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1.26.26
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3.19.25
we were smoking outside and you made a little pile of
branches, pushed them together with the tip of your sneaker and we were waiting to see if my cigarette on the ground would catch on fire. it didn't, so when you finished your cigarette you stuck it in the pile and
we watched the tobacco smoke up.
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the California i remember was basically these large, trader joes fruit tower pyramids. so tall and perfect all the time, with fluorescent coloration; from the fruit bowl of the country, all of the fruits with any sort of wounds discarded and sorted to be shipped elsewhere.
I wrote: people stacked many many fruits into the largest fruit tower to go see god.
there are a lot of houses on the high high mountains that enclose santa Barbara. The only way to reach where those houses are is by car- it's too far from santa Barbara proper, there are no bus lines, and the altitudes become challenging quickly. I'm not even sure if it's legal to attempt to do that.
so the houses up here are all people who want to be left alone, like most people who go hiking, the exhaustion knocks the breath out of you, and mostly, the only sounds you can hear are bird calls, airplanes, and wind. no life except what has been deemed wilderness.
the houses you pass by when you're driving up to the mountain trails are vast pools of rectangles, connected to itself only, veiled in separation. the cars when visible are glossy and sticky in the hot sun through the thin air.
the story i was trying to write was basically trying to turn this other story on its head, because it was like, oh, heaven is on earth already, and i was like this is exactly the type of anti-"doomer" nonsense that someone who is way too depressed with themselves has to read to feel better about being alive. whatever. limp optimism. my story would be... communist... because... i didn't see enough communist themes in literature. like early Russian film communist, where the people are treated not as individuals but as a community, a collective, more than the stupid ones you see in the US where individuality and
identity are in reign.
so then a cute tower of babel type story could be to destroy language and create a new form of communication, something that transcends the limitations of language, the cultural differences, something that acts as the opposite of violence, something that is so shared to destroy language.
like a sauna, where you sit in the heat and wait for your body to warm up nicely and sweat. all naked in the tiled baths, i was never really sure what the difference was between them and the kid pools we would play at in the suburbs (minus the swimsuits and the temperature of the water), but the nakedness destroys the bodysense, the act of being seen, because the seeing is necessarily reciprocal...
on the beach the tiny bikinis in the shops acted almost as the same purpose. heat dissipates so much better with as little on as possible. it has to make physical contact with the skin that creates the tender feeling required to tan, and it feels the same way in the cold pacific water rushing across swathes of skin. maybe the temperature bath thing makes you feel better (compared to what?), a high school classmate's girlfriend (?) said. Well maybe. At the beach a man walked up to me, balding, chubby, white hair creeping into a ring around his head. He introduced himself and told me I was so "cool" because i didn't care about anything he said- if I should be smoking, if i shouldn't dispose of it properly (i ashed it in the sand). before he said that though, he prayed, touching his head down to his prayer mat that pointed towards mecca, and said the rakats, although it was the first time i had seen it in person, so i didn't know what it was called then.
it's good to have some suspicion towards acts like that, although i did respect the rigid schedulekeeping, it was also easily possible for him to do it alone and finish it without me nearby, and the way the conversation continued didn't raise my hopes up for a pure intention. finally, he left me alone.
2.09.25
i used to have to wait at elementary school to get picked up, especially in the fifth grade, because my mom worked in dc, so my brother and I used to just fuckin hang out with these children, right, because the only other people who did this were basically kids who were really supposed to be in day care right after school so we'd camp out on the school computers and just wait for the clock to reach 6:30 and finally my mom would drive out from the deep dark depths and we'd get to go home.
between those times we had to find a way to distract ourselves from the general chaos in the area. Mostly it smelled like bleach and clorox wipes and there was a lot of yelling, but my brother around this time started asking for expensive earbuds so I got to use his older pair and our school was pretty technologically progressive (pros of being in a blue state for education) so we had computers to putz around on and recently I had figured out how to download touhou, which didn't require any internet (none of the school computers could run a multiplayer game anyway) and could just be run right off the USB.
I had downloaded Ten Desires at home maybe a year or two before (touhou 13) and didn't understand quite why this game was somehow the same type of idea as pokemon, or Minecraft. It takes full concentration- shower of bullets (it's just as poetic of a phrase in Japanese- danmaku) is the name of the genre, and even before I had seen an arcade game I had seen these. Much later in life I would watch my mom score a 90\% kill rate on a plane arcade game and suppose it must have been something like family matters.
