In August and September I was posting every weekday in what I retroactively named my “Four Weeks’ Blog.” Yesterday, I made a new page called the “Four Years’ Blog,” because I've been thinking about the 4 years from when I was 17 to 21 when I dreamed desperate dreams of becoming a blogger. I was writing that entire time, so I might as well posthumously declare myself to have been a blogger. After I turned 21 and went to Beijing, another persons’ guilt was injected inside of me, and I became so determined to make something of myself that I stopped writing. So it was only for four years that I was a blogger. Thus the name. Of course in this “Four Years’ Blog,” I’m not posting any of the writing I did during that time, but I’m hearkening back to the feelings I had then, simply because that’s (sadly) when most of my current feelings were first formed, if one can talk about concrete “origins” of feelings.

I wanted to try releasing the bits of writing on this page in massive fonts, which you might have seen yesterday. There was a time when my life revolved around fonts so massive only a single word could fit on my computer monitor. It throws off the rhythm of reading, and I feel lost inside an endless stream of words — a delightful sensation. But on second thought, I don’t think I’ve yet earned the right to write so big. So I’ve returned to using normal sized fonts.

I started my Four Weeks’ Blog in August after failing once again to write a short story. I was sick of putting all this mental energy into soulless fiction, so I finally gave up, renounced all literary ambition, and figured I might as well try being a blogger for a month instead. My usual modus operandi is to announce I’m going to do something, then totally fail to do it. In hopes of making a change, I decided that during my month of blogging, I’d make no attempt to explain what I was doing. This came back to bite me at the end when I announced that I was done writing every weekday. Someone who I’ll refer to as my serial-misinterpreter saw this and began saying that I was shutting down my website for good, and wrote what felt like a kind of "eulogy" for me, summing me up as a person based on this misunderstanding that I'd quit my website. Later on, when I mentioned an anecdote about Number Girl in my letter series with Balckwell, he completely misrepresented this on his own blog as me bragging that I’d never met someone else who likes Number Girl — the exact opposite of what I’d actually written. Though he was also honest about not actually reading it — he was just going off how his girlfriend described what I’d written. So really his opinions should have been completely meaningless to, and yet...!

All of this caused me a lot of distress, to the point that I was no longer able to write anything for a few weeks. I kept imagining the serial-misinterpreter reading me again, and I’d try to preemptively argue with him. I would plead to him “This isn’t just internet irony like you keep suspecting me of! I am trying my best to be sincere!” I’d be writing about one topic, and almost automatically I’d find myself writing on a completely different topic as a rebuttal to one of his misinterpretations. Then I’d feel embarrassed about still feeling this strange childish pain after so many weeks, akin to the feelings I had in school getting yelled at by a teacher when I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and only getting in more trouble when I try to defend myself. And so I was trapped in this cycle, unable to write anything.

I suppose I’ll use this opportunity to more fully relate that anecdote of “the first time I met another person who had listened to Number Girl,” since doing so would perhaps shed some more light on the point I was trying to make by bringing it up. I keep forgetting my life isn’t some literary canon everyone’s already familiar with. The people who find themselves trapped on this black-backgrounded webpage aren’t necessarily going to understand the import of the allusions I make to things that happened to me over a decade ago.

The anecdote goes like this: When I was 18, I had a “girlfriend.” I’ve written about her many times before, in different contexts. I’d go to her house nearly everyday after my classes and sit on the edge of her bed. She had a guy who was the true object of her dreams, a man with perfectly circular glasses whom she’d met in New York that summer. He was at least ten years older than her. He made mixtapes and sent them to her by email. My “girlfriend” and I would sit in her room and listen to these mixtapes, and then I’d go home and listen to them by myself. This is where I first heard Mort Garson, Luminous Orange, and Inoyama Land, punctuated by musicians I already knew like Jun Togawa or Takako Minekawa singing songs new to me.

She kept on talking about this man from New York, and soon enough I had my own fantasies about him. I added him on Facebook, and amazingly enough he accepted my friend request. This was a decade ago, so it still wasn’t that strange for hip guys from New York to regularly post on Facebook. Once I’d been accepted as a “friend”, one of the first posts I saw by him was him talking about the nostalgia he felt for having first heard Shinsei Kamattechan six years before this. He linked to the Tsumanne album, which I listened to over and over. Eventually I worked up the courage to start sending him messages.

