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drought, flames, ashes

2009-08-27T04:43:00Z

When is the right time to write? It never seems the right time when the words come. Paper, pen, or even keyboard, touchscreen are never in reach when the words bubble up, unlooked for, unheralded. And before I can write them down, they evaporate, like a single cup of water spilled heedlessly upon the cracked, dry earth as the sun beats down mercilessly.

I woke up this morning to finish reading a tale of woman who turns into a dragon. I’ve read it several times before, but the story always haunts me. It was in this fey-inspired mood that I trudged off to work today with dread. Dreading what, I’m not certain.

Today is my mother’s birthday, so my brother and my sister decided to take her and my dad to Disneyland. When I finished up at 6 pm, they were still there, so I told them I would meet them at Downtown Disney.

I headed out staring at the brooding clouds of smoke billowing from the San Gabriel Mountains to the north. Yesterday, with the winds completely still, the smoke climbed straight up, looking like a stack of sullen thunder clouds. This morning, the smoke had diffused throughout the entire basin, filling the SGV, contaminating everything with taste of charred ash, of burning, of fire season in Southern California. Quickly I made a 180̂°, climbing up into the Puente Hills. The broad parkway narrows suddenly into a windy mountain road, and it’s easy to forget you’re still deep in the bowels of the vast conurbation known as Southern California. Cresting the hill, you can see downtown Santa Ana and the whole of the OC opening up before you.

I’ve always been obsessed with roads. I still see the ancient tracks crisscrossing the valleys and the basin, even thought they’ve been paved over and turned into Interstate highways. A lot of these roads were here before the Spaniards ever set foot on this distant land, coming together in a twisted knot in the Place of Smoke, Yang-na, the Tongvan village that eventually became Pueblo del Rio de Nuestra Señora la Reyna de los Angeles de Porciuncula. One of these roads the Spaniards eventually called the King’s Highway, El Camino Real, going up and down the Californian coast. That’s where the road out of the hills eventually intersects, that ancient track, miles inland. Before the Interstate Highway System bypassed it once and for all, it used to be the US 101. Now it’s only known as Whittier Boulevard, as it threads its way to Fullerton, and then swings south as Harbor Blvd. The road, buried under concrete, steel, and asphalt, heads all the way down to San Diego and into Baja California.

It also happens to pass by Disneyland. I took me about 45 minutes driving surface streets from the City of Industry to Anaheim, and I wound my way through the streets of the Magic Kingdom, where my memory fails me. There was a time in my life where my parents took me to this place every year, and now, none of it looks familiar. I met them in Downtown Disney, an ersatz urban center, the likes of which proliferate throughout all of Southern California (There’s Universal City Walk, The Grove, The Block at Orange, The Americana in Glendale, etc., etc.) The walkways were filled with throngs of people, and there were musicians performing in the plazas.

On my way back to my car I stopped and watched a group of musicians playing a cover of Muse’s “Starlight”, with a reggae feel to it. And then I drove off onto the I-5, heading back to the heart of the city, and I thought about the hundreds of times I’ve taken this freeway up from San Diego, and all the possibilities I never had the courage to explore. Time never waits. You’d think I’d know that by now.

Despite the raging brush fires and all the light pollution of Hollywood, you could still see the brightest stars glimmering in night sky, and the helicopters patrolling the city, flaring bright as they made their turns. The words really never come very easily. I have to scrape them from my brain, like the splattered droppings of an insane bird trapped in a cage much too small, and it’s only the rearranged remnants that end up written down. Well, I tried.

off the rails

2009-07-28T17:46:00Z

Destiny as simple as booking a one-way trip
on a train winding through the canyons and passes of decision
along the lonely gray strand of time
where the waves crash and break into quantum foam
chances realized then dematerialized
and not even a scrap of hope remains

Looking back, it was never a single wrong choice
not even a failed gambit, a collapsed strategy
rather the unrelenting summation of a hundred thousand moments
fate, like a gusty wind, a torrid sea, buffeting me this way and that
still, in the loneliness of the utter darkness
in those aching moments before blessed sleep
I search my memory, sifting through the wrack and ruin
trying to find that one moment I can pin my despair onto
where it was guaranteed to go wrong from there on out
a monument to the end of daydreams, where fantasy died.

traces

2009-07-10T06:41:00Z

Betrayal? What was there to betray? Abandonment? But what claim did I have, what duty did she have?

