Posted on Friday, 09/19/25.

Application statements have trocared whatever meager gland I squeeze in order to write; however, if I keep to that most optimistic sliver of the early morning, I can eke out some of the more stunted diaristic stuff.

gloomfruit

I’ve been eating yellow kiwi, usually one per night: cool from the fridge and vivisected with a diminutive spoon. I am a glutton for them. The spoon slides easily within the flesh, extracting cones of sunny nacre. Someone told me that the yellow kiwi have been engineered to be eaten together with their skins——but by now I’ve gotten used to their paper-thin demispherical remainders, which fold in on themselves and dry in the morning sun through my kitchen window, adhering scab-like to the interior of my celadon MUJI bowls.

webcams

Didi whisks matcha; the morning sun casts a warm limn on her arm. I don’t see the bowl, actually, only her arm moving, I have a photo on my phone of her when we are at a café in new york and there is a spot of green matcha at the corner of her lips (which press together almost always). Holding on the photo it becomes ‘live.’ I look up the spelling of ‘kouign-amann.’ After the conversation, because I am sad about how many things I forget, I write the following in an email to myself, which it surprises me now to read:

growing diurnal frogs that chirp.
tarantulas don’t have funerals.
too many dogs in the world.
the train is just the right distance to rumble.
girl writing.
sad men become audiophiles.
pedagogical public writing.
humidifiers, expensive aquarium lights.

東北沢 → 下北沢

A true screaming homeless person on my morning walk——I walk down a sloped esplanade (?) which has replaced the former grade-level train tracks, now safely stowed beneath gleaming white luxury retail space. The burial was in 2013. At peak times the crowded crossings could be closed-down for fifteen minutes straight, meaning one had to pick a side of the neighborhood on which to spend the night. Now people move too freely. The town’s heart offers no frictive resistance. The man is screaming outside the Cotopaxi, the Matsuda Eyewear, the ‘The Ordinary’ pop-up shop.

梅ヶ丘

Three of us read books at the cafe’s rounded, naturally-treated teak tabletop. The edge thins enough that I find myself touching it often: worrying it. I read Saunders at the table before someone leaves, then readjust, and there is enough room for me to relax into editing serious documents on my laptop. In memory now I think that when I stare at my laptop I lose a sense that there are windows in a room, or breeze-bent grass outside. I read Kawakami on the train back. In the story an author known by the narrator commits suicide. The story is in an anomalous second-person-past, which I haven’t read from her before.

wordcell

I look up the etymology of monster, then remonstrate. Then I am reading from my copy of Infinite Jest and feeling keen missing of the shape of Cambridge, MA: the sepulchers, the speleothems below MIT. The beautiful bookshelves of my labmate’s studio she shared with her pale, quiet, long-term mathematician boyfriend whose sister I once spoke to for an hour in a bar——a pale classics major recently returned from Edinburgh, newly in publishing, and with whom I didn’t pursue anything because I was worried about upsetting my labmate’s whole thing.

There is some feeling this morning, in the warm wind, despite its rasp and insistence, that the summer’s heart just isn’t in it anymore.

frictionlessness

I walk routes from a fixed set, meaning I have begun to notice other people who keep routine. A woman who runs a hair salon near the convenience store near 池ノ上駅 paces behind a tortoise she lets shuffle down the street, perhaps to wear down its claws or maintain its vigor. The tortoise really moves. At the bend near スズナリ横丁 a man pushes himself backwards in a wheelchair with a wrapped, edemic leg. I saw him again yesterday up near the level crossing of the 京王井の頭線, calculating that the effort required was obviously enormous.

Walking up staircases out of train stations I am made privy to a surfeit of achilles calluses and blisters, some of which the women have bandaged. Thin, almost transparent socks with ruffled hems: repeating floral or cardiac motifs. I listen to the faint smack of heels sticking and unsticking from the thin pleather insoles of chunky platforms navigating safety-textured stairstep edges. I try to remember if I know the difference between a pump and a wedge. What makes a heel ‘kitten’?

八幡神社大祭

On Sunday I bike in the evening again, out to 明大前, where I had taken the train earlier in the day. I drop down to 豪徳寺, from which it’s easy to wend back along the 小田急線 to my home. On the west side of Tokyo streets abruptly begin and end, snaking in honor of buried rivers and drained rice paddies. The moon is low, yellow, and pregnant: the likely reason for the autumn festival. 神輿, hoisted on the shoulders of men and women, wander along the backstreets, portended by yells. An isolated patch of fireworks makes spitting noises from out at the horizon, and the blooms reflect in a tall glassy condominium complex. I run into three 神輿 on my loop and stop for two to pass——there is usually a man in front with a sash flanked by two lantern-bearers (young women). Earlier in the day I see a group of old men in colorful 法被 huddled around a 神輿, smoking. The oldest among them, with varicose noses, tend to stare openly around. Many day-drink. Many wear their 鉢巻 at increasingly jaunty angles, and it seems common to store various small goods inside one’s coat at the level of one’s stomach, supported by an external corded belt.

roughage

I read an article about William Volmann, who is dying of cancer. My first edition first printing of Infinite Jest can be identified by the blurb on the back from Volmann having only a single ‘n.’ He explains, in the interview, that he can barely drink anymore. The author seems to imply that magazines publish him only out of pity now, though it’s not his writing that has changed. Some day if I am old, or riddled with metastases, I will lace the pages of ‘Europe Central’ with talmudically nested margin notes.

