8/14

After some time I will have to admit that there is not really a core storyline behind my many moves in the past 10 odd years. For sure, I have planned each of them meticulously, with a certain stringency that a good, steady life is not supposed to entail. However, at least in this moment, in one of the 4th-floor rooms of a stroad-side hotel in Danbury, Connecticut, I cannot really ascribe a character to the outcomes of my plan, all the while the years increasingly speed by. In Munich, I have a weekly routine that basically zigzags between the office, the Asian supermarket at Rosenheimer Platz, and my apartment, that is soon going to morph into one between the office, the Chinatown at Flushing, Queens, and my apartment. More words or even sections will appear on my LinkedIn profile, which, no matter how hard I tell ChatGPT to furnish with a better variety of English, remains quite dull. Yet, everything else that I have once held dear, the literary things, the metaphorical objects, and abstract emotions that are only felt in deep thoughts, has not managed to influence my LinkedIn profile but vice versa. Reality, or at a more personal level, realist thinking, seems to have definitively won out. Paraphrases include empiricism, pragmatism, maturity, the way it is, rationality, and FIRE. But I do not even know when the battle was fought, or what exactly is the side that has lost the war. Maybe the losing side has become the winning side, or maybe there was no battle at all. Regardless of what it was, all of it has happened in an instant of the 10 odd years, the youth of a single person.

In retrospect, there has been a great irony, one of a journey that had started in idealism, fantasy, and pursuits of things that go beyond the mundanity of what used to be my day-to-day life, and a journey that only started because it was at all costs, somehow ventured into an unknown place that feels eerily familiar. It has a different character of course, like how Germany is different from China and from the US, lifestyles, cultures, traditions and all that, but the struggle of living a life without knowing what end it has, and the toll of this thing I still don't get, "adult life", are largely the same, if not weighing down more heavily than before. Russ, my future boss, after hearing me saying that my original destination before going to Germany was the US, remarked, what a detour that was. And indeed, what a detour that was, and what a detour everything was. Maybe it is not that everything is a detour, but that nowhere is home. Most insidiously, the existence of home could be contextual. It might have only existed, amongst many other things, when I believed in them. Like a neatly built sand castle on the beach, it readily melts away after one or two waves of reality. But, after having spent 28 years being alive, and more than 10 years trying to find some sort of corroboration of what I had believed in, the search and rescue effort perhaps needs to come to a close, or at least be shelved. In my life thus far there aren't many such things as successes and failures - things happen and I am a good pupil.

Only in rarified moments, I shut the bathroom door, put my AirPods on, sit down on the toilet and listen to punk rock of which I used to be an avid fan. In those moments even the punk rock feels a tad dry, but still, two or three minutes in after the warm up, I bang my head a little.

9/27

Lately I haven't gotten to write a whole lot. And whatever I do write feels increasingly like it is written with the trembling hands of a Parkinson's patient. The closer I examine it, in words' and paragraphs' distinct lines and blocks, the more it stands out to me as some combination of background noises that seem to vaguely depict something, only to distract from a deeper, indescribable vacuity. I juxtapose arrays upon arrays of metaphors, objects, fragments of thoughts and try clumsily to weave them together into a picture that lacks context but nevertheless seeks to disturb emotionally - like a doodle of a kindergartener with very strange color choices that I don't understand, mirroring some subset of perceptions of reality, which, equally, I don't understand. And in a way, this is precisely the point. The formation of the letters and the arrangement of them, aim to amplify a residual pain which almost goes away as the normal range of human needs, e.g. hunger, greed, and the need to pee, emerge and subside. I invent them, in the same way a space exploration game invents procedurally generated side quests. These are the tissue sperms, the muscles pushing against the wall, and the jitters of electrical signals emanating from a warm corpse.

