Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, Every morning when walking Sumi I'd cross path with a neighbor from a couple of blocks away, an old lady with her little deaf-blind dog, a touchpoint we'd tacitly acknowledge from a distance away, sometimes with a nod that we weren't even sure if meant for each other, sometimes an exchange of a subdued grin, the only animated element in a familiar mise en scène, sometimes a studied opening up of wider berth between us to allow sustainable interaction. We dance around and apart for the truth, a truth that our loved ones can't handle. Sumi is ok as long as I keep up my diligence in self-censorship and maintain a space and subtlety that evinces my effort; her dog is fine insofar her deaf-blindness can remain so.  One calls this the working out of "Small Dog Syndrome."  Which is not to say it is not a human problem. I'd love to believe I am an OK dad.  I'd love to say all-natural peanut butter and a touch of triple-berry sweetness b...

Dear Eugene, "Very soon you will find you don't make choices but choices make you," I texted my daughter last night. I hate myself talking this way, preaching, and not a very original sermon.  I am sure I stole the line from someone else; call it parental (re)appropriation. But that's what parents do, don't they?  They expose themselves to the hazard of glib dismissal, disdainful glance, self-disgust, the quickest and most disgraceful free fall from youthful care-less idealism to decrepit care-full disenchantment.  They can smell just as good the skunk on their back that everyone else in the room is pinching the nose for. We have ourselves a functioning nasal system too, you know. Last night I watched a movie, one that I expected myself to like--like, really like--but was disappointed.  I won't give you the name, don't want to spoil it for you.  Most people like--like, really like--it.  I will only bring up one point to say what I want to sa...

Dear Eugene, "Well, the morning speaks for itself..." The conclusion that concludes nothing came to me first thing in the morning, and now I am working  backward to trace my steps in dream(s). (Last night in my dream I was surprised/confused by a restaurant owner who laid big platters of free food on my table, so many that finally other paying clients would come to take a share.  Then the restaurant had a power outage.  Then it turned into a story about jealousy.  Someone please get me Daniel.) The true meaning of the statement is: My morning speaks about my life . I woke up with sore limbs.  Hours of lawn work last evening.  " I ache in the places where I used to play.. ."   Every time Cohen got to this line in a concert, the audience would find fulfillment in turning their anticipatory smutty smirks to a collective bawdy roar, angels shot down to meet us at our place, desecration that points us to the sacred, classic Cohen modus ope...

Dear Eugene, What a brilliant morning, happening in the here and now, as brilliant as I have ever taken any in. I meant to question with the last statement if the brilliance is in what's happening out there or how I absorb this morning and make it so in the sanctuary of my heart. No one should philosophize on a Monday morning.  But I do know my kids had problem waking up so whatever that was out there had no chance to break in.  The breeze they'll feel on their face walking to school won't be the same that blessed me. That is if there is still any breeze at all. I believe in the Kingdom come Then all the colors will bleed into one Bleed into one But yes, I'm still running You broke the bonds and you loosened chains carried the cross of my shame, of my shame You know I believe it But I still haven't found What I'm looking for I remember U2 doing one of their signature songs "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking for" ...

Dear Eugene, This morning, still easy like last night's breeze, I feel priggish, like a scholar wanting to organize his stuffs in point form lest people miss the luster in the gold nuggets he has to offer. There was a time in my life when all I do is to show off my nuggets of truth, put them under the sun at a perfectly strategic angle to let out their unhinged glory, make them glow in a way to take shine off others' nuggets, to blind the world once and for all. " Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends ," Jesus told his disciples, those who claim to follow him and his way, to do things the way he does, who claimed to trust, to "have faith" in what the Father was and still is doing through him the Son. I say  I would die for truth... Jesus answers  I am the Truth and you have no need to die so that I can shine.  I shine all by myself.  I am not asking you to die for an ideology, a set of high moral, good doctr...

Dear Eugene, It's a soft Friday night.  Everything feels so right. Or so I feel. So I feel that the world is in the right with me.  Right in my book.  Suits my flow.  In my humble opinion. What if nothing is going right in a different person's life?  Would that make my right not right? I happen to know a lady who is, as I am typing away now feeling the spring night breeze on my left cheek thanks to a sliding door opening to my backyard balcony with a window screen in between winnowing out unwanted elements in the air, working the closing shift in a big-box store, making one-third of what I make, toiling three times as hard as I ever did, three hundred miles wide a gulf between us in our assessment of how right everything is this very evening, three lifetimes of difference in our access to education and resources, ingress to culture and community, entitlement to love and care. I wonder if what is alright with me tonight works for her too. My wife...

