The winter chill still lingers in the air through the wretched howling wind and the raindrops are clicking on my window in a harsh, pixelated groan. I lie on the bed without spectacle like any man lies on his bed. If David Foster Wallace thinks everyone is identical through their unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from anyone else, then this is the moment when I, a person usually heavily armored by words, implicit judgements, and various deep-seated internal rules, need to concede that yes, I'm indeed identical to everyone else. This, is a moment of angst, of tedium and of discordance of the mind, stemming not only from a sense of helplessness in face of reality's immovability, but also from a recognition of the fact that there exists an upper extent of human agency whose presence is not susceptible to feel-better chatterers, make-belief romances, and a healthier or less healthy diet. And it pervades my dwelling in this tiny room just like it does in many other rooms.
I continue to lie on the bed and carry out different body positions of varying twists and outlandishness and potential future reassurance of comfort. But all of these efforts are thus far empirically progressing towards an ill ending. To rub salt into the wound, the yellow furnitures that surround me would crack haphazardly in tiny explosions of the wood - blam blam blam, leaving me jerked and wondering like an idiot. My significance as a human male seems to diminish mechanically with each of these explosions. Perhaps in some other rooms in College Nordmetall or elsewhere, furnitures are also exploding, with their respective persons, tender or strong, hopeful or disillusioned, social or reclusive, witnessing time's passing-by in a kind of collective symphonic chore of life. Leopold Bloom muses in his square in Ulysses "Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.". It's been a while since I last had blood washed off me; and it'll take a while for me to kick the bucket; I am in the middle of these two, a tiny fraction of the middle as a matter of fact, yet my belief in its uniqueness remains puzzlingly firm, or rather, "settled by a warm human plumpness", as Joyce would put it.
The corridor is resolutely silent. The Sunday evening crowd of some Korean woman's birthday party is quelled. And nary a sound can be heard. I wonder secretly if I too, should brace myself up for the likes of YouTube or LRB - the external, pampering things on screen and on paper - though my timidity that results from having only worn a pair of underwear makes such a move quite unseemly. So I decide for the next hour, to languish on the bed until sleep. I, and I alone hidden behind this third floor window, with brownish light oozing through the curtain and a man wide awake inside, am so uncreative to the point of banality - I wiggle my fingers around this wad of smartphone like a child on a piece of chocolate, fondling the touchscreen with all the raw adeptness that the youngsters of this generation have. This posture of lazily holding a smartphone in bed is one so automatically post-modern that it tends to make everything else less tenable - suffering, death and the process of growing older from a young man seem frail and irrelevant amongst all the mental candies of the user interface in which I so readily indulge.
I suspect, that everything I have thought of on this bed, in these few weeks, in all weeks, has also been thought of by some other people, perhaps less intently so that their thoughts don't oblige them to write them down. Maybe they would instead dismiss these thoughts as mere anomalies of their mental process. But I am not in a position to make such a claim, or to make any claim, because who am I, but one person with his own thoughts. When I cross other people in my path their existence always fascinates me - their burgeoning young and old faces, colorful and monotonous clothings, the way they walk and their peaceful surety of it, and their vague optimism and dismay towards their strand of life different from my own.
The night is late, and my room has begun to blend into a sort of abstraction. Otherworldly definite indefinite sounds and sights swirl by like my mom's lullaby that I don't remember, and I surrender to another of a night's sleep in the same underwear's timidity and unseemliness.
Tuesday, January 16
Saturday, January 13
1/13
In this Saturday afternoon on these carefree pages I realize that I am no longer sad. Not that I intend to have fun through the usual venues of eating and drinking with friends, just that, I am in a peaceful state of disrepair, free from any physical threat and unable to be compelled by motivations. It would be more apt to say these sentences if I am reclining on a checkered woven chair on the summer balcony surrounded by trees of vibrant colors and the birds that chirp on them, perhaps in a medium-sized city run through by traffic that is neither bustling nor spare, but is only constant. But I am not - I sit on where I have usually sat, amongst various screens turning themselves off and the buzz of the ventilator that is still on.
