This is a jagged, sorta confessional piece about that experience.

2016/

The first camera I bought for myself was a Digital Harinezumi 2.0. Plasticky and red, the toy camera came shipped from a Japanese merchant on eBay. I had read that Terrence Malick and Harmony Korine shot footage on the Harinezumi (for their films, To the Wonder and Spring Breakers, respectively).

With a sensor as small as a pinky nail, the kind of image the camera produces is intentionally imperfect. However, instead of trying to compensate for the compression and smooth out its fuzz, it does the opposite. The Harinezumi leans into the noise and oversaturates itself instead. Rainbow-colored grain litters the footage, not unlike a Seurat painting.

I got the camera in the summer between my first and second years of college. In 2016, I was 19 and a bad student. Avoiding coursework, I opted to immerse myself in my true passion at the time: filmmaking. Fixated by the transportive, sensorial experience film provides, I wanted to learn as much as I could about it — what each button and dial did on a camera, how to pace and structure a screenplay, how to talk to actors. I was self-taught. I was excited. I had a secret.

One of the first filmmaking concepts I learned about, that really resonated with me, was the Kuleshov Effect. Closer to a magic trick, the effect plays out in memory like this:

We open on a tight, close-up of a woman’s face. She is relaxed, almost expressionless. Cut to black.

Next, we see a ship leaving harbor, the camera at a distance. In my memory, it is a large ship. No one is on the docks. The motion is simple — the ship, once stationary, moves away from us and into the ocean. After another cut to black, our eyes reset again.

The images are then shown in sequence: the woman’s face followed by the ship leaving, then back to the woman’s face again. Suddenly, a story forms.

The once-seemingly neutral face is painted with whatever emotion we, the audience, project onto it. How does she feel about the ship leaving? Happy? Sad? What is she hiding? What does she feel? The images begin talking, creating meaning and context with each other.

2017/

I had my first panic attack in the winter of this year. It was at a house party I threw with a couple of friends I was living with. We timed it to begin after a huge concert on campus (which we did not attend), and for some reason, we made the invitation public (my idea). In retrospect, I wanted to throw a party, because I wanted attention. It was an act of beckoning. Come here, come inside — see me. Look at how cool and interesting all this is/I am. I have nothing to hide.

As the first batch of complete strangers wandered in, my feet felt like they were encased in concrete. The cones in my eyes went in and out of focus. I felt my chest caving in on itself, and I began shivering. The room, lit by color-changing LEDs, shrank into itself. My fingers and toes felt like they were attacked by insects. The ground was wet.

In the following years, waves of anxiety and depression crashed in-and-out of each other like the sea under a storm. The first years were the worst. Ashamed of my pain and unable to communicate what I was going through, I distanced myself through vice, disappearing into distraction. Getting high and watching movies and online videos for long stretches of time, listening to podcasts over loudspeakers. Missing classes, over-eating, under-eating; text messages went unread for months. The sink spilled over with dirty dishes.

I grew estranged from my life, and with it, my perception of time. In rare moments of clarity, my mind attacked itself with thoughts of insecurity and over-estimations. Fear everywhere. If I tried looking forward, towards the future, I saw only a dead end. A version of myself that was unable to change, my problems worsening, spiraling, the world burning. If I tried looking backwards, the past would shroud itself in dusk. Memories in pointillistic fragments, years blurred into each other. Everything was fuzzy like a Seurat painting.

2020/

It is difficult to describe the summer the world went into lockdown. I scribble in my notebook, trying to find the right words. The word “disease” is too obvious and too broad. “Death” was a part of it. “Selfishness” rose. “Hiding”? Nothing suffices. Staying in place with an abundance of interiority overwhelmed me, and my depression worsened. I was holed up inside reading about and watching the outside, through my computer and phone. Story after story, devastation after devastation, distraction after distraction.

In this fugue state, a line was drawn inside my mind. On one side, there were the “Before-Times,” an amalgamation of the world I knew. A world where I was ignorant yet somewhat blissful in my unawareness. I was a child in the Before-Times. Anything I knew of the world lived there. On the other side of the line, there was the the pandemic. This unknown presented itself dire and seemed, at its worst, fascist and unavailable.

2025/

In the present, I want to say outright how irrational depression-thinking can get. . The worst part of this line-drawing-kind-of-thinking is its myopia. A dramatic, unnuanced, and solipsistic myopia.

But it felt/feels real when I spiral. It felt like I was crossing a threshold, because I couldn’t make out what was on the other side. Depression, a grease fire, obscures all but its self, its own blinding blaze.

2021/

Six months after we received our vaccines, several friends1 and I drove out to the desert for a concert. We arrived at the venue, Pappy and Harriets, early and ate dinner. Because this was our first show together in almost two years, our feelings were heightened. We took our masks off when we ate, but we put them back on when we walked to the bar. The desert heat, like a blanket, added a layer of sweat onto everything.