Dear Eugene, I read somewhere in the news now that Meghan Markle has the hoopla of the royal wedding behind her she can finally focus on doing feminism again.  I take that to mean she can now devote herself to saving women from men, from the ways of the world, or frankly just from themselves. I don't know her and even less about feminism.  If I do there should be an exponential reduction in my cynicism in relation to my knowing. One thing I do know though: If there really is something called feminism, whoever that is a real fighter for it is a nameless face that we shall never find on the front page, a face that is most likely haggard and ugly, one that no respectable cause would want to enlist as its advocate cover girl and neither would she allow a simple -ism  to circumscribe her call, her vocation, her very life. To say my life is now settled into a certain favorable, congenial pattern conducive to my activism is to say I am a lost cause to all causes alrea...

Dear Eugene, Last night a perennial question in the literary world was settled: Whether Philip Roth will ever win the Nobel. That needs not be asked any more; Roth passed away last night . I have a feeling he would have chosen to hold on if not for the Nobel being cancelled this year .  (They don't give the Prize to a dead man.  How thoughtful.)  But to wait till next fall to be disappointed all over again?  Nah, f*** it.   His words. Yes, the time that Roth could have won the Nobel has come but passed him by and there is no second round.  He knows.  He writes about that's how life is.  He whines.  Like a baby.  But he must admit it's the most fitting punchline to his sick joke of a life. I was saddened when I heard the news this morning, though I've expected it long time coming.  He's always been writing about sickness and dying anyway.  Like, dead already, dude.   I can hear him laugh. I feel like writing tw...

Dear Eugene, I was walking into a mall with my wife and in-laws. Someone's playing rough , I thought, from what I heard. Two young East Indian men were wrestling another young man, forcing him against the large surface of a supporting structure.  It looked violent but it really sounded like frolicking. I thought I heard giggling until I saw the man against the wall had only one skate-shoe on, his other shoe not too far from where he tried to stay standing, three feet away from a skateboard obviously his, two twisted "Mr. Big" candy bars foregrounded the commotion, off-creen from the left entered a voice ill-at-ease to put ease in all bystanders:  I got it, I got it.... An older man, apparently a retail store manager, finally got it altogether. With a pair of handcuffs. Where do you get a pair of handcuffs, just like that?  I muttered to who knows whom.  Was it on him all the time?  In a drawer where he'll open to pull it out at a rude moment's...

Dear Eugene, When you walk around aimlessly, just to get rest, to have no particular purpose in mind, you are free to ask question that you are afraid to ask and have been avoiding such aimless walk just to evade asking. Well, there it is, your life, things you've left behind with every step forward, things you walk towards, make them present only to right away see them past .  You've picked up a lot and left behind just as much; you have so much to look forward to but nothing much to die for let alone live for.  We are a walking statement of our life, speaking to the world what we believe to be true or else why would we keep walking this way? We say to ourselves, Well, this is it.  You have an uncertain handful of years to make a point.  So what is your point?  What da heck are you trying to say here?  Now stop evading and just spit it out, be honest for once and say it loud and proud: What. Is. Your. Point? That I've grabbed life by the horns...

Dear Eugene, Yesterday I talked about sex and violence and the Bible and just left it at that.  I intended good shock value, but I suppose I didn't get even an obliging scoff out of you, my dear seasoned pastor? There is this very ambitious recent movie , in it there is this very thoughtful passage of dialogue: K: How can you tell the difference? Can you tell if something really happened? Dr. Ana Stelline: They all think it’s about more detail. But that’s not how memory works. We recall with our feelings. Anything real should be a mess. Anything real should be a mess when we recall it.  Do you believe that? I love reading the Tanakh, or what Christians call the Old Testament, but that is not always the case. Growing up in church I found the Old Testament stories grew older, triter, and staler with every retelling.  To a sterilized mind the number of stories suitable for kids cannot be more than what my fingers can count anyway; not even a Dickens can kee...

