I'm at a café-cum art gallery in a refitted warehouse, across the tracks from the platform of the Taichung train station. The coffee is a little watery. So is the art. The coffee is always watery here, and the people on the platform always stare at me through the window. There is a single very noisy and very dark installation roaring in the gallery space to my right. I would describe it to you if it were worth the effort.
This is supposed to be a Christmas note, but I don't think it is, really. I don't really believe in Christmas, you understand, though I do believe in Jimmy Stewart. I don't really believe in notes, either, so you can imagine the danger my convictions are in.
I had another disturbing dream last night, though this one didn't involve cruelty to animals; and I dreamed of Kurt Vonnegut, in passing, and pleasantly.
But that isn't the sort of thing you've come for, is it?
There are four astonishingly plain high-school–age girls practising a dance routine to the tinny sounds of a five-pound portable stereo outside the window. I don't dance. I don't wear leather and I don't wear suede. My day begins with beeping and I never notice when it ends. The other day I told Judy, who is nine, that I wasn't sure about anything anymore, and she said, 'Me, too.'
This fall I received in the mail the two-volume, boxed Complete Peanuts 1950–1954, wherein Charlie Brown loses over ten thousand consecutive games of checkers. Consider that for a moment. Charlie Brown is a truly epochal loser. There is nothing mediocre about this kind of loserhood.
Three people just walked past on their way to a table. One of the women is wearing a black t-shirt bearing the word 'Slayer' with cover art from the Diabolus in Musica album. She is an exaggeratedly timid type. She shuffles her feet and doesn't move above the knees when she walks. I just watched her bow and pinch her nose to stifle a sneeze. She is about thirty. This woman has clearly never heard of the band Slayer. What was it about the shirt that attracted her? Was it the vague occultism implied by the typeface? Was it the vague nihilism implied by the edgy, overexposed image of a white, corpselike figure in a cassock? Was it a gift from her grandmother? Who can say?
Excepting the night of my birthday (you will surely except that?), on which I indulged in venison sausage and veal kidney, a viscous Australian wine that tasted like a date square, and a cigar that tasted like a cigar, I have not had a smoke or a drink in 75 days. That is true, and I am at the same time proud of it and ashamed to be proud of it.
78 days.I have not sent you a Christmas present, because you don't need one, and because I'm poorer than I thought I was when I was drunk all the time, and because I don't believe in Christmas. Probably if I hadn't pointed it out, you wouldn't have noticed, so I'm not going to bother apologizing. I sincerely hope you have not sent me anything, because I have more than I need in every category except money, and the trouble there is profligacy, which cannot be cured by gifts.
I was sorry to hear of Uncle Tobe's death. There doesn't seem to be anything else to say about it.
Mostly on account of my recent sobriety, I have neither spoken with nor written to any of you in even longer than usual. I don't think this is a good thing, unless you do. I think a person ought to talk to his family and friends, ought to have friends, and ought to feel bad if he doesn't. And I am going to try to do all of those things.
On the whole, I don't think I am any happier or unhappier than I have always been. The reasons have changed, it's true, and in some cases have changed quite a lot. I don't want to live in Taiwan, but I do, and I will until I move. I don't want to be a teacher next year, but I don't mind being one on Monday. I am aware of a sort of drifting away from other people that has characterised my life over the past few years—excepting children, whom you will admit only partially, as I do, though it seems a little unfair—and I'm sure that's bad, but it causes me no particular discomfort most of the time.
On an unrelated note, it turns out Susan Sontag isn't so bad after all, Umberto Eco is a terrible bore, and Krazy Kat is better than just about anything else set down on paper in the last hundred years. Also, if you haven't seen Les Triplettes de Belleville, you must. Right now, if possible.
There is plenty of good riding to be had in Taiwan, but it's a bitch getting to it. I suffer from acute road rage in the city. On weekends I usually put in between 70 and 150 kilometres in the hills. My school is on the landward edge of the city and my lunch is long, so I can sometimes get out for a quick climb during the week. I am in better shape. I had to buy a new bike a few months ago, because I gave the old one to a needy thief. I bought a better crankset and cheaped out on pedals, and now I regret it, because the pedals are garbage, and they make me angry.
A while ago, in October, I think, I actually went for a ride with some other guys, but it wasn't any fun. I just don't understand it. These guys, one of them is Asia Underlord for Ritchey and another guy sources tubes for Trek and never stops telling you about Lance in a fruitless attempt to conceal the fact that he doesn't really know how to ride a bicycle. Nice people, I guess. Wives, children, hamburgers.
I don't want to race, because I don't think I could win a race, and there isn't any point in racing if you aren't going to win. I just like to ride.
And that is all. I have tried not to write about the things you don't want to read, or the things I don't want to write about, or the things no one needs to be told, and I'm afraid that hasn't left very much. Which is how life is. You start with the world, and the world is so gosh-darn big and you can't even see over the back seat, and you start cutting out the parts that don't matter and the parts that don't fit and the parts that don't help you, that make you look bad to others, that make you cringe, that make you feel stupid or powerless or forgettable, and there you are, you haven't left very much for living in.
I hope all of you have a happy Christmas, and a safe New Year's Eve.