Story

the rain in LA this past year has been a gift. like all good gifts, it is occasional and well-timed, mostly doing its business overnight so that by the time we awaken, we are greeted by a layer of pristine sheen on the ground, sunlight bouncing off of it as the clouds dissipate. i’m not a fan of surprises, so i never made friends with DC’s rain, as hard as i tried.

maybe one day i’ll appreciate those mornings when i took my bike out for a balmy commute down 15th toward the smithsonian, when suddenly thunder boomed and unleashed an instant, district-wide ice bucket challenge. i cursed the perpetually-inaccurate meteorologists as i showed up at my important meetings late, with socks soaking, scalp reeking from a helmet that had gone stale holding the water from previous storms.

sometimes i’d enter the metro station after work, excited to catch the last hour of sunshine that i had been fomo-ing from my office all day, only to resurface seven minutes later to a hurricane. i’d find a spot to stand amongst the other staffers from various departments, eyes heavy from the day, lanyards wilted over chests, waiting for the sun to come like a night bus.

it strikes me as odd that DC was chosen, with its wildly unpredictable weather, as the place for government to establish routine systems and processes. it’s as if all this bureaucracy was established in contempt of a city whose climate forces people to break out their galoshes in the middle of july. in the summer of 2013 while moving into our DC apartment, we rented a car to pick up our first nice furniture – a non-ikea dining table with a polished wood surface. i stepped out into the sweltering heat to let the guys at the store know we had arrived, but in the middle of lugging the table over to the car a torrent of rain befell us. after stuffing the soaked box into the trunk, i collapsed my drenched self into the driver’s seat and started crying hard. i don’t even know why i was moved to tears like that, it just seemed appropriate for the weather. by the time i left DC, i had curated my wardrobe with exclusively waterproof clothes.

so it seems growing up in california’s endless drought never taught me to appreciate the rain like i should. don’t get me wrong – i love walking through fields of dewy plantlife. i love the sound of droplets ricocheting off my window as i fall into a warm, cozy slumber. i miss the days of being in honolulu and singapore, where tropical thunderstorms drop in for a minute or two to spritz the day. and i love DC, even if i don’t miss the celestial uncertainty. there’s something so endearingly-DC about sitting in a meeting on a rainy day, everyone in soggy suits and wet hair, trying to keep it together and go about business as if everything is fine, even though it’s not, because in the bigger scheme of things, it actually is.

it’s spring so i’m writing again! this is the story i tell myself when i cringe at my winter dry season, which followed fall burnout, which was preceded by summer stopgivingafuck. whether the change in season is a placebo, or if my creative juices are actually photosynthesizing in strange and complex ways probably doesn’t matter, at least not for the writing itself. i already spend way too much time writing about writing.

the stories i tell myself about why i write or don’t write could fill a book, which is how i know i’m not ready to write one. i’m already too product-driven, too concerned over what people might think that i often can’t hear my own mind. this past year i’ve produced some of my favorite writing, thanks mostly to the fact that i stopped making a big deal about it. i’ve always interpreted the periods i don’t spew out a beautiful poem or vignette as a sign that my powers are fading, that i’m destined to look back at my talents like the “one that got away.” this year i learned that whatever’s trying to get away probably isn’t the one.

i also learned that there is no amount of workshops, classes, motivational memes, or prescribed regimens that can do more for a writer than what’s gained by cultivating a deeper understanding of self. in my most prolific days, i was showing up at poetry slams every week with new fire, a new notebook filled to the margins. i was generating stanzas with quadruple meanings encoded, multisyllabic rhymeschemes stacked like brick walls, 16, 24, 32 velvet-smooth bars lined in a row. i was writing as a way to learn who i was. this year i wrote to remind myself of who i’ve become.

one of the books i’ve been grazing on over the past few months is bruce lee’s tao of jeet kune do. as with all martial arts, it begins with underlining how much more important it is to defend than it is to strike. it was here that i discovered a different way of interpreting the writer’s block, as not an impediment but a defense. the best fighters recognize that most of the fight happens while in a block. to come out swinging inspires awe for only so long before they reveal themselves as empty blows.

we writers, too, can master our blocks. it’s while in a block that we can observe, feel, understand, intend. even when we’re not writing, when we’re not sure if the words will ever find us again, we’re still telling some kind of story in our head. i return to spring with a deeper appreciation for those stories, the ones that are often filled with the most epic battles with our own demons, the odysseys for self, the ones that have no language because they transcend. the stories that hit the hardest.

