These may or may not end up in a story, but I want to keep track of these brief flashes of inspiration, just in case.

Two Faberge egg-looking lamps hanging from the ceiling, sort of like chandeliers, but more like the sword of Damacles since they hang above where I sleep. It's the kind of thing that you could easily get paranoid about. I take pride knowing I don't. This reminds me of my willful confidence around bees. It's like a notable psychological defiance to bolster my self-esteem given how fragile my mind generally is. Could I sleep comfortably under an actual sword? Am I that detached? Only one way to find out.

---

The first to go is always my clothes.

---

Here's how it went down. A long time ago, I made it a matter of principle to always jump right into the pool. That always pays off better than the icy laddering down, body part by piqued body part. But I couldn't get myself to do it. Usually the conditions encourage the jump. The water is so freezing that you just tell yourself, "fuck it." Or maybe you have an audience that's weakly slinking into the pool; a bit of bravado incetivizes the plunge. But tonight, none of those conditions were met. I was just an inch away from the tipping point of jumping right in. I wanted to just "fuck it," but I didn't want it bad enough. Wanting something, but not enough to act, was my punishment. How can you want to want? And so I slinked in slowly, measuring the water level rising over the usual rungs: my ankles, my knees, and then meeting the bottom of my crotch. A flash of suicide flitted across my mind, at which point I made an executive decision, and plunged.

---

Always fight the bad guys in your nightmares.

---

Prophylactics. Anxiolytics. Tricyclics. Reading medical names slows you down as you struggle to sub-vocalize the words in your head. What are the hardest things to sub-vocalize? Personally, I'm mildly averse to reading about Eastern Europe and Russia to avoid pronouncing Medevev, Saakashvili, Csikszentmihalyi. Some of those names are so fucking hard to spell when you want to look them up on Google. Thank you automatic spell check.

---

The effects of placebo can't be underestimated. "This practice of yours might just be the most popular placebo on the market."

---

My boredom-killing routine wanted to resume. But structure quickly collapsed. What entertained me yesterday failed to stimulate me today. My first line of defense against boredom is obsessive news surfing. Drudge, Huffington Post, Google News, etc. I refresh the pages, even knowing that the last three times had the same god damned headlines. So I hovered my mouse over the bookmarks, ready to get the fix. I even applied some finger pressure to my mouse. Yet I didn't click. In suspension, a grand "eh" washed over me. Okay, I decided. On to the next line of defense. Video games. I entered a 32-player brawl, rushed into the field, guns blazing, bang bang, but all the bullets flew past ears and over heads. There was no life to my actions. My eyes lost focus. I was looking at an indeterminate space a few inches behind my screen. So I turned away from my laptop and just stared out the window, far into the horizon, meditating on the god damned quantity of tall buildings in this city. And then I stood up, walked into my mother's bedroom, and lay chin-down on her bed, staring at the sequins on the cover.

There were no mantras in my mind, no repetitive thoughts, just an organic lifelessness.

---

Promiscuity is like sexual theater.

---

I'm the kind of person that has to reach his high water mark before receding back to his true self.

Not having realized my temptations will just haunt me. If I'm going to be square, it'll have to be an apostasy from a life of deviance. I'd have to own a tacit look at the wild kids that says, "okay, you guys are alright. Just not for me."

---

He faded in the rear-view mirror and left behind open sky.

---

Just like me, she takes big naps before big parties.

---

I hate that tree.

---

It took me three days to remember the name of the book I read. Each day, a new stab at the title sprung forth then receded. "No, that's not it."

---

Who are my role models? I'm only surrounded by things I know I don't want. As a result, all I know is how to say "no." What if I was born in a different time period. What model would I cling to?

---

I ruined his jacket in the wash. I heard that it was his favorite one.

---

Heisenberg anxiety.

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Incandescant personality.

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I feel like we're each other's back-ups.

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If I don't see the reasoning, then I can't follow the advice.

---

"It was the time of my life and I knew it at the time."

"Shit, I didn't."

---

I somehow see what's beautiful in things that are ephemeral.

---

This is not a test.

