Nation Without a Name

Ask the average American what they know about Taiwan. The first thing you'll probably hear is something along the lines of “where your shit comes from,” vague memories of “Made in Taiwan” stamped onto the plastic undercarriages of the Matchbox cars they had as kids.

And of course many will know about the country's occupation of a gray zone in international law, the fact that it doesn't officially exist as an independent entity, the legitimate government of the Republic of China in the eyes of certain old Kuomintang stalwarts, the group marching under the banner of “Chinese Taipei” at the Olympics, a requirement for awkward phrasing for all but the 17 of the world's recognized sovereign states who still regard the Taipei government as the legitimate single China.

Until not very long ago at all, my response wouldn't have been much different. Because to Western eyes, the country is a cipher, a country people know, but seem to know little about, and even fewer visit.

Which means that like all ciphers, it can be visited without preconception. TripAdvisor can only take you so far. Without knowing all that scaffolding that typically constitutes “nationhood” in the popular imagination – an awareness of traditional culture, literature, film, pop music, cuisine, iconic architecture, and natural scenery – you're at a loss.

Even after spending some time in the country, it was hard to create a cogent metaphor, a unified image. I suppose Taipei 101, one of the world's tallest buildings, and the tallest from its construction in 2004 until the completion of the Burj Khalifa in 2010, functions as something of a national landmark. I didn't go.

Instead, I explored the back streets of Taipei, the dizzying night markets where patient queues serve as a rough metric for quality and local reputation, the neon alleys of Ximen pulsing with Mandarin pop music, the banyan trees and decrepit arcades of the older quarters, the grand shopping boulevards of Da'an, the mouldering mid-century architecture, a legacy of the importance of Taiwan in the old Japanese colonial empire, the militarist aspirations of both early Showa Period Japan and the corporatist governance of the country in the wake of the Chinese Revolution.

Outside the city, the West Coast of the island forms a great megacity, town after town blending into one another, apartment complexes and light industrial parks punctuated by tiny fields of rice and pineapple between them, never either fully urban or fully rural, managed with the mindset of a nation with a bare minimum of arable land.

And the East Coast is wild and rocky, cut apart by steep canyons between high mountains of heavily warped schist and gneiss, a testament to the country's position on multiple fault lines, a landscape the Japanese army lost countless men trying to build roads across, still remote enough for there not to be a public transit route that crosses the mountain ranges that divide the island.

That lazy old line from geography textbooks, “a land of contrasts.”

With transportation being dirt-cheap, I managed to get in quite a few miles. To the little town of Jiufen, supposedly (although apparently not) Hayao Miyazaki's inspiration for Spirited Away, with its black beamed tea-houses and hanging red lanterns that dance in the anabatic winds that blow up the mountain off the Pacific. To Shifen, with its waterfall, its fire balloons, its train going down the middle of the street to save space in the narrow gorge of the townsite. On a boat across Sun Moon Lake, where branches full of cherry blossoms hung low over turquoise-bright water. Over the Zhuilu Old Road, through the Taroko Gorge, where I clung to a narrow cliff face over a 1000-meter drop to the valley floor. Up rough trails through forests of palms, bamboo, cedar, laurel, and pine as I ascended higher and higher, and through Taiwanese aboriginal villages where woven-rattan walls still enclosed yards of clucking chickens, the faces of the forest gods carved into trees, the birthplace of the Austronesian peoples before they migrated south and west as far as Madagascar, east as far as Easter Island. On a rickety train through the half-abandoned coal mining towns above Ruifang, where old murals of merry citizens living the legacy of Sun Yat-Sen were left to gather grime along the railway sidings, where at the little free library on the station platform, about 30 books were made available to take or borrow, the only one I recognized being a Chinese translation of the Marquis de Sade's The 100 Days of Sodom.

I ate incredibly strange meal after incredibly strange meal. Noodles with pig intestines, boar in numerous forms, shoved into fatty sausages and served on skewers with cumin, massive sugar apples and durians, sausage stuffed with mullet roe, a stew of beef tendons and tripe, smoked shark, raw duck, the hearts, livers, and gizzards of geese, a sweet green bean drink, country millet wine, “lovers' tears” algae, pig blood cakes, lotus greens, some kind of funky identified slop wrapped in sticky rice that apparently merited a 20-minute wait in the eyes of the locals, raw squid with mayo, “mountain pepper” that tasted less like pepper than Kix cereal soaked in limoncello, venison stir-fried with celery, multiple kinds of fern, and the national dish, stinky tofu, both in its fried form (edible, if not something I'll seek out again, a testament to the egalitarianism of the deep fryer) and its stewed form (which smells like wet dog and has a texture like overcooked scrambled eggs).

