Story

lately, even being at home feels not quite like the being at home. this pandemic did not strike like an earthquake – it did not shatter windows, or topple books from shelves, or leave cabinets disheveled and ajar. but still, the things around me seem different. a new consideration assigned to every one of my possessions – are you too unclean to touch, or too clean to touch?

every thing i reach for, put to use, adorn myself with, is attached to a calculation about whether i’ll have to wash it before, or wash it after, or wash myself before, or wash myself after. remember that time i got all interested in “minimalism” and convinced myself that one day i could have an apartment that looks like it belongs in kinfolk? those kinfolk homes seem clean enough to touch, with people clean enough to touch them. me? i’m still struggling to get my socks to end up in the hamper.

the word i always accidentally use when i try to say non-materialistic is immaterialistic. either way, you know what i mean when i say it. non-materialistic is a way of living in which i am not driven by the consumption of material objects – objects which may or may not include the ones i already have, which may or may not include the ones that fall in the spectrum of necessary and convenient.

when i began thinking critically about my consumption patterns, things i already owned were originally grandfathered into my world of aspiring non-materialism – they were in a safe zone that said, like, “from now on i won’t accumulate dozens and dozens of plastic action figures of animal mutants.” then came the kondo method. the kondo method is a notion put forth by marie kondo in the early 2010’s that convinced me and millions of others that true freedom from material objects entails talking to each of them like they are humans, and then only keeping the ones that filled you with a sense of inebriation. no longer did objects fall into the two dimensions of necessity or convenience – enter the third, quantum value of “sparking joy!”

what is necessary? what is convenient? what sparks joy? – these attributes have shifted in each object during this time, where so many things can be “a carrier.” when touch-screens and flip-switches that once could be activated with hardly a thought can now send me back to the faucet to use another 20 seconds of water, an extra helping of soap, another perpetually damp towel that must be washed more frequently.

this is why i can not completely be a non-materialist or an immaterialist (and by “not completely be” i guess that means “not be”). i dwell too much on the things around me, and that dwelling makes them too real to exist only in my mind. there is a fork, and that fork needs to be sanitized. should i abide by kondo’s mandate, what of all the things that don’t “spark joy” but rather evoke grief, concern, regret, and fear? without objects for me to hold these sensations in the safety of my own home, what chance do i have when i inevitably encounter them in the world outside?

yesterday the nytimes dedicated its front page to acknowledging the 100,000 people in the u.s. who have died from the coronavirus. in perfect nytimes fashion, it landed as both a thoughtful gesture, and as an alarming siren.

i spent the first moments of my morning thumbing through the interactive endless scroll, reading through names, ages, and bite-sized descriptions – also in perfect nytimes fashion, it simultaneously communicated “these people weren’t just statistics,” as well as, “look at this crazy death statistic!” happy birthday, drizz, i thought to myself, don’t forget that it’s never all about you.

for the rest of my birthday, as friends sent me messages letting me know how happy they are that i am alive, the internet passed around the article to remind us of how devastating it is that all these people have died – a meme that made celebrating my own aliveness feel self-centered, insensitive, even cruel.

i thought about the article all day, the dizzying number of people who also had birthdays, and now deathdays, and their loved ones who would keep the may 24 edition as a somber momento, a reminder of the 100,000 people who would’ve also had loved ones tell them on their next birthday that they were so happy that they were alive, if only they still were.

nico, lovely, and i decided to escape the reaches of the internet and go for a long hike in the forest. at the end of our hike, we reached an elevated rock formation that offered a 360-degree view of countless trees, each home to countless critters, bugs, fungi, bacterium. i thought about how, in all the stillness of a sunday afternoon, within the limited scope of what my eye could see, was an ongoing cycle of enduring birth and relentless death.

i wondered if any of those trees sprouted on the same day that i was born, and then all of the other innumerable beings on this planet and in this universe – the flowers that blossomed, the eggs that hatched, the beasts that breathed their first breaths, the cells that split, the dust that found gravitational pull in distant galaxies to become stars – everything that came into existence in the short period known as may 24, 1983 – myself included.

and in that moment, even in the face of all this death, i found what to celebrate.

blow me a kiss, but
press your lips at your elbow.
no blowing/kissing.

