The Navy

I have this uncle who was in the Navy during the Vietnam War.

He was in an aircraft carrier off the Pacific Coast, mostly.

I asked him once, what that was like.

He said in an aircraft carrier, there are many levels or floors emplying thousands of people.

His department was towards the bottom, subsequently, he never saw the light of day during any battle. His recollection of war was just doing his job with little interference or excitment.

Suicide, Part II

My friend. In HS he was a 4.0 student, studied Latin, was in a Magic society, and was the keyboardist in our band. Classicaly trained, he was definitely the most educated musician in our collective. We lived, ate and slept music.

He ended up being accepted into the UCLA PreMed program and stopped playing music all together. Two years into the program, he hung himself in his bedroom only to be discovered by his parents and younger brother. A month later, his younger brother murders his father by shooting him in the skull during a domestic fight in the parents bedroom.

Evidentally, the father had been physically abusive towards the family members for years and the youngest son couldn't take it anymore. He spent some time in prison as a minor but was released shortly afterwards.

So one element in a suicide situation is the feeling of no options or that killing yourself is the best of all options. How do you get to that point in your mind? In this case, it's the harsh environment of abuse and through time a kind of brain and physical torture. You lose a lot of yourself in this kind of experience and soon your options and anything remotely empowering becomes intangible. The word "gradual" is important. Suicide can't be a newly concluded reality or an option that comes out of a recent self evaluation but a condition that happens slowly, almost like nano emotions or nano death emotions.

In my case, it was the impact of a negative relationship that pushes you so hard and for so long that you are compacted into a metaphoric corner. You have no idea you can get out of it. Your perspective along with your self worth gets so pushed that taking your own life becomes the "best" option. It is utter darkness. At some point, the dialogue is primarily in your mind. It is a dangerous and lonely act of self destruction.

Suicide, Part I

"The hardest part of this is leaving you" -MCR

When someone dies, that you have a relationship with be it family, friend, neighbor, hero, fellow soldier, it not only reminds you of mortality, opens up the evaluation of life again but it bites a little part of you so hard that it leaves a life long mark and takes a little chunk of you too.

I've lost my share of family and friends starting from a very early age (single digits). Caring for the dyeing, funerals, comforting those around us through the sad times, wakes, these are all rites of passages.

However, suicide is a little bit different. Physical illness, accidents, tragedies, didn't see it coming or did see it coming , there's an intangible outside force involved. A suicide, is totally different, especially for those closest to the person. In retrospect, there may be signs but often, you don't see it coming during the time leading up to the suicide. In the few instances I have experienced losing someone through suicide, I didn't see it coming. Till this day, I still miss them and I often wonder what life would be if they were still around. For one of them, I still keep the letter he left me. It's a thank you letter but at the time, we were so young, I had no idea it would be his last communication with me. He was also an artist. I remember him well and I wish he were still here.

Suicide. Is it natural to think about taking your own life?. I admit that I've come close to taking my life but "life's promise" has always pulled me away from it. Life's promise could be the potential of your talent, your child, a friend, etc. Of course, life goes on with or without us but how will it go on? is part of life's promise we all keep in our beings. You can also call it hope. That's what stopped me the few times I was at that threshold.

So many think about taking their own life. Many carry through with it but if you could do something that helped someone decide not to, wouldn't that be worth it? That "threshold" is frequently visited space. What are we doing to wave the detour sign when people walk up to that threshold?

Bill Short invited me to his home in Santa Monica this week to meet a special guest, Mr. Huyhn Dong, a national treasurer of Vietnam. Mr. Dong was a soldier in the Vietnam War and fought for the North Vietnamese Army. He had the unusual task of documenting the war utilizing his skills as an artist. His drawings and life story have recently been published and he was in the US for a premier of his book in Boston MA.

I was allowed to interview him and have an hour of footage of him discussing the need for peace, the Vietnam War, and his encouragement for the younger generations to learn more about the effects and experience of war.

It was an amazing evening. We will use excerpts of his story in the zine that Mona and I are creating.

First Entry February 19, 2007

This is our first post for a project Mona and I (Alan) have been working on for two months.

Drinking "?" wine from Trader Joes (which Alan doesn't like at all), we begin to submit thoughts regarding personal and private stories about battles and in a few weeks, we'll begin to develop a work for a zine and a collaborative performance for Highways, an alternative performance space in Santa Monica CA, USA.