I wonder what it’s like to be a blogger?

What would it be like, to finally give in?

To be a blogger…

In spring I learn again what it means to sweat. I find myself lost in ecstasies incited by the fragrant creatures on the subway, to and from work. I convert their damp skin, their stubbly armpits, and the pleats and folds of the fabrics that contain them into 12pt prose for you, the reader of my blog. I take notes on my phone that I’ll punch up when I get home, not noticing that I’ve already missed my stop (a detail I revel in when the time comes to post). Each mouthful of micro-plastic infused seltzer (bought at the convenience store located below the station nearest my house) burns my tongue — oh how I wish you could share in the delights of this pain!

The summer thaws the glaciers that have kept me suspended in internet world. The rivers overflow, turning flat plains into an inland sea. Do you still survive, my exiled poetess, waiting for the day of your reinstatement? Can you see these countless blogposts I’ve written for you on your computer screen? Or does your husband print them out on paper for you to read at the kitchen table with your morning cup of tea, highlighting in purple the phrases you find amusing?

In the autumn, the desolate moon overhead, I find myself at a bar one Friday with a coworker I’d known a decade, our keycards still on lanyards around our necks. It’s the first time we’ve found ourselves alone outside the office in all this time, and I can’t help but fear she expects a confession. I look her in the eye: “Yes, I’ve blogged about you. Every time I see you walking out of the bathroom, each t-shirt you wear, the myriad of stains — I share it all with my loyal readers. They cheer me on, hoping that one day we’d have the sort of moment we’re having right now — just two coworkers finally getting to know each other. Yet I can’t give them that. I promise I’ll never write about you again! Now that you’ve told me your secret, the darkness you keep in the refrigerator of your heart — now that I have the makings for a blogpost that could make me immortal, I’ll keep it to myself… forever!”

I spend the winter walking past Starbucks, not daring to go in. All the other bloggers sit at shared tables, listening to that Starbucks Jazz, but I have integrity — I'm a blogger of the highest caliber, nothing like them — I’ve sworn my oaths. I’ll never munch on Starbuck pastries myself — I’ll never blog about Flat Whites or Mochas I’ve personally tasted — I’ll only describe the way they look in other people’s mouths — lips stained brown, cheeks bulging like some kind of rodent. I wish that could be me — I admit it! I wish I could be so carefree. To live in that world, typing away at my bloggings… but no, I don’t dare go in.

...if only my own fate, and that of the whole universe, could depend on my blogging. That’s the life I’m missing, merely being a saddler rather than blogger. A saddler has no readers — only ghosts. Saddlers write for people on the other side of heaven, who will never read any of what they write. Maybe there’s a sense of freedom in that... yet why must I use all my freedom to explore new ways to keep myself in bondage?

Siqu said:

would be curious how you'd design this game [about reading websites]. coincidentally thought about the a similar thing, some metagame about building websites... the difficulty is choosing the objective. it'd be conceptually amusing though to boot up a game where you go on a computer day by day, handling emails and improving a website, but wouldn't be sure how to design it, or how it ends, or how it's fun. collect stats through surfing maybe

My imagined game would essentially be a modern day adaption of Yu Dafu’s short story Intoxicating Spring Nights (春風沈醉的晚上). You play as a man/woman working in the world’s tallest office building. It’s not clear what your duties are — nobody ever requires anything of you. Instead, you can spend the entire workday looking through a telescope out of the office window at the world below. There is a little human-like creature, living in a tiny room with several other creatures, all strangers to one another, separated only by thin partitions. This creature, it turns out, is the proprietor of your favorite website. You begin to take a deep interest in it.

The creature starts the game with a jacket, but is forced to pawn it early on to pay its hosting fees. It has no job or way to accumulate income, so instead it must post rampantly until it dies of starvation. It operates its website by mail, since it doesn’t have a computer. Presumably it’s writing HTML on paper with a pen and mailing it off to the mysterious place that makes websites happen. Every time it goes to the post office to buy stamps there’s a chance it’ll die in the tundra, as winter deepens.

Due to the nature of the company you work for, you have a fixed budget each month with which you can cause natural disasters like meteor impacts and snow locusts, which may stimulate memories of the creature’s childhood. It frantically attempts to convert those memories into HTML, which you can then view on your office computer. These posts are represented by out-of-context snippets from my real life website, saddleblasters.com, rewritten as rhyming quatrains.