---

If it's all the same to you.

so when I think about these terms chaos, creativity, imagination, I see them, it's like a three-stroke engine of some sort, each impells and runs the other, and sets up a reinforcing cycle, that then stabilizes organisms, processes that are caught up in this, in the phenomenon of being, the phenomenom of being is this self-synergizing engine... into the imagination, back into chaos, out into creativity, so forth and so on, and it operates on many levels simultaneously, so that the planet is undergoing a destiny, deep time, the time of geography, was only discovered around the turn of this century, and it is cosmically enobling to think of the universe as a thing of great age, but I think it is time to put in place next to the notion of deep cosmic time, the notion of chaotic sudden change. cusp-flux, and sudden perturbation, because what deep time has revealed, as we've pushed our understanding of the career of organic life...

Cold sunny San Diego morning, wake up to a thoroughly lonely house. Put on my warming shoes, plus my Chaz Tenenbaum puma jog pants, and my snowboard jacket. Maybe I'll change into normal clothes; I have showering planned sometime later. But in spite of my half-hearted intentions, this haphazard keep-me-warm get-up becomes my day clothes.

Ignite this Thermador stove and hard boil three eggs. Set the timer on my sports watch for 10 minutes. In the mean time, let me lay my wireless laptop on the icy marble countertop so I can pump pirated mp3 sound wave metallic tingles from my two-dollar head phones. Meanwhile, I duck the shower of bubbles snapping in the boiling pot of water.

I'm trying to sharpen my skills at observational writing, and so I've been posting these expose's of the mundane in Palo Alto. The more mundane, the more interesting the challenge. Hope you don't mind.

Got my hand in my pocket, as I'm tooling down the sidewalk, down the decline of Cowper Street. The decline is about half a degree below horizontal, making me move half a degree faster, making my temperature rise half a degree sweatier.

Parallel to me, across the street and on the other sidewalk, is a mommy and her toddler, also rolling down Cowper. I tool and they roll, and together we go, in parallel, in the same direction, down Cowper Street.

The eager toddler is trying to yank free from mommy, already trying to escape. Mommy lets go, letting sweetie tool down Cowper all by herself.

But Cowper is intersected by the traffic-heavy, one-way, no stop-sign Homer Street.

10 paces away from Homer I enjoy the toddler's fumbling trot as I continue on my own, hand-in-pocket.

7 paces away and the kid's going faster than me. Okay, I'm a little impressed.

But 5 paces away and mommy is yelling, "Shelly! Stop running! Come back!"

3 paces away and I get the urge to do something. I scan the options. Can I run over the street in time? No. Can I yell at the kid? Perhaps. But am I gauging mommy's worriment properly? Why do I assume the kid is clueless? Afterall, mommy wouldn't let her kid go off irresponsibly, would she? Besides isn't there enough yelling going on? And if I scream and the crisis is averted, won't I look foolish? I might even frighten mommy and sweetie in the process. But I have to do something.

Awkwardly and automatically my right arm extends out, palms open wide, in an attempt to avert an accident through gesture.

1 pace away and mom yells, "Don't cross the street!"

0 paces and the lil' tike spontaneously turns right and into Homer's sidewalk. I see the toddler wobble away like a rapid penguin, while some SUVs thunder by in the opposite direction. Mommy glances at me and I drop my extended arm. I shrug my shoulders as if to say "kids these days" and then I put my hands back into my pockets. My final gesture is to rocket away, down Cowper, across Homer, and out of sight.

I'm taking my book at Borders to the checkout area. Behind the counter are three twentysomethings. Let's call them, for simplicity's sake, Abatha, Beu, and Carl. I'm Dhingra, since that's my last name. Abatha and Beu are both girls, and Carl is a pencilly boy. So A. B. C. are standing there in a row, behind the counter, and D, that's me, walks in. The checkout area is shaped such that I have to pass C before I get to B, and I have to pass B, before I get to A. All three of the characters are available to handle my check out.

Who do I go to?

Well, Since Carl is a male, if I bypass him and go to Abatha or Beu, then I've done something "natural" for a twentysomething male like myself. Plus, it looks like he's binding something, so perhaps Carl is not available. Good bye Carl, you can continue being pencilly, with your short black pencil hair and your sweater hugging your pencil of a body together. pencil.

