T9vt1E55

1Sexual Adventures
2by Samuel—II
3
4—
5
6She kept biting me. We kept talking and laughing, then making love again. We told each other things from our lives. We opened the window and cuddled and looked at the rain together. It had begun to fall during our lovemaking, pattering against the window with the drum of fingers absent-mindedly on a desk at school. I was the first to notice, I got up and said: ‘Want to listen to the rain?’ “Yeah, open it.” ‘Isn’t that nice?’ “It is.” So we stopped and the window let in a flue of cold air, though the day had been unnaturally warm, the remnant of the day’s heat, smelling to me because I always thought of the river, with the breath of the fast flowing river, its expanse over which herds of geese flew. It was as if, sitting there, momentarily going limp since my meditative nature had taken over, I could see the white arc of a swan’s neck in the cold shimmering darkness of the water there, indistinguishable from the shining daggers of distorted light from the street lamps, but which, dunking up-and-down in the black of the water, revealed its strange pallor, its god-like nature, ghostly and coming all of a sudden to my consciousness, so that even as she curled up upon my shoulder, putting her hands on my bare shoulder and making me feel strong in my frame, I suddenly mistook the sound of her words for the sound of a thousand spangles, of the silver coins in a tambourine shimmering against each other with a bright, dangerous, revelatory sound, an orgiastic circle chanting of hell and heaven, the same descending wave of music from the soundtrack of Ghost in the Shell which would land upon my shoulders during the perfect moments when at the gloaming blue I stood before the river: so that it was as if from her voice issued coins clamoring together, a celestial metal victory, completely different from the body’s orgasm, seeming to reach all the way to the ends of history, connecting me to some shimmering force that had not stopped its under-consciousness sound and would not cease. She had started talking, but I didn’t notice her. I saw myself from behind, my figure sitting on the bed, bare and with lean but strong shoulders; with her leaning upon me, like how a god attends to a little boy. But as she began to caress me again, absent-mindedly, taking pleasure in my bare arms, she accidentally grazed something sensitive; and I began to rise up again in strength, and the shimmering music in my mind began to dim, to fade away, so that suddenly it seemed to me that I was the god, attended to by the swan of a goddess who was there to serve my pleasure. I did not know where I was. She had started talking again, but I wanted to go back to that mood, even as, like a current rising and changing the weather, my lust had returned and the feeling of manliness replaced that of the charmed meditative passivity that had come through me, not unlike as if two ghosts were warring for possession of my body. I turned to her. She was complaining about something while wearing only a red jacket. I gently touched her breasts, as I listened to her voice and examined the rest of her body. She had put the jacket on because she was cold, and its color was so exciting to me that I wanted to press her to me, but instead, I allowed the cold air from the open window to pass and hang itself gently upon my ear, and, as if to memorize the picture, sat merely touching her without embracing her, as she sat with her knees under her and her bare feet tucked neatly beneath her bottom. Sometimes she would say things that annoyed me and I would laugh to myself that holding these breasts in my hands made it very worth it. So the night dragged long in the rain until almost dawn. It had the feeling of making love in the apocalypse, with the virus taking everything away, closing the entire city down, and she had to leave the next day; the whole world gone and wasted away in the shadows of misty rain. As if we were on a boat and the distances of the city had disappeared, and at any moment the lights would turn on in the buildings across the street, the buildings would lift up and drift away, revealing that they were house-boats, the night-river, a Venice of dreams, exposing behind them yet another reach of the city, yet another distance and set of towers.
7
8*
9
10‘So why did you throw this passage in front?’
11	—I wanted to make money so I put the part about sex early on. 
12	‘Hm. Not a bad idea.’
13	—Well. Shall we go back to talking? I kind of need to keep talking. I just got a message from First Girlfriend and it looks like I’ll be having sex with random girls from now on because I’ve lost the first love.
14	‘Lol.’
15	—I am really sad. Thankfully she wrote back such a cliché: “It being life and all the love in it.” Somehow this gives me energy.
16	‘What did you write to her?’
17	—Just asking her if she’d ever have feelings for me ever again.
18	‘What’d she say.’
19	—“Don’t dwell in the past because then you can’t move along towards something better.”
20	
21
221.
23
24‘Who is this? Hart Crane? His poetry is dumbs.’
25	—No. It’s not.
26	‘Dumbs.’
27	—I’ll rewrite it and show it to you.
28	‘Won’t that make Professor Something angry?’
29	—He can go fuck himself, lmao. A theft of words, what was it, “though credit is given, at least it is not plagiarism.” What is it, Andy, with these literary people? I know you’re going to say that it’s cause they’re white, that they’re used to how things are done and so they assume we don’t know what we’re doing because we barely speak English correctly; but you know, that’s only half the explanation, and far too easy, and I don’t like how you’ve gotten me into the very black habit of always blaming white people. Anyway, I’m going to rewrite Hart Crane. And if poetry people have issues with it, I’ll yell out, as a refrain, ‘White People!’
30	‘Okay but I don’t have to read it.’
31
32*
33
34from VOYAGES—I
35
36Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
37Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
38They have contrived a world upon shell shucks.
39
40—Meaning, there’s a ton of urchins upon the rocks, they have contrived a world there, climbing over them; behind them blaze the light of the surf, crested over with ghostly fingers of foam. 
41	‘I’m pretty sure the urchins mean ‘children,’ as in ‘little urchins,’ but I see you completely misread the poem and rewrote it to mean the actual sea-plant.’
42	—There were two meanings, and I chose one.
43	‘I can see you: your brow is forming some metaphysical statement.’
44	—OH fuck off. Girls shouldn’t be like you are. 
45
46	*
47
48‘You’re really going to write in poetry? Didn’t he already say something about how you were putting poetry in the second place to prose?’
49	—No, you’re right, it’s too limiting. And my God, who in this day and age would want to be known as a poet.
50	All these lines, stealing and repurposing some of Crane’s more confused revelations, to say something about how a poem – and I know you hate poems – how they seemed to me to open up beneath me, like the waters in the heart of sea touched into the froth — such a boring thought.
51	‘Well, at least you can tell. That’s an improvement.’
52	—These days I don’t even know, Andy. By the way, I just reread it, and the poem sounds wrong. You know why I’m not going to spend the next year trying to fix it? Because I actually have things to say and places to be. Plus I don’t really know how.
53	‘Good. Don’t be dumb like a poet.’ 
54	
55
562.
57
58	‘Don’t you think that it’s right that all pleasures are eventually and eternally punished? Anyways, that’s what happens.’ 
59	—Remember A Farewell to Arms? Hemingway, sitting in a hospital waiting to hear news of his wife’s labor, begins to feel dread. Then he has the reverse of a a moment of recollection, because it’s full of pain rather than reverie, which combines all his life into one narrative: it is such a moment.
60		
61Once in a camp I put a log on a fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out…I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire…But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants. So now I sat out in the hall and waited to hear how Catherine was.
62
63	‘And?’
64	—So his wife died, and we arrived at tears.
65	Hah, what would you say, Hemingway? Maybe: And we profited catharsis and did not mind and passed on.
66
67	‘You don’t want to tell the story of your mom apologizing to you in the mental hospital?’
68	—Why? I’ve told it so many times, it’s not interesting to me anymore. When I tell it to white people they make a frumpy face. Whoop-de-fucking-doo, it’s horrendous. 
69	I guess, if I had to think about it, the commonality with Hemingway is that of ‘apologizing too late.’ Or maybe: ‘Sudden realization of Karma.’ 
70	She confessed that her making me eat as a child (abusing me) had given me this (she could not say bipolar and continues to deny it despite every doctor giving the same diagnosis). The amount of anti-scientific stupidity and bias in such a thought was very clear to me and were I not already suffering, I would have suffered again the mind-bending feeling of misinformation and awry logic that so characterize the parents who were born to me. 
71	‘Yeah…’
72	—You know how it is: being around immigrant parents, because they repeat themselves so often and use very memorable clichés, enact a kind of brain-bending. They can remind you to be heterosexual so often that you actually turn out to be bisexual instead of gay; it’s kind of a miracle. 
73	So, as she went on and on (I was unable to speak, they had given me so many mood-stabilizers), I felt a moment of sense, for she reminded me of Hemingway sitting in the hospital in A Farewell to Arms. Which, by the way, deserves a place in a certain challenge…The challenge, we had a friend who used the phrase ‘Before Hands’ instead of ‘beforehand,’ was to use the word ‘Before Hands’ in a poem. I think I wrote something like:
74
75Before hands, how did we please each other?
76As in how did we mutually masturbate…
77something something, we discovered our genitals:
78Ah, Farewell to arms!
79
80	By the way, I was amazed last night at how difficult it was to find a gear, can I call it that? A kind of hold on the girl, to keep her pinned in place. I kept using my arms to hold her legs back, so that her feet were in the air, placing my hands onto the bed, and it was very good exercise, but it would keep me from feeling the most sensation down there because, like, I had to maintain myself in this superhuman posture, so to speak. Sorry if this is gross. It’s just new to me cause First Girlfriend never had sex, you know. But when I had her hold her legs back, and then I put my hands on her throat, no, I kind of leaned over her into the warm darkness of her hair, besides her ear, pressing my forehead against the bed as support and draping my arms over her; then I listened to her panting and murmuring my name, then I felt myself to be in a kind of heaven, there’s no other name for it. Below I was entering and reentering some kind of dark cavern, and in her hair I had lost myself completely, and everything brushed so closely to my ear it was like her hair was vibrating against my face; a double-darkness, in my eyes and in my lower body, made all the steamier because my breath was getting caught up in the hair, like a terrarium. I hadn’t sweat like that in long time. She was really wet lmao. I suppose heterosexual sex is really incredible, after all. It reminds me of the remark my dad made that really bothered me because, well, for various reasons. His point was that I didn’t know what sex was because I had never been in the position of conquering someone. I mean, the thing was that in sex I always wanted to be conquered. But my dad, with his complete lack of knowledge of how homosexual sex worked, actually struck upon my most insecure feeling: that I was not a man because I did not like conquering other people, that I always felt bad when I penetrated someone, whereupon I would lose my erection, because I feared I was hurting her, whereas I wanted to be hurt myself. But in this case, I found this hold on this girl, in missionary-position obviously. And it was fucking amazing. Jesus Christ. So yeah, where was I? 
81
82Before hands, how did we please each other?
83something something we figured out a hold. 
84
85	Obviously this is not the interesting part. You want to hear this?
86	‘Fine.’
87	So we had this friend who kept saying ‘Before Hands’ instead of ‘Beforehand.’ This girl was Asian-American like us. And people like this sort of thing, to make fun of other people like Michael Scott for not speaking correctly, and it is hilarious in general, though if I were to play some stupid post-colonial critic, I would point out that English-speaking White people always have an advantage since they’re making fun of malapropisms. Which immigrants tend to make all the time. It’s like how that professor kept trying to correct your ‘Anyway[s],’ which we say because we don’t remember this kind of minutiae; but poetically we’re correct because we choose whether or not to say it based off how it sounds. Though there is something to be said for judging someone’s intelligence based off of malapropisms. 
88	—Just, fucking let me say one sentence.
89	‘Fine.’
90	A malapropism, assuming the person is not English-Second-Language, usually indicates a misconception, or at least they lack the reflective quickness to see that something like ‘Before Hands’ is ridiculous in its image; they fail to see the actual phrase. They just use it like common currency, like they used the dollar-bill without ever looking at the portrait of George Washington printed on it. Perhaps they don’t form pictures of language as quickly. It’s like they talk without seeing the images their words form. So in that sense it shows they do not really have good awareness of language, and are perhaps imprecise in their wit. Ah…
91	‘Dumb. You know this is dumb.’
