the blueshift journal

I.

the tanforan mall, home to hooters of san bruno, hollister (of the west coast), dirty glass walls, concrete jungle, kiddie jungle. and, perhaps most importantly: that ironic triumverate of the star spangled banner, the growling motto of the west, and their brethern, the bare flagpole. the irony of the "american" flag framing the court of the tanforan "mall" is palpable: not least because the tanforan, before its concrete makeover, was a racetrack and the northern california japanese internment center. yellow men, yellow beasts. framed by the mellow sky. you can still see the traces of barbed wire, only now there grows a stubby line of hydrangea bushes.

the "american" flag: who is american? the tanforan "mall": who decided to curse the poor horses with such an ugly home? where was america, anyway. i think the concrete offers a step toward better times.

the only person who hates the mall more than me is my father, who hates the idea of me at a mall enough to murder a small horse. not that a horse has anything to do with my being at a mall, but if you shoehorn me into the right retail center, i just might buy one. i've always wanted a nice mare. i certainly spend enough time with them at night: an acquaintance, you could call it.

my father's calculus of debt methodically includes me as an expenditure. but the eliding boundaries of the "nuclear family" threatens to leave me out of his reach, and both of us confused. too, my father is plagued by (including, but not limited to): narcissistic subjective dissolution, a gendered horizon of responsibility, and a fixation on the patriarch(y) of the tang "family," which is to say that he is, in fact, an investment banker. call us the provincial chinese branch of merill lynch. i am dr. tang: stroke neurologist, part-time psychologist, and a phd from the university of tokyo.

but no matter what i do, my feminine failing renders any panacea to my father's ailments an impossibility. medical miracles are deemed (doomed) a triviality in the periphery of tang concern. comprised of books, makeup, and the vain misgivings of the everyday, the cure to melancholia is not, contrary to the doctor's orders, a healthy dose of sertraline and a daily routine. the vain misgivings of the everyday happen also to be everything i give a shit about. dr. tang, in her entirety, is a feminine misgiving of the everyday. her sins: depression, anxiety, bulimia--all viral forms of home and love "sickness." her frivolities: of painted nails, expensive sunglasses, and the occasional glass of merlot. deadly enough to kill. her life, with its fragile edges and poor substitute for curatorship, is simply not worth enough to sustain her daily routine.

i wonder. what would gabriel garcia marquez say about the pathologization of my gendered failing? love sickness is not a punch to the gut. love/sickness is in the time of cholera. the former is a meningitis of the heart; the latter an aphrodisiac.

never has a matriarch of the tang "family" surfaced. rare was it that a woman--who was not, and could much less imagine herself as, a constitutive strand of the implicitly professed tang fabric--would willingly bear the weight of several generations of men-children. tarantula sized tantrums require a professional extinguisher, and the tang fold can produce only bug swatters.

things no one talks about in the field:

did gong gong used to beat po po?

did second uncle used to beat his wife? does he still?

the infant girl second uncle gave away

first uncle as tyrant

auntie's relationship to po po

po po herself: dust in the field

The Children: unless it is about their academic prospects, or lack thereof

The (grand-)Children: born out of wedlock

the latter comprises the fray of the "family," and inspires in the tang patriarch(y) the anxiety of a ranch owner in a cattle pen without a corral. who is a tang? who will calculate the debts owed and oversee their uneasy settlement? the concrete steps of our country villa seems like a good place to start.

methodically built and angular in structure: stairs. polluted only by the kelp of emotion and the cacophony of overlapping voices, which render explosive the torrent of facts disappeared. like the occasional smattering of chicken shit which accompanies the cascade of secrets. one learns to walk around the fecundity. others learn to sweep.

the last time i went to the tang home i became struck by a violent cold. expelled lumps of coal sized pus. not very polite dinner conversation, i'm afraid. that i was a mere mortal, subject to sickness despite my american upbringing, did not answer any of my cousins' questions about our fundamental ontological differences. they and the neighbors wanted to know every parameter of my life, but they were careful to establish boundaries for themselves--things they knew i could not know. things they could not, but would, tell me.

 

II.

DO YOU THINK I WOULD MAKE A GOOD TROPHY WIFE?

i do, he answers before i can change my mind. i'm disappointed. even joanne the scammer knows: it's all one big circle jerk of misogyny. the artist as art object is rather: the woman as art object. occupant of the curatorship of her life, to each her own caucasian home. so to speak.

here's a reminder to polish up on adrian piper: the personal and the theoretical as Praxis and praxis.

once a dude tried to hit on me in philz by pointing to my "got privilege?" sticker. do you know where that's from, he asked me. curatorship, challenged. the artist's theoretical knowledge: loop-holed. i gaped at him. i do not say he was aroused by me. to hit: diminish, degrade.

to be feminized as an artist is to be simone de beauvoire as a manic pixie dream girl--sartre's, but with a sinister underbelly of her own. the artist's impeccable taste: a chiaroscuro, and in this case, a delightful proclivity for under-aged girls. sex, seduction, a room of one's own. these are the trappings of the modern woman: artist in her self actualized exceptionalism.