I crack open the curtain to see the whiteness of the January sky, freed from the elation of Christmas and the New Year that now as if didn't occur and watch these lines of words forming out of a vast absence of any restful things that occupy me - the planes, tanks and machine guns many are imaginarily combating, the guitar string that spastically fiddles, the documents and projects and all the wistfulness of dreams that wait to be accomplished appear not very dissimilar to the ventriloquists of an aimless parade touring around an empty building. I am more moved by the freshness of the lawn that sits immovably outside, the archaic softness of my own pillow and the quiet lament of the piano. These things strike me as more lucid and more readily appreciated than the high and tantalizing edifices of humanity that have thus far so eagerly catered to the whims.
I imagine walking on the misty street that stretches away from beneath this room, singing a childhood song that intones in the frigid cold as the northern wind blows on the dormant ground and the treetops waver in my childish fugue. Meanwhile, distant apartment windows, ablaze from their inner warmth, shines sprinkling lights through the gray twigs into nowhere. I find wonderful companionships in these images - in their dilapidation I find calm; in their ancient expanse I find a sense of direction and in their subtle quiescence I find liveliness. But as with all the imaginations, the moment I step out and even only quiver at the thought of going to the trees, I cede into the tormenting cold and my utter diminution. I prefer my tired progression in life affairless and embossed only in hopeless yearnings and occasional twitches of the mind, while I unremittingly revel in my fantasy of the distant winds, stifled laughters, and the wild serious sex that I unsexually have, even though the winds might have long stopped, the laughters disappeared and the sex orgasmed. I revel not in their lush presence but in their unascertainable absence, in their gradual but inexorable paling, and in their passages of a past long past away.
The apartment window hangs there in a cold emotionless suspension. The merry gray sky has rescinded into a sort of deep fluorescent blue. These clouds and fogs, selfsame and perpetual, drift around and around into the highness of the space, into another of the day's end like the an anonymous and forever ode. I stand amongst what is left of today: my head tilting upward and my mouth half-open, in this absurdist reverse painting of my own sterrennacht.
So I, rattled by these soulless abstractions, mournfully twist my fingers into a tentative circle, as if seizing, as if letting go, of this turbid evening air.
I crack open the curtain to see the whiteness of the January sky, freed from the elation of Christmas and the New Year that now as if didn't occur and watch these lines of words forming out of a vast absence of any restful things that occupy me - the planes, tanks and machine guns many are imaginarily combating, the guitar string that spastically fiddles, the documents and projects and all the wistfulness of dreams that wait to be accomplished appear not very dissimilar to the ventriloquists of an aimless parade touring around an empty building. I am more moved by the freshness of the lawn that sits immovably outside, the archaic softness of my own pillow and the quiet lament of the piano. These things strike me as more lucid and more readily appreciated than the high and tantalizing edifices of humanity that have thus far so eagerly catered to the whims.
I imagine walking on the misty street that stretches away from beneath this room, singing a childhood song that intones in the frigid cold as the northern wind blows on the dormant ground and the treetops waver in my childish fugue. Meanwhile, distant apartment windows, ablaze from their inner warmth, shines sprinkling lights through the gray twigs into nowhere. I find wonderful companionships in these images - in their dilapidation I find calm; in their ancient expanse I find a sense of direction and in their subtle quiescence I find liveliness. But as with all the imaginations, the moment I step out and even only quiver at the thought of going to the trees, I cede into the tormenting cold and my utter diminution. I prefer my tired progression in life affairless and embossed only in hopeless yearnings and occasional twitches of the mind, while I unremittingly revel in my fantasy of the distant winds, stifled laughters, and the wild serious sex that I unsexually have, even though the winds might have long stopped, the laughters disappeared and the sex orgasmed. I revel not in their lush presence but in their unascertainable absence, in their gradual but inexorable paling, and in their passages of a past long past away.
The apartment window hangs there in a cold emotionless suspension. The merry gray sky has rescinded into a sort of deep fluorescent blue. These clouds and fogs, selfsame and perpetual, drift around and around into the highness of the space, into another of the day's end like the an anonymous and forever ode. I stand amongst what is left of today: my head tilting upward and my mouth half-open, in this absurdist reverse painting of my own sterrennacht.
So I, rattled by these soulless abstractions, mournfully twist my fingers into a tentative circle, as if seizing, as if letting go, of this turbid evening air.
