452. Photographic Collection: Celebration of Papu Ray's Memorial and the Minnich Family, 2009, 2008, 2003 (Literature Discussion Leaked In)

Photographic Collection from Ray's Memorial (Riverside and Mount Baldy, California, July 12, 2009, as well as Ray's 96th Birthday in Corona July 2008 and a happy summer back in 2003.

The Blurb that I Wrote in Picasaweb:
Ever since my grandfather Ray's passing, I felt like a strong current in my mind and life had stopped flowing, a string of attachment to this world had been cut. But it's funny; though Ray has metamorphosed into new life and planetary cycles, the past flows of this mental river of Ray never seemed erased--perhaps now even more vibrant than ever. [Paradoxically chopped up, severaged, and reconverging into a new order] I returned to Riverside shielded by video cameras, digital cameras, voice recorders... knowing that this familiar home is somewhat foreign, now that one major character in my life has been removed... or altered into another state. Through loss, or perhaps, strange transformations (for me), I feel I have gained new, stronger currents... more closeness to my family than I had ever detected in myself before. Anyhow, the least I can do is construct a collage of the memorial and highlighted past adventures, which reflects a heightened consciousness and appreciation of family, as well as acknowledgment of inevitable change.

I emailed several of my family members--I don't have everyone's email, but whatever emails I could scrounge for--and I sent a long email to my aunt Jeri Lyn in Sebastopol. She vamped up her website http://www.dillindesign.com, and I can't wait to tell Barry Spacks about her work!!! Jeri Lyn had this funny line concerning her life-long moodswings as well as her attempts to differentiate "nothingness" and "pointlessness." That's SOOO funny. SOOO Beckettsonian, and something I SOOO get. My Ph.D. question is "What's the point?" in the first place.

I'm glad I performed this task of photo compilations. I feel I have delved deeper into the psyche of my grandfather Ray, preparing me for writing an upcoming story, "The Mountain's Last Flower," concerning the story of a scientist with a troubled history with personal walls and universal walls of perception and action. And due to these internal walls and borders and failure to address them and break them down, he defied his own childlike commonsense and his adult antirationality took his own life. The main character is not a mirror of Papu Ray, but certain elements mimick his circumstances, especially in terms of retroactivity of perception of the condition of his son John--the retroactive diagnosis of Asburgers.

Well, shxtso! I'm ruining the story! I better write it SOONER than LATER! Okay, I'll shut up now. I invented the story on the fly in a car drive, and through my conversations with Barry Spacks, I discovered I was crafting a character that summed my fundamental troubled relationship with science and scientists, as well as my attempts to understand the inner world of Ray. It was all very subconscious creativity... now taken into full blown consciousness. I am actually kind of shocked at myself.

Barry Spacks mentioned two things to me and the class. He noted in one of my poems in which "my writing became smarter than my own self," which I agree. And we also talked about the IMPORTANCE OF READING versus THE IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE. I argued that if I spent most of my life reading litrary classics, then reading would become my experience, and then there is no possibility of injecting novel input to the field of literature. And if I lived a life strictly of experience (without being well-read), then I can be majorly detached from the gestalt of human history (except for the stories told by people in real life). My combination of life is (1) experience, mostly with mountain and ocean boys and chics (2) reading scientific literature, being taught scientific ideas (3) barfing everything out in literature-art mode (4) retroactively being informed that I sound like Samuel Beckett. I told Barry that we have to unplug ourselves from the Matrix to bring new ideas into the matrix. If we read strictly classic literature, the field would be self contained, and the likelihood of anything new coming out of younger generations is close to minimal--especially if experience constitutes of being locked up in a classroom for 20 years (so I raise my hand, claiming to be victim of that). And then I argued, another horrible part about modern experience is that most of it is INDIRECT, as opposed to DIRECT. If you ask someone, "how did you spend your day?" they discuss the news they watched and this movie star did that, and that pro athlete took this type of dope, but did not talk about their own personal lives or experiences, like I talked with my neighbor about the tides and had an adventure up in the mountain and worked all day trying to make a gadget to improve fuel efficiency for my car. I could not write a glorious piece on tennis (for another person baseball), because I feel insulted that this society has come to glorify the most absurd sport of swinging at a ball to hit over the net with a stick of high surface area. Professional tennis players get paid more than teachers, etcetera. Society has made absurdity a CONVENTION. Granted sports is all about exercise of primal aspects of our brain, like socially acceptable forms of competition beside bloody warfare, but to make it the centrality of entertainment?! Come flipping on! I would rather go in my backyard with my friends and figure out, and invent a new sport. That would be more self amusing. And to think the psychological damage tennis was for the entire family, and so many familes who's mommies and daddies who want their little kids to become the next Venus Williams or Roger Federer. Like flipping whatever. Okay, okay. I'll shut up. The point is, I would be mortified to write a more rudimentary memoir of my life simply because the first 19 years of it, I was trapped, drowning in a largely consumerist mentality, largely consumerist society, physically and mentally. By the time I entered CCS, I started carving out a universe of my own. I was 19 years old, and that's when I felt like I was born, when my "self" and my "surroundings" was born to its truer state of consciousness. Right now I'm in a fiction phase in which I construct alternative fictional realities based on oversimplification of components of the current universe I live in, and through this fictional universe--I seek to discover new and greater truths about the world we currently live in. Tadah!