My index fingers are like a pair of pincers caught on the edges of my phone. Sometimes one of them bends a little bit, adjusting the angle of the screen in a blunt white. My eyes, fixated by the words shown and deleted there, move as my thumbs type on a projected keyboard. Everything that is not the screen is dark and peripheral, even my fingers and hands appear only as silhouettes. On the thousandth night nothing still interests me on the screen. There are just a bunch of letters on a yellowish background and chronically cute lumps of colors. At 12:00 AM instead of sleeping I am looking at my phone and my tireless obsession with it. This is the sixth iPhone 6 Plus for me and the tenth phone in general, yet the urgency to immerse is so painstakingly fresh - what clever cursors, images and gestures, and the way they are subordinated - a feeling nowhere else to be felt - no more card drawings and running-out-of-tissue-in-a-public-toilet-in-the-middle-of-the-night moments, it ensures to kindly remind you of low battery and that the apps will function optimally. 100% satisfaction guaranteed with refund, no one says no to anyone anymore.
The mattress cover was a bit wet; the dryer downstairs mustn't have handled it well. I wrap my legs with a corner of the quill, dried, and continue to look at my phone - Google Plus, hmm, too beautiful; LinkedIn, just Facebook in suit; Reddit, too niddering in taste; WeChat and Quora and Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock, all of them are confined in tiny, rounded squares for my ultimate pick. And I, pampered by their butt-shaking eagerness, suddenly decide all of them disgusting and instead open the Notes app to jot down a few thoughts, non-thoughts to be precise, words and lines to make up space rather than content and which I quickly delete.
Two days after Mid-Autumn Festival the kitchen behind the wall to the right of me still lingers the buzzing noises and the bursting laughters of a group of my compatriots that I unexpectedly come to despise. Their leftover dishes in the sink contrast ever greatly with their domineering heads flinched behind pairs of glasses, coddled in a persistently mild smile - concubines made of palace. But I ain't got anything to do with them anymore. Perhaps in them there was certain sensitivity that I failed to foresee - albeit their produce is neither ingenious nor outlandish they do, however, retain a particular finesse to cast the superficial as the supercilious - going to singsongs and buying Coca-Cola - dreams come true when they are not even looking. You play, you pay, you bastard.
Even if I sleep now, since I am already quite sleepy, waking up tomorrow will be a hard reset of the insights that I have garnered today. The bitter nostalgia that I taste in dream is my heroin. My rationality denies it; my reality refutes it; and I keep going back to it, because my subconscious mind keeps going back to it, and I keep going back to sleep. Thus I would rather stay somnolent here on this seat that hardly bristles me than to become lucid in dream - I would prefer to keep the pieces together than to scatter them in wind; I keep remembering for it once was. But such foolhardy nonsense! Such foolhardy nonsense indeed!
Intending to preserve, I have reduced myself. If two months ago I strived, now I merely endeavor; if two months ago I loved, now I like; if two months ago I had faith not to be sought from religion but from real world, now I see faith as lordly as to be nearly a contrivance. With such reduction I am much more anchored. Instead of fluctuating from ecstasy to despair, I hover around delight to dismay. I used to see obstinacy as something to be upheld. I now doubt it - solipsism dragged me out of turbidity, but it can only go so far. The rest to me is only vacancy, resembling what I thought was life's monotony, which I had smashed, for then I was a gambler, a daredevil and a pagan.
I no longer am.
Wednesday, September 30
Monday, September 21
9/21
Tumbling out of bed as if fleeing, I calmed as soon as my feet are set on the road outside of Nordmetall - at 5 AM in the morning the gravel was appeasing - rustle, rustle as I moved along. At this time of the day barely anyone had woken up. The lights seemed dimmer, and cars were marveled at like an arrow piercing through the dark. And I took them, and I took it literally - the driver was never seen - on the car and in the window the only things visible were pairs of headlights, and even they would disappear swiftly.
Thoughts were as useless as language. Intuition ruled. I commanded myself to walk, to gaze, to bust out cobwebs, and to snap pictures of faintly lit trees and buildings that were unpopulated, but I didn't talk, think or even enjoy. It was all there to be felt, to be merged, and to be stopped. I moved; beneath my penis the legs oscillated, grasstips swang and mud churned. And that was it. The stroll was brief and containing - I saw myself as infinitesimal and almost irrelevant. The oversized green t-shirt and the body it covered were mere anomalies, heated up and vital, contrast to everything that surrounded. And I couldn't help but wonder, how much more distance would they travel? How much more time would they shine? At least it all appeared static, and thus it all appeared eternal.