92	Anyway, my mother was sobbing. We were out in that small outside area of the mental hospital, which had walls ascending on all sides and curving overhead so that you couldn’t climb them, couldn’t jump out and find your way to the nearby Caltrain tracks. I do wonder, though, how many patients, after being discharged from the hospital, immediately went to the Caltrain afterwards. I might have been hallucinating, but I remember, as I woke up that first morning to completely white sheets in a white room, that I heard the long call of a train, traveling across distances and announcing that the normal world had continued to be normal irrespective of my having gone to hell. It was like a ghost passing through the room. Then I woke up. In any case, the evening I was discharged, my mom had to go pick up my brother from this drawing class with high windows where you could look in at all the children bustling about with paints and pastels. You would have liked it: they were like themselves within the frame of a painting, like a lit glass box, posting colored papers on the wall, tussling with their parents, who hovered nearby to make sure that the teachers were giving their money’s worth in instruction. There is nothing more pathetic than watching tigerish Asian parents inspecting a teacher. The mom typically holds her bag, frowns, and listens very closely to the English that the teacher speaks, making sure that the teacher is being harsh enough and strict. 
93	So, oh yeah. I had to sit with my mom that evening since I couldn’t be left alone in the house. They kind of discharged me because they had to, since I had been there a week and probably my insurance couldn’t cover more; and anyway I was suffocating to come out. 
94
95Doctor: “Hi, Samuel. We’re happy to tell you today that we’re ready to discharge you.” —Oh. = I’m still dead inside and want to kill myself. “Are you experiencing any suicidal ideation? Do you have a support group?” = “Please don’t say you have suicidal intent because that means legally we’d have to keep you.” —I think I’m okay. = I want to die but I want die here and out there too and it makes no difference. Also, my mind is a stone. = I don’t know what I’m going to do. “So you have a support group?” —Yeah, my family. “Great. If you’ll give me a sec. Let me write that down.” = “Let me document this so I don’t get sued later in case you go off and kill yourself.” = “We’re afraid of your parents.”
96
97	I came outside of the hospital into the daylight, into the empty flat land of parking lot, which was interrupted boringly here and there by fleets of motionless cars. Into a world. Which seemed to me so strange, clean, expansive, like I were in a box. But there were things to do. My parents were leading me to the car. They were happy, and I was happy too, to be out of the hospital. This I took as a sign of health, and said: 
98
99—I guess it’s better now. = For now I feel alright, though I’ll check back in in five minutes, and the very fact of my having to check back in, probably means I won’t be doing well in five minutes. “What do you want to go eat?” = “We’re not going to ask you about your mood, which seems to be swinging again, and your mother is extremely nervous.” —I’m not hungry. = I am very nervous and afraid I will throw up. 
100
101Mom: “Your dad has something at church but we have to go pick your brother.” —Okay. = I don’t want to see my little brother because I don’t want him to see me like this. Seeing him in the hospital was hard enough. But luckily he played the puzzles and didn’t notice the crazy people. “So we’re going together.” —Okay. = I’m relieved and we both know that I can’t stay alone at the house. —The doctor said now is the most dangerous time and once we get over it it will be better. = I am reassuring myself that it will get better. = I feel terror right now that I’m not in the hospital where there’s soft walls and no hooks and where I can’t kill myself. “What are you talking about, there is no danger, you’re just scaring yourself.” = “Because I’m terrified, I’m going to keep doing what I did before you went into the hospital, which is to deny everything.” 
102
103	Shit, it’s almost 3 a.m. and I’m going through this memory, and felt shaken, and I can tell I’m anxious because I checked to see if there was something standing to my left. Anyway, to continue the story, my mom started to pray very loudly and I held onto the seat. 
104	Oh wait. Going back to the first day of the hospital (not a week later, when I was discharged), she was sobbing, and I was just sitting there, but upon remembering the Hemingway, I’m almost positive a cold smile must have curled around the edges of my lips. 
105	‘Yes, your literary joys, I know. You’re coming to another point, though, I can tell.’ 
106	Listen, it’s as if sudden flashes of pain even create their own narratives. It’s a full-body insight into the history of your life: defining you by your one Error. You get this physical conviction, a posture you can’t get rid of. A thought that no amount of therapy or soul-searching or clarifying meditation can root out. So much so that, even if you were to plunge a dagger through your stomach, you wouldn’t be able to get rid of that awry feeling of cause-and-effect, of ultimate Karma and shame for your actions. You can beseech for forgiveness but it won’t get you anywhere, for forgiveness would be to remove from your sight the reality of things as they are (to change what you are seeing into a mere dream); and very clearly you are being punished. Not through you, but through your loved ones. And that is the most divine, and canonical, kind of punishment. 
107	The sufferer suffers. But she sees it. 
108	And I smiled a little, thinking all this in some form about my mother, as she sat there watching me: I was bent over on the bench, unable to speak. 
109	It was from that moment on, that I realized I could just analyze people and not to have to engage with them.
110	Wait, let’s hear white people be frumpy with my attitude towards suffering, how it’s dehumanizing, how I’m not taking it seriously and am speaking like a sociopath. I remember telling this story and giggling because I thought it was hilarious and this person that you and I both know pulled this particular sour face. Remember from Kincaid’s writing seminar? There is a particular kind of socially-minded mediocre artist who is allergic to me. “I’m really sorry that happened to you.”
111	‘I know you’re laughing hysterically right now, and that’s almost always for jokes that aren’t that funny; but this is pretty funny, I’ll be honest.’
112	—And the horror, and the dread, and everything that ought to be felt! “That must have been a really tough time for your mother.”
113	—Yes, she fucking felt awful. You fucking idiot. 	
114	‘And then, haha, you had to pretend that his feelings and opinions actually mattered…’ 
115	—Aha, yeah, like I had to put on this face of gratitude, totally suppressing myself, thanking him for his offering in which he sort of gestured at my feelings, which is exactly what he would have wanted were he to divulge his feelings. This type of person expects this sort of give-and-take of emotions, where we reveal and eventually talk things through…I bet saying that he was gay will get literary white people very mad at me. But speaking from my all-powerful Identity-Politic, yes, I believe I can say that of gayness that part I hate the most. The Sensitive Feels. The Dandy Justice. But you know me. You know how it is.
116	‘Yup.’ 
117	And when I left the hospital and slowly gathered in my senses again, I began to hate her more and more, all thanks to that moment, her apology, during which I had felt nothing at all. The funny thing is, I had so repressed my memories that I didn’t even know what she was apologizing for. She just spoke blandly across from me. I listened silently, smiling, thinking to myself that this was something out of Hemingway. 
118
119“I never meant to hurt you.” = “I’m suddenly remembering all the times I yelled at you for piano classes or Chinese classes or art classes or swimming classes or when I yelled at you for not doing the online math thing with the animated swimming pool, or when I kicked you out of the house and told you never to come back, or when I threw your Gameboy away because you weren’t eating my food, or when you refused to play piano, or when you said you hated studying Chinese. Or when you or when you.” = “How do I not remember these things right now?” = “Or when I made you throw up in front of all those people family members and they left because of you, because you wouldn’t eat the food and you were skinnier than everyone else’s children and so I wouldn’t feel like a failure as a mother.” = “But I didn’t mean to do it.” —I didn’t respond, I thought of how Bartleby the Scrivener never responded to the businessman. “It’s going to be better, okay. We’re going to get through this.” = “I am in agony and this is the only thing I can say.” = “How can the thing that kept me alive for those long years be looking like this in this mental hospital surrounded by crazy people?” = “How can it have come to this?” = “How is it that we all knew he would have to come here or he would kill himself?” = “How did I do this to him?” = “What is it that I deserve?” = “How many times in the past have I had just such a thought, looking at my son ruined by my scream? Shuddering and turning pale and with a strange look on his face.” = “How many times have I resolved to not do it again?” = “And now look what I have done to him.” = “If only I could have remembered, one of those times when I regretted everything, to write it down, to tell someone about it, then I wouldn’t be in this moment, but I kept forgetting to remember that I was harming my son.” = “O God thou art curse.” = “O God help.” = “O God where art thou.” = “Benevolent God O God O my God.” = “Where is my husband?” = “He’ll be here soon, he had to go buy food for him.” = “My son can’t speak.” = “It’s okay, my husband will come and we will take care of him and the doctors will find the right medicine and eventually he can come off the medicine and be normal.” 
120
121“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”
122
123	Anyway, that was the clue that opened up an understanding of my childhood that has provided zero help to me and only Hatred. Formerly I did not know who to hate. Then I got a whiff of it, and kept inhaling, for no other reason than to have something to think. For people like me are only afraid of being bored. And now that I knew who to hate, it was like a vein had extended outwards, and discovering oxygen on the surface, pulsed with new life so as to return and nourish the childhood-deep nitrogen-rich roots of my hatred, my outrage, my disdain for this womanish pathetic imbecilic creature. For women really are some sort of inferior idiotic species.
124	So I’ve said it. Are you glad that you pushed me to this point? Does this do anything for you, making me remember this? Does the remark about women enrage you or, as I see it, does it proceed out of the sneer of the voice and earns the ‘pass’ that violent yet authentic statements get – when their irrationality sufficiently removes them from a direct author-proposition and seems to exist in this careful seething dark vacuum, separate from the author’s actual system and feelings ‘in the daylight’? 
125	‘Um…’
126
1273. 
128
129—Back to Crane’s Voyages. I do really want you to appreciate this poem, because it’s good, I think. 
130	‘I think you think things are good just because they remind you of your own writing. I mean, I’m not against it.’
131	—Crane is the poet with the greatest reach of vocabulary, even greater than Shakespeare; he’s probably the only writer where I feel I can’t approach that same interlocking of metaphor…
132	‘Yeah but like, half of it makes no sense.’
133	—That’s why it’s interesting to rewrite it, because you’re forced to make his associations make sense, as if you were sort of diagnosing the image hiding under the complex syntax. If only you could get the text out of the way, you could see, behind the transparent page, a perfect vision.
134	Also I’m a big fan of having to brush the hair of the girl away during sex. Usually she does it, I guess. By ‘usually’ I mean by the two days of love-making I just had—losing my heterosexual virginity at twenty-four, Goddammit. Anyway…
135	‘I think we’re both bored of this thought.’
136	—But like, you know. The way they—
137	‘I also girl.’
138	—Yes but you weird. And also we both like girls. So I talk okay? And you have said in the past that my soft-core writing is pretty good. Plus, what are literary friends for, but to share porn together? Think of Hokusai sharing his prints.
139	‘True. Though you know how I feel about Hokusai. Fucking aesthete.’ 
140	—Anyway. The way the hair gets all messy, and a little sticky, as you’re on top of them, or when I was on top of her, so that my eyes were near her forehead and I was breathing over the top of her head, as if I were a whale stretching for air above the surface of the sea. And as I kept on thrusting—though now and then she would complain about pain, which, you know, I kind of took to be a compliment, so that I pulled out a little which was actually more stimulating for me—she would get hair into her mouth, and into her eyes, and she would very quickly remove her hand from where it kept her thigh in place (so that I could enter her more easily) and scatter the hair across her face in a sweeping motion so as to keep her face clear of it. So that, my eyesight level with her forehead, it was like watching a canvas crossed with strokes of ink that now and then became clear only to get crossed by the same messy though elegant strokes again; as if the passing of the centuries on a minimalist Chinese tapestry. Every time I thrusted very deeply, going as deep as I could, she would moan and close her eyes. But after a few thrusts she would make me stop and go out a little more. She would breath out sharply, turning to her side, almost as if it were a kind of agony, and issued short pants like she were undergoing labor pains, and her cheeks blushed, were more rosy than usual. One time I stayed there, as deep as possible, but without thrusting so that it was gentle and she seemed merely pleasant and warm with us connected like a puzzle piece. I looked in her eyes, and carefully rearranged her hair, strand by strand, tucking it behind her ears, as I’ve seen girls do so beautifully when they stand up from class, put their books in their arms. They look out into the bright windows of the afternoon, then absent-mindedly, with the free arm, tuck the lock of hair behind their ear. It’s these small gestures that make for a kind of feminine beauty –
141	‘You know only you think in these terms of feminine and masculine, right? It’s your traditionalism. Some old Chinese gentleman.’
142	—Well, anyway. But it was so warm and squishy down there, and I was amazed that I could stay inside her as she shifted her position on the bed to keep from falling down its side, for example. We would have to pivot around the bed while connected lmao. Like those conjoined insects in sex, these two mosquitos pinned together one night. I remember trying to attack them and they flew crazily in the air like tangled helicopters, bumping into this that, a brown blob flying beneath the lamplight of the doorway. Until I got bored. Maybe I squished them. Anyway, she would brush her hair aside…
143	‘Sigh.’