So now it's down to two.

Well if I go straight to Beu, it's logical. Logical because I've skipped the boy in favor of the girls, and she just so happens to be the first girl in my path. She is also standing in the middle of the ABC, so I have a middle-ground heuristic on my side.

But then the gauntlet's thrown down: Abatha mumbles to audience, "letz see, who he is gon' go to first."

So here's the gameplan. Abatha needs some love. But Beu is in the middle, the first girl after the skipped Carl, and ding ding ding, wait, Beu is also slightly hotter than Abatha. And even though both are not really pretty in the scheme of things, Beu does have a slight advantage. Naturally, I think of going to Beu. Besides, what of the alternative? Let's say I skip Beu and go to Abatha. Since Abatha threw down the gauntlet, I've just assisted Abatha in scoring over Beu. The score is a double because I had to bypass the logical middle-choice, and bypass Beu herself. So I had to skip Carl and Beu, basically run the whole counter length to make Abatha's day. Sorry Abatha, I'm picking Beu.

Abatha snakes her head around like exorcism, except she doesn't actually turn her head 360 degrees, she more just jiggles, like a car engine that won't start. She then brings the base of her palms an inch apart from each other and fans her fingers out like bird wings and says, "See, Beu, yu juss exuuude radyance and. warmpth." She said "warmpth" in a way that made her nasty curly hair wiggle, as if her body movements were the grammatical punctuation for her sentences.

And it's as if Beu doesn't even hear the—what would you callit—compliment?

I try to disturb the flow of things by answering Abatha's—what would you callit—rhetorical? I impishly cutely say "Sure." My tone is such that I either mean "sure, Beu's puppy face and chic dyed hair and probable piercings, is, nice" or "sure, you dropped the gauntlet, now you shall be punished." So in essence, I dropped two messages: a flirt for Beu and a "move, get out the way" to Abatha. To Carl, I sent him a, "hey, I'm just some innocent guy caught between two girls' interaction. So commiserate with me buddy."

Carl just rotates parts of his body enough to observe whatever it is he wants to see through his glasses while his hands stay focused on binding whatever it is he's binding. whatever.

Nobody responds. Beu doesn't register my flirt. Abatha folds her arms on her chest, gazing forward. Carl has finished binding whatever. And I pick up my book and rush out of there as fast as I can, hoping to leave this micro-disaster behind.

Rubi sighs, "I don't know Phil."

I reply, "What don't you now, Rubi?"

"Phiiil. I have boy troubles."

"What are your boy troubles?" There's this technique in couch-therapy where, in order to keep the conversation flowing, u repeat the last part of your patient's statement, but in the tone of a question. I'm not doing this on purpose, but I'm bored, so it rolls out that way.

"I don't know if Danny likes me."

"Why don't you know if Danny likes you?"

Then there is a tapping on the window behind the curtain. Rubi jumps off the bed, unwraps the curtain, unwinds the window door, and in unfurls Danny. It reminds me of a fisherman releasing his catch from his net onto the boat deck.

And, just like the fish, he remains plopped on the floor, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. He places his right hand on his heart and his left hand behind his head as a headstand. And then describes his day. His drone appears as if he is reading off a teleprompter on his foggy eye glasses. The content of his description includes what he had for dinner and why his TA is soo uncool.

Rubi forgets I exist and engages with Danny like this is something they do every day. I pause for a minute, deciding whether to display my surprise or not. But I give in and mimic Rubi by humoring the fella with interested nods. "Wow, I had a TA once who was so uncool"

"Yeah, and Rubi, you remember the kid that keeps staring. He kept staring at me again. I swear, I'm going to shoot him."

And on it goes until Danny rewinds himself back out of the window and into the night.

Initially I feel sorry for Rubi, sorry that she has fallen in love with a confused lout. But then Rubi tells me things that make me feel even more sorry, but in a different way. Apparently, this Danny's behavior is a microcosm of a more general pattern. Danny came by the week before, and he and Rubi hooked up and it was great. The next day, he came over for lunch, but he was listless and despondent. So, initially I felt sorry for Rubi because she has low standards. But now I feel sorry for her because she inconveniently got wrapped up in The Game.

