2025-04-05 Journal Entry

I’m sitting in this Starbucks, and there’s clearly an anime convention happening here in Ikebukuro. I don’t know what probably half of these anime are, but I’ve definitely seen some Haikyuu!!! and Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man and some other ones whose names I’ve forgotten. And there’s some motherfucker who I think is literally just Where’s Waldo unless I’m missing the reference.

Anyways, I’m going to continue writing. I’ve fallen a little off the horse on this lately. Yesterday it was because went up to Tsukuba to see the shrine there and hike the mountains around it, the names of which I’ve forgotten, but they’re somewhere on that 100 Famous Mountains in Japan listing. They even sold pins with that 100 Mountains little seal on the side.

Anyways, that was fine. I was silly and hiked it with my white Onitsuka’s on, but they seem to have faired well enough despite trudging through more mud than I had originally bargained for.

Oftentimes when I type, I sort of bear down on the heels of my palms and push into my laptop. I should sit up and sort of let my hands float.

What else is happening in the world. Well, a lot of things are happening in the world, but I suppose the better question is what’s going on in life! I don’t know. My mind is kinda fuzzy. I think I need more caffeine. My usual strategy of going to Starbucks is apparently a bit less useful when I haven’t had even more caffeine beforehand. That’s basically just because I don’t really go to Starbucks for the caffeine, I go for the place to work. I’ve been here for almost 3 hours now though, so it’s probably time for me to get going before someone gets mad at me. I shall, however, finish my morning pages before that, because otherwise I fear I will not quite get back to them.

I really burned through like 200 pages of The Book of Form and Emptiness yesterday, which I haven’t done in quite a while. It was mostly because I got to sit on buses and trains for like 5 hours yesterday, which gave me a ton of time to read. That would probably be a great way to read, just get on a train and ride it up and down the line while you read. You’d have to plan it such that you were pretty much guaranteed to get a seat and also not accidentally stay too late and end up on the last train going the wrong way. But the gentle lull of trains and buses is essentially the perfect reading atmosphere. I think that’s the reason I struggle to sit at home and read – it’s the sitting part. That’s also why meditation is hard, really. It feels like I should be moving all the time. I don’t quite know what that says about me, but I think it says something.

Aaahhhh what else. Some other words. Some other things. Even in another time. Etc. etc.

I was thinking earlier about the psychological study where they found that depressed people generally give more accurate representations of events and estimates of the real world than non-depressed people. I’m looking at all of these people dressed up and I wonder if fantasy, if change and our desire for it is really the most human thing there is. What are the other ways in which we do that… I mean there’s the sort of ritualistic dressing up of religious ceremony, Halloween (that line and who are you supposed to be from Mad Men – chills), I suppose there’s the obvious bit about wearing clothes at all. I don’t know. Sometimes, like in clothes, that partially comes from shame or purely from habit; it’s not necessarily aspirational. I think the religious example, or like some kind of festivals where people wear masks and so on, those are aspirational or for changing our state of conciousness.

But that’s the other thing, that we’re so addicted to changes in our consciousness. We cannot sit still, and instead we’re always trying to be drunk or high or otherwise trying to modify the way we experience the world.

My whole train of thought was just thrown off by some girl cosplaying as some character I don’t know – grey hair tied back in a single braid and just full on booty shorts that stopped about halfway down her ass cheek. I think that’s my cue to move on. Peace and love.

Anyways I’m back here again, and it’s 5pm and I’m ready to write something. I don’t exactly know what yet, but I suppose we’ll see. I should probably continue the thing I was really thinking about before, the dressing up. A child’s perspective is always a good one, or an adult reflecting back on their childhood, looking back up at their parents and seeing what they do. A child finding what they assume is their parents Halloween costumes, the mother’s nurses outfit or skimpy police officer or schoolgirl or whatever, and the father’s outfits are like a construction worker or also a police officer – and of course at this point the child believes his parents will dress up as police officers to match, a fact made ironic by his parents involvement with the ACAB movement or anti-police protests or what have you. And the child themselves wonders what they would like to be, what their fantasies are.

