Notebook

A couple of years ago, I put together this video mood board for the story I've been writing and rewriting forever—I hope to finish it once and for all this summer.

The song is M83's "Don't Save Us From the Flames," and clips are from several films that have altered my thinking, especially Poltergeist, which probably made an entire generation afraid of television static, as well as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Mother, Apocalypse Now, Audition, A Face in the Crowd, Titane, Max Headroom, Night of the Hunter, Stalker, The Running Man, Nocturnal Animals, In the Mood for Love, and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring.

Last night I finally got around to checking the mail, which I rarely do because it’s usually filled with bills and sad advertisements. Inside, I found a small box from Prince Edward Island, Canada. Peter Rukavina, whose blog I’ve enjoyed for years, had emailed a month ago asking if he could set my instructions to myself in metal type and letterpress them. Of course I’d be delighted—I’m thrilled when anyone spends their brief time on this planet reading this station, let alone considers working with it by hand. 

And he did it. And it’s magnificent. The pebbled texture of the paper, the pleasurable ivory hue, the heft of the ink—it’s impossible to capture the sensation of this little booklet in a photograph or words. Which is the whole point.

Thank you, Peter.

In Greek mythology, dreams were often personified as black-winged demons that enter our sleeping minds like bats to deliver messages from the gods.

An ongoing archive of my dreams:

• Another tangled, richly plotted dream about picking up my teeth in the street while a gigantic man told me he was raised by a mountain and that I did not understand how to live. When I asked if I could bum a cigarette, he tossed me into the sea. I swam into the dark until I was rescued by an inflatable child who cried like a ticking clock. I woke up wondering if I would live my life any differently if I measured my age in days or hours instead of years.
• Last night’s dream brought me to the ruins of a university where we played chess with pieces of tandoori meat. “You cannot withdraw from this game without suicide,” said my veiled opponent.
• A fire destroyed the library, and I picked my way through the ruins. Among the empty metal shelves, people were doing grotesque things with each other in the dark—every act of violence and perversion—until they were flaying themselves into strips of flesh. I ran away, and when I returned, I realized they had figured out how to make books with their bodies, to replace the classics that were lost.
• I discovered my consciousness was powered by someone forced to run on a treadmill.
• A dream in which my mother was alive and serving a delicious tea brewed from stones. I woke up pondering the feedback loop of life: is there anything we eat or drink that wasn’t once alive?
• I discovered a new substance called ‘onesium’, which are the forgetting cells.
• My father won a silver medal at the Olympics. He was the first man with a lung transplant to medal in the hurdles, at first we cheered but then we cried because we knew this was not true.
• A complicated dream about whether a mental breakdown occurs gradually or slowly. The debate took place in a crowded waiting room where I could not find a seat.
• I ducked in and out of tiny record stores, spinning racks of cassettes and flipping through stacks of vinyl, frantically trying to find my favorite song. Turns out I was kneeling on it the whole time. Perhaps this dream was the result of my anxiety about having so many unheard songs in my queue—the lack of connection to an artifact, the impossibility of ever getting my head around music again.
• A doctor told me I had a rare condition and no matter how far I walked, it would take one hour and twenty-two minutes.
• C. and I watched a stuttering videotape. Somebody warned us that we shouldn’t watch the ending because it shows how we’ll die. Everyone in the movie had the flu and was lying down to die. We stopped the tape. She sniffled. I coughed. I wanted to run, but she shook her head and took my hand. I put on a record—A Million Miles to Earth—and we laid down.
• Another dream about meat. I was cooking it for important guests but no matter how long I fried it or how much I seasoned it, it had no flavor.
• I drank perfume and had a minor role in a detective show in which none of us could remember the name of the president between Johnson and Ford.
• At the hospital my father threw a fit, fighting with the nurses and hollering slurs. I'd never seen him like this. He tried to smoke a syringe. "But you quit smoking twenty years ago," I said. I look into his eyes and realized I’d been trying to rescue the wrong man.
• I dreamt that each of my fingers had its own consciousness.
• C. and I had a baby and it called me by my first and last name the moment it was born. We lived in a world made entirely of bread. The ground was soft and tasty, and it was wonderful at first—and then it wasn’t.
• A dream about something called digital atonement.
• I was driving over hundreds of dogs, their bodies kerchunking beneath the wheels, and I could hear them howling. I sped up to put them out of their misery. The car veered onto a lawn, where my parents were moving into a new home. They were older than I would ever see them and I stood on the sidewalk, happy but frightened because they were not supposed to be alive.
• I dreamt about the infamous “dishwasher episode” of a critically acclaimed drama.
• I was on my knees, picking spaghetti out of the carpet, and the noodles turned into all the people who would ever want to hurt C., a long line of cruel men and a few women. I led them into a building and was given a choice: I could flip a switch and kill everyone who might harm my beloved or set them free—the promise of safety versus the possibility of grief.
• I often find my father within the labyrinthine architecture of parking structures. I once woke in tears from a dream about hugging him after he told me I could always find him there. I asked him about the afterlife and he smiled. This was the closest I’ve come to experiencing a visitation.
• With my mother, I tend to find her in small houses or remote cabins. She is living a new life and she is happy. I do not intrude.
• I dreamt I painted a picture and could not tell if it was god or the devil because the image was too big for its frame.

