San Diego, USA - San Diego - May 2002

May 30 - I did lousy at basketball today, I blew some very easy lay-ups. Whenever the level of competition increases, I have a tendency to get excited and make silly mistakes, which is something I really need to get over. If anyone has any good advice on how to overcome this hurdle, I'm all ears.

May 29 - 7:34 PM - Tying into my last thought, maybe thinking about the future is connecting to other realities. Our physical entities are locked into both this reality as well as a linear concept of time, but our souls are capable of traveling into other realities, unrestrained by restrictions of time. When we envision the future in this reality, it is actually our souls temporarily entering the future in other realities.

I was just contemplating what I might do this evening, when my mind struck upon an image of walking downtown and having a cigar. What if this was more than just an ephemeral thought, but an actual connection occurring between this reality and another? My mind would be the bridge between these realities, and my soul could hover upon the bridge and even flit onto the other side momentarily (an image in our mind), but because my physical entity was locked into this reality, and my soul onto this physical entity, my soul would never be able to actually pass over the bridge completely.

Following up on this thought, perhaps when one dies, subsequent separation of soul from the body would imply that they would be free to travel any avenue which they deemed fit.

May 29 - Space and Time just dissolved. I just got back from jogging and on a whim, I went into my closet and inhaled the shirt you left your scent on and an image of you swept into my mind for an instant along with the words, "image is reality." I liked the way that "image is reality" sounded as a phrase, but also as a concept because it is something that I think about from time to time. The first time it occurred to me is when I was walking on a hill in Donggak, an area in Seoul where I taught, and I saw these children playing and for some reason I flashed back to a scene from my own childhood.

There was some sort of strange connection beyond the physical between the children's experience in the present and my own experience in the past. I don't like to think of it as a detached relationship, but as two amorphous substances rubbing against one another and perhaps fusing for an instant. I just got it from your scent - for a split-second, the experience of your smell in the present fused with some transcendent image of you from the past. It was just so vivid, bespeckled in vibrant colors of red and green and orange. It was like watching a multi-colored wave wash over a bland sandy shore for a moment and then quickly recede. Not to get too romantic, but I think there is something to this phenomenon.

(Two seconds later) Woah - to make matters stranger - the second I sent this to you, I received a message from you. Say, you didn't just have a flash of me two minutes ago? That would explain the simultaneous messages and also explain telepathy.

May 28 - I'm struggling to decide whether I should just let it all hang loose and write every little detail of my life on this site, or stick to being fairly neutral. I mean, on the one hand, I would have to be stupid to write my secrets on this page for the entire world to see. On the other hand, this journal is boring even me, and I'm the one who it's about! It's not even a journal, I don't know what the hell it is.
Maybe I'll say throw a disclaimer out - that - oops - pizza is here, I'll finish later.

May 21 - I made short film with content that I gathered during Earth Festival 2002 right here in Balboa Park. I've got another short in the works that could take several weeks. I've contacted the San Diego based band, Ilya, about using one of their songs for the video.
I saw Ilya play at the Casbah several weeks ago and I was absolutely struck by how innovative and hauntingly beautiful their sound is. I would advise you to download several of their tracks here, and if you can, try to see them in concert. Furthermore, you can read a review of them from SLAMM magazine here.

May 13 - I've started work on incorporating Miguk into this site. The film is intended to be shown in one shot, but due to technical constraints, I've had to split it up into different chapters.

I really put a lot of my soul into these so I hope you all enjoy. This is really the first thing I've created which I'm truly proud of and which I think somehow whispers something bigger. Miguk has given me a foundation upon which I'm thinking about creating more short films that somehow incorporate aspects of music, poetry, and of course the visual medium. It is interesting because part of the reason for this format is the technological confines that I have had to work with, but somehow in the midst of existing in leeway, I think I've found something that I can become attached to.

May 10 - I saw Waking Life last night and it completely blew me away. There was something organic about the film, which was a refreshing break from the endless stream of manufactured vomit that comes out of Hollywood on a daily basis.

The film director Luis Bunuel once spoke of a disturbing trend that he had observed in cinema, in which film audiences would enter a zombie-like trance state during a film and become passive entities. Waking Life departs from this phenomenon and enters into a territory in which the audience must constantly focus and re-focus its gaze in order to follow the stream of thought on the screen.

Linklater (the film's director) somehow manages to pull of the seemingly impossible feat of creating a feature-length film that is an amalgamation of various theories and philosophies on the subject of the human condition. There is a slight whisper of narrative structure in the film, but it is more of a secondary device than anything else. Like the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the soul of the film emanates through as something beyond the sum of its individual parts. That something is a comprehension of the vastness of the universe, but not in a manner that might lead one to dwell on his or her lack of presence, rather, it is a comprehension of some unspeakable binding-force that connects us as phenomenon and subsequently legitimizes our existence as human beings.