We do not bear the burden of honesty;
It is words that speak the truth, that
Turn meaning into intention - the
Inverted paradigm of distant minds.

We began quite as innocents. We
Shunned our words with trepidation and
Left too much to the stale reticence,
Poised to offer no interpretation.

But for the silence we would all be
Kings and philosophers.

But the image did not forgive us
For our trespasses. Our silence bordered
on criminality: a cruel judgment of the
Wind made us shiver in the quiet night.

Our words did not choose us, we sinned not
Against the pluperfect certainty of our acts;
Inaction was our complete defense.

It was left to the unspoken image to tell us
We bear the burden of words.

I just realized that I haven't posted in months and months and months. Maybe I'll start writing one of these days again.

We are funny men
lobbing jokes at the world that denies our laughter
trying to fill with comedy our hollowed shells

The echoes are murderous
bloody in the night when everything becomes trite
semblance of reality falling into disrepair

Is it me you’re calling
from your sad tower
farther out we’d drown

We are funny men
drawing circles at our feet
enclosures of ignobility

You said, after he had gone,
we’d all be like tattered flags,

And in every shadow of an ant
there is the face of God

In the hush of the streets busy with tourists
          you and I walk on the cobblestone
Searching for food or drink, something to fill
          our empty stomachs and aching hearts.
It is not, like I said to you, the scenery that I crave,
Nor is it that charm in the air, that quaint air, where
the people living amongst these old walled-in streets
tend not to notice.

It is not those two kids, tanned and exuding their Provincial
innocence, who played on those steps in the town square,
that bring my heart to a contented fulfillment.

Nor is it the simplicity and easygoingness of it all.

It is not, as I suspected, because you seemed to reflect
What I ought to have been feeling—the careless smiles,
The infectious boyish giddiness that seemed to follow us
Wherever we went;

Is it the sun, the weather maybe, that made me want to
Simply halt time, so that space could overcome me
and make me give up all the things that I held back:

They rushed in and away like the waves.

Learning to Ride a Bicycle

It is unfortunate that it had to end
like this, my hand on my heart and
whispering gently against the wind,
saying goodbye and this is it, rewinding
the days and weeks that passed before
me and before the road comes to an end.

It isn’t deliberate but the thought is
debilitating, those two divergent pathways
where the unchosen one always seems
wiser and more chaste, and the hand steering
the fate cannot but obey the heart, and
before the false façade of friendship crumbles.

They say the unbending will succumbs
to the unending road, but the hand on the heart
and steering the fate knows no end, and the wind
gently blowing cannot unsway the crooked path,
where missteps are fatal and shattering and
do not bring back the days and weeks that passed.

Even when the joyous songs break out
among the strangers whose unknown faces
bear the crosses that are mine and not the wind’s,
even when that happens it is impossible to unwind
the spool of thoughts that have crinkled the heart,
and that is when the road splits and the hand shakes.

It is possible that the unspoken word died
under the rolling wheel, where even the most
delicate of thoughts becomes bumps in the path,
and where the path diverges and splits the heart in half
and lets the wind gather and wither the moment away,
like the heart that is never made to crumble.

It is, and it isn’t how it is supposed to return,
not sagged down heavy with the crosses that the others
have born to the satisfaction of the rare heart
that beats against the wind and the hand that strikes
against the separate paths, but it is, and you say
this is it and it is unfortunate but it is at least the road.

Yay; it's a proper response, I suppose. It is what's expected. I think I've learned how not to look forward to things in life ever since I figured out that expectation is the only cause of disappointment. Everything to look forward to--I'm just not doing it.

Jean-Paul Sartre, in his essay on The Sound and the Fury, writes that the events during Quentin's last day, leading up to his suicide, are written in such a way that it is as if we, the readers, are sitting in a train with our back against the direction of travel; we watch the world escape forward in our peripheral vision, while the locomotion drives us toward an unseen terminus. "It has already happened," I think those are the words that Sartre uses to describe the death of Quentin. When does one realize that the train has hit a brick wall, when the brick wall cannot be seen? When it has already happened.

Existentialism, such a depressing topic, like showers in April. And to think that soon enough I will be at some cafe in Rive gauche, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee--something that Sartre must have done at one time or another. And to think that I have putatively rejected existentialism. Too depressing. Too high school. I'm not sure that I'm better off now, unhinged in time, lost in my own nebulous construct of a world. A postmodern quagmire that reeks of Sartre and Eliot--look, there's Nietzsche pushing up daisies in the corner there.