Or a couple deciding what to wear to a costume party and debating about what they’re supposed to wear, trying to be at once understandable by others but also funny in their specific way, trying to essentially graft their own personalities onto others. And then of course they get there, judging others for their own overly normative costumes or whatever and as soon as they see their good friends they get hit with the and so what are you supposed to be.

I just love that line so much, I think it’s wonderful and it feels important to

I just stopped typing mid-sentence earlier and switch to reading The Book of Form and Emptiness, which I just finished. That’s partially the type of distraction I’m hoping to cull a bit, but I also finished that book, which I’m happy about. I’m really glad that I can just sit and focus and burn through 100 pages in two hours or so. My partial hack was that I put on a Yamanote Line ASMR YouTube video in the background – the train sounds get me in the same focused headspace I was talking about recently where I really focus on the train.

Anyways, I want to start reviewing a lot of the books I read. Not necessarily to give them ratings or anything, but just to reflect on their contents.

(I’m gonna abbreviate the title to BFE from here on out.)

To give a short summary or synopsis: BFE follows Benny, a young boy who begins to hear voices following the death of his father. Benny’s mother Annabelle, struggling with her husband’s death and her son’s subsequent diagnosis with schizoaffective disorder and admission to a mental hospital, develops hoarding problems.

The voices in Benny’s ears make his school life untenable, and he finds himself skipping class and spending his days in the one place he feels stable: his local library. There he meets Slavoj, the homeless philosopher, and an enchanting young street artist who calls herself The Aleph.

Just to get down to my objections to this book early one while I’m somewhat fresh (and these may mellow out in the following days): I think perhaps my biggest objection to this book is the ending. Ozeki seems too kind-hearted to really deal with the struggles she has brought to bear on her characters. She manages to throw them into the blender when Benny gets pulled into the election riots, and Annabelle essentially snaps at the end of the book. But all of this is largely reconciled about 20 pages later. This feels at odds with what The Book (that is to say, one of the voices that Benny hears that speaks as both the sort of Platonic ideal of A Book as well as Benny’s specific Book, his personal experience and so on). Take the following:

We don’t want to upset you or make you feel guilty. It’s not out of malice that we’re telling you about Annabelle’s suffering. We’re telling you because, as your book, that’s out job. And even if we’d prefer to spin you pretty fairy tales and tell tidy stories with happily-ever-afters, we can’t. We have to be real, even if it hurts, and that’s your doing.

What somewhat annoys me is that this is the pinnacle of the book, and it’s on page 528. Less than 20 pages later, we’ve seemingly resolved the entire thing. Benny, out of nowhere, magically recovers from his afflictions, grows a pair – literally, he goes through puberty seemingly out of nowhere right towards the end, and this seems to have some sort of relation to him Growing Up and Taking Responsibility or whatever – and then basically just walks out of Pedipsy and practically saves his mom.

There’s this whole section in there about taking responsibility, but the book doesn’t really take Annabelle as seriously as I would like it to. And in a way it doesn’t take Benny all that seriously either. Or the Aleph. I noticed towards the end, maybe in the last 80 pages or so, that the tone changes, hard. The Aleph relapses and switches from manic-pixie-dream-girl (something I will hopefully return to later) to druggie, and then she switches hard from druggie to basically making friends with Annabelle suddenly. I find all of this not necessarily confusing but perhaps offensive – it happens so quickly as to feel like it minimizes the character building that happened in the other 500 pages.

What’s weird is that most of the books feels really comfortable, like a cozy read. Easy, light – like I said, almost a classic manic-pixie-dream-girl trope that goes extremely predictably – and then suddenly Benny gets thrown into a riot, which I think makes excessively little sense. Perhaps if the Aleph took him it would have made more sense, but he runs into those three other homeless guys who got him high, and that seemed strange to me.

To some degree, this is all my own neuroticism about stories making sense and being believable, but I find it hard to really buy into the ending of this book. It really is basically a happily-ever-after – like the last few pages are basically like “yeah and then Benny just went home and helped his mom clean stuff out and then CPS said that was all cool and then things were good.”

What.

Anyways, I need to finish this all later. There should likely be more coherent structure here, but I think the theme is that the book’s self-awareness is cozy at first but betrays it at the end, and while endings are hard, the worst thing you can do is completely shoot yourself in the foot. Anyways, tomorrow.