Drops of Ink

On Research
On Caffeine
On Waking
On Manias Unattained
On Self-Destruction
On What I Mean
On Beijing
What is a website for?
On International Literature
A Fragment From an Unsent Letter
On Order
On Rain

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When I first met my friend Alice, an individual who liked to say the word "moé", she was working on a roguelike in Love2D that required detailed illustrations of medieval weapons and armor. One time, we'd made plans to go on a photo-taking expedition together, but neither of us had our own cameras, so we needed to borrow them from our school's library. "This is as good an excuse as any to finally return all my overdue books," she said. She'd brought a backpack as tall as her own body filled with photobooks that she was using a reference images to do the art for her roguelike. When I saw all these books, I couldn't help but be jealous.

"Why can't I make something like that?" I thought. "Something that requires research -- something that I'd have to make trips to the library for."

Of course, I spent countless hours in the library anyway, without any external need to do research. There was no purpose to any of it. I'd pick out books about the history of railroads or the French revolution, read the introduction, then put them back on the shelves and continue my wandering. Somehow, that didn't feel the same though. All that wandering didn't amount to anything.

Alice had gone to Art School. At some point she'd dropped out, lived "out West" for a while, then ended up at my public university, a school completely absent of any glamor. Her existence felt like a fresh green gale blown in from another world. She knew whatever it is that goes on behind those closed doors of Art School. All I have is that itch.io game that spells "school" with a Q. Was Art School that taught her to take on projects that required research?

Maybe my own "art" would be more powerful if I researched it too. I yearn for the days when I was first learning to draw realistically. Research was just a matter of looking in front of me. Form, shade, size and angle had suddenly become so mysterious and uncertain the moment I decided to put my pencil to the paper and record things as I saw them. The idea of drawing something that didn't require "unique knowledge of the subject" would have been an oxymoron. I would spend hours and hours staring at my hand or flowers in a cup, trying to capture "the pleasure of the curves." There are John Singer Sargent paintings embedded in my brain forever now because I spent weeks drawing grayscale copies of them in pencil. I never told Alice (or anyone else) about all this time I was spending (wasting?), trying to draw. I felt ashamed at how long I would have to stare at things before I could place them on paper and how imprecise the results always were. Somehow I felt like someone who went to art school would find that all infantile.

Alice never even finished her game! She did all that research, but nothing came of it. Nothing that I can see at least. Now she's a Twitch streamer. Sometimes I open up her Twitch, and wonder what life would be like, if I could still play video games. There she is, playng Pokemon, thinking of clever responses on the fly to whatever the chat says. Does she ever talk about medieval armor? Does she ever talk about art school? Maybe being a streamer is one of those occupations that acts as The Great Synthesis (I'm fantasizing here that "Twitch streamer" was in fact her occupation). Whatever life experiences one had up until then become the precise qualifications necessary to become the streamer that you are. Don't we all wish we had jobs like that?

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Every so often I go a few days without coffee, and I remember the person I used to be: someone who takes three naps a day while still managing a good eight or nine hours of sleep at night. The better part of my life was spent dreaming. I used to suffer so much, endure all kinds of persecutions, all for the sake of sleep.

Then one day I started hanging out with a guy who owned an espresso machine. "Wanna come over to my house and get real caffeinated?" he would ask me. I'd go on the long trek across sidewalks, beneath highways, and into the forest to find his little suburban abode — the kind of place where you can actually get snowed in during the winter. We'd sit at his kitchen table staring at our own respective computers while drinking espresso. He was designing a game about the joy of having legs and sharing that joy with apples and coffee mugs, teaching them how to grow legs too. It was the kind of deep thought caffeine makes seem so easy. Before I knew it, I'd engage in caffeine on my own, without his instigation. Suddenly I was able to do my homework, read books, program games, study all sorts of math for fun, all while maintaining a fruitful social life. It turned out the only thing I needed to become a normal person was caffeine.

