Thoughts

I set out from Victoria Park on a bright spring afternoon, heading into a suburb I had never visited, known to me by reputation as somewhere worth exploring. My plan was deliberately incomplete. It meant avoiding Google Maps, entering whichever food shop caught my eye, and buying ingredients without deciding what to cook.

Glebe did not unfold as I had imagined. Most of the streets I wandered into were residential, while the food shops I had expected to encounter one by one along the way sat clustered together in a single stretch, quietly revealing how calculated my plan had actually been. For all its apparent openness, it had still given me something to look for and somewhere to stop. The failure of this small plan unexpectedly created the opening I needed for the dérive. With nothing left to search for, I could finally give up the usual motives for movement and action and let myself be drawn by the attractions of the terrain. On such a beautiful spring day, this letting-go felt surprisingly easy.

The breeze carried the scent of plants through the streets, and I let an unfamiliar flower or a tree leaning into the pavement decide which way I turned. At one intersection, a thin stream of water appeared at my feet and ran down the pavement. I followed it uphill and around a corner to trace its source and found myself back at the shops that had unsettled my plan. I stepped into a fruit shop anyway, where a ‘Jazz Apple’ label made me mistake a yellow apple for a new variety. Only at the till did I notice the plainer name above, ‘Yellow Apple’, a small misreading that had turned curiosity into a purchase.

Outside, the scent of flowers drew me around another corner to a house painted entirely in cow patterns, from its front door to the steps. I lingered there without needing to know what the place was for. The city’s oddities stop needing explanation once they stop needing a use. Patterned tiles, old façades and the smell of aged timber gradually began to form a map of their own. Glebe became less a sequence of streets and destinations than a loose geography of scents, textures and curiosities.

This openness did not last for long. Further down the slope, an overgrown shrub blocked my path, and behind it stood a house whose restored façade retained the quiet, worn appearance of an older Glebe, even as small details gave away just how recent the work really was. Walking on, I came without warning upon the city’s skyline in the distance and felt as though I had woken from a dream. The path led me down to a waterside park, where yachts sat moored beneath the cables of the ANZAC Bridge with traffic moving steadily across it.

After drifting for so long among plants, aged brick and quiet residential streets, the sudden presence of the modern city felt almost intrusive. For the first time, I wanted to escape rather than explore. I turned back towards the greenery and older streets, seeking the ease I had felt there before. But even as I retreated, the houses around me carried the same telltale signs of recent work, making it difficult to feel that I was returning to anything older at all. The boundary between past and present had been unstable all along; what the waterfront had disrupted was the sensory world I had gradually assembled while drifting. Nothing physically prevented me from staying, but the change in atmosphere was enough to reverse the direction of my movement.

By then nearly two hours had passed, the sun no longer as gentle, and I found myself craving nothing more than something cold to drink and a way home.

Wanting to go home gave me a destination again, but I still resisted opening Google Maps. Sydney Tower, pale above the rooftops, told me exactly which direction to walk. The modern skyline I had just wanted to escape now guided me home, a small joke the city seemed to be playing on me. Letting go, I had written, felt surprisingly easy at the start of the walk, but I had not yet understood how much orientation that ease quietly relied on.

I had traded one map for another, a digital one for a landmark.

Nor had I ever moved through Glebe entirely freely. The city’s ordinary organisation of work, leisure and consumption had been redirecting me from the start, the concentration of shops disrupting my search for food, my own idea of leisure treating exploration as bound up with buying. The freedom the dérive offered was therefore always conditional, negotiated within these structures rather than found outside them.

The dérive never promised an escape from the ordinary city. It only loosened its usual arrangement just enough for other forces shaping how I moved, sensed and felt the city to become perceptible. And that brief shift in perspective, in a place I am about to leave, felt like its own small kind of power.

