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.

2/25

Few things are not to be forgotten this year. In this late Wednesday afternoon, in a brief respite I take from work, I have once again shut off the computer and moved away from my office chair. The afternoon in February is not as dark as the one a few months ago in December, birds have started to tweet, and enough flies have reawakened so that a few could slip through the window. Every day I have worked diligently, like any other qualified salaryman of this day and age. Through the unchanging routine of waking up and turning on the computer and a few hours later, turning it off, days' elongation and nights' protraction could almost be perceptibly felt. And in the process very little room has been left for anything else. To a certain extent, the act of leaving room to anything else has begun to feel a little antiquated and ill thought-out. I work, eat takeouts, look at YouTube, the trees, and the stock market, buy various things and erect them in my room, and debate and examine visiting friends or not visiting them with a calculated, financial exactness that has not been present in me previously. As a result, each day becomes easily dissectible, with clear, definable structures and any excess part trimmed away.

I have struggled with this way of life, because many values that I have held have dictated my understanding of how a life should be lived - that is, fully, courageously, and optimistically, and even while life at one instant is not full, courageous or optimistic, I should at least strive towards these qualities. But lately I have come to a tentative realization that both the course and the outcome of life are determined primarily through circumstances not subject to change through human willpower. Or more precisely, they are subject to change only through the willpower of humanity as a collective, but not through the cries of its individual member. The many glorified qualities an individual might have, are a bit like the fur patterns of dogs and cats in an animal shelter, which may or may not cater to the whims of the potential owner or the fads of what is considered good for a dog or a cat at the time. And the notion that this is wrong, that cries actually should help and fur patterns should not be used to judge whether a dog or a cat is good, but instead something more metaphysical should be used, is founded on a sort of anthropocentric, normative naivety, which I still partially harbor, and which bears no causality to the realpolitik of the world.

Strangely, living without a preoccupation to give off an upbeat, teleological underpinning in everything I do has ironically empowered me to do things more effectively, or to use the phrase from my employer, to "be more productive". When I look at the computer screen, solve the countless virtual issues that appear throughout the workweek, and be compelled to drink coffee, I am no longer inconspicuously cynical. I no longer possess the urge I once had to deplore the vulgarity of the modern capitalistic system of labor as I participate in it. I simply devotedly participate, like a rice farmer deweeding his field not because he hates weed with spite or that he likes the strain of hard work, but simply because he needs to eat, and the less weed there is, the more rice he gets.

And insofar as I continue to physically chug along, I don't see a valid counterargument to it.

2/17

DROP VIEW "3060_FIN_FC_PRED"."CAPEX_FC_LOAD_1_KPI_AGG";
CREATE VIEW "3060_FIN_FC_PRED"."CAPEX_FC_LOAD_1_KPI_AGG" AS
SELECT
TO_DATE(A.FC_TIMESTAMP, 'YYYY-MM-DD') AS FC_TIMESTAMP,
A."Country Text",
ITEM,
A.UNIT,
A.DATE,
SUM(A.VALUE * 1000000) AS VALUE_LC 
FROM "3060_FIN_FC_PRED"."CAPEX_LARGE_GROWTH_1_DATE_PROCESSING_TBL" AS A 
WHERE LOCATE(UPPER(ITEM), 'BACKLOG') <> 0 
AND A.VALUE IS NOT NULL 
AND A.VALUE <> 0 
AND LEFT(A.DATE, 4) = LEFT(A.FC_TIMESTAMP, 4) AND SUBSTRING(A.FC_TIMESTAMP, 6, 2) <> '12' 
AND "Country Text" IS NOT NULL 
AND KPI_LEVEL1 = 'Capex'
GROUP BY
TO_DATE(A.FC_TIMESTAMP, 'YYYY-MM-DD'),
A."Country Text",
ITEM,
A.UNIT,
A.DATE
UNION ALL
SELECT
'2020-12-01' AS FC_TIMESTAMP,
"Country Text",
ITEM,
UNIT,
DATE,
VALUE_LC 
FROM "3060_FIN_FC_PRED"."BUDGET_2021_FINAL_TBL" 
WHERE ITEM IN (SELECT ITEM FROM "3060_FIN_FC_PRED"."FC_ITEM_HIERARCHY" WHERE KPI_LEVEL1 = 'Capex')

10/19

一个追寻者,
一条可怜虫.