Arcade games are fun because they're very life and death- moment to moment suspense- you physically cannot think of anything else lest you trip- anybody can imagine this with tetris. Go watch tetris 99 gameplay- anybody can feel the emotions generated by simply moving blocks. Abstract tension and conflict. My wife and I are watching Super Mario Maker and when she pauses the video you can see the story within the blocks and spikes- the platforms creating a visual puzzle to solve. Mario can do all of it, he's never tired, he's actually having a pretty good time, you just have to execute it-
Reimu is the Zen version, where she is just so fortunate as a Shrine maiden that she is described to be able to "float" through life- thus literally granting her the ability to fly, she once stepped across a river by stepping only in the places where fish were, allowing her to cross without getting her feet wet. This seems to imply that every time she dies it is because she was not fully in that floating state, so our human error relates to an earthliness that doesn't allow us to fully concentrate on the game. There are plenty of mechanics that reference this- the trance state in Ten Desires, collecting cherry blossom petals allows you to reach the "supernatural border" in Perfect Cherry Blossom. The history indicator on the spell cards could be read as the past reincarnation memories where you didn't save the day.
The girls are kind of like the digital equivalent of playdoh dolls, and act the same way too; they are indifferent, playful, violent towards others (mostly trying to eat them). They are alcoholics, they are sages, one of them tries to ram a giant boat into you. Even though I was just stuck in this stupid daycare with the incompetent teacher who mostly just yelled at us (I didn't even do anything), in Imperishable Night you fly through the infinite bamboo forest as the false moon comes up in the background of the stage, the music takes you up the infinite star corridor to the true place the real moon has been tucked away.
Mostly though, I would just end up with a headache. Having failed to be absorbed into the game entirely, I would sit there, with my eyes smarting from tiredness, and wondered how much longer it was until 6:30.
6.11.24
I don’t know why I’m here, honestly. Every time I step in, it feels like the first time I went to the drama club at my high school, these kind of weird hipster art people who didn’t really know what my deal was and weren’t interested in finding out. I wanted to paint backdrops because I read about a painter who mentioned that he failed through his figure drawing classes, but his art professor at the time said it was fine because the painter wanted to paint backdrops anyway, and I was like, hey, if I’m painting, shouldn’t I push my own practices by getting into not just landscapes, but background pieces, something that hangs behind someone else? My first project was to help repaint a flower, and I added a bunch of details to add contrast and warmth to the flat image that was on the wood already, and it was fun, feeling the brush touch the wood and take on the paint so vividly, until the girl who was in charge of this came over and said that she actually kind of wanted it the other way without whatever I had added and I understood implicitly that I wasn’t really welcome there and I didn’t go back.
But anyway, I’m at Sidecar once again, or I’m not when I’m writing this, but I’ve been there so many times for some reason that I can re-enter the cafe whenever I want, not with many details, I’ve never been detail oriented, maybe why my landscapes were never particularly good, but when I think about Sidecar it’s like their quirky little fairy lights in the entrance and books you can borrow in a little bookshelf and then lots of tables and the big windows and the bar stool-chair things attached to the window wall, which is where the only outlets are. You get like, a 50-50 on sunlight coming in because the graphics on the window kind of block a lot of the light.
Their coffee sucks. I only like drinking coffee straight because then I can taste what the coffee is really like, and the coffee they have at Sidecar is bitter, shitty dark water, and the unlimited coffee always has grit at the bottom of the cup. I used to get their unlimited coffee decaf but they told me they stopped offering it, maybe because I was the only person ordering it and they had to french press it every time because they didn’t have a batch premade. It seemed like a little bit of a personal attack, but I just nodded and asked for the unlimited coffee caffeinated, then. They had even made the unlimited coffee cup smaller, swapping out the big hefty mug for a dainty little tea cup that holds what feels like just three shots of espresso but I can’t really complain about that either because the tea cup is admittedly very cute.
The other day I realized that I had forgotten about a meeting and I had to run out, and I asked for a cup, and the guy who runs the counter unsmilingly poured my cup into a teeny tiny take out cup and I said thank you and he didn’t respond so I just, took the cup, I guess, and walked out and felt stupid the entire time. If I had done that at Pamela’s or something I just know that they would have given me a big take out cup and then filled it up to the top, they had the coffee brewed anyway.
Especially in Pittsburgh, where food service people tend to smile at me or at least be grumpy and nasty to everyone, it really fucks with me a little bit that the people who run the counter here don’t even greet me, don’t give me anything, and then a chick with a beret and overalls runs in and then it’s all smiles and “oh my god heyyyy” and like, “how’s your 19th century poetry class going,” and like, it’s not a big deal that I’m not in the in-group, but maybe it is? I kind of watch the two people running the counter and I try to see how they react to a tall student in a sleek black jacket with his laptop under his arm and that distracted look in his eye, thinking about homework, I’m sure, or the mom with a blunt cut bob and a big scarf and her two daughters, here to have a snack, or the man with a beard and a mustache in a fall scarf and handsome coat with a dark brown leather briefcase, here to do Business Work.
Maybe it’s just like when my statistics teacher in high school told me about how much he loved Korean food, especially blood sausage, which at the time I reacted with a wow, that’s rare, rare meeting white people who enjoy blood sausage. That wasn’t how I should have reacted, I don’t like “rewarding” white people who eat “rare” cultural foods because like, I’ve been eating blood sausage, but I was excited to hear from someone that they had had soondae before. He was like, you know what, there was this Korean restaurant I went to, and I said, can I get the soondae, but then the lady didn’t let me order it! She said, no, no soondae, you won’t like it (he did this in an accent but I wasn’t really sure what kind of accent it was).
