August 2024

The sun beat down upon them, for it was early summer, and her face was soon dripping with her sweat. Wang Lung had his coat off and his back bare, but she worked with her thin garment covering her shoulders and it grew wet and clung to her like skin. Moving together in a perfect rhythm, without a word, hour after hour, he fell into a union with her which took the pain from his labor. He had no articulate thought of anything; there was only this perfect sympathy of movement, of turning this earth of theirs over and over to the sun, this earth which formed their home and fed their bodies and made their gods. The earth lay rich and dark, and fell apart lightly under the points of their hoes. Sometimes they turned up a bit of brick, a splinter of wood. It was nothing. Some time, in some age, bodies of men and women had been buried there, houses had stood there, had fallen, and gone back into the earth. So would also their house, some time return into the earth, their bodies also. Each had his turn at this earth. They worked on, moving together — together — producing the fruit of this earth — speechless in their movement together.

— The Good Earth

My favorite television show of all-time is The Twilight Zone. And there are plenty of reasons for this — the very forgiving (21-minute episode) nature it has towards my short attention span, the preview and exit interview with Rod Serling smoking a cigarette in his classic black suit/black tie combo, the clever writing, the fact that it’s in black and white, etc. — but above all it is timeless, like art. I could have watched any episode as my first and been attracted to it and immersed in its universe.

I’ve gone back to it several times since the first episode I ever saw, back when the Sci-Fi channel used to run it at 11:00 P.M. Pacific Standard Time and again at 11:30 P.M. PST, during my junior year of high school in 2006. I learned the ironic outcomes of every episode before I knew what the word irony even meant.

One of the lasting themes of the show is more a mantra, first heard (I believe) in an episode titled ‘Elegy,’ where three astronauts are marooned on a foreign planet that is seemingly full of life if not for everyone existing there being frozen in place, some with smiles on their faces, others with cigars in their hands, while music plays in the background as if at some festival or fair. And the three astronauts are consumed with trying to figure out this puzzle of theirs, to make this planet make sense. Towards the end of the episode they run into a god-like figure who appears as a normal-sort-of-looking old man, who treats them to a tour of this world and explains this and that and offers them some tea, or whatever. And upon drinking the tea the astronauts are stricken with ill-type feelings and question the old god-like figure as to what has been done and why it has been done to them, and he finally explains the reason:

‘Because you are here, and you are men. And while there are men, there can be no peace.’

So much of The Twilight Zone universe revolves around this specific sentiment, which is understandable given the time in history when the show was running. Namely, that the United States and Russia (or U.S.S.R.) were in a race to space, and there was always some imminent threat of the world blowing up via nuclear holocaust. So it goes. The Twilight Zone was so far ahead of its time for all the concepts and technologies the show theorized about, those which had not yet been introduced but would be, years down the road, but it endures because it in some way holds up to you specifically a mirror — along with society and/or civilization itself — and tells the truth.

I have been struggling and so far away from peace in general, of recent, and I’m really like trying to negotiate my way through everything. Life, that is. I thought two or three months ago when I was anticipating making wholesale changes that that would be my cure, but it wasn’t. I then believed I could try to piece it together, one thing by one thing, and that worked a little better. But each time I slipped and fell off the proverbial wagon, I woke up the following morning and realized that no progress at all had been made.

And so the last month or two have been like a revolving door of this tradition, where a couple weeks pass, or a few, where I am on the road I desire, and then I run out of gas and awake the following morning once more. It’s a depressing type of morning and day that follows these long nights, always. Kind of the feeling of being up a bunch of money at a casino only to give it all away and walk lugubriously back to my car wondering how I arrived there so empty-handed, contemplating all the things I could have used the money for. It’s a childhood-like trigger, every time, because it was so familiar a place when I was in my early 20’s.

I laughed about it today. I did not let it bother me, this familiar place. Knowing how many times I have been here, and knowing that the sun will soon rise, again, and that I will laugh some more, and get back to work and earn more money, which is all I am good at, putting on this face and making this money that gives me such freedom to make such mistakes. How blessed I am!

