administrative stuff first. as usual, i’m calling out for both gigs and contributors to the site. i’d love to book a show whereever you are. ’specially if you’re at a place i’ve never been. and secondly, i’ve love to have more writers here. i’m adding another friend of mine to the blogroll, going by the pseudonym harleyquinn. she’s lived on the west coast, lived in the best coast, was raised in a place with no coasts but lots of cows, seen the world. she’s as bitter as i am, as romantic as a nightingale singing in flight and has the right combination of mania and fatalistic humour that always seems to resonate with me. i’ll be pressuring her and sheeptang to post more to make up for my short comings. please continue to remember contributing to asian women. and if anyone wants to send me penpal notes like some of you have done, then please feel free to do so. i don’t know how long it’ll take me to reply, but i will.

i’ve had some really amazing pen pals in my time who’ve managed to teach me more about myself and about human nature than i could believe possible. it’s always nice to add more, ’specially since i’ve gone through… drama with some and fallen off with others. at any rate, all the pen pals i’ve had and kept in contact with have always been dope, beautiful souls and great writers. it’s nice to vibe, without the exigencies of the body to mediate text and meaning. it removes tensions and adds layers of meaning. or maybe removes layers of confusions and misunderstandings, thereby allowing us to come closer to the truth of ourselves.

fair warning, this is hella emo post. hell, i buzzed off my mohawk and have a monk’s fuzz. you know it’s bad when i shave my head.

so i haven’t posted in what for me is a long while… firstly this is because it’s a hectic time for me, as it is for pretty much every other student in the united states. secondly, it’s because my laptop keyboard is hella broke, which, because i do most of my writing at home, has slowed down my creative output pretty badly.

finally… it’s because i’ve been going through rough bit.

it’s a cliché, but then, like bukowski says (in now,ezra,), we always write in cliches, say the same things when we’re trying to touch the divine. mainly because there is no divine, there is only the human, those bits of ourselves, dark, light, in between, that we all share. and it’s the lucky writers who manage to speak to those universals, those shared spaces in a way that’s just the tiniest bit different, has that much more nuance to the entire thing. so as i come to reexamine cliché, i find myself not as afraid to use it. they become cliches for a reason after all, we do all understand what we’re talking about when we’re using certain phrases… they have all the familiarity of your home’s bathroom door, that you somehow manage to navigate yourself to even through the dark, as familiar as the crutches a man uses when he’s discovered that which carries him has atrophied and all he has left are his crutches, as familiar as reaching for a long time lover in the half-sleep that comes in the wake of night terrors.

misfortunes always come together like hurricanes, the confluence of fate-winds that meet almost perfectly together to somehow form torrential downpours and gusts that scour the soul. it’s never a single piece of bad luck, one stubbed toe that breaks down the human creature, we’re too resilient for that. it’s the combination of misfortune, that addition of burden that is never additive, but always exponential. (yes, the kid who almost failed the sped math class just made a math metaphor. epic win bitches)

so mischances and mishaps have left me here, all torn asunder, like a florida town after a particularly horrific season. the windows of my life battered and cracked, the detritus of my everyday scattered and strewn. with the odd quiet, that sleepiness in the air that only comes after catastrophe has hit, the misery of hopefulness, of having to rebuild, no matter that you know that you should, that you can. the fear that it will all be futile.

but then again, it is seasonal. i go through my moods. and i call them that to hark on some form of artistic pretension, to touch that part of you, the reader, that has accepted unto the point of cliché, the artist and his moods, his sensitivities. that is not to say that i’m not a sensitive dude, i am. i can be as touchy feely as the next, and i have my passions, that come with all the force that i apply to any portion of life i care about.

but it’s more than that, it always has been. i’ve pulled a hikikomori these past few days, locking myself in my room and leaving only to eat. or to drink. only able to function once i’ve managed to fill myself with enough uppers that to not leave my apartment would be even more maddening than what already inhabits me.

les face it, my moods are not just moods, passing fancies. they’re the moments that have such a powerful confluence of painful shocks and grinding burdens that the storm proofing that i’ve done all my life is not enough. the boards over the windows that i’ve constructed out of the flimsy resilience of duty and of lasting fancy are torn, and the the full brunt of tidal waters floods in, to take away that which i’ve sequestered, locked inside of myself and cherished. and the blasts drag my past up like malignant zephyrs, to hail them once again on the battered sidings that my father put there with his own hands. the careful arrangement of my mother’s garden within myself, torn all asunder. the photos and snatches of workworn prophecy and poetry that i’ve stolen, cribbed and cherished from each and everyone of you, tainted by devastation that only comes when one has given up plugging the holes in the walls, consigns what one has built to the maelstrom and hides oneself in the basement.

yeah. sorry, i’ve been emo recently. and emo to say that words have power, and if one is able to call a tiger a kitty kat for long enough, maybe one will come to believe it, and the fear of it is no longer so frightening.

