b u l g o g i b o i

i'm just a character on the internet.

[bulgogiboi]

The sequoia tree tunnel where my parents once drove through on one of their wedding anniversaries has been wiped out with a rain storm. My father’s heavy scolding and my mother’s silent weeping echo through the constant rain and wind that has swept through San Francisco. 

On these cold days, I’ve occupied my time with Botchan by Soseki Natsume. It’s straightforward, funny, and talks about the morality of teaching honesty backed up by a life of dishonesty against the backdrop of chameleon Japan in the process of its westernization. I find myself muddled in the key components of the novel. Rearranged, I’m learning lessons without honest emotions at a pivotal point in my own life. Things are straightforward and I can laugh at my life for what it is. School nears end, careers on the rise. I am the Frances Ha at heart and the sad clown in mourning white at first glance. It’s these little details that make up the wheels of my little red wagon which have become stuck at the top of a slope hill. 

I’m left in a blank confusion. It’s not so much a standstill. It’s like if I was waiting in the rain at a bus stop, looking at the screen for bus predictions wondering why it won’t tell me when a bus is coming. 

--

Because we had a good time and you urged me the urgency of your past life, for your ideas to bleed out of you. And then we lost touch. In some flurry of busy lives and daunting weather, I can comfortably place two feet, soggy in a shallow rain puddle, in the peacefulness of my infancy, I registered this simple pleasure in the sip of my coffee, looking out at the short sun that peeked through a sheet of gray. For a breathable moment, everything was okay, but I remind myself of the memory we shared, one I cannot repeat, and my lifetime’s wrongdoings accumulate into a deep dark wall that overshadows the shortcomings of my future. 

[bulgogiboi]

The Inflation and Deflation of Touristic Elation - dec 17

In the first time of past many nights, I took the time to visit my my long-time friend’s coffee shop cozily tucked underneath a KBBQ joint. Someone had puked all over a chair and table right outside the entrance. The partner swooshed in with a flushed face, apologizing before asking for paper towels, and apologized again when my friend said she would clean it all up. The metaphor of our past lives clung in the air as we examined, at the same time, the current spaces in which we inhabited–alone, calm, and everything with the sentiment of Goldilocks-just-right on the brink of sudden disturbance. We had been through hard times, and harder ones, alone and together.

This whole alarmed action outside of my peripheral forced me to look at other tables which were occupied with couples or groups all minding their own warmth and laughter. They were all people who belonged to each other or at least shared a sense of belongingness. I looked down at the work in front of me, notes on Nabokov and Hitchcock for an exam on Tuesday, the beginnings of a short story, and Yoshiyuki Okuyama’s Bacon Ice Cream. Bacon Ice Cream centers around the taste of first times. A first time for anything only ever happens once, experienced a single time in order to ignite or justify sentiments, beliefs, or epiphanies for the following experiences, and for those experiences to become second, third, or forever times.

In 2016, I made the brave move from a two bedroom for four to a single bedroom for one. In a neighborhood on the edge of gentrification, I reap the feeling of freedom, at the age of 22, a youth that tightens and dissipates underneath my belt. My imagination formulates big futures outside of the small world I know and experiences to be lived-in. I am what baby-boomers call a “millennial” and for those five years plus than me, I am “lucky”, living in an “easier” world than what they’ve pushed through. But I am lost like anybody else. I am also just a speck of dust, the bitten edge of a dying star. I know where sand comes from. I am still eating bacon ice cream.

[bulgogiboi]

This is two days before I leave to LA. A reunion with the two most important people in my life await me. This is the middle of October after a weekend of heavy rain. The weather matches my mood and lifestyle: leaves crumple to a brown and red, but my passions--whatever they are--have hibernated in an early winter. Everything feels like it makes sense, but under some nervous, fragile skin is an unfathomable storm. At some point, all of which I feel and know now will crumble. This is how all things go, but when it comes to love, you never know how to rise from ashes, and only lay there swishing arms and legs into little citrus slices, motioning waves of acidic moods. What do you do with ash-angels? Here's what I did with mine: My indulgence focused on the mood of playlists versus the usual "listening to old favorites and new favorites". These playlists are curated by two sisters, Tanya and Zhenya Posternak, fashion photographers for Mansur Gavriel, who do more than take pictures. They see things through particular filters with unfiltered Instagram pictures. For them, beauty lies in the voluptuous shape and shades of fruit and the bloomed and unbloomed forms of plastic shopping bags. Another indulgence: the music of Nabokov. With my comparative text class between Nabokov and Hitchcock, I've learned too much about how I should be shaping my stories. To become less ambitious, and polish the small, forgotten stones. Remember that one time I walked down Grant Ave, where the florist shop was from Vertigo, and a man with a trumpet played twilight into night, hushing the streets to an early sleep? Whenever I think about that night, I think of- Mantovani and his Orchestra. Sweet symphonies- much like eating a whole tray of Ferrero Rocher's. Three romances and an absent life. Unfilled and filled at the same time. Des vagues vagues.

