If you are curious (semi-NSFW)
I’ve reached the point where I have too much unpublished writing floating through the depths of my hard drive, and it’s haunting me. Every night, as I try to fall asleep, I think of all my poor essays which will never be read, and I can’t help but break out in tears over their sorry state. If only I could do something for them!
The most obvious thing to do would be to simply finish each essay, one by one — to make them readable for the everyman, the kind of bearded lumberjack living in the Pacific Northwest that I imagine as my typical reader. However, despite my standards being quite low (as should be obvious if you’ve spent any time clicking through links on my website), I do in fact have a sense of shame. This is the source of most of my problems writing-wise.
The reason much of my writing has been left unfinished and unpublished is that it contains content I feel uneasy about releasing into the world as is. Whether it be embarrassing stories of my past, admissions of horrible guilt, or simply badly phrased sentences — whenever I’m perfectly at ease and sit down to write, I always seem to go in directions that, once ventured, spark the sudden and pressing need for self-censorship. Being removed from this writing by time makes it slightly easier to release it into the world, but upon rereading it I still find myself wanting to say more. Moreover these fragments typically aren’t substantial enough to feel publishable on their own without a huge amount of additional work I no longer feel inclined to do, as removed as I am from their point of conception.
So I’ve come up with a compromise: rather than editing my essay fragments or continuing to work on them, I’ll publish several related fragments together as is, noting their dates of composition, then add my commentary, written by current me. Maybe this can serve as an inter-temporal dialogue with myself. At the very least, it might prompt me to finally write down certain thoughts I’d been wanting to put into writing for months or years.
July 3, 2023
My girlfriend [Xiaoxi] is a lot like me, but less inhibited. I’m lying in her bed now as I write this. We just changed her sheets today and she spread out a blanket I hadn’t seen before — it was lying somewhere beneath the pile of clothes she keeps in her closet. It has printed on it a blue haired girl with cat ears and a cat tail lifting up her shirt so you can see the bottom half of her big round shining breasts. The flesh beneath her eyes is a glowing pink blush, and she’s holding the bottom part of her shirt up with her mouth. It’s very sexual. My butt is currently where her breasts are and my head is somewhere in the midst of her popsicle-like blue hair.
My girlfriend’s in the living room, talking to her mom on the phone. She always sounds so angry when she talks to her mom. Originally I was sitting beside her, but it was too loud in the living room, so I came here. Whenever I talk to her mom I feel like she doesn’t understand a single thing I say. Her mom just laughs nervously at every statement I make, sometimes repeating it back to me in a questioning tone.
I wonder what it’s like to be my girlfriend. I spend everyday next to her. We talk constantly. I still don’t really feel like I understand her. I could give countless examples, but since I’m lying on her hentai blanket, I’ll talk about that. It’s not the only hentai thing she has. The towels we use all have images of girls stripping. All the drawings my girlfriend makes are of girls peeing on cactuses or girls on all fours as blood drips out of their vaginas.
There is an aesthetic to sex, and I don’t know how to write about it. Especially when it’s not real humans who are doing the sex or being sexualized, but instead abstract cartoon forms with glimmering eyes and shining breasts. In our modern world, you’re allowed to be interested in sex. That’s certainly made clear. Though I get the feeling that you’re still not supposed to be interested in it — especially as a male-like creature constantly terrified of becoming an incel or MRA. I at least have never had the guts to openly talk about sex much. My girlfriend on the other hand spends all day long thinking about it, surrounded by it, and feels no shame. She goes outside wearing cartoon vaginas on her shirt and cartoon boobs on her pants. That isn’t to say she is obsessed with it. For her sex — in it’s aesthetic form — is as normal as Disney. I wish I could know what that’s like, but even seeing it with my own eyes everyday, living together for six months now, it feels so far away and incomprehensible to me.
My girlfriend just finished talking to her mom. She came in to tell me she forgot she was using her can of Coke as an ashtray, and accidentally drank a mouthful of Coke mixed with ashes, but because she was talking to her mom she couldn’t gag and had to power through the conversation until she was finally able to hang up the phone and gargle out the ashes.
