One year ago my father was diagnosed with colon cancer. Three months later he underwent a surgical procedure to remove the cancerous part of his lower intestine, which left untreated could have killed him in a matter of months. At the stale age of 73 a procedure like that became a statistical hypothesis, a guessing game where one gambles on the longevity of one’s time on this planet as a living organism. After disturbing complications from his surgery, he was released from the hospital in good spirits, only to find out the cancer had spread to his lymph-nodes, sending him back to the cancer specialists for six grueling months of chemotherapy.  And though his spirits stayed resilient, most likely due to the fact he’s as stubborn not to die as he is stubborn not to show his emotional weaknesses, he had many more months of recovery. During this period, I visited him on several occasions in hopes to open up an emotional and connected bond with him in ways never available to me during my childhood. I came to find out he was just as guarded, if not more now then when I was a child, with his emotional and clandestine secrets. His reticent and guarded thoughts were admirable– I could never withhold my heart like him, as I wear my heart on my sleeve for the world to pierce, poke and prod. Even though there was no “ah-ha” breakthrough moments to gloat about in our recent sessions together, I take pride and pleasure in the experience of his presence. It’s like two fingers touching without words,  Michaelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” incarnate, only fleeting moments of “this is” and the connection of a human’s understudying to the touch of god. His health seemed to slowly regenerate, however with occasional hic-ups expected from such a traumatizing experience. ((Fast forward to the present)) Exactly one year after his first cancerous diagnosis, Dad’s now been in the emergency room for over a week. What started as a routine colonoscopy turned into something disconcerting and dire. After his mandatory bowel cleansing before a camera/tube was shoved in his anus, my father tried eating what was to be, hitherto his check-up, a solid meal. Something happened to his bowels and his small-intestine decided it no longer wanted to pass food through its opening. His body’s reaction was to violently vomit the ingested food, as it had nowhere else to go. Obviously this was a major concern for his doctors. If the body can not digest food, the body can not survive. The “specialist doctors”, or “body mechanics”, attempted another CT scan of his intestinal tract. However, if the body stops digesting food it also stops digesting CT dye, which is necessary to perform an accurate x-ray of the digestive tract. This becomes another troubling perplexity for the doctors. At my father’s age and with his history of complicated recuperation from these invasive procedures, the last option a doctor considers is opening the patient up again. Their best bet and their most educated guess was to stick tubes down his throat and vacuum his intestinal acids while slowly pumping bursts of air onto the small intestine’s opening in hopes of dislodging whatever was blocking his passageway. At this time, my father had not had a bowel movement nor had he passed any gas since his admission to the hospital. With his stomach distended like a starving 3rd world child and with no time to waste, he underwent this mechanical “suck-and-blow procedure” for three days. Twenty-four hours later, he passed a bit of gas, giving hopes that the procedure was helping move along whatever it was that was causing the blockage. In an optimistic decision the doctors removed the tubes and attempted to feed him solids like soup and jello. He immediately dejected the “food”, alluding to the theory that this was more than just a minor blockage in his intestine. After two days of attempting to unblock this unknown mass the doctors reconvened to discuss their next option. ((Breaking News)) I  just received a call from my mother telling me they are preparing to operate on him in the morning. Their best guess is the removal of scar tissue resulting from the original invasive surgery. My worse fear is that the cancer has moved from his large intestine to his small intestine, causing significant closure of his bowels. I’ve been in contact with him in this past week and his spirits continue to be at an all time high; however it is my suspicion his optimism is the same facade he’s known for during these understandably undesirable times. It is my hope he is currently without pain and suffering. I hope his blood pressure is low and his spirits are high. It is my hope he walks out of the hospital with a smile on his face and with the confidence of a man who knows he will live to be 103 years old and who isn’t ready to retire to the next realm. But these are MY hopes. I’m not done making this beautiful creature laugh; I’m not done surprising him. Even though I’m 3,000 miles away from his body, I feel more connected to him tonight than I ever have. He is the one who taught me to be man and how to make honest connections in life. I suppose after he passes, so too shall my commitment to the idea of manhood. I will be left in a non-definitive  world of pure existence. But until that time, he’s still my dad; he’s still the one I look towards finding peace in his mistakes. After all, like Father, like Son.

