I Think I... Believe in Something?

Change. It's a word I've been hearing a lot of lately. At least when I listen to the things coming from the Barack Obama campaign. It sounds nice. Hey, yeah, change, Ok, I could go for some of that. George Bush is stupid! Whooo, I went to a liberal college and now believe firmly in blue things and things on the left. Yeah, poverty and big business sucks! And screw war. That's totally wack, dude. Ah what? Health Care? Sure, I'm 20 and covered by my parents, who gives a fuck, but yeah Change!

I admit I haven't been much of a politically minded person, well, ever. I didn't even vote in the 2004 election. I spouted the same old stuff I remember a lot of other people saying: the candidates are the same, my vote doesn't even matter anyway, who cares, what can the president really do, no matter who wins my life won't change much, blah blah, apathy is cool, blah blah. I didn't vote, and it turns out that, technically it didn't really matter after all. John Kerry won Washington, lost the election. Had I voted, nothing else would have changed. And it certainly wouldn't have Changed. Still, I've gotta think that my heart was in the wrong place. And yet, to continue qualifying myself here, I'm not too ashamed. I was 18, which is young, and having just recently come from a place where my biggest social concern was where in the South Lot I was going to park my car in the morning, all of a sudden affecting a massive political interest would have been just that; an affectation. I wasn't ready to vote because I didn't believe anything because I didn't really know anything. So I didn't vote.

However, you go to a school like Whitman and you can't help but suck up a lot of ideology. And that's good. That's what college is for. You're supposed to learn about the injustices in the world, about the way things should be in a perfect world, and about how far in actuality we are from such a perfect world. It's good to feel, to sense what's wrong out there in the great wide open and put on a drive to fix it. If you don't leave school with a little bit of a bloody heart then, well I won't say you're doing something wrong, but I will say that it's good to soak up some sense of social justice like a giddy human sponge and hold onto it like the sort of sparkling water you one day hope to see the world reflected in.



I wouldn't say I ever really became a massively politically minded sorta dude, but yeah, by the time I graduated I had a better sense of what's right and what's wrong in the world. What we're doing well and what we need to rearrange. Of course everybody thinks George Bush is a dummy (speaking here not for the whole country, just the vast majority of Whitman's admittedly small, admittedly liberal population), and so of course I'm going to vote democrat, because we need a Change, and Obama's gonna give it to us. However, as my first paragraph-paraphrase of my first take on the Obama campaign suggests, maybe my appreciation for the actual meaning behind that capitalized word wasn't really that great. Maybe I was more of a body surfer bowled over and helplessly swept away by the wave of Obama-mania surging through that little liberal community than, to persist in a tacky metaphor, someone who had ever stopped to think about what sort of kinetic energy that kind of a wave actually possessed. What it could actually do.

Now? I guess I'm not that much better than I was. I didn't even know Joe Biden was the democratic VP nominee until a week or so after it was announced. I'm in Japan, a little separated from the epicenter of US political activity, and I'll admit, that old political apathy was starting to seep out from deep within my bones again. Yeah, I'll register for an absentee ballot eventually. Whatever. But, today I watched the speech Obama gave at the DNC, and I had to reevaluate a lot of stuff. I always figured I'd vote for Obama, but unfortunately my sentiments listed heavily in the "just because" direction (dereliction). Well, he's a democrat. Doi. But I watched that speech today, and I now know I'm going to vote for Obama because look at what he could possibly do.

Look at where America is now. The rest of the world hates us, but much worse it's almost become expected that we hate ourselves. I'm speaking largely from a liberal viewpoint, but the past few decades, and particularly the past eight years, have introduced an infusion of national shame into our collective bloodstream, and we can't hold our heads up in public unless we do it with a sheepish look on our faces. Whoops, yeah, I'm American, yeah we suck, sorry. This is especially true for those of us in foreign countries, but I'll get to that. The National Anthem has picked up more than a minors and discordant resonances, and it gets harder to look at people waving the American flag without wanting to cringe, to look at it without feeling that the red parts are died in blood, the blue part mostly melancholy, and the stars either ironic or just more rows of soldiers waiting to fall into and get lost in the blood. I see that flag and the last thing I want to do is smile, the last thing I want to do is salute it. Because how can I, when America is rapidly becoming synonymous with a host of words far less savory than liberty and independence for all. Even "freedom" has been hijacked as a word we can believe in, has been slowly beaten and broken down, reprogrammed so that now it's just a shade of what it used to be, just a shade we hide behind when we go out into the world and do something for our own sake. The national lexicon is changing, has changed, and, though I hardly need to say it, America is far from the global angel it once was (a title which is itself intrinsically flawed, but gets to the point that people used to like us more than they do now). At this point, it feels like we've fallen out of the international sky and crashed straight into hell, only it's happened so slowly that only now are we noticing the horns poking out of our collective forehead.

That's where America is now. Living in a foreign country makes it worse. Sure, I'm in Japan, and if there is one country that would stand next to the US if it managed to shit toxic waste from the Florida coastline it's this one, but I spend a lot of time around people from the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (our... allies?) and hating on America is something of a pastime around here. We played this silly game called Typhoon the other day, where you get points for various things and if you pick a particular card you can wipe out a certain team's points. We played it where different teams were countries. At one point the US had zero points, Canada had 1,500,000, the UK got the obliterator card, and I'll give you one guess whose points they whiped out. "Uh, we'll whipe out the US's points." "Don't you dare, we'll bomb your asses." "Sorry, we're taking your zero points anyway" "Oh it's on now. Japan was the last country to bomb us and you see where that got them" And so on. It was all banter, all done with irony in mind, but it proves the point anyway that the rest of the world bashes on America, and America has no choice but to bash on itself in the face of it.