Schopenhauer comes to mind: “What is to be expected of heads even the wisest of which is every night the scene of the strangest and the most senseless dreams, and which is expected to take up its meditations again on awakening from them?”

The idea of converting my reading life into pixels on a screen unsettles me. Books are meant to be highlighted and dog-eared, their spines cracked and lying facedown on the kitchen table. They become part of the scenery and signposts for our memories. Here are some of the books I've read, many of which I recommend. (My strongest recommendations live here.)

2025

• So Far Gone, Jess Walter
• The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami
• Orbital, Samantha Harvey
• The Cabin at the End of the World, Paul Tremblay

2024

• In the Dust of this Planet: The Horror of Philosophy, Eugene Thacker
• The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula Le Guin
• Hum, Helen Phillips
• The Anomaly, Hervé Le Tellier
• Recursion, Blake Crouch
• The North Water, Ian McGuire

2023

• Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam
• The New House, David Leo Rice
• The Power, Naomi Alderman

2022

• The Throwback Special, Chris Bachelder
• The Fifth Child, Doris Lessing
• The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson

2021

• Shadowbahn, Steve Erickson
• The Memory Police, Yōko Ogawa

2020

• The Children of Men, PD James
• The Stand, Stephen King
• Severance, Ling Ma

2017

• Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
• The Woman in the Dunes, Kōbō Abe

2016

• Cruising Paradise, Sam Shepard

1. Wait an hour before responding, ideally two.
2. Before going to bed, leave a note on my desk that tells me to do one creative thing in the morning before looking at any screens.
3. It can always use more reverb.
4. Avoid people who take themselves seriously.
5. Write it down immediately. I will forget.
6. Whatever I'm making better be fun because I'm certainly not doing it for the money.
7. Do not confuse my beliefs, complaints, and politics with having a personality.
8. The best advice I ever received was from a profane old Buddha in New Orleans: “Opinions kill motherfuckers. Experience saves lives.”
9. Make it a game: "How quickly can I let this go?"
10. Algorithmic recommendations are poison, cf. "the freedom to choose what is always the same." Never forget the joy of learning to deal with a piece of music or writing or art on its terms, even if it takes a while.
11. For every hobby and pastime—music, running, movies, photography—there’s always a middle-aged man nearby taking it way too seriously. Don't be that guy.
12. Artificial intelligence cannot make cool shit, but it can help me learn how to make cool shit.
13. Look out for the moment when I make a situation about me. It's usually not.
14. Waking up early does not make me a dork.

See also: the heavy metal version from Peter Rukavina.

I wish I appreciated running when I was younger: the art of breathing, moving like a metronome. Now it’s a war against entropy, which I suppose is an art of its own. I run at night so nobody can see me cry. Here are some songs for this—updated frequently, organized alphabetically, and tracks appear, disappear, and reappear as needed. A Spotify playlist is below.

Aphex Twin - Tha
A stone running classic, thanks to a steady basketball beat beneath plush tones of optimism. Remember how exciting a technological future felt back in ’92? I wonder if I’ll ever feel that way again.

Bassvictim - Canary Wharf Drift
The sound of everything at the same time. I hope this is what the kids are into these days.

Cranes - Beautiful Friend
One of the most bighearted road songs that I know: 1960s drums, surf guitar, and the way Alison Shaw sings “our love was special, our love was strange.” I will always remember the night C. gave me this song on a Maxell cassette a few days before I fell in love with her.

Beautiful Friend

0:00

/194.6122448979592

1×

Demdike Stare - Hashshashin Chant
A sinister low-end and a klaxon in the distance herald an otherworldly swirl of voices and drums that evoke a conjuring, even an exorcism, which running sometimes is.

