Pasadena

The night's exact coolness -
crickets and apprentice crickets
debate loudly.

On a Catskills peak,
with a friend,
napping.

Following lunch

Beets yesterday -
today, pee the color
of a Turner sunset.

On exercise

After having lost 20 pounds, and after starting doing ashtanga yoga very regularly - one the morning, shirtless, in front of the mirror, doing my morning toilette, I reach up for something and see, just for a second, a first tiny crease - the faintest beginnings of a six-pack.

Seal's head
poking out of
the Arctic Ocean.

Overheard haiku, Astoria

Do you ever wake up
With cuts
Out of nowhere?

Lunch with Thi

Lunch:
Beets.
Beets, beets, beets.

Beets!

cool

cool, cool, cool

My room feels cool

because it's so hot

Getting up every once in a while

Turning on the switchblade-switch that makes sure the light goes on over the fan

and then turning on the switch on the wall that controls both

Pulling first one metal cord; hung with plastic coins at the end

then the other

Then trying the switch on the wall again

To see which order produces the air-lift;

To see which order produces the least heat with the most light

Should I breathe in sloooowly first or should I try finding the optimal order again

Or should I do them at the same time

It may not matter

But it's kind of fun to play with the fate of the room

And figuring out what may do it

And what might be the absolute best thing I can do given the preparation I have:

The physical condition of my body

The state of awareness and cunning my mind has started itself in

today

It somehow, ironically,

Feels like a cool, and breathily numinous--breeze

On New Jersey being somewhat less bad than New Yorkers make it out to be, but not exactly awesome either

Working away at my dissertation on my laptop, at a street-corner cafe. For some reason, all the vaguely pleasant cafes in New Jersey are jade green. I don't know why. People here associate jade green with hip. Maybe it's an Asian thing.

Outside table,
Hoboken afternoon.
Aggressive pigeons.

My mother, in person, on my going to New York

Where's your jacket?
Do you have an umbrella?
It might rain.

My mother, on the phone, on me going to New York

"Do you have a shirt?
Bring a shirt.
Sometime people in
New York are different."

How to soothe the savage hemorrhoid

Sitting in a
warm bath all day
reading Moby Dick.

Massive 'rrhoid:
like having a
third eye in my asshole.

Home greets
me with savage
hemorrhoidal flareup.

Revelations

What the fucking
fuck!?! My mom loves
The Daily Show?

Group chatting with Sarah and Kathy

i just invented a new icon
to represent kathy's wagging little fist
on g-chat:

{lll}

Long drive on the 5 to San Jose

I packed a thermos full of dense, cheese-tasting butternut squash soup that Curator made last night as my long-drive snack. Hot, dense, spiced squash soup is vastly superior to Pringles, as it turns out.

Car smells,
soup smells -
now stockyard!


The last time I made this drive, instead of listening to all the This American Life episodes I had prepared, I just listened to the two Joanna Newsom albums I had over and over again. This time: two new Boris albums - the beloved drone-sludge stoner-doom-metal Japanese band.

Boris -
makes time
vanish.


Traffic is perfect - I make the drive in 5 hours flat. My mother greets me with these words:


"How was the drive?
You came so fast!
Your tits are enormous!"


(translated from the Vietnamese by me)

Hugged by
my favorite professor.
Suddenly I feel like an adult.

Landscape with drunken family II

David pondering the similarities
between his exes and his mother -
the late-night crickets.

Extracted from my response to a point about his sister in a conversation with Daniel at the Pie House

Daniel says that his sister visited, and that it took him a while to realize that she, in fact, was assuming that there was a well-ordering of restaurants in L.A., and that there was, in fact, a single best restaurant in L.A. (though, says Daniel, she probably wouldn't have used those precise words), and both of us begin pondering how many of our families believe in the well-ordering so adamantly, and how Daniel's sister seems to think that there is objective goodness of things, which is given by their Neilsen ratings and reviews, I come out with:

"Maybe the Asians and the Jews
have just substituted Zagats
for their village elders."

On the state of friendship in Los Angeles, part 2

A feature of every great conversation:
at least once, you both laugh
at the shocking truth of something.