Posted on Saturday, 08/24/24.

I’m finishing up writing this in a café again, a day after it says it has been posted Now many days later, by some malaise.. I arrived later than I sometimes do, just before 8am, and have watched the seats fill as it nears 8:20, which is also usual. My apartment is still bare, and I’ve felt less desire to work there, though this may be some secondary effect.

Following boxed text added Friday, Aug 30: Over the past few days I have lugged items from my office to my new apartment, left there to make the initial move easier. Jackets, gallon-ziplock bags filled with stationery and cables and sentimental accoutrements. There is more left but I have taken the essentials. I can now make pour-over coffee in my apartment; the scale is still being shipped, but I eyeball my v60, using medium-roasted Ethiopian beans bought from Blackwell Coffee. I imagine he roasts them—the café owner—they are a little unevenly colored, and vary in size, but the smell is nice, and the coffee has been pleasant. I try to determine the right setting for my new grinder, and where to place various appliances and towels around my kitchen. This sort of rearrangement and calibration is a basic ward for sadness (at least during the thickest, most accommodating parts of the day). My cypress すのこ arrives from a small factory in 和歌山県, and smells pleasant when I slip through the thin cardboard wrapping with a box-knife.

Some mornings I have mistimed coffee, or eaten poorly, and pass hours in hurried exhaustion, immersed neither entirely in leisure, creative, or vocational tasks. I hope for letters, or texts, or emails, like the hedonist I am. I wait for my MUJI shelves and for whatever flavor of inspiration allows one to spend $300+ on a dining room table. I think about how everyone’s life is so different from mine, and that I can’t give them a good reason for why I’m doing what I’m doing, and not clubbing, or grinding LeetCode, or running a theater production in rural 広島県, or courting rich benefactors as an ingénue.

The pour-over today is stronger than yesterday’s, and I’ve set the grinder two clicks coarser (not far enough). The taste is like melon, or apricot. I’ve left it out and the last sip is room-temperature.

A small sign is affixed next to my apartment door, reproduced in scalable format:

フィリックス・ザ・キャット。

The text is common: セールズ、勧誘お断りします, basically ‘no solicitors,’ as posted near doors in the United States also. I see such signs less and less; maybe because I have lived in student-heavy neighborhoods less prone to opening doors or spending money, or else because the great American campaign to eliminate door-to-door salespeople has largely succeeded My honest guess is that door-to-door has survived, just that most solicitation concentrated in areas I don’t frequent, for a variety of reasons.. It amazes me that anyone has ever bought anything from anyone on their stoop—I imagine something like a scourge of such salespeople, in my mind at their zenith from the 1950s to the 1980s, in part supported by people’s willingness before that era to trust most anyone wearing clean clothes. How could it have been that encyclopedia salesmen ever existed? And why does the loss of such people, mythical or not, make me a little sad? Wearing out our innate receptiveness, cultured over decades in enclave-adjacent US neighborhoods, is one of the great corollaries of the American project. A slow and voracious hollowing-out of the market, and a resulting residue of leftover signs, warding off no-one, slowly peeling and yellowing in the sun Of course little of this probably applying to Japanese society, which I imagine must be higher-trust in some ways, one corollary being the persistence (and ongoing generation) of successful neo-religions (or quasi cults) in Japan since the 1940s..

More fun anyway is the character below the text—Felix the Cat—who here, perhaps more than in his homeland, is plastered on goods. When I look up Felix I find he was created in 1919. I learn that the Felix on the sign by my door is the ‘new Felix’ with longer legs and a shorter body, redesigned in the 1950s for a new audience.