Just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there. What choice is there but to go forward?

apophenia, again

2009-06-11T04:10:00Z

I suppose it’s no accident that I ended up in the profession I’m in. From the beginning, my mind has been tuned to look for patterns. The finding of patterns is actually quite easy: everything has a pattern, every bit of data, every tiny stimulus can be fitted to a scheme. The big trick, the thing that they pay you big bucks for, is figuring which of these patterns actually match reality.

And it’s not just a peculiarity of my own mind. Some have argued that that’s basically the reason why that roughly 3-pound, metabolically costly, incredibly convoluted, quivering mass of neural tissue that sits in the vault of your cranium came into existence. What we call intelligence is nothing more than assiduous pattern-matching. (Which is why it’s not a huge reach to believe that the first true artificial intelligences will evolve from something like a search engine, but I digress.)

In any case, while my job is really nothing more than teasing out patterns, recognizing them, and then acting upon them, I haven’t recently been trying to apply this method to my life in general. Mostly, I’ve really just been trying to keep my head above water. I’m still really quite at the bottom of the steep learning curve as far as my (still relatively) new job is concerned. Every day is a learning experience. And for a while my main task had been to keep the feeling of being completely overwhelmed at bay.

This has not been anywhere as easy as I had hoped, although I have been known to hope for too much, and a little struggle never hurt anybody, but a lot of this is because my body really is in terrible shape.

I marvel at what a few years can do to a person. Somehow, despite the abuse of recurring episodes of 30+ hours of work straight through, and 80-hour work weeks, I managed to stay (relatively) healthy over the past four years. I only called in sick once or twice at the most, and only really needed parenteral antibiotics once. All told, there were probably a total of three or four episodes during my whole residency where I was, at most, moderately ill. None of these episodes would’ve required admission to the hospital. In retrospect, though, for the sake of the patients I saw, I should’ve probably just called in sick after all, but unless I was on an elective where they didn’t really need me to be there, I always got the feeling that the only reason I should call in is if I were intubated.

Be that as it may, so far, in working for two and a half months, I’ve been sick twice. I blame the swine flu. A few weeks ago I came down with fever and a cough, accompanied by diffuse body aches and shaking chills. It really didn’t even last the whole seven days. While I felt like I was going to die that Monday, and still felt like crap on Tuesday, and didn’t think I was going to survive at all on Wednesday, on Thursday I stopped running fevers, and by the weekend I was OK.

Then, just a couple of days ago, on Saturday, I started feeling like ass that night. By Sunday I was febrile and rigoring. On Monday, I still felt crappy, and had an annoying cough to boot, but I didn’t feel quite as terrible as I did on Sunday. Tuesday was a little better. Today was fine. Not 100%, but pretty much asymptomatic.

I’m not sure what’s going on with my immune system lately.

Well, as Count Rugen from “The Princess Bride” says, “If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything,” and, really, the past few months have been all about trying to successfully maintain my mental health, and, at times, my physical health. I can’t claim success quite yet, but leave it to me to start thinking too far ahead as usual.

This, naturally, leads me to a rather bleak vision.

I can’t really see beyond the endless rotation of days at work. I’m not going to say that every day is exactly the same, but each day has a disturbing symmetry with the day preceding it. I can usually keep the days of the week in order, but the sensation of being on a giant, metaphysical treadmill is starting to creep up on me.

But the part of me that always worries keeps worrying that this can’t possibly be sustainable. I *am* hoping that things will settle down, and I won’t have to worry about being overwhelmed all the time, but given my general lack of optimism, this is a difficult hope to hang on to.

What I need is something to look forward to.

What that something is, I have no idea.

But you can always count on dreams to unearth extremely disturbing things about your psychologic state. For some reason, I dreamt randomly of a person I haven’t talked to in quite a while, whom I only really knew from working together for about a week.

Naturally, this person is on Facebook, so the first thing I did in the morning was look up their Facebook profile.

Interestingly enough, their profile description is a single quote from a Radiohead song that I’ve been obsessed with lately—”There There”

in pitch dark i go walking in your landscape.
broken branches trip me as i speak.
just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.
just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.

The part of my brain that strains for meaning and pattern demands that I make something out of these random coincidences. The rational part of me recognizes that this is just a symptom of a greater malaise. There is a single question that troubles me, and I cannot answer at this time, and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever be able to answer it before it’s too late. The question is this: “What do I do with my life?”

the fractured city

2009-06-03T03:49:00Z

I just finished reading The City and the City by China Miéville, the first book of his that I’ve read that wasn’t set in New Crobuzon and his Secondary World of Bas-Lag.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

As with New Crobuzon and the city of Armada in The Scar, Miéville once again displays his penchant for creating bizarre and memorable settings. The subject of the title are the fictional cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, which are supposed to be in the Real World somewhere in the southeast of Europe.