i’m a depressive. i admit that.

but as my father reminds me, as i beg him to, i also have duty. it’s what i am. so fundamental to the core of my being that i could not imagine myself without an understanding of duty.

i’ve been fixated on salt recently. not on salt in and of itself, but being worth my salt. roman legionnaires were once paid with it, because it really is essential to life… and if you took that from another man, you were expected to be loyal, to do your duty. hence, “being worth your salt.”

ain’t no man ever gon’ say i ain’t worth my salt, ain’t know my duty.

life is the art of the possible, and the denial of reality.

btw, this is going to be a long asssssed post, covering a wide arrange of topics. so be forewarned. to a large extent, i’m blogging so profusely because it’s helping me to explore myself in a way that i haven’t been able to for awhile. i have been writing poetry, but in a lot of ways, i haven’t been able to say much new. i haven’t been progressing as much or as quickly as i want to be. i’m hoping that by blogging, i can push open the artistic barriers within myself.

“i’ve written pages upon pages, trying to rid you from my bones”

it’s weird to see someone you once loved, deeply and powerfully, but no longer do now, for whatever reason. especially when there was also negative emotions enough to match the positive ones. which is not to say that love is inherently positive.

i saw my ex today for the first time in awhile. or i should say, for more than second, more than a flash and a glimpse. i gave her a grin or a half-hearted smile, i’m not sure which.

there’s so much emotional weight, so much baggage to even an image of a person who had that type of place in your life. it’s hard to reconcile it with the realities that we deal with in the everyday, when, some part of us remembers that link between people.

soldiers who have lost limbs say that they sometimes feel those missing pieces of themselves, as phantom sensation or the pain of something that isn’t there but should be. i guess seeing someone you once cared about touches that old wound, reminds you of a bond that was once there. and on some level, no matter how “ever tortured” you are, some part of you can’t help but want that back.

these moments are life’s kicks in the balls. the awkwardness, the shock. the oh shit factor of it all. the freezing up and the wondering what the hell to do. and then the pain afterwards, the inevitable ache of a missing limb.

no wonder i’m epic fail at relationships.

but hey, like they said in dedication, no woman loves the truly fucked up guys. so i guess it’s time to make an effort to fix myself. or to find myself a shy illustrator somewhere who is just as damaged as i am. someone who needs to be needed.

which actually brings me to the first of my love poems to an asian women. yes, i know that’s not grammatically correct. it was done on purpose. i’m artsy like that. or a moron, either way.

—————————————————————————————
#1

insomnia
her constant companion
now, in the days after

when she has reconciled
or she tells herself over
and over, again

her body
remembers too well
the missing comfort
of squeezing into sparse space
between arms splayed

being needed.

she slept earlier, then
as if holding together
tenuous miscommunications
enough to tire the heart out
the effort at trust

she wishes him well, she prays
in half sleep, everything
he needed, she didn’t have
her feelings, she examines, paws over
touch till they lose their cutting sharpness
the angles worn, memories fade
dulls the ache, cools
the phantom warmth
lingering

stiffness of dried tears, regrets
maybe even the resentment
like fleeting city air
through the the gap of her window
begging to be filled.

now she waits, till
the sun creeps its fingers
to her windowsill
before she will climb
the few feet, insurmountable
to her bed.
———————————————————

“your pain was my pleasure, your sorrow my joy, i’m afraid i’ve lost you now to pain and good cheer”

one of the most interesting things i’ve gotten out working on this series is the fact that my socialization has made it so that i look at the same emotions much differently than some of the women that have written in to me. it’s actually kind of dope to examine these feelings in a different light.

consider an emotion as a many sided object, a rubix cube of sorts. i’ve only seen one side of it, seeing it from another side brings out a completely revolutionary experience. it’s full of epic win.

BUT i need more, many many more. SO PLEASE SUBMIT MORE EXPERIENCES TO ME.

more poems in the series are forthcoming, i promise.

“i’m more than a handful you’ll see, so kiss me, i’m shitfaced

so. the nyu protests were all over the news and all across the blogosphere.

i was actually there. me being me, i was at the bar before hand, but wanted to come out there, like many folks, to see the drama. and maybe get some free quesadillas.

let’s face it, i’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life for the sake of free entertainment. dating women, going to events posted on the internet, antagonizing people, going to nightclubs. a lot of random experiences and events that have become a large piece of who and what i am. so why not right?

but as luck would have it, i actually ended up hooking up with a crew of street medics and spent my night watching their backs, making sure they had space to work and no one fucked with ‘em. not protester, not counter protester, not bystander.

it would figure that when there were three distinct sides and a shitload of bystanders, i’d have to take up a fourth side, one likely to get my ass into a fight, with no back up in sight. after having left a bar no less.