Soon it was the end; behind the church I waited for salvation - Owen, a chunky figure, oh there he was to greet me, "good morning, let's jog", and at once we started to jog. 4 laps were not an easy task and I had to adjust the breath; a lump-sum of energy was pumped into my body or squeezed out of it. And as I jogged more attentively the world faded; the dark and the quiet retracted; a tinge of my sense of familiarity steadily revealed. Owen had been jogging for years in streak - his unaffected, concluded posture intrigued me, and my ego strained to keep up. It was still night, and there was no distinction between the sky and anything beyond campus. But suddenly I smelled evening - as if the two of us were jogging around the Campus Green several hours after dinner and into the night, when life had just started to be fun. Beginning to sweat mildly, I took off my overcoat, the one I bought from Marktkauf last winter, and threw it to the side. It was the same place where she and I first talked. But it neither aroused nor discouraged me. I had excised the part of my own from reality, and turned it into something remote and absurd and comically admirable.
Never mind the past, I had taken photos and written poems, those shall suffice. My pursuit had become grander than just these human tomfooleries, even the grass and breeze and star and tree - magnificent and exquisite they were but stale and diminutive. Having nothing to report to the police and living in a peaceful country, I was content. When I walked out, I was escaping dream; when I walked back I had yet again convinced myself that it was not true. I was happy, even light-headed. What a wonderful morning! Just as people braced for another day of routine I had already finished it, falling back to sleep!
And by the end of the day, as I lay down to fiddle aimlessly for a few moments to prepare myself for another round of sleep, all that had remained was an impenetrable line in the Notes app of my iPhone:
"Dream: remnant of noodles and cute letters to someone else."
Thoughts were as useless as language. Intuition ruled. I commanded myself to walk, to gaze, to bust out cobwebs, and to snap pictures of faintly lit trees and buildings that were unpopulated, but I didn't talk, think or even enjoy. It was all there to be felt, to be merged, and to be stopped. I moved; beneath my penis the legs oscillated, grasstips swang and mud churned. And that was it. The stroll was brief and containing - I saw myself as infinitesimal and almost irrelevant. The oversized green t-shirt and the body it covered were mere anomalies, heated up and vital, contrast to everything that surrounded. And I couldn't help but wonder, how much more distance would they travel? How much more time would they shine? At least it all appeared static, and thus it all appeared eternal.
Soon it was the end; behind the church I waited for salvation - Owen, a chunky figure, oh there he was to greet me, "good morning, let's jog", and at once we started to jog. 4 laps were not an easy task and I had to adjust the breath; a lump-sum of energy was pumped into my body or squeezed out of it. And as I jogged more attentively the world faded; the dark and the quiet retracted; a tinge of my sense of familiarity steadily revealed. Owen had been jogging for years in streak - his unaffected, concluded posture intrigued me, and my ego strained to keep up. It was still night, and there was no distinction between the sky and anything beyond campus. But suddenly I smelled evening - as if the two of us were jogging around the Campus Green several hours after dinner and into the night, when life had just started to be fun. Beginning to sweat mildly, I took off my overcoat, the one I bought from Marktkauf last winter, and threw it to the side. It was the same place where she and I first talked. But it neither aroused nor discouraged me. I had excised the part of my own from reality, and turned it into something remote and absurd and comically admirable.
Never mind the past, I had taken photos and written poems, those shall suffice. My pursuit had become grander than just these human tomfooleries, even the grass and breeze and star and tree - magnificent and exquisite they were but stale and diminutive. Having nothing to report to the police and living in a peaceful country, I was content. When I walked out, I was escaping dream; when I walked back I had yet again convinced myself that it was not true. I was happy, even light-headed. What a wonderful morning! Just as people braced for another day of routine I had already finished it, falling back to sleep!
And by the end of the day, as I lay down to fiddle aimlessly for a few moments to prepare myself for another round of sleep, all that had remained was an impenetrable line in the Notes app of my iPhone:
"Dream: remnant of noodles and cute letters to someone else."
Wednesday, September 9
9/9
Sitting on my bouncy office chair, as usual, I find myself at a complete loss at what to do. My recent days has become the most peculiar of what I have seen - peculiar in what regard I don't know, but it is such that the person I am now, a person from whom I seek and derive most of the joy seems exceedingly a stranger - as soon as I start doing things, like waking up in the morning at seven every day to train students, or showering and trimming before classes, each of these things will incarnate as a different person, a person who is in front of me but nevertheless oblivious and indifferent to my being, and a person who is not me. And I observe, with penetrating consistency and awe, him doing things with an increased elegance and esteem - speeches are uttered clearly without hesitation, goals are undoubted, and he appears to not take pride in what he is doing but to accept it as a kind of flawless and unbreakable routine.