The City and the City is ostensibly a detective story, about the investigation of a murder, which rapidly spirals into an international incident. But the part of it that really blew my mind was the central conceit: Beszel and Ul Qoma occupy the same space. There are areas that are “total”, meaning that they are entirely in one city or the other, but there are a lot of spaces that are “cross-hatched”, literally overlapping areas in the city that are simultaneously in Beszel and Ul Qoma. But the even crazier thing is that the populace has been trained over the centuries to ignore one another. While citizens of Beszel and Ul Qoma walk the same streets, they deliberately “unsee” each other, and even do so with the buildings and transit ways that are not in their reality. They even “unhear” sounds from foreign cars and “unsmell” the non-local food.

In fact, to acknowledge the presence and existence of the other city is considered the greatest of crimes, known as “breaching”. If committed, you forfeit your rights to the mysterious agency known as Breach, which is the hidden force that maintains this bizarre division.

What blows my mind about this is precisely because it *is* plausible. Never mind that there are lots of divided cities in the world: East and West Berlin prior to unification, Jerusalem, the cities straddling the U.S.-Mexico border. The one real world city that Beszel and Ul Qoma perhaps brings to mind is Kosovo, which itself exists in a sort-of existential limbo. But the Orwellian process of unseeing is even more mundane than that. Many reviewers use the example of how lots of people unsee the homeless. But there are other circumstances as well. On public transit, it seems that people readily unsee and unhear each other. Motorists have a tendency to unsee pedestrians in L.A.

And there are the more insidious, institutional forms of unseeing: for example, how people tend to unsee ghettos, which police forces appear to selectively see and unsee. This was made manifest to me during the L.A. Riots in 1992: whatever the reality, it seemed at the time that the police had decided to unsee the violence going on between blacks and Koreans, instead focusing on defending the more affluent parts of the city.

If anything, the brain is designed to unsee that which we do not wish to see. It is the reason why eyewitness accounts are so unreliable. If you weren’t looking for it, you’re probably not going to see it, never mind that the photons actually did hit your retina, and an electrical signal did get transmitted to your visual cortex. Unseeing is the way we make the stimulus-laden world bearable. Without this selectivity, we’d be constantly overwhelmed.

But this selectivity also leads to neglect, and this allows us to believe ridiculous things, like the idea that racism and sexism no longer exist, for example.

It is in this mind set that I think about the recent debates about the definition of the Eastside of L.A.

I’ve had my own thoughts about the geography of L.A. myself, and I don’t ever remember thinking of L.A. as a city with an obvious axis. NYC has uptown, downtown, and the boroughs. Chicago has the Northside and the Southside (and the Westside). Talking about the Eastside never occurred to me. There were districts: Silver Lake, Echo Park, Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Glassell Park, Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, etc. On the opposite side of the city, there is a district known as West L.A. It’s only in the last decade or so that I became aware that you could think of the Westside as a single monolithic entity, so the idea of imagining a monolithic Eastside was even more foreign.

But obviously, a sample size of one is almost worthless, and there are lots of long-time Angelenos who think and have always thought of the Eastside as east of downtown.

This seems to be a sane definition of the Eastside. Regardless of how much Westsiders ignore Downtown L.A., it is still functionally the center of the city. The major freeways all converge in downtown, which can be considered their point of origin, and they are named for their distant destination: The San Bernardino Freeway, the Pomona Freeway, the Santa Monica Freeway, the Hollywood Freeway, the Pasadena Freeway, the Harbor Freeway. And while lots of people commute away from the city, the flows of rush hour (or hours) are still mostly recognizable: in the morning, the heaviest flow is towards downtown and in the evening, the heaviest flow is away from downtown. The light rail, subway, and commuter rail systems are centered on downtown. Dodger Stadium and Staples Center are in sight of downtown. Naturally, the seat of political power—City Hall—is in downtown.

To ignore downtown is to ignore history: this is where the city was founded, where it was first named El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula. But even before this, this is the place the Tongva people called Yangna, the Place of Smoke.

