the LA river.

I once saw the LA river awaken. By chance there was a pressure system of some strength coming inland. There was thunder, magnificent desert thunder that cracked and snarled all the way deep into the Mojave, deep into Arizona. I know this because I saw pictures in my friend’s Instagram feed. there is something about thunderheads crawling over saguaro have such an empowering feeling. 

I was on the train heading inland to go visit my parents. They live in a city unimaginatively called Upland, because it is literally “Up-land” on the side of Mt. Baldy. Mt. Baldy, or more accurately Mount San Antonio is the ultra-prominent peak in the background of the L.A. skyline. It is a majestic and dangerous mountain. Its peaks snarl defiantly into crisp blue skies like a jawline of jagged teeth that are ready to snap shut on some unsuspecting hiker. Like all mountains of the Sierra Nevada she is willing and able to end the lives of the carless.

In the Chinese tradition the spirits of rivers are represented as dragons. And if this is true then then the soul of Los Angeles’ river is a mean one. As I traveled to the mountains on some Friday afternoon the traffic patterns indicated a dark reality: the volume of accidents in a flash flood. The Dragon of the L.A. river had amassed his power in the blood offering of Friday traffic. Forty-Eight accidents. The networks of numbers representing freeways were all deep red, that same crimson that represents gridlock like deep lacerations over the map of the city, miring the façade of her touched-up plastic-surgery face.

There was something like nine accidents involving Fatalities in some cases multiple fatalities, some of them were families with children. I know because the internet told me. I know because I could see helicopters circling in the air over the freeways like mechanical angels welcoming their souls to the underworld. Honestly, the L.A. river is a complete geographical lie. As a feature Ninety-nine percent of the time the L.A. river is a concrete chasm on the east side of downtown. It used to be filled with stupendous graffiti, like colorful urban coral that had taken root on its concrete banks. They buffed it all but I have a hopeful feeling that it will all grow back. It looked so awesome when seen from the bridge of the Metrolink train lines. These bridges extend over the concrete chasm in concrete arcs like rainbows, with the exception that they are ugly and grey and nothing like rainbows. They are the concrete clasps that hold the dragon in place. Under the weight of its own self-importance the city sits atop the back of this dragon carelessly forgetting that it is there.

In the thunderous bass I loose myself at another rave. I Become the sound and the soul for which I inhabit. And my body, it writhes under the circumstance that it didn’t come with an instruction manual and I control it entirely. I feel human with these other people. These Strangers, completely unknown to me and yet part of my village. I feel connected to them like an owl in the woods. Oftentimes I want solitude from their inane chatter and yet I would never like to see my forest burn, and I would do anything to prevent that reality from taking place. And yet the reality is that forests burn. People die, and the landscape succumbs to the encroaching concrete of the modern world. And I think of how clever I am for posting a well-articulated concept of this to social media. #environmentalism

The train was delayed for some time. When I crossed over the concrete chasm, hopefully looking for fresh graffiti, I saw for the first time a much different entity: the angry dark blueish-brownish visage of the LA river. Smashing against the sides of is container lashing and splashing like a coiled up angry serpent being released from years of confinement. This angry dragon lashing out at everything that ever tried to contain it. A powerful barbaric masculine energy embracing the sophisticated feminine metropolis. And she held her monster well as he rose up into the clouds and down onto unsuspecting motorists. Thunder Growled in the distance and lightning cracked against the sky, bearing this monster down on everything that ever trespassed on this desert. In the distance sirens wailed- harbingers of death. Helicopters rushed to scenes of horror while people sat in their cars calling their loved ones. And the fucking dragon dropped from the sky again and again destroying man and machine alike, effortlessly. As if they looked like they had done it themselves. Because that’s what the insurance companies were going to say on Monday: “Mr. So-and-so lost traction headed northbound in the Number 1 lane at 85 Miles per hour on the 110. His vehicle began to roll when the right front axle buckled and resulted in him being flung from his vehicle into the center divider.” But the truth is that I saw that dragon rip that motherfucker right out of his SUV and tear him apart on the freeway like a monitor lizard feeding on some oblivious mouse. And I felt a tense of surprise and terror though he was a stranger to me. Completely unknown to me.   All the while the city gracefully gestured in the dance of a storm-caller cracking the whip of lightning, beckoning this monster into masochistic action. She moved to a rhythm that was not unlike the warehouses in downtown, the clubs in Hollywood, the clustered angry halls of LBC Hip-hop, or the beats from car subwoofers. And the city of angels danced in the chaos, because she knew these scenes well.    

