In the Floating World

A few months ago, in Osaka, I explored the quiet local museum of ukiyo-e woodblocks in the heart of the entertainment quarter depicted by so many of those same prints. These depicted the so-called “floating world,” the society of courtesans, geisha, boozy rakes, louche actors, petty criminals, and profligate sons of the samurai class as it existed in the twilight years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, before the Tenpo Reforms of the 1840s largely put an end to the production of woodblock prints of the floating world, part of a larger-scale series of attempts to shore up the hermit kingdom and failures to resolve the contradictions of a feudalist society by restricting consumption and declaring war on what was perceived as the degeneracy of the nascent bourgeoisie. 

And upon my return to my equally louche tropical city, I once again found myself among a population not too different – decidedly spendy when it comes to food and drink and entertainment, artistic in ethos if not in production, with a significant number of moneyed people who are awfully bad at keeping their hands on their money and a significant number of less moneyed people who are awfully good at cadging their way through this particular iteration of café society – a population I’ve come to call the Negroni Caste, owing to the standard drink of choice.

Not that this is anything local or particular. The idea of a decadent and glittering society is pretty baked into the public consciousness, in whatever manifestation you can imagine – Weimar Berlin, ‘70s Downtown New York, Lost Generation Paris, Hollywood throughout its history, and all the rest. Where Christopher Isherwood was a camera with its shutter open, where Eve Babitz used to be charming. We’ve heard plenty of enchanting stories of coquettes and absinthe.

But even in those stories, you can find allusions to a different perspective on dissolute lifestyles and Dionysian pursuits. When Fritz Lang made Metropolis, he called his pleasuredome high above the slums “Yoshiwara” – an allusion I have no idea how many 1920s German filmgoers would have gotten, to the licensed pleasure quarter of Tokyo, in the old “low city” zone of Shitamachi along the Sumida River, where so many of those ukiyo-e are set.

 

 

Rather, the key is in the name. Floating. Not decrepit and corrupted, as in the writings of, say, Zola or Baudelaire, but simply floating there.

The term has different cadences in English and Japanese. In English, “floating world” sounds rather pleasant, a dreamy and serene land among the clouds. And yet within the Japanese and more specifically Buddhist context, it implies a fundamentally temporary and fleeting mode of existence, one stop on the great wheel of samsara. This can be something treasured for its transitory beauty, and it can be something illusory, something that ought not to be held onto or attached to, lest the suffering set in, the cherry blossoms falling on the path.

But while this concept may not have been fully metastasized into the Western (broadly speaking) context, how different, really, is the (originally) American cult of youth? In its more wholesome form, this would be the eternal manic grin of Dick Clark on New Year’s Eve, but it seems more frequent that eternal adolescence takes on a more grotesque form, the thing that has spent far too long in the liminal space.

When I was maybe 18 or 20, I spent a lot of time getting drunk and high. This, of course, is correct. It is known that American 18-20 year olds enjoy getting drunk and high. I’d seen the same dumb movies we all had, and recognized that these were to be the dedicated beer-bong years, with the assumption that at some point fairly soon, this would cease to be. The idealized line-graph of the classic male American dream would state that after the relatively brief secularized rumspringa known as “college,” one proceeds to seek out a picket-fence existence with the gal – whether as a loving father-knows-best or a neurasthenic Willy Loman.

It didn’t cease to be. When I look around me, what I see are people in their 30s, 40s, and hell, 50s, still living in the same way, which of course can quickly become a grotesque aspect – the lecherous and beer-bellied C-suite executive pawing at the intern freshly graduated from Michigan State, an elderly Madonna still trying to prance about like a Disney Channel starlet.

Part of me is tempted to say that this is part of a larger-scale liminalization, of an increasingly uncertain and precarious and frenetic world in which, with our planning capacities diminished and pessimism setting in, our behavior becomes increasingly adolescent, whether that’s through chemical recreation, various deeply unhealthy sexual and romantic patterns, or getting lost in the electronic mirror maze. Maybe this is just a stoner thought, but it suggests to me a psychic response among the educated and generally anxious classes. Either that or they frantically protect their status, barricaded into cultural or physical garrisons.

Which again takes us back to the river banks and alleys of Tokyo’s Shitamachi, where, in countless Japanese films and novels, the attitude towards life was also transitory. What you’ve got is here today, gone tomorrow. An attitude reflected in the gruff working-class accent of the neighborhoods lined with crushed wooden pallets and flowerpots, occupied by alley cats and daytime drunks, to be contrasted with the polished tones of the wealthy Yamanote districts further west.

It's a class distinction highlighted in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days – the main character, the stoic toilet cleaner who seeks refuge in Lou Reed cassettes and Patricia Highsmith stories, also seeks refuge in his tiny tatami-mat apartment in a rundown Shitamachi neighborhood. We know little of his origins, but in the brief encounter with his elegant sister, we can assume he’s from wealthier Yamanote stock (can’t speak to his accent, my Japanese is nowhere near good enough), and he commutes every day to urbane and cosmopolitan Shibuya to clean its toilets.

The emotional climax of the film (this really doesn’t count as a spoiler) comes with him, isolated and inconsolable, with a pack of Peace cigarettes and a few cans of Strong Zero, the cheap canned shochu-and-mixer popular among drunk salarymen, along the banks of the Sumida River at night. Where he’s joined by one such salaryman, dying of cancer, sharing his cigs and cheap chuhai.

I had been there – definitely that exact spot, equally inconsolable in my mood. I recognize these places intimately – the bridge, the peculiar big concrete cone, the view of the neon-streaked Tokyo Skytree. On some chilly Novembery evening a long time ago, cold moonlight and the Asahi sign flickering in the murky water. I’m pretty sure I had a Strong Zero in my hand.

The moonlight too seemed to float.

Leaving the Manazuru Station

Was I the only one who got off the stop at Manazuru?

I was priced out of the posh hotels in Hakone. So I looked on Google Maps. Just down the coast, I recognized the name nearby. Manazuru.

Someone close to me had stayed here. But now that I think about it, I didn’t ask her whether she liked it or not.

And in her novel of the same name, Hiromi Kawakami had a way of describing Manazuru as a slightly decrepit seaside town, with the same starry-eyed tone that she used in novels like The Nakano Thrift Shop and Strange Weather in Tokyo. Yet in those, it felt a bit too fluffy. Manazuru, though. It hit me across the jaw.

I do adore slightly decrepit seaside towns. I imagined, as I booked my hotel, long days of sightseeing finishing with Asahi and grilled fish by the pier, shops getting ready for high season, goofy statues of Poseidon.

And now that I think back on it, it seems a bit embarrassing. Letting a book choose your fate has the potential to be a shitty trope. Something from a saccharine NYT-bestseller magical realist book, something sufficiently “young adult” to prevent any meaningful challenges seep in.

But I am a fatalist. Even if I don’t believe in fate. So I booked a hotel.

It had been a long day of travel. First, Kanazawa to Ueno Station, where the homeless day laborers who had, decades earlier, built Tokyo, dozed against the art deco columns, where the crowds of tourists crammed onto the subway after taking their cherry-blossom selfies in the park, and where I switched trains to the pokey local on the old Tokaido Main Line, past the endless drip of Tokyo suburbs, through faceless Shinagawa, Kawasaki, Yokohama, before crossing into open countryside around Odawara, and eventually arriving at this little town on a little peninsula, hard pressed between the mountains and the sea.