144	—He he. One time you and I, remember that? We went on a seven hour walk after not speaking to each other for two months, since we were both depressed. And I caught that photo of you where you turned to look back at me; and your hair, flying, split into two, like Moses parting the waves of the sea, so that I could suddenly see your face in full: and captured the photo. Really you are quite handsome. Isn’t it nice to be good-looking?
145	‘It kind of is.’
146	—I’m pretty sure, given that I haven’t had sex until twenty-four years old, if I were shorter or had a small dick, and had no places to go walk (since without places to walk I get obsessed with my own intelligence, one of those idiot men who stake their life on their having genius), I’d become a vicious incel. Anyway. One of my favorite things about girls is that, when they’re walking in front of you, let’s say you’re on a city street, and someone shouts from behind you, and she quickly turns even as you’re going forward so that her hair whacks you in the face: I am a fan of this. 
147	There is a type of girl whose essence, whose charm you don’t get until she gives you a sullen look, until, beneath her politeness, she suddenly makes a cutting remark about someone you both know, which is utterly precise and reveals her contempt for the other person’s incompetence or incoherence. 
148	You’re not responding.
149	‘Sorry, I’m tired. You’re just not saying anything interesting.’
150	—I know, I’m bored too. I stayed up to four a.m. last night writing this. The girl has gotten me off schedule. 
151	‘Let’s just do the Crane.’
152	—Alright. So Crane is by the shore, looking out at the sea, preparing a voyage to the new world, and his feeling of power, his bipolar megalomania, can only be properly represented by his representing himself as a kind of Columbus figure.
153	
154—And yet this great wink of eternity—of rimless floods, 
155Unrestrained and leeward bending, hiding coils of calm beneath
156The bow of waves, whelms us—
157	
158	The sea is of rimless floods, yet just one wink of eternity, it floods out everywhere but it’s just the blink of an eye; as when God blinks his eye, everything dissolves…
159	‘This is so boring.’	
160	—Fine, I’ll say something interesting. Crane was gay.
161	‘Oh was he?’
162	—Of course you’re happy, now. You’re the first girl I’ve known to find gay pornography hot. I remember there was this girl named Lauren who I snuck out with once, anyway, I said to her, trying to be seductive in the back of the car, ‘So do you think it’s hot when guys kiss?’ 
163	‘Dude. You were queer even back then.’
164	—I’m not queer. I fucked a girl for four hours last night.
165	‘Which is exactly what a gay person would have to say in order to prove that he’s not gay.’
166	—Holy shit there is no getting around you. Anyway so I asked Lauren this…whatever, let’s keep going. You know, usually people pay me for lessons like this. But you’re far too impatient for me to develop things, which is, I guess, helpful.
167
168Thus Crane walked bound to his big sailor
169
170And onward, as sunken bells off San Salvador   
171Salute the crocus lusters of the stars…
172
173	—The bells of the sea are sunk in the ocean.
174	‘Oh, they’re like Sirens. Nice.’
175	—Yeah, and listen to to that. They salute the crocus lusters of the stars. It’s beautiful. The next lines are hard to understand but they’re also amazing. 
176
177In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—
178Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
179Consummate, and let me need confess no more. 
180
181		for my veins are fire
182		my desire is pleasure
183	and the binding Briar is strength—
184	Hold me in the crook of thy elbow,
185			O my God. 
186
187	‘Yeah, this is mostly just you again. But I like the crook of the elbow part. It’s like getting choked out.’
188	—But look, ‘Adagios of islands,’ it’s as if the ‘A’ itself were the island in the word, for otherwise it doesn’t really make sense, other than to say that these islands are bathed in a kind of slow and luscious evening sound. 
189	The very ‘A’ of the Adagios is blue, and you can kind of see the islands resting as lumps, an archipelago…
190	
191And I tied the rope to the hook, and waited for your intercession, O my God. 
192
193	‘This is Noontime Love Songs?’
194	—Yeah. There’s something still powerful, after all these years, about this invocation ‘O my God.’ —What’s wrong with me right now, Andy?
195	‘You’re looking for content and you’ve fallen into your worst habits, analyzing random language.’
196	—You’re right. I feel like I’m Odysseus adrift, in the parts of the voyage where there’s nothing to do, only expectation, waiting for the better parts of the story. The thing is, I don’t have enough experience of the ocean in order to parody Homer. It’s really true that a poet arises out of his surroundings, the special flower of his region, like the lonely cactus in the desert, as if all the sinews of the land, or the way that the fishes of Ithaca fertilize the soil, as how minerals in New York’s water flavor the pizza…
197	‘All you’re saying is that a poet writes about his world.’
198	—But you misunderstand me; or you don’t grasp it with sufficient intensity. 
199	‘Hmm…It’s like when you don’t understand my ideas as intensely as I want you to, and I feel annoyed with you. That you’ve lost your step or something.’
200	—Exactly. I mean, not that I’ve lost a step. Which I have. As well. You know. Fuck you!
201	Somehow the intensity of grasping the idea is the idea itself. For example, I want somehow to convey to you the proposition, ‘The poet emerges swirling out of his surroundings.’ But if I just said this to you, it’s like nothing gets said. And I only feel satisfied with it when I’ve joined it to a bunch of associations in my head, in a poem of resemblances. 
202	Because what I actually think is so simple, if I said it to you straight-forwardly, you wouldn’t actually feel what I feel. You’d call me dumb. 
203	‘Yes.’ 
204	—Because the simple proposition is the bud, the surfacing of a whole interior sphere and system, very much like how—sorry—the stimulation of the clitoris—
205	‘Like you know where that is.’
206	—I even had to look up how to spell it. How when you repeat the phrase, say, in my case, ‘ah blue,’ or ‘the poet is the world,’ you hear a kind of resonance throughout your whole body, as if in your hands and legs…
207	‘And…’
208	—And like, you know. Where was I. We each have a secret word or such. And when I try to convey this word to you, if I just say it, nothing happens, none of the intensity is conveyed, and I feel like I’ve betrayed the word. I’ve given to you my hand, so to speak, and it’s no longer nourished with Life by the veinous system of my body. So instead I just don’t say it. Trying to explain what’s deepest to me to people who don’t understand exhausts me and makes me want to never talk again. Because, if it could be formulated in simple words, then I’d already have it in clarity already. And in clarity, it bores me. 
209	‘Yeah, so just never talk.’ 
210	—But I’m chatty. Come to think of it, because I only feel satisfied when I’ve joined the thought to a web of associations, actually, I’m incapable of clichés. Because the thought is only presented to you when likened to something else an in imaginative way; even if you think what I’m saying is boring, like a magician performing false magic, I’ve still managed to present, at the very least, an image to you. 
211	Surely some socially-minded mediocre poet is grimacing. ‘I’m incapable of clichés.’ Some people are afraid of genius. It tends to be this kind of artist. They say things like: “There isn’t really such a thing as genius; there are people who work incredibly hard and have had bountiful strokes of luck,” something like that. But you and I both know that you can tell from reading one sentence whether or not this person has genius. Which is simply the inability to be boring, yet accurate and always making sense; no matter what subject. Of course, if the genius is depressed then of course he is going to be boring. But with common energy a genius can never be boring.
212	‘Doesn’t David Foster Wallace…?’
213	—Yes, his sentence always begins: ‘This is cliché, but it’s really true.’ People who are obsessed with their own genius—and these people tend to pretend to be very scared of the word ‘genius’—people who have… 
214	‘You do realize that…?’
215	—Other people who’ve staked their lives on being intelligent because they lack a lover or other things that would situate them within the general habits of happiness, such idiots as David Foster Wallace are very scared of saying clichés. But at the same time, so amazingly, he realizes that clichés are so powerful! For example he says about the slogans at his alcoholics meetings: ‘The dumber it is, the better it is.’ It just means that he thinks that these slogans are beneath him, which is why he’s surprised that they work on someone so smart as him. He’s too smart for clichés.
216	‘He is so fucking boring.’
217	—But apparently good at sex.
218	‘Yeah but he fucking stalked people and stuff.’
219	—I’ll use a Hebraism: ‘May his dick be cut off and his name be cut off from the years as a remembrance.’ Lolol. 
220	‘You were saying something though.’
221	—Yeah, what was it? Let me scroll up a little. Yeah, I would always be consumed by this idea or that. There’s a certain type of person whose mind is very sensitive and loves nothing more than to be inflamed by some imaginary thing, like Don Quixote. To be possessed, like how a rhino, punishing the ground with his hooves, stares terribly with huge red eyes as the horn on its head which it can never touch but which arranges him completely like the North Star. There is some idea in me that I want desperately to convey, which I would give every ounce of my body to say, but which I can’t say. 
222	It’s on my forehead but I can’t reach it. 
223	And then I would try to convey this to my parents, and they would have no understanding. When I was ten or so I wrote an essay on what it meant to be baptized, the first time I had written anything like that, and I showed it to them. It contained the following metaphor, which I got from playing in the creek all those afternoons, those lonely times which were my only happy times: ‘Baptism is like water rising to the rims of a dam.’ Because I had this, like, water hose, the length of which, like a long green serpent that ended up in a spout of a mouth; this I would toss into the creek during the dry season (which was the entire year, since you know California gets like zero water). Then I would find the finest sand, and gather it from the neighbor’s backyard, crossing the boundary beneath the dogwood trees. I would remove the huge maple leaves from where they had fallen, since they would obstruct my experiment; from beneath the leaning white solidified giant ghost above me, the pale Maple, whose leaves were always brown and curled, not knowing what to do with an endless season of sun. So yeah. I’d stick the hose deep into the water. Without turning it on. Then I’d build a mountain, a volcano of sand, above it. There would be a solid flat stone, usually blue corroded with dark blue, like slate, special unto itself, that out of pleasure I would choose as the ‘bottom stone,’ as I knew the Christ to be the corner stone of the Church on whom everything would be built. I’d place this flat stone at the bottom of the hose, the entry, so that the water would not sink into the earth but would go up. So it would shoot up through the volcano of sand. And usually it would cause a secession of sand, a slump, like a slow-moving brown avalanche or mudslide. The pale sand would turn dark. And it would trickle. Then all of a sudden it would get sloughed off, like it were losing a lump of skin. And all the water would pour out and down the sides of the mountain of sand which it would erode and destroy so that everything ran over the little pedestals of pebbles that I had heaped at the base of the mountain, like the ritual stones in the Bible where two people heap a stone tower to commemorate a deal that eases the tension of the battle over the water in the desert wells, each naming the pile a different name as if out of spite. These would get run over by the falling water and sand, and I would pretend that these were the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah that were destroyed. 
224	Now check out how I’m going to end this epic simile, the epic return, and I don’t think anyone in the world is quite capable of this. Ha ha. So I got bored of doing this all the time, and it suddenly occurred to me that I could get more action if, instead of keeping the volcano as a tip, I instead dug out a crater there, like a bowl, which would gradually fill with water, rising higher and higher, until one tendril of water, like an octopus trying to get out of a tub, would poke over the edge of the sand. Just a trickle. Then it would widen and open up and destroy the mountain and the cities below with far greater force, for a cistern or reservoir of water had been built up for so long. So the water would rush down. The reservoir would open up and surge downwards, destroying half of the mountain, like the eruption of Mt. Helena which obsessed me back then. I’m not going to talk about how when I did this during the watery days, when the creek was flowing, that it sent bursts of cloudy silt running through the slopes of the underwater clean sand, curling with brown, exactly like how hot erupted pyroclastic flow devastates the volcano’s mountainside and incinerates, blows away the living substance of the trees themselves and replaces where they were, those hollows, with shining minerals of granite and mica, thus forming petrified wood, which I stole from a park in Washington, and kept forever.