Friday, January 12
1/12
It is always easier to figure out the twists and turns in literary metaphors than to face the profound patience of the real world. I miss the smell of morning coffees on the long-distance train. But the morning coffees don't exist as much as I couldn't really miss a smell, an olfactory sensation, in words, which are conjectures of the mind. I was traveling from Munich to Hannover on the train, in the morning and without much sleep the prior night. I needed to renew my residence permit; the "Morgen" from the train stewardess sounded formulaic and insincere; and I was troubled by the state of my haircut, while the coffees, steaming in those brownish plastic Deutsche-Bahn cups, past by me under my blurred vision and an utter disinterest to pay. The smell of morning coffees coupled with the sweet rays of sun on the horizon, the moment of warmth and fresh feelings of a journey and of everything starting anew, stands only in my distant awareness, hovering with a false and fragrant bitterness that I have not gotten to taste.
I live off these metaphors amongst all my pulsating urges to eat, sleep, walk around, and look at things. I distill what I understand and remember of the real world into unperturbed, abstract pieces, and store them in my mental reserve like the photos in my Google library, not to supplant the dull, eventless days, but to decorate them with my hopes that, despite their dullness and their eventlessness, they, as well as my life in them, have meaning, in precisely the way I envision meanings to be. So when I cook ramen noodles at the stove, sit on toilets and scratch my head when it itches, I get to overlook the fallibility of life that underpins these actions - my immune system is fighting off infections, my digestive system is getting energy from what's left of the food this afternoon, my toes are occasionally twitching, and I, sitting on the bed with pillows and quills covering everywhere, am typing on the keyboard in a state of spiritual nobleness while the dusts from my skin dance invisibly in the air with Engerer's Chopin vibrating off my speaker.
The furnitures of this room, the walls, and the milk cartons are rendered with an orange hue from the late evening lamp. The brightness shines down from near the top of the cabinet and spreads on the table like a piece of butter I cannot eat, and grows gradually feebler towards the more insidious places of the room. As usual the outside noises, always sporadic and lazy in their composition, lift somewhat the weightiness of my whole body on bed, before it resumes and relapses into the pull of gravity. Aside from this room on the third floor of this residential college, I have not known a place that captures more duly the inaction, the tedium, and the permeating immaterial blandness of a twenty-something life, looked forward to as that of hopes, enthusiasms, and excitements, and remembered as a series of fond memories of crispy red lips, gentle skins, and tight jeans that are the youth. I admire greatly those who are staying outside on this time of the day, telling words to each other and drinking alcohols to make the words more relating and believable. Or maybe they are just eating pizza, with a couple of them sitting together neatly around the table, chatting away time in senseless mumbled sentences. It seems an agreeable way to combat life's vacancy. But strangely my interest in these activities has never been greater than my awareness of myself being in them. I tell funny jokes and put up a laugh so authentic that all of my prior restraints would melt away like the sand dunes in a storm, only for them to come back later like the hollowness of an empty room when the festivity has ended and the lights have been turned off.
The mood begins to take on a more positive note as the Chopin has changed into the second movement of Beethoven's Sonata No. 32. I appreciate the way classical composers manage to convince me of the virtue of optimism with such pathos and hope. "After all! After all!" - they yell at me through the notes in a calm despondence and bliss, in a state of ecstasy that almost borders on the sadomasochism. And as the piece slides towards its unwilling but inevitable end, the last lights of today's passing are boxed in firmly behind the curtain, from the same building to which I am eternally subject.
I lurk myself further onto this side of the lamp, and onto the blue twilights of a laptop screen with dead pixels. The flame of my 23rd year continues to burn low under the rim of this ceiling, amidst the random footsteps and a beveled corner of my beloved magazine. While I, for the last time today, gaze around with sparkling eyes, into the echoless dark.