I’m back in the living room and my girlfriend is standing in front of a roll of paper she’s supposed to paint a gangly armed fashion monster on for a friend. It’s 10:30 pm, which in another life of mine would have been too early, and in yet another would be too late, but in this one I’m not sure which it is— though regardless we decided to order some McDonald’s. In this brand new world of ours, french fries and ice cream can come right to the door, instead of us having to go out and get it ourselves. I’m still not sure how I feel about that.
When I was in another place, living in my own tiny apartment in a cinderblock-like building, there was a McDonald’s a short walk away. Slightly farther away were two choices of convenience store, and somewhere in the middle was an independently owned grocery store. During the months in which I was responsible to no one, had nowhere to go, no one to talk to, nothing to think about or do, I often found my life to be floating in between these places — the only one of which was subject to time’s influence being the grocery store. The convenience stores and the McDonald’s were open 24/7, and other than the presence or absence of light through the windows or the volume of customers that needed to be navigated before making a purchase, they were always the same.
My girlfriend’s world is also one that drifts through the night as often as it stands sturdily through the daylight, though I find that we often spend multiple days indoors. All of the places that, were I by myself, I might venture out to visit can instead come to us. Men wearing helmets knock on the door at every hour of the day, for both my girlfriend and her roommate, bearing milk tea or full meals. There’s also far more packages coming here than I ever received on my own. My girlfriend’s roommate [Yinyin] gets things shipped to her from across the oceans. I guess they’re related to her job — she takes normal looking clothes, tears them apart then sews them back together into stranger and more discomforting forms.
We gave my girlfriend’s dog a bath this afternoon — the two of us in her blue-tiled bathroom. The whole time the rain was falling outside. Outside our window cinder block buildings — this time vertical cinder blocks rather than the horizontal kind I used to live in — faded into the grey sky as the sun — invisible behind the clouds — presumably set.
But all that time we were indoors.
The rain was — is — a sort of wallpaper or background noise that can never actually touch my skin. Instead my girlfriend is sitting beside me, with her legs on my lap. For the moment at least, everything besides her touch, everything outside of this apartment, feels too abstract to possibly be real.
I asked my girlfriend just now why she likes hentai so much. I figure she’s the more interesting person in this regard, so I might as well write down her views instead of only airing my own vague conjectures. She said she likes erotic cartoons because they’re more exaggerated than live action pornography.
“Pornography is already nothing like real life, but when you make it into a cartoon it can completely lose all connection to reality and become it’s own thing. I think that’s interesting and exciting.”
She also talked about how she thought it’s cool to take something innocent meant for kids (cartoons) and turn it into something depraved. She’s seen so much hentai now that she has no interest in regular pornography. It’s too boring.
It’s closing in on 11pm now, so I think I’ll leave it at that. We’ll see if I ever have more to say about this particular topic. Until then, good night.
Saddle says:
This was perhaps the first reflection I’d ever written about the life I was living last year with my girlfriend in Yinyin’s apartment. At the time, all of that was still fairly new to me. I had finally gotten used to it shortly before writing this, so this was the perfect time for reflection on what about this world seemed so magical to me.
Yinyin was a fashion designer, and my girlfriend has had various jobs at the edge of the fashion and film industry. It’s not like I didn’t know anything about fashion — but I’d lived a life up until then resigned to feeling as though fashionability was impossible for a creature like me. Xiaoxi and Yinyin had no such insecurities. They could dress however they wanted, displaying their bodies however they wanted, with no apparent shame. In other words, they were just so unimaginably cool, and even now I sometimes feel overwhelmed by how much cooler my girlfriend is than me. I don’t exactly feel insecure — I realize that I perhaps have other redeeming qualities — but I still sometimes wish I could be cool too. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? At the same time, this desire to be cool seems incredibly sinister to me, which is why I try to write in as uncool a way as possible so as not to create any delusions. Besides, if I tried to be cool, I’m sure anyone who mattered would see straight through me.
Last week I saw Yinyin for the first time in months. I was standing at the sidewalk outside of Xiaoxi’s friend 69’s new bar Sympathetic Angel which I was visiting for the first time, when Yinyin got out of a taxi with a couple of her friends. I jokingly asked her “do you still remember me?” Yinyin was already slightly drunk. She replied “We spent so much time together, how could I forget you?” She then grabbed my arm and spent the rest of the night telling me how much she missed me and Xiaoxi, how she had always assumed I hated her, how she’s so lonely now living alone in the suburbs without us. Whenever she became conscious of other people looking at us, like Xiaoxi’s friend Mianmian, she’d turn to them and say things like “there are certain feelings that develop when people live together — you don’t understand! We’re a little family that can never be broken apart!”
