court’s analysis used what would be the first level of the Parol Evidence Rule, the “fully integrated” document which limits the document to its plain meaning. However, the Court uses a negative as the basic document: the lack of hard proof in the Constitution that there was an intent to discriminate. The Court excluded all other evidence which changes the meaning of that lack of intent to discriminate and concluded that there was no intent to discriminate.

“What the Court effectively excluded was the experience of African Americans in Richmond. There was no racism in the awarding of municipal contracts in the city of Richmond, Virginia. The Court treats race as it always has been treated in the United States. It subordinates it and then uses that subordination as a reason for ignoring it. As Williams puts it, “when segregation was eradicated from the American lexicon, its omission led many to actually believe that racism therefore no longer existed” (Williams, p. 9). That is precisely the position the Supreme Court takes in prescribing its narrow view of equality. It is a flawed view, however, that affirmative action has already delivered the equal treatment that it promised.

“The rules may be color-blind, but people are not” (Williams, p. 10). Societal discrimination is directly related to how the government and courts have treated race and how they continue to treat race. It is not enough to change the rules and proclaim equality has been achieved. In any human race where white males are given a substantial lead of generations of advantage over and at the expense of women and people of color, there cannot be equality. Attainment of the liberalist notion of equality is not fully possible until the generations of societal discrimination has been adequately addressed and redressed.

“Race needs to be recognized by the law so long as society recognizes race. It is the law’s responsibility to recognize race because it is the law that has made women and people of color to “compose and literally define both this society’s underclass and its most underserved population” (Williams, p. 1). If the law chooses to ignore race under the Constitutional proclamation of equality, equality may eventually be achieved, but it will take a considerably much longer time, and an even longer time for the law to figure out why race riots occur.”

Jen’s smart, but she’s offensively clueless as to the issues. Or she’s a Republican.

***********************************

I must say. As much as I care to emphasize the similarities in various religions and spiritual beliefs and reconcile them in unifying way, I must reject the proposition that each person has only one lifetime - one period of responsible moral choice - which is irrevocably decisive in determining a person’s eternal fate without appeal. I reject the belief that our time on earth, from birth to death, is all there is and all that matters on Judgment Day, however that concept is interpreted.

It is exorbitantly egotistical to put that much importance on each of our individual lives. That is more of an expression of human psychology, the need for self-affirmation. I don’t think God, however that is interpreted, has a vested interest in the good or evil of each individual soul that ever experienced the random accident of birth on this planet.

I doubt that "God" is so vain as to handpick which people, freshly raised from the dead, will go to heaven and which will go to hell. I won’t even entertain the idea of God as being anthropomorphic, as a being that makes rational, logical moral decisions, in the manner of human beings, as to where a soul goes. Those are human projections of themselves onto the concept of God. Humans are limited by their knowledge and being to understand the nature of God, so they naturally project human attributes onto God. Such projections are suspect.

What lifetimes are subject to judgment? Only human lifetimes? Who lived the first human lifetime? Was it the first soul that could be said to have evolved out from being considered ape? Or after Neanderthal? Or after human morality developed the concepts of good and evil? Morality is really quite arbitrary when God is couched in such simplistic terms.

At the time of any given formulation of what is good and what is evil, there has been limits on human knowledge. Morality has only been able to be informed by the knowledge and information available at the time. There are now things that we don’t know and haven’t even considered. What happens to morality when we have a better understanding of metaphysics and multiple dimensions. Time goes on, discoveries are made and new knowledge is added. Concepts of good and evil, as far as human beings can define them, are malleable and the standards change.

Delineating a single human lifetime as the moral basis to judge that soul seems arbitrary. It doesn’t make sense. Human character is shaped by circumstance, so once we start asking “what if...” and “what about...”, we start seeing that it is not only arbitrary, but wholly unfair. People are born into advantages and disadvantages, they vary and their experience differs. So how can there be only one moral yardstick to judge their character?

It assumes that everyone is given equal moral choice. People are not given equal moral choice because the advantages or disadvantages people are born into defines what moral choices are available. The delineation of a single human lifetime as the basis for judgment was probably just a projection of a dominant hegemony that didn’t realize that the life of a soul transcends any single lifetime.

