Posted on Sunday, 11/08/26.

野ざらし紀行

I take a green car between 新宿 and 小山; it’s only the second time I’ve been in 栃木県. For the past four days the atmosphere has been a clear and sun-bleached blue. It rained for thirty five days and now there is no sign of it——like a pneumonia patient asking eagerly for food, their forehead’s slick heat replaced by cool, benign salt. Weather like this makes me feel magnanimous. I combat this by sharp and ill-advised espresso shots early in the morning. I come up on the espresso while on the train——I feel empty and rarefied. Consider the two words: 酸味 and 酸鼻. Being immature in another language encourages me to hawk philology; unpracticed academic output is nitrogenous and good for the worms of the mind.

Heavy loops of sheathed cable drape near the rail sleepers, able to accommodate volumes of electric current that might pleasure us if only we could stay awake to experience them. As we leave 東京 proper the station platforms shrink down to their original and basic function. There is something soothing in the name of the station we’ve just stopped at: 土呂.

I hope constantly for some stability in my opinion of my life and station; something about this must mean that I haven’t lost enough yet, not nearly. I exhibit that most embarrassing of impulses to dash myself over sharp igneous things. I think, sometimes, when I scroll through podcast clips where the caller has decided to cheat on their wife at the age of fifty-something, about the practiced assiduousness with which many of us try to lose or destroy everything we’ve ever scraped together, in part because narrow survival of such trials would affirm, almost unbearably, the value of the saved thing, and the skill of the person, and so on.

vitreous

It’s now a month later, or so; my time in 益子, sifting through pottery, rests more heavily now in the pictures I took with my phone than in my literal body. I sent some of them widely. I make a little Instagram post of the sun-warmed station and the interior of a bakery-cum-microbrewery.

Yesterday I disassembled by bike, sandwiching its rhomboid frame between its wheels, securing it with little day-glo bungies, and wrapped it in a thin, peat-colored bag made of some advanced polymer. Bikes are required to be broken down and wrapped up for train transport here. I recall the massive, electric, mud-crusted, fat-tired commuter bikes that’d zoom onto the roomy BART cars, all heavy with zippered frame bags and lithium battery packs, inevitably piloted by a true character. The bag I bought came with the bungies, and a built-in cinch, and a shoulder strap, and its own holding bag. The first time I bag the bike is awkward and slow, though for the return trip it slots together easily and compactly. A taxi-driver in 藤沢 taking a break watches me roll up, place down my bag, and dirty my hands to rearrange all that aluminum.

I find a high-quality PDF of Angle of Yaw. Mr. Lerner says:

Reading is important because it makes you look down, an expression of shame.

He’s such a little stinker all though this. Says stuff like: I’m on my umpteenth Pabst. The pivot of the smaller stuff is all the dangling referents, the teflon entendre. The cute raucousness of kid in a candy store and a bull in a china shop. Makes me oh-brother and eye-roll, yet here I am rapt in the loud café this morning (Nov 8) among the wagies on their spreadsheets, doing such things as closing my eyes to try to feel what he felt, that poor, poor man.

The bald girl is interested in boredom. I’m interested in algal cells and fungal hyphae. Our grant is awarded in installments of cigarettes. We are trying too hard not to be funny.

On Saturday (11/08) I rode from the terminus of a branch line of the 小田急線, the town of 藤沢, along the coast towards 逗子, and then back again, which is around twenty miles. This passes through 江ノ島 and 鎌倉, which are more famous and stuffed with people. If anything the bike has gotten more pliant with use, any awkward edges worn away. I’ve oiled it and worked this oil through its crevices. I’ve tightened the chainring bolts and seated the back wheel a little truer. Still, the brake-pads cry out for fresh rubber and the cable housings are all gunked up. During the ride I tuck in behind men wearing lycra and clipless carbon shoes, testing how difficult it is to follow their pace, though mainly they are sedate. Their composite bikes, which are fragile and stiff and rattle noisily when coasting, have all the grace of a rarefied dog breed doomed to dysplasia and blindness.