"This is quite irregular, I know him. He is not like that." Yet I can't help but feeling a bit ecstatic: he is indeed too good; he is indeed the embodiment of perfection; he doesn't even have to pee, and other disorderly conducts like eating in the servery and jogging before dinner he does but out of etiquette and respect for norm. I suspect, if given the chance, he will just exist with his buttoned shirts and buckled jeans, and smoothly and smilingly glide. The weather is awesome this afternoon, but for him there's neither shadow beneath his hands nor fluffs floating in the air, not even tables and chairs, windows and curtain, only a sky whose blue is meticulously hued and several deliberate clouds as decoration. Even the sun isn't there; there's only sunshine in a sublime tranquility. Almost religious!
Beyond his upright stance, I sense no love or hatred or the secrets and flamboyancy of souls, but an evenning-out of all of them, a process of manufacturing so intricate and deep that upon its surface is a sinuous banality - tiresome and unflattering - a screen entirely scratched yet functionally robust in every conceivable way; a black body recklessly extreme in magnitude but dull and changeless however one is seeing it. I have admired him fondly; and although I have wanted to talk with him, and to ask him some questions, I always refrain because I am too unclean, like a clown in the pool, whose strokes are awkward enough yet who still hopes that nobody notices him.
Sometimes he'd exude some sadness though. But those occasions are getting rarer and rarer; for firstly, he isn't entirely sure why he is feeling sad, and secondly, like a tropical tree in the middle of the desert - there might have been a forest, whose destruction no one foresees and whose history no one relates, the only determinable fate about the sadness, is of at least a concealment and at most an erasure. He hardly feels it now, which is good; only then his mission is complete.
I don't agree with him though. And I presume all the accusations of my naivete come from this. There is too much weight for my world to become as ethereal as his - nearly everything that tries to escape will be caught with more attention, and the result is unsurprisingly a corpulent mess. I know the right choice to make and the correct course of actions to take; yet due to indolence or nostalgia or an inexplicable yearning I don't feel ready to do it, and perhaps will never be able to.
That is how I differ from him. I always carry forward with me my own history. Stale and sleazy the occurrences in it are, I treasure them like a newborn baby simply because they were mine; they were me.
-
iPhone 6s was released with the new rosy gold color. I would have made enough by the end of September to afford two. Yet I will not spend an extra - there's no need, and now my interest in these appliances is so overshadowed by a disdain of how superficial and innocuous the joy they provide is that I actually am not going to afford even one. And it is with this disdain that I preserve myself.
-
You're a greedy greedy man.
You want everything,
Now you know you can't.
Tuesday, September 1
9/1
In this aircraft cabin nothing compels me more than the will to write, even more so than the need to sleep. However, after wolfing down an entire glass of whisky and taking a sip on a second glass of wine, the only noticeable change seems the return of slowness - on all four of my limbs there exerts a weight, hindering my motion in such a way that although I wave my arms as agilely as before, the actual command of them takes on a genuine challenge.
I remember, on the returning flight from Munich, I felt exactly the same - I was as intoxicated and as quizzical as right now. What differs is my attitude towards the act of writing itself. Undoubted is the fact that I have so far written quite a lot, and that among these of my written works several merit at least some literary value - but what end, I question myself, does it serve if by writing nothing vaguely of reality is altered, and nothing remotely of my quest is accomplished? I try to capture my life at its utmost clarity - I exaggerate every bits of it I consider memorable; yet, there is always more to be missing; and there is always this helpless fate that by venting my anguish I barely change it, and often I will be faced with an outcome that is worsened by when I contemplate and conclude than by when I devoid myself of thoughts and instead pursue literal happiness that tends to fulfill in the immediate moments.
Nothing appears to present itself more clearly than the depressing pain of attempting to understand life! For to the end, it consists of only fragments - the heated tin foil that wrapped my dinner from Lufthansa, the moaning in bed, the shirt my mom washed for me a few hours back, the decade of my education, and the more decades to come that will become my work, my retirement, and my death, carried forward by a distinctness in which I'm either happy or sad, either hopeful or despondent, either married or widowed, causal but never continuous; and in it the past is merely negotiable; and the future aspired but never attained. My desire, bears too little to signify. I utilize no resource, persuade no peer, and upkeep no promise - I move laterally like everyone else nonetheless and writing is a consolation, an entitlement with which I falsely elevate myself, "hey you vagabond infidel", "hey you heartless peasant", and "hey you who drunken yourself not with alcoholic drinks but with milkshake and cinema and vacation and whatever pedestrian". Yes, that is me; that is, upon retrospect, what emerges as the goal of my writing. And what could possibly be more depressing?
