Chris Kim A

To get things rolling, I thought it serendipitous to start off with a show from 28 years ago this very day: L.A.-local heroes “X” performing on campus at UC Santa Barbara.

Back in those days, it was easy enough to catch them around Los Angeles, but I was dating a girl who was going to school there at the time, and there weren’t always a lot of big date things going on around Goleta and Isla Vista, so this was quite a bit of a treat. Funny, I can’t recall who opened — either The Dream Syndicate or it might even have been Dave Alvin (or even both). That I retrospectively place Alvin there may just be a mind-mash of concurrent events, since he would replace X-founding-member Billy Zoom a year or so later.

What I absolutely do remember quite distinctly, however, is that by about halfway through X’s set, we’d been moshed out of our great stage-side spots to about halfway back in the auditorium. I saw a dark shadowy something fluttering over the heads of the crowd from in the front of the stage, and it wasn’t until I felt a hard thud on my chest and heard the glass tinkling on the ground that I realized 1) it’s coming toward me! and 2) Crap! it’s a beer bottle! As much as we were having a great time, it seemed like maybe it was time to call it a night before the chairs started flying next.

Something else that came to mind thinking back on this show — up until that weekend, I had been taking the Greyhound Bus up on Fridays from Santa Monica to spend the weekend with her a couple times a month, and take the return bus Sunday night. What dawned on me when I scanned the ticket stub for this show was that this would also have been the first weekend I would have driven my brand-new Isuzu I-Mark (the “ChrIsuzu” I still drive today) up to show off to the girl and her girlfriends.

(As a token tangentially-related factoid, it may also interest you to note that singer Katy Perry was born in Santa Barbara exactly 8 months after the day of this show.)

At the very end of today, it will have been a full year since Mom quietly and peacefully passed away, or “was called to Glory” as she frequently liked to say.

“It’s the Glory shining down” was how she had described the beautifully majestic, natural atmospheric optical effect known as ‘crepuscular rays’ to us when we were kids, explaining that that was how her mother and grandmother had described it to her as a child. It is no wonder, and perhaps now very fitting, that I always think of her when I see this wonderful effect of nature. Heaven opens a bit to shine down its Glory, and it will forever more remind me that she is smiling down on us, safe in the arms of her Savior, singing praises in the Choir Fantastic.

Her unrelenting faith — no, trust — in God and absolute assurance that she was moving on to a better existence were her daily testimony and witness to all with whom she had contact. Not through pious, evangelical speeches, but through simple, everyday loving acts of thoughtfulness and kindess that she extended to the world around her. This was her story, and this was her song: praising her Savior all the day long — to borrow appropriately from the old standard hymn. Being a channel and example of the Love of Christ was something she did as easily and automatically as breathing.

Bringing joy to people, through conversation, laughter, song, a meal, a card or a phone call was how she devoted her time and energy. Of course, there were those with whom she did not agree, and she secretly suffered idiots to the best of her genteel nature, but she loved nearly everyone from her seemingly limitless heart. Those she couldn’t like on her own, well, she prayed to love them as Jesus already did. She still might tell you what was on her mind, but in her heart, it was always love, and that was never in doubt. This lifelong example and practice is the legacy which she left us, and the manner of living in which she tacitly, but earnestly, instructed us.

As much as the preceding 5 years since her initial diagnosis of 6 months had had my brother and me holding our breaths and awaiting the inevitable, neither of us had any idea what to expect for the year following our loss, either as brothers, or as individual sons. Through this year of the “firsts” without her (first Valentines Day, first Easter, first Mother’s Day, etc.), the anxiety of expecting her passing moved to the anticipation of a surprise attack emotional meltdown, but it has been thankfully peaceful over all.

Without question, I miss her daily, and quite often deeply. There have been several ‘sneak attacks’ of sadness, and there are bound to be many more, I’m sure, but I remain convinced that she is always with me, with all of us, whose lives were blessed with her presence, persistence and steadfastness.

Sitting with Mom as she appears to peacefully and comfortably sleep, it is very difficult to articulate the intensity and diversity of thoughts, emotions — all very disjointed and incomprehensible. The decline of her health has been rapid and irreversible, and it seems impossible that she’s not just resting and recuperating and that everything will just go back to normal.