6/1

Today in one of my habitual afternoons on my narrow front porch, I notice that spring has come back. The trees in front of the apartment building have amassed enough greenish sprouts that the green has become visible. I wear fewer layers of clothes at once and have already learned to appreciate the sun less than I did in winter. But this spring differs somewhat from the last, mainly because I have stayed home from the middle of March, when the weather was still chillier, and have not accomplished many things of note since then. I do not find the return of spring this year particularly relatable. The routines I have every week are all carried out from the same wooden desk next to my bed - working, learning German, and doing German homework. The memories I have with people are all from winter when the hours were still dark early and when I wore a jacket on top of whatever underneath. These usual or sweet moments have already receded, some more fully than others, but nothing new has replenished them. I am left to dwell in them, to look at them and to try to feel them like trying to gauge the impression of the sun from the balcony of a cloudy day. The birds chirping in the woods, the occasional eager cyclists riding along the road, and the added likeness of spring in the air hence feel a tad out of place with many missing parts that are nowhere to be found.

I look up to the sky. It is so bright that the shapes of the white clouds coming from the west cannot be seen exactly. From in between these clouds strong oblique lights cascade through and blast onto the concrete floor in front of my chair. I can feel a burning sensation through my pajamas but I cannot feel its warmth. Many times I have sat here and thought of many things, even though when seen retrospectively most of them are in vain or no matter. My sitting here, alone under the afternoon sun, with the entirety of my rented apartment behind, calms me in a way that I only quite rarely feel. Here, the white concrete floor is the stage, the wind blowing through the crevice on the door is the orchestra, the spring trees and the rumbling cars on Wolfratshauser Straße are the audience, and I, the conductor, unfold life's symphony into all of its unchoreographed movements.

This afternoon will be insignificant, and the day that wraps around it will be reduced to what I have written on this page. My concrete existence as of now, will turn into a shadowy silhouette, from which I neither hear nor see. This moment, when all the warmth from the sun, the green from the trees, the noises from the traffic and the fluffy pajama bottom covering my legs feel so tangible and concrete, will be frozen and gradually chipped away. And I am always marred by an inability to seize anything from it. Summer is impending and I cannot do anything about it. The months roll forward and so do I. My sitting on this chair static is but an illusion. Time has grabbed me like an ocean freighter carrying its goods - moving slowly but surely with a set origin and a set destination.

The street below my front porch all of a sudden has ramped down. There seems to be a respite from the flow of cars that I can even hear the slow grinding-to-a-halt of the S-Bahn that is at least 1 kilometer away. Aside from this there are only reigning silence and a torching sun. I lift my right leg so that it rests on the edge my chair and wrap my hands around it to, no matter what, keep a semblance of warmth from this afternoon in me.

3/13

The many late and obstinate evenings I've had in the office finally seem to have amounted to something. In a few months of time, I would have a different title and work out of a different building. I am not sure whether I would then lead a different life. I do not know what to expect and the degree to which my expectations matter.

