Posted on Thursday, 03/26/26.

I’ve been neglecting my duties here.

I bought new bar tape on Sunday; this morning, while the rain fell outside my apartment, I wound it carefully around my bike’s aluminum drop-bars. The naked bars were striated with gummy residue from the previous tape (which may have come with the bike, though I can’t be sure; it now sits in chaotic foamy coils in my waste-bin), and I made no real effort to remove it. Now the residue is trapped beneath the new tape, which gleams more than the abraded old tape did. I can feel its slightly aggressive tackiness: how it is made of insidious polymers. I bought the bike on my second day in Cambridge, maybe something like August 28th, 2019, before I had even a mattress, and rode it home to my apartment. Even then it showed evidence of a previous, hard commuter life. Mismatched tires. Deep scuffiness. It’s an aluminum Cannondale mid-tier racing frame from the middle-nineties in a dark (and in some places sunburnt) blue, which means it was built for basically anything but commuting. When showing it to other people I point out the unusual cantilevered seat stays, which provide the frame stiffness on top of its wide-tube aluminum construction.

This file became a compost heap for desultory and rheumy sentence fragments over three months. Examples include the following:

The same thought about how the internet is heavy with the nodes and antinodes of desire.

Hating people I have no reason to: antipathy as the prognosis of most adults, viz. compared to the constant apprehension/excitement of children encountering obstacles. Then thoughts of Frank Ramsay in the mountains with Wittgenstein. His poor constitution. The utility of infatuation.

Bought a lamp (transparent sun-yellow plastic, some y2k-contemporary knock off of the Ikea ‘Espressivo’). Tender, nostalgia-stained purchases or intimations of purchases. Reading Melville on the train; his humid exchanges with Hawthorne. My inability to demur desire to be Sophie’s pre-raphaelite muse; self-debasement. Writing a story (Gwyn and Sam appear again) that features hemi-orchiectomy.

Too many observations have been slipping through my memory. Because I mostly observe, this feels awful. Spring’s brutal birth and neonatal epoch. Thinking about seeing kids in parks with bug nets running furiously to capture the produce of Spring; dense dark clouds of gnats above the 妙正寺川. Watching Cynthia Erivo sing ‘Gethsemane’ too often late at night.

This boutique hotel near my house as a concise cross-section of a sort of Japan-Europe-US élite clientele, with dialects smeared across a neutral American English and 標準語 Japanese, all perfectly conditioned hair, expensive seeming pants, gleaming trail-running shoes, and the pale darkness that emerges from beneath the eyes of people over thirty-five, etc.

Something like this paltry, human generated text as being a sort of spotty mold or lichen that can cling to the incredibly smooth iridium-coated tubes that compose the metaphor of the modern internet. But this metaphor is too mixed, and data slinks through barnacled seafloor fiber-optic cables. The release of slowly lobbing emails back and forth belatedly, imperfectly: a small photonic pulse, hugely lensed and overconstrained and wrung through Reed-Muller codes.

The term sitzfleisch (implying persistence).

The insistence on the use of cassettes in the DeLillo story. The sense often, during the story (‘Creation’, trapped in the huge PDF stolen from somewhere), that I have forgotten how many words I’ve forgotten. River silt.

More Boygenius, where Phoebe says she wants to be emaciated, wants to go to a show without thinking of you. Desire to write about the brief DC punk scene foray with E when we were seventeen.

The impossibly lucid moonlight slapping my face through a slit in my Muji curtains.

Reading sun and steel—the section where Mishima says that basically that the only thing keeping bullfighters from being totally gay and lame is the element of death. Thomas Mann and Death in Venice. Taking the airs.

The moon hanging in the sky, in daylight, behind rarefied winter atmosphere: terrifyingly close.

The cold moon, the wolf moon; their discussion of my sashiko-ed pants, though not directed to me, just in my presence.

My brother’s fallen in love with someone new every time I call him. (Update: it happened again in March, 2026).

Something about my being attracted to women who look incredibly put out. (Update: it happened again in March, 2026).

Usual starved for touch sensation.

Back to Melville on the train; something like an idea at work.

Erratum 1

I read a little Melville in the corner while he works himself out. It is consistently unbelievable to me that anyone could have ever written like this. The words ‘flensing’ and ‘integument’ make me feel a sort of way. I intuit with a little niggling something like the hatred I imagine he’d feel if I communicated to him how easy it was for me to excite myself. The famed ‘spermaceti’ versus the useless ‘melon.’ How the unbelievable beauty of the cetaceous body could be stripped so efficiently down by so many men wielding such sharp steel in a matter of hours, just to get at rare oils and unguents deep in the marrow-spaces of those sensitive acoustic organs. What could possibly be the reason for the tender, embarrassingly juicy centers of whales? Hordes of men fettle them into jellies, creams, liniments, and offal. They empty them.

“We’ll work on it,” I say, “we are working on it,” my eyes sluggish on the page, “there’s no rush.” I’m not even reading a whaling story, just thinking about it all while leafing through some minor novelette they must have scraped off the underside of his writing desk. Something about a lowly clerk’s misgivings, about the South Pacific’s humid pull. But even this is unbelievable, is how good he is.