In Game Theory....

I go in and out of thinking I'm going to be a writer. Anyways, I gave a shot at writing a character sketch:

Ezra likes caves.

Freud would have a field day with this guy. Sigmund Freud, the seminal German psychologist of the late 1800s and early 1900s invented the concept of the Oedipedal complex. Oedipus, according to Ancient Greek mythology, killed his father and then married his mother. Freud saw in Oedipus a universal male drive to "return to the womb."

But Ezra did not have a desire to return to the womb; he automatically and unconsciously rejected women.

"Man, I need to get a girl," he would say, the day after getting a girl's phone number but failing to call her.

Ezra's syndrome, therefore, was not a desire to be wrapped in the warm embrace of a relationship, but to reside in symbolic caves.

"This is a tragedy," Ezra said to me. "This is the end of an era."

Ezra doesn't usually speak in Homeric terms as "era" and "tragedy," but rather uses abbreviated computerspeak and hip-hop (for the ladies). So you can understand my concern.

"Why is this a tragedy, Ezra?"

"They're closing the Sweet Hall basement. This is the end of an era, Phil."

Sweet Hall is the "ministry" of Computer Science at Stanford. Or rather, the "citadel" of Computer Science. After Bill Gates gave Stanford the right amount of money, a "temple" was built for Computer Science half a mile away, so Sweet Hall's importance to Computer Science has been diminished. Nonetheless, it offers round-the-clock access to conference room-sized pods of computer clusters. The clusters on the second floor are arranged in rows like a NASA control room. There is just enough space in between the rows for students to sleep on the floor, as they often did around finals. This is somewhat odd, though, given that many of the dorms are seven minutes walking distance from Sweet Hall.

Ezra was not interested in the second floor though, where all the "commons" of Computer Science lurked, but rather the basement. The basement had older computers and no windows to the outside, making it an unpopular attraction. The emptiness perhaps gave Ezra freedom and solitude. But, unlike the second floor with its rows of computers, the basement's computers were arranged around the edge of the room, leaving free space in the center for a couple of tables. Ezra would sometimes sleep on those tables underneath the flouresence. And then there was a dark nook with a couple more computers. Out of all the computers, most of which were in well-lit areas, and all of which Ezra had complete access to, he consistently chose the nook.

Ezra has deep black hair, deep black eyebrows, deep brown eyes, and never wears shorts. His skin color gives no indication that he had lived in the deserts of California most of his life. But, perhaps this makes sense, given his nocturnality and preference for caves.

"I used to be all goth."

Goth is a fashion statement of black and macabre. Think Elvira. Think black boots or black dresses worn in the summer.

I'm not going to look at strangers anymore. The habit of people-watching is utterly useless. I never gave my casual meandering glances any thought until I realized that subconsciously I was expecting inspiration, looking for kindness, and hoping for beauty and intelligence. I've been disappointed, unfortunately. The masses are dull and unintelligent, and in America, they tend to have an adversarial stance toward one another.

What good has any stranger done for me? Even at those conventions with mixers where you exchange business cards.. do you ever follow up? Did you exchange any useful information except the mission statements of your respective companies?

Or if I'm standing in line for a burger and a blond bombshell walks in wearing a short-shorts and a halter-top stands a few places in line behind me. I turn around, give a flirtatious glance, she smiles back, and then what? The exchange is over.

Even in the larger sense, why should I care about my "fellow man."

NOTE: Entering critique of the "Bleeding Heart" and the "Terrorist"...

I woke up in this world to a series of infinite choices I would have to make, but I did not choose what came before me nor did I choose the actions of others. So then why should my responsibility be connected to those of others? Perhaps you think this is selfish. Indeed it is... having a worldview that concerns only that which concerns me... my family, my friends, my body, my world. (Well, I didn't choose my family, but I choose to love them)

So why should I care about what's happening around the world? Castles burn down, and castles rise. People suffer and people experience elation. This is the movement and wave of things that surround me. I didn't ask for things to be terrible nor for things to be good, they're just there as they are.

