2025-12-12 Journal Entry

My brain feels mushy, so to that end I am going to begin writing with my usual ambling and rambling and senselessness. It has just occurred to me that my time in Bangkok is nearing its end. Sometimes when I leave a place like this I wonder if I shall ever return. It’s a strange some sort of sadness, or a relinquishing perhaps, about the immensity of the world. How strange for a place like this, huge and bustling and resplendent in its life-fulness, to exist and yet soon disappear from experience. I shall soon return to the familiar.

The return home will be similarly brief. I arrive on the 17th and then again leave on the 27th, and those days include Christmas and all its engagements. Between acclimating and hopefully overcoming jetlag, errands, and the aforementioned celebrations, those days will fly by at once.

(I wonder if you compare my journals from different times if you could tell what book I’m most recently obsessed with. I sound far more English than usual in this one.)

I have been writing some each day in the previous days, though it feels like nothing at all. I cannot yet see what will come through the trees. It feels to be something at once both uplifting and terrible I hate to put characters throug too much distress, but I don’t know how else to do it other than to make them suffer. Only one man in it so far seems vaguely happy, and he himself quite deranged. I suppose to see the world as he does, as a series of doors which one can open by burning them to the ground, one must be either deranged, enlightened, or both.

I should spend more time at this writing desk. It is therapeutic for me to sit here in silence and let this pen glide over these miniature pages (ins’t this such a cure notebook?). I don’t actually know what putting these words down does for me, but it does something. Is it vainglorious to obsess over one’s thoughts in such a way? ‘Tis indeed, and I would have it no other way. It’s a vice I know all too well. Alas.

I have a hankering for a drink, perhaps a beer or soju from the nearest 7-11, though I’m requiring myself to write (or stare at this blank page) for an hour until I do so. Thirty-seven minutes to go.

I think I enjoy this sort of writing because it resembles meditation but gives me slightly more focus. The object is right here before my very eyes. I can see the thoughts as clearly as anything else.

I wonder if I will every marry. “Marry! Marry!” says Mrs. Ramsay. Perhaps I’ll be a Lily Briscoe, an old artist looking back on the possibilities of an earlier time. “That loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.” This in many ways is how I feel. My self-sense is perhaps too strong, for I am stuck in this thought like some C-tier Don Draper: “you’re born alone and you die alone, and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget that. But I never forget.” On some level this is true. No one else can penetrate the consciousness that is You. But jsut as much as I’m me, I’m also everything. It’s what I enjoyed so much about The Waves, how everyone is unified almost as a single conciousness. Alone together.

I put a countdown timer on my phone home screen that counts down to when I turn 8, which I guess is a proxy for when I’ll die. 18,485 days. I figured it may be some kind of memento mori, but all I can think of is how that seems impossibly arge, and also no time at all.

Ah yes, marriage. Marry! Marry! I feel no such urge, much as I perhaps wish I did. Women are lovely, but I fear I have grown too accustomed to solitude. My enclave of self is a fortress now, and it may require a concerted seige to really blow the walls down. Last time I was home, Melissa seemed to make it her mission to find someone for me, but my expectations are low, frankly, especially given my present circumstances of being a mit of a mendicant at the moment.

My primary hope in writing many of these things down is that in so writing tem I shall eject them from my working memory and can move on to better things. My fear that such a mechanism doesn’t exist and I’m just repeating myself in so many places like this. Who know.

Man, I really can just fill pages when I put the timer on. Perhaps I’m a yapper too. (It’s actually just that writing by hand is exceptioanlly slow, and all of this may only take a few minutes to read. Still.)

I do feel, after writing so far, much clearer. My senses seem sharper, my mind is quiet. How strange.

Anyways, my hour is up. Bye now.