2025-12-09 Journal Entry

9:00AM

My sincere hope is that by writing more in this tiny journal of mine, I’ll come to some decent hand writing. I look at it now + it feels so strangely not-my-own. It looks like my handwriting from middle school, perhaps worse having atrophied so much in the computational world.

To the Lighthouse is a wonder of a novel. It’s more of a regular narrative than The Waves — which is by no means a knock on the latter but rather a note on the felt experience of reading it. What’s perhaps so interesting is that the experience of each character seems to overwhelm or supercede the plot. Paul proposes to Minta but this is practically lost in the sea of the search for the brooch or the rising tide or Paul’s memory of Mrs. Ramsay. Mr. Ramsay feels his own self/sense rise + fall just in the moment of seeing his wife + son. One thinks of the sky + dinner + what to wear + old memories + they all mix and flow like the tide.

Suffice it to say that I’m in love.

11:00AM

I don’t entirely understand the role of monks in Thailand. Like, I understand that even monks have regular human needs to eat + drink, though I do find it somewhat strange to see them chilling in this coffee shop + investigating their coffee beans. But what the hell do I know.

Sometimes I sit here + feel nothing but that’s often when I notice everything. The strange vocal acrobatics in the song on the speakers, the whirr of the agitator (?) foaming milk, the Indian trio behind me with phones all blaring, the crack of ice falling into the ice machine.

And yet in all of that I feel tired. I’m hunched over this notebook with a cup gross-brown with melting ice + the remnant drops of coffee tinting it muddy. Each day wears on.

I think I just have been sitting around for too long. A walk is in order.

4:30 PM

Hoit wondered often about the boy. How he looked so intensely on the world. He imagined the boy to be sad mostly, but other times he saw him preoccupied or in those brief moments of assumed solitude in which his eyes softened, the corners of his mouth rising + his jaw unclenching. The boy often watched other children just beyond the tracks when they passed some farm or town, watched them laugh or fight or do other childish things. In the boy Hoit saw none of this. He saw only a child turned too early into a man. He saw a body incapable of bearing such a burden, and for this Hoit often grieved. He was not religious but found in his dim hope for the boy some kind of faith, for without it he saw no way this world could go except for death + famine + all us with it.

The boy himself never saw such in himself. In his own body he felt a strange darkness. Not evil, but a lack of that candle we call compassion which so compels mankind beyond its basest level. He felt only flashes of sensation, tightness, a boring which felt to him a divine punishment fit for his rank. At night he lay on the exposed iron chassis between the railcars hoping it would quench the heat in his belly but none such mercy came. He saw, in the eyes of others, judgement and shame for his presence, though shame would not fill his belly. Hunger + fire occupied the space in him simultaneously, but no placation would come.