Looking out over the Bay, looking out east, the sky’s still light even though the sun has already set. Alcatraz straddles the horizon, rough rock washed gentle shades of mauve and blue. In my hands, I think there must be a kite, and it flutters in the wind, strains against its tethers, wants desperately to cause an airplane crash. I hold the nylon cord tightly in my hand and watch the beach goers, black silhouettes against the blue, pink and gray of oncoming evening, play. The seagulls call and children whine. Dogs run off leash, spraying up heavy wet sand as they gallop into the surf. Low tide begins to run, and the estuary will pull out, rushing , empty only after nightfall.
I can swear that I took a photograph of this moment, but when I flick back in my phone–nothing quite like it, no exact image exists. Are my feet planted in the sand, or are my shoes filled with the stuff? Does the moment exist , or is it an amalgamation of all the moments that I’ve known this place before? Are these seagulls crying the same call as the ones on the Long Island Sound? Is this beach trash the same trash that I used to pick up in Massachusetts? What else is there to scrounge from the surf? Coffee cans filled with pebbles and clam shells, handmade bricks and old porcelain plates, shattered by the undertow, now become cabochons washed smooth and clean.
The days run strangely, a collage of experiences that flow together to create who I am, ebbing away at night, leaving only detritus that tumbles in the wake of my dreaming. In the prologue to Ellison’s Invisible Man, the narrator smokes a little of that good old reefer, letting the sound of Louis Armstrong’s Black and Blue course through him, reveal him, waves of realness and recognition bringing him to being. And I lie back on a bamboo mat that’s made its way, two years and a trip around the world, through the hands of three or four friends, to somehow come here to be with me in Davis. And I lie back, toke a little of that good old Humboldt County stuff, and I fold my body and let the sound from the little speaker I’ve kept with me this whole time flow over me.
I’m listening to a set by California’s Flying Lotus, emphasis of the BBC, from 11/29/2008. That would’ve been the year before I graduated from high school, right before college. I can’t remember much of the year; I know that I must have been visiting and applying to colleges. Here and there are a few pieces that hold fast, the bright, sunny arboretum of Smith College, the way that the Amherst College tour guide left the only two families of color behind on the tour, stranding one black and one biracial family, two strangers with one small commonality, in the middle of a church that hadn’t seen a live service in half a century. Belief in a higher power is passe now that we have computers which can run calculations faster than an underpaid woman.
Flylo’s set opens with an Alice Coltrane track, the sound of his grandmother’s music slowly becoming subsumed to a pulsing beat and an text-to-speech reader with a bad British accent, a programmed voice that pronounces “BBC” as “bibby-see” and, skipping as if degenerating into repetition, pulls the listener into the next track. There’s something about the way that Flylo mixes a set that gives the listener a sense of endless progression; sound degenerates into noise which alternately recedes and bubbles over into the next track, forming an aural collage that carries you through as a listener. When he uses vocals, the voices are distorted to the point where the ear strains to make out even a full syllable; where that doesn’t even matter, lost in the reverb and the constant ebb and flow of the samples that make the set keep rolling on. After a point, it isn’t even about the voice any more; it’s about how much it can be stretched, and how the words can be worked in to a web of pattern and implication. In this set, Flylo pulls easy-listening fresh out of a stimulus progression Muzak track or a 1950’s advertisement and juxtaposes it with Thom Yorke and Bjork, with samples so far out of context that you almost lose track of what you are listening to in the first place. Was that a sample from Super Mario Bros?
Before you know it, your eyes are closing and you’re drifting away into the amnion distortion of a real, garage-style, k-hole-style dubstep track. The listening experience is immediate; I’m forgetting that it’s from 2008. I try to hold onto what remains in my memory,turning a wave-worn popsicle stick over and over in my hands. It’s been in the ocean so long that the bad joke seared into the wood is barely legible. It’s not even sticky anymore. I think that there’s a good chance that I was listening to Flylo in 2008. My friend from high school was a DJ at American University’s college radio station. He sent me a dropbox link to the college station’s music, and it was filled with weird, exciting, experimental stuff like Flylo and Merzbow. Not this set, exactly; but other great sets, sonic collages and samples.