And I come back to them, to the graveyard of scrapped thoughts, to their malady and disrepair. Not to commemorate the futility as they are, but to ritually show up, as the regular alcoholic of the Biergarten, drinking to the bitterness of the many days and nights with the clash and clangs of syllables to toast. Perhaps, it is not so much that these non-thoughts are drawing me in, but rather what they represent, a fading era, in which, I, unemployed and therefore unburdened, would sit down every once in a while to record life as I saw it then, and the fact that those things that I have once seen and sought to remember by writing them down, are now only remembered with a strange clarity that dissects everything vividly, yet at the same time, to which I do not so much relate. Therefore, similar to a middle aged man, clad in suit, returning to the dance floor of his favorite night club, I return to this blog, with the addressable concerns I had back then mostly addressed, to write something as a token of me still being around, if only less vivaciously. It might have something to do with the nature of the adult life, of the emergent callousness and indifference after having been marinated with the many expected and unexpected lectures on the perils of naivety. The space for strategic maneuvers and make-belief passions feels slimmer - a twenty-seven year-old single male, a back office corporate finance worker, and a resident of suburban Munich, all of these labels take up precious space of my life's character count, leaving me little room to freestyle the twists and turns without them appearing too abrupt. And hence, I simply extend the storyline by inserting one modifier here, and another metaphor there. I am a playwright of the Season IIs.

In the evenings when I am alone, I sometimes feel homesick, but not for any of the cities where I come from or have been, because none of them interests me any more. The parties I had in them have been over, the door of the departing Uber has been shut, and the last message has been left at read. I have turned around, and to turn back would mean that the only thing I would find is their absence. And in theory I shouldn't feel homesick because everything I am homesick for resides in my brain, which has become a Möbius strip of home and the sickness for it.

So not knowing whether it's the home or the sickness for it, I stare at the dimly lit wall as blankly as I have done a gazillion times before and after, as if still puzzled, as if still trying.

10/26

In the "About" section of my website, one of the introductory sentences reads "during my free time, I maintain a blog", and above this segment of texts hangs an avatar, in which a generic anime .png of a blonde guy, who's not me, sits smilingly in front of a laptop. I know the reason I put up that picture - it is an anime figure, thus more approachable, and it is a static image of a person, so no effort is required for it to project a sense of optimism through an impeccable smile and wide gazing eyes. I'd like to look at the "About" section quite often, not to be impressed at its adherence to material design nor to polish up its terse, corporate speak, but to look at the website as how a constrained shop window would look to a passer-by. Its décor of colors, lights, and softened edges blend into the techno-selling-points of most things today, and mask everything that was left behind.

In the past I would be quick to ridicule this. But then I realize that such a reaction is illogical - I am typing on a keyboard, in front of a screen, on a chair, under a warm rooftop in the pre-winter cold, all of which are incremental results of a bullet point here, a punch line of a joke there, and the fonts, wording and colors used in some copies of .pdfs whose ultimate printed forms I do not see. By day I am that anime guy with a smile trying to project the same sense of the same things with a more spotted skin and a less styled haircut. By night the smile wanes and I start pacing around in a room which is desolate weren't it for me and a few scattered-around things. And in these gaps between working days something sometimes finds room to exist very briefly like faint glitters finding the dark how amidst the darkness there are lights being turned on in my neighbor's bathroom - I don't know what it is. I used to describe it with phrases like human willpower, nostalgia, etc., but none is accurate because of it being rather sentimental and anthropocentric. It is something statistical and universal, similar to a trough of a wave between peaks that very soon oscillates away. In these constant back-and-forth transitions, I end up feeling like how a dung beetle, who can bury dung 250 times its own body mass in one night, would feel like, if it takes a pause and examines passingly the fact that it is moving dung around. And by all means the dung beetle wouldn't stop after the said examination, at the maximum it'll perhaps move the dung a bit more half-heartedly, because evolutionarily that is how the parameters are set for it.

And in this sense the order of events that kicks off with me logging into the computer in the morning as "DE2FEA" and ends with me lying horizontally in bed in the evening starts to make sense, in the same way that the projected optimism in the avatar of my website morphs into a more believable version given enough time and a flashier design language. The nuances of each day and the pursuits of each era are different but on an aggregate level, they involve food, mating, and some play, nothing more and nothing less. And at the end of the day some of these aspects are just commemorated by either a website, or a piece of paper, or spoken words, or muscles and girths; many are just not.

So yes, a beetle, buries dung 250 times the body weight one night every night, and rolls some of the more okayish balls, under the Milky Way.

6/1

A few days ago a large crane fly got into my room, I sprayed some pesticide on it. It did not immediately die and instead struggled to fly away. So I sprayed some more pesticide on it, and then it died.

