This moment is a crayon in my hand, five years old, sounding out the alphabet while rain drips over the classroom awning.

I suppose since 2010 is coming to a close, I will indulge in a poorly executed explanation as to the whys/wheres/hows and with whoms that have brought me to the state I'm in- not that I owe anybody a goddamn thing in terms of justifying myself- I just feel a weighted notion telling me to bear everything to the almighty connectome!

The months have been solitary since I moved away from my hometown Riverside- as with most moves I'm sure- since I know fewer people in Los Angeles, the freeways are more treacherous, the old commons replaced by alienating infrequency, and here I am sitting in Kristina's office, listening to the rain, watching her work her magik on the computer, feeling a bit lonely (but not alone). Normally, from what I can recall from my jumbled career of a life, whenever I experience the pengs of self-reflection reaching a boiling point, I feel a need to run or to shut myself out, yet this time is different. The reflection is constant, bewildering, antagonizing and some times crippling, but the source of my frustration is a cloaked frequency, an architectural monstrosity, as if all my previous selves have ganged up to build an epic and hideous metropolis, and when I shut my eyes and cut out all the static around me, I feel it in its entirety.

I'm beginning to wonder if this is just what it's like to grow up as a male in the 21st century, with cold indifference to the earlier paradigms of our forebearers, wanting to bring something new to the table, coming up short, then sinking into a silent revery. I see the men around me trying relentlessly to BE something or to DO anything worth a damn, and I relate. I can see in their eyes the same madness that I feel, the same ultimatums, the same questions. And yet for all we understand, how much of it is communicable? Oh, how many times have I wanted to reach out to those who are suffering, yet when I open my mouth to speak, to consul them, to tell them that it may not get better but that they have a shoulder to cry on, my mouth runs dry, I cower and relent. Yet what would I say in the first place, and what does anybody truly say at all? We throw around phrases, constructions, buildings, cities of words to hopefully somehow accurately depict our growing uncertainty in all things, and fall terribly short every time. This is because of the ouroborus; the snake eating its own tail, symbolizing the pursuit and ultimate failure of men. At the brink of wisdom, the moment where all truth seems to coelesce and appear in its naked form, the rug is pulled out from under us and we are left with even more questions and even more fears. At the end of knowledge there is only the beginning. To know anything is a fallacy, an abomination, a riddle.

Maybe this seems a little far-fetched, but much more explanation is required I think.

So, in the spirit of rehashing already stone memories, I will recount the passing of my father, in much abridged form.

This is my dad, Robert Edwin Freeman, born December 5th 1949.

My dad was born into a middle class family. His father, Ernest was an oil worker.

After marrying my mom in 1973, he took up plumbing and general construction to pay the bills, and in the fateful year of 1979, he took two jobs from two different companies that ultimately led to his exposure with Asbestos. As with most cases, the manifestation of lung cancer caused by Asbestos does not take fruition for about thirty years, which brings me all the way to 2009, as a 26 year old man, getting an urgent phone call from my dad asking me to pick him up and rush him to the ER because he can't breathe.

As it turned out that day, doctors extracted (as I watched) over a gallon of ruby red juice from the inner lining of his right lung, which was the cause of his discomfort, and within a week he was diagnosed with Mesothelioma.

For the next year, I watched my dad fight the good fight, subjecting himself to fucking ridiculously painful chemotherapy and a last ditch effort to surgically remove his right lung (theoretically eradicating the cancer). As with many cases of this nature, all attempts to save him failed, and I watched slowly as the strength of his body withered into paper, his hair whitened, his skin yellowed, and his resolve crushed. I remember as a kid how I would measure the stature of a man based on how they compared to my dad, and rarely did I come across anyone with arms the size of his, or hands as gnarled and fucked up from thirty years of construction, yet at that moment I realized his true fragility.

On May 2nd of 2010, I sat next to my father's bed and bore witness to his death, hanging on to every painful breath until absolute silence, and that last moment is a canyon in my mind to this day, paved too quickly and made too permanent.

As strange twisted fate would have it, he had sued those two companies that LIED to him about the Asbestos being present in the walls he worked on in 1979, and he won a large sum of money to be divided amongst those who survived him, myself included.

A few months before he passed, my dad told me he wanted me to take my portion of money and buy a house with it and work on my music. This of course leads me to the state I'm in now, living in a house in Los Angeles that I own, striving to create something, anything that could somehow justify the death of my father, and yet I feel as if there is some other timeline, some other self being lived where he isn't dead, where I'm making my own choices, living independently of his fate.

For all I'm worth, that existence is not real, and now I am forced to live in a nature of malignance, like a fork in the road that shouldn't have ever been...

So, next time you see me and you think "Dude, it must be so awesome to live in your own house and have all of this and all of that," I hope you might consider what had to happen for me to get to this place, and though I consider myself to be the fullest and most enlightened I've ever been, I wish this fate on nobody.

2011 will be full of great things. Look out!