I just dragged a razor across my face for way-too-long. Maybe four minutes. I’m not even sure why I shaved. I thought about it, yesterday, while taking a bath: Am I going to remember this bath? Probably not! Nothing out of the ordinary happened. I ate my apple and banana and drank my orange juice and had my bowl of honey-dripped grains swimming in soy milk.

I bathed, too.

That’s what I do, now: I clear up time. I make room for more nothing-to-do-and-no-one-to-see. If I eat my fruits and grains while I’m letting the conditioner to set in, hell, that’s some good time management, as far as I’m concerned. When I showered more (as opposed to taking baths), I used to brush my teeth while the conditioner set in. Now I take my morning-to-late-afternoon-breakfast.

Anyway, that’s all I remember. It is, yes, a rote thing — eating breakfast in the bathtub. As I shaved the spiny black hair from my soupy-sad face tonight, I thought, you know, I’ve accepted doing this for the rest of my life. When I first saw the tides of testosterone flooding my system ten years ago, or whatever, I told my dad, “This is nice, having to shave like this.” He said, “You don’t really have much of a choice, either way.”

When I first started piloting a two-ton vehicle in order to go, well, somewhere, I told him, “This isn’t that great.” His reply was the very same, “No choice, really.”

And I guess that’s it, huh. It doesn’t matter if I like shaving, or driving a car (I don’t know like either), it’s just something I have to do.

Which reminds me: the garbage needs to be taken to the curb.

I did the math, recently, and determined how many more times I’ll have to take the trash down to the curb. It wasn’t a startling number. It was, yes, a rough estimation, no matter how you look at it. I don’t even know if I’ll be producing waste in the next ten years — maybe I’ll be dead! Maybe my development will have dumpsters — I don’t know. Maybe the garbage-men will all be dead.

Maybe everyone will be dead.

And anyway, my skin looks terrible. I took a picture of myself the other day for no reason other than I wanted to know what I looked like at that exact second and apparently I have purple-white skin. It looked horrifying. I noticed this while shaving, too, just now. Have I stopped looking at myself in the mirror in the morning? Do I have no idea what I look like anymore?

I guess not!

God, I looked spooky as hell.

I think that maybe I’m only looking for specific things when I look in the mirror, which is to say that I’m looking for something wrong. In the same sense, I never really even consider that I work in Baltimore, because I’m all ever in one tiny corner of it, and that’s inside of a building with one enormous window that overlooks an overpriced vanity condominium complex that a whopping total of nine people live in. Beyond that is the harbor. The hell if I know what it looks like anymore. As soon as I’m doing pecking around with my hands in my pockets for six to seven hours, I tunnel-vision it back to my car and drive to exactly the only place on this earth that is Mine.

Which is, generally speaking, the only place I ever go.

Which is where I shave my face because I have to, whether I find it fun to do or not. I don’t find it fun to do. It’s winter. It’s dry. My face stings like a God damned jack-o-lantern snorting cocaine. My hands look like they’re inhabited by restless earthworms, I notice now as I type up this coal-black schlock that no one — not even myself — ever reads. And you were wondering why it seemed like I never proofread!

No, you weren’t!

So, I’m driving to Virginia tomorrow, though I’m not sure why. I told my boss-man, “Hey, I’m out of here, man. I’m going to Japan and I’m not sure why.” I say this every year. He said, “Okay.”

Really, why am I going? Because I have to? I don’t know! I’m truthfully asking! Do I have to do this, whether I want to or not? Does that even matter?

Questions, questions!

There’s no one to see! No one ever calls! Who is this nebulous “no one” anyway, I wonder. I asked this guy I know if he wanted to maybe get dinner with me, and I jokingly said, hey, if you’re too embarrassed to do anything with me, I understand. He never replied. He said, “Talk to you later,” and then . . . nothing. A lot of days went by. I should have assumed then that my joke was not taken as a joke, but I went on in this way just because I felt like it, I guess, told him just today that I was still waiting for a reply. He then invited me to do something that was already going to happen anyway, whether I was invited to show up and say stupid things or not.

Also: On the twenty-third, a day before the day before “the day that matters,” (I guess!), I’m going to, for whatever reason, have dinner with some people that I barely know. I think that I will maybe not say a whole lot of things that night. I’ll just stuff my face with rice and think about buying boots (I need to buy some boots for Sapporo). I am, as I have repeated nonsensically for months and months now, God damned tired. I am changing a lot of things, and I guess I should take the hint as soon as my comprehension allows and realize that a lot of other people are trying to change a lot of other things about their lives, too. Maybe sometimes that includes not returning phone calls and messages, and to a greater extent, maybe that doesn’t include including me.