3/31

Sometimes I like to sit vacantly on the eastern end of the bed. I look at my skin and the random grooves on it which I was never aware of, and my consciousness would gradually recede to reveal the naked mechanicality of my life, in which on a daily basis I internally repeat the process of asking some random questions, providing no answers, and then conjuring up an off-topic speech to make a non-related point. Usually before long the big screen will be turned on, people will begin to sing or talk very loudly until the screen is turned off again. This is not to say that the line of events being kicked off afterwards are identical. The color of the sky, the growth of the weed on the balcony, the mood, the professional goal I have in mind, the genre of the music in the background, and the return of the stock portfolio all change numerously, even kaleidoscopically. However, at times these changes feel like the character configuration screen of an old Japanese RPG, where there are a rotating roster of gender, race, hair color, nose size, and a pool of skill points waiting to be distributed across some traits.

Occasionally things that do not fit to the theme pop up. Some of them are once mundane images of me walking down the street with a cup of latte macchiato in hand, of me getting off a car near a restaurant in a distant city, or of me peeling grapefruits - as the timeline deepens these images invariably become more succinct. The others are not images, but rather traces of smell and pieces of sound that I cannot decipher. All of them pop up very abstractly. Like the quantum fluctuations of the Higgs field. They come into existence and then disappear the same way, without context, only that I am left feeling a bit hollowed in their aftermath. I drag myself back to what I eminently and immediately have in order to shrug off the hollowness - what’s in this room and the strand of life this room represents, and realize that whatever I seem to have are not ammunitions that would help me fend off anything, but rather the hollowness itself. Far removed from when the images, smells and sounds were real, I’m left sitting by myself, like a lone passenger on a one-way train leaving his favorite city. I try to soften my posture a little so that my ass and back are less sore, only to collapse in bed and to begin to feel a little afraid.

I remember as a kid I used to go through one nightmare repeatedly, the exact content of which I have never pinned down - in it there is a dark and infinite unwinding, and nothing from this entire universe can escape from it. I could never bear witnessing it unfold entirely so I would abruptly wake up. And upon seeing the many lights and shadows that surround me from everywhere in the room, I would think that the unwinding had followed me, piercing the boundary between dream and reality. A fearful kid I was, I could only cry and fret aimlessly. Luckily the soft soothing voice of my mom, who was then a lot younger and always by me, would calm me down. She would pat me on the shoulder and put me back to sleep, and everything would once again seem fine. Many years later in another moment as I lie on a different bed, the vague fear has started to creep back. Only then I had my mother’s soft voices. Now those voices are gone. Not only that, the myriad of things that have taken place since those voices are likewise gone. All of my grandparents have died; and my mother is becoming frailer, while I stronger. I went from playing basketball with friends from my local high school to working out of an office with international colleagues, from kissing the one girl in my life without any reservation to lying alone in bed with all of the internal restraints of a calculating adult. And it seems that the unwinding has still followed. No longer a kid I am, I cannot cry and fret tonight. Only somewhere inside me the hollowness grows.

A column of shadow is being cast on the wall by the moonlight. Its black, geometric shape is a monolith with an unknown purpose. And the room where I am is left without a sound.

3/25

At night the wind just kept blowing. I cracked the window slightly open, and a gust of cold, fresh air blew on me, sneaking a sense of immediacy into a room full of old things. I wanted to step out into the balcony to feel more sincerely the evening cold, only to be deterred by the thin layer of pajama bottoms I was wearing. Last year around this time, trees had already begun to sprout and I knew it was spring. This year, however, everything had dragged on and so had the seasons.