Sometimes new furniture arrives in the mail, sent by loyal readers, with little notes of gratitude attached — but none of it improves the creature’s life. The furniture just takes up space in the creature’s little room. The first two times the creature reaches starvation, one of the neighbors walks in just time to save it, sharing some carrots or lemons. The third time though is for real — the creature is finally dead.

The screen dissolves and you no longer play as the office worker. Now you control the creature, who has been reincarnated in hell. The game is now a side-scrolling platformer. You must escape from hell. The world’s level geometry is constantly deforming and rotating. Platforms dissolve if you stand on them for longer than two seconds. There are lots of SMB3 note-blocks.

Once you reach the surface, you leave the consciousness of the creature, returning to the office-worker, and we find the creature back in it little room. It is, for the moment, no longer hungry and instead filled with inspiration to work more on its website. Thus the cycle of posting, death and reincarnation repeats itself over and over.

Each journey through hell unlocks new features for the creature’s website. For example, the first time the creature comes back, a little voice-synthesizer button is added at the bottom right corner of each quatrain which will read it aloud in a computery-accented voice. The next upgrade makes it so that if you click on the quatrains, the odd-numbered lines start scrolling to the right and the even-numbered lines start scrolling to the left, until they reach the edge of the screen and wrap over to the other side (like in Pac-Man), returning to their original position.

Sometimes your coworkers see you looking at the creature’s website and ask you questions about it. This gives you some dialogue options to choose from. Depending on your choices, your coworkers will either think you’re a real cool person or a nerd, leading to further conversations later on. Eventually, if you succeed at enough dialogue options, one of them will elect to marry you. You then quit the company to stay home and raise the children. The game ends with your boss giving a teary-eyed speech at your farewell party about how you were the best employee he’s ever had the pleasure of working with, and about how much you’ll be missed. He gives you one last hug, then the screen turns black and the credits start to roll.

I woke up a few mornings ago convinced that Suboptimalism was dead: he’d died on the way to enlightenment in Japan. I had an image in my brain, suddenly pulled out of the recessed of my memory while sleeping, that had been conjoined with Suboptimalism’s recent description of his flight. I suppose I should do what I can to communicate that image to you:

When I was 14, my dad took me to Jacksonville Florida to visit my grandfather, who lived in the middle of some Floridian forest. It was the first time I’d seen him in about five years, at a point in my life when five years felt like a century would now. The journey there was uneventful enough. My father had timed the visit with a business trip he was supposed to make so that he could expense his own plane ticket, using air-line miles for mine. He rented a car and dropped me off at my grandfather’s, where I spent a week reading Plato’s Republic in my aunt’s old bedroom during the day and watching Hong Kong action movies with my grandfather at night. My father only stayed for about an hour to chat. He then went off to embark on the long drive to Miami to do whatever business it was he did in those days — presumably consisting of taking clients out to watch football games and shoot machine guns. At some point, perhaps while taking a break while the employee of the shooting cleans the guns and loads them up with new magazines, the grand deal would be made, and tens of millions of dollars would be transacted with a handshake. That’s what I always imagined my dad’s job at Samsung’s home appliance division was like.

After the allotted week was up, my father drove back in a different rental car. It was on the flight home to Baltimore that the incident occurred. The plane took off without an issue, but before it reached cruising altitude, the flight attendant announced we’d have to turn around and make an emergency landing. There was something wrong with whatever magic mechanisms maintain the plane’s proper cabin pressurization. I remember my ears popping at a greater frequency than normal when flying, but I wasn’t particularly bothered. The other passengers, however, seemed to have descended into a panic. As soon as the plane landed, before it even came to a stop, and long before the door was open, people were racing to grab their bags and push their way to the exit. One man in particular was shoving with a greater vehemence than the others, managing to get to the row my dad and I were still sitting at before coming up against an unpassable density of other human bodies.

“Someone’s in a hurry!” my dad said, for no real reason.

The man didn’t seem to hear him at first, but after a moment of processing, he realized this remark had been addressed at him. He turned to my dad and, almost politely at first, explained that he couldn’t hear from his left ear and had to get off this plane immediately. My dad responded, again quite needlessly, by pointing out that the cabin door was still closed and the speed at which it would open was completely out of our control.