when lovely and i moved to LA last february, we gave ourselves a year and some change. lovely grew up here, and there’s something about settling down in the place where you’re from that doesn’t vibe with the culture of ceilingless upward mobility that so many of us have been raised to aspire for. probably the same reason i could never see myself in the bay again. “i wouldn’t even be able to afford to move back!” is typically my response – a convenient truth but not actually the reason.

i remember when i was going to put the une on the map (the une is what we called union city, a suburb that i often even need to point out to fellow californians as one of the exits that blur by when driving the 880 from oakland to san jose). “it’s where they opened one of the first jollibees in the bay,” i sometimes offer, often to just further confusion. sometimes i resort to identifying the une by referring to our neighboring towns. my go-to used to be hayward, “next to where the rock grew up!” these days, its easier to just say it’s near the tesla plant in fremont. but that’s neither here nor there.

if our time in LA was just meant to be a year and some change, tbh i don’t even know if the counting has even begun. it was a year, but was there some change? we made our last big target run just a week before the lockdown – a hybrid of nesting and hunkering down. just yesterday, we finally braved the outside world to buy new furniture – an antique chair with an elaborate wood carving and mustard velvet upholstery. we’re calling it our zoom throne – recognizing that this may be a vote of no confidence to assurances that we’ll be back to the old normal by the fourth of july. not depending on it.

not counting this first year in LA does a disservice to the city as a landscape. the fact of the matter is that i’ve spent more mornings at the beach than not, have hiked malibu state park so regularly that i recognize each tree, and have learned to navigate from venice to DTLA without the guardrails of waze. i have planted trees and watched cacti shrivel, been confounded by why some of my succulents discolor in the sun, and can recognize exactly at which hour my yard patio gets engulfed by the shade and drops the temperature ten degrees.

to say our time in LA hasn’t started yet is to claim that all of the sand, ocean, greenery, and groundedness that defined my past twelve months were only consolations for not being able to hit the club. okay that’s not fair – not just the club, but the theme parks, the concerts, the sun-coated brunches on january patios, the bbqs and kick-its, the joints passed with the countless people i know here whom i may not have seen anyway, regardless of the pandemic, but which we amicably allow to be the explanation – a convenient truth but not actually the reason.

last month, my brother commiserated over how nothing happened for the past year. he turned 30 last february – he anticipated a brave new world, but instead he got the same old thing. none of us might truly understand all the change, growth, and transformation that this past year of lockdown brought us until we actually go back out into the world. i imagine that many of the public spaces that i used to flow through with such ease will feel jagged, awkward, suffocating, compelling me to escape to the isolation and boredom i’ve learned to embrace. some of the familiar faces that have been missing from my life will feel like a breath of fresh air, other reconnections may be greeted with new incongruences, proving that so much has indeed changed.

what i do know is that i’ve lived the shit out of LA this past year – it may have been filled with emotional rollercoasters rather than actual ones, more nights with netflix than hollywood encounters, time passing on my couch rather than cars in traffic. it was an LA that only i know, and only could’ve known this past year. it was a year at home.

two words that i have not been able to learn how to correctly distinguish in all of my years as a writer are vein and vain. one is the term for the innumerable vessels that fill and make up our bodies, transporting blood and minerals and oxygen and nutrients from organ to organ, literally pumping us with life force. the other could be a direct opposite – a disregard for, a lacking in, an absence of what is vital. “not to be vain,” one might say, before embarking on a comment that distracts from the issue at hand in order to put the focus on oneself. “do not use the lord’s name in vain,” says the third commandment, arguably the most-ignored one.

god. if one were to trace the etymology of the word, it could be beautifully described as a term that has now worked its way not only into describing an almighty deity, but as an exclamation for joy, grief, rage, and all the minor feelings between. “this isn’t me using it in vain,” i told myself, when i first began incorporating it into my non-religious lexicon. when i say something like “god damn it,” it has nothing to do with the supreme being, or the most ultimate existential act that can occur to a soul…it’s just a very similar-sounding colloquialism for when i can’t find my keys! god has become a casualty by way of the casual. on any given day, i can hear and say those three words pronounced without my mind ever going to a heaven, a creator, a focal point of worship. if the purpose of the third commandment was to prevent humankind from stripping the word god of its shaking power, it’s safe to say that it was a god-awful failure.