The dynamics pushing inward from both sides of my brain, reverberating outwards, feel sometimes difficult to manage and maintain. This idea that growing up every classroom I was ever involved in, every flash-card contest involving any kind of mathematics, every spelling bee where every class put forward like two students out of thirty, every GATE program competition where we had to take a trip elsewhere to play all the other schools in the district I was involved with, every sports team I ever played on, etc. I was always the guy, or at least one of them, you know? We always outperformed expectations, depending on the school I was at or the league I played sports for. And I generally kind of knew that I was part of that reason, for reaching those heights. But when you are a little kid you are just going along with it. It’s nothing special when you are used to it.

Then you get a little bit older and you see that outperforming expectations is not only about the kids you are competing with, but your own family. And that you have a responsibility to carry the torch and be the standard-bearer for your own personal brothers whom you grew up with. And then you graduate to a certain other level when you recognize that it is not only about your siblings but even your own parents, where you have to in some way fill in the cracks of everything they do not know, and that they never themselves were taught and/or learned, and that you only want to do what is right according to your own standards.

Being sheltered from the realities of San Bernardino CA was one of the greatest fortunes of my life. Because it would have been so easy for me, had back then I realized what I was dealing with, and who I was actually competing against, to throw in the towel and accept a modest life. Yet my motive was never to do better than my parents. It was never to outshine or outperform my two brothers. It was never even to be that person that I was, or happened to be, in comparison to all of my classmates, who for whatever reason could not garner the scholarships from Johns Hopkins University having scored perfect on the math section of the state exam something like three years in a row.

In other words, I feel at present time that I could fail my own personal standards and feelings and emotions towards life as I know it and still end up in perhaps the best position of anybody in my immediate family, or the contemporaries of my general family (cousins, etc.), and be in this same type of place, years later, where I am not satisfied with it. The band Brand New had this album titled The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me and that is the only way I can describe the section of this blog. That it is now Sowing Season (track one), a time for rebirth. That there is a Millstone (track two) around my neck that nobody can see, and that only I can feel.

All of this is a reminder of my greatest fear, which I mentioned in a previous blog. Something about failing to live up to my own expectations. Being a 34 year-old quote grownup suggests somewhere along the line I probably should have learned my lesson. And I pawn so much off to the vague cliché that one never stops learning, er, growing up — which is true — but in the whole Process vs. Results paradigm it’s incumbent on the operator of this vehicle to turn a corner every now and again and have something to show for such labors.

You wanna talk about keeping shit simple: I have produced a college-ruled notepad that sits next to my crystal-colored chess board atop a cheap white coffee table in my living room and am simply making tally marks each day I do not spend money needlessly, or otherwise do something stupid. Because I do like to have my fun. And it’s the fun that I have by night which invariably creates these mornings that fill me with such emptiness.

My own personal learning curve, which 10-15 years ago was so precipitously uphill that every lesson navigated and traversed, every nugget gained and pocketed, seemed like a mountain in itself, is now much less severe. In other words, no longer are these leaps so giant to pass the necessary levels of adulthood and life. The only gains now to be made are hardly noticeable, such as a person with a pair of scissors might put to use by continuing delicately to shave off the corners of a piece of paper until they become rounded.

And so it is thus how my insecurities of the past, which were both abundant and a source of constant obsession to fix, or transcend, have hardened with age and become the epicenter of my obnoxious sense of personal pride. Which is why I assume present-day I care more about the infinitesimal gains and less about the great strides I once made, for the things big and obvious are those that everyone notice, whereas the little stuff is only mine to keep.

I must let go of the person that has been proven as, while it has served me well, could only ever have brought me so far. That point is now here, at the end of its run, which I imagine started somewhere in the late-2010’s sitting in my room in Riverside CA staring at a bank statement from Bank Of America that stated plainly if I kept on making the absolute minimum payments on such and such credit card that it would take me until circa 2030, or something, to extinguish the fucking thing. And there a plan was borne, aided unironically a few years later by the unemployment money that was given to me during Covid quarantine, to turn around, in a manner of speaking, my life.

But somewhere there, however, I lost my sense of building for the future. Almost as if I reached a certain limit with myself, whether due to financial security, or personal security, or emotional security, it became forgotten what it meant that night in my room, where I was executing some vision of my own prosperity. Because when plans work, and are followed through, sometimes it makes one believe inside that already the labor has been done, and therefore the future must always comply.

I have over the last handful of months been finally humbled again. I could argue that the uniqueness of this particular humility that has confronted me is similar to other times, at least insofar as the feeling is concerned. I could say also that this go around is different because it seems so much as if it is coming from the inside-out rather than the outside-in, an acknowledgement that nothing has been done to me, but rather that I have done, and have been doing, it to my self.

