FIVE / SIX / SEVEN / EIGHT

No insight.
No understanding.
No clarity.
No dreaming.
No alternative.
No colors.
No monochrome.
No needles.
No doctors.
No nanotechnology.
No bomb.
No counterbalance.
No Soviet Union.
No youth.
No adulthood.
No nonsense.
No instead-of-nonsense.
No communique.
No tolerance.
No need.
No need.
No need.

—

I

DO

NOT

GET

IT

.

—

Summer of 2001. I was truly, truly happy. Coffee every morning, early. Coffee, ivy, bicycle helmet. Traffic. Class. Class. Class. Sara and I walking around UMFA. Me and the curly-headed guy pretending we were too cool for skool. Bagel. Morning. Fountain in front of Marriott. Desert. Iran. Bedouin. Black wool black sheep black storm white desert. Sunshine. Architecture.

Sidewalks.

Sidewalks.

Sidewalks.

Sidewalks.

125 S. 900 E. #14, Salt Lake City, 84102

Up and down and up again, and in between, leaves and leaves and leaves and seasons and summer and winter and all of the things that forgot you.

Don’t forget your dreams.

Don’t remember your dreams.

It is too easy to be cynical when you are not happy. It is too easy to be happy when you are not cynical.

—

Summers. I hate summers. Apart from 2001, everything bad, ever, has happened during the summer. My whole life has been ruled by problem summers. After, the winter has healed them. 2001 was simply an aberration.

I am an ape, I make connections. I make connections. Connectivity jones. Connectivity Rockefeller. Connectivity science method Jackson Five. Connectivity purple placid wanker thighs.

I must find winter. W I N T E R.

—

to forget, I drank
and drank on the cusp of tomorrow
until the entire book of faces
disappeared beneath the black evening waves
and I too was forgotten
I too was forgotten

—

A      L      A      R      M

I will never understand anyone at all. I am an outcast and an inhuman.

Quiet desperation, my favorite!

—

Better to rule in hell, yesss… but **only** if you have **subjects.**

—

Optimism is easy when you’re happy.

Me: “Hi, how’s it going?”

Her: “Fine.”

Me: “Are you done with work for the day?”

Her: “Yup.”

Me: “How was it?”

Her: “Fine.”

Me: “What did you do?”

Her: “This and that.”

Me: “Okay… well… what are you up to now?”

Her: “Not much.”

Me: “Hanging out?”

Her: “Yup.”

Me: “Doing what?”

Her: “Just hanging out.”

Me: “Anyone else around?”

Her: “Same as ever.”

Me: “What are you going to do tonight?”

Her: “Don’t know.”

Me: “What are you thinking?”

Her: “Nothing.”

Me: “What are you doing right now?”

Her: “Talking to you, babe.”

Me: “Okay, welllllllll… I spent most of my day in meetings, but I did get some things done here and there, though of course I’m always behind, it seems. I’ve been looking for other opportunities on my breaks, too, but I can’t really look while I’m at work, which is kind of a bummer. I was thinking maybe I’d see a film tonight, but it’s going to depend on what’s playing. Anyway, I still have some work to do at home. Maybe I’ll go and buy a houseplant, I think I could use more plants in my apartment.”

Her : “Hmm.”

Me: “I’m still thinking of buying a motorhome, too. After living in the trailer last year, I think it would be cool. I used to always wonder if I could live that way, and now I’m pretty sure I can. Plus, they’re cheap. They’d save all kinds of money on rent (and I’m pretty broke right now) and it would be cool to just pick up and move somewhere else anytime I got bored with my neighborhood.”

Her: “Yyyyyup.”

Me: “What do you think? Would you be interested?”

Her: “Hmm… we can talk about it.”

Me : “Okay. Well, anyway, I also got my latest royalty statement in the mail. The book is selling okay but it’s going to be a while before I earn out and start getting royalties. It’s all because it took so long to get the damn thing to market and so there was all that advance that got built up. At least it came out, though.”

Her : “Yup.”

Me: “Are you okay?”

Her : “Yes, of course, why do you always ask?”

Me: “Okay, well I guess I’d better let you go.”

Her: “Okay, if you want. Bye.”

—

The thing that drives me nuts is that while I’m getting this all summer, whenever I go to visit her where she is, hanging around with other people, or whenever she pauses the phone call to talk to someone in the background, I can hear her carrying on a complete, interesting, enthusiastic conversation with everyone else. Just not me.

It sucks to turn up to visit her and to have nothing to talk about, no matter how many questions I ask her about herself to try to involve her in the conversation. Then someone else walks into the room and she’s smiling and laughing and enthusiastically talking a mile a minute with a winning smile, in some cases about all the same stuff I was just trying to talk about.

It hurts.

I do all of this great stuff, yeah, but it’s not fulfilling because it’s not really adding to anything. It’s just “stuff I did” and maybe it’s cool stuff, but it’s stuff nonetheless.

Thirty years on and I don’t have much of an identity. I have a personality and a few exploits, but it’s nothing I can hang my hat on. My pictures are all just photos of me or photos of other people or photos of me with other people. They’re not photos of “Aron Hsiao’s XYZ” that detail my life and who I am. I can’t really claim to be anything, I’m a mile wide and a millimeter deep.

I don’t really have family, most of the people that I call “family” are actually my parents’ family. I don’t really have a career, my work history isn’t filled with people that recommend me or achievements I can list. I don’t really have any hobbies or any identifying features.

I haven’t managed to build much for myself. I look at some of the other people that I went to school with who now have a personal life complete with wife and kids and a career in the state department or at CNN or are teaching now and about to achieve tenure, and I wonder: what did I get by avoiding all of this that was actually worth it?

Or was I just too busy intently being a bastard to notice that half of what my elders warned me about was probably true?