The End of the World is Lasting Forever

These baby blue, cinnamon apple red and lemon colored candles that I keep around me are burning out. I go to pick up the bright yellow-colored one, the one with a butterfly shaped into the wax, but it hides sparkles in my palm. Now I have sparkles all over my face. My mom laughed, but the ones in my hair will probably be there forever.

My keyboard is sparkling.

Speaking of home, it's my last night here, and then off for a few more weeks. Time in a real bed has been something of an ironic twist. I sleep on a twin, circa middle school, sitting on a classic wooden frame from a garage sale re-finished in a garage to look like kiddie beds from the movies, covered with flowery sheets from the 80's (in China). I wake up every morning with a sore back. My body is more used to sleeping bags on carpet and lightly cushioned gray upholstery. Not for long though. Two more weeks and I'll have to get acquainted with this bed again, and to my last quarter here.

Everyone has those moments when they look back and wish they could have done more in the time they had. The difference for me is that I set the time limit. Maybe I'll cheat and set my deadline back a little longer. Two weeks into winter, maybe three or four, and by then I will definitely be done with 'social projects.' Until then, I still have to couch-surf a week with strangers, spend more time at the beach, and sleep with the top down once. I'll miss the candles.

Speaking of candles, there's a big difference between ending something and just having something die out. I have a friend who will never bow out a candle once he's lit it. The wax will settle in weird ways, and when you come back to light it later you just get weird light. In Buddhism, blowing out a candle is often related to achieving Nirvana. Everyone is surrounded by an overwhelming light of feeling, pain, 'being,' but you can make this light smaller, into the light from a candle, so small that you have no possessions, no family and no attachments, and then extinguish even this. Suffer no more. I am of the crowd that does not like to blow out candles. It all seems more poetic to cap it, cut off the air, and watch the light fade.

Harrrrrt

For all his exploits, explorations, exhortations, and other such extremely exaggerated events of swashbucklery (exacting revenge and the like, you know), the pirate came back to the same room year after year.

This particular room was special for a couple of reasons. First of all, no one, no matter how hard they looked, could ever find it. It was hidden inside a house, that was built along a street of identical-looking houses. Ten houses on the left that differed only in the shade of brown paint used on the walls, twenty more on the right with a slightly unique lawn gnome as the only indicator that you were anywhere different than you had been eight houses back. And when someone did chance upon the right house, the pirate's house (which never happened), they couldn't find a way in, because they didn't have a key. Now this may seem silly to some of you, but for a pirate a key is a pretty precious thing that doesn't come along all the time. A lot of pirates out there don't have a single key to show off to their friends.

Perhaps the reason the pirate kept coming back, though, was that this room never, ever, ever changed. The pictures on the wall had been there for ages. They told a story; a portrait of a pirate as a young man. When the pirate came into this room, this eternal room, he stepped into a simpler time, where a feller didn't have to worry about bad wenches and sea monsters and scurvy. It was so simple, that sometimes this pirate would just sit in this room, from morning until nighttime. Then, when it was dark, the pirate would take off his hat, then his boots, then his breeches and overcoat and unbuckle his sword and take off his rings and jangly bracelets and just disappear.

Perhaps You Should Sit Down Before You Read This

9 weeks into this, and the 'project' is still the biggest secret I keep from many of my friends. I decided from the beginning that it would be a 'need-to-know' basis, which meant either I could sleep at your place or I could keep stuff at your place. Since then I've revealed to a lot to people where there was no benefit, and shied away from it when someone truly could have helped me out. Every now and then someone overhears something, finds out that way, and everything turns into a sitcom for about five minutes. Neither of my roommates from last year have any idea. Maybe half the people I work with have heard from one source or another. Most importantly, my parents have no clue and I intend to keep it that way. I don't tell most people I meet, and when I'm pressed, I lie about it. So, here I come clean.

"I live on Veteran. Near Strathmore."
Well, actually... the graveyard side of Veteran is the best place to hunker down for the night because no one walks on that side of the street. So I "live" there as many nights as I can find a spot. The vague area around Veteran and Strathmore is also where Jack lives, and this has become a second home for me.

"I get a nice view of Westwood from my place too."
From any angle you could possibly imagine.

"I don't cook much anymore. No time."
No kitchen.

"I'm more of a morning person myself."
The sun is up by 7. On hot days it takes a good two hours before you can start to cook something in that sun. I'm up around 8.

(To the boss, interviewer, or judge) "Traffic wasn't bad this morning."
I slept in your parking lot last night so I wouldn't have to 'drive here' this morning.

"I'm going to bed, goodnight."
I've slept on a bed once this quarter. It was the night I spent in the hospital.

"Yeah you should come over sometime."
I'll show you around the trunk.