I live off these metaphors amongst all my pulsating urges to eat, sleep, walk around, and look at things. I distill what I understand and remember of the real world into unperturbed, abstract pieces, and store them in my mental reserve like the photos in my Google library, not to supplant the dull, eventless days, but to decorate them with my hopes that, despite their dullness and their eventlessness, they, as well as my life in them, have meaning, in precisely the way I envision meanings to be. So when I cook ramen noodles at the stove, sit on toilets and scratch my head when it itches, I get to overlook the fallibility of life that underpins these actions - my immune system is fighting off infections, my digestive system is getting energy from what's left of the food this afternoon, my toes are occasionally twitching, and I, sitting on the bed with pillows and quills covering everywhere, am typing on the keyboard in a state of spiritual nobleness while the dusts from my skin dance invisibly in the air with Engerer's Chopin vibrating off my speaker.
The furnitures of this room, the walls, and the milk cartons are rendered with an orange hue from the late evening lamp. The brightness shines down from near the top of the cabinet and spreads on the table like a piece of butter I cannot eat, and grows gradually feebler towards the more insidious places of the room. As usual the outside noises, always sporadic and lazy in their composition, lift somewhat the weightiness of my whole body on bed, before it resumes and relapses into the pull of gravity. Aside from this room on the third floor of this residential college, I have not known a place that captures more duly the inaction, the tedium, and the permeating immaterial blandness of a twenty-something life, looked forward to as that of hopes, enthusiasms, and excitements, and remembered as a series of fond memories of crispy red lips, gentle skins, and tight jeans that are the youth. I admire greatly those who are staying outside on this time of the day, telling words to each other and drinking alcohols to make the words more relating and believable. Or maybe they are just eating pizza, with a couple of them sitting together neatly around the table, chatting away time in senseless mumbled sentences. It seems an agreeable way to combat life's vacancy. But strangely my interest in these activities has never been greater than my awareness of myself being in them. I tell funny jokes and put up a laugh so authentic that all of my prior restraints would melt away like the sand dunes in a storm, only for them to come back later like the hollowness of an empty room when the festivity has ended and the lights have been turned off.
The mood begins to take on a more positive note as the Chopin has changed into the second movement of Beethoven's Sonata No. 32. I appreciate the way classical composers manage to convince me of the virtue of optimism with such pathos and hope. "After all! After all!" - they yell at me through the notes in a calm despondence and bliss, in a state of ecstasy that almost borders on the sadomasochism. And as the piece slides towards its unwilling but inevitable end, the last lights of today's passing are boxed in firmly behind the curtain, from the same building to which I am eternally subject.
I lurk myself further onto this side of the lamp, and onto the blue twilights of a laptop screen with dead pixels. The flame of my 23rd year continues to burn low under the rim of this ceiling, amidst the random footsteps and a beveled corner of my beloved magazine. While I, for the last time today, gaze around with sparkling eyes, into the echoless dark.
Wednesday, January 10
1/10
There was always something unsettling to me about a large crowd of students having dinner in the cafeteria. The roomful of muffled words, the laughters in between, and the sounds of a collective ding as the forks touched the plates betrayed a sense a youthful innocence like the celebration of a big party. Tired or drunk people were leaving constantly for cold and dark places; yet the celebration went on regardless, in a rather triumphant, everlasting rhyme. And everyone could participate in the celebration; there were no fees for entrance, nor was there penalty for exit; I participated in it when I was the more junior of the students there. But nobody embodied the celebration as much as the celebration embodied them - it seemed, as if when people finally left with the contentment and drunkenness and triteness of a finished party, they have left everything behind, bits by bits, irrevocably without even realizing it.
I had left long time ago. An inner emptiness first began to alert me to everything outside of the party. It was quieter out there, more reserved in the posture for smile and complaint, and gentler and more respectful too. The sunlight that shone through the large windows during summer was replaced with one moon and a few faint stars in the northern sky. The juice machine remained in where it had usually been, the ladies from the catering company Apetito all sat there in front of the cash machine, nodding approvingly while I carried my tray full of food towards them, and, as their delight and professionalism lasted longer and more persistently, my feigned politeness turned into real politeness, and eventually into a vague sense of weariness like the yellow banana lying amongst the food. I reached into my pocket for the plastic campus card with the picture of a fresher person, acknowledged the staffs for their services, put the card back into my pocket, said hi to a couple of familiar faces in their familiar tones, picked up the tray and walked back towards my room. On my way out, the hum of the people did not dim a decibel, and the warm winds from the hallway caressed my face with the same rosiness like when I first came in.
