Posted on Monday, 06/30/25.

I read ‘Franny’ again, in the afternoon. From my bed I could see my pepper plant outside, drooping in the heat. At night it swells and lifts its leaves again. The past few weeks have been meteorologically miserable. I have developed, I think, some real anxiety over going out unprepared into direct sunlight, verging on photophobia. So I stayed inside; I drew my MUJI curtains; I adjusted my AC to be low but constant. When the days seethe I often roll around on my futon for a while, at intervals, in petulance. I notice that my chest sometimes catches, especially in the evenings, and when this happens I rub a spot roughly over my heart with the heel of my hand, to smooth the bolus which is either sadness or worry. There is a psychic aspect to this, but that does not mean the bolus is not really there. I thought that the short story was very beautiful——it depicted a sort of spiritual crisis. It also showed that embarrassing habit of speaking indirectly or even obversely about one’s desires for another, where while one might intend to effect coolness or erudition, the result is obfuscation and distance. What is the shape of Total Submission? To openly affect infatuation with another often basically euthenizes their interest, and so we end up intestinally knotted and cerebrally thrombosed. We writhe in our sleep. Salinger says later, in ‘Zooey,’ that anyone over the age of sixteen without an ulcer is a goddamn spy. The story is, of course, also ‘about’ Salinger’s spats and resentments. Salinger wrote many letters, often simultaneously, to many extremely young women for most of his life, proclaiming a unique love in each. But when I read ‘Franny’ I am focused, and feel moved, I think, or at least smoothed, by Franny’s earnest attempt (unto syncope) to communicate what she thinks she’s been given by her little pea-green cloth-bound book, ‘The Way of a Pilgrim.’

I tried to socialize on Friday and Saturday, rather abortively: first at a local restaurant and an underground bar, and then a party thrown by an anarchist space in a crumbling public housing project near 東高円寺. I don’t have the constitution to drink much, and this abstinence allows wan shims to slip between me and the heart of the throng: that usual eschatological feeling that everyone has clumped into discrete jovial units against which I glance and carom. Self-pity feels awful: it’s deliquescent and enmiring. None of this holds much water the morning after, but it’s difficult and self-reinforcing in the moment, and I can’t help but feel ossified and doomed at parties.

I’m not sure what sort of month June is for me, usually. Many of my accounts and projects have started in June. The first time I traveled to Tokyo, in 2017, was in June. Many of my relationships have alternately started or imploded in June. I spent many June nights in C_____ sipping elder-flower tonic water over ice, window open, the smell of the adjacent house’s garden lush and vegetal. Some of this is probably tethered to or cross-correlated with, uninterestingly, the US academic calendar. I ascribe it also to the ecliptic. I think she is also my most common writing voice: June; the same here as for jg, and in most of my fiction. Of course I picked a cliché name. I’m not even sure if my aversion to writing men is honest; feedback on my stuff is infrequent and narrow, and so for all I know I scratch out only the basest misapprehensions.

I’m sure there is plenty to understand about the reticent language of men. They speak so softly and terrifiedly, if one is only to listen. Recently, I have been watching long interviews of Harold Bloom, Cormac McCarthy, Noam Chomsky, John Conway. I watch grainy video clips of most well-known recorded performances of critical scenes in Hamlet. I think about the young man I once advised for a summer in physics, who carried a copy of Atlas Shrugged with him at most times, and deadlifted in the mornings. Such strength. What is the shape of men’s souls? I go through a strange essay by Amy Hungerford on why she refuses to read DFW. I read DeLillo short stories from ‘The Angel Esmerelda’ supine on my futon. I read Kafka short stories about him wanting to have sex with a young female ghost while I ride the subway. I chew through ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation’ in a two days, because I found a copy for $1 on a street corner, and allow myself to imagine it is 2019, and that I am taking the ‘L’ from Garfield to somewhere up past Belmont.

I have occasionally been asked if I have ever thought I was trans. Sometimes I wish I could have appeased these people——at times I have felt relationships could have been mollified or preserved if I had admitted to something, or at least expressed legible doubt or anguish. I don’t even think I have a good answer to the negative. There are perturbations of my life where I attempted to live differently than I do now. I say sometimes, to myself, that I don’t even know what it would mean——this comprising that slippery di-lemma where either there truly is nothing, or there is indeed something, but I also know that I am Totally Unequipped to carry that something to its conclusion, because it would mean annihilation. If I think about this too closely, I feel oblivion. Mostly though, when I am level, and to myself, I say things like ‘I do not think that is my crisis,’ or that ‘I do not think that if I were to expend effort to live a different way that I would be any more present in or satisfied with my life.’ In this way I am vain, and cowardly. But I also think these thoughts are truly felt. The question has not been pressed so seriously, either. Maybe if I were not so isolated, so neuronally-wracked, something simple might be thrown into relief that I hadn’t been made to know before——e.g., if I had an extremely well-paying job and health insurance with reasonable hours in a major American city and spent time with people against whom my life and body were consensually shaped and tested. I have the right interests and insecurities. I know at least the outline of what that life might be like. But I have found comparatively meager handholds on the shapes of my desires. I have, for whatever reason, by the grace of others, or my own inattentiveness, never been made to live very masculinely, to perform it egregiously. I speak seldomly with my parents. Most of my creative expenditure——the stories I write, the emails I send——can abuse a feminine voice freely, and this has felt satisfying enough, and may implicate instead deeper, more oblique, and more fucked explanations than whatever this paragraph is about. It would also be, I chastise myself sometimes (unseriously), too silly, too overdone among people I know or have known. I.e., that at this point to do anything else, to come to another understanding, would be too late, too derivative, too theoretical, too impulsive, too presumptuous, to even begin to claim that thing people would often like to claim: naturalness, obviousness, relief. It may be more curious that I have not yet been made to feel sure, one way or another, by some mechanism of ‘intuition,’ of the geometry of my relation to gendered actions or relationships. When I imagine some more feminine life it is still so distant from that of my sister, or my mother, that I wonder what exactly I intend at all (to such an extent that to exposit further would be messed-up)——and always, at the end, the question, what would it even mean. What would be its mechanism? Where could I possibly go? My life is, and at this time zenithally, mediated and actualized primarily through text to (apparently) no-one, for which such problems of how to (actually) live or act or desire get quite wiggly and irresolute extremely fast. And this mirage-like quality of text, which can operate at the diffractive limit, which can split the brain, is such that any essential conclusions, even those which saturate every word, may have no obvious pre-image in my corpus, in my puttering at the surface. Here it is obvious to be june, and this obviousness signifies nothing.