The counter-argument to this would be that none of this is relevant and each one of us is alive, and to the extent that we are aware, we are responsible for our own moral behavior. Any complaint as to the definition of a human lifetime or to the uncharted boundaries of human epistemology is irrelevant. Fair enough. But then I would then hold that a “single human lifetime” means any series of human lifetimes, cycles of rebirths, occupied by the “same person”. I don’t know what the “same person” means, but it has something to do with what gets carried over from lifetime to lifetime. The soul.

***********************************

God is not a being who will be making the big decision of who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. Rather, Judgment is a process that involves the nature of “God” that is within us all. God is that process. God as a part of each one of us, that which gets passed on from lifetime to lifetime. Anyone who believes God is an external agent is afraid of being accountable for oneself. Judgment Day involves a deep introspection and realization of our own natures and the “big decision” is an inherent part of that.

I’m not aware of the concept of a Judgment Day anywhere in Buddhism. At least not termed or conceptualized as it is in Western traditions. It may be incorporated, but not explicitly. Anyway, borrowing the term, I do believe in it to some extent. I haven’t quite finished formulating the mechanics of it.

I mentioned already that I don’t believe in the one lifetime theory upon which all human action is to be morally judged. So I don’t believe that you live your life, get buried or burned, and are kept in stasis until Judgment Day comes when all people will be resurrected and returned to life for judgment. That’s a little sadistic. I do, however, view the concept of resurrection as the Buddhist analog of remembering all of one’s past lifetime; a critical component of enlightenment.

I think resurrection means the returning to life of all past lives through remembrance of those lives, and it is on the moral behavior of all those lives that a soul, born and reborn through many lifetimes, will be “judged”. The mechanics part that I’m still not sure about yet is that in Buddhism, the remembrance of all past lives is a precursor to enlightenment, but according to Western eschatology, bad people go to Hell, i.e., they don’t attain enlightenment. How can you get to the threshold of enlightenment and then be judged as not attaining it. If it’s a given that once you reach the threshold of enlightenment, the remembrance and judgment, you will be enlightened, then what’s the point of judgment? The judgment already occurred.

Further, those who have reached enlightenment have supposedly remembered their past lives. Does that mean they have already experienced Judgment Day; i.e., their past lives have been resurrected? That necessarily changes the very nature of the Western eschaton. That would be seriously impairing the Western doctrine in favor of Buddhism.

It’s the God-nature within us that does the judging. Upon remembrance of past lives, the individual can recognize and distinguish between good and bad. I think by the nature of Judgment Day, there is no chance of deception or subjective biasing. There is an objective measure of “good” and “evil” that is beyond any of us. Truth is truth on Judgment Day and each individual can see for him and herself whether they go to “heaven” or “hell”.

I have no idea on what basis judgment will be dispensed, but I do think it is the individual that does his or her own judging and to the extent that the judgment is based on their God-nature, God is “sitting in judgment”. That’s all.

I haven’t done much figuring the different levels of heaven and hell. That comes to mind when I remember that living on earth is one level of hell. The “life is suffering” maxim represents that.

***********************************

I have no more justifications or rationales for dying. There never were any. I don’t need any. I simply do not want to live this life anymore. I don’t want to be here. The unbearableness of being. It has nothing to do with parents or family, or life, or what I’m doing, or what I have to do, or being human. In some ways I don’t feel like I’ve ever been here, I don’t feel that I belong here. I don’t want anyone to understand and don’t care if anyone does or doesn’t.

I’ve got another day set, even though I said I wouldn’t set them anymore. Force of habit. It’s how I get by day to day, week to week. It gives me something to look forward to, something immediate to strive for, even if my feelings have shown a pattern of changing before I actually do anything. Setting dates by which I want to die gives me a reason not to do it today, right now. I need to know that my current feelings can have a foreseeable end.

Am I prepared to kill myself right now? Most moments are pretty bad, but occasionally a not-so-bad one surfaces. Or at least a neutral one. It rained this past weekend, and I could have done it at any time. If that mood persists next weekend, I would think I’m ready to go through with it. After all, what is my life anymore? What has it come to? What is it made of anymore? Certainly not living material.