i hate that phrase, self-actualization. other words i hate: priapic, wanderlust, escape, adios (for its misuse as a flippant adieu), bildungsroman, self-discovery. i knew a white boy from our recruitment camp at stanford who took a year off before yale: to go bicycling in turkey. finding his middle of the road destiny in the middle of the East. it sounds like an indie movie, i told my friend. "riveting"; "human truth"; "touching; a masterpiece imbued by --'s charm"; rollingstone, new york times theater, some white yuppie from the new yorker who thinks he can write. one big circle jerk of male navel gazing. to be masculinized as an artist is to be heroic, a mastermind, and graced with inherent knowledge of the Bigger Purpose. which for him inevitably includes crazy sex, a sizable inheritance (or accidental trust fund from his estranged grandfather's long island estate), and a peculiar but situationally-justified taste for the absurd. white boys are always so basic: either they actually trust the ethnic restaurant's yelp reviews or they really just don't want to try anything new but are afraid to say it. everything else (including that foodie who thinks of himself as a connoisseur) is fake.

i fit in this schema as a flavorful chapter that veers toward the salacious. only then are we neither artist nor woman but artist woman: the well oiled harmonica of an abandoned cinematographic feature, starring none other than the turkish bicycle and its sun burned rider. we are the only audience of this budgeted art nouveau. as she sits in the empty cinema, sipping on a gin and tonic, she wonders: could scopophilic narcissism be read as simple masochism? it's hard to sit back and enjoy the disembodied schaudenfreud's flickering projection.

 

III.

that afternoon she sat barefaced in dolores park, musing about that particular brand of abrasiveness she had come to associate with her tar-tainted secondary education. that same bitter aftertaste which, aroused by reinitiated mediatization, she tried immediately to repress once more. she had done this many times since her uneventful departure from an altogether provincial childhood. with it, she left: suburbia, priapic heads (cursed by baldness), and, less successfully, a grudging admiration for whiteness which bloomed from initial infatuation. but weren't all childhoods provincial. the thought of vanilla nauseates her: the creamy deception of it all. no, it was better to stay away from ice cream, and all those plaster-variances which became too easily tainted or, just as randomly, threatened to swallow you with their infinite blankness. she had forgotten the particularities of her befuddled adolescence. the return of its sting left her numbed in surprise.

which was better: to be cared for in acts, or to be regulated in the taxonomy of friendship as a self sufficient being; a potential competitor, in nothing if not that persistent departure from a testosterone-induced haze of self-worth. she didn't know. or, she did: no one knew. it was impossible to know. she had realized, in conversation with friends torturously made and discarded, that care cannot exist in a state of isolation. it was always getting left behind by the simulacrum of her life: this, she decided, was the problem. she could only ever near a semblance of care--peek the rosy horizon of (that mythical essence!) love--before she, that is to say the "i" of her fleshly cast, decided to impose its unforgiving will on the metaphysical court of her life's narrative. so that she remained constantly on the verge of reunion with the rumored landmark of care, only to be dissembled, time after time, in the name of the love story.

the abrasive recurrence of her childhood friends--those peculiar specters from a previous life! whose cotton candy induced coma on the neoliberal merry-go-round she would otherwise find distasteful. but their silent presence made sense in the pothole-riddled paradox she identified as "living." what was it to live if to do so is to enact a constant delay of living? the transient space between the actionable term (and a fossilization of the thing itself) and the phenomenological extension of its "being" initiated by continued occurrence. the only assured thing, she thought, was that of her drifting, which, at the moment, felt worringly directionless. she felt libation at the prospect of tunnel vision, only, unlike joan didion, she could not yet drive. the high way was indefinitely unavailable to her. so she worried, simultaneously buoyed by her anxiety and driven directionless because of it.

I MIGHT HAVE MUTED YOU ON FACEBOOK

shuttled along from one pothole premise to the next. she ran after herself; her "i"--the self, split within the matrix of the Holy Trinity--alternately played catch up; twisted; the game of life, which proved to be a combination of catching up and leaving behind as perverted souvenir. IF ONLY THAT WERE GOOD ENOUGH TO BE TRUE. scampering after the Good Life. she wondered how long it had been since she inadvertently muted her-self. it must have been the last pothole-cum-vacuum out of which she had recently emerged, skin papyrus pruned and hair coarse. into which she was uncertainly plunging once more; she had only traced a shadow of the actual escape.

he looked at me with those big, lazy eyes and i knew it was over. we have been a part of the event of the end for a long time, baby.

IV.

i shared with him the same improvised sublingual connection i enjoyed with my dog. it was irrationally rare, despite its simplicity: invention of agreed upon symbols/sounds to act as a signifier, the resurrection of form, and voilà, linguistic invention. the dog/human connexion: i scribbled frantically.

significance

history

linguistic relation

emotive symbology

reframing "friendship" "family" "ownership" between womxn + Dog

the later was a terraced thought of two parts: a consideration for the commodification of dogness that was an extension of basic capitalist critique. the second was a doubling back on the teleology of consumption, which included questions of functionality, value, and the death of art.

it was at this point that she realized his doe-sized eyes shared with Dog and a new character, J Did, the same ontological performance of exceptionalism.

J Did, it may be said, has perfected a tone and thus cannonized herself at the cost of reducing the THING to less than "it"self via nomination. the moment "it" became a tone (cannonized, generic), her writing--its pulsing, ontological core--died.

J Did is the dissipating drop of estrogen in a vat of cis-driving testosterone. your evil man-brother's favorite informant (whose bruised crush he does not reciprocate).

this was what she realized, as she picked a stray slice of grass from the canvass of her cellulite. but by then the sun had faded and her things, she realized, had blown halfway up the hill from her.