At 22

Must we know the direction we go
For love--for loving;
life, for living
and we all end up eighty
with regrets there and
absent.

Alphabetizing

I have this sensuousness with books, in the FICTION/LITERATURE section & aisles. After closing, without any obstructing mandates, first place I go for recovery is that--and I take my time, oh do i. I don't live up to my end of the deal, that's for sure, and it's a shame for the colleagues who are dogging it to try and get out early, or on time, on my closing shift--I like to touch each row, column, run my fingers bang my palms over and under all the sections; grasp a handful, pull it out, rearrange and insert it in, so there's space to breathe for all of them. I treat them like my precious kid, I embellish and orient so they each individually and together get to shine and act as one, respectively... Austin--Borges--Bukowski--Conrad--Conroy--Crane--Dickens--Dreiser--Ebershoff--Faulkner--Garcia-Marquez--Hesse--Joyce--Kerouac--Melville--Mitchell--Nabakov--Oates--Rand--Roth--Sedaris--Steinbach--Tan--Twain--Vonnegut--Young--

dreams & child[ishness] into whatever follows

I realized: damn this journal has become so morbid! I've been writing lighthearted-er and more humor`ful stuff in the dizzy fog of waking nightmares by the nightstand. Amongst the nightmares: there're these places, where pants and non-short-sleeved-t-shirts-items are not a matter of choice out in the open air, where instead of sunrays, sneezes of liquid and frost spray down from the sky and the coulds, and at a time like late-November it is'nt obvious to any

2yearold on the street that it, duhhh, is beautiful and a perfect
day for tanning, or solar-panel harvesting, or just smelling in the heat that
rises from the asphalt at noon, through comfortably flared nostrils
below surroundings-admiring eyes.

And moreover, this nightmare continued, not only are there these places, but I plan on going--I repeat: plan on going--there, that wilderness of a bad choice, with its rugged weather & its insistence on actually collecting rent.
It's all a bad dream. This part of blog 11/21 is true: When I wake and brush my teeth in front of the mirror, and remember what happenings of the day before became the basis for dream-scenes during the night, those happenings are absolutely no more real--or maybe even less--than the scenes in my REM

experience. So what's the Real Life, and how does answering that matter,
and how to answer?

working the knife around the neck like to peel an orange

god it's so nice to come home from work. The bones are really

tired, and the home is where you're allowed to not-work absolutely, even if it's just sleep. That time before Thanksgiving, when the cousins are piling into this original city of all our common experience, this location shines its gleam of being root, and that easy social laughter in loudness, in life, over the wide dinner table. I was thinking yesterday, being disturbed while munching down spoonfuls of raisin oat cereal puddled in milk, the significance of cutting off the heads of humans in an act of war horror--and being disturbed that I was munching on spoonfuls of milk cereal, and continued doing so. Why is that so repulsive, so terrorful as observers, conscious of the terror as perpetrators, and singularly most everything of all, as victim--to have the mind-body so literally and in figuratively, so immediately severed--what must it be like: and doesn't that verbalizing, more than any other way of death, explain so directy the wonder and mystery of dying & the leaving of life? Is there more violence today than ever? Terror, for that matter? From whom am I speaking of: soldier or civilian--or is there distinction, or reason for it? How does this world strive toward becoming resolved (which it has without a pause always done) without us collapsing it into one big explosion? And then are the individual works and seconds of an individual artist's lifetime, that don't affect anything on the grand scale of things except that individual's life and its surroundings--which is without exception always the case--significant and with meaning?

Solutions to these things, are the working through/against of these things; the way the canvas becomes not a likeness to the apple but the apple itself through the artist.

mission statement

The world's racing between successful cooperation and total disaster,
I hear on the radio;
Technology and Biology cross to save humans, or to break humanity,
I begin to understand;
Life calls to fulfill me while other times I battle it,
I know;

And it all amounts to some decades worth of
consuming this oxygen.
This worthy oxygen?

