Tuesday, June 30, 2009

July!


July!, originally uploaded by Reeses World.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

parades


parades, originally uploaded by Reeses World.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Lt. Dan Choi!

dan choi and me


dan choi and me, originally uploaded by Reeses World.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

lunch!


lunch!, originally uploaded by Reeses World.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Tingle

My skin tingles like on those warm summer days when everything seems possible and every is possible and all is behind us and all is before us and all is right with the world and the world is my oyster and you can have your cake and eat it too and the possibilities are endless and life is full of possibilities and the bowl is full of cherries and there’s a cherry on top, a big red beautiful cherry on top, sitting right there, on top, feeling the wind beneath the wings and the joy in the hearts and the knowledge that the day is brighter and better and most beautiful and the hope is achieved and found and all is right with the world all is right with the world and my skin tingles, yes it tingles because it is finally all coming together and coming to fruition and bearing the fruit that one had always hoped it would and one always knew it would, one day, when the time was right, and yes, yes, thankfully, yes, the time is right right now and all is well with the world and I can feel the skin tingle all over, my forearm, my neck, my chest, my legs, my face, and I see you and I can’t believe you are here and I can’t believe I am here and we are together and it is so peaceful and tranquil and beautiful and perfect and it’s the way we thought it should be and it finally is and yeah, it really is, this time, it is because the time is right and the cherry is on top and the glass is full, completely full, and the glass is warm and beautiful and we are feeling this tingle together and it is so touching and warming and I feel a tear to my eye as I think about how long it took to get here and how much I hoped I would get here and how often I dreamed I would one day get here and now here we are, and here I am and here you are and here we are together and I feel my skin tingle and I feel you skin tingle and your skin tingles with my skin tingling and we tingle together and I know that you are feeling just the same peace and excitement and culmination that I am feeling from a lifetime of hope and dreams and wishes coming true and hopes finally achieved and it is an amazing feeling of life and love and peace, yes, peace, finally, peace in this world, in this crazy topsy turvy world that we live in for some reason that we choose to live in and we never thought it would get better but then all can be better if we just truly really firmly believe and hope that it will get better to where one day it leads us to this day where it really is better and everything has culminated into a beautiful lasting moment in time where you are feeling it and I am feeling it and I feel so good and it makes my skin tingle, the way that it tingles sometimes when the time is right and all is right with the world and just like the last time when my skin tingled when all was right with the world and everything was beautiful and hopeful and loving, until, well, when it changed and everything changed and it was dark and wrong and sad and different, but not this time, because this time my skin is tingling the way that it is supposed to tingle because this is the time when it is right and there are cherries and the full glass and the dreams and the sky is blue and the pasture is green and the path is clear and the sight is in my eyes and the possibilities are once again endless because all is well and all is beautiful and everything is going to work out just fine because I can tell because my skin is tingling that tingle that it does when everything is jus so, just so perfect, just like I always knew it could be. I love that feeling, that momentous wondrous temporary feeling.

Ache

I have a headache. My head is killing me. The pain won’t stop. Blah blah blah. It’s always the same thing.

I press my finger against my temple, I rub my eyes, I shake my head, I pound my head with my fist, I crack my neck, I pound my head against the wall, I pound it again, I keep pounding, I twist and turn, I move and jump and jostle and I close my eyes and try to remain calm and feel a quiet sense and try to remember life before the aches and pains of everyday life. It’s always the same thing.

I sit here and wonder if it’s possible for my head to not hurt as it always does, as it constantly pains my life, pains my mind, pains my thoughts, thinking that maybe the pain will go away with a simple this or that or maybe, yeah, maybe that’s a good idea, maybe that, but alas no, it’s always the same thing and I sit and stare and blank and close and open and tire and tire and wish and it’s always the same thing.

And the goddamn coffeeshop is playing that irritating 60’s singer again for background noise and all it is to me is noise noise and I so hate that singer and I can’t remember his name but it doesn’t matter because he’s irritating and annoying and he makes my head hurt even more and goddamn they are always playing his music, everytime I come here, and why do I come here, they always play his music as if he’s a great background to have for the coffeeshop experience and goddamn I hate him and I know that everybody loves him and he’s supposedly this great 60’s musician and we’re all supposed to idolize him but I don’t, I don’t at all, never have, never will, stupid, goddamn musician and it’s always the same thing.