But is that how America has to be? Do we have to be a country of fat, rich, trigger-happy assholes that nobody likes? Do we have to do all the shitty things to ourselves that we do? I think for the past few years I've resigned myself to the fact that America sucks, and all I can do about it is be aware of and apologetic for that fact. But. Can we actually change what we've become? Is that what this whole Change thing is really about? Taking America in our hands like potters clay and remaking it in the beautiful image of what it could be, of what we want it to be? It's hard to think of an America I can actually be proud to belong to, because for as long as I've had a consciousness of national identity we've been shitty. We've been a bully. We've been sloppy and sordid and untrustworthy and that was that, all there ever was, all there ever will be. But just maybe we have a chance to take on decades of dishonesty and slough them off like old skin, and maybe underneath there is still a place that sparkles. Maybe we can never get our wings back, but, well, then again maybe we can. When I think about it, aiming any lower than that is to underestimate the message of Change.

Hope some of that was readable.

My First Day at Work

So you want to make a good impression on your first day of work, huh? I did. Wanted to, I mean. Sure I've been coming to this school for about two weeks, cheerfully popping in @ around 7:55 ( a full 15 minutes before work starts (which is expected)), sitting down at my desk for a couple hours and working diligently on, eh, well I guess I've been studying, but considering my title is "English teacher" I feel like Japanese student doesn't necessarily fit the job description. But with nothing else to occupy my time, that's what I've been up to since I've been here; lounging around an empty teachers' lounge, reading books, occasionally drinking the other teachers' things from the community fridge, and generally using up oxygen and freon (it's like 100 degrees in this city and the teacher's lounge has AC).

Yeah, I've been making a good impression. Every once in a while if somebody is here we'll exchange a word or two, they'll praise my Japanese, I'll smile demurely into the carpet and that'll pretty much be that. However, today was supposed to be the dawning of a new era, and I was supposed to be able to make my first impression for real.

Yep, today was the opening ceremony for a new term, a requisite part of the Japanese School year. You guys remember fighting back tears as Jean Carwile Mastellar showered us with some over-quoted Emily Dickinson some four odd years ago @ convocation? Yeah, well, here that happens three or four times every year. And it starts in middle school. But, hey, different country, different customs. And if it means I get to make a speech (which it did), then I'm all for it.

For such a momentous occasion I figured I had to put on my Sunday best, so I woke up early, brushed my teeth, pulled my Dad's old suit from the wardrobe, fastened my tie nice and tight, and stepped into the late August sunlight with the words of my upcoming speech fluttering meldiously against the walls of my skull like little puffs of silver wind through church bells. Hmm, I just realized I'm using a lot of Christian iconography here, which is totally inadvertant. But anyways.

However, true to form, this is where everything stopped going according to plan. Immediately upon stepping out of my apartment. And I had even eaten breakfast, too. The late August sun is pretty hot, it turns out, but being the mach man that I am I decided to ride my bike to work. Which was my biggest (and in fact my only) mistake. But it was enough. Have you ever tried biking twenty five minutes to work in a full suit in 95 + degree temperatures. Aesthetic perversions aside, it's a great way to turn yourself into a human stream of sweat. So here I am, lost (did I mention I didn't really know how to get there?), pitting out in ways even BK could never imagine, and starting to freak out. At this point, the fact that my blue suit was so dark it was sucking in matter and crushing it to nothingness within the cavernous maw of the sweat-stain opening up in my lower back was probably the least of my worries. I had to find where the shit I was. Ok, landmarks, that's what I need. Street signs, anything. I just gotta find that one, building, with the, kanji.... on it... o fuck i'm fucked.

My heart sinking to the squishy soles of my shoes, I took a left and started mentally preparing myself for the impeding loss of my pink (seppuku isn't quite an appropriate punishment for a first time offense), when, Holy Amida on a sunbeam I recognized something! Yes! A landmark! I knew where I was, and now I just had to concentrate on getting my butt to school as rapidly as possible.

I surged past the trundling groups of my soon-to-be-students like a speedboat past clutches of ducks, splashing them with twin streams of sweat that must have spread out behind me like a wake, and with about a minute to spare I made it to the teachers' lounge, my shirt transparent, my smile triumphant. Sure I had to introduce myself to all the teachers looking like I'd just gotten out of a swimming pool, and sure I gave my speech with my nipples clearly visible through my clinging white shirt, but, I rocked it all. And maybe now they will never forget Frisk-Sensei, the speedy, sweaty foreign wonder.

New Material

Hey I just wrote this! I haven't written a poem for a little while, maybe a month or so, and this one I kinda like. It's about food though, which sounds pretty dumb, but I found a way to make it transcendent, which redeems it completely. That's my trick to try to sound smart (I stole it from John Keats): if you make anything sound transcendent, you sound like a G. I could probably write a poem about fuckin, like tying my shoes or something and with enough prodding and use of delicate (if pretentious) language make it seem big and momentous. Which, may I add, isn't necessarily synonymous with good. So, without further compromising my poetics, here it is!

It all runs down a river of red, of blood, of sweat,
Of dusty ages spent underneath the earth and locked within
Slick green walls of glass, a single polymorphous stream
Of sublimated grapes and transubstantiated soil caught
In the momentary swell of a bottle, the briefest blunted whiff of
A cylinder that is a glass I raise to my health and turn into a sip
That is more than red and more than wine but is some mysterious
Sum of flavors drawn from an earth that is some mysterious sum
Of mysterious sums, countless complicated sums that have little
To do with math but add up just the same.

Short and sweet. This isn't part of the poem anymore. It's just me rambling, and turning this post long and bitter. A quick disclaimer about that thing you may or may not have just read: I used "sublimated" incorrectly. However, I really like that word, and so will use it in just about any context, even if it that means it must be used inappropriately. "Hey Chad, how are you doing today?" 'Oh great, I just sublimated the lawn. It was getting shaggy.' Or, "You know what, I think I really sublimated that test today. Turned right to gas in my hands." Hm, can you sublimate a solid that doesn't have a liquid phase? You can't turn paper into a liquid right? If you heat it just burns. Straight to a gas. Nothing to skip, ergo unsublimatable. Well, I realize that I don't actually know what the word sublimate means. I also realize that I should avoid the barest mention of science, lest I give my own stupidity away. I do know this, however: kinase kinase kinase. I'm out.