On Sunday I wake up late. The morning is cold, and I stay under the blankets for a while, fingers idle in the pile of my sheepskin. I slink out from the warmth to check on the persimmons, to fill my water bottle, to stare a little at my ground glass window, behind which is the deep yellow sun. The day passes simply; I take the train up to 吉祥寺 for the made-up task of buying lip-balm, because I am almost out, and the cold mornings have left me feeling chapped. They don’t have the Weleda I’ve grown to like, but they are the only place I’ve seen that imports Burt’s Bees, and I nab two tubes. I poke around used clothing stores, of which I am more tired of now than just about anything in the world. I pinch a strange cotton-wool CDG shirt in black between my fingers. Inspect some mossy Issey Miyake pants (too short). I think things to myself like that in the absence of strong community I turn readily and embarrassingly to consumption, and that the impulse to consume against my stubborn hermetic affect leads to elaborate hypotheticals or dreams of consumption. In another store I see and feel a pair of Nest Robe Confect pants with diamond quilting in a pretty, dark sumi color and a gentle half-linen cloth. Stopping at a curio shop in 逗子, the old woman who ran the store asked me what I collected, seemingly expectantly, excitedly. I made some half-assed answer about glassware, and indigo-dyed fabric, both of which I have in only modest amounts. I tried to guess, from what she placed in the vitrines closest to her seat, what she prized most——who she was, what she was all about.

anaemia

Some recent obsession with 都築響一. Long bike to the 多摩川 riverbank. Persimmon printed fabric bought from Sou-Sou. I mail another, printed with cucumbers and vines, to the USA, from a mailbox near 池之上. Revulsion, briefly, at academic stricture and impotence. An overwhelming, facile desire to hone and whittle lapidary things. To talk to the men who collect life-size dolls that I’ve recently found the innocently barebones blogs of online, because of the 都築響一 connection. I buy a t-shirt commemorating his 2002 exhibition in ゑびす, which is beautiful and which I now prize.

My propensity for severe lovers leaves me endlessly despondent for simple affectionate signals. I am waifish about them. I subsist on low-protein bone-meal. I scry the morphemic slurry of their epistles.

金木犀

Sophie sends a little bouquet of images. I miss the Bay, though only as a child, as that is when I left. At night, after the typhoon, there are corners of Tokyo that smell strongly of 金木犀, or osmanthus. The etymology tickles me. The scent is unbelievable and many despise it.

As my persimmons have dried and wrinkled along their peeled cusps they have released a faintly sweet and benign smell. Today, one week and one day after I hung them on my small, metallic rack, I massaged them for the first time. This 初揉め, I remember from past years, is the most critical, and their interiors are impossibly soft; I palpate internal structures, maybe septa, or loculi, and gently encourage them to homogeneity.

I’m not sure what would be soothing to me. Recently I’ve been wishing for long stretches of unconsciousness to flatten out the kinks in my brain——to leach from me whatever bad oxytocinal cycles keep me wrapped up watching videos online. This has been worsened by little clusters of interviews at ill hours. I watch the movie 豚と軍艦（1961) and as usual fall in love with the lead actress, who I learn is also in 鬼婆（1964). In an attempt to soften the impact of pre-recorded media I route my Mac Mini through to my 14’’ CRT and futz around on the internet archive for low budget 1980s Japanese pink films to tune out while writing.

mass production

There is some correspondence between the local 喫茶 and the nearby retirement center; a man sighs after every sip of his midnight black iced coffee. It’s been raining for months now. The phrase, I read, in the PDF of Denis Johnson’s debut, that a jolt of fear could burn all the red out of one’s blood. Soft cantonese radio from somewhere around the corner, in the kitchen. Pour-over made but reheated in a microwave. Dreary, wet breeze coming through. The shop has two internal chambers; the deepest for the old women who smoke. Loculi.

All aluminum and veneer; the sense that things before the war were all somehow whittled (fettled?) into existence. Thinner, more tenuous, more illustrative of the paucity of good material, of the need for every mechanical interface to be scraped toward perfect marriage/interference. Overcompensation for this is the reason behind all of the cellophane here, I think.