We attended plenty of concerts before the pandemic. It was how we spliced each other into our lives. Driving to the venue and finding the right spot to stand, dancing and singing, then going out to grab chicken tenders after a show. Quietly reminiscing about the entire night on the drive back home.

As the sun sank, the show began. The artist, Alex G, and his band performed. The crowd was antsy, full of energy. As soon as the instruments were plugged into their amps, the entire pit squeezed into itself, like a lung inhaling. My nervous system flared up again. After more than a year of social distancing, here I was, pressed into the bodies of strangers. It was an insane way to acclimate to the outside world after being inside for so long.

People moshed. People danced. People yelled at the band to play the song “Powerful Man” (maybe a little too aggressively). We were outside, yet the darkness created a room.

2022/

If I had to examine these years, when I wasn’t occupied with depression or bowled over by anxiety, I was looking at the world through the viewfinder of a camera. Throughout college, I made short films of my friends in the vein of early YouTube vlogs and DIY skate videos we’d watch in our living room. We loitered in each other’s lives: sitting around tables, eating food, drinking, or hiking around a forest. And I set these movies to music. Glorious iPhone video, footage taken from the Harinezumi, DV, a cinema camera Farhan held on his shoulders — through recorded image, I remembered my life and the people I loved.

A year after lockdown ended, I began rewatching and unearthing old photos and videos from that time. During a writing workshop with some friends, I put together a fiction of how I felt in the present using images from the past, taken directly from the Harinezumi. It was my attempt to piece together meaning, trying to explain how I felt at the concert in the desert. How strange and mutable our world is and has always been.

My friend Allen gave me the gift that became the title of the zine, “Earlier/Today”.

2023/

I tried publishing this project. I printed everything out. I made plans. I was ready. Then, irrationality appeared again. Depression dissuaded me with the same arguments it always made. A box of the zines sat at my feet for another two years.

2025/

After nine years of owning the camera, eight years of panic attacks, and four years of driving out to the desert, I feel at peace releasing this project. This is 2021 told through the images of 2016, finally released in 2025.

Memory is a narrative we continuously set and break ad infinitum. I look at various times in my life, and whenever I felt shame, I piled onto it. Today, I greet the younger versions of myself with patience.

It has become a kind of a loop. I get hurt, come in and save myself, forget about it, then do it all over again.

EARLIER/TODAY will be out this week. I’ll send an email blast with a nice link to buy the zine!

Last year, when I had even less of an idea of what I was doing on this blog, the first subject I wrote about was about cleaning my espresso equipment. My words, from then:

Now, ten months later, I have to admit a secret. You might think that writing about cleaning would inspire me to do it more, and maybe even create a habit, but the last time I deep-cleaned my coffee stuff coincided with the last time I wrote about it.

//

Being sloppy is a privilege, one that I have benefited from and felt shame for my entire life. In the house I grew up in, mother would say, without looking at me, in a serious-yet-gentle voice, don’t leave a trace, as she picked up some cup I left on a side table, two or three days after it was used. Echoing a sentiment protected outdoor areas use to dissuade their visitors from littering, don’t leave a trace became an anti-mantra that haunted me1. The phrase like a bell reverberated through my head constantly, and I would sometimes heed the call, but most oftentimes, I would ignore it, as sons are likely to do.

I remember the first time I lived away from home, in a house close to my college campus. With distance comes a gross clarity, exposing the degree to how unkempt I really was. Dishes left overnight in the sink? Guilty. Don’t leave a trace. A coffee mug balanced on a precarious ledge, set down after talking to a roommate about whatever we discussed? That’s me. Don’t leave a trace.

The messiness grew to its most egregious when a roommate2 and I stayed up all night, pumping music throughout the house (people were definitely sleeping) and being rambunctious to the point of opening a bag of brown rice and spilling its contents all over the living room floor. I still have a picture of the morning after; shadows caught on every grain, defining it; like ants sleeping atop everything. Don’t leave a trace.

I got my first credit card in 2015. My first job a year after that. Becoming a participant in our economy was being ushered into a rapidly evolving retail and online landscape that fought for my attention. They so desperately wanted me to want to buy things. Amazon’s quick ascension into providing anything and everything you “needed”, with convenient returns and two-day shipping, was unheard of. Every season, something new and exciting and loud popped until in the aisles of the local H&M or Zara, tempting us with novelty and constant reinvention. The rise of micro-transactions in phone apps created environments of free-to-play dopamine hits. Ticking clocks, hot deals. Being a consumer felt gamified and fun, not unlike a hobby.

Now, in 2025, consumerism has gotten insanely good at itself. It seems like every company on earth uses the same never-ending, hyper-aggressive, always-on methodology to steal our interest. With industries, like fast fashion, constructed around the mercurial nature of tastes, the fear of being kept out of what’s en vogue and what’s not creates an endless cycle of desire. There’s not only fashion week. There is the biyearly Apple developer conferences, announcing the new slimmer computer.