225	So yeah. This is what I wanted to convey in that baptism essay when I was ten. I wanted to say how, when you’re in church, you feel super embarrassed and self-conscious at first about singing, about enjoying God, because you’re afraid that other people are looking at you—and look, maybe you’re faking your faith and just singing so that other people see; which actually becomes the case, simply because you’re thinking about what other people are thinking. Then my cheeks would turn red and I would hate myself for being so fake. Fucking David Foster Wallace and his concerns about feeling like a poser; I feel like everything he wrote about I graduated out of when my freshman year of college was over; post-modernism is like a phase you just get over. But, then, rising up, the feeling would rise. The feeling of God, Andy. The divine sensation. Singing in the veins, tinging and singing with fire the very tips of my hairs that stood erect like a vital child. And it would rise through me as the flush of a ready drink changes the nature of a sprig of dried golden barley in the spring so that the springtime is fulfilled and it waves little and greenly and sends out its seeds. Through the dam of my body, through the blockage of feeling, the water of God would slowly rise to the rims of the crater of that mountain, and one tendril of water would extend out like a tentacle, and open up piece by piece limb by limb my body, so that I wept, and gave thanks, and in total private darkness, saw once more, had a vision of that figure in the center of the expanding darkness, the very face of the suffering God and his eternal loneliness which was just like the loneliness my childhood years: he himself was the embodiment of my greatest suffering. For I had no friends, and my parents didn’t understand me. But God did. O, praise God! —So this is what I wanted to convey in that essay about baptism; the feeling of water rising and destroying the dam inside me, and breaking forth.
226	‘Hm!’
227	—Ye, not bad, right? The epic cycle of my thought. You can tell the medicine decrease is working, and that I’m able to go on an epic yet precise ramble again.
228	‘Do you want to keep going? I think it’s going somewhere.’
229	—Let me rest a little, I’ve had too much coffee. Plus…
230	‘Go rest. I like this. But you’re getting a bit scattered.’ 
231	—Blame Kanye. I’m listening to his gospel album. I’ll post this on Medium. I probably have like twenty stories on Medium with not a single view. Which is fine since…
232	‘Go rest.’ 
233	—You’re right, I’m talking a little too fast. Gotta keep that bipolar in check.4.
234
235—I think I want to tell the story again. About my mom in the hospital. 
236	‘Are you sure?’
237	—No. Yesterday got kinda bad. First off, the things I wrote seemed to me full of rage and spite.
238	‘But they were funny…’
239	—Funny to me and you. I’m pretty sure that anyone else who reads it will cast an ethical rather than aesthetic judgment on me. Especially so if it’s good to read. Because they’ll keep reading even if they hate the voice, and so they’ll end up hating me. David Foster Wallace’s ex-girlfriend said that the majority of his works were a way of compiling reminders to himself to not be an asshole (which is why his characters are so unlikable). Is it okay if I talk about this?
240	‘Yes, keep going, I’m listening.’
241	—People end up hating writers, but they forget that they hate the writer for he has represented on the page the part of himself that he hates the most. There are writers for whom it’s absolutely necessary that the writer stand-in be likable; imagine reading all of Proust while hating Proust. I don’t know where I am, but my self seems so variable, so different across my various moods, that within the span of a week I feel, not as if I were different persons, but as if I had worn so many different hats.
242	‘You should go back to telling your story.’
243	—You really are a good reminder of things. 
244	‘I am Interlocutor.’ 
245	—You know I just stole this device from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations? It’s like how I plagiarized a ton of Hart Crane. 
246	‘Yes but it works. Plus your language is more colloquial now so even people like Ted like it.’
247	—I want to tell the story leading up to the moment of my mother’s apology in the mental hospital, but of all the hats I can wear, telling a linear story doesn’t seem to be one of them. I just don’t have the patience, or the discipline, and forcing myself to be one way, forcing myself into a kind of mental habit, completely removes whatever semblance of genius I had. It’s like trying to be someone I’m not. Like trying to be purely heterosexual. The amount of strain involved ends up killing me with self-hatred. I’ll leave your quotes in ‘single quotes,’ and everyone else in “double quotes.”
248
249*
250
251‘You gave up. Why did you do that.’
252	—I had to delete all of it. 
253	‘Why?’
254	—It felt wrong. I want to die.
255	‘It wasn’t bad.’
256	—It was bad. It was bad.
257	‘No, Sam. It was really good. You should have at least sent me a copy.’
258	—But then it would exist. Aha. Remember how Harold Bloom always says, like, of James Wood who wrote a bad review of him, or of that science-fiction novel (which he wrote and published himself but tried to retract since it was so awful), or of anything that bothers him: “It doesn’t exist. It just doesn’t exist.” 
259	‘Ha ha yeah.’
260	—Wouldn’t it be great one day to just get up and say: “Asian American literature doesn’t exist. It begins with me and my best friend Andy. We should try to forget the rest of it because it’s largely garbage and barely exists.”
261	‘Lolol.’
262	—Remember how Proust writes of Swann that he was the type of person who, on his death-bed, if you said something interesting to him, he would manage to talk himself back to life for a minute or two before dying? I feel the same way. As soon as I remember various things, like what Bloom said, or what Proust said, I feel myself coming back to life, simply because they activate the circuit of pictures in my brain, blood flows through them or they flash correctly, and my feeling of depression, of wanting to die, whose symptom is boredom-with-oneself…
263	‘Kind of like how David Foster Wallace one time went driving way too fast down the highway yelling aloud “I’m so boring, I’m so boring, I’m so boring,” then wrote a story in which the character kill himself by driving.’
264	—Yeah then his girlfriend reads it and goes to the toilet and throws up. “He already knew he was a doomed man.” But DFW gets it wrong. He is boring. But what he means is: “I’m so bored, I’m so bored.” But because he cares so much what other people think about him, and maybe because he’s really insecure whether or not he’s said anything interesting in the first place, he’s then attached himself to the idea of his genius, so that’s why he says “I’m so boring” instead of “I’m so bored.” He innovated a million different forms, all of which were merely eccentric rather than original, strange without being appropriate, all to no real spiritual purpose. 
265	I read so many DFW biographies because they all tell me what kind of person I shouldn’t be. I hate his written works but the biographies and revenge memoirs (against him) are always good. I don’t think I’m very attached to ideas of my genius, though definitely there are places in the text where you can point to, where the seam shows and the monster behind is glimpsed. But I think of those instances as temporary manifestations of the high moods of bipolar, and not as me. Again, I think people, not just bipolars, are so variable that they become a different person in a different mood, or, better, as I’ve said before, they wear a different hat; their brain is charged with a special kind of loop, just like how depressed people, when they see themselves in a mirror, will have temporary body dysmorphia and see themselves as ugly. All these things can be predicted. Which makes you question whether there is really a unitary self, or if, rather, there is a collection of interwoven mental habits, reactivities, which are shifted and rotated through, a special combination of which a mood will call into being. My high mood will make me an arrogant asshole obsessed with his own intelligence. My euphoria will make me a mystic. They are loops; they can be traced and predicted, and even interrupted by the various methods you learn in therapy so that you throw the ‘cart’ off its tracks. Like if when I was gazing over the river, and you slapped me on the face, my ‘mystic’ loop would be destroyed, replaced by shock and annoyance. So that people are fundamentally predictable so long as you know their habits and reflexes to certain kinds of stimuli. Like I know exactly what will happen when my dad is grumpy, and I put a beer in front of him; his grumpiness will want to keep him away from enjoying anything, especially enjoying a beer that our family gave him, because this would be to acquiesce to being happy. And the mood of grumpiness, that loop, since he is so strongly running through it, doesn’t want to die, to be interrupted, because it would require the pain of shifting, of suddenly breaking with a mood, which sucks. But because the sparkling golden beer is there, tall in a mug, releasing its tangy fume like a magic perfume, no different than how when a girl wants to have sex with you it’s as if you literally come back to life, it stimulates his senses, his desire for a drink, and quite naturally makes him put down his defenses. His grumpiness is surmounted by another desire, to drink the golden beer. So eventually, as if in a moment, the weather changes, and he no longer cares to be grumpy, or he overcomes the fact that we have offended him, or that we are being nice to him despite the fact that he wants to maintain his anger against us; and a few minutes later we look over and he is quietly sipping the foam of the beer. And when we laugh at him, he can’t help but make a sheepish smile and smile back. Then we all eat food together. In this instance my mother is very wise, and likes to gloat: “See, I know your father. I told you to ignore him when he said he didn’t want a beer. He was just grumpy. Your father is very easy to manipulate. He he.” All said in his hearing. 
266	‘Hmmm your dad is funny. Your mom too.’
267	—Yeah, wait. Let me finish. And since moods are dependent on your surroundings and other people, being, for example, in nature, will quite literally change your person, whereas, to give another example, (sigh), if you’re around boring people, because they don’t stimulate your imagination, you yourself become boring. When I stayed in the Bay Area around only Chinese engineers I felt my brain falling asleep and quite literally slowing down. That’s why movements in art, or like our friendship, is so important: we literally become dumber when we’re surrounded by dumb people. And our energies are infectious. When you get depressed, I get depressed too, and we don’t write for like a year. 
268	I do think one of the reasons that David Foster Wallace killed himself was that he grew up in a car-consumed society; so much of what’s he reacting against, the reason he will probably be lost to history—though people like me keep writing about him—is that he’s reacting to the surroundings of his time, the cheap commercials, the perpetual bad taste, whereas if these things go away, he too goes away, and no one understands any of the references he’s making. A poet rises out of his surroundings. But once that ‘surrounding’ is taken away, when we no longer have the same circumstances, just as I could barely understand Whitman because I had no experience of nature around my house—every time I looked at grass loafing in summer wind the horrid sound of a distant machine would interrupt it—he was very uninteresting to me. The reason Proust maintains his relevance despite all of his references no longer making sense, is that he discovers a kind of reverie-associational-sentence, the process of which joins together pictures like linking together scattered and random stars into coherent imaginative constellations, a meaning foisted upon them. He makes significance of various elements rather than describe them or represent them mimetically without change. DFW describes a social world, mimicking it, while Proust enacts a loop through that social world, a vein of blood, only so that it may nourish his understanding of himself; he performs the role of the reader and dreamer by endowing what was sound and fury with reverie and meaning. So that what is operated on is our inner world, our images, our feelings. Maybe this point is incoherent.
269	‘I think what you mean is just that Proust was better at making sense and vivid images, whereas David Foster Wallace thought he was smart just because he spoke quickly.’
270	—Lol, yeah. He had the worst instincts of bipolar. I had my roommate say this to me: “Look at his prose, it’s obvious he has bipolar.” But I looked up his biographer online and the biographer said: “David was very resistant to being categorized as your typical artist-bipolar, and insisted on his diagnoses of major depression, since he had always wanted to be normal and function like his heroes like Don DeLillo.” Which sounds to me a little like denial. Given that so many people write about the variance of his mental states. 
271	But to get back to my point. Talking about interesting things literally talks me back to life, because they relieve my depression simply by giving food for me to take apart, to nourish my imagination; whereas watching dumb TV shows makes me feel ‘dead inside,’ simply because it’s only engaging my visual senses, with bright flashes and drama, rather that enlivening the powers of the faculties of my mind. And, not to get boring, but as to the attachment of my own genius, and I don’t find this strange, the knowledge that I possess it makes me no longer attached to viewing myself in this way. 
272	‘Well because you wrote Samuel’s Book.’ 
273	—Yeah. It’s hard to get past that. You know it kills me, of course, to no longer be able to write that; but it kind of settles the affair once-and-for-all. Maybe I’m speaking too early, and maybe you’re withholding your judgment from me –
274	‘I’m not.’
275	—But, very much like Proust’s thesis that we no longer want something once we have it, like how once we have the lover we no longer value her, since she acted upon our imagination simply because she was always fleeting, giving us jealousy that is as powerful an incentive to the imagination as anything else, just so, realizing that I had done something worthwhile, no longer makes me angsty about saying something like: ‘I am a genius.’ Because it is simply the case.
276	‘Lol people are going to be mad.’
277	—But what’s there to be mad about? I’m just trying to sort and categorize various words.
278	‘This is like in Kincaid’s class when you got everyone to hate you, and you just said, ‘I’m trying to be accurate.’’
279	—Yeah, you’re right. That’s like what my mom says when she’s mean to someone. “So what if I told your dad that he’s getting older and slower and dumber? I am just being honest!” Aha. That’s funny. But you’re right, people frequently claim honesty when they insult someone, and think that the person shouldn’t be offended because “I’m just trying to point out the truth, to help you understand yourself,” but this all the more insulting because, firstly, there’s an altruistic…
280	‘It’s okay, it’s not that interesting a thought. You’re just caught up psychologizing language again because you’re trying to put off telling the story.’
281	—Yeah. 