I hope my time in Europe will at least take my mind off the present, a little less pressure pushing up against my cracked shell. Too pretentious, describing myself using Scott Fitzgerald's words. I need to stop living in literary allusions.

Happy birthday to my father. I cooked dinner for him tonight.

So the only thing that keeps me buoyant is the emptiness inside. Great is the feeling of having put aside all school work for 2 weeks, great is the feeling of feeling alone in the world, knowing the sky is falling and that I won't be the first one or the only one to be crushed by it.

Last night I was repeating out loud the phrase 'I am unhinged in time' to myself. Looking forward, I see an uncertain summer and an even more uncertain life. Looking back I see myself in more vivid colors than I see myself now. Life should be like Paint by Numbers. It should because it'd be easier. I'm sure that's how God created the world in the first place. He probably painted according to transcendental numbers.

Back to smoking a pack a day. I'm rather proud of myself now that I'm a recovering ex-smoker. Maybe time to get back on antidepressants. It would make the colors more vivid. Same old ugly landscape though.

Tragedy for beginners. I guess that it could become a poem at some point. Or a short story. But I don't do those, short stories.

Tragedy for Beginners: A Play in Two Lines

Didi: Shall we go?
Gogo: Yes, let's go.

No, that's quite the tragicomedy. Thanks Beckett, but not quite it. Perhaps another try, at another time? Only if I don't sink before that.

Color me in.

When that time you curved your arm over your head
and tried to be both the moonlight and mountain,
and the silver lining behind that cloud,
the cloud that never dissipates but hung around
days on end, thinking that less sunshine was what we needed.

When that time you kissed me on the cheek
and said that all we’d ever need was a little house to live in,
maybe a kid or two, and ran your hand through my hair
and said that you loved me so, that not even tragedy itself
could tear us apart from each other.

When that time you were upset, not talking to me for
days on end, not noticing everything I’d done for you
despite your anger, not noticing that I had even changed
the brand of salad dressing on the dinner table because
you didn’t like the taste of blue cheese.

‘It tastes fake,’ you said, and you were angry because
your day didn’t go you way, your past two days didn’t
turn out the way you would’ve liked, and that your life
had been a miserable failure despite of me, or was it maybe
because of me?

I wasn’t angry the night you came home drunk and
smelling of another woman’s perfume, no, I didn’t even
ask you where you had been; I think it was clear in my mind
that our relationship had been digging its own grave since
the day you asked to marry me.

When you got into our bed, after having undressed and made
an excuse of an attempt to brush your teeth, and with me
smelling the scent of liquor on your breath and that exotic,
unfamiliar scent of another woman’s perfume, and I asked you,
‘would you like me to wake you up at the usual hour tomorrow?’

You were too drunk to answer, maybe too angry,
or is it that you were simply ashamed to return home to
someone loving, someone knowing full well what you have done
and yet still had chosen to love you, still had chosen to ignore
your faults and instead tried to patch up the relationship.

And when that time you were in an accident on the interstate,
rushed to the hospital at three in the morning, and the police
called and said that you’d need emergency surgery, was I not
there in half an hour, hardly dressed in a presentable way
and sat there in the waiting room waiting for your sight?

And when the doctor came out of the operating room and said
that he was sorry, that you were in a coma because your heart had
stopped beating for too long, and that my tears came falling down
believing that my life had ended as well, and that he was truly sorry
and that I should try to get some rest.

And was that not when I realized that I had truly loved you,
despite of what you had done and despite of what you weren’t
or couldn’t have been, and that I thought perhaps it was because
of my weakness that you had not lived, and that had I been stronger
you would’ve come home safely that night.

When I came home the day of your funeral I went into the bedroom
and buried my nose in your pillow, that scent of your hair which
still reminded me of how you tried to be the moon and the clouds to me
was still there, that despite how my love had died for you, yours was still
there, a scent in the wind lingering for me.