But beyond the concept of Taiwan, I also had to address the larger concept of China.

When Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek's armies crossed the strait to what was then widely known by the old Portuguese name, Ilha Formosa (the beautiful island) and its outlying islands, the Pescadores (the fishermen), they claimed to be the sole legitimate inheritors of this very old idea, the idea of China.

The National Palace Museum sits on a high slope in the Taipei suburb of Shilin, and it's where the treasures of the Forbidden City were either absconded with (according to the People's Republic government) or preserved (according to the ROC government), and carefully arranged in rotating exhibits, only a fraction of the museum's vast holdings being shown at any one time.

Anyone who's ever dealt with the influx of Mainland Chinese tourists in Southeast Asia knows the score. Like Americans in Europe in the '50s, suddenly finding themselves moneyed, they behave, by and large, like absolute pigs. The Ugly American has become the Ugly Chinese in this part of the world. Sure, you could blame Mao Zedong's seizure of the Nanjing capital in 1949 and the chaos that ensued in its wake, but the truth is that Chinese civilization had been in decline for centuries... what Mao inherited was a culture on the verge of exhaustion.

Yet in the National Palace Museum, you see wonders you couldn't imagine... delicate jades, intricate strolls, pottery in the most gorgeous shades of cobalt-blue, celadon, saffron, vermilion, and aquamarine, with detail on a level that almost makes you think they had 3D printing technology to achieve this degree of mechanical intricacy. The realization hits that Ming Dynasty China was the most refined civilization the world has ever seen, and in all likelihood, ever will see. Nothing like this will probably ever exist again.

Then, a tour-group member comes by and is taking a video of the every exhibit on her phone, not even bothering to look at the damn art.

I thought of Napoleon on Elba, the man who commanded armies now stranded on an obscure island, of Thibaw Min, the last king of Burma left to rot in a port town in India, living off a government stipend and occasionally appearing in ads for cigars.

I boarded a plane at Taoyuan International Airport, did a little light duty-free shopping, looked through my notes and my few photos. Schist canyons, Tang Dynasty scrolls, boiled goose hearts.

And I thought of the dialogue in Calvino's Invisible Cities between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, whose relics I'd probably seen:

“Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

'But which is the stone that supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks.

'The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,' Marco answers, 'but by the line of the arch that they form.'

Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: 'Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.'

Polo answers: 'Without stones there is no arch.'”

The Politics of Horniness: A Study in Internet Anthropology

It seems strange to me how people seem to forget that it has its own anthropology. Given the infinite number of niches one can occupy, it seems inevitable that communities arise, each with their own vocabulary, strictures, taboos, cultural patterns, and general ethos. And one obscure Reddit community, for instance, can reflect something odd about the cultural landscape at the present moment.

DuckDuckGo is a particularly useful search engine for online ethnographic research. Not only do you not get your more fucked up searches mingled with your Google search history, but given the anonymity of it, you aren't forced into a filter bubble. Furthermore, the search algorithm is just screwy enough to send you to the wrong place sometimes.

I don't even remember what I was looking for, but I knew it had nothing to do with feet, or with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and yet first page of search results, there it was. WikiFeet, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Huh.

It was a remarkably active community. Which made sense -- if there are active forums dedicated to leaked nudes of celebrities, revenge porn posted by grumpy exes, upskirts of Korean secretaries, the bikini shots of girls of questionable age, etc., then the population of foot fetishists, which is larger than many imagine, would concordantly have its own forum for porn that isn't porn as such, but is consumed pornographically. Especially given the fact that most people aren't particularly bothered about covering their feet.

I wasn't quite sure what I was expecting, but it was mostly innocuous shots of the young congresswoman at official functions.

What was less innocuous was the comment section, and what I found so fascinating is that despite the fact that, according to at least one recent survey I'd seen, Americans as a whole had a generally positive impression of the representative (although men surveyed leaned slightly against her, with 52 percent having a "strongly" or "somewhat" unfavorable perception), the dedicated foot fetish community had a decidedly different opinion.