On every workday for the past two years I have traveled to the building complex along Wolfratshauser Straße to the south of Pullach, and away from the same complex a wearier person. On the door tag of my office writes my name and beneath it, my title, and in it I drink plenty of coffee and fight soundless battles against the screen. In winter I could witness daily the changes of nights into dawns, and dusks into evenings. Nowadays the days are longer, and therefore I could see only the latter. In these two years I have won many battles that won't be understood by anyone outside of my floor. And the more battles I win, the more I am defined by them. Words like "bridge", "delta" and "basis" are becoming more and more tangible; and words like "love", "literature", "belief" less so. In books I have read about people looking forward to things in a train station, by the river, amidst a desert, on their way home from a joint dinner, or around the turn of the street - I have not read about people looking forward to things in their companies - yes through companies wages are received and lives are lived. But there no one seems to have any longing beside having a vacation, and no one uses the word longing. And therefore, I simply prepare the slides and talk about the rises and falls of KPIs through a Beamer attached to the ceiling - Net Sales is up, OP is down, Volume is up, Price is down, compared to the budget, and compared to the forecast.

There are moments in the office when, temporarily setting aside my projects and tired of drinking even more coffee, I turn my chair to the right, and only a sheet of glass separates me from the world outside. In those moments time feels static - the contours of the building on the opposite side, the monochrome of the sky, and the distant white dot created by the hidden sun form a sketch painting with abrupt and meaningless contrasts. In those moments I feel the need to miss something, or rather many things, the more recent of which I still remember vividly. I could see them, put them on pedestals, or imagine around them, but I couldn't ever touch them. Their glow coupled with the restrained white lights brimming through the clouds somehow makes the office dimmer than it actually is, and the aroma of the just-now steaming coffee blander.

I try to sit straight to see the things perhaps more clearly. But before long the loose rub of my woolly suit pants against the black fabric of the office chair slumps me back. I then turn my chair back to the left, jiggle the mouse and continue the work. In the office there are urges for me to discard these short moments of musings readily, urges for me to make some progress and progress. For me, these urges are hard to ignore, not because they are more tenable or rational than the others, but because increasingly I do not know of what lies beyond them. What is an assistant bookkeeper without his book, a pharmacist without his pharmacy, and an office clerk without his office? In the face of these types of questions I have grown routinely timid, yet no amount of my inquiry has thus far produced a comforting answer.

Instead, I type on the keyboard piecemeal the thousandth line of code for an FX effect calculation, and slam loudly "Enter" at the last line break before the report runs through.

2/19

In this wintry Sunday evening large hopes are difficult to find. My room has quieted down from the activities during the day. Compared to say, Friday evening or Saturday evening, the quietness of the Sunday evening is vastly more resolute. It is quieter because of the anticipation of tomorrow - not Gibran's dreamy tomorrow, not Shakespeare's dramatic tomorrow, but rather the more logical, easily abstracted tomorrow, full of not murders, turning points, or candles but of work emails, green Excel sheets, and cups of machine coffee, things which, come to think of them, are so direct manifestations of reality that they only make sense in context of other terms like money, greed, and the inanities of modern life. In this evening, unlike the evenings in Berlin, I could not just have a walk around my favorite square to quell my thoughts - there's no square downstairs just as there's nothing in my life for which I need to take an immediate walk. I could, however, drink tea from a glass to the side, look at some apps from the screen, and open the window.

Pessoa wrote that the perpetual hope dissolves in the darkness of the night with a faint splash of distant foam. In the black sky from my window sit the silhouettes of the morning trees. They branch out upwards, but stop short of covering half of the sky. My Sunday evening perhaps is like the trees - dormant and selfsame in the moment, less dormant but still selfsame when tomorrow arrives. The laments I have this evening will not change tomorrow. They do not even forebode it. In the free and empty evening I could picture many things, having a coffee with the person I like, going to the mountains and to the seas, volunteer in a foreign country, etc.; but there are very few things I could enact, and if I could, it would only be possible during my vacation. Therefore, tomorrow I'll as usual don my business attire, put up my corporate smirk and ride my S-Bahn.