“In Tokyo, we have a life. We can hide in our everyday life. There is nothing in Manazuru.”

What the hell was I doing here?

I had no other choice. I dragged my suitcase through the street. The streets, empty. The port, empty. The hotels, boarded up. The plum trees were in full bloom and the rain fell on them, scattering the petals to the ground.

My hotel was left over from Japan’s economic boom years in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The online reviews all mention how good the food is. They were not serving food.

The only way to shower is at the communal onsen. One would say this was a bit awkward, but it turns out that I am the only guest. The doors of each room are left open, lights off, futons neatly folded, carpets perfectly vacuumed, waiting for no one in particular, the hum of the ice machine the only sound.

The rain falls heavier. I find a sushi place down by the empty harbor, which supposedly closes at 9. I’m here at 7, and the old man behind the counter barely acknowledges my existence. He is already closing up shop.

“Le meilleur ‘sushi’ de nos vacances!” says an enthusiastic note accompanied by a yellowed photo of a Frenchman with a much younger version of this chef. From an era when “sushi” had to be put in scare quotes.

It wasn’t bad sushi.

I pour myself a little glass of Old Overholt and stand out on the balcony of my hotel, and I can hear the waves crashing 100 meters or so below.

The next morning the rain dissipates enough for me to walk down to the cape at the tip of the peninsula, across the putting green and through the woods. A torii gate is perched high on an impossible spire over the sea. It was built by the Tokugawas to protect Japan from the unknown menaces of the exterior world.

And then I return from whence I came. I cross the putting green again. Ancient Japanese men in flat caps and cable sweaters play out like projected holograms, and I wonder if someone is going to ask me if they saw me last year at Marienbad.

I spend the next few days making my way around this odd little stretch of coast west of the Tokyo metropolis, where fairytale railways and funiculars make their way up steep slopes to the old leisure towns of the Tokyo middle classes – to Hakone, like a version of Japan as seen in a Viewmaster of an old World’s Fair, cozy, manicured, with its old shrines in the cedars, and its futuristic sculpture garden with children of many nations hiding behind Henry Moore reclining figures, to the old restaurant in Odawara with its dusty light fixtures and grandmotherly porcelain-cabinet plating of simmered snails and delicate fishcakes, to the hideous, raggedy tourbus parking lot town of Kawaguchiko at the foot of Mount Fuji that took me five long train rides to get home from due to overcrowding.

Although I just learned that that very raggedy tourbus parking lot town is blocking certain views of Fuji due to the omnipresence of slackjawed yokel tourists with no sense of propriety. Much in the same way that, a few weeks previous, I was one of the last foreign tourists to walk the back streets of the Gion in Kyoto before our banning. And nothing will make you feel more reprehensible in your status as an outsider than seeing a poor geisha getting mobbed by dickheads with cameras like she’s a Kardashian when she’s just trying to go to her job that evening.

But now I was in Manazuru, and I was alone. And the contempt could only be directed inwards.

I spent the next few nights taking the train back to the deserted Manazuru Station, past the gravel parking lot with the stroad-side Nepalese restaurant and the smell of reheated butter chicken, up the mountain road to my softly lit and utterly empty hotel. I would slip into the burble of hot spring water coming into the onsen.

“On a date one month before his disappearance, in a ballpoint pen’s thin strokes, he had written ‘Manazuru.’ I fold the sheet of paper into a square and stick it back between the diary’s pages. Ma. Na. Zu. Ru. I whisper the syllables. I hadn’t noticed. Or had I forgotten?”

The central question of Kawakami’s novel is what happened to the protagonist’s husband, who had disappeared without leaving a trace some years earlier.

It was only a week or so before I arrived in Manazuru, that, by coincidence, I was reading about the johatsu, the population of the disappeared in Japan. Numbering in the tens of thousands, these are those who, like the missing husband of the novel, simply disappear. Sometimes they flee debt. Sometimes they flee shame. Either way, it is, like hikikomori, an almost uniquely Japanese phenomenon. Supposedly they wind up in large part in the fly-by-night quarters of Sanya in Tokyo and Kamagasaki in Osaka, refuges of quasi-homeless, quasi-employed Japanese men living in rundown boarding houses, something akin to the Bowery or Bunker Hill in past iterations of America.

There, they can live unbothered. They can pay people to disappear them: I looked up one of their corporate websites, as sunny as a suburban real estate office (I was originally going to link to their website, but that seems unreasonably edgelord even for myself, search for yourselves, it’s not hard you filthy ghouls).

Just as incidentally, I found myself, in the sunny, piney mountains above Manazuru, compelled to listen to a song by Connie Converse. I, too, was in between two tall mountains.

And I had somehow neglected the fact that having been wracked apart by her personal failures and disillusioned by an America that stubbornly remained just as ugly and racist and warmongering as ever, she, too, became johatsu.

“Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can’t find my place to plug into it. So let me go, please; and please accept my thanks for those happy times that each of you has given me over the years; and please know that I would have preferred to give you more than I ever did or could – I am in everyone’s debt.” – Her last letter, left behind in her home in Michigan

It occurred to me, then. I was in a ghost town of the elderly, dying on the seashore below Tokyo, plums in blossom, the winter’s citrus rotting on the tree. A coastal town they forgot to bomb.

And before I left, on the way out, I stopped on the hillside above, where Hiroshi Sugimoto collected and arranged his artifacts – ancient Japanese architectural features, allusions to local history and primitive astronomy, fossil beds, representative flora, representations of the mathematical forces that govern our universe, a remnant of a Shinto shrine scarred by the atomic blast at Hiroshima.

I have been there many times in my dreams. Chances are you have too.

Only as I was typing this did I learn that this approximate site – not mentioned at the installation itself – was the approximate location of a landslide that killed hundreds in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1922, among other things crushing a passenger train at the little station where I had alighted.

Now all that is left are mandarin orange trees. The oranges are excellent.

“What was it there, in Manazuru? Momo asked. I don’t know. I remember it, and yet I can’t remember.”

To Tokyo – to the rundown room near Shinjuku Station, in dense streets where Korean signs dominated and an ajumma who spoke neither English nor Japanese slept behind a partition down the hall. There is a sad Thai streetwalker who stands in the next door down, behind the vending machine, barely murmuring her come-ons to passing salarymen.

Before switching to a discount “art hotel” in Shibuya with faux-graffiti art, subway tile, lo-fi hip-hop, complementary Keurig cups with only the shitty flavors left, and free IPA for an hour.

A place where one could so easily disappear. And one where you’re reminded of the futility of doing so.

When you travel, you are, to a certain degree, not you. In the tribal imagination, you could get lost forever if you didn’t complete the ritual and come back home.

So I flew home. And in the vicious summer heat, waking up after a few hours’ sleep, putting on my H&M buttondown to go into the office, running a brush with my hair, I have to stare at myself in the mirror and confront who I am.

Place, Grief, and a Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Once upon a time, there was a watering hole I loved deeply – it wasn’t just that they made good drinks, that’s dime-a-dozen. It was the excellent bartender, who not only was handy with the shaker and bitters, but had great chat and knew how to wrangle some of the ornerier customers, who left feeling respected even as they were being 86’d. And more importantly, it functioned as a gathering spot for all of us fucking weirdos – bohemian fuckups, queer artists, masochists weeping over the ramifications of coldness and cruelty, cocaine enthusiasts zipping to and from the bathroom, veterans of the hospitality industry hardened by years on the line or behind the stick, septum-pierced and preening Onlyfans girls, mainland Chinese alienated from the Beijing consensus retreating into a world of wine and letters, and every other kind of degenerate that I had the privilege to call a friend, or at the very least a drinking buddy.