[bulgogiboi]

i. cold turkey

A year ago from this time around, I was in Lisbon. This was two weeks after a year spent in the eternal summer of Aix en Provence.

But two weeks before I left, I met a demon. This demon would not let me sleep but let me sweat. This demon bruised my mind with raging ideas, and trapped me at the top of my shit. This demon was neither friend nor foe, but provided needed company at a shifting moment in my life.

This demon partied in my bedroom which, on weekends, was cleared for hundreds of balloons, strobed lights, and drunk dancers that, to this day, remain strangers.

But there comes a time when a demon abandons you to your own hurt. Or, perhaps I abandoned the demon, and I had only hurt myself. I would leave to Lisbon, and then back to California.

I left to a wondrous tropicana that carried an orange air around me, salted my skin, and made me forget that night fell because every day felt like two days and one night.

I can only remember eating bacalao, but sifted the fried bits of cod with a silver fork and no appetite. The local dish was served with fresh-cut fries, and a whole pitcher of white wine all to myself for five euros. But every bite tasted of cold turkey, and I could not help but puke everything that I consumed. I would go to bed at night and wake up in a puddle of sweat. I would thrash around, blankets falling to the floor of my hostel bunk, and, red-faced by morning, haul it back to my bed.

Bags pulled my eyes down and dry. Espresso for breakfast and iced cokes for lunch, I wandered through the mosaic city, and found that I was trapped in the mosaic, that the demon had followed me here, engulfing my skull in flames.

The fire could not be put out no matter how much white wine filled my veins.

In youth is pleasure, I thought, but pleasure could only last for so long. Who was it that told me that they learned this mantra from a Buddhist: Why is it do we think of sadness to last forever and for happiness to end so quickly?

Eventually, the demon was exorcised. I drank enough water. I listened to Elia y Elizabeth. I kissed some, and forgot others. The demon was outside of myself, but reminded me of my otherneness.

[bulgogiboi]

ii. the alien

In Principe Real, long dresses flow and linen oxfords are left unbuttoned. Egg tarts and coffee swirl through the breeze as children swing and laugh to a music secret and content. The tiled streets are ruptured with tree roots. Palm trees spill over the sidewalk, and nearby, beyond the local boutiques, is the largest botanical garden I had ever gotten lost in.

Rivers of green engulfed me. I walked through a tunnel of bamboo trees, and remembered, this was where Panda Bear had stood for an interview (Dazed?, Noisey?, etc.?). He had said that while living in Lisbon and being away from America for so long, he had felt like alien, and that is what I made myself out to be for the remainder of my time here. A confidence built up in me, and I felt an invincibility to understand the world as I had never done before. There was a pep to my walk and I could think of nothing but buildings drenched in orange light and see them twinkle at night in lamp lights.

On long tables down a winding path, people feast and drink until late in the night. I ate fish, I drank white wine, and I wrote experiences that I had not reflected upon, and when the reflection was over, I churned and mashed it all into applicable fiction that would be given to someone that I thought I loved. You have to understand, writing is the only medium in which I can understand the world. The combination of 26 letters rearranged in phrases, sentences, and paragraphs in order to evoke something, anything at all, surprises me. It’s a miracle, a crime, a hand-mirror inside of a full-length body mirror.

As a miracle or crime, how would I have gone back to California to tell me that yes, indeed, I am French or I was French. How do I tell them–prove to them down on my knees–that yes, I am Vietnamese, and it finally means something. How I tell them that I don’t feel American–do you know what that means? That perhaps I am not American, that I am Californian. That I am not French, but perhaps Parisian. Would that work? How do I translate that to you, in my native tongue, English? How do I translate that?

But for now, before I reach the end of the translation, I am understanding what paradise is after many years of wrongness, the inevitable hurt, and sorrow that stays for too long in a worn-out body. 

Lisbon is a pocket of light away from the rest of the world, the last beam of the sunset before it disappears beyond the meet-n-greet of sky and ocean. It’s the best-kept secret for eternal summers, for a glow on the skin and for people that would like to live as vaycay kings and queens.

[bulgogiboi]

iii. the alien dissected

What is the origin of misery and why had it engulfed me? A better question: why had I let misery engulf me?

Why had misery mushed my memories to a pulp as I walked along the waters of Lisbon? When I saw lovers kissing on concrete? When I had a sushi buffet all to myself? When the sun kissed my neck? When the breeze carried me through the seaside of Belem?

Why had something born in San Francisco move with me to Europe? Unless it was born inside me..

I had left San Francisco lonely and became alone in Europe. Misery traced my steps but I made sure to gobble down all the bread crumbs I must’ve left. I pushed through language barriers and encountered other ethnicities. I made it a habit to take a piece of culture from each place and kept them in my pocket.

When I would return to the states, I wanted to ask for a coffee in French and thank them in Portuguese. When I asked for the check, I wanted to do so in Japanese and leave sunburnt with Moroccan mythology.

