Posted on Sunday, 05/04/25.

I’ve told myself I would write this long weekend, but it is easy to do the immature thing and sour on an idea just as its possibility is earnestly presented.

💧 Weather Report (2025/05/04)

It rained fiercely on Friday night; this is the reason for the featureless warmth and sun of today and yesterday. When I think about it, it makes me sad: the atmosphere is throwing fits. The atmosphere is being childish.

On Saturday I bike to 渋谷——the sun draws sweat down my back, sneaks into my skin. My shirt is cotton, white, a promotional tee for a movie from 2004 with generous sleeves that let air dry me as I coast down the steepness dividing 北沢 and 大山.

The late sunlight is bloody and heavy with fine hydrocarbon particulates and pollen, which makes the tangle of pastel houses by 代々木上原 intoxicating.

I lie supine on my floor Saturday night, having just taken a shower, feeling the chill of my damp hair which radiates out in lax curls on my linen pillowcase. My head abuts a floor-to-ceiling window and the moon, just then dipping below zenith, appears to me. A lattice of wires inside the glass measures subtension, unknowingly. Supinity makes me feel (as was always true) that it is hovering above me, the moon. In my mind, because I know that light takes a little over one second to reach the moon, I calculate its distance is about 200,000 miles. Because I know the circumference of the earth, I can know its diameter is about 8000 miles. Such pedestrian numbers; what business does the moon have being 200,000 miles away?

Earlier that morning I read The Starveling, again, because I love it; DeLillo says:

Whatever moons of disquiet and melancholy hovered over his experience, recent or distant, this was the place where it might all evaporate.

Later he says:

…——just the unfixed rhythm of his need. Then That was the innocent surface, on loan from childhood.

Like Nabokov I agree that to tether the purpose of literature to ‘identifying with the characters’ is dumb, but in weakness, and maybe he would agree, it cannot always be avoided. The Starveling lives in the Bronx, is very thin, keeps a tight schedule crisscrossing NYC; like Don DeLillo, I think, I am not totally separate from her. My hair dries very slowly.

I think of Didi crossing the city. I hear, from the various touchpoints I have in NYC, that there is a storm somewhere, about to arrive. If that storm were the storm that had been here it would have had to travel at about 200 miles per hour, in defiance of the atmosphere’s convective moods.

She spoke fantastically fast, words and key phrases expertly compressed into coded format, the accidents, road repairs, bridges and tunnels, the delays measured in geologic time. The BQE, the FDR, always the biblical Cross Bronx…

They say here sometimes that the weather is 快適, or 快晴. Everything about it is very 快.

💧 The weather is that I sip sweet beverages at midnight and unglove mandarin oranges. The weather is that the red cordura sheath around my bike chain dampens on contact with my shoulder. The weather is that I have remembered some of my dreams recently and they embarrass me in their plainness.

Online I see that my undergraduate institution’s film society is playing a 35-mm print of ‘Terrorizers’, whose name in Chinese, 恐怖分子, sounds to me in Japanese like the molecule of fear.

I do my usual editing and collation in the morning. I probe a nearby music store for CDs (I see a copy of １５才 by 山口百恵, amusing as she holds a small dog on the cover, but have no reason to get it). I pick up a lunch at an organic food store and smile politely at the cashier. It is all quite usual. I notice that I can feel the sun less because my clothes are lighter, because I shaved my face the night before, just before seeing the moon.

Last week I walked by a large, sleek raven scavenging for something dropped in a corner; this was on campus, where a large new building has been lofted on great steel stilts above another, far older building, and where there are only scant walkways at ‘ground level’ between deeply-cut slits toward basements and enormous sheer columns reaching upward. I pass more men in cornflower-blue all-in-ones, and then a thin man smoking in a corner, and then a leaning wisteria of some kind, propped up by punky wood.

I am writing now for no reason——because I am avoiding being plain, as if that were the worst thing.

Where I curl and writhe 🪱.