For four weeks I was a blogger...

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 acquaintance I’d known a decade, the keycards of our respective office buildings still on lanyards around our necks. It’s the first time we’ve found ourselves alone in all this time, and I can’t help but fear they expects a confession. I look them 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 fellow acquaintances 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 thirty-something 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, despite expressing himself quite adequately in Chinese up until then, 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 thirty-something 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...

If I’d stayed in the faith, I probably would have gone to seminary, then grown up to become a failed youth pastor. No church would hire me. I don’t know how to talk to kids, or even young adults, despite being a young adult myself. I’d wonder the countryside, walking barefoot from church to church, begging for a job. In lieu of an interview, they’d grab some kids off the street and tell me to talk about Jesus with them. What would I say?

“Jesus was a man with a beard. I myself am too scared to ever grow a beard. As a child, I remember my mom trying to convince my father to grow a beard, or at least a mustache. He’d often go two or three days without shaving, but never more than that. Why? His father had a beard — he was the son of a hippy, you see. Perhaps his clean-shaven life amounted to a kind of rebellion. I sometimes wonder if my aversion to facial hair is just another inheritance from him — a completion of his will. I've never rebelled. It’s been a decade since I’ve gone more than a day without shaving — and I only go a day without shaving maybe two or three times a year. I am jealous of those people I sometimes run into who can’t grow a proper beard — maybe they’re lacking in the Jesus genes — pagans bound for Hell. They can get by only shaving once a week, and at most they’d have a soft fluffy mustache — nothing like the hard stubble I find covering my face at the end of the day. The best men all shave twice a day. That’s something Humbert Humbert told me once. I don’t dare shave in public bathrooms, where strangers could see me. What would they think of the man shaving at five in the afternoon? Yet Jesus never had these problems. Jesus was the son of God. Did the women he walked past in the streets of Galilee find his beard sexy, the way my mom might have, yearning for my father to grow a beard? Did they dream of bearing Godly children imbued with Jesus’ genes? Of course Jesus’ beard would be so powerful that even his daughters would have little mustaches at least. Yet I think of my own genes, the genes I inherited from my father, injected into my wife, and bursting out like a Xenomorph. My beard-bearing genes can only cause death, I am sure of it. This is the distance between me and Jesus. I can’t imitate him. I can’t learn from him. All I can do is run away from his beard.”

I’d finish saying this to the kids, gasping for breath. They’d look at the old pastor interviewing me and ask if they could go now. “Of course,” he’d say. “That’s all I needed.” They'd go back to playing basketball or smoking weed or whatever it was they were doing. The pastor would then turn to me and say he’d keep in touch. I’d shake his hand, bid him adieu, and I’d never hear from him again. On and on, I’d continue through the countryside, jobless for eternity.

I had another bout of insomnia last night — I finally fell asleep at 6:30am, and had to get up for work at 8am. I was doing so well before this. I went a whole two weeks sleeping about as normally as could be hoped for. Hopefully this doesn’t begin one of those chain reactions where I can’t sleep for more than an hour at a time for the next month.

I used to hold to the philosophy that I should do mentally intensive activities in morning, when I have the most energy (assuming I actually sleep). In my early days of being a graduate student, my ideal would have been to get up around 6am and do mathematics all morning so that I could be free in the afternoon. Once I started this website though, when I tried to study, I instead had the irresistible urge to write disjointed sentences about no clear topic that I kept fantasizing might one day turn into something (Record 17 is a good example of things I wrote while I was supposed to be doing mathematics that I later stitched together).

When I finally escaped from mathematics, I could start writing in the morning without any guilt. I engage in the intense struggle to form coherent words, and while I usually come out of it empty-handed, I console myself that at least I’m using my brain.

Yet I’m starting to rethink this philosophy of mine. When I was in elementary school, I’d wake up at 6am to play video games before going to school. No matter how tired I was, I had to get my morning Pokemon in — how would I manage to survive to the end of the day without the afterglow of my DS still trapped on my skin? I sometimes wonder if I could recreate the kind devotion to video games that I had as a child, when games felt like the only thing in the world of value. I had a purpose in life, because I was so certain that, somehow, my future adulthood would be devoted to games — what else was there?

I mentioned last Monday that during the summer of 2020, Mippy convinced me to start drinking Monster Energy, which coalesced in me writing a novella. For about two weeks I’d wake up around 9am, walk to the 7-Eleven five minutes away in the hot summer sun, slathering myself in sunscreen beforehand so I’d feel horribly oily for the rest of the morning, and buy one of the sugar-free Monsters.

I experimented with all the different flavors. There was the purple flavor, whose copy talked about the psychedelic dream of the 1960s. There was the green flavor that tried to evoke islands. Yet what stuck with me most was the orange flavor, which advertised itself as a beverage for people who wake up before dawn in order to catch the best waves or to bike the best trails — in short, people who orient their life around experiencing that bliss that can only be revealed to those awake when the sun rises.

I read this marketing copy over and over, every time I bought a can, feeling guilty that I was using this potent stimulant for novel-writing instead of its advertised use. I certainly did outdoor exercise at the time — namely running — but I always liked running in the middle of the day when the sun was at its peak.

There had been periods of my life when I’d get up at 5am to go to the NCR trail with my dad and run through the forest, but that already felt like a lifetime away when I began drinking Monster Energy. I would often take the kinds of feelings that running in the sun made me feel, combine it with the battery-acid-like sensation of Monster Energy dissolving my gut, refract it through the prism of early morning sleepy-adrenaline, and then place that on my childhood obsession: video games. It’s here that I recall a half-remembered sentence that I thought was found in Tim Rogers’ 2006 Fukubukuro applied to After Burner Climax, but which I can’t seem to track down, so I’m sadly forced to paraphrase it in a form far less affecting than the original:

“It is precisely because my hobby is engaging in perfect stress that, in daily life, I remain in perfect calm.”

The gamer who lives on Monster Energy... who needs max energy so as to game properly — why can’t that be me?