Even after coffee, tea and energy drinks entered my life, I still spent most of my time in bed. All through high school and college, my bed was where I did homework. I'd lay on my side and used a hardcover book as a writing pad. It wasn't until my living conditions changed and I no longer had a bed, only a mat on the quite hard floor, that working at the kitchen table started to seem preferable. Lying on my side on the floor for too long made my ribs hurt.

Back in high school, the first few weeks going back to school after summer break, my back would always be quite sore from having to sit upright all day. All summer long I'd been lying down in my room. I'd get exercise of course — even back then I enjoyed long distance running and I'd go outside nearly every day. But when I wasn't outside, I was either in bed during the day, or lying on the sofa at night, playing the PS2 after everyone else was asleep. My bed was where I read books, worked through the exercises of Spivak's Calculus and copied capitula from Hans Ørberg's LINGVA LATINA PER SE ILLVSTRATA. I imagined myself as being one with the Greeks and Romans, who preferred to recline during their symposia. Sitting was something only barbarians did, gathered around their campfires.

When I was 17, my mom took me on a pilgrimage to visit the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis, since Kurt Vonnegut was the one author I liked that she had read too. It consisted of a few rooms in a brick building that housed miscellaneous artifacts from the man's life. One got to stand in the presence of Kurt Vonnegut's typewriter, imagining one's own fingers on those keys, churning out the kinds of witty aphorisms that were printed on the walls of the library (e.g. “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country”). What lingers in my memory more than the typewriter itself was the desk it was placed upon. It was more like a coffee table, rising not much more than a foot above the ground. There’s a photo of him sitting at it, cartoonishly bending his whole body down over this tiny desk to type. This was my first time seeing the workplace where an important man did his important work. I went back home with the determination that I too would someday spend all day hunched over a little desk like that.

When I had a real job at an office back during my year and a half in Wisconsin, I often fantasized of staying after everyone else had gone home and sleeping at my desk the whole night through. The best I could ever manage to do was just take a nap every once in awhile around lunch time. Just as dogs compete against each other to accrue as much territory as possible by peeing everywhere, I only feel a place is really “mine” by sleeping there. Work environments in particular tend to feel quite hostile — to transform them into a place where I sleep, to break down the barrier between dreams and productivity, makes reality all feel less alien.

Today, caffeineless, I took a three hour nap around 5pm. I hoped that after waking up I’d have the energy to write a deep exploration of the human condition, but instead it seems two thirds of my soul have left me, still lost in the muddled journey of my subconsciousness that I experienced while sleeping. The more disturbing my dreams are in the moment, the less interesting they are to put into words. This time I dreamt about a restaurant in a mall next to some (non-existent) structure in Shanghai that kind of looked like the Lincoln Memorial back in D.C.. When I first came to Shanghai it was a lot easier for me to find shopping centers and metro stations “magical” feeling. Since then, a lot of that magic has disappeared from my everyday life, as all the massive seven story malls that felt so impressive compared to anything back in the United States have turned into "the boring part" of Shanghai for me, but I suppose the effect of all these indoor structures first had still lingers in my unconscious. My dreams often involved all sorts of non-existent places, but the memories I have from real life carry over into the dream. Conversely, sometimes I instead get new memories implanted in me by the dream — not something I ever got to experience "the first time", but a longing for something that apparently happened long ago back in the real world. I wake up and realize that not just the dream but the memories too are all false. This was what happened in today’s dream: I’d been seeking a fake Italian restaurant (imagine Saizeriya) on the fourth floor of the mall next to the “Shanghai Lincoln Memorial” that I "remembered" going to when I first arrived in Shanghai, but instead I ended up at another place, a skewer restaurant that didn’t have anything vegetarian. I kept feeling regret for not being able to find the Italian restaurant and staring that the skewer menu in dismay, as nothing they had was vegetarian, and yet I couldn’t leave.