Karaoke: Something of a Sociological Survey

If you’ve never experienced Karaoke, then you’re really missing out. Well, I guess I should qualify that statement a little bit by saying that it’s the Japanese version of karaoke that you need to experience, because they do it a little different here than I suppose we do it back West. When an American thinks Karaoke they can’t help but react negatively to the offensive smell of truckstops, stale cigarettes, cheap whiskey, Journey, and public humiliation that hits their imaginative nostrils. Karaoke back home is generally performed in wide open rooms in front of (potentially) hostile, and (almost certainly) wasted audiences ready to rip you limb from limb if you can’t hit the high notes on Don’t Stop Believin. Doesn’t seem like much fun, does it? Getting up on stage in front of a bunch of people you don’t know and trying to belt out song lyrics as performed by actually talented musicians is a pretty daunting task.

Karaoke in Japan is a different story, however. Not entirely different, of course. There are two things that are common to Karaoke anywhere in the known universe: booze and Bon Jovi. There’s really no getting away from it. I’m not entirely sure who put it into the collective unconscious that Living on a Prayer is a fun song to sing, but I’ve been to Karaoke plenty of times and I don’t think I’ve ever escaped without having to listen to some drunk fuck(s) scream about being halfway to somewhere. Maybe sobriety? At any rate, there’s no use trying to fight it, because unfortunately people get upset if you try to put in A Whole New World on repeat for three hours. You’ve just gotta swallow a couple pills of South Jersey angst before you can get back to singing stuff from the Lion King or N*SYNC. The alcohol and 80s masterpieces aside, however, karaoke is a much kinder, gentler creature over here. Worried about getting up in front of a bunch of people and signing off-key? Well, say goodbye to the spotlight, because most karaoke places here are actually just warrens of corridors and private rooms, which you rent out with just your closest friends. Hmmm, when you get down to it I guess that’s the only difference, but it’s a big difference. You don’t have to worry about being heckled by drunk bums, you only have to listen to a couple songs you don’t like so much, unless of course you go with me, in which case you’ll be singing Linkin Park and Third Eye Blind all night, and, well, the rooms are generally pretty well sanitized. It rules, which is probably why people do it here at least three times a week. I wouldn’t be surprised if some Sarari-Men spend more time with the microphone than with their children.

As I suppose you might have guessed, I went to karaoke last night. It wasn’t your normal night out on the town, however. This party had a planner. His name is George, and calling him a character doesn’t quite get down to it. The first time I met him was at the Reggae Festival, actually (which you loyal readers will recall intimately). Yep, George is the big fat liar who promised us a day with Bob Marley and delivered an afternoon with the Dixie Chicks. I don’t think he cared much, because he was totally wasted. Said he’d been drinking since 3 AM when we met him at around 5 PM, which I find highly suspect because who starts drinking at 3 AM. Ah, yes, there goes the alarm, time to greet the moon with a nice pint of Sake. No, I guess that George had been drinking for about 20 hours at that point, a guess which is at least partially substantiated by the fact that he a) plopped himself down in the midst of our little group and asked my friend Luke if he “wanted some pussy,” and b) was seen doing doughnuts around the field in his mini-van shortly after.

But those little quirks aside George is actually a total baller. He lived in Seattle for some undisclosed period of time, (I want to say in Wallingford, but I’m not so sure), so he speaks great English, and he’s basically a dirty 18 year old beach bum in a 50 some-year-old Japanese man’s body. Yes, he might be 50. But he sure dresses young, and is really friendly. He organized last night’s get together for us with a bunch of other older men (one actually celebrated his 36th with us) dressed like their much younger, hipper counterparts. 5000 yen, all you can drink, all night, karaoke and good times. Sounds expensive, but not for this country. And there was a live band! A fucking Jazz trio in a karaoke room. George sang some Frank Sinatra. If you’d told me maybe four years ago that my post-graduate life would entail hanging out with drunk Japanese men old enough to have sired me, listening to them sing Rat-Pack hits I would have smacked you upside the face with my copy of the Odyssey, but life is strange. And I no longer am shocked by such turns of events. In Japanese they say arugamama, or shikataganai for things that you can’t control, and yeah, I guess that works. It’s just the way things are. Of course people drive their cars on the sidewalk and eat fermented bean curds. Arugamamada.

I managed to put down enough beers and delicious food (there was fruit, which is like gold in this country, so I probably got my fifty bucks worth in pineapples and kiwifruit) in five hours to satisfy me, and though I think we had the room until 3 somebody put on Bon Jovi again and I had to walk out around midnight, serenaded by the sultry sounds of the South Jersey shore as I disappeared into the gently winking Japanese night. Thanks George, always a pleasure.

The Deluge Part 2

Well, it seems it takes more time and knowledge to post a video on this thing that I thought it did, but I'm trying now, so we'll see what happens. If I do manage to get it up, the video will appear on the last post where it was supposed to be. Eh, now I'm going to post some more poetry, per my promise. This is book three, maybe, I think? This part blows kinda. It's about Iesous wandering through the woods and being whiny. He eventually goes home and blah blah blah, stuff happens but it's not that tight. Initially, he had only had a father, but I thought a single mother made more sense, keeping all metaphors in mind. But yeah, of the crappy parts I think this is the second to last. The next one is silly, too, but.... it's smooth sailing through violent waters from there on out. Trust me.

Let us not with our special ability
to fend off shock lose the scope
of the occasion, for it is not even
infrequently that a man dominates
completely a god in arms. Never
is it that he achieves this unnoticed.
Yet it happened, on the banks of
a small bay just off the Aegean sea,
achieved by a young boy of unobvious,
yet readily apparent strength, achieving
the glory of Diomedes, Tydeus’s son, without
the subsequent curse.