The evening is inching deeper, and the cars on Wolfratshauser Straße are getting fewer. The debates I have with myself are also becoming less eloquent. At the end of the day, perhaps it does not matter that I concern myself with different things this evening than I would tomorrow. The transition between days might seem significant in the moment, but it is rarely the case when viewed retrospectively. I tend to grasp, savor, and keepsake moments over other moments, thoughts over other thoughts, thinking that by considering something more strongly I get to cling on to it for a bit longer - I take pictures and write for this exact reason. Though I realize eventually what gets savored are not the moments or the thoughts, but rather the metaphors and recollections of them. There's nothing of wonder about this evening, in which I sit and look around like any other evenings. Only when the evening is viewed in conjunction with the materialistic and monetary tomorrow, can I use it to fuel a certain sense of relief and righteousness in my inevitable capitulation to reality when the alarm sounds in the morning - a formulaic banner of resistance before the ready surrender.

Perhaps there have never been large hopes, just that the brave man goes forth in his bravery, while the sheepish man surrenders in his sheepishness.

2/8

Nowadays time withers by without an eye being batted. I have had many showers but few dreams. The necessity that I had in the past of having to ask questions and abide by tenets has worn off - in its place are on the surface, words like career, promotion, salary increase, jacket vs no jacket, IGM vs IG BCE, and descaling powder; down beneath scatter shreds of hope, love, and an empty antagonism. There is a full story behind each of the words, but the words together convey no novel message and accomplish no coherent whole. The things I aspired to could often be found in these words, and they would dazzle me if I dare look at them, but nothing quite corroborates them so each continues to linger singularly, like the lines in the SQL codebase I wrote for an analytics project that was later parked.

When I cherish something every so often I carry within me many added normative assumptions about it, like with career, I envision respect and a certain suspense of personal interest for the collaborative gain; with romance, I picture sincerity and genuine smiles and thoughtfulness; with friendship, I prefer it to not dilute with a difference in time or a divergence in location. These assumptions usually prove to be untrue. And the longer I have held these assumptions, the better and more capable I am of refuting them. I have a sizable reservoir of sly gestures, sarcastic remarks and terse adjectives for this particular use. In refuting these assumptions I get to feel unburdened. But because after they are refuted what I intend to cherish becomes less cherishable, I continue to hold on to them.

The reality I am faced with has the habit of being very multifaceted. In it many storylines, characters, and all shades of sanities coexist. However pompous I am, I would not regard my storyline or the world from my point of view as representative of the wider picture. But neither seems there any storyline that could be. Perhaps this is why Sartre says that men are condemned to be free and that Heidegger says that we are thrown into the world. The leftover option for me, under the curse of the freedom and being thrown, is then to attempt to flail at least more stylistically. My Barenboim collection, my work involved in the unnecessarily convoluted projects, and my bursts of obsession with good food are all part of this attempt. Tomorrow, I'm meeting with someone to whom I have barely spoken, in a coffee shop where I have never been; next week I will participate in a development center to determine how my skills can be better used by a corporation I work for; and then perhaps there will be beers, friends and some festive noises that narrate the same story in different forms and with new metaphors. For these events my dress code, the allowable amount of cologne, the words I utter and the pictures I paint will change significantly. And I shift between these events like a seasoned party animal going between parties, accustomed to the cycles of being eager and being tired without any unduly expectations or out-of-whack actions. After all, upon realizing reality as a whole as largely unalterable, I have chosen to focus my efforts on the more manageable components of it, and only concern myself nominally with the others things.

I remember distinctly though, that in the past I used to possess the capability to see things through some different lenses - in all of which a certain inner flame was burning, rendering everything I saw in hues that were more upbeat. I was marching towards somewhere. Since then I have spent a lot of time looking for that flame, through bubbly afterwork beers, hotpots, tanks, dates, anything, in hopes of finding it. And there, I have yet succeeded.

11/12

Earlier today a piece of very unfortunate news was delivered to me - Magnus, my former boss, had been hospitalized last night due to a bike accident near Harlaching, and he will be receiving his surgery tomorrow. I wish that the doctors who will be treating him take good care of him. May God bless him.