My dreams feel less all-consuming when I drink caffeine. I went about 4 months without caffeine back in 2023, and like today, I immediately returned to the life of sleeping 10-12 hours a day. It was nice and nostalgic, but only really worked because there weren’t that many requirements of me at the time. I yearn for only partial existence, to be able to fade into darkness from time to time as people forget about me, only to reappear. There have been periods of my life where I wasn’t really an important figure in any one else’s life — not even my own family’s. That’s what’s most comfortable for me. But it’s not practical long term. Pretty much any job requires you to consistently engage with one person or another. Having a romantic relationship by definition turns you into a main character in someone else’s life. After I woke up today from my nap, I felt like I had to apologize to Xiaoxi for abandoning her for so long.

It rained all day today, which was another contributing factor to all the oversleeping. I woke up at 11, had breakfast, then Xiaoxi told me a guy she’d slept with seven years ago in Berlin was in the neighborhood, so we went to the noodle place beneath our apartment to meet him. He’s a saxophonist visiting here in China to tour at some Jazz clubs. I was prepared for the whole situation to be awkward — but like something from a Haruki Murakami story, we got along great and talked for two or three hours straight. He asked me how I felt about my country falling apart while I observe it from afar, on the other side of the planet. I didn’t really have a coherent answer for him. He talked about how he only likes tea — he doesn’t like coffee. If me and him combined forces we could form the lyrics (well, a single line) of the only song by Hedgehog that I actually like.

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A mist emerged from my window this morning and soaked the curtains, the bed sheets, the linens, my pillow case, my hair, and even my belly button. The world outside was dyed red. Birds hopped from leafless branch to leafless branch, chirping in that red glow as I crossed the street to the convenience store. Always seeking convenience and never finding it! All I find is tired men who have been awake since the previous night, waiting for their shift to end so they can go home and leave this world just as everyone else enters it.

On the internet, crawling through the depths of other people’s blogs, I encounter reflections of myself, of my unshaven face in the early morning, and I want to destroy them all. Indices of self-exposure – others expose themselves and, in the process, they expose me. I want to destroy the “me” we all become when we step outside of our homes and stand inside the “public space”, objects in the shared consciousness that fills every available plank-length of space-time stretching from my front door to yours. If only I could enter that world without anyone seeing me – if only I could see “the other” without having to have a physical form myself – a fleshy body that you too, dear reader, could poke with a long tree branch if you so desired.

The world of my dreams, it’s called “America”, and I want to destroy it! Let the whole country become empty space, and let that space shrink itself down into a single point – let the topology of this planet become that of a punctured sphere, which it turns out is just the topology of a plane: this is how we'll make the earth flat. None of this would help my situation very much – I would still be myself whether or not America continued existing. I doubt such destruction would grant me any catharsis, and I know not what it would entail to wipe out from existence such a many tentacled political entity. Yet let me destroy it anyways, just to have a taste of the consequences, or better yet the lack of consequences. I’d like to feel for once a cause that has no effect. If there must be an unmoved mover, then why can't I meet the moved-who-does-not-move?

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Several months ago when I was trapped in the ever-expanding travail of properly formatting my graduation thesis, I kept dreaming of the period of state-enforced unemployment I would experience in March and April while waiting to get my diploma, which is required before applying for a work permit. I imagined how much writing I would get done, how many books I’d read, how many sidewalks I’d walk along, how many revelations about human existence I’d have, and so on.

Alas I have been stuck at the first of these. My only hobby is sitting in front of my computer with a word processor open, hoping to write Great Literature, but instead getting distracted browsing Soulseek in order to fill in holes in my discographies for bands I don't even like. Since I'm massively unproductive, I feel like I have to spend even more time failing at writing, so it ends up becoming an all day activity.

When I watched Long Vacation many years ago, it sure did make the unemployed life in a stagnant economy after giving up one's dreams seem a lot more glamorous than whatever it is I'm doing. Maybe I should be standing on roof tops beneath Konami signs, hanging out at bars, or going to see the Ben Folds Five live in concert — all the while spending away what remains of my savings. Maybe then I’d finally learn something about this world and the people who live in it.

