2025-11-15 Journal Entry

Space black. Red Bull. Springs pull forward this desk lamp – all for show, I think, though I may just be a cynical bastard. Red Bull tastes of sweat, somehow, those old Gatorade commercials where athletes sweat neon. I think in relations of products and advertising. I speak in consumptive tongues.

I hate this lamp because it has an LED bulb that hurts my eyes. LEDs blink in a way that hurts our brains but that is so fast as to be often imperceptible. There’s a metaphor there that I won’t draw out about our world.

(Such is often the case: that everything is a metaphor for something else, I can feel it in my bones somehow, or more likely in my nerve endings, and I don’t care so much to pull it out.)

Or actually, perhaps we shall pull it out, be Focault for just a moment and see the whole world in our daily movements and routines. My mouth tastes like rotting dirt. I feel, sitting in this rented apartment, as one of millions, as one sort of taking in a glimpse of a world that others have crafted for me and not my own. In Saigon there are many shoeshiners, people who come with brushes and soap to clean the layers of dirt on your shoes. I wave them on – my shoes will get dirty again shortly and I wish not to waste their efforts – but today a man insisted and shined the side to show me how good it will look. I have now a white patch on a dirt-gray shoe. I said I would draw out the metaphors but the contents of this one escape me. The whole world is in it, after all.

I pride myself for writing this morning, for doing what I say I will do. It pains me all the more because the sky is actually bright today, the rain staying away for the first time this trip. I can fulfill my fantasy of walking and walking and then walking some more to see the city on foot. Outside my window I see a blue sky which is not the sky at all but more building, just painted the faintest blue like the thin-cloud-strewn sky. Saigon – I am too lazy to type out HCMC, and everyone calls it anything (metaphors abound) – is a bustle, and it takes so much of me to be here. I heard someone argue, probably ironically, that the ability to be alone together is the great triumph of modernity, that it exposed to us our inherent aloneness and our inherent togetherness all at once, compartments in skyscrapers (metaphor and not) after all, and I am so accustomed to such a view that to be thrust out into the streets, opening my door to the market and to the man sleeping in a hammock beside his stall and to the roar of the street, to be hurled into the lives of others so aggressively makes me feel cornered, incapable to taking in so much life all at once. People say this place is dynamic, and I cling to static.

I will go out into the world after I write. (Metaphor! I hope you’ll forgive me for all of these, my love.) I will go out and walk north through Japantown and over by the zoo, perhaps beyond it. Or I’ll walk the riverside as far as she goes, north and then tomorrow south. I don’t know how much I actually learn of these cities by walking them, but in truth I feel I have no other way. I have no other option but to convince myself to be thrown in the chaotic machine, to see it all for myself. I saw a man yesterday with no legs, and I wondered if an American did that to him. They all seem incredibly friendly towards the Americans, thankfully, and I always wonder why we are perhaps not more despised. I wonder how the Cambodians will feel. My better judgement tells me, of course, that most people don’t despise each other for their passport, but this place is so young and so changing that one can never truly know for sure. I can’t begin to see the world as they see it, to crack open their heads and know where how their spirit moves. But they have been kind, all of them, and for that I bow.