And there’s this cigarette smoke sifting into my nostrils from this goddamn smoker sitting right outside the coffeeshop window as if she doesn’t care, and I hate her, I don’t even know her, but goddamn I hate her, she is sitting there smoking and filling my nostrils with her expressed smoke as if she don’t care and, well, she don’t care, but I do care, because I hate the smell and I hate the noxious fumes and I hate her I simply hate her, even though I don’t know her, because goddamn she is smoking near me and she doesn’t care and I do care and I have another goddamn headache and it’s always the same thing.

And I remember you, and I remember that time, that time when we, yeah, you know, that time when we, when we were, and we did, and we laughed and loved and felt and it was and we were and then you said, well, I wanted you to say, but you didn’t say and I was hoping you would say, and I still hope you would say, even though you never did and we were and we clung and we touched and we were, yeah we were, and we did but then you, you, well, you and I were not, and did not, and felt but we said nothing and it was over and it was over and it was over and it was something different and all was changed and everything was wrong and not right and not good and we weren’t and we didn’t and I felt, I felt, and I felt, and I still feel, and I ache and I ache and I ache, and it’s always the same thing.

And there’s someone over there, across the room, sitting there, just sitting there, concentrating on reading and not noticing me but I am noticing and I see and I feel and I wonder and I hope but there is no connection and it’s just here and I’m just here and I’m just noticing and wondering but there is no connection and I feel and I ache but there is no connection and why is there no reciprocal noticing and why is it always the same thing?

And so I pretend that all is fine and I sit here and I think about how life could be and I think about life in some ways that might be better and I hope for greener pastures but I realize that the pasture is actually as green as it can get and I am stuck in a lifeless pasture of pseudo green, not quite ripe and buoyant as one would hope and dream but sort of a listless faint color of green that is green, yes, it is a green pasture, but it’s just not the pasteurized color I had hoped it would be one day when I was looking out for green pastures and hoping to find myself in a greener pasture than the one that I was in before and I realize that there probably is no other pasture for me and even though I ache and pain and feel and hope and dream and wish, I realize that this is all there is and there is nothing left and it’s always the same goddamn thing.

And I realize that I have been here before, I know that I have been here before and I have the same headache and I hear the same goddamn 60’s musician in the same coffeeshop with the same goddamn smokers and the same fumes wafting into my nostrils and I’ve thought many many many of the same thoughts and have the same memories about you, yeah, about goddamn you, and there is always someone over there, across the room, sitting there, reading or writing or playing or thinking but never noticing, oh, I’m always noticing, but it’s never reciprocal and I’m always just noticing but there is no noticing back and I’m thinking that I’m stuck in this same place and this same time and this same moment after the same moment that happened already and again and it’s always happening the same and everything is always the same and no matter how much I feel or dream or wish or hope and cling or contemplate or dream of a pasture which is green to where I can grow and flourish and beam and feel fulfillment and feel life in my full red blood of life, I know now, as I have always known, that there is nothing more to this and I will always ache, I will always have this pain, I will always feel the anger and the nastiness of which I really had hoped I would never have again and I will always want and be wanting and wishing and I will still think about you, yeah, goddamn you, because no matter how much time goes on and no matter how much better I feel, I still think about you, and I still wish I was noticed from across the room and I still wish I had things better and I still wish my goddamn headache would end, but it never does, it really never does, it is always here and it is always all the same goddamn thing.