By the window of my apartment I listened attentively to the sound of the wind, of its brush against everything in view, which was the nocturnal edition of all the intimate and familiar things I had seen in the morning. There were lights being emitted from the houses across, in the same paleness as ever; they were either lights from the television screens of neighbors whose lives I had never come across, or dining room lights, which were a bit brighter; really far-off the white LED streetlights of Pullach could also be seen, but from this distance they were mere speckles. They lined up haphazardly and a few would occasionally flicker, indicating perhaps someone had passed by, or a tree branch had shuffled. Between the islands of lights and my apartment window the wind blew, like the march of an invisible legion severing the crowd, while the shadows of trees, the dead cars in the parking garages, and the angled rooftops of houses all sat stationary in the deep, murky sky. Everything put together looked like an oddly manipulated GIF picture - it was looping ever so slightly in trivial places, and all of the colors had been converted to an unsaturated grayscale from their daytime versions, aside from the few spots of lights, which were sparse and almost distracting. From this picture no story could be extracted, not even cursive ones. If the world were a fantasy novel, certainly the protagonist would not be living in this part of it. However, I liked it, not because my wishfulness had yet again assigned meaning to where there was none, but because when I was exhausted or when my pursuits were aground it was in the very dullness of what was beyond this window where I could find accommodation. There had been a limit on how interesting, accomplished, varied, sexually prolific, socially accepted, intellectually stimulating, politically and financially adept my life could be. Placed in the context of the population of this planet or the window of existence of this human civilization, my individual being was but one of the many, just like the unknown souls in the many houses with their lights on, who would probably remain not only unknown but also fundamentally commonplace, and who, by turning on the lights as they had always been doing from one day to another day amidst the winds which had been blowing for one year to another year, had offered another soul, who was equally unknown to them and just as commonplace, some accommodation. Not comfort, solace, hope, empathy, or optimism but accommodation, and very plain accommodation indeed. But accommodated was I.

Strained for having been standing for too long, I decided to take a couple of steps back for the bag of M&M's chocolates in the fridge and grabbed a handful. Each of these chocolates had supposedly different colors, which were anyways difficult to tell under the faint lights. By the time I walked back to the window, the chocolates had been assimilated into the same grayscale extended by all the other things. I quietly went through them as I looked out of the window one last time this evening, where the wind kept blowing.

3/6

As the heart drains, so do words. At 1 AM while I lie horizontal and insomniac, in the background the screensaver lights of my OLED television shine unpredictably, projecting the ceiling lamp into shifting shadows on the wall, constituting the only illusion of movement in this otherwise still room. Earlier in the evening I have drunk coffee, not because I needed it, but because the air I breathed and the water I drank were too soothing, and I wanted to have something more pungent, something akin to a smoke break in winter without me having to actually smoke. I struggle to fall asleep cleanly, but at the same time am not fully rationally awake. Again the quietness of the night tries to remind me of a black backdrop of an imaginative story awaiting its debut, so that the dead plots pieced together from the many pasts are once again malleated into a single stage show. But the March of 2021 is so distant from any real testament to these plots that anything more than just one or two flashbacks becomes hard to obtain. Therefore the backdrop remains largely vacant, with the sole audience member frozen in his seat, amidst a sea of dark.

I remember that many a times during the night, regardless of when it was Bremen, Berlin or the more uptown area of Munich, I had lied in bed surrounded by the same darkness. Then, I always had something in me, be it missing a person, worrying about a future, or simply having an ire for some abstract, yet-known changes. There was a silent drama, a contextual clash of where I came from versus where I wanted to go. But tonight, and in the succession of nights prior, I am perturbed by nothing. I had a penchant for sentimentality, as was reflected in the music I listen to, the words I write, and the many objects I described through these words. I thought that through more varied experiences and more intense feelings, life would somehow become more porous and therefore easier. However, at the end of it I have only found a rebuttal. Not rebuttal in the sense of proving something to be false, but rather in the sense of proving something to be non-ascribable, that metaphors, sad adjectives, long clauses appended to beautiful sentences with multiple conjunctions originate exclusively from me, and bear no relationship with the things they seek to define. I merely borrow them, so that through them emotions can be discharged. The darkness in which I lie alone is devoid of emotional elements; the listing moonlight through the glass window is devoid of emotional elements; all the places, weather, outlines of people, and the literary elevations of them from the past moments are devoid of emotional elements. It is only that I, am not. As I lie half-naked in this green, foldable, polyester bed that I have inherited from the former tenant, nothing have me in them, and conversely, I have nothing in me.

I do not know exactly when the OLED television has turned itself off. I did not hear the electrical clicking sound it makes when it's completely turned off. I feel a bit apprehended and unlock the phone which is on its charger and next to me. I got this small work phone a few months back after some nagging with the IT department. Right now the only lights in this room are coming from the phone. At this hour the lights appear more glaring than they usually are, a bit like the candle lights from an age-old birthday party of mine, flooding everything else into airy little impressions, eerily removed from reach.

After some time the phone goes dark as well. And the sea of dark envelopes me, scribbling the warm regards of the day's end.