“Just take it easy!” my dad concluded. “We’ll be out before you know it.”

The man’s politeness turned into searing rage. “I don’t need a fucking bald wiseguy to tell me to take it easy!”

It was precisely at that moment that the line ahead started to move forward — otherwise the man may very well have gotten in a fist fight with my dad, which my dad would have surely lost. Despite calling my dad bald, he was bald too — though maybe he didn’t realize it. He was bald in a cool tough guy way, whereas my dad was just bald in a George Costanza way.

I often imagine Suboptimalism as a personage not unlike my dad. They have the same taste in non-fiction insider finance lit. They’re both world-weary travelers. Maybe if my dad were born several decades later, he too would be writing about Japanese pop-culture on Neocities — instead he had to find out about Haruomi Hosono via a sample of the Watering a Flower Muji BGM used in a Vampire Weekend song.

Anyway, that morning, waking up from reading Suboptimalism’s blog post, I couldn’t help but feel some rift in the space-time continuum had resulted in his website being updated from some other universe — the peaceful happy one where everything turns out ok. In my universe, however, the Suboptimalist’s flight didn’t go so well. The seat next to him, which he’d boasted of being empty in the blog post, was actually inhabited by the man who’d almost punched my father. At some point in the flight, high in the sky, Suboptimalism had made an innocent remark — maybe he tried to ask the man to move so he could walk past to use the bathroom. This had set the man off, ripping Suboptimalism to shreds before the flight attendants could do anything. They’d have to jettison what pulverized bones and disintegrated flesh remained of him into the Pacific ocean, lest the smell disturb the other business class passengers.

This phantasmagoric vision of mine is, of course, quite unfair to that man from a decade and a half ago on the plane. Of course "A gentleman speaks with his mouth, not his fists", but it wouldn't have been that unreasonable to beat up my dad. That's the cost of being a wiseguy. So it would be more appropriate if Suboptimalism actually did something to deserve the pummeling he received. Maybe his perverted visual novels disturbed the man's moral sensibilities, or maybe Suboptimalism made some not-so-clever quip of his own that enraged him. I can leave this as an exercise to the reader: what might Suboptimalism say to a stranger that would result in him getting beaten to death on a plane? What remark would YOU make to get beaten to death yourself?

Since waking up with the above premonition, I’ve had this poem that Du Fu wrote for Li Bai echoing in my brain:

天末懷李白
To Li Bai at the Sky’s End

(Note from Saddle: this was written while Du Fu was living in Qinzhou. He had received news Li Bai had been exiled to Yelang, in the deep south of the empire.)

涼風起天末，
A cold wind blows from the far sky...
君子意如何？
What are you thinking of, old friend?
鴻雁幾時到？
The wild geese never answer me.
江湖秋水多。
Rivers and lakes are flooded with [Autumn’s] rain.
文章憎命達，
A poet should beware of prosperity,
魑魅喜人過。
Yet demons can haunt a wanderer.
應共冤魂語，
Ask an unhappy ghost, throw poems to him
投詩贈汨羅。
Where he drowned himself in the Milo River.

I took the translation from this webpage, positioning the English lines beneath the Chinese, despite them (quite sadly) not being perfectly one-to-one. I’m a bit skeptical of lines five and six — I interpreted the Chinese as saying literature doesn’t allow the poet a happy fate (literally "detests" a happy fate), rather than being a simple exhortation as in the translation, and that demons delight in the passerby, i.e. because the opportunity has come to devour him — all of this hinting at something horrible having happened to Li Bai on his journey. The last two lines are a reference to Qu Yuan and Jia Yi. Qu Yuan, existing at the very beginning of the Chinese poetic canon, author of Lisao, was a fellow exile who drowned himself in the Miluo river. About a century later, the Han dynasty poet Jia Yi wrote an ode to Qu Yuan, which at the beginning announces itself as being thrown into the Miluo river as a gift/act of veneration to Qu Yuan.