The train rolled through the heart of the storm, on the 10 freeway as I remember watching this man dissolve into the rain, but the train hammered on unencumbered. Unbothered by the scene violent rain rattled against the windows as our train left the man and his twisted machine behind us. I arrived in the foothills just slightly before the onset of the front. Wide-eyed I explained to my über chauffeur that it was about to hit us hard but he dismissed me as if I were exaggerating.

It rained through the night, the wail of sirens gurgled in the rain in the attempts to reach accidents. I stayed up through the night making love to the thunder. The sound shook the loft and the lightning gave the sensation of paparazzi outside intermittently snapping photos and banging on the walls. In the foothills, the rain was soaked up by a yearning and thirsty earth that was appreciative of every bit of moisture it could get. The hills drank in the rain deeply and snow frosted the Summit of Baldy. The city slowed down just a bit the following day, if only for an instant, they were humbled with reverence for the environment that they took for granted every day, driving by it in their cars and sitting in it with others, separate but isolated. In the power of the storm, it made them feel connected to each other, if only for an instant. Because connectedness between strangers can exist, even if they are completely unknown to one another. In this instance, they were similar to each other in how small they were. How easily their lives could be sheared from them in two inches of water on the way home from their nine-to-five office jobs.

On a dancefloor the following night, the bass throbbed to the perspiration of human forms, not unlike the ones that had been lost the previous evening. They were strangers to me pulsing to a kind of unstoppable thunder.  They are completely unknown to me, these beautiful creatures of many wild and beautiful places that can never be conquered. Because L.A. is nothing if not a wild and beautiful place that cannot be conquered.       

Damn internet, you're such a strange parallel to real life. except you're like, not.

In other news let's go to the machine sea tonight.

Daddy needs spraypaint.

Theres a place that sells it for 4.25 out the door. and that's a good price.

...its less than what it costs to get my ass handled in modern (MTG)    

I don't win anything by making art- but that's not the point. I would pay 4.25 to have anything to do tonight that isn't sitting here and reading stuff that makes me sad.

Fukkit, there's even (literally) underground house tonight at the sushi bar.

Recently, my life is a recurrence of the scene in Nightmare Before Christmas; where Jack having been shot out of the sky on Christmas Eve realizes that he is, in fact, the pumpkin king, and makes a lousy impression of Santa.

I've spent my entire life being shaped into something I am not. and if you knew me in high school or whatever I'm still as crazy as I ever was.

I am brilliant. not casually smart. not book smart. fucking brilliant.

And I feel more than ever like Halloween town needs me.

There is time. There is always time.

Hardcore

Once, while in a very heated discussion I was challenged to the question: “what does it even mean to be an alpha? What is human alpha? And what does that mean to you?”

I said: I don’t know. I don’t have to know. I just have to answer the call.

I answer the call. And if it means fucking your wife, so be it. She, obviously, didn’t give a shit about your marriage when she wanted it in the ass. She didn’t give a fuck about you while you were overseas fighting brown people in the Middle East.

All I can think of, is savage as fuck.

I just consume the human form

I crush clams under a variable hammer

I break borders as the roots of a great ficus; overtaking and uplifting—

Putting pressure to the weakest points

I am concerned with my own interests and those interests are the interests of my tribe. They are the interests of my people, the aspirations and actions of my kind; and my kind are variable. My kind is vast

Filled with temerity and beauty. They revel in the in the darkness; the children of the night.

And I am there, with my strengths and weaknesses, my temerity and beauty, ready to reign chaos on the minds of our enemies and I understand the nature of being rooted to something deeper.

I answer the call
 because my ‘why’ is greater.

& I am beyond this theater

I am beyond that wedding ring

Your laws

The chiseled beliefs about right and wrong which are so unbelievably worthless.

I am savage and unconquerable

And I shall have everything I came for

As they lay it out on an altar  

Fearful of an unsatiated deity

I do not have to understand it, I merely have to answer the call.

And I live to answer the call

I live to spread my wings

Sejin

Sometimes when I am cutting onions I hear a high-pitched squeak that I associate to them shrieking. I think of them crying out as my knife devours their bodies. I think of how I would explain it to them— that their bodies are being used to feed other humans. That their sacrifice is noble. That they were bred for this moment. Somewhere in a far-off field their extensive family was created for this moment. But I am lying to them. They don’t make this noise, I am imagining it.