Should I then devote my life to just Having Fun? If I was only allowed, say, 30 minutes a day to write, maybe I’d be a lot more frantic about it. As soon as those 30 minutes are up, I’d have to run out of the house and meet up with my multitude of companions to engage in our shared past time of stalking fashionably dressed old men and snapping photos of them when they’re not looking. Would life have more meaning that way? At least if people asked me what I do, I’d be able to show them my stacks of old man photos.

Instead I've been working on another essay that's actually "about" something, which is always asking for trouble. Why can’t I just learn my lesson and only “write where the wind takes me”? Whenever I have a goal in mind, something very specific and concrete that I want to express, I get too stressed out to approach it head on. Instead I have to an elaborate series of rituals that I imagine will induce a state of mania thereby allowing me to belt out an entire 10,000 word semi-comprehensible piece in a single sitting. Very rarely do I succeed in this, but since it's happened twice in my 10+ years of being a failed author, I'm always waiting for when it will happen again.

When I was younger, if it took me longer than fifteen minutes to make any progress with my writing, I’d immediately give up. There was perhaps some sense to this. I had a lot more hobbies back then. But I sure didn't finish very much writing. I felt like I’d have to "learn how to write" first, and then I'd be able to consistently produce, say, 1000 words in an hour, all organized in beautiful sentences about whatever topic I set my mind to. That never really happened. In fact, I'm not sure if I've improved as a writer at all since I was 17, beyond just having a better idea of what types of writing I dislike and therefore not wasting time writing that way. The only reason I've been able to finish a substantial amount of writing in the past few years is simply that I devote far more time than I ever imagined possible to ineffectually sitting in front of my computer and writing things that I hate and will never show anyone. I've also lowered my standards enough that I basically publish anything that I don't hate, rather than waiting for the day when I’m capable of producing something on the level of Saiichi Maruya's Singular Rebellion.

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You told me you were jealous of my sister — so pretty, so pure, so white — but now my sister's in a cult, you're working for a defense contractor, and I have no way of contacting either of you.

I'm not sure if you actually wanted to become my sister, or if that was just one of those things people say to make conversation. I know for a fact though that I wanted to become you. For instance, that icon of the virgin Mary hanging on your wall, staring down on our naked bodies — you hated it. So I wanted to hate it too. I imagined it on my own wall, I imagined growing up with it as a treasured possession of my own mother — and in the process I fell in love with it.

I come from a world of religion too of course, though maybe you didn't realize it. My religion had no icons. When you visited my house, the same day you met my sister, there wasn't a single trace of Jesus, his mom, his apostles, or even the cross he died upon. If only my brother were still living with us back then. I could take you down into the depths of his room and show you his shelves of Christian metal CDs. Then you'd understand the true nature of this religion we subscribed to.

Now as I sit at my desk, thinking about you, I wonder if you ever think about me when you're designing those missiles of yours, surely intended to descend down on my adopted home like cherry blossoms carried by the wind. The skyscrapers will crumble and our bodies will turn to dust. Two centuries of struggle — East meets West — reduced to nothing. I would die and I'm sure you would too not long after, but what about my sister? Will she be spared from the fallout, in her little cabin in the countryside, sleeping peacefully with a warm water bottle tuck into her sheets with her to keep her warm, blissfully unaware as our two societies annihilate each other? At least we'll all be able to meet again, once we finally vaporize ourselves. Will we still know what to say to each other? Will you even recognize my face?

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Whenever I end up saying something or making a point, whether that be on my website, or just in normal everyday life talking to people, I always am filled with regret. Before anyone’s even argued with me, I want to say “that’s not what I meant!”

Every thesis in my writing is unintentional — something I disagree with. It’s not a matter of me being unable to clearly articulate my actual thesis, or even being unable to find a thesis — it’s more than that: it seems that by arguing for one stance, no matter how strongly I believe in it, I inevitably turn into a sceptic. Perhaps my mind is poisoned by relativism. Sure, I believe that there’s probably something like “truth” out there, but my brain is allergic to it. I’m trapped in an inescapable Liar’s Paradox.