“Why do Socislists [sic] ( OPPS [sic] I MEAN LIBERALS ) look like this. While Conservative Women Actually look Hot.”

Of course, she had her defenders too, and there were also a few old souls who actually were able to separate her ideology from her feet, but interestingly, she didn't seem to have any fans of her politics who disliked her feet – granted, a quick overview of the forum suggested that its users skew strongly rightward (I thought about doing a detailed analysis of this, but the idea of putting together an Excel sheet based on a fetish website was unspeakably depressing) – but this shows that Internet denizens on the left are likewise largely unable to separate their political stance from their dicks.

This is nothing new – how long have Fox News et al been propping up archetypally blonde conservative commentators? Or how long have thirsty right-wingers lusted after Mediterranean bombshells in the IDF armed with Uzis?
 
As I was preparing this piece, I was informed by an acquaintance that there had been an actual incident in which a supposed quasi-nude of AOC was actually debunked by the Wikifeet community as a fake. The investigator who reported his results to Vice went into frankly clinical levels of depth. And it makes you wonder why this level of forensic scrutiny isn't being as applied as it should be to things unrelated to things that give Internet men a funny feeling in their pants.

Of course that happened, I thought.

But alas, all of these things have been exacerbated. We live in a world in which a mass shooter in New Zealand screams “Subscribe to Pewdiepie!” and the head of the Gambino Crime Family was killed not by a rival mafioso, but by some 24 year old QAnon dork.

And just today I found out that Elon Musk released a Soundcloud rap about Harambe. Shut the fuck up.

This is of course the danger of being extremely online. Everything is real, everything is false, and above all else everything seems a parody of everything else.

Perhaps this truly is the modern incarnation of the Athenian agora, as those early '90s net-optimists said it would be. But it isn't in the way they thought it would be. Because let us remember that in those open squares under the sunny Peloponnesian sky, while Plato taught his pupils that he had nothing to learn from the mountains and city life made man free, most of the gawkers around him were probably watching a guy eat dog turds for drachmas.

Psychic Protection

"I was one of those skinny young men in scary glasses and thrift-store clothes whom you see on Boston or Brooklyn subways, young men who look like they possess massive amounts of data about small-label rock bands or avant-garde literature or video technology, the very size of these data-sets affording a kind of psychic protection."

                - Jonathan Franzen, "Mr. Difficult"

When I read Franzen's essay on his major influence and literary frenemy, William Gaddis, it was that quote, more than Franzen's remarkably intelligent analysis of how we approach difficult systems-novels, that resonated with me the most, and it's not the physical stereotype -- true as it might have been -- but the fact that it's there's something protective in those data sets.

Consider the archivist, the curator, the enthusiast who has translated their passion into expensive, exhaustive collections and bases of knowledge about things that few people care about.

Now consider how unlikeable that person is, by and large. We think of the snobbish douchebag record store clerk, the Simpsons Comic Book Guy type who brutally gatekeeps his fandoms, the sweaty-palmed erotica hoarder who actually went to the effort to start a Pornhub account, the sports-stats guy who knows just how to turn a great play into a mere data point (the subcategory of baseball dads being the worst of the bunch), the health and exercise fanatic who has uses the word "gains" unironically, the conspiracy theorist who can manage to string together every major current event of the past 100 years, the frugality Nazi, the video store weirdo (nearly extinct species, that), the natural healing guru, and so on.

I can't say I'm a fan of most of these types, either, and it's largely because I've been most of these at some point in my life, at least to some degree.

All my life people have asked me how I amass so much useless knowledge. I don't know, nor have I ever known. It was always said with a mix of wonder and contempt. Because outside of bar quiz nights where it occasionally yields a free pint, useless knowledge is indeed useless, especially in an era when the whole fucking encyclopedia is in your pocket.

As a small child, I made lists in my spare time, lists to accompany the drawings of trucks and rockets, maps of imaginary nations. I kept boyish collections, Hot Wheels cars, brightly colored bottle caps, street maps, old atlases I found at garage sales, foreign coins -- an interest sparked, I believe by an Indonesian 100 rupiah coin with a Sumatran longhouse on the obverse, which I accidentally got in change at some point in time in the early '90s.

