Posted on Monday, 11/11/24.

Things have gotten so bad that I just googled ‘vr headset price’ in complete earnest. I feel unable to watch movies. I nap in the evenings sometime, only waking once it’s too late to do anything besides go to bars, the prospect of which repels me, so I just walk around my neighborhood and sulk. I pass a couple outside a convenience store and the woman laughs about something freely with her mouth full of food and the whole scène nearly makes me start crying. The words people usually throw around like wretched and maudlin start to fizzle at the periphery of my increasingly lame thoughts. On the train I read the entire Wikipedia article for the ‘Rorschach test’, realizing that for all its appearances in popular media I have never once read anything remotely formal about its purpose. Perusal of related articles reveals terms like pathognomic, then extensive glosses of Freudian concepts within articles not explicitly related to Freud, either written in intense excitement or boredom by rail-thin graduate students.

Watching a YouTube clip of the opening scene of the movie Amadeus again, for some reason. The phrase ‘like a rusty squeeze-box’ standing out, per usual, maybe because of F. Murray Abraham’s delivery. His pale aged makeup is like how we imagine someone very old must be: pale and dry, rather than the reality, which is dark and wet. Blood becomes increasingly visible just under the skin in advanced age, made to contuse by the slightest injury.

I’ve never really understood the idea of someone being right for me—of having a large number of things in common with me. Besides the obvious, i.e., that most people I’ve dated have been basically in the same socioeconomic class as me, have had similar education to me, and so on (and thus were basically in a position to spend a lot of time with me, further weakening the position that these commonalities were essential), there has been a persistent feeling, often explicitly discussed with these people, that we are ‘outcasts,’ even if only benignly or blue-bloodedly. That we feel it is not so easy, by some series of accrued developmental errors, to reach out, to continue to communicate, to be honest in the face of a tendency to renege or get defensive. What becomes in common, then, is the long-term shared experience or ‘co-misery’ viz. the relationship itself which, while it may not have been obvious that it would work out or is a ‘natural fit’ has remained, and manages to be both comfortable and energizing. Maybe this is as insidious as incest. A variety of haploidy riddled with faults. Maybe I just don’t know the feeling that someone is supposed to feel, that ‘fitting feeling,’ only by chance: i.e., just through the small number of people I have met. But I’m not sure.

I walk behind a man on my way home who says to himself, pausing in-between, 「最悪、最悪、最悪」. He seems very sad, my sense of his sadness heightened in that it’s rare to hear Japanese people having breakdowns on the street. In the mornings sometime this week I have been having what feel like mini panic attacks, where the skin at the back of my neck seems to wring and squeeze and I can’t totally get my heart to relax. I think some of this may be waking up too fast, or having coffee too early, or moving from dark to light spaces without intermediate steps to acclimate. I may have developed, somewhere along the way, a legitimate form of photosensitivity. I think about how mean I become in the sunlight, and how horrible this must be for other people to experience.

I had been trying to write a short story, in part because I was feeling basic motivations to write in the wake of emotional pummeling, or else because I have a bad habit of trying to make my stories punitive, having realized that misgivings toward people are a reasonably effective ersatz motivation, and that they might as well be alloyed into something more beautiful. But a story written purposefully and offensively crumbles into the cliché pea-gravel it was made of, and the document’s been stillborn since it began. I have written very little in the last few years, and where I have it has almost always been on the tail of something resembling a break-up, though this is less insidious, usually, than I have made it sound. The story is also not always a different story. Like annoying French authors in the mid-twentieth-century I appear to derive pleasure from re-arranging fixed mythemes while (in my case metaphorically) chain-smoking myself to death. A breakup is usually paired with having learned something new about the other person (or more usually that what you had thought you had learned before had been wrong). Consequently they are miniature enlightenments, and prone, in their acuteness, to further apparent enlightenments as their narrative is continually sutured to something more palliative and etiological. The mind’s-eye image (and professorial excuse) for the purpose of a short story is epiphany, which is why these sorts of events lead so naturally to them, poor as the produce might be.

I began to hate the initial story so much that I started to write down ideas for other stories I could write instead. I consider incredibly thinly veiled diary entries, like a triptych of the three people (M, E, D) who’ve broken up with me over the past two years or so, each one sort of quiet and horrible and minor in a subtly different way. One over the phone, one in person, and one over text (true). One before sleep, the other while drunk, another while jet-lagged (true). The more I think about it the more there are strange and amusing symmetries and dis-symmetries among them all—this is an example of the unconscious and furious effort of the mind to apply narrative to assemblages of events, mainly because narratives are receptive to extrapolation, which affords greater safety and comfort. The secondary irony of most of my breakups is that I still talk to most of the people involved (I say ‘involved’ as if there had been a crime whose perpetrators were foreign to us all) though the present state of this correspondence is sort of thin and ethereal and infrequent. There is only one person from my past who chose not to speak to me again and maintained this indefinitely, though again I think that that is not rare generally, just within my lived experience.