Something in the flaccidity of modern mass produced denim is disarmingly sad. An image of this stuff coming out and onto massive rolls, all sloppy and resigned. Thread running unimaginably fast through vats of blue-black chemical suspensions. I can imagine myself getting tired of dressing in mossy, wrinkled garments with hand-felled seams, if I had the money. I don’t remember, when I think about it a little harder, what it is I so dislike about the tiny brick-red beanies that balding men in expensive glasses and deep-dark denim wear, besides that I imagine if I were where they are I’d be doing it differently, better, a little less sheepishly. I’d be slinking around blasted Bushwickian warehouses in a daze. How is it that the plastic on these automatic doors has yellowed so much? Is it just cigarette tar laid down over years? Denis Johnson’s flooring ability to cheapen every image——it gives me cavities.

歪み

Time with R. The slow Sumida river. Naval battle YouTube videos. The fever breaking. More Phoebe listening. Considering religious conversion. Demoralizing developments in professional mathematics.

At the twelfth anniversary of a bar we’d both never been to, watching her face redden gently with the cider, the late summer evening warmth, a faint sheen and ease of expression. She tells me about growing up at the edge of an immense desert. For the same reason I was born in New Mexico, her existence is snared inextricably in the American war apparatus. With Tritium. She tells me she was supposed to be a twin. We realize we were born three days apart, now a little over twenty-nine years ago.

The stiff aluminum bike frame is kind when I push into it, eager and tense, and speeds me down the western Tokyo roads. クネクネ. I pass from 杉並区 to 中野区 somewhere. The yard of a school gives a view of two massive paired towers with strange alcoves cut into their faces, interrupted by parabolic dishes. We have left the era of parabolas, it feels, sometimes.

The Taiwanese-born Japanese artist has left, in her wake, hundreds of metalized acrylic surfaces heated and formed into soft shapes. White walled galleries. R inspects them with me. We observe our twisted forms in their warp. I find a smooth brown acorn on the side of a walking path and press it into her palm.

A small replica Edo-era city, completely inside. A mechanical cat, badly manged, is bolted onto a roof and screams at ten minute intervals. The day night cycle is around twenty minutes. A guide from 北海道 tells us about her daughter’s time in San Diego, which neither of us is very familiar with. I find myself hoping, from some distance behind my own body, that I am speaking in a casually funny and warm way. I think: jocundity. Behind even this I enjoy, quietly and distantly, the feeling of self-consciousness and protectiveness and risk I’ve developed around R, all of which is intermisced and dispelled briefly in soft natural maneuvers. I open an umbrella over us when the rain finally catches the city, before she leaves to take the 半蔵門線 home.

Blasting Phoebe while walking home from the microbrewery outside downtown Kitchner. Too little food and two medium ABV pints (west coast IPA, Pilsner) kneads me into emotional Jell-O.

Rifling through racks of graphic tees cools my ganglia. Something pretty limbic recognizes vague patterns, trends, shifts in weave and cotton staple length. Summer’s end means they’re half off, the shirts, and I find a soft green example from the 1980s for the University of Toronto’s anthropology department, whose name is given in the international phonetic alphabet, which I associate with Sophie. When I send a photo sometimes, the response is something lozenge-smooth, like ‘wowie.’ The laundered shirts are infinite and soft and silent to the touch. I sift and they warm my fingers. I’ve acquired enough that my knowledge of their tags, hem stitch patterns, fabric weights, allows me to blast through racks. I see but don’t buy a XL butter yellow 80s example for the Aricebo observatory in Puerto Rico, which I associate with the movie Contact and my girlish crush on Jodie Foster. My standards are very high. I have certain specialties like early software release tees and niche academic department one-offs.

dehiscence

On Monday it rains. I feel affection for the flat, sparse landscape of Waterloo. It is all strip-malls and deciduousness: kin to a larger, transnational region of which my mother’s native Minneapolis is part. All habitation and infrastructure is stretched thinly across the unkempt post-glacial moraine. The landscape could be said to ramble. If it were a little warmer it might be some of the most fertile farmland in the world, I think. It’s late August and the winter is barely held back. The time for planting is long past. There is a Dairy Queen and a brightly lit asian grocery store selling imported cracklins and steel cans of coconut water. I walk across six lanes to gather rations, and sleep soon after the sunset, near 9pm.