Imagine how wonderful it would be, to create a little shrine to gaming in some corner of my apartment, where I could go early in the morning to drink an orange Monster Energy (oh, how long it’s been since I’ve had one…) and engage in that very serious business of having intense and concentrated fun — like Haruki Murakami's father praying each morning for all the Chinese and Japanese soldiers who died in the war.

The only problem is I don’t know what I would play. Does intense action still exist for me? Where would I find it? Or would I just play Pokemon, like childhood me did?

When I think of any particular concrete game — After Burner Climax for instance — all of the early morning religious fervor I fantasized of immediately dissolves away. And so I go yet another day not playing games in the morning, or the afternoon, or even the evening.

How do would I even start playing a game? What would I be doing it for? “Is it not too late”, I scream. “Is it not too late to return to game? To even know what a video game is anymore?”

Or am I already lost?

The first time I ever drank coffee as an adult was on a Thanksgiving in Boston, when I was 21. I’d had coffee once as a kid, but disliked it enough that I didn’t dare try it again for nearly a decade. I had to go through several quarter life crises before it occurred to me to give coffee another try. My dad and I had just finished our Thanksgiving dinner at a Sichuanese restaurant, where we’d sat just the two of us at a big round banquet table that could hold ten or more. Despite being the kind of person who retweets stuff about how humans were meant to subsist solely on raw red meat and how everything else is poison, my dad would always forgo meat whenever we ate out together. We had vegetarian Mapo Tofu, Yuxiang Eggplant and Green Beans, which the servers at the restaurant perhaps thought was quite pathetic for as high and mighty a holiday as American Thanksgiving is supposed to be. We finished our dinner and went out for a walk nearby. Very quickly we got cold, so my dad suggested we go into a cafe to have dessert. At that point, the last time I’d been in an cafe had been half a year earlier, when I was in Beijing and accidentally wondered into one during my many hours lost on the streets. Cafes were such an alien place to me. The cafe my dad took me to was a dark place with concrete floors, dimly lit by orange lights that you could pretend were candles. My dad suggested the place because he figured we’d have pastries. Once inside though, I was suddenly overcome with the urge to try coffee. I was jealous of all the serious looking Bostonians, drinking their after-dinner coffee that Thanksgiving evening. I was wearing a sweater and the pea coat my brother had given me six years earlier, covered in cat fur when he’d dug it out of the closet for me, after having acquired a much fancier pea coat. I always felt like an idiot wearing that pea coat — like some kind of sad marooned sailor bracing the winter alone — but it was the only jacket I had. My dad suggested I try a mocha, since it’s “basically a dessert.” As I drank it, my dad scoffed at me for actually taking up his suggestion to drink this sugary beverage. He only ever drank his coffee black, straight from the French press. If he did buy coffee, it was only shots of espresso.

When we got home, I changed out of that itchy sweater and the bleached Levi jeans I wore at the time into basketball shorts. I laid down on the sofa which served as my bed when I lived with my dad in his tiny studio apartment, and immediately fell asleep. Somehow the coffee had done the opposite of its advertised effect and instead made me extremely tired. I slept all the way through the night and woke up at 8am, which was the time I’d normally be just going to bed in those days. I worked the night shift at a 7-Eleven, but for whatever reason I had that night off — I can’t remember if it was just because I always had Thursdays off, or if I’d been given the day off.

My original plan in bringing up coffee was to transition to writing about the Malaysian lady on the internet who I was frequently messaging on Line at the time. She had asked me to be her “practice boyfriend,” because she wasn’t sure how to talk to men in real life. In memory, that Autumn in Boston, working at 7-Eleven and trying coffee for the first time, was defined by spending my nights messaging her. But I realized just now that I don’t remember a single conversation we had, except for one time when my phone ran out of battery while I was in the middle of a conversation with her one morning, just after I’d gotten off of work. I panicked and ran as fast as I could to the nearest library so I could use the library computer to log onto Facebook and explain the situation to her. She said she’d momentarily thought something horrible had happened to me when I suddenly stopped messaging her. It seems so amazing to me now that anyone could think that back then. I was much more polite about messaging in those days. I’d respond promptly, and when I had to go I’d tell the other person. Nowadays I take weeks to reply to messages, and when I do find myself in a real time conversation with someone, I often disappear without a word the moment I don’t know what to say.

I wish I remembered more about her. I’m starting to become suspicious that perhaps I just turned her into a symbol of all the happy things I did during that period we talked. If I went into a bathroom with a mirror, I’d send her a mirror selfie. If I walked aimlessly through the streets, I’d take pictures of the leaves falling. If I tried coffee for the first time on a Thursday that just so happened to be Thanksgiving, I’d tell her about that too. Yet the only things I remember her saying to me about her life are the kinds of details I don’t feel like I should share in public. I seem to remember the day to day existence of other internet acquaintances I’d known in that era — e.g. the lady precisely 30 years older than me who still lived with her elderly mom and fought with her constantly, whose best friend had stopped talking to her several years earlier, only to one day suddenly send her a single smiling emoji with no other context, whose iPad charger was broken, but who was too tired to go on the journey to the store where she could buy a new because it would require a thirty minute bus ride, so instead she went weeks and weeks without using her iPad, dreading the day that her family was going to move to a new house, refusing to pack her things despite her mom yelling at her everyday to begin doing so. This was someone who just stayed at home everyday, and I still remember all the minutiae of her life. Yet the lady I was the “practice boyfriend” of — I don’t remember a single thing about her. We began talking one day around the time I began working at 7-Eleven, and stopped talking one day, almost immediately after I stopped working there, I remember quite clearly my anxieties from that period, all the conflicts I had with drunk strangers at my job or people trying to steal stuff and how terrible I felt whenever I had to accuse them of stealing. But I remember nothing of her.