So, once I’d become lost in delusions that Suboptimalism was dead, you can perhaps understand now why this poem might have come to mind. Strangely enough, despite being separated from me by only one timezone, Japan still feels like “The sky’s end” to me. The closer we are, the more intangible we seem. Du Fu often wrote of Li Bai. Li Bai only wrote a handful of poems about Du Fu, one of which mentioned the bamboo hat Du Fu had perched on the top of his head. I’ve mentioned this poem on this website before — maybe you remember it. I suppose then Suboptimalism must be the Li Bai of Neocities. This would then give my life some purpose: I could aspire to be the Du Fu of Neocities, writing poems about him (I’ve already written one, as those with any dedication towards the Saddle all already know), tracking down the coordinates in the Pacific ocean that his body had been airdropped at, so that I might tie those poems to a cinder block and let them drop down into the salty waves — my last sacrifice.

When Suboptimalism had written his semi-live Las Vegas diary, my friend Stephanie — a Las Vegas native — had gone from Shanghai to Seattle to stay with her brother in what must have been a week of slow discomfort if her later narration to me was anything to go by. Mere days after Suboptimalism left Las Vegas to return the Pacific Northwest, Stephanie had in turn left the Pacific Northwest to return Las Vegas. My representative in the United States had passed him by, as seems to be the norm.

What can an internet guy like the Suboptimalist do with the friend of a reader of his blog? If they were ever to cross paths, she’d at least have to stay up until 2am the night before (hopefully the jet lag would make this easy) studying up on his backlog in order to make the encounter valuable for either of them. I can’t help but feel that would be impossible. None of my friends trust my taste in websites enough to do more than skim an blogpost I send them, let alone diligently read through an entire website — especially not one that heats up a laptop computer to boiling temperatures, eating through an entire battery charge in five minutes, the way Suboptimalism’s website does. And so my representative was hopeless from the start — we can only be representative of ourselves, it turns out.

Suboptimalism is still alive, as far as I’m aware. His death was just the confluence of several mysteries flowing through my subconsciousness — not anything to be taken seriously. So while he’s alive, let’s rejoice in all the lessons a Suboptimalist has to teach us. Have we paid enough attention to the nuances that permeate his webpages? Will our notes we’ve taken remain readable tomorrow? Or are they merely splotches of ink and long curly lines — an illiterate child’s imitation of cursive?

Lately I’ve been listening to lots of compilation videos of Phantasy Star Online music while at the office, pretending the game I work on is PSO, which of course it’s not.

I only ever played PSO: Blue Burst briefly around 2010. My brother played the original a lot, back when it was a somewhat current thing, and after he left for college I developed a strange nostalgia towards this game I’d never played myself — only catching glances of him playing it from time to time. I was in middle school then, staying up until 3 or 4am every night. I’d already gotten knee deep in emulating old games at that point, so when a stranger on a video game forum I posted on at the time mentioned that you could still play PSO on private servers, it seemed natural enough to give it a try.

I remember feeling like an intruder in Blue Burst, the same way I would feel seeing Shonen Knife at some punk bar in Baltimore five years later — I was in the land of middle-aged men who all already knew each other, and I was nervous about revealing just how small a child I actually was. At the time Blue Burst was only five years old, though I suppose going through the trouble to play on some private server made it feel like I was engaging in an act of archaeology. It really is quite strange: around that same time I started watching Elfen Lied, which I’d found out about from a website called socksmakepeoplesexy (which may have been my earliest inspiration in making a website of my own). The Elfen Lied anime felt like something out of the ancient dreams of my predecessors, yet it was also a product of the year 2004 — six years old at that point. Maybe because I was first introduced to it as an object embedded in this internet lady’s personal history, it too took on the gravity of history. Or maybe it was simply the fact that 2004 preceded my own introduction to anime as anime, and everything that existed before I started watching anime “seriously”, in the sense of trying to understand it as an art-form, might as well have existed forever.

The proprietress of that website had also played PSO at some point in her youth, which I suppose is another reason I was interested in the game. I never really made much progress though. I probably played it for around 20 hours total, which seems like a lot to me now, but was nothing back then. I’m not sure if I ever dared join in anyone’s party. When I did see other people wandering around the mostly empty lobby, I was terrified they’d notice me. I just did story missions by myself, listening to the music. The fact that the game was online, that there was some group of hobbyists out there who’d made such efforts to put together their own servers to replace the servers the grand old company Sega had once run — thinking about all of that made the game feel so mysterious. I didn’t even have a clear idea what a “server” was back then. Now the tables are turned and I’m one of those shadowy people that make online games happen, which feels strange whenever I sit down to think about it.