Part of how these behaviors stick is by distancing the consumer, us, from the impact of our collective waste and harm. It feels pushed out of our conscious-functioning mind and into our dark, gooey subconscious.

I know the ice caps are melting at an alarming rate. I know that, but it takes an effort to feel it. I have never seen the ice caps up close; I have never heard the sound of these glaciers cracking. It goes the same with a lot of other things. Smaller harvests and worse conditions for farm workers aren’t immediately conjured up when I buy corn in a can. Slaughterhouses are sadly reduced to statistics; natural disasters are footnotes until they blow away our front door.

//

The grinder is caked with months of coffee dust. Beans from around the world congeal and create a coating of neglect. It’s been weeks since I last pulled a shot of espresso or made a latte. With shame, I’ve spent my mornings button-mashing the Keurig to satiate my caffeine fix.

Enough is enough.

I take to the whole set-up — kettle, grinder, and machine — and begin cleaning again. Only this time, the act of cleaning felt necessary. It felt good to take cloth to chrome, to rinse out the brown-crusted drip tray. As the machine gets cleaner, I get excited by it. The more excited I feel, the deeper I go. I run a toothpick around the corner and crevices of the grinder. I begin to rearrange the whole set-up in imperfect fengshui. A mirror shine develops on the chrome. I see myself in it.

//

There is a word we hear from an early age used to describe a responsibility we don’t necessarily want. Chore. Chore lugs negativity around like an anchor. Chores are the worst! Chores suck! When I was younger, I detested chores. I didn’t understand why the bathroom needed to be cleaned if it was going to get dirty again. I didn’t understand why we needed to clean our nice, white ceramic plates when we could buy plastic ones at the store. Do you really want to spend your life doing dishes?

The problem with this perspective is a failure in connection. When I was younger, I wasn’t connected to what was around me. I didn’t see cleaning as my responsibility, so I didn’t see a reason to care. It’s going to get ruined anyway, so why bother? Why own nice things if they are destined to obsolesce? Futility is often a way out of responsibility. Chores then felt like some kind of obligation, or payment, for my existence. Chores beget futility and repetition and monotony.

That crucial choice between futility and its alternative is at the heart of privilege. Caring and choosing to care is a motor that drives the ship, and without it, the entire thing comes to a halt. Giving a shit, giving anything of yourself is immediately a way in — a connection point. I care because I touch it. I am a part of it, and I must be present for it. When I care for my products or my waste or my environment now, I feel padlocked into the context of those objects, wholly aware of my actions, wholly aware that I live in a world larger than myself.

Is it more work? Yes totally. Can it be perfect? No. Are individual actions hyper-emphasized when it is corporations whoare to be blamed for a larger majority of climate change’s problems? One hundred percent. However, the value generated from being a responsible item owner and a thoughtful consumer I believe is worth the effort. I feel connected to what I use. The things around me have greater meaning.

//

One of my pals Bryce owns and takes care of a 1993 Land Cruiser. He named the car Duke. Duke is a year older than Bryce. Parts of it decay, and mechanisms fail. Bryce is constantly making repairs, scouring online forums of other cruiser enthusiasts, looking for knowledge long lost to time. It is an object that has every right not to exist, Duke is kept alive by Bryce’s effort.

Sitting inside the cruiser itself feels deep. It doesn’t feel fragile. There is authorship to the care — key choices made when either respecting the original engineered machinery or upgrading to something more modern and comfortable. Duke glides on the freeway to take us out to the bowling alley. Duke traverses the sandy dunes of Baja California, the loose humus of forests near and far. It represents time and care, investment and design, intention and maintenance. I maintain that it is one of the most beautiful objects someone I know owns. It shouldn’t exist; it shouldn’t be beautiful; but it does and it is.

If I look away, the world falls into a black, inky darkness. If I look away, I don’t have to deal with it. Yet, things continue. Humans make an effort to mine the earth. Humans propose alternatives. Water erodes the canyon. A billionaire builds a casino on ancient land. I can choose not to look, but I want to engage with it. I can’t abandon the privilege to take care of what I have. I can’t abandon what little bit of the world I walk in because it’s a world I share with others.

The process is imperfect. There are still too many coats in my closet. When I get sad, the desire to buy more, to have more, burns hot like an ember. When this happens, I step back and take inventory of what I do have. I notice what needs repairing. I oil my cutting boards. I sharpen my knives. I learn how to take care of my own, twenty-year-old car. The shoes return to their boxes to keep their shape for just a moment longer.

A big thank you to Bryce Drobny for all our wonderful conversations about cars, movies, and putting intention into your work. He makes wonderful travelogues and maintenance/repair content on youtube and instagram under @la.cruiser! Also not mentioned by name, an acknowledgement is in place for my dear friend Elisha Knight, whose care for our breathing environment inspired this piece.

