The Last Day of July
I've been searching for a word to repeat late into the night, until the sun rises on the little raised wooden platformer beneath my window that I like to sit at in the morning. There are little slots you can lift to access the space beneath, which always seems mysterious to me. There's not really anything interesting inside them though -- just bed sheets.
Here's a blurry picture I took of my metronome on that wooden platform. Unfortunately it doesn't help very much with imagining what it looks like.
Since I live on the 30th floor, I don't really feel like I belong to the human world when I'm at home. It's all beneath me. Here's a picture of West Yanan Rd, as seen from my window.
This highway dominates my thoughts. I hardly ever find myself in a car driving down it, but so much of my life has spent walking along the road that goes beneath it, or waiting at one of the many bus stops at its center for the 71 bus -- the most exciting of bus routes, since there's a lady in a fancy uniform whose job is holding a flag out the window and announcing the stops.
Ivy, a friend of the Saddle, told me once that she used to keep repeating the word "Doorman" to herself, when she had a career that was roughly analagous to being a doorman, though it was a different job title. I wish I had a word like that. Where does one find such words? The dictionary? The only dictionary I have easy access to is a two volume Buddhist dictionary, each volume almost as thick as my mattress. It was published in 1922, compiled by Ding Fubao, who begins the preface with the words "余平生無他嗜好": "All my life, I've had no other hobbies." Maybe somewhere in the thousands of pages of the concrete realization of this man's singular hobby, I can find a word to repeat. I opened a page at random (165, which is really nearly 500 pages into the book, since there's over 300 pages of indices at the beginning). The the first word my eyes landed on was 九淨肉: the nine pure meats. It's embedded among all the other terms that begin with "nine", which I suppose would be really useful if I were interested in all the various nine entry lists that permeate the sutras. Obviously I could look up other numbers, like three, five, or seven, for even more lists.
I keep having this fantasy of waking up on a Sunday morning (let's say at 7am) and listening to Miles Davis or Wes Montgomery while drinking coffee. I suppose this is a very easy fantasy to fulfill. (I must have used this phrase "a very easy fantasy to fulfill" on this website before -- it seems like a recurring theme.) The main issue is I don't have a good way to listen to music at the required fidelity on this little wooden platform beneath the window. Our speakers are in the living room, which is where they have to be, because Xiaoxi's DJ equipment is there, and she needs the speakers to practice. There's nothing particularly magical about drinking coffee in the living room on sofa. Coffee is only magic when it's on these wood planks, beside the long slender leaves of our potted plants, feasting on the morning sun rising behind the skyscrapers.
The other issue I have is that I'm too tired most Sunday mornings to actually enjoy the sunlight. I only have this fantasy late at night, or around 11am once I'm fully woken up and the morning is gone.
It's late at night as I write this. I'm listening マイクロWAVE by Kyoko Koizumi. I'm sure I've said on here many times before that her body of work is my favorite of all the ultra-popular J-pop idols that emerged in the 80s. Here's a list of songs (besides the one I already mentioned) that you can look up and listen to if you feel so inclined. Maybe, as a kind of puzzle, you can try to use the contents of this list to reconstruct my "submerged emotional unconsciousness" as it happens to be arranged today.
魔女
気分はハートブレイク
Candy Kiss
Moon Light
CDJ
It's strange to talk about having "a favorite idol", because I've really not interacted with any of these singers the way it feels like they're meant to be interacted with -- that is as visual images. I've watched a few videos on Youtube, but I'm usually startled by how differently they look from what I imagined. I'm not even sure if I like any of the songs I listed above. When I listened to Kyoko Koizumi, it was mostly in the form of albums, and these songs feel like high points of the albums I like most. But when I've plucked them out like this, they just make me tired. So maybe I don't like Kyoko Koizumi after all -- I just like listening to a few of her albums (particularly 今日子の清く楽しく美しく, BEAT POP, and Koizumi in the House).
Here's a poem I wrote a few days ago as I fell asleep after reading a diary by a woman from a thousand years ago:
Dessicated by
sulfates in my soap,
how would my
skin react to the oils
covering yours?