Over time I have started to notice the effect of various insufficiency most likely related to my lack of contact with people with whom I speak honestly. It is like I have stopped eating leafy-green vegetables. Only D really ever satisfied my perverse tendencies to be spoken at and encyclopediacally shamed, to participate in something adjacent to the world of letters, or whatever. Each one of them writes, or at one point wrote semi-seriously, though the sort of extremely (maybe misguidedly or erroneously) serious species of writing I get onanistic about was unique to D, while E now seems to mostly feel shame over not writing so much any more, and M, the only one currently in a dedicated writing program, doesn’t share their output, which from what I’ve read long ago is very emotional and intuitive and almost fable-adjacent. There are some people who I’ve only known as friends with some of the same level of seriousness, I think, like R, or the marginal case of L, though correspondence with the former has regressed into the sort of biannual pleasantries that I feared adult relationships were made of back in my mid-teens, and the latter quit academia entirely, last I heard. Then there are people who’ve read my websites, which are freely available and only very gently decoupled from my name at best, and for each of these people I imagine there are two or three more who have read what I’ve written and not mentioned it. These messages from the ether are the most exciting and headrushy (but correspondingly the most temporary). The comments are kind, even flattering, though I imagine this is in part because most people have not come across most of the base-level tricks and tropes that dominate more modern MFA drivel that, on first encounter, can be very freeing and enthralling to read (i.e., the sort of euphoria that accompanies first discovering literature by sad grad students, for sad grad students). To pause here, I am being to mean to myself; if someone is moved by your writing then they are moved by it, even if later they may come to know its flimsiness. My instinct to punch myself down is part of the seriousness mentioned above, out of the plain realization that what I write could be less narrow and better technically and thematically. I reread an email from D—actually an email between them and another briefly mentioning me along with some incredulity over my astonishment at their compositional skill, and a corresponding statement that for them it (writing) is like flexing a familiar and strong muscle, and that they forget that many people are not at all basically comfortable with writing. The email was of their usual species during a certain era when talking about me, which asserted some sort of basic (perhaps cute) genius in my output as constrained by having read, as mentioned, only narrowly, and thus being a sort of curious outsider donning the clothing of a first-year comp-lit grad student at some mid-tier Midwestern university not yet having had their teeth knocked in by some conference panel a few years down the road, etc. Maybe this is sort of like watching a small dog open a door, or operate a lever on a food dispenser, i.e., mildly fun and a good conversation starter. Opening the observer’s mind that not all is lost, and that the everyday hides treats. I oscillate back and forth between the idea that I was only ever some sort of chamber which, when pressed against D, amused them with its resonance, versus that I legitimately moved and influenced them over the years. This is again ungenerous to myself, if only for the fact that we often legitimately believe the miraculous attributes we see in people at the time that we see them. Like the eternal lame question of whether the zebra is white with black stripes or v.v., I can choose to see D’s bi-annual renunciations as lucidity or something less kind.

I sit in the same café as where the above was written (and just now lightly proof-read) and keenly miss things like new, barely university-affiliated academic bookstores (think seminary co-op or the MIT bookstore) that I used to spend a whole lot of time around, or would meet acquaintances in. And not necessarily these alone but the whole blocks around them devoted to a sort of popularized but still reasonably serious and built-out notion of ‘academic-ness’. Zones that develop when the demography and affluence of a place are so mature that otherwise unrelated businesses and human behavior are modified and subsumed only by their adjacency. Big glassy public libraries and bars (never visited) with science and literature pun-centered names. Stores devoted to expensive yarns pushing 30 USD per skein. Broadsheet and that tall androgynous barista with the same bright red socks and black Clifton-9’s who made eye contact with me once while I was wearing bright red socks and black Clifton-9’s. This is the café that has resemblance to that café, though without any of the seep in from the neighborhood. Maybe because I have been a little down recently but I miss New England very obviously and superficially, even though during my last half year I was barely participating in society. I miss speaking that annoying and clever variety of English that got scraped and hollowed out of necessity in places like the Media Lab or CSAIL or any apartment party where the former MIT frat bros spoke about perverse triplets of topics like ‘Jordan Peterson,’ ‘Ricci flow,’ and Gaza while simultaneously getting shitfaced during a game of ‘Wisest Wizard.’