Drain

There certainly comes a point when it no longer functions, no matter how much I try I have reached the end, the end of the road, so to speak, so to say, so to feel, I have drained all that is within me, all that can be with me, all that is left is the lifeless and listless bodies who can no longer exist together, when at times like this there never seems to be another possibility, another resolution, another new hope that something may change the fact that we have reached the point of no return, the point of never going back, the point of isolation and chaos where nothing is possible but the end of the dream that was shared, all the hopes and dreams and possibilities and loves and lives have been drained from us and I am left with the sadness and disbelief in creating a new life with proposed new hopes and dreams and possibilities and loves that I never really wanted to consider but now there is nothing left to do but ponder that new road that new path that new existence which I didn’t really want to ponder but I am left with nothing else to do but ponder that new existence that new road that new path as I am left, left at the wayside of the road I had been traveling, where my feet have stopped along the side of the road, recognizing that the path down this dark road is not the right and appropriate path for me to undertake if I am to be whole and full and the best I can be, so I am left, left to choose another road, looking in all directions, but the one I hoped I would be on, because I hoped that the road I was on would turn out to be the wonderful road of hope I had hoped and dreamed once before and now I look and wonder which of the alternate roads, the short cuts or the long ways, the low roads or the high roads, the easier roads or the more difficult ones, is the best for me to pursue in moving ourselves forward through this life that I sometimes lead but more often than not follow. So with all that, with all that has come before me, with all the effort and time and energy and hopes and dreams and love and life I have put into the expense of this road that I have taken, I am now faced with the recognition that I can no longer go down this road even though it is the road that I had hopes and dreams and given all my life and love and attention and energy to throughout the winding path of this road, throughout the length of the road of which I had taken and from where I began to where I currently am along the way side of the road, realizing that I have gone as far as I can go down this path, for I am at the end of the path of which I can go of which I am allotted of which I am allotting myself the extent of this path because I know now that I have gone as far as I can down this path to where I still have some life left to move to another path in order to continue my life and my dreams and my hopes and my love, and although this is not what I had hoped or dreamed, it is the alternative to which I must move and steel and gird myself in order that I have a future life and love and hope and dream that no longer drains me of the very life and love and hope and dream I put into it. For I am drained now in this world of this path and a new one must be taken.

Clutter

There is dirt on the mantel, there is trash on the floor, there are papers that no longer need read, there is hair in the brush, there is stain on the tub, there is soil on the shirt, there is more than that all around the home, and it stays there, lives there, fulfills more than its usual life span for I am blocked from the desire for change which is needed to make that change and clean that dirt and pick up that trash and throw out those papers and take out that hair and wipe that stain and rinse that soil, for I am blocked by my own fright of change that change which is needed is feared even when all around says it needs to be, but where that fear is set in and overtakes everything to where there is nothing left but the fear itself of the change which is needed, but for want of concern of the negative aspects of change the positive aspects of change cannot be set free, and so I am left with the dirt on the mantel, the trash on the floor, the papers, the hair, the stain, the soil of life that cannot move forward and lives in the past for fear that the future may need something like this from the past in order to move forward and in order to be better. It is not laziness in the promotion of change, in the plans for cleanliness or order or making things better, it is fear, fear itself, that one day that change that was made was the wrong change to make and it should have been something different that should have happened and not what I did to make it change.

Say I finally throw out that piece of paper that I have already read, of which I no longer need, of which I am sure to never look at again, but which still sits on my shelf waiting for me to change its placement on my shelf into a place in the trash which will then supposedly go into a receptacle that will then go into another receptacle and into a larger receptacle which will then be taken somewhere far away and gone from my placement on my shelf, gone from my life, gone from me, and then days later upon its disappearance from my life, my shelf, it suddenly is recounted and re-needed upon the realization that something I never could imagine before of what could possibly be a reason for needing suddenly came before me and showed the need that I could not see but now which I do and I wish and wish and dream and wish that I had not taken that paper off of the shelf to go into the receptacle to another receptacle to another one and so on until it was gone, gone, gone from my world into another world never to be found by my world again and I am left, left all alone in a world without simply because I could not fathom a world in which the change could hurt me but here it is a world where the change did hurt me and so it really was not worth it to make the change even though it seemed like a good idea at the time for it often seems like change is the right thing to do and consider and plan, but in reality this change of which I chose had turned out to haunt and hurt and pain me, and so therefore I should never have chosen this change and I should have left the paper on the shelf and left well enough alone and left all as it was, so I am left with recounting the past that was and the future that could have been all due to the fact that I made a change and threw out that paper that was cluttering my home and life when it was the clutter all the time that was needed around me to make the future brighter and my life more whole.