I was trying out a new messaging style,
writing in lines instead of sentences.
I don’t mean I’d send each line as
a separate message,
but they’d all be one long message,
filled with line breaks.
I forget if I used punctuation,
but you can get a feel for
what they were like
by reading this paragraph.

He kept calling my messages poems, which annoyed me. He was quite forward. He told me that I’m insane and that he had no idea how to respond to anything I’d written, but I could still keep sending him “my poems” and he’d read them. This made me a little bit sad. I didn’t just want to send messages to him. I wanted to receive his messages too. I tried thanking him for introducing me to Shinsei Kamattechan. He retorted by saying actually he didn’t like Shinsei Kamattechan all that much:

“Manga Sick by Number Girl does a far better job channeling my teenage angst.”

This was that first instance of me encountering Number Girl in a context divorced from Tim Rogers which I referenced in the letter to Balckwell. I’ll now quote myself, where I described the import of the anecdote without telling the anecdote itself:

The first time I met someone in real life who liked Number Girl and knew nothing at all about Tim Rogers was quite strange to me. It wasn't a case of me finally connecting with someone who liked this thing I thought only I liked — I didn't actually like Number Girl (though I do like Zazen Boys). Something much stranger was going on. I had let Tim Rogers, an at-the-time obscure internet personality, define in my mind this band much more well-known than he was, to the point that I couldn't imagine the band existing without being mediated through him. This shock has repeated itself far more frequently since I've come to Shanghai, where there are a lot more people familiar with "lesser-known" (i.e. unrelated to games or anime) Japanese culture than in the US. Anytime an acquaintance talking about their vacation to Tokyo back in 2018 mentions some toponym I'd previously only known from Tim Roger's writing, I think to myself "that place actually exists after all."

Obviously when I read Tim Rogers writing about Number Girl, I knew he wasn’t the only American who liked this band. I’d seen other Americans in his comments sections get psyched about him mentioning them. Yet all of those people seemed to have nothing to do with my world. It felt like a moment of worlds colliding when my very real “girlfriend”, whom I knew all too well be made out of the same human flesh I’m made of, put me in contact with this guy who was clearly as cool if not cooler than Tim Rogers was, and who liked the same sort of stuff he did.

“So this is the kind of person who likes this stuff,” I thought.

Suddenly that other world I’d only known through the internet felt realer, and also more sinister.

I think part of why my serial-misinterpreter bothered me so much is that I’ve already gone through many years of being embarrassed that I “only” found out about music like this when I was 17, reading Tim Rogers’ website. I didn’t learn about it when I was 12 or whatever, going to Japanese bookstores or talking to guys at record shops — what I fantasized as the “correct” way to learn about these things. And again, it’s music that I don’t even like! It’s music that only feels “important” to me because it was important to someone else. It’s of course ridiculous for me to be embarrassed about this, and so I forced myself to write about it candidly. And yet, in my attempts to be honest, my serial-misinterpreter took it out of context and missed the feelings I was trying to express.

I’m referring to him over and over as my serial-misinterpreter to emphasize that, as far as I know, it’s only when he comes in contact with me that the misinterpretations occur. I have no idea if he misinterprets other people. I’m sure there’s something about the way I write that makes it difficult to have any idea what I’m talking about. Maybe everyone else who reads this is also interpreting me in all sorts of ways I’d also feel are “incorrect” if they’d vocalized them in my presence. Yet even the people who email me don’t seem to actually attempt to “judge” me. Without the pressure of judgement, misinterpretation doesn’t feel as painful.

I’m just not used to being judged by strangers who don’t really feel any obligation to understand me before they do their judging. I certainly have made my own share of judgements upon popular artists and authors without any real understanding of them, simply because their popularity seemed to remove any such obligations. When something is popular, it doesn’t feel like it’s made by a human being. It’s just some object existing in the media-landscape, and by judging it I can use it as an excuse to talk about whatever nonsense is going through my head at the moment.

Having been judged, I want even more to escape the picture of “media-literacy” that I’ve grown up with — this ideal of being a hip guy who watches lots of movies, reads lots of books, listens to lots of music, and reviews it all constantly, if not in literal reviews, then at least parenthetically when talking about other things. Media becomes the manifold — and there’s something about being caught up in that manifold that seems so terrifying to me: just being another object for people to review. I don’t think anyone wants to be that. So why should I continue to turn others into these objects of review? It’d be better to find a different approach.