11/9

This November I have bidden a quiet farewell, one that is known but not said. These days when I meet people I hardly bother to present myself fully. In the real world there is always an implicit sense of futility. And since I, like many other people, use restraint as an insurance policy for it, farewells, usually associated with some unchecked emotions, can then be carried out quietly. Instead of the hackneyed formalities of "bye", "take care" and "good luck in life", a conversation simply ends when no new message arrives.

I do not recall exactly when I have become used to this kind of farewell as I was not. I don't think there is a moment or a series of moments that have hastened the transition. As the years go by and life progresses, something has just gradually brewed in me that allows everything to feel more palatable. I have seen many things and people being gained and then the same being lost - in between there are often some noises and fights, but those are mostly short-lived and rarely make a difference. Recognizing this, I now pick my battles wisely.

Life after the farewell is the same as it was before the farewell. Looking around, I couldn't see any material change. The world does not turn more blue or more gray because of the thoughts of an individual, though the reverse is quite true. Some bits of the morning fog seem to glisten as the clouds temporarily thin out to let the sunlight through. The cycles of weather in Munich are always mashed up together, difficult to tell apart.

In this November everything seems feeble, so was everything last November, and the November before. The mild morning light shines through the window, casting my shadow on the wooden floor - an elongated circular head that sits on top of a rectangular box with rounded corners. The trees, compared with a few weeks ago, seem looser. I can see more of the colored houses from across the woods. I am not interested in the houses, nor am I curious about the story-lines of the people living there. When I go to work, I pass by some of those houses on my way to the bus station. I see on the door tags the names I could neither pronounce nor remember. Nowadays I dare to acknowledge most things in my life only quietly or passingly, sometimes due to a lack of need, or a lack of time, or simply, a lack of reason. But interestingly the outcomes of these tacit acknowledgements aren't better or worse than those for which I have actively tried. The only difference I have observed, is the lack of repercussions from the former. Dostoevsky said: "The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment." Conversely, crimes that are committed half-heartedly and acknowledged passingly, must often go unpunished. And somehow I have learned to exploit this fact.

To me, the lights, the trees, the houses, and many other things this morning are faraway. I'm detached from them because I have no obligations towards them. But being detached from things does not mean being free. In fact, being detached from things sometimes is the opposite of being free. In this room where I am idle, I'm locked in my idleness; where I detach myself, I'm burdened by what I have let go. The misty white lights which shine through the windows, the leaves which fall from the trees, the houses which are lived by people unknown to me, collectively create a picture which I am not in.

And I reach out for something in the lump of air in front of me like a baby reaching out for its milk. But nothing is there.

8/22

Soon I took refuge in the corner seat - the loud bass of the electromusic passed through the wall behind me in rhythmic vibrations, like a giant machinery pushing me from behind. The crowd on the floor were dancing to the yellow disco lights hanging above them. I looked around for the guys who came with me, failing to find them, and took a little sip from my glass of gin and tonic. The chilled tonic water sizzled on my tongue for a moment before the warmth of my body flushed it away. I had learned to appreciate the nuances that came with using alcohol, turning things and people around me into gentler, less crude versions. In the background, the music was still playing as loudly as ever - it thumped on my ear drum every half a second, asserting itself above all else. But it was also sounding somewhat vague to me - the loudness seemed to disperse with the purple and red smokes and become more monotonous. As a result, there seemed to be no rock solid things any more in this room - the boundaries were blurring, the edges eased out, and the people began to move like waves.

I noticed that on the outer surface of my gin-and-tonic glass the layer of mists was condensing into tiny droplets of water - the ice cubes had also gotten smaller. Intuitively I began to sip faster and started to feel somewhat lightheaded. In front of me a group of people were dancing to a set of lights that seemed increasingly flashy. Or rather, they weren't dancing at all - they were merely shaking their bodies around. I had the intention to talk to someone but the cascade of the music and the voices singing to it quickly overwhelmed. I became bottled in this room. And it was only 11 PM, a long way to go until the night would die down. My decision to show up in this club was not voluntary, but it was inevitable. It occurred to me as though when there was more freedom to make choices in life, there would be fewer reasons to adhere to any particular choice. So I ended up making no choice at all, merely allowing myself to be taken to places simply because going to places was to me preferable to not going to places. I couldn't pinpoint exactly what I felt when I quietly sat in the corner - it wasn't a material substance but rather the lack thereof - the lack of belief in essential oils, in playing golf, in dotted or not-dotted reporting lines, and in the future me taking the kids to the swimming pool.