So, this dinner. I am indifferent. Honest! If it happens, that’s something. If not, I will find Something Else to do. My phone book has dwindled to damn-near no one at all in the past year. There’s that “no one” again — the absence of someone who once existed, but exists no longer — at least in my small orbit. I’m just a flake of laundry detergent, man. I’m just a fucking upside-down penny.

You want to know what’s lonely as fuck? When you want nothing! Hey, look — I promise not to get into this bowl of oatmeal again, but really, the small wisps of smoke that dot the sky tell me that people want things, and that they’re after them, and that they have no room in their lives for silly black-haired children who have lived longer than most children live, and refuse to be anything other than silly black-haired children for the rest of their want-nothing lives.

This dinner is going to be about none of that! The company will expect me to say the same stupid things, but I don’t think that I will comply, this time. I think that I will just be heavy-headed and heavy-tongued and just eat my meal and sleep and wake up and sleep and wake up and eventually I’ll be on a plane that will take me to a foreign country. There I can stare at shadows and think of water and see smoke and hear sirens and walk on trains and at the top of skyscrapers reach up to see the lowest rung of God’s heaven, which is maybe in Korea or something.

. . . not really sure if I’m even going to publish this on THE INTERNET yet. Still debating!

Will I break my six-month streak of sludge-sucking nonsense and say way too specific sludge-sucking nonsense??

I think I will, actually.

You know, last year on Christmas eve I went to an internet cafe in Ogikubo and drank three gallons of hot chocolate while waiting for a friend to get out of the gym, and then I went to this friend’s house and watched six episodes of season four from Seinfeld, and man, I don’t know. I’ll be home this year, a place I wanted to be last year, and I don’t really particularly want to be here right now. I said to the occupants of my bedroom, just now, that I may just kill myself on Christmas, because I’m not really sure what else I’m supposed to do once that twenty-four hours sets in. Sit in chairs? Drive around?

. . . open presents?

There are no presents to open. I guess I will be sitting in chairs! And driving around!

I am excited about this!!!

(Aren’t you just enthralled that I’m not being abstract, today? That I’m not the gum at the bottom of William Blake’s gold-tipped boot?)

Anyway, if I end up alive at sunrise on Jesus’ birthday, I will go to a place west of the only place that’s ever mattered to me and pal around with the only people I ever want to be around. And that includes my grandmother, God help her. I hope, yes, that there will be snow on the ground still. And I hope that we can pile logs into the wood stove and regale fondly the technology of our springtime years.

And I will comment on the savagery of the wind, and the toll it has taken on my thankless legs.

I am certain that my skin will have melted into an even purpler purple-white, by then. I’ll be downright reflective come the morning of the twenty-sixth.

And then away I go on an airplane, bubbling, bubbling, bubbling.

Made human soup out of myself tonight. It’s forty-five degrees fahrenheit in my bathroom. By the time I was done ridding my body of microorganisms and bad thoughts, the temperature may have raised itself an degree or three, I don’t know. I’m in my bathroom now, actually. I can’t find anywhere else in the house I feel comfortable writing in.

I’m sitting in the bathtub. It is empty. I am fully clothed.

Okay, I wasn’t actually sitting in the bathtub. I’m sorry. I am now. This is real, as of just now.

It’s very cold. There is nothing more to report.

I just thought of something else: my bathtub, for maybe the first time in my life, is not shaped like a coffin. It’s far too deep, not boxy enough. I don’t know what all of this means.

It’s cold in here — this room, not just the bathtub — because there is two-and-a-half-feet of snow on the ground. (And I am so cheap that I will not turn the heat on!) I know this because I measured it with my pelvis. It’s probably deeper than that by now. Hell. It was still snowing an hour ago. I saw some men outside digging out cars and uttering profanity like they were shaking loose change around in their pockets. Maybe they did that too.

God, what am I doing.

That’s not even a question!

Though that was an exclamation. The answer is, too: I don’t know!

I’m in that gum-sticky slurp-bubbling mood that I get in before something astronomical is about to happen.

No, it is not “Christmas”!

God, what is that, really?

(I’m actually asking God, here.)

I don’t know. The snow has dulled my feelers. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be sensing. It feels like being slowly crushed by an asteroid while wearing an unflattering bathing suit in the Middle Ages, honestly. This is such a curious day.

It is the longest day I’ve had in maybe six years.

I dream of these long days.