It’s been busy here in the SGOW biome. Many events. New clothes. Sweat everywhere. It is all, relatively, good. I told my assigned partner, during a corporate icebreaker, that my proudest achievement this year was taking more time to rest. Going on a trip. Asking to leave. The prioritization of rest. 

Instead of being a buzzkill, he warmly affirmed the sentiment, before telling me about some cool systems he was working on in Austin, Texas, the specifics of which are hazy in memory. Rest is good. Writing is good too, but I am trying to have it complement the rest, which right now is top priority. I rather not eclipse it. 

THE MUST-TRY COMBINATION OF THE YEAR

I’ll just say it right here, at the top: orange wine and oreos together are very good. A couple friends and I picnic’d at Ernest E Debs park. A chilled, skin-contact wine, one I paid $30 for at the Erewhon in Culver City, was a match made in heaven with the half-stale Oreos my friend bought from work. There is an expectation that comes with expensive things, that you must pair that thing with something equally overwrought and overpriced. Maybe a fine goat’s milk cheese. Fermented purple cornichons. Muscat grapes imported from Japan. 

Go for it, if you have those things. I didn’t. Yesterday, I peeled back the blue plastic film from a half-eaten tray of normal Oreos, and I took two out. I sipped the wine, which was tart and tasted of stonefruit, then I promptly popped an Oreo in my mouth. I took another sip, and there was harmony. 

A QUOTE FROM ELIZABETH BISHOP DELIVERED BY MATTHEW SAGE

M. Sage performed at the Audubon center, as part of an ongoing outdoor performance series organized by Living Earth LA. Before he began his set, he shared with the small crowd this quote from poet Elizabeth Bishop: 

“There’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet”. 

Elaborating on this, he shared his perspective on embarrassment — how it is the feeling one feels when they brush up against conformity — and that our chimeras, our creative instincts are inherently embarrassing. Embarrassment is a sign that we are well on our way towards the personal, the interesting. It is a pirouette from shame and into curiosity. 

I have a friend who told me that whenever they are faced with situations they might feel embarrassment, or even shame from, they go right ahead and live inside of it. They go into the intensity of their being, because it is an embrace of what they are. And their constitution, built on compassion and a fierce respect for themselves, is strong enough to withstand any cringe that might be a byproduct of their decision. She said this to me in the same park as the concert, but it was a different day. 

SUMMER AS A DECLINE

Days are blurry. More and more, I often find myself lost between months, between seasons, misremembering holidays and birthdays in the process. 

I have begun considering the seasons with greater intensity1 — trying to be more aware of equinoxes, solstices, etc in efforts to place myself within a year. In preparation for a good friend’s wedding, I was looking up the first day of summer, under the impression that their wedding might coincide with the solstice. When I discovered that it was indeed happening on the solstice, I was stoked. The seasonal synchronicity gave the event more symbolic weight.

Summertime is a beautiful time. I am a big fan of the season. Summer is sunshine, cicadas, and warm buildings. Summer elicits freedom. Summer recalls childhood and its bedding. 

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One of the first poems I wrote was called “Sunset Activities”. In one draft, I lamented how locales closer to the top of the world experience sunsets longer than I did in California. There is simply more daylight, and in the world of this poem, daylight acted as a currency with which you had to spend wisely, as it was limited. Naturally, the longest day of the year is special, because per capita, it has more daylight than all the other days in the year. Once the longest day of the year has passed, we are then hurtling towards the shortest day of the year. It splits time and space in twain: time we spend traveling away from the sun versus the time we spend orbiting towards it. 

When I was outlining this next part of the blog, I just wrote “BOOO” in my notes app. If you look up what day the summer solstice begins, you will find that it coincides with the longest day of the year. My naïvete believed that I had more time than I did. The longest day, I thought, would land somewhere towards the middle to the end of summer. Placing that day at the beginning of summer, you subject summer to a downwards slope. Peak summertime is literally the first day of summer, and from then on, it begins to end. 

Every sunset this summer will be shorter than the day’s prior. The “endlessness” summer elicits is just that — a conjuration, an illusion. I am faced with a dilemma of meaning. Is summer a death spiral? A cursed shell on the beach? The storm clouds looming in the distance, eating up the yellow sky? I can easily resign myself to this altered reality. I think, though, on the possibility that we already knew this. Since figuring this out, I have wasted the days I was most looking forward to, worrying about this new perspective. 

Now knowing this, what if I gave into the delusion of joy? What if I discarded the notion of delusion and just saw joy in the decline? There is no endlessness, but there are ninety three days I can spend however I wish to. I can go on and travel to the beach, trim the tops of strawberries, don flip flops and shorts, and listen to Mac Demarco’s earlier work. Summer is a short song, but it is still worth singing, despite.

HOT ONIONS IN THE AIR

Passing by an In-N-Out on a Saturday evening, trees devoid of color, only murky shades. Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee crackles through car speakers. I am tempted to drop everything in my life for a cheeseburger. But I need to get to Target before it gets too dark.