“It’s the pills,” he says, pushing on his own eyes, “they make my whole life limpid.”

Limp, I think. Limp, he means. I remember that beautiful word: ‘limpet,’ then all thoughts are lensed on mollusks and their cockled crura and the brine and spume. I feel something warm between my legs.

I’ve a bad habit of bending back a book’s unread half while working the opposite page, furling and unfurling as I go, which slowly breaks down a paperback to pulp.

He’s doing ‘child pose’ on my duvet. His smooth ass in the half light of my salt lamp, vellus hairs aflame. We really had worked at it—whispering, rubbing, soft wet apologizing—and I really don’t think that I am frustrated with him. I don’t think I have become distant or numb about it either, because it simply does not matter all that much, and will be oh-kay. I genuinely and embarrassingly enjoy reading with him here in the room, the poor boy with his smooth, smooth ass limbed by the gentle salt-lamp light. The effortful expenditure, the feeling of having had his limpet for a long while lolling about in my mouth, and how this maybe had allowed or even enabled the current reading and the pleasure of the reading. But then also the knowledge that, were I to tell him about this, he would try to change some part of how he was, to avoid the embarrassment, which he should not feel, but which is the insidious part of intimacy. He writhes, but need not! I wish I could tell him: some poor jawless fish he is, knotting his slim body to rid itself of mucous.

I really clung to him after his first admission. He’d done a hemi-orchiectomy in his dorm room. While he was gowned up in paper those first two weeks, and fed only mild soft foods, I’d sat in the strange peripheral chair common to medically serious rooms and swapped legal pads with him. Just simple geometry, though we weren’t allowed anything like a compass and straightedge. Basic incenters and inversions. The university has a shitty little pre-war brick building full with old radiators slathered thickly in chalky white paint, and it is where all of the self-harmers get juiced to their eyeballs. So now then since he’s been on the big doses of atypicals, and has the difficulty coming to attention, and the dyskinesia, and the persistent feeling of Total Distance which I, out of love, do not tell him about, though I do not think he’s an idiot.

Erratum 2

The usual Friday evening is passed with her supine in the dark, like this, head gently propped by a folded rectangle of terrycloth. I scratch out geo or calc practice by touch on a legal pad. Blue-black gel ink lays smoothly down. She lets me know if she begins to see anything like moving disco lights and I update her on any feeling like if the mathematics has become ‘easy’ or ‘embodied’ or not. She doesn’t believe that it ever feels natural or friendly despite my saying so, and I can’t bring myself, even in her most available and tender postictal time, to tell her, in truth, that sometimes it feels embarrassingly and prolongedly like intercourse: like immediate and proprioceptively overwhelming abdication.

She lets me gently press at her temples, manipulate her occipital protuberance, thumb her post-fontanelle, when the night is going bad. You think it really works like that, she says, when I’ve suggested that the action of the feeling of release is truly physical, as in the braincase can be maneuvered to slip quietly around and release the adhered and tired sulci and gyri.

Is that how it feels like it’s working? I ask.

Sam moans cleanly.

The deepest part of them we call the crisis, and I am the only one who can tell her what they’re like. She is all scleral during them. Her head owls dextrally. The body’s natural electrical frequencies are measured in single-digit Hertz, which is terrifyingly slow to feel. I don’t tell her but I sometimes think about how epileptics were once sometimes imprisoned or killed for fear of possession. I see what they saw, is all.

Sam says she feels terror only up to and immediately preceding the crisis, and after that, she says, I am totally dependent on you. Hearing stuff like this makes me feel quite out of breath. If it didn’t hurt so much afterwards people’d be paying nose-wise for this sort of konking, she says.

Only after a half hour or so do I go away from her to sip water from her bathroom faucet. Cold mineralic faucet-water up onto my face by splatter, which dries to a light crust. My toes sink deeply into the baby-blue bathroom carpet. By an hour or two her sleep is just sleep. She is docile and smooth. I’ve wiped the sweat that pricks at her hairline, above her lip, in the hollows of the back of her knees. With my ring finger I dab chapstick at her mouth’s corners and on her cupid’s bow. Three or so sheets of legal pad are now laced in my own blind shorthand. My own Total Mouth Dryness reveals sour, bacterial flavors that I have to assume are latent in my throat’s fissures. On top of everything else I’ve found recently that my joints stiffen in the evening, and the skin on my elbows, only at touch and not yet at sight, reveals the prodromal thickening of psoriatic plaques.

I don’t know what to do about it, I say, just after crisis and well before faucet time. I take the terrycloth off my shoulder and carefully chamois away the whitish salivary foam. In the postictal time I am free to say to her that I haven’t eaten today again, and that it really feels like this helps with the mathematics, and encouraging the energy that it’s pregnant with to backwardly-mix with the rest of my day. I feel really alive about it. The aliveness is not related to whether what I think about it is ‘true.’ Her teeth sometimes chatter, and she’s often slow and echolalic. I write down everything she says.