And as an adult, I might not collect much, but instead I keep obsessive lists of books to read, movies to watch, places to visit, recipes to cook, fitness goals to reach. So even when my obsessive habits are productive and yield positive results -- when I read those books, watch those movies, travel to those places, cook those recipes, reach those fitness goals -- I wonder how much I am truly enjoying myself, and how much I am simply trying to bring some veneer of order to a life that so often seems directionless and dysfunctional, against the backdrop of an uncaring and disordered universe.

Hence Franzen's use of the phrase "psychic protection." This is my attempt to cope with that chaos. OK, I hate it when laymen use psychiatric terminology without regard to the actual implications -- consider how many times per day you hear words like "OCD," "bipolar," "autistic," and "anxiety" radically misused. But I can't help but think that my amassing of knowledge and lists is only one or two steps from washing my hands 30 times a day.

And there is an anxiety that haunts me at those weird moments when I'm leafing through an old notebook, staring at my computer screen at my office, watching the sun glint off the skyline on the train, lying in bed at night. That all there is left is a collection of lists, categories, hierarchies, bullet points of mundane accomplishments, banks of knowledge about geography, literature, and the natural sciences, frameworks without content, content without frameworks, like a whole series of Excel tables you find in a file somewhere on your work computer, with no idea quite how to interpret it.

Notes on a Steakhouse From a Murakami Novel

We live in an era in which our restaurants are designed, more than anything else, to be photogenic. Our dining rooms are decorated to catch the camera's eye. Our plates are garnished to act as indicators of lifestyle more than anything else.

Naturally, I fucking despise this. Which is why I'm deeply in love with a quietly and magnificently off-trend restaurant, hidden deep in the labyrinthine recesses of the older and grimier of Bangkok's two Japanese quarters, a dusty street where at night, the ladies of the evening come out in full costume to appeal to the tastes of salarymen, row after row of prim schoolgirls, nurses, prom queens, and kimono'd quasi-geisha on folding chairs.

Walk down past the security gate, past the signs for "erotic lady clubs," past the half-empty '90s shopping arcade with its postmodernist fanlights and glass-brick partitions, to a barely marked door. There is a sign in Japanese, but nothing in English to indicate the name, just the words "Teppanyaki," "Japanese," and "Dining" in tiny Helvetica Narrow tucked beneath the katakana characters, and an equally tiny Thai spelling of the establishment's name.

This is where I will pause to conspicuously not give the name of this fine eatery -- for those of you living outside Thailand, you probably don't care, and for those of you living here, I want to make it a treasure hunt. I'm sure you can follow the clues to get there.

Once you walk in the door, you see a dining room that was once peak trendiness, and its peak trendiness of course coincided with peak Japan in the early '90s, in the kind of shitty "Asian minimalist" décor in dark wood with lots of potted plants under track lighting. The soundtrack, is, naturally, piano jazz (the only other choice for such an institution would be the sort of '60s and '70s easy listening that enjoys an enduring popularity in Japan -- Claudine Longet, Judy Collins, and the like). Take a seat on the low chairs upholstered in walnut-brown vinyl, next to the little caddy of liquor bottles for the most conservative possible choices in digestif spirits -- Glenmorangie, Courvoisier, etc. – and I can't imagine the face they'd make if you asked for a craft cocktail.

Having sat down, a warm towel between your hands, take a look at the menu -- all of the à la carte items are written in Japanese, with no English translation, just a transliteration into Latin script. I've only gone at lunch, and I've focused on the lunch set items, all attractively priced, and in keeping with the teppanyaki tradition, it is a set vaguely modeled on Western dining, of the sort developed in Kobe in the wake of World War II during the MacArthur occupation -- a Japanese interpretation of an American interpretation of classical French service à la russe, brought from Moscow to the salons of Napoleon's France by Prince Alexander Kurakin (shortly before Napoleon returned the favor by marching 700,000 men into Kurakin's homeland).

And so what you get is a teppan-grilled steak or a "hanbagu" (oh how the Japanese can completely warp a borrowed English word) steak served under a fried egg with what the Japanese call demi-glace, and which tastes more like teriyaki sauce than a classical French demi-glace, but is wonderful all the same. It comes with the sort of Japanese salad that is designed more as a garnish than an edible, a natural coming from the country that perfected plastic models of food to place in restaurant windows -- fluffed pieces of cos lettuce, a few strips of Vegetable Incognito, a whole cherry tomato – along with a bowl of rice, a remarkably bright and flavorful miso soup, and three sauces (soy and shaved radish, kind-of-chimichurri, and maybe-mayo?), followed by coffee and a beautifully inscrutable Japanese dessert.