It was a long day because it is the first day in many months that the world has asked nothing of me, was content to let me breathe and eat and sleep in my bedroom. No one needed the warmth of my body, today.

Though the thing is, I’m very tired. I never get tired around 1:30 in the ay-em. Something is wrong with me!

Last night, I felt the same thing. Though I was sputter-spitting and alive and turning about! I’d never felt such electricity in my bones and head-glob. It was ticking like a psychopath with a machine gun, let me say now. When I was in the presence of people who pay obscene amounts of money to eat over-size creepy-as-fuck shrimp nested on top of sticky-warm made-from-a-box grits festooned with sausages made from pheasants (this indicates I was At Work!), my mouth uttered things that had been ordered from my brain in fractions of fractions of milliseconds. It was incredible. There are all sorts of hokey myths about what the God damned full moon does to people, why not snow-babies when they anticipate snow? I can smell snow circling us from space hours before it even happens. Is this my birth-ability? Mom? Is it?

What I am saying is: I don’t know where any of these words are coming from. Sometimes, lately, I have felt like all I ever say here is maybe five percent of the metric-ton cargo dump that fires out of my fingertips in the middle of the night when I feel entranced and frankly psychotic enough to say something. What you see here is such a small amount of the overall bloated, sweating hunk of fuming meat that festers in my mind over the course of many days and weeks. I almost never sit down and think about what I’m going to say. What am I saying now, I don’t know!

And the only reason I can’t endow you with the other ninety-five percent of the sad garbage that sizzles in my mind like pancake batter is because my fingers cannot type out the words and sentences and complete thoughts that slobber out of my brain fast enough! If I were to attempt to really communicate to you (as opposed to making large, public reminders of my Place in any given Time in my Life), it would be incomprehensible and I might get arrested! Thank God I can’t do that!

Or have the patience to attempt to!

What I am trying to say, really: My brain and fingers and voice and knowledge of language and syntax were working faster than fast last night, on account of the impending dump truck of snowfall that would later make my ride home a slippery-explosive thing! Was it the snow? Was it? Maybe! I think so!

Lord, when January 26th pokes its hungry head into my cloudless skies next month, I might end up jumping off a building, what with the speed of thought!

Going to Japan in nine days!

I think it’s nine days. I can’t be bothered to check.

Because that means more time spent sitting in a frozen bathtub!

I promise not to be publicly sad!

You jerks, I swear.

Man.

Christmas in five days, huh?

Man!

Hm, there’s this cousin of mine I need to see on that day. I think I will slumber in the Village of Berries for several sunrises when that day comes.

And then I will go where the sun fucking lives.

What a December!

He is not dead, not yet. Sick through and through he weathers fearful dreams, waking only to cough blood onto the floor. But that is what he has always done, don’t you see? What could those smooth measures be but the leaking blood of the soul? What could those lines of poetry foretell but the death of a humble giant? He is dying, and that is what makes his sound so glorious to our ears. It is a grey story his quivering lips tell, whispering it to anyone who listens, and to his own shadow when he is alone. And he will carry that story with him and tell it over and over again until his heart is either still in his chest or in splinters on the concrete. Today that holy organ pulses and stabs against his ribs. But how could those movements be beautiful if he were not dying? And my brothers, how could he be dying if he will not one day be dead?

I pick up my guitar and play a few notes. A rhythm emerges. It is deep and earthy. The way I like it. Something convoluted. A slow song, heavy with purpose and mechanical in design, and yet unsure of itself. It’s the style I’ve been looking for if you can call it a style. Full and powerful but not harsh. Where soul and technicality dovetail into something human. I put down my guitar. I can feel it waiting, there in the corner.

But there is something else waiting.

Who are all these people? I’ve been trying to find out for so long, and in doing so I may have let my own definition slip into obscurity. But I can’t turn around now. Maybe one day I’ll find time for myself, but the projection of the soul on the outer world is what I need and what I crave to emulate. I hope I will harness and sharpen the steady music in my fingertips, and give it shape. The fingers that pluck the strings, the same fingers that tap the keys.

I know what I want. I want the explosion of the sunset frozen in time yet leaving its dying warmth intact. I want the feeling of the thin coating of ice on the railing solidified in ice of a different kind. I want the ghosts of trees and factories and lamp posts and wheels and beaches and their passive emotions bottled up for safekeeping. The bottomless momentum of the train, the curious poetry of the moth, the roaring spirit of the fire, all ground down from boulders to sand, and melted into warped, discolored glass. I know what I want. But it is so far away. Give me strength, whatever force assigned me this task, to let myself starve and die for something worthless. I’ll need every ounce I can gather. Every friend I can find.