Departures were the saddest when people had to leave, from a place to another place, or from one walk of life to another. The actual moment when they had made the decision to leave, though, was far less distinct. During that time, the other people around were still woefully unaware. And often it was better for them to remain that way - the fickleness of human sentimentality allowed only for brief bursts of grief and farewell, and sometimes, no farewell at all. And hence, when I went back upstairs, hardly anyone had bothered me with such formalities.
Mere meters away from the cafeteria the noises had been dampened into a relic of the past. Corridors and white lights and I were lined up in a perfectly linear progression. The fuzziness of a warm inhabited room was replaced by the ruggedness of a functionalist interior design. Every five seconds the black doors that were embellished into the wall swooshed by. Behind them were either humans or the absence of them; in front of them was me, walking down the path as men have usually walked, surrounded by a ring of silence made up of dead air. Distant people also seemed to be walking; their feet clip-clopped on the ground, meandering downstairs and upstairs and into their room and into their cafeteria, their voices cheerful and remote.
Through the same pair of dorky glasses I had always worn I gazed forth with an empty conviction, with my hands attached to both ends of the food tray, and my belly slightly protruding to compensate for the weight. I was walking on a pair of leather shoes I bought from a Karstadt near Stachus back in Munich. In them I wore a pair of black socks I had put on earlier that had strange stripes and ugly logos that would run up my ankles. I was also wearing jeans with a fresh pair of underwear inside. The jeans were rubbing against my legs just like the underwear was rubbing against my ass. My woeful unawareness of their presence bequeathed me a sense of reassurance of my own impeccability, and my mind was then free to roam in an endless series of self-referencing metaphysics about the soon-to-be-eaten dinner. Myriad other things also flashed by my mind and I remembered nothing about them. The fickleness of my sentimentality only allowed for brief bursts of deep examination and provoking thoughts, and sometimes, no thought at all.
And just as I was about to reach my room, a sudden emptiness struck me the same way the immensity of an immense building struck a disinterested visitor. I grabbed the keys from my right pocket as I approached a black door that was embellished into the wall, the one with my name tag hung next to it, and beeped in.
In there, was all that is my life, in this College Nordmetall, in this Bremen-Vegesack.
I had left long time ago. An inner emptiness first began to alert me to everything outside of the party. It was quieter out there, more reserved in the posture for smile and complaint, and gentler and more respectful too. The sunlight that shone through the large windows during summer was replaced with one moon and a few faint stars in the northern sky. The juice machine remained in where it had usually been, the ladies from the catering company Apetito all sat there in front of the cash machine, nodding approvingly while I carried my tray full of food towards them, and, as their delight and professionalism lasted longer and more persistently, my feigned politeness turned into real politeness, and eventually into a vague sense of weariness like the yellow banana lying amongst the food. I reached into my pocket for the plastic campus card with the picture of a fresher person, acknowledged the staffs for their services, put the card back into my pocket, said hi to a couple of familiar faces in their familiar tones, picked up the tray and walked back towards my room. On my way out, the hum of the people did not dim a decibel, and the warm winds from the hallway caressed my face with the same rosiness like when I first came in.
Departures were the saddest when people had to leave, from a place to another place, or from one walk of life to another. The actual moment when they had made the decision to leave, though, was far less distinct. During that time, the other people around were still woefully unaware. And often it was better for them to remain that way - the fickleness of human sentimentality allowed only for brief bursts of grief and farewell, and sometimes, no farewell at all. And hence, when I went back upstairs, hardly anyone had bothered me with such formalities.
Mere meters away from the cafeteria the noises had been dampened into a relic of the past. Corridors and white lights and I were lined up in a perfectly linear progression. The fuzziness of a warm inhabited room was replaced by the ruggedness of a functionalist interior design. Every five seconds the black doors that were embellished into the wall swooshed by. Behind them were either humans or the absence of them; in front of them was me, walking down the path as men have usually walked, surrounded by a ring of silence made up of dead air. Distant people also seemed to be walking; their feet clip-clopped on the ground, meandering downstairs and upstairs and into their room and into their cafeteria, their voices cheerful and remote.