In saying so I’m afraid all the things written about on this blog in the year 2024 have, as they pertain to the topic of personal growth, in a sense recoiled against me, and transmogrified into a self-fulfilling prophecy, where on the one hand I make clear who I am and where I stand and who I want to be, while in reality revealing myself by succumbing to the worst of my nature.

And so: It is in failing to overcome these such tiny, incremental, and unnoticeable changes and advancements, that have led me to even further disappointment. I can forgive myself, and feel much less anger and shame, in trying with every ounce of my might to hit a home run and ultimately striking out, as compared to, say, what I am experiencing currently, where all I am attempting is to make contact with the ball. The toll in which the latter creates on my psyche has been far more cumbersome.

Alas, all that is worthy of being sought in life remains just as an artificial mechanical object dangled before a dog sprinting towards it, directly in front of me. It has been stated on this blog so numerous a time that most individuals — myself included — know not only the problems that face them but the answers required to correct them. Such discontent has plagued me so long that I have forgotten what it’s like to have normal days, and normal nights, where there does not exist some anvil weighing down my shoulders, or some monster hidden beyond the horizon which I feel lurking. And I do miss it, such normalcy and happiness. I miss it very much.

I do also admire in some way abstract my self-awareness at something I lament with my own brothers and my own mother and my own father, of whom all of them I love and adore deeply, when I chastise their decision-making in all of the things they do and do not, those things which are necessary, when I tell myself privately: I cannot do it for them; they must do it for themselves.

As such, what I mean is nobody else can do this for me; I must do it myself.

This frustration I have carried with me throughout so many of these recent days is sometimes overwhelming, like a parent who feels some urge to ring the neck of a petulant child who knows better but continues acting out, only during this analogy the hands of the parent and the neck of the petulant child belong to the same person.

It was indeed many moons ago when second chances and third chances and forth and etcetera were asked for, asked for and granted, undeservingly, to he who was asking for them, as then a young man the earth operated at a different pace, where each day existed in itself proportional to the scale of weeks or months or even whole years to an adult, and as such the promises made from such extended chances were never fulfilled. As the day came when chances were no longer either requested or accepted, such a young man dreamed while in his own pity and seclusion some defining direct action or perfectly crafted combination of words which would deliver him the ideal future that he so longed for.

And now here, with the oft-regrettable wisdom inherited by the passage of time gone by, such a man can blame neither the acceleration of a world spinning as it always has at the same rate — regardless of age or experience in life — nor the ignorance in which adolescence demands of all its youthful subjects. He can only, therefore, rely on his own accountability. He can say this and that and have earnest objections towards himself when in his quiet moments, and yet none truly matters unless he is unimpeachable in his actions.

This is not one big thing in which requires course correction. It is not the folly one feels when they push the boulder up the hill for a week at a time or two only to see it tumble back on them, down all the way to the hill’s base, knowing they must now, again, start anew. Have we not been there before? Have we not been here?

Much time has been wasted toiling along with the challenges — seemingly manufactured — of such idle hands, and it is in these moments of weaving webs which often induce the tangler to become stuck. And no longer than at the point when one grows stagnant and bored that they realize how little they wish to be so paralyzed. But as one constantly jumps from one web to another, hither and thither, or like some clumsy fish who continues chomping down on the latest bait, they must recognize eventually whether by virtue of muscle memory or otherwise, such as a caveman who knew not the heat of fire until he felt how harshly and dramatically it scorched his flesh, that such another way was, and must be, more fruitful.

The August sun burns down during the daylight on my pale skin, and by nightfall the winds of summer bring with them a voice of reason. Unintelligible as such a voice sounds, its faint whisper signals only of change. One that speaks to the trees which are soon to suck all the nutrients from their leaves before they, again, collapse back down to the earth in time to satisfy the autumn months. One that takes with it from place to place the blustery desert sands. One that gives further work to the brooms that must be handled, from this weekend to the next, knowing that the broom-handler is fighting the type of cause one fights when they know the battle is already lost and that even more sweeping must be done.

And so along we go with this sun and away we carry ourselves with this breeze, unremittingly, as we humble ourselves against the whims and impulses which are surely to follow. Day by day we will check the tally marks and make full our hearts with a silent pride invisible to anyone, save for the one who takes pen to paper, such that one diagonal line follows four vertical ones, and so on, until perhaps a lovely sort of day arrives when the piece of paper is so cluttered and satiated with itself and without so much room as it had when the tally marks began, when the one with agency over the pen and the paper might tell himself: I did that.