282	‘So are you going to tell the story? You don’t have to.’
283	—Do you have to go somewhere?
284	‘Kinda, but I can keep checking in. I’m just doing homework.’
285	—Oh, okay.
286
287*
288
289‘Deleted again?’
290	—Yeah…My mind is too scattered. But this time I learned something. Rather than approach a novel as a story, I seem to be approach it by a case-by-case examination, linking together anecdotes and observations by some very hidden thread, but which thread is never lost, so that I kind of criss-cross on skates through my life, flashing through my brain into different regions, rather than move, as a novel does, like a disciplined army, a mobile mass covering ground slowly and building up a world. I teleport through my life. 
291	Help me out, Andy?
292	‘Start with the fight with your parents.’ 
293	—Lol. Yeah so I had the night of sleeplessness, as you know. That I wanted help. I knew it would end up with me killing myself otherwise. 
294
295Parents: “Have you considered running and praying? We really feel like you need more exercise.” = “Medicine is evil and we don’t know anything about it.” = “We don’t believe you when you say you’re feeling like killing yourself, when have you ever talked about this before?” —I hid it from you for four years. “How can this be?” —Remember freshman year when I didn’t call home for three months? “No.” —Well you came to visit me because you were worried. “That’s just because you broke up with your girlfriend.” —Well I broke up with her because I was depressed out of my mind and wanted to stop inflicting myself upon her. “What does that mean?” —Never mind. 
296
297	Hm, I’ll start here. After completing the first three stories of Samuel’s Book, I felt myself to have finally become myself; that is to say, I had found the language in which I was free. It was a language in which I could walk, and if I so much as stepped of a building, it would smoothly coalesce beneath me so that I took yet another step across the air. 
298	Indeed a time of glory. But I went to China, Andy. O Andy! I went to China and the difference in time zones ruined my sleep schedule, and something weird began to happen. 
299	I would wake up way too early, far before dawn. The black light rained down over the city streets of Hangzhou, rounding about the street lamps and the closed-up shops which interrupted their flow like a light stone in a brook but not so much that they did not completely, as like ink, darken the picture totally, like I was looking at the world through dark-glasses, a different mood, mysterious yet creepy, edible and a relish to me. There was, I remember, an inflatable massive doll, an advertisement for cellphones, a giant Panda, that, as I walked out one dawn, stood there, half-hidden in the shadows, grinning malevolently, expanding the circle of its eye in profile to stare at me, like a ghoul. It caught me in one glance; there was a monster hiding under a tree, standing by the shop-windows. No one else was on the street. Perhaps I would have to fight it. And yet, because I was always listening to music in my headphones, I was more mesmerized than afraid. I was not afraid of anything those days, since I had yet to experience psychosis, or sleeplessness. It scared me a little, but truly, I was ready to fight it, to tear it limb to limb. So I was a bit sad, I guess, when it reduced again to just an inflatable advertisement, a grotesque panda made of air, which, I realize now, I must have always known, for otherwise if I truly thought it was a monster, I would have shut down, I would never have tried to engage it with my imagination, in the way that, one time in Qingdao, I ran up to the mountain in the gray schizoid air to take in the thunderstorm (and got afraid and ran away), whose clouds were so low, Andy, they were so low—as low as in those paintings or prints, Chinese or Japanese, where ornamental clouds adorn the top of the print, curling downwards, enclosing the carousing lovers below in a kind of suffocating atmosphere. What I want to stay is, I wanted to appreciate the thunderstorm, to hear its multiple strikes of thunder that, invoked by anger in the many folds of the distances of cloud beyond what I could see, a whole churning foreign language which built up charges only to relieve their emotion in a orgiastic burst of temper, that weather was so attractive to me that I was not afraid of the summer rain which was to come. I felt that like any summer thunderstorm it would give me something of great intellectual content by relieving me of heat in the rain in which I would dance like a Bacchic ritual and feel the raindrops ricocheting off the dirty washed pavement and hitting me in its rebound on my knees. As always, I wanted revelation. I wanted access into the divine mysteries of my self and my self in the world. To know where I stood. And to stand against and over everything, to summit within myself. But as I went up the mountain, in the open air, as others rushed in the direction from which I came, I even made up to where a giant red ball (the building of the weather observatory) connected to the platform of the mountain, which was situated in such a fashion that it brought into contrast the rest of the landscape that I suddenly found myself above, as I had just walked into a clearing away from the trees: there, O my God, the rolling hills of Qingdao covered in trees, with apartments visible between them and bicyclists hurrying to get out of the rain. And the thunder rumbled. It rumbled, as if rocks were being formed, and smashed, one by one, mingling that smashing sound with one another. Beyond the low clouds above me, there were, perhaps, giants of clouds building high up and higher, preparing a world of devastation. Yet, unbeknownst to myself, I had begun to feel a tinge of fear. The hairs of my arm were standing up. The hairs of my head lifted. My ears tingled with a strange sense. My eyes grew warm. What if a bolt of lightning should indeed strike me and enclose me in the deafening death of thunder? Wouldn’t I lose what wonders in my imagination awaited me? (For I valued this more than my family). So then I ran down the mountain, bounding like a doe in my sandals, like a prophet afraid of God and no longer wanting to deal with him, who, in his tent, shall be met with God as the angel of death who arbitrarily kills him as God moved to kill Moses after Moses was reluctant to bear the role of his prophet; and his wife cut off the foreskin of his son’s penis and cast at his feet: “And now thou art truly a blood groom to me,” saving his life by appeasing God whom he had offended. And as I walked through the slower slopes of the city of Qingdao, now amongst the towers, the air had turned blue, the walls beside me enclosed me in their protection, even as bolts of thunder were stretched out and shot across the sky, and the crack of lightning opening up the air in the distances resounded with fear and awe in my mind. The rain came pouring down. The rain in the blue air. I was overjoyed. I had never felt anything like this before. It made me so happy. Everyone else had gone into their houses, into their shops, watching television, eating noodles with the sound of chopsticks clacking against bowls, and very aware that I was alone and able to watch them like a god sent to travel across the earth and make a report of what he has seen, so I observed the many peoples and families in their homes in the intricacy of a moment of intimacy forced upon them by the elements of nature; and they were beautiful. So the rain came, I walked towards home, and I danced without showing it, afraid that someone would see what joy I held in my heart and make me self-conscious. The gutters overflowed. Brown dark water began to rush through the sides of the street, on the side of the sidewalk. But this water felt clean, even though it probably was not. At some points my legs were so deep in the water that I had to lift up my shorts. I wore very light clothing, my jacket waterproof, so I felt perfectly at home in this warm bath of a summer thunderstorm; nothing I had on me could be ruined; I was as if naked as an animal. All this is to say, Andy, and here I enact my perfect return, that as I watched the inflatable Panda monster in the black dawn of Hangzhou, some part of me must have been aware that it was only an advertisement, for if I truly felt it was a monster, then, hm, like the thunderstorm that made me feel unsafe and made me run away, the hairs of my arms would have stood up and made me feel danger, I wouldn’t have engaged in it imaginatively. For we can only look upon the sublime when we are safe. 
300	During those dawns in Hangzhou, as the dawn lighted up with blue, I would walk up mountains whose trees were infested with birds and monkeys. But then something strange happened. Even now I feel fear. I went up, as unto the sanctum of God, fully expecting that, as before, a revelation would sweep down upon me and give me rest and relief from the strange anxious feelings I had in me. But that morning in the mountains there was a perfect red sun rising over the vague atmospheric ambience of the city, no less than an egg, casting out pink rays that shrouded the jagged silhouette of the city that faced me with a ghostly purple light. So I stared at the red light, blinking it in-and-out to see if it would do anything for me. I wanted to take into my contemplation that red egg. Its pink atmosphere was interrupted by the lower branches of the trees. But the thick foliage above didn’t block it, so that they formed a shadowy dark-green hood, of leaves whose shadows faced me, so that I looked into the red perfect orb of an eye of a giant hidden there. The pink atmosphere, and now it was as if the red egg were hatching, from the nest of scudding clouds, dark as dried feces, and like the rind of an orange unpeeling, a pure sunlight-orb were pressing through, coming out of the red shell, as around me the birds, some of them newborn and hidden in high up nests, chirped viciously and violently as if surrounding my consciousness, just as those shapes and forms crowded around the birth of a new era in a manger in Bethlehem, the changing of millenniums in this change of light. There were old men doing their exercises about me. Daily they climbed this mountain. Again I sought out to see something.
301	When I came to the pagoda, the city disappointed me. I felt that Hang Zhou itself were lacking in beauty. I said to myself: ‘Nothing, Nothing, Nothing.’
302	Then a week later I was back home, and the days blended into each other strangely, I would wake up at dawn and go biking and even when I saw the golden dawn light hung over the steeple of the library, as I glided on my bicycle and saw the changing of perspective in accordance with my movement that pivoted me around the steeple so that I gradually formed a three dimensional picture of it in my mind, that I felt not what I wanted. That I felt, as I feel now, as if I had nothing inside me.
303	So then one night I couldn’t sleep.
304	‘You kept hearing a voice that would jolt you awake.’
305	—Yes, Andy. I guess that was it. 
306
307*
308
309‘You don’t have to keep going.’
310	—I haven’t even gotten to the fight I had with my parents over seeing the psychiatrist. I’ve only gotten up to the night of sleeplessness. 
311	‘Take a rest.’
312	—Okay. 
313	‘I can tell you’re depressed now.’
314	—I am. It sucks. I wish I never wrote it.
315	‘Don’t delete this one, okay?’5. 
316
317—I think I’m slowly figuring out what this book is about. I kind of set out not knowing where I was going, since I have been exiled from the free and profitable language of Samuel’s Book. So, you know, here I am. 
318	‘Yawn.’
319	—I think the book is about the struggle to write something. Glenn Gould, in his recordings, when he can’t make the piano play the music correctly, much as how in Samuel’s Book I had to wrest the grammer of the language to match the shape of the image-movement I had in mind (thus making certain bai ren ask if I was English-Second-Language), then, you can kind of hear him murmuring, mumbling. He’s famous for this. He’s trying to hum the piece into making sense. James Wood remarks on this and says it’s the struggle of the author, the pathos, the faint zephyr of life, his breathing. 
320	‘So what you’re saying, basically, is that this entire book is a struggled breathing without music.’
321	—Um.
322	Well, at least let me make a remark that I followed the path of the metaphor and it led me into humiliation. And that, I think, is the true hallmark of an authentic writer.
323	‘Delete this.’
324
325*
326
327—It’s weird these days. I don’t mean to be too gross here, but you know, knowing you, it’s hard to gross you out, and I find this interesting. It’s been a long time since I’ve had such continuous strong erections. It’s started to happen ever since I had sex with the girl. For some reason, when I was having sex with men, during those months when I brought myself to orgasm it would only involve a complete erection for the half-second of my climax. Then, you know, everything would wither. 
328	‘Yeah it’s because you’re having penetrative sex.’
329	—What do you mean?
330	‘It’s cause your whole body is involved.’
331	—Yeah I guess in sex with men, it’s like there’s no need to maintain an erection, which was part of the reason why it was soothing to me, why it made me less afraid. I thought I just didn’t have the libido to maintain penetrative sex. But now Jesus fucking Christ I’m horny all the time. And the girl left for home, cause of Coronavirus shutting down the college here (good thing this didn’t happen last year when we still went to school here!), and she basically left me in heat and with no, you know, outlet for it. I’ve found my behaviors on Tinder changing; my inclination is more creepy, I think, which is very unfortunate. I was chatting with a rather attractive girl for awhile, who I had matched with. For some reason after having sex with the girl, no doubt because my confidence has been inflated, I’ve been more aware of getting a ton of matches with girls I’d actually like to meet up with, whereas before I was sure they were accidents and had accidentally selected my profile. Then this new Tinder girl told me that she was leaving because of the virus, and I asked her a bit wryly if she wanted to hook up before she left. And she unmatched with me! As I should have expected. But I’m off my kilter, a little. The sudden success has made me think that I’ll have successes everywhere. Which is, to a small degree, true, because confidence makes you more attractive, in the same way that the higher phases of bipolar, so long as they are controlled, make it more easy to seduce people (which is why bipolars tend to have many children and many spouses). But I would hate if it meant that I now started becoming uncouth in my interactions with girls. But, as with mental habits, this girl has really shocked my system entirely and changed my belief in myself and how I am with other girls: I no longer feel any shyness, which might actually make me less attractive, for I may come off as, shall we say, a bit forward. Jeeze. But where did all the pussy go! Stupid Coronavirus. And just at the time when you’re not allowed to go outside and stay in bed all day. I’m full of discomfort just thinking about this. I need a girl, dammit. Guys just won’t suffice anymore. It’s quite literally like she has changed my sexuality simply by having sex with me and showing to me that I don’t need to be afraid of having sex with women: the very fact that I don’t need to be afraid of losing my erection, which anxiety drove me to men, now completely alters my sexual preferences. Which is a big fucking whammy! Because guys, so horny, are so much more available, and require so little emotion to deal with. Whereas girls? Girls, goddammit! 
