Jul 2000, 5 entries

hey buster!

there are four kinds of people on my bus to work: really old people, really sick people, really young rich people, and asian people. i love them all. one of the really old ladies whispers in my ear each time i get off the bus with, “Amazoooon dot coooom…” in a very knowing, very creepy way. I say, “Yup,” and smile to her like a friend. She says, “You have a nice day.” I say, “Oh, thank you very much, you have a good day too!”. And that is our morning ritual.

She, and the really sick people, are coming home from a night spent at Harborview, one of the countries best, and scariest, hospitals. It’s old Art Deco, in the same style as Pac Med (where I work), and the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Art Deco covers the beautiful, the sickly, and the computer geeks. How beautiful and appropriate.

They’re trying to make me stay at work. They gave me 1100 shares of company stock at Thursday’s closing price of $30.75. Funny thing is, just two days ago, I broke the website. I made it so that a lot of the content in the center column of the gateway was missing. It was only gone for about an hour, but that hour was worth over $2000. Oops. Hey, why don’t you give him lots of stock to make him feel better. Okay.

I’ve bought another website, which is taking most of my online attention these days. You can see it here. Hey buster! I’ve finally found a project that combines my interest in writing and web design and communities and etc. If you’re interested in finding out more about it, subscribe from the main page. Anyway, it’s not as exciting talking about it as actually making it, so I won’t. Unless you want to know, and in that case write to me.

once again i find myself trying to think of good urls. this time, not for a personal site, but for something new. i have been trying to think of a way to involve lots of people without having to feel like the quality of the site, and the content on it, degenerates with every passing day. like diaryland. like aol. like almost anything. but there has to be a way of getting people involved in something without necessarily asking them to contribute content that’s bound to be boring. even the best people around can’t create good content consistently.

so, what is there to do? organize. what if someone created a site that tried to create a reference for short stories—stories that have already been written and which have already passed the quality test. wouldn’t it be more worthwhile of our time to go back to those things that weren’t created in one sitting, like this entry? the proven pieces of content. why are there no good online book clubs? the internet is so great at bringing people together, but why don’t we do anything worthwhile together? reading groups, writing workshops, art appreciation… none of these things has been created with any scale, and if it has it’s always been associated with universities that cost lots of money and have no sense of innovative design or a quality experience on the internet. old dogs.

bn.com has online courses, and they’re even free. that’s a good start. they’re associated with NotHarvard.com, which isn’t associated with Harvard. but even then, it’s led by instructors. what do instructors know? okay, they know something, but there just aren’t enough instructors to make it worthwhile, and really, they’re experts in the classroom, not on the internet. we’re experts on the internet. we know how to bring people together, set up websites, get people involved, etc. what are we doing? why can’t we set up an online university dedicated to improving our own writing, our own reading, etc, and have it run by the people participating so that it’ll grow as fast as people become interested. is it possible to do this right? or is there something stopping us. time. money.

it’s really the first year ever that anybody with a computer and a modem could create unlimited content on the internet. i think people are writing more now than ever. and that’s always been the biggest obstacle to becoming a writer: consistent writing. now, we have the pencil and the pen in front of us and all we have to do is start using them to improve. turn quick diary entries into first drafts of stories, fictional and autobiographical. anybody else think so? more later.

A Shakespearean Sonnet

Your face is painted by the lack of lamp and sun
With broad, loose strokes of shadows blue and gray.
The thinnest ray will pull the threads undone
That’s sown with care to keep discord at bay
And symmetry the ruler of thy face.
With humble eye the moon returns the sea
So Time will paint, remove, and then replace
Your plant-like beauty—which will sprout, grow free
And wither in a moment. Bless’d fragil-
ity! That you can mock the sun’s white light
And dim it too. And I, by sitting still
Can watch your twin opposing forces fight.
  But Logic laughs when Nature has me write
  These words that bend two shadows into light.

It’s strange how looking over older writings makes me realize that I’ve been thinking about beauty and ugliness for a long time. I even remember making a resolution to this guy several years ago, as we walked through the University of Washington campus late at night, that instead of studying any particular topic (I think the time to choose a major was coming up) I would instead study beauty in all topics. It is less tangible but more expansive than the English language, than History, than Physics, but there’s a thread going through them all. It’s both very objective and subjective at the same time. And almost everyone responds to it in an unmistakable way that seems more real than a good idea, or right and wrong, or most other thoughts and emotions. You can’t really fake the response to beauty, but it can be tampered with—if you see an old beat up statue that’s been crammed under your stairway for more years than you can remember you’ll respond to it differently than if you see it lining the top of a cathedral, or in a self-portrait by Rembrandt. I want to continue this study. I’ll see if I can, or if this is another one entry project.

Anyway. That was a sonnet I wrote around the time when I was writing the first draft of this story “Something Ugly” that K and I are now re-writing. It’s weird to come back to old ideas, old stories, I usually don’t expect old ideas to be worth much, but recently they’ve been coming back to me and re-entering my thoughts like half completed sentences.