Demdike Stare - Hashshashin Chant

0:00

/380.1338775510204

1×

Dj Niraha - Lali Lale
Lale Pishmari sings in a language I do not understand, but the intent is clear: to speak to the limbic, to make the listener feel cool and sleek. When she bursts into laughter in the middle of a verse, it is not calculated or cool; it’s the sound of someone breaking character, and now the song is truly alive—a document of the unpredictable, an artifact of the human. It’s the sound of joyful abandon, even if my running style is anything but.

Drissi El-Abbassi - Zedti Laadab Aliya
Skeletal psychedelica with a wild voice that wraps it in flesh and blood. When the clapping starts, it’s impossible not to pick up the pace.

Fever Ray - If I Had a Heart (Fuck Buttons Remix)
Ideal for an ugly run in the rain, gloriously dramatic in the mud and the grey, and perfect for picking up some springtime mileage once the weather is no longer fuck-you degrees.

M83 - Don't Save Us From the Flames (Superpitcher Remix)
Anthony Gonzalez’s third album remains the godhead of stadium anthems for wiping away your tears beneath neon skies, and Superpitcher stretches it into church.

Dont Save Us From The Flames Superpitcher remix

0:00

/626.9333333333333

1×

Negro Dinero - We Must Unite or Die
I imagine a hypeman on a PA system at the end of the world—lasers fill the sky and he’s encouraging the crowd to unite against our robot overlords in one last gasp of humanity. Anyway, this track gets me moving.

Orbital - Halycon and On and On
My guiltiest of pleasures. Never fails to cheer me up.

Saint Abdullah & Eomac - Kiarostami's Stash
The perfect song to kick off a run. Built from crowd noise, an encouraging emcee, and a loop that sounds like a false memory of Mobb Deep's Shook Ones Pt. II, it builds into a loopy haze that provides a gentle motivational chug.

Thirteenth Floor Elevators - Slip Inside This House
Roky Erickson kisses God’s forehead while an acid-eating jug-player keeps the ship from going down. This song has its own weather system.

Thomas Brinkmann - 2Suns
Like being pulled along by an industrial strength piece of elastic while a voice like stones tells me to keep up.

One year of incense ash.

Eleven months and one day of incense ash.

Ten months and seven days of incense ash. (This time with a bit of smoke.)

Nine and a half months of incense ash.

Seven months and five days of incense ash.

Six months of incense ash.

Five months of incense ash.

Four months of incense ash.

Three months of incense ash.

Two months of incense ash.

One month of incense ash.

Assembled from the ephemera in my suitcase. Made with letter paper, scissors, glue, and the scanner on my telephone.

Sweet potato balls, socks, salted grapes, electric fans, live shrimp, umbrellas, anything you can imagine doing to a squid, mobile phones, beef noodle soup, blue jeans, games of mahjong played for stuffed animals, pepper steak, an archery range with real arrows, quail eggs, the spoiled gasoline reek of stinky tofu, corn on the cob, wedding rings, live gerbils, flashlights, chili oil, a crepe filled with ice cream and peanut dust and cilantro, carrot smoothies, cookware, a lady screaming cheesecake! at my very white self, pajamas, dumplings filled with every flavor of flesh, toy robots, sweet sausages wrapped in sticky rice, live goldfish, strawberries, luggage, anything that can become a kebab, toolboxes, scallion pancakes, flip flops, a sweaty man auctioning remote-controlled cars, fresh meat, blouses, turnip cakes, hairdryers, eclairs, intestines, and hats.

The idea of an animatronic version of eighteen levels of hell sounds funny, and for the first five or six levels, it is. But repetition nudges comedy into absurdity, which can quickly descend into horror.

Like the sinners it torments, Madou Daitian Temple is trapped in time. Built in 1979, its sun-bleached paint and lonely vending machines evoke the tender melancholy I felt while visiting Coney Island on a February afternoon: The memory of families with a picnic basket, wowed by the crowds. The ghosts of honeymooners spending more than they should. Madou Daitan Temple occupies a similar zone, its heyday etched in the face of the ancient woman who collects $1.20 for admission to hell and another $1.20 to visit heaven.

Each level of hell is ruled by a king who governs demons that specialize in tongue ripping, disembowelment, and gouging. They could do with some fresh oil in their gears, but their squeaky joints pay dividends in hell. (Anyone with a memory of Chuck E. Cheese knows animatronics are high-grade nightmare fuel.) The eeriest quality belongs to the contemporary clothes of the sinners—blue jeans and khakis conjure a local fever dream rather than a mythic otherworld.

Video seemed like the best way to capture the relentlessness of this particualar hell, so I made this inventory.

