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AIDS/Lifecycle Days 5 and 6: A Ribbon and A Raven

AIDS/Lifecycle Days 5 and 6: A Ribbon and A Raven

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Day Five: Santa Maria to Lompoc

This day was the so-called “red dress day”, a call for the riders to wear a red dress, or in my case just red in general since I dropped the ball on dress shopping. When you see the entire peloton of riders wearing an almost uniform shade of red, it creates a powerful image: a living, moving ribbon of AIDS awareness. It being a 40 mile ride, the pressure to leave early and not procrastinating was gone. We all slept in, ate breakfast late and left the camp basically at the last possible moment before they locked us out of the bike parking. Today was for vibes! We decided to stick together pretty much the whole ride, it was like riding together back in Long Beach, just for fun. I even broke my most hallowed ALC rule and stopped at the first rest stop which on this day was a HUGE party. There was a sea of cyclists in red dancing and hanging out. It was so full that we couldn’t even get back to our bikes to leave until people cleared out. We weren’t sweating it though because we were informed that we couldn’t even get into the next camp until after 1 since they still had to set it up.

Extended LBC family


Eventually we got moving again and I guess my body had slipped into recovery mode because I felt that lactic acid burning in my quads. We had two substantial climbs that day which were nothing to scoff at but compared to the bigger picture almost became irrelevant. My reality had been redefined by the previous four days, I was no longer a tech worker who cycles in his spare time but a cyclist who had no time to spare. Mountains and hills were just natural occurrences, not challenges to be overcome but objects to move past and through. I was going with the flow, feeling Wu Wei. Physically I still hurt, and suffered on those hills, but my mind had shifted into a place of clarity. We got through the 7-9% gradient climb at Devon which led into a descent and then a second climb (lesser evil twins?) up the switchbacks of Cabrillo Highway and ending at the much maligned Vandenberg Space Force base. Here is where the column of riders twisted into a ribbon that could be viewed overhead. It was impossible not to feel the weight of the symbolism as I saw red for miles, stretching out around the bend and out of sight touching places I’d never see and people I’d never meet but was still connected to.


We pulled into Lompoc around 12:30 pm still before we could even get into camp so we went to get a well deserved lunch. Like the rides we did back in the LBC we found a cool pizza spot to bike to and walked in. I think almost everyone got a personal pizza. I got a bacon apple gorgonzola one that was leagues ahead of everything we had eaten thus far (save that burger). We hung out for hours and chatted away without any foreboding sense that time was ticking away and we still had miles to go. That night, camp had enough programming to fill the extra hours: a talent show, cyclists performing DIY versions of Broadway hits, and a burlesque performance of the anti-fascist song “Bella Ciao.” In short, it was a relatively relaxed day — a much-needed break before the final two-day push, 175 miles left.

Day Six: Lompoc To Ventura

I woke up feeling amazing. The chill day before, combined with the apparent vanishment of my cold, had me feeling like I’d emerged from the 35th Chamber of Shaolin as a master cyclist. This part of the route I had done before as part of my training so there was going to be no real surprises. I knew the day started with a climb then a long stretch of riding the 101 until we hit Goleta, followed by a cruise through Santa Barbara to Ventura along the coast. With the end of the ride rapidly approaching, having reached the end of my illness, and cycling back in familiar territory I felt relief begin to wash over me as I thought that maybe…just maybe I was actually going to finish this crazy thing. I began the climb to the 101 early and in earnest knowing that no matter what the group would always catch up with me.

The previous night at camp I was talking with a roadie about how I didn’t know having license plates on your bike was a thing. I guess it provides an easy way for riders to call out to you when they don’t know your name. He gifted me a plate that said “OMG OMG” and now that I was so slowly climbing this hill I enjoyed all the variety of ways other riders announced they were about to pass me.
“oh my god oh my god, I’m coming on your left.”
“om gomg (phonetic pronunciation), on your left”
“oh em gee! on your left”

I skipped the first rest stop as was tradition and maybe by this point a hint of superstition, lest I upset whatever delicate cosmic balance had worked in my favor to get me this far. It was bittersweet passing by all the riders enjoying their break but in the dense fog of the morning I quickly lost sight of the stop as I ventured higher and higher through the marine layer. A shadowy figure materialized out of the haze: A man in a hat, and he said to me “May these good vibes give you safe journey home”. I said thank you as he vanished back into the cloudy unknown and I wondered whether I had just talked to a spirit or Odin himself. Not long after, the outline of a raven appeared on the shoulder. As I got closer, I realized it was a corpse. My oxygen deprived brain wondered whether it was Huginn or Muninn, Odin’s ravens of thought and memory, sprawled out and discarded on the side of the road and what it would signify for the last two days of my ride. It must have been Memory, I decided, because I was the ultimate Taoist cyclist now. What did I need memory for? There was only the constant flow of the present with no past or future and me riding in it forever!

Breaking me from my existential spiral came along one of my teammates, and I could mercifully chat about the weather and breakfast instead. It didn’t last long though because soon we hit the crest of climb and began the incredibly fast but fun descent down the 101 to the coast. This was probably the steepest descent besides the unbustin’ part of the Quadbuster and I would have been more worried have the crew not already done it three weeks back WITH cars blasting by. We got to Gaviota and rest stop 2 was not so far from there. We chilled there and recharged, the hard 1/3 of the ride was now behind us and I had the fabled ice cream stop waiting for me at the beach of Santa Barbara so we didn’t dally long and kept going. I was by myself not long after, being the slowest pedaler out of the bunch, but my spirits were high as I was looking forward to the comforting sacked sandwich vibes of the lunch stop in north Santa Barbara. I would swiftly learn a lesson though, just because you feel good doesn’t mean your body is doing well.

When I got to the lunch stop I felt a strange tingling in the back of my legs that I had not experienced before. Strange pains are not uncommon when you are putting in this many miles, so I pushed the negative thoughts to the back of my mind, even as the slightest limp began to appear. After lunch I pushed hard to the beach to get this fabled ice cream. The stop was affectionately called Paradise Pit and it was manned by volunteers and the mayor of Santa Barbara. They really went above and beyond because not only were there six ice cream flavors to choose from but there were also churros, coffee, fresh strawberries and chairs lined up along Ledbetter Beach so you could stare at the vastness of the ocean while you ate your tiny little sweets. Against the magnitude of the sea what’s a few little calories going to do? We definitely took our time there, enjoying the amazing stop but also starting to reflect on the impending finish of this crazy experience. Eventually we left since all the other riders were saying that rest stop 4 was the “dance” stop. The only thing I remember between paradise pit and rest stop 4 is how even though I’d ridden to Santa Barbara so much I had never ridden in this direction, on this bike path along the beach. As Heraclitus said more or less: different river, different me.

We approached the next stop and from down the street we heard the “oontz, oontz” of whatever massive festivity was happening. The scene spread out before us as we turned the corner: a sprawling park dotted on the sides by cyclists lying in the grass and in the center a massive bacchanalia of shirtless dancing riders overlooked by a DJ and performers on podiums meant to evoke the go go dancers of the 60s. It was clear that everyone had a lot of stress to relieve or perhaps they were enjoying the last gasp of the love bubble that would end the next day. We stopped here and some of my teammates immediately joined the dance but I preferred people watching and lying down on the grass, almost wistfully falling to sleep even as the music pounded with whatever electronic rhythms carried people into perpetual motion. I can’t know what an Ancient Greek party was really like but I don’t imagine it was much different than this. Even with no wine or alcohol everyone seemed content to let loose, all I needed was grapes and a toga (and maybe a light sacrifice) and I’d believe I was at Dionysia itself.

When we finally decided to call it a day and finish the remaining 17 miles before camp I felt a tightness in my hamstrings that had me almost hobble back to my bike. At this point I thought maybe I pulled a muscle or something but as I got back on my bike, the motion of pedaling still felt fine. So we played it a little loose with the rules of the ride and we pacelined to the last camp of the ride so we could get there faster. The reality that this was the final night we’d spend at camp together hung over everything I did. My last mobile shower (not really going to miss that), my last kind of bland but nutritious buffet dinner, our last team meeting, my last time pitching a tent which I was pretty good at by now, and the last time I got to just exist outside of the time and space of my regular life. To cap it all off the tightness in my hamstrings was worse and I could barely walk around camp. I thought I had done irreversible damage to myself, with ONE day to go! I brought it up the group and they quickly asked how much I stretched that week and I said “none…”. They immediately took me to task for being so dumb. but I have never suffered repercussions for not stretching, which doesn’t mean that I should have ignored it but us non-athletes have to learn the hard way. I was given a quick how-to on foam rolling which felt like I was squeezing pins and needles through my legs due to six days of built up soreness. It was undeniable that my hamstrings felt so much better afterwards though. I could walk again which made getting to participate in the vigil that night a realistic option.

The last night of ALC the camp hosts a candlelight vigil on the beach where participants light candles and place them in the sand next to a riderless bicycle. It’s meant to honor those lost to AIDS and show support to survivors. During the ride, it was easy to forget that this was not just my personal endurance project. It was also a way to raise money that would affect people immediately. I lit my candle and walked out onto the beach with hundreds of participants. The procession was mostly silent, I didn’t hear a single word spoken. After placing my candle I stepped back to join the circle and everyone stood in solemn muteness for as long as they felt appropriate. I have not been personally affected by AIDS and I’m not sure I know anyone who has but if causes only reached people with direct personal stakes, they would not be causes. They would be private grief. The ride afforded me an opportunity to accomplish a goal I once thought impossible. The candles in the sand represented people who never had the chance to attempt whatever impossible thing they might have wanted for themselves. For that perspective, and for every friend and family member who donated to my campaign, I was grateful. All I had left to do was actually finish the endeavor. Little by little people started walking away back to the tents as the candles still illuminated the darkness. Eventually I did too, ready to finally make it home.

AIDS/Lifecycle Days 3 and 4: Climbs And Lines

AIDS/Lifecycle Days 3 and 4: Climbs And Lines

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Day Three: King City to Paso Robles

I woke up at 5 am and rather than try to fight it and return to the dreaming I just decided to pack up my stuff and get on with it. I was developing a system, I was learning to be efficient with what I put where so I could grab and go. Efficiency is the name of the game here at least if you don’t want to waste hours waiting in lines for restrooms, food, snacks, or coffee.

There was one inevitable line again, the one to get out. One dirt road leading out that intersected with a street with actual traffic at which cyclists were making a left. This meant that it was the traffic signal from hell now. Every time cars drove past the procession stopped and waited, there was no going around and no shortcuts. At the back of the line, I didn’t know what was happening, just that we were inching along this dirt road. I wasn’t on my bike for long since there was no point pretending I was riding.

