hot child in the city

This new neighborhood, to employ a colloquial term, fits me like a glove.
Whenever I describe it to friends, colleagues, passersby, I tend to employ these vague grandiose phrases - "It just feels alive", "Things are happening", blah blah blah.

It's hard to pin down on what I like the most about it. Is it the manifestation of the traditional city life that I've long kept buried? Los Angeles is a city and isn't a city. As increasingly is the case, the haves like to segregate from the have-nots in well-decorated and gentrified areas - gated off by the invisible barriers of blocks and intersections. Though you could argue that the same is occuring here, the Pressed Juiceries, the fair-trade coffee shops, and the industrial bistros occupying the former street residences of the 99%, if you live here, you can't just drive away from what you don't want to see.

The scourge of mental illness, addiction, what have you, is right in front of your face - not conveniently tucked away in the boroughs that you drive quickly through. Those that are forgotten, those that are invisible, are there right in front of you.

But obviously, gentification has it's benefits. Wonderfully inventive restaurants residing in old banks, hotel lobbies, etc. are merely a few minutes walk. Street art transforms decrepit walls and alleys into makeshift galleries. Everywhere you turn you are faced with the past - in the form of an intricately designed turret, balcony, etc. In the age of mass-produced everything, chain restaurants, and little boxes on the hillside, seeing the echoes of an older Los Angeles feels oddly refreshing rather than regressive.

It's really the first time I've felt at home. Los Angeles was always an adopted city - I was raised with redwoods, big backyards, and a constant sweater weather climate. Yet for some reason, in a place where the only green thing within a half of a mile is a succulent in my apartment, I've come to find the home sense I've always craved. It's strange, pleasurable, and comforting all at once.

musings

Just because it's been awhile doesn't mean there aren't things on my mind. It's more a question of where to begin and where to start.

I've been noodling a lot about the purpose of things. On a macro/obvious level, the purpose of life, human existence, what have you.

I've been struggling with something that I've realized lately - I've been trying to hold it at arm's length lest it get too close and really pollute my state of mind. It happened most recently when I had a day to myself - a day where there were no appointments, nowhere to be, no one to meet, and nothing pressing to do.

I'd long thought in busier times how there's nothing I would like more than time at my disposal. Yet here I was, no less satisfied. Instead this dread started to surface - the realization that for all of my industriousness, once that was taken away, the activities that I was preoccupied with were merely a distraction from the meaninglessness of those activities. It sounds strange but in those unoccupied hours, I really felt the onerousness of time much like I did in school, watching the clock drag on and willing for it to fast forward. It's a sharp change from how I've felt the past few years - hummingbird time - where everything seems to move so fast and I can barely get my hands around 24 when all of a sudden I turn 25.

I've also been struggling with Nick's death and the absolute irrationality of nature. A more devoutly theological me would reframe his death as an act of God - something foreseen and meant to be. Yet the current me, atheistic and profoundly logical, knows that this is something the more theological me is doing to contend with the freakish circumstances surrounding his death - a narrativization of traumatic events. All I know is that someone pure and good and wonderful was ripped out of this world prematurely and I don't know what to make of it.

fleeting moments

What I hate most about this blog is the element that I can't change.
I can't not write about moments that I have yet not experienced. 
But a cursory look at this godforsaken blog is yet another trivial account of youth graduating ever so ungracefully into age and (hopefully) wisdom. 
My experiences are (despite my internal protestations) universal; they are not unique and upon reflection, are veritably trivial. Yet they are mine own. So within owning ownership of my memories and moments, let us discuss. Time.

Of course, as a young one, I never gave time a fleeting thought. It wasn't until Jon's death that I even realized that there was an end to this consciousness, this being, the way of life that I had grown accustomed.  In the grand narrative of my life, Jon was a catalyst for many revelations; we used to spend many a night in his Jeep Cherokee discussing and dissecting the exigencies of both our existence and that of the human race and it's a credit to our friendship that even today, I continue to reflect on our conversations and see how those earnest investigations would apply even today.

But as is the way with most life experiences, we cannot understand them until we experience them ourselves. I recently got my wisdom teeth removed (everyone can breathe now). What petrified me most about the procedure was not the grisly process of digging out teeth and unrooting them from my mouth but the prospect of being put under, losing time only to be reoriented again with the normal way of doing things.

And as I sat there, tears streaming down my face, potentially facing the "end of my life" or my orientation with time itself, I thought about many things. I thought about how back in the day, people in small towns, in the middle of nowhere, had no concept of the time. The time on the clock at the local train station was literally miles away from the clock in the local general store. Wherever you were was the right time.

I thought about hummingbirds and humpback whales. To hummingbirds, we are slowly slovenly giants, lumbering around stumbling all over oneself. To whales, we are hummingbirds, flitting around from task to task, barely getting a chance to reflect or let alone, breathe.

I thought about who I was four years ago, even three years ago, even two years ago, even yesterday. I realized how quickly time slips through your fingers; it's literally a slippery process. One minute you have hours, the next you have seconds. One second you're 22 and impenetrable; the next you're 27 and you feel everything so viscerally it's difficult to think of letting anyone else in. It's so hard to remember to stop and feel, to stop and reflect. I don't want to spend my life remembering; I want to spend my life experiencing.  

vagabonding

There's nothing lonelier than walking the streets of Los Angeles.