° ° ° ° °

This last week was the best week I have had in a long time. And I don’t mean that most weeks of mine aren’t at least all right, because they are, but it’s the first in a while where I’ve steered clear of any sort of anxiety. I don’t know if it’s in part the level of reflection I issued in the last stanza of this blog, as a means to clear my mind, if it’s the book I read and recently completed — titled: The Good Earth — or some combination of the two. I just feel in a good spot right now.

The Good Earth was really something, though. I will give it that. I can’t place which book is my favorite of all-time — whether it’s Crime and Punishment, The Fountainhead, or another I can’t currently think of — but The Good Earth has to be right up there. I imagine just with anything else a large chunk of what makes up one’s favorite book is the time where, and the place when, they read it, how they were feeling at the time, what the book provided for them in a global, all-encompassing way, etc., but The Good Earth did that for me. Whatever it was.

I try so hard not to be a confirmation-bias type. You know who those are. The ones who spam your Facebook feed with crackpot bullshit about how California allows women to abort their children after birth (which doesn’t happen), or who post about an Olympic female boxer who knocked a bitch out in 45 seconds and so everyone thought she was a man (which she isn’t), or, more simply, anyone who agrees with any opinion such that it satisfies what they already believe. An ‘echo chamber’ is what it’s sometimes called.

If The Good Earth is my own personal echo chamber, that which confirms my own biases towards reality, then it must’ve done the same for people in the 1930’s as well, because it won a Pulitzer Prize and the author, Pearl S. Buck, won a Nobel Prize.

I identified with it so much because it’s a story that goes into great detail on what I frequently touch on here, on my blog, about the nature of how one feels, and operates, when they have nothing, and contrasts it against how one goes about their business when they have everything. How the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. It’s been a while since I have had a book I couldn’t put down, that I was willing to sweat over outside during the heat of a California summer. Yet I feel like my life is never going to be the same now having read it.

Again, how much of that involves when I happened to be reading it and how I happen to be feeling at this point in my life, I do not know. But of that which I do know is that it is rare to come across a person who can sympathize with me, my wants and needs, and hopes and dreams, and for it to be a woman during The Great Depression is all the more impressive.

In the end it’s really a story about family, and how far one will go to both support it and be at peace with it. It taught me some about my own mom and dad. It taught me about the relationships I have with my two brothers. It taught me about the connection I have to the earth, and everyone who occupies it along with me during this journey of mine.

It’s such a simple story, and yet so revelatory (probably because it’s so simple). I was forced to attend it, The Good Earth, at its own pace. And in the way that great stories do — though I cannot recall the particular page or section — it captured me. Similar to the aforementioned Crime and Punishment and The Fountainhead, which are both old, and each authored, coincidentally, by a Russian, The Good Earth turned from a humble book into an exercise in philosophy via the simple action of me flipping from one page to the next. Again, I don’t know when exactly it happened. But when it did there was no hiding from it.

I imagine the greatest lesson with it, The Good Earth, is that this story of life has been written before many times over. The mysteries and wonders that fill my head on a day-to-day basis are not as uncommon as they sometimes feel. All the trials and tribulations (for lack of a better cliché) which have been wont on occasion to bring me down, and keep me down, have been seen and understood and rationalized and boiled down succinctly in ways far more beautifully put that I am capable of.

And it helps, for a man like me, to see it. Because I have traveled throughout so many days of my life with the feeling — whether legitimate or not — that nobody understands me. It is true that in most cases I do it to myself, choosing to meet others and empathize with their wants and needs in lieu of opening up to them, and seeking help of my own, which has been a lifestyle choice of mine out of fear for showing vulnerability, or convincing myself that my problems are more important than anybody else’s. (Which they aren’t.)

This lifestyle choice has led me to having both very positive relationships with most people while at the same time not being, like, close to anybody in particular. It all goes back to that which I wrote of during the 2023 Year In Review, when I opined of a certain tendency of mine (insofar as interpersonal relations go) that compares a fire burning bright but burning out quickly. These limits are infinitely boundless, if only the X-axis would allow me the time.