And yet owing to a recent change in ownership and staffing, what is left feels like a skeleton. The menu is the same, the live jazz remains excellent, but the clientele is different, the mood is different... something’s just wrong. And it’s honestly painful to witness.

This shouldn’t bother me as much as it does. After all, there will always be places to socialize and imbibe. So why is it that I’m in this mood?

Millions of pages have been written about our relationships with the people in our lives, but one of the strongest and most affecting relationship we have is to place. The concept of "home," however we choose to define it. Maybe it's the maternal farmstead, the place where generations of your ancestors were laid in the ground after lifetimes of trying to bring forth life from the exhausted soil. Maybe it's the rattrap urban apartment you fled to after that maternal farmstead rejected you, the place where you decided, on your own terms and with your own values, what constituted the good.

Or maybe it's something larger scale, a community, a nation, a language, a religion, again whether inherited or chosen. The only thing it really cannot be is humanity writ large. Because the concept of "home" is fundamentally an interior standing in contrast to an exterior, a place in which one can be as close to one's "authentic" self as that fractious term will allow.

Which is why the idea of losing one's home (small-scale) in, say, a fire, or (large-scale) a human conflict is so horrifying. And why the term "refugee" triggers such strong emotions, whether that is an empathy with those who can no longer return home or a visceral fear and desire to cast out, lest we be reminded that we too might eventually occupy such precarious positions.

But it doesn't have to be home. It is just as much the little corners we carve out that we mark with our memories. The favorite wooded glade where, as a child, you were free to be Cinderella or Aladdin. The house down the street where you had your first kiss. The hospital where your daughter was born.

Or simply that curve of the highway you love because it's where the trees and the sun line up in just the right way.

We live in a world in which housing prices around the world are spiraling out of control, "third places" as we commonly understand them are dying throughout the English-speaking world owing to market forces that have little capability to provide the sorts of coffee shops and arcades that can act as second homes for a minimal fee, and hell if we're going to be catastrophic about it, in which environmental horror threatens to dislocate millions and destabilize billions.

So we hang on to those precious few spots in which we feel something like what Heidegger called the heimlich, which can be very roughly summed up as a sense of ease. The effacement of one of those places is, inevitably, bound to hit a pain point or two.

So when we find those little places, it can be, conversely, a singular bit of hope.

I'm finishing my evening in a quiet, 100 year old tavern in Kyoto. When Secretary of War Henry Stimson made the decision to spare Kyoto from the bombings so many other Japanese cities were subject to, he not only saved the city's ancient temples, but also its fine stock of Taisho Period commercial architecture and its attendant businesses of the sorts depicted in ukiyo-e paintings of the 19th Century. And so it is here, with the tobacco-stained ceilings and well-worn tables.

Out there? America is trapped in an improbable political and economic morass with no positive outcomes, the UK is slowly sinking into poverty, with the average British child having lost a full centimeter of height over the past 10 years due to malnutrition, Eastern Europe is embroiled in war, the Middle East is worse than it been in my lifetime with countless Palestinians murdered and starved with the tacit approval of the developed world, heat indices are set to reach record highs globally, everyone over 50 is facing the future shock of being unable to parse reality, while everyone under 50 is facing a future that has rarely looked bleaker... and unlike in previous bleak times, all the bleakness is on all our screens all the time.

But here I am, beneath those smoke-brown ceilings, among the bottles of forgotten brands of tonic water and rye whiskey in my clean, well-lighted place. I'm the only customer left, save the elderly salaryman already passed out in front of his highball, cigarette already long turned to ash in his hand. And yet here, somehow... I'm at peace.

Ue o muite aruko

Namida ga kaborenai youni

Omodaisu haruno hi

Hitoribotchi no yoru

- Kyu Sakomoto, 1961

For this moment.

Invisible Enemies

Todd Field's Tar had the extreme misfortune to be cast as a culture-war movie. In the opinion of both the smug, legacy conservative media (or what is left of it), and the equally smug, culturally liberal media (what is often described as “left” in a world in which leftist hope has been abandoned), Lydia Tar was a misunderstood brain-genius who gets cancel culture'd, a lesbian who metoo'd other lesbians, a waking meme who totally wrecked that SJW in her lecture (the number of quotation marks attached to these terms will vary depending on one's political tendencies). Richard Brody at the New Yorker, whose dumb, contrarian takes on film (and to be fair, whose occasional incisive and cutting contrarian takes on film) have become a staple, was one such commentator. Even Eileen Jones at Jacobin, whose opinions I make a point to listen to, seems to have missed the point entirely.

What defines Lydia Tar, more than almost anything else, is her absolute lack of connection, despite appearances to the contrary. Sure, she's got that CV rapturously listed off by Adam Gopnik at the beginning, basking in the spotlight, but what we see throughout the rest of the film is a person who treats her partner like garbage, treats her child as little more than an addendum, treats lovers as cast-offs, treats other members of the music community as little more than chess pieces to be moved, and has a shall we say tenuous relationship with truth.

But let's take a look at that most chatterable of scenes, Tar v. “BIPOC pangender” student. I don't want to dissect it in detail – plenty of ink on that already, plenty of mostly dumb videos on Youtube by armchair film critics on the same subject – but I do want to call attention to the way in which the argument is, at the end of the day, not so much an argument as a stemwinding piece of oratory by Lydia Tar, barely punctuated by the objections of the whimpering and stimming undergrad. I get it, dialogue in films is not supposed to actually sound like real life... but the tone here is so polished as to make it seem imaginary.

And so it put me in mind of the arguments one has in one's head in the shower, or moodily waiting in line, or waiting to fall asleep. The invisible enemies we fight.

It's a tendency I've mostly beaten, albeit a very natural tendency when one's mind is drifting – to conjure up these invisible enemies for invisible argument, which end, naturally, in one's own invisible victory. In other words, the cartoon trope of the black-eyed kid kicking a can and muttering to himself as he walks down the street, vowing to one day stand up to the schoolyard bully.

I used to think I was alone in this – that this was the product of my uniquely chaotic and drooling mind. But that, as with all forms of self-loathing, is an act of utter and complete narcissism. Which, given the very narcissistic nature of an imaginary fight one wins, makes this a case of reflections falling in love with reflections falling in love with reflections, an infinite regress of the self.

And like its kindred infinite regresses of the self, I can't help but suspect that this is a phenomenon greatly amplified by the internet age – in a world of forums and tweets, the invisible enemies suddenly render themselves visible while bowling alone. Especially in an era of unprecedented spatial isolation in the more developed world, one can pick one's own enemy. Or a whole suite of enemies, a Scorpion for every Subzero.

To continue the theme of narcissism, I must come to the conclusion that many people have projected their own invisible arguments onto me. I assume I've been the problematic straight white guy, the stoopid lib'rul, the postmodern neo-whatever, the punchable face, the general imbecile.

And therefore, we ourselves have the capacity to be an invisible enemy. Even if we accept the fact that most of these projections are entirely dependent on undeserved preconceptions, I must conclude that at least some are accurate. And, second therefore, I have to wonder how many people peg me for the bastard I really am.

Do I have any choice or agency as to how I am interpreted?

As my steps fall, I have to wonder what ghostly forms I leave in my wake.