I had lots of time to contemplate the challenge of the day though: the Quadbuster. It was a five-mile climb that starts immediately upon exiting camp. The last mile is an infernal 10-14% gradient. The kind of hill that has your quads screaming in repentance. My goal was to finish it without having to get off my bike. I wasn’t even thinking about how fast because at efforts this big I have to worry more about not falling off the bike rather than beating any sort of time. Everyone around me was pedaling as slow and as steady as they could, we were crawling up a hillside. There were plenty of people that got off and walked up, which was definitely a move maybe I wasn’t above making but I wanted to give it my all first. Near the top, most of the people that completed the climb were all waiting to cheer the rest of the cyclists on. This was motivating and inspiring, but the sad human truth is now I had an audience and I didn’t want to fail in front of them. That got me past the last agonizing quarter mile. One of our team members was already there and cheering us on so I parked my bike in a bush and joined him, and we whooped and hollered until our whole group was at the top.

We all left together and as Isaac Newton successfully predicted, we accelerated down the backside of the Quadbuster, taking turns re-busting our quads but this time to go fast. In the blink of an eye we were at the second rest stop, mile 18, which for a 65-mile day was almost a good third done. The rest stop we were at was a church, and it had opened its door to the cyclists as a way to get out of the sun and relax a bit, no religion required. I took a peek inside as an excuse to get to the star of the show which was the banana bread the congregation was handing out. I took a slice of bread as well as a sprig of lavender that came with it which I stuck in my helmet for good luck and a pleasant scent. I think we hung out a little too hard here, it was 11 am by the time we left and lunch was still 20-ish miles away.

The church of the immaculate rest.


We were riding somewhere east of the Santa Lucia Coastal Mountain Range and experiencing the mediterranean climate of the Salinas River valley firsthand. It was getting hot! So when I saw the third rest stop, even though I was starting to hurt I wanted to just make it to lunch once and for all. I had lost most of the group probably because I left it all at the damn Quadbuster. That was the running theme of the week, we were not so much a team as we were a group of riders whose paths connected and intersected in sometimes mysterious ways and other times in less mysterious preplanned ways. I was always happy to run into one of them or spend time at a rest stop chatting about how different this was than riding around a considerably less hilly Long Beach. I ran into another teammate and we both agreed to just hightail it out of there before it got hotter and so we could get lunch. We set off together but pretty soon she was pulling and I was struggling to stay on her wheel. Ces’t La Vie, but we were rolling through some scenic vineyards as we approached Paso Robles so I just took it all in.

We made it to lunch and connected with the rest of the crew. This was another stop I oft heard about, the elementary school where students sold burgers as a fundraiser. They also sold postcards and keychains, it was a real enterprise. You could even pay a premium to get your burger faster and eat it in an air-conditioned room! Who’s teaching these kids about capitalism so early?! I didn’t get the VIP package but I DID opt for the double cheeseburger, and I’ll tell you what: I know they were just store-bought frozen patties but, on that day, on that ride, it was the best damn burger of my life. Not to mention it was probably the single most delicious meal I had all week. The food at camp was for the masses and had to fit that nostalgic blend of nutritional and palatable. That burger though had grease, cheese, and calories. I showered the kids praises as I left full and content.

Because the heat was approaching 90 degrees, even though I left with the group I was quickly dropped. Historically speaking, if you’ve read any of my ride reports, the heat is like my kryptonite and it was no different today. I’m not sure how the “easy” 65 mile ride turned into an almost whole day ordeal, but I had officially boarded the struggle bus. I wanted to finish quickly but I found myself needing to stop at the fourth rest stop because I was dying and my bike started making a weird noise when I braked. I sat there and just tried to enjoy the spectacle of seeing a drag miss America pageant performed while I waited for my bike to be looked at. Say what you will about the convenience or cost of doing this ride supported but that’s an experience you’ll never get anywhere else but on AIDS Lifecycle. Eventually my bike was ready to go again and I lazily pedaled to Paso Robles. I was hurting and stopping at every chance I got, including for some goats that were hanging out on the side of the road. When I finally made it to camp I felt a sense of relief, which immediately was subsumed by annoyance at having to set up my tent in the windiest section. I near passed out from the heat and exhaustion of trying to wrangle that damn tent without it flying away but eventually I got it done after anchoring it with my luggage.
That day they had Ice cream root beer floats waiting for us. I think I probably had mild heat exhaustion or dehydration and combined with my cold I felt sicker than ever that night. It’s probably not good for recovery to put my body through all that in one day but I didn’t come that far to quit then. That night I called my mom since it was her birthday, I had to miss it for the ride and she told me I sounded very sick. I didn’t let it get to me though, after a nice dinner and plenty of fluids I was feeling okay. I was even allowed back into the group tent since they decided I was *probably* no longer contagious. We talked about the day and about the plan for the next day. It was an 88 mile day but I only had one thing on my mind: cinnamon rolls at Pismo Beach.

Day Four: Paso Robles to Santa Maria

Again I woke up early as I was having fitful sleep. Yet somehow I also felt refreshed and re-energized, my body was learning to use the times between rides more effectively and finally fighting off the damn cold that plagued me. I was up way earlier than the rest of the group, I was ready to roll out while some were still waking up. I decided to just go ahead and get a head start because if there’s one thing I was certain of it’s that they would all catch up to me.

The first part of the day consisted of crossing back over the coastal mountain range so we could ride down the coast proper. I was thankful because it meant getting out of the heat and back under the nice overcast marine layer. I wasn’t thankful that to get there I had to get through “The Evil Twins” first. To get back across we had to go over the mountains using a route that had one big climb, then a descent that lulls you into a false sense of accomplishment (evil) before running straight into and even steeper climb (twins). The first rest stop was right before the twins began and I just zoomed right past it, at that point in my life I didn’t need first rest stops. This was an example of a bigger change in attitude I was experiencing.

It was the 4th day into the ride and I was beginning to feel that flow state of Wu Wei. The ride was hard, the climbs were hard, the weather could be against us or with us and it all just started to blend into one experience. I started to feel that with the proper nutrition and sleep cycle I could pedal forever, a perpetual motion machine powered by chicken, rice, Oreos, gummy bears, mac and cheese and an occasional double cheeseburger. Whereas normally I would obsess over the minutia the route: all the elevations, efforts, rest stops I started to cede control over to fate. More specifically my confidence that I could overcome any obstacle had grown and that whatever was thrown my way would just be part of the experience, I was beginning to act without doing. I knew that eventually I would surpass the evil twins, since my style of kung fu was superior, and get to the much celebrated halfway to LA point at the top.

That I did, but once again I was met by my bureaucratic and logistical foe: the line. Lines! Was this a bicycle ride or a waiting-in-line-thon?! I could have kept riding, which would have been the more Taoist approach, but I also firmly believe in the modern philosophy of Instagram permanence. It was a photo op I would not dare miss. So I got into line thinking I was so far head of the rest of the group that they wouldn’t be here before I got my photo and they could cut in front of me. This thought summoned an instant pre-emptive strike from karma because to my horror three members from a different team in front of me slowly let the rest of their teammates cut one by one until there were 20 or more, all taking photos individually AND as a group. I gaped at the gall of luck that had befallen me, I was not feeling the Zen of yin OR yang at that particular moment, rather I felt the sting of suffering due to my attachments and preconceptions of what it means to be in a “line”, the Buddha would be pissed. I bit my tongue and waited. It was fallacious of me to assume that moving to another line would be time wasted yet I held my ground until this massive team was done taking photos. The funny part is that even though holding the sign was cool, the normally majestic backdrop was completely covered up by fog due to how early I had gotten there. In the time I spent waiting, the rest of the group caught up. In a way getting waylaid by that initial group set up the Long Beach crew’s photo so going with the flow proved beneficial once again.

We left together and once again it was a matter of descending from the mountain as fast as possible. This time we went West back to the coast then turned South towards San Luis Obispo. We got to Cayucos which was a big party because there were several bakeries. This is where I had my first non-camp coffee of the week. It’s crazy to me that I wasn’t doing one or more coffee stops per day but normally we were riding in such remote environments that our options were non-existent or limited. No wonder the streets here were overrun with cyclists they also got cookies from the Brown Butter Cookie Company. I indulged, it was a nice little halfway celebration. After that stop I was back in known territory as we passed through SLO and Morro Bay, Morro rock was still a sight to behold and I felt satisfied to have closed the loop from the training ride I had done. I pushed on to Pismo beach. It wasn’t as hot as the last couple days and somehow I was feeling great. This is the exact moment when my health turned around on the ride, conveniently at the halfway point perhaps but I’ll ascribe it to the glorious cookies I ate.

Unfortunately, I was not to have a second dose of medicinal pastries because when we rolled up to Old West Cinnamon Rolls it was swarming with cyclists. The line for rolls was down the street and around the block. That most despised and evil of foes, the line, here reared its ugly head once more to rob me of my most coveted object of desire. Can man do battle with a metaphysical entity?! Would that I could greet it on the battlefield of reality or cast down curses upon it that no person should have to wait in a line ever again! This was why ancient civilizations anthropomorphized concepts into deities, so that we could HATE them! I swallowed my disappointment and moved on to the next stop; I had already burned time with the earlier lines and the cookies. I ate some sad consolation pop tarts instead and kept going. I had 20 miles left and I just pushed through, skipping the 4th stop since I was feeling good for the first time at the end of the day that week, 340 miles in and somehow I was getting better.

That night camp proceeded as usual and as we were hanging out underneath the large tent where dinner was served, about to head to sleep, something truly serendipitous happened. Someone with the roadie crew came by asking if we wanted leftover cinnamon rolls from Old West! Apparently the crew bought them in bulk and had leftovers, lots of them! The roadie exacted payment from me in the form of a physical offering to him, a hug, and left us with a box, no lines required! I grabbed some decaf coffee and my dessert that night was one of the best cinnamon rolls I’ve ever had. It was a good night, my health had turned around, and fortune favored me. I was beginning to think maybe things were turning up Jairo. The next day was the 40 mile “rest” day, which is something only a cycling junkie could consider restful.

AIDS/Lifecycle Days 1 and 2: The Learning Curve

AIDS/Lifecycle Days 1 and 2: The Learning Curve

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Day One: Daly City to Santa Cruz

I woke up in a sweat, a good fever breaking sweat. I felt much better though I had to admit to myself I was definitely sick, still had a sore throat and a congested nose. I couldn’t back out of so many layers of organization and planning though. As far as I was concerned, I was on a one way train to Santa Monica whether I got there on my own pedaling power or on the SAG car. I took care not to breathe or otherwise interact with my teammates too much. My mantra for the day, as all days really, was “keep going until you can’t”. It applies whether I’m sick, dehydrated, tired, overheated, or not feeling it. I’ve ridden enough to know that how you feel at the beginning is not how you feel in the middle and is not how you feel in the end. The first day was going to be 80 miles in a freshly sick body which I have never even attempted but I wondered… what’s the worst that could happen?