Even while the Dethroned King
of the Sea was chasing his sanity,
and by all accounts trailing
miserably, the source of his suffering
crossed under the dappled eaves of
an enchanted wood. There the light
was a gentle blend of green and gold,
at least when dipped in Phoebus’ ink,
and silence was friendly. Most often
though, the air ran with liquid music,
the symphonies of varied birds or the
bow of the wind pulling over nature’s verdant
strings to provide a score for the forest.
Yet, for all the contented caroling and
sweetly blooming flora about him the self-titled
Arbiter saw it not, and though it usually warmed
his heart, on this day his heart was foundering too
deep under a darkling sea to make out any soothing
sound. As his feet stumbled unconsciously onward,
a single thought like a winged iron spike flew
around his head, another rooted deep in his stomach,
one thumping, in-out-again, the other held fast, a thick,
expanding root bearing fat, poisonous fruit.

“ That was a thing I had never expected,
But the rest aside, I didn’t kill him, I can
kill a god, but I didn’t kill him, and I don’t
think I can kill a hundred gods at once.
I don’t know what I can and can’t do, but
I am pretty sure of what they will do when
Triton finds them. It will be like a shower
of fire and lightning and whatever else
they can put into it falling down and down
on my home and my friends’ and neighbors’
homes until there’s nothing left of them at
all, not even the memories. They will hit
them so hard that they will erase our pasts,
and there’s nobody to blame but me. To think,
a spear, to think, me? I did it though, I did
what none of the ones they tell about could do,
not even Ajax, and I could have done more,
but I didn’t and now I will die more completely
than anyone ever has. Stupid! You live one
day at a time, you should take it one god at
a time, however impossibly silly that is.
Stupid, I don’t want to die yet, and I don’t
want anyone else to die because of me
being stupid!”



Occupied completely by these thoughts of self-
reproach, he wandered deep into the forest,
entirely mindless of where he set down each
foot, until by many a random step
chance found him at the secret gates
of his forest home. Reaching high into
the air before his unseeing eyes were
spires of cedar, their woody boughs conspiring
to form an interlocking grille so cleverly wrought
as to appear natural at first glimpse, but upon
closer inspection proving intentional and carefully
made. Continuing his aimless wandering, the youth
trudged on, neither knowing nor caring where he was,
even until the needly boughs of the gate scratched his
smooth face. Momentarily startled, he stopped short,
and stepped back, slightly surprised.

“ Uh-oh. Sooner or later, sooner or later,
but it’s just bad. It’s all bad. Still, I have to,
and later never did anybody any good.”


Then he pushed aside the boughs and with tears sparkling on
his cheeks he stepped into the hidden village. Just inside the
gate, he stopped, perhaps to imprint a memory of
this place, before the gods, as he was certain they would,
destroyed it. His feet stood on a path that
became a lane shaded by leafy olive trees, paving
the breadth of the village in lazy meanders. Simple
homes rested along the path, solid maple walls eaved
with handsome beech. Behind some of the houses
hung laundry lines, clothing gently swaying in the
little breeze that found its way into the secret clearing.
In front of the homes and in the soft lawns around them
children, little kids, played, their laughter sweet enough
to deepen the boy’s sadness to the color of
a growing bruise. Yet he was nothing if not
resolute, and though his stomach was busy
consuming itself in nervous acid, he forced
his feet to follow the street laid before them,
his gaze seeking at its terminus the humble home
of his mother.



She had been feeling the tremors for weeks, like
the preliminary rumblings of a massive earthquake,
and from the moment they began she knew there
was no way anyone could stop the eventual release
of pressure. She waited helplessly as she felt the
vibrations intensify, accelerating to an infinitesimally
sharp point before they exploded with terrible
force, seeming to tear the very air in rifts and great
rents of severed reality. She felt clearly the moment
the boy propelled himself through the mortal shroud
draped ‘round his being, a shroud not unlike one
a great sculptor would draw over a masterpiece to
keep it special before some predetermined
unveiling. She felt the moment the boy burst through
his shroud, and passed out from the shock.
When she found her reserves had again filled
enough for her to open her eyes, she perceived
the recession of the trembling; somehow the
boy had managed to gather the tatters of the
shroud around himself and knit them into
a coherent blanket, achieving once again
the concealment of his spirit from the world.
A subtle melancholy pulse was all that remained.
Even here, she felt her son draw nearer, the epicenter
of the great quake that split the sea.

He’s outside her door, and the vibration ceases.


A woman’s intuition is real, and a mother’s
intuition is fact, stretching over the wavy field
of the future like a morning haze over hilly
country, shifting sideways out of the air in
the early dawn and settling loosely upon the rises
and sinking into the valleys, taking in the topography
as if it were brail written in a language of misty
letters and half-dashed words and then gone,
burnt through and burnt off by the rising sun.
She could guess from the way the dew wet the sky
that something was coming, and there had been
that sense of impending bigness, of approaching
heights in a certain place in the air behind her
ears for the past few weeks, towering over and
evaporating around her on again and off again
while she watered her plants or sat in meetings
or when she kissed her son good-night. Then
she heard the door knob turning, and there it
was, no longer the impression of mist but
actuality locked up in dull metallic sound-waves.


Almost struggling against the resistant air,
the door creaked open and the boy walked into
his mother’s home, kneeling in front of his mother’s
chair, putting his hand upon his mother’s knee,
and speaking to his mother thus.