The reason why calling Echo Park and Silver Lake part of the Eastside is problematic is because it is a form of unseeing. It ignores the true Eastside, the people who live there, and their history. And it ignores the centrality of downtown L.A. If Echo Park and Silver Lake is on the Eastside, what are they east of?

the axes of the city

2009-06-03T03:41:00Z

L.A. does have Cartesian axes in practice, even if they aren’t really acknowledged. Broadway and 1st Street is origin. Addresses are numbered from here. The y-axis is Broadway, and it runs all the way from Lincoln Heights to Carson. The x-axis is 1st Street, which extends from the unincorporated area of East L.A. to just east of Beverly Hills (although not quite continuously.)

Of note, once Broadway crosses the L.A River, it no longer serves as the y-axis—east and west is delineated first by Pasadena Avenue, and north of that, by Figueroa Street—oddly enough, this puts Northeast L.A. in the northwest quadrant of L.A. Also, west of Beverly Hills, Sunset Boulevard serves as the x-axis from which addresses are numbered. San Pedro has its own Cartesian axes, implemented before it was annexed by L.A.

Using address numbering alone, it doesn’t make much sense to consider areas west of origin to be the Eastside (although there is that quirk with Northeast L.A. that I mentioned above.)

But what seems to be the best geographic feature to delineate the Eastside is the L.A River. Everything east of the river is the Eastside. What separates Northeast L.A. from the true Eastside is the Arroyo Seco.

what is gone is gone

2009-05-26T06:29:00Z

He found it strange how an old song that his dad always used to listen to on his cassette player had embedded itself so deeply into his brain that when he heard it again, it instantly took him to a time and place he could scarcely remember, a past that never was, memories that had faded into a story, into lore, more akin to fantastic fiction than to anything he had actually lived through.

Where was I? Where had I been? How did I get here? It wasn’t that he didn’t know the narrative of his life story. It was just that every time he rehearsed it in his mind, it sounded more and more like something that had happened to someone else, to someone perhaps who had never existed, just another character in some novel, existing only in his mind. He remembered the admonition of Jose Rizal, the martyred revolutionary who had stated that if you didn’t know where you came from, then you’d never figure out where you were going. It wasn’t that he didn’t remember, exactly. But he wondered if these were his memories, and even if they were, were they really memories, or just idealized narratives of events long passed, long ago divorced from any modicum of authenticity? And he started thinking, maybe I don’t want to know where I’m going, anyway, except that he knew, and of course, everyone knew. The end was obvious. Sooner or later, he would die. It was the getting there that was the complication, the thing that would remain mysterious and opaque so long as his memories continued to feel fake, as if they had been implanted all at once by some sinister band of conspirators.

That’s just paranoia. Everyone has that, he paraphrased a line from a book he had once read, a line that he repeated often, each time being amused by it, even though he didn’t actually remember the exact phrasing. My brain is just full of holes, that’s all, he told himself, as if somehow such a statement should be soothing. He was too young to be having these kinds of bouts of forgetfulness. But he didn’t want to look at it too closely. Because then he’d be stuck between two unpleasant possibilities. Either there really was an evil cabal deliberately falsifying and obscuring his memory, or he had actually done it to himself.

the end

2009-05-26T06:06:00Z

This blog post by S hits close to the mark with regards to my fears of dying completely alone, of dying and being quickly forgotten, although I’ve sort of become more and more resigned to the idea.

wandering

2009-05-26T05:55:00Z

Would it be the mountains? Or the sea? It had been a long time since he had seen the south-facing beaches, so he decided it would be the sea. He would go west, west toward the sunset, following the ancient road leading out of the city, the King’s road, though no king ruled any longer.

endure

2009-05-19T05:23:00Z

The hill loomed before him. His legs began to ache, and maybe there was even a little numbness in his fingers. He was just terribly out of shape. To put it bluntly, his body was a shambling ruin, encased in pounds upon pounds of fat. He drew deeper, sharper breaths. The cold air raked his lungs, sort of how he imagined an aerosol of glass would feel, only he knew he was exaggerating as usual. Sweat beaded, then trickled down his face.

He wonder idly, “How do you endure that which, by definition, is unendurable?” His thoughts strayed to the tumult heaving in his mind. Even the rigors of exertion did not distract him from wallowing in self-pity.

He knew that everything, ultimately, came to an end. Some endings would be happy. But many wouldn’t be. Certainly, many hadn’t been. None of them had killed him yet, though. That at least was something.

And after every ending, he would begin again, just like he always did. Except for that final ending. Somewhere down the line, there would be a winter that had no spring, a midnight with no dawning. You just never knew. But the indeterminacy made it not worth thinking about. One thing at time, he supposed. Except he really, really couldn’t see his way out of this one. There was no time limit to this one, no automatic expiration date. For all he knew, this could just go on and on and on, until the years finally piled on so heavy that he would snap under them. Well, that would be one sort of ending, he supposed.