People kill themselves when something happens or changes that finally makes them snap. I’m the opposite. I’m going to kill myself because nothing is happening or changing. It’s a little frustrating knowing the feeling probably won’t last. But of course all I need is one time when it does. And I should note that every time I survive, there’s no real release, everything is still building up as it always has.

I know a lot of this feeling has to do with school stress. I have a 20 page paper on Islamic Law due at the beginning of December on the same day that I have a 5 page paper due in Jurisprudence. In the meantime I have to facilitate a discussion on post-modernism in Jurisprudence class on the same day that I have to present one of the essays on Law and Literature.

And I think to myself that I can get by. In the pinch, I can make it through all the presentations and papers and then exams on top of that. I can get the work done. But then I look beyond that and look for what’s there. So what if I can get through this month of concentrated stress and achieve yet another catharsis in my education? So what? Look at next February, what’s there? I’ll be getting through all this just for the sake of getting through all this. Nothing’s going to change, nothing’s going to be accomplished. It’s not about survival. It’s about what I really want. It’s about whether I really want to be playing this wretched game anymore.

Then there’s bullshit going on with the band, and finding the one person I liked in law school voted yes on 209 and that she really isn’t all that cool. It’s been so hard to meet people, I meet someone, look what I get. I get Jen. It’s been so hard to get into a band, I get into one, look what I get. I get these bozos. Great life. I’m wasting four years of my life, I still don’t have any marketable skills, and I’m 27 and I still have never held down a real job. Wish I had family, wish I had friends, wish I had someplace warm to spend.

I have to justify nothing. I don’t need to make anyone understand. The presumption will be that I was a nut that cracked under pressure, a basket case, emotionally depressed and disturbed, history of mental problems. That’s what people will look for first and read into whatever I write. Fine. Patterns of psychosis and delusional behavior, fits of depression and paranoia. Anti-social, a loner, suicidal. Troubled family background, poor upbringing, neglect, possible emotional abuse.

Preconceptions of what was wrong with me will be read into whatever rationale or justification I come up with. He concealed a dark double-life that he never showed and no one knew about. Good grief. The psychological mechanisms he employed to justify his suicide and to conceal or displace his psychosis were very complex. Here we have an example of an individual who may have been emotionally neglected, obviously depressed and suicidal, but complex and self-aware enough to detach himself in order to analyze his feelings from an almost objective voice. Of course, that objective voice was a perpetuation of his psychosis and may even be symptomatic of schizophrenia. Good grief. Fine, let them say what they must.

***********************************

In the sea of love, there are no shores, and there is nothing to do but drown. Rumi. When you fall in love with someone, you just know it. At each step, you fall in love again and again, more and more. You can never lie. If at any point you lie, you are not in the sea. If both are true to themselves and fall in love and let it be known, then there is no escape, and all you can do is drown. And if you resist, worse - if you succeed in resisting, you will die.

***********************************

Now it’s just getting curious. Why am I still alive? I tell myself I can kill myself at any moment, but then why not right now? What’s stopping me right now? I haven’t the slightest and I find that very, very curious.

I can’t imagine a better time and better circumstances in which to go ahead and do it. I have no pending obligations, I’m not in a moment of high stress, which allows me to clearer about it, and I want to do it. I’m calm and I’m in a moment of relative peace. The night is clear and the moon is close to full.

I still feel that my existence is a joke and it won’t make any difference however much longer I live. Nothing is going to change and my existence is not going to get any more bearable. What will next Spring bring? Only more of the same. There is an amorphous possibility of some change, but that’s not why I’m alive, it’s not good enough of a reason, it’s no reason at all, it’s just a lame excuse - to live just for the possibility change? That’s not living. To stay alive to strive for creature comforts which I know are fleeting? No thanks.

I know that theoretically suicide is not the only option. I could find and join an appropriate religious community. I doubt I’ll find anything perfect to match my beliefs, at least in this country, but it may be the proper environment in which I can live with my conscience and accept my existence. Do I not have the strength? Do I have the desire but not the commitment? What am I? What am I doing here? On the other hand, said community might also end up annoying the hell out of me.

