Posted on Tuesday, 08/23/22.

The auxiliary rack for drying my laundry has something like forty small pincers for suspending various small items. It’s not raining, nor is it forecasted to until tomorrow, but I worry a little if my clothes will dry in this air. I read somewhere that warm air holds more water, which makes sense, I guess.

For breakfast I ate some granola; the brand name is ぐろグラ which is sort of humorous, and is a concatenation of the words for granola and an expression meaning non-boring. It is indeed pretty interesting granola. I eat it along with some toast that my microwave-cum-oven prepares very excellently. I have yet to buy enough groceries to completely stock my fridge, preferring to slowly layer and complicate my supply of foodstuffs over time, and this means my meals have been sparse and simple. A single vegetable and a single type of grain. Some rice and meat with some sauce. A piece of chocolate. I bought ceramicware from the local MUJI and on my table, arrayed, it makes me feel like I am part of some small theater production: the silent days of Z_ R_. The strange happenings of 東町通り. ドストエフスキーの「白痴」のような人生の物語.

I have bought some books from secondhand stores, ostensibly for reading practice but more truthfully because buying books is a vice and the used ones have acquired all the patina of having been loved and opened, which I can inherit and make use of even in adjacency. In other words the feeling of the work of the consumption of the book is transferable and valuable to me. Usually the places in which these books are found are also dense with people prone to the same complices. I prefer to view it like an allergy or a parasitic infection, though I would like to imagine these entirely free from their usual baggage; imagine them instead as we see the remora, or the easy and unknowing monogamy of lichen.

I have plans to go to a used camera store sometime soon; I brought my film lenses with me, but not the body of my camera, whose internal mechanisms seem to have broken, leading to severe underexposure despite battery replacement or manual adjustment. I do not know the word for the body of a camera, though in all likelihood it is just the same word transliterated. I just looked up the term for light meters and discovered the obscure 露出計, and the proper terminology for measuring the strength of light (photometry) 光の強弱を測ることは「測光」と言う。 as well as auxiliary technical terms for LEDs, light and heavy glasses, apertures, and optical aberration.

The translucent, dimpled glass of the door to my balcony transmits the dark forms of hanging clothes. How they ripple make me more aware of the wind’s strength. These clothes are experiencing the outdoors while I am not, which is probably a shame. If I stay in this cool dark room for too long (I don’t like turning on the lights in the main sleeping area if I can help it) then I will develop an even more tragic vitamin deficiency than I already experience. I have no impulse to become sick, not really, though I have read that such deficiencies have been sometimes been linked to theia mania or sudden understanding of prophecy. Sometimes drinking a lot of coffee very quickly can give the shadow of the possibility of this sort of existence, which it seems like many people ignore. I have only known a couple people for whom reality was actually semipermeable or porous, and in the moment seeing this only ever caused me fear. There is a huge amount of beauty, though, I think, in surveying from great distance the horrible things that can happen to people, or that they do to themselves. Why else would we keep bringing it up.

I think later I will go to the local HOBBY-OFF, which I have passed by sometimes in the evenings but not gone in to. It is on the main street out in front of the station, among the low oily restaurants and teens whose job it is to pass flyers to people who do not want them.