stop sitting front row
at poetry slams. don’t shout
ayo spit that shit!

oh, and rap battles
must be performed back to back.
disinfect your grill.

no more MAGA dates
(sharing milkshake with two straws)
think of the turtles.

and most certainly
come next halloween, no more
bobbing for apples.

lovely just showed me
this video of a
contraption made for
contactless hugging.
i don’t need to give you a
detailed description,
just know that this guy
hugged his mom through a shower
curtain with arm holes.
i could already
imagine my own mother
donning a plastic
sheet, arms outspread wide
while my bourgie ass asks, is
it BPA-free?

our household has been watching 10 years with hayao miyazaki, an epic documentary series that follows the life and process of the legendary animator. the second episode is a flyonthewall view on his process developing ponyo, and it’s mostly shots of him wringing his hands, tearing at his hair, smashing his palms against his eyes, being irritated at everyone, and questioning whether or not life has any purpose. “that seems excruciating,” heaved nico. “this is why i’ll probably never be one of the greats.” “yeah,” i replied, enviously.

i know it’s common for people to see the work of an artist and think, i wish i could do that, but that feeling is usually reserved for the output – the film, the song, the painting. but is it only other artists who see the moments of torment, of self-doubt, of spiraling, and feel a strange desire for a dose? for as long as i can remember, i’ve associated the depth of art with pain and sorrow. after all, what’s a biopic without a rock-bottom scene?

i can think of no other kind of suffering to be jealous of, aside from that of the tortured artist. it’s why tupac, hendrix, cobain, and countless others are heralded the way they are. the same demons that made them “gone too soon” were responsible for the works that will be remembered forever. it’s as if the artist who goes through life pleasantly is the anomaly, the coward, even – the evasion of suffering the reason some never became legend.

i have my own battle scars from art – nervous breakdowns, mangled relationships, numbing self-belittlement – but it all seems so less-than when compared to how they’re conveyed in the biographies and profiles. these days, my lowest points are the last thing i want to create around, to dwell on in the limited creative capacity i have. often, it feels like a chosen survivor’s guilt – a threshold i’m unwilling to break, thus a decision to never be great.

i’ve been listening to a lot of bone thugs lately. i always seem to return to their body of work during lonely, difficult times. i remember discovering them around the time they dropped e. 1999 eternal, and how captivated i was by the sorrow in their background story – their desolate upbringing in the badlands of cleveland, the recent loss of their bandleader eazy-e to the aids epidemic, the myth that they had only reached their level of fame and fortune after making a deal with the devil and agreeing to meet their collective demise in 1999. all of that pain was pent up and concentrated in their dark, beautiful songs. to my early-teen ears, the heartbreak was sublime.

the logical antidote to all these feels is to recognize that the associations forged between greatness and sacrifice are part of the larger ploy of capitalism, that only in the schematic of human energy as commodity does one have to deplete oneself in order to thrive in legacy. i know, i know, i know. i’m learning to accept that, especially in these times of romanticized dread – the quest for joy one worth creating for.

i’d like everyone to believe that i’ve had an innate and everlasting connection for nature, but that would be a lie. i’ve spent most of my life infatuated by urban life, and living in cities instilled in me a belief that most if not all things could be solved by human intellect and technology. one of the ways this manifested during my earlier years as an artist was my insistence that the social justice and identity-themed poetry i wrote and gravitated toward was far more relevant and had way more substance than conventional, frivolous poems, the kinds about “flowers and shit.”

i’m reflecting on all this while sitting in a garden that has been the only place where i’ve been able to find my inspiration to write for the past couple of months. without the motivation to compose for publication, without the assurance of human interaction in the near future, these plants around me that have been growing, blooming, withering, persisting – have been my primary audience and my only visceral indicator that the world is continuing on, worth writing for.

maybe i got old, maybe i got soft, maybe i got tuned in, finally.

last night we watched the 2016 film neruda, which focuses largely on the poet’s run-ins with chile’s power struggle, but not quite at all on his notorious love for gardening. that someone can possess the spirit of a revolutionary while at the same time mastering the stillness needed to thoroughly describe a flower is beyond my comprehension and beyond my discipline.