During my last month in Boston, I tried coffee one more time, when I was walking in Brookline along the Green line, coming home from the Brookline library on foot rather than taking “the T.” I’d quit my job and had a few more days before the journey back to Baltimore, so I was returning my books before I left. It was in early evening, just as the sun was setting, and the air was rapidly growing colder. This time it was a latte, which seemed like a slightly more acceptable thing to drink than a mocha. I had this fantasy that if I drank a hot beverage while I walked, I wouldn’t feel so cold, but it didn’t seem to work at that way. The coffee made me sweat, but it didn’t really keep me warm — and in less than five minutes the coffee was cold anyway. When I did finally get home, I was physically tired from having walked two hours, but hyper from the caffeine — that magical exhaustion that the first cup of coffee on Thanksgiving had induced in me was completely absent.

In my early days drinking coffee, I pretty much only ever had it after dark. I would have many nighttime espressos with my friend Shawn in Baltimore as we made games together until two in the morning. At some point though, all that stopped, and I began to “respect the coffee” as a morning beverage holding immense power. Maybe this coincided in part with my girlfriend teaching me to make coffee myself, and suddenly I could have it everyday rather than only having on semi-special occasions. Coffee became divorced from cafes or other people’s homes, and became something like cereal or instant noodles.

“There’s more cafes in Shanghai than New York” — this is a factoid that’s been repeated to my enough different people that I can only assume that they’re all victims to the same covert marketing campaign. All those Shanghai cafes are meaningless to me — I’ve never had coffee at night in one of them.

When I hear the word “pass,” no matter the context, I think of the Big Black song:

He had what they call
“Passing Complexion.”

The song makes “passing” sound so lonely. Standing on one side of a line, separated from all the people on the other side, yet at any moment knowing some monstrous hand could come out and grab you, dragging you back across the line where you belong. The line shrinks around you, until every single human being feels like “the other,” and maybe your own self does too.

I often forget that “to pass” isn’t something inherent to the laws of physics or the animal kingdom. It instead is a concept that derives from exams. It always amazes me reading classical Chinese literature how psychologically pervasive the imperial exam system was — it was the central metaphor all of society was based around, to the point that pornographic novels like The Carnal Prayer Mat named sex positions after imperial exam vocabulary. Of course, this really shouldn’t be that surprising to me. The society I come from isn’t radically different in this regard. We all grow up to become adults having recurring nightmares about showing up on the last day of school for a test we never prepared for. We’re also surrounded by Japanese-imported pornography with titles like “Classmates” and “School Days” (not to be confused with School Daze). It’s just that I’m so embedded in the locality of my own life, that minor differences in terminology and outlook can feel magical and otherworldly.

A real human being is the one who “passes” — again using the word without context, in as abstract a way as possible. Life is an exam one is simultaneously preparing for and taking every day. Passing never feels very good, because it just means there will be a more difficult exam tomorrow. To make one’s whole life about passing and then one day fail results in a kind of identity crisis.

Perhaps this is why, at one point or another, I found myself identifying as a failure whenever it felt necessary to identify as something. So much is denied to the failure — for one, since he refuses to pass, he, by default, is “no longer human” (the word 失格 of the title 人間失格 is an antonym of 及格, which of course means “to pass.”) All those succulent wonders that the world reproduces each day in advertisement must remain sealed within the realm of imagination and fantasy.

I keep hoping that somehow 0 will flip around to infinity, or one of those Daoist paradoxes might take effect where the useless becomes useful, and failure becomes its own kind of passing — for instance one passes one exam by failing another — but then life becomes about choosing which exam one prioritizes. Isn’t this still lonely? It feel likes a condemnation of all the people who worked so hard to pass what I turned away from. Have I abandoned them? Why must I always be erecting walls, no matter what I do?

A Confucius of the University might rise up and say something like “the true gentleman passes one class by studying for another.” How would I respond to that? What does that even mean?

When I read other people’s blogs, they’re always talking about their parents. Sometimes they’re trapped in their parents’ house with no future prospects and no hope of ever leaving. Sometimes they’re people currently living far away from their parents’ influence, and so instead harbor on childhood trauma. Regardless, I never really am able to imagine what their parents are actually like, the way I could so clearly visualize Proust’s parents when I read the first half of Swann’s Way around this time last year (only to get distracted almost right away). Blogging doesn’t seem to lend itself well to impressionistic portraits of other human beings, or at least one’s parents. Why is that?

I often wonder, “What is a parent?”

There are all sorts of games like Pokemon, where you raise hundreds of infantile creatures, but you don’t give birth to any of them. At most you breed them. I sometimes encounter anti-breeders who boast about how they will never have kids, and they refer to all the other human beings as “breeders.” In this case “breeder” refers to someone who gives into the animal instinct to birth spawn, but in the context of Pokemon, a breeder isn’t actually doing the birthing. They simply force two other creatures to mate and birth, and then take the progeny away and raise it as their own. Is a Pokemon breeder a parent to their Pokemon? Or is a Pokemon breeder like the American university, acting in loco parentis?

On the other hand, you also have all sorts of breeders in the first sense who can’t really be called parents. You sometimes find advertisements in your email spam filter trying to locate them:

Busty Women Seeking Immediate Impregnation

These women are rapidly approaching menopause and cannot wait. They are not looking for companionship or love — only your semen, which you must personally deliver. The transaction is strictly confidential: You will not be held accountable for child support and cannot be traced. No matter their numbers, you must be willing to impregnate them all.

We have determined you have what it takes. You have already been pre-approved. Reply now to help these women out!

When I think of my own parents, it doesn’t seem like anybody could reverse engineer them just from looking at me. Much of my adult life has been a kind of denial of my own genes. I sometimes feel like I should write about them — for how else is anyone reading this website going to understand me? Yet I’ve been trying so hard to silently annihilate any trace of their existence still remaining in or on my body, that I realize I don’t really know anything about them. I mean, I can state facts about their lives (and often do), yet I can’t seem to assemble those facts into a pair of coherent human consciousnesses. My body and theirs — somehow I’m connected to them. I fell out of my mother’s body like bird droppings splatting onto a car window. And yet they seem so alien to me. It’s impossible to consider us as a single organism, or even to imagine my body as some kind of fleshy peach-like pulp grown around a hard kernel containing whatever “inheritance” it is I owe to them. So what are they then?

This morning I finally accomplished what I set out to do at the beginning of the week: I woke up at 5:30am, walked to Lawson to buy a Monster, and played video games (or rather a single game) for an hour and a half.

