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[jimmychenchen]

19 September. Some of you may notice a figure standing on the ledge outside the windows, facing inward, ostentatiously moving around. He is not trying to get your attention, but rather, was contracted out by Facilities to clean the windows. The spectacle of his industrial squeegee and agile limbs, while theatrical in nature, merely point to the daunting task at hand. Please do not be alarmed, wave back in solidarity, or distract him in any way. In short, your windows are being cleaned today, so that tomorrow's acute vanishing point into the landscape of life itself shall look clearer.

[jimmychenchen]

4 January. The remote control lies just beyond the radius of my arm, whose arc might trace some incomplete Venn diagram marking the overlap between volition and apathy, free will and depression. I resign to watching a marathon of Law & Order, dozing in and out of sleep, waking up to succeeding episodes which oddly still made sense, as if some grand narrative of perverse violence were being told, inadvertently, in syndication. At the commercial break, a Charmin bear perversely wiggles its ass as the subliminal receiving end of corporate sodomy. A brain is biochemically addicted to its state, and the neurons in a depressed person is most stable under deficient serotonin levels; that our fates are contingent on this badminton match going on in our heads illuminates the infinite cosmos of how one is feeling. It's hard to change my brain chemistry when I can't change the channel. I gaze at the remote control yearningly, alarmed by orange fingers. Emma has disappeared into the closet, only corroborating her existence by the occasional unburied turds she leaves behind, and a wet nose on mine when I'm in bed. I feel ashamed to look at her, so pretend to be asleep. Turns out he didn't rape and kill the victim. It was the mom. I discover a Cheetos puff in my navel, smell it, and put it in my mouth.

[jimmychenchen]

28 August. The hole puncher is missing its lower plastic tray, such that the residual holes—though it is odd, if not contradictory, to refer to them as "holes"—end up on the counter. Prior to this, the hole puncher had been missing for two days, leading this administrator to suspect that someone took the hole puncher home for their personal use, which somehow resulted in it losing its tray. In the course of this afternoon, the holes which were on the counter are now on the floor, like bland confetti without celebration. Congratulations.

[jimmychenchen]

25 June. I always attributed the dull knoblike sensation in my anus to my office chair, on which I've sat for the past decade. Since the beige incident, I wondered if it were not further inside me, like a tumor. I'm considering getting a colonoscopy, envisioning the grainy footage and shaky cam of a snuff film coursing over a heap of metastasized cells, some bulbous conjoined twin with a pulse of his own. A lazy narcissist, I imagine the clip garnering one hundred-million views and being featured on morning shows. While the like to dislike ratio would be rather favorable, the comments will be most unsympathetic.

My therapist characterized this as distorted thinking, which played along well with my catastrophic thinking, fulled realized the day I could legitimately worry about a problem I actually had. A blackberry seed temporarily slips under a gum, I have visions of a bloody root canal; a self-inflicted hangnail gets inflamed, I resign to amputating the entire arm; I sneeze from allergies, prepared for a snapped rib to puncture a lung; I poo beige, convinced it's a metaphor. Turns out it was just my liver shutting down after some heavy drinking, according to the doctors at least, yet I could still feel some deep resonance inside me. I still worried, not just about a tumor, but about having become the kind of person who would worry about such things, unseen but obstinately felt, fractals of trepidation going inward. When the serpent finally catches its tail, or tale, it will know true boredom.

[jimmychenchen]

20 September. I didn't listen to your entire message. I am at work. The router and modem are two entirely different things, as I tried to explain the last time I was there. I asked you to keep the diagram I drew for you.

20 September. The modem is between Dad and Comcast. Don't worry about the modem. Please just ask him to get you back on the router. He changes the password every day because he's a sociopath.

20 September. I don't understand why you are so interested in the modem. The modem is a "residential gateway" device that transmits digital information between the internet cable and the router, whose wireless signal is only "in the air," as you say, between your mobile device and the router, which connects to the modem, which connects to the internet cable, which actually goes deep in the earth to places neither of us can imagine.

