2025-11-18 Journal Entry

It seems the fastest way for me to feel alive is to fall back to my plain ol' senses. In my mind fly around too many thoughts that woo and distract me: thoughts of what and how to write, the implications of trying, the world as some kind of limited game that wants to tear me down. But instead I can be here clearly and write away, feel the keys against my fingertips, here the beat of the music in my ears, the tension in my neck as a hunch over these keys, all the tension in my arms and back and how I need to breathe. There’s so much heat outside, the air choked into my lungs. I never noticed the air quality in HCMC until today. The food stall at the top of the street was flooding smoke into the streets. The diners didn’t seem to mind, but it stung my eyes as I walked by. Motorcycles spew exhaust into my lungs, sweet-smelling cigarettes don’t lack for a sting in my chest. The streets seem to simmer in the heat. The heat of asphalt sits on my tongue.

The taste of jasmine tea makes me happy. I feel bad for seeking out the Japanese things in Vietnam rather than the Vietnamese stuff, but in my mind they win. I ate at Matsuya this morning, bought some clothes at Uniqlo, bought Ito-En jasmine tea at Family Mart. This FamiMa was huge by Vietnam standards, like a full-fledged grocery store, replacing the usual Vietnamese chicken feet and ca phe sua da with Japanese chips and seaweed and furikake. It almost felt comfortable for me to be there.

I worry often about how I’m spending my travels, if I’m too comfortable. I feel uncomfortable for most of the time, so I think not, but I’m not the “best traveler” – I fall back often to what I know, get complacent, seek comfort. But that’s a pattern in my life anyways. I think now of what I’ll do in the future, of moving back home and staying in my house and putting up bookshelves and sitting in my house and reading all day. Of course that’s what I often do here too, sit and read and write and do little else. It’s a lovely life though, one I don’t want to do forever – I want to expose my writing more, eventually, – but one that I’m happy with right now. I feel as if I’m growing, as if I desire a conversation between myself and these books. To feel oneself as part of the tradition seems important. Whether or not what I make will ever be a great book, I hope it will at least be seen as engaging in a conversation with them.

I still think of The Waves. I write the way I am right now because I want to see the world in that way, as this kaleidoscope of sights and sounds and memories. And truly, that is the way the world seems to me. I sat in bed last night and felt memories connecting in that latent space of the mind, the black behind the eyes that extends forever onward and yet stops at my skull. I felt memories arise here and there, and I could tug on them and see them in full like unrolling a furled scroll. I could see the whole thing but now on the following day their contents escape me. All I remember is their pleasantness, a sort of warmth and light and also a tinge of pain. They were probably of Mom, though I cannot say for sure now. I recall vaguely memories of being a child and how I cherish now what I didn’t cherish then, how despite how much I despise so many scenes in my childhood – a statement I’m loathe to make, but is obvious if one reads many of my older journals in which I’ve previously hashed out much of this – I also hold them closely to myself and upon their slipping away so too would I disappear. Aren’t we such curious creatures who cling most tightly to the pangs of life.

What a journey it is in this single journal – I started frazzled and distracted, and I arrive melancholic and still. This music is now too loud. I wish to get under the covers and read a book, though that may be a distraction until I get to my next task (writing fiction) which I always shy away from but desire richly. I write as if I’m a sickly Victorian child. As it were.