Currently I am reading the second book of this apparent trilogy, one that started with The Good Earth, and it’s titled Sons — which follows the lives and conflicts of, naturally, the three sons of Wang Lung. And I know it can’t like replicate the utter perfection of the first story, but nonetheless I am so eager to consume it just as I will inevitably the final book as well, because at this stage I am desperate to realize where it is, where it’s going, and how it ultimately ends. The story of a young Chinese farmer who bought with hat-in-hand a slave woman from a great house to be his wife before lucking himself into riches and buying a beautiful concubine and eventually sending his sons to school to become scholars and growing old and purchasing the great house he once bought his wife from before being buried on the same land he grew up on.

To varying degrees all men are Wang Lung, just waiting for their shot to capitalize. I tried explaining once to my childhood best friend, named Josh, who in his adult years fell in love with a girl and married her and she bore a couple kids for him (thus far), this idea that not everybody has the same chances in life. Nor the same odds for success. And he disagreed with me, citing America and all of its allure and possibilities. And I argued that most black people, for example, didn’t have the same opportunities that we, as white guys, had. And so on.

But even Josh’s life experience was different than my own, despite us both sharing in the genetic lottery victory that such white men in America possess. For while we both entered this earth of the God-fearing Christian variety, and while both of our families raised us in so-called middle class households, I chose the road less traveled and broke away from my roots as a church-goer and he doubled-down on it. He and his wife are of the Creationist worldview that says the earth is only 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs and humans once lived together, and so on. And while both our families were ‘middle-class,’ his was clearly of the upper-middle variety while mine happened to be on the lower-middle end, which no doubt in some way shapes his Republican-ness and my Socialist-ness.

But the metaphor I let him in on, Josh, that is, about how not everybody has the same opportunities in life, was about football. I said some people begin at the 50 yard-line, some inside their opponent’s 20, and others start all the way back on the complete opposite side of the field. And while it is true that he and I started in decent positions, as white men from middle-class families, there is no comparison between my plight versus his in the same way there is no comparison between our mutual plights and those who grew up poor, or where English was a second language.

And I knew then what I know now: that I cannot change anyone. For someone like Josh could simply cite the needle-in-a-haystack foreign-born poor person who became a billionaire because of some fluke like being better at coding than everyone else as his argument, while I am much more of the mind to use large numbers and percentages — such as ordinary people, in this case — to argue my own perspective. Because to me the masses mean so much more than the one-in-a-million.

I remain completely unaware of which theoretical yard-line I was born on, only that it was (probably) better than most and at the same time nowhere close to anything ever being, like, handed to me. On legendary college basketball coach John Wooden’s ‘pyramid of success’ it says that Luck Favors The Prepared Man, and even before I read that once upon a time as a teenager it was always kind of how I operated in life. Rarely have I ever outworked anybody. With me it has been about the volatility of being clever, and out-smarting where- and when-ever possible my competition.

The doorstep is not such a place where opportunities generally arrive, as the existentialist would contend those only come from the individual seeking and capitalizing on them. Opportunities, that is. Which is why it makes so much sense that Josh, with the backing of an educated and successful family unit, was able to start his own painting business despite himself having no formal education of his own, and how I, to lesser degree, am myself doing better than average and dramatically so given the socioeconomic climate of where I am from.

(Perhaps the saddest reality of all, which bears with it the point I am attempting to drive home, that which I tried to explain to Josh, is that the number one indicator of future success for an individual, based on future earnings, is the ZIP Code that a given person comes from. Mine is 92407.)

Back to the original point: I have been doing just fine. Better than I have been in a long time, as a matter of fact. With good literature to fill my days and evenings, a little writing here and there, and the prospect of a new NFL season right around the corner, I begin my ascent into seeing that light at the end of the tunnel. I haven’t found complete peace, but I have found some.

Let us not forget that life can be pretty fucking awesome. And not in some fake-it-till-you-make-it, speak-it-into-reality, manifestation bullshit way (no offense). I mean: Who has it better than us? We have food at the ready to be consumed. We have not only water to hydrate us but specific designer-styles of water which may or may not be our preference to drink. To pass time we have books to read and video games to play and enough leisure to exercise and watch all manner of television shows and if all else fails, jerking off is never a bad option.

We have the earth, and it’s still breathing, which allows us time further to figure it all out. How blessed I am, truly, to have a mom and a dad and two brothers, where love remains omnipresent among us all and that they, as a unit, raised me and fostered me and gave me growing up everything I could have hoped for, who had each their hands and left each their fingerprints over everything I was and everything I am and everything I will become. I am a lucky man.