In between two of the tracks, Flylo samples a lo-fi recoridng of Hindi singing, which in its repetition loses vboice to become uncertain if what is being sampled is vocal or flute or whatever. It puts in some plucked string instrument, maybe an oud, which in turn fades into a drum track and samples from a video game, the sound of an exuberant shout, hey! but muffled and low-fidelity. The low-fidelity doesn’t mean low-quality, it means less-of-an-adherence-to-whatever-is-real-here. It means fantasy. It means cobbled together, the way I hold all the beach glass in my hands, turning it over and over, wondering if there’s a way to pull together a bottle or jar out of the smooth pieces in my hands. There’s still a little bit of salt on them, and they leave my sweaty palms slightly sticky, as if they’d taken the opportunity to had a good cry.
I wonder if each of these little shards remembers what it used to be, what it’s like to be a bottle, a glass, a jar, a firecracker ice cream pop. I wonder if they remember what it’s like to be made, then to be re-made into something else through the grinding of the tides and the currents that snake t hrough the bay. I wonder what it is to be here. To make something from them. Sometimes, I used to stack stones up into cairns, build one on top of the other, build sculptures that would beforgotten as soon as the water rose high enough to knock them apart. I wonder if I remember what it used to be like to be me, how scared and small and tear-stained wet I used to be.
I can’t remember much from 2008; can’t remember my birthday, can’t remember prom (from the year above me, I was cool like that, even as a nerd) I can’t remember much, even though I went with a friend and got dressed up beautifully. I can’t remember what the dance was like, I can’t remember my friends or crush. The photos are there; and there must have been Thanksgivings and Christmases and Easters and all kinds of holidays, and there must have been video games and everything to play with and books to read and projects to write. I think that was the year when I got major depression, but I’m not really sure. I used to play the flute and the piano, but I’m not much of a musician; the memory of how to play has gone too. There’s no collage I can make of these things, and even visually collage isn’t one of the things that I work with as a medium either.
I could try writing about it, here; but what’s the point of trying to write nonfiction when you cant stitch the web of happenings that must be a part of your life together? What’s the point of nonfiction when so much has been unremembered, flushed from your being? I can only report, now, on what happens in the moment; I weave my lines back into books and music, into ideas that I can play and replay, into things said and documented–because for me, what has not been inscribed into some type of inhuman memory is not, and can not, be. A wise teacher of memoir once told me that this thinky writing might jeopardize my attempts at writing nonfiction that meets the requirements for a graduate degree, though a wiser anti-memoirist has since told me otherwise. When my memory is as loose and runny as my bowels after a bad day, how am I supposed to write cohesive nonfiction about it? And can it be compelling when the tragedy and gore of it has been hushed up, hidden away, or even purged? Because no one can say what happens to the memories that are lost to ptsd; they might come back in the beaks of owls for the dreamers or they might be gone entirely. And the attempt to remember is exhausting, met each time with a block that tells me not to progress, to go do my laundry or something else more important.
So I do the best thing that I can think of. I build a simple little bot to automate it.
I start by opening the copy I’ve made of Zach Wahlen’s SS Bot V. 4, a Twitter bot built using google sheets and a couple lines of python. An absolutely lovely misuse of google sheets, if I must say so myself. I go into the code, make sure that it’s updated so that my bot can tweet up to 280 characters, so that we’re not stuck at a mere 140. After all, I think this bot is going to have to say a lot. There’s been updates since the bot was first released, and some features don’t worked as planned anymore; but that’s okay.
I start by choosing the function that will allow the bot to compose text by selecting a few words from each column, filling in the desperate ruminations of the gaslighted like some kind of highly depressing mad libs. I’d like it to iterate and explore all of the memories that could have happened–those holidays and life milestones that movies portray as sunny, effervescent family affairs, but for which I know nothing more but a wash of confusion and which, in my memory, feel like a kind of nervousness that cuts like a knife.
A sample peels through the beat.
Shall we play a game? Oh, I’d love to. Let’s play Global Thermoneuclear War.
The track that’s playing is sampling from the movie about a computer game gone rogue, which coordinates to actually cause global thermonuclear war by gaming the situation out with a bunch of hapless teenagers. I wonder what would will happen if my family ever found this out and traced it back to me. Let’s play total thermo-nuclearfamily war! What would happen? How much do they remember? What pieces of that time do they hold onto dearly? What memories do they carry with them? Where do they feel it in their hearts? What scars marr their thoughts, tell them to stop right there? How much time can we hold on to in a lifetime, given the petabytes that we supposedly can store? Up to 200 years of HD video–how much do we hold dear?