PRESCRIBED TIME AND LATE DINNERS

I wake up at six thirty a.m whether I like it or not, sitting upright for a couple minutes, in a half-stunned state. By nine, I feel the most fury. The caffeine hits, whatever I eat for breakfast undergoes fission. I write best at this time2. Come noon, I desire a sandwich or sandwich equivalent. Four to five p.m. is often forgotten time, a temporal ravine. Floating between finishing work and thinking about the upcoming evening, I flounder. I get weird.

I feel trained to want dinner at six and I often follow through this routine when I am at home. There are days though, usually when I commute, when the only time I can eat is at seven or eight. I feel loose. Every movement feels out of time. There are even days I work or eat at ten or eleven. Instead of winding down at this time as I would normally, I eat curry, blasted in a microwave. I write a really bad poem. These controlled bursts of rebellion, rebellion against, are exciting enough to justify how abysmal I will feel the next morning, when my body’s clock wakes me up at six. And I sit there, for a couple minutes, feeling waves of the day before.

DAD SHOWING ME PLACES ON GOOGLE EARTH

He flips between Google Earth and Google Maps to show me the current route he has planned for a vacation next year. He and Mom are going to Switzerland. Traveling via train, they will cut through Vienna, as there is “nothing to see there”. Overall, there is a lack of good food in Europe3. You don’t see German or Austrian restaurants here, he says later as we carve through Rowland Heights4.

He is almost giddy when he drags the little orange guy onto a village street in Copenhagen. The shops lining the sidewalks each have bespoke metal signs. Shoe repair. Market. Bakery. Police station. I point to one with the McDonalds M painted in mustard. He gives me a stern nod and flashes a thumbs up.

MICROWAVED SWEET POTATOES

In some convenience stores around Korea, there are steamed sweet potatoes next to the register. Held on warm plates, the spuds are wrapped in aluminum foil, and people grab a couple in the morning and go along their way. Men in gray suits chomping chunks of yellow tuber in their mouths, steam emanating from their mouths like dragons, wait for the bus. My family microwaves sweet potatoes when they want a quick breakfast. I never understood what the big deal was until I was running late-ish to a shoot. Hungry and pressed for time, I threw a potato in the microwave and collected call sheets and rolls of tape. Five minutes later, a long beep, then suddenly, I am in my car, heading towards Malibu. I get it.  

TOM WHAIMTS

Singing at the top of my lungs is among my favorite activities to do in the car5.  It is less fun and more helpful, if I am being honest. Singing is catharsis, a release of what has been kept inside, liberated through voice. I like to sing on the freeway, where the overall sound is so loud that my voice is enveloped.

Sometime last year, “The Wire” by HAIM comes on shuffle. I turn the volume knob up. Winter and its limited daylight has a hypnotizing effect on LA drivers; everyone forgets how to drive. Somewhere between the first chorus and when Alana Haim begins her verse and between the numerous stop-and-starts on the ten6, I begin to sing along to the song as Tom Waits. Swordfishtrombones, gravel-voiced, wailing Tom Waits.

Mumbling, “I GIVE IT ALL A-WAY” in a growl, I was first amused by the absurdity of Tom Waits singing HAIM. Tom famously sings with a conviction, a ferocity that is imitable. Then it started to become weird. Tom keeps singing, and as my voice just gets louder and louder. Tom not only takes over the song but the wheel and the road. I am gripping the wheel, digging my fingernails into the plastic leather. As the Haim sisters sing rounds atop each other, Tom wails through chorus. Brake lights illuminated red look like flowers. My voice breaks into his, and I am alone in my car, yelling and weeping. The freeway clears up.

I roll the windows down and feel the seventy five mile air whip my face. The tears dry into icicles.

A long week for me. I was on set producing a shoot while battling the beginnings of a cold. Lots of Tylenol and caffeine. There was a version of this SGOW that was 5x as long. The wing sauce I mention later opened up a big can of worms for me. I wish I could put it all together, but I! am! tired!

Bag Inside Of a Bag

Maybe it’s redundant. Maybe it’s an excuse to buy more smaller-bags — pouches, sleeves, covers — to fit inside more bigger-bags — totes, packs, sacks. The bag inside of the bag is a teenager’s bedroom; the separation gives the contents inside meaning. Feeling organized, I possess a healthy certainty, knowing that inside my bag is a smaller bag and inside that is exactly what I need. 

re: Bald Eagle Cams

The fledglings never hatched. One of the eggs was stepped on, so it became breakfast. Spring continues. 

Wing Sauce

Last weekend, a couple friends and I went to Yangban in the Arts District. The streets were deserted. Coachella, the Christmas of the spring, was in full effect, and it left the city delightfully sparse. 

