let there be blood

it feels like lately i have been growing complacent, like the hunger is gone. the bloodlust and anger have subsided in the last few years and sometimes i don't even know if i am myself. but fuck all that, it's time for some carnage.

best friends

when i was young i remember i had a best friend named greg. i had just come to america so communication was hard, but most friendships are based on activities and shared interests, so
talking isn't always necessary. his mom picked me up after elementary school sometimes and even taught me the alphabets. he was my only friend for a long time since i couldn't speak to any of the other kids and when i look back i thank him for that because without him i would have been alone.

greg and i spent many afternoons together, playing video games, watching movies, exploring the outdoor expanse of his backyard. one summer we really got into mountain biking, the next he introduced me to footbll. somehow when i went to go visit him, i felt that my life was much more incomplete. his dad was a gadget junkie so his house was always furnished with newest toys, nestled cozily into the modern decor picked out by his stay at home mom. they always ate dinner together at the table, while their yellow lab, casey, begged imploringly with her doggie eyez.

at my house, it was me, my brother, my mom, and grandparents. pops was back in taiwan getting his grind on, and it was anything, but a typical american household. i remember wishing that my family were more like greg's, americanized, modern, normal.

greg was my portal to american culture since at my home, only mandarin and taiwanese were spoken, while my grandparents held stringent ties to the taiwanese green indepedent party. i remember wishing that i didn't have to miss weekend morning cartoons due to chinese school and church.

me and greg's were both made to learn piano during the 1st grade and i ended staying with it through junior year of high school, although at the end I could hardly stand it anymore. my mom even started making me play for her church on sundays and i began to feel very much like a highly trained show dog.

me and greg were pretty much best friends through all of grade school up through middle school and as a kid you don't realize that sometimes interests change and that friendships don't last forever. i remember during the '89 earthquake i was still in kindergarten and all of like 4 kids showed up for school the next day. it mostly kids with hard ass asian parents, and also oscar, but oscar was that kid who liked to eat his boogers and elmer's white paste so i didn't really hang out with him much. i remember wondering why greg didn't show up for school and i knew then that we were from different worlds.

we developed different interests through middle school and the only things we really had in common anymore was the advance math class at school and piano on wednesdays. i started playing little league baseball, while he joined the ultimate club.

i don't know what happened in high school. i tried to be good, tried to fulfill my filial duty, but something inside snapped and i just really didn't want to be a good little boy anymore. greg kept doing his thing, excelling at school, formed a garage band, won merit awards and national recognition. i began experimenting with drugs, sex, hung out with the wrong crowd and basically tried very hard to get into trouble, but never quite trying hard enough.

i still did pretty well in school, because to me high school was very much a joke. i cheated just enough in the classes that i hated to get by and thought that i could get by okay with sitting in cruise control through life. this ideology continued throughout college, a debilitating conceit, complemented with bouts of alcoholism and drug abuse.

me and greg stopped being friends in high school, but i think that is mostly due to my own proficiencies as a bridge burner. he has since continued to be a good, nice boy, graduating from a nice school, getting a nice job, finding a nice girlfriend, and buying a nice safe condo. but i suppose that is one of the many reasons that we stopped being friends in the first place.

sometimes doubt creeps into my head and i wish that i had lived that life and continued to be a nice boy. but fuck that asshole doubt.

maybe sometimes friendships are only made in times of circumstance and situation. maybe sometimes friendships are only made for proximity and necessity. maybe all things in life are only meant to be temporal.

wednesday beers

during the summer i would always go to the 21st amendment for lunch because the weather was extremely pleasant and they have tasty beers and it is nice to paint in the early afternoon with a slight buzz going. there was a cute redhead in my class who was always pretty curt to everyone, but she was really nice to look at, so the flaw seemed to be a little less harsh. she started showing up to the bar on wednesday's and we had our little routine going. we would be pretty distant and reticent in class, but we were wednesday beer buddies during lunch.

she was an avid boxer at her local gym where she had met her husband who she was living with now. she had wicked talent in the studio and i always looked forward to lunch with her because she was like no one i had ever met before. she had grown up in a little town of nevada, with 7 brother and sisters, strictly mormon. i had grown up with mormons in the k-12 system, but i had never befriended one.