Such a sentiment may have been lost over the recent months and years with me being focused so much on myself and the pettiness and trivial nature of my life. This thing of ours that we hold so dear without sometimes ever realizing how completely insignificant it actually is. As it feels more important, we become lost. As it is put into its proper perspective, this thing of ours, we find again our ten toes on the ground and feel our ten fingers pressing deliberately upon keyboard, and only here do we understand ourselves as we should be. Right where we belong.

How I do wish the burden was not so heavy as it might be for a more ignorant man, so too is the payoff that much more rewarding when such a light at the end of such and such tunnel is finally found. And I mean that not so much in a dramatic way, for it is entirely easy to downplay and dismiss and delegitimize these last months of mine. Even those who may for a moment have been close to me, who were part of my struggle ongoing in realtime, can rationalize with their own heart that no true damage had been done to my own, and thus fail to meet the kind of understanding it required to deliver me to the place as I happen to be at now, well further along, when it may have meant something at the time.

I have most of my life acted bitterly and spiteful to each of those whom I have deemed wrongdoing against me, and the size of the chips that grow on shoulders aren’t usually so large as they’ve happened to be on mine. Yes, it is true that never have I completely shed the skin of my youth. The precocious nature that was once described of me at an early age I was quick to get to, as if by some rush I was in both to separate myself from the field and clear it, completely, and I spent not only my formative years but well into adulthood holding on to such a feeling. Where even the faintest slights required some grudge to keep.

Used as I have these petty grievances as fuel for my many motivations throughout life, no longer do they seem so necessary. As much as I would have loved to go on in such a way forever, there were such nights even in the worst of my depths these moments when I could produce a smile. Thinking back on the persons and places and things and each that went right and equally wrong, such as the ingredients and spices that make up a stew, where when I came to and out the other side of such thoughts with an unknowing smile on my face, it was indeed all the things which made me who I am.

In other words, the haste I once made to get to a certain destination of contentment in my youth became that in which I have been so stubborn for so long to continue clinging on to. And just as I slipped before of knowing certain answers to my own certain questions that have brought me discontent, I have now and for the last handful of years known it didn’t feel so right as it once did. Like some stiff block of ice that has been salted down, bit by bit, down, and away, what then is left to hold onto?

The choice now is not one leading to possibilities ad infinitum, of whether to go here or there, or perhaps elsewhere, and so on, but rather the binary decision of going or not anywhere at all. I talk aloud of my entire thought process and tiresome for the reader that can grow, I’m sure. Oftentimes this blog doubles as an internal monologue and triples as a stream of conscience. Where discussed is each angle and analyzed is each stone turned and unturned again. For this, I assume, is in some way how everybody operates.

Thus the bird in the hand of my life is not anymore worth two in the bush. Speculated I have for several months and wondered about which path I would choose to be mine, and none have been suitable for I wasn’t in fact of mind or readiness. When the earth is so wide open, each step is both a blessing and a mistake. No, the faults I have made revolve ignorantly about believing I could maintain being exactly the same person regardless of which path I chose and expecting a result different than all of those leading to such evenings that led further to such mornings that provided me such days of such emptiness.

So it is: not the path but the person. For the path can help dictate such processes that lead to similar lapses in decision-making, while it is the individual who decides the outcomes. True as it may be that every path taken and traversed undoubtedly has shaped the ultimate decision-maker, what can only be understood eventually is that the decision-maker shapes the path, and that never is it the other way around.

An exercise like this is about control. But neither is it the type of control one attempts to obtain over those persons surrounding them, nor the nature one has a role participating in. For many have tried and many have failed to grasp at what isn’t able to be held for longer than but a brief moment in time. No, the only control in this world one may attempt to aspire towards is a control of the self. Nature is far too random, and the whims of others far too reckless and unpredictable. We may reach, and we may touch, and we may feel its intoxicating tug clasping back. But how hollow such a feeling meets us when inevitably we find ourselves again looking up from the bottom at all we lost, at all we believed there to be, and true, when it was never in the first place ours to carry.