There is a part of me that tells me that suicide is the proper path for me in this life, or that it’s at least an acceptable component in a series of lifetimes. If I don’t kill myself, I’m going against something, the way it’s supposed to be, something primeval.

I have not lived my life in a worthy manner. I leave no legacy or last words. When I die I will die alone, and unknown. I will have no ritual except to the sea and the stars, the wind, the sand, and the four directions. I will die never having touched another person, never having known another person’s heart. I hope that I have been good and that I have lived true to myself, and that I may be forgiven for the harms I’ve caused others.

198 Shakespeare St., San Francisco

July 1996

I wasn’t ready to move back to San Francisco. I wasn’t ready to leave the house in Berkeley. It feels more like a displacement than a move.

I’ve cut off some acquaintances. I decided to stay in touch with SHAG, they might be valuable connections. Kevin I’m staying in touch with; Cat I’m staying in touch with even though we’re drifting apart. I’m getting along better with her housemates, Daniella and Emily. Tria is gone, as are all the remnants of Oberlin in the East Bay. Good riddance.

***********************************

My car got broken into when I was visiting Emily and the CD player was stolen. I drove to the police station and filed a report and had the window fixed within 15 hours. It was no big deal. It’s either that or I’m repressing again. I really think it was no big deal. I don’t feel violated or invaded at all. It was purely material. It was just an annoyance I had to deal with. I have too many problems to let myself be caught up with such trivial things. I could have laughed.

I’m glad it happened at Emily and Cat’s place. If it happened in front of my new place so soon after moving in, that might have made me feel even more apprehensive about my move back to San Francisco. It’s not the greatest neighborhood. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about my car getting broken into anymore.

***********************************

Cat organized an overnight camping trip somewhere up in Marin and a bunch of people went. Not the best thing for an anti-social like me to go to, but I’m glad I went. After dark, everyone was seated talking around a picnic table lighted by lanterns and camping candles.

I stood away from everyone, watching the scene from a fence that surrounded the campground. No one noticed me slink away. I could hear everyone equally well because I was relatively the same distance away from everyone. Darkness surrounded the glow of the scene, making it seemed isolated and contained.

It was the most enjoyable conversation I’ve been in for years, and I wasn’t even a part of it. It was fun just watching, seeing people interact and enjoy themselves and have fun, enjoying each other’s company.

That was what I want to do. I want life to be a spectator sport, I just want to watch. A ghost or an angel. I imagined the spirit or angel that I’ve always felt following me all my life, sitting there with me, next to me on the fence. What she has been doing all my life, I want to do. I want to go around invisible, exerting the subtlest of influences, knowing what’s best, knowing thoughts, whispering suggestions, but not have anyone know why they do what they do or think what they think. I can’t feel anything, I hold no judgments, but I watch and I appreciate.

***********************************

I’ve been setting dates to kill myself more often this year than ever before. I’m not sure what the feeling is whenever I get past those dates without killing myself. Blessed? Cursed?

So far, so good, but each time I survive one, I’m a little more wary of the excuses I’m making to stay alive. They are difficult to get through.

Leading up to them, I am psychologically preparing and bracing myself to go through with it. I plan, I go through the scenario, anticipate the feeling, the motions, the emotions, the actions, the act. Try to imagine every bit of the experience. After I survive them, all I have are questions, feelings of doubt, wondering why I’m still alive. Feelings of guilt about surviving when certainly some part of me had died.

Do I deserve to die? I know I don’t deserve to live. I’m living in a twilight zone between not deserving to live and not knowing if I deserve to die. Dying is a privilege. It is a rite of passage. It means you reached the ticket gate and your ticket was accepted. You can go through. I guess I’ll know when I deserve it. I will have succeeded in doing it. Unless there was another way for me to go. That would be the best. Until then, I will keep setting dates and they will come, and the pattern is that they will also always go.

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.

***********************************

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”.

***********************************

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.

***********************************

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.

1347 La Loma, Berkeley

I was trying to fall asleep but my mind was too active. For a while, I freely let images flash through my mind. I've always had certain images of myself which I felt reflected how I felt about myself or my situation, such as lying in a snow-covered field, or my body being pulled out of the Hudson. I wonder if people normally have these distinct images that reflect and correlate to how they feel or feel about themselves.