A Question of

I'm sitting in a long, low room that is dark, inside a dark mansion with brown walls located in a place that I can only describe as resembling North Carolina. The bad part of North Carolina. And a third person has just barged noisily into this room.

Alarmed, I stand bolt upright. Someone knocks my chair down. An empty wrapper rolls across the floor, and I stoop to pick it up. A shadow engulfs me on the way down. In the darkness, I vaguely make out beads, tattered silk, and a pale, beautiful face.

Hope twitters into my head, then the sharp prick of a new idea, but the rest of my head is so far away, it won't be here for some time.

Update on Bigfoot

Right foot still large. Supersized. Left foot thankfully still small, plain-Jane dollar thirty-nine regular-sized golden french fries. Can't see veins. Pain still there. Cankle, overwhelmingly cankle. Cankle cankle cankle cankle cankle cankle. Balloon? Hippopotamus. Round, rotund, rolly-polly, racked-up, rear-end biased, re-sized to the extreme, really really really cankle. Cankle!

Fragme

He is not famous. He is not widely known. Most people would not recognize his name, are unaware of his past, are unaware that he exists. They will never see him in US Weekly. Yet he is a public figure. He is a public figure in that everyone in a room knows exactly when he enters and when he leaves. If there was a coffee shop, and Helen Keller was inside drinking a French roast, and this guy walked in, Helen Keller would know. When he dances through the crowds, he looks straight ahead because he can feel the eyes drilling into him from left and right. If you had been with him for any one of these instances, you could see this too, but then you would not see it, because you would be too busy, looking at him.

Alive

I've spent the last several hours alternating between feeling very cold and very hot.

You see, my right foot is infected. The infection began with a cut, a scrape really, that left untreated turned my right foot into a balloon. The infection led to bouts of fever, which explains the shivering and sweating. The fever led to delirium, which I always consider quite enjoyable, but this is besides the point. Pointedly, I have undergone what I would call a mild fatal experience.

There are things you learn when you are this close to death: water is the tastiest substance on Earth, eating is overrated and debilitating pain in the foot can be conquered by laying down. My right foot is so big, my Crocs which are usually a size and a half too big now fit snugly over said foot, and I admit this is kind of a plus. But the most important thing you learn is... love.

This piece just fell flat. I hope my shoes fit tomorrow for my court date.

The Problems of Smell for Derek Liu

The problem with being homeless and being by yourself is that you never truly know how good or bad you smell at any given moment. Sure, you're usually a pretty clean guy, but then again you got your clothes this morning from a suitcase sitting in your trunk next to your shoes and dirty laundry (which sits in another suitcase, which sometimes you intermix). Or maybe you got your clothes yesterday morning, who knows? Then there's your car. I've done all I can to make it smell nice. There's an odor-deleter hanging from the rearview, a bag of pina colada scent under the drivers seat, and two (two!) vanilla scent sticks in the vents. But sometimes I still catch a whiff of something... strange. Is it the car? Is it me? Or is it the car, and by transitive property, me? Maybe I'm lucky and it's just my nappy hair.

Fortunately, no one cares if you smell bad when no one's around. I suppose you might, but you don't smell yourself that often, and honestly smelling bad sometimes is just one of the sacrifices I've come to accept with this lifestyle. I'm just afraid that I'm stinking up everywhere I go and none of my friends are telling me. Because seriously, I'm not sure I would tell my friend that dude smells like rot. That's just rude.

Return Of The King

The Bag King is back!

He's got three this time. Disguised bags, or rather bags in a bag. Somewhere in there, he also has clothes, yet when I see him he's always in the same outfit. Same blue Adidas sweats with dark brown mismatched blazer, draped over his long, wispy shape. When he stands in line he stands a head and a half over the people around him, softly grasping a mangled five dollar bill with both hands. He holds the money out the way a thirsty man cups water from a basin to drink; his skinny elbows make such sharp angles that if he were to suddenly thrust one back, I think he might impale the face of the girl behind him.

When he gets to the counter to order, he briefly lowers the scarf that hides his mouth. I hold my breath- finally!-just as he takes a deep one, then another, then one more deep breath. He has a short, scraggy mustache, very defined cheekbones, and no beak.

He bears a passing resemblance to Dave Chapelle.

It's 11 O'clock. Do You Know Where Your Face Wash is?

The showers in the gym are public. They are partitioned into sets of two, side-by-side, running down a white linoleum hallway. They resemble cells in a cloister. During the day these get a lot of action, as in you're showering next to one guy and across from another guy. And the past few times I've walked out of these showers, I've been forced to leave a little part of me behind.

It pains me to write about these experiences, considering the preciousness and sanctity of what I've lost, the sheer embarrassment was almost enough to silence my voice. But no, I just can't let this dark secret eat away at me anymore.

Those of you who have no stomach for grotesque descriptions will have no problem reading further.

I'm a face wash dropper. I forget face wash.