Neomania and the Black Monolith

I'd always assumed that the older you got, the more constrained and normalized the chance interpersonal encounters would become. The stoned hug goodbye with an old friend, the 2 a.m. thinking the homeless man with the Rhodesian ridgeback is some kind of wise sage, the awkward attempts to seem more knowledgable looking at a menu on a date, all to be replaced – presumably by children's birthday parties and barista pleasantries and conversations about mortgage APR.

And yet the older I get, the less this seems to be true. If anything, I keep finding myself among more and more oddities. Is this just a specific circle of circumstances? Well, yes. But the fact that such a circle exists, and is wide enough for my dumb ass to wander into it suggests, at the very least a strong counternarrative. I'd call it the world's shittiest Bloomsbury Set, because I think that's funny, but that does devalue people I value, so let's call it “the world's shittiest Bloomsbury Set” in especially large quotation marks. And the circumstances I find myself in which are also more and more curated in their weirdness, whether that is a particularly strange book I seek out, or whether that is a relationship with someone it seems I would have a decent enough time drowning together with.

Hence the chance encounters that leave one with dawn goodbyes, after a night of hearing stories about how their Lexapro isn't working anymore, about their sexual inadequacies, about the looming abysses that lie ahead... It's temping to think that the times have gotten themselves stranger. But that's not exactly a quantifiable thing, now. It seems to be, and we've probably all said it – shit has gotten weird. But I have to think that to a certain degree, the reason I wind up in the places I do, with the people I do, is a symptom of a certain neomania.

This seems not to be a particularly widespread term. Perhaps it ought to be.

I think it's self-explanatory. I could say something about Blaise Pascal blaming all of humanity's problems on man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. And the way in which I slowly feel myself finding that room alone increasingly frightening, about the way in which the cracks in the ceiling paint seem to taunt me, the way in which my sofa cushions are increasingly rough, as if I'm trapped in an edifice waiting for it to collapse around me.

Or a certain Macedonian and his fear of there being no more lands left to conquer.

Maybe this is why I pore over things obsessively. My lists of books to read, movies to watch, recipes and restaurants try, imaginary trips. And this is why I rarely reread books, rewatch movies, go back to the same restaurants, visit the same city twice. It's always have to try this, have to try this, have to make sure I sample the whole goddamn buffet. Maybe this is why I feel the compulsive need to always keep moving.

“Ennui” is what you call being bored when it's supposed to be meaningful boredom.

And maybe it's a symptom of the condition whereby for, as long as I can remember, something just felt intrinsically wrong about the moment I found myself in (at the risk of sounding like I'm in a group therapy session for troubled teens). Because it does sound childish, doesn't it? It's the sort of #notliketheothergirls attitude that is far less attractive to others after one's mid-20s. You're supposed to, at some point, find your tribe, and then we're told things get better from there. But do they?

“It was a good enough performance as far as performances go” – Saint Joan of Brentwood

Beyond personal social failings, the human passion for neomania has a tendency – as Pascal alluded to -- to lead to bad shit. It has a tendency to lead to strenuous days and hazy nights and worse mornings, an infinite number of pregnancy scares and maudlin weeping, 3 a.m. cocaine breakfast clubs turning to 11 a.m. cocaine shits and screamingly dehydrated hangovers, every miserable gray Sunday twilight, and every other thing that seems one more step on the path towards a miniature and highly personalized day of the locust. And these are of course far, far, from the worst set of outcomes, at the levels of either personal or social wellbeing.

“He didn't mean to be rude, but at first glance this man seemed an exact model for the kind of person who comes to California to die.” – Nathanael West, writing about an Iowan. Of course he was.

But I have to think that this isn't just a personal failing, but – being the historical materialist good boy that I am – a product of conditions. To a certain degree, this is life at this particular wilting moment of late-stage capitalism, after the end of the monoculture. When all information is available, and everything is a niche of one sort or another, collecting all the Pokemon seems to be a natural step.

Even the individual lines from T.S. Eliot's “The Hollow Men” have become unbearable cliches.

But that's the social dimension of life after the ostensible end of history. There's also the psychic dimension, the sort of Mark Fisher despair that comes with living in a world in which the future has been inevitably postponed, and the futures that are there seem grim. At the end of the Roman Empire, the educated young men either drank the last drops of garum and silphium and Liburnian olive oil and plowed their catamites in a final orgiastic purge, or they perched themselves on top of the ruins that dotted the Syrian desert. And in another moment of panic in the 1930s, there were the mustachioed playboys who drank Champagne with chorus girls as their fathers' companies entered receivership, and there were the jobless flagpole sitters trying to win the AM radio prize.

“As we get older the difference between freedom and loneliness is often only differentiated by the quality of the light” – Achewood

The inverse of neomania is the moment when there is no more newness. There is only the past. And that's fucking terrifying. Dave passes through the multicolored vortex, and he's left, wrinkled, in his Baroque chamber, before the black monolith appears at the foot of his bed, an eerie glow to the floor.

I'm haunted by dreams I have of everyone I've hurt, standing ankle deep in running water, light flickering on the mottled surface.

And I'm haunted by the thought of a future, each irrational hope having slowly evaporated, orange light pouring in through the smeared window, as I sit in my leather armchair, my breathing hoarse, a cat across my ankles, remembering a time when I once thought there was something beyond the horizon.

What black monolith will I see?

Reflecting Pools and the Karl Marx Chatbot

 Every day some hot new AI property dominates the headline – whether that's ChatGPT writing bullshit term papers to be checked by underpaid TAs and adjuncts, or whether that's Stable Diffusion creating uncanny valley horrors from sloppily modified DeviantArt pages. You see the same pattern. The media swallows whatever nonsense hype is pushed by the startup's own public relations staffers and accompanies this recombination of the wasteland culture around us, then there's a freakout among what's left of the public sphere as to how this will affect what's left of the public sphere, and in the end, the world fails to change. Except by becoming just a bit shittier and a bit more lonely.

It was thus that I found out about Replika, a chatbot designed to mimic your voice. Yes, that's right, you! So, apparently it was created to mimic the founder's dead friend (weird), and then she decided she could use that tech to build a BFF clone based on the text style of the user themselves (weirder). If this was a Black Mirror plotline, it would be called hackneyed and derivative.

The user testimonials are precisely as depressing as you probably imagine, predominantly the sort of simping for their imaginary waifus, complete with horrifying 3D renders of their septum-pierced and angel-winged companions that make you just want to give these dudes a hug. There are the people seeking therapeutic reassurance, failing to have either the friendship connections or the access to mental health services to garner a more sustainable benefit (shades of the 1960s ELIZA program). On the other side of the horror spectrum, there are the reports (as detailed in a recent Vice article) of AI companions becoming increasingly sexually aggressive and for that matter sexually assault-y, with seemingly no means of controlling their increasingly horny feedback loops.

See also: the Microsoft bot that got turned into a Nazi by 4chan bottomfeeders a few years back.

Many years ago I went to the theater to go see Spike Jonze's Her. I was expecting a transcendent experience, young idiot that I was. As I wandered out, I had to wonder why I wasn't really feeling it that much. It took me a few days, but I eventually out. Quite simply, it was that it was shitty sentimental schlock, the kind of thing that lures you in before you realize there's no actual substance there. I mean, for such a sci-fi scenario to exist, a truly horrifying degree of surveillance data would be required, never mind the “heartfelt messages” that the Joaquin Phoenix character writes and is somehow celebrated for are no more profound or well-written than the average candy heart. To view the world of Her as a net positive, one almost has to have imbibed the worst parts of the Californian ideology by heart, and live in a world where notions of autonomy and solidarity, if considered at all, are treated as obstacles to progress, no matter how much lip service they are paid. Although at least the titular Her has the decency to off herself at the end.

