“…volatile times can be productive — I know that sounds weird — but turmoil can stimulate creativity for artists. When you read the biographies of jazz musicians, it does seem that difficult experiences might have fostered creativity in others — names like Monk, Cannonball, and Jaco come to mind.”

Wonderful music flowed out of Lisa Hilton despite the COVID-19 lockdown last spring, cutting her Chalkboard Destiny 2020 tour short, halfway through. A loved one in Italy had also fallen ill. The whole world was falling apart, thrust into turbulent, dark times.

Compelled to create something out of nothing, the jazz…

in my dreams
I look for a key
already in my front right pocket
next to the plane ticket
and a taped picture of you
and I, together in one of those funny
yearbook poses of the ‘70s

a window is always open to the other side storms and dinosaurs, seas and ice caps, happy, shiny people in Eddie Bauer ads sipping lattes in gleaming white cups, their eyes peering over designer glasses - celebrities, elusive, vibrant, and slightly vacant when you ask them for the time - as if they’ve seen a ghost, pass the scones, darling, where was…

Oh, we’re back to this again? Sigh.

Apparently. Look…an(other) alarming spike in hate crimes against elderly Asians in polite Canada and Seattle society, cosmopolitan Manhattan and Chinese-intensive San Francisco.

Dammit.

I spent my entire life trying not to get singled out, get my ass beat, prove myself to white (and black) people, even other Asians, that I’m okay, I mean well, I don’t mean any harm.

You haven’t lived until a Japanese- and Polynesian-American gang up to throw out racial slurs that have been thrown at them.

Just a few short years ago, I was getting off a bus in…

For the past week or so, I haven’t been able to get what I really wanted to eat.

I went off my diet back in early Feb. to get a writing assignment done in record time. Several writing assignments.

We’re moving in a few days. So that too.

Nothing I have eaten has been remotely good: bland, dish watery tofu soup, shitty basil-intensive voodoo fries to go with revolting cadaver wings, and now, this.

All of a sudden I have to turn around an entire magazine layout in PDF form without any ability to comment on or edit it from…

I’m really bad at this. Making lists.

“Wake up.” Indeed.

One of the first lists I ever made and tried to take seriously was the kind of man I wanted to marry. Of course, when you’re seven years old, you don’t realize that you can’t conjure up a dreamboat based on a *Top 10 list.

Love doesn’t work like that…I’m assuming.

And men, are notoriously stubborn.

Whittling down the important, biological task of pair-bonding to a list is especially futile when you’re picky as hell — and generally can’t stand people for any length of time.

Also, fun fact: I…

I’m fairly certain everyone’s high. On something. But me. I’m standing in the middle of a football field, after rumors of a lone gunman send crowds streaming towards the exits.

Clues drop like shots in the dark. My heart races. I go blind for a few seconds, gather my thoughts. I would rather die here, as an open target, than go down with the ship of fools stampeding over their friends and family.

To live one more day.

Get high.

There is bread to bake, and mouths to feed. I am neither young nor beautiful enough to stand onstage and…

Coke times, and summer block parties. My dad’s best barbecue chicken. I miss those days, when all I had to think about was whether the boy across the street liked me. (Answer: he did. Until he didn’t. Because you’re a whore, like your mother.)

We are debris, washed up underneath their beautiful Japanese glass floats, starfish, and black pearls. The invisible players behind this screen, writing awful movies and that insipid apple.com commercial interrupting Lady Gaga all the time on YouTube.

We’ve been made. In the image of the next “It” couple. But somehow, I slipped through the cracks. Rippling…