And yet, I see old friends in the faces of strangers, and strangers in the faces of my oldest friends. So tell me, you virtuous souls, who am I to trust? There are the sweet smiles I now know too well to ever bring me comfort again. And look there, more of the laughing faces I see too often to believe in. And fleets of frowning thinkers swagger with disdain, who think too often to feel. And flocks of eyelids clenched in sorrow circle above, lost in the world and in themselves, closing tightly at the first sign of truth or danger: one and the same, on these dark, soft nights.

And so I set out to find that one and the same, and the gusts of wind whipped around my legs and past my ears with cold that was like weights on my weak frame and wheels on my clumsy, promiscuous mind. I found myself within a house of tarp and scaffolding. I listened for a while as the wind beat at the windows and bent the walls of my staggering castle. The framework creaked in protest. I was alone in this house of horrors for a long time. The spirits of the place toyed with my senses and my memories. I can’t blame them. After all, that is also my occupation.

So I stood inside for bit longer, taking lessons from professionals. But I couldn’t stay too long. There was something else waiting.

There still is something else waiting.

It’s growing, I think. The tempest is building up above. It can’t be held back any more. It waits. It waits for a perfection of moment. And some day soon the heavens will open, and right where the first drop meets the stream: that is where I will be. The force will grow and the banks will burst and maybe, if the way is made ready by the rusty shovel of a lonely creature, the water will twist in a new direction and make its way to a new place by a new path. It will reach and strain and fan out and perhaps one tiny strand, against every dirge of friction this world has to offer, will find its way to the sea. It will be my estuary. And if it has been crafted in just such a way, it will carry me out into the ocean with a solemn, earthy rhythm; the sigh of a mountain.

Are you comfortable with your disquieting lifestyle? Does it bake your brain to thread yourself into soul-rotting colorlessness?

I am asking you, you!

Does it . . . ?

I am anxious to hear what you have to say! I demand your attention!

Here I am: in a little room stacked atop a little house. I can see the highway from the place where I rest my quivering head in the darkness of every morning. For days I have seen frost on the transparent filter that separates my Inside World from their Outside World. Here it is filled with a glowy-glow weighted down by lullabies and washed-out photographs.

Out there: it is murky and haunted. Fog and rain swirl around the white lights that hang their heavy heads over the midnight traffic like somber undertakers. My body does not permit me to do anything but watch the red lights of cars shine and shine on that rain-slicked road. It is too cold to do anything else.

It is too cold for me to be anywhere else.

Here I am! I have not been anywhere in months.

I purchase food and sit in classrooms governed by professional thinkers. I nod my head and blink at all the right times. I fill little black pads of paper with daydreams and nighttime thoughts. I write most frequently: “I wish to be home.”

I draw octopuses and clouds and tall, tall characters that all have the same haircut.

They have my haircut.

I draw a speech bubble above the heads of these characters.

“Fuck,” they often say. Sometimes, “Yes, yes, no!”

Below them I write the thoughts in my head. They’re all jumbled up into a clump of chewing gum and seashells and guitar strings! I can’t iron them out!

People say things to me, and I wince. My mind slams into the surface of the planet. My mouth fumbles with vowels and the sound of air. When I am unable to articulate anything resembling language, they turn away. They say quiet things and make noble efforts to laugh sadly at my indifference to what fills my eyes. I can’t God damned think when the sun is out. Whatever it is I am thinking now — and Jesus Lord God, is this thinking, what I’m doing now? — is horrifying and not long for this world. My head is a fishbowl filled with oatmeal and screws and old keys. When I die — and when is that, again? — it will pop and all, all, all of this will vanish into the air like vapor.

I am able to “communicate” only five-percent of it here, to you, whoever you are. Are you a friend? Are you alive? Can you see me in your head, if you close your eyes and clear the taffy from your vision?

. . . are we friends?

Unlikely, I say!

I have only one friend. He writes this now. I am he!

And what a thing we have, the two of us.

We watch the snow fall on the week-ends!

And we watch it melt in a day’s length . . .

Tonight there is cold, cold raining falling from space. It falls on the roof of my tiny home. It swirls around the ghostly lights that leer outside my bedroom window. I look at them every night, and I ask no-one, “Are you comfortable being you?”

You are, of course, soul-rotting colorless. I don’t mean to be cruel! I am only asking honest questions, tonight, and I require only honest answers. We respect each other, you and I. And that’s how I have mustered up the darn-tootin’ gumption to ask such a personal question.

I hope that you’ll forgive me for doing so.