[jimmychenchen]

20 June. This morning while combing Emma's litter box for ossified nuggets, like some loyal archaeologist looking for clues into the obvious, I thought of the lessons offered by zen rock gardens: how the rake is to move around the stone, without conquest, only form, their contour manifesting in faraway ripples which gently collide into other ripples of similar origin, all within the constrained harmony of an intentional rectangle. I thought of the trancelike repetitiveness of a being alive, both feline and human, sentenced to the mini-eternity of our lives, ringing the tube of ourselves clean in this endless loop of poo pinched off by a sphincter that, were it an eyelid, only wants to squeeze out the light into oblivion.

[jimmychenchen]

6 August. It is with confidence that I'm not a creep that I solemnly write you this, given the stigma of long emails sent to reticent parties who have failed to establish their disinterest by such reticence. If you're concerned about this being composed at 2:00AM, don't worry. I live under two Start-up bros who apparently can only code to House music. At dinner that night, when I somewhat pejoratively referred to "white girls," I wasn't invoking you; obviously, I am not that daft. I just meant that the bohemian posturing of Anthropologie is disproportionate to their prices. According to Wikipedia, a Bohemian is a "socially unconventional person, especially one who is involved in the arts," which is indeed a fitting description of you, and I don't say that sarcastically, as I too am an unconventional person who is also involved in the arts. From the crusades to democracy, millions of people dead, the best genes now plastered on the cover of Cosmopolitan. If I do seem bitter, it is merely on behalf of the emasculated "other," think Harold and Kumar, whose obsession with White Castle is a Kafkian metaphor for the futile conquest of those such as yourself. You are our Moby Dick, we one-legged sperm boys with psychotic eyes on the prize. Which is why I got that fancy olive oil when you said you liked salad, whose dressing I rendered by emulsifying it with heirloom tomatoes. So when I heard you were hurt that night, as your outfit was largely procured from Anthropologie, I was stunned. And now I feel bad for doing the thing to your face, despite you wanting your face to be treated as a utilitarian orifice, as a way to temporarily detach it from a relentless consciousness by which you are prosaically tortured. I recall idly lingering in your mouth, almost ticklish, and getting worn out by the push ups I was doing in order to go back and forth cordially. And they say nice guys finish last. The position seemed counter-evolutionary, absurd, and made myself feel alien. After I softened with disenchantment, you flipped over and asked if something was wrong. Your disheveled hair reminded me of Cy Twombly, how I wish I had his abandon. The courage it must take to destroy something as you are making it. I said nothing, a tiny bud of love now smothered by a sigh.

[jimmychenchen]

I dressed head to toe in Banana Republic, miming the movements of someone who wasn't just an office temp, affecting the confidence of looking intensely at my watch as I walked among the avenues, as if this world needed me somewhere sooner. Chic financial district women hid expressionless behind convex shades, whose gleaming surfaces traced the distorted buildings above them.

I stacked binders of meticulously filed stock reports. The hiring manager offered me a job after my two weeks, which would entail getting to work in another time zone.Part of me wonders what I would have become had I accepted the position. The office was on the 36th floor, its spotless floor-to-ceiling windows pretending not to exist. I saw myself calmly walking to the edge and jumping off, my shadow morphing into a blurrier shape of my body the moment before impact. "Sorry, waking up would be too much," I said. I exited the office in silent Cole Haan loafers. He calls my temp agency to express his disappointment, which then called me, to express their disappointment. I waited for my last day to end in the spare cubicle I was provided, digging an uncoiled paperclip into my finger, to feel a joy we mistake for pain.

[jimmychenchen]

When you came across my Meet the Parents, you asked me if I was serious. I remember it clearly. You said, "Are you serious?" in part earnestly, but also in derision. Are you serious? Meet the Parents is a great film examining castration anxiety, the dark corners of anti-Semitism in New England, airline bureaucracy, the CIA, conspiracy theory, schadenfreude, all within the context of an ostensible romantic comedy. I've watched it over twenty times. Ben Stiller is a genius. I mean, his name is Gay Focker. But you were always too busy staring off into Rothkos to see the true American landscape right in front of you. When you're done with art school, you're still going to need to get an office job. A sad man with a bulky wife and a son who relates to Eminem will elaborately try to fuck you over the course of a year's worth of happy hours. Rothko killed himself with a razor, spilling uncoagulated red on the kitchen floor. What he thought was truth were just rectangular clouds. We'll believe anything in front of us.