When I was in my college game developers club, the club president seemed to have some weird complex where she wanted to prove her mom that making games and playing them are two completely different things: that she’s not just wasting time having fun, but is doing something important and productive. I suppose I can appreciate where she was coming from, but at least for whatever it is I do at this company, the line between working on an online game and playing it feels so hazy as to be invisible. The teammates I work with are all spread across different floors of the office building we’re in, so we communicate entirely by messages. All my coworkers were raised on MMOs and MOBAs, so I suppose that continues to influence the way they communicate, even in a professional setting. While talking to them in Chinese, I see the players of my game, all back in America, talking about possums they’ve killed or their job as a fireplace salesman. Somehow it all mixes together in my brain, and the massive world of menus in the game get superimposed on top of the massive world of menus that is the WIndows operating system — then I stand up from my desk to use the bathroom, and all of that feels like a dream for the thirty seconds it takes me to pee and wash my hands. Somehow my workplace isn't my office, or even the table that I sit at, wedged between coworkers working on other games — my true workplace is the world inside the computer.

I wonder what it would be like to play MMOs in Chinese? My company makes games solely for international audiences — they’re all too raunchy to get official releases in the mainland. Instead of possums and fireplaces, what would Chinese people talk about while wasting away their lives late at night in the guild chat? My only experience with this is those sad days I spent in Sichuan in 2016 playing Maplestory in a “netbar”. I don’t think I’ve ever written about Sichuan on this website (a period of my life I now realize is closer in time to the PSO days than to today). I’m not about to start talking about it just yet, so instead I'll merely state that my Chinese back then was nowhere near adequate to extrapolate very much about the lives of Chinese Maplers from the messages they sent.

Since coming to Shanghai, I’ve been too scared to go back into an internet cafe. If I did go into one, would I just play Maplestory again? Maplestory is over 20 years old at this point, far older than Phantasy Star Online was when I played it. Am I going to spend the rest of my days comparing the relative ages of different objects at different points of my life so as to exclaim in wonder at the flow of time?

Yinyin has a friend named Duoduo (多多), whom I always assumed was some tattoo-covered lady wearing torn-up clothes, like all of Yinyin's other friends with reduplicated syllables for names. It turned out, however, that Duoduo was actually a middle-aged British man. He used to be one of those jobless people who lived in Shanghai by leaving the country every few months to reset his visa status, though that sort of lifestyle became untenable after the pandemic. He had to move back to London and cultivate for himself a big blond short-banged haircut like the lead singer of Cheap Trick. This was his first time back in Shanghai since 2021.

When Yinyin asked him what his MBTI type was, he said he wasn't sure — all he remembered was that it was the rarest MBTI type of all. He asked me to translate this into Chinese, and for a moment my brain malfunctioned. Instead of 罕见, which would be the more appropriate translation of "rare" in this context, I said it was the 最珍贵的, "most precious." Like some kind of inverse Freudian slip, after I referred to him as precious, I started to suspect that maybe this middle-aged British man really was precious — and not just in the way that the lives of all sentient beings are precious. He was wearing a white t-shirt with the Shenyang Conservatory of Music logo on it, bragging about how he’d bought half a dozen of them, so when one wears out he can always wear another.

For a few moments, it was just me and Duoduo talking alone — he switched chairs to sit within six inches of me so as to hear me better. If I'd asked him to send me his worn out Shenyang Conservatory shirts in the mail after he returned to London, England so that I could take up the mantle and continue wearing them until the logo faded out completely — or even until the threads gave way, exposing my bare nipples — would he have agreed?

I'm sure there'd be a price attached to it though — and as tends to be the case, I doubt I could afford it. Goodbye Duoduo! Goodbye forever!