On reading too much into things

I have the egocentric tendency to see the online presence of the people I am estranged from as relating to me more often than it does. Excerpts from a book appearing to apologize in veiled, distant terms, the choice of some outfit seeming to echo my own choices or preferences. Some of this is what the online call a ‘cope,’ though I come by it honestly—at a low level I am trying to bridge the gap between how much I think about others and how much they think about me, and because I am very obsessive and my personal world is small, there is a fair amount of ground to make up. During an afternoon last weekend, as I waited around the PARCO mall in 吉祥寺, too timid to show up to the zine fair there precisely on time, I combed through the Mont-bell store on the 8th floor and browsed their silently luxurious and expensive selections of base-layers and other fall/winter garments, thinking that it is impossible for me to touch tactical merino anymore without thinking of other people. I have sworn off polyester- and acrylic-rich clothing entirely as some sort of abortive and thoroughly modern form of prayer. This is not clustered to one person. I have a chain of eight hand-folded paper cranes that must be cursed given what it represents. I have a painted rock that sits in plain view on my kitchen counter from someone who no longer talks to me. I have a bag of weighty postcards and letters in the bottom of my closet in an old Timbuktu bag florid with admissions. On scrutiny there is almost nothing about which I am not superstitious, and much of the discomfort I feel over this is that I am in many ways not committed to the monasticism enough, to reading the air enough: I let myself consume YouTube drivel and rot on my bed like some sort of normie. I have discovered ways not to think at all, and inexorably my brain smooths and uglies.

In some attempt to think fewer things yesterday I biked eleven miles on what may have been one of the final truly warm days of the year. I followed the 神田 river out towards 吉祥寺 but took the large artery-roads back, slightly allergic to the idea of retracing my steps. The neighborhoods get lower and poorer as you push out, at least until the major shopping hub and suburb of 吉祥寺. I have new aspirations to head southwest next time, like out towards 調布 or 登戸, where the mansionsA term here used to refer to the lower (2 or 3 storey) steel- or wood-framed Japanese apartment buildings that are considered more affordable. get a little rusty or vine-covered or otherwise yellowed by the sun. Someday maybe I will try to bike to 厚木 and back, which pushes something like 80km, but I think not for a long while yet, and I would want to swap my tires for cushier 28s, rather than the current frankenstein arrangement. The ride was easy and snaked on the way out, with more open quiet straight wide streets on the way back. Two or three times Japanese men in brightly colored bibs and aero-helmets passed me by, but most of the cyclists rode electric-assited ママチャリ. I log the ride on Strava, which makes me feel like it could be 2018.

(As I write this in my local Komeda Coffee the couple next to me clasps hands and conspiratorially smile at each other across their booth table; I listen to Kaneko Ayano loudly in my headphones and feel like that blurry Squidward crying meme.) I returned to writing the above paragraph but have come back here as one of them feeds something to the other off their plate with a fork, like in an early 2000s romantic comedy.

On the subtropics

For the week I’m in Okinawa for a quantum information and materials science conference that I was invited to at last minute, and which is not very close to my area. I have watched multiple older men discuss their extremely prolix experimental setups to investigate increasingly esoteric properties of magnets for the beginning of the day. The subfield is filled with terms thrown around as if their meaning is obvious, despite most of them having been created twenty or thirty years ago by the men talking. Pseudo- and kineto- are tacked onto already long greco-latin chimerical terms.

I think I’m not made for the tropics, or anywhere close to them. The beach glows very chlorinically outside the windows, out until the coral shelf ends and the ocean blackens suddenly. I walked for a bit in the night after arriving and turned back after an extremely large bat started swooping over me. Mold creeps at the corners of buildings. In the corner of the hallway off my room I find a small green gecko or lizard, which skitters across the peeling linoleum. The building is not so old, or poorly maintained, just put up against a losing battle that abhors carpet and glue and paint and all electrical equipment. When I close my eyes and crack my window the smell of salt and beached seaweed drifts by. A mild storm rains down briefly, as if it didn’t have the heart for anything serious.

The skyline of Naha and Okinawa city, and the smaller hamlets along the way, are built almost entirely out of concrete, either unfinished or painted in pastel. I wonder if the first painted houses faded in the sun and subsequent homeowners chose attenuated colors to match. Dense dark green spiky plants, some bearing fruits or flowers. Dark shapes out in the water, or concrete husks off on the tops of distant hills, all speaking to the hulking, utilitarian forms unique to military architecture.