The energy at the starting line was infectiously high. I think the sheer adrenaline from the mass start, hundreds of spectators cheering me on my way out, banished the sickness right out of me for at least those first 20 miles. Every day would have four rest stops, more or less evenly spaced out throughout the route. So when I got to the first rest stop I thought “why not take a little break”. This turned out to be a huge mistake as basically the entire ride stops at this rest stop. I could have turned right around and left, but the salty dog in me refused to leave after I already “invested” 20 minutes into the bathroom line. I swear it must have taken me 40 minutes to leave which was a little absurd for being the first stop of the day. That was my first AIDS/Lifecycle lesson: Never stop at the first rest stop.

There was some climbing at the beginning of the route, it wasn’t hard but with all the riders having left at once and with the mandate to stick to the shoulder of the road things got very crowded. It was like being in a traffic jam where you kept having to leapfrog past other cars. What I noticed though was in this section and in the next before lunch as long as I kept going I didn’t feel the symptoms of my illness. My body was too busy pedaling to worry about fighting the cold I had contracted. This was so alleviating; although I’m sure I wasn’t performing at peak capacity, not being able to breathe or having a lingering cough while exercising would have been a much worse experience. Then of course once I stopped moving I felt the symptoms come back. At lunch I thoroughly enjoyed eating my sad packed sandwich meal that they had prepared for us while overlooking the ocean at San Gregorio Beach. As I felt the solids in my nose quicken however, I decided it was time to leave. One of my team members was departing around the same time and I rolled out with them, only to be unceremoniously dropped after a mile or so. Given the climbing and my waning health this was just par for the course.

I never truly rode alone though since there was one unbroken steady stream of riders the entire way to Santa Cruz. This was a unique aspect of AIDS/Lifecycle. With over 2000 riders participating I was never far behind or too far in front of anyone for very long. It warps an individual feat into a greater accomplishment. The stronger riders, the slower riders, the roadies, the rest stops all form some sort of collective cycling consciousness whose sole goal is to move all of its body parts from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Being a cog in such a glorious machine is comforting since all material concerns and objectives are replaced with one defining motivation “keep going”.

I kept riding down the coast, which this was my first time ever riding north of Santa Cruz and the views delivered that same magical California coastal vibe that we get all the way down to Long Beach, so I never felt far from home. It was overcast but the temperature slowly started to climb. By the time I got to the last rest stop (“seamen” themed) I was not feeling 100%. My sickness had come to roost, or my body was catching up to pushing too hard in the morning. I almost skipped the stop, but I wanted to load up on oranges and vitamin C to fight the cold. I pulled into camp around 4 pm which I thought was a great time. But on Day 1 I was going to have to figure out the ropes about camping on the ride so there was going to be a learning curve.

It goes like this: You pull into camp and park your bike at the bike parking. Once you park, take everything you need off your bike, collect a chocolate milk from a handy cooler by the exit and get to the cargo trucks. The truck I left my stuff at in the morning was the same truck I’d be picking up from at camp. From the truck I collect my giant bag of stuff which I regretted bringing because sometimes the walk from the truck to tents was long. The first thing I did when I got my stuff was take off my cycling shoes and put on my Crocs, which quickly became my favorite part of the day. Then I would wander in the direction of the tents trying to find my “site”. My teammates did this on day one and never again, opting to place their tent wherever they could get away with and was convenient for them. But I doggedly adhered to the rules every day, not really having the mental capacity to consider actual options after I finished. Assembling my tent sucked, but it was better to get it over with immediately, so I actually had a place to relax. Putting the tent together on an empty stomach made me feel woozy as I wrestled with the hooks, flaps, and the wind. That first day was the hardest. I was so tired from the 80-mile day, the struggle with the tent and my illness that I just lay down in the tent and tried to process everything. My stomach began to rumble. I knew it was time for dinner but before I could eat, I needed to figure out how to shower.

Contemplating why I am even doing this


I’ve never used a shower truck before, but it was kind of like the locker rooms at school or showers at a gym. It was a great feeling getting rid of the gunk from the day and the shower is a good way to signal my body to relax a.k.a. start the recovery process. It’s not lost on me that if I was doing a real self-supported bike tour, showering every day like this would be a huge luxury that was unlikely to happen. I tried to keep that clarity of mind as I realized the hot water in my stall wasn’t working. The cold water was bracing, and it woke me the hell up from the stupor I was in.

Finally, I was in my comfy clothes, and I could just relax and desperately try not to think that the next day was the most challenging single day out of the whole ride. Dinner was something carb heavy and bland that night, I can’t even remember now but I’m sure at the time it was a blessing. Our group had a little team meeting inside one of our member’s tents, but I excommunicated myself to the outside as I was still trying to fight off whatever cold I had. We discussed the plan for tomorrow which was going to the be the same plan for the rest of the week: try to meet up for breakfast and leave together. Afterwards I went to my tent to just try and let my body rest, and to actually sleep early so I could wake up early the next day and get out of Dodge.

Day Two: Santa Cruz to King City

I woke up feeling like crap. Had a stuffy nose which didn’t let me sleep very well, that and my body was still getting used to the inflatable sleeping bag mat. I sighed and got to work deconstructing my belongings, my tent, and my life. I was grumpy at the Jairo from yesterday who threw around all his stuff as he was trying to shower and get dressed for dinner. I was able to more or less pack everything the way I had the first night. It’s sad how taking down a tent is so much easier than putting it up, “the universe really does favor moving towards entropy”, this was my pessimistic thinking as I groggily rolled over my belongings to the truck. I needed coffee asap, then a light breakfast, and I would be able to start around 630 am to allow for spending extra time on the road if I had to. At least that’s what I thought but I learned some more ALC lessons that morning.

The sheer logistics of getting 2000 riders fed and onto the road was staggering. I saw the line for breakfast and knew I’d had to throw my planned start times out the window. Even the line to just get coffee was absurdly long in case I wanted to skip breakfast. I waited patiently as more of our team showed up and we began to chat. I decided to just get food and skip the coffee line but once we put our heads together, we divided and conquered. I sang exalted praises underneath my breath because I would have to otherwise stop somewhere during the day for this delicious elixir, adding logistical overhead I didn’t want to deal with. Then when we were done eating, I realized we made a huge mistake. The bikes were stored in a baseball field with a very narrow entrance and exit. It wasn’t a problem getting them in since every rider came in at different times based on their pace, but now that almost every single rider was trying to leave at the same time it created a huge bottleneck. It was a traffic jam from hell. Everyone’s instincts in this situation were to get in a line and wait their turn but even that proved chaotic because the number of riders and bikes was enough to wrap around the field several times over. A zig-zaggy queue formed but it was clear that the further back you were the later you would start due to people hopping into the line wherever their bikes were instead of dutifully walking to the end of the “line”. This morning I played it straight, but I took mental notes for the next day about what would be morally permissible, at least from a line-ethics perspective. I got out around 7:30 am, an hour gone just like that due to the challenges of moving bodies at scale.

I tried to make up the time by implementing the lesson from the first day and completely blazing past the first rest stop. It was a honey pot for basically every rider that didn’t get to use the restroom before leaving and also there wasn’t enough time from the start to spread out the massive column of riders into digestible chunks yet so it was crowded when I rode by. I knew I made the right choice and surprisingly I felt much better on the bike and pedaling than I did when I woke up. It’s like the symptoms of my cold had become subservient to the goal of finishing this ride. My sickness and my body were putting aside their differences to meet the proverbial gauntlet. This part of the course I had actually ridden previously as well on a Santa Cruz to Big Sur century so I knew I was expecting lots of farmland and crops. It made it easier to ride the 32 miles to the first rest stop without pause, and what a stop!

As if it was the culmination of all the vegetation I had seen up until that point the stop was Pezzini Farms: an Artichoke farm that had a dedicated shop with artichoke themed merchandise and food. It was crowded but not obscenely. I was able to enjoy an artichoke cupcake and grilled artichoke. As it turns out I don’t love artichoke, but the frosting was delicious. We very quickly came to rest stop 2 at mile 40 where the DJ was playing some throwback music that lured me to stop and eat a banana just to soak up the vibes. Then before I knew it, Bam! Lunch at mile 50. Not sure why the rest stops were bunched up but I could never say no to lunch so of course I stopped and ate some sandwiches under a tree with my cohorts. It was meditative to lie there and relax, I can see how the Buddha reached enlightenment that way, but before I reached Apotheosis I had to get on with the next 60 miles.

Time was waning and we left Salinas and away from the coast through neighborhoods and more farmlands. Stop #3 at about mile 70 was yet another park, I saw the fabled cookie lady delivering homemade cookies to all the starving cyclists. I couldn’t deny myself the pleasure! The temperature started to climb as we left the overcast coastal vibe of the morning for a more sun-drenched valley situation. To sour the deal we even had a steady headwind that had slowly snuck up on us. This was the hardest part of the day when you threw in some elevation and the high mileage count. Our bodies were exhausted and mine was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I pressed on and eventually came upon the otter pop stop, which offered otter pops to cyclists on this last stretch of a hotter day. I took one look at the never-ending line of sun kissed riders and peaced out, it was tempting but this day was dragging on and if I didn’t get to camp pronto I’d be setting up my tent in the dark.

It was about mile 90 when I came to an interesting sight, I crossed a bridge and there were dozens of bicycles on the side of the road seemingly…abandoned? All day I had heard people talking about the “secret” skinny dipping spot unsanctioned by the ride itself of course, and yet all these bikes left next to the bridge could only mean that the secret wasn’t so secret. Our group wanted to check it out, so we dutifully left our bikes propped up against a hillside wall and clopped down to the side of the river. I had no intention of dressing down or even getting wet but I wanted to be part of the experience. I will say this, there were a lot of people there and plenty of appendages soaking up the sun. This was the perfect time to indulge in some Beaver nuggets I had brought back from Buc-ee’s on a recent trip to Texas. If you look at the sugar content on those things, a 100 mile bike ride is just about the only way to justify eating them. Before we knew what was happening the Sheriffs arrived to break up the party. Apparently innocent families had chanced to look down at the river while crossing the bridge and what they saw had been burned into their minds as indecent and criminal. The Sheriffs told everyone to leave immediately or they would take all the bikes. Of course we got out of there, “not the bikes!”. It was better this way, I was definitely indulging in killing time when I should have buckled down and just gotten to camp.

The beaver nuggets. Just out of frame: human nuggets.