The only "reason" I can see for helping strangers is that I have a natural attachment to the suffering of others, and as a result, in order to alleviate my own personal suffering, I should try to alleviate the suffering of others.

This is important, this is compassion. You'd be labeled "soulless" otherwise. But can't this natural inclination go overboard when you start to care about people a thousand miles away from you or about the politics of temporary nation-states?

Like who is Arnold Schwarzenegger anyways? Is him being governor of California going to make any change into my life? I will still have to call the phone company to get Internet access, I will still go to the same restaurant down the street for a Philly cheese stake. And Einstein will keep ripping me off when he tries to sell me rugs. How will Arnold factor in? And what about Kobe?

Now, I'm not against helping nor participating in the world--I'm just trying to make a point. Your notion of helping should be colored with the understanding that first the world does not need your help. Second, it won't necessarily thank you, and if it does, it will do so inefficiently. Third, you may not even want to help the world in a large way. Interfering with the affairs of others brings more responsibility and angst on your shoulders since you have to be completely sure what you're doing is right or wrong. And even then, what's to say your notion of right and wrong is accurate enough to be enforced over others. Who is to say you even have the right to.

And it's all deterministic anyways. Your notion of compassion has been programmed into you by the great Principhers so that you may more effectively keep the engines of Earth lubricated. Compassion is just another module that can be switched on and off and is not sacred (like everything else).

And is your notion of compassion even consistent or worthy? Females tend to be more compassionate than others, correct? Well, I was pondering over the idea of the myth of feminine compassion... (but then realized I was just being a sexist pig)... but then I thought about the myth of parental compassion or the myth of human compassion in general. If parents were so naturally compassionate, they there wouldn't be those groups of parents who push their kids to join every sport, after-school activity, Chinese lesson, SAT prep courses there is. If they could really see how sad their kids were, as would be implied by their so-called compassion, they wouldn't aggravate them so much.

False modes of compassion come from having false senses of what is truly "good" for someone. If you're going to lay the smack down on your child for his own sake, you better be damn sure that what you're doing is going to be good. Discipline, you've learnt is good, but there's a lot of other torture that's tenuous and possibly inspired by the influences of the media telling you what's good and what's not.

Like if you truly want to help the world, become a teacher, or fund education so that mankind can better take care of things. Doing technology is not necessarily going help people, becoming an activist may very likely make things worse, and even influencing dogma's like pro-sodomy v. anti-sodomy is relativistic and it just reduces to your opinion vs. somebody else.

And despite all of this... I blog.

My eyes were open, I saw through a rectangular artifice that I remembered was labeled "window." A sense of inside and outside emerged, and I felt I was on the inside. Inside was attached with a sense of calm, of peace, and beyond the window was the opening of vastness that I sensed existed "out" there. My vision was blocked somewhat by the window, but since distant objects came into view simultaneously, almost on top of the window, I knew I was looking "through" the window. There was a continuous plane of green items under a homogenous plane of an opposite color. The label of this color popped into my head. "blue" I thought. Superimposed, but not exactly, were comparisons to other scenes "through" the window. The scenes were darker, less green and less blue. Immediately, I felt like what I was seeing was good. This was odd because I was inside, and not outside, but immediately, there was a quickening of the pace of my thought, a releasing of tension, and I felt some muscles a little bit below my eye tense up. If what I felt before I noticed the green-blue scene, or what I later knew was a "landscape," was a negative, then I felt a positive, it's opposite. The weather was good.

I moved my head around and noticed that there was a desk around me with a computer a few pixels ahead in the y direction. Thanks to the shapes and some automatic system, I recognized that the computer, or rather the monitor, was above and further back, hovering around the desk. My hands and body definitely weren't hovering. I felt rooted to my seat and henceforth, so I concluded that the monitor was on top of the desk and not the desk being on top of the monitor. Upon looking at the monitor, I had a sense that this monitor was a part of me. An infinitely long vision of previous prescences of me in front of the monitor confirmed that it was a part of me, and hence I felt like it was mine. If this monitor was no longer on top of this desk, I think there would be an space cut out inside of me. I later found that the term for this sentiment was "possession."