Through the same pair of dorky glasses I had always worn I gazed forth with an empty conviction, with my hands attached to both ends of the food tray, and my belly slightly protruding to compensate for the weight. I was walking on a pair of leather shoes I bought from a Karstadt near Stachus back in Munich. In them I wore a pair of black socks I had put on earlier that had strange stripes and ugly logos that would run up my ankles. I was also wearing jeans with a fresh pair of underwear inside. The jeans were rubbing against my legs just like the underwear was rubbing against my ass. My woeful unawareness of their presence bequeathed me a sense of reassurance of my own impeccability, and my mind was then free to roam in an endless series of self-referencing metaphysics about the soon-to-be-eaten dinner. Myriad other things also flashed by my mind and I remembered nothing about them. The fickleness of my sentimentality only allowed for brief bursts of deep examination and provoking thoughts, and sometimes, no thought at all.
And just as I was about to reach my room, a sudden emptiness struck me the same way the immensity of an immense building struck a disinterested visitor. I grabbed the keys from my right pocket as I approached a black door that was embellished into the wall, the one with my name tag hung next to it, and beeped in.
In there, was all that is my life, in this College Nordmetall, in this Bremen-Vegesack.
Monday, January 1
1/1
Literature has been my retreat. Not retreat from school, the world, friends, or the weather - for if those would bother me, I could always play a few games and read a couple of books. In fact, as dull and anxious as the weather in Bremen is, on YouTube and many other places a blue sky is always within reach. Literature has been my retreat only in the strangest and the most timid of moments - when surrounding this apartment are only sound-activated lights and an endless stretch of not many streets of Northern Bremen, on the internet is a New Year joyfulness that has begun to subside, and on the bed is myself leaning vertically against the pillows. During these moments the combat for a continued and bettered existence calms somewhat, and everything, the computer, the bowls, the papers and books and magazines, and my old jeans, is tucked in place like a warm kitten sitting by the fireplace. My times in Munich, even my times in yesterday recede to become a sort of fond narration - the red railway light by the 7th S-Bahn line, the pink soy milk carton, team lunch on the third floor of the twisted brutalist corporatist cafeteria building, my red-and-black mountain bike parked near Preysingstrasse, and the riverscape of Isar - I am folded away in these metaphors of impression, vaguely real but never real again, like the smiles and clamor on an old marriage certificate.
I dot this white page with the words to allay the weight of these impressions, just as after watching a good movie, I listen to the sounds of vendors and taxis and bakeries to distinguish the realty of this world with another, and consciously or unconsciously reminisce I don't know what scene from what movie, and I don't know what snapshot of emotion from walking down what street.
An image of my childhood rises up from nowhere. In this image, there aren't any objective things - in it are only my grandfather whose face I don't remember, me whose thoughts I don't think, and a backyard on the back of my grandparents' home, colored in varying shades of sweet grayness. I retreat into this image with both of these figures unperturbed. Like a Japanese tourist taking picture of a tree and examine the liveliness of the photo, I take a picture of the backyard with words and proceed to relive its meaning - the content gladness of the grandfather, the innocent naivety of the child, and the bare timelessness of the backyard seem almost artistic.
I half-emptily gaze in front of the virtual touchscreen keyboard, and proceed to recline a bit further into the pillow. Nothing quite compels me in this winter and in this room. The occasional cracks of firework outside stir up the night sky like a pinch of sugar in a steaming coffee mug, registering its strange, exuberant existence only so long as to pique a notion of its presence before dissipating. This morning I saw white fluffy clouds in place of the fireworks; they were drifting eastward with the steady amorphousness that clouds have; the same blue sky mingled in-between them, like some sort of daytime lullaby for the unoccupied man. I don't know whether it's still cloudy right now. The pure darkness of the Bremen sky hasn't the usual halo of light pollution I'd used to see, all I see is a depthless veil shrouding my window with its tamed, but perhaps still bitterly chill. The bed lamp is the only source of light in this room beside the eerie yellow glow of my "TrueTone" display. In these scarce moments when I am not consumed by the inanities of consumable contents on the web, I am instead consumed by the inattention of my own consciousness. While I know that judging from the perspective of someone standing in the corridor, I am but one of the tenants behind one of the closed doors, the sense of distance between me and everything else always hinges on what I presently see and feel and irradiates outward in my decreasing knowledge and concern. In my room in my apartment is silence, therefore however fresh and heartfelt and restless the faraway people playing fireworks are; their smile, their excitement, their sparkling eyes are but formless pieces of my mind, arranged in a twist of slipshod abstraction, in the leftovers of imagination.