In my half-sleep, the image kept repeating. It is in Shiho's apartment in Japan and the sun is shining brightly, illuminating the room through the closed drapes. I am facing the door, away from the window, either walking or just standing. Shiho comes up from behind, places one hand on my shoulder, and as I turn around, I can see what she is about to do. I don't resist or react as I see the arc of her other hand come up. It is either her hand or something in her hand that slashes at my neck, cutting my head cleanly off.

I don't know why the image is at all freaky, after all I believe that anything she does is out of love. I hope that there will never be any hate between us. In all the years we've known each other, there may have been tensions, some questions, but never animosity. There has always been some degree of love, and that seems to be what has shaped my feelings towards her now. Each time I've seen her, I've loved her even more.

In one permutation of the image, she stabs me in the back, and as I turn around, she pulls the knife out and hands it to me. I plunge it into her and grasp her to me as I feel her feeling the pain. I press my lips to hers as we fall and die together.

The image stopped repeating and continued linearly. Somehow, we both die together. We are in stillness, no light, no darkness, just nothingness. I feel my existence and I feel Shiho there. We are able to communicate, we can hear each other's thoughts. I reflect upon death, how I am now dead; my body has been left behind and is in the world that I have left. My existence continues and I find it supremely fascinating.

Shiho and I reflect upon our situation and decide that we had better go and figure out what comes next. We are very happy about the fact that we are together, that we've taken a huge step in our path, our journey, and we are traveling it together as it was meant to be. She and I were meant to be together.

As we continue in a direction with only instinct guiding us, I reflect on how surreal the situation is and randomly think, "why can't I be in Tower Records". Suddenly I find myself in Tower Records. I get really excited and tell Shiho about this and she says, "What?!" I told her what I did and told her to just imagine herself in Tower Records, and she tried it and it worked, only she couldn't see me. I could see her looking around for me and she could still hear me, but she couldn't see me.

So I said, "Go look for me in the classical section," and I found that my movement wasn't at all restricted by gravity or what used to be physical objects and boundaries, and I was able to bounce over to the classical section in a flash.

It took her just a bit longer and when she turned into the aisle of the classical section, she saw me. We ran to each other and hugged and kissed and realized that we were the only ones in the store. That's when I woke up.

Nobuko and I went shooting today. She let me use her camera and film to just take pictures, kill the roll to see what came out doing what. It was fun. Afterwards, I pulled out the camera I took from Rob's room the last time I was in New Jersey, and for the first time an SLR camera wasn't a complete mystery to me.

247 19th Ave., #2, San Francisco

October flew by. Joy helped the time by. How different it all is from last year. How muddy last year was; through fish-eyed lens, under bell jar, in a fish bowl. I left Japan two years ago in October. Recollections are still so vivid, and whenever a specific memory comes to my mind, it comes back to haunt. The trains, the river, the people, the air, the land. I want to be there, I belong there, I just feel it in my bones.

Joy has been so much, more than a comfort, more than a friend. Slowly, very slowly, she's making her way into my life. But nothing endearing, nothing that has truly pierced my heart. Everything is so cerebral, the passionate is completely outweighed, almost absent. I love her and wouldn't leave her, but if we did separate, it would be mutual, a decision. She wouldn't even get the benefit of the passion of a pain. No yelling, no drama, no scene, no wrestling over emotions and feelings. We would have thought it through. She wouldn't have felt it through. We wouldn't be friends afterwards either.

The benefit of the passion of a pain. The benefit of the passion of a pain, I say, as I hunger for revenge against or restitution from Amina. For once, I've gotten the "benefit" of the "passion" of the pain.

I love Joy in my life at this point. My life is so much better than it was a year ago. I'm clearer now, I can handle my work, I can deal with myself. Why am I not happy? Why can't I get on the topic of Joy and stay on it? Why am I not at least somewhat satisfied? Where has the passion in my life gone? I've lost something and Joy isn't making up for it. She's not offering anything new.

Was I more passionate with and about my friends at Oberlin? Or am I doing my usual psychological step of making the past look so much better just because it's safe in the past? Did I really love Diem and Luyen and Madoka so much? And love Amina so much that I can hate her so much now? I'm probably comparing Joy unfairly to something against which she can't possibly compete; memories and a denial.

