8/27

The stone house up the hill alongside Mill Plain Rd is quiet at night. When it was deep summer, the window air conditioner made a constant hum. But summer is inching to a close, the air conditioner is off now. If I listen closely, however, I can hear cars going about on I-95 which isn't super far away. The thin glass door which is also my window does not block off sound well - it does not need to, in fact, silence is not quite the absence of sound, but rather the abundance of scattered, far away rumbles. Within the stone house inside the room where I routinely sit, words and voices are heard rarely, and only through either the Sony portable speaker connected to my phone, or built-in speakers of my laptop. At the push of a button, whichever words and voices that were uttered at said time would pause and then not resume for a long time, or resume but with an entirely different tone, narrating an entirely different subject. The algorithm that produces the content on the web nowadays ensures that content is abundant enough that it is practically infinite for a human lifespan. The tradeoff would then be between the natural quietness of the stone house and its surroundings and the artificial festivities of whatever the algorithm decides to spit out. But the reality in here, I observe, is more rotational, with each option taking turns governing the room. In between the turns the stone house and the room in it sometimes feel like the central pillar of existence of this reality, through the alternating Boolean states of noise and silence, activity, and tranquility, they produce and encapsulate everything that at least given the constraint of reasonableness, is at all possible. Thoughts which only sporadically sizzle up, get mixed with them like spices on a rotisserie chicken, making up a whole and coherent culinary package. But "feel like" is never "is", the same way that "want" does not align with "get", and "need" with "have".

The stone house and its room are only part of a constellation of things that are far more grandiose and riled up. These are, for example, the corporate office that I subscribe to, the people in it, the Metro-North Railroad and the not-so-distant NYC, friends that I like a little bit, somewhat, or a lot, and the martinis, karaokes, lights that represent a roster of people that I have not even come across. In between the other things are the stone house and its room, or in between the stone house and its room are the other things. Whichever they are, their totality nourishes, chastises, educates, and eventually, assimilates me like how eyeglasses gradually become one with the person wearing them. At the beginning of each day my exit from the stone house and the room is my entrance to perhaps other houses and other rooms; and at the end of each day my entrance to the stone house and the room is an exit from other houses and other rooms. I exit, I enter, on repeat, days into weeks into months into years, and finally into decades that take up increasingly sizable chunks of my life's surface area. More and more things gradually start to make sense; more and more things gradually stop. Or more precisely speaking, fewer and fewer things are categorically definable. Things and the people creating them are coalescing into a blend of non-descript gray, around which tokenized viewpoints, emotions, and many humanly or animalistic ideals swirl around like how the myriad gas clouds, star systems, and the dusts around them orbit a galactic center.

Amidst the stone house and its room, I sit stately without committing to any interpretation of truth. The absence of the hum of the air conditioner in the background has made the room feel suddenly smaller. If previously I felt I was viscerally connected to it in some way, now I no longer feel like it. Its darkened physical boundaries have faded with nothing to replace them. As a matter of fact, I am not connected to anything. Relative to the cosmic microwave background I am moving through space at a rough speed of 370km/s, a number when timed by the seconds elapsed since when past events have occurred or until when future events will occur would explain the distance I am away from them. For now, sheltered by the stone house and its room, I sit stately.