There's a number of ways it all could have turned out:
but I'm at where I'm at
on this path I took and the others
are as foreign
as I to them

ephemeral

ain't we all just feeling about life the way we're feeling at that part of the day
in death, where're the absolutes
where's the Life is good (or life is all preparing for death);
there's not the rule
that everything else is just relative--

judges:
our understanding tells time to move

bleh; useless entry

the ponderings of an unemployed graduate (recent) of a liberal university with a realistically idealistic mind, trying to solve for the intersection of biology-astrology-genetics-personalpast-placenationality-path of humanity comes up with stalemates that get stale like locked in a box with no exercise for days--the muscles--and a lot of silent anxiety while the world chatters.

---*&()%*o~ yes

I feel black today.

I'm A-sian.
I am An Asian-American.
I'm white, I mean I'm from the U.S.
Or from Taiwan.
I'm whitewashed. Something like bleach, I guess that means. I eat Chinese food. There was a CNN.com article today advertising the breakfast cuisine sounds & aromas, every no-exception sunrise on the backalleys of Taiwan's streets, and I felt pride; and hungry. I think more than most Americans about how the U.S. works politically. Or even more specifically more than majority of white Ang-lo-Sax-on Americans (more specif. those who voted W.)(yes, i'm bitter)(oh, and yes, I think about ways wanting to save the world; all the time).
I think about the way Taiwan was made, politically, which is tied to culturally, ethnically, generationally, historically, educationally, self-identification-ally; and in the end see the me in American democracy the way an audience member can see how a play is going, as a holistic play--while myself being the actor too.
I got a tan, and my skin is darker because I bake like an oven, just by existing, since Miami's still summer in the Winter, and as I said I feel black.

poem

With this keyboard
It's like anywhere can be reached
For a second there I thought
To punch in the address of
That young euphoria of love
That has been shut sealed--
like a clogged artery--
with pain--plaque hardened,
and remembered it doesn't go that far; realized
I don't either.

3 today

I.
The world inside the house
The walls, privacy, inability to be seen
And look out

On the scale of all things
Who am I to exist
Out of the square foot I stand on

Give voice to me
The ghost behind Want
Is to give
Voice to others

All
From here.

II.

We

can't be ghosts

anymore things are

really too real

III.
I jogged today and saw a cat,
followed it through darkness with my eyes and saw others;
a kitten; a cat I imagined male, sitting regal;
another kitten tumbling into the first one.
They disappeared into the brush.
The parents (I imagined they were)
standing atop the flat grass plain motionless.
Unnoticing.
They were one family--that
was their home there--and I ran
by.

ripped page before Election

non sequiteur in honor of the world's (Americentrically-speaking, that is), and a lifetime's most important election tomorrow, I will rip what I wrote yesterday on the plane, into this electronic format on the pixelled screen existing now. Think of it as July fireworks for the main event of Independence Day: showy, but utterly unrelated. Oh, and before I begin, since I imagine no one will finish through the ensuing jabber and continue--I have not written here for three months, it seems, and in that time much has gone on, and at the same time so little; I just got back from a trip back to Brown where the last time I was there was graduation & sadness & goodbyes: t'was a good good time, great to see old friends, and to meet new ones, as they say.

There's this exception then there's election

I get tripped in words

American Other
I/A walking pin-up board walks
crossing America
collecting pins

American Tuesday
Ruby Tuesdays; Tuesdays

with Morrie; I used to confuse

Tuesdays with Thursdays or

skip over one and come up with

6 days a week on the test.

American Poet

I just knew Shakespeare for most of school--
Then he wasn't even American--
And so ordered a used Frost book from web
Stranger America during college
(my first)--

And college befriended me Creeley--
who led me down B1 library level Olson and Pound and Duncan
and Levertov, and the
mighty man/words Creeley, whose humor whose
bareness of human
whose breathing
of America resembled
mine when I
spoke with him
every office hours and e-mail
Onward!,
best, Abe,
Robert, and
they are the
audible voice that plays, streaming from this reading;
that digitized collaboration:
they all were the breathing speakers of America
based on breath--

And elsewhere belatedly read Whitman
And Ginsberg and teh raging Ameriholic
And pieced in O'Hara (Frank) and Faulkner of the South
And the white whale swallowing it all--
And I continue on
with my own here
at this point