[jimmychenchen]

5 September. I recall saying "goodbye for now" or something along those lines in my last letter to you, which is the only reason why I'm giving myself the liberty to finish this final address. What I remember the most is contemplating what seemed like a sentimentally arranged collection of succulents on your window sill while you brushed your teeth, then hair, the latter being one of my favorite sounds in the world, as if we had both agreed to a John Cagean silence that morning, whose sole accidental instrument would be a multitude of bristles each finding a singular path through your hair, each follicle tethered to a warm scalp, in whose average mind underneath held, ephemerally, a sympathetic notion of me, lying in your bed, a cool morning zephyr coursing over a pair of relaxed thus asymmetrical testicles, unabashedly displayed for anyone with a telescope, in whose hidden viewfinder a dutiful voyeur may have seen, the previous night, moments of lust so tenderized they were mistaken for tenderness. When someone brings a plant, pet, or person inside their home, they are essentially entering a contract with themselves: to stave off death, or goodbye, for as long as they can. In a brief Mr. Miyagi phase, I once bought a bonsai in solemn anticipation that only it would grow old with me. It would never resent me for how twisted my attention was. It died three weeks later. I imagine your watering your succulents on a lonely night when Netflix won't buffer, the drama now demoted to real life: a silly romantic comedy with witty dialog where it doesn't quite work out; in which the confounded suitor resigns; in which the woman looks around one last time before boarding the plane, a bottle of Fiji water and a progressive monthly curled up in a Louis Vuitton bag, one given to her by her father, the only man she could really rely on, and how sad the feeling of paternally subsidized fine things must feel.

[jimmychenchen]

As for Dupuis, I'm sorry that you find traces of his semen throughout the house, but I gotta say I think you are actively looking for it. I recommend chilling out on that. This is one case where perception would trump forensic science. This is not CSI: Los Angeles. You live with a chronic masturbator slash graphic designer who doesn't look anyone in the eye. I know. You can't move out. A studio is too expensive. But I dare you to keep track of every dollar you spend a month at bars, I mean this entire "argument" started after you were quick to justify the egregious profit margin at bars as simply a "lonely tax" incurred by said affliction. And what exactly do you think will happen on this magical night at 2:00 am when you're tanked and creeping on some Borderline case who mistakes difficulty for complexity, kindness for weakness. So you sucked on Alyona's tits, good for you. You need to be dating someone in your league, a nice Latina her early 30s who used to party but now just wants kids, maybe a nurse or social worker who had a little too many empanadas but still has a cute face, whose favorite movie is Notting Hill—oh whoops, I forgot. That's beneath you. Such a lame mainstream movie. You didn't major in Film and smoke all those cigarettes to end up with someone whose favorite movie is Notting Hill, or You've Got Mail, Maid in Manhattan, or any of those clit flickers that actually arrive at a place we all want to. Love. You're real special. I want to make a documentary about you and all your contrarian thoughts about film and music. Werner Herzog can narrate it. We can all go to Cannes for the opening, where you can finally jam your taquito into an anorexic and feel happy, because that's happiness right, your taquito finally inside a hot chick with counter-mainstream taste's rectum? Anal sunshine when she's gone.

[jimmychenchen]

10 July. I would estimate that my cafeteria has made about ten thousand dollars in profit off of me, the math being the number of work days a year multiplied by how many years I’ve work here, then multiplied by projected profit margins; and yet, were I to stuff a tuna melt inside my pocket, it would be me stealing from them. I hid some curly fries inside some three-bean chili, the scam being I would only be charged for what was apparent. Upon noticing a ceiling full of nested Metroids hiding cams, I wondered about the possibility of getting fired for vocational shoplifting. The cashier wore a hairnet, latex gloves, and came close to having a mustache. Her saggy breasts coursed over her gut like lava. I told her there were curly fries inside my chili. She barely heard me, or cared. I brought my failed coup to my desk. The curly fries did not fare well.

