Lost Angeles

12 years a Slave to the Matrix

It’s that time of year again, where your neighborhood friendly Douglas Kim waxes poetic about the existential nature of reality, particularly about his own subjective experience of it as if it’s something uniquely unique, and makes some bold declaration of where his life will go, only to have it not go in that direction just months later. This will be the second time I have declared myself done with Los Angeles, ever since I decided that I had left behind show business in 2020 and returned to New York. My plans aren’t even 100% set to leave, and already I’m writing this entry, fully aware of how stupid it will look if I don’t follow through.

But that’s the way I’ve lived most of my life, often wrought with foot in the mouth moments: some that I admit, others that I deny, but always take account of internally either consciously or subconsciously. Due to my persistent depression since my teenage emo years, I am ultimately my own worst critic. The reason that I am able to absorb insults and derision from all angles and all comers no matter what while pressing on and fearlessly embracing apparently cringe is the conviction I have in my own sense of discovering truth. However subjective it may appear, I constantly self critique my world view to try to be as objective as possible, taking in all the data my brain can handle at any given moment, while understanding at a very young age that I would never have all the answers (and being depressed about that as well).

Maturity towards universal objectivity itself is a dialectical process, no one has Zen mastery over the self from the womb. Even this realization is fairly recent, supercharged by my obsession with German philosophy this year, in order to understand the roots of both Marxism and Nazism, to trace their lineages from the 19th century back all the way to Ancient Greece and beyond. And I still have much to learn, and so much to realize, like Socrates, that I will always be expanding exponentially my awareness of the set of knowledge that I will never know in direct relation to the expansion of the set of knowledge that I accumulate. I understand my own limitations as well, that I will never have the ability of some in certain regards, my intellectual weakness is that I will typically be capped in any given subject in terms of depth, where my intellectual strength is my ability to absorb subjects in terms of breadth.

But in all of this recent self discovery has been a re-evaluation of my life, particularly my adult life, especially that I am now an “unc” as the kids say. The path that I have forged over the past two decades after being thrust into a somewhat more interesting than average set of events originated in the surreal experience of winning millions of dollars at a poker tournament immediately upon graduating college, somewhat as an unqualified pioneer. I thought then, as I do now, that I was not nearly as good at poker as people thought I was, and that tournament poker involved a degree of luck that most people could not conceptualize at the time. Instead of feeling proud, I felt depressed when people knew me as “the poker guy”, as I felt this was unearned, and knew plenty of professionals my age and even younger who were exceptional at the game (and would soon eclipse my win by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude).

So I forged ahead as a management consultant, trying my hand at finding meaning in the business world, which ultimately came to an unceremonious end during the cataclysmic financial crisis only a couple years later. I decided that destiny had given me the chance that no other Asian guy had, to use my resources to attempt to become an actor in Hollywood, to try to brute force my own subjective humanity into the industry as a way to universalize Asian American humanity to the rest of the country. I did all the things in the Asian way, trained at a conservatory, moved to LA, networked with casting directors and agencies, attempted to create a show, did everything I could to succeed, and ultimately failed, the first six years into my stay in LA.

But the thing that depressed me the most wasn’t my failure, but from the realization that nearly every other Asian American, and in particular the ones that were “chosen” by the industry, was essentially a puppet to the system, and that the game was rigged against people who actually try to make a difference through artistic expression. Though at the time, I thought it was merely because that’s what generated the most easy and predictable profit for the machine to self propagate. The next 6 years involved me going through another dialectical process in figuring out the other reason underneath all that, somewhat encapsulated by this video I created this year.

But because of this disgust and due to the insane events of 2020, I decided then that it was time to come back to NYC, and that it was time for this new more political chapter for me to begin. Unfortunately, due to some personal health problems, the overwhelming sense of dread from the looming liberal PMC HR fascism from the Biden presidency, and the fact that COVID made living in a small 450 sq ft. studio feel like a prison cell combined with a total ego death of my previous dreams and desires, I came back to LA a year later, tail tucked between my legs. I needed to mentally rebuild. My somewhat low level depression became an avalanche of pain that I could not endure without the rays of Los Angeles sunshine beaming me back to life as if my mental health ran on photosynthesis.

And so rebuilding I did, even through political strife with Asian diaspora leftists who I eventually cut off all ties with, I continually found small bands of misfits who would see the glimmer of truth that I was fighting to keep alive, no matter what lies or slander were levied against me by my enemies, no matter how many death threats or doxxing attempts I faced, no matter how many conspiracies were planned to destroy my credibility. I read intensely into the lives of the leaders I admired, Lenin, Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Sung and sought guidance from their eternal wisdom, each struggling decades through the impossible, knowing that at any moment they could be killed and forgotten in the dustbin of history for their beliefs, and discovering how they had the will to make the ultimate sacrifices to press on despite the overwhelming odds that they would be killed before ever even tasting success.

And with each victory, I sought to make a stand in California, attempting to link up with Asians all over the state in order to build upon a movement for and by the Asian diaspora, to awaken the diasporic masses to the coming strife from the American warmongering with China that is becoming increasingly apparent by the day. But over the past year, I feel that my own efforts here are capped, I now realize that ironically enough, while NYC might be the finance capital of the empire, the entire state of California is the center of the Asian American Matrix. And in the past few months, I’ve been making the realization that deep down, I was a born and bred New Yorker, and that Los Angeles would never truly be my home.

My past iterations of these types of existential posts would always be tinged with a sense of regret, thinking that I should have done this or that on this or that timetable, as if the sequence of events determined the “rightness” or “wrongness” of one’s path. But I now no longer regret the first six year cycle, my first failed return to NYC, nor my second stint in Los Angeles, due to my growing understanding of the dialectical process of life itself. I’ve always been a mathematical thinker, visualizing life in discrete probabilities, but ultimately having a deterministic view as if it should unfold in a certain destined way for maximum perfection. But my reflective philosophical introspection has led me to slowly embrace all the “imperfections” of my history, knowing that each monad of my timeline has been vital in placing me where I am and need to ultimately go. While this trip also gave me very strong personal reasons to return to New York, stepping off the plane and walking the familiar steps from Penn Station to Grand Central, the overwhelming feeling of “it’s time” filled my senses.

So with that, I am set to move back to the center of capital, as Marx did to construct his theories on capitalism and Lenin did right before he formulated his ideology to split with the Mensheviks. I’ve toyed with the idea of moving to Asia over the past few years, but I knew in my heart that while that may be in my future some day, it is not where I need to be now. I will be entering my 42nd year back where I was in my 22nd when I LARPed 20 years ago as Mariano Rivera coming out to Enter Sandman, attempting to close out the rest of my life where I need to be.

Start spreading the news.