332
333Economic standpoint: Girls require emotions, are less horny — more emotional labor, less chance of sex. Whereas guys are horny all the time, no need to form relationships with them; can be found at any moment on Grindr. — Girls, have to go on a walk with them first and seduce them. — Guys, ready to fuck from the moment they walk in. 
334
335	Why have I done this to myself? 
336	So now I’m living the life of literary men: write till you’re exhausted, masturbate to sleep, then work again. But, you know, something very strange happened for the first time last night. First off, the body of the girl seems still very present around me, in the crook of my body, as if I contained it and her back were pressing against my chest and stomach, or as if again I were on top of her, pressing my chest against her and completely inside her, like I was joined to another animal, in complete intimacy. It’s not like oral sex, where it’s more like you’re alternately teasing and being teased by the other person, since it’s hard to give pleasure at the same time, so it’s like less intimacy is built up, though I think that kind of sex tends to lead to more creative avenues and, for that reason, very powerful orgasms; since you end up playing with power and fighting and stuff like that, or teasing—cause you have less toys to play with. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s just like how the technological limits of the early Pokemon games for the Gameboy, the small amount of memory available, forced the game makers to write excellent code and actually make a minimalist game, far better than the more technologically-wealthy games that followed. Having a limit on the abilities, not having access to penetrative sex (for let’s be honest, does anyone really like anal sex?), actually incentivizes more imaginative originality in sex. 
337	So I really miss her. It’s like that which was connected to me, that which made me whole when I was entering and reentering her and she responded with my name, murmuring and panting, like the two of us formed the same sphere and were contained within the same amniotic sac not just atmospherically but formed by the shape of our conjoined bodies, as when one partner ‘spoons’ the other by cuddling against her back and holding her breasts in his hands, all this, seems to have been detached from me. I’m suffering withdrawal, basically. Usually my erections are not powerful at all. But it’s like the rest of my body hasn’t realized she’s gone yet. And she made my dick very very happy, lmao. So it’s still searching for her, for that feeling of dark and warmth inside her. My dick is like Blake’s invisible worm: it flies in the night, looking for its bed of crimson joy. I’m not going even to tell you about my dreams, you’re welcome. I somehow still believe that she’s here, as if were I to lift up the thick mountains of white blankets beside me, I would find her underneath pale and naked, her breasts pressings pressed against the mattress so that their shape is deformed like a sac of water flattened on a floor. And with that wry perverted expression of hers, ready to be pounced on and to pounce back, she would kiss me violently and submit her body to my inspection. So these last few days my dick has been very erect and my masturbation especially pleasurable. It was like the first time I kissed a girl, so many years ago. My first girlfriend, Angela. Kissing her was extremely pleasurable, but because kissing alone couldn’t get me off, it was actually the several weeks of masturbation that followed, since we kept making out and I kept masturbating afterwards, in which the real delight, the endless pleasure lay, in the after-shocks of the first excitement of kissing her, the way it opened up in my imagination, in my sensitivity, the whole new world of ‘what it feels like to kiss and be kissed.’ Of course it gradually wore off, and I wanted different pleasures, namely, to have her touch me down there. It was like the ripples of the pond had slowly quieted down, and my erections were less strong, I had lost the excitement that the first kiss had given to my imagination and I wanted more in order to feed my appetite, or, to give me appetite. So I know in a week or so I’ll probably go back to weaker erections. But as it stands right now, the novelty of the feeling has certainly not worn off.
338	What was it that I wanted to say? Oh yeah. Yesterday night as I sought her, you know, in my hands, for the very first time, the feeling of my mother flashed through my mind. Jesus Christ. It was night and suddenly, as I was thinking of possessing the girl, all of a sudden the warmth and open body I sought was of…So maybe there is something to be said of Freud, after all. But what’s strange is that up till now I’ve never had any such thought; the thought repulsed me. In fact it made me think I was gay, that I never felt any attraction towards my mother (nor my father, of course, thank God). But there is something peculiar about the images that flash through our minds at the moment when we search for climax. They really are uncontrollable. For a long time, as I dealt with my homosexuality and thought that I was losing my mind, I would force myself to masturbate to girls, but then at the very last moment, what I wanted was to be underneath a man, so I would bring my legs up in a posture of submission. These days I can only masturbate on my knees, using my hands in front of me as support, in the dominant position: the posture tells the sexuality, as much as a feminine way of sitting, or the way that girls, when taking a photo, will automatically cross their legs. Anyway, this sudden desire for dick would drive me insane. So that I took an alternate tack. I would masturbate to a man and then, at the climax, as if to prime myself with this image, as if to perform sexual conversion therapy on myself, I would call up, I would make myself feel physically surrounding my dick, the receptacle of a vagina, and then afterwards I would congratulate myself for being heterosexual, just as my parents wanted, and just as I wanted. Sudden flashes of thought in masturbation; they betray us, just as, for example, when we are climaxing with a live partner, at that moment we really know what we want, because our brain calls it to the fore, as that one thing which when you contemplate it gives you the most sexual satisfaction, and there is no escaping it, this moment can’t be denied. Gradually the poke holes in your self-delusion and tell you what you really want. In just this way people who want to cheat on their spouses may force themselves to be present imaginatively with their spouse, and yet at the moment of excess, of climax and ecstasy, they lose the control that they had previously enacted upon and bound around their imagination, and imagine they are with their neighbor instead. It leaps out. You teleport out of your bed and self. And comes back with the rich luscious glory, like foam lathering upon the skin in shimmers of warmth and shuddering pleasure, like the shower she and I took together afterwards, of the orgasm, which is all the better because it disturbs you (the opposite of boredom), because it is not the image that your daylight self wants you to be aroused by, but that sudden breaking of repression enhances the orgasm immensely. In any case, and this is quite funny, oftentimes I would walk around town, during the times when I was desperate not to be homosexual, and every time I found myself with a perverted thought about a girl, a girl catching my eye as she crossed the street, I would inwardly tell myself to notice that I was having a heterosexual thought, and congratulate myself for it: well done, Brother. 
339
340*
341
342—Anyway I’m just going to keep writing gross stuff since it makes me feel good, cause it’s funny, and not angsty, like the stuff I was writing earlier about the thunderstorm, panda-monster, and the sublime. And you haven’t responded…
343	‘I’m still checking in, I’m just doing homework at the same time. I like the masturbation comedy. But just remember that bisexual men are glorious.’
344	—No. I am a Hetero Hero.
345	‘Okay.’
346	—So, um. I just went to take a dump, after I wrote the previous section. I’ve been having coffee recently, which I almost never do, because I’m afraid it’ll make me go too high in energy. But apparently the coffee has been having an effect. I was very satisfied with my production. It felt like I had produced something of worth and effort. But when I got up I immediately said, Oh. In the clean light yellow of the toilet water, there was this massive dark-brown solid log, round at the bottom like a bomb but tapering off at the other end like a turnip pulled out of the earth.
347	‘This is a bit much.’
348	—Shall I stop?
349	‘I’ll just skim this part.
350	—It reminded me of how one time, I hadn’t been able to take a dump for what felt like a week. This was when I was a teenager. I would go sit on the toilet and nothing would come out. I was very afraid that never again in my life would I take a dump, just like how once I was afraid I would never stop hiccuping, or, as now, never produce another great work of art. In any case, I think I’d been in China for a month or something. Day by day would I sit on the toilet. It felt like only the edge, like a tendril, of the dump would come out, but when I checked with toilet paper there was never anything there. Oh God, this is a bit too much, even for me. But that amount of strain and effort! My grandfather, who was always incontinent, died on the toilet because he got a stroke while he was trying to poop. David Foster Wallace has this utterly stupid piece in Oblivion about how, ha ha, this guy makes art by taking beautiful dumps, and how he can make a sculptured shit, which is, haha, just like a writer. Go fuck yourself, DFW. He needed like 10,000 words to make that one point. There is, however, some deep meditative satisfaction in taking a really good dump. When I was on a lot of medication and really depressed, my mind would linger on nothing, cause I couldn’t read. So my days were spent in great monotony. I only didn’t kill myself because I didn’t have any energy. I didn’t like food because it had no taste. But when I took a dump, or when I went out to pee into the winter flowing creek – something that I’ve always enjoyed – then I really felt as if for a moment I were free of my depression. Simply by taking a small physical act, it had harmonized the effort of my body even as the music in my mind was permanently scrambled and unfocused. And then, pressing on my sphincter, my entire body focused to produce a massive brick of poop. And, straining there, I entirely forgot that I was at home, alone, without any friends, away from college, with no literary prospects, without any intellectual activity: all my life was concentrated on producing, indeed, an expulsion out of my body, the issue of all my muscles, what could be done despite everything impeding my situation, my respite, my recondite act: I took a dump then went back to being sad. 
351
352*
353
354—Hey, remember when Obama was president?
355	‘I mean, yes.’
356	—I remember the rapper, you know him? Kendrick Lamar once says, somewhere, that black people have to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, that they had doubted him once, and never should they doubt him again (in the context of Trump and his non-literary white people winning the election). I remember some of the arguments thrown against Obama in 2008. We were in middle school then, right? Anyway, one of those arguments was: “I feel like people are voting for him just because he’s black, and I don’t want to vote for someone under-qualified just for an arbitrary reason like race.”
357	‘Yeah, fuck those people.’
358	—No, I mean. It’s interesting, right? What’s really meant is: “I think you guys are just voting for him cause he’s black. But I don’t consider race. In fact, the reason I’m voting against him is because you guys think his being black is so great.” What’s being hidden is that he just doesn’t want to vote for a black man. But instead of just saying this, he instead critiques the popular support for Obama, and he’ll say things like: “I mean, it’s not just black people. There’re a ton of Asian people who vote for him just because he’s black. And that’s not right,” thus making sure he won’t be accused of talking only about black people. So, in this case, to hide his critique of Obama, he critiques Obama’s supporters by a round-about method. It’s just like people who hate social justice will say things like: “I’m not against social justice, they’re just so annoying.” No, what you don’t like is the image of a ton of black kids crowding into your library. The disdain for that image is conveyed through a disdain at something else: you’re too afraid to attack the center, so you attack that which surrounds it. You overreach a little. I know this because when I was in middle school, in church, there was an older girl who stood up and confessed, with the aim of achieving general support for such a confession, that: “My friends are pro-Gay, we actually went around tearing down the anti-gay marriage signs,” since our church, and everyone then, was very against gay marriage in California. Then she was met with outrage but encouragement for having confessed this. I remember this because I felt this was very strange: she had done something horrible—she supported gay marriage with her teenage rebellious friends!—but she also, weirdly enough, confessed it to the crowd of young people, in the sight of the elders, who furrowed their brow as might be expected. I very much absorbed their arguments. Someone said that “soon in schools they’ll start having children’s stories where it’s two men instead of a man and woman.” —Cause it’s worse than two women, probably because men are more gross and less delicate. You know how it is. Lesbians are more acceptable than gays. Dunno why. In any case, the other day I heard someone say: “I’m not against transgenders, I just think they’re mentally ill.” No, you only say this because you’re afraid to make your actual thought clear: you don’t like gays or transgenders, you find them weird, you’re allergic to them. So when I heard the bit about teaching gayness to kids, I was obviously outraged, and I expressed myself as such to general approval: I was a little kid with a loud mouth, and, much as now, when I have a thought, I can articulate it. ‘This is really against God’s plan because as kids,’ I said, already understanding how identity politics works, using my special position as a child, as an innocent voice-of-God, ‘as kids we’re innocent, and not supposed to be, like, exposed to the things of the world. Cause like the Age is sin, you know, and is degenerating in accordance with Satan, and it’s getting worse, because people are doing unnatural things. That’s why it’s really wrong to have gay storybooks with gay people kissing.’