He doesn't understand why I like to do it. Miles that could get eaten up in the span of minutes take hours on foot. Hours that could be occupied by doing laundry, getting groceries, reading a good book, Instagramming. It's a solitary pursuit, this hobby of mine. The sidewalks here are what I imagine the dunes of the Sahara must look like - ghostly and deserted save for the occasional lone traveler trudging along, carrying too much, and undoubtedly wishing for some Uber to pluck them away to the nearest oasis. Walking places is now regulated to one of those ancient diversions, a fanciful activity of the past like horse-drawn buggies.

I walk alone most times which is fine with me. Solace is few and far between these days but is slavishly treasured. The consistent rhythm and pace of it, the onward movement, the repetitiveness, gently rocks my mind away from the mental checking off of boxes and allows it to wander, mirroring the pace of my feet. It's so easy to forget to be present.

I slow down and notice things. Call it the stop and smell the roses effect. I smell the city - all the baked concrete, the lingering gaseous scent that tinges the air, and the occasional corner whose air is perfumed with the scene of roses that some green-thumbed Angeleno planted on their balcony. I see the passage of time - the vestiges of an older Los Angeles that hangs on the signs of some storefronts, a piece of the sixties and seventies hidden amongst the Subways, Starbucks, and Ralph's. I read between the lines of the construction of Los Angeles. We sneer at the New Yorkers for their cardboard box apartments, people piled on top of one another. But to me, the expansive stretching sidewalks separating one from the other, each Angeleno given the sovereign state of their space, overlap be damned, reeks of a people torn asunder. Wanting their own kingdom but wanting no one else to populate it.

Sensory and visual stimuli aside, walking reminds me to reconnect with the world. There's no public square  anymore for rich and poor alike to gather and gawk and squabble. That's been calibrated to the internet and no the Grove doesn't count. It reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite movies:

Hey. Could we do that again? I know we haven't met, but I don't want to be an ant. You know? I mean, it's like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one another, continously on ant autopilot, with nothing really human required of us. Stop. Go. Walk here. Drive there. All action basically for survival. All communication simply to keep this ant colony buzzing along in an efficient, polite manner. "Here's your change." "Paper or plastic?' "Credit or debit?" "You want ketchup with that?" I don't want a straw. I want real human moments. I want to see you. I want you to see me. I don't want to give that up. I don't want to be ant, you know?

the dictionary of obscure sorrows

liberosis

n. the desire to care less about things—to loosen your grip on your life, to stop glancing behind you every few steps, afraid that someone will snatch it from you before you reach the end zone—rather to hold your life loosely and playfully, like a volleyball, keeping it in the air, with only quick fleeting interventions, bouncing freely in the hands of trusted friends, always in play.

Well here I am old friend. It's been quite a time since I'd last checked in with you but as my friends in the real world can tell you, unless you're in the here-and-now, I'm eternally the friend who is terrible at keeping in touch (this might be because maybe I perversely love those catch-up conversations- where people are forced to summarize their lives of the past couple of passage of time - it's interesting to me what they choose to disclose and what they choose to omit). So it only feels natural that in the wake of some pretty monumental events, that I would let you as well, the blog that hopefully no one reads, slip and fall between the waves. Fortunately now I have the distance and the wherewithal to contend with the reality of the last couple of months.

But I mean honestly, do I really want to linger on the piercing pain of losing not one, not two, not three, but four relatives in the past six months? Oh it feels ever so dull- being confronted with the reality of death forcing one to pontificate on the meaning of life, the omnipresence of death, blah blah blah. I will admit that it was particularly tempting at times to succumb to the lures of religion and it's hollow promises of the afterlife for my family's dearly departed. But reason concludes that it's ultimately it's a sugar-coated fantasy- one that goes down easy but doesn't heal or replenish those which are lost...gone.

Loss is a familiar friend now- no longer this awkward concept that I knew inevitably that I'd have to confront one of these days. Unfortunately now, he/she/it is now ever present. When I leave my family, I clutch them ever more tighter, tearing up, almost panicked at our parting. Armchair psychology allows me to conclude that my recent preoccupation with the ominous natural disaster that it bound to shake our state, "The Big One", is merely another manifestation over my fear of my powerlessness over controlling the fates of those I love deeply. Whaddya think about that Freud/Dr. Melfi/Dr. Phil?

collapse

it's funny to realize how the impetuousness of youth wanes and flexes in the face of the years as they tick by
i used to be the type to fling myself out of the plane before giving it a second thought
yet now weighed down by the responsibility, the love, the very adultness of it all
i cannot be the flighty self that i once was

i fit into this new self like a new skin that requires a bit of adjusting
and after a brief uncomfortableness, it starts to feel seamless, like i haven't lived quite without it
i don't mind the new skin, the new self
the responsibility, the ownership is reward enough

the old me is indistinguishable from what once was.

complacency is hellfire

You should date an illiterate girl. Date a girl who doesn’t read.
Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. 
Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in a film. 
Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her. 
Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. 
Find shared interests and common ground like sushi and folk music. 
Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale or the evenings too long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. 
Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. 
Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.
Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. 
Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. 
When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster.
Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. 
For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. 
If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same. 
Let the years pass unnoticed. 
Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail frequently. 
Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. 
Feel, during walks, as if you might never return or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love. 
Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. 
Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. 
Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent of a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. 
A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. 
A vocabulary, goddamnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick. 
Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. 

Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. 
A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. 
A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on.
Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived. 
Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. 
The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. 
But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. 
She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness. 
Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are storytellers. 
You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. 
You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. 
You, who make my life so goddamned difficult. 
The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. 
She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. 
You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. 
But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. 
You will not accept the life of which I spoke at the beginning of this piece. 
You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being told. 
So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you.
-reposted from Thought Catalog