“Mom, I have to tell you something. Something
that will be hard for you to believe but is the
absolute honest-to-whomever-you-please truth.
Triton, the Triton, came out of a pool of water,
the sea where I go, and something has happened
to me. I did something. He made me so angry
and I speared him. I speared him and made
him cry, I know it’s impossible, crazy, but I did,
I cut straight through his shoulder, through the skin
I mean and all the way to the bone. Then I told
him to tell everyone that I did it to him, and I let
him get away. I could have killed him, I should
have killed him, do you hear me, but I didn’t.
Oh, No...... phew... I didn’t. Every time I think
about it I remember Odysseus, and if Poseidon
would put him through that for a few mere word
he will have me and everyone I know wandering
through the lowest levels of Tartarus
until the world ends. Mother, I don’t know what
to do, I don’t have a single clue, but if I do nothing
we’re all going to die. I need your help.”

From beneath delicate brows the boy’s
mother looked upon her son with
benevolent eyes, for she knew
that sometimes there are fates that
cannot be escaped, that sometimes
all roads converge upon the same
point, and the only way to differentiate
one from the next is by the scenery in
between. With this knowledge
in her heart she spoke to her son.

“ When you burst in here, your face so pale,
I thought you had lost the sheep in the forest
again. Collecting them all up took days,
searching for little puffs of white behind
all the green and brown and yellow, trying
to pick out the bleats from the whistles
of the birds and the creaks of the grasshoppers.
But in the end we found them all, and when
we did you said you would never lose them again,
and that you would learn to talk to the sheep
so that you could always keep them together.
You said you would be the best shepherd ever,
and I knew that you would, but that sheep
were too small. This day was bound to come
sooner or later, and the only question now
is not why it came but what to do now that
it is here.”

These words confused the boy in a way
that gave him hope, because he was worried
that he had pulled somthing out of nothing
in a way he could never do again, or that
he was nothing stumbled upon something
meant for someone, someone else, but if
his mother saw it, he believed her.
“I’m going to fight the gods,” he said.
“I’m going to fight the gods whether
I should or not because I have started
doing it, and with this sort of thing there
is no backing out, unless you mean dying.”

His mother was silent for a moment,
looking into her boy’s face for what would
be the last time.

“ My son, the road ahead of you could not
be more dark, because you are a little boy
in a world of angry gods. Not so little anymore,
maybe, but then again the gods are very angry.
I’m afraid you’ll need more than an umbrella
or a shady tree to weather the storm they
will raise against you. I want to sit you down
and make you eat a plate of cookies, but it makes
me old knowing that I have to direct you somewhere
else. When you have to put down a rabid animal
you must cut off the head, and so this is the same
with a rabid pantheon. You can do nothing but
cut off the head, the Olympian gods, children
of ancient Kronos, for they are in charge, and with
them removed the rest of the headless beast will
fall down dead. It must be Hades first, the
lonely Olympian beneath the ground, who sits
in the dark with the ghosts of the people we used
to be. You must go into the earth to prove your claim
to it, my child, you must teach it the goodness of your
heart from inside out so that it will know exactly who you are .”

A lesser soul would have cast aside his
gloves and thrown down his trowel, learning
that his life’s road could be paved only with the
skulls of the Olympian Gods, and further,
that the first brick was to come off the neck,
off the block of infamous Hades. What hit-man,
no matter how ice-cold, could help but blink
at the next name on his list were it to read
the “Steward of Death himself”? Yet now
resolved to the quest, nothing could deter
the boy, and with an almost uncomprehending
stoicism he nodded, quickly rising from his place
before his mother’s knee.

“Into Hades? I didn’t want to die until I was
an old man, but if I come out again then I
guess I will have been reborn. Whether or
not I will be a different person, only time will
tell, but you’re right, if I am to win this fight
I’ll need the earth on my side, and what
better way to start than by taking it back
from within? My eyes have been opened
mom, and who knows what world they
will see when I look out through them.”

His mother’s eyes were gray clouds sinking
in a quiet twilight, but she raised her hands
in a benediction, and spoke to the boy in
a voice like rain on a metal roof.
“ Your eyes have always been open, and
you see the world more clearly than I.
If you had not the thing which {necessitates}
this quest, I would do all that I might to keep you
here. It is a mother’s job to bring her boy up,
to lead him through tears and chubby cheeks
and cradles in the night to the doorsteps of
his own destiny. The doorsteps are his to walk
through, though, and when she can see their liminal
glow in the distance, she knows that she needs to let
go, and leave him with both hands free to wrestle
the world. Still, she’ll never forget the way the lines
of his palm fit into hers, no matter how time
stretches them out, and even when all I can do
is wave you on your way, I’ll be watching
the set of your shoulders and the bob of your head
as you disappear, even so I’ll be able to recognize
them in whatever world we meet next. Here,
one list thing before I see you off.”

And taking from a pocket deep within
her cloak, the woman brought forth
a gleaming talisman. It was cleverly wrought to
hold in the light that struck it and burnish
it as if with a rich and lustrous laquer. Displayed
upon the precious sigul was a bright flame
on a field of shadowy green, the deep red flame
emitting radiant streaks of brilliant white like
rays from a vibrant sun. Above the flame, the
green grew dark, and became a cap of sable within
which little diamonds hung like ornamental stars. A
single ruby shone in their midst, glistening like
blood.
Within and about the flame, like wood for
a campfire, burned an array of detailed symbols;
a giant three-pronged fork, a sceptre the color
of a deadly bruise, a great mithril axe, a giant
hammer, a staff entwined by two serpents, a slim
bow, and a few others which the intensity
of the flames obscured.

At its top, the flame blossomed out like a
rose, its petals reaching up to the stars above.

With a glint of reverence clear in his eyes, the
boy took the sacred pendant, and at his touch
it began to resonate, sending out brilliant shafts
of multicolored light that brightened the
already lit room of the house. It was hot in his hand but
he did not burn, and it seemed that as the light
escaped from the pendant it rushed directly
into his eyes, illuminating them with a beautiful
and terrible energy. Determination drawn
cleanly in every line of his being, he raised the
pendant to his neck, and clasped it there around.
As it settled over his chest it gave out a single
blinding pulse, and then went dim. It seemed
alive around his neck where it had been only a
piece of art in the hand of the woman.