before the lockdown, as i was acclimating to life in los angeles, a burgeoning, favorite pastime was going on long walks with my friend sheng. “lookatdat one,” he’d chuckle, pointing out how the same thing that can make a plant beautiful can also make it hilarious (i guess the word for that would be awesome if it still meant awe-some). and as the hours passed, this awe-someness of nature seemed like the only thing that mattered, as if each bud on each stem on each root was asking, “what was that you were saying about substance?”

one book that has been a refuge for me during this time is ross gay’s the book of delights, a collection of 100 short essays written over the course of a year, each a different take on the seldom-explored emotion. especially amidst this period which has been deemed a net loss, delights is a welcome reminder that joy and gratitude can still be found in every contour.

today i reached his essay “stacking delights,” a role call of the backlog of delights waiting in his queue after five months of writing. the piece is simply a list, a cleansing that allows each of them to breathe as opposed to going stale in waiting. it has inspired me to consider the delights that persist in my life in this moment of isolation. including but not only:

nico’s mom, who sent our entire household handmade facemasks and assigned specific ones to each of us based on color, and how this makes me feel like a ninja turtle.

popping a mango ginger chew before putting on that facemask and letting it dissolve so that i can glide down the backstreets on my bike with a secret in my mouth.

the way lovely said “just make sure it’s not toxic” when i told her that i had picked a bunch of jasmine flowers from our yard to make yunnan-style scrambled eggs, to which i said “it’s probably fine” but looked it up anyway only to discover that yes the kind of jasmine in our yard is totally toxic, so even though i didn’t get to make yunnan-style scrambled eggs i still got to spend a morning picking flowers.

the la times profile on ben barcelona, the 81-year-old retiree who, until the pandemic, had an 8-year streak of going to a different museum each day of the week, and who says “art is everywhere. now the streets are my museum.”

tammy and aerica and mei and emmy, and the creative inspiration they’ve given me this week, and mentioning them in the old school way not the instagram tagging way, and the delight they may experience in case they come across this anyway.

waiting in line to get tested while listening to mariah carey’s 2018 album caution, which i had reluctantly pressed play on when it first dropped, only to fall in love with it because it totally gave me butterfly vibes, until over time it gave me its own vibes.

how revisiting caution inspired me to then revisit the catalog of bone thugs, which sparked a newfound appreciation for wish bone, the bone who i had slept the hardest on.

how revisiting bone thugs reminds me of the time in sixth grade when i was on a bus home from a church retreat and someone in the back played “tha crossroads” on repeat for the entire two hour commute and when i got home all i wanted to do was listen to more “tha crossroads.”

sesame seeds, in all contexts, but especially in furikake, and especially when a furikake-flavored sesame seed is stuck in my teeth until i coax it out with my tongue and squeeze out a mini sesame seed from inside that sesame seed with my front teeth.

my top right front tooth, which is gently chipped from a quinoa tortilla chip from trader joe’s that i bit down on with too much excitement in 2017.

egg.

look, if i can’t bear to watch the footage of ahmaud arbery being murdered, it’s not because i’ve chosen to “turn away.” if i can’t bring myself to repost another vector illustration of a black man with angel wings, it’s not because i do not stand against systemic racism. i’ve spent all morning trying to figure out what it means to not just crowdsource my grief, but everything else just comes off like i’m trying to make it about me, when i know it’s not. and if your response to all this is nobody asked you, i reply, isn’t what we ask of ourselves already too much?

i really hate waking up early, but i love my friend, so when she asked me to speak at a morning “assembly” for her brooklyn high school students about community action during covid times, i grumbled wu-tang is for the children and agreed to set my alarm clock for the first time since isolation began. as i sleepily watched the list of attendees file into the video conference, i clicked over to the q&a box and almost laughed my entire cup of espresso out my nostrils when i read the first comment: “THIS ZOOM IS WACK.”

i’ve been booed offstage while reading poetry to high schoolers before, so someone typing THIS ZOOM IS WACK from an anonymous account doesn’t phase me – but it does impress me that the word wack continues to endure so resiliently through the decades that, here in 2020, it can be a choice adjective for a kid to describe a scenario in which a teenager is marked absent unless they log into a teleconference to watch a bunch of strangers talk. i get it. actually, if i could anonymously comment THIS ZOOM IS WACK on all my calls throughout the past month, i would. i might, from now on.