Hours, and hours, and minutes, and seconds! Hours, and hours, and minutes, and seconds!
Is this a game, or is it real? ask the teenage boy. What’s the difference? replies the computer.
Is this a game, or is it real? Did this happen, or is the kind of fiction invented by a nuked-out mind?
What’s the difference?
The first column sets a time, introduces the event as one of many that have occurred. Hours, and hours, and minutes, and seconds! Hours, and hours, and minutes, and seconds! I try not to be too exact. The next columns get more specific, laying out timelines, rough events that definitely happened, events that had meaning. Christmas, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) each have their own meaning in the pattern of holiday suffering. Christmas Day was always spent with my paternal extended family; the day after was when we got to live with the fallout of whatever had transpired the day before.
| That time when | right before | the holidays |
| I remember that time | right after | Thanksgiving |
| How about when | before | turkey day |
| That one time | after | Christmas |
| Once, when I was little | the day before | Christmas Eve |
| Once, when I was a teenager | the night before | Advent |
| Once, when I was in middle school | the night after | New Year’s |
| They said, “you probably don’t remember,” but | the day after | Boxing Day |
| some time around | Ephiphany | |
| on | Halloween | |
| during | Christmas Day |
The next few columns set up characters in the story; people who I remember, even if vaguely, participating in the events that went down on Christmas. If i try to get too specific, the wall rears itself again, blank and concrete and a mile high; it blots out the light from my computer screen like a migraine, more than a warning. I keep the actions vague; no need to get too close to that; no need to risk opening whatever cursed scrapbook there is there. Then, I complete the sentence with the aftermath, the most difficult part to think about–the part that I remember best. Because what’s gone is gone; but what’s there is the memory of how I felt in the aftermath of it all, that visceral, rotten, rooted feeling of what it was like to try to find safety or regulation in the face of abuse.
| I | reacted | then calmed down. |
| had a panic attack | a little bit. | |
| cried | for like forever. | |
| hid in a closet | for an hour. | |
| hid under the bed | for a long time | |
| was quiet | for a hot second. | |
| ran into the woods | in the car. | |
| played video games | next to the Christmas tree. | |
| lashed out | the whole way home. | |
| screamed | with my whole body. | |
| yelled | all over the place. | |
| got triggered | privately. | |
| vomited | until I passed out. | |
| felt unsafe | but stayed strong for mother. | |
| developed racial trauma | but stayed strong for my sibling. | |
| couldn’t handle it | and internalized racism. | |
| in front of everyone. |
The shells and sea glass that I snatch from the tideline look different once dried and set aside. A well-worn piece of sea glass or porcelain like the ones I’ve pocketed takes about 20 years to become a smooth pebble, a neat little cabochon. Once dried, the salt that covers them reveals deeper textures, flaws, hints of a bottle that used to be; more of a memory, more of a thing. It wasn’t until 2020, when COVID-19 hit and Black Lives Matters protests forced me to reckon with what was going on in my own family. My white family was always conservative, but I shrugged it off as being part of America; some people will always have a different opinion, especially if they live in the suburbs. But what I came to recognize is that some of the fear that was baked into me didn’t come from just my family, but word came and was given to the idea of racial trauma, the trauma of racism.
My father never defended me or my sister from the racist comments of family. I remember some discussions where they tried to tell us that they saw us as white too, but I told them that it doesn’t matter and there’s nothing wrong with being asian. They’d say that being white was better, but I always felt closer to my asian aside and people keep on saying it. I mean, one of the things that was ritten in my shout it out graphic thtat i reference earlier in the collectionwas that i am half white and half asian, but i felt more asian. i never got to pass or found myself treated easily for being nice and white. i was law abiding and good and small and obliging. But yeah, i soon found out that people didn’t treat me right and that there was a lot worse stuff that went on and that we were very aware. And I remember when my mom brought the IQ test results to show the family and they were still saying mean things about us even though our IQ tests proved that her kids were smart and capable more so on paper than our half retarded white cousins, their children, their fat white sows of wives.
It didn’t feel good to realize that. It made me feel pretty bad. Bit I broke up with my therapist who kept on trying to bring ti back to family trauma when it wasn’t the trauma, it was that the family was doing violence against me and she was making excuses for it. And then I actually felt a lot better once that process was being automated…