Drumbeats torture my mind, growing weaker and more feeble each and every day. Any kind of music with percussion in it seems to make its way through my brain blood barrier and poison my consciousness. I’m sitting at our living room/dining room/bed room table typing this, and even now, every percussive beat I’ve heard today is still echoing inside of me, all at once, drowning out the sound of my own thoughts.

Sometimes human voices sound a bit like drums. Or rather, the impact of their voices against my flesh hurts, much as I’d imagine someone beating me with a drumstick would. In the last month, too many disharmonious human ghosts have exited their original hosts and been transmitted to me — the ghosts of people I hardly even know, infecting me the same way I might get the flu from a stranger sitting next to me for five minutes on the bus. I’d be ok with a single human ghost inside of me, or even a major triad of ghosts, yet there are as many ghosts inside of me as Abraham counted stars in the sky, and each is tuned to a different frequency.

I wish I could do away with music. For some reason, people keep assuming I’m a music person. Maybe they see me writing about music here, and assume that must mean I like it — as though I were a person who writes about things I like. I wish I could go back to the silent hallways of Chaoyang District Library in Beijing as I remember it in 2018 after having searched for it for so long (I was GPSless). I wish that, instead of melodies and rhythms, my mind was soaked with dusty streets and sunlight and the saliva of old men. I wish that I could drag this saliva soaked head, too heavy for the neck it’s been propped upon, up to the second floor reading room, where a single seat at a bookworm-infested table lies open for me, where I could ignore all the scorn these study monsters might direct at me and use the Chinese copy of Fortress Besieged I’d brought with me (and was still unable to read) as a pillow, where I could finally leave this world and let the experiences my skin has absorbed over the years compost into inhuman abstractions. Why did I have to wake up after that short 20 minute nap in Chaoyang? Why couldn’t I have gone my whole life dreaming there? Why couldn’t someone have lifted the needle from the record and let existence dissolve precisely at that point? Why did I have to go back to the Chaoyang District Library last year? Why did the whole place have to feel so unrecognizable to me? Why can’t I just finally return to somewhere I’ve been before for once, instead of always finding myself in a new instantiation? a mutation? a fragmentation?