THIS ZOOM IS WACK washed over me this morning in the form of teenage nostalgia. it made me think of the years in my early twenties when my weeks were spent performing at high school assemblies all throughout the bay. standing on stage, looking out into the auditorium, i could see all the microcosms – the cliques with their leaders and tag-alongs, the ones taking the opportunity of darkness in a crowd to sleep, the teachers shushing, the honors students paying avid attention and wanting me to know it, and of course, the many in the audience who could give a fuck. regularly going to high schools was a way to keep me grounded, to not get so carried away by all the things that people in the adult world take seriously even when they really shouldn’t.

when i’m on a wack zoom call these days i choose more subtle rebellions: switching off my camera so i can roll my eyes, telling people i have to go when i actually don’t, or just straight up logging off and emailing an apology for getting disconnected. all of these are socially-acceptable expressions for people like myself who have gotten old and polite and opt for professionalism over keeping it real.

here’s a covid-era statistic i’d like to see: how many wack zoom calls have been allowed to go all the way through without anyone pointing out how wack they are? for the record, i felt that this morning’s zoom was incredible. but someone else disagreed, and they were going to make sure we all knew, damn it!

i don’t miss the drama of adolescence, but popping my head into a virtual high school today did remind me of how many other worlds are out there, each with people who are processing this moment of uniformity in vastly different ways – including at least one kid somewhere in brooklyn, who amidst social distancing and new norms, still figured out a way to step out of line.

i’ve long been enamored, even consumed, by the prospect of going through life on autopilot. my earliest memory of being appealed by this notion was in back to the future, the scene where doc brown’s alarm clock sets off a series of events beginning with waking him up to brushing his teeth to brewing his coffee. with eyelids heavy throughout the entire scene, doc brown sleepily makes the most meager movements while everything else does the work. the scene ends with doc brown having been coaxed into full alertness, overjoyed by yet another perfectly-roboticized morning. even for the mad scientist inventor, the ideal day begins with no thinking.

wouldn’t it be relaxing, i remember daydreaming as a kid, if my entire day were like that? i wouldn’t even have to think about it and somehow i would get through school, have all my homework done, shower taken, without me having to go through the excruciating human conditions of anticipation, effort, procrastination, and regret.

this infatuation for autopiloting things continues to exist in my life in different ways – the convenience of automatic bill payments, email autoreplies, and the jungle of triggers deployed by my phone. meanwhile, the conveniences of capitalism have made it possible for me to jump on amazon to subscribe to almost anything, and for shows to invite themselves into my life without me even asking for them. lately autopilot has manifested in this weird idea that the best way for me to get through this lockdown period is to live each day as a perfect routine. like if i just got through a checklist of things that the ideal me would normally do (meditate, exercise, eat healthily, get some work done, connect with loved ones) then i’d be happy that day. and if i did that everyday, then i’d be happy everyday. easy.

i call this idea weird because it’s completely un-gemini and also against the way i’ve framed so much of my life around my love of adventure. how is it that just a year ago i was excitedly hiking in new zealand and today i’m getting just as much satisfaction out of sitting on my patio each morning? maybe in this apartment, behind these gates, in this closed world, i’ve given up on adventure.

i know it sounds kind of corny, but the adventure that still remains constant is my struggle to write each day. i’ve been able to corral every other good habit except for writing. me wrestling a green ghoulish cyclops version of myself – that’s the image that comes to mind when i think about the moment each morning between me chillin with a cup of coffee, and me writing a non-work related paragraph. like, if i could just trigger one outcome with a doc brown-style contraption, it would be that i could somehow just have a beautiful piece of writing channeled out of me each day without all my insecurities about purpose and audacity and what gives me the right to say anything at all discouraging me. this inability to somehow just have is the dose of adventure that has kept me from being lured into a euphoric cycle of groundhog days.

in this age where we’re constantly being reminded to check our privileges, and amidst days dedicated to tending to my loved ones who have fallen ill, it’s been hard to take my artistic conflicts seriously. a projection of hundreds of thousands of more deaths, and you seriously want to talk about writer’s block? the green ghoulish version of me has a point. but while so many elements are containing, regulating, fearmongering, and subduing us – insisting on still exploring, imagining, and creating is a risk worth taking.