Posted on Sunday, 09/15/24.

On the floor under the table next to mine, someone’s small black dog sits quietly as their owner orders at the counter. It looks like what I remember a ‘Schnauzer’ looks like; lightly curled fur, a mustache of sorts, a blockish knobbly frame. It has on some sort of non-standard, custom harness: stylish, with small leather accents, made probably in some boutiquish way. A the counter of the cafe four large Americans sit shoulder-to-shoulder, each more blonde and firmly built than the last. They idly discuss sim cards and data plans, making some small talk with one of the employees. One of them, among the Americans, is younger, in his 20s or early 30s—large and in a oversize white shirt with a ponytail, someone I imagine was the impetus for the trip—has led them here. I’ve been to the café a lot; I’ve taken other people here. The exquisite handmade mugs have bible versus carved into them, and the bathroom is decorated with pictures of the Kansas-native grandmother for whom the café is named.

Yesterday I made two loops, the second smaller than the first, from 下北 to 恵比寿 to 目黒 to 渋谷 and back, primarily to develop and pick up a roll of film 大沢カメラ did the development, which from what I can tell is a bit of a trendy place, popular among visiting hipsters, though when I arrived the store was unbusy, and the negatives could be developed, scanned, and returned within five hours, which made me feel privy to some delicious secret of what it might have been like to live in the late eighties. I shot during and after graduation back in June, though I let myself stop in to any place that happened by. I bought front and rear-facing bike lights, to give myself some encouragement for evening outings. I picked through books at a few bookstores, but came away with nothing.

Self-portrait from the developed roll.

In the time since I began writing this a second couple with a dog has come to the café, this time with a well-groomed Pomeranian half-wrapped in a towel. The spherical dog sometimes yells in a high-pitched, human timbre. Sometimes I think that a subset of my interests are maintained by me in service of others for whom I think these interests are held more honestly. I know so little about fancy dogs, my mother’s interests in raising Newfoundlands having died off just before I was old enough to remember us having them. The more I think about the honesty of my interests, however, the less I see a difference between primary and epiphytic infatuation. If I am interested because of the interests of others (as many are), then it is more like some large diopter has been placed between me and the eventual objects of interest, only some mild distention, and a lack of knowledge of the target of interest has never really prevented people from solidifying their interest (i.e., in the physical expenditure of time, or money, or in the negative expenditure of withdrawing from others, or forgoing other potential interests). I sit here not speaking to others and write about the two dogs whose presence has established two poles in the room between which charge almost crackles. My interest is written locally and pushed to a repository stored somewhere unclear.

The employee and the pony-tailed man have started discussing some upcoming concert, making their relationship less clear, though their speech is still peppered with the formalities of new acquaintances. When they all leave he says 「じゃあ、また〜」, which the employees discuss amusedly once the Americans have left, swapping other slangy (sometimes feminine) phrases that visiting people often pick up, and which to Japanese people can appear unexpectedly interpersonal and light. I peek at the weather in 世田谷 on my phone, and see that the 90+ days continue until next Saturday, when the highs drop to the 75; this feels like some sort of ill omen, though I have desperately hoped for this for weeks now. There must be something, though I do not know the mechanism, that gives summer its hysteresis—some reason that it grows so fitful near the end, and finally expires not slowly or by degrees, but all at once, like a fever breaking.

As I write this two men dressed casually and walking tiredly lead two small spherically expensive dogs on walks across the adjacent street. The Schnauzer owners next to me look out idly as they pass, as if completely understanding what these men are up to, and how they must feel. Neither of the couples with their dogs appear totally at ease, though at intervals pet their companions, and so in the net there must be some benefit.

Almost unbelievably, as I fiddle with the previous sentence, the music changes to a substantially slower harp cover of the main theme Of course this is not a song composed specifically for the game, and may be some well-known harp piece now, but its appearance in the wild still amuses and spooks me. ‘Maenam’ from BRAID. I still listen to the soundtrack these days, as it exists on Spotify, inoffensive and instrumental, and mixed up with all sorts of impressions of people I’ve known or heard about.

This Sunday contains no definite plans or errands, as yesterday did, though there are work tasks yet to complete, and planning to be done for the month to come. Maybe I will watch another subset of the obscure DVDs I have been acquiring from used shops. I especially covet the ones that appear in Jewel cases, like standard CDs, and which often contain small posters. A few days ago I found a copy of Crash (1996), which I watched in the early afternoon, and which reminds me of Cosmopolis (2012), of which I’ve seen copies of both the book and movie here, for unknown reasons. In Crash I watch the high, thin, circumflex eyebrows of Deborah Kara Unger carefully, wondering why this style is comparatively rarer now. I feel in that movie, somehow more than in Cosmopolis, that Cronenberg has the capacity to understand and worship Don DeLillo, and I wonder if they were friends well before the production of the movie, in whatever way such recluses can be so. I imagine many letters I’ll never be able to see, at least before their deaths or outside an archive deep in some mid- or south-western university.