Yinyin never said stuff like this to me when we did live together. I’d thought she hated me too. I thought, at best, she just saw me as Xiaoxi’s weird pet, some strange indulgence that she was willing to put up with, but could never fully encourage. Now here she was hugging me and crying while Xiaoxi kept looking over and breaking into laughter.
It felt nice. It turned out that this person whom I desperately missed in a way beyond verbalization missed me too.
Anyway, let’s get back to the piece of writing at hand. To give you some context, this was originally meant for a game I was working on at the time. It was an email-reading game. You’d sneak into other people’s houses to use their computers when they’re not around and read their emails. You’d also get emails from the real life me, of the form that you see above. To get an idea of what the game would have looked like, you can look at the screenshot of it that I included in Record No. 9 — the one with the cat wearing a cherry t-shirt. Though I hoped to make all the rooms far more dense with material objects — potted plants, lava lamps, shag carpets, etc. I of course never actually got that far. As usual, I laid down all the necessary technical infrastructure then stopped.
However, there is one crucial difference that occurred when making this game compared to my previous attempts at games. Since I wasn’t confident about my writing ability, and since this was a game I imagined would be filled with text, I figured I should practice writing personal essays first on a blog before I commit all the way to writing for this game I was making. So that was the origin of this website you’re now reading.
Eventually, once I got into the swing of writing, it proved much easier to write dumb diary entries than to work on that game. I’d get excited about the game for two weeks at a time, working diligently every day, then I’d lose motivation and not touch it for a month or two. This isn’t necessarily the worst way to work on a long term project — it’s probably better than, say, only working on it for several hours every Saturday and Sunday, which is how a lot of my friends with jobs work on the hobbyist game projects. The game continues to exist in the state I left it in, the infrastructure all mostly complete. I could pick it back up at any time, designing more bedrooms to explore, more characters to bump into, and more emails to read. Somehow though I’ve convinced myself that I’m supposed to be a novelist rather than a game developer — that these blog posts are now practice for a novel, and no longer practice for a game. Sometimes I even delude myself into thinking what I write here isn’t practice for anything — that it is art in and of itself.
As to the genesis of this game concept, here’s the first email you would have receive from me upon starting the game:
July 1, 2023
When I was 17 I had an internet girlfriend. I wrote her emails almost everyday. Often my whole day would be planned around the email I would write. I wrote furiously, sometimes sending her three or four thousand words in a single day. She was busy, so I very rarely received replies. I was mostly talking to myself. Eventually she broke up with me, but I kept sending her emails anyway. She reinitiated contact from time to time, prompted by my emails. When I went too long without writing to her she’d sometimes contact me to tell me how much she missed my emails. We even met in person once, years after having nominally broken up. But over time I felt more and more like a weirdo writing to her. By the time I was 21 I’d completely stopped writing her emails. We no longer keep in touch.
I tried writing emails to other people after that. It never really worked out. I’d built up too much of a romantic image of what “the email life” is supposed to be — and besides, only old people write long-form emails. I went through periods of writing old-fashioned snail mail — but words on the computer, written by keyboard, and words on paper, written by pen, are two completely different things. While I can appreciate the world of stickers, stationary and many colors of ink, I’ve found that the cold digital world behind my computer monitor is my true home, and I long to return to it.
Unfortunately, the world of email — at least the one that exists in my head — is too divorced from our own world now. If I try once more to write someone an email, I’ll be overcome with an unbearable loneliness. I still need to write though. So I decided to create another world, a place to put my words.
This small world that acts as a sort of envelope for everything I write. Maybe someday it will contain the person to whom these words are addressed, but for now it can contain you. While you wait for my letter, you can spend some time here. I also put some characters in it, with lives of their own, that you can talk to. These characters also give me more people to write to, depending how I feel. This world will change periodically, as will its inhabitants. If you don’t check in for many years, perhaps it will be unrecognizable when you return.