Just slips my mind. And really, you can't blame me. Here I am drying out, pushing my wet feet through my underwear, navigating through the maze of steaming bodies, all as quickly as I can manage without looking to the left or right. It's hard, but I know it's no excuse. I'm despicable.

And the worst part is, it's happened more than once. This past incident will make three total. Three bright-eyed little face washes, literally left out there to dry. Sometimes at night I can still hear their voices. I can still see their faces, full of innocence and promises of being oil-free.

I can only hope that a gentle, clean-faced stranger will have picked them up and given them a good home. I shudder to imagine them in the hands of some abusive, overly-compulsive face-washer, squeezing the last bits of cream cleanser from their twisted bottles.

Please, if you see a stray bottle of face wash, tell them I'm sorry. And don't tell them about the shiny new bottle of Deep Clean with Sea Salt Rub that I bought today.

On Sleeping at the Beach, Posthumously

Fortunately for me, I woke up far too early that morning. I felt warm with my head underneath my sleeping bag, where I had curled up in a ball the night before. That night I had concealed my shoes underneath my bag, and when I awoke I was relieved to feel the uncomfortable lump protruding through the fabric, near my thigh. No bum had stolen it. Then I remembered I was a bum. My mind wandered to the plastic water bottle I had left near a rock, and hoped it was still there.

There wasn't much time to think though. The rain that had woken me up was still coming down. plat plat plat. My bag would be dry for another ten minutes at most. Or is it at least? At least, that gives me 9 more minutes to sleep. I beat back the idea, wiggled carefully out onto the sand, and turned my face up to the rain. My water bottle was still there.

It was 6am, the clouds were a dark blue of early dawn, and seemed to stretch well into the ocean as two pieces of fluttering paper, upset by the crashing tide. My glasses started to fog, so I took them off. I retrieved my shoes, took my backpack out of my sleeping bag where I had huddled with it the night before, and rolled up the bag. The sand around my bag had been shuffled. I wondered how much of it had already been like that and how much of it was made by me tossing around in the dark. Maybe people were walking around me, over me in the dark, mistaking me for another dead rock. I might've looked like a tombstone.

Maybe I could have stayed longer that morning, and sat down on one of the rocks nearby that didn't give me any shelter. I might've had an epiphany there, sitting in the rain, gradually feeling the wetness seep through my three sweaters. Something would have clicked, and I would have seen through the beach, sand, the waves, I would have seen through it all into something beyond, reality beyond the unreal. The truth of nature. I wish I could say this, but I don't believe it. There's nothing glorious about waking up on a rainy beach, and you have plenty of time to think about how much it might rain the next night as you make your slow, laborious way through the sand.

There was no nightingale, serenading slumber, no doves to herald the dawn. Just rain, falling on a vast graveyard.

The Bag King has a Beak

There is a man who I have seen in the coffee house a great many times. I find him there at night, but I suspect if I were to come during the day, he might be still be there. Most of the time he reads; he is reading when I get there, and still reading when I leave.

Today I saw this man leave, and this would have been a hell of an ordeal for most people. You see, he had a lot of bags. They were plastic bags, the kind that the student store uses mixed in with nondescript ones, and he must have had at least a dozen of them. I don't know what he had in them, they looked lumpy enough to be clothes, but who knows? He could have had cabbages, for all I knew. Whatever they were, he planned to carry them all home on his bike.

The man is dressed the same every time I see him. He wears a dirty brown tweed blazer, not quite a business suit but close, mismatched with a pair of blue Adidas sweat pants, of the style you see volleyball players walk to practice in. Shiny black boots poke out underneath, and as he walks I think I can see studs. He is tall and undeniably thin, but with naturally broad shoulders. All this you can see from the way his blazer stretches out on top, then fits inward at the waist. He has the frame and arms of a high school basketball player. White earphones are always dangling from his ears, and he always wears a scarf over his mouth, and a dark woolen cap over his dreadlocks. As I look, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out what looks like a white plastic headwrap, and stretches it on his head over his cap. Before, I wondered if he had a beak. Now I have the sudden thought that he might transform into an eagle before my eyes, spread his long arms wide and fly away.

He stands very straight over his bags; so straight that when he bends to pick up a handful of his bags it seems to take him an eternity. When he finally stoops, it looks like it's causing him just enough pain that he can suppress it. While he reaches down with one hand he holds the other behind his back, revealing a silver chain dangling from his wrist.

And so he stooped, grabbed, rose, and put each bag on alternating handlebars of his bicycle with the speed of a 50-story crane. After a couple of bags I worried he might not have room on the handlebars to rest his hands. Still he piled them on, and when he had only one bag left, he paused for a little longer, stooped in his stiff, ponderous way, retrieved it as an ape would scoop up an infant, and put it with the rest. Then he wheeled his bike around and stepped into the night.