looking for the new world
two month long spiritual jet lag calls for stupid journal entry slop
Hong Kong is one big shopping mall. Every two blocks, by Victoria Harbour, you can find yourself in a different Prada store to find refuge away from the heat. Kendall Jenner stuns in a billboard above me, looking gangly and awkward. I fly through seven Adidas stores in one sitting. I walk closer to Nathan Street while I’m drunk on several beers, my bartender being the poor soul at the hole-in-the-wall of 7-11, the new territory an amalgam of neon and women dressed in mini skirts and pleasers.
I should’ve written this two months ago when I got back from my Asia trip, but I think I left my soul there. I beat jetlag, so the consequences from the universe must have acted accordingly to punish me further.
We stumbled upon an art exhibition by accident in Hong Kong after riding on the escalators from building to building. Imagine a busy street, vendors on the edge with moving walkways above you. Restaurants and stores from floor to floor. There is no limit for frivolity on Hong Kong Island, where the moving walkway gets me past the Chinese businessmen and white foreigners. We saw an ad for Tai Kwun and took the next left to reach it on the second-floor labyrinth.
The exhibit that was being shown was called “Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud,” which highlighted the multitude of digital technologies and the bleak manufacturing supply chain that runs society. In the contemporary world, digital technology pervades all the intimacies of life – my favorite pieces that reflected that were both strangely technical yet immensely erotic.
My favorite exhibits: a forest sprite apparition of artificial parts – dew drops and moving parts and repeating screens to portray something of an orgasm, but also a stimulating slime video. A video screened amongst a pool of toy dentures, the kind you wind up so they jump and chatter. A story about humiliation and masturbation.
I met the Can’t Help Myself Robot by surprise, scraping her viscous little fluid. We have the same Sisyphean doom, except at the time, I’m on vacation and outside my glass box. Once I get back home, I’ll scrape all the blood back again just like her.
Sun Yuan and Peng Yi’s beloved robot went viral a couple years ago because its repetitive movements make the arm into an anthropomorphic being. A TikTok user comments on a video of Can’t Help Myself: It looks so tired :( . The original intentions of the piece were to portray violence at China’s border and the inevitable doom of technological industrialization, but its legacy is ultimately the viewers’ empathy with the machine. We all relate to the Can’t Help Myself Robot – we’re all scraping by to live until we inevitably die. We’re all caged animals.
I think about my soul being removed from context when I sit in a row of airplane seats in the exhibit, supposedly resourced by some German airline. Wong Kit Yi tells us about the origins of Astroboy, the adopted child of Japan after World War II. Her karaoke-style lecture displays on the screen, transitioning to Yes-Jet-Lag, which theorizes the disruption of circadian rhythms through a quirky infomercial.
To beat jetlag on the way to Asia on a sixteen-hour plane ride: Take the flight late from your timezone – after midnight at the least. Stay up as much as you can watching shitty movies. Attempting to sleep. As long as you sleep a little, it’ll be fine as long as your arrival time is early in the morning.
To beat jetlag from Asia to New York: do the exact opposite.
I wanted to write something profound about being in Asia, but I couldn’t find anything. In Taiwan, I was struck by the sweltering heat, the novelty of different sidewalks, of shopping malls integrated into the subway system. If I lived there, I’d lose so much money in the underground alone, betting on useless anime figurines and gachapon.
I was essentially escaping Western capitalism to be in Asian beacons of economic growth, every third storefront either vending high-end skincare products or prepackaged bentos. The scale of it: mall after mall, all latticeworked together, a single great iridescent intestine clogged with commerce. I have to buy several lip products that are different variations of maroon because my favorite KPop idol wears the same one. I’m microdosing going blind because Family Mart sells colored contacts in my (extremely horrid) prescription. I’m talking shit about America because you haven’t been able to get a beer for a dollar over there since the fucking seventies.
I landed at 11 pm at JFK and didn’t feel energized at all, but the Herculean task of getting home to Brooklyn was enough to tire me out and get me to sleep. I had a dreamless sleep. The next day, I walked outside and mourned the New York autumn – I was gone for nearly three weeks of October and returned to a chill when I had left New York in its artificial, last-chance summer. The inklings of autumn, if you will, only to be bombarded with it once I got off the plane.
Now it is December, and I am wine drunk in the streets of Brooklyn listening to a playlist that I made for my friend Adam. I try to communicate with others in this way, imagining them listening to the same music as I, as if their neurosis could align with mine in any way. I walk home to a loud instrumental, one of my favorite songs, and it reminds me of snow, of being struck by something larger than me.
I’d heard it in [redacted]’s car in Western Mass in the winter, years ago, the crunch of the synths aiding me to complete calm. I listen to the song now and think of her head in my lap, my fingers in her scalp. I think of the frigid night out on the street, kneeling by her car as it blasts my song. Silhouettes of trees. Voices fading in the forest. Tearing up in my bedroom now over a Cameron Winter song, knowing I’ll never see that girl again.
I find that every time I travel outside of the country, I step into a portal, like spawning into a video game with an avatar that does not look like me. How healthy and happy and carefree I look on all my Instagram stories, only to revert to a Vague Concept Of A Human Being instead of a real one once my feet hit U.S. soil. I had this feeling when I went to Spain last summer, too – like the person who was on that trip wasn’t me. I was in some fucked Severance situation. My outie is still in Taipei, loitering in a Family Mart. The innie you’ve all been interacting with lately is a miserable bitch. Sorry.
It’s December, and I’m drunk in my apartment on a Wednesday night. I wrapped three presents before running out of wrapping paper – what a fucking farce. Seven dollars for gold foil detail, l and I couldn’t even get more than three presents out of it. I cry silently because I’m listening to Drinking Age by Cameron Winter on repeat. I’m late to the party, I know – I loved Getting Killed, though. I did. I was not interested in Cameron’s solo album until I heard a bit of piano from a clip of him playing in Brooklyn with Paul Thomas Anderson filming him with his big camera. I see this guy (Winter) every fucking where, all over my social media, as if he is the new messiah. I listen to Drinking Age, and I think maybe it’s not all for naught. There are tears in my eyes, after all. I’m full of heavy metal, and maybe God is real, and I have work in the morning.