[jimmychenchen]

13 August. I woke up to Zoolander, which might have seemed funny to someone witnessing this—of a depleted man falling asleep after the very thing which depleted him, work, in front of a random movie one happened upon—but ended up feeling embarrassed at the small rush and decline of dopamine I experienced when encountering a film I barely enjoyed the first time. It was hot. I was naked. My back stuck to the faux leather couch a little stronger than a Post-it. Owen Wilson's nose always expressed what his crooked penis might look like from the perspective of someone about to perform fellatio on it. The acute foreshortening of his shaft coming at me reminded me of Lamentation of Christ, a problematic 15th Century painting that is unable to place the viewer not just before the work, but somehow inside it, directly before the subject. Simply to look at Owen Wilson was to be unwittingly reduced to pleasing him, pictorially at least, his head tilted back under the ecstasy of my deft mouth. Here I discover two blueberries on my chest which were apparently on their way to my mouth when I lost consciousness. For someone who doesn't believe in fate, or rather is terrified by it, I didn't rationalize exactly why I inserted them into my nostrils. Serendipity may be invented by the bored. I blew them out on to the floor and laughed the kind of laugh that makes one feel bad after laughing, as if the laugh were merely summoned, performed, from a wishful place within. They both rolled out of reach.

[jimmychenchen]

Looking down between my legs, past a clammy penis whose recoiled foreskin seems to be squinting, I gaze into the serene waters. I sat in my employer's bathroom stall as I do every morning, going over a mental shopping list for items on which to gorge myself after work. Staring at the grid of bathroom tiles, imagining patterns where there are none, I envision the bothersome turd slightly curled against the toilet bowl like a napping cat. Like Basho's frog, the sound of water. Careful that my fingers were fully ensconced in toilet paper, I wiped thrice and looked down. It was beige.

The idle mind and unexercised heart will find itself to chew on. Was this the beginning of the end, or merely one of many in an endless succession of false beginnings? Had the walking ghost within me finally settled, somewhat sarcastically, on Khaki? Was I dying? I stood up, stared surreally at it, then flushed. It would course towards a void that forever receded from me.

[jimmychenchen]

The camera's flash will flatten out nuances of tone, such that a group of women at a bar presenting their cocktails to the lens are rendered ghostlike and slightly demented-looking the next morning: the pasty glean of heavy foundation; the surfacing forehead vein; the fake eyelashes venus flytrapping buggy eyes; the excessively garnished cocktails; the laborious artifice of a smile sustaining itself while the photographer fidgets with the camera. Women with insufficient confidence in their looks might protest the photo, asking others to promise never to upload it. You'll always find them at the end of the group, ambivalently leaning in, their smile behind the communal "cheese" hardened with strain.

[jimmychenchen]

Hello, I live in the apartment directly below you. My sleep has been disturbed by the playing of House music, whose repetition I hoped at first might have a meditative effect. It does not. The low register of the bass can be felt in my chest, creating an oppressive climate in my bedroom. Please try to not play House music after midnight, even if the building’s curfew is two hours earlier. I am a reasonable man. 

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Please stop playing your House music at 2:00AM. 

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Please stop playing House music at 2:00AM. You must have really good woofers. I looked up this issue on Yahoo Answers, and placing the speakers on a folded bath towel will help muffle the sound. Please try that. 

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I would like to file a noise complaint on the tenants of #211, who have been ignoring my requests to not play music after the curfew. They are young computer programmers at a burgeoning company, whose unconventional hours may explain why they are up so late. Let me know if there are any forms one should fill out, or if this note will suffice.

[jimmychenchen]

Two middle-aged asian women with carts full of groceries were separated under the overpass before the freeways, one of them cautiously standing by the graffiti-sprayed pillars waiting to cross the road and get to her friend, safely on the sidewalk, whose nervous hand waves were effaced by the rush of cars. Every other week or so, the city paints over the graffiti on the pillars as kids without fathers negotiate an ongoing turf war between gangs. Their signatures are indecipherable from one another to me, as are their lives, their dark childhood bedrooms. The litter at the stoplight betrays wild nights and sober mornings: torn panties, condom wrappers, coffee cups, empty Advil bottles; a minutia of evidence fated to fade in the sun, grown over by the ice plant. As I edge towards a disappearing lane, the demands of life expelling cars, like blood, away from the heart, unfinished stories rattle in my rearview mirror.