终于来到，这一片少女时代的精神故乡。

或许是前阵子过于忙碌的缘故，又或是近乡情怯，我没有如同往常制定详尽的旅行计划，就匆忙间踏上了那个口中念叨着这辈子一定要去的，梦之彼岸。不知道过早的夙愿得偿，究竟能否算作好事一桩，还是对个人欲望的过度纵容，幸福的阈值眨眼就水涨船高。

不知道蘋芬在写下这些词句时是何等年岁，面对着什么样的景色，又怀揣着如何的情愫。六月，我也短暂变成这诗中的野物，侥幸于梦境与现实间游走。水草行径，无处不在又知名不具的邀请，在小岛湿气中满盈，绊住一双脚，使我跌坐，洇开我与台北，那个夏天的故事。

二十一日的湾湾观察日志，我得出以下两条结论：

一、台湾食物最执拗的两桩心事，一是嚼劲，二是勾芡。

二、台湾人民于谐音梗之运用已至酣畅淋漓、炉火纯青之无人之界。

先说食物，嚼劲是不肯痛快赴死的。粉圆要一颗一颗地咬，地瓜球在齿间不断回弹，连爱玉都留着几分倔强的筋道。不像有些食物，舌尖才一沾，便化了、散了、尸骨无存。

勾芡则是另一种缠绵的把戏。一勺薄芡搅进汤里，汩汩间清澈不再，面线汤汁稠稠地缠住每一块食材，黏着、抱着、胡搅蛮缠不肯撒手。嚼劲与勾芡，磨人的两个家伙，一身蛮不讲理的娇气，从不许人囫囵吞枣，敷衍了事，非得舌头、牙齿、耐性全都一并陪它耗下去，才肯堪堪作罢。

就凭这一身不由分说的娇劲儿，轻轻巧巧一勾，便由不得人日思夜想，欲罢不能。

再论谐音。若说咀嚼不过是一时的口腔快感作祟，可这股子痴迷毫不安分，偏偏钻出牙缝，对文字动起另一种手脚。除了 Barthes，世上大抵再没有谁，比台湾人更懂得如何一手炮制现代神话。巨大的文字游乐场，巷口的招牌无时无刻不在“丸弄你心”，转角不见竟又“梅柠不可”，教人怎舍脱身。

台湾的空气也是黏腻的，把人泡得软下来，声音也甜起来。湿湿的，不知是汗是泪，就任由感情附着弄湿琐碎，以此消解抒情自我可能耽溺之风险。于是最流水账的歌词，也被潮气腌渍出艺术的盐影。淡水河的旁边能疯狂几遍，晨之美又在哪里欢迎光临，到底谁能忍受热水器的忽冷忽热？这份理直气壮的直白，听着听着，也让人生出一种说不清的幸福来。

就在那样一个阴云密布的午后，我走进椰林大道，路上行人三两，瞥见车流穿行，远处的傅钟并没有敲响。片刻雨势渐起，雨水顺着棕榈纹路绵延下落，溅起阵阵神性，倒影中晕开丝丝缕缕悲悯。韶光一瞬，我想，一定有太多的意气风发，太多的倩影在这里定格绝代风华。

彼时的他们，抑或是现在的我们，都是

台大的杜鹃底下，就这样，件件桩桩，藏满了不愿被命运找到的悸动心事。

最近天天在文化的场域游走，自负的专有名词裹挟着故弄玄虚的急风骤雨，把我本就混沌的思想洼地糟践得愈发泥泞不堪，翻腾着溃烂与混乱，却又不捎丝毫歉意的向下一片沼泽逸去，任我在迷雾与沼泽之间踽踽独行。

无端的怅惘令人无处着力，又莫名引人痴迷。如同野兽嗜血般的天性，我们在悖论中纵情狂舞，将善恶罪罚的争辩，连同一切执念，在忘情的鼓点里尽数粉碎。一瞬空白，窒息之间不忘腹诽眼前摇曳的天际线，环顾四周，只剩一片算不上白的白。

意识终于回笼。诚然，这种宏大的叙事令我心生沮丧，阳光瘦下来，黄昏也靠过来，天边浮现出一种迷幻电子乐的色彩，像一盘被过度拉长的磁带。