There are times when the green is so overwhelming, so utterly humbling in its scale that I feel like a small fish in an ancient ocean of thoughts and rhetoric. I feel connected to this great aroura of literal thinking.  But it can be obnoxious. The endless chatter, as if they were birds constantly chittering about nonsense. Mostly the weather. Incredibly, insanely apathetic household weather people giving you updates every 4 minutes. They view what they do as very important. And are mainly interested in their own affairs. Affairs being the operative term. Sexual activity, and their manifestations of it are basically all they care about. it governs everything in their world. I imagine this in so many ways it’s a conversation for another time.

                I think our rudimentary version of this is dreaming. They are never really awake, and they are never really asleep. They are this abstract halfway point of consciousness and machine. Their hormones govern their movements, their lives are a kind of dream that they meet with nobility of their presence; they are as we are, playing our parts in life.

  He never just showed up with firewood, he came with a bundle of hickory, that he schlepped on his back eight miles through the switchbacks, where he harvested the timber by hand, with a kukri.  This motherfucker came to stoke a fire— to burn hotter and brighter and smell like some kind of umami. He came to revel. To watch things burn. To ignite something, to watch it smolder, to watch embers crumble and flames lick. To revel, to be wild & become the soul of the swarm was his true gift. It felt native, like the savagery of his home. As if the firewood was merely the buy-in to transform into something more, something less human, more akin to the eye of a storm. As an electric dynamo that rained chaos; he grew to possess the form that reigned in chaos. Haughty on his of power, fearless in the certainty that death would claim all.

becoming (soc)

 

When I think of the name Tim I envision this kind of caterpillar-version of myself. The potential makings of my future self were there, and who I would become had its kernels forsure. But, the emergence of ‘Chess’ the Cheshirekat this was primitive and unrefined. And how and why that word and not another I don’t rightly know-
the sound of it I guess, the crisp hissing of certain language has attracted me to words. And at a young age, I must have been playing basketball with a neighbor at about the age of 10 the first time I vocalized this concept. In truth I had envisioned this as early as I can remember, as if the question were “how long have you been an artist?” and the answer is; always.

I have always felt distant from the name Tim. It is not my name. It is a name my father gave me.

It is the dream of a man that is not to become.

When I say “Cheshirekat” I feel at home in myself.

When my friends call me Chesh I feel connected, understood, and loved.

The love, the love is why I do this. Because I am addicted to it, like all humans, I am addicted to it and I cannot relinquish it. It is the drug that keeps us playing. And it is the ache for which we gauge our lives.

And we heal it. And we heal from it.

It helps us carry ourselves. As it is inherently ours.

And Chess is inherently me.

While it has been a long time coming, for the first time I have to ask myself; “what does this really mean? Who am I even?

And for the first time I have an answer: I am addicted to the becoming.

My left hand could slap Nietzsche to death I am so übermensch.    

The becoming, like a sweet seduction that coils around my wrists and pulls me to the earth. With the march of time, the more orgasms I experience, the more dancing I have, the more experiences I experience. And forsure, this is coupled with rage, this is coupled with the chains of being human, this is the fiery dance that is the human experience. And we are awoken in the flames.

I dream of something so different than this.

And yet this is all that I know. This world of constant change.

I legitimately experienced the entirety of my childhood environment become tract homes. In our modern way shit changes quickly. And so we adapt, rapidly. I am of these future generations that will constantly be forced to adapt rapidly. This too, I see as becoming.

As we are to become and become, like these tor versions of ourselves, radiations of mental encryption. That only become known through manifestation and we bring them to life. We bring our actions into existence and so shape our own futures as we are the gods of our own actions. And I believe that this stems from a bit of the void. We are the dark energy we seek.

Why is the universe expanding? Because we’re fucking looking at it.

And I am certain we’ll meet aliens. We will become and become until they wish to know us openly. Which might be tomorrow or might be never in our existence. And with this caveat I think it is important to reevaluate who we are as a species.

 I think the native Americans have it right: we need to fall back in love with our planet. And it doesn’t mean that California rests on the backs of turtles and this explains the plate tectonics of the San Andreas fault, but it does wonders for understanding the importance of the layers of gasses that sit upon one another, forming a bubble around the rock in space we live on. And inside that bubble we exist in our entirety.

 I think that we need to Native-Americanize our thoughts with our place on the planet. I think that the secret will lie in the meshing of our technology to our nature. We need to learn to wield our technology like etherium before we can ascend into the ranks of our own species. And assure that the future of our technology is centered around concepts of creation. Quite literally, we would have to become it.