The meal was jam-packed with really delicious riffs on classic Korean foods — sujebi in a beurre blanc sauce, doenjang-infused caramel, $30 worth of various banchan highlighting local produce1. The standout dish of the night was not actually a dish. It was the simple, bright “kimchi sauce” that accompanies the restaurant’s take on a soy-glazed Korean fried chicken. 

In a night full of inversions, this was the smartest one. A classic hot wing sauce, like Frank’s Red Hot or Louisiana Crystal, is a thin, vinegar-forward, and pepper-heavy liquid that goes well on just about everything. These same attributes are mirrored in kimchi and, by extension, kimchi juice. This is a well-thought out marriage of cultures. The sauce homages classic Southern fried chicken in a cool, nuanced, and very Korean way2. The simplicity is what makes it so surprising. 

Today, I grabbed a bottle of Louisiana Crystal and a jar of overripe kimchi; this is my best approximation of that sauce.

Yangban-inspired Kimchi Wing Sauce

Yield 

1/2 cup of sauce

Time

Quick

Ingredients

4 tablespoons of overripe kimchi juice

2 tablespoons of hot sauce, preferably Louisiana Crystal

1 tablespoon of lemon juice or red wine vinegar

Directions

Mix kimchi juice and hot sauce in a medium bowl. Taste immediately and adjust using the lemon juice or red wine vinegar. The final flavor should be tart and funk-forward. Serve with wings or fried tofu. 

Driving on Monday Morning After a Rainy Weekend in LA

Subsiding storms, green mountains. Traffic. 

Complete Darkness

It is 2024, and our light switches automatically toggle on when they detect motion. It is a hands-free experience, that is handy1 at night. Two weeks ago, sometime after midnight, the lights shut off without warning. I didn’t know if it was an electrical matter or if the timer ran out, but the suddenness caught me off guard. Think complete blackness. Any outlines, shapes, or colors were obliterated. My stomach dropped, and the feeling was akin to falling. There was once a room and a “me” here — now both are gone. 

The first feeling was a caution. My fugued mind swam, checking in on itself; it attempted to make conclusions. Did I slip and fall? Did I hit my head? Was this death? What else could have happened? This felt like death, but I couldn’t imagine what dying could feel like. In the dark’s hold, I could not discern any part of what made me “me”. Problems, complaints, and insecurities were gone. The physical too — the musculature, veins, fat, and aches once embedded into my body — melted off. There was a hollowness. 

This whole affair didn’t scare me; rather, I felt easy and warm. This was a brief exhale. For a second, I was freed of what I was. And I could experience that. I could perceive warmth and process comfort. If something did go wrong, that could be okay. It reminded me of a common metaphor relating to meditation. The meditator is a solid mountain; their thoughts and feelings are pieces of pollen drifting off into the cold air. I was there, then I was not, but I still was — and all of this was okay. 

The fluorescents snapped back on. I crawled back into bed and felt the itchy cotton bedding, the hump of the pillow propping my head up. The window was open, and ambient noises of the street at night and the trucks far off in the distance twinkled. 

Zucchini Jam

Tucked behind stacks of kimchi, leftover jasmine rice, probiotic yogurt capsules, and quart containers of beans, I found the jar of zucchini jam I made in February. My second favorite reason I love this jam is just that I get to tell other people about it. What an easy thing to discuss! This weekend I made jam! Zucchini jam! I don’t need to talk about my problems, look at this wonderful, odd object! The phrase “zucchini jam” itself is so irreverent yet mystical that I feel like a thief stealing from a larger reservoir of coolness in the world2. 

The primary reason I love this jam is actually what follows after the initial astonishment: curiosity. If I mention the jam, unfortunately, I have the jam on me. And I want you to taste it because it is legitimately tasty. There is a vegetalness that the zucchini gives, but it is suplexed by the copious amounts of lime zest, lime juice, and sugar the recipe asks for.  The texture is also a hoot; think flat translucent strips of plant matter that glow green when held up to a light source. The smallest bits of crunch also add a nice bit of texture and substantiality. 

I enjoy zucchini jam on top of a nice bowl of old-fashioned oats. The recipe is from All the Stuff We Cooked by Frederik Bille Brahe. 

Bald Eagle Cam

After several days of declining self-esteem, my friend sent me a link to a livestream of a bald eagle nest in Big Bear, California. The birds roost in a nest that has a camera inside of it. Inside the nest are eggs, which many believe are goners. Yet the birds continue to sit. Thousands watch the eagles eat fish, take turns watching the nest, and ruffle their feathers. “They do this thing where they just stick their whole heads down to the ground and scoot their butts onto the eggs”1. No one knows when the birds will realize what we know. No one knows when the video will end. Snow surrounds the nest. It looks like a powdered doughnut. 

How / Are / You?

What individual word you emphasize in the question “How are you?” changes both the tone and the object of curiosity. Across all permutations, however, the question is motivated by care. 