° ° ° ° °

Pearl S. Buck’s second book of The Good Earth trilogy, titled Sons, revolves predominantly around Wang Lung’s third son — also known as Wang the Tiger — who as only teenager at the end of the first novel abandons his father at the Great House of Wang and heads south in search for glory as an understudy to one of the many lords of war in the region. Upon learning and growing and fighting, he mutinies against his war lord and takes with him his trusty soldiers and executes various campaigns that bring him money and power and prestige.

He falls in love with a woman who upon their first interaction tries to kill him, after he (Wang the Tiger) had just killed her own lover and leader of his own army. His love for this woman, who countless is called a ‘fox’ — but with a negative connotation, for fox women are considered evil among the superstitions of the time — makes Wang the Tiger’s blood run hot and passions run amuck, he having never slept with a woman and never having any particular use whatsoever for them given his singularly narrow focus on domination over the region.

But despite her looks and her guile and seemingly supportive nature, she one day betrays him in clandestine fashion and plans to join up with some of the rebels of her old warlord lover and Wang the Tiger is forced to kill her — which leads him into a deep rage before depression sets in. He recedes ever further into having no use for women, let alone any trust in them, and whereas he loved this fox woman so deeply and wanted her to bear him a son, he essentially checks out emotionally and takes two wives with no feelings attached to either in hopes of one of them delivering him one.

When Wang the Tiger’s son is finally born he has great plans to begin his own sort of dynasty and begins to look again toward the future, which was virtually the only slim happiness he displayed throughout the entire story: The infinite possibilities that existed of what he could mold his son into as a future war lord of his own.

But then his son got older, and Wang the Tiger recognized early on that his boy had no real interest in either the art of war or the obligation of being a soldier. Just as Wang the Tiger’s own father — Wang Lung — did with him, forcing him to stay behind at the earthen house (in The Good Earth) to live out his days as a farmer, just as Wang Lung himself was, Wang the Tiger’s son rebelled on him and wanted nothing more than to work the fields and live off the earth.

And so the great irony in Sons is that Wang the Tiger rebelled on his father and became a war lord, and Wang the Tiger’s son rebelled on him with want to become a farmer.

There is a lot in this book, of course, about love and betrayal and family dynamics. But it’s almost like you can see it coming the whole time when dealing with an overbearing parent who forces their child to be a certain way, in hopes of guiding them into a certain life, and all the complications that come thereafter. Like in real life it’s kind of a cliché — that’s true — about these super religious parents who home school their kids and keep them hidden away from all the sins churning about haphazardly in everyday life, and they seemingly always are the first girls to get pregnant, or boys who get the girls pregnant. And then suddenly there is life, and the parents recognize (one would hope) that the freedoms they withheld were directly the reason why their children rebelled on them, or why their kids were so uneducated about what happens when they commit such acts of adulthood without understanding the consequences.

On the other end of the spectrum exist people such as me, whose parents were not so overbearing, where in high school I had like a curfew in quotation marks that was supposed to be midnight and as long as some minor amount of communication was involved it didn’t really matter what time I came home. My freedoms were so liberal that rarely did I ever do anything to take advantage of them. Had they been more stringent I would have taken all the liberties I could have, but they weren’t, so I didn’t.

The irony in that is when I did in fact grow older I actually challenged my own mother to go harder on me as a means to set an example for everyone else in the house. A lot in the same way I have mentioned in the past of the coaches I had when I played sports or the teachers I had when I schooled or the bosses I had when I became a craps dealer, the ones I hated so much for going so rough on me turned into those I appreciated and loved the most. Because I always possessed this soft and defensive sort of exterior that led me to rebelling and talking back whenever possible to authority figures, while on the inside having a type of heart both petty and hardened that said: I’ll Show You What I’m All About.

So it is thus why I was such a proficient (though I can’t say good) student and why as I stated earlier the sports teams I played on never finished worse than second place in league and why one needs only the digits on their hand to rank me among the best craps dealers at the casino I work at. Because there were always teachers, and there were always coaches, and there were always bosses, who knew that the only way to handle me was not to be soft.

This is what will one day make me a good father of my own, or a good teacher, or a good coach or boss. The idea that not everyone is like I am, and that one’s personality not only matters but is everything in the equation. I cannot talk to everybody how I personally need to be talked to. I cannot teach others how I myself need to be taught. Just as one ought always to know their audience, so too one ought to know them self.