I hadn’t had a clear idea of what I would play this entire week, which is perhaps why it took me until this morning. I wanted to play some 3D action game, but the kind of 3D action I imagined didn’t exist. Then I thought about the time I played Summer Carnival ’92: Recca for a contest on the forum I used to post on. I remembered that being nice. The game was just a few minutes long — something one could play over and over until reaching perfection. Yet I wasn’t in the mood for that either — I wanted something at least a tiny bit new.

What I ended up with was Saturn Bomberman, simply because I had downloaded it three years ago and never played it. At the time I’d watched a long video about every Bomberman game while I was sitting on the floor in my Wisconsin apartment. I didn’t have any sofa or comfy chairs — just a coffee table and a pink shag carpet. The video produced a strange paradox inside of me: on one hand, it awoke an inspiration to play more Bomberman myself, yet on the other hand, he’d already played them for me already. All the mysteries I might have been curious about from playing the first few levels of two or three Bomberman games as a kid had now been revealed to me — or more accurately, they had been communicated to me in the mental framework of this random Youtube guy I hadn’t heard of a week prior. When I did play some Bomberman games, namely Bombermans (Bombermen?) ’93 and ’94, it felt a little pointless. These games had already been fitted into some massive evolutionary tree, which somehow wiped away completely all the value of their gameplay as “individuals” (if it is indeed appropriate to refer to a video game as an individual). So I lost interest almost immediately and didn’t play much Bomberman at the time.

Almost the exact same thing happened to me later on with classical Chinese poetry when I read the quite authoritatively titled book How to Read Chinese Poetry. In retrospect, I think this book was a horrible way to learn about Chinese poetry. Like the Bomberman video, it took the evolutionary approach in structuring itself. They were up front in the title: this was a book concerned poetry, not poems — that is, a macroscopic abstraction, not real feelings that real people had at real moments in time and wrote down for us. In the process of trying to present the whole of Chinese poetry in a systematic way (that incidentally would be easy to test students on in exams), it managed to temporarily kill of whatever interest in poetry I had at the time.

For instance, the book presents five and seven character lines, that is, those favored by all the Tang dynasty Shi poets we know and love, as the “ideal” form for Shi poetry, based on an argument that such line lengths were more or less “determined” by the topic-comment structure of the Chinese language. This makes it feel like the entire thousand years that preceded five character lines becoming the norm was simply a matter of generations of poets not being able to awaken to the “fact” that five characters are more linguistically productive than four or six. These earlier forms feel like the misguided early attempts of a primitive society, not powerful expressive tools in their own right.

Similarly, there’s a little table at the front of the book with serial numbers that certain common themes/genres in Chinese poetry get referred to by in the main text. The individual poems don’t matter — instead a poem is nothing more than a theme, a form, and an allusion or metaphor. Once you pick one of each of these, the poem practically writes itself. That’s the impression you get reading the book. As time went on, new forms and themes were added, and so the art of poetry gradually reached the state of “perfection” achieved in the Tang and Song dynasties. But I already knew how the story would end as I read through the early chapters. The poems they introduced all kind of felt like mere stepping stones — curiosities — not ends in and of themselves.

Later on when I came back to the Shijing, Qu Yuan’s poetry (though not Lisao), the “Nineteen Old Poems”, the works of Cao Cao, or even what Han dynasty Fu I’ve been able to make sense of, I’ve found that all I have to do to appreciate them is pretend, at least for a few moments, that the poem in front of me is the central gravitational vortex around which all other Chinese poetry before and after it orbits. This is perhaps the most honest way to read anything — because for the person writing the poem so many thousands of years ago, when they were in the moment of writing the poem, no matter how briefly, it really did fill their whole consciousness — their whole world.

I had a similar sense of pleasant surprise playing Saturn Bomberman this morning. “The pixel art is perfect, the music is perfect, and I feel perfect,” to paraphrase the announcer from one of the Ridge Racer games. Sadly, I don’t have any wonderful insights to share with you about it. After playing for that hour and a half, the caffeine ran out (so quickly!) and I ended up going back to bed to slept another hour before heading to work. I came home, ate dinner with my girlfriend, then got lost in a Discord server crawling with cyber-Confucians, where I read their doctrinal debates dating back the past three years.

I’m so tired now. It’s hard to write when I’m this tired. Between coming up with the next sentence to write and actually typing it, I keep forgetting it halfway. I am about to collapse at my keyboard, but because of the vows I took, I need to have something for today. So with that, we’ve reached the end of this post — nothing more than the fulfillment of a contractual obligation.

I think I’d be a cooler sort of person if I just did things without making my deliberations about them public. Deliberating is quite exhausting. If we were thinking in the abstractions of economics, 20 hours worth of deliberation might exchange for one hour of action. I’m so tired all the time (for no good reason) that I can only afford half an hour of anything a day. So I find myself deliberating my life away without getting much done.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what amounts to a reading list orally transmitted to me by Xie Wang, the proprietor of a Buddhist bookstore I like, and his little buddy Fish. Xie Wang had seen me reading QIu Huadong, and more or less said that I shouldn’t be wasting my time with this nonsense — that I should read Xu Xing instead. I took up his recommendation and bought an old yellowed copy of Variations Without a Theme (无主题的变奏), and Xie Wang was absolutely right. Xu Xing blew everything else I’ve read this year out of the water.

Every story in the collection felt completely different: A young man who dropped out of school meets a violinist who keeps trying to encourage him to pursue literature, resulting in an immense uneasiness. A slightly older man who has no talents at all except for giving strangers directions meets a teenage girl who dates men in their 30s. A different sort of man entirely gets rescued from his drinking debts by a woman he knew as a child, so they get married and move into a tiny apartment which they spend years trying to get out of, but when they finally move into a bigger apartment they find that everything feels off and yearn to move back into the smaller one. You get the point. Now that I’ve summarized three of these stories, I suppose that there might be enough parallels to put into question my above statement about each story being entirely different. But their plots are just a diversion. What's actually interesting about these stories is something else, unspeakable to me. That something else is the magic that contains their diversity. (I’m imagining the different colors of magic Susan speaks of in her distinctive voice towards the end of her cover “Do you believe in Mazik.”)

