Posted on Thursday, 09/01/22.

I’ve been telling myself to go out for walks after getting home from work, as otherwise it is easy to stay in my room and consume media until it is late enough to sleep. This is a bad spiral around a locus of no good. The glass doors of my apartment, the ones that give out onto the small balcony, are textured and only translucent, adding to the sense that this box is very much not somewhere which exists or has a location in relation to other places. This is part of why I should go outside at night: to orient myself with the lattices of power lines, street lamps, and small shuttered shops. I eat so little that I am not very tempted to go into the restaurants, and there are no late night cafes I have seen so far (besides カフェ鈴木, which is too fancy to linger in for a long time). Maybe I will go to a Denny’s, or a Jonathan’s, or a サイゼリア, or a ガスト, all of which are open for a long time, sometimes 24 hours a day, and may help in becoming oriented. I do not buy beer. I do not buy snacks. Sometimes I buy ice cream at night but it doesn’t make me feel much better. The impetus to spend time in restaurants or bars on weeknights is part of a larger desire to be surrounded by people in a casual way. My apartment is very modern and sleek; all of its surfaces are so smooth. Likewise my workspace in the mountains of 厚木市 feels similarly smooth. I haven’t described it yet: the building is part of a complex of buildings, all of them tall and slender and grey, built with raw concrete among the overgrowth of the surrounding mountains. The walls are a soft taupe inside, and are also smooth. The jaggedness of the mountains far off is the only contrast to all of this terminal smoothness. Why are no walls in the US smooth? Pipes run overhead and small hatches mark the floor. It is the best disaster-prepared building I have ever seen; fire extinguishers and hoses and hydrants and lit exit signs and exit floor stickers and emergency ponchos and hardhats and breathing apparatuses. We tap badges on doors when leaving and entering rooms, ostensibly to track us if an earthquake were to occur. The door sensors click. This does not feel creepy or overbearing but instead somehow immensely but only distantly soothing, like an approaching rain. We are ready for when the disaster will come. We sort our trash carefully and walk three laps around the building after lunch.

Lunch was curry, rice, soup, and tea today. The tea is dispensed by vending machine, as is the soup. The curry is served by an older woman who asks everyone which type of rice they want.

Later tonight a subset of the lab will go into 下北沢 after work to eat and talk; I don’t yet know how this will be, but most likely this will be posted after that has occurred. The nationalities of the people who will be there are: New Zealand, Columbia, Japan, United States. We had a German until recently, but she left. She had been involved with someone else here, a Frenchman, who is now also gone. They were not decided whether to continue their entanglement on those distant continental shores. The Frenchman, an Englishman, and I drank wine from the same bottle on the shore of the river 相模川, which is also the name of a bar near my apartment. near our apartment the night before the Frenchman left, and he spoke to us about everything he had been feeling, and it was the first and last day I would see him. I pretty much told him my deal, too.

I have taken the first photos with my Pentax MX on a roll of Kodak Gold 200 which I bought a little above standard price. The exposure counter seems to be slipping occasionally, but this doesn’t interfere with the functions of the camera, and looking online it seems like a common problem with the MX, the ME, and the ME super. There are deep forums on almost all models of Pentax camera, and schools of thoughts on the best models and accompanying lenses. People marvel at the size and mechanical aspect of the MX. They claim it has the brightest viewfinder of any 35mm SLR film camera ever to be made, which makes me feel something inside, a little. Remarkably, hardly anyone posts photos. Where are all of the photos that the people who love these cameras are taking? I imagine them activating the shutter with no film inside; I imagine that the thrill is simply experiencing the mechanism in person, to hear it, to feel its whisper click against the check, to hold the device as one would a child.