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I’ve finally returned to Beijing. I’ve achieved the dream I’ve had ever since I first heard Led Zeppelin’s song Ramble On as a 12 year old: the dream of going somewhere far way and then many years later once again going to said far away place, walking the vaguely familiar streets and whispering to myself “I’ve been this way X years to the day.” In my case it’s only 6, which doesn’t feel as significant as the number 10 used in the song, but one must admit, 6 has a magnitude all its own.

It now makes total sense to me why those images are so haunting and nightmarish — I thought that memory and the forces of projection had somehow warped what little sense data remained pulsing in my brain into something no longer connected to reality. Now as I once again find myself in both the inner and outer edges of Chaoyang, I can see my past self, sleep deprived, hungry, and filled with terror about the future as I fruitlessly wandered the streets looking for a way to stay in Beijing longterm, never having to return to the United States again, despite not even having a college degree. My mind latched on to these massive streets, convinced that they contained the secrets of all existence.

I forgot streets could be this wide. I forgot that this is where my idea of "the big city" came from. Returning here, I understand now why I felt so instinctually disappointed when I arrived in Shanghai. Everything is so narrow there!

I can't remember enough details of Beijing’s geography in order to, say, find a given location on a map. But now that I’m existing in a sea of place names, walking around and taking the bus (but not the subway — the place I’m staying is on the far edge of Chaoyang, where the subway does not reach), I suddenly realize that, somehow, I remember where these places all sit relative to each other. Maybe this is thanks to not having cellular service when I was in Beijing last time, so I had to closely study maps outside of McDonald’s locations with free wifi and memorize routes or find a map at a bus stop whenever I walked anywhere. The effect this has had seems to be very different from my sense of place in Shanghai.

The dream: live in a massive city, yet never leave my little neighborhood. Live the rest of my life knowing there's the possibility to go on a multihour journey to the other edge of the city, yet never feel the need to actually engage in that possibility.

Beijing, shadow world. I wish I could spend my life here at the edge of Chaoyang, where the city is being constructed around us.

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I want to pluck other weirdos out of the cold dirt, like Pikmin, so that we can huddle together and keep warm through the winter. In this metaphor, I don’t see myself as Captain Olimar — I’m just another Pikmin. Perhaps the origin of all my problems is that there aren't any Captain Olimars in sight to crowd behind — or if there are, they’re all very negligent Olimars — the kind liable to get us killed. What makes things worse is I’m an individual of quite nervous disposition. If I do see a Pikmin stalk twitching in the ground, I’d never actually dare to pluck it like in my abstract imaginations. Instead I just whisper to myself “One must venture forth on their own path...” and continue alone deeper and deeper into the forest.

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By being born in the circumstances I have been, it’s been more or less decreed that if I want to become a writer that anyone actually reads, I will be part of a certain team — the international team of writers using English, dominated by native speakers from the United States and the UK — and more importantly, not a part of any other language-defined team, no matter how much I relate to some other language. The only way to leave the English team would be to achieve a “professional” competency in another language.

When trying to read classical Chinese literature, I can’t help but feel how far behind I am compared to anyone who grew up in China or Taiwan. Much of what I’m struggling to read now is at a level that would appear in standard high school curriculum. The standard Classical Chinese courses in college for literature and history majors would go far beyond where I’m at now, after already having studied fairly seriously for quite awhile.

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I didn’t go out with my girlfriend last night. She was out at her friend’s bar until 2am, imbibing on free drinks. It’s a bar for connoisseurs of gothic fashion to dress themselves up in layers and layers of black fabric, do their make up, and come to a place where they feel at home. I’ve only been there once. I felt like an intruder. After sitting their awkwardly for half an hour, another white guy came in and shared a table with two Chinese girls in bikinis. When they stood up, he put his arms around their shoulders and they walked out together — a single unit.

If you came to visit, if I’d never seen you before, and you stepped into that bar, would I think you too were just another loser white guy, here for sinister sexual reasons? Is that why I’m here?