I hoped that when I met with Xie Wang again to tell him I’d taken his advice to read Xu Xing, he might be able to help me articulate what exactly it is about the guy that feels so fresh and powerful — but Xie Wang merely said (paraphrasing) “Of course you like Xu Xing — he’s one of the best novelists who ever lived, and all he ever published was that thin short story collection.” So I have to somehow figure out on my own where the magic comes from.

After I asked Xie Wang about other similar authors writing in the 80s, he more or less drew a blank. He said I could try Sun Ganlu if I wanted to read some Shanghai authors, but the way he suggested this didn’t lend much confidence. Fish said I should read some early 20th century modernists like Mu Shiying and Shi Zhecun first, both of whom I’d heard of, but had never read anything by. Then suddenly Xie Wang cried out “Li Rui! Read Li Rui!” Fish looked at Xie Wang in shock, like suggesting Li Rui was an absolutely ridiculous thing to do.

“So that’s the kind of thing you like,” Fish said.

This made me feel so sad. Why don’t I know anything about Li Rui? Why can’t I instinctually understand why Fish would be shocked that Xie Wang liked Li Rui?

So I have this fantasy of finally understanding 20th century Chinese literature enough to make sense of conversations like this. Maybe part of this fantasy is swept up in videos like that 8 hour Bomberman journey I mentioned last week, or article series like The Rise and Fall of Final Fantasy, hosted on socksmakepeoplesexy dot com, that I’d read as a child. I’ve always wanted to do something like that, where I embark on some immense “intellectual” journey and write about it as I go. The two examples I gave both involved video games, but my fantasy certainly isn’t video game dependent.

So I keep imagining a webpage where I discuss all this modern Chinese literature while also making excursions through the non-Chinese literature that these authors reference — perhaps reading it through their eyes if such a thing is possible. I’m not sure how I’d create such a webpage though. Up until now, my website has been almost entirely unorganized sequences of words that one might refer to as “essays” or “articles.” That is, everything I write belongs to a discrete unit. How would I go about writing a bunch of in-progress thoughts about authors I’m just gradually getting to know, which all connect to each other, while often coming back to revise or respond to my thoughts as I read more about these authors or discover new context?

As always, I am completely perplexed — and so I will have to keep deliberating, having yet again made no progress on the idea today. I did read the first four stories of Shi Zhecun’s collection Exemplary Conduct of Virtuous Women (善女人行品), and it feels like exactly the sort of thing which could launch a dozen posts on said imagined webpage. It is so incredibly early 20th century European feeling, but not in a way I can clearly articulate. I feel Shi must have read all those important European authors that I haven’t — the modernists. I’d have to go on a quest to seek out these authors and finally read them and contemplate what aspects of them would have resonated with this man raised on Tang dynasty poetry in the last days of the Qing dynasty, writing psychological “studies” of women in 30s Shanghai. Or, for a much more routine exercise, I could go the other direction and merely comment on the strange feeling of seeing these major roads of Shanghai that now bear the names of Chinese cities being instead referred to the European names they had once had, like “Avenue Road” (Beijing West Road) or “Albert Road” (Shanxi South Road).

I guess part of what puts me off of this particular genre of blogging is I feel uncomfortable writing about things that are new to me — that I don’t already possess an immense wealth of “direct experience” with. That’s part of why whenever I write about anything, I got lost in tangents about my own meaningless life — because at least I can be honest about things I actually experienced. Whenever I step outside myself, I get so nervous that I’m going to mess up disastrously and irrecoverably.

From what I can tell, my brother’s descent into atheism was an enormous mental struggle. He’d been way more involved in church than I’d ever been. There were points where he’d talked seriously about studying to be a pastor. He was the kind of guy who both owned a concordance and listened to Christian metal. To say the least, all of his friends were people he’d met in youth groups or at “Purple Door.” So to give up on Christianity meant giving up the entire life he’d lived up to that point. Friendships that revolved around going to church together had to either be reoriented around something else, or given up entirely. A new system of values had to be developed to replace Christian values.

I, on the other hand, didn’t have much trouble at all rejecting God.

The series of events that led to me no longer thinking of myself as a Christian started, funnily enough, with studying Latin. For several years I was filling my brain with all these texts that talked seriously about pagan gods like Mercury and Phoebus Apollo, or which made mentions of Vestal virgins. Saturnalia and Veneralia, or the Kalends, Nones and Ides of each month. It all excited my imagination — and it made me think about history. The realization that the Greeks and Romans actually took their gods and goddesses seriously — that this was religion to them, not “mythology” — gradually made Christianity feel less and less “assumed.” I started contemplating how my most ancient ancestors were all pagans, and that I lived on land to which the god of the Hebrews had been completely alien up until a few hundred years ago.

My brother, like most people who “leave the faith”, did so because science, logic, philosophy or whatever else convinced him he had no other option. I, on the other hand, simply got lost in idle fancies about Diana wandering the forest or Philomela transforming into a nightingale. All of this makes one wonder how much I actually believed in Christianity in the first place. I liked reading the bible and I enjoyed praying by myself each night — but none of that really required much faith.

I realize now that if I had faith in anything, it was in video games. I’m sorry for writing about video games again, but I really can’t help myself! My life since “growing out of games” really does feel like a crisis of faith, the same sort of crisis my brother went through, or that Dostoevsky characters soliloquize about.

To put it simply, until I was around 25 or so, I believed in my “heart of hearts” that, hidden somewhere deep in “the medium” of video games, one could find the ultimate purpose of my humanity. This produced a lot of mental conflicts for me, of course, since I found the vast majority of games incredibly stupid. Like God, the kind of video games that I had faith in, that I’d imagined while looking at screenshots of game I’d never play in Nintendo Power — they couldn’t be found in this world, no matter how hard one looks.

