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Mettle celebrations

To Malu

02/12/20, sometime before that—and likely long after

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I

I semi-regularly dread the future scenario of hard conversations…. whether you for some reason seek answers from me or I just impulsively blurt them out cause I freak out at the prospect of you discovering the world’s hardships in tougher ways.

I dread the scenario of being the one to explain what’s wrong about something in this world. Why people are willfully ignorant and bigoted. Why things are unfair for the stupidest reasons such as someone’s skin isn’t the color of computer paper. Why the carved-in hatred of the worst humanity has to offer really just waits for the first misstep from those they distrust as a green light to hate HateHATE.

This Lunar New Year my core’s heavier. I’m not a gay-parade-dance-choreography-caliber guy nor a K-pop dancer no I don’t dance. To paraphrase Dr. Sanjay Gupta, “people get emotional when I dance.” Anyway I’ll be just as present for Mom throughout the Lunar New Year’s traditions. The least I could do is collect what mettle for something that matters to her. Yes she still finds I’m an asshole for doing arts. She’s doing just fine.

Having said that, my core is heavier from grappling with celebrating [per-usual-mild-mannerly, unless partying with Demo] good things, while with the genie-bottle-smashed next level of hate going on with everyone. I know better to maintain. I’ve had to reconcile with the totality of hatred that’s out there and put upon the undeserving and all that I can’t change from where I am. If I had a portal gun though, I don’t know if I’d somehow escalate a situation by taking my skateboard to the hater[s] regardless if they surrender.

I doubt I could diplomatically explain hate crimes against Asians cause bigots think all living Asians from Asia all the way through North America collectively conspired coronavirus. I couldn’t know where to begin explaining how Blacks are all seen as threats by the bigots who’ve ironically since the dawn of civilization enslaved them and even after the Civil War still treated them as below them, and that even in the age of coronavirus bigots still find a way to make it about taking down Blacks. I definitely won’t know how to explain anti-Semitism and how bigots blame Jews for… fudge like, everything, coronavirus too sometimes. If the frequency of cats stuck in trees goes up, they’ll get blamed for that also.

Meanwhile when the craven cowardly bigots in power make the missteps they or/and their cronies cry unity and moving on. Bunch of grown-@ss-to-middle-aged-to-senior-excuses-for-adults who could control and influence what proverbially your life can be. How do I explain that?

When you’ve never once jarred at why I look Asian-cause-I-am. You’ll be part of the next generation that doesn’t think twice about what differentiates people. It won’t even be something you need to consciously remind yourself. To you it’ll simply be what makes each person uniquely matter.

If you ever asked me to explain a world problem, I’d explain too much too fast like the dad in Psycho Goreman. I’d try though. I’m making an effort to swear as least as possible cause unless I’m in a Martin Scorsese film, it’s a tired trope. I’m not one to get tired; just pass out. I’d try to be better around you.

Again, I’m terrified at what unchanged world you’ll have to grow up in, as much as I hope it’ll be significantly more compassionate. The least I could do is maintain mettle composure. The food’s always great.

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II

Look I’m not one to talk about Valentine’s Day even to diss it.

Malu you’re gonna see with people how instinctively natural it is for them to “hate” things—be it cultural-sociopolitical things or trivial things. It’s trendy—and easy—to hate using only the information that makes it convenient to hate. One way or another this world is unharmonious, and it’s easier to confirm our resentments. That way people think prejudging can put them ahead of what they think threatens and hurts them.

Society’s at a point where an abstract sub-version of Valentine’s Day is recognized by those who hate Valentine’s day. I’m not with them either.

There are bad people who commercialized a day about a man in third century Rome who got likely beheaded but definitely executed for performing secret marriages against the emperor’s needy will—the said modern day bad people capitalizing it into a day to make you feel bad if you’re alone.

There are bad couples-people who exploit Valentine’s Day to make you feel bad if you’re alone, cause they think making you feel bad in your aloneness will make them feel less existentially alone of which no surplus of Axe Body Spray-flavored or Foundation-coated chocolates can cover their gaping metaphysical voids.

There are bad people who feel bad cause they’re alone and in their externalized self-hatred they’ll take down whoever they can with them.

It might be cruelly poetic—that even the last-level thing people collectively have—this damn God Ludamn L-word—even that can’t not get caught in the middle of the hate.