Coffee Grounds

I hate coffee grounds. The bits of oil that come off the ground beans2 stick to every surface. After inheriting an espresso machine from my sister and brother-in-law, I have gone off the deep end: modding the grinder, ordering parts from Europe, and soliciting strange, fermented beans from an enthusiast up north3. Yet, the counter continues to collect coffee-dust. Last Sunday, I deep cleaned the entire set-up, the stench of isopropyl alcohol clinging to everything, microfiber towels freckled with debris. The next morning I made myself an iced Americano without a second thought.

“Turtle” by Luc Tuymans

I didn’t know this painting was named “Turtle”. I saw something different4. I enjoy it more. 

I heard…

I heard that there are secret coves in San Pedro. I heard that San Pedro is the new old Venice — and that it is molting the San Pedro off itself (to become the new new Venice). The city has a large, copper bell, and everyone loves it. It has its own roof. The bell is Korean, even. I won’t fact-check this; I am only telling you what I have heard. Supposedly, San Pedro’s citizens are hoarding the whereabouts of a secret beach privy to only citizens of San Pedro. If you live in San Pedro and know of this secret cove, tell me. Share your swell. I may move in. 

Solace

During the lowest points of lockdown, hope became so abstract that nurturing it felt more harmful than inspiring. To this day, I opt for solace in place of hope. Solace is immediate. Shifting my focus to solace shifts my focus to reality; I must parse through it. Solace is not a precursor to hope nor is it mutually exclusive to hope. Solace is noticing the beams of sunlight slicing through the overhang of leaves that shade me — and being thankful for both the tree and the harsh sun it protects. 

Sunday Glass of Water

One of the many reasons I feel horrible5 is that I don’t drink enough water. I ramble around town like a strip of beef jerky picked up at a gas station. I’m a mess. A glass of water, to be enjoyed for the sole purpose of drinking a glass of water, in the early hours of Sunday, preferably by a window open to the offset blue sun is a gift. I sip and write. I sip and look out. I sip and think as the water meets me at room temperature. I feel my biology and sit inside it. 

The seasons never feel like seasons in California. The sun is consistent most of the year, and the pseudo-Mediterranean climate rarely changes. Despite this, we continue to find new ways to make small talk about the weather.

The differentiation between a perfect day and a slightly imperfect one is razor-thin and often exaggerated. Do you feel a breeze? How slight is it? How many clouds populate the sky? Do you feel your shirt sticking to your skin? Talking to transplants from around the states (and the world!) who come to Los Angeles for work, I cannot relate to their experiences with seasonality — how jarring it feels, how much they miss it.

Seasons demarcate periods of growth, decay, and the fertile transitions between. Southern California acts as its own summer world—as it is the only season we can claim as our own. From the paintings of David Hockney and Robert Bechtle to the cinematography of films like The Long Goodbye or The Graduate, the quality of the light rays—harsh and inescapable—are intrinsically connected to the region. Even in the winter, when sunlight is at its least, the daytime feels like summer.

Summer is also when school ends. It is the first encounter with freedom that children properly understand and grow to miss. Summer is when blockbusters are released. Summer concerts in the park, summer cocktails, summer trips to the beach, summer picnics, summer vacation. Summer markets a mythos around itself; it gives itself importance — training us to crave it when it is gone.

Jeff Rosenstock’s fifth solo album Hellmode is about tension, feelings “butt[ing] up against each other and it doesn’t make sense… How can I be happy that this thing is happening while this other terrible thing is happening”. Understanding the song via its tenses — noting when it oscillates — gives us context to the various dichotomies at play. The differences between ingenuity and fabrication, perception and reality, past and present.

Beginning in the present tense, the speaker bristles up against his privilege, feeling like a hypocrite and impostor to the communities central to his identity. These portions of the song are a jagged mix of self-pointed judgment (“Don’t tell yourself that you’re not evil”), existential questioning (“How long can you defend against a cheat code”), and manic yearning (“Stay young until you die”). These verses are long and relentless. Lines attack each other — and the speaker himself — in a machine gun spray of overwhelm, negativity, and self-consciousness. 

We first visit (return to) the past with the lines, “I danced and sang / I held my friends / For three whole summers." The lyrics of this section are disarming — the verbs are relaxed, simple, and monosyllabic. The sentiments are warm. The speaker makes less abstract judgments of himself and invites a more measured reflection. This verse answers the one before it — remarking how all he needed was “love… warmth… [and] pressure.”

Side note: I love it when an artist inserts a specific detail about their life that only they know about but becomes super impressionistic to the listener. The title, sung as “three whole summers” in this verse, is that. We are not privy to what three summers Rosenstock is talking about — but we fill in those details with our own experience. Back to the past.

Our time here is brief as we are whisked back into present day — this time with increased anxiety. The refrain from the previous verse, “I want the warmest breeze to blow..” returns — heightening and heightening with desperation until it finally climaxes into Jeff singing, “Stay young until you die,” over and over again. The song then reaches max loudness and descends into the guitars chugging into a stop.