J. Terry was more than a little angry when he discovered that his girlfriend of 2 years has been cheating on him. He became suspicious when Leslie, the girlfriend of 2 years, started to show less and less interest in having sex with him. Although he wouldn’t admit it, the sex was probably the best part of their relationship, and it was probably the only part, all things considered, that actually worked. The first met when they were undergraduates at Crest College, a small liberal arts school that had a reputation for cranking out small-time novelists and television screenwriters. She was a senior when he transferred in from UCLA as a junior, and they first met each other during a drunken party when the both of them were high on ecstasy. They were at an off-campus house, on St. Patrick’s Day, and since he was half Irish and she was dressed in fluorescent green bikinis, they decided that it was only natural for them to go to the upstairs bedroom and fuck each others’ brains out before the ecstasy wore off. They didn’t see each other again until 2 weeks after that, when they ran into each other, or more precisely, when she ran into him, at the ice cream shop just a walking distance from the campus.
He was just trying to lick off the ice cream that has dripped down the side of the cup as he handed a $5 bill to the cashier when he heard a voice call out from behind him.
“Hey you,” he wasn’t quite sure he was being hailed but turned around nevertheless after retracting his tongue, tasting vanilla and rum in his mouth. He was a bit surprised when he first saw her. The recognition was immediate, but he struggled for half a second before he could remember her name, and put on a full attempt of a smile. He didn’t know whether to give her a hug, since he was holding two giant scoops of Special Vanilla in his left hand. She smiled back.
“Oh wow,” his tongue stumbled a bit, “er, Leslie, it’s been a while hasn’t it.” To be honest, he didn’t expect to see her ever again. In fact he was beginning to wish that he hadn’t run into her, because as far as he could remember, he hadn’t been the nicest person on the planet when the two of them were last together.
“So what are you doing here?” he added.
“It’s my shift coming up next. I work here.”
She is wearing a plaid beret sideways, has on a brown pile jacket with a tank top underneath, and a pair of rather vintage jeans. A man’s cravat was tied around her waist, serving as an ornamental belt. He tried to picture her with those fluorescent green bikinis on.
“You want to sit down?” Leslie asked, sensing that he was glancing down at her chest. “We should try to catch up. And don’t forget your change.”
He turned around and saw that the cashier had been waiting for him, felt a little embarrassed, took his change, and followed her to a booth toward the back of the ice cream shop. They sat there and talked for just a few minutes, enough for him to finish most of the ice cream and for her to give him her cell phone number. Most of the conversation was just basic small talk, making up for what they should’ve done on St. Patrick’s. He called her later that week, they went out for a dinner and concert, and then they got back to her place and fucked again. This time they were both sober.
And then they started dating, and fell somewhat in love with each other, and since they could see no reason to break up, they instead stayed together due to a lack of excuses.
Now we skip about two years, but not because of what happened in those two years are trivial, but because they do not fit the frame of this story, which is about their relationship. They have both graduated by now, and live in an apartment in the suburban area of Los Angeles. She has found a job with a creative agency in Pasadena, and it is agreed upon that for him waiting tables in Santa Fe and in Los Angeles don’t make that much of a difference. So after some searching around, he is able to find a busboy job in one of the Italian restaurants on Colorado Boulevard, in Pasadena. With any hope, he’d be promoted to a full waiter in a couple of months.
So he was, and let’s not bother with the details and get back to the main story, which is how J. Terry discovered that his girlfriend of 2 years has been cheating on him.

Monday night. Cabinet turnover at the pub. Per tradition, they hired a stripper for lapdances. Wade, once again, is the prime victime. The incoming president of Hanszen didn’t feel quite up to a male stripper, dressed as a UPS man who ended up stripping down to a golden, yellowish G-string that barely covered anything and showed all, including the cockring he was wearing. I was there around 10:15, sat with some friends and chatted a bit. Just before that, I was in Michael’s room to drop off a check—I owe him some money from the roadtrip.

Speaking of which.

Last week was spring break, and I was with Michael on a 6-day trip to New Mexico with him. He took his car (since he doesn’t know how to drive a stick shift) and drove through El Paso, Las Cruces, Alburquerque, Santa Fe, and on the way back, we made a stop in Fort Worth to check out the Modern Museum, in a brand new building. The trip, more or less, was amazing. Mostly we visited museums and galleries—it was an art trip, with the exception of a stopover at the White Sands National Monument and the Sandia Mountains in Alburquerque.

Nothing otherwise exciting happened on the road.

Michael and I spent quite a lot of time talking, and with his comment that I don’t understand myself (possibly because I’m too complicated), I feel like I need to figure out some things about myself.

Am I complicated? Yes. I am too postmodern to have a real grasp of the world. I don’t have any firm principles except that every truth in life can be looked at another way and turned into a non-truth. I am atheist yet I mourn the loss of religion; I crave to be able to have a God, yet I cannot bring myself to subscribe to all the laws and dictates of a religion. I drive too closely behind other cars (yet he was the one who ran a redlight). I am full of ideas, yet I cannot express them or put them into a coherent system. But I do have a coherent system, I just believe that it’s too complicated to explain. And as a result, I often ignore to do so, because I don’t believe that anyone can actually understand or care to do so.