Since what I write in this world doesn’t quite qualify as “email” — it doesn’t use all the technical protocols email uses and is delivered to you in a completely different way — I’ll revert to using the term email is an abbreviation for: “electronic mail”. I’m not using this term out of pretension or as some convoluted attempt to sound quaint — I just think it’s a better description of the letters you’ll be receiving from me. I hope it doesn’t annoy you too much.
Saddle says:
Clearly such a game idea was heavily inspired by .Hack, a game set in a future where a new operating system has replaced all the old ones, and the only thing it can do is check mail and play games. I’ve already written about the game far too much, so I’ll leave the description there.
As a kid, my imaginations of the future weren’t very far from this. To use another even more obscure video game metaphor, they were like the Artdink game TOKIO (not to be confused with the Sawada Kenji song whose name is also written in English as TOKIO — also if you’re this far in my parenthetical statements, you might as well listen to Kabuki Rocks’ cover of the song, O-Edo or Leslie Cheung’s cover H2O — listening to these songs and keeping an eye on the music videos might serve as mental preparation for the transition coming very soon in this “piece of writing” that you’re currently reading), where all the small things are the same -- we still have CRTs, dress the same way, dial phone numbers on land line phones, etc -- with one crucial difference: now we have orbital space colonies. I was growing up in the 2000s rather than the 90s, so my reference point for the things I assumed would stay the same was slightly different -- but I always figured video game consoles would continue being game consoles, phones would continue being phones, TVs would stay boxy, etc.
In some sense, what I wanted to do with the pixel dioramas of bedrooms you’d explore in this little game of mine was create the material world of adulthood I imagined for myself as a child in the mid-2000s, which was more or less the same as the world I’d currently existed in — just more magical and fabulous. With the characters that inhabited this world, whom you couldn’t talk to — you could only read their emails — I wanted to explore all kinds of pixel fashion.
You see, as I a kid, I always dreamed that I’d become fashionable at some point. I just didn’t feel like I yet had the right “role models” or the right “raw material” to truly remake myself as a fashionable human being. I was haunted by a mental image of myself trying and failing to become fashionable, something that if you used some brain scanning device to print out on a piece of paper, would probably look a lot like that recent picture of Mark Zuckerburg wearing a big coat. A fashionable human being seemed like a far safer thing to be than a white guy who’s really into arguing about Stoicism on the internet — which is what I always assumed would be my default form if it didn’t do something to stop it. Though as the “safety” of fashion, beauty, consumerism, etc, we’ll get into that a little bit later (perhaps in the next Forgotten Saddle).
It would be years until I encountered New Pants, but like them, my imaginations of Fashion were grounded in the 80s:
At some point I encountered the famous Cantonese pop guys, who generally had short hair, and the famous Japanese pop guys, who had longer hair. It didn’t seem like I could be like either of them. This was also around the time I convinced myself that I’d aged prematurely and already had the body of a 60 year old man. (Even to this day, I often mutter “早老了” to myself in a resigned tone beneath my breath: “I’ve prematurely become old.”) Sometimes, typically after shaving and taking a shower, I’d look at myself in the mirror and realize I actually don’t look like an old man at all — I actually look like a 16 year old boy, even more than I did back when I actually was 16.
At some point I met a 19 year old Portuguese lesbian whom I realized looked exactly like me, except with cooler hair. So I copied her hair style and have maintained it more or less as is in the 5 years since then. There were a few excursions where I once again tried other hairstyles — those hairstyles I’d seen 80s Cantonese or Japanese cool guys don — but, as before, they always looked terrible on me. It is this Portuguese lesbian’s hair that I instead must make do with.
When it comes to actual clothing though — the greater substance of fashion — there are just so many problems that feel insurmountable to me.
When teenage me dreamed of becoming a fashion expert, what I assumed this consisted of was spending thousands of words describing hairstyles and fabrics, communicating the magic of whatever I imagined it would be like to wear cool clothes. I was too poor to buy fancy clothes, and too depressed to consistently go to thrift stores or scour the internet looking for a good deal — at least that’s the narrative I told myself. So all I could do was look at pictures of cool looking people (e.g. FRUiTS magazine archives), and sketch the people within, allowing my pencil to act as sort of trans-dimensional hand reaching into the world behind the photograph, caressing the fabrics, the shoes, the locks of hair tied down by bandannas and scarves. It all felt vaguely shameful, to be this unfashionable man, fantasizing of the fashionability of others — to become a fashion monster!
