kids don't let kids get lost...

Didn't you hate it when you were a child, when your parents take you to a children's movie, say Bambi, and in the trailers they show you, "Coming soon in Universal Pictures..." and then this creepy trailer comes on and some monster comes out to eat children or something like a random psycho coming out shooting people?

This morning I read about a horror film and I felt as though I had seen it. The whole day I found myself trying to wash away the images while also trying to convince myself that the world is good.

It comes down to a few things: Why do people make these random films about torturing and cutting up people? What does it reflect in me as an artist? In other words, how am I to stand, as a writer, in the midst of these forms of fiction that seem to do little but give people a thrill in seeing people get cut up?

The funny thing is that this sort of thing makes me feel like a little child again. The whole day I've been looking forward to being in my room this evening, coming here, writing, and getting it sort out. I just won't stand for immorality. I won't.

The world is a strange place. But I'd like not to think people as evil. People are lost. They are lost.

This too shall pass.

and sadness began

My dear, you say I’m too serious and that I’m not good at laughing with you. I wished I could take things more lightly, but I can’t. I’ve been this way since I was very little. I can’t pinpoint exactly when my sadness began. But I do remember one time when I was six or seven, I was at a fancy hotel restaurant lining up for omelettes. I watched the man make omelettes with intense curiosity. First he put oil on the pan, then vegetables, then he poured egg over it and let it sizzled. At the end, he tossed the egg in the air, flipping it, once, twice, and each time it landed on the pan flawlessly, a perfect pocket, served on a plate. He did the exact same steps when making my omelette. He flipped the egg, once, twice, but this time, the omelette broke on one end. Diced tomatoes and green peppers fell out. He handed me the plate but took it back. “I’ll make you a better one,” he said. I was confused. A broken omelette must have tasted the same as an unbroken omelette, I thought. But he made another one anyway. The next omelette he made was perfect like the ones that came before the broken one. “Here’s a better one,” he said, and gave me the plate. I took it but I couldn’t walk away. I just stood there and watched him cook. I wanted to see what he did differently that made the perfect omelettes, or what he failed to do when he made the broken one. I kept watching but I couldn’t see any difference. There was no difference in the way he made each omelette. No difference at all. What made the broken one? I had no idea. And soon I wasn’t hungry anymore.

a day like any other day

He writes well when nothing is bothering him. The back corner table at the Timothy's coffee shop at the underground level of the shopping arcade serves him just fine. It is dark there. That serves him fine too for today is raining. There is not light even if he were to go outside. So the dark corner serves him just fine. The ceiling light is a mini-chandelier with little candles for lights. The fire on the candles are little dim orange bulbs. He writes for two hours. All is good. Good.

He lets the day pass without thinking too much about it. He also plans to sleep well at night.

No fireworks. Nothing spectacular. Just some strawberry ice cream in the freezer and some fried cauliflowers for lunch and some soggy egg rolls for dinner. Enough to make him very very happy.

(melody)

Why have you to say goodbye... How have I loved you so...

when creating persons

If I know what a person is like, say, my character, if I know what she keeps in her drawers, every single drawer, then I'd know what she'd say when she orders Pepsi at Burger King and they tell her that they only have Coke. I'd know exactly what she'd say with out me thinking about it.

there's this circle and then there's that circle... which circle would you like today?

Last night I thought to myself, how does one craft such a wonderful story bringing in two characters and intertwining their fate... Then I thought to myself, how do I create a story... Then I thought to myself, has this little life of mine been as wonderfully story-like...?

I woke up at 8:05 this morning pondering the same things.

I went to the library in the afternoon to polish up my story about Alice, a girl who runs around the mall in order to find out whether beautiful stories only happen to beautiful people. Such is the theory Alice has. She wants desperately to be proven wrong.

A man sitting across from me interrupted my thoughts.

"I would like to ask," he said in Mandarin, "What is the date today?"

"22nd," I said.

"Then what date will Friday be?"

"Today is Tuesday the 22nd, so Friday must be the 25th." I checked my cellphone just to confirm.

"Thank you."

August 25th 1996 was the day I said goodbye to my first sister, a girl who often wore turquoise. It was my sixteenth summer and it contains everything I would ever need as a writer. It was ten years ago.