A lot of this was tied up with the fact that I’d been making games since I was 8 or 9 — I’m not sure if someone who simply plays games without ever thinking about how they’re made could feel the kind of intense identification I felt towards games. There was a feedback loop: I’d play a game like Ultima and try to make my own version. I’d play other games as inspiration for my own games. I’d play the original Super Mario Bros. over and over and try to program my own Mario physics. I’d encounter throwaway mechanics like the Koopa shell in Bob-omb’s Battlefield in Mario 64 and spend hours doing the math required to create that same frenetic feeling moving an analog stick around.

When I met “normal” gamers — people who played “worldly” games like Fallout or Elder Scrolls — I’d roll my eyes at them. They’d never know the agony I knew, granted this life mission that I couldn’t articulate. They’d never know my pain, or the sensual pleasures that pain unlocked.

My friend Captain Jay said it best: “For other people, video games are like an old friend they can come back to whenever they’re feeling down. For you, video games are a dark ancestral spirit [like something from a Lu Xun story] that fills your nightmares and drags you into insanity.”

I’m not really sure what went wrong. At some point, around the time I came to China, I could “no longer believe.” Nothing outside of me really changed though. Video games certainly didn’t. Maybe it’s like this passage from The Possessed/Demons:

“On the contrary Shatov, on the contrary,” Stavrogin began with extraordinary earnestness and self-control, still keeping his seat, “on the contrary, your fervent words have revived many extremely powerful recollections in me. In your words I recognise my own mood two years ago, and now I will not tell you, as I did just now, that you have exaggerated my ideas. I believe, indeed, that they were even more exceptional, even more independent, and I assure you for the third time that I should be very glad to confirm all that you’ve said just now, every syllable of it, but …”

“But you want a hare?”

“Wh-a-t?”

“Your own nasty expression,” Shatov laughed spitefully, sitting down again. “To cook your hare you must first catch it, to believe in God you must first have a god. You used to say that in Petersburg, I’m told, like Nozdryov, who tried to catch a hare by his hind legs.”

“No, what he did was to boast he’d caught him. By the way, allow me to trouble you with a question though, for indeed I think I have the right to one now. Tell me, have you caught your hare?”

“Don’t dare to ask me in such words! Ask differently, quite differently.” Shatov suddenly began trembling all over.

“Certainly I’ll ask differently.” Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch looked coldly at him. “I only wanted to know, do you believe in God, yourself?”

“I believe in Russia.… I believe in her orthodoxy.… I believe in the body of Christ.… I believe that the new advent will take place in Russia.… I believe …” Shatov muttered frantically.

“And in God? In God?”

“I … I will believe in God.”

Not one muscle moved in Stavrogin’s face. Shatov looked passionately and defiantly at him, as though he would have scorched him with his eyes.

I’m lost somewhere between Stravrogn and Shatov — somewhere between “To believe in games, you must have a game” and “I… I will believe in games…!”

But how did this happen?

A lot of why I’ve been so interested in Chinese poetry in the last year has been to try to fill the void video games left in me. When reading about early 20th century Japanese and Chinese authors, a common theme is that they had immersed themselves in Classical Chinese poetry as a child, only adopting the novel as their main preoccupation after reading Western literature as young adults. Classical Chinese poetry, perhaps more so than Western poetry, was a kind of "thinking man's diversion." I grew up thinking that literature is serious business — yes it can often be fun, but in the end, we write novels as a way to meditate on society and the human experience. Obviously all of that is happening in Chinese poetry too — but one gets the sense that when kids learned it, it was treated more as something like learning the violin. You read the great poems of the past, and then you wrote your own in the same forms using the same allusions. It was a game you could play against both ancient and moderns alike.

Natsume Sōseki wrote this poem on one of his paintings in the early 1900s:

山上有山路不通，柳阴多柳水西东。
扁舟尽日孤村岸，几度鹅群访釣翁。

A mountain on top of a mountain, no way out;
Willows hide more willows, streams flow east and west.
A little skiff sits all day by the bank of a lone village,
Many times flocks of geese visit the old fisherman.

(Translation from here.)

One can’t help but read this and think of Liu Zongyuan’s poem 江雪 (River Snow) from the Tang dynasty, which Sōseki would certainly have been familiar with:

千山鳥飛絕，萬徑人蹤滅
孤舟蓑笠翁，獨釣寒江雪

A hundred mountains and no bird,
A thousand paths without a footprint;
A little boat, a bamboo cloak,
An old man fishing in the cold river-snow.

(Translation from here.)

In this way, Chinese Poetry is an art that depends on the feedback loop of creation and revisiting the great works of the past — just like video games had been for me. Sōseki had Du Fu or Liu Zongyuan, and I had Miyamoto.

And so I chant old memories to myself… alone on my early morning walk… as the cat’s outside feast upon tuna the neighbor lady sets out for them… though I’ve never actually witnessed her in the act.

After I played Saturn Bomberman on Friday, I put Bomberman ’93 onto my 3DS to play during lunch at the office. Saturn Bomberman is brimming with excess, so I needed something simpler. The first world of Bomberman ’93 is functionally the same as Bomberman for the NES. It’s the core Bomberman experience: you place bombs and watch all the animations monsters have when they die. Monsters move in idiosyncratic semi-predictable patterns. If you press the “run” button of your Turbografx-16 controller, the music stops, but crunchy bombing sounds still play intermittently.

I’d played the PC port of Bomberman ’93 as a kid. It was included on some Bomberman collection CD I’d gotten at Five-and-Below, back when it was possible to buy PC games in stores. It was already an ancient game back then — which is precisely what made it feel so mysterious. Here I am, nearly two decades later, still laying down bombs in the same dungeons, to the accompaniment of the soul-stirring melodies of Jun Chikuma, peppered with Pac-Man “samples” — a game about as far away from Bomberman ’93 as Bomberman ’93 was from me in 2004.