This was a word I learned from Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, which I often found reverberating in my brain. It’s a word that appears in the passage above to describe a drawing Xiaoxi was doing for Yinyin — which looked something like the characters in Puyo Pop Fever: thin dangly limbs with massive hands and feet wearing an Yinyin-like outfit filtered through the haze of a cartoon dream.
Now I just wear Xiaoxi’s clothes — which is quite fun. Some of these have holes in the armpits, while others have several superfluous sleeves dangling off of them. I can wear her clothes and pretend I’m her (I still haven’t quite gotten over wanting to become anyone that I like, even if I’m nowhere near as incapacitated in this regard). Perhaps more importantly, I can wear her clothes and pretend I’m cool too.
None of this really makes me feel like a fashion expert though. Where is my own style? Do I have a style? If I had a style, what would it look like?
I can’t imagine such a style existing on my own body. I’d need the body of another — which is why the allure of pixel art fashion seemed so enticing to me. Of course, all of that is just a pipe dream. I’m not very good at pixel art. Or at least I keep convincing myself that I’m not, which results in me always being demotivated to do the art part of my games. Though I was always scared to do the writing parts of games until I finally forced myself to just write a bunch, and now I more or less know how it’s done. Maybe someday I will find myself in the right mental framework to Just Do The Pixel Art for weeks and months until it no longer feels daunting.
Since Kyary Pamyu Pamyu has already been brought up, I of course need to talk about her in more detail. Her debut single Pon Pon Pon was released when I was in high school. This was before I really knew anything about Japanese pop. When it went viral on Youtube, I had as little context as 99% of the other English speakers fascinated by it.
I can’t exactly say it prompted me to explore Japanese music more — it’d be more accurate to say that it coincided with an interest I was acquiring to another form of Japanese music which I initially assumed to be completely unrelated: Shibuya-Kei.
In retrospect, I realize that if one’s goal is to become interested in many different types of music, Shibuya-kei is an excellent genre to serve as one’s “first love”. It is an intersection of hyper-commercial pop-aesthetics with indie sensibilities. It directly connects to all sorts of other types of music, whether it 80s J-pop, British Post-Punk (and especially él Records), countless production techniques that had been adapted from contemporary hip-hop and techno, and of course the seeds that would blossom into Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.
Listening to this in the 2010s was just far away enough for me have my first taste of that peculiar melancholy-of-distance that I’ve since become so intimately acquainted with, and yet close enough to feel hyper-modern — more modern than modern — a modernity that far surpassed that of Kanye West, K-pop boybands, or whoever else it was overhearing my classmates talk about at the time.
It’s strange watching the music video for Pon Pon Pon now, after filled in much of the context that teenage me lacked. Now, rather than feeling like the beginning of something, she feels more like an end. But not the sort of end that actually came to fruition — not for me at least. It’s more like an unfulfilled future — a promise that was forgotten. There’s a certain emotional zone, locked deep inside of me, that I find opening up as watch Kyary dance around in her CG bedroom.
In light of all of this, I’d like to share this final fragment:
July 31, 2023
I think what made a lot of Japanese pop feel important to me was simply that I can’t understand most of it, but I can understand some of it. There will be a sea of vocalizations whose meanings as words I don’t understand, and then one of two things happen: a single English phrase is uttered, e.g. “I remember falling in love again”, or a miracle happens and a meaningful syntactic unit comprised of Japanese words I know appears: “Itsudemo tsumarana”.
So instead I’m left with just sound, and 80s Japanese pop in general revels in sounds. Just as a child not hugged by his mom grows up craving touch, a lack of diversity of sound in ones musical formative years leads to a deep fascination, even fetish, once one realizes there can be more than just guitar, bass and drums. As a young teenager I listened to a lot of post-hippie rock — music from an era where weirdness kind of disappeared, and all that remained was either proficiency or rawness. I got interested in Japanese music, first Shibuya-kei and later on 80s stuff, in the twilight of my teenagerdom.
I remember Tom of Gong Gong Gong complaining about how bad the Cantonese pop music played out of the speakers at a restaurant we got lunch at on a Saturday was. [Note from the future: I write here “I remember” like this was a distant event — it actually happened only the day before I wrote this.]