Dear Eugene, I walked with Sumi just now, going our usual route.  Around my neighborhood. Door after door, my neighbors behind them.  I know many faces, but I hardly know anyone.  One can get used to the remoteness, the indifference, and forget it is a disease. One time I was talking to a lady--she said she is old but I think she can take me down in the ring--and she had her finger going down each door from where she stood, going, "Well, she's dead ...and there used to be a couple but the man's gone; I dunno about the lady, haven't heard from her...and the next door, well she's dead ...and next to her, well, dead too..." She's among the first generation moving into this neighborhood. Yesterday talking to a friend I recalled what Arthur Eddington once said, "We often think that when we have completed our study on one, we know all about two, because two is one and one . We forget that we have still to make a study of and ." It is a...

Dear Eugene, If you can pick a season to experience a life-changing tragedy (that you must face by the end of the year), what would your choice be? Hopeful spring?  Youthful summer?  Dreamy autumn?  Cosy winter? Around Valentine's?  Just before/after Christmas?  Back to school week?  Tax season?  Mother's Day? Don't worry, I have nothing heavy or profound to say today; it only sounds like so.  In fact, I think the weight of this question (which I personally have not heard asked) is in how matter-of-fact it all is when tragedy strikes. It just happens; what are you going to do about it? Not that you have not heard of something like this happening before.  Not that anyone has pledged to make you the exception.  Not that the possibility never crossed your mind.  It kind of just happens, like in the final scene of " The Departed ," which in the script reads: COLIN (accepting it, sort of,but only in a COLIN way) ...

Dear Eugene, I find artificial turf a very disturbing idea, one of the more unsightly anti-creation project of man.  (Wow, where does that rancor come from on a pleasant Friday morning such as now?) I don't mean a ball field.  I can see the function (though still have great reservation about the rude juxtaposition of human's spirited playing upon a blanket nonchalant to the baptism in blood sweat and tears.) I am talking about artificial turf for a home, what a person does to her "home turf." It is one thing to make things neat.  There is nothing more pleasant to my sight than the uniformity displayed on freshly mowed lawn, especially mine.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and my eyes were opened by sparkling fairies (with beautiful names like Endorphins, Adrenaline, Dopamine and Serotonin--bless the poets) descending, honoring me for my good hard work. Still, uniformity is not forced conformity. I am aware of--have nightmare of damaging my lawn ...

Dear Eugene, I was playing in my garden last night, giving all the hedges around my house bad haircut.  If they are teenagers they'd swear to never talk to me again. I don't mind, cos people talk to me when I am out in my garden. Old folks.  Older folks.  Some I have seen before working on their own garden, others in their eyes I saw them looking at me seeing themselves once working on their own garden.  Sometimes they'd stop to talk, if our eyes met, if the beast in my hands wasn't roaring.  More often though they would just give me a big, approving grin, telling me, among many other things, to not take things for granted. Even my toil. I've finally got a chance to talk to the wife of my neighbor, the auto mechanic who suffered a big stroke .  She was walking her pit bull.  I've learned more about him in this 15-minutes conversation with his wife than with all the conversations I had with him over the years added together then times by tw...

Dear Eugene, You might think I don't like going to the mall but I do.  And if I am to ask you to take a wild guess what I like to look at I bet you can't get it right :) Books, of course, that's easy.  No.  I am talking about something other than books. I like to look at toys, play with them. Last night I dropped off my daughter at church and got a couple of hours to burn.  Library first, no doubt.  Then I went to the toys. I saw an anime cat figurine that can sing three different raps songs at the push back of her hip-hop flat cap and of course I pushed it three successive times to release the full-length magic.  A father with his carbon-copy toddler laughed and I think they finally found what they were looking for right in my hands.  I should get a cut of the profit. The mall is a colorful place, isn't it?  Contrary to our cynical self-denial (not that it happens too often), there's happiness to be found among the colors. In his...

Dear Eugene, "You live with your parents, you hang with your buddies, and on Saturday nights you burn it all off at 2001 Odyssey. You're a cliché. You're nowhere, goin' no place!'' The "nice girl" tells the John Travolta character in " Saturday Night Fever ," an almost angelic, "dream girl" that is anything but cliché in the eyes of the boy.  And apparently that's also how she sees herself. When we live according to the world's prescription we are a cliché.  When we believe in the world telling us we are not a cliché we are a bigger a cliché.  As we grow older the burning sensation of such tragic irony subsides and we make peace to live and die with the contradiction.  There is no more need to single out who is what when the world is just the way it is and we'll forever be the way we are.  It is called acceptance, compromise, maturity. Learned helplessness. To not want to a live like a cliché is a testimony to...