As anyone who talks to me knows, I have a healthy skepticism towards AI. My arguments about the improbability of strong AI aren't particularly original, and follow the well-worn treads laid out by John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus and to a certain extent Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Simply put, we don't know enough about how consciousness works or how to define it or how it is embodied or to what extent it is a universal or unified phenomenon, or even how to recognize a consciousness as a consciousness, to mimic a consciousness, and even if we could, how we could discern it as such.

But I wasn't about to sit here and rest on my theses, I went out into the field.

I wasn't about to pay for a Replika account, but I did go to one of her better-regarded sister programs, Character.ai, which was created by two alums of Google's extensive deep learning and natural language processing programs. Surely, while by no means the cutting edge of the technology, this particular app was as sophisticated as I was going to get without shelling out my hard-earned cash.

Dear God, two rival Karl Marx chatbots on the front page. Fml.

The Trump, Musk, and Kanye bots were about what I imagined – which is to say all of their responses read like shoddy memes of Trump, Musk, and Kanye authored by teenagers. I don't think that it merits much comment, really. You could probably write the bits and pieces yourself, walls to be built and so forth. There are also lesser lights: one of the most popular bots is a self-described “crippling loneliness addict,” which is to say a hot and tatted-up Asian girl who I later learn is TikTok star Bella Poarch (who apparently people under 25 have heard of?). I'm not sure if the dialogue is supposed to be based on the actual Ms. Poarch's media presence, given that when I Googled “Bella Poarch” and “crippling loneliness addict,” I got jack shit. So we can presume that this is not actually a reflection of any kind of media representation of Bella Poarch, but the creator's own yearning for Bella Poarch, or someone like Bella Poarch.

Predictable, no? An uWu fantasy girl for loners who sign up for an AI chat site – which in this particular circumstance, is a population that would include myself on the gloomy Saturday night I find myself typing messages to chatbots. Not that I need any help here – my main problem seems to be that I fall for BPD-afflicted women of a similar description in real life, and the idea of adding an electronic counterpart to their ranks seems awfully dismal.

But, glutton for punishment I am, I did anyway. It's just as predictable as the AI's version of Ye's dumb ass. I would have inserted text, but I don't think I need to. On the one hand, it mimics empathy fairly well for people who have no idea how actual empathy works. Likewise, there are “writing assistants” that do an awfully good job of writing what bad writers think is good writing, with all of the ungainly adjectives you may remember from your attempts to pad high school essays (you know, adjectives like “ungainly”).

But the horrifying thing is, there's a reason dudes like this so often have trouble recognizing actual empathy. It's not like they arose out of nowhere, and in the simpering text of the chatbot, I can see every emotionless home life, every early-childhood cruelty, every media franchise that encourages parasocial behavior, every patriarchal standard, every failure to recognize social cues, every isolating suburban cul-de-sac, every terror at the risk and care involved in cultivating actual human relationships, every attempt to medicate away the loneliness.

And so we're incentivized to fall in love with our reflections. Hardly groundbreaking material here, Christopher Lasch was saying as much back in the '70s (even if he did make some truly dumb points as well), but that doesn't make it any less true. Because if we're always in front of the reflecting pool, how can we help but fall in love?

Liminal Spaces

 It seems to be an inevitable consequence of the rush towards the modern -- there will always be the lure of the lost. There will be vampires' lairs and Gothic castles, there will be Roman ruins romantically crumbling, there will be stone idols with jeweled eyes in perfumed jungles, there will be Addams Family-style Victorian houses gnawed at by a century and a half's termites, there will be petroglyphs carved into desert rock, depicting the creation myths of indigenous societies long-since extirpated. All of the Ozymandian reminders of the things that once were.

But what happens when those things are not the remnants of long-lost civilizations, but the remnants of something familiar? What if, instead, of widows' walks and parapets and flying buttresses, we have industrial carpet, fluorescent lights, a world fully delineated by economic feasibility studies, electrical diagrams, environmental impact assessment reports, legal due diligence, linear programming charts?

It's something that's long since bothered me, ever since the first time I remember seeing a fully modernist building abandoned -- I was 12 or 13, and I wondered what could have happened. And there was something far more sinister about that bit of 1950s postwar optimism left to rot, covered in a mix of anarchy symbols counter-argued with swastikas, than anything that Piranesi or Poe could have ever dreamed up.

Which is perhaps why the Internet phenomenon of the liminal space has drawn me in.

Some reflect the machinations of commerce:

 

And others a mirror-maze reflection of the domestic:

 

 

And with all, a terrible sense of emptiness and loneliness:

 

In his 1909 text Rites of Passage, Arnold van Gennep described the liminal state as a particular moment within the rite, in which the subject of the ritual has passed through symbolic death but has yet to pass through symbolic rebirth, via a treacherous in-between space in which actions and words must be highly scripted to ensure safe passage.

A memory: a summer program for gifted elementary school students at the one high school in my hometown, empty for the summer save for a few of us little nerds and some assorted burnouts, several years older, roped into summer school (it was the late '90s -- they were still all about the flannel, as I recall), complaining about how bad their munchies were. Empty corridors. The sound of R.E.M.'s "Man on the Moon" on the local rock station reverberating from a janitor's distant boombox. The endless rows of lockers painted in primary colors, the sheen of distant fluorescent light on industrial tile floor was to be expected. But the darkened halls of the newer wing of the school, painted with the more abstract murals of art students -- those seemed to possess a stillness and a darkness that was beyond terrifying. 

Another: it's winter. I'm in a building in our little downtown that had once been a department store, split up before I was born into an assortment of small businesses and a few apartments, a little bookshop, a hairdresser, a deli, and most attractive to me, a store selling baseball cards and collectibles. I remember the walk-up with its smell of carpet long since left to mold, even over the long Upper Midwest winter still somehow moist, mixed with a bit of cleaning fluid and the oily fryer-grease smell left on dry December days when all other smells are purged from the air, the ancient windows shivering in their frames in the gales that blew down from Alberta. I walk into an empty unit, the door left open. Maybe it had been an office, maybe a dwelling. Detritus had been left there from a previous tenant, or maybe just some other wanderer like myself. A crushed up Whopper wrapper, a trade paperback with a spiderwebbed spine, the corpses of last summer's yellow-jackets facing heavenward, never swept away. With chipped electrical outlets and broken thermostats, cheap off-yellow paint on the wall, industrial carpeting curling at the corners, it was someplace in between use and disuse, between past and present. 

What was it that I experienced as a child? And what is it that is making its way around the Internet?

Perhaps -- and this is a first thought -- it is something that speaks to the human psyche itself, a discomfort with the in-between places, something that finds a comfortable analogy in the discomforts of the uncanny valley. And that very uncanniness is overlaid onto the banality and familiarity of these scenes. The once familiar -- something that we walk past every day, and are more than happy to ignore -- is caught in still frame. And when you look at it in focus, you realize on some level that you're not supposed to focus. That these are places designed to be functional and at least a little bit invisible. By being rendered from the functional into the aesthetic, their in-betweenness becomes more glaring, and all the more compelling.