Winner and I will be keeping each other accountable. We need to put up content that isn’t in first draft. Start spell checking entries again. Start revising your thoughts before hitting save again. If you are already doing this, or want to start up with us, let me know.

There’s a theme of recording events going on in my life right now—meaning that the idea and concept pops up in my life from many different unrelated directions at once, as if my author were trying to get a point across to me. I used to be more in tune to themes that my life was going through, and would actually record them. Now, I just see those records and imagine that the new theme is the act of recording the past and present, as a gift for the future.

I sincerely believe that the world presents ideas to us in an organized manner. It talks to us.

Today I went through some old papers, letters, and photos that for one reason or another I’ve chosen to keep since moving to Seattle. All the things I chose to keep before moving to Seattle are in California still, so I only had the last 5 years or so to think about. But reading through old notes for stories and poems and rough drafts of poems and stories, and completed stories and poems that I’ve forgotten about has me wondering if leaving a trail of fiction is a better record of the past than non-fiction. Cause now I feel like I’m not producing anything anywhere near the quality of what I’ve done in the past. What this means to this site, is that perhaps for a while I’ll stop this daily drudgery and get back (again) to fiction (for a while at least).

My fear, right now, is that text in the amounts that are required for fiction of average length, isn’t very well suited for the flashy dashy medium of the internet. So I’ll give it a try but if it doesn’t seem to be working I’ll take it offline (gasp!).

I hate how I’m talking right now. It too quickly betrays the fact that I’ve been quietly sorting through papers for hours and am not minutes away from going to bed. Too calm. Well, good thing I’m moving to fiction now. Here’s one last thing before bed:

An Autobiography

I am the absence of (not by choice) the trees, the rocks, the air, and also the absence of that temporal body which some people think I’m forever attached to with some kind of hypothetical Spiritual Tape – binding soul, spirit, and body like some microcosmic Trinity or something, but ALAS, they are greatly mistaken (it has even been proven by those masterminds in the Lab o’ Chemicals, who ever so often bring about tradition-crashing waves of New Thought, that our bodies are recycled every seven or so years and everything we are in terms of matter – atoms, cells, nuclei, pancreas, spine, gastric juice, etc. – is in constant flux), and I am none of that nonsense in the same way that I’m not Shakespeare nor King Solomon (although many a time I’ve wished to be both the genius of literature along with the most wise collector of truth and distributer of justice), nor Beethoven with his beautiful eyes and his star-filled fingertips, who discovered the sonatas and symphonies that hid just a couple inches up and a couple inches in from his ironically empty ears – no, these people I am not, and if it brings me any mortal comfort, they are not I – but hopefully, you are thinking, this is no great source of sorrow for me, because any child of age greater than, say, three, should have the mental strength and endurance to deal with such a blow as realizing that he, in fact, is not the alpha and omega of all human existance, and in reality this truth does not bear such a great burden against my soul but rather is almost comforting because now I can stand up and stretch my thoughtful arms into this vast, dark, scary, unknown universe (say that in a ark and forboding tone with much gesticulation and fluctuation for full effect) and rejoice in learning new things – or as Plato would say: remember old things, for it is his thesis (not mine) that we know all things from before birth and “learning” is only a Recalling of old pre-planted thoughts from that infamous “Somewhere Else” that men and women of all history have been endlessly chattering about and I … I am included in that mixed crowd I suppose, always trying to stay one careless step ahead of those old and current thinkers with my much vocalized and never flawless Theories of Everything and Everything Else (for example recently I’ve been campaigning the idea that – oh nevermind, it’s just a long list of yady-yady that really does nothing more than bounce about and twist and crash and snicker-snack like the beamish boy’s Vorpal Sword through that unrelenting Jabberwocky of infinite mystery without doing a bit of good) – oh great, now we’re (speaking in the plural, of course) judging what is “good,” and what is opposingly, “not good,” and this is just another fatal attempt to give the end-all, that last fatal word that resolves what centuries and Ages have been trying to figure out, and really, that is what I see myself doing eventually (rather deludedly I must humbly admit) in my own time and in my own manner, or rather in God’s own time since My own time is rather linear and blind and ultimately stagnant, whereas God’s time spin-spin-spins toward God-knows-where (ha) and we: the small bits of dust – dust is 90% skin to state a gross and irrelevant fact – and ice – like the asteroids – are tumbled chaotically through black-swallowing-black space hopefully towards Salvation and back home again to the Heaven parabolically known to exist in the sky above us when literally we know that everything above us and below us is 99.9999% emptiness and – OH! how lovely and sad and pitiful we can get about our own loneliness in this empty universe when really we all believe what has long been proven wrong in actuality: that we, the smart, the glorious, the ubiquitously praise-worthy humans are the dramatic epicenter of this and this and this and that and that and that and above all the infinite I’s that make up the human race are the more specific center of the universe (for example in my case, everything revolves around me-me-me, but in your case it’s you-you-you and for them it’s them-them-them and you see the pattern I’m sure), so you see how we have to look past the material world if we’re to see anything but an endless field of mirrors and reflecting pools of ourselves, and pretend that we’re not only staring at a crowd full of ourselves (how scary) but rather I propose irrefuteably that inSTEAD there is a crowd full of ourselves all sitting in a movie theater and there is something absolutely NOT ourselves that we are staring at on the movie screen and the movie screen is staring back at us – for this is our only hope and I only wish we would realize this and also realize how easy everything really is and just forget about our ever-present squibbling and whining, but that is just an idealist’s dream of a dream of a dream (squibble) that will never be realized this side of death (whiiiiiiiIIIIINE!), but in the meantime we can pretend that any of these things really matters in the longer run, but really they don’t matter cause when it comes down to it, I, I, I, am the absense of everything I’ve said and what’s left after God and time and worries and emotions and thoughts and ideas and atoms and wishes and jobs and clothes and EVERYTHING is taken away – that is me: after all.