To find the source of misery was to push past the unknown to make light of the known.

My misery comes from the suburbs. The nothingness of summer that weighs down harder than the sweat on your back. The emptiness that engulfs you in your bare ceiling. I remember lying in bed, waiting for my ceiling fan to spin its last turn and fall and splice my head off. Or at least open, so that all the inner, imagined futures could actually taste the real world. This world of mine, spent napping and thinking how much higher the minimum wage could be, was laughable. I felt like a Jeff Koons’ piece–solidified in my own kitsch inflation, trapped in a life-long joke.

Is that the root of it? When I see a Jeff Koons? The root to misery?

Or perhaps Lisbon, and the many places that will come after, are baby steps towards an understanding–not ultimate nor lasting–that will make me write better, wonder more, and to give, give, give.

[bulgogiboi]

iv. like death

Death is a reoccurring theme throughout my fiction, and my own life. There were times when I really felt it, needed it, craved it, and didn’t care if it would slam straight into me.

I wish I wasn’t dunked into water, a moment in which I think I cried, like most Catholic children do. My brother was ultimately baptized at the age of 10 when he almost drowned in a backyard pool. I watched him from above the water, a smudge of dark flesh that could have possible ceased to exist. I stood there not quite understanding the end to anything. When we are young, we are never taught the end.

Because we’ve just begun. And always, perpetually, we promise ourselves beginnings with the start of the new year, and if that’s the rate we’re conditioned by, I should be producing a novel each year.

Here, death would be okay. I wouldn’t have to go back to San Francisco and see how punished the city, the homeless, the natives are with gentrification. I wouldn’t have to face old problems. I wouldn’t have to wonder how I would make a future possible enough for me. 

Confused on the coast, I saw the Golden Gate Bridge. Or at least its doppelgänger. For a second, I thought I had walked all the way home from Lisbon, but realized it was a reminder that I indeed needed to return to my roots. It stood there, looking at me in its out-of-place gaze.  

But here I am, born again, to recount last year, this time around. Change, for the better. I think that’s what it is. And I can’t believe it was ever possible, that it really did happen.

[bulgogiboi]

v. resurrection

The moments when I’ve felt shoulder blades shift with grandeur happen when I wake up. The shifts aren’t gradual changes. The process happens in dreams, and I wake up to a different reality. I have to admit I’m thankful for that. I don’t feel change within the company of friends or a change of scenery. I feel change alone, and I couldn’t ask for a better way to feel.

The demon ceased to exist. It would revisit me when I return to California, to the suburbs, where there was nothing to do but fornicate with the demon. But I didn’t succumb, and though the cold sweats came back in hot flashes at night, the early mornings gifted me with a breeze that reminded me of the cool, Portuguese winds and waters.

It brought me to a park I happened by mistake. I got lost in the greens, the mini ponds, the wild flowers that dripped over the walkways. Frogs and dragonflies homed the areas. A bloated liveliness thrived within me, and I became conscious of breathing. I was a living organism that craved for something beyond instinctual survival, beyond part-times and education. I craved life itself.

I craved space, imaginable or physical, and wanted to occupy it. I wanted to shift things and fill things up. Build things. I wanted to create with my bare hands. I wanted to tell somebody I loved them. I wanted to do things that I could deem monumental, beyond my own intelligence and generosity. I wanted to help. I wanted to be a human being. Raceless. Cultureless. Created by my own interests and beliefs. I wanted to live the way I wanted to live, within the system by my own standards. I know this feeling has been felt before. It’s the same feeling dreamers feel, and it’s the drive that do-ers do. It’s specific. It moves. It inspires.

That is resurrection and, at some point, it happens in a person’s life.

[bulgogiboi]

vi. preparations for the waiting, existing world

Before I would go back to the United States, I had to visit a place that I had dreamed about because a specific soul had helped me through my adolescence when it came to suppressed creativity.

I would visit Zurich in search of the presence of Pascal Grob. I floated in the grace of his presence, and more. I saw San Francisco. I breathed. My toes stretched out through the park grass, and I dreamt of the paradise that existed in my own becomings.

I can only remember my last day by the port. The sun out, the water blue. There was vibrant music in colors, and I wanted to lounge in the sun with greasy fingers from too many egg tarts. I wanted all my private pleasures to happen at once. 

I wanted to read and write. I wanted to sex and love. I wanted every ounce of emotion in me. This is what it means to move on. This is what it means to travel. This is what it means to live. Yes, I’ve learned. Yes, I’ve struggled. Yes, it will all keep going.

[bulgogiboi]

cold brew days

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in the sunset

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A Trap in Soft Division

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Paper Light

[bulgogiboi]

your midnight in paris is out of stock.

[bulgogiboi]

Oh, Lolly Day !

[bulgogiboi]

been procrastinating because your heart is a small good thing ⛅️

[bulgogiboi]

jamie xx - in colour - the fastest moment of my life