Finally, we got past all the climbs of the day and like some sort of token victory from the universe the wind changed direction and all of a sudden I was flying towards the “privilege” of setting up my tent. I was doing so well that I ignored the last stop somewhere around the 100 mile mark. It was time to eat dinner!
That night I was so tired from the day that all I could was slowly set up tent, shower, and scarf down dinner. My cold was waiting in the wings, biding its time until I got off the bike to make its presence known again. I went to bed early, still sick, still tired, and now aware that every day brought its own set of challenges. In the morning, that challenge had a name: The Quadbuster.

Tolstoy’s Case For Jesus Christ

Tolstoy’s Case For Jesus Christ

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Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil.

Well I say that ye have heard it hath been said that ye resist not evil, but Tolstoy says unto you: stop making excuses for and misinterpreting what is unassailably divine proclamation. “Resist Not Evil” is the foundation for his entire book What I Believe. It’s the rosetta stone of the entire doctrine of Jesus. To Tolstoy this has a profoundly simple meaning: that resisting evil, compounds the evil and provokes evil in response. Evil can be an abstract term, but it can be defined by what it is not: good. Abstaining from resistance to evil is the only way to banish evil. Imagine the world is like the stock market and “Evil” can be summed up as shares, when you resist, you are selling shares of evil which someone will quickly buy. But by abstaining you hold onto the shares, the evil is removed from the market for as long as you can hold onto it. If the entire world did this at once, evil would be gone overnight and we would step into the kingdom of heaven on Earth. That’s not reality though right? If we do not resist evil then we will suffer and our loved ones will suffer…Tolstoy says NO.

When I refer to the doctrine of Jesus I mean the specific philosophy and words he has proclaimed in the gospels. That is separate from the theology of Christian religion which came later. This is the specific doctrine which Tolstoy refers to in his book, which he articulated from the oldest surviving greek texts of the gospels. In a sense the value of his work is that we can see the closest representation of what Christianity would be like in the days before and after the death of Christ. As you will see, it is very different than what we call Christianity today.

His first point is that the idea that adherence to such a profound edict is “aspirational” is a fabrication and obfuscation of the truth. He claims that believing the proclamation of Jesus is divine yet somehow impossible to follow is a human error. Why would Jesus speak in absolutes and never intend for his followers to do exactly what he said? According to him we live with our heads in the sand, claiming to follow the Christian doctrine yet

“deliberately assist in the organization of property, of tribunals, of governments, of armies; to contribute to the establishment of a polity entirely contrary to the doctrine of Jesus…”

We have organized our life around resisting evil by homicide, judgement, and justice. This creates a cognitive dissonance in us where we have no choice but to claim that the law of Christ is aspirational, to admit otherwise would be to admit that the entire fabric of our society is blasphemist.

The State forces us to take oaths, pledge loyalty, and participate in courts of justice. We take it for granted but if we put ourselves in the shoes of a christian follower from 30 A.D. and Jesus had just gotten off the mound where he proclaimed “judge not” and “take no oaths” would we ever have dreamed of sitting in a court as justice or jury and passing judgement on a fellow man. Justice is simply part of the routine of our lives now but Tolstoy argues it is in direct contradiction with the law of Christ. So in our day to day existence we must continually make the decision to follow the rule of God or the rule of Man, yet by merely living in the great machine that is organized society we implicitly choose the law of man every time. Judge not has been mistranslated as “do not gossip”, “do not speak ill” but Tolstoy reasserts that the original words (in the Greek bible) can only be interpreted as do not pass judgement in any shape or form, including by law or through a council or court. Therefore, though the words have been softened over time, Jesus would would not want anyone to participate in the justice system and to extent our government. In today’s globalized society, how can someone choose not to participate in government, in society? It is impossible to do so without upending modern life and so man puts the blinders on and conveniently pretends that this is not part of the doctrine of Jesus.

Perhaps the biggest and most diabolical enabler of this false life is the Church itself. The Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholic church both cunningly disguise themselves as arbiters of divine law but they are themselves institutions which serve the law of man. Over the years the churches complicity or explicitly sanction policies that serve to destroy or alter the original words of Christ. One of the ways they have done this is by slowly introducing the idea of a heaven as a post-world place one can enter into given they follow their rules during life. When Jesus speaks about entering into the kingdom of heaven he does not do so literally as a place you go to after life. Rather he describes it is a state of being you can step into at any moment by following the doctrine he describes. By subtly transforming heaven into an physical, immortal gated community, the churches have placed themselves as gatekeepers which in turn give them power and agency in the worldly life. First they used this power to gain agency over Rome, then they used it to justify their conquest of other religions, and all the while they increased the amount of rituals, rites, and sacraments performed to keep themselves relevant. This is much easier for people to stomach than removing themselves from participation in society, it’s the easier pill to swallow so it is accepted as divine law.

One system in place used to keep us complacently unaware or intentionally removed from directly violating the doctrine is described simply by Tolstoy as thus:

The judge who has condemned according to the code, is not willing to hang the criminal with his own hands; no clerk would tear a villager from his weeping family and cast him into prison; the general or the soldier, unless he be hardened by discipline and service, will not undertake to slay a hundred Turks or Germans or destroy a village, would not, if he could help it, kill a single man. Yet all these things are done, thanks to the administrative machinery which divides responsibility for misdeeds in such a way that no one feels them to be contrary to nature.

In this way we have fabricated a machine to absolve us of sin, no one person can say they committed a violent act yet all persons along the daisy chain of causality is responsible. If a person cannot stomach passing judgement and executing their fellow man themselves then we can say it is against human nature to do so. Creating a system that allows us to violate our own nature is the ultimate sin and Tolstoy argues that it keeps us from accepting the much more natural law that is the doctrine of Jesus, not the other way around.

Tolstoy wondered how he could be the first, or most relevant discoverer of what he felt was the only objective interpretation of the doctrine of Jesus. Through mistranslation intentional or otherwise, we have come to have a standard Christian bible that includes the Old Testament and New Testament together as a theological framework. Yet Tolstoy also argues that the New Testament, the doctrine of Jesus, is a direct refusal of the old testament, the doctrine of Moses. Smashing the two doctrines together and calling both of them divine law has caused contradictions to form in what otherwise should be a simple, natural doctrine described by Jesus. He argues that Jesus took what he considered the eternal rules in the doctrine of Moses and based his own doctrine on this, intentionally leaving out the rest, never intending for them to live side by side as a confusing amalgamation of rules. It is this confusion, and requirement to verbally juggle two separate and incompatible doctrines that has led scholars to badly misinterpret divine law. He further lays out the five commandments that Jesus reveals in their most basic, and untampered way:

  1. Be not angry. Live in peace with all. Do not regard anger as justifiable under any circumstances. Consider no one foolish or unworthy.
  2. Do not commit adultery. Do not consider the body an instrument of lust. Each man is to have one wife and each woman one husband and one is never to forsake the other under any pretext.
  3. Take no oaths. Oaths contain within them the implicit assumption that you control your destiny.
  4. Resist not evil. Never resist evil by force, never return violence for violence.
  5. Do not make war. Consider all people your brethren, love your enemies.

The first commandment contains the rest, the simplest edict he gave, which is to love one another. The rest of the four commandments represent the worldly temptations which would serve to obstruct one from the first. Adultery, oaths to people or institutions, resisting by taking vengeance in the guise of justice, having enemies and waging war against them all poison the love you would have for humanity. Tolstoy doesn’t just offer his own opinions, he gets to down to brass tacks in a pedantic way, his whole rationalization for evidence of tampering in the gospels coming down to the most minute turn of phrases or words within the greek canonical gospels he studied. The first commandment illustrates his point in Matthew 5:22:

Ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι πᾶς ὁ ὀργιζόμενος τῷ ἀδελφῷ αὐτοῦ εἰκῆ, ἔνοχος ἔσται τῇ κρίσει· ὃς δ’ ἂν εἴπῃ τῷ ἀδελφῷ αὐτοῦ· Ῥακά, ἔνοχος ἔσται τῷ συνεδρίῳ· ὃς δ’ ἂν εἴπῃ· Μωρέ, ἔνοχος ἔσται εἰς τὴν γέενναν τοῦ πυρός.

which translates to:

“But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother without cause will be subject to judgment. And whoever says to his brother, ‘Raca,’ will be subject to the council. And whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be subject to the hell of fire.”

He pinpoints the greek word “εἰκῆ” meaning “without cause” as a particularly troubling inclusion. Adding that qualification to Jesus’ statement renders the entire commandment almost meaningless, for if we cannot judge how we can decide what is an appropriate “cause” worthy of our anger? He goes on to find that earlier versions of the gospels do not include this word so he is forced to conclude that such qualifications were added retrospectively to Jesus’ sermon, a very human touch to an otherwise divine edict. There is a whole ocean of difference between the two texts with the omission and without, one outlaws all anger no matter the justification, the other holds the door open just enough for the justification of war, violence, and other such utilitarian arguments where the ends justify the means. The strong suggestion that the gospels the church uses as canon have been edited in order to make Jesus’ teachings more palatable to the way our society is organized is cause for concern. How can we participate in wars if we cannot be angry or resist evil? How can we comply with the will of the state if we can take no oaths? The co-authors of these texts surely came to the same roadblocks and changed the meaning of the words just enough so that they don’t intrude with our every day way of life: We can be angry with cause, we can’t swear against God or Jesus but can swear on their names, and we can break the bonds of marriage when justified.

If we consider Jesus the objective source of these divine rules. If, how Tolstoy tries to prove in his book, his commandments are simple and direct with no ambiguity then Christians are forced to reconcile with the fact that most do not follow his doctrine. Moreover the church has moved the goal posts so even those who follow the churches’ interpretation of the gospels are not truly Christian. What is implied by Tolstoy’s research is a war over the authorship of Jesus’ doctrine, with the victor being the church and its theological machinations serving to push people further away from the true meaning of his teachings because the truth is that Jesus was anarchist believing that to enter into kingdom of heaven meant to remove yourself from your attachment to material worth, the state, the church, your anger, and even your family; There can be nothing else above your service to the father. This is a radical and hard truth and I can see why collectively the entire religious body just kind of chooses to ignore it and live life in the half measure world of the masses but Tolstoy argues that no one will ever find salvation that way.

So if Christians have collectively put their blinders on to their own religion, it would be my assumption that the religious fervor that permeates the current political climate would be nonexistent. Using christianity, the bible, or the name of Jesus as a means to justify a political action is already in defiance of the doctrine of Jesus. So it’s my opinion that either Christians remove themselves from participation in politics and war or admit that no one is willing to follow the words of Jesus and stop using them as a way to rationalize the actions of the state, it’s all or nothing.