Everything is so aggressively outdated, it almost seems studied in its languor. The weird future-Japan '80s aesthetics haven't been preserved like treasured jewels, but have to a certain degree left to fade. One teppan sits mostly abandoned, and they sit me at one solitary chair at the end where a copper cloche sits on the grill alone, fake flowers dusty, and wrinkled, a decorative plate sitting next to the cardboard box the air conditioning unit came in. Sitting alone at the teppan, a piano soundtrack playing, unsure whether the palms are real or not, you can feel like you've stepped out of our reality and into a Murakami novel.

But it is a reflection of its surroundings. A relic within a relic, on a back street in a neighborhood dedicated to the flesh industry.

I often comment on the ubiquity of vaporwave aesthetics in the wild in Bangkok. With the Thai economy having collapsed in 1997 (immediately following Japan's deflationary period, and exacerbating Japan's problems in the process), and having not really recovered since, it becomes inevitable that the architectural style of early '90s Asia has become the definitive standard of the city, much in the same way New York is defined by the style of the years leading up to 1929, and the way Paris is defined by the style of the years leading up to the collapse of the Second Empire.
We can think about food in the context of history pretty readily. You can imagine the thick steak on the plate of a '50s Madison Avenue accounts man taking a big client out, or the massive joint of poultry being gnawed upon by a Medieval king.

So my curious little restaurant is but one instance -- one that takes the impersonal aesthetics of architecture and design and carries them into the intimate aesthetics of gastronomy. And for that it is a monument worth preserving akin to a row of old commercial buildings, an antique tea set on a dusty shelf.

The Story of a Failure

On Monday, January 21st, the news broke of yet another virginal man, Christopher Cleary, age 27, of Denver, planning to murder women en masse -- of course, this being my benighted republic, this barely counts as news, especially given the fact that no one was actually murdered. But the issue of the incel mass murderer has become one of the more trending topics of the past year or so, to the point where the "what an incel be" think piece has become utterly stale.

What fascinates me more about the sequence of events is everything but the fact that he was a 27 year old virgin.

When the photograph of Christopher Cleary came up in one of my daily traipses through the Internet, all I could see was an almost emblematically sad American. Someone whose life had been molded by the late-capitalist Sunbelt world -- making him one of many, of course, who had come out of a landscape of Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Chang's, the persistent smells of fryer grease and Yankee Candle Company, the rows of townhouses hemmed in by dwarfish pine trees, vinyl banners reading "RENTING NOW! CALL xxx-xxx-xxxx!" limply flapping in the wind. One of many shaped by the ideologies that prop up this purely marketed world. The difference is that he was foolish enough to announce that he was going to mow down women.

This being our current iteration of networked existence, we, the general public now have the ability to probe his social-media personality, and you see the way in which he tried, himself, to mold his persona into a brand. Even his threat of murder was accompanied by sad-face and angry-face responses.

 His Facebook Intro was reported as saying "I'm Kris. from Denver, sports pa announcer, free spirit traveler and a lonely Starbucks lover."

It's a bit like the "short story" famously misattributed to Hemingway -- "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." In that 15-word statement, a life, a picture springs forth. There's something terribly sad and desperate-seeming about the way he switched the "Ch" to a "K," about the way he self-describes as a sports announcer (despite seemingly not being one outside of his own mind), the way he describes as a free-spirit traveler despite the fact that he seems like he's so ensconced in the suburban world and just cribbed the term from a legion of Instagrammers, the fact that he unironically announces a love for Starbucks, a chain that tried 30 years ago to seem like the sort of place cosmopolites would congregate, and which now is just another fast-food joint by the side of the highway, but the way he pairs it with "lonely" seems to conjure up some self-image of a lonely café dweller, a trope that has been a cliché for at least 100 years, but this time buying into a marketing campaign.

