2025-11-28 Journal Entry

I’m trapped in a liminal world, a town of ghosts, a town called Nordikes Siem Reap. (/end dumb reference to a Make Some Noise bit.)

But yes, I am indeed leaving Cambodia today. Thailand is next!

My intention there is to live my daily life out quite a bit more. Writing, reading, easy meals, things like that. I hear 7-11 is the thing in Thailand (second most 7-11s, only superceded by Japan!), so I’m sure I’ll be crushing some toasted sandwiches and prepared meals. I’m a convenience store afficionado, if I do say so myself.

Today’s Morning Pages (again: traditionally done in the afternoon, it seems) is more of a diary than anything else. I’ve just been updating my blog and such today, so I don’t really feel like I’m in the creative mood. Let’s just get a bunch of words out. It’s also too hot in this goddamn bus terminal, which for whatever reason feels like an anti-creative scene. I want to be cold, with a warm drink. Or something.

And also today I just have a lot of logistics, with getting to the airport and then the flight and then immigration and then getting to the hostel and finding my key and getting into the room and blah blah blah. It’s just going to be a bit of a tedious day of a lot of waiting and details. I think perhaps it’ll be more of a reading day than anything else.

But yeah, what else to really say on a day like this. Not much, it doesn’t seem, so this is one of those times, which happens quite often, where I’ll just keep typing words until something more of interest comes out. It’s a way to just keep my fingers moving, a sort of brain-massage. Speaking of massages, I did indeed get a massage yesterday, which was magnificent. Two hours, which was quite a long time but also was enough time to really have the masseuse get into my back real deep. I have that hurts-in-a-good-way soreness today. Maybe not great for a day where I’m going to be sitting in buses and airplane seats all day and carrying my bag the whole time and so on, but oh well.

Jeez how the fuck am I going to write another 350 words. My writing brain feels like a raw, uncooked potato dug straight from the earth, dirt and all.

Words words words, words are the medium through which I am conveying thought in this moment. This could easily be a page from Agua Viva. Something about it and its primordial nature and rose petals and painting. I really didn’t love that book, but it’s not so much that it was bad so much as it was intentionally meandering and devoid of an object of focus, so it just felt like words. It’s almost like someone read that David Foster Wallace quote that’s something like “how strange I can feel all this and to you it’s just words” and then made a novel on that premise alone, a novel of just words. Words and thoughts and feeling devoid of object, free from the world. Idealist literature. Sometimes I do wonder what a novel written by, say, a consciousness researcher would be like, though I think there would be far more DMT gnomes or whatever in them, or fields and curvatures and usages of the world “qualia.” I do find it somewhat interesting that nobody in the rationalist crowd seems to enjoy or appreciate fiction, but I suppose I’m also not that surprised. Patrick Collison tweeted recently as if he were trying to extract a “point” to reading Dostoevsky, and his final conclusion, after much text spilled, was that they were good because they were explorations of the human spirit, and I felt strange reading it because it felt so inherently obvious to me that that was sort of the role of all art, to act as symbolic representations of what we experience in our lives without us having to be literally embroiled in them. But patrickc is not an art connossieur, though he does also spill much ink on beauty in other ways, so I wonder if he would be better at it if he gave it more attention. Who knows.

Anyways, see? I did find something to write about. There you go, rationalists and consciousness-oriented fiction and things like that. Anyways, I’m off to the bus.

Au revoir!