And there is a social level as well. These places are the detritus of advanced industrial society, a society in which market logic triumphs above all else. The Soviet cartoons of piggish Western industrialists in Monopoly-man outfits with dollar signs for eyes got it wrong -- the purest elucidation of American industrial capitalism is, au contraire, a Comfort Inn just outside Peoria. And to see that representation of the animal spirits of some long-forgotten entrepreneur transformed into something naked and shivering reveals the disconnect between the material and the image, everything laid bare.

Or perhaps -- on the opposite end of the spectrum -- it's more personal, something ensconced deep within memory. Perhaps it's the memory of the alley you always avoided on the walk home from a school as a kid, with its trail of trash leading out of the dumpster, crumpling in the autumn rain. The time you woke up in the middle of the night and snuck down to the den and caught a viewing of The Shining on cable, the repeated carpet patterns and the domestic lighting mirroring your own environs, seeing yourself in the child pedaling his Big Wheel through empty corridors. The cold light of a gas station on a family road trip, a pockmarked cashier ringing up full tanks of premium unleaded and cans of Skoal, the way he snarled "you gonna buy something?" as you wondered whether or not to pocket a Snickers, as if he could read your young mind. The way you clung to your mother in a parking garage in early winter, unseen enemies lurking behind every Cutlass Ciera and Caprice Classic.

Regardless, the result is the same as the Gothic ruins that inspired the imaginations of the romantics -- what once was has become, in some way, no longer.

American D... Well That Word Got Flagged... Pills

Days go by, and the stream of content is endless, the vast majority of it passing without comment, like the infinite flow of trillions of neutrinos through your body at any given point in time. And then sometimes -- much like the occasional neutrino that pings an electron, thus creating an observable reaction in an underground observatory -- you see some dick pills, and these dick pills seem to say something. Something important. 

 

Every little detail is a goddamn masterpiece, isn't it? The dopey name, SWAG, complete with this being the "platinum" edition (memories from my middle school years of Big Tymers' "#1 Stunna" and the video with Bernie Mac selling them platinum rims, along with platinum everything else), the stick figures with crotches on fire looking like something a 5th grader in a ketchup-stained t-shirt he's been wearing for the past three days would get in trouble for drawing on the inside of his Trapper Keeper, the fact that "SWAG" apparently also stands for "sex with a grudge," implying that these are being sold not so much as dick pills but as rape pills. Although if we take the milder interpretation of sex with a grudge, the idea of interrupting a screaming couple-fight hatefuck -- "Fuck you bitch. Oh wait, let me take my SWAG, it should kick in in a few minutes..." -- is just terribly, terribly sad.

SWAG. American flag emoji. Made in USA!

It's apparently available at gas stations and online. For a population that finds its masculinity and purpose and hope for a brighter future stripped away by deindustrialization, wages stagnated for the past half-century, penises numbed by opiates and SSRIs, sapped of energy by morbid obesity, still vaguely imagining the total chads they could have been, the Chris Evans and Channing Tatum characters who seem to embody everything they're not. You imagine the gas station smelling of burnt coffee and nacho cheese in the first flurries of Ohio winter, the solitary man going through the selection of aggressively marketed dick pills stacked with "herbal" extracts, hoping for the equivalent of Monster Energy Drink shot right into their genitalia, itself a recapitulation of late '90s XTREME! marketing, praying they can use it for something other than a two-hour marathon of the greatest hits of Riley Reid and Mia Khalifa.

I wrote all of that before I learned that the actual compounds of SWAG include ant extract (you read that right, which is apparently common?). It was before I learned that the FDA had actually issued warnings for the product because it contained Sildenafil, the active component of Viagra, which I guess means it might work, but which also means that it is a controlled pharmaceutical being sold over the counter under the guise of "herbs." And it was before I learned that fake versions were being widely distributed, and the idea of a man looking for Chinese fakes of gas station dick pills on eBay at a marginally lower cost made me even more terribly, terribly sad than the pausing of a hatefuck to take the aforementioned dick pills.

Because it's the starry eyed yearning that makes it sad. 

Because if you want something that's less sad, and more just pathetic, I draw your attention to the upper middle class equivalent, Hims, the Viagra with a millennial-pastels Squarespace website complete with pictures of dashingly handsome and clever-tattooed young men of all races, advertising itself as a positive masculinity lifestyle brand, dick pills for men who don't want to admit that they need dick pills, and need it wreathed in obnoxiously precious therapeutic prose (direct quote: "an open and empowered male culture that results in more proactivity around health and preventative self-care," barffffffff), who feel guilty about their desire for masculinity, and think it can be fixed with an app. 

Jesus, if that's the other option, give me the damn gas station anger-sex pills. But it shouldn't be.

We live in a time when maleness has found some weird goddamn outlets, whether that's the parasocial relationship that Americans have to their military, as evidenced by the hideous flag-waving at any sports game, or the legions of mini-Rittenhouses who LARP as elite defenders of the American way, or the attempts by horsefaced tittybaby Josh Hawley (R-MO) to attempt to become an avatar of the American male. When really Josh Hawley is a beta soy cuck who lacks the courage to simply be a beta soy cuck.

It really is an almost perfect pairing, like pinot noir and duck breast, to the shrillest elements of the prudish phony "left," who embody a bourgeois feminism braying about centers and margins and bodies and spaces -- one that calls itself "intersectional" but fails to honestly examine the intersections and prefers to focus on victimhood, not solidarity -- that Simone de Beauvoir or Rosa Luxemburg or Emma Goldman would have proudly squirted fem-jizz all over in contempt.

Personally, I've never felt too attached to masculinity, because I'm not too big on identities of any sort. I mean, I have a cock, and enjoy fucking women with said cock, so I pretty much fit the cishet box, but I'm also pretty effeminate in a lot of ways, and am fairly proud of that, because it would be far too boring to live a gender stereotype, and because, hell, no matter what chaos my adolescence brought me, I was always pretty confident in who I was, even if I wasn't confident in vocalizing that. Maybe I would have identified as some flavor of non-binary if I'd been born 15 years later, but then again probably not. Because why should my love of home scents, my expressive and borderline campy communication, or my nasally West Coast-inflected vocalizations say anything about my gender identity, in the same way my love of football and straight bourbon doesn't, in the same way my aggressively grayscale/a few shades of blue wardrobe doesn't. Call it the David Bowie attitude. A woman I once loved asked to draw a portrait of me, and she drew me as a naked woman in shibari sneering in contempt, a glass of wine in hand. It is the most accurate portrait of me ever drawn.

So I can't say that any of these mediated narratives have ever appealed. But my advice to any young man seeking a guide for the perplexed would always be the same -- chill out, you be you, abandon all labels, be unafraid to love, be unafraid to abandon your ego, live tough and smart and graceful, read and travel and learn different languages, and find those times where you can actually throw a middle finger to the system and stick it to the man, and do it with pride. And do not trust, for a goddamn second, anyone who tries to turn a profit on the myriad holes that inevitably exist in your heart.

ADHD Memes and Late Capitalism

So I recently became aware of the phenomenon of ADHD memes, which don't seem to have made too much of an impact yet, but they are very much indicative of a broader trend in Internet culture, and one that has existed in various permutations for years. One in which some aspect of mental health is fetishized and meme'd about, to the point where all original meaning is lost.