I wanted to write about the city of Portland tonight, as well as my friend Mippy, who grew up in it’s vicinity. This is, in part, because Friends of the Saddle Michaelmas and Loneliwish moved to Oregon recently, so I figured they might be interested in someone else relating his nearly forgotten Oregon memories. Though the reason is that I keep promising Mippy that I’ll write about her on this website — that I’ll immortalize her in internet prose, so that her name will be remembered long after we’ve all returned to dust. I’ve never been able to put together the energy to do so though. Usually I just casually mention her in the midst of relating an anecdote that is primarily about something or someone else. I write instead about all sorts of other people who don’t really matter — though I won’t state who those people are, at the risk of hurting their feelings, should they be reading this. It should be so easy to write about Mippy. She’s at least as interesting as Neal Cassady is depicted to be in On the Road, and, like Kerouac, I’ve travelled across the North American continent on the ground in order to hunt her down. Of all the friends I’ve ever known, Mippy is the one I’ve had the most adventures with in the greatest variety of locales. She’s had a multitude of strange boyfriends all with murky backstories. She’s the person who convinced me to drink Monster Energy, which, in 2020, my body transformed into the only piece of writing of mine that has any real value (not published anywhere). Yet whenever I sit down to tell the tale of Mippy, I have no idea what to say.

I feel like I always end up making fun of the people I write about. I want to say this is entirely by accident, but I’m sure there is some latent malevolence lurking inside of me. This is my website, which I control entirely — the tables are turned, so it’s my chance to strike. Yet I catch myself in the midst of these shenanigans and turn my 讽刺 into a kind of sentimentality. I suppose part of why I struggle writing about Mippy is that I don’t want to put her through that process. Maybe I could get around that by writing about her ex-boyfriends, trying to create a Mippy out of the negative space of all these curious individuals whom I never really knew all that well, though Mippy would take me to look at their windows through the chainlink fences outside their apartments. Or we’d hide in grocery store aisles to gaze upon them as they worked at their butcher jobs, unaware of my existence as the observer. But I don’t want to write about her ex-boyfriends. In abstract, they seem like great material for a blogger, but the abstract is useless to me.

I wish America could be like China, where every city has its own little language. What language would they speak in Portland? It’s so sad to cross a continent and be confronted by people who talk exactly how they did back in Baltimore. Or at least how the white people in Baltimore talked. The old people in Portland had a certain cadence to how they talked I suppose, but I’m always too scared to make friends with old people. I was scared they’d talk to me and be able to tell I was just another trespasser. So I didn’t talk to any old people at all, other than perhaps a cashier or two. Portland, at best, felt like a whole city of people whose lives revolve around consuming media — though maybe that's just everyone in the world at this point, with varying degrees of ostentation. None of the things I like hold any currency in places like Portland, so I'm sure if I lived there long enough, I'd feel sad and lonely. The little time I was there was nice though.

I woke up at 4am this morning with this line from the Classic of Poetry ringing in my head:

This is from 東山, Eastern Hill, the poem of a man narrating his return home after having been conscripted to pull carriages around with a bit in his mouth like a horse for three years. In the context of the poem, these worms were just one of the sights he sees before he reaches the overgrown ruins of his old home and finds his wife sweeping away at the floor — yet, lost in the anxious restless semi-consciousness that I found myself in this morning, I thought I was one of those wriggling worms, white as chalk, living my life on a mulberry leaf, eating away at its green fibers.

There was a certain comfort in convincing myself I was a worm. I thought about my boss, whom I always so scared of saying Good Morning to when I encounter her in the elevators or hallways of the office. I say the full phrase 早上好 and, after the delay that it takes her to realize I am speaking to her (fear turns my morning greetings into a faint whimper), she responds with the single syllable 早 ! spoken from the bottom of her lungs with enough force to make the whole floor resonate. If I were a worm, or perhaps a single consciousness spread through the bodies of many worms, there’d be no need for good mornings. I could live on her scalp, feasting on her blood, laying my eggs, and accumulating brood after brood until our numbers are enough to leap to the heads of other coworkers, like European sailors piloting their ships to new continents and enslaving the peoples they encounter there. Me and my spawn — despite our meagre stature, we’d dominate the entirety of this shadowy corporation’s workforce. Though, after further consideration, I suppose what I’m imagining is actually lice, not silkworms — an entirely different breed of small white insect.

At some point, after enough anxious thoughts like these, I gave up on sleep and went to the kitchen to heat up the pizza I’d had for dinner last night. I looked at my phone and saw a text message Xiaoxi had sent about an hour earlier. She said she’d forgotten her key, and instead of knocking on the door and waking me up, she had gone to Yinyin’s house to sleep. Yinyin lives in the big tower across from ours on the very top floor in some kind of renovated attic. I felt bad about this — despite all of Xiaoxi’s efforts, I was awake anyways. Though maybe sleeping at Yinyin’s house is a pleasure of its own.