hi again. so i got married on the 17th of june and went to Paris for two weeks. i got back last night at 2am. the wedding was … and the honeymoon was … and now we’re back and we’re …

here are a few highlights i’d like to share and remember:

• a lot of people were here for the couple days before the wedding—it helped ease the nervousness that was docked in the back of my mind—how would i cope with the infinite variety of scenarios in my head and the one singular event of the wedding. would they clash or blend or harmonize or generate a feedback loop. it turned out that the wedding was both more chaotic, and a little more calm than i had been expecting. there were a few rough areas (like when the piano player didn’t stop playing once we were up the aisle and the best man had to kick his chair to make him stop, and like when my friends from utah were talking about K but i was in a zone and didn’t realize and sort of gave the impression of being really stressed even though i wasn’t.)
  
• nick, K’s six year old nephew was a tough competitor for my deserved spotlight as he delighted friends and family alike with his rapid succession of taking about 5 rolls of film from the disposable cameras dispersed about. he also showed us his cartwheel and his deft leap from the staircase to the ground.
  
• day one in paris: hot. our modest one room hotel hardly held our beds (yes, there were two twin beds nudged up against one another which they called a double bed). our shower was about 1 square foot. the window nicely overlooked the local paris university. during the second night there we realized that our entire neighborhood was consumed by the solstice festival which lasted all night. small cover bands lined st. michel street (one block away) and people filled the streets forcing cars to find another way around town. people climbed local monuments and hung from ancient statues symbolizing victory in war. this was the first of at least half a dozen fetes (festivals) that we experienced during the two weeks.
  
• we quickly found a favorite area of paris lined with cafes, bars, brassieres, and stores at the corner of st. michel and the seine. our first cafe au laits were purchased as we sat at a cafe where almost all the chairs were outside. the tables were arranged so that each table had two chairs on the same side of the table, so that customers could watch the street and the people on the street. this is the model that all the cafes in paris seemed to follow, much to our liking.
  
• this was K and i’s second trip together (the other being japan), and we get along well on trips since we both don’t feel like there’s any real need to hit all the hotspots one after another in rapid succession. instead, we’ll plan a day at a time and will spend a lot of time at a couple places that we really want to explore. we spend five days at the louvre alone, and saw probably two thirds of the exhibits.
  
• rick steves is a huge dork. he was so bent on making us experience the cheapest and most americanized version of paris that we read his book mostly for comic relief. in reference to his 90 minute walk through the louve he finishes his humorous essay with this quote: “once you get your gottas out of the way, head on over to the orsay”.
  
• the paris like football. during our last night there they won the european cup and there was chaos in the city for the entire night. again, they were hanging from statues and we joined them for a while running into the streets whenever the lights were red and pounding on cars and jumping up and down like little children full of glee, waving flags, popping champagne (alcohol is allowed in public, and often encouraged), buses danced around, people haning out of car windows and sunroofs, and even the ambulances and policeman would wave and honk their horns to the tune they had invented for the occasion…

well, i have returned from paris feeling full of inspiration to paint again, and will be continuing to collaborate with K on a story we’ve started and on a painting we’ve done some sketches for. also, this sight will undergo some redesign eventually. lots of things can now be cleaned up and reorganized in my life such as the money situation and the creativity situation and the job situation. looking forward to it.

sorry for the noted lack of non-event related material in this entry, i’m not sure what i want this diary to be anymore. whenever i go travelling i become very anti-record keeping. i feel animosity to those who carry video cameras always a foot in front of themselves and who have to take a picture of every little thing. you have to stop recording sometimes in order to enjoy what you’re doing at the moment. so i didn’t keep any detailed notes about the trip, and only took one and a half rolls of film during all two weeks. but here i am with an entry with the sole intent of recording. i can think of a few justifications for this and so can you so i won’t talk about them.

today, we cleaned the house (dirty still from visitors), and opened our wedding gifts—one of the best ones being a box filled with a particularly esteemed friend of ours’ ten favorite books, only two of which i’ve already read.

one other new resolution i’ve made is to start running again—i even bought an mp3 player to kick start me. i have been messing around with it today and love it. lots of new things. have you ever seen me so content.