Bypassing the straw I took a gulp of gin and tonic from the glass, wishing to drive the feeling away as it permeated me like the dimly lit smoke permeating the crowd. The swirling loud electro-bangs at the moment were like the background music of a movie scene waiting for something to happen, except for that nothing did happen and everything remained the same as it was thirty seconds ago. I was somewhat amused and put up a bland smile. I drank up the rest of the gin and tonic and decided to leave.

Pessoa once remarked that "what was social is now individual". And it was exactly like that when I left the club. The dry air with low levels of carbon dioxide was refreshing. Some specks of stars from afar were faintly visible. There were tire noises of cars in the city going places, and I was going back to the apartment where I would stay until the end of September. At this time of the day, walking on the streets were only people who were the patched up versions of their former selves. But which version was more real or less fake was not an answerable question and not the point.

In whichever version the solace people sought was still missing and at a distance the music went on.

3/25

The shred of blue sky that was revealed after this afternoon's rain slowly receded from the view as I sat on the S-Bahn back home. The day was a day of usual business with an early Monday morning start and a late Monday afternoon end. Sitting in front of me was the girl with whom I had inadvertently chatted up a few weeks earlier - she reclined lazily on her seat, swaying rhythmically as the cabin moved forth.

I looked around at those who were sharing the ride - a lady in her winter clothing was swiping her phone, and a dog laid between the seats that were behind mine. The loud speakers of the train announced the stations I passed by as dutifully as the first time I heard the announcements almost two years ago. I put my hands snuggly in the pockets and babbled some words to the girl and she babbled some words back - there was a particular instant in these babbles when I felt that, everything, the train, the people, the dog and all of these selfsame routines seemed to brim with a certain softness. I smiled and then peeked away.

I had no idea what I would do when I would be back from work. Nothing in my apartment room still amazed me, and nothing I could do in my apartment could amaze me. I drifted out from the apartment every morning, and drifted into the apartment every evening. The apartment was an instrument through which days transitioned into other days. But its mereness did not disconcert me - on the dotted blue S-Bahn chair I eventlessly and happily sat, waiting for the station where I could then transfer to an U-Bahn.

The sky dimmed a little as the sunset neared. The traffic lights and the tail- and headlights of cars began to stand out. Though it wasn't so much of a dazzle - through the tired eyes of a long day in the office, nothing could dazzle. But nonetheless it made the city, and subsequently me, slightly more alive.

The train gradually slowed down as it approached the Harras S-Bahn station. I got off, and took a long deep breath of the crisp wintry air. When I waited in the morning on this platform, the sun shone from the east through the trees. By the evening the trees had turned into silhouettes, impatient like the weariness of a late afterwork crowd. The girl was still following me. Her walk was a bit slower than usual, as was mine and everyone else's. But her dotted coat looked merry amongst the sea of black and grays. I tried to conjure up some words to say to her but couldn't bring about any of them - there wasn't anything in this world that was so novel that I had to say it out loud. Thus I kept on walking straight, but not so straight as to appear nonchalant.

On the escalator down to the U-Bahn station, I faintly remembered some quote about shooting stars. It said that there would occasionally in life be shooting stars, upon which we would make our wishes and then let disappear. In the rumblings of distant trains and the gusts of tunnel winds, I somehow felt better and began to walk more affirmatively.

It was still a couple of minutes until the next U-Bahn would come and pick me up - until then, I walked in my black and gray overcoat, against which the dotted coat fared.