Mycology

Mycology

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Back in 2019 I started attending a FILM 1 class at LBCC after work. The goal was to give myself the language and the knowledge to analytically interpret the films I watched. This was a period of my life where I started to attend theatre screenings in earnest because I realized I loved watching movies just a tad more than your average person. I tell people my cinematic awakening came when I watched There Will Be Blood for the second time. The first was in the theatre when I was 17 and I wasn’t *quite* there on my sociological or philosophical journey to grapple with the ideas beneath the surface of the film. The second time I saw it though was sometime after I started college and had been exposed to ideas, thinkers, and some critical analysis of literature. So when my brain tackled it this time I saw the nearly unending wealth of symbolism within the frame, the ideas that were presented as the two opposing forces of capitalism and religion as measured by the effect on the family. I thought if one movie could have such fecundity, surely others would as well.

After that I began chasing that high across the cinematic landscape, becoming familiar with directors and their oeuvre. Still the deeper layer of understanding was missing, as evidenced by the fact that every time I read a good analysis on the AV Club or the Criterion website my mind would be blown by the evidence and conclusions these writers were drawing. I had to tap into this second sight of sorts, open my third eye to the pieces of film as a text. After I took Film 1 everything opened up to me, I understood why I loved music in film and how it worked in concert with the action on the screen, I learned to notice things like camera movement, pacing, cuts, mise-en-scène, colors, framing. By seeing all the different pieces I was able to form interpretations and analysis that were beyond my previous capability. The side effect was that even films that I didn’t have any interest in or that I considered bad or boring now became an endless stream of subtext and symbolism that I could also analyze. This sort of retrospective analysis is the sorts that reclaim certain movies from the box office graveyard or the genre film wasteland.

Of course this was all for personal enrichment as I never thought I would be in the business of making a movie, but I thought maybe I could write one. The next class I took was a screenwriting class, it was eye-opening. Especially in the way that I realized this class was geared towards writing a very specific type of movie: A Hollywood Blockbuster. I guess the goal of this school is to get you employed which is great, but the classes were definitely centered around the kind of cookie cutter process that can threaten to rob the art from the artifice of movies. Still being able to write even the most basic script to create stakes and deliver an emotional response is better than writing my indie, arthouse script with 0 thought to dramatic tension. I came out of that class with a 20 page script that although I thought was pretty good, remains unfilmable (for now) because of the set pieces and locations I had written into it.

So I figured my journey was over at this point because the rest of the classes in the film program, the ones that required hands-on training were 6 hours of lecture and lab and, as I tend to forget, I have a full blown software engineering career that I still have to maintain and I couldn’t disappear for a whole day every week to take more classes. At this point I took a quick dip into Philosophy courses, but always keeping eye on the film classes. This Spring I saw an opportunity, the class was being offered on Saturdays! So I devoted my Saturday for 13 weeks straight to learning filmmaking from scratch because I didn’t even know how to turn on the camera. This was the workshop version of all the analysis classes I had taken. Lighting, framing, coverage, color temperature, scene direction, I had to learn these basic concepts and apply them every week and by the end I would end up with a 5 minute short.

The film I eventually made is 10 minutes and 45 seconds. This was because the script I wrote about a “humble” mushroom salesman who tries to breathe life into crappy spores had an ambitious montage sequence that was basically a love letter to a specific Allman Brothers Band album. The version I aired for class was 6 minutes long with a huge chunk of the montage cut out and I absolutely could not stand it so the version I’ll share with the world is my longer cut. The challenge presented by our professor was to write a script with 0 dialogue so the success of this little film of mine rests on whether the viewer can piece together the interior thoughts of the character without any explicit exposition. I broke the script up into individual shots of which I ended up with 50, not counting the coverage we would eventually have to take. I realized that the props I had written into it (mushrooms, trays, spores, caviar, flyers, etc) would take some effort to procure so on day 1 I wanted to film the easier scenes. This kind of backfired because we spent 80% of the time arranging the lighting so that it would look natural but well lit in the room. It was very slow at first, but by the second and third day we were figuring out what worked and what didn’t work and the shots we had to retake vastly dwindled in number. There were some shots we took that were….let’s say experimental and although I wasn’t happy with them we spent too much time setting them up so they had to stay in the film, you’ll probably know which ones I’m talking about.

My perfectionist streak was wearing thin with the deadline looming so the iron grasp I had on prop design went from being true to life to being “good enough to get the point across” and me and my friend Sergio went around to a couple Cambodian grocery stores in Long Beach looking for interesting mushrooms before going to the mushroom mecca that is H Mart. I took my iPhone into the store and guerrilla filmed the scenes there. For the scene at the liquor store, Hops and Vine in Long Beach was nice enough to let us film at 8 am when they opened and we didn’t take the boom mic because I was self conscious about filming in a public place with it. I deeply regretted it because the sound we recorded on camera was basically unusable and I had to flex some sound design muscles to make it sound okay. We also filmed the drug exchange at Ground Hideout which was kind enough to let us shoot the scene in their outdoor sidewalk as long as we didn’t interrupt customers. Then my friend Will who was in that scene as the USC student suggested a little field off the LA River bike path that we could use as a cow farm so we drove there and I mixed up some chocolate pudding and dirt at Sergio’s suggestion and we had our cow poop. The editing process took another week and a half and although there are some things I would have liked to reshoot it wasn’t in the cards with my time running out.

So to undo any pretentiousness that may have seeped into the rest of this post, I know this film is not an example of any of the aforementioned masterpieces and to boot there were other class members who seemed to take this course as just another class on their way to a degree of some sort. But once you’re over 30, any accomplishment is worth celebrating and I feel like for someone who graduated college with an engineering degree, exploring this wholly unrelated field and being able to produce something that is at least intelligible was a great accomplishment. Most importantly it was fun shooting with my roommate and friend Daniel who is in every single scene and contributed the one word of dialogue in the movie. This marks the first step in what I hope is a series of self-financed, short films involving me and my friends that will get better and better as I practice the craft a bit more.

Jesus Christ. Messiah. Lisan Al Gaib. Dude.

Jesus Christ. Messiah. Lisan Al Gaib. Dude.

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The Last Temptation Of Christ

Raise your hand if you’ve seen Dune 2. Keep your hand up if you’ve read the New Testament. Keep your hand up if you’ve been obsessed with the writings of Leo Tolstoy. If your hand is still up, then you might be Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. If they were still alive today. Tolstoy took a stance of radical love later in his life that influenced all forms of non violent protest that we are familiar with now. Where did this stance come from? The source of eternal life, the Son of Man, Jesus Christ. Yet he approached the life and teachings of Jesus in an experimental way, by removing the miracles, the divinity and the mysticism from the gospels.

I read A Confession in which Tolstoy admits his total lack of the will to keep living, and the book is framed as a way to make a logical argument against his own suicide because if he can find no reason to live then why should he. The thrust of the novella is beautifully summed up in the parable he details:

There is an old Eastern fable about a traveler who is taken unawares on the steppes by a ferocious wild animal. In order to escape the beast the traveler hides in an empty well, but at the bottom of the well he sees a dragon with its jaws open, ready to devour him. The poor fellow does not dare to climb out because he is afraid of being eaten by the rapacious beast, neither does he dare drop to the bottom of the well for fear of being eaten by the dragon. So he seizes hold of a branch of a bush that is growing in the crevices of the well and clings on to it. His arms grow weak and he knows that he will soon have to resign himself to the death that awaits him on either side. Yet he still clings on, and while he is holding on to the branch he looks around and sees that two mice, one black and one white, are steadily working their way round the bush he is hanging from, gnawing away at it. Sooner or later they will eat through it and the branch will snap, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish. But while he is still hanging there he sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the bush, stretches out his tongue and licks them. In the same way I am clinging to the tree of life, knowing full well that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand how I have fallen into this torment. And I try licking the honey that once consoled me, but it no longer gives me pleasure. The white mouse and the black mouse – day and night – are gnawing at the branch from which I am hanging. I can see the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tastes sweet. I can see only one thing; the inescapable dragon and the mice, and I cannot tear my eyes away from them.

Leo Tolstoy – A Confession

Facing the inevitability of his own death, the decreasing pleasure he gets from living every day life, and the inability to forget about the futility in which he now exists he comes to the conclusion that not serving any further purpose he may as well die but admits that he is too cowardly to do it. He tries to find a way to overcome the suffering when he remembers that he gets a glimmer of existential joy whenever he considers how he felt when he had faith in God. It was a matter of course, perhaps even the trend for intellectuals in Tolstoy’s time to be atheist, or to at least accept that religion was not a rational endeavor. Yet he makes the claim that he was at his most happiest when he believed and that this faith in itself could be the key to finding his will to live. He tries to return to the Russian orthodox church in earnest only to find himself disheartened and confused by the dogmatic and empty ritualistic acts that plague the sermons. Tolstoy decides that he must cut away the cruft that has accrued over the centuries since the crucifixion and get back to the very soul of Christianity which are the teachings of Jesus Christ. This is where the novella ends, with a promise that after years of research he will come back with his findings. He delivers this in a following book, The Gospel In Brief, which is itself a smaller piece of a larger work in which he reinterprets the four gospels of the New Testament, stripped of all superstition. Admittedly I did not see his existential crisis ending with a renewal in religious faith. I understand where Tolstoy is coming from though because his conceptualized idea of faith is akin to the Christian idea of the spirit. Then as Jesus teaches his disciples, eternal life can only be found through the spirit not through the flesh. In the parlance of the fable, all the honey in the world will not save you from being eaten by the dragon because the mistake is serving the flesh to save the flesh, in essence making yourself more delicious for the dragon to enjoy. One should serve the spirit to save the spirit which would allow Tolstoy to lift himself right out of that well and enter in the kingdom of Heaven, eternal life or as I like to think, existential purpose and fulfillment.

Now that I’ve put that out there I want to state that I myself am not religious, and I don’t believe in any literal sense the scripture writ in the gospels. Jesus never sat down and wrote his thoughts into words, the gospels were written around 60 years after his death. Not only that but the canonical gospels are only a subset of the many that were written which the budding Christian church decided were the most suited to be canon. Even the canonical gospels don’t always line up with each other either. So we must tackle these religious sources for what they are, unverifiable accounts of the life and teachings of a man which may be more literary creation than historical figure. This is of course supreme blasphemy according to the church. The funny thing about heresy is that it only matters to you if you abide by the institution that declares it such. The greatest Christian institution: the Roman Catholic church is a military hierarchical framework originating via the Nicene Creed. It was created as such to protect Christianity as a religion and to standardize the creation of theology, the greatest misstep I think in the history of Christianity as a philosophy. Because in doing this, they wiped out the most anarchic of Jesus lessons: the rejection of dogma in favor of belief. His words are simple, yet the institutions that sprang up in his wake continually complicate them in favor of maintaining the idea of religious divinity and disseminating this power into a purported chain of command that starts with the pope. Yet Jesus was a teacher of the poor, disavowed the rich and powerful and held that men are more important than all religious ceremonies. The catholic church then, and any offshoot from its inception, is itself a heretical organization.

