46.

With the way things are now, I really had no desire to write about things, my life, whatever. As things continue on, I find myself feeling more fatalist? Nihilist? Well, hopelessness to the point of apathy, paralysis. What will happen will happen. We all die in the end, anyhow.

Nonetheless, here is what has been happening as I have plummeted through my 47th year:

• I’m still mostly taking public transit to work. It’s given me a lot of time to start reading again. Here are the books I’ve completed:
  • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I actually started this during my Berlin trip. A strange little book. Not as good as the first 2 volumes of 1Q84.
  • Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. This is one of the only books I’ve read that left me crying at the end. Detailing a Korean family from the Japanese occupation to their time in Osaka, it broke my heart. Aka, it’s very Korean.
  • Ask the Dust by John Fante. I love imagining living where I live back in the 1930s. It proves that the blood of Downtown LA hasn’t changed much over the years. It was a shithole then. It’s a shithole now. But it’s MY shithole. And I love living in it.
  • Sula by Toni Morrison. This is my first Toni Morrison book, and it pulls no punches. It’s a great portrait of black life during the first half of the 20^th century.
  • Queer by William Burroughs. I had to re-read this after watching the film. This is one of the few instances where I liked the movie more than the book.
  • The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. I’ve started this one so many times but have never finished it. A fun romp through the most drug-addled paranoid plot put on paper.
  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Oh man, that sermon on evil. A fucking classic for a good reason.
  • Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I’ve been meaning to re-read this the last couple of years, and here I go. I forgot how hilarious this book could be at times. The detached voice is a bit annoying, and some of those endnotes, come on. I like how the plot is shaped like a moebius strip, infinity symbol.

• I’ve had a hemorrhoid for most of the year. It’s starting to go away now, but it’s been making things a bit messy in my underwear. It hasn’t been painful or itchy or anything. It just feels like something is a bit prolapsed down there. The annoying part is that I haven’t been active, so it really is a mystery.

• I spent my birthday near Joshua Tree. Unfortunately, it was still a little too cool to fully enjoy the pool, but my Airbnb did have a hot tub. I did go to the Integratron for one of their public sound bath sessions. I probably would have enjoyed it more if the guy next to me didn’t breathe loudly and fart.

• On May 2 to May 4, I’ll be in middle-of-nowhere Parsippany, NJ for the Dark Force Fest. My little blackened coal of a goth heart will be filled to the brim with what can be construed as happiness as I get to see Razed in Black, Haujobb, Funker Vogt, Covenant, Klutae, Suicide Commando, the Genitorturers, Beborn Beton. I’ll be in my 20s all over again! Except in this 46-year old vessel of blood and gristle. After the fest, I’m going to head off to New England and explore mostly Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

•  Here are some random pictures from my travels on public transit:

• Oh yeah. I relented and got boxed dye to cover my white hairs.

No one reads me aside from some friends. Every now and then someone will stumble across my words, but I’m a bore so they immediately go away for good. Imagine my surprise when I see that someone spent around five hours reading a whole bunch of my shit throughout the years. Wow. I mean, I do have about 27 years worth of absolute bullshit and egomaniac blatherings on here, so it’s not like there is a lack of supply. Anyhow, my apologies to this person for a complete waste of time.

I’m really tempted to go to Dark Force Fest at the beginning of May. It would be really nice to see Razed in Black since I never saw him live during his active days, and seeing Haujobb, Funker Vogt, Klutae and the Genitorturers would be nice. But fuck, that would mean getting out to the middle of New Jersey.

I finished reading Pachinko the other night, and I don’t know if it was because it was 2 am or what not, but this was the first book that caused me to cry. What a fucking heartbreaking book.

Well fuck man. That’s about all I can say after the last several days. Absorbing all the information, looking at fire maps, seeing the videos, hearing the stories, listening to the blame game. I’m numb.

We were told a life-threatening wind event was going to happen beginning Tuesday afternoon. I knew this, and I think a lot of folks knew the winds were going to be bad. We’ve all lived through bad wind events. Seeing the Palisades Fire sparking up that day at work was bad but wasn’t a surprise. But fuck man. We never expected it to be this bad.