Anyways. I went back to typing Alice's story. Alice enters a cinema which she calls the Gallery of Symmetrical Faces. She watches a young woman introduce herself on the screen, "Hi. My name is Priscilla, and here is my story..." By the end of it, Alice is so overwhelmed by the colossal quality of the motion picture that she runs out of the cinema in a frenzy.

"I came out because I wanted a story," says Alice. And it made me wonder about my own little life, and whether I have lived a story or has it merely been a series of mundane incidents.

Then I found this CD in the library.

The city is too crowded. Theatres playing love stories have no vacant seats.

It was our song. Me and my sister in turquoise. Ten years ago, we had it played on the air waves.

That

is

a story

I suppose.

Here I am sitting here at my desk some thirty minutes before the day's end. There's that Iwai Shunji movie I want to finish. There's that Ivan Turgenev story I want to read. Not to mention Alice's story. Then there's my own story. Me and my sister and this little life of mine, sitting here in my 26th summer's end, feeling like everything is possible. The air is full of possibilities. But really, is my voice not obvious? I'm really only trying to feel hopeful. I said I wouldn't say it, but I have. Dear me. Dear me. Please tie a knot here and let me rest

in

peas

in

peas

ohashi station

If the grand urban space in front of Ohashi Station is a grand urban cluster of nothingness but lights and signs that advertise an Italian restaurant with tiny bottles of Tabasco on each table I'd rather remember the spinach pasta that was served to me from that same urban space, further south, near the water and the tower and the dome, or is it further west, or east? If the grand urban space in front of Ohashi Station is a cluster of bicycles stacked up against one another then I suppose I'd like to sit on the curb and watch these wheels tumble... then they shall all evaporate instantaneously except one, one that resembles the bicycle I had, the bicycle that was stolen from me in front of the Hokuo Bakery is now here before me as I stare at this stolen object, feeling lost in direction and feeling a lost of something so dear and nostalgic. The bicycle is on its side. The frame is bent ever so slightly. The front wheel is spinning. I reach out to touch the wheel with my finger. The wheel stops spinning. My fingertip is blackened.

by the lake

If I am mindful of a day's success in the way I relate to people then I suppose it is good to record this success so that I may in the future replicate it. The difficulty is that the process of recording is cumbersome because it feels very much like having a concrete cylinder stamping my brain and limiting my view of myself when really, I'd rather be seeing the whole picture. So I choose not to record. I choose to reflect a day's happiness. Yes. To simply reflect a day's happiness is enough. This shall do. The mind is inclined to drift at night (and it is night) and 'success' is too harsh, too stiff a word to use on such a night when the mind is inclined to be drifty. Happiness was today. We walked many kilometres. We crossed many streets together. We reached the lake and fed the birds with the bread we had carried with us for the many kilometres we walked. Then we took the bus home and we concluded in our minds that it was a good trip. A piece of happiness added somewhere in the corner like a fine piece of armchair, a rocking chair, perhaps, or one of them wooden shelves for ornaments or little plants.

things transparent

You make the grass greener by watering it at night when there's no sun to take the water away from it. So I watered my backyard and front yard. While standing at my front porch I shot water onto the middle of the street. There was something poetic about the lamppost light cascading upon the spraying water.

At the Royal Ontario Museum they are building this crystal thing in the middle of the structure so that once finished it would look like a sort of postmodern explosion behind the museum's same olden facade. The crystal thing has a name. It's the _____________ (famous architect name) Crystal. A transparent explosion.

Oh my Crystal... la la...

hole in my soul

If everynight I come here for a bit, type for a bit before bed I wonder if the writing will become better, and when I say better I really don't know what I mean by it, for there doesn't seem to be a way for myself to measure myself about what I mean by better. I suppose, like most other things we do in this little life of ours, that the more I write the more insight I will accumulate. But sometimes I feel as though I see too much within myself, as though my eyes are shooting laser beams through my chest. And I am literally seen through.

balcony poem in progress

person with the feeling of having just landed on this landscape is
having a feeling that will never go away, for foreignness is
a feeling that doesn’t wash off, not
even when a splash of orange paints over the street outside, where
a flower passes by and stops beneath the balcony and
calls out, “hurry let’s go!”
person hops over to meet her and
breaks his legs.

if i be a wave

If I be a wave of ocean water and cry with my true true voice it might actually begin to feel a bit like lying on a net thing tied between two trees where you may often find a person taking a nap, swaying a little, soaking in the lazy summer breeze.

the midget lady, the tea lady, and the girl in white selling illegal stuff

Sat for almost three hours in the food court at Market Village marking my students' writing assignments. They were given the topic: A good short story is _________. The have to fill in the blank and write out the metaphor. A good short story is the single red tomato on top of a green salad, a student wrote. I liked that one.