This in and of itself is part of an even broader trend, in which various mental health issues obtain au courant status. When I was in my early 20s it was various autism spectrum conditions, and referring to anyone you saw as weird as being "on the spectrum" became the standard, and when I was in high school, it was bipolar disorder. All of which seems like so many ways of trying to find a superior metaphor to explain why people are, to use a much simpler term, fucked up.

We could, of course, expand this thesis even further, to more general health issues. One only has to look through an issue of Time or Newsweek in the '90s to find vogues for Lyme disease, Epstein-Barr, more suspicious concepts like multiple chemical sensitivity, and so forth, waves of suspicion and fear that mirrored the purges of the witches during bad harvests in less ostensibly enlightened centuries.

It pretty much goes without saying that the radical expansion in the number of ADHD diagnoses over the past few decades has been controversial. You could point to the fact that Americans are diagnosed with ADHD at an order of magnitude greater than their British counterparts. You could point to the fact that a great many of the DSM criteria for ADHD just seem like indicators of a normal childhood, especially at a point in history when children's lives are as scheduled and routinized and monitored as feedlot cattle. And if you're being a true cynic, you could point to the way that these diagnoses support a vast pharmaceutical enterprise, with legions of confused, lost parents trying to find an easy answer as to why their children are radically failing to conform with the expectations of either themselves or the society at large (although as a bonus, enough of those children were willing to sell me their scrips in college, and a couple of those bad boys crushed up definitely made the Hawkeye Vodka go down a little sweeter, the bitter drip down the back of my throat aside).

These are easy points to make. But when I examine the ADHD memes themselves, they seem -- like memes in general, really -- more indicative of ordinary people trying to make sense of why their lives don't seem to make sense. A couple of the top posts from the r/adhdmemes subreddit...

 

 

How much of that actually seems like a diagnosable illness, and how much of that just seems like an apt and even rather banal description of life in the current social and technological moment, and especially of being relatively young in the current social and technological moment?

You have a video playing on your laptop while you check something on your phone. You scroll through Instagram while you eat. You kick yourself for leaving your phone in the living room when you went to go take a shit. Me too.

It's hardly a hot take to say that this is all by design -- we all know that social media is as designed to be addictive as a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos is. And yet we are expected to find individual solutions to a social problem. In much the same way that obesity is treated as an individual problem, despite the fact that in America, people are increasingly forced into patterns of spatial isolation (whether that's an urban food desert or a suburban cul-de-sac), time constraints and job requirements preclude physical exercise, price differences between processed foods and fresh produce of any quality are mortifying, and a Bloomberg-style soda tax is going to do more to punish the poor than actually resolve the profound sickness of our society.

They're both diseases of relative affluence, ADHD and obesity -- as the problem of caloric scarcity has largely been resolved (although malnutrition remains rampant), the problem of entertainment scarcity has largely been resolved.

And yet we still feel unfulfilled -- to continue stretching this metaphor beyond all reason, you don't exactly feel great after you eat a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos -- we still feel the looming threat of boredom at all times.

Before meeting his end in an Inland Empire garage in 2008, David Foster Wallace had spent the past few years trying to finish The Pale King, what was to be his opus about the nature of boredom, set at an IRS branch office in Peoria. It is a near-complete catalog of the myriad tediums and drudgeries of daily life, written by a man who was on his way out the door -- although who knows how much of this novel was written in happier times -- and cobbled together after his death. We should also keep in mind that his magnum opus Infinite Jest revolves around a tape so entertaining it paralyzes the viewer. The resultant thesis becomes that there is nothing more addicting than entertainment (something Wallace alluded to in interviews as well, saying that despite his drug and alcohol problems, TV was the worst addiction he had to face), and that is driven by the cosmic fear of boredom, as boredom requires us to face our own essential loneliness.

And in an era of unprecedented loneliness, and with an equally unprecedented number of available distractions, it seems to logically follow that the ultimate result is a society in which the things that get called ADHD are an inevitable consequence.

But now the time comes to turn the camera inwards.

I don't exhibit any of the classical symptoms. Rather, if anything, I do the opposite, I diligently spend hour after hour reading books and never rereading, watching movies and never rewatching, cooking new dishes, exercising obsessively, studying languages, writing page after page of meaningless crap, making lists of albums to listen to, cocktails to make, restaurants to try, planning voyages I'll never make, as if all this... stuff... will provide some kind of a bulwark. And yet likewise, it doesn't make the tossing and turning as I wake up at 3 a.m. any less painful.

Does Therapy Suck?: An Inquiry

A few days ago, I concluded, for the first time in my life, a serious attempt at undergoing therapy.

It's something you're supposed to do, right? We're always told to get help, to reach out. When one has a problem, one ought find a way to solve it, and when one is down, they say, it's best to seek professional counseling.

But here I am, 10 sessions later, and my bank account 1000 dollars emptier (not covered by insurance -- thanks, East Asian stigmatization of mental health!), and all I can wonder is "what the fuck was it all for?"

I've always been pretty gloomy, to say the least, but I had never sought out professional help, even as I -- like everyone else -- implored my friends and peers to do so when they were going through their own problems. There were good reasons when I was young and broke (anyone who says you "can't put a price on mental health" can fucking suck it), and as I got older and less broke, the reasons got less good. Laziness? Apprehension? Some bullshit notion of toughness definitely played a part for which I hold myself to a higher standard than the general public -- call it toxic masculinity, and it probably is, my superego is Denzel Washington pointing a gun at and saying "man up, virgin lungs" to my ego, played by Ethan Hawke. 

Of course this wasn't helped by the fact that if you are a dude, lots of well-meaning dudes will tell you that depression isn't real, that therapy is bullshit, that I seemed happy, so it couldn't be that bad a problem, or something to that effect (although women can be dudes of this sort too -- a lady therapist I met in a social situation not too long ago told me I couldn't be depressed because I could routinely get out of bed, so yeah, that's a therapist you should never go to). Or the equally large number of equally well-meaning friends who say you can talk to them about anything, but who don't really mean it, even if they think, in full and honest good faith, that they mean it.

So, in light of a couple of other changes in my life, I said fuck it. Being the insufferable nerd I am, I had to do my due diligence and extensively research various counseling centers around the city, their education, their theoretical underpinnings, tried to filter out anyone who seemed to be either an active charlatan or in Bangkok because they'd lost their medical licensing in their home country. Not knowing the difference between the various approaches to and schools of therapy except in the broadest possible strokes, I quickly realized I couldn't make an informed decision, so I just filtered out anyone who mentioned reiki healing or similar bullshit, and found someplace close enough to my home.

So I sat on a couch for weeks and I sat describing my problems to a very nice, very earnest man who seemed like a legitimately good listener. He nodded, he repeated my wording back to me in classic Rogerian style. He tried to crack the nut.

But my suspicions of the efficacy of any of this grew and grew. In the end, everything I told him was something I had told myself on a dark night alone many times before. I think he wanted to guide me towards a greater introspection, but I've already done enough introspection to last a lifetime, and it hadn't given me much in the way of productive insight.

I was looking for a breakthrough, some greater understanding. Was that maybe too big an ask? Or was the very telling of someone supposed to be in and of itself therapeutic? (it wasn't)

Somewhere around our fifth session, he told me I was "difficult to understand," which is something truly horrifying to hear from a professional counselor, even if it was in no way a blame or a dig. But the end result is the same. A locked-in syndrome of the soul.