satan, on the other hand…there’s a word that sends chills up my spine when i even utter it. i blame this not only on spending my formative years in churches, fellowships, youth camps, and my dad’s subscription to christianity today, but also on our culture. i grew up with an understanding that the devil is so predatory, so cunning, that even speaking of him could be an open invitation to be possessed, or at least influenced. for all the elements of the church that i’ve shaken off through adulthood, this notion of satan as a name to avoid speaking – like candyman, beetlejuice, bloody mary – i haven’t been able to unlearn.

i heard somewhere that for all the intellectuals who have reasoned their way out of believing in god, they somehow remain steadfast in their belief in evil. today i’m thinking about the third commandment, and about words, and about what we take in vein, and what we allow to fill up inside of us and circulate in our systems. whose name and image do i tremble before? is this a fear that would be injected in me by an all-knowing, all-loving deity? ultimately, how important are the deeds and words we speak on the fly, when we don’t mean it, which is to say how important is most of what we do and say?

i didn’t mean for this to be a rant on religion, just something i’m thinking about, as i approach a year of sitting here, inside, reflecting on everything i’ve taken for granted, and feeling everything that courses within me like it was closer than ever before.

let my initial resistance to the second chapter in akomolafe’s essay be a testament to how deeply entrenched i am in the environment built by the queen’s english. akomolafe suggests that hope, like all other things, can’t be the one true way. that to have hope (in this case that by 2030 we’ll have completed all the checkmarks designated by human minds that are required for continued planetary thriving) is to project the colonial belief that we can have whatever we want as long as we try hard enough. but isn’t that true? the voice inside me pleads. if it isn’t what else is there to live for? perhaps everything – the vastness of everything else when we aren’t preoccupied by the weight of the world. because isn’t it hope in the first place that leads to expansion, invention, corralling, domesticating? is all endurance, all effort, holy terrain simply because it was wanted badly enough? how much pain and death came upon the hopes of empires, dictators, enslavers, demagogues? how many of these hopes were vindicated as righteous merely because they were realized?

each day i write, i do so with the hope that i’ll impress myself. this is a bit of a paradox, in that being impressed requires expectations to be lower than what is received. some of my best writing has come upon me being broken down, wrung dry, depleted, so low on ego that i couldn’t dare to even hope that something beautiful could come from my lack of inspiration.

i don’t know what this all means – i know that dr. bayo’s message isn’t that we stop moving toward justice, liberation, life. but to move toward those things do not mean – and perhaps do mean not – a rebuilding of the old systems that got us here and barred us from other portals of possibility. i begin 2021 with an unfamiliar lack of motivation, direction, agenda. and it feels freeing.

to keep the writing up, lovely and i have been doing exercises with prompts. i’m generally terrible at coming up with them, but lovely is a wizard. her concepts have jolted me with energy, especially when my troubled mind can’t come up with anything to write about other than how guilty feel for not writing enough. but the other day, she stumped me. write about a time, she began, when you experienced an unexpected miracle. whatever i began writing right away, i deleted almost as immediately. what i ended up with was the third or fourth draft, mostly cheeky comments about how everything and nothing can be considered miraculous, that expectation and reality are merely dividing lines in binaries.

which is all to say it has been a refreshing start of the year to finally come around to reading dr. bayo akomolafe’s essay coming down to earth, where he so poignantly declares that “power and enchantment are always in short supply relative to deepening demand,” a deepening demand powered not only by capitalism but the framing of the modern world as we know it – one where a sense of dissatisfaction can only and must only be met by accumulation of materials, experiences, data.

but is that the source of  my sense of dissatisfaction, lately? in my memory, this dissatisfaction was not present throughout the weeks when i was writing constantly, when creativity felt like a generous and bottomless fountain. i found this sense of peace during a rise in trauma of 2020, when it seemed that nothing of the outside world could produce the joy that i could mysteriously recognize, in that moment, in myself. an unexpected miracle.

what they don’t often say much about miracles is how sorely they are yearned for once they’ve transpired. miracles appear to widen the scope of reality, even though nothing in reality has actually shifted – just the notion of it. a crack, a tear, a puncture in the world that we’ve allowed to be built around us, the futile sense of me as the center of it all, the toxically imaginary, slanted and skewed i.

i’m reading dr. bayo’s essay slowly this week – it has been neatly divided into 8 parts, conducive to one of my new year’s resolutions to consume everything more slowly. every night i starve myself for the few hours before dinner, only to fall into a hypnotic state once i start stuffing my mouth, only to awaken from it with a decimated plate and a battered stomach. much like when i haven’t read for awhile and lose a day on paragraphs i glossed over too quickly in order to reach the last page. much like when i don’t write, only building more and more pressure on myself to finally sit and produce endless reams that i’ll never revisit. so here’s to taking things more slowly, indulging in the smallest of things, and resting assured that miracles are abound, even if i don’t recognize them when they appear.