Things weren't so hot with Hiromi. If they were, we would have stayed together and Luyen wouldn't have tugged at me. Things weren't so hot with Luyen. If they were . . . they weren't. And if we were together now . . . they definitely wouldn't be. Things weren't so hot with Diem. If they were, why didn't we get any closer? Things weren't so hot with Amina. But I loved her anyway. Why can't I get on the topic of Joy and stay on it?

Are things so hot with Joy?

My only problems are the problems I have with myself, my inability to deal with being inside my skin, of still having the 'rents pulling my strings, of still not being able to find a musical community. My issues are about me, not her, they only affect my relationship with her. I have to learn to be happy with what I've got. And I still can't get on the topic of Joy and stay on it.

Joy and I got together downtown for a short bit last night. She was going to a comedy show and meeting up with someone, so I held off coming home so I could meet up with her. It was wonderful seeing her face and seeing her for the first time noticeably healthier than she had been in the past four weeks. Both of us have been pretty sick. She gave me her flu at my insistence. I can't say I minded how I got it.

247 19th Ave., #2, San Francisco

Why did I tell Joy about cutting? What purpose did that serve? The drinking was different. If Joy wanted me to stop drinking, I could stop. At least I have a defensible explanation about drinking, I have my argument. No one could take away my feelings and understanding about it, even if they disagreed or didn't see it. But cutting? I can't explain it, I just do it. I don't know why I do it or why I don't feel pain. I can take a knife right now and . . . I don't know why I simply don't do it. Why did I introduce this part of me to Joy when I can't explain it to myself?

She came to San Francisco. We met at school because I had to register for classes, and then we came to my place for lunch. The long intimate hug was an extension from last night. We were still close, caressing, half holding, looking, loving, and then she asked about the scar on my arm. I knew the topic would come up, how could it not? Even though most people have an easy time ignoring or avoiding it.

It wasn't until we were on the sand at Ocean Beach, after having walked along the entire Sea Cliff trail, that I started talking about it. From that point on, I was winging it. It was difficult for me, often I felt my heart hurt, I realized the degree to which parts of me have been numbed insensitive. I hated having to tell Joy, but I couldn't imagine not telling her, either. I trust her and she means enough to me that I refuse to not disclose anything important about me.

I had told Amina. She seemed uncomfortable and she detached herself pretty quickly. Then it never came up again. Why even bother? She may have noticed scars on my chest at some point and run her fingers over them, I forget, but she never asked to understand. Much less that she was the inspiration for several due to the unfortunate period of my life in which she decided to get involved with me.

It hurt to tell Joy; to look at her face, her eyes, knowing that here was someone I was beginning to care for. Why did I tell her? I'm angry at myself for having told her. I had no business exposing this side of me to her so blatantly. I'm getting together with her again tomorrow, the last time on a regular basis. I won't panic, it won't be any different than if I hadn't told her anything. We have plenty of other things to discuss and share.

247 19th Ave., #2, San Francisco

I had a love so solid and so definite and it dissolved into nothingness. Did the love and care even exist in the first place? Were they just appearances, a front for something I can't touch or realize. What about the illusion of Shiho that I hold so dear? Can't that love just as easily be discarded? Do I trust Shiho? Could I? How can I trust anything anymore. I don't. Not even my own existence. My existence is hardly a solid and definite thing anymore and it hardly has any significance or reliable substance.

What is so important about our existences? We float in, we float out. People go on vacations, they go home after the party, they leave the stage after the act. They move to other states, they move to other countries, they die. It all boils down to absence and the future access. But what's the big deal? People who die are like people who move away and you never hear from again. Why should my feelings toward Amina be any different if she were dead? Dead only means dead to this existence, it's only absence. People who are true friends will always find each other in different lifetimes.

If Amina and I never meet again, eventually I wouldn't be saddened by her absence. There would always be the possibility of running into her, regardless of how unlikely that is. But if she died, I would be saddened by her death, despite the realization that we probably never would have met each other anyway.