Or look to his Youtube channel, with its Intro video showing him cheesing and posing in front of arenas (in such exotic destinations as Las Vegas and Salt Lake City) and simulated backdrops of palm trees, special-effect dollar bills falling over the screen. You see his videos of him eating fast food, CRAZY MCDONALDS BURGER MUKBANG!!!!, and so forth. And you see his painfully superficial analysis of coming sports games, his attempts to mimic the cadences and hand gestures of ESPN talking heads -- "I find it so difficult how the Patriots seem to be in Superbowl contention every year, I'm not saying they're a bad team, but man, like, can't they just give somebody else a chance."

It's the voice of someone who has been told the great lie of the Internet era, which is of course an extension of the great lie of American optimism -- that you too can be a star. All you have to do is implore enough people to hit like and subscribe.

I should hazard right now that it's best not to prematurely project a narrative onto news events. But at the same time, it's hard not to see certain connections.

In the same way that Travis Bickles in Taxi Driver came to represent a specific kind of post-Vietnam malaise and the quixotic male response to this malaise, the Christopher Cleary case seems to be so specifically of an era. This is 2019 in America writ large.

Alone and adrift in a world of ephemera, unable to find personal romantic or financial success, but inundated in images of the same, one particular man, in the grand tradition of failed men, threatened to translate that failure into violence towards women.

I am not trying to defend this would-be Elliott Rodger, and I'm not trying to sympathize with him, but I am trying to illustrate that there's something horrifyingly logical about how the whole series of events manifested itself.
 
I'm reading various articles in various outlets covering the issue. Regardless of format, every page is accompanied by "Sponsored Stories," in which everything is "legendary," "insane," "genius," "stunning," "tragic." Every stock visual, every aggregated piece of bullshit, every mindlessly assembled listicle, every thinly veiled scam masquerading as a news story that occurred just minutes from where you live, every EPIC WIN and TOTAL CRINGE all repeating themselves immediately below, the immense Ouroboros serpent of our image industry.

Fear of Flying

I had thought that Mitski's “Last Words of a Shooting Star” was a calming song to listen to while waiting at the gate, half-asleep, with its pretty guitar line, its quivering vocals, until I listened to the lyrics: “All of this turbulence was not forecasted, apologies from the intercom, and I am relieved that I left my room tidy, they'll think of me kindly when they come for my things, they'll never know how I'd stared at the dark in that room with no thoughts like a blood-sniffing shark, and while my dreams made music in the night, carefully, I was going to live.”

It's been a quick series of events lately. Time zones flash by. I see the world from above, when I'm lucky. Traces of snow over the Canadian prairies. Endless parched flatlands in Turkmenistan. A labyrinth of impossibly deep canyons somewhere in the Afghan desert which, if it was anywhere less remote, would be world-famous.

For various and complex reasons, I've been flying a lot. A total of 15 flights over the past three months, including three trans-Pacifics, one trans-Eurasian, and one trans-Atlantic – I'm counting that one because while Reykjavik is something of a halfway point, with its winter vibes and little bottles of brennivin at duty-free, my final destination was Chicago, so it was basically a trans-Atlantic.

Bangkok to Oslo, Oslo to Paris, Amsterdam to Reykjavik, Reykjavik to Chicago, Des Moines to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to Seattle, Seattle to Taipei, Taipei to Bangkok, Bangkok to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Dallas, Dallas to Kansas City, Des Moines to Denver, Denver to Seattle, Seattle to Tokyo, Tokyo to Bangkok.

That's not to count the numerous trains, buses, courtesy shuttles, and long drives in private, taxi, and rental cars as part of the process, nor does it count the numerous taxi and subway rides that take up my life, given my choice of a city-center existence, which many would consider absurd given the fact that I'm rapidly approaching middle age.

I am flying by air not just because I love travel – which I do – but because of various personal reversals, and above all else, the fact that for as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be somewhere else, whether that “somewhere else” is my adult self wondering where I'll move next, or my kindergarten self wishing he was digging up treasure and gunning down Nazis alongside Indiana Jones.

Probably the best-known movie about the fundamentally evasive nature of a life defined by travel, Up in the Air, wasn't an especially good movie – serviceable, but not especially good – but one thing it got consistently right was the dread feeling of transitory space, of departure lounges, airport bars, tinny music in Marriott Courtyards and Doubletrees, stodgy smoked salmon on stodgy bagels, of being simultaneously sleepless and tired as well as overcaffeinated and twitchy.

