tags: memory

Oh, see the sunlight's play upon
the sapphire glaze of Western Sea
as fires dance across the sky
and daylight fades to memory

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1998

October

1998 Oct 8

Endless Wonder

I am to wonder, I am to wonder
Dreaming of finishing this book
flipping pages until it's over
but it's never over
remembering flames, the buildings all lit up
amidst the burned-out wreckage

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So I went to the new Tommy’s in San Diego on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard between the 805 and the 163. It, like the Tommy’s in Hollywood (on Hollywood Blvd.), has an indoor sit-down place to eat, unfortunately essentially resembling an In-n-Out.

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April

2006 Apr 2

it’s a trap!

Here I am pondering the chances of actually breaking out of the Black Iron Prison when I am reminded of a quote by Douglas Adams, author of the cult classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (who by the way was an atheist and is a big influence on my philosophies regarding the universe):

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August

2006 Aug 15

ten trillion ideas

I feel like I’m completely losing my mind. There are like ten trillion ideas whizzing around my brain. This can’t be good for me.

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2006 Aug 16

attack of the past ten years

What sucks is that I can’t do this vacation thing at all. I can’t fucking relax. It’s like all of the sudden all the thoughts and feelings I’ve been avoiding for the past ten years or so have come out to attack me.

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September

2006 Sep 21

the last days of summer

I can taste autumn in the air. Septembers have always been bittersweet. Since I turned 30, I haven’t really had much of a chance to reflect, although I find that regret frequently colors my reminiscences.

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2006 Sep 24

equinox

Summer is officially over (despite the fact that today’s high was 76°F and I went out in shorts and flip-flops) and I can’t help but wonder where all the time went. Of course, I don’t know if it’s an artifact of getting old, but it also seems like it’s about a decade since it was June. (Yeah, I’ve been noticing this strange paradox ever since I started residency. The recent past seems simultaneously like it was just yesterday, and like it was 100 years ago. Go figure.)

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November

2006 Nov 21

rescue mode

Damn it. My main blogs are down. Disordered Thought Processes and Starlight and Gravity are down for the count.

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2007

March

2007 Mar 25

the color of the sky as far as I can see is coal grey

Mostly I’m tired. This can, of course, be attributed to the fact that I was on call last night, although it’s not like I did much of anything except maybe sleep.

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April

2007 Apr 17

april is the cruelest month

I worry that my capacity to empathize with sadness and tragedy has been destroyed. Most the time at work, I’m forced to put on a mien of detachment and objectivity. If I took everything bad that happens at work to heart, I’m pretty sure I would’ve quit a long time ago. Or I’d have committed suicide.

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2007 Apr 22

the color of your skin

I am dismayed by this post about a brown-skinned professor who gets detained by the authorities simply because he leaves a bag full of discarded manuscripts to be recycled.

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May

2007 May 1

tempus fugit

My oldest friend whom I’ve known since we were in third grade is getting married to a wonderful woman sometime in 2008, and I can’t help but marvel. It seems like it was just last week we were playing Wing Commander II and listening to the Cure, the Smiths, Soft Cell, and Front 242, or walking up that godforsaken hill while playing some weird word game. There were all those hours spent in front of the Commodore 64 and the 8-bit Nintendo. There was Robotech. Voltron. Bastketball in my backyard. Junior high football. Watching movies at the AMC in Burbank. I could stop and reminisce for hours on end, and my memories may be astray. But it all goes by so fast.

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2007 May 5

definition of insanity

Listening to: “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” by St. Etienne

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2007 May 8

holding on to a thin strand of hope

I suppose if that’s all the medications accomplish, I’m still getting somewhere. For the first time in a long, long time, I actually believe that there’s a good chance that my life will get better. I’m actually looking forward to the future.

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2007 May 9

griffith park fire: flickr stream

People posted a lot of awesome pictures of the fire on Flickr. What is it about fire that fascinated me so?

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2007 May 13

years upon end

Reminiscing about distant journeys
lost in the murky mist of my fading memories
down that Mother Road, and the paths of generations past
to the south side and the lake shore
and back again
to the mountain pass and to the Sea
the years wash upon the sands, wave after wave

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2007 May 15

glen campbell “wichita lineman”

Driving back from Harrah’s on the Rincon tribal lands, my iPod suddenly popped up ”Wichita Lineman Was a Song I Once Heard” by the KLF. (The KLF?!?) This immediately took me back to my childhood, when I couldn’t go to sleep without the radio on, and the station I would listen was the easy listening station. It used to be called KJOI 99, but now I think it’s Star 98.7. Crazy.