I don't trust in anything anymore because that's the way it should be. I don't feel or believe in the importance of my life because that is the way it should be. Care doesn't exist for me anymore. Care is just another word for awareness. I care about people, but I don't think my caring makes any difference at all to anybody. It's mine alone, all I can do is be aware of other people's situations and be concerned to that limited extent.

No one "cares" about me. No one can have an effect on me or the way I live my life, so no one can care about me. No one can care about me in a way I can believe or accept. I must accept myself for who I am. I can't deal with my problems because I never learned to deal with problems. I never witnessed problems effectively dealt with. I grew up in a family that covered up and ignored problems and always pretended that everything was rosy.

I have huge problems looming over me, inside me, eating and rotting me away, creating pressure around every cell from every direction and there is nothing I can do about it. I can't approach the problems, I can't face them, much less do anything about them, much less tell anyone about them.

Is it low self-image? I know I have an immense self-hatred and I know that these things are a result of my upbringing and intensify now due to the loss of a support group and other external factors that have worked to counterbalance my disadvantages. I know that my feelings about my inadequacies and failures and failings are merely perceptions. I know that from another point of view, I'm doing better than fine. That is not the way I feel, and knowing it doesn't do a thing to help cope with it.

Osaka, Japan

I got back from Taiwan and found one letter in my mailbox from Madoka. What’s up with everyone else? I shouldn’t wonder, I know what’s up with everyone else. Coming back to Japan from Taiwan makes Japan feel like home. Japan’s landscape is so familiar compared to Taiwan. Taiwan was, at best, surreal. I floated in, floated around, and floated right back out. I had no desire to stay, no fond memories, too many ghosts.

I faltered and struggled to communicate in Japanese, since the older generation of Taiwanese speak Japanese. I spent more time with Uncle Taka than ever before. We drove all the way to Tai Zhong just to indulge in the cuisine they are famous for.

Uncle Bun’s wife is in the final stage of cancer. Audrey’s mother, a finer woman this family has not seen. I visited her in the hospital. At first, I don’t think she recognized me. She was undergoing radiation treatment and she was in such pain, all I could do was let her squeeze my hand. She told me not to tell Audrey, and I knew what she meant. She knew Audrey and I are close. “Don’t tell Audrey”. No, I won’t tell her, but I can let her know. I’ll make sure Audrey comes back at the end of the semester.

What is it about her? She names her daughter after Audrey Hepburn, and then I meet Amina, the love of my life, who rings of Audrey Hepburn. Amina is a big Audrey Hepburn fan. When me and my brothers visited Taiwan in 1980, we were total monsters, yet she not only took care of us, but she eventually named one of her sons after my American name. Why? After the show we put on in 1980, I would think she would try to disassociate from my name as much as possible. We were that bad. Bottom line, the woman is a saint. But there must be more.

I dreamed of Amina for the first time in a while in Taiwan. It was a sunny summer day and it looked like we were pool-side outside of some fancy hotel. She had joined me there at a table with one of those big umbrellas. She was silent and in thought. I guess it was just my fantasy, but she knew that I had decided to take up the issue of Shiho and me with the possibility of starting a relationship with Shiho. So Amina was there, silent, to tell me that she really did love me and it only struck her when it became very possible that she would lose me for good. Oh yea, fantasy.

In my sleep, my eyes opened a little. At two o’clock in the morning, someone had turned on the hall light so that if my eyes opened a little, they would open a lot. The dream and Amina faded away as if an angel had turned my face towards the light and pried my eyes open a crack to warn me, “no, don’t”.

I’m having major doubts about my role in the music thing here. Sakura has hooked up with those three semi-pros who are certainly older than us. I get the sense that they’re wondering what I’m even doing there. They are very professional, to them it’s a job, not an expression. They do as they’re told, their input is professional, not personal creativity. It’s kind of cold and not really my bag. They’re really good, but not the kind of good I can get into.

The pressure of living in Japan is what is changing me the most, though. I’m exercising a lot of self-control and I’m being super careful not to let my predisposed problems surface. There is no room for that old diagnosis “adjustment disorder”. What a load of crap anyway. “Adjustment disorder”? I think it was just a descriptive that psychiatrist came up with to match his observations. He sat there listening, thinking, “hmmm, sounds like he’s having trouble adjusting - I’ll call it an ‘adjustment disorder’!” Screw that.