There were many gaps in time when I zoned out. I watched people as a running commentary travels from one side of my head to the other side but tragedy is how this commentary sometimes becomes a sort of interesting and hopeful narrative that doesn't get captioned. If all my thoughts are captioned and printed I would have written a shelf full of books by now.

A midget lady goes up to a vending stall to buy bubble tea. The top of her head is barely half way between the floor and the top of the counter. Even with her arms outstretched she cannot reach the top of the counter. The tea lady with the apron comes around to collect her money. Then she goes around back inside to make the tea. Then she comes around to give the midget lady her tea and her change.

At the shop where they sell copied VCDs, a girl of about high school age wearing a blank white t-shirt stands behind two tables set up at an 'L' shape. A collection of copied movies and music are on display with bright neon labels on the boxes that say, 3 for $20 etc etc. The girl's shoulders are slouched a little bit and her white shirt looks a bit big on her. She sees me glancing at her and the way she looks like she doesn't want to be there. There's an older man in the store, I know. I used to buy from him but I don't buy copied CDs anymore.

acceptance letters

At the close of a day of nothingness comes something. A short visit to an old lady's apartment flat. Mom brings home a carton of rich and creamy strawberry ice-cream. Two acceptance letters from the university. One says, we like your stories. The other says, we like your poems. I actually try when writing my stories. But I'm surprise to hear you like my poems. But acceptance letters are always quite heartwarming are they not? Doesn't it all come down to we wanting to be accepted? Alongside 'birthday' and 'wedding' and 'sympathy' and 'new home' we can also have a new category of cards called 'acceptance' cards.

the figurine sways back and forth

There's a quiet joy in writing in a place that is so accessible by everyone while at the same time no one may care no one may read and yet here I am in the middle of the day (15 minutes til noon) typing away and away on this tangent that's soaked in oil. If someone drops a match.

The late morning. The almost afternoon. The everybody is at work. Yes. The Everybody. The Everybody is the busiest and heaviest machine we've created. The Everybody drives and is annoyed when stuck in traffic and is amazingly productive regardless of the degree of boringness in its task. The Everybody is made of steel or aluminum or copper or some whatever sort of metal that looks like human skin. The Everybody is at work now.

The shelf is removed and away goes my books and my many stacks of papers that I put on this shelf. It's all preparation for selling the house. I shall start early in this fun fun task. I will need boxes. I will need a healthy and well-rested body to put things into these boxes. I will need a white truck to move these boxes for me to the new home. I will open these boxes at the new home, put my things into place, and all will be good then. I will then flatten these boxes and keep them in the basement for who knows when I will need to put things in boxes again.

zz...

Let me consider your worries. Let me try. Does reading this blog make you lighter? I hope it does. Let me try to think about you. What are you doing here so late at night? Aren't you tired from staring at that monitor for so long? I thank you for dropping by. Though you do look a bit tired and it may be good for you to get some sleep. Is it the afternoon where you are now? Well, get some sleep anyways. It's more fun to sleep in the afternoon. You get more out of sleeping in the day than you do sleeping at night. But that's just me. Oh. I'm sorry. It's not about me.

It's about you. Now, let's find a comfortable place to sit. How about there? There you are.

Snap.

Actually, it's probably better you sleep and we don't talk. Yes, it's better this way. I find that these words are really getting in the way. So don't mind them, my words, I mean, don't mind them. Just rest and rest and deal with the things after you wake. Things may get better after you wake, but in any case, at least you can rest.

a dot between my blinds

If your world is very small, your head shrinks, becomes smaller and smaller and many times smaller than your world that's already very small. You turn into a dot and enter your head and become claustrophobic. You cannot breathe and your dot-size body flickers as the pink padded walls of your inner head press inward. The moment you leave your head you regain existence, come back to life, no longer just a dot, but a being of some respectable shape. From a fair distance you observe this person whose head you had just entered. You see many similarities between you and your head. You feel sympathetic, but you will not sigh for long. Your world is spacious now and you'd rather explore.