Xiaoxi’s been tending to her friend M, who has come down with a certain form of illness that I’m not going to even try describing, for similar reasons to why I’m incapable of writing about Mippy. M’s father also has come down to Shanghai to try to help his daughter, but it’s all quite a lot to handle. All of M’s friends — even her ex-boyfriend — have been having meetings in Xiaoxi’s office, when her boss isn’t there, discussing what to do about M. Now M is in the hospital, and Xiaoxi stays with her late into night, her sweat alternatively dripping down her whole body, then drying in the hospital air-conditioning. M’s father tries to converse with M between fits of tears getting in the way — and the smell of the excretions Xiaoxi’s body produces when she’s nervous fill the room. So, it felt like yet another cruelty that I’d inflicted upon her when, after a day spent on this other person, she never came home out of consideration for me.

After my reheated pizza this morning, I managed to fall back to sleep. The deepest sleep of all is always the last hour and a half of unconsciousness I force myself into before having to wake up for real and bike to the office, stuffing Xiaoxi’s key into a shoe outside the front door to let herself back in with. I spent the whole day in some kind of extension of that unconsciousness — of the 17 different wordless dreams I drifted between during that hour and a half. My own excretions soaked through my t-shirt — a by-product of the garlic sauce that came with the pizza. I thought about M. I’d always assumed that if I’d come down with an illness like hers, no one would know except for maybe my mom. She’d lock me away in a closet and everyone I’d ever known would forget about me, as I slowly descend into old age, the shadows staining my skin. I can’t imagine what friends I’d have who would take pains over me, other than Xiaoxi. Maybe such people exist, but they’re scattered over the planet, and would never know anything about me’s changed unless I sent them a long epistle explaining in detail all that’s happened.

When I got home from work, I made my favorite form of spaghetti sauce, which is 80% spinach and mushrooms, with just a tiny bit of tomato. After I got back from walking the dog, I saw that Captain Jay had sent me an email. After Microsoft shut Skype down, Captain Jay and I stopped talking. He sent a few cryptic emails, but when I replied to them, he never answered. That was in May, so it’s been three months like this. Suddenly Captain Jay is writing to me at length, expressing himself like a normal person, making fun of my blog, talking about old dreams and describing his urges for lesbian pornography. (I feel like I need to specify that Captain Jay is a he/him lesbian, not one of my "dude-bro" friends (which I don't actually have any of), in case that affects your reading of his consumption/creation/contemplation/philosophization of lesbian pornography.)

Anyway, it’s so nice to hear from you, Captain Jay — I’ll try to write back to you soon. An apple, an unblossomed flower and a slice of toast, all walking hand in hand between two barb-wired fences — such is the life we live!

Living in America, it seemed like I was always taking buses from one city to another. Maybe it was simply a matter of not particularly liking any of the places I lived, so I tried to go somewhere else whenever I got a chance. Greyhound, Megabus, and Van Galder when I lived in Madison, WI — these are the three bus companies I interacted with most. I remember being so excited to get one of those fabled $1 Megabus tickets from Boston to Philadelphia to visit Captain Jay — do such prices still exist? There were also a handful of smaller more mysterious companies that would stop in the parking lot of the White Marsh mall north of Baltimore.

When I’d take day trips to New York, returning home was always a big source of anxiety, because I’d often be scheduled to arrive only a few minutes before the last city bus arrived. I’d then have to transfer from that bus to another last-bus-of-the-night, again allowing for only a thin margin of error. One time I missed that transfer, so I ended up walking the remaining two hours to get home. I wasn’t very familiar with the northwestern parts of Baltimore — they existed in my imagination pretty much solely as the backdrop I had to pass through to get to White Marsh. It was only that one time, at 1 AM, that I walked through the area on foot, and since it was dark, my only lasting impression is that of an inky blur. It was foggy and wet, and when I finally neared my home, walking past the massive mural of “Mr. Kim”, it felt so much more mysterious than it usually did, when I’d run past it in the middle of the day.

