Lights Out On University Parkway

Summer means it's time to read Haruki Murakami again. The season of greatest solitude and desolation is a good reason to read stories of solitude and desolation, and ruminate on solitude and desolation. This time it's After Dark, his new novel, more of a novella really (I finished it within two nights, and probably could've done it in one if I'd tried). It's even more surreal and removed than his usual, being entirely narrated in present tense, using self-conscious omniscient plural first person narrators from time to time, and featuring a girl in a coma who phases through a television screen. Can't say I understood it entirely the first time through; fortunately, I bought it (the English translation has only been out for a month, even though the book was published in Japanese in 2004, and the library didn't have it, and I was too impatient to wait), so if I ever decide to re-read it--yeah, right--I'll have the option. But the book felt like home starting from just a few paragraphs in--I've read enough of his books to almost immediately tune in to his style.

A recap of all the Murakami books I have read:

Sputnik Sweetheart
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Dance, Dance, Dance
The Ghosts of Lexington
100% Girl*
Television Men*
South of the Border, West of the Sun
Norwegian Wood
Hear the Wind Sing*
Underground
A Wild Sheep Chase
Kafka On the Shore
After Dark

* = short story anthology not available in English

That's a good one dozen books. I haven't read every last thing he's written, but I get damn close. I recall how, a couple of years ago, my blogging name was "K," since a few of the first-person narrators in Murakami's novels are only referred to as K, especially in his earlier books, and my life at the time felt like a Murakami story. I don't use that anymore, though life does still feel like a Murakami story from time to time.

My high school roommate Mike Pham came to visit for a week. Me and Mike have always been a love-hate sort of thing; when I met him junior year of high school, he was a cool kid who knew other cool kids who did cool things, then we started Paper Jet Fighter with Charlie and suddenly he was annoying, then we got pissed at each other for the last few months of high school, then we graduated and I felt bad about having been a jerk about the band and other things. This time he visited, and I was reminded both of the reasons we were friends and roommates, and the reasons we ended up at each other's throats. Then again, any description that's entirely free of contradiction is probably an incomplete description, in general.

Mike and I deal differently when interacting with people. He's got a way of, no matter what the context of a conversation was before he entered it, driving the entire interaction and all parties involved towards one of a number of domains with which he is familiar; at this stage, they are 1. veganism 2. bicycling 3. linguistics, particulary Semantic languages. After watching him talk to people we meet around town, it became almost painfully obvious how we inevitably ended up talking about one or more of these things. It's one of the things I found most irritating about him back in high school. But I understand it a little better now; as Mike explained it, since he travels so much, that's his way of connecting with people he meets on his way, by finding their overlaps into his personal world, and drawing them into it via those overlaps. As a fellow nomad, I'm sympathetic to his motivations. Still, I remembered how I'd gotten fed up, back in the day, with how everything we did, no matter what it was, always ended up focusing on him. You either buy that shtick or you don't--Andrew didn't, still doesn't, and asked "Is he still obnoxious?" when I told him Mike had come through town--and I didn't, back in the day, and I still don't, but I can empathize, and it's not like he doesn't have intelligent things to say. He talks about the same shit all day every day, but he knows that shit inside out.

In contrast, whenever I talk to someone, I always try to meet up with them at an abstract, conceptual point in between our respective points of view. I don't like talking about myself (though it wasn't always this way); I don't talk in events, and I don't speak in confessions either. (Close friends need not apply, obviously.) I discuss and make points using hypothetical examples instead of anecdotal ones; I appeal to theoretical logic as much as empathy. Hell, even in this blog I have to force myself to talk about experiences, and not just thoughts and ideas, so that I don't forget them. This is not superiority, only discrepancy; I know better than anyone how much more weight empathy swings than logic does. I also don't try to wrangle people into my own familiar territory; I'll drop them a line occasionally, but if they don't bite, I let it go, and more often than not I'll prefer to extract concepts from what other people have already said and discuss that, instead.

Regardless, the week of Mike was a good week: in no particular order, lots of vegan food, lots of jamming through the small stack of amps in my room, two lesbians he met in Israel (one is Israeli, one is Canadian) crashing in my living room for a night after they got kicked out of the house they were staying at, lying on some grass waiting for the bus to come, meeting and hanging out with One World waiters Brian and Katie, crashing RachieK's birthday dinner, drinking free iced tea in the backyard garden of a Zen boutique in Hampden before wandering through Honfest as Mike balked at the gruesomely non-vegan festival food and guffawing at the shitty band there, finding some long metal piping next to the dumpster and using them as canes as we went exploring down the creek in the ravine, hopping between rocks in the water and swinging over on a vine, playing a shitload of video games, talking until 4AM on weeknights about politics and the human condition.