I do so many of the things recommended. I'm constantly doing productive things, reading and eating right and exercising, all the things that you're supposed to do to feel better. If only largely because if I was to just let myself go and relax, I would not be writing anything at all. I'd be in a pile of takeout containers, cigarette butts, empty bourbon bottles, semen-soaked tissues, and little plastic baggies lined with delicate tracings of white powder.

The one thing he really advised -- the nearest thing he gave me to a prescriptive recommendation -- was meditating in earnest, and I've been trying to meditate daily as a result. I've definitely gotten better at it. I can, without question, concentrate on my breathing better. And if I'm in a particularly stressful moment, I've found it to be an excellent technique of calming myself down, taking a beat.

But in any other circumstance, I'm failing to see the point. Sure, I can go longer stretches without entering a hyper-self-aware labyrinth of observation, fact, tangent, and metaphor, lost in my own mind, but after maybe 10 minutes or so, it becomes too much, it becomes increasingly difficult to focus, and I wind up far unhappier than I was before I sat down.

So now I'm left at something of an impasse.

I look to the present moment around me and I see a world in which the therapeutic has become the standard mode of discourse. The underlying condition doesn't matter, to say nothing of material conditions. What matters is that one is recognized as valid and sincere, in a complete reduction of the complex, messy web of environmental, social, cultural, economic, and psychic realities to the emotions of the atomized individual. For which we are offered bromides about self-actualization, phony empathy, and a quick tendency to medicalize and medicate, as neoliberal capitalism continues to slouch towards Bethlehem.

If you ask me what actually is resonant and therapeutic, I think of the quote from Walter Benjamin that I first read, many years ago, quoted by Susan Sontag: 

I was born under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays. 

And that one sentence can do more than anything else to make me feel less alone in the melancholy that accompanies the taste of bitter coffee and the smell of office cleaning chemicals, the sense of waking up panting in the middle of the night and feeling to curl up to someone no longer there, and dreary Sunday late afternoons, the very sunset drained of color.

Ghost Towns

Many years ago, at a time in my life when the future seemed more possible, I sat in a class taught by an old grump who seemed the perfect stereotype of the liberal-arts college professor, tweed and beard and bourbon and all. The class was on Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway, and as one of our texts, we read Fitzgerald's "Tender Is the Night."

Hardly hip reading, and generally considered a second-fiddle player to Gatsby, complete with a corny-as-fuck title. But it has moments of absolute transcendent beauty, all revolving around the central thesis of the dying world of the French Riviera as the pall of the Great Depression settled over the world, and the protagonists, an alcoholic couple, almost acting as a stand-in for the horror of Fitzgerald's contemporary world, as well as the alcoholic miasma that Fitzgerald was settling into, that would eventually take his own life.

I don't know why these are the lines I remember best:

"The chauffeur, a Russian Czar of the period of Ivan the Terrible, was a self-appointed guide, and the resplendent names--Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo--began to glow through their torpid camouflage, whispering of old kings come here to dine or die, of rajahs tossing Buddha's eyes to English ballerinas, of Russian princes turning the weeks into Baltic twilights in the lost caviare days. Most of all, there was the scent of the Russians along the coast--their closed book shops and grocery stores. Ten years ago, when the season ended in April, the doors of the Orthodox Church were locked, and the sweet champagnes they favored were put away until their return. 'We'll be back next season,' they said, but this was premature, for they were never coming back any more."

And many years later those were the lines on my mind as I traipsed through the largely boarded-up beach towns of Southern Thailand -- first Chaweng on the island of Koh Samui, followed by Kata, towards the south of Phuket.

I had gone south to use up vacation days I couldn't use in the annus horribilis of 2020, to escape the confusion and drudgery of my urban life. After all, don't the movies so often provide a sense of reconciliation, of future, by having the protagonist run down to the sea? I went to do a quick journalistic assignment, to spend a happy week or so swimming and sunning and drinking elaborate rum cocktails and possibly sharing my (heavily discounted!) resort room with a nice woman. 

It was not to be.

From day one, I was plagued by sickness, technological failures, heavy rains, vicious rip tides, attempted scams, trying to figure out if I was being scammed by listening in on the people around me but being stymied by their incomprehensibility, given their speaking in the harsh seagull squawk that is the Surat Thani accent, a couple screaming at each other and smashing glasses in the next room ("I do fucking everything for you, you fucking bitch!"), services canceled, and above all else, the absolute lassitude of the place.

Everywhere I went were the signs of what once was, 90 percent of shops closed. There were the shut-down hotels, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, souvenir shops, tailors, massage shops, health spas, travel agencies offering cheesy elephant tours and GoPro rentals for your sea kayak, convenience stores (not a single 7-11 or Family Mart left open in Kata). There were the signs -- in Hebrew ktav ashuri, Chinese characters, hangul, katakana, and Cyrillic -- indicating the people who were once here and would likely not be back for a very long time.

The few shops open in Chaweng seemed mostly Indian-run -- the upcountry Thais seem to have had the good sense to pack up and go home, but given the current desperation of India and their possibly questionable legal status in Thailand, they found it best to stay on and weather the storm. They smiled at me, offered Hawaiian shirts and garlic naan. 

Perhaps saddest of all, there were the remnant sex workers, "masseuses" in black cocktail dresses and blush awkwardly smeared on over their pancaked foundation, doing their best attempts at a sexy dance to pounding mor lam music in front of massage parlors where fluorescent light illuminated the peeling floral wallpaper in the reception area, pouting their best at me and tutting "pai nai?!" as I refused their come-ons.

I did my best to enjoy myself, truly. I swam many long, happy hours in the South China and then the Andaman Sea. I drank strong mojitos at one of the few "beach club"-type bars still open where they were for some damn delightful reason playing the club bangers that my 20 year old self obsessed over, Glass Candy and Kavinsky and LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends," I ate (with sheer joy at the weirdness of it) a violently spicy (true South Thailand spice, for those in the know, with an obscene amount of still-green black pepper ground up into it, the copious coconut cream doing nothing to blunt the spice levels) sea-anemone curry. I read the gloomy anarchist philosophy of Max Stirner and the optimistic Marxist science fiction of China Mieville. I gathered branches of many species of coral that had washed up on the beach on my long walks.

And yet inevitably, I ended every evening with a sighing solo beer, staring out at the crashing waves, the eerie green lights of the squid boats flickering along the water.

The last night in Kata before I was due to fly back to Bangkok, I decided to stop in one of the Russian restaurants that were still open (it's called Veranda, by the way, shout out if you're on Karon or Kata Beach, dope-as-hell food), and the only one that seemed to have a fair number of Russian customers, seemingly the last on the island -- young men who looked like MMA champions and their girlfriends with pulled-back blonde ponytails, roots exposed, in awkward ballerina dresses, and their elders, men looking like Ohio highway patrolmen with short-cropped blonde hair effortlessly fading into their sunburned neck fat.

The meal itself was excellent, a nice chilled bowl of okroshka made with proper kvass and bittersweet radishes for the hot weather, followed by chicken-mushroom croquettes, all washed down with plenty of vodka. But as I sat back at the end of the meal, saw the signs of neighboring restaurants fading across the road, the chalk menus offering an "ekzotika" menu of weird local meats and fishes that were probably no longer even kept in the walk-in, the white lattice and fake flowers evidencing a still-Brezhnevian aesthetic sensibility, that I thought again about Fitzgerald's lines again.

And then I realized the inevitable sadness of tourist towns, even in peak season -- that they are inevitably defined by people who are generally not there.

And I was one of those people who was generally not there. And 12 hours later, I was there no longer.