1/9

Almost half a month after I have traveled back from Germany, I haven't any idea about what I had set out to achieve. In turn, I have simply become a more susceptible, or to put it figuratively, a more walkable person, guided by a set of believes that are now rather malleable and infirm compared with, say, when I first embarked on this journey earlier this month. I realize, that however I adorn and defend my follies with rousing appeals, seeming arguments and wishful thoughts, I remain largely helpless when it comes to confronting how things would actually work in this reality - which is always kind of rash, devoid of the bittersweetness, the caprice, and determinism that I have had the habit of ascribing to it. I have not been disappointed as much as I have been taught, of what I do not know - I just have this vague sense of being shown, like at the end of one of those interviews with the vibe of engagement a door is politely shown which is then promptly shut closed.

I used to lament when I have to sit alone in a curtained room, lit only by the solitary glow of an artificial light - sitting in it feels demeaning to me because of the deafening silence. In such a room there are no facts, only hypotheses, rootless fantasies, and half dreams that extend wildly and unrealistically outward. But now I savor it because it is more comforting for me to have the certainty of what isn't real than that of what is.

Hence I sit on this wooden chair where I have sat nearly five years ago, with my elbows and wrists drooping forward onto the desk. Through the window I see that the sky is getting darker. In the past I could see all the way to the road on the far side; I could see the street lights slowly turning themselves on, and the cars coming and going about their own businesses. But now the view has been blocked by a towering yellow mall with furniture stores and supermarkets in it - massive billboards of varied artistic designs and messages are stuck onto the side, ready to blast their lights on my face when the night falls. Familiar traffic noises, sometimes even loose vestiges of voices talking to other voices, will shine through the window with all the liveliness of this city that is my hometown. At the same time, on the streets and in the rooms the uncomforted people are still uncomforted.

It was on this chair that I posed the many questions, drew the many conclusions, and decided on the many actions which have led me to this point in life. The ideas I had at the time were not necessarily accurate, but were nevertheless temporarily inspiring - some of these ideas were, from the get-go, logically untenable, like the belief in the power of a man triumphing over his reality, or the belief that the future will be better when a deplorable past is renounced. I recognize now that these ideas are only convincing when left unpursued, since a reality, by definition, is merely an objective state of being that cannot be triumphed over, and the past, however deplorable it is considered, can never be altered, not to mention renounced. But at least back then I had these ideas and could seek solace from them. Now I have become more sheepish - having learned the extent to which many of my insistences were ungrounded, I'm no longer capable of being the idealist I once was with the same fervency. However, neither am I a realist, for to me, a realist is just an unknowing nihilist. Five years ago on this chair was a reckless young man setting out for his shiny dreams; five years later the same man sat on the same chair, looked out of the window, and did not say a word. The chair is the same chair but it has also somehow started to feel awkwardly anachronistic - the meanings once assigned to it are no longer so heartily needed and appreciated - the sparkles, the fists, the countless remembered or forgotten nights, yes they once exist - but only like the old wounds from the days past that are never quite healed but are nonetheless increasingly unseen.

Emptily I sit on the chair. The dim gray sky hovers above the buildings, and all of the nearby or faraway people walk by.

12/12

My original plan was quite simple - two years ago I had written fondly of a serene, salaried life which I then did not have - a sturdy corporate job that needn't be glamorous, an apartment to call my own, and a couple of places around the town to hang during my free time. I have achieved all of them - I now work for a DAX company in Munich, and my apartment is at the very center of the city. The surrounding area has a healthy dose of genteel vibe. Late at night sometimes it would be foggy so the traffic lights, the LED signs of the various eating establishments will sort of hazily blend in with the background darkness of the night - it often looks quite picturesque, almost dreamy I dare say. And my walking in them, my existence amongst them, when examined outwardly, will seem poetic. But I, like or unlike other people, have a tendency of never being appeased. Probably it's the lingering youth, or the set of foolhardy believes I maintain deep-down, or the fact that I'm in general a fidgety person, as a result, over time my plan has gotten more abstract, and thus, less attainable. With all of the worldly items crossed out, the rest are difficult to even describe, let alone to accomplish - ethics, love, altruism, acknowledging but not kowtowing to the passage of time, the smooth transition from the current me to the future me, having the proper level of sarcastic undertone to myself and balancing the tradeoff between the respect of knowledge and the respect of people. I can't cross out these things by making an action plan of what and how and when; and strangely from pondering these goals I no longer find the consolation which in my more desperate times I used to.