I didn’t know really how to react to that but I was like, well, you know Mr. Stein, she probably was acting upon the fact that other white people had ordered it before, or something like that, and then they sent it back and it was a whole hassle or something.
But I knew what it was, Mr. Stein said. It was just because I was white, that’s racism!
Like, I guess, but it was different, but I couldn’t quite articulate why it was different in that moment, cause then I was thinking about how in the Korean places I went to they did treat us different because we spoke the language, but was that something I should be ashamed of, to exclude in that way, to not fully open the borders of our culture to everyone else?
Last year when I was super depressed I would walk like 15-20 minutes from my dorm to Sidecar because that was my like, challenge, to go outside and walk for a while and take in the cold air for a little bit and force myself to feel the sun hit my face and skin and not buckle under the light that made all my dark nasty parts shine and show off to anyone who looked at me. There I would get a snack and try to read or catch up on my statistics class, the one class I had to pass because I needed it for my senior classes next year. That’s how I really got into Sidecar and going there all the time and I didn’t really notice anything then because I kind of was super sensitive to any sort of stimuli and I was surviving by shutting them out as much as possible, or maybe it was more like that infinite outside light was blinding me to these things?
The cakes are good. Or maybe they’re not? I kind of waffle back and forth on it. Maybe it’s like I was eating whatever I wanted back when I was depressed and so I got used to the cloying sweetness of their cakes.
The German chocolate pie cake is a chocolate cream filling with a chocolate graham cracker crumble crust. I don’t really like American style chocolate cakes, which are thick and gooey and stick all over your mouth, and then you’re supposed to wash it down with a glass of milk, which is like, a thick liquid, and it’s just so much, my god. The German chocolate pie cake at Sidecar somehow hits upon a deep chocolate flavor with a light cream that isn’t hard when I bite into it but it’s fluffy and soft and plush, not thick and velvety and heavy. The crust is lightly salted and I find myself trying to create perfect forkfuls with each bite, balancing that sweet cream and crunchy crumbly crust. They also have vinegar pie, which is a real American invention, right there, and it’s syrupy thick sweetness that is tangy and pins the flaky crust to stay on my fork and I can get all of that in my mouth at once and it’s maybe if a pecan pie married a lemon tart and decided to just relax and maybe settle down somewhere and they mellowed each other out and found they were really, very happy that way too.
The cakes make the coffee almost forgivable, washing the remaining sweet bits down and mixing in an almost lovely way in my mouth. Then the grit at the bottom comes back up.
Last year I could eat a slice every day, and I think I reached a max of three times a week. This year, maybe because I’ve changed my eating habits, I find that the cakes are so so sweet and not much else. There’s almost nothing challenging in the flavors the cakes have. The vinegar pie isn’t balanced with the nuttiness that comes with pecan pie, and the German chocolate pie cake is just that, just chocolate, not even cherries or something to change up each bite a little bit.
The breads aren’t even worth mentioning. I would prefer the loaf bread wrapped in plastic in the supermarket, not from the bakery section, but from the “bread” section.
I’m just like, why do I go there? The cakes are fine but the rest of what I’ve written seems pretty unforgivable, and I’m kind of disappointed every time I go there, because I remeet the dry white bread slices with chicken salad and I think about how literally any other place would be better, maybe the deli next door, the greek pizza place, the chinese place, just eating rice and a fried egg at home would be better. But I end up there with my friends and I always have a shit time with the coffee but I still go there, for some reason.
When I took Lukas there, he asked them if they could fill up his water bottle with water and they were like, of course! And did so happily. I didn’t even know that I could ask that, I felt so cowed by everything else I’ve already said.
And I mean, the theater girls, back in high school, I noticed immediately that the theater girls were all white, even though our school is 35\% hispanic and 25\% black and 12.5\% asian.
And of course, Lukas is white. And I’m not. And the people who work the counter at Sidecar are white.
When I go back there, is it that I’m dreaming that one day, these white art people that make up Sidecar and my high school theater club and the radio club on campus will accept me? Is it that I’m yearning to be seen as an artist, by these people who might not even make art? Is it that I want to embody whatever they can embody just by dressing up in overalls and yellow and brown striped shirts, by taking english classes in reading Jane Austen in a feminist way?
Is it that I want to prove to myself that I can morph and shift and then have the power to be weird and cold myself, although I don’t think I’d ever want to be, but if so many people are acting that way, maybe there’s something to being weird and cold that I don’t understand yet?
Maybe it’s just that I can’t stand being on the outside like Mr. Stein, and I need to be able to force myself in, and say, look at me, be kind to me, doesn’t everything I have make me deserving of your hospitality, of your love?
1.26.26
In celebration of bringing this website online
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