-The concerned son

It’s winter in New York and there’s a snowstorm expected tonight. I moved here a little over a month ago leaving Los Angeles and its haunting stench and staleness behind. I miss my friends, although I know my absconding was justified as a matter of life or death. In the land of the lost I was quickly losing myself. No, never soft nor subtle, but only fast and furious. When I come, I come correct. I come with passion, ferocity and fervor, propelling ever closer towards the abyss, millimeters from event horizon. It is my suspicion that if I did not immediately leave Los Angeles, I would have been dead in no more then three months. This is not a Hollywood dramatization; this is candid concern for my conscious health. I left my friends behind, and as well my enemies. Most importantly, I left the self destructive part of me that was closing in on the slippery doorstep of death’s domain. No, this is not drama. These thoughts are the cause for my departure from California. So cheers to the rat that jumped ship. Cheers to the survivor and to the loner rodent running as far as he could from the haunting suspicion of an ominous and deadly storm. Yet, instead of running FROM these pathological uncertainties, I ran TOWARDS a better life, towards the Drala, towards the golden sun and the ineffable peace of a winter’s blizzard. Snow is peace; it is warm and cold congruently. It is a peace of mind which allows thoughts to wander into the nude nature of consciousness. Snow resets the cognitive mind like a freshly shorn scalp or a freshly drawn bath; it is the antithesis of the abyss. My natural instinct has been to strip off my confining clothes which inhibit me daily, and instead prance around in the magical freedom of snow’s white canvas. I am the artist’s brush dipped into the palette of the universe, ready to make my mark again. Yet the question prevails: will I continue creating the grotesque, or will I engage in unadulterated beauty? Only time will tell; only time and being will know. It’s beginning to snow now so I shall end this letter knowing my mind and heart are falling deep into to a falling blizzard.

- The Snow Flake

This year has been by far the most challenging battle I’ve faced on this god-forsaken planet. Consecutive imbroglios have beleaguered my opportunities and yet I still have a panoply of tricks up my sleeve to abscond the despondent strangle-hold I feel on a quotidian basis. Constantly reminding myself to laugh and enjoy life has been a major weapon against the sadness and depression my pathology is drawn towards. One must be burned by the flame to know that the delusion of beauty is the greatest trick of all; do not go into the light for your life will immolate. I offer myself life-lines of hope and happiness to stave off the surrounding invaders of despair. I quell my pain with laughter. And although seemingly insane at times, I still laugh to myself… out-loud… diabolically. And in the words of the late heath ledger as the joker, “why so serious?!”

love,
insanity

there’s a hero and he has a million faces. He looks just like her, just like him, and has a body of a tired extinguished star. We’ve seen this hero in our dreams, in our fantasies beyond the realm of what is; the hero surpasses being throughout the infinite. Therefore we can not see the hero, we can not be the hero. The hero only exists in our dreams, in between the synapses eluding reification and materialization, in-between the lines of poems and on the margin’s of the canvas. The hero knows nothing about quotidian plebeian life; the hero has nothing to do with this. The hero wants nothing but the best for everyone, a schizophrenic lover and and despondent foe. The hero is a manifestation of the plight of mankind. Man made the hero what it is today, that is to say, man made the idea of the hero, which could not exist without man’s understanding of what the hero purports to be… when the hero falls in the woods, everyone hears its pain. The hero craves nothing more than that which the hero needs, which is to say, nothing more than the ego-less protection of the hero’s surrounding: you and me. The hero is organ-less, desires nothing, needs nothing and produces nothing. It is perfect and alone.

-The Anti-hero

-the warrior

I have just realized something very interesting about how serious I take my lovers, but more importantly how serious I take my break ups. I don’t choose to be so dramatic; my mind just seems to go in the direction of depression and self-loathing when love fails. It’s as if I were predisposed to depression after an intense emotional relationship. I wonder if anyone else has come to this conclusion about his or her post-love state of being? Am I the only one in this world who feels destitute at the end of a relationship? Maybe I should develop a fallout out plan for myself, which I can follow like a nuclear threat document. A step-by-step guide to ending a relationship might be the only way I will survive my next love. Instead of making enemies with my ex-lovers, which I always seem to do, maybe a goal oriented document which I use as a daily reference, can lead me on the path of, dare I say, friendship? The steps to such an instructional manual would read as follows:
1. No! Whatever you are thinking right now is wrong.
2. Breathe.
3. You are making assumptions out of your emotional disfigurement which only have superficial relevancy to YOUR well-being.
4. Stop making universal conclusions about this breakup.
5. Smile if you know what’s good for you.
6. It’s not the end of the world, unless you kill yourself.
7. Breathe again.
8. Now is the time for you to turn to your friends without embarrassment to ask for their help and support. Don’t worry, that’s what they’re there for.
9. You are going to get through this, if you want to.
10. Stop blaming yourself, even if it was your fault. Shit happens, people separate, new loves are conceived, and yes, people die alone.
11. People dying is a metaphor; get used to it buddy.
12. Find something beautiful today, even if it is something minuscule or temporary.
13. Keep fucking breathing asshole.
14.  Do you really think God has time to get vengeance on you? No! God didn’t do this to you and neither did the devil. Remember, shit happens.
15. Crying is natural. Don’t hold in your emotions. That shit can kill you.
16. Someday, I promise you, you will laugh again. Even if it’s a macabre ironical laugh on your deathbed; you’ll still crack a lame ass death-grin.
17. You may never find another person like this one. But why would you want to anyway? If things didn’t work out the first time, they sure as hell won’t work out the second time.
18. Go watch the sunrise. Then go watch the sunset. Now think about home many people saw the same thing. You are not alone.
19. Stop winging about your loss. If you don’t smile, I’ll beat a smile into you.
20. Be nice to yourself. You’re all you have in this world now.