Maybe all I’m really looking for is something to chase the blues away — something like scatting. When I reread Deadeye Dick a few months ago, I suddenly remembered that this book was where I'd gotten scatting from. The narrator mentions about a third of the way through the book an old black lady who taught him to scat while he was in prison, and it made me want to scat too. the first time I read the book back in middle school, I started scatting under my breath, trying to cultivate this diversion like on practices an artform — and I kept on doing it to this day, despite having forgotten the origin of this habit. “Chasing the blues away” — that’s the phrase the narrator used to describe scatting in the book, but it’s never actually had that effect on me. It’s just become another part of my idle existence — a daydream that makes a sound. And still, the blues remain. I’m like the guy in that Eiffel 65 song.

Two autumns ago I read a book called The Part of Me that Isn’t Broken Inside, which tells the tale of a man the same age as me, living in the year 2000 (give or take), with an aversion to both phones and computers. It’s one of those depraved, anti-social, misogynistic novels that one might expect me to like. What can I say? I found the narrator, for all his evil, quite lovable. It ends with him gazing out the window of a taxi, noticing the sun had already set, and realizing what this meant: it was winter. That’s how I feel too. Every day of my life I’m realizing all over again what season I’m in — each time not quite believing it.

Now I can feel the autumn arriving again. Autumn comes early when you live your whole life in an office. The air conditioning is so cold all day that I can almost see a sharp white moon in the sky and hear a howling wind, even at noon.

I wish I had another novel like The Part of Me that Isn’t Broken Inside to read. Maybe I’ll just have to reread it. I wonder what that would feel like? I read it two years ago, but those two years have felt like nothing — two years since I was in Yinyin’s house, hiding in Xiaoxi’s room from the endless cast of characters visiting us each night, trying to drown out their voices with the sound of my own internal narration, reading this book.

I get sick sometimes, returning to the same places in memory day after day. If you zoomed out to look at the totality of my life, you’d find the memories I fixate on are changing constantly — at the very least they change with shift each season. But immersed in each moment of my life, just spending one week on the same memories is enough to exhaust me. Sometimes I’m lucky to feel my fixations float towards a new object — yet that never last more than a few moments.

There was a time when thoughts of autumn brought me back to dark nights spent next to the piping hot radiators, lying upon the big purple futon with intricately patterned purple sheets that I’d carried home from some stranger’s house a few streets away, listening to Philosophy by the Ben Folds Five, a song I’d been introduced to by the show Long Vacation. Yet I'm not sure if my memories will ever return to that autumn again — it's too far away now

How does one forge a new autumn? I mean, how does one make a season new? Any conscious attempt to do so wouldn’t really result in anything “new” — the autumn can only come from outside myself. I don’t get to choose what the autumn does to me. It just invades my body like a disease, whether I want it to or not.

I always feel guilty when I use this website to write about music or video games or even books. To do so is to betray my core values! And yet I keep doing it, over and over…

I have no interests. I am the man who enjoys no music, who’s hated every book he’s read, and who feels only pain when pressing forward on an analog stick, causing the polygonal creature living inside the TV to move forward too. How can I survive on the internet? This is a place where the only thing to do is talk about every single media property one’s ever been interested — even making “shrines” to them.

This word “shrine” is a dreadful trap. A shrine is something I could touch, to caress the place the gods reside, if only I dared — yet I’ve never known anyone to reach their hand into the internet and succeed at grasping whatever lies on the other side. It’s impossible!

Once you’ve written about a video game (or album or book) on the internet and received an email from a stranger who only paid any notice to your website because of said video game article — your life has already undergone an irreversible transformation. What was once an animal consciousness, trapped in the material realm spending sad nights alone, seeking companionship through art, has become an ethereal “voice” with “thoughts” about “media.” What happened to the silence of thought?

For so many years I whispered to myself “I need to type this out to think about it — it’s only by writing that I know how to think.” Of course this was a lie! As soon as I write a thought down, it transforms into a non-thought — ammunition for an advertising campaign.

It’s so easy getting caught up writing about female singers who whisper instead of singing, performing sensual lyrics written for them by middle-aged men with eyepatches — philosophizing about the effect they had on me when I first heard their songs as a 13 year old. That’s essentially all this website amounts to. What would I write about instead? I yearn instead to be the whisperer — the unknowable one — so that others can write about me, and I can just go on whispering inscrutable words that have no need to be interpreted within the framework of language.

Taken in
by the smell of
damp cat fur,
emanating from
your knitted sweater.

I can see so clearly that that’s not you! It's just a front! A diversion! Why can’t anyone else see?

After I got off work today, I went to have dinner with Yinyin and Xiaoxi at a restaurant we’d been to before with Duoduo. It’s whole thing is that they don’t have any set menu — just a bunch of ingredients laid out for you to look at behind glass. You can ask them to combine the ingredients together however you’d like, which is convenient for the particular genre of vegetarian I am: the kind that is terrified by the possibility the restaurant staff might realize I’m a vegetarian. There’s no need to ask what’s in anything or request elaborate substitutions. You always know exactly what you’ll get. I kind of wish all restaurants could be like this.

I got home filled with determination to write today’s “blogpost.” It’s the last one after all — not that I had announced this previously. The four weeks I’d given myself to try transforming into a blogger have finally come to an end, and I’m still no closer to discovering my inner truth than I was when I began. Despite that failure, I figured I could at least end it with a bang. I imagined my friend Balckwell, who is very talented at reading my disjointed essays and succinctly summarizing them in a way that brings out themes I didn’t even know were there. “Maybe I could try summarizing myself that way,” I thought. My very last blogpost could analyze the themes lurking in all the blogposts that preceded it, lay them all out in their proper order, and come to some conclusion. As soon as Xiaoxi and I got home, I changed my clothes and was excited to get started. Then I laid down in bed and immediately fell asleep.

The next thing I knew, it was 1am. The light was on in the kitchen and I heard Xiaoxi mumbling to herself about how she’d broken out in some horrible rash. She had some kind of medicine delivered (is this the joy of living in Shanghai, that you can get over-the-counter medicine delivered to your doorstep at 1am rather than have to embark on the treacherous journey to CVS or Walgreens as in the United States?) and now she’s managed to fall asleep. That left me alone, caught up in my post-midnight anxieties, and I started to wonder if I’d caught her rash too. I wasn’t itchy per se, I’d simply convinced myself that evil was lurking somewhere in the millimeter thickness of my skin. I tried desperately to will myself to type this final blogpost — but I couldn’t ignore that latent non-itchiness. So what else could I do? I took a shower and thought about past showers.