it’s important for you to know that the only audience that you can ever guarantee is yourself. because in the end, who else can really afford to sustain the attention you crave? who else has the time to hang onto every word? think about how many of your own favs you’ve forsaken because, unbeknownst to them, they failed your expectations?

in my mind, there is a person, and in that person’s mind, there is a version of me that i didn’t live up to be. i didn’t keep performing poems like that, or releasing songs like this. to them, i have fallen off. not that this should matter to me, but it does – in fact, it drives guilt into my heart each day i don’t write. they personify the disappointment that only i can possibly feel for myself, but because i haven’t taken the time to value my own vision for who i could be, i have created this faceless avatar. they are nobody in particular, so they are everyone in general. it is this fear of not being any of the things that i possibly could have ever been that makes certain that i might never feel that i am enough.

but if only i had the humility to recognize that i couldn’t possibly hold the judgement of so many people, that even if i could matter this much, that i don’t necessarily have to. to entertain the notion of fading away, being forgotten, or never even noticed in the first place – in this age of perpetual visibility, of omnipresence, is being a nobody in fact freedom? what would it mean to live my life like the name behind a pseudonym? to transform the world while covering the tracks – not because it is a secret, but because it simply is.

lallygag. dillydally. pussyfoot. these are real words that describe true to life my approach to writing, each and every morning. what is the science behind this? for the past week, i’ve refrained from the 15 minutes that it takes for me to feel like i’ve done my minimum duty of being a writer. instead, sadistically, i’ve chosen the alternative route of going about my days with the aching in the background of having not done so. when i don’t begin my days writing, everything else i do is tinged with guilt – scrolling away at feeds, meandering through the banalities of work, even doing things that i truly love, like spending time with my family.

i’m aware that writing isn’t a typical regiment. it is not like the clinical ways in which i’ve incorporated meditation, stretching, and other routines that i’ve tucked into my daily schedule in neatly-timed doses. i make my excuses to not write by convincing myself that these short sessions don’t count, that they’ll never be shared or published, that they probably won’t be any good. why waste my time on it then? i believe that i came to writing because it’s one of the things that i believed i could be truly great at. every writer i admire has said in one way or another that such greatness does not present itself like the eggs of a golden goose (the golden eggs of a regular goose?) but rather like a diamond in a pile of shit. tbh, i’m not sure if that’s a helpful analogy for me. who wants to spend each day knowingly producing shit? or do they mean it’s like taking a shit? that only by forcing yourself to squeeze one out each morning can you get to a point of regularity, of smooth movement, a healthy system.

or maybe that’s just bullshit. things people tell themselves to quell the unrealistic desire for constant, consistent, uninterrupted perfection. maybe it’s slowly and arduously realizing that it’s the perfection that’s the bullshit, and it’s the bullshit that’s the truth. [shrugging emoji]

LA has been cold and windy lately, which has offered ample excuses for me to do nothing but stay inside and play video games. i bought lovely a switch for her birthday, following a steadfast tradition that we’ve established of giving each other presents that are actually for our own selves. it’s been so long since i’ve sat in front of a television, letting the hours mudslide away while gripping a controller, that i woke up after my first day of playing mariokart with pain running from my wrists to my neck. it was like the inverse of a post-workout soreness after hitting the gym after a long, lethargic winter. but perhaps these are the dues to pay in my current campaign to find pockets of unproductivity. productivity is what squeezed gaming out of my life in the first place, following college when i decided that i have a grand purpose in this world that would only be achieved if i spent less time playing and more time working. for years after, i traded the RPGs and combat games i loved to instead expand my internet presence. instead of collecting gems and coins, i started chasing likes and followers. instead of striving to get to the next level, i placed my sights on inbox zero. instead of combatting fantastical monsters, i took on internet trolls. better to spend this energy on real life, i’d tell myself, as i assigned my various emails to their appropriate archive folders, sent links to “read later” tabs that i’d never revisit, let my time disappear into days spent rummaging through productivity apps. welcoming videogames back into my life comes as a desperate measure in my struggle to resist turning to work (or worse, the news) when i don’t have anything else to do. it’s an attempt to retrain myself to need to be productive by default, to denounce the religion of optimizing my life. it’s an acceptance of all that this year, with this pandemic, and these lingering stresses, are trying to tell me. that no matter what i do or don’t do, i’m worth my own time.