Which is why, personally, I can say I am one of the ones who needed more guidance growing up. I was actually speaking recently with one of my best friends and I came upon the realization — induced perhaps by a few shots of green tea — that I think I’ve been struggling for most of my life seeking out a father figure given that my own was so absent for so long. That with every one of my male friends (of whom most are significantly older than me) I am stealing bits and pieces from them all in an attempt to fill that void. That such emptiness and loneliness I speak of probably has so much to do with never really having someone there for me to show me the ropes, in a manner of speaking, and that most of what I have learned as an adult has been either through the help of others or entirely by my own willingness and earnestness to figure it out myself.

Perhaps the funniest/saddest/worst part is my mom and I have held many discussions over the years about my dad — her ex-husband, that is — and how disjointed a relationship he had with his own father and how when they (my mom + dad) started having kids in the late 1980’s, my dad vowed to my mom that he wouldn’t be anything like his own dad. That he was going to be close and have real actual relationships with his kids.

Now here, in 2024, my dad has three sons — born in 1988, 1990 and 1996 — and I happen to be the only one who communicates with him. This obviously weighs on my dad and it always has. And he gives more to my two brothers (via birthday and Christmas gifts and what not) than he gives me, which seems opposite of how it should be, but nonetheless. It is so incredibly ironic, this human nature of ours. How my dad turned into his own dad. How so often we become the exact thing we don’t want to be.

I say none of this as a means to divert blame towards my father for the way I am and/or the choices I make, nor to look for another excuse and do the lazy thing where I convince myself that because it is not one hundred percent my fault that all therefore is okay. I think honestly I have never put enough thought into such topics, and if I did then I wasn’t willing to take the plunge and write it here on my blog.

Because I remain with a type of romantic resolve where I still believe in my future. I have yet to give up on the dream of a sustainable kind of happiness that brings with it a forever kind of love with another that I have yet to experience, one that involves children of my own, and a comfortable life for us all. And with the same fervor and lust in how I have lived up until now, and how generous and liberal I am with every thing I have to offer, such that so often I prefer those around me satisfied before I myself am, it is exactly with that same hopefulness and enthusiasm that has made me so uncompromising and particular about who will be next to me to live such a dream.

It is thus how I have managed to grow to the age of thirty and four years having not consummated a marriage nor produced any children. For when such a day arrives I will have if nothing else experience enough at my back to know of the things not to do, having lived with a father so absent a partner to my mom, and so estranged from his children. With that, combined in some fucked up way with my own external missteps and internal struggles, and such life lessons that come from the humble tears and blood and sweat thereof, I can envision no future in which I am not well beyond satisfactory at the duty of being a good dad.

But, you know, I am certain my father as well had those same feelings. Just as I am sure his own father had similar thoughts when my dad was born in 1945. We all want to do better. We don’t want irony to strike us down in such a way where our good intentions are foiled, especially so if we can see it coming.

Alas, the film from 2007 titled No Country For Old Men explains to utter perfection this idea, when poolside the story’s protagonist (Llewelyn Moss) responds to a woman looking for a little action that he’s ‘Just looking for what’s coming,’ to which she replies: ‘Yeah, but no one ever sees that.’

Which is what inevitably makes this current era of my life so silly. Like I am aware I cannot predict the future; I am (and clearly have been) releasing myself from the grip of trying to control all the things that for so long were as close to me as possessions themselves; it’s as if the whole goddamn blueprint of life is staring me right in the face and I am shunning it in favor greener pastures involving all manner of new challenges and difficulties that need not exist.

Further, already I can envision a world not even so far down the pass where I look back through this window, the one I have been living through for these last some odd months, and contemplate in greatest bewilderment who I was, and what possibly I could have been thinking, and, again, laugh about it.

But by that time I am afraid it will be because actually there will be a new challenge, or a new difficulty — a legitimate one, I mean — and the only reason I will be looking back on the current here and now is out of some vague envy for wishing still I had it this easy. This future of which I speak, it is coming. Through this August breeze, and from the other side of the gaming tables where people play, and by key inserted and twisted such that another door is opened, and from every step taken and each mile completed on the running machine, and every word written on this blog, until finally this body of mine shuts down and tells me it is time for sleep: With each and all, the future comes.

In the scope of both the summertime and the year itself so boring and drab is the month of August. Yet for whatever reason, in spite of accomplishing actually very little, I feel it somewhat strange or annoying that it, August, I mean, has offered me a sense of deliverance from the more sexy and action-filled months of this past year of mine. But that isn’t ironic.

It’s just a coincidence.