3 p.m. - eating rice sticks

Sex with ____ tonight, and my stomach's a mess. Why is that?

It's winter here in New Haven, the snow hasn't come out yet, and the only thing to show for the season is this persistent lack of flavor in the air. Scents, rather. They grind to a halt come November, which makes garbage pickup a bit easier but strips the life out of everything else. Winter makes me miss New York. You can walk anywhere and it's fucking cold, so you put on your headphones and everything unfolds. It's like a big silent movie, walking through traffic, especially. Traffic is weird when there's no sound attached.

That's where I am now: New Haven. Cultivating something like domesticity -- which is strange. Recording life in an academic town, when school's been out for awhile. I walked by Toad's today and bought coffee at the store, and just kind of sat around for a bit. Maybe this makes me an attractive stranger? Sitting in a corner, nursing coffee, listening to people talk. Reading bits and pieces of Toderov, trying to figure out what he actually means when he talks about things being uncanny, as opposed to - what does he say? Marvelous. The only place I've ever felt like the term "uncanny" actually meant anything is in war pictures. Looking at bodies, and realizing that you don't actually know how to deal with dismemberment. Disarticulation. Not knowing what to say, but knowing what to do when you can't find the head. That's uncanny.

My friend Sharon sends me bits of war journalism every now and then -- that's what I think about, when I read this stuff, and don't quite know how to take it. Lots of tough guys sitting in bars -- the last outpost of expatriate life, sitting around and laughing it up on someone else's front. Hemingway, having a fucking ball, gradually drinking himself into a stupor because they won't print his stories. But I don't actually know anything about these things. The point is to send back these totally cynical lines, on how people don't care, and how the stories get churned into Africa fodder, fetishized, clucked at. I read them, like anyone else. But I'm not there, you know? I don't get to witness - I'm not even black. How can I know what to feel? And why bother reporting on it, if I can't know?

___ keeps sneaking out at night. Not out of the house - just out into the kitchen. Sometimes she sleeps on the floor, but mostly she just makes insane amounts of coffee. Three o'clock in the morning, and she's up making mocha. She says she's trying to shift over to an entirely nocturnal schedule -- that if she can time it right, she'll stay up all through the plane ride to Japan and not even be jetlagged. She's going to Japan in a month, and every day she goes to sleep twenty minutes later. I don't know how this helps, because she always wakes up at three anyway, and can't get back to bed, so goes to make coffee. But whatever - she says it works for her.

She's going to Japan. I don't know when this became a thing.