And then the trail evened out, and he drew a deep breath in and slowed his pace. He did not stop to look around though. Certainly, he did not look back. In the growing dark, he wandered. Yeah, everything always came to an end, but the road, for now, would go on.

lost my train of thought

2009-05-18T04:34:00Z

So that 5.0 earthquake in Lennox threw me off for a bit, and I’m just trying to reassemble my thoughts.

It’s only been a couple of weeks since I finalized my move from S.D. to L.A., and I didn’t realize I would actually miss it. I decided to take a trip back down to S.D. today to hang out with some friends at the North Park Street Fair. I took the train down, something which I apparently haven’t done in a while, and it occurred to me that, yes, I’ll gladly pay the extra money to avoid driving.

The day started off foggy, as is typical for this time of year, with the marine layer coming in as far as downtown L.A. The whole trip down, the train was enveloped in drear grey clouds. But as the day wore on, and as I made my way inland, the sun burned through the grey.

I didn’t really stay for very long, and started my trip back up with the sun still high in the sky.

I do fine on my own during the day. It’s really the nights that got to me. I started hating the loneliness of darkness. It didn’t help that I wasn’t working. And then, I starting not being able to sleep. I didn’t have anywhere to go. And I didn’t have anyone to talk to, unless you count people on the Internet.

So, in the end, I guess I really couldn’t have stayed

The thing I really like about taking the train up and down between S.D. and L.A. is that it literally runs along the coast for at least half the trip. It’s been a really long time since I’ve hung out at the sea. I used to do it more, when I had a little more hope in my heart, when I still dreamt of impossible things. When none of those things came true—it was inevitable, and even though hindsight is always 20/20, I already knew it as things were happening—when it became impossible to pretend that things were going to turn out OK, I stopped going to the beach and watching sunsets.

Again, I didn’t really think I would it miss it that much.

Even at 6pm, the marine layer still hugged the coastline, and under the grey sky, I watched the waves crash upon the shore, dissolving into white foam. And I thought about how it seems like the universe is just the remnant aftermath of the clash of titanic forces. Vast and powerful energies that meet head-on, almost completely annihilating each other. We’re the wreckage, the detritus of this clash.

In a literal sense, this might be true. At the moment of creation, massive quantities of matter mixed with massive quantities of anti-matter, resulting in near-total annihilation, and it just so happens that a small fraction of matter remains.

So it is with the foam in the sea. The vast sea rising up to crash against the earth, and the random patterns of foam are all that remains.

This is perhaps why John Wheeler’s metaphor of quantum foam arrests my mind. Our lives are the threads formed out of that seething randomness.

It’s hard to see where I go next from here. I spent the last view months just getting into a rhythm, and while I don’t have it completely under control yet, it gets a little easier every day. But with more leisure, there’s more time to think, and a lot of people have warned me about my propensity for getting mired in my own thinking.

Well, here’s hoping that Heraclitus was right, and that it really is impossible to step in the same river twice. Because I can’t bear the idea of history repeating itself on such a short and personal time scale.

like a ladder to the sun

2009-05-16T02:51:00Z

For a while, I couldn’t get the Yeah Yeah Yeahs “Zero” out of my head. The lyrics are pretty sparse, but people have come up with interesting interpretations. The idea of the song referring to a prostitute does seem to fit. But, maybe because the bass-line reminds me of an engine, or a propeller, “zero” makes me think of the Mitsubishi Zero, the mainstay of the Imperial Japanese air force during World War II, and of kamikazes.

“Ladder to the sun” leads me to think of Japan. “Get your leather on” also makes me think of fighter pilots. “Try to hit the spot/get to know it in the dark” (while more appropriate for a bomber rather than a fighter) and “better find out where they want you to go” also make me think of aerial combat. “Can you climb, climb, climb higher?” certainly fits the flying idea. “Shellshock” (while more of WWI term) also makes me think of that time period.

Or it could just be that the first time I heard this song, it was right after hearing “Enola Gay” by Orchestral Manœuvers in the Dark

fuggedaboutit

2009-05-14T04:31:00Z

I haven’t been sleeping well lately. Which sucks, because how I feel when I wake up pretty much dictates how the rest of the day goes.

I just have this cloud of self-doubt hanging over me lately.

