After years of absence I feel like I’m finally coming back to myself, returning to the stranger that possessed my body for years and years and years and evicting him forcibly. Nothing seemed to feel right, nothing I read, nothing I wrote, nothing I did. But opening up the past seems to be just the elixir needed to reclaim my body. I miss the old uniforms, the knee-high boots, the fishnets, the coats, the yearnings, the lusts, the visions from heaven, the fantasies, the commingled scents from other boys filled with the desperation from isolation. The memories remain, hollowed chrysalis husks that crumble to the touch, mere ephemera that disintegrates in the wind.

Last night, Ben and the Tran-Kaisers came down to the South Bay to do an abbreviated version of STEAK AND CAKE. Since Damon’s was out of the question, I picked a family-owned steakhouse in Redondo called The Bullpen. The decor was reminiscent of Regal Beagle from Three’s Company. It was no tiki a-la Damon’s, but it was pretty nice.

To be honest most of the evening was a blur. Since I don’t drink very often, the three Sapphire and Tonics I drank allowed me to be completely disconnected. I know there was cheese toast, rib eye, baked potato, salad. I know that everyone was very pleased with the quality of the service. I know that the inscription on my cake was well appreciated by the staff of The Bullpen.

My only complaint was it was over way too soon. I got home by 8 so The Grandmother wouldn’t feel bad. I was slightly hungover by 9. And that’s it!

This morning was my normal weekly Sunday manse cleaning. There was some more birthday cake eaten. And that’s really about it.

It’s 37. It’s prime. I’m over it already.

No, seriously, what the fuck is this?

I get that as we grow older, so does unwanted hair grow in odd places. I’ve dealt with white nutsack hair, with white nostril hair. But look at this. A white nose hair! Nose hair? Other than witches, who grows hair on top of their nose? All I need is a fucking wart, and my witch hag chic look will be complete.

A lot of people love Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me. I mean, they REALLY love it, and you don’t have to go any farther than the book jacket to see evidence of this. “The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, [sic] and beautifully redemptive,” Toni Morrison writes while proclaiming that Coates has filled the void left by James Baldwin’s death. Toni Fucking Morrison! James Motherfucking Baldwin!

This is an important book. Coates talks about growing up in Baltimore knowing his body was in jeopardy everyday, that his struggle in life was to keep his body from harm. “To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease” (p. 17.) It’s a very compelling 152 pages and enlightening in his struggles with life as a black man.

Between the World and Me is a letter to his 15-year old son telling him that as a black boy, “you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know (p.71.)” But that is part of the problem: a premise that is very personal being written in a very impersonal way.

Reading this feels like reading a longer think-piece in the Atlantic, New Yorker or New York Times, one that straddles the divide of being purely academic and being made for public consumption which is about as impersonal and antiseptic as you can get. Since reading does bring out all of my shortcomings, they are once again exposed in my utter hatred for long think-pieces. Usually I end up reading two paragraphs of these pieces and start screaming, “Where is the fucking editor?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” before throwing a tantrum and moving on with my life.

I suppose it is a talent to take something that should be very personal and have it come off as impersonal as possible. Knowing how vital this book is especially now as we’re being awoken to the still omnipresent racism that exists in American society, I just wanted it to be written better.

Don’t worry. I already know I’m a terrible person, and by not completely loving Between the World and Me proves I am a completely reprehensible creature.

Over the last several years I’ve had a lovely birthday tradition: STEAK AND CAKE! Celebrate with the Kaiser-Tran-Ackerman with dinner at Damon’s in Glendale and cake from Portos. Unfortunately it looks like I won’t be able to follow through with tradition this year. With The Grandmother’s increasing dependence on me (I can’t be gone for more than 3 hours at a time because I have to give her meals) and with just how busy my family’s schedules are, it looks like no STEAK AND CAKE for me. No being able to get out of the house for a night. And, turning 37, I would be in a prime of my life. Shame.

So now I’m left with dreams, fantasies of what I want to do for 37.

– A really bourgeois champagne brunch complete.
– A coke-fueled depraved orgy.
– A buffet of drugs to sample and try.
– Watching several films.
– Booze. Lots of booze.
– Gathering everyone I know and just hanging out and chilling. With booze. And drugs.

I think it’s funny that my birthday falls on Easter Sunday this year. Yeah. I’m going to be trumped by a god I don’t believe in.

Yesterday was The Grandmother’s 87th birthday. Some family came over, I cooked, cake was had and she had a great time.

