The Historicity of a Train of Thought - April 25

That son of a bitch, that son of a bitch!(1) What the fuck he thinks he tryin’ to pull here?! Next time I see him, I’ma say to him in Japanese, ‘I’m gonna kiiiill, you!’(2) But wait, how do you say that in Japanese?(3) Anata o watashi wa something o shimasu...something like that. What’s that verb, though? I have no idea. Luckily I have a translator on my phone (thank God for the new age we live in!)(4) type in ‘to kill’; source language: English; target language: Japanese....stupid phone, why is it so fucking slow?!... 殺すために. Great...Something sutameni. What’s that something? Why isn’t given in hiragana? If you don’t know the kanji, then translators don’t do you any good! Even if I knew the kanji, though, I assume my grammar would be off. Anata o watashi wa something sutameni... A threat should be written in the imperative, right? Fuck, I don’t remember (things I don’t remember).(5) I wish I had kept up the study, or maybe I should go back to Japan,(6) this time to really live there, get fluent, participate in something: maybe the Sendai earthquake relief efforts. Be useful to people but also get to live in Japan and get fluent, maybe get a cute little Japanese photographer for a girlfriend, or a journalist: it’s so easy to think a journalist would make a good girlfriend, but I have nothing to base that off of. Could it be that I would like to be a journalist and somehow sex is a form of becoming like through osmosis?(7) And why Japan? Why not the Middle East? Or Latin America? If I could speak four languages, I would want them to be English, Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish. What about French? Fuck French, that’s so 19^th Century. Japanese for the spirit,(8) Arabic for the cultural roots and the global communications idea,(9) and Spanish, just because it’s useful. Any of the above, really, just so long as I actually pursue any of them. I’m getting older. I’m almost 24. If I don’t really commit to learn one of them soon, I’ll never really learn any of them. Why do I always jump to the end result: being quadrilingual, when I’m doing absolutely nothing to further the efforts of even being bilingual right now? I’m working right now, getting out of debt, opening up future options.(10) But I have to hurry up with that future, get back on the road, start working on the ground in countries that will teach me those languages. But I keep talking about going to Slovenia or Bosnia,(11) and they speak Serbo-Croat there, probably Slovenian in Slovenia, which isn’t even Serbo-Croat! I’m sure it’s similar, but it’s still a different language, like Lebanese isn’t quite Arabic and I had to study them both simultaneously in Beirut, which was way too much and in the end, I didn’t even learn one of them, much less both of them.(12) Maybe I should just go to Lebanon and finish what I started there: be a journalist, have an in just by being American (you know the ruling class there is not impressed with the American nationality), and then rise up to prominence through talent and gumption, nerve, though nerve is probably the best way to get killed in a place like Lebanon...so fuck that, how about Bolivia, the poorest country in Latin America, and be a documentary film maker: make films about tribal battles and colonialism, poverty, and the objectification of women...That’s way too many things for one documentary to be about. But then again, if there’s one thing I learned in Critical Studies,(13) it was that all of those are essentially the same subject (Power!), it will just take a truly visionary artistic mind to make a cohesive documentary that shows that without being 17 hours long and full of boring tangents...My mind isn’t up to that kind of snuff. Why not just come up with the idea and then strongly encourage someone else to realize the vision? Because if you keep thinking that way, you’ll never be anyone or anything.(14)

1. This is a reference to a real person, who through unkind, backstabbing behavior had brought much pain to the narrator and his family in the weeks that preceded the writing of the poem
2. The stylistic flairs here are indicative of the narrator's tendency to take on a kind of urban slang when overly excited or feeling eccentric
3. The narrator's go-to of trying to translate phrases into Japanese are the result of 4 years of study of the language in high school, a 5-week trip there with his mother, as well as a generally pervasive belief that the most amusing way to garnish life or speech is by giving it a Japanese bent
4. This is a reference to an iPhone that was given second hand to the narrator by his father, but which subsequently proved to be a veritable 'piece of shit' because it froze nearly every time he pressed a button
5. This the chorus of an Ugly Casanova song that echoes in the narrator's mind every time he uses this particular phrase
6. This is a reference to the aforementioned trip to Japan with the narrator's mother, circa 2006
7. This is a gesture towards a larger, ongoing internal conversation of the narrator's: his consistent track record of rarely committing to girlfriends monogamously continually gave him an excess of grief and led to much self-abasement; to combat the feelings of inadequacy that these experiences interpolated into him, he intellectualized the idea of partnership, and translated it into a kind of narrative of becoming...
8. This idea probably dates back to the narrator's 14th year when he somehow became convinced that Japanese Zen, Shinto, [Chinese] Taoist, and Teaist thought were representative of this highest aspirations of human kind; that is to say, the student who could master these philosophical thoughts would also, inevitably, master the strange art of Living
9. This reference is at once to the narrator's ethnic roots on his father's side to the Arab world, but also to an ideological view that the most important language for a Westerner to learn in the 21st Century is necessarily Arabic because that's the sorest point in current international discourse and learning the language of the Other is the first step in massaging out the knots of human pain and friction
10. This has been an ongoing monologue in the narrator's life; "I'm working in my hometown at the moment to dig myself out of student loan debt...I'll be in a position to start 'living' once that debt is no longer weighing on my shoulders": this narrative has been repeated so many times that even the narrator is achingly sick of it, so the reference here is meant to be ironic
11. Both of these are countries the narrator has visited before (circa 2007), the current appeal for the narrator of Slovenia is based on the daughter of journalist he knows there, who is a three dimensional artist and a writer; they have recently been in communication and the idea for him to begin a new life in Ljubljana has crossed his mind more than once; Bosnia, in contrast, is symbolically linked in his mind to self-destruction and excess: Sarajevo is a city he has frequently cited as somewhere he would like to move to in order to write a novel, do many drugs, engage in many orgies, and drink far too much coffee all of the time; this idea digs deeper to a (mis?)conception that only through ravaging one's body and mind can one shed the burdens of life that are only (according to Japanese thought) an illusion, and through the shedding of such, one is able to be reborn as the all-capable magician he or she has always dreamed of becoming; furthermore, the appeal of Sarajevo in particular for the narrator is due to the 'rawness' of the city and the fact that nearly everyone there has fresh running wounds: this connects the city in the narrator's mind to humanity at it very realest, for right or for wrong
12. A reference to the narrator's stint studying Arabic and Lebanese dialect in Beirut for 6 weeks in 2008; the bitterness behind these phrases are in part a reference to a moment, upon his return to New York, when his friend Christopher, who had never visited the Middle East and had only studied Arabic from textbooks, tried to engage the narrator in conversation in Arabic and the narrator was at a loss as to how to respond even though he recognized all the phrases from the textbook that he too had studied from in Beirut
13. This reference points both towards the narrator's self-defined major at university (what he called, 'the topography of ideologies') as well as the underlying global/metaphysical view that led him to study it in the first place: the connection between language and power, colonialism and racism and chauvinism, and the nature of subjectivity
14. This sentence reaches to the deepest core of the narrator's insecurity: a seesaw effect persistent throughout his life in which he was happy and open, putting his faith in the world around him and living easily from day to day, in faith...contrasted by a kind of overly abasing self-deprecation that maintained faith in a cultural pressure to be successful (by a standard of fame and fortune), failing which, a human soul would be nothing and therefore, Nothing.