What I couldn't sympathize with though – although I realize it's regrettably a real thing – was the George Clooney character's obsession with the tangential benefits of travel, the accumulations of frequent flyer miles and platinum cards, the rights to use express lanes and VIP rental cars, all the little titles granted to little men with business cards.

For someone who loves travel, I hate flying, always have. This is not an original idea – most people do, I think. The uncomfortable seats, the security lines, the constant reminders that I am a valued customer even as I'm treated like a veal calf. And the perks and add-ons, even when I get them, fail to comfort me. From the moment I enter the queue at check-in, I feel as if I am entering the vortex.

I come out hours later. Generally, if I'm flying clockwise I'm fine, but counterclockwise, I'm likely to be in trouble. I carry that weird, jittery energy out with me, and small things seem ready to set me off. Maybe it's the falling concrete that forms the “wall” of the metro station at Barbès-Rochechouart in Paris. Maybe it's the ersatz localism at Chiang-Kai Shek Airport in Taipei. Or maybe it's the Dad humor scrawled next to the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny drop at a store on the drive in from the Kansas City Airport after a 24-hour series of flights -- “Take a penny, that's fine. Take two, get a job!!!” – while the local constabulary busied itself harassing a random black man in the parking lot.

After flying, all seems to be a disgusting, farcical facsimile.

I thought I was fine, after my time in the vortex ended. I thought I had, more or less, beaten jet lag. I thought I had balanced the appropriate quanta of alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, THC, CBD, alprazolam, and melatonin that would ensure a graceful dismount, a return to everyday life. A swim, a little bowl of noodles for breakfast, a bottle of vodka to infuse with guavas, mastic resin, and cedar tips.

When I arrive in Bangkok, I find a city trapped under a thick blanket of smog as the cooling winds from the Sea of Japan failed to blow in, a high-pressure zone preventing the normal particulates – organic molecules from vehicle exhaust, heavy metals, and the like – from rising and dispersing, with talks of cloud-seeding operations to relieve the Beijing levels of industrial hydrocarbons in the atmosphere.

And on Saturday night, when I went to bed, I quickly lost myself in an 18 hour passout, not waking up until after sunset the following day.

I tried and failed to fall asleep the following night. “Well, another long dark night of the soul,” I told myself, my own bed-gnawing misery probably bearing little in common with what Saint John of the Cross had in mind when he'd coined the term la noche oscura del alma.

But when the sun rose, and I was still whole, if sweaty and on edge, before my apartment building was shaken by the sudden roar of helicopters.

Lying there, I thought of the climax scene of Through a Glass Darkly, the spider crawling through the wall, the helicopter flying past, the door opening with no one behind it. Karin, our heroine in the midst of her stands up calmly before running into the corner, screaming.

I was frightened. The door opened. But the god that came out was a spider. He came towards me and I saw his face. It was a terrible, stony face.

Was the door open, more now than the night before? And was that a spider on the far wall, descending between the curtain and the first shaft of morning light?

Montmartre

Perhaps it's the memory I return to the most. I'm 16 years old, the summer heat is stifling – it's 2003, a year of record heat over much of the region. The elderly are dying, forests are on fire. And yet here, above Paris on the heights of Montmartre, on the steps of Sacré-Coeur, I can breathe, and a gentle breeze is blowing over a cityscape bristling with steeples and chimneys, a light smell of jasmine on the wind. The sun is slowly setting over the Champs-Élysées, guitarists play, couples hold each other, and I'm away from home, with the money I've squirreled away from summer farm jobs, and I read the line from Italo Calvino that makes me gasp:

“An oracle was questioned about the mysterious bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet and the city. One of the two objects – the oracle replied – has the form the gods gave the starry sky and the orbits in which the worlds revolve; the other is an approximate reflection, like every human creation.

For some time the augurs had been sure that the carpet's harmonious pattern was of divine origin. The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no controversy. But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness.”

The bells clang as the sun disappears, a collective sigh, and the awkward American teenage boy knows he will be thinking of this forever.

The name “Montmartre” had always held some magic for me. As a young child, I saw reproduced images of the paintings of Maurice Utrillo, showing the haunted-looking streets of the neighborhood, in a light that could be either dusk or dawn. And not long after, I remember being at some pâtisserie in some American city – and seeing an elegant-looking pastry called a Montmartre, next to the little Sachertortes and Réligieuses and other things that I'd never heard of.