Dear Eugene, Yesterday I took a long bus ride, a Sabbath route new to me, to rest in the familiar bosom of Jesus. I ended up at the edge of water. The weather was good, everybody came out to play.  There was only one narrow street going along the seaside, on it a congested parade of beautiful people stuck in their beautiful cars going nowhere.  Apparently they still looked happy to have arrived, even before setting foot on the promised land. I went there to be alone and was not disappointed.  When you are on the beach no one bothers you, especially when you are looking down.  I try to pick one pebble to take home every time I go to a beach, a special enough chosen one. There was a time when my son was really into rocks and minerals.  A visit to our local gems store was a real treat then.  He chose a field guide on the topic from an independent book store not too far from where I was yesterday not too many years ago and I remember it was $12...

Dear Eugene, I think there's always some sort of benediction at the end of a worship service, sometimes a formal liturgy, sometimes a praying together; there is always a goodwill send-off. "Be Blessed and Go Bless," if there is a slogan for it. And I suppose a certain power is also expected to come out of these words and acts of blessedness. Yet most of the times there simply wasn't any.  (In fact sometimes we wish the preacher would shut up already and "let it go.") I suppose the reason for such lack of power could be me the beneficiary, or it could be the benefactor, or God just willed it that way that no energy was transmitted and no "benefit" created or exchanged. We could go into deep theology but I just want to step back and ask one question: If there truly is a state of blessedness to pass around, would it be conveyed only in the final declaration to send people off with a good send-off, or would it have already manifested itse...

Dear Eugene, This is going to be long; sorry.  I worked it out in my head just now while fixing my backyard.  Suffering helps. This morning I looked out my kitchen window and found big patches of my lawn being opened up like crude drug-store novels, folded and curled. Raccoon(s).  Skunk(s).  It was artfully done, I must say.  I dutifully spent an hour to remove and reinstall my stratagem of garden nets (which they outwitted), closing up all the scattered books, which, upon closer examination, looked more like failed open-heart surgeries. Mud splattered all over my legs. I tried not to swear (and failed).  What a bloody mess. And this was after being followed by a most pitiful looking coyote earlier and ran home holding Sumi in my arms.  I think I've used up my weekly allotment of heartbeat in one morning; now I am going to talk about science after giving you this likely unscientific claim. Doing science certainly cannot be about getting facts s...

Dear Eugene, "[Jesus'] disciples said, “What are you talking about? With this crowd pushing and jostling you, you’re asking, ‘Who touched me?’ Dozens have touched you!” Possibly the funniest line in the whole Bible, from definitely one of the best short stories I've ever read any where.  If Alice Munro is asked to hand over her Nobel Literature Prize for this piece of " Markan Sandwich ," I think she well might take the bite. Mark's storytelling is savagely succinct, to-the-point; yet every next line opens up a new human universe, with big enough off-screen space to give account to a cosmic tragedy but told like a sit-com.  You could almost hear the rimshot and laugh track right after the zinger. If I am to re-imagine the scene and have the stage-light go off at the right moment, all the characters freeze their action, leaving only a spotlight on the disciple, I can hear his soliloquy going something like this: Who touched you?  Are you serious...

Dear Eugene, Last night I was reading science.  I've been doing quite a bit of that lately. My son asked me, "Dad, is that, like, science science that you are reading?" I knew what he meant.  As compared to "Christian" science.  Sunday-School science.  Young-Earth science.  Noah's-Ark science.  Jonah-in-a-whale science. "Oh, no worries, this is real science," I told him.  "I've already worked through that whale thing you are talking about before you were a sperm." Much of "Christian" science gives Jesus a very fishy name.  And whales are not fish, even a kindergartener knows. Anyway, this is not the can of sardines I am opening today. Science is fascinating, isn't it? But do you know what is just as fascinating?  That I would call science fascinating, as if it is a person, a beautiful, intelligent woman, a visionary man.  Who am I to put such value on... her ? When I was reading science, a questio...