He looked up at his mother and in his eyes gleamed
eternity. For a moment they were every color
and none, like darkness and light entwined and
melded, a shade and hue so radiant and impossible
that his mother faded away in the shower of not-quite-white,
and for a moment she was little more than an outline,
a small smile in the backwash of eternity. Then the boy
spoke two words to himself, “Not yet,” and willed it
to subside. In the breathless calm that ensued,
he bowed low to his mother of old, gently kissed
her forehead, and left the house forever.

A pause- and then some Art

It's strange to be out of email contact with the rest of the world for even three days. Whitman's server has been down since Sunday night for me, I guess, and so I've got nothing but radio silence from the West. My link has been severed! Well, I guess I have gmail, but I don't really use that address, so all I've got there are a few old emails about student loans. Which are pretty funny. Makes you appreciate the internet a little, I suppose. It all seems so solid, but I guess it is fragile. Hundreds of millions of people linked by fiber-optics and binary code, putting their lives into ciphers of ones and zeroes and entrusting that they'll be retranslated into alphanumerics once they've reached the other end of the instantaneous digital pulse that is the send button. Everyday we pack a little bit of our selves into invisible streams of electrons and send them streaming out into the infinite, mutable, and (to me) entirely incomprehensible internet, wrapping up our lives in words and shipping them out in little inscrutable packages that uncountable computer chips handle and chuck unceremoniously through circuits that are the digital, Silicon-Valley-inspired metaphors for delivery trucks, and then somehow anybody anywhere can open the package up, and there you are, smiling, unchanged, and none-the-worse-for-wear for a trip around the world in eigthy miliseconds. I don't understand the internet at all, but I do understand that it's sweet.

But on to bigger and better (well, longer, anyways) things (dammit that sounds like a penis joke): here's some more of my shit!! I'm hesitant to do this; not only is this an unprecedented amount of material i'm about to post here, but it's also my first forray into the world of internet acoustic covers. I'm so excited! Ok, here's what I'm going to do. I'll split it all up into two posts: one, me at my greasiest and most socially-reticent wailing away on a guitar to a song that I'll think you'll be pleasantly surprised to find isn't one of my hits, and then the second a rousing round of epic poetry. There's surprisingly little to blog about when you're largely just sitting in rooms and studying Japanese for 8 hours a day. I could speak to the grammatical expression "ばかりか” for a few moments, but I won't. But yeah, here's me in my room. I'll get a video of the concerts for homeless people and the occasional Japanese passersby i've been doing later, maybe. Sorry about the sound quality. By the way, I just discovered this dude on youtube who sings the male and female parts to A Whole New World from Aladdin. Watch it immediately, it's the fucking sweetest shit ever. He looks like Jasper Lipton if you gave him jaw implants to look like the Dad from the Incredibles.

Bombs Over... Fukuroi?

For a country that is renowned for its group dynamics and mildly repressive the-protruding-nail-is-hammered down (this is actually a proverb) view of the individual, it seems like every tiny little town is famous for something or other. If it’s not always OK to stick out as an individual, it’s fairly standard to try to stick out as a community. Don’t let anybody tell you that Japanese people are all the same, because while conformity does dress up in the guise of adherence to rules of social propriety that probably wouldn’t ever occur to many non-Japanese (it’s considered rude, for example, to drink from a water bottle while walking), this is certainly not a nation populated by flat grey robots thinking through the mechanical mind of some massive metallic queen bee barricaded in an office building in the heart of Tokyo. I think regional differences are pretty fascinating, and I have never seen a country whose people vary more from place to place or take so much pride from being residents of a particular area. Which I guess makes sense if we want to look at it in the context of group identity. Community is built fundamentally out of a connection to place, and because Japan is a society based around being a member of a group, sure, it follows that people would identify strongly with the specific place in which they live. Ugh, now that I think about it I don’t want to get into a sociological examination of Japanese identity, I just want to talk about fireworks. So I’ll dispense with the dissertation and get into it a little more.

Every place in Japan is famous for something (this is eventually where my blogging was going to stumble out of the academic woods and into the light of someplace more interesting). Of course, Kyoto is famous for autumn leaves, tea ceremony, and as a cultural center. Osaka is famous for its accent (among many other things). Tokyo is famous for being Tokyo. But that’s not quite what I mean when I say every place in Japan is famous for something. Saying Kyoto is famous for temples is like saying New York is famous for tall buildings, rude people, and crazy taxi drivers. No doi, right? However, in Japan, not just are the biggest cities famous for things, but so too are the tiny little shit towns in the middle of nowhere. Have you ever heard of Niigata? Probably not, but it’s famous for rice and Japanese people will pay a lot of money for rice grown there as opposed to, say, Gifu. Hamamatsu, where I’m currently posted up, is well-known for mikan and unagi (oranges and eel). People rave about the Okonomiyaki (a food virtually impossible to explain in English to someone who’s never eaten it) made in Hiroshima. Hirakata’s got milk-tea, Kobe cows and shoes, Miyajima cakes, and if you’ve never had dango from Ibaraki you’ve never lived. Every little shit-ball town on the map is famous for something, and everybody knows about, which brings me to the tiny little town of Fukuroi, just about a half hour or so from where I live.