The proper posture for showering, so I’ve been told, is standing. When I imagine “the ideal shower”, it’s a capsule of warmth floating in darkness, and inside I’m standing with just enough space to lift my arms 45 degrees. Yet when I actually get in the shower, I’m always tempted to sit. I’d grown up in houses with bathtubs, and as far as I’m aware, sitting while taking a bath is the only real option available. So even if I very rarely put the bathtub into “bath-mode”, it didn’t seem wildly inappropriate to me to sit in it.

The first girlfriend I ever had found this very disturbing though. She seemed to bite her lip and politely accepted it when it first came up in the course of constant daily conversations, but after our relationship grew distanced, she posted on Miitomo (of all places) about how weird it was that I sat while showering. All her friends, people I didn’t recognize, popped in to express their shock that such a person existed. I’d been to her house and used her shower. It was a bathtub too. I didn’t get where the disconnect was. I continued to sit in the bathtub-shower after that, but I felt a little bit guilty each time.

For so long, showering was my only hobby. I wanted desperately to write a novel called “The Seven Hour Shower” that would take place entirely inside a shower and would last, as the title suggests, seven hours. It had to be a novel, because I wanted to impress on the reader the flow of time. Anybody could write a short ode to the shower, about the sensation of hot water drilling into the skin, the escape from worldly anxieties, or white mist clouding out one’s vision — yet those sensual pleasures weren’t what made showering feel so important to me. It’s as though there’s some other me with his own inner life, his own long history, that only exists when I shower. Real life me is as tenuously connected to the me of the shower as it is to all the different other-mes that exist when I’m dreaming. When I finally do emerge from the shower, the ritual of toweling myself off, putting on my clothes and blow-drying my hair seems to erase any memories of what had happened in shower world. My body would hold onto the experience, but my mind would erase it, using whatever storage space it would have taken up for more important things, like remembering every time I’ve stood in front of an automatic electric door and felt sudden terror when it didn’t open. This is perhaps why it’s so difficult to write this “Seven Hour Shower” novel that’s been haunting me the past ten years. If I have no memories of the shower, what would I put in it? It’s yet another unwritable novel, the only kind of novel I ever try writing.

Now, years later, I live in an apartment so tiny that the bathroom doesn’t even have a sink — I have to use the kitchen sink to wash my hands or brush my teeth. So of course it only has a non-bathtub shower. This has been balanced out by one of those magical tankless water heaters that Walter White made a big deal about installing after he’d given up pretending to be broke around halfway through Breaking Bad. “Endless hot water,” as I remember him putting it. It’s exactly a mechanism like this that makes “The Seven Hour Shower” possible. Since it’s not a bathtub, I stand — just as I always imagined the Seven Hour Shower protagonist doing, but when I took my shower just now, I started to wonder what it was all far. Why do I keep denying myself the pleasure of sitting — of resting my back against the cool ceramic tiles, relaxing every muscle, and feeling the water spray over me for as long as I’d like? The shower floor’s clean, and there’s no one to watch me — certainly the ghost of my ex-girlfriend hasn’t followed me all the way to Shanghai to keep me from sitting? So that’s what I did.

While sitting, I thought about what on earth I was going to put into this final blogpost. I thought about all the blogposts that came before it. What was I trying to accomplish through them?

A real blog requires one to sneak into the backdoors of abandoned buildings, wander the dark alleyways and glimpse upon ladies with brightly dyed hair who’ve gone there to vomit and crawl into a corner to await the sunrise. Part of me wants to go experience all that stuff and write about it. At the same time though, I’m still so enamored by simply being a guy with an apartment. I’m not sure if this is the latent effect of encountering Animal Crossing as a kid or what. I’d be happy to spend my whole life in here, never going outside, writing record after record about beds and desks and closets and — of course — the shower. All my favorite books are about people who do nothing with their lives — so I’m not sure why I feel like I need to be an “observer of the world,” exploring its darkest corners so that I can be the intermediary describing them to you. Maybe I’m simply not confident I have the abilities to make “writing about nothing” interesting?

As the night deepens, I find that all this blogging is making me hungry. I went into the kitchen just now, opened up the fridge, and was delighted to see Xiaoxi had bought my two favorite foods: natto and okra. I’m not going to have them now, but at the sight of them a plan for tomorrow instantaneously formed in my mind: I’ll wake up late and have okra-natto noodles for breakfast. I’ll make myself coffee and read more Shi Zhecun, then get ready to go to Trigger for my friend’s “album release show” at 3pm. I have no desire at all to leave the house tomorrow, but unfortunately I have no choice. I’ve been coerced…

For now though I’ll steam the mantou in the freezer — that’ll get me through the night. So I began boiling water in the kettle, rinsed out the little pot we have, positioned the special rack for steaming things inside of it, poured the boiling water and placed the mantou. As my fingers touched its cold bulbous white form, I thought about the neighborhood dog I sometimes encounter while walking Xiaohei — he’s named mantou. I’ve seen him at the park, his owner throwing balls for him to catch, and calling out his name “Mantou! Mantou!” Before coming to Shanghai, I’d always assumed that it was only Asian-Americans who named their pets after “foods of the homeland.” It turns out actual Chinese people do it too — though after some contemplation, going through the catalog of dog names I’ve heard cried out at the dog park, I’m not sure if Chinese food names are all that common. The other food-named dogs that come mind are “Coffee” and “Whisky”, but those are both western beverages.

It was nice coming home each night after work this last month feeling like I have a mission: how do I find something to write about? Exhaustion would deepen, and I’d become acutely aware of how little time was left to turn tonight’s thoughts into words. “Once I close my eyes, I’ll forget this all.” Yet all of that is coming to an end. Maybe I’ll keep writing each night out of shear momentum, but the obligation to do so is gone. I’ll have to find something else to obligate myself with.

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