By the time I got home Tuesday evening, the Eaton Fire had already started out in Altadena. But without the aerial visuals on the news due to helicopters being grounded because of the winds, I tuned out for most of the evening. When I caught up with the news as I was going to bed Tuesday night, I saw that the evacuation warning zone for the Eaton Fire stretched all the way out to Arcadia — my office was a mile away from it. Fuck. I get in contact with other accounting managers and decide that we will be working from home. It became a scramble to get a hold of everyone to let them know not to go into the office.

This is the closest I’ve ever had any wildfire come to affecting me, and really this was nothing compared to what others are suffering through. As I’m sitting here in my Downtown LA apartment, I keep thinking about just how bad this has been. Fast-spreading wildfires and Santa Ana winds are nothing new to the Southland. I remember 1993, 2007, 2008, 2011. They were awful, and I was riveted to the news coverage, but they didn’t freak me out like this.

Actually the only other fire that really freaked me out was the Thomas Fire in 2017. Just like the Eaton Fire, this fire didn’t just stay up in the hills of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. The fire actually came down into the neighborhoods and burned houses. Not rich folks homes. Normal working class homes that were nowhere near brush or the hills. And seeing the homes torched in Altadena and Pasadena fucked me up.

Anyhow, those were some thoughts I had about these fires. The winds are supposed to pick up again in a couple of days, so let’s see what happens.

I had a thought of going to Grand Park for the NYE festivities. It was a passing thought, a moment of psychosis really. It wasn’t going to be particularly cold, and there was going to be no rain. And as opposed to being at the first one in 2016, I live a few blocks away rather than having to get in from San Pedro. But I got ahold of my senses pretty quickly.

The annoying thing about living at this point in the evolution of technology is that there is always a considerable delay when you rely on a streaming service for television. So there I am on my couch hearing people in the bars on my block hoot and holler and light fireworks while the fucking ball in Times Square hasn’t even fucking started its decent on my television. (I was stupid enough and missed it happening live at 9 pm here, so I had to watch the tape delay version. If I had watched the live version, I could have just ignored it, but I’m gay so I need to see descended balls.)

With the fireworks going off, my cats predictably got spooked and ran underneath my bed. So happy 2025.

I’m writing this in the morning, so I will soon be off to my uncle’s in San Pedro to get the obligatory 떡국. It will be nice to see the family since I was in Berlin for our Thanksgiving gathering.

We’re halfway through this decade, so let’s see how things go.

When thinking back on this year, I totally forgot about the eclipse back in April. It’s amazing how even though time seems to accelerate as we get older, April seems like a lifetime ago. Then again, time is an illusion.

But I remember driving out to Poplar Bluff, MO to see the eclipse and luxuriating in the four minutes of totality. Seeing the eclipse in 2017 in Newport, OR was a bit of an appetizer in comparison since totality was less than a minute where we were at. As great as it was to see the eclipse again, planning was such a bitch because of forecasted storms and cloud cover. I originally was going to go to Dallas, but the threat of storms forced me to be very flexible.

I also got my rental car stuck in the mud when I parked for the eclipse. But that was such a minor thing compared to the thrill of seeing the eclipse.

I am also grateful to work at a place that not only pays me properly but also has a good vacation policy since I was able to take this trip and a nearly-three-week vacation to Berlin recently. Fuck Disney.

I didn’t read as many books as I wanted to, only nine this year. But I did finish Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Hopefully I improve on that next year.

Here are some songs I liked this year. I really don’t understand the appeal of pop music, so while everyone gagged over Charli XCX, Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan or whatever pop thing came out, I just ignored it. To be honest, I probably listened more to NIN more than anything else.

But all in all it was an okay year. Dull, sure. But hopefully I make changes to that in 25.

Today is Christmas. It’s weird because my family doesn’t gather for Christmas — we do Thanksgiving and New Years. And as an atheist, the day doesn’t hold anything significant for me. It’s a day off where most everything is closed, a more dull Saturday. And since I’m not a child, there are no presents. So yeah. Happy Christmas? Sure. Whatever.

So to close out my adventures in Berlin, one thing I am awful at is buying tchotchkes during my travels. I don’t really frequent touristy areas, and if I do it’s a quick hit-and-run just to say that I’ve been there. I have to make a very conscious decision to buy that refrigerator magnet or coffee mug or other useless space vulture. I guess my tattoos were one way I could get a memento of this Berlin trip. But I did want something more tangible, something I could use.

XXXMas indeed.