I'm mildly a bit drowsy after only 12 hours of waking up. Like a battery mostly drained, I lose the confidence in a reality that was once firmly grasped only a couple of hours after dinner, and continue to live in the aftertaste of an increasingly unrecognizable world. If in the morning I see the objects of a blue sky, clouds, people walking everywhere in different directions, and my own clothes draping down from around my shoulders, now I see only flimsy little metaphors of them - the pungent green of the lawn no longer is pungent, but is only colorful; the poignant pronouncement of the NPR Morning Editions no longer is poignant, but is only audible; in the morning I said: happy new year, in the evening I say nothing. The vestige of the this day seems not so much different from the vestige of last year - an endless stream of colorful things flows past me like a river flows past its bank; while my mind rests on my factless body on a factless bed.
Though I do have some raisins on my desk. Those I would still like to eat tomorrow morning.
I dot this white page with the words to allay the weight of these impressions, just as after watching a good movie, I listen to the sounds of vendors and taxis and bakeries to distinguish the realty of this world with another, and consciously or unconsciously reminisce I don't know what scene from what movie, and I don't know what snapshot of emotion from walking down what street.
An image of my childhood rises up from nowhere. In this image, there aren't any objective things - in it are only my grandfather whose face I don't remember, me whose thoughts I don't think, and a backyard on the back of my grandparents' home, colored in varying shades of sweet grayness. I retreat into this image with both of these figures unperturbed. Like a Japanese tourist taking picture of a tree and examine the liveliness of the photo, I take a picture of the backyard with words and proceed to relive its meaning - the content gladness of the grandfather, the innocent naivety of the child, and the bare timelessness of the backyard seem almost artistic.
I half-emptily gaze in front of the virtual touchscreen keyboard, and proceed to recline a bit further into the pillow. Nothing quite compels me in this winter and in this room. The occasional cracks of firework outside stir up the night sky like a pinch of sugar in a steaming coffee mug, registering its strange, exuberant existence only so long as to pique a notion of its presence before dissipating. This morning I saw white fluffy clouds in place of the fireworks; they were drifting eastward with the steady amorphousness that clouds have; the same blue sky mingled in-between them, like some sort of daytime lullaby for the unoccupied man. I don't know whether it's still cloudy right now. The pure darkness of the Bremen sky hasn't the usual halo of light pollution I'd used to see, all I see is a depthless veil shrouding my window with its tamed, but perhaps still bitterly chill. The bed lamp is the only source of light in this room beside the eerie yellow glow of my "TrueTone" display. In these scarce moments when I am not consumed by the inanities of consumable contents on the web, I am instead consumed by the inattention of my own consciousness. While I know that judging from the perspective of someone standing in the corridor, I am but one of the tenants behind one of the closed doors, the sense of distance between me and everything else always hinges on what I presently see and feel and irradiates outward in my decreasing knowledge and concern. In my room in my apartment is silence, therefore however fresh and heartfelt and restless the faraway people playing fireworks are; their smile, their excitement, their sparkling eyes are but formless pieces of my mind, arranged in a twist of slipshod abstraction, in the leftovers of imagination.
I'm mildly a bit drowsy after only 12 hours of waking up. Like a battery mostly drained, I lose the confidence in a reality that was once firmly grasped only a couple of hours after dinner, and continue to live in the aftertaste of an increasingly unrecognizable world. If in the morning I see the objects of a blue sky, clouds, people walking everywhere in different directions, and my own clothes draping down from around my shoulders, now I see only flimsy little metaphors of them - the pungent green of the lawn no longer is pungent, but is only colorful; the poignant pronouncement of the NPR Morning Editions no longer is poignant, but is only audible; in the morning I said: happy new year, in the evening I say nothing. The vestige of the this day seems not so much different from the vestige of last year - an endless stream of colorful things flows past me like a river flows past its bank; while my mind rests on my factless body on a factless bed.
Though I do have some raisins on my desk. Those I would still like to eat tomorrow morning.