The truth I so earnestly am trying to keep hold of is that her body has truly lost the ability to recover, that the Mom I can’t let go of has already moved on, that this part of the process of living, while inevitable for everyone, never really gets any easier to walk through — nor should it, when it involves a parent.

I know I will move both through and past this portion of the journey, never completely alone, but with the courage and strength of God the Father, the presence of my brother & our family, the deeply heartfelt thoughts and prayers of friends.

It is my privilege and my choice to stay with her earthly body until it is no longer useful to God or to her. I know she will always be with me, and I with her, and in the next part of the journey, the next dimension of experience, we all are already together.

Ah, Little Debbie! Few things have been as consistent in my life as the Swiss Cake Roll queen, Little Debbie. I think I was enchanted by her depiction on the box before I’d even ingested the delectables in the box. In her girly bonnet, she kind of looked like someone that would be in my Sunday School. Somewhere along the way, I learned that the owner/proprietor of the McKee Baking Company had named the line of snack cakes after his granddaughter (Debbie), and that we are about the same age. I used to wonder if her friends had a direct line on all free Swiss Cake Rolls they wanted, which was just idle thinking, since there was little chance my family would be moving to Collegedale, Tennessee in the foreseeable future.

It seems for a time, the treats were only available regionally (in the MidWest), and after I’d moved to California, I would bring 2-3 boxes back to L.A. every time I’d go back home for a visit. Fortunately, they finally started carrying them locally, and I could stop being a Swiss Cake Roll mule for my transplanted midwestern friends.

Kim A Gallery :: Other Drawings :: DevilDebbie.

Here’s the thing: I’m as shocked as the next that I’d end up having anything at all to do with computers, let alone have them play such a utilitarian and seemingly seamless and natural role in my everyday life.

In fact, there was a fair period early on that I was relatively convinced that computers and such could well be the gateway to perdition (frankly, I’m still not completely unconvinced, especially on days I get to help with the one Windows machine we have at the office).

When I was in junior high school, my grandmother bought me a DIY binary computer kit, with little spring contacts, bridge wires, little incandescent light bulbs, and sliding switches. I’m pretty sure there must have been a manufacturing defect in some part of the device, as I could never get it to appear to function the way the instruction manual indicated that it should. Computers: 1, me: 0

It’s also important to keep in mind that back in my high school days, portable hand-held calculators were just becoming affordably available to the average family, and were typically verboten in class. The computer “lab” class was a DECwriter connected to some machine that ran enough BASIC to program the printout of a big green-bar paper banner. However, to even get that close to the machine, you had to have made your way through Calc and Trig, and my loose grip on math skills got derailed somewhere early on in Algebra II my sophomore year. Computers: 2, me: 0

It wouldn’t be until I had moved to California and found myself in the position of operations manager for Pacific Bell’s paging services vendor that I would finally break through my old notions as SysAdmin on the 3b2/400 mini mainframe from AT&T that ran a solid System V Unix. The score was about to even up, and even a turnover would seem plausible…

For most of my adult life, Converse’s Chuck Taylor low-tops have been my standard non-sandal footwear. While I prefer the unbleached canvas ones, I’ve had to settle for bleached white on occasion. Rarely (as in almost never), will I buy my low-Chucks in any other color or trendy style (that double-tongue thing, that laces sewn down thing) — for me, shoes are those things you put on your feet to protect them from poop and sharp things on the ground, not particularly a statement of fashion or anything in particular. As you can see, I’ll wear my Chucks thoroughly before replacing them.

Which brings me to the point of my query — each time I start out a new pair, I puzzle over how to begin the laces: over or under? In the box, the laces are decoratively laced through the eyelets, and here, over does look better, but as you may know, the laces are rarely functional from the factory, and must be redone from scratch. To be fair to both camps, I alternate from pair to pair (the shoes depicted are from two different pairs), but am curious how others go about getting their Chucks’ laces started.

There was a time when it was a lot easier for me to come up with some way of doing something I found interesting (whether I knew what I was doing or not) and just doing it. In hindsight, the greatest ally of my youth seems to have been not being weighed down by knowledge and experience.

The great blessings of my curiosity, busy eyes and hands have always compelled me to investigate, create and fabricate artifacts of my experiential journey. Setting off in one direction to explore an idea, the path frequently begins branching out in other directions, many of which seem worth pursuing. Along the way, I may temporarily suspend the initial investigation to fathom the usefulness of the new branch’s offering, or I may abandon it entirely for the new branch’s potential for new and shiny.