Therefore I can get to the real business of Jesus, which is interpreting his philosophy in a way that applies to humanity not divinity. As I read The Gospel In Brief I could not help but make continuous connections to other great teachers of life. So much so that I thought Lao Tzu and The Buddha must have been pen pals with Jesus while he was in the forest coming up with his ideas. I kid, but Eastern influences must have been present in the time of historical Jesus, there’s very little evidence to suggest there was any direct contact but the similarities in some of the lessons is striking. Firstly there is Jesus’ role as an ascetic. The Jewish fasted before the time of Jesus but the biggest difference is they fasted to commemorate events or to perform a sacrifice as dictated in the Old Testament. Jesus not only willingly gave up food, but went so far as to say food is not necessary:

He who fulfills the will of the father shall always be satisfied and knows neither hunger nor thirst

He upends the paradigm choosing instead to not look at fasting as a sacrificial act but as a display of the will of the spirit, a supreme act of self control. The Buddha also recommended his followers to fast as a way to detach from the need of food and sustenance which would arouse suffering. He practiced extreme fasting for a time before giving it up in favor of the middle way yet he did so with the realization that one does not need as much material food as they think and that one’s power over the mind is one of the greatest tools against suffering. So on one hand we have the food of the spirit (service to the Father, the origin of life) surpassing the need for food of the flesh. On the other hand we have the removal of the attachment to food by our willpower. The two concepts seem inevitably entangled to me. Moreover Jesus taught generally that needs of the flesh chain us to dying by the flesh. His concept of eternal life, as being removed from any sort of fleshly desires could be read as another version of the eightfold path of buddhism which aims to remove all attachments to any concept or materialism that stop us from achieving enlightenment and exiting the cycle of death and rebirth, aka eternal life.

Next we have Jesus’ radically nonviolent stance. As he famously states:

If anyone strikes out your tooth on one side, turn him to the other side. If you are made to do one piece of work, do two. If men wish to take your property, give it to them. If they do not return your money, do not ask for it.

Jesus reinforces his belief that resisting evil is itself a mechanism of evil, hence the only means to do away with evil is to not only to willingly suffer, but to give more than the actor against you would take. This form of “generous” victimhood is a means to highlight that the things that victimize us do so at our own volition. Here we have a smattering of the stoic concept of “Amor Fati”, love thy fate. Jesus encourages his followers to love their fate by multiplying its effects. The buddhist concept of right thought, right conduct, and right effort all apply to this situation, because Buddha also taught the ancient concept of Ahimsa, nonviolence towards all living things. Jesus’ method of multiplying those violent or evil acts against us can be seen as the inversion of the buddhist belief that life is suffering. If you throw yourself on the sword instead of resisting against the sword then no action can be taken against your will and therefore you cannot suffer by the spirit. This also has moral implications because by increasing the acts performed in your detriment, you are increasing the evil done in the short term however there can be no moral victory against a non-violent resistor and in our modern times in particular, in which all actions are surveilled and criticized, the moral victory is the everlasting one.

Lastly Jesus preaches that the kingdom of heaven, contrary to popular culture, is timeless, cannot be seen, and is not physically present anywhere. He says that it exists on earth and can be entered at any time provided you access the origin of all life, the spirit.

Understand that, if man is conceived from heaven, then in him there must be that which is of heaven

Rather the kingdom of heaven is part of us because we are created from it. We lose touch with it and Jesus’ lessons act as the shepherd that reconnects us to our divine origins. This concept is striking in its similarity to the words of Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching. The tao, for the uninitiated is the eternal and limitless substance from which life springs, and life returns:

The Tao is infinite, eternal.
Why is it eternal?
It was never born;
thus it can never die.
Why is it infinite?
It has no desires for itself;
thus it is present for all beings.

Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching

The tao represents the unlimited potential from which humanity is made. In the Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu describes how being more like the tao improves our lives because the closer we are to the origin of life then the closer we become to realizing the perfect life, or perhaps as Jesus would say, the everlasting life. Jesus refers to “the father” as this origin of the spirit. The father is one with the kingdom of heaven and traditionally he has been identified as the Abrahamic God that created the earth, and gave Noah his purpose etc. But what if it wasn’t the same God? What if Jesus never meant that the father was an actual person or deity but a force, origin, or an immutable aspect of human nature like the tao? He certainly alludes to the fact that his father cannot be known, nor can the origins of his own birth be verified because the light that illuminates knowledge cannot itself be illuminated. Similarly Lao Tzu describes the tao:

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching

Here he states that although we can try to describe the tao, give it a shape and a name, we are incapable of ever actually understanding it or knowing it. By naming it we create a lesser version of it in our minds, similar to Plato’s theory of forms, we can only reach approximate knowledge via an imperfect understanding of the infinite tao from which all life springs. Jesus seems to think similarly of his Father:

You have understood that understanding proceeds from the Father into the world and returns from the world to the Father.

Lao Tzu and Jesus reasoned that trying to define something intrinsically unimaginable robs it of its power and purpose. Rather they all preached that keeping this unfathomable barrier in mind while accepting that it is a part of us is instrumental to being at peace with ourselves. The Buddha and Jesus also both believed that maintaining strict beliefs and expectations were fundamentally damaging to our internal lives. Siddhartha famously encountered the four sights which (eventually) awakened him to the four noble truths of suffering. Jesus understood similarly in his meditation out in the wilderness. He states in the gospels that that the temple of God lives in the hearts of men who love each other, taking care to illustrate that no physical sacrifice, place of worship, or ritual can bring you closer to eternal life and speaking harshly to the orthodox who upheld these values for their own sake due to their attachment to scripture. According to the buddhists, once you remove all attachments you will achieve the state of enlightenment which will allow you to exit the cycle of rebirth. Enlightenment, eternal life, entering the kingdom of heaven, returning to the Tao: these all sound like the same concept to me.

So it seems there must have been some dialogue between east and west at the inception of Christianity. But whether these are all teachers that borrowed from each other or whether they all possessed the clarity of mind to arrive to similar conclusions doesn’t matter. Religions have sprung up in the place of teaching to try and control the power that comes with sanctity. Yet holding the words of our teachers as unimpeachably sacred is damaging to the whole endeavor of human progress. Jesus knew this which is why he taught that belief supersedes actions. Correct belief gets at an objective center of morality, but correct actions leaves room for the false teachers to bear ill fruit in the realm of subjectivity. This is the true power of Jesus’ words, because even if you do not believe in the christian church or have ever heard of Jesus, are part of a Satanic cult, or are born on a different planet if you do as he commanded and always, and to the end, love each other then you are a disciple of Christ without ever realizing it. It is this concept which propelled Tolstoy from suicidal ideation to passionate living. The connection to these truths which have been realized over and over throughout history saved him in spite of the obfuscation caused by the religious theology that paradoxically try to protect them.

Deep Fried Revisionism: A Trip To Texas

Deep Fried Revisionism: A Trip To Texas

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I went on a trip to Austin after telling my friends for years that I wanted to go. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was seeing all of them take their epic summer vacations to Europe. I know it sounds tone deaf considering I just went on an epic trip to Japan earlier this year. But I also feel that being in a privileged and unique position to have the agency to take these trips puts me in moral bind. If I do not exercise these powers that I have, am I worthy of having them? If I don’t take advantage, am I wasting the opportunities presented to me? and most importantly will I regret it later in life when I think, “oh how I could have traveled in those days and chose instead to be humble about it and wait for my turn again”. There’s this capitalist instinct to squeeze as much productivity as possible into your days. Yet everyone’s concept of productivity really rests on the goals they have defined for themselves. And for someone such as I, whose only real goal is to live life authentically…how is one productive at living?

My answer is to act on those flourishes of inspiration. When the muse speaks to me, I listen. And here it told me (not literally of course) that I needed to get away for a bit. I felt that inexorable rejection of the mundane which visits me from time to time. I don’t want to end up like Ivan Ilyich and reject these in favor of a predictable existence so I checked and the universe laid bare a gift to me: Fantastic Fest. The Alamo Drafthouse’s film festival held at their base camp in Austin, Texas. I knew about this festival before but I had previously decided not to go thinking I couldn’t make the days work with the already lavish time I had taken. Now it would serve well as the grounds for a revenge trip, a revenge on myself really, the me that had dared to decide I wasn’t going to act on it before.

The plan was simple, I wasn’t going to take the 7 days off required to attend the entirety of the festival. I was going to opt for the cheapest badge possible, the second-half badge, partially as a trial run to see if the full experience would be worth it and also so I could offset some of the negative optics around my trip by working remotely a couple days. I flew in Friday night after work and would cram as much tourism as I could into that first weekend including some bike rides, work Monday to Wednesday, attend all five rounds of movies on Thursday, Fly to Dallas Friday morning and hang out with my cousins there, then fly back Sunday night. Only two days total of official vacation time if I could make it work.

I found out that Lance Armstrong is based out of Austin and it just so happened that the bike shop I placed a rental with was his bike shop. I discussed with Daniel, as a barometer of the cycling community, if it was cool to like Lance Armstrong again. He said that it’s kind of undisputed that everyone on the Tour De France (TDF) would cheat during his tenure there, and that’s a big reason why he felt he could confess the truth but that he still acted like a total douche about it and that’s why public opinion is against him. So okay relatively speaking he wasn’t any worse in deeds than his peers, but if we’re dealing with absolutes maybe him and the rest of them deserve the hate evenly spread amongst them. But all’s fair in love and war and morality tends to go out the window in intense competitions like the TDF, especially if winning is determined by the amount of cheating you do or don’t do. So this is all to say that although I don’t worship at the altar of Armstrong, being in his home base bike shop was still pretty cool.

The morning before picking up the bike I walked to the state capitol of Texas which I think was the biggest checkbox on my list of tourist activities plus I thought it would make for a great “I’m here” photo for my IG stories.

Which yeah it totally did

I didn’t go in as it was too early for visiting hours but I walked along its grounds and just tried to absorb the Texas-ness of it all. There was a statue of the ten commandments across the street which I thought “yeah, checks out” and then I was surprised to find a statue dedicated to the confederate dead….which okay I see what they are trying to do but the dedication said the reason for the secession was a matter of “states’ rights” but I think it is intentionally obfuscating the real issue at the core of the civil war: slavery. This was the same kind of Lost Cause gaslighting I saw on my trip to Virginia and Georgia last year so I guess I should have anticipated it, but that’s when I finally felt like I was in Texas.