Whispers fill my ears, and I long to share them with you. I still think you’re the coolest person in the world — in certain moments. Then that feeling is gone, and all I want is to be the opposite of you. That’s part of why I always imagine myself as a girl when I think about you. If I really were a girl, we would be two incomparable objects — apples and oranges as the saying goes. We could exist together in peace, love and understanding. Yet I’m not a girl. I’m like you, but worse? Tainted?

I know you’ve said the same to me though — that you wish you could have the same taste for adventure that I have. I’ve always found that strange though. Can anything I’ve done here be called an adventure? But that’s the word you keep using, and hearing you speak of me that way, I sometimes feel like I need to keep up the illusion. When I write to you, I turn truthful stories, everyday anecdotes, into “adventures” — and somewhere along the way they turn into lies.

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My website’s become too sensible. I have about four different places to put things, each with their own defined purpose. I’m worried that this is resulting in me only writing four different types of writing. When I sit at my computer and start typing, after around three or four sentences I start wondering “is this an essay? or is this a micro-saddle? or could I rework it as one of my pseudo-tanka? Or is there some photo on my phone that I could use this as a caption for and post under my snapshots?” This was exactly what I was trying to avoid when I started making this website. The hope was for a kind of pure chaos and inscrutability. E.g. in November of 2023 I started writing “sentiments”, which could only be navigated by the web of cross-references between them, rather than appearing in a linear index. Once I came up with the micro-saddles, my sense of adventure disappeared. I had one place to put any sort of writing that didn’t have a topic. After awhile though, I started to develop a distinct style for the micro-saddles (reaching maturity around Record No. 17), so the freedom they were meant to promote evaporated. Around the same time, a lot more strangers started reading my website, so I guess I felt an obligation to promote accessibility.

What does it matter though? This is my website, and I am on my own journey to create a brand new world of literature that can serve as a starting point for anyone else trying to understand the problems of Modernity. That is what we’re all doing here when we visit the Saddleblasters Saddle Site, right?

I wish people would give me a harder time about these words I write. I guess it’s my own fault in a way — I’m not very good at engaging in timely correspondence. There is only one person who has emailed me an unsolicited critique of my writing, a critique that pierced to the core of how I view the world, and I still haven’t replied to him yet. Are you reading this? Do you know who you are? I promise to you, I have been thinking about what you’ve said over and over — the reason I haven’t replied yet is that I still haven’t figured out the answer. Your influence however permeates everything I’ve written since your email — especially the writing I haven’t published. So I’m very grateful. I will reply to you eventually, perhaps long after you’ve stopped caring.

(There have been other people who have critiqued my writing only after long back and forth emails talking about other things, and while I appreciate that, I feel like there’s something special about sudden and surprising critiques that come from a complete stranger, something that can never be replaced by the words of a friend.)

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As I write, it’s raining outside.

I long to find music that can represent all the things simple rain makes me feel. When it’s raining, it’s more than just a sound. I can feel it with my skin, even when I’m indoors. It’s as though each droplet contains every rain shower I’ve experienced in my whole life. It all returns to me in a single moment — a kind of psychological moment with no real correspondence to anything that’s ever happened.

I’m listening to Nintendo Sound Selects — an old series of albums given to Club Nintendo members that, as the name suggests, “selects” pieces of music from Nintendo’s history (as of the early 2000s). A peculiar song comes on — peculiar by Nintendo standards at least. A woman sings a standard pop melody as the musical style shifts every few bars. This is a song I’ve heard dozens of times before.

I’ll never sing like her. She’s not a pop singer — she sounds like she’s the wife of one of the developers, or maybe just a female staff member that they bullied into singing for them. I’ll never be anyone’s wife. At best I can be a husband — but that most certainly isn’t the same. It’s a different way of perception. A different relationship.

I hit return twice after typing that last sentence, preparing to start a new paragraph. I pause for a moment, realizing I have nothing else to say. The rain has already stopped. I hear the faint sound of a bird chirping.

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