Posted on Wednesday, 09/07/22.

I look up a bunch of words like lazarlike, escharotic, pudendal, osteosarcoma, hirsute, aphasia, kyphosis, and preeclampsia. This is a sort of weird birthday gift to myself. I have omitted words from the above list that are particularly graphic or unkind. Most of them are medically derived. The history of medical terminology is largely unkind. I have a growing list of words in a secondary document that I gather on my own or steal from people I know. I am writing this paragraph on my birthday, but the post will be dated a couple days later, because the second gift I gave myself was a very quiet, solitary night.

Since around noon today (now the 7th) it has been raining lightly outside my office window. I wear headphones when I am working, and on them I play “Rainy Night Coffee Shop Ambience with Relaxing Jazz Music and Rain Sounds - 8 Hours,” which is now recommended to me when I type in YouTube search. I listen to the rain sounds of the night cafe while looking at the rain falling outside. It is not night yet, but the clouds are dense and the dark deep trees outside are gloomy even in full sunlight, and thus are positively frightening today. Two birds fly in lazy circles at the level of my window, but set back some hundreds of meters. On Monday while taking the bus here in the morning I saw a heron standing out in a rice paddy. When I walked home that evening I passed a row of trees by the supermarket in which swarms of small round birds chattered fiercely. There were so many of them, and they were so loud, that it immediately appeared as some sort of anomalous phenomenon, as if some geomagnetic contusion or some hormonal disaster had driven the birds to madness. Multiple people I passed by on the way home also stopped to look and comment on the birds’ yells. Small children pointed. Old women tugged on the sleeves of their hunched, oblivious husbands.

Nothing about my birthday was horrible; it was simply a non-event, like a small exercise for myself, a demonstrated proof, that I could remove all of the auspiciousness from a day. I should have advertised that it was my birthday to other people and convinced them to go out with me, but I didn’t much want to go out, and it was a Monday, and so the whole thing seemed liable only to make me feel worse the morning after, and so I let it be.

I have been reading on the bus; the new cloth cover for my copy of ノルウェイの森（上) has given me confidence to store it in the depths of my backpack, or the side pocket, or in my New Yorker tote, and whip said reading material out on public transport. I get to business. I don’t use my phone to look things up while on the train or bus, in fear of being seen as a poser. I will notice repeated kanji I do not know and will try to guess what they mean as they are repeated back to me again and again, as if he is mocking me. I am a child. One of the embarrassing ones was 可愛い, which I so rarely see outside of kana. Another was the slightly more cryptic 極端. I try to remember the differences between the only apparently similar: 踏, 路, 跳, 跡, and many others. But it is getting easier, and it is nice to be able to read in the compact A6 novel format that is preferred here. I wish for A6 sizes in US media, but will have to remain content with the behemoth loud affair that is modern novel and pop-lit-crit packaging. Maybe I should switch to PDFs only. Dusty scanned heavy 50mb digital files.

The grocery store I normally go to is open until 23:00 most days, giving me an excuse to walk around a large well-lit overstocked place late in the night if I want to. There is a pizza place that is open until 5am also, and a few bars that I have wandered past but not gone into. I wonder if there is a location for live music in my town that is popular. 厚木 is a bedroom town, but it is far enough away from 東京 proper to have developed its own small vices: the alleys are littered with nightclubs advertising pleasures, and loud cars, brightly colored with dark windows, scream down the main streets at night at intervals. I walk behind a man with full-sleeves and leg tattoos in the morning before waiting for the bus one day. Men in dark glasses and casual suits come into restaurants and make eye contact with the owners. People orbit. The old walk slowly. The fog hangs over the nearby mountains, in the morning.