I picked up the bike from Mellow Johnnys, only to realize that it was way more hot and humid than I had anticipated. I’ve ridden in hot conditions before but it has been a while and I was afraid my body was not acclimated. Still I shook it off and thought that it wouldn’t be any worse than the Tour De Palm Springs century I did a year and a half ago. I set off probably at the worst time, 11 am, as the heat was beginning to climb but the first part of the ride was through the shaded canopy along the Colorado River, then through some beautiful forested areas on the Austin-to-Manor Bike trail. It was going so well that I even stopped for a decadent coffee at a mochi donut shop also conveniently located next to a bike shop. Okay you probably feel me setting it up but once I hit the open plains and the blacktop coming back from Lake Long I was WRECKED. I explained it better in my Strava recap but I definitely was suffering from heat exhaustion by the end of that ride and I had to lay down and focus on not passing out for about 20 minutes once I got back. This kind of shifted my plans a bit because I decided bike rides were no longer in the picture.

The following day I decided to go to the Texas State history museum insetad. They have a cool immersive 4d theater experience were they play admittedly propagandic films about how great Texas is. No one loves Texas more than Texas I think and one of the films was about its identity as the Lone Star state who fights more its beliefs and doesn’t have problems standing in defiance of anyone who says otherwise. To wit outside the theatre there was a display from Gonzales, Texas the site of the very first battle in the Texas revolution. The narrative the museum tells is that being fed up with Texas’ poor representation in the Mexican government and mishandling of their economy forced them to rebel, and when Mexico showed up to Gonzales to take back the cannons they had given the outpost there, the Texans said enough was enough and erected a banner with the words “Come And Take It”. Mexico tried to do just that but was sent packing in what was the first volley towards Texas independence. Myths like these and the tale of the Alamo bolster this Lone Star identity. I admit as a story it is inspiring, and I can see why Texans love to embody this image of a scrappy, rebellious, and confident underdog. It hits the same notes that the American revolution did, and they would claim that Texas independence was also a struggle to break free from a tyrant. The reality though is a little suspect because at the time of Texas’ independence there was just as many Mexican residents as foreigners, perhaps it is for this reason that Texas would have preferred to be its own nation not really Mexican and not really American. Yet by eventually joining the United States it created a rift between it’s identity as an American white state and its true Mexican roots. To further confuse things it almost immediately seceded from the union in order to preserve its vast and powerful cotton trade economy. It’s still the Lone Star indeed but on the wrong side of history this time?

Okay these guys maybe are a little too white

When you think of Texas what comes to mind though? Longhorn cattle, cowboys, horses, rodeos? Not slavery, cotton, sweet tea, the confederacy? That is because there was an intentional rebranding campaign during the Texas Centennial Exhibition. Texas was(is) a southern state yet after the massive publicity of the centennial celebration we not think of it as a Western state. clever isn’t it? Granted the division between South, West, and Southwest is blurry and imaginary but our relative perception is all that matters. The humidity, heat and general swampiness of Austin told the real tale of the South at least geographically speaking. Having said all that I still bought a Gonzales pin because there is something universally badass about telling an overbearing source of authority to dare and come take their approval back.

Fantastic Fest itself was an amazing experience. It was like being at a film camp, seeing the same people everyday and sharing your thoughts on the films with them and the actors, directors, or crew that were there for the premiere. Then it ended in an extravagant party that reminded me of the crazy company holiday parties Verizon used to throw. I think 2024 will include me buying a full badge but for now I’ve written about all the 2023 FF movies I did see on my letterboxd.

After the festivities I got to treat myself even further and take a short flight to Dallas to spend a whirlwind two extra days with my cousin there. I’ve been meaning to visit her for a long time and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity now that I was within striking distance. I went to the Texas State Fair, the biggest of all the state fairs, while there and wow…you know how all throughout the world the United States is known for uniquely death defyingly fatty foods, well the Texas State Fair is the breeding ground for them. It’s the wellspring of the American diet including foods such as deep fried fritos and chili, deep fried pumpkin pie, deep fried shots of Fireball whisky, deep fried texas oatmeal pie and much…much more. Of course what is America without our rich tapestry of immigrant backgrounds? They are not be left out either as I had deep fried Vietnamese coffee, deep fried cacio e pepe, deep fried birria bombs, deep fried bao buns and still much more. It was a culinary experience unique to Texas and perhaps all the state fairs in the US have a little bit of this and a little bit of that but there in Dallas everything was bigger and abundant.

Big Tex, presiding god of Texas and its deep fryers.

Lastly and perhaps most overwhelming I visited the scene of John F. Kennedy’s death. There is a museum built on the floor where Lee Harvey Oswald fired three bullets at the president’s cavalcade. I’m not a big presidential buff, or even a fan of deifying presidents the way certain people do (looking at Reagan and Obama) but walking through JFK’s museum was absolutely gripping. I think there were several reasons for my fascination:
1) Just the general spectacle of death as entertainment which we are so accustomed to seeking out. It’s probably the whole reason the museum can be operated, droves of tourists coming to literally walk on the ground where a president was fatally shot. This tangible connection to the past is its own force too I think which is the reason we like to visit ruins and ancient structures etc.
2) The Zapruder film is an amazing public document. This was one of the first video recordings ever used in a criminal investigation shot on one of the first EVER home video cameras. The film runs at about 18 frames per second and each frame becomes a tick in the clock of the assassination. The detailing of events then unfold as each frame of the film snaps by. Is these 486 frames of films that have caused an explosion of conspiracy theories and deep dives into trajectories of the bullets etc.
3) The exhibits at the museum are laid out in such a way that it places you in the roles of an investigator. After covering JFK’s brief presidency you are inundated in facts about the murder each mapped to a frame of the zapruder film. Then you are exposed to various theories and although officially Oswald was found to be the only guilty assailant, the real nail in the coffin of any resolution is that he ALSO gets assassinated right after. So are you left trying to piece together what “really” happened yourself a technique which I admit left me wondering about the whole affair for weeks after.

My final act in Texas was to visit one of the South’s unique twists on open road culture. I joined the cult of Buc-ees which on paper is a gas station with a giant general goods store attached to it. In practice though it’s so much more, it’s like you’re walking into the temple of some ancient Greek god and their followers have set up a festival of goods and foods that you can only find in the shadow of the titular Beaver. You can buy idols and merchandise in his image to take to his followers back home for good fortune. You can indulge in the pristine bathrooms that upend the stigma of roadside lavatory usage and hygiene. This is all to say that I will be back to Texas if only as a pilgrimage to worship at the foot of Buc-ees once more.

My Grandma

My Grandma

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Encarnacion Lara 1935 – 08/04/23

My grandma passed away as I was watching Meg 2. It feels as ridiculous to say as it does to type. How could two disparate events be connected in time so permanently? My memories of my grandmother are now forever linked to memories of Jason Statham murdering prehistoric ocean monsters. My grandmother a real, living person of flesh and blood and a movie so haphazardly thrown together it barely even qualifies as having plot.

I stepped into the theatre knowing she was sick. We had known for a long time in fact. Over the last year as I saw her at gatherings or just random occasions she got thinner and thinner. At some point she began using a walker to get around being unable to keep balance on her own. It’s strange seeing a relative slowly lose their vitality, each time you see them you are made aware of the impending doom awaiting them, and each time you slowly come to terms with what’s heading their way. That’s just me of course, my mother probably sees it much differently having put a lot of effort and energy into worrying about her mother the last year of her life. She took the time to take her out to lunch or dinner here and there and when they were feeling extra rebellious they would go to the casino which my grandma really loved. She didn’t live with my mom though, she lived with my aunt not but 20 minutes away having permanently moved to Palmdale from El Salvador so she could live closer to (most) of her children and grandchildren and get better medical attention (which is honestly debatable but that’s a whole other blog post).

I would not say I was very close to her though. For the last decade or so she remained mostly a fixture at parties and birthdays. She was eternally sitting on the couch or using the restroom or sipping coffee or soup. But she would watch and observe, giving curt nods or responses when someone approached her. She was not what you would imagine a typical grandmother is like. She was not doting or fussy, and not chatty or opinionated. She was stoic and taciturn and forever serious. The interactions I would have with her would play like a series of questions and answers, a matter of facts and niceties and not much else. She wasn’t cold or belittling though, just reserved. Honestly this is where I felt the most kinship with her since I am the same way in social situations and we made excellent couch buddies just sitting there in silence and watching the goings on of those around us. My sister made a great point to me that the odd moment where someone could make her break out into laughter or a smile really left an impression on you, and that’s probably what I’ll miss the most.

I don’t take issue with her for being that way either, she’s a survivor of the Salvadoran civil war, and my mom has plenty of stories of having to run through the jungle to hide from helicopter fire or being shut in their house together to avoid soldiers on both sides of the conflict from taking issue. I cannot imagine the horror of living through a war, literally it’s not possible…I’m a peacetime schlub, and I hope I am never able to. Yet the repercussions of that conflict reverberate through my entire family, psychologically and physically and I don’t think anyone can handle that much distress and come out okay on the other side but yet here they all were establishing a foothold in a hostile country, putting the next generation through school, and finally culminating in allowing me to sit in a coffee shop and write alternatively dumb and cerebral blog posts without having to worry about my basic needs or threats to life and limb (other than self sabotage of course). For that I am, and must be, eternally grateful to my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, and the vague wider cast of close family friends that built their house of cards life in the US back in the 80s.

With the death of my grandmother I am left bereft of grandparents. That whole generation save a couple of great aunts and uncles has departed this realm and with them goes a whole way of life to which my connection is severed. My trip to El Salvador last year really opened my eyes to a lot of the stories and relationships that have followed me and my family my whole life but writing about it became overwhelming, so I’ll come back to that some day. But case in point is that with every year I grow more and more distant to those roots and me and some of my cousins seem to be the only ones interested in preserving at least some of the pieces of those twisted, withered roots. I guess the lingering question is why does it matter? Placing my existence in context has revealed itself to be more or less my raison d’etre and there is so. much. context. Technically, every preceding event that has ever occurred has lead to this, to me. Undoubtedly some things are more important than others though and that’s the Jairo based ontological excavation that I have undertaken.

So my grandmother’s death is both symbolic and personal. That’s redundant though as nearly everything that occurs is symbolic, especially to a literary eye. I wonder if she ever struggled with these questions of existence, of purpose, of living. Did she suffer from ennui, depression, or just malcontent? I’m not sure. I never asked her and she never talked about it to me and I’m dubious ever even mentioned it at all. I don’t want to say that if I had more time or if I had known I would have tried to ask her about all of this, or about herself. Even if I had known she was leaving the earth in a day I don’t think I would have sat down to talk to her like this. To me it would feel disingenuous and disrespectful, a person should be allowed to take their secrets and their being to the grave if they wish. If she never felt the need to discuss it then who would I, or anyone, be to ask her about it. She lives on as she wants to be remembered and that memory is something I won’t begrudge.