I had talked to several of my friends and they insisted that pursuing a married chick was out of bounds like big time so I cooled the jets off that mess and just kept it in the friend zone. I learned that she was going to introduce her husband to her family for the first time over christmas break. she seemed pretty anxious about the whole ordeal.

we talked about art and our lives and where we wanted to take all this mess, but mostly i liked to look at her pretty face. we talked about maybe doing shows together in the future and all that. i remember right before finals she got a huge cut on her brow from an amateur bout and i thought it was pretty sexy an all. we traded information and then finals came and i hopped straight out to thailand so we really didn't get a chance to say bye, but i figured she would always be at the 21st next semester because that was just the way things were going to be.

i remember receiving an email from an event coordinator about possibly curating a show in early february while i was on vacation in thailand. i emailed the redhead from class but never got a reply back. the show came and went and school started and i've been back to the 21st, but i have not seen her since. i suppose that maybe most likely she just couldn't afford to go to school anymore and probably had to take up a job somewhere to support her beer habit. but the way i like to look at things, she probably got shamed into divorcing her husband when she went back to nevada because he wasn't a mormon and is now living in a little town back home wishing that she could have beers at the 21st with me on wednesday so we could bullshit about where we could see the future taking us.

art dump

so i was thinking yesterday and it's about two years since i started on this art journey and it's been both good and bad times. all i know is it takes more than boyish good looks, charm, and general badassery to make it big in the art world.

i want to do a big solo show and destroy the space and hang up dirty pictures that people will probably sneer at, but it's okay because i'll probably be drunk at the opening. i've been trying to get in contact with gallery people, but my strong suits aren't within the realm of verbal negotiation. i'm trying though.

until that big break through, i'm gonna keep chugging along.

if you know of a big wall space that needs to be destroyed, i will do it for freezy as long as you follow these rules.

1. i will not paint on large plywood nailed to the wall, because then you are just asking for free shit and that is just not going to happen unless you are a hot chick.

2. give me lunch

lil weezy and friends in progress

yaager in water color

young lady with handgun oils

killer mixed media

liana water color

you know what it's about.

nick: dude, her vagina looks too much like meat curtains.

me: you think?

nick: yeah it doesn't look as appetizing.

going big at auto logic san bruno

N.K.F x d.chen

trip mao shocker for your mother fucking ass

nicola helping hang and sippin brew at the fatal attraction show

do the damn thing.

live painting for the first time.

dog fight.

As i was driving home yesterday all i could think about was veggin out for a little bit and procrastinating on all the shit i had to do for the upcoming week. rounding the last right up to my street i see two dogs in stride trotting up to my house. they must smell emma because they stop at my front yard and smell about. i pull up on my driveway and step out. one looks like a mastiff/boxer mix while the second one looks like a rottweiler/german shepard. They are both males with collars on. i walk up to the rott, which barks and walks away, the mastiff is friendly and lets me handle it no problem. his collar has no tags which means i can't call the owner.

the mastiff is friendly and is under voice command. in hindsight i should have gone inside and grabbed leashes from inside so i could have controlled the dogs better. i let them both go so i can get my phone out of my car and see my neighbor johnny coming up the block with his snow white pomeranian mix on a walk yapping loudly ferociously at the two strays.

"hey, you ever seen these dogs before?" i call out to him as he makes his way towards me.

"nah, you just spot them outside?"

"yeah"

suddenly as johnny approaches i see the two stray dogs stop, focus, and attack. my friend johnny's eye's go wide with fear and out of no where is as flurry of teeth, snarls, fur, growls, and cries. johnny is yelling madly, frenzied with rage, his body a blur of kicks and fists. the pomeranian is on his back, yelping with the fear of death and i was pretty sure that we had a dead dog on our hands as i ran up to the scene. i manage to grab a hold of both collars and drag the fight apart.

johnny is overcome with rage and a torn knee hole on his pair of jeans and runs up to the dogs and "yells i'll fucking kill you" as he squares up to kick one of the dogs in the face while i yell out "no it's cool, i've got them" and he slows and calms down and goes back to his shrieking dog. the rott starts to lunge on his collar and it snaps at the buckle and he goes right for the pomeranian and the dogs and johnny go yelling down the block.

i just stand where i am with the mastiff in one hand and the broken dog leash in the other and think that if the pomeranian hadn't died or escaped terrible injury the first time, this had to be it, and i felt a little bad for johnny who was just on a nice stroll with his lap dog and now it might be dead.

after awhile, the shrieking form the pomeranian stops so i yell out to johnny "is your dog okay?" and he yells back "no!" he is on the phone describing the situation to what i assume is the cops. as i am walking up to the johnny's house with the mastiff in hand i see another gentlemen approaching, he is wearing a balack hoody and work boots, with a goatee. he grabs the rott and uses his belt as a makeshift leash.

i walk up to him and ask if these are his dogs and he says yes. he then goes on to tell me how the pg&e guy opened the side gate and the dogs ran loose and all that and i am glad to be able to walk away from the situation. i check up on the pomeranian cowering on johnny's stoop. besides a damp mat of fur around the jugular, there is absolutely wrong with the dog. no lesions, fractures, punctures, nothing. it is not hurt at all.

the cops come and they do the whole trading of information business and i get to walk away from all of that. i thought about how i quite liked the mastiff and that maybe after another year or so i could finally get a second dog. also i thought about how much i dislike most little dogs because their owners are horrible dog owners and do not properly socialize and train their pets.