That plastic rod thing... You know that plastic rod thing that hangs down with your blinds? As the breeze brushes through the window, the rod taps the blinds. It's one of my favourite sounds.

black grid orange light

At my friend's house there's a sliding door in the kitchen that leads to the deck. After dinner I stand on the deck. I look into the blue and orange sky and I see a cloud that resembles a wavy potato chip. I look down the street and see that all the decks at the other houses are vacant, except for one, three houses down the street, a mother stands on the deck to call her son on the bike to wash up and come inside. All the other houses with their vacant decks look disowned, unowned, as if they are rented out to people of an indifferent temperament, or perhaps the houses themselves are actually vacant. Tall white blinds hang there unmoving. The east view sees a low-rise condo with plenty balconies. The west view sees a condo under construction. The sunset is visible through the black grid that is the building's frame. Once the condo is built, the people occupying those floors will surely have the sunset for themselves, and me, from the deck, will only see the orange light that surrounds the structure that will surely look blacker and heavier to me than it does now.

a mid-summer's autumn thoughts

Who bothers to trace the footprints we make on a long autumn's street? Printed images of you and me but mostly you and mostly having to do with promises that end up vanishing in a pool of clear water. Watch the autumn colours cast down on me. As each autumn comes I become two years older. This compensates for the way I become a year younger at each summer's end. It's fair. A lift and a fall. A lift and a fall. But yes, the autumn colours. I see only through a shapeless hole, a blue sky revealed to me, revealed to me only through a shapeless hole, so I step back, and all I see is a patch quilt of yellow and orange and brown slender arms that point this way and that and the one leaf dangling off your fingertips transforms into a thousand leaves as we both step back and say, yes, this is autumn, but really, we're standing quite far apart. We wear scarves and try not to catch a cold for it's contagious.

houses and rooms and humans like me

On the way home it was sunny around 7pm alone, for I had not made plans with friends, so alone I drove home with the windows down and I drove by the Red Maple community where my family intends to move to. The houses are modest-looking but much more expensive than our house now.

My room is hot again. It's cooler downstairs. But my bed is up here and my books are here and my stereo is here and all. I shall turn off the ceiling light and lie in bed for awhile. Then I will fall asleep and not know it. Have I ever fallen asleep knowingly?

hot cold

It's hotter at night for some reason. My room is dark except here my screen is bright and it was hurting my eyes a bit, looking up stuff on wikipedia, so I had to turn down my screen light, and now it feels a little better. It feels better because I am typing. Do you hear me? I don't hear any trains outside. It's usually about this time of the night that they choo. But not now. At least I can't hear it. I hear my typing. I hear my voice. I'm sweating a little, but my bed is cool, so I guess I'll go there.

returning to a home i'm about to sell

I'm home. Today I enjoyed my home. I spent today, purposely, for the purpose of enjoying my home, and how odd it was yesterday the feeling of returning to a home that I'm about to sell. So today I enjoyed home. I slept a healthy 7.5 hours, woke up to birds and sunshine and a breathable summer morning by writing for two hours, and then slept some more, and then I walked out to the coffee shop to plan some lessons, and then walked home, and then I listened to the radio while the sunset lights filtered through my shutters casting spots of shadows along my desk and along the white wood floors that still give a touch as smooth as the touch I felt the day I had them installed in this then-new home almost two summers ago.

Dear me. I'm in my room now trying to make sense of it all. I try to make sense of it all by typing in my room. And I end up feeling I've made some sense of it all. This feeling lasts for three seconds. Then I lie in bed with the desklamp on, and so often I end up sleeping with the desklamp still on.

There's a touch of genius about my room. The short side of my writing desk is placed against the wall, but the other three sides including the two long sides are placed against openness, openness! Meaning that my desk, my writing surface, is placed well under the ceiling light. Most people have the long sides of their desks parked against the wall so that when they write, they stare at the wall and their backs are against the ceiling light. I've always thought that silly. I knew from the day I saw this room that my room would be arranged the way it is now.