what do you do when you have trouble sleeping?
i’ve rarely had full on, sustained insomnia, but ever since college, maybe once a month, i’ll have a terrible night of sleep. it’s trouble instantiating sleep, for all my insomnia enthusiasts out there, and so i’m often very conscious, aware the whole time
i never know what to do
at best, i’ll read. i love to read. strong memories of books i’ve read late: the metamorphosis with a cat on my girlfriends floor, george perec curled on a futon under half light and humming of an air conditioning, librivox recordings of greek dramas sometimes, as though amateurish retellings of child murder might help me drift off. always important: laying or sitting in some position uncomfortable. half-wakefulness is dull like a pin through felt then skin, so ya gotta exaggerate all the sensations
tonight: a blog. legs up on the back side of the couch, eyes dry, i present an image of myself into the world
Making Obsidian my CMS
I am so slow at updating, so lax in this blog. I have even stopped posting translations, though some are done, wasting away on my harddrive right now. (apologies to my mostly imagined audience)
why? cause this is a static site, so i have to work to post things. sucks
instead: i’m copying my whole-ass blog into obsidian, which i use on my phone
daily posts?
daily posts
perhaps
you could swap 'em out (2026-25 weekly post)
i bought a whiteboard last week, in order to be professional. nothing is more professional than the ability to erase. there is some kind of message in this, something like truth
what i mean to say is some of my agent submissions have, as you say, “timed out”, so im looking at more agents, more publication attempts, and i’m attempting to be more strategic and ordered this round of submissions. people speak of cargo cults as if they were a bad thing, but organization like this soothes me thru small failures. at least i’ve tried
(i do, to be fair, believe in the novel i’m sending out: The Girl. It’s just a good deal non-commercial: surreal and confrontational, with no named characters as such, so it’s almost definitionally an uphill battle. this year i’ve been submitting directly to smaller presses as well, on the hope that random luck gets my stuff read. its hard!)
life: a week of allergies. since my last update i’ve been diagnosed with cat allergies “pretty bad”, and it’s also shedding season, so i’ve spent a lot of time with puffy eyes, wandering the days like the before in an allergy commercial. television, antihistamines, dragon quest. maybe why my similes are so dully television commercial now
next week im going to fl to help my dad after a surgery. preppin for that
Sudden Death, by Haruki Murakami
my translation of the 34th story (of 99) of 夢で会いましょう [Meet Me in a Dream] by Haruki Murakami and Shigesato Itoi, not guaranteed to be accurate. see the intro post to read more!
Once I got my glasses, all was clear. I hadn’t realized how bad my vision had been. One glance around and it was like I’d entered a new world.
Things I’d seen unclearly became clear, of course, but also I was seeing things previously invisible. In this second category, for example, was Big Gorilla.
It’s been just four months since I got my glasses, and I’ve already seen Big Gorilla seven times. Per month, then, that evens out to about 1.5 encounters with Big Gorilla—two times each on Monday, Thursday, and Friday, and on a lonely Tuesday only once. Does it go somewhere else over the weekend, or is that coincidence?
Big Gorilla’s not out on every corner, only some—always near the Ginza line. As of yet, per my daily journals:
- Omote-sando (3 sightings)
- Aoyama-itchome (2)
- Toranomon (1)
- Kyobashi (1)
This is nothing more than happenstance really. It’s only the couple times I’ve seen. I never, for example, take the Marunouchi. Big Gorilla’s free to take whatever route it/they wants, via whichever platform.
By the way, is Big Gorilla an it or more a they? I can’t anything of its/their number, in other words whether I’ve seen one gorilla seven times, or rather seven individual gorillas. Glasses may have made my world more legible, but they’re no magic or even telescopic thing. I can’t see close enough to memorize patterns in Big Gorilla’s fur, for example. Not that I’d be expected to, I guess.
The clearest look I got was Big Gorilla in Kyobashi. It was on the corner near a Kinpodo warehouse, visible from the platform on the side toward Nihonbashi. I saw its hairy hands clung round a wrench, waiting for somebody to appear. It crouched on the sidewalk, motionless. If not nor the occasional puff of breath just visible near its mouth in the clod air, I might have believed it taxidermied, but there it was—alive, ready to strike, to bash in skulls.
Whoever came around would have no clue, just a sudden bonk and they’d be done for.
Oh, but I couldn’t stay long. I have things to do. Whatever happened? I’ve no clue.
translator's note: (incidental:) i just glasses too, for the first time in my life, translating this story. coincidence? or Big Gorilla?
(real:) i made a big localization change here on this one, by titling the creature Big Gorilla. in the original, its really just an animal name. But English, having plurals, didn't agree so well with the number ambiguity at the start of this, so I had a proper bit of proper noun fun with it. any other translation errors are likely mistakes
Condor, by Haruki Murakami
my translation of the 32th story (of 99) of 夢で会いましょう [Meet Me in a Dream] by Haruki Murakami and Shigesato Itoi, not guaranteed to be accurate. see the intro post to read more!
—July 26th, you shall not step outside, the fortune teller told me.
—How about an arm? I asked, my terror mounting.
—An arm?
—Yeah, say I want to get the morning paper? Can I reach for something?
—I guess an arm won’t matter. As long as you keep your legs in.
—If I do step out though… Well, what happens?
—The unimaginable.
—Unimaginable?
—Yes.
—As in… Will a giant ant-eater come eat me?
—No, of course not.
—Why not?
—Because. You’ve already imagined it.
Of course…
I didn’t especially believe what the fortune teller told me, but come July 26th I locked my door and kept inside, drank a few beers, listened to a few Doors records. Unimaginable nightmares ran through my imagination like wild. The more I imagined, the less was unimaginable.
In the end though, after all, such thought was pointless. No matter how many terrors I imagined, as soon as I thought one up is was by definition imaginable.
Fair enough.
July 26th had to be a beautiful day. Sun spread across the surface of the earth, or blessed it, warming people out of doors down to their metaphysical depths. Children’s voices carried from the pool around the corner.
The pool: a full twenty-five meters… wonderfully cold…
No—there could be an anaconda in it.
Anaconda, I wrote in my notebook.
Thus the anaconda was no longer possible. I’d imagined it.
Time went on, shadows grew long, then evening happened. Seventeen empty beer cans on the table, twenty-one records listened to then put away. I’d become immensely bored.
Seven o’clock, the phone rang.
—Wanna come get drinks? so and so asked me.
—I can’t, I said.
—C’mon, we’ll make it an occasion.
What kind of occasion? I thought.
Acute alcohol poisoning, I wrote.
Eleven-fifty, the phone rang again. This time a woman.
—I’ve been thinking about us, she said. Our break up…
—Uh huh, I said.
—What you said the other night, you know, I’ve just been going over it over and over again, she said.
—Uh huh.
—Please… let’s meet tonight.
STDs, pregnancy, I wrote.
Eleven-fifty-five, another call—the fortune teller.
—I see you haven’t left the house, she said.
—Of course, I said. But tell me, what was this unimaginable danger I had to hide from. What was this for?
—What about a condor?
—A condor? I said.
—Did you ever think about a condor?
—No, I answered.
—Well then, it was a condor. It swooped down and grabbed you by the spine then dropped you off, oh, in the ocean, far away.
A condor, huh?
The clock struck midnight.
translator's note: i've missed the murakami ones, his voice fits well with mine. if i were trying to imitate itoi in english (as he does here in japanese), id sound like this