Who is this place for? Is it a cautionary tale for the believer who might take a wrong moral turn? A godsend for frazzled parents who want to tame their children? Or is it the equivalent of rubbernecking at a wreck, an attraction that offers the cheap rush of self-righteousness, an opportunity for those who aren’t selling adulterated pharmaceuticals to feel smug in knowing this suffering will not be theirs?

And what is hell for?

I think it speaks to a craving for justice, the need to know the monsters among us— even if they have escaped the punishment of our earthbound institutions—will pay what’s owed in the afterlife. And it’s hard to imagine a rougher hell than being trapped with a squeaky machine performing the same mindless gesture until the end of time.

As for heaven? Lots of tea and board games. The human brain is endlessly inventive when it comes to suffering, but the prospect of eternal salvation seems to leave us at a loss.

You have to really want to get to the island of Naoshima. A bullet train from Tokyo across five hundred miles in two hours. A sluggish taxi ride along a coastal road with five thousand stoplights. A ferry among the islands with muted freighters on the horizon, cutting through the fog.

Squid ink curry is my new favorite food.

Eliminating photography at museums is a righteous policy, although I was initially vexed by the need to take pictures to prove I had witnessed a piece of art. Nowadays, taking a picture is how we see an image or event, an amplified echo of Susan Sontag’s declaration in ’77 that “today everything exists to end in a photograph.” But this phantom twitch quickly faded as we moved through Tadao Ando’s severe concrete halls, and I was delighted to discover I was experiencing art with strangers in a way I hadn’t since the early 2000s. We weren’t ducking out of the way of each other’s shots. We lingered longer. Even the roomful of Monets held my interest.

But how to deal with a gigantic marble orb on a concrete staircase surrounded by dozens of golden three-pronged statues? To start, we moved around it slowly. We hunted for patterns and imagined the rituals that might occur in such a place. We lingered long enough that its strangeness became familiar, and soon we were dealing with it on its terms.

I enjoyed the ritual of removing my shoes before entering a gallery. It was somehow both formal and intimate. And quieter.

James Turrell's room of hyper-blue light gnawed at my peripheral vision until I was on the edge of a big-budget hallucination, unsure if he meant for me to be seeing what I was seeing.

We walked through a tiny silent town that smelled like a sauna. The wooden buildings were elegantly charred, and a sign above a shuttered door said Fortune Favors a Merry Home.

Fifty-two degrees is the threshold between a light and a heavy sweater.

For the first two nights, we dined next to a stern young couple who were always holding hands. The boy wore an oversized black coat, she floated within a billowy skirt, and I never saw them speak. They looked like they stepped out of an Aubrey Beardsley print, and I’m surprised how heartened I was to see that Romanticism is still kicking.

I was moved by a hunched boulder that appeared to pray before a glossy sheet of metal.

A line from Tatsuo Miyajima caught my attention: Keep changing. Connect with everything. Continue forever. I purchased a copy of his sketchbook, and C. bought a letter-opener shaped like a bird.

I always get drowsy on ferries. It’s such a fight to stay awake. The amniotic rocking of the waves, I guess.

Japan has the best coffee, especially the cans of iced black charcoal.

On the island of Teshima, we took a long rainy walk down an empty road to get our heartbeats archived for posterity at Christian Boltanski's Les Archives du Cœur, where a lone lightbulb in a dark hallway pulses to the beat of any one of the 90,000 archived heartbeats, generating the effect of a sinister rave in a forgotten factory.

You’re given two attempts to record your heartbeat. My first recording was a slow industrial thump that made me grateful for all the time I've spent running, but there was a slight scuffle against my shirt, so I tried again. The second recording was a disaster, and now the sound of a microphone snaking through a noisy forest of chest hair has been archived for eternity.

I believe the function of art is to create a situation where language falls apart, and this happened at Teshima. An absolute hush came upon me when I stepped into the strange curves of Ryue Nishizawa and Rei Naito's Matrix. Beneath the oval of a cloudy sky, droplets of water darted across the concrete to join larger rivulets that fed into a puddle. It's a remarkable feat to make water look alien.

But is there a correlation between the effort required to view a work of art and the degree of my appreciation for it? Perhaps this is why I've never felt anything close to the sublime while flicking through images on a screen.

Is a digital sublime possible?

In America, the men's restroom is typically a site of unconscionable body horror. But in Japan, even the public restroom at a far-flung bus station was immaculate. My home country is fucking barbaric.

A resonant moment from Bruce Nauman’s One Hundred Live and Die says "Try and live."