359	‘Lol.’ 
360	—I mean, I had no homosexual inclinations as a kid. That only started when I was in college. My parents are still confused about this. Anyway, I was outraged about teaching this to kids, kids like me! I imagined kindergarten classes where the story-books had two grown men kissing, which was very gross to me, and still is now, for some reason. Interesting. But this was probably not factual at all; who in the world would show kids a storybook of gay men kissing! It was undoubtedly some of the mind-bending misinformation that was afloat around that time, just to stir up outrage amongst the conservative Chinese Christians. But listen, here’s the thing about precocious kids, especially ones who learn to be afraid of their mothers or fathers. We’re really, really good at mimicking what our elders think. 
361	‘Hmm.’ 
362	—Cause we learn super fast. And you can tell, because some people are really good at mimicking other people’s voices in writing. We catch their thought-pattern very quickly and we just mimic it back to them so they’ll say things like: “Wow, you’re really smart!” in the presence of our friends, so we can turn the shoulder bashfully and pretend to be shy. But we’re well aware that the girl we like is in the vicinity. And then I would hear my mom say with approval: “Auntie Susan said you had an understanding of the Bible so well that she was amazed, better than any of the other kids. Not bad.” 
363	‘Yeah but that’s why we end up hating them.’
364	—Exactly. Because we so easily absorb their opinion, as we grow older we spend a lot of time thinking about it, and it keeps giving up red flags, so we eventually realize that they’re all wrong and stupid, whereas a kid who’s never really understood them, this more oblivious kid will sort of float indifferently, in parallel, to that kind of thought for the rest of their life. Unless Experience—being attracted to the wrong gender—should interrupt them and force them to deal with these patterns, like a branding of the skin, to which their entire person is accustomed. That’s the shock of losing one’s faith. It’s like trying to lift off a tattoo. I know an old literary critic who when he was young was sent into deep depression by losing his faith. It’s because you’re used to praying to God when you’re sad, or because the name of God has replaced the word for happiness; the sudden shock in the change of habit is too severe and you lose everything.
365	‘Kind of. We’re always smarter than the adults though we don’t know it yet, and so we think they’re gods.’
366	—Ye, it’s not bad, right? So to close it off…
367	‘Keep it short.’
368	—Ye, so like. In my sophomore year of high school, I won this award from a conservative forum for this essay I wrote about Ronald Reagan and China’s economics. My super-conservative teacher got me into it, and I won a thousand dollars. But even then, I understood that the way for me to win the contest was to position myself as a Chinese-American critic of China. As our friend Ted says, “sneaky pragmatism.” I feel like this is how a lot of people-of-color conservatives come into being. Not the ones who are interested in economics, but the ones who understand that they’ll get special approval if they criticize their own identity, because conservatives can’t just say: “We don’t like China,” or “Black kids are violent,” they need someone who has the identity to say it for them so they can’t be accused of racism. So in that sense our value is inflated. And if you’re a smart kid, or a self-hating adult, you can figure out that you gain extra approval by doing this behavior, so long as you’re okay with feeling a tiny tinge of humiliation in doing so, which is confusing because they’re all applauding you. 
369	‘Hm. Not bad.’
370	—Thanks! I like figuring out various mind-bending phenomena. It makes me feel relieved. Because there’s so much of it, and my parents have a ton of it, and it makes me hate them a little, because they can’t be persuaded, or they simply don’t or aren’t willing to grasp, that what they say actually reveals their intentions. Dammit, Andy.
371	‘Sorry.’
372	—I’ll say it briefly. 
373
374“We are worried for your future” = “We think you’ll have trouble finding a wife.” —But why do you think I should have a wife? “Because that’s the best for your health, it keeps a man grounded and normal, without eccentricities” = (in part) “We want to be able to proud of you, we want to be able to like you, and for you to be part of the extended family, and we don’t want to be grossed out by you, because you’re one of us, and we created you, so you can’t be weird like this.” = “We deserve something because we created you.” —But you know I’m my own person, right? I can do as I like? “Sure you can, you’re an adult. But you have to be in accordance with nature, right?” = “Homosexuality isn’t natural, and God created nature in his own image.” = “What you’re doing is against God.” = “What you’re doing is against our taste.” 
375
376	Fuck them…!
377
378Just one more. “We think you’ll have trouble finding a wife.” = “We want you to have a decent girl.” = “No decent girl would date someone who’s soiled himself with men.” = “No decent person would love a bisexual.” = “A bisexual can’t be loved.” —Thanks, just kill me then.
379
380“You’re our son, we’ll always love you.” = “We can’t be blamed, because we love you and have your best interests in mind.” = “We know what your best interests are.” —But, you know, maybe you don’t know how the contemporary world works? “The world right now is a mess” = “The age is degenerate and Satan rules it” = “We just don’t like it and it offends our eyes.”
381
382“We’ll always love you.” = “We love you, we just don’t approve of your behaviors.” = “You can just stop doing them if you tried.” = “Bisexuality isn’t real.” = “If you really loved us, you would try to stop doing it, since it’s a sin like alcoholism.” = “Homosexuality is a sickness that you have to be cured of.” = “We just really can’t stand the thought of you with other men, and we don’t know how the sex works, probably you got it from watching gay pornography, and we can’t even bear to think about it, it makes us want to claw out our eyes, and we’re disgusted by it.” = “But we love you, how could we find our own son disgusting?” = “If you were really our son, you would try to stop hurting us like this.” = “You’re not really bisexual, you can’t be.” = “The universe is hurting us right now.” = “We love you but you hurt us by doing that.” —By being who I am in accordance with my nature? “No, it’s not natural.” —Yes it is. Read science. Jesus. “Contemporary scientists even think evolution is real. Can man really come from a monkey?” —Are you fucking kidding me? 
383
384“We’ll always love you.” = “We’re really having a hard time squaring our love with you with this disgusting thing that’s also you and we’re very confused and in pain.” —Thanks for telling me that I cause extraordinary amounts of pain. “We just have to be honest with each other, right? We have to be honest?” —Oh, you’ve been very honest. 
385
386	Godammit, Andy! Can you imagine having to deal with day after day, and trying to correct them so they stop saying extremely hurtful things that they think are caring? 
387	‘Gg.’ 
388	—Lol. I fucking hate self-delusion. It’s like gaslighting, they’re surrounding my reality with their own self-lies. Then they wonder why I want to kill myself when I’m around them.
389	‘But it’s better now, right?’
390	—Yes. But they’re still really glad to hear I slept with a girl. I am, too, to be honest. Girls are cute, I can please my parents with a wife, they have vaginas; holy shit I’m horny again.
391	‘Bye.’
392	—Sigh. I meant to write something more about porn but instead I got into my parents’ head again and hate myself.
393	‘Sorry…’
394
395*
396
397‘You don’t have to keep going.’
398	—I haven’t even gotten to the fight I had with my parents over seeing the psychiatrist. I’ve only gotten up to the night of sleeplessness. 
399	‘Take a rest.’
400	—Okay. 
401	‘I can tell you’re depressed now.’
402	—I am. It sucks. I wish I never wrote it.
403	‘Don’t delete this one, okay?’
4046. 
405
406—Hello?
407	‘Hi. How are you.’
408	—It’s been pretty crazy. I think I wrote two chapters today, sections 4 and 5. I got really depressed rereading them and I wanted to destroy them, but you know, I sent them to you before deleting it off my computer.
409	‘Good boy.’
410	—But there’s something on my mind. It’s the case that the activation of a particular mental pattern in writing will start to orient your inner universe so that you start noticing certain things with greater sensitivity than before, like special nodes. So the the reader is sensitized to it so that you see the world as I do. For the duration of this piece, let’s call it an essay-novel, there undergoes a kind of infection. And it’ll last months after, and you won’t be able to tell where you are, where am I. I’ll be hiding as an alteration in your language. 
411	‘Who are you even talking to?’
412	—I don’t know, I don’t know. I feel like I’m being infected by a mental mode and being ridden very hard. I have no peace. I’m on edge and nervous and very sensitive to light. 
413	What I want to say is, that there seems to me something to be said about being infinitely smarter than one’s elders. 
414	‘Lol.’
415	—But it seems to me that wisdom is worth almost nothing. By wisdom I mean the wisdom of one’s parents. I can hear my first girlfriend Angela cringing. She’d say: “Samuel, you can’t speak like that about your elders, they’re older than you.” And my parents always say: “Do you truly think that our age doesn’t give us more knowledge than you, do you think you’re so smart?” But look at how I took apart my parents’ speech earlier. I don’t mean to be arrogant, though I am arrogant, but it’s always seemed to me that I were a step faster than them. Perhaps that’s the wrong way to say it. Of course parents can provide helpful insights. But I’m talking about something different. I want to say that, for a genius, wisdom means nothing. The wisdom of age. All of it is taken into account just so you can discard it. The only ideas that make sense are your own. You don’t ever listen to other people. You never repeat the things that other people say except to make fun of them. 
416	‘I know what you’re saying, but what you’re saying right now sounds just like normal brain activity.’
417	—By genius I mean this: the ability to rapidly synthesize very faraway associations under the domain of a germane metaphor. 
418	‘Hm…’
419	—I don’t mean this just for writing. But you know what I’m talking about, right? Geniuses, they always give this thought they just had they never had before. So that they’re making it up as they go along. Whereas other intelligent people carry in themselves a set of propositions, previously gained insights. But it isn’t radically synthesized before your eyes. Do you know what I mean?
420	‘Yeah, I do. Quick on their feet.’
421	—I’m so fucking tired. 
422	‘Go rest. Seriously.’
423	—This essay-novel is going to burn me out. I don’t even know if it’s any good. 
424	‘But finish the thought about wisdom.’
425	—Oh, yeah. Like our elders think that they know more because they’ve had more experience, and time is supposedly a great Tutor. “You have to listen to us, look at you, you’re so young, what could you know?” Or, like Professor Something: “You need to travel the world in order to get out of your isolation and meet all sorts of people, talk about this and that,” and so on. As if Experience were in itself a tutor. But, you know, I’ve always held that in order to write you didn’t need to know or meet anyone. I think writers who go out and search for certain experiences in order to write, or who need to do research to write, will almost completely by wiped off the face of the earth. And now I can hear our math friend Emerson saying: “That seems like a bold statement.”
426	See, this is what I mean? I can hear all these voices. I know a million different mental modes. In the process of writing this, I’ve so sensitized myself to various voices, that I’m really afraid I’ll have psychosis. 
427	This is exactly why I don’t need to go outside. Besides for my own health. Though we’re all pent up inside because of Coronavirus. In any case, I hear every voice and know how they respond to me. Because I remember the things that people say that struck me. So what was I saying? Oh, yeah, I guess you are the voice I’ve chosen as my interlocutor.
428	‘Yay!’
429	—So experience means nothing. We tear apart the words of our elders. We learn from them only to learn that they are dumb. How many professors did we meet that seemed to us like gods and which, after listening to them for two months, after reading all their books, after reading all their papers, did we figure out that they were full of holes? And the ones who remained, we kept them in our respect, as our peers, nothing close to a god. 