In conclusion, if you’re still feeling suicidal, sad, lonely, depressed, unnerved, restless, demonic, etc., feel free to punch things like walls and cars. However, just know, walls and cars don’t care about you, just like your ex lover. They will hurt you ten fold. Good luck, stay sharp, stay smart and remember, BREATHE ASSHOLE.

As you can tell, our breakup damaged me pretty badly, and I can only imagine how horrific the next breakup for me could be. In fact, the fear of what’s to come inhibits me from pursuing the thought or action of finding a next love. In terms of emotional connections with other humans, especially women, I’ve been recluse, almost to an extreme agoraphobic state.

-Silly me

You’ve signed them and mailed them back to the Los Angeles court house. I’ve been meaning to go check up on the process, but haven’t had the will power to do so. The courthouse is only ten blocks from here. Again, I’ve failed. My phone rang a month ago. Your voice on the other end of the line sounded like the sweet currents in the rivers of Hell. You asked if I had heard from the courts. No. I haven’t. And I don’t expect to. Not for another 4 months at least. I’m not sure why you decided to share this with me, but you told me you had plans to leave the country, to go travel to South America with friends. How lovely that sounds to my deaf ears. I want to be happy for you, happy for your travel plans, for your ongoing life. But I will not allow myself to feed on that pleasure. Depression is setting in. I can feel it in the back of my head. The muscles around my temples are spasming and my mind is clearly fogged. I feel confused by my wandering thoughts during lonely nights. The bed seems empty and cold and wrapping myself in a blanket makes me uneasily claustrophobic. It’ll be my 25th birthday in two days. And here I sit, a year and a half after our break up, lamenting and tormenting. The ghosts scream thoughts of suicide and self-destruction. 25 years old, and I’m lonely, cold and tired. I’m tired of meeting new acquaintances that go nowhere. I’m tired of thoughts full of self-doubt and pity. It exhausts me to think that I may never know another lover with eyes wide open. I’m mentally sleepy, and it shames me. I don’t write to you often. Now it seems, only in moments of desperate sadness do I turn to these journals to share with you the darkest side of my psyche. Good things have happened since my last entry, yet I can’t recall a single one of them. The nature of depression is the nature of the beast. Like Saturn eating her young in Francisco Goya’s painting, the ugly mother eats at my thoughts. Even before the depression, I have tell-tale signs of its oncoming. I start to feel numb to the world. My inner vision fine-tunes itself into a myopic tunnel. The world around me collapses as I refuse to interact with “the other”. Sadness prevails as I am swept away into the bleak and miserable void. Am I a cliché because of how inescapable desperation makes me? Are these the feelings of the classic manic-depressive states? If only there were a pill to make it all go away. Not just something to cure the symptoms, but something to dissipate everything. Is that death? Does it all end when I end? Wouldn’t the irony of an afterlife be a miserable conclusion to the nihilist? For my sake, and for the sake of anyone who just wants to finalize these curious demons, I hope there is no heaven or hell. I hope reincarnation doesn’t exist. I hope that when I die, I die forever. As a side note, there is a bible that has been sitting next to my desk for a few weeks now. I know I’m getting desperate because the thought of starting to believe in something better than the daily squalor I interact with is getting stronger. Weakness propagates the onset of depression. I want to find strength, somewhere, in something; and I know it’s not inside me.

