Bronson Gao

中学二年生の時

家

とても可笑しいね

中学二年生の時、私は転んで、三週間歩けなかったんです。When I was in the eighth grade, I fell and couldn’t walk for three weeks. でも、まだ宿題をしたり、勉強したり、掃除したりしなきゃいけなかった。But I still had to do homework, study, clean, and so on.

私の部屋に歩けなかったから、毎晩ソファで寝ていた。Because I couldn’t walk to my room, I was sleeping on the sofa every night. My room was—is— upstairs, which I don’t know how to say in Japanese;でも、あの時にテレビを見るのを忘れていません。But I haven’t forgotten watching TV in that time.

私の部屋にテレビがなかったし、それは面白かった。Because I didn’t have a TV in my room, for one thing, that was interesting. あの時に遅くまで起きて古いアニメを見た。In that time, I slept late and watched old anime. I’d never had any interaction with it until those nights. Out of terror, I turned it down until barely audible.

The clear perspective I could save was the room as a foxhole, the television a nightly flair to smoke out my position, a self-administered cyanide—only that it was expired. The twitchy rustle of the TV and its Apocalypse Now pyrotechnics was a place of war catatonia. My disaffection to institution triggered an attempt towards subversive submission: mass quantity, super-size consumerism, me and the late night media.

There were lurid, exotic worlds I’ve now forgotten; of course I had no context for any of it, the last two episodes of FLCL like tracer rounds through a shoulder blade. If the PGA tour, the news, and the fucking gardening channel were each squares of intellectual nutrition, what I was doing must’ve been worth my personality’s assassination.