I think I’ve become afraid of traveling since I’ve started living in Shanghai. Maybe part of the issue is that, by default, one would take the train from one city to another in China. I used to fantasize about trains in the United States, but other than the MARC from Baltimore to Washington, DC, there was never really a reason to take one — they were always so much more expensive than buses while not being all that much faster. Time drifted by like a river, and, despite all my fantasies, years of bus riding have made it so train travel can never feel “real”.

When I’d take the bus in America, I’d think about all the bus rides I’d had in the past. I would think about the old lady I met when going to Pittsburgh who asked to pet my hair since it “looked very soft.”

“Maybe I’ll dye my hair pink too someday,” she said.

When I take a train in China, it just feels like getting on a more streamlined plane that never leaves the ground. There’s no bumps and turns, no sudden speed differentials as we get on and off the highway. All the cities in the country might as well be connected by underground tubes with little LED displays inside simulating weather and scenery, like the advertisements that once entranced me so outside the windows of subway trains, in the dark tunnels beneath Beijing.

It’s about 90rmb to take the bus to Shaoxing (the only city I have any desire to visit in the near future), and 30-70rmb to take the train. So I’d be paying a premium to engage in those bus-riding feelings that I’ve convinced myself I miss. I’m sure I’d board the bus to Shaoxing and feel nothing. Then I’d arrive in Shaoxing, forgetting why I wanted to come in the first place, and have to wait the whole day until the time comes to return home.

A few months ago I started getting Youtube recommendations for this guy’s videos. I watched a few of them, none of which I remember well enough to comment on. What stuck out to me was the little slogan he’d made for himself about “Joining the Literary Renaissance” on Substack, which you can also see in the descriptions for all his videos. Sometimes, on his Substack, he writes LITERARY RENAISSANCE in all-caps.

I’m terrified of the “Literary Renaissance.” I’m terrified of getting sucked into this slogan, so delightful and tempting, despite my having no idea what it could possible mean. The Renaissance was a revival in interest towards Greek and Roman art and thought. If this guy and his friends on Substack are building a Renaissance with their own bare hands, what is their Athens? Authors who lived less than 200 years ago, many of whom I was exposed to in middle and high school without putting all that much effort into seeking them out?

When one learns Literary Chinese, there’s a list of “canonical” pieces that one gets pressured into reading, whether you like it or not. That’s how I ended up discovering Han Yu. In his essay 原道, a polemic against Buddhism and Daoism calling for a revival of Confucianism (the “Original Way” of the title), he ends on a melancholic note:

Paraphrasing, Yao’s teaching was transmitted to Shun, who transmitted it to Yu, who in turn transmitted it to Tang, the founder of the Shang dynasty (now we’re skipping some steps), who transmitted it to patriarchs of the Zhou dynasty (skipping even more steps), until it ended up in Confucius’ hands. Confucius transmitted it to Mencius, then Mencius died, and there was no one else to transmit it to.

For a thousand years, Han Yu is implying, there was no transmission. None at all — all the way up to Han Yu’s day! It feels like an astounding thing to claim, when we’re so used to thinking of Ancient China as being synonymous with Confucianism, but the Neo-Confucian revival all happened after Han Yu’s death.

When I read Han Yu’s writing, I feel a man who is very much alone, lost in that world of Master Kong chatting with his disciples about “The Odes.” I imagine him as a man with all sorts of strange interests and personality quirks that, at best, earn him a kind of cautious respect from his peers. Perhaps this is mostly just a fantasy induced by half-understanding the handful of essays and poems of his I’ve read. Maybe I'm being charitable, attributing his violent injunctions to "turn their [the Buddhists' and the Daoists'] men into [real] men, burn their books, reposses their monasteries, and let the former kings' Way shine forth to guide them" as a kind of misdirected release of such love and yearning. Yet I can’t help but imagine “The Literary Renaissance,” as an abstract concept, is built on top of this loneliness, this life spent gazing at people who died a thousand years ago, with whom it’s impossible to establish any of form of lineage a lawyer might recognize — the melancholy of an insurmountable gap. There's more to it than that, I'm sure — one must put their loneliness to work, so to speak. Yet the lonely knowledge of a predecessor, unreachable, who lived a life nothing like your own, in a world unlike your own, who likely would never recognize you could he or she gaze back in your direction — that's where it starts.

Have I ever felt that kind of distance towards anyone? I suppose I have... I must have! And yet I can't remember to whom...

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