Rubs forehead . . eyes face I’m still fine. If you can fulfill your individual autonomous public duties, then you’re good to think, feel, do what you want, away from the shackles of expectations and so long as you don’t cause hurt. At least that’s my non-rightwing-radical fringe ethos. So don’t listen to anyone who thinks securing a mortgage and a fantastic credit score so to accelerate to their pension is actually above underground outsider art. And to ground myself in the usual humility, if I’m preaching similar words to you way later from the alleyway of some smoked meat store you’ll know I meant moderation back then.

Saint Valentine made the moves to certify let alone validate people’s bonds. He lost his head physically for it but his mind was intact. His legacy sanctified aside—was knowing he made his moves enough for him?

To him, was it worth his life

He was good though. He genuinely did good things for people and he knew it.

That, he got to have.

I have no doubt Malu you’ll be given back the good that you’ll give. If you otherwise become an all-powerful supervillain I’ll just blame your dad.

For my part I’m not one to expect good boomeranging back my way. If I do get a boomerang to my person, it’d be likely cause it was never good, what I gave.

I thought it was,

but what I think is good is more likely than not [beat] not what the receiver wanted—let alone ask for. My life isn’t a movie where someone’s just waiting by the window for me with a vintage boombox to say or give the exact thing they need. I don’t even know what the window looks like. I’ve imagined it—throughout the summer, between the rain and rain-scented air and after—but it’s all in my momentarily attached head, mind-manufactured.

That’s my self-prophecy-fulfilling pitfall of L-wording another person—someone else with full autonomy and their own subjective set of hopes, dreams, fears, pains, wants. I could make a discography’s worth of articulating what I think they mean to me but at the end of it, if they’re just not into the genre let alone I, it doesn’t matter if I evoke Michael Bubblé or Daniel Johnston. Feel[ing]s let alone pheromones are absolute. I have to remind myself often that despite how often against-my-realist-judgment I think of the person, I’m pretty sure they have a plethora of more diverse and novel choices for meaningful connection. If I’m VHS, then they’re why Blockbuster’s not a thing.

My first gargantuan move last summer was a full-length LP complete with accountability liner notes and back cover album art. On one hand it was oozing out all I had at the time while on a separate hand finally eulogizing a suicide colleague whose forgotten-by-everyone memory I feel an existential obligation to address. I’d believe a thoughtful person if they thought that macabre. Despite my self-awareness, I might not be as thoughtful as can be about how forward[?] I express—Hell to the degree that the opening track is titled Cyborg heart stays for real pianist / kills for suicide colleague.

And the last time I gave it all I reasonably had—again always appropriately stopping short of the pre-13^th-letter-of-the-alphabet-word—I admitted to having no creatively-merited moves left after that. At least not with weirdo direct reachouts. Cause one way or another—whether directly or understatedly, with their presence or their memory, by reference or consciously unrelated—it always comes back to them. From listening to them narrate a script reading, to a fictional character that could only legally-morally exist cause that person who inspired it would do and say all those things anyway and then some, to watching them practice and perform what matters most to them.

A part of me would think me a loser for holding onto these feels if it weren’t that I make something of it all. There’s nothing special about how I think and feel. There’s less than nothing novel about unreconciled longing. There are entire genres of music and worse young adult novels dedicated to mining off the feeling.

Which prose-appropriately brings us back to the holiday in question. I don’t think Saint Valentine’s last words as his head partitioned from his upper body, I don’t think he went “..ghhww the way I acted on my feels….that suhhcked tsk/dies/fuckyouClaud¹” Sorry Malu I once again have no idea where I’m going with this and what the moral is. Which means I should stop typing soon.

Look I keep coming back to the neo-Nazi metaphor cause the absurdity works. So if a neo-Nazi came up to me, told me I was their one and only, and presented me with a monument series of sculptures, a life’s creative work of undying adoration proposed to me—

It doesn’t matter how wholesomely expressive, sequenced, and / or impressively elaborate it all is. If I’m just not feeling it

This might be the conflict-of-interest with moderating a creative label meant to provide a canvas of unconditional compassion to the unreconciled. I don’t know how to be candidly [metal-hop/sometimes dark folk] emotional yet be an example for empathy. You’ll have to decide for yourself if what you absorb from this is good. Not just not-shitty good. But good.

That’s the least we can be to each other.

It shouldn’t have to be the most to ask then of the world.

1. History. [2009, November 24]. St. Valentine beheaded. Retrieved from https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/st-valentine-beheaded

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