430	Listen, I’ve got a master-slave dialectic for you. The Elder speaks, and he speaks a ton, and speaks a lot, because he holds forth. He doesn’t realize you’re anything special. And you’re right that in saying this I exclude almost everyone who’s going to read me. So he talks on and on, magnanimously. And it’s awesome. Because he knows so much. Professor Something used to invite me and another girl to his apartment and hold forth on all the riches of history and literature, his personal experiences in Russia, Iran, and so on. But I kept flagging things that he said as hypocritical or contradictory. The Elder talks, he assumes that, like himself, you don’t hear him; he talks un-self-consciously. He likes the feeling of lecturing, of being admired. And if the Child is really intuitive, of course the Child likes this. He has no confidence in himself precisely because he is too conscious of what he says; he is too conscious of saying stupid things; so he assumes that he himself is stupid. So he assumes that everything the Elder says is true. And he memorizes, like any good student, everything the Elder says. Isn’t it true that geniuses always have a good mind for remembering remarks in their field of study? You’re good at remembering things because these things you immediately understood; because you learned quickly, you memorized them more easily; in the snap of your fingers. That’s why dumb kids never remember anything. Cause they don’t get it, and they aren’t able to connect to other thoughts. So anyway. The Child memorizes everything the Elder says. He even goes out to live the world in accordance with how the Elder says things are. But in the world he finds out that things aren’t entirely true as the Elder says. He realizes that the Elder himself is mistaken about certain things, about the world. That the Elder must have blindspots. So the child begins to examine, since he memorized everything and knows the Elder’s thoughts better since they are fresh to him whereas to the Elder they are merely established mental modes, he begins to hold up to the light certain phrases that the Elder said. He can analyze them because they’re still new to him, whereas to the Elder, they’re the very foundation of his own brain. Whereas the Child is in the process of tearing down foundations. Of coming into his own; but of course, he can’t actually make new foundations, or else he becomes an Elder: he must remain this mobile, limber, skeptical intelligence, on his toes, extremely conscious of the potential to say stupid things. So he hears the Elder’s words in his mind for the last time. And they are strange to him, and he can’t understand why. For surely the Elder is a god. 
431	‘Then one day you overthrow him.’
432	—That’s right. You realize he’s dumb. I have to stop. I can’t keep doing this. But one last remark: the genius is able to move with the invisible arms of a spider across vast distances, faraway voices, images he barely remembers, and is able to synthesize them for you in one moment as you speak to him in an original insight that he’s never had before. This itself is the hallmark of genius. And I know a ton of people have described genius before, shut up Emerson. “It’s nice that you’ve made an entry into the thousand descriptions of genius.” I am battling against a thousand voices, in this shut up room, in midnight, afraid I won’t be able to fall asleep. This speed at which I’m talking and thinking, it reminds me of Eminem’s rapping. 
433	I’m going to shower now. 
434	‘Bye.’
435
436*
437	
438—Something terrifying has happened. 
439	‘What?’
440	—This girl told me that she felt that I pressured her at some moments in sex. I feel fucking awful. Can I tell you this? You’re not responding. Please hear me out. 
441	I don’t know what’s going on. She said: “I felt quite negative to you over the past few days, but I talked to a specialist, and I realized I have my own issues with boundaries, and that it’s not just you. But I want you to acknowledge that I did not want all parts of the sexual interaction. And that you did hear me say no.”
442	—But I don’t remember her saying “no.” I wrote back to her: “I acknowledge that that you did not want all parts of the sexual interaction. I’m really really sorry you feel that way. But you’re terrifying me. I don’t mean to make you angry. But I don’t acknowledge that I was very clear on what you wanted or didn’t want.”
443	She said: “I definitely don’t think I was very clear about the boundaries, so it wouldn’t make sense that you would’ve been clear yourself.” 
444	—From my experience (so I texted her back), the boundaries felt like they were shifting a little and I wasn’t sure where they were, and there were quite a few of them. She laughed, “Hahaha,” then went on:
445
446“Oral sex was definitely a boundary I meant to maintain. Then I felt flustered when you kept asking for it. And then I felt bad.” —Oh. I’m sorry about that. “It’s okay. It wasn’t just you. It was my own relationship to my boundaries.” —Okay. Maybe um. I didn’t realize you felt so bad. Now I feel awful. Not to give you advice or anything. I have no idea what I’m saying. “Lmao it’s okay.” —Ok. “I talked extensively with a specialist yesterday. And I was like wow fuck I don’t know how to set boundaries. Like I think some of my negativity towards you was misdirected.”
447
448	—But what does this mean? I only remember cajoling her, teasing her a little, trying to get her to go down on me. 
449	A small light was on, casting the room into shadows though her face appeared in its healthy color, as that special color of a lover in the chiaroscuro, the warm light shading the rest of her body into darkness as if it had run out of ideas and just discarded it and let it fade away, of the one who leans toward us and whose features we don’t actually see since, even if we gaze into her eyes, dominated by the ridge of her nose, we are no table to make pictures because we are bathed in that sexual aura. You never see her when you have sex. You only react physically as an animal. Maybe when she goes to the bathroom, and she’s left you spent on the bed, and suddenly appears between the pillars of the kitchen, which form a frame in which the shadow of her body and her particular stance and shape become clear; this you remember. But this image seems altogether different from the sounds of her tongue and the caress of her hands on your body, which is more auditory and tactile than visual. Or the unconscionably attractive sound of entering and reentering a wet place. So we have dreams in which we have sex with faceless women. For when we kiss them up close, we barely see them. We just want to possess them. We had been making out. I had asked her if I could perform oral sex on her, but she said it was unhygienic, in the soft tone that she took in sex whereas speaking to others she was often a bit too loud and overpowering. I’m not going to describe her speech habits, it feels wrong. Anyway, I had the sense that she was reluctant; but moved by lust, I gently cajoled her. I didn’t use my hands. I know what it’s like for someone to use their hands on you. In any case, it was brief and neither of us enjoyed it. Then we went back to having sex. 
450	Now she says that when someone says “Fine,” it warrants a closer look. —Okay noted, thanks, I said. Maybe she only said “Fine” when she went down on me, and I didn’t hear her. I vaguely remember that she got over her reluctance, but I certainly don’t understand how “Fine” is the same as “No.” I don’t know what went wrong. During sex she said how happy she was. And I’m not deluded into thinking that she enjoyed it. I mean, it was really good. Anyway, she’s also continued to text me through the past few days. Without my prompting. But was she just putting up with me the whole time? Secretly, was she shirking from my touch and did she want to leave the whole night? But why did she ask if she could stay the night, and why did she stay the night? And why did she sleep with me until the morning and say: “I feel kind of bad about leaving.” 
451	—I asked why. 
452	“I mean, I want to be with my parents, since it’s a bad time with the virus and all, but I feel like I’m leaving a road open here.”
453	—You mean you miss going to school? 
454	“Well, I feel like we started something here…” 
455	Was she lying even then, lying just to make me feel better? By no means did I sense any deception from her! 
456	Now she says she also had to apologize to me because she was callous toward me when she laughed when I asked if we were dating. I was confused by this apology. Since I had asked only to ascertain if she thought we were dating. My stance being one of ambiguity. I had felt no negativity towards her.
457	Has she been lying to me this whole time? Have I done something terrible to her? Did I rape her? The first afternoon we hooked up, she said very firmly that we weren’t going to have sex. That she was on her period, and so on. She wasn’t lying about her period, but then after maybe ten minutes she asked if I had a condom. I was surprised, but of course I agreed; she had brought it up. I remember asking her almost every step of the way if I could do this or that. Since she kept talking about how boundaries were very important to her, and I really, really didn’t want to be accused of sexual assault.
458	But am I going to be ruined by this being exposed, in terms unfavorable to me? I’m never going to sleep with a girl again, Jesus. She’s a writer. Never date a writer, my God. She told me she’s going to write a story called “Lust in the Time of Coronavirus.” —But what does this mean? I asked her if she was writing a story about boundaries in sex like in “The Cat Person,” and whether she would write about me. And destroy me. She said: “I don’t want to destroy you.” She said: “Lol no, I’m going to write another story about boundaries.” 	
459	Another story about boundaries? How many stories about boundaries has she written? 
460	She said she would try to keep me out of it unless it was the crux of the story. How is this reassuring to me? The story will most certainly be about me. I mean, it’s called Lust in the Time of Coronavirus. I hope it’s not just like one of those revenge stories written by women, which is the equivalent of how old male writers used to make women feel bad about their bodies, in which the woman makes fun of the man for how bad he is at sex. Fuck, I hate reading those. They’re like horror stories. Anyway, I’m still panicking. I want to cut her off just for my own peace and quiet; just so I can keep writing without having to wonder if she’s going to write a story painting me as a sexual assaulter. To hell with sleeping with girls! Back to men! Was she pretending the whole time when she moaned and panted and said my name? Was she just doing this to get me to stop? Was my stamina painful for her? At the very end of the night, probably the fifth time we had sex, she said she was tired; so then I immediately pulled out and we stopped. Did she want it to be over the whole time? 
461	Maybe what I’m describing is the sudden awareness that someone was not there with you even as they were right beside you. In intense sex, with body against body and connected inwardly like two conjoined puzzle pieces, in that sway of passion it’s like you’re pushing each other on the swings, like you’ve merged into one person, surrounded by animalistic fire, bathed in the same atmospheric glow of endorphins, and each time you thrust to give pleasure, she receives pleasure: for no price, both parties benefit. But afterwards, though you had merged into one person, one machine, you find out she had a different strain of thought than you. That though your bodies had run in parallel, it’s like she were on the other side of the air, separated from you by an impenetrable flap, in a different dimension of time. Just like how when you’re being assaulted by someone and they’re on top of you, for the assaulter it’s the fervent seconds of passion, but for you it’s like every thrust deep into your body is a chime on the eternal clock as you wait for it to be over. And you shut your consciousness deep inside yourself or cast it with a glance onto the potted plant in the corner of the room where, from then on, because you went to that plant for salvation, you’ll hate it forever because it reminds you of the assault. Just like how when you tell somebody your secret ideas, and you feel awful doing so, you end up resenting them for you associate the pain of telling them these things with their face and person, even as all they did was sit there and listen, as you tried to explain yourself. So you throw the plant away or abandon the friend. 
462	On reflection, I’m certainly being a bit paranoid; but isn’t it weird how, if she wanted to, she has the power to immediately ruin my reputation? Who would believe me? All she has to say is: “He forced me to have oral sex.” How violent a phrase that is.
463	Have I done something terrible beyond belief?
464	
4657.
466
467—Hello? You haven’t been responding. 
468	‘Sorry, have been busy. I don’t hate you.’
469	—Okay, thanks. I’m sorry. 
470	‘You can’t persuade girls to do things. Especially girls who’ve gone through stuff.’
471	—Okay.
472	‘Sometimes they don’t think they can say no. People need to learn this shit in sex-ed classes. Like how to deal with girls who guys have messed up.’
473	—I don’t really want to talk about this. 
474	‘Just learn your lesson.’
475	—So like. 
476	‘What.’
477	—So you’ll still talk to me?
478	‘Well, yes.’
479	—Okay. So you don’t hate me?
480	‘No. Just learn your lesson.’
481	—I’m just going to stop talking about this and pretend it didn’t happen. I don’t know how else I can continue to write this book. It’s like this black hole, this original sin that can’t be forgiven. I still feel terrified. 
482	‘You’re being overdramatic. Also, the title of her story sounds stupid as fuck. The story’s going to be fine though. It’s called Lust in the Time of Coronavirus, after all.’
483	—Aha. I guess it’s good that she talked to me about it. It means that she still wants to talk to me. To be honest, I’m definitely never going to date her. She scared the shit out of me today, and I’ve barely been able to think straight. I just want my peace, Andy. I want to go back to being gay. It was so much more comforting. You felt submissive all the time and didn’t have all this vigor. You got on your knees and pleasured other people. It’s better just to serve other people. Than to have this vigor inside, this energy that needs to be expended. What’s the thing that all those theorists say, but which is really annoying? “Sexuality is…”
484	‘Sexuality is fluid.’
485	—Yeah. But I want to keep writing about her. I have so many more images from sex. And they’re beautiful and there’s rain, and I want to write about them. But all my longing is for my first girlfriend. With this virus around, all I can think about is going back to her. That kind of innocence. I always thought that she left me that one night because, you know.
486	‘Yeah.’
487	—It’s strange, now that I feel like I have all the ‘accoutrements’ of a man, the power, his primary ability…It’s this strange kind of confidence. I want to go back to the passivity of sitting by the river all the time, though. But now that I feel like I have the ‘accouterments of a man,’ it makes me think that I can go back to her, and that she’ll accept me, instead of thinking me, you know. 
488	‘Bisexual men are glorious.’
489	—Yes, but. 
490	‘It’s okay.’
491	—I do want to keep writing about her, though. This girl.
492	‘Just remember that she can write about you, too.’
493	—One should never date a writer.
494	‘May you be cursed by the same curse.’