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2007 May 17

crossing my fingers

The last time my sister graduated, I was seriously in love with S. While in the back of my head I suppose I always knew it wasn’t going to work, I had been doing a good job ignoring that particular fact. Naturally, when I got back to Chicago, everything went to hell, and I went into a patented downward spiral.

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2007 May 27

summer in the city (a flashback moment)

There are certain parts of the year that seem to get me down. That perception may simply be apophenia. A meaningless confluence of stimuli that cause me to believe there is some sort of pattern. Like listening for voices on blank cassette tapes. Or seeing the image of the Virgin Mary on a scrap of tree bark.

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July

2007 Jul 11

ok computer: 10 year anniversary

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September

2007 Sep 6

rivermaya "himala"

It was 1997 when I first heard this song, on the island of Tablas, in the province of Romblon, awaiting a plane to take us back to Manila.

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2007 Sep 7

trying to achieve escape velocity (retrospective: 10 years ago)

I’m not really sure what triggered this strange mood of mine. My mind wanders back to the end of my college days, unearthing a lot of bittersweet memories. (And do I even have any memories that just have the sweet and not the bitter?)

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2007 Sep 7

even farther back

1995: Deep wounds. Ugly scars. And then: new, unfounded hopes and unfulfillable wishes. I learn a secret that, in the end, fucks me up bad, but which I am bound by honor to keep. (And would the outcome really have changed if I had betrayed it? Except for the damnation of my soul?)

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2007 Sep 24

hulogdahon (the heart of the matter)

So S (of whom I’ve written a few things here and there) got married on Saturday. Strangely, it didn’t seem like it had been all that long since she first hooked up with her now husband, but four years is a pretty long time.

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2007 Sep 29

julia roberts already made that movie

I feel like a lot of loose ends are being tied up in my life lately. I don’t know whether to be relieved, or to be sad. Or whether to be wary of the future. Every time life comes to one of these pauses, one of these lacunae, it seems that everything goes to shit.

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2007 Sep 30

september fades

This song is by Pedro Gil, whom I ended up watching a few months ago.

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October

2007 Oct 28

past tense

As I shot down the I-5 listening to my iPod, this song came up, bringing up memories from my first year in college, way back in 1994-1995

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2007 Oct 29

flashback: the unit

Love is watching someone die.

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December

2007 Dec 10

still chasing starlight/the relationship of music and spacetime

I think it might’ve been Sirius, the dog star, in the southern sky that lit my way tonight, like a beacon, brighter than the ambient glow of the urban sprawl before me, but I only have a faint grasp of celestialography, so I could be wrong.

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2008

February

2008 Feb 10

time marches on

This week's I-5 playlist, featuring cheesy love songs and songs to commit suicide to:

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May

2008 May 12

reminiscing/high school days

Whenever I hear this song, I can still feel those cold autumn early mornings after pulling an all-nighter, writing an English paper or a History paper, fully saturated with caffeine (a total of 230 mg would usually tide me over), with no one but Sluggo on KROQ to keep me company.

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2008 May 13

easier said than done/15 years/too little, too late

I seem to be stuck in a time warp.

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June

2008 Jun 1

neglect

Ever since I got addicted to Twitter, I guess I haven't been blogging as often as I used to. There are just so many ways to express myself besides the long form of a blog post: Twitter, Facebook link posts, Google Reader shares with notes, del.icio.us. I am Web 2.0-ed out.

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July

2008 Jul 21

the past comes bubbling up to the present

Apparently one of my neighbors is either reminiscing about the past, or feeling heartbroken, or both, because he/she was playing this song from TLC from yesteryear:

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2008 Jul 30

earthquake retrospective

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2009

May

2009 May 25

what is gone is gone

He found it strange how an old song that his dad always used to listen to on his cassette player had embedded itself so deeply into his brain that when he heard it again, it instantly took him to a time and place he could scarcely remember, a past that never was, memories that had faded into a story, into lore, more akin to fantastic fiction than to anything he had actually lived through.

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2011

July

2011 Jul 8

fireworks

Tonight was fireworks night at Dodger Stadium, and as I watched bright colorful explosions in the sky from a distant hill, I remembered that it was around this time of year twelve years ago when I made a last-minute decision that would forever change my life in weird and sometimes quite traumatic ways.

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2012

May

2012 May 28

almost like a time machine

I have always used music to index time, since I was a little kid. I may not remember exact dates, but I can often remember the exact details of what was happening around me the first time I hear a song.

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