The name retained its cachet, something about its association with various -isms of the artistic and philosophical worlds, even in the way some kind of vague notion of Parisian bohemianism was presented to us in the moronic textbook sidebars in high school French class (you know the kind – “C'est Patrick. Il est un élève. Il aime aller au café”).

But it wasn't until I climbed those steps, saw the city laid out before me, and just as important, sat down with the book that would probably inform my life and thinking more than any other, that the name truly meant something to me.

So it was preserved in amber for me for so many years, another sepia-toned memory of another place, another time.

I come up the stairs at the Pigalle station in October 2018, into a light rain after a long journey.

Part of me was somehow expecting the worst, and the din of voices of 20 year olds from my homeland wasn't helping. Nor was the Steak 'n Shake that had popped up on the Boulevard de Clichy. Nor was the self-conscious supposed naughtiness of Pigalle, nor the crowds of mouthbreather tourists coming out of the Moulin Rouge, expecting whatever ooh-la-la bullshit the came to Paris for.

I walked around town all of the next couple of days. A lovely meal of rabbit in mustard sauce and escargots à la gascogne, balanced with the motherfucker who caught my jeans on a metal bar, ripping the knee open. Curling up with a book at Shakespeare & Co., knowing full well that James Joyce almost certainly had sat there, balanced out with the braying crowds at the Musée d'Orsay of what I termed the 5Ms (that's Minnesotan Moms on a Mission for Monet and Merlot). The delight in the fact that the Panthéon was carefully restoring extensive murals of French victories over Moors and in the Crusades (preserving the long-standing Gallic love of casual racism and Islamophobia) and venerating the body of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (preserving the long-standing Gallic love of sexual deviants with grand and unworkable theories of human nature who wrote like whiny high school sophomores).

And at the end of the day, I walked back to the top of Montmartre.

I followed each street up, up, up, the chill of the fall evening setting in between the fairy-lit streets, the air of the neighborhood taking on that of a street carnival more and more. Groups of unbelievably attractive young people sitting on the steps drinking wine, a brass band, all in fezzes, playing a cover of Serge Gainsbourg's “Je T'Aime... Moi Non Plus” (which Bangkokians may know as one of my 2:00 a.m. shitfaced-at-a-Japanese-karaoke-bar standards). And lastly, at the very crown of the hill, pop-up stands selling wine and regional foods, singers and guitarists, a beardy hypeman in a striped Breton shirt (Mr. Too Damn French over here) getting in some crowdwork.

What shocked me the most was that these didn't seem to be tourists. None of the conversation was in English. This wasn't the image of the city, it was the city itself.

The next day, I climbed the steps again, to say my goodbye to the place. It was a different Montmartre, the Montmartre of quiet, swept streets and the smell of morning baguettes, the Velvet Underground's “Sunday Morning” drifting from a cafe. On the steps made famous by Brassaï's photos, the assorted detritus of the previous night littered the stairs, broken glasses and wine bottles, a few revelers still up, a XXXtentacion (of all people) song playing from an open window, disembodied voices.

That week, Paris had decided it was in mourning for Charles Aznavour, the father of French chanson, and a singer whom I never quite understood the appeal of. But his 1965 hit about life in Montmartre, “La Bohème” was a hit because the bohemia he sang about was the nostalgic one everyone had thought/wished they had had, once, even if the ending line was a bit of a screw-you.

La bohème, la bohème
Ça ne veut plus rien dire du tout

“It means nothing at all,” he sings, the closer to line after simpering line about lilacs and café au lait.

I don't think anyone can say much of anything new about Paris. It's like New York. Most of the time someone tries, it comes across like a voiceover from Gossip Girl.

My feelings are the same, as rapturous as they might be.

The unfailingly arrogant and tiresome Ernest Hemingway famously called Paris “a moveable feast,” but it has always struck me more as a Xanadu, a place always beyond the horizon for us homely, try-hard self-loathing Americans.

And yet up on the now-deserted steps in the morning sunlight, I didn't want to leave. Sighing, I walked back down the hill, gathered my bags, and took the Métro to the Gare du Nord, looked at my ticket. Bruxelles-Midi. A new country. I took my seat and set off north.