We take a second to breathe and oscillate back in time. With twinkling acoustic guitar, the speaker watches the wind blow and feels idle, helpless before the weather. He reveals that the nostalgia of “the three whole summers” he previously told us about was a defense mechanism that hid his anxiety. In stasis and numbness, the dread only gestated. The idyllic veneer is broken open.

He leaves the song with a final devastating admission, singing, “I’m different than before and you can’t help me anymore.” The word anymore ringing out over a fading outro. We can take the anymore in context as a set statement of finality. I likewise hear the word sung with a question mark — bargaining, wondering with desperation if this truly is it.

Listening to this song at home (instead of on the freeway when I scream it like a madman; more on this in a future entry), I think about the first line of the song a lot. “Don’t kid yourself.” Kid has double meaning; used as a form of "kidding", the word is closer to deception and false hope. Rosenstock also dips into verbification and treats kid as a noun-turned-verb — the meaning now closer to infantilization. Literally, do not make yourself a kid.

“3 Summers” is my song of the summer, because it is a song mourning summer; and how summer morphed into a hologram of itself. In an autumn world, I realize how tight I held onto the idea of the season, unaware of the actual season itself — passing quickly without fanfare.

This post is not sponsored. I just love Jeff Rosenstock’s music. Buy Hellmode here.

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I began writing in elementary school. Our teachers encouraged us to journal, scribble, and note down whatever thoughts and feelings ran through us into clear and readable sentences. It was to practice articulation — an attempt to make the curriculum personal and encourage literacy and creative writing at an early age. During this awkward period, I wrote down everything — small crushes I had, petty squabbles with friends, grievances with family. As I wrote more, my mind eventually wandered towards imagination; I remember being engrossed in a piece of action-fiction, entitled “Monkey vs. Airplane,” and beaming with happiness.

Growing up, my parents and grandparents primarily spoke in Korean, or Hangul, around the house. They would chat, gossip, and ruminate about the news in both the U.S. and Korea over breakfast bowls of hot noodles and containers of fermented banchan. Despite sending me to multiple Korean-language learning schools (Hagwuns), I never learned how to speak the language — spending most of my home life half-understanding the conversations within it.

Later in college, I was told that King Sejong created the Korean language as a tool for nationalism in the face of imperialism. The language was meant to simplify adjacent languages and allow Koreans to realize themselves within their own words. When I searched King Sejong on the internet, Wikipedia’s meta-description listed him primarily as an “effective military planner”.

One afternoon, in fifth grade, I was rolling around the seafoam green carpet in the master bedroom and discovered my school journals splayed open on the bathroom vanity. I stopped writing about my life after this.

I shifted my attention towards theater — acting in plays and musicals in front of an audience. As a shit teenager, I stumbled onto the equation of the more of a reaction I get from the audience, the more they’ll pay attention to me. Unfortunately, this worked and I was applauded. People laughed, and I was desperate for their laughter. The period after high school, I spiraled into many other passions — film and photoshop; David Lynch and punk music; guided meditations and drunk cooking. I had my first panic attack at a party I threw in the winter of 2017. As soon as people began to show up, I retreated into my dark bedroom, regretting that I invited them over in the first place.

A couple of years after college, I was moving for a job, and my friend Jean gifted me the record “Purple Mountains” by Purple Mountains, the moniker for poet-slash-musician David Berman. The warm, lush timber of the instrumentation (provided by the excellent Woods!) gave life to Berman’s catastrophe-ridden yet brilliantly written lyrics. The words, however devastating they were, were meticulously cared for — plainspoken and perfect, and this effect sent me down a rabbit hole of Berman’s work. It was the first time I actually read contemporary poetry and enjoyed the feelings it stirred.

It is a certain hill.

The one I imagine when I hear the word “hill,”

and if the apocalypse turns out

to be a world-wide nervous breakdown,

if our five billion minds collapse at once,

well I’d call that a surprise ending

and this hill would still be beautiful,

a place I wouldn’t mind dying

alone or with you.

— from ”Self-Portrait at 28” by David Berman

Language sets a boundary between what is said and unsaid. We can cross the boundary and bring the unsaid into shape — codifying the abstract into actual. Engaging with language, and learning how to communicate gives you admission to the conversation.

At work, I had a secret pad of post-it notes, tucked underneath my lunch pail. Whenever a line came to me, I wrote it down and jammed the note into my backpack. After commuting home, I shook my backpack open and a poem would fall out.

In retrospect, whatever desire I had for attention overshadowed a hidden desire for articulation. When I write, the words jumble into non-sentences. Tenses mixed. Passive voice everywhere. Only after am I given the chance to arrange the pieces into readability. I still reckon with writing and publishing as swipes for attention. The desire for articulation, I think, cannot help but coincide with the desire for attention.

I hope that this clanging-around of pots and pans is, at the very least, not a total waste of time. I hope it’s a nicer waste — the kind that can be recycled anew.