The more I read, the more I become acquainted with my intellectual shortcomings. Believe me, there are many, but one thing that really bugs me is the fact that I have a hard time recalling plots to stories once I have finished consuming them. This isn’t exclusive to books — I still can’t tell you the ending of half the movies I watched for the 2010 BJs. And that was less than a month ago!

With Slade House I’m told that this is some sort of sequel to David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks, and it automatically causes me to roll my eyes not out of disgust but of being forced to hash up the plot of a book I read a year ago. I do remember a fully enjoyable book that was engrossing right up until the very end which was a sort of cop out. I do remember wannabe immortals feeding upon the souls of a special sorts of mortals to feed their immortality. And the Alps.

But Slade House isn’t a sequel at all. It’s a stand-alone story that unfortunately was not as engrossing as The Bone Clocks. Told in vignettes as twin wannabe immortals begin their soulsucking, each vignette nine years apart, it made it difficult to fully dive into the story. Once one story ends, you have to begin the process all over again and so on and so forth.

Unlike The Bone Clocks, the ending is more satisfying. While it does end with a bit of cliffhanger, it doesn’t feel as cheap and rushed. However my interest flagged in the middle parts, by the end I was completely hooked and going where Mitchell wanted to take me. Where he led, I followed.

The Slade House is a tiny book — at 6 inches by 7 1/2 inches it’s physically smaller that most books and is only 238 pages long. While I anticipated it taking a day to read, I spent parts of three days getting through it. Again, probably my shortcoming more than anything.

The renovated Laemmle Monica movie house on 2nd Street in Santa Monica.

The upcoming end-of-the-line station for the Expo Line in Santa Monica.

At 6 am, a loud crack of thunder woke me up from my slumber, and the heavens opened up. Rain, hail everywhere! We got half an inch of rain in an hour, and just like that the skies cleared up leaving a windy and crisp day for us.

A bent tree among the straights.

It is a bit hard to read a book when I have a rare weekend off. Dallas Aunt comes to town, and finally I am free to do what I want to do: hang with friends, go see all the foreign films I’ve been meaning to see (Embrace of the Serpent and Son of Saul being great films and highly recommended by me.) Rachel Cantor’s new novel Good On Paper finally arrived for me at the library, but my I was ready to party down as much as I party down nowadays.

The problem is I really had to read this as quickly as possible judging from the list of books on hold I have with the library. About four of them are becoming available at the same time despite my best attempts to time them out. Fortunately since I hate driving and took public transit as much as I could, it gave me some good chunks of time to spend reading.

Here is a novel about a down-on-her-luck translator in New York City named Shira getting a seeming dream job translating the new work of a Nobel Prize winning Romanian/Italian poet Romei while trying to keep her makeshift family and life together. The first half of the novel builds the pressure in her life until it comes out exploding about 2/3 of the way through.

I’ll admit I enjoyed Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot a lot more than Good on Paper. I wasn’t as engrossed as I was in the former. Then again that could be the symptom of reading the first 100 pages while on transit. It’s a perfectly fine novel, although one thing lingered as I finished the epilogue.

At the point where Shira’s life explodes, I thought I missed something. It was certainly written with the intent of the mind-blowing explosion ready to happen. “Shira! he half shouted, his coital dream cracked open like a canteloupe.” “With the precision of film rolling backward, the pieces shot back into place, the shattering of my life became whole.”

Cantor brings back strains of prior events as she brings this all to a climax, and perhaps it is my shortcoming that I completely missed it. I knew it was a something, but what this something was mystified me for a bit. There I had Shira in bed completely devastated, and here I was in bed more fully clothed than Shira wondering why.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great book, but I am upset that I missed the full effect of the climax. But, I suppose, that is my own personal motif.

Over the last couple of days, I have seen a lot of Koreans get very angry at Chris Rock’s Oscar joke. Child labor is not funny, they rage. Not all Asians are good at math, they say (and seeing some of my cousins, I know that is definitely true.) As the furor kept getting louder and louder, it got me very self-conscious: did it make me a bad Asian that I actually chuckled at that gag?

As society has turned more into an outrage society where we express our displeasure in all caps on Twitter and Facebook and nuance is just another four-letter word, I decided I would only get outraged about real things. You know, that it wasn’t until the last decade that us Hapas were given equal rights in Korea. That I speak only in English in Koreatown to get better service than if I spoke Korean. That my entire time growing up at a Korean church it was made very clear to me that I did not belong.

So yeah. I found it very delicious that some Koreans got mad.