but all in all, it was a great experience, the street medics were great folks.

on to a discussion of the larger implications of the take back nyu action though. let’s face it, it was a failure. there were hella mistakes made. many blogs have already discussed the various problems with the whole thing.

what i just wanted to briefly talk about was the dopeness of the democratic spirit in action. not just in the protesters themselves, who i thought were a little crazy even if goodhearted, but the counter protesters and the folks just screaming out random shit. democracy is not just about the idiots agreeing with you, it’s about screaming at the idiots who disagree with you as well. it’s the discussion that grows out of diametrically opposed theses. it’s the creation of discursive space. and let’s face it, clashing signs saying things like, “we support tbnyu” and “you suck” and “we want quesadillas” are, to me anyways, a sign of democracy in action.

the ability for those three sides to exist in one space is probably the only positive thing i see coming from the entire fiasco. i actually managed to see people who didn’t agree with each other having semi-rational and fair minded conversations about their politics. that’s dope as hell.

of course, there were hella scuffles. but fuck that shit. the voices battling each other, singing freedom songs against oppositional chants, smells like democracy to me.

i do wish there was a little more entertainment and it wasn’t so fucking cold. but hey. ain’t nothing perfect, i should know that better than most.

“can’t make it alone, i built my dreams around you”

i think i’ll be posting nyc moments from now on, just the things i see day to day that warms my heart and reminds me that i live in the greatest city in the world. new yorkisms. moments that are quintessentially urban, and contribute to the mystique that new york has and always had in my mind. will always have most likely.

today, i saw a father playing football with his son on the sidewalk. all i could think of was that it was such a new york minute, to be playing on the side walk, as people walked by. there’s not that much space, so waddya expect?

i love reading new york’s missed connections on craigslist. there’s so much loneliness, yet hope there, that i become addicted to it. the image of a shot in the dark, a chance at love, the ultimate message in a bottle appeals to the hopeless, broken hearted romantic in me.

the sheer variety in them, everything from hipsters and indie scenesters narcissistic enough to realize that folks who are just like them have a bloody good chance of browsing missed connections, because hey they do it too. forreal forreal, the sheer amount of stuff that comes from the L makes me laugh hella hard. i’m really tempted to do ride the L one of these days, dressed hipstered out, smile tentatively at some girl on the train, write furiously in my tiny notebook and get off at the next stop. i figure that’d earn me a missed connection. yes, i just stole that from xkcd. but hey.

old people making a last ditch effort, the last arrow before their quivers are depleted.

folks cussing folks out anonymously. full of teh lulz.

all sorts on missed connections, and every one of them entertaining. so addicting. now i miss get back to it, in the forlorn hope that i’ll get my own. come on, how many mohawked asian boys are there in this city?

actually that kind of reminds me. i have this crazy thing about love and crushes. let’s face it, i’m obsessed with the concept of love, probably more so than most men. i’m not very good at it, i epic fail at relationships. i’m too much of a fuckup, and i admit it.

sooner or later, i’ll get my shit together on it. but for now, i enjoy it.

i like having crushes. they’re fun. even if they usually lead to nowhere. and even when they do, i usually end up getting bored and restless. i guess the unattainable is so much more fun than the real. i like having this image in my head of an attractive woman in my head, attractive for whatever reason and having the hope that she might be the one. whatever that means.

but it’s all so conceptual. i guess that’s the way it is with me and love and relationships. i’m good at thinking about it, dealing with it on a flirtatious level, but i epic fail at maintaining it. im better at writing about it then actually going through with it. i always say i want a relationship, i want what i see that other people have. those folks who are pretty much married make me jealous. but if i can’t get my shit together on the fact, is it fair for me to pursue something like that? especially for the girl?

i guess that’s love and relationships in the city.

or maybe i’m just immature.

“i’m lucky to have been what i have been, lucky to be coming home again”

more than that, i wanta tell all of you that the chapbook is back on. in lock step with the children’s book i’m working on. i am inundated with work of all sorts these days, but i NEED to get this ish done for the sake of my sanity. especially since i haven’t gotten a chance to go to jits nearly as much i want to. it’s full of epic fail.

my webguy, i36, will be revamping my page a little bit, updating it to make it more efficient, easier to use and spoofier. i’m eventually hoping to get a gallery together where i can post pictures that i take with yall. you’ll notice that the blog is the first page you see when you get to vinh-hua.com, which is the first of the changes.

i will also be bringing more people onto the blog team. while this is my personal website, considering how much i ruminate and touch on all sorts of artistic and philosophical topics, i figured it’d be appropriate for me to bring more people in. and i think the cross pollination of ideas would be good for all of our creativities.

i’ll be announcing acquisitions to the team soon. if you’re interested in joining the team, hit me up.

life is a woman, you should be able to love her with or without her makeup.