barbituventure

this one time i was in Thailand i had the unfortunate or awesome occurrence of finding out that every pharmacy has every imaginable prescription drug out in the market. i was out in chiang mai with nick after a few days carousing out in Bangkok and things had been going pretty well and it was pretty much a night to night alcohol diet. we met up with an ex-pat, tommy, i knew back from in the states who decided to move to thailand to learn some kickboxing the hard way.

he brought this chick named ally from australia out with him and she had a cute accent and ended hooking up with me for the rest of my vacation which was nice, but back to the barbituates.

our little party of four had just finished up a nice thai lunch fueled with lots of beer in the humid heat of the winter sun and tommy dropped casually that "all pharmacies are stocked with anything you want man, no prescriptions needed, just cash" and that was that. i was on soma break for the rest of the trip. anxiety? pill. stress? pill. ennui? pill. anxiety, is that you again? pill. it was an unending cycle which didn't quit til i had to leave the country and boy can i tell you the nightmares i had during withdrawals alone aren't worth me ever going on a binge again, at least not for awhile.

it was during one of these euphoric wavy daze that me and nick decided it was a good idea to rent scooters to travel around town. we rode up and down zipping through the busy streets, faster than everyone. it was like bombing a hill during 2pm traffic in the tahoe mountains, gunning the throttles, always faster in and out of the lead until i low sided at an intersection and thank god i didn't get run over and i was wearing that bike helmet they gave us at the scooter place.

I remember rolling twice with my backpack on and that probably saved a lot of skin off my back and i left the accident with little incident besides some scraped up elbows and knees and even the camera i just bought had survived the accident without incident. after the wreck i stood up and checked the joints and made my side to the side of the road where there happened to be a bar with a bunch of middle aged ex pats and a horde of concerned looking thai ladies who happened all to be working at the same bar.

i checked myself again and i couldn't believe that i was okay and by then nick had hauled and parked the scooter next to me and i ran to a local pharmacy to pick up some bandages and antiseptic since the last thing i wanted was gangrene on vacation.

we rode around some more after that, but i had had enough and the pills in the supply sack were running low so i wanted to get back to the hotel as soon as possible. i knocked on my hotel room after parking the scooter and went up to the room where ally from australia answered the door and asked me what had happened and i told her and then she laughed in my face and i always thought that was kind of a dick thing to do.

it happened to be a pretty okay night though because we kept buying beers from the liqour store next door and ally from australia kept going on food runs so that night didn't turn out to bad. and it didn't hurt either that i got woken up with the next morning either but i am sure it was more sympathy than anything but it kind of absolved the whole laughing in my face thing.

the barbituventure was fun, but once again those nightmares were bad and i couldn't sleep for like 3 nights straight without waking to some terrible trepidation swearing that all the fears, anxieties, and ghosts hadn't caught up back to me after all this time.

my father's chauffeur

my father used to have a chauffeur, years back. i don't really know why, because he could have driven himself and does so perfectly well now. i think part of the reason was because his driver was a college buddy. the driver's name was "ah-long" or as a literal translation uncle dragon and he was just this cool, chain-smoking, whiskey drinking, golf hustler who'd hit a few bad streaks.

ah-long was the type of uncle to give you cigarettes and sneak you drinks when you're 16 and stuck at a lame adult party. he gave me pointers on my golf game and once even gave me a few cubans he had somehow procured. since him and my dad were friends, they went everywhere together. during long rides i heard them debate life, politics, and everything in between except women, at least never in front of me.

my parents always spoke highly of him. he had been popular back and college and been lucky with a few small businesses but things changed and he had to start driving for my dad. he was always smiling his nicotine stained yellows and was always with a quick "good morning" or "how are you today". i would probably only see him once a year, just the number of times i went back to taiwan to see the family. every year, i would go back and my dad would tell me that he would have to let ah-long go. but he never did. at least not until a few years ago.

"dad, where's ah long?"

"he stopped working for me a few months ago."

"how come?"

"just because, that's how things work out."

"how is he?"

"who?"

"ah-long"

he paused for a while. sometimes i can still never tell if my father is in deep contemplation or an unengaged stupor.

"he's not doing so well. his son recently had an accident. he was on his scooter and was hit by a utility truck, they had to amputate both his legs after unsuccessfully trying to save them. his girlfriend at the time was also on the scooter, but luckily she survived the ordeal with little injury."

"is his son okay now?"

"he's recovering."

"what about ah-long?"

"he's dealing with it."

i haven't seen ah-long since he stopped driving for my dad but every once in awhile i'll ask about him and how he's doing. he's one of those people that kind of just fade out of your life, yet leaving a tremendour impression. my dad recently told me that ah-long has just found a new job. he's managing a manufacturing plant in the steel industry. his son isn't doing too bad either, he recently got into law school and is engaged. sometimes, things work out okay.