But it’s too late now. Nothing I can do until I invent that time travel machine I’m always talking about.

always, always uncertainty

2009-05-12T03:19:00Z

May gray is in full effect, and I’m dragging in the mornings, my eastward commute cloaked in sea-borne fog. Everything felt out of sync for some reason, and instead of listening to the morning shows, I ended up plugging in my iPod.

Out of the random collection of songs, it managed to pick one out that dragged me back over a decade, reminding me of an episode of my life that—quite pathetically—I still haven’t gotten over.

The wound that will not heal. How positively Arthurian.

Anyway, I tried to shrug it off. I rolled into work as always, grumbling, with a full-on case of the Mondays, and as the day dragged and finally waned, I wondered why I felt so out of sorts.

Some wounds run deep, I guess.

I have, though, been mining the past quite a bit lately. I haven’t really been reading any new books lately. I’ve been rifling through the disorder of my library, re-reading books I haven’t read in a while. I recently just finished Roverandom, a light-hearted children’s tale written by J.R.R. Tolkien. After that, I re-read A Fine and Private Place by Peter S Beagle (the author of The Last Unicorn, a book that I first read when I was in college, and which got me through a rather rough patch in my life. And yesterday, I started The Farthest Shore, part of Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle, only just realizing that I don’t remember much of it at all.

I read a lot of books in college, mostly in that fallow time when I broke up with my girlfriend from high school and before I knew who my true friends were. I spent a lot of times wandering aimlessly, heartbrokenly, around the South Side of Berkeley, along the warrens and alleys darting this way and that from Telegraph Avenue. I spent a lot of time roaming the shelves of Cody’s and Moe’s just reading fantasy and science fiction, trying to escape the seeming morass of my own life.

But the darkness snapped eventually. (You would think I would’ve learned this lesson by now.) The books have always been my refuge, but I don’t remember them ever being as vital or as necessary as that dark time.

Still, that veiled time is not the time that haunts me most (although they run rather close to one another, and sometimes I wonder if I’ve confused the memories, letting deep sorrow flow from frozen moment to frozen moment until everything is under deep, cold water) and I suppose the great consolation of growing older is that, while I may never again feel such happiness and joy again, nor feel love and desire so keenly as that, at least I will never again feel such abyssal depths of sorrow and heartache. Everything I have seen and felt since that time is a mere echo, a reflection of a reflection. There is certainly something quite desolate about that idea, but I’ll take desolation and numbness over harrowing pain, I guess.

the subjunctive mood

2009-05-11T04:46:00Z

The month of May always, always makes me think of possibility. It is, I suppose, merely a function of the lengthening of days. The sunset continues to inch further and further north, and closer and closer to 8 pm, while the earliest rays of dawn encroach upon my dreams earlier and earlier.

This time of year, my heart stirs, and I feel like I’m waiting for something. Something unpredictable, something unfathomable. There is a little dread that creeps in a this point. As tiny and circumscribed the footprint of my life has become, there are lots of things that could overthrow this fitful peace I’ve managed to attain.

It’s not anything like what I had wanted, but that’s what happens when you fail to make adequate plans.

Still (even though my soul does not wish to be still), the sunlight makes regret doubly woeful. This is not the time to be looking back. The light is for looking forward. As the rhythms of my days, my weeks, my months settle, it’s hard to see across the endless sameness. It’s like staring across the open sea, I suppose, over the infinite plains of waves. Water, water, and not a drop to drink. And not a cloud in the sky either.

But I’ve been pondering this particular truism: A writer writes because he must. And let me tell you, the fields of inspiration have been pretty fallow these days. There was a time when I was bursting with words and ideas that demanded to be let out, never mind that in their mad rush tumbling from my mind to my fingers and then either to the screen or to paper, they never managed to be coherent or euphonic. The words would come out in torrential spurts, like blood from the femoral artery, and just as vital, I suppose. But all bleeding stops eventually, and the days, the weeks, the months have been hard and dry.

If I do not write, then must I not be a writer?

(And why does this mad dream assert itself now, when the crossroads have all been crossed, when I couldn’t unravel the braided twistings and turnings of decision and indecision, even if I could spin time backwards?)

And still, as direct as I want to be, I still feel like I’m dancing around my meaning. Is it my will that is straight, and is it the words that bend my meaning and lead it astray? Or is it because, from the start, my desire has always been twisted, and the words are only flowing like rivulets of water down their accustomed courses?

I just wanted to write something, for no reason at all. And all I have is a map. A map can tell you how to get from here to there, but it can’t choose your paths for you. It can’t tell you why you need leave here, arrive there. A map can only tell you what is. It cannot tell you what will be.