“Why do restaurants need to play such terrible music?!” he screamed.
I often wonder what it was that Tom was reacting to. Was it simply that is was pop music? Was it that it was music in his native language? Or was it that specific kind of Cantonese music, the kind that if you wrote “generic Hong Kong pop” anyone familiar with C-pop would know exactly what you mean, that bothered him.
There was a time when I tried to like 80s Hong Kong music. Other than a not insubstantial number of exceptions, I failed, the official reason being that it felt too “produced”. 80s Japanese music of course was produced too — everything that makes it interesting lies in the production. Like a man who says he doesn’t like makeup, then praises the “natural beauty” of a woman who spends half an hour every morning doing her make up, it’s not that I don’t like production, I just don’t like bad procedural production. In Hong Kong pop I hear ordinary 80s sound and melodramatic singing. In Japanese pop I hear sounds I’ve never heard before and immature childish singing. This is of course a problematic statement to make on many dimensions. I’ll just focus on one: saying one dislikes 80s Hong Kong pop music is like saying one dislikes all the artists on a single label. That’s because it’s a small enough place that, while there is more than one label, there isn’t that much more. Japan on the other is has a larger population than any European nation other than Russia, and as such contains its own world of music. Is wrong to say Hong Kong doesn’t contain a world? It certainly reached a world.
I wish I could stop thinking about pop music. I wish I could only think about weird underground stuff and experimental music. Unfortunately pop has entered my brain, in a form that seemed more palatable to me due to its distance (80s and Japanese), and as such many ideas were first introduced to me through pop.
Saddle says:
In a later installment of A Saddle Forgotten, I plan to share the essay I wrote about Haruki Murakami, which also goes into this obsession with pop music — this strange inability to leave behind this music that I wish I could dismiss as simply the cynical products of capitalism. This desire to feel fashionable — to exist in a world of magazines that no longer exist — who injected it inside of me? Fashion and pop music are somehow a single unit. I listen to this music and want to be these 80s girl pop idols — why can’t I look like Kyoko Koizumi? Or at least be the sort of person who could dress like her without looking like an idiot? I can spend hours, days, studying how she emotes — maybe I can even learn to emote the same way she does — but, on my body, all of it would be wrong. I simply can't be her. Besides, the Kyoko Koizumi I know is merely a lady who lives inside of music videos and rehearsed television interviews. Whatever reality exists behind her has been concealed from me.
Tom talking at the restaurant about how bad the music was terrified me. When I wrote the above fragment, I was still getting over that. i was scared he'd catch me listening to bad music. I actually like a lot more Cantopop than I implied, but I generally see it as something very different from the kind of Showa girly idol pop I like (even if Cantopop often covers songs by these idols). It’s possible that i can identify good music, but i'm not sure how to determine if music is bad. i listen to all sorts of music that is less than good -- i feel like the only way for me to figure out if something is good is for me to listen to it a lot and see if i still like it after hearing it 100 times.
Yet maybe that’s just a form of self brainwashing?
This kind of music that’s come to define so much of what I like — 80s J-pop— it feels so different from where I began as human being: walking behind my mom through K-Mart as “Mmmbop” played over the loudspeakers. No matter how much new music I listen to, no matter how many new worlds I find myself as a mere bystander in, I can’t escape the gravitational pull of K-mart. The world of big box retailers — is that my true home?
I repeat the unspoken mantra that, were my subconscious turned into words, 17-year-old me would have have found himself repeating over and over: “Americaness is ugliness. The American male, or rather the white American male, is the loser male, existing at the opposite pole from fashionability.” This is what I’d more or less concluded by the time I graduated high school. And I suppose it would be a lie to say I don’t continue to feel this way! Clearly, I’ve left the country and have no plans to return. Somehow my simultaneous gropings towards the past and future have led me to Shanghai of all places, first to Yinyin’s apartment, and now Xiaoxi’s. Neither of them can understand this American ugliness I feel so deeply.
Yet is this ugliness just a different kind of delusion?
You’ll have to read on to find out.
To be continued in the next part: Connection, Extra-ordinary, Grand Espoir, and Other Song Titles from Neuromantic.