In any case, I’m here for another three months. The plan is to enroll in the Japanese course at the YMCA tomorrow, and then I’m going up to Tokyo this weekend to visit Shiho and meet up with Mark Holdaway. It’s unbelievable that I’m going to see them both at the same time. What is up with that? It still blows my mind. I’m taking the Shinkansen up on Saturday morning, and on Sunday night I’m hopping onto an all-night bus back to Osaka and on Monday, classes start. That’s the plan.

Fort Lee, NJ

I did something I shouldn’t have. I went through everything that Shiho ever sent to me. It took over three hours and it was very painful. I had nightmares afterwards, the guilt was so overwhelming. What I’ve put her through was an injustice. She did try, she wanted so much from me that I know I was able to give. She took in so much of what I wanted her to. She deserved so much more than I gave and in the end she was an innocent victim of all my personal difficulties. There’s a good reason why she’s so far away now and how I do deserve it.

Back in high school years, Shiho and I decided to go out with each other a few weeks right before she left for Japan. It wasn’t enough time to make much of an impression and when my mental stability declined after she left, she got more and more overshadowed. By the time I got sent to the hospitals after my first semester in college, I was totally numb. The letters she sent from six months preceding my admission into the hospitals are filled with subtle pain that I totally missed.

The hospitals started in February 1988 - the same month Shiho managed to return to the States for a visit, a year and half after she left. She actually visited me with Liz when I was in the second hospital and I think she was quite shocked at what was going on. Immediately after that, I don’t think she knew how to approach me. I don’t think she was even able to ask if I was alright because she might have been scared of my reaction. We considered ourselves broken-up soon after that. Nothing said, it just happened.

For another year I was numb and minimally functional. A year after that, March-April 1989, corresponding to my move into Third World House, I started getting better, developing a positive outlook with death as its ironic base. Shiho and I had kept in touch writing occasionally, but I guess by then we had pushed each other into the margins of each other’s lives that we were already on a pen pal type letter basis. We’d gone our different directions.

She got hurt, she was a victim of my self-destruction. It’s a self-destruction that isn’t designed to succeed and this time, the cost has been Shiho’s trust; a very high cost. I guess I shouldn’t see the tragedy of Shiho in tragic proportions, though. It’s all abstract, theoretical and emotional.

I imagine one day we’ll be sitting in a coffeeshop in Japan, sipping at $7 coffees and talking about the too many years we’ve missed. I’d look her straight in the eye and recollect this weekend to her and tell her how sorry I was. She wouldn’t give any indication that it meant anything to her and she’d tell me to forget it, there’s no need, perhaps because that’s exactly what I’d tell her if the roles were switched. The coffee would be my treat.

Englewood Cliffs, NJ

My life has really fallen apart without my noticing it. Everything just went wrong and fell apart last semester. I have nothing. I had Sakuko and I lost her. Now I have nothing. No plans, no possibilities, no potential.

I really need to change. Before we broke up, I kept telling myself that I wouldn’t be the one to break up the relationship because I wasn’t sure whether I’d be doing it for real, legitimate reasons, or if it was because of my psychology. If it was my psychology, not only would it have been solely my fault, but it would be inevitable and I’d be responsible for putting Sakuko through shit that she nor nobody deserved.

It didn’t work, I ended up repressing a lot of bad feelings towards her and they’ve all been coming out since breaking up. It still was my psychology, there was no avoiding it. To me, “getting to know someone” means collecting their faults until my mind decides that they are too imperfect for me. Or rather that they are imperfect period. There were problems with the relationship, but there were more problems about me. And the problems about me probably caused the problems with the relationship.

There was probably little wrong with Sakuko. She was perfect for me in many ways. What more could I have asked for? She was devoted, kind, pretty, sexy, considerate, intelligent, caring. Good lord, what more am I asking for?

Instead I chose a perspective that emphasized her imperfections. It doesn’t have to be that way. It can’t be that way anymore or I’m doomed to be alone. How to change, I haven’t the slightest idea. I haven’t even a grasp on my problem.