Is it really the dirt’s fault that it lies there on the mantel? Is it not easier to see the dirt and watch the dirt grow and thrive? Who am I to make the decision that the dirt should go? What if this piece of dirt should contain a million lives of which I cannot see and which are helping me in my life in ways unknown to me now but in some science fiction related story of how I am killing all of humankind because I have chosen to clean the dirt away from the mantel leaving nothing behind but the so-called and so-desired cleanliness which is supposedly close to godliness but which one wonders if that is not evil’s way of tricking us all into thinking that we are doing good by cleaning when in reality we are killing thousands of specs of dirt where life lives and thrives and people are bettered for it in ways that we simply cannot ascertain now but which maybe one day when we come to realize that there are other options in the world and other worlds in the world and we have been so blind to it all and now that we can see the totality of the world we recognize that cleanliness was not next to godliness but that we have been tricked by the evil of the world into doing the exact opposite of what we should have been doing because by the trickeries of the evil all around us we were really doing exactly what we should not have been doing and we are left now with a continued effect of killing ourselves over and over again to where we are stuck in the same cycle of life that we think we are making better by fixing and changing but in reality it is the cycle of the first which we need to continue and not move into that next world based on change, where if we simply trained our eyes more closely to be attuned to the reality of the necessity of the dirt on the mantel, even if which we cannot see and for which we cannot fathom a reason, we should recognize is more than we thought it might be and more than could be in a sense of the world of which we know, and so we have actually, in changing things, in cleaning that dirt, in sweeping the dirt away, in moving in a new direction, we have damaged, we have damaged, we have destroyed and damaged our future and our life simply because we chose to make a new change and clean that dirt and sweep it away and fix the problems in front of us, rather than recognizing that the festering of the old is what is needed for our future where we know it or not, today or tomorrow or next year, but one day we will recognize that the future needed that past and needed that dirt to continue on the mantel and we willy-nilly swept it away, assuming incorrectly that in cleaning it we were doing the work of good and god and hope and dream, but in reality we were tricked into doing the world of evil and the devil and destruction.

So where do we go from here? I am staring at the dirt on the mantel, and with the full recognition of all the thoughts and possibilities I must consider surrounding the placement of that dirt on that space on that location of that mantel, it is obvious that the simple act of cleaning is not exactly what it is cracked up to be and that potential harm could be done through this simple act and therefore this simple act is not so simple after all and we are left with the drained mind and body pulling us away from anything and are stuck in the place questioning whether the place is really stuck or the being stuck is the right thing after all.

And with all this clutter and all this drainage and all this past and concern and mental anxiety and pain, how are we to know what is right and what is wrong, and what if, what if, after all that has been considered and debated and overwhelmed us over these many minutes and many hours and many days and many weeks and years we have stared at this clutter and this dirt and this stain, we may have been wrong in thinking that the cleaning would make things better, and oppositely what if we realize that we may have been wrong in thinking that the cleaning was wrong and that a better life awaits with a new and changed environment, one in which we cannot see now, but which could be there before us if we could only see the fullness of the reality surrounding us, and so here we are, here we are, once again, stuck in an overwhelming decision process of what could be one or two or multiple futures with possible positive and possible negative consequences of the choices we make even without all of the knowledge we would hope we would have should we make full decisions in our lives but which we end up making ill-informed choices because we simply are not fully informed and therefore we cannot make a well-formed decision and possibly making wrong decisions and so therefore perhaps it is best to make no decision at all and not doing anything at all and sit and stare at the dirt and the paper and the clutter all around us and not doing anything about it because it seems like maybe that is the thing that will save us in the future, unless of course, of course, we are simply wrong and the current clutter of the past is simply and overwhelmingly killing us in ways we simply do not see now, cannot fathom, but is obviously doing so.

And so we are stuck with our clutter for fear of what might be or what mightn’t be and we are drained from the full contemplation of these options and we are left, staring, contemplating, debating, and finally distracting ourselves from the pain of the current state of life and ignoring the choices because the choices themselves are overwhelming and we end up doing nothing about anything because it could be the right thing to do, or it could be the wrong thing to do, but the choice is too much to fathom and the clutter is too much a debate and needs to be considered further at an appropriate time in the future when it might make sense to make one decision or another but right now a right decision or a wrong decision is not known which is which and so there is nothing better to do but to do nothing and hope and dream for the best to come in the future. How are we to know what is right and what is wrong? How am I to know? How am I to know...

sundays


sundays, originally uploaded by Reeses World.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

digital days, the end of television

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

yay! everybody loves angela lansbury. i have been addicted to murder, she wrote lately. but really, it's one amazing character she created in the midst of thousands of wonderful characters she's created over the years. glad she's rightfully appreciated for her work on broadway even if i've never seen her in that venue

so sad about ronald takaki passing. 15 or so years ago when i was living in dc, i read his 'strangers from a different shore' and wanted to follow it up with a historical book he had mentioned in some of the materials. i could not find the book, anywhere. someone suggested i call him up and ask him where i might find it. i thought, who am i to call up this author and scholar? but i did. and he answered the phone. and i said something like, omg, i'm a huge fan, and wow, and yeah, great book, and, um, do you happen to know where i might find this other book? and he told me and i got the book and i read it and it was great.