(中文)
(33 records of a saddle)
(the saddle feed)
(drops of ink)
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Record No. 33
Today's one of those special weekends that's only one day -- I have to go back into the office tomorrow and earn my vacation next week. It's a strange feeling. I had trouble sleeping last night, so I gave up on sleep when the sun came up and went for a long run. I hadn't gone for a run that's truly left me winded since the beginning of the summer, when I ran so long that I came down with a fever and spent the week afterwards in a daze. Now I'm not sure if the season we're in is still summer. It feels much cooler this September than I remember it feeling last year. I had big plans at the beginning of summer that I mostly did nothing with. There was one morning when I noticed the sound of cicadas swelling as I walked to the bus stop and I was deeply moved. I wanted to spend this summer contemplating the sound of cicadas. I opened up my copy of the Shijing and looked for cicada poems. "Maybe I'll write about every cicada poem I've ever read," I thought. Soon enough this thought faded from my mind as other concerns came and went. Now the cicadas are gone.
After I woke up from my post-run nap, I convinced myself to get out of bed and go outside for a walk. The sky was overcast, but girls in fancy dresses taking selfies and holding frilly umbrellas filled the streets. I got on the bus route I take to work everyday, but instead of going in the direction of the Special Economic Zone my office is in, I got on the bus heading towards the French Concession. I read an article the Suboptimalist posted a few days ago on his Substack about an event someone he met at an AI slop workshop organized. It seemed like they were trying, unsuccessfully, to do something similar to an event about nothing run by "Remilia Corporation" that my girlfriend Xiaoxi went to a year and a half ago -- something that existed solely because people with money wanted to throw a party and promulgate an empty philosophy. They rented a boat on the Bund and got the photographer who used to run FRUiTS magazine to come and advertise NFTs he'd made based on outfits featured in his magazine 20 years ago. The next day, while walking our dog, we saw him outside of Columbia Circle, down the street from our house with a young Chinese woman who was presumably acting as his guide. We couldn't follow him in though, since dog's aren't allowed in Columbia Circle, so that was the last I saw of him -- gone from my life forever. My friend Fish wrote a story once about these strange guides that foreigners always seem to get assigned to lead them around whenever they're invited to Shanghai. I'm not sure how many of my "readers" are capable of engaging with it, but I highly recommend it.
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