Posted on Monday, 09/19/22.

I’ve been despondent, which has made it hard to write. This despondency has a secondary effect of making it hard to go out, which means that there is less to write about that isn’t very endogenous and dead. I made myself go out to 下北 again on Saturday evening, which was not unpleasant in the moment, but in hindsight held mostly the shallow epiphanies of speaking to strangers while intoxicated. I went to a bar called Little Soul Cafe, which contained thousands of records in boxes along dim walls. The bartender plucked records practicedly as each song ended, replacing them on the turntable hidden behind the counter. He made very high quality cocktails and a variety of Soul and Jazz heads discussed their days and preferences next to me between about 8 and 10 pm. An older couple came in and sat to my left. A younger pair of men to my right, who smoked two cigarettes each and pondered over some obscure whiskies. A young pair of exchange students sat on the couches at the far end of the narrow room (about eight feet wide and maybe three times as long). The drinks were well prepared and the music obscure and well-curated. The axial walls of the oblique room were mounted with square shelves of what was probably, when I estimated it, close to three thousand individual records. I didn’t ask if he had bought them all, the bartender, though his strange speech, the asymmetry of his face, made me assume all sorts of unverifiable things about him. He spoke in confidence with a woman at the end of the bar, who stayed the whole time I was there, and seemed to know him very well. After this I went to another bar, 月灯, which was much more energetic. I spoke with some of the patrons for a while, and the bartender, keeping an eye on my phone for a preemptive alarm for catching the last train. A very lost German man sipped a beer in the far back corner. To my left a woman, a good friend of the bartender (another young woman) explained to me the trials of indirect and/or collectivist societies. By the end of the night I was almost entirely sober, and had gotten poor at conversation again, overaware of the tendency for drunk people to lean very close and repeat things with emphasis. The train ride back was more meditative than normal; as expected it was a crush until around 登戸駅, or maybe 相模大野駅, after which most everyone departed, leaving only the hardcore and obscure among us to see 海老名駅 and 本厚木駅 pass by. I wonder if I will ever depart any of these intervening stations; I imagine they are not so dissimilar to my own, giving onto large but mostly anonymous plazas and malls and straight wide roads carved out of low flat topography.

The next day I spent quietly, having been aware that a typhoon’s edge had been set to hit that previous night. It rained periodically and fiercely. It is set to rain all of the next two weeks or so, though it is not so bad here. Before I went to bed I watched the news some, seeing if the eyewall had yet hit 九州 like it had been forecasted to. I have not been in a dangerous storm for a long time. Rarely do they reach up as far as Tokyo proper, though this has been less true as of late. I try to understand barometric charts. I remember unhelpful properties and corollaries of the Coriolis effect. I watch kdramas and drink lots of water before sleeping.

Escaping despondency is probably tied to letting go of certain reflexive or unconstructive shame. It is about letting the small neuronal knot cradling the despondency die from a carefully calibrated emotional hypoxia. Many people attempt this sort of surgical brain death through intoxication, to apparently uniformly bad results in the long term. In sum total my Saturday left me with mostly feelings of dehydration. I have been trying to construct small plans to escape despondency by the rapid influx of people among whom it is difficult to let said despondency fester, but executing this plan is difficult and requires more time, more energy, more study, and perhaps more ill-spent abandon, which will, in total with everything else, raise the possibility of accruing more shame. Like plaque on one’s teeth. No one I know has every bought their own dental implements. No one I know has ever repaired their own cavity, yet it seems reasonable that this could be done, and precisely that I think this is so reasonable (connecting this through the previously implicit metaphor) is probably basal to my illness.

Next weekend I will go somewhere much more remote; in the meantime there is a lot of work to do, publications to read, annealing to the form of various idioms of modern theoretical computer science. Eventually I may write what I think about the shape of the research I am attempting to make myself do, but it is not immediately of the form of the kind of loose journaling above, so it can wait. Recently the shape of my closest work has been in the local Starbucks here, getting railed on cold brew and wearing noise cancelling headphones as the sun makes its slow transit out the south-facing floor-to-ceilings. I worry that I will become known. Enough caffeine makes this worry very benign, though, and dims anything beyond the screen of my MacBook, with which I scrape long articles for small excerpts, which are then transferred gingerly to a waiting Obsidian notebook with custom black-red monospace theming, quite similar to this website when this was posted.

I have also been thinking about the people I have lived with, in reflex to suddenly being alone in a studio. I vacillate between infinite charity and substantial scorn for some of these people. I have become very aware of my biases against those who fully insert themselves into the world and attempt to be sincere, and to hold anger for the people or events that have wronged them. It is much easier for me to appreciate people who refrain from almost everything. Who bear horrible pressures. Immediately though there is something wrong at the bottom of this feeling. It is related also to how I feel about intoxicated people, or researchers who express constant surface level joy about their work.

I think I am despondent because of very basic, socially-tethered things. This doesn’t mean there are not very complex, interesting reasons for despondency also, or that I am not feeling the effect of such reasons, and it’s not forbidden to write about these knots and involutions. By various mechanisms I find opaqueness and density mollifying; they are the ultimate emollient. They are easy to hide within, to manufacture, to feel as substantive and dampening. Maybe this is a goal of these posts. Effusions. They soften the impact.