I have my doubts on that.

I imagine that millions will die. They will learn the true state of nature and they will die.

In the way that I wonder if I could strangle a person if I had to; so too, I wonder what I would do to survive. But this remains a fleeting thought and I enjoy dancing in the setting sun far more than I care about angry people and their machines.

In a sense, I am too busy being cool to give a fuck about tyrants.

But then the question also emerges: am I too busy to help the less fortunate?

And I find that the answer is yes as well.

     Once while walking on the beach, I saw a baby pelican fledgling. It was alone and malnourished, its eyes had some kind of cataract-gaze. It was stumbling where it stood and it was surrounded by a group of seagulls that were aware that it was not long for the world. They were diving in and taking shots at the ostensibly blind bird and it was to play out in its entirety hours later when I walked by again, and the young pelican was still alive. Bleeding more now, no longer standing, but still alive as the seagulls lacked the strength to finish the creature.

There was nothing I was willing to do to save the bird from its fate. And this is true pretty much across the board, we don’t care about anything that isn’t us. It is the nature of our nature. Our struggle is so much more real, our pain is the only real pain. And we cannot care less If it is not our tribe or our family, we care little for the lives of others. Whatsmore, we can’t even help them. Even if we wanted to how much blood are we willing to hemorrhage to save our fellow man. How much blood will we shed to save our planet? How much bloodshed are we willing to spill to keep our minds closed and our universe simple?

And the answer is: an endless amount. We are divided upon levels of our own survival, typically centered around wealth, while the nature of wealth in our world separates us from each other and ourselves.  

The people in Beverly Hills are too stuck in traffic to give a fuck about the hopeless homelessness on skid row.

They will pave half a street, I have seen it.

As if to put one psychological wall up against LA county, like a constant reminder, “you are not us.”

And I will say it this way: I do not wish to become that.

As, what I am becoming is something quite different. And I am forced to ask myself, “what exactly is that?” and the answer that I have, is that I have to do it. Someone has to be it; and that someone is me. Only you can be yourself. And I am becoming committed to the idea of who I am to become.

It is your destiny to discover who you are to become. Not all will share this destiny with you and you must find it in yourself first. But the truly awoken will make the journey. They will carry the burden. And they are the future of our world as there are thousands of species of orchids and they will cross-pollinate quite readily if given the chance. We are the emergent orchids of our world.

In college, I managed Raymond Burr’s orchid collection. My greenhouse had a variety of species that would commonly cross-pollinate each other. What’s more they were said to be of a separate genus Layleia is different than Cattleya is different than Brassia. But if left in close contact with each other they had no problem getting busy with one another, especially if I were the one pollinating them. So it made me realize that the only thing that separates these species is the denomination we put on them. WE make them a different species, nature simply separated them.

                We are this emergence. We make ourselves separate by believing it. We are like or unlike something simply by believing it. And people lie to themselves every day, all day in attempts to be more like some kind of idea that they have.

And who’s to stop them? Nobody.

Quite literally, without police or a judicial system I would end certain existences.

Because I am a certain kind of primate that is becoming.      

What they admire in us is that we are cute, elegant, and savage. they like our dancing, our dreaming, our temerity. what they don't understand is that I sense them. behind the scenes, that tests my understanding to the core. I draw from great pools of thought, penetrating into this place, releasing myself into the mycelia of my networks, the lattice structure of our ecosystems, we are of a kind of existence that is so vibrantly complex it fills them with envy and admiration and that is what separates us from them. we have the capacity to be violent and magnificent, beautiful and pathetic, glorious and vain-- we have duality. It is an extension of our inherent character, and I think that that is amazing. So, in so many words if you are a human I think that you are amazing. ...And if your not, I see what you like about us.