Maybe my travel has unsettled me, and I will eventually tune into whatever type of silence this place offers. The conference provides plenty of time to steal away, and because I am housed, along with a minority of participants, in the same building as where the talks are held, I have a locked chamber overlooking the sea in which to sulk, for better or worse. I have to believe in a purer, terminal form of isolation, or else my attitude for the past half year tends toward nothing. Like a child my year is scaffolded on distant events to look forward to or worry about; something like the interruption of these long-term expectations might be what has made this past year so difficult. For now, though, I can plan for my family’s visit over the end of the year. Maybe something about trying to find a job sometime after next summer, or else some concrete plan to give up this one. Am I too old to get wrapped up in a subculture? To write embarrassing long things to beg my way into an MFA program? Do I take up running or climbing or kendo or ikebana? Do I wait for the people I know to find new crises against which I provide some level of familiarity and comfort, and speak to them on the phone every couple days for a few months until we tire of the exercise?

On insomnia

It’s not so much that I’ve been having trouble sleeping, I just get tired at the wrong times. The night gets late and wobbly and I feel like I haven’t done enough. Or in the mid-afternoon, while the sun is at its zenith, I suddenly don’t really want to deal with it anymore and, if I am at home, can crawl under the sheets if I want to. Giving in to these impulses of course makes the situation worsr—my body gets used to it, and this, pummeled by the time and amounts of coffee I drink in an attempt to damp the oscillations, just means that whatever original rhythm might of been there has been drowned out. The days are so short now but it doesn’t feel that way, I guess—more concerning is the uniformity among each day, and how the anxiety I feel over this uniformity is itself uniform, and so never crests into the crisis that might allow me to change my circumstances. This might be part of the reason that I am at least eventually thankful for people who leave or otherwise drastically change their position toward me; they reassure me that there is and could always have been a crisis. I have thought and written about the etymology of that word and it’s completely correct and exactly what I mean by this, just as a physician thousands of years ago might have silently worried over while applying a cold compress. Much of the saying of this flows in the same way that someone would post on Facebook that whatever tragedy had befallen their life had been because God had willed it to be that way, and that he had a plan, and so on. I.e., like how such statements are paradoxically made more steadfast by any arguments like that there cannot be such a cruel God as to have allowed whatever horrible pediatric oncological thing they’re posting about to happen, against which (to stave off the alternative, which is madness and despair) one can only give themselves up to the mystery of it all, which is a powerful and euphoric thing. No one has any idea how any one decision might dendritically propagate toward future forking crises, whether religion creeps into their figuring or not. I realize that I am prone to injecting mild divinities relating to the people I’ve known and by proximity myself, having not been raised to shuffle off these mysteries to anything more distant or universal, but it doesn’t seem to be so different, ultimately. Most people are obsessed by the events and people who immediately contact them—by what these people might mean, what their actions might mean, whether these meanings are in accordance, and what, if anything, the resulting constellation says about themselves. If they’ve been a good person. If they’re actually and completely irredeemable. If they’re going to end up alone not out of calamity or happenstance but by some slow inexorable and above-all foreseeable creep of deficiencies.

So I sleep poorly. In the afternoon just before the sun set I inspected the nearby rocky beach for hermit crabs, which would appear to one out of seemingly nowhere and in great numbers as the eyes settled. Dinner passes in idle conversation. The sun sets early even here and the evening passes in a blur of unrelated long-form media consumption mostly to just listen to people talk. I feel the gentle urges, like the tide sucking at the sand, to buy new items, or plan a trip, or invite someone to travel here, or consume more sugar or salt, each of which in their displacement and mild risk offers exactly what’d be needed to get to the next moment. Of course giving up everything is impossible. I have to eat, and I can see the clothing of mine that has worn thin over years, and somehow, eventually, my job compels me to write thoughts down on paper. I think maybe I just wish I wasn’t so sensitive to the low-level constant noise of this all—in the fragile and annoying sense I wish that the mechanisms of consumption and satisfaction weren’t so plainly audible right now, and instead knotted up more honestly in the lives of others. It is so quiet out that I can hear my own heart beat, or the ailing compressor of the air conditioner in the far corner, or more beach lapping. I prefer complicated distractions, those kabbalistic ones, all knit together and felted down. The ones so consistent, so personal, that I am reminded all the time of how stupid and limited I am, and so malleable to change.