Waking up from the dream which I have dreamed repetitively, I proceed to say something, but I stutter - I have already said everything I should, and therefore am left with nothing else to say. My nose is stuffed up and my throat is a bit sore. I have forgotten to put on long-sleeve shirts, mistaking this flight for a regular flight to Chengdu or to Shanghai. While the person I am now might be an abridged version of my previous self, I intend to bring normality back to my days. I don't miss any meal; I drink plenty of water; I sleep sound; I go occasionally to see some relatives and talk with students regarding the manner in which their training should continue. And I realize these things, hassle-free as they are, I deal with the same severity as if I am preparing for a major project - and beyond I hardly shed any thought - not that I don't want to, it's just that, when seen objectively, my recent affair is so rife with unflattering occurrences and regrets that the only option to keep my health and sanity intact is to be as artless and as superficial as is allowed by my conscience. I am not, however, incapacitated. Because I too, am wholly aware of the peril of dwelling in the past; the future for me is supposed to be about different possibilities, and in no way may I assert that any of those possibilities is inferior to the one I have envisioned. Although, I am sincerely scarred, and will hence become a more callous and knowing person than the one I want to be. And reluctantly and devotedly I accept.
I have yet managed to live an unbroken fairy tale; and my jealousy for those who incidentally do shall be eternal.
I remember, on the returning flight from Munich, I felt exactly the same - I was as intoxicated and as quizzical as right now. What differs is my attitude towards the act of writing itself. Undoubted is the fact that I have so far written quite a lot, and that among these of my written works several merit at least some literary value - but what end, I question myself, does it serve if by writing nothing vaguely of reality is altered, and nothing remotely of my quest is accomplished? I try to capture my life at its utmost clarity - I exaggerate every bits of it I consider memorable; yet, there is always more to be missing; and there is always this helpless fate that by venting my anguish I barely change it, and often I will be faced with an outcome that is worsened by when I contemplate and conclude than by when I devoid myself of thoughts and instead pursue literal happiness that tends to fulfill in the immediate moments.
Nothing appears to present itself more clearly than the depressing pain of attempting to understand life! For to the end, it consists of only fragments - the heated tin foil that wrapped my dinner from Lufthansa, the moaning in bed, the shirt my mom washed for me a few hours back, the decade of my education, and the more decades to come that will become my work, my retirement, and my death, carried forward by a distinctness in which I'm either happy or sad, either hopeful or despondent, either married or widowed, causal but never continuous; and in it the past is merely negotiable; and the future aspired but never attained. My desire, bears too little to signify. I utilize no resource, persuade no peer, and upkeep no promise - I move laterally like everyone else nonetheless and writing is a consolation, an entitlement with which I falsely elevate myself, "hey you vagabond infidel", "hey you heartless peasant", and "hey you who drunken yourself not with alcoholic drinks but with milkshake and cinema and vacation and whatever pedestrian". Yes, that is me; that is, upon retrospect, what emerges as the goal of my writing. And what could possibly be more depressing?
Waking up from the dream which I have dreamed repetitively, I proceed to say something, but I stutter - I have already said everything I should, and therefore am left with nothing else to say. My nose is stuffed up and my throat is a bit sore. I have forgotten to put on long-sleeve shirts, mistaking this flight for a regular flight to Chengdu or to Shanghai. While the person I am now might be an abridged version of my previous self, I intend to bring normality back to my days. I don't miss any meal; I drink plenty of water; I sleep sound; I go occasionally to see some relatives and talk with students regarding the manner in which their training should continue. And I realize these things, hassle-free as they are, I deal with the same severity as if I am preparing for a major project - and beyond I hardly shed any thought - not that I don't want to, it's just that, when seen objectively, my recent affair is so rife with unflattering occurrences and regrets that the only option to keep my health and sanity intact is to be as artless and as superficial as is allowed by my conscience. I am not, however, incapacitated. Because I too, am wholly aware of the peril of dwelling in the past; the future for me is supposed to be about different possibilities, and in no way may I assert that any of those possibilities is inferior to the one I have envisioned. Although, I am sincerely scarred, and will hence become a more callous and knowing person than the one I want to be. And reluctantly and devotedly I accept.
I have yet managed to live an unbroken fairy tale; and my jealousy for those who incidentally do shall be eternal.