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...