Two nights after he arrived, we caught the city bus and went to a show at the Copycat Building (of the multiple-felony lobby)--banking entirely on Anna Dean being there and letting us hitch a ride back uptown (she was, along with her twin sister Dorian and a rather distant-looking Fox Camponovo, and she did)--where we saw a drum + bass (the real instruments) band, King Kong Ding Dong who were Anna's friends, an energetic Danish band which name I can't remember right now, and Double Dagger. We sat in the window between sets, but when Double Dagger came on the entire room dissolved into a massive slam-dance riot; Mike and I hurled ourselves into the midst of it and got hurled around by the other kids, and I nearly tripped over the bassist's EQ pedal, actually got nauseous from being tossed about so much, not to mention nearly slipping a number of times because the floor was soaked in beer (and so was my shirt, after a while) and goddamn Converse don't grip for shit, yet amazingly never actually fell down, and drank water from a mug in their kitchen (yes, people live there) and dumped some more on my head before jumping back in.

Mike met a girl who wore the same red thrift store shoes as he did. There was a really cute girl with short brown hair and a sleeveless army-looking jacket who stood on the wooden block stabilizing the kick drum during end of the Danish band's set to keep the kick from sliding forward. She seemed to be friends with the Dagger and was consistently in their pit, too, and I might've tried to talk to her, but I'd given my glasses to Anna when I went in the pit, and she disappeared after the set and didn't come back until it was time to leave, and talking to total strangers (especially cute ones) is that much more difficult when you can't see shit. At least I didn't walk away completely empty-handed; I walked away with an excuse.

Saw a free Thrushes show last Saturday night with Sterling, Diamond, and Anna C.. Lord Baltimore Recording studio grand opening party. For the record, if I go see Thrushes again on July 3 opening for A Sunny Day in Glasgow, I'll have seem them more times than I've seen any other band. Got to talk to Rachel and Casey from Thrushes again--really nice people, especially Rachel who always seems so happy to see me--and a few of the guys from Hymnen were there. Closers The Death Set sounded like Big Black, if Big Black sounded more like Rancid--I wasn't too sure what to make of them. At some point we found ourselves standing awkwardly in the control room, the only other person in the room being Brooks, who was manning the soundboard, all because Sterling is a gear junkie. We stood around in the hallway and talked about completely absurd ideas until I was doubling over from the laughter and couldn't stand up straight. Key words: "post-menopausal-core," (referring to Trafalgar's tendency to recruit increasingly old female singers) "post-punk'd," (referring to a hypothetical prank to trick Paul Banks into shitting on Ian Curtis's gravestone) and "www.iancurtisgravecam.com," (no explanation needed) among others.

Patrice and Vijay's joint going-away party was last night. Showed up both to say goodbye and get my copy of The Virgin Suicides back from her. Ended up borrowing Vijay's Fukuyama book to be able to confidently call its bullshit (the introduction alone pretty much took everything I believed in and ran the opposite way with it), and talking to Anna Dean for nearly four hours straight about many, many things, including, but not limited to, but consisting largely of, death. And siblings, and travel, and life plans, and how to some extent one must assume people are malicious assholes, and so on etc. A waitress she and Fox knew at CVP was shot by the man she was having an affair with and who got her pregnant, who was waiting in her car when she and her friend came out of Home Depot. The friend survived. The waitress and her baby did not. The man turned himself in because the entire staff of CVP was out for his blood. Another guy got cornered in the alley behind Anna's house by a car-theft gang in two cars blocking either end of the alley. They shot him dead. Then there was the guy Anna saw riding a bike down the one southbound lane on Charles St., who got hit-and-run'd by a car behind him--deliberately--and who the fuck knows why? The driver was having a bad day, I guess. No good reasons, obviously, but then again there is no good reason, period. In everyone's life there comes a turning point when they're forced to confront the senseless--for me, that was the first two weeks of Lawrenceville, and since then not a whole lot shocks me anymore, but these things do, in fact, happen on a daily basis.

Still, it's often jarring, after having lived here for three years, to be reminded that we do, after all, live in Baltimore.

The apartment was packed when I walked in at 10PM, but when I looked up again at 2AM most of the people were gone; the others had gathered in a circle. It was a little weird when everyone else would lapse into silence occasionally and Anna and I were the only ones still talking. Never let it be said that I complained about having edifying conversation, though. Especially in the abundance of beer. Though I did feel bad about not really talking to Patrice that much, considering it was her going-away party at her apartment. She's got bangs now that make her look like Tenev's ballerina ex-girlfriend Becky, ironically or otherwise. Parting words? "Come back safe." Couldn't have been any other way.

Talked to Rachie on the Gilman couches today, while reading a paper on detergent-like activity of pore-forming peptides, about the complicated process of missing people and places, and how oftentimes it's prolonged, and other times it just never goes away, no matter how long you wait. Such things become the foundation, I said, of what one is; certain nostalgia and regret become fundamental elements. Then I fell asleep.

I've taken up the habit of reading comics at Barnes & Noble after work. Today I read Apollo's Song by Osamu Tezuka. Old school manga. I enjoyed it; it made the walk home that much more satisfying. That's a significant statement.

Noticed earlier that the "N. LOVE_____" ("GROVE" covered in stickers) sign down by Niwana had been replaced during the construction with a new one; now it just says "N. LOVEGROVE." Luckily I still have Jordan's photo of the old sign. If nothing else. Streetlights have been out in the street outside for a few days now. A few steps away from the front steps of my apartment and it's total darkness. Can't say I dislike it though.