Keeping notes of things to get back to used to appear to help — but the more I take in, the more my interests seem to branch out. Computer-aided organization of these ideas and pursuits was a reasonable and logical solution, but there are more and more new and shiny things down that rabbit-hole, too. Over time, my researching has become a bit of a morass of indecision and barren of artification, or artifacting or even much annotation. “Too Much Information” as the Police so aptly put it before I realized it had happened to me (and well before ‘TMI’ was to become co-meme-erated).

Unexpectedly, I’ve allowed the variety and voracity of my unbridled curiosity to short-circuit the documentation of the process (the art or artifacts, or at least some notes). In the absence of any clearer notion than this, I find myself in the familiar position of just jumping in anyway. Okay, to be honest, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that one more pointless, meandering, whatever-pops-in-your-head personal blog on the interwebs actually has neutral valence in general, but may well be a good move in self-advocacy for me, personally. Really.

Watching the Sun set tonight on Venice Beach, as I am very blessed to do, frequently.

The weather was so very nice today, that even the Sun seemed to take its time going down. Minutes after the official setting time, a band of clouds just on the horizon still held the brilliant light afloat, making it look like the Sun had simply flattened out against the edge of the world.

Even Catalina and Anacapa were clearly visible to the South, their purple profiles etched sharply into the orange sky beyone Palos Verdes Peninsula.

The recent U.S. Presidential Campaign stirred up the country in an unprecedented way. Whether you watched, participated in, or avoided it, practically everyone was swept up in the hope of a World changing for the better. Hope is great (certainly better than not having any at all), but it won’t get the job done on its own.

It dawned on me that the frequent, compelling, nagging feeling I get to make some kind of difference in the world has been even more frequently squelched by the terror of the sheer immensity of the task. I mean, really, change the World? As it is, I barely have enough energy left at the end of the day to change the channels… but, somehow, almost miraculously, I seem to muster enough to at least distract myself into a temporary state of blissful, beautiful, backlit LCD denial that lasts long enough to convince me it’s too late to do anything tonight, anyway.

The real shocker was this: while I really do want to broaden my part in making this world a better place, I’d really prefer that it not be too uncomfortable or inconvenient. Yikes. Am I as selfish as that sounds? or just human? or both?

Okay, now, I don’t feel this way all the time (thankfully), but it certainly pops up often enough to notice that it weighs in unpleasantly heavy far more often than not. Wow. Making a difference was turning out to be different than what I imagined, in that I had to start with changing my mind about what it takes to change the world.

Change can be daunting, usually because it means something will be different. If it turned out the same, it wouldn’t be change. For a real headache, consider that change may the only constant in the observable universe. But the newsflash is in: Science has proven that the universe is made up of an unfathomable number of virtually unobservable, imperceptibly discreet movements — teeny, tiny changes — that aggregate into a galactic-scale difference.

Honestly, I get it: everyone is busy. Some more than others (okay, so if you’ve found your way here, maybe you’re not so busy). Perhaps some of this sounds familiar: throughout the day, moments are filled with anticipating the next task, event, obligation; barely getting through the task at hand before multitasking efficiently on to the next actionable item. New items and opportunities squeeze their way into the schedule and the dance card is getting crowded, but the flurry of activity is exciting and exhausting at the same time.

Now here’s the thing: between the time you start and end your day, you likely have interacted with some of the rest of us who live here, too. Here in the world. The one in which your bubble (and mine, and everyone else’s) is an integral part. In most cases, no one is out to thwart your efforts to get on to the next thing. In fact, they’re probably just as frustrated and harried by the whole experience as you are.

So, where to begin? Tackling it all is too much, and although what I’ve been doing has helped up to now, I’d like to dial up my efforts where I can. Even if it’s just a few seconds here and there. Starting to get the idea?

No matter how full my day is, in the course of getting it all executed and performed and delivered, etc., I can take a moment or two, a few seconds, at least, to have a kind word of salutation or well-wishing for the other humans in my way…er, I mean, in my day.

Thus was born 60secondsaday.com. A place where suggestions, reminders, and the like of simple, little, even discreet things that can not only ease the human relations of the day, but maybe even add something to someone else’s day.