It would be easy to say that I’m twice as complicated as the normal person because I grew up in two cultures. Because there is a gulf in my life that separates the two parts of me. Because I was another, at some point in time, and who I am now can never know who I was.

But to me this is just all fancytalk, a bag of mulch rotting under the midday sun. Did I really open up to Michael, did I tell him all truths and none of the lies? In a way, I suppose I am more honest than I have ever been. After all, spending almost a week sharing a room, a car, the expenses, and everything single thing you do with another person can be quite revealing. I chose a level of truth that I was comfortable with. And to be honest, I’ve never been quite comfortable with even the idea of truth.

We looked at an exorbitant amount of modernist and contemporary paintings on our trip. Some of them were truly amazing; the rest, certainly, were no more than pieces of compromised artistic integrity. I think I was truly happy at certain points in time, when I was so enveloped in the experience that I, in a way, was truly myself—denuded of my cracked mask, robbed of my sense of suspicion of other people, wholly swallowed up in the moment of being.

But on the whole, now looking back, I’d have to say that I was mostly disingenuous with Michael. Because he is such a precious friend, because I love him for who he is, because it is so rare in the world to find someone who shares my interests and is willing to put up with me, even for a moment; because it is so damn impossible not to compromise, because I don’t want to make him angry or ruin his impression of me, because I’ve learned that life’s second chances come sparsely if ever. Because of all of these reasons, and dozens more that I’m either unwilling to think about or unwilling to put down, that I’ve tried to be my best to him. After all, these are moments so rare, so hard to find in life, I’d rather be fake and bathe in the veneer of it than be truthful and suffer the real consequences, what they may be.

And is this me, this complicated, calculating, inauthentic shell of a man, who changes colors even when the wind shifts? And what am I doing here, mixing metaphors and blathering on about things that few, if any, will ever read, and even fewer will care about?

Thinking, believing that this is my catharsis, my redemption, my last chance to patch up my faults, my confession, and my salvation—I am here, in my best attempt to be honest. Yet to what? To a computer screen, a laptop on which Michael spent hours trying to write a short story but failed, during the nights of our trip? On this lifeless pieces of integrated circuit boards and electrified diodes, I am rewriting my life. But this is the only way that I can come to know myself. Something about the Wordsworthian “emotions recollected in tranquility” still captures my essence. Yet, I have been lost for so long, so out of touch with who I really am, while, oddly enough, becoming more in touch with the harsh realities of this world.

We spent some time talking about the future, our careers and aspirations and so on, and I realized that we are both too pragmatic for our own good. I am an escapist, he said. And while I don’t completely disagree, I do think that no matter how far I try to run away, the world will still be there. And the only true moments of escape for me comes about only through self-annihilation coinciding with death—not drinking myself silly on a Friday night, not getting stoned out and listening to Radiohead, but merely being able to create artistically, to write down something that I know in several days or weeks or years, I will be able to come back and read and feel completely overwhelmed—by my talent, by my feelings, by what I at the time could not have done or experienced. Delayed gratification, in a way, is the thing that drives me; my bliss comes not from the immediate release, but sometime no release at all. What I keep bottled up may kill me, but it is what makes me whole, and that is probably why I have never been able to be truthful, never been able to find myself to the notion of truth. Because I know that only what I don’t know is true; or, to put it another way, the truth is yet to be discovered, out there under some stone on a beach, just waiting to be overturned by me. But perhaps that notion of the truth, the unison of being and existence, scares me. Because so far only in the most tragic and pathetic moments of my life was I able to reveal what is underneath that stone to myself. Every revelation is a price to be paid.

And now, I am afraid again.

After the trip, I feel like that I am on the brink of overturning yet a new stone, yet about to uncover a morsel of enlightenment that I had been afraid to come to terms to before. I feel, I fear, that something in me is about to change, and I dread that change. What I don’t know can’t hurt me—or at least, I will be unaware of its injuries. My struggle to maintain my blissful ignorance has been a losing one, and still I pretend that I don’t know what I’m talking about.

So this is it, I suppose, 1,400 words in 20 minutes, the kind of speedwriting that I am always to attempt because of what I let slip through my fingers. Have I been completely honest? No. But did I unwittingly let some of those things that I try to grab on to, to guard, come through? Perhaps. I won’t know, and I don’t want to know, until some time has passed. That is my weakness. That is my bane.

And that is my life.