Grandma didn’t die in Palmdale though, she went back to the motherland, El Salvador to pass away. I don’t know whether she did this on purpose, all I know is the timeline of events is suspect. My aunt says she wanted to fly back and visit and a week later she went from being just generally sick to taking a turn for the worse. The doctors there gave her a prognosis of death and that’s where the chaos began. My mom of course had to fly out there as fast as she could accompanied by most of my aunts and uncles eventually. My grandmother lasted five days in a state of fasting, eating very little to nothing, at first suffering painfully from her ailments but soon after being administered a sedative out of mercy. My last conversation with her was a brief video chat on whats app in which she was cognizant of me and nodded as I told her I loved her and I wish she got better, taciturn until the end. Eventually she passed away surrounded by her children and some extended family that lived in El Salvador. My mom watched as she gave her last breath. I don’t know if this is the perfect death or the worst but that’s how it happened.

Was it right as Statham launched an exploding harpoon into the head of a Megalodon? Or when he picked up a helicopter blade and impaled an Alpha Megalodon? I’ll never know and that’s a mystery I don’t care to solve. I like to think that it was her choice to go back home and pass away, that it was totally in her control which is a very rare opportunity afforded to anyone in this life. She was buried the very next day as is tradition in El Salvador in a service attended by friends, family, and loved ones.

My Spiritual Pilgrimage in Japan

My Spiritual Pilgrimage in Japan

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(Originally wrote the below for my caption on IG but it had the GALL to tell me it was too many words so I added even more words and photos and turned it into a blog post. Excuse some repeats if you’ve read both)
I’m two days in from my trip to Japan and I’m still thinking about the Japanese free jazz concert I went to where Masayo Koketsu recited the bodhisattva Amoghapāśa’s mantra of light to attain revelation over sultry piano and percussion before launching into saxophone improvisation. Is this the Japanese equivalent of a Christian rock band? I’m not sure, but I think it was divine intervention since one day previous I was admiring the statue of Kokuuzo Bosasu in Todai-Ji (IG photo 1 and 2). His name means “boundless space treasury” which reflects that his wisdom is so great that it must be infinite and is prayed to in part for excellence on tests and education. They say if you recite his mantra 10000 times you will gain understanding of all the teachings in the buddhist canon. He sits to the left of a giant statue of the Buddha Vairocana, The Great Illuminator, a cosmic and primordial buddha that is sometimes interpreted as the spiritual blueprint of which all buddhas are made and return to (reminds me of the Tao). I took a photo of this vast edifice but the scale just doesn’t do it justice, just go see it for yourself! I donated 2000 yen to write my name on a roof tile that will get added to the temple as part of a restoration process. I left a piece of myself behind and this tactile exchange of self represents the metaphysical exchange where I took a little from Japan and gave a little of myself and to me that’s what traveling for is all about.

But I saw LOTS of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Heavenly Kings, and Divine Generals as I obsessively sought out temples to visit while I traveled Japan. None impressed me more than the Great Buddha of Kamakura (IG photo 3) which I accidentally stumbled into on my pilgrimage to find the resting place of legendary film director Akira Kurosawa whose grave is a modest tribute to such a legendary force in both eastern and western film.

I felt almost like I was trespassing on sacred ground, I wasn’t though since it is a publicly accessible site behind a buddhist temple…not trying to incur any spiritual wrath here. I paid my respects and left. On my way to the site I saw directions to a “buddha” statue so me and my friend Evan who had joined me that day took upon ourselves to explore.

After walking for about 20 minutes we came upon Kōtoku-in, over which which the magnificent Great Buddha presided. It sits completely outdoors like a meditative giant, 5 feet shorter than the Vairocana buddha I saw at Todai-Ji but the picturesque backdrop really makes it feel more epic in scale. The Great Buddha of Kamakura is a representation of Amitābha, who after many achievements over countless lives attained buddha hood and decided to create a separate realm which remained pure and free of the corruptive forces that exist in our realms. If you call upon him at your death you can be reborn into his pure land where you will live in peace and be able to attain enlightenment much easier. It seems to me like a precursor to our Western concept of Heaven, but then again those ideas are littered throughout the whole of human history.

But if we’re talking about Buddhist temples, Kiyomizu-dera (IG photo 4) is one of the most impressive sights in Kyoto. One night we were at a rooftop bar having highballs and I noticed this radiant beam of light penetrating the darkness out of the mountains and the next night I was out there with my friends seeking it out. It houses a statue of the Buddhist deities Daikokuten and Kannon, who bring wealth and save humans from difficulties respectively. Daikokuten is what’s known as a syncretic deity. His roots are in the buddhist representation of the hindu god Shiva, which has been mixed with the Japanese shinto god Ōkuninushi creating a whole new entity that is worshipped throughout temples to this day.

The aspect of Daikokuten at Kiyomizu-dera.

Kannon is also an important deity in Japanese buddhism and I saw representations of him the most. Usually with many arms and a different tool in each hand. He is a deity of compassion and the aspect at Kiyomizu-dera specifically is prayed to for prevention of suffering. Below him sits the Otowa Waterfall. Here they have ladles where you can wash your hands and drink pristine mountain water in an effort to make your wishes come true. I took a deep drink of the water here and continued to navigate the impressive temple.

The view of the temple from below the buddha, at the waterfalls.

Buddhism is not the only way to gain favor in Japan though since it is an import from India via China and Korea. There are also Shinto shrines devoted to native Japanese gods and spirits. Again in Kyoto I climbed Mt Inari by way of the Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine devoted to Inari Okami, the god of (IG photo 5), at first with a staggering amount of tourists but then as I climbed further up the mountain they were less and less and I got to enjoy the assortment of Fox spirit statues and local desserts made by the residents in a more relaxed environment. Here I bought what a monk described as sacred sake only found on that mountain. Throughout the hike there are almost 10000 Torii gates, which traditionally represent the gateway from the mundane to the sacred. So you can say that as I passed under each one, the intensity and potency of the sake was only enhanced. Alas it would never make it back to the States, as me and my friends who did not participate in my thousandfold blessings shared it in a Ryokan not two days later. Yet in sharing the sake I think we all have charged our spiritual meters to max, at least that’s what I’d like to think.

Later in Osaka I visited Sumiyoshi Taisha which enshrines the gods of the sea and sailing. There is a spot behind the main shrines where it is said that the empress Jingu encountered the spirits first and decided to build the shrine. On that spot is an altar of small pebbles most of which are unmarked but some of them have one of these: “five” 五, “large” 大, or “power” 力. If you find all three you receive the five blessings of the spirits: health, wisdom, wealth, happiness, and longevity (IG photo 6). I almost left without collecting the pebbles, but damnit must one not do everything in their power to live a good life? I still have the pebbles in the decorative pouch in my room, choosing to keep them instead of leaving them tied up at the altar as is customary.

Of course no survey of Japanese iconography is complete without the macdaddy of them all GODZILLA and although he had no offering box I still venerated at his altar (IG photo 7). Godzilla traditionally represents the nuclear devastation the US wrought on WWII but I think it has turned into a symbol reminding us of the futility of our everyday lives compared to the titanic march of nature and time. At least that’s my reading of the latest movie Shin Godzilla, but with over 38 films in the canon it’s hard to pin him down to just one reading. There is no doubt that he is a cultural force in Tokyo though, as his grim face towers over one of the main avenues in the Shinjuku district. The first time I saw him there we were visiting an old expat high school friend. I asked him if we could visit the giant head and he said he wasn’t sure and he had never heard of people doing that so we left without trying. I found at that you could in fact go up there but we left Tokyo soon after. On our itinerary, however, we had one last night there before we traveled back to the states just for these kinds of last minute missions. I made it my goal to go up to that hotel and witness the statue for myself. Of course my tenacity was rewarded with the sight before you. A full scale representation of Godzilla from from Godzilla vs Mothra (1992) and also at the height which he would be in real life. Perhaps this was the shrine I treasured the most of the whole trip.

Godzilla from street level

To wrap this up, this a photo sharing service or something right, I have so many photos of the beautiful cherry blossoms that were in full bloom for our whole trip but I like this one (IG photo 8 ) from the zen Buddhist temple, Tenryu-ji, in Arashiyama which was the city where I saw people dressed the most in traditional clothing. The temple had an exquisitely maintained garden which I’m told has been preserved almost in its original state for centuries. The temple also houses this intimidating depiction of Bodhidharma who is known as the buddhist monk to begin teaching zen buddhism to the Shaolin Monks at the Shaolin Temple in China, creating a direct connection to the origins of Shaolin Kung-Fu. Since Zen Buddhism came to Japan via China, he is also revered at this temple. Another interesting legend states that he once sat and stared at a wall for 9 years in seated meditation. One version of the story states that after all that time his legs atrophied and became useless, hence Daruma dolls which are modeled after him have no legs.

Shrine to Bodhidharma at Tenryu-ji.

Obviously the totality of Japan’s religious and spiritual identity cannot be summed up in one trip, nor perhaps even in a lifetime of trips, and drawing any conclusions about it is like visiting a couple different states here in the US and forming a national opinion based on them. Yet there are similarities and patterns I can see. Compassion, enlightenment, meditation (mindfulness), respect and honor are all highly valued at the various shrines and and temples I visited whether couched in the forms of deities, spirits, emperors or buddhas.

Suffering Exists

Suffering Exists

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I’ve talked about suffering before but lately I’ve been reading up on Siddhartha Gautama’s teachings. That’s the Buddha, not to be confused with a buddha. His lessons can probably be summarized as suffering exists, and suffering can be overcome. Today I wont be waxing on about him though, that will come in a few weeks, I’m here to talk about physical suffering. More specifically suffering for 14 hours on a bicycle.

Maybe it’s not fair to say I was suffering for 14 hours because I certainly started off feeling elated, undercut with just a touch of dread maybe. Certainly, even in the midst of the worst pain I felt spurts of joy as well. Delirious, pure joy such as the one described by the buddha as the second jhāna of Right Concentration:

Furthermore, with the stilling of directed thoughts & evaluations, he enters and remains in the second jhana: rapture and pleasure born of composure, unification of awareness free from directed thought and evaluation — internal assurance. He permeates and pervades, suffuses and fills this very body with the rapture and pleasure born of composure. There is nothing of his entire body unpervaded by rapture and pleasure born of composure.

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samma-samadhi/jhana.html

On these long rides it’s hard not to consider them a form of meditation, yet I’ve never really experienced the banishing of thought on my bike until this day.

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