Fukuroi:

A (beautiful) town of maybe 35, every year in the beginning of August Fukuroi braces itself for a tidal wave of Japanese folks as thousands of people crash upon the shores of the little hamlet to watch the third or fourth biggest fireworks display in all of Japan. It’s amazing. We got off the train at about 6:00 and for miles around there was nothing but people and rice paddies. I’m a little hungover right now, so can’t accurately or very humorously describe the situation, but I think this picture will do wonders:





My face says it all. Where did all of these people come from? I don’t know, but the allure of two hours of fireworks drew them to this little place like pyromaniacal moths to a flame. Wait, two hours? Of fireworks? I know what you’re thinking, sweetest thing ever, and yeah that’s what I thought. But at the same time, two hours is a long time…. How are they going to keep it from getting really boring? This is where my mind started doing laps and I started imagining Gandalf-inspired phosphorus dragons and fabricated incandescent rainbows snarling and streaking across the night sky, and this is also where I started to get very excited. Unfortunately, turns out Japanese people aren’t actually sorcerers, just nerds with a lot of explosives on their hands, so it was two intermittent hours of your garden variety bombs in the sky, which ain’t bad. I’ve got a lot of pictures, so, I figured I’d post them all so you could experience them too. Sit back, relax, grab an overpriced beer and a small container of yakisoba and it’s like we’re all there together, watching the static imprints of old explosions in a far-away sky.

Boom!

Phoosh!!!

I really like this one, it looks like the sun is blowing up. Or maybe the Death Star?

Doesn't this one look like a big chandelier?

Ah, so nice.

This shit seriously went on forever.

Dammit that's satisfying.

This was the grand finale, and even though it sounded like the world was being ripped apart, you couldn't really see anything because of the two hours worth of fireworks smoke in the air. Whoops, but at least we know what color yen burns when you set it on fire.

I love this kid.

Well, that's about that. If you've seen one fireworks display you've seen them all, but they're still beautiful. No getting around that. Oh yeah, here's me with a homeless dude.

More Self-Promotion

Book two, anyone? This one is shorter than the last one, but maybe not any more readable. Still in my early phase here, so there thee's and thou's sprinkled about pretty liberally. Just pretend Homer wrote it and everything will come out right. Oh yeah, Japan is alright. But it's well past my bedtime (about 8:30) so I'll have to catch up with myself a little later. 6:30 comes disgustingly early. I've got a couple pictures of me playing a private guitar concert for a homeless man I've gotta stick up. Also, I've always been in love with the youtube phenomenon that is people webcamming themselves in their depressing bedrooms doing acoustic covers of songs, so I'm going to do that. Expect a link to Wet Sand, or maybe Wagon Wheel, to be up and running soon. Rock on.




Time passed, and for the accustomed
period the land was dark, though
brushed with the softest silver in wash from
the constant stars and a wild moon.
The night was like a sable blanket tucked
under the chin of a slumbering world, but it was
like Triton had kicked off the covers and there
were only nightmares. He shivered and shook
like a child who sees terror in the dark, weeping
softly but violently into the indifferent emptiness
around him. Nobody saw, but as day threatened,
and it still seemed as if his berserk grief would never
end and that his pitiful condition would soon
be revealed to all inquiring eyes, Triton stopped
wailing. He clutched tightly at the tattered and useless
shreds of his sanity, the pitiful remnants of his
godly mantle which now seemed more like a
beggar’s vestments, and looked far to the East.
There he saw the first glowing tendrils of dawn,
as Aurora softly drew her yellow robe across those
Oriental skies. Animated by his great shame,
Triton mastered his quivering body, and slipped
quickly beneath the cover of the waves,
forsaking to their sullen fury his crumbling
throne of coral, whispering a dirge as it sank.

And so it came to pass that Aurora blazed
beautifully across the entire sky, lighting it
from her shining lamp first with tendrils of pink,
then blossoms of orange and peach that spread
like smoke from a harem fire, wafting into the
lightened sky before disappearing in the aery ocean
of early azure, all without alighting upon
anything amiss amongst the heavenly ranks.
Maybe the gulls calls were forlorn,
and maybe the sea seemed a bit hollow,
but what were they to her whose realm
was the conduit between night and day?

His introduction made in Aurora’s heraldic colors,
Apollo led his orb over the edge of the
world, its golden spray spilling over
the mountains and into the valleys of the earth
in a dramatic, sweeping moment of light. Ascending
his fiery throne, the great Archer looked down,
seeking maids of virtue and beauty to caress
with a beam, and glory to wreath with a laurel.
He too gazed at the distraught sea,
but from ignorance took its restlessness
for playfulness, passing it over.

So it was with all the other spirits
of the world. Flora tended her flowers, Ares
raged and slew, Hephaistos put the bellows
to his forge, Athena played her subtleties,
Demeter ripened the amber grains
growing in the farmer’s fields, Hades fumed
down with the dead, and so on and on
ad infinitum, up to Zeus, who sat on his throne
of clouds and threw lightning bolts where(ever)
it pleased him to. Only the spirits of the sea and
mighty Poseidon knew of the infliction of their waters.
The extent they knew not, however, for how could
they guess at the truth?

There was one who knew the truth of her lord’s
afflictions; a naiad feeling upon her soul the salt
of his wound though knowing it not. Seeking its cause
she found him, though not it. Joanna she was called
by her sisters of the sea, and seeing her lord, she hailed
him thus. “ My lord, glad am I to find thee here,
whence so much deadly pestilence hath sprung, though
it’s source I perceive not. It feels to me as though
the waters bleeds, and when the water bleeds,
I feel it poisonous upon my skin; I think that I should
not weather its unnatural sting much longer.
Dost thee feel it too? For though I would that it were
with me, and not this my beloved sea, I think not
that I am so far off the mark. Lord, what
is this anathema, from whence....”