Lately, it has also gotten harder for me to portray the things that happen to me with the same clarity and poignancy as it was previously. If in the past things had gone either well or terribly, now they merely cascade down on me like odorless puffs of air - it's easy to ascertain the fact that they exist, but I have not been capable of assigning to them an apt, moving character. In this apartment I live in, which isn't dissimilar to all the other apartments I had lived in, I'm warmly surrounded by random things in random places. I'm wearing a facial mask in preparation for my trip to Shanghai in four days, and earlier I was working in the office, and even earlier I was asleep. Outside, the December Munich sky is ruthlessly dark, just like the December Bremen sky or Berlin sky - the places that have now become faraway places simply because I haven't been there, and inhabited by faraway people that I once was acquainted with but no longer am. Its darkness has nothing special within it; and the living ones under the darkness have nothing special to add to it. Wind occasionally and fruitlessly rams on my window and the cars, varying in their brands, shapes, and compositions graze against the road in a constant but usual roar - an evening bore, one might say, but according to Chesterton, "there are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people". Fair enough.

Though I haven't the idea of an interest - what is it consisted of? It seems to me interests are only of 2 types - a disregarding interest that takes place at the expense of other things, or a more reserved, appreciative interest that is only rekindled after experiencing life's great unearthing pains. At the moment I had neither of the interests - I lie for granted on my bed without an inkling of a war, and without harboring any grand resentment towards my life that can only be alleviated by drinking a beer. I simply lie on the bed, with a portion of my torso touching the bedsheet in all of body's trite familiarity. The night is steadily inching towards an utter silence that nights are associated with. The scant sounds and clamors are becoming even scanter. Happenings during the day, when people were still a bit more cheersome, are being slowly diluted away. It is often tempting to think of such a void as what's revealed after all the hustles and bustles are peeled off - that in this sort of a dark, uneventful, existential crevice, a truer facade of life is somehow represented. But there isn't a true facade so much as there isn't a false one.
-

Sitting invariably in the airport with two hours until my flight would depart for Shanghai, I'm again listening to Chopin's Prelude Op. 28 No. 4. Not that I have the need to mourn for a loss nor that I want the bland waiting hours to be cast in a particular light so that it becomes less bland - the prelude simply calms me by bringing me a certain kind of reassurance amidst the sort of underpinning naivety and futility of it all - of traveling 20,000 kilometers multiple times, or perhaps, more generally, of my capability to see things realistically and then of my refusal to then believe what I see. But, increasingly I'm confronted with the fact that there exist a set of conditions in this world of which one can never be reassured, one can either choose to accept them or to detach from them. Such as the ephemerality of the beautiful things, the stern silence that often follows them, and the reason people would sometimes drink alcohol. I have had the courage for neither - I sit sluggishly in the airport seat, with my feet shooting out from underneath. I look around at the bright swaying intermittent lights patched up against the wall and the exuberant or subdued faces all around me and suddenly begin to feel a bit stymied. I have never quite been able to understand them so much as they have not been able to understand me. I merely drift along, with the phantasmagoria of various gold-tinted pursuits: happiness, meaning, gratitude, money, becoming good at useful things, etc, glimmering on an invisible sideline, cheerleading my strand of life as I nonchalantly walk on it.

1/16

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

3/17

Bremen had started to rain
Again
In my daily morose
Of having carried out life