Someone sends me photos of their new apartment in New Haven: single-paned leaded windows with soldered muntins, low American overgrowth. They bike a microwave from a craigslist post back to their room. A smiski, head in its hands, rests on a sill. I am told that the American Studies department at a university there is having trouble keeping unenrolled students out of psychoanalytic seminars. In a long interview online Harold Bloom decries the state of this same department, in the early 2000s, as having unwisely abandoned the literary canon. In a phone call with my sister weeks ago I am reminded again, as she has said often to impress that our father’s roots are not as agrarian as his Iowan adolescence might imply, that his infancy passed in a New Haven apartment whose upstairs neighbor was Dr. Bloom himself, who I am told would occasionally babysit.

sunfade

Returning home in the evening a few pale geckos scatter at the edges of my vision. Their shade is so well matched to the bare concrete that I wonder if they are some hardened and specifically urban geckoid, long since robbed of the ability to return to the mountains. The word for gecko here is yamori, ヤモリ (🦎).

I go for a walk during my workday on Friday, toward 上野, which clusters around a famous lake, now tall with huge lotus leaves with their disturbing pods, and a busy train station. I stop into a used goods store and pick up an old Sony CD-player-cum-radio, placed in the ジャンク section only because it was badly sun-yellowed (the label said 日焼け, the same word for human sunburn), not because it didn’t work. In the mornings now I sometimes listen to local stations, of which there are surprisingly few across the AM and FM bands. I think the deep yellowing of plastics is beautiful: how it falls off in the crevices, around corners, as bits of the device shield other bits——the radio must have been outside, or in a window, for many years.

the lady in the radiator

It feels like the last truly warm day (September 18). The atmosphere is slack. While I know from my phone that a storm is coming in the night, I think that it could have been possible, if I had trained myself, to intuit this from the sky’s pallor, or some secret and weak barometric organelle. This must be one of those senses that hominids have had to develop, out of necessity, over hundreds of thousands of years. As in something that might have once manifested as a dull ache in the stomach of a scurvy-stricken sailor at morning, overlooking a becalmed but doomed sea.

My senses yield only cramped, urban data. I can tell, from the top of the 千代田線 stairs at 根津駅, by the volume of air blowing up at me, whether I will make the train. It the speed of the air quickens as I stand I can be leisurely, while if it is gentle and falling I need to take the stairs two at a time to have a chance. I have twice thrown myself into a train.

In my room I watch Eraserhead on VHS; Jack Nance sits in shirtsleeves, making vigil over The Child, having fashioned a humidifier for it that is letting off a tall white column of steam. On Jack’s bedside table sits a mound of dirt supporting a stunted dead tree that is never explained. Atop the dresser is another, larger pile of earth. I sit on my sheepskin, reclined against my futon and supported by various pillows shoved beneath my lumbar spine.

I spent the day in my own neighborhood. I did laundry so that it could dry before the upcoming series of storms. I brewed 16 grams of coffee brought by a friend from 1369 Coffee House in Cambridge, MA, which has long since gone a little stale, and was roasted dark to begin with anyway, though I prefer its murk. It grinds with almost no resistance. The coffee cooled and I savored its flavorless tepidity while I futzed with application statements in the AM.

A couple weeks ago I found an original CD for the Eraserhead soundtrack, which consists of two eighteen-to-twenty minute recordings of mostly ambient noise, clanking, static, distant vaudeville music, and snippets of the lady in the radiator’s well-known song. I place the second track on my iPod Shuffle and work quietly through it some days, if it comes up.

As I write this Jack Nance makes out with his neighbor, a young woman with deep-set eyes and long dark ringletted hair, in a circular pool of milky water. Her focus is distracted by The Child whimpering in the corner. 微かな煙は風呂の上に漂っている。彼と彼女の輪郭が見えて、抱き続けて、お互いの唇を吸おうとする。急にラジエーターの中の女は歌を歌い始めます。小さな狭くて舞台で朽ちた葉っぱがない木が現れて、彼は首になって、頭が床に転んじゃう。

verbal nutrition

I wonder what sort of crisis could precipitate me writing consistently——could drive me to hermitage in Marfa, TX, or IA, or Western Mass, to pick away at some slim, devastating novel about incels and weebs. I pick up a copy of The First Circle from the box outside my local academic used bookstore. I spy an old Penguin collection of the poems of Rilke, which I do not permit myself to buy yet because I haven’t started the Solzhenitsyn, nor finished 春の怖いもの. I am too comfortable with the idea that I am prevented by practicalities from trying to write in the embarrassing way of the men in Brooklyn who wear tattered blue moleskin French work jackets from the 1930s. It is possible the answer is to feel more shame, or to become the live-in lover of an heiress out of Vladivostok.

As I watch, The Child’s body is consumed by what appears to be expanding foam, pouring from its viscera just then opened by the scissors of Jack Nance. The Child’s head expands to fill the whole room. Strobes. Screeches. The sound of open, ferocious, American wind. We cut to perhaps the most famous close-up in DL’s œuvre: white particles swim behind Jack Nance’s tall pompadour or bouffant. An unnamed man covered in boils or carbuncles grinds sparking base metal against a great roaring wheel of stone. The lady in the radiator, bathed in light, embraces Nance.