19

I realize it in those moments when everything seems like it’s a fish-eye lens. Things are going faster and faster until there seems to be nothing in my way. To taste the mania, to feel the fire. Is to truly press the edge of our universe’s expansion. It is sharp and sometimes cuts you, but it is there, and worth knowing about. It is this that both holds and drives me. In the way that I am a scientist. I must know. I want to know. But as we cannot have one thing without another. All of our knowledge comes at the price of obtaining it. I believe this to be a paradox that governs why things unfold as they do. I cannot understand some of the things that took place before I was born. The idea that the holocaust happened blows my mind; we literally envisioned a concept of hell and then made it. I can’t understand how world leaders are corrupt. I cannot understand a world that treats women as anything less than equals. I was born in the eighties, raised by a single mother. Nobody I know from that blip in time has any idea who their fathers really are, and those that do are fortunate but uncommon. So much of our world was so deftly in play before any of us was ever a part of it. Yet, we are forced to reconcile: our knowledge of launching rockets into space comes directly from our stupidity of launching them at each other. Or put another way; we always learn by falling first. We are less useful as a whole if we hold any of our members back. We are as dumb and misled as we allow ourselves to be. This is the unfortunate part. For bi-polar people, I feel as though I’m tired of being held back by you. I feel like it is the fire inside us that lights the way. Without it, you are in darkness. But what is strange is that we let dark and simple minds tell us what to do, we listen like fools and we trust because, we too, are afraid. But we grow out of that fear. Because what tends to be scarier is the truth. We know this well. Our planet grows overpopulated. Global climate change has been wrought. Our mass is a force of nature. We are an extinction event unto ourselves and we are locked into a lifestyle that is the cause of what is killing our planet. Quite literally, we are consuming it. We don’t want to face this problem. We don’t want to face any of our problems. Nobody ever wants to embrace the challenge, we are driven to it. In this way our minds evolve. They are propelled against the consciousness’ of others and made faster, sharper, more diligent, equipped with more stamina, more and more and more. The mind grows faster than the body. It evolves faster than the body, it is the ultimate tool of adaptation. It is so strong that it can over-adapt and begin to consume its environment by being overly assertive in its landscape-modifying approach. For the same reason we see in color we need to be aware of this, sometimes the path of our evolution needs to lead backwards, sometimes not. Sometimes we are more lost than we think we are and sometimes we are less evolved than we think we are. But this is the nature of nature. We are becoming divergent. We are being the creatures we were meant to be. I think that in the future I would like to surround my kind with its kind. Species have a way of understanding each other better. We are divergent, it has been a long time coming and there is still much work to be done. But I cannot afford to die, I cannot afford to let my species go extinct because another species on this planet cannot awaken. That is all that I ask of them, that they awaken. Please, wake up. Your short-sightedness is killing this place. We are the most advanced thing that our planet may have ever seen, and we will be the last thing this planet experiences unless you awaken. I need you to wake up. I can’t reproduce in the environment that has been created. I don’t get to be with my loved ones, I live in a world where people are perpetually miserable and it is because they are asleep. They are able to put my kind into cages and treat them like monsters and then they become monsters. We know how to train dogs why do we make the same mistakes over and over, and I am done with it. I am over this simple-minded world of its own volition. The suburbs are not where I want to live, I don’t give a shit about what kind of car I should own. I am tired of these concepts that our lives are not inherently our own. I am tired of searching for another’s happiness. I am free in the way that I know that your pills are a lie. I am free that I know our culture is cheap. I am free in those moments where I have a sense of humor for all of the shortcomings of our world. I am free from this charade because I have an imagination. The problem is that this is a complete article. The idea of this bipolar imagination has another side; the not-mania. Everything seems to be off. Lights appear brighter or dimmer than they normally seem. Things are more confusing than they typically are. Like a genie bound to a lamp we are captured within ourselves. We are bound to our limitations. It begins absently enough like the early parts of some poltergeist horror movie. The sleep doesn’t come, the world seems strangely out of focus, like everything is happening two seconds too slowly or some social que brainwave is off or out of sync. But it progresses and progresses until it’s unbearable. You feel like a buzz-kill that is killing its own buzz first. The nature of our conscious mind is moored on a dock of reality that floats on a lake of dreams. The waves we feel on the surface care little for the priorities of whatever passenger sits afloat in the boat, the waves on the surface are so much greater than we are. We ride them in hopes of gaining more experience. We seek them out in a strange personal quest for fulfillment, but ultimately we will all eventually be capsized and end up back in the lake returned/converted back into the dream of ourselves. The mind evolves though. There are mariners that can touch the water. There are sailors that can drink it. These individuals are powerful, they are sensitive, and they are not particularly rare. But it all stems from desire, it stems from the yearning to do more with one’s own existence, in every concept of what that might mean. I seek to grow gills and swim in this lake. I wish to be beyond life and death. I wish to have an unbridled mind. I wish to be free of all of the constraints that govern this flawed world. But, somewhere I know that the meaning lies within the experience, somewhere in there the whole is better than the sum of its parts. I know this because I feel it in those moments of beauty when I connect to the music of the universe, I feel at one with nature, where I am entirely beyond the judgement of humans.