A new image appeared and replaced the old image. There was a rectangular trapezoid. The side closest to my right eye was shorter, the other side longer. But this image was shaken and stirred as the relative length of the sides changed. A golden circular object half way down the previously longer side grew a little bit. The door was opening, I thought.

While I was stationary, the images changed. I couldn't recover the older image and meditation of the "through the window" scene, nor was I looking at the monitor. Those previous recognitions had since disappeared and were forever lost. Now I was fixated on this door opening. Because of the permanence of losing the previous scene and the immediacy of the door opening, I divided the previous scenes from the current scene. The previous scenes, as you can tell by my usage of language, were in what I already knew to call, the "past." As for the scene in front of me, that I coined as part of "now." It was easy to distinguish the past because I was no longer looking at it. Determining the now was difficult because I didn't know whether the trapezoidal movements in flux should still be considered the now or should the state be called now now, of the door stationary and opened.

Nonetheless, I felt like this current scene would also change. What popped over the image was the thought of doors opening associated with a tall figure appearing immediately thereafter. I figured there must be a third division, the "future" I knew to call it, where this image would arrive, in a more solid way, and replace the now. The past, the now, and the future, these coincided in into a nice, homogeneous whole. One followed the other consistently everywhere. The future was going to be a tall figure, and so my head turned to greet this figure.

Upon glancing upon the figure, I felt a sense of roughness, a sense not unlike looking at the trees. Here was a man, I thought. I also had the same sense of possession that I had with my computer. This figure had been in my view permanently over time, yet I knew him in infinitely different situations yet almost in every situation I could look back. In certain places where I had been, he had usually been. Images of my mouth moving and his mouth moving appeared a lot, along with a whiff of images of me and him moving together in faster moments. These were all in the past and were spotted all over the time period. It became apparent this was not a stranger.

Then, I looked at the tall figure and I had a sense that I was looking through him and seeing another image. I saw another figure that I couldn't discern easily, but I sensed it was myself. Then it came to me that a part of me was inside of this person. This was a little foreign because indeed I was sitting here and he was over there. The initial foreignness sparked some movement in my head. My mental pace quickened a little more and I felt other parts of me start to animate in a way that felt special or ordained for this figure. Then I realized, that indeed, I was in this person because were part of the same one. This one was a group of other images I had collected of other figures who were scattered often in the same place but throughout a large sequence of time. The one was my family and this man my brother.

I then realized something, this "now" was actually a date, and that date was one of many dates, but a more important one at that. It was a date that was of special importance to my brother. I realized that an event I was supposed to be responsible for was lacking, and alas, I realized, I forgot to buy him a birthday present.

Campo-mato-Mo-Mo: The AIR BAG is full, the sun and green wake, Woody Allen, happy eagle. Don't cry son.

UPDATE: Dah, I forgot to use a new Dictionary.com Word of the Day. Well, I would have done something like, uh, and in the susurrus of the sounds creeping through the door or over the landscape, or some other nonsense. susurrus, susurrus, susurrus. There, it's in my brain and hopefully, in yours.

It's so easy to find suggestions in nature. It's raining outside and I can see a million little raindrops wandering the surface of solid land. At every connection between the numerous drops, at every size of a junction, the resulting formation is completely different. Drops land on an awning, stream to the lowest point of gravity, fall off the edge like a river, then land onto more tiles which funnel and distribute them along splitting paths. The different forks lead the original droplets to collude into superstructures, sometimes making new friends, sometimes flowing solo. The interesting part is that the environment with which the rain interacts was not intentionally planned to allow for the wonderfully different dances that the droplets animate themselves into over the course of their journeys. Every time it rains, the symphony is unique and serendipitous. The drizzle then makes me wonder about the drivel that other people set themselves into. The human world has got to be gargantuanly more complex than rain, so then why do people think that their best bet is to draw a single straight line from here to their objectives. The best path has got to be the one that w(a|o)nders. That is, unless you prefer marching to dancing.

UPDATE: if you need a single smooth line, at least choose an arc or a spiral.

UPDATE2: or "multilayered perfect circlez placed upon each other" as yoshitama refers to spirals