It’s not like we’re friends, you and I!

You are a no-body. I am something else. I am something that my mother would be displeased to know can even exist!

Maybe that’s worse than being a no-body . . .

In which case, you’ve got it swell, chum-oh-chum!

I just look at these lights and hope for snow. Is it snowing now . . . ?

Will it snow again . . . ?

How can I transcend the rift between Then and Now?

Can I describe to you the weight of the snow beneath my boot, or the shape of the fog that surrounded the valley below?

It’s all shapes in colors in my head, now. I will keep it that way for a long, long time. I can think of these shapes and colors whenever I want, every morning and night, so long as the red-sticky stuff thumps through the dead weight on the top of my body for the remaining moments of my life.

I went to a mountain in the Westlands. I did so because there was nothing else I was conditioned to do at that very moment in time.

Words appeared in my head.

Music is there now. I can hear strumming and coughing in the distance . . . A woman is talking. She is asking questions. The music plays on.

No one answers her questions.

I don’t have any questions. I have only this:

Dear Cousin,

We drove down the mountain, zig-zagging like slick-footed bandits. Our grandmother — she calls herself a dinosaur with a doctorate in Being Alive — told me of memory. She said that she wakes up and thanks the big, big man Way Up There for another chance to thank him. She turns her head to pictures of her long-gone son, says little words to him. Is he listening? I don’t know. I hope, for her sake, that he is. She thinks he was a German soldier with unfinished business, decided to come back and be her son for a few decades. And then she buried him.

Parents burying their children.

She sits down in bed, maybe returns to the indenture where she lay moments before, hours before, when she rested her ancient mind on the feathers of geese and padded softly through eight decades worth of shapes and colors, moments and scents, people and faces. Maybe she visits her long-gone son, our long-gone older brother. He died on D-Day some time ago.

That’s why she thinks he was a German soldier.

She’s in that place now, thinking of everything and all things. She said she plucks a strand from the well of her mind just once every morning, places the thin band of sensation into her brain, and lives out another moment in some time other than the present.

I softened when she said this, loosened my neck and muscles and gaze. I felt a whirl of snowfall in my chest, thought of moonlight and early morning chirping.

I watched the valley below, whipping by like tear-stormy dream-places. I nodded and thought and thought. There is nothing else I do. It is the eerie condition of my fathomless melancholy. I study the anatomy of dreams and long-gone people.

She does as well, she tells me.

“When you were eleven months old, you had your very first Christmas day,” I can envision her telling me now, dangling in the shapes in colors way up there (but not, dear cousin, Way Up There).

“You turned your little head and looked at me that day,” she says, “in a manner that an infant does not look at an adult. It was bottomless. It soared through me. I said in my mind, ‘He is someone who has been here once before.’”

I drive and drive.

“Maybe he is back, my husband, I don’t know. You’re an old, old soul.”

“I feel old. I feel tired, too.”

She says something about eternity, and of memory, and of everything that has ever happened.

She quotes a man that she believes I am — a man that used to exist, once — one I want very much to meet, somewhere, maybe, if I’m not already him.

In which case I have already met this man. This man — maybe me — said this, as she tells me now in my head, tangled in snowy mountaintops and cups of hot chocolate, tangled in little warm circles engendered with the only happy feelings I claim as my own:

“‘There is no way that history is gone forever, left to the memories of finite human beings, the blood rushing inside of their temporary heads the only buoyant points of existence. Memory is eternal, it is sleeping in space. A huge, huge film reel that plays on endlessly. The Battle of Troy is not lost to the memories of the men who lived it and later died. It plays on, and on . . .’”

I tell her of the anatomy of melancholy. It is something that my mind whirls on about, I say.

“It never shuts off, always spinning around in this manner: black and black and black.”

She, our grandmother, her voice shaking, tells me of the story of a thirty-seven-year-old man who shot himself in the stomach with a shotgun. She says, the mother of this man is a friend of mine, indeed.

“Our lives have many eerie parallels.”

I wonderly-wonder what all of this means, and she goes on:

“The suicide note was seven pages long. It read: ‘Do not blame yourself, Mother. No human being could have saved my soul. You did your very best to quell the incurable sadness of tormented man. And now I will be tormented no more.’”

He slept with many women, she said, for reasons he probably didn’t understand. He felt achy and deep-dark-bad about it. He hopped from person to person, thinking, “Save me, won’t you? Won’t you please?”

No one did, no, not one of them.

“Couldn’t exist in this world. Too sensitive to be alive.”

I drove and drove.

Boy oh boy.

Ain’t that a rainy forecast.