-Depressed

Let us discuss this day of love. Let us delve into why this day even exists. That damn Grecian angel of love comes down into our lives, a living in hell, and shoots us with his hypnotic goddamn arrows of slavery. What kind of bastard anarchist saint of god would trap us in the dungeons of chains for its own amusement? No! No minion of a good lord would enslave humans in such a dark myopic cage! Cupid must be a servant of evil, or the lord Satan himself. Ever since I can remember, and from what I have read in human history, love has been on the tips of human’s tongues (and genitals). Love has been the epitome of “ultimate self-realization” because one can only love another if one loves oneself. Well, I say fuck this clichéd assumption of what love has been for humans in the thousands of years of our silly traditions. Let’s restate what love is for individuals living now, in the year 2006 (of our dear lord). Love is not an ultimate or a truth to cling on to, as if it were a scientific discovery of universality. “Love” is a word imagined by human-beings through their subjective understanding of their experiences; it does not define any truism set forth by god, saints, prophets or holy magistrates, and it does not constitute any sort of ultimate ominous doctrine for existence. Must one love another to procreate? No! Must one love another to cause pain and suffering? No! Must one understand a socially acceptable definition of love to gain social status? No! Our western (American) faith in the etymology of the word “love” convolutes the diverse and fluid existence of our human neurological process which we coin the term “love” as representing. “Love” is not monogamy. “Love” is not a tax break. “Love” is not a state issued marriage certificate. “Love” is not what we’ve come to understand through language. However, “Love” is a prominent goal in our western culture. “Love” is a wonderful feeling that westerners fight for, lie for and die for. We have faith in “love”. We believe that “love” is an ultimate stasis which can cure any illness, physical or neurological, no matter how far we stray from “love’s” path. But, let me tell you, my dear, “love” doesn’t destroy any demons we have stowed away in our inner neurological suitcases. “Love” is only a high that leads to clandestine machinations of our super ego. “Love” is an unlawful addiction without a 12-step program. Furthermore, “Love” is the culprit which makes hate possible. For what reason do we celebrate such an insidious emotion on this day, February 14th? As I pause to contemplate what I’ve just written, a voice inside is telling me how wrongfully hateful I am being. Ergo, I’d like to state a disclaimer to this letter: I do believe “Love” is the most important thing a human can hold on to. “Love” is the propagation of faith, which in turn is the answer to intuition, where intuition is the nurtured response to the nature of survival; hence, “Love” is Darwinian, meaning it exists to propagate survival, yet at the same time, “Love” is the only reason artists make art, while art has nothing to do with survival. “Love” is the only reason why I write these letters to you.

-A lover

You’ve come too soon, like an inexperienced man with no stamina during his first sexual encounter. Or maybe it was I who has come too late, possibly never cumming at all? Did you come tonight? I’ve yet to have sex with anyone besides you in the year 2005, which is a disappointment. Nevertheless, when I am sexually active, there is usually a feeling of emotional and/or physical satisfaction- post ejaculation- which is the evolutionary byproduct of survival; however, right now I am feeling nothing that resembles the sort of neural satisfaction I tend to enjoy post coitus because I know with the birth of a new year, coincidentally there is also a funeral for the death of the year which has just passed. We celebrate new beginnings with hope and promise for a better year filled with new endeavors, friendships, hopes, dreams and love; yet concurrently we mourn the loss of friends who have moved away, loved-ones who have died, lost jobs, depreciating bank accounts and fucked up events that preceded tonight’s celebrated (holy-day) holiday. On this eve there is an abundance of reflexive thoughts echoing through the minds of every American. It’s not just me this time! Cliché questions like, “what have I become?” “Where are we going?” “What’s the purpose in all this?” stroke the inquisitive minds of even semi-conscious beings. We think in terms of progression and digression when we dog-ear chapters in time. Henceforth, we make New Year’s resolutions that answer the mind’s plagued ponderings. “What can I do better this year, which hitherto tonight, for some reason or another, I couldn’t do last year?” “Who or what can I appreciate more this time around?” “Does any of this even matter?” Yes and no. New years are a time for reflection, a time to anticipate the future and to let go of the past. You are the past; you are my past– a most emotional time, a roaring rapid of lust and passion, of anger and aggression, blah blah blah. The new year is a time to wrestle with the brain and to figure what the fuck to do with ourselves for the next holy year, in the year of our lord, Jesus Christ the savior. Amen. New Year’s eve is an interesting holiday. It has astrological origins as well as religious ones’. It’s an agreed upon number by cultures throughout the world. I’d almost go as far to say it’s a humanistic universal standard (if there could be such a thing). It is the one day we celebrate as the defining point to start another trip around the sun. But how can one keep looking foreword when one is so fixated on the past? The new year is upon us: new beginnings and final endings; a time to reflect on what’s happened to us in the past 365 days and what to look towards for the next 365. Last year’s New Year’s eve was a tumultuous night for us, as I recall. We were at an anarchist punk show in the Mission where there were no rules, no laws, 40 Oz’s and gutter-punks. The smell emitting from the venue wasn’t from the stains on the floor, but from the stains on the clothes of the dirty mother bastards we called friends. Well, they were more your friends than mine, however I never had anything against them. They were some of the most passionate people I’d met in a long time. I could especially feel their enthusiasm in the moshpit. That night, I got clocked in the face with an elbow. My front tooth was pushed back a bit, but I didn’t mind. It was fun. Yet, That was then and this is now. I spent this New Year’s eve with my good friend Alexia who was in town for a few days this holiday. I even got a kiss from her when the clocks turned midnight. How sweet of her to bless me with her lips. We made our rounds around town by stopping at a few house parties. Nothing extreme happened, which I consider a good thing. Sometimes, no news is good news.

-XXOOXX to the new year