Seeing here her lord’s sparkling wound, she
broke off sharply, and was greatly shocked
to see its drastic degree.
“ O Triton, it is not the sea that bleeds, but thee!
How camest thou by this grievous wound,
and what mighty god under the Pantheon struck it?
It is no wonder that the waters cry out, for its Monarch
to be so assaulted. But still- I see thy wound is grave,
a gaping ruin of muscle and skin, yet even then there is
more pain here than the rending of heavenly flesh,
so easily repaired, could confer. Please, what befell
thee that makes my heart tremble so?”
Here, apprehending fully her lord’s
shaky condition, she was stunned
by what she saw. His crown of shells
which once so lightly and proudly had adorned
his wide brow hung askew and crumbling,
forgotten amongst his wild locks.
Like the forsaken grandeur of an ancient ruin
mostly lost beneath a sheath of jungle creeper,
they framed the growing madness on his haggard
face. Unkempt and ragged, he looked a bedraggled
beggar at the side of a road, wild and covered
all in smut. Twin pasty paths followed a
frantic trail down his cheeks to converge
on the unsteady point of his chin, clear
evidence of the passing of many sorrowful
pilgrims, divine tears marking divine suffering.
This recognition nearly drove the naiad to weeping
herself, so out of place they seemed on that strong
face. Worst of all, though, were his eyes,
those windows to the soul, and his swam
with uncontrolled frenzy. Even when respectable
control of his body he would regain, still his eyes,
opaline shot with ultramarine round the bindings,
would be illumined with an unhealthy light
and a lurid tint, wont to flick about furtively
as if searching and deathly frightened
of what they might find.

Yet, god he was, and in the boys’s absence
he was able to remember, and affect at least
a passing resemblance to his former station.
Looking into the watery eyes of the Naiad,
he composed himself, and like Theoden before
the staff of Mitrandir he seemed to grow.
That this being so proud and so high was weeping
like a baby only moments before was impossible,
so massive seemed his presence and iron
his will. It was almost enough to make
one forget the profound wound ‘cross his shoulder,
almost enough to make it insignificant;
but his regeneration never reached his eyes,
though they filmed a little, and the turbulence there
was only momentarily turned aside.
Raising his chin, he spoke to the nymph,
dissembling, but not without love. “ Dearest
daughter, I would fain thee had not seen me
in my distress, but truly ‘twas nothing
more than a passing storm, a sudden squall
quickly come and quickly gone; already
it hath passed and I feel calmed, nearly placid,
say true. See how my countenance is eased?
As for this, as you say, a trifling,
for there is no hurt the healing arts
of the Immortals cannot mend.
Yet it brings me pain, here, and indeed when I hurt,
the sea follows suit, being tied so neatly
to the flow of my soul. As for the author
of this hurt, ‘twas nobody, and at any rate
matters not, for it closes already.
The only consequence now is to soothe
it completely. Let us go to my father,
as his skill with wounds like this is supreme,
and though it should be within my limits
to make it alone, I would not mind
your company and support should I falter.”

So convincing was his speech and
so eager was she to believe it that, ignoring
the niggling unease at the back of her
mind, and forgetting mostly the violent
doubt that had wracked her so recently,
she smiled and swam off in the direction
of Poseidon’s palace, while Triton, a sea
serpent twirling momentarily ‘round
his fishy half, followed with a cozening
hope kindling in his outer heart.

Sculpture Safari

One of the coolest things about this place is the public art sprinkled around the city like a civic engineer's version of exotic spices. Now, I put it that way because the sculptures are all quite strange, and tend towards the aesthetic of objects once used in ritual sacrifices. It's like Hamamatsu's city planners went on an artifact-finding expedition into the deepest regions of the human soul, the heart of darkness, if you will, and emerged clutching Kurtz's, misshapen, blackened head and the physical manifestations of the darkness that warped his heart. There are also some really cute statues of kitties! But honestly, the art, and in some cases, the architecture, is a (potentially unwitting) tribute to all things mysterious, pagan, and hierophantic, which is all like the coolest shit ever, so here's a little tour through the Kabbalistic wonderland I get to walk every day.

This, folks, is the Babylonian ziggurat where I go to work every day. I feel like many recent graduates find themselves waking up at an unreasonably early hour, trudging to work through a fine mist of reality-induced depression, looking up at a non-descript, boxy, twenty-something-story pile of poop of an office building, and then maybe sighing once before dragging themselves into an elevator, and sitting down behind a desk to do whatever they do for eight hours. I, too, find myself crawling out of bed at the unreasonable hour of 7:30, but instead of a bland, pile of poop office building I get to climb the steps of an obsidian, triangular temple to Asherah, peeling back sacred veils with every step upwards to reveal the increasingly more sacred mysteries of the Japanese system of Bureaucracy before reaching the sixth floor where I pass into the air-conditioned inner sanctum of room 4, take my seat around the rectangular tables of Enki and proceed to… well, compose internet blog posts for hours on end. Sometimes I play cards with the other priests. We also nap. It’s a very spiritual life.

Continuing the tour, this is the bizarre idol enshrined at the entrance to my building. I’m not entirely sure why anybody would want to pray to Earthworm Jim’s disembodied head, but you don’t put something on a pedestal of three circumscribed triangles unless you plan to bow down to it.

I’m not sure exactly whose nightmare this thing stepped out of, but the artist has somehow managed to fuse into one nefarious being the uneasy, inhuman attributes of marionettes, stone golems, headless robots, and valley girls. Notice how it seems to be trying to use the giant arrowhead thing behind it like a scratching post with its right hand while its left hand looks ready to morph into a big fat “L” and fly up to its forehead at any second? Too bad it doesn’t have a head. Whatever, Major Loser, I can’t even imagine the identity issues this thing must have. To fry you with my laser fingers, rip your head off with my claws, summon the creatures of the earth for a rocking sylvan tea-party (hey, I never said it couldn’t be friendly), or just sear you with icy disdain and simplistic catchphrases? This one’s complicated, that’s for sure.

Nothing funny to say about this, it's just a sweet photo. See my shadow? You can almost imagine a council of ghosts sitting on the lighted seats, just breathing peace and quiet into the night sky. It's a pretty calming place.






This place is gorgeous too. Last boring photo, I promise.

Now, this place does confuse me a little bit. What is a creepy, ominously lit, faux-gothic cathedral doing in downtown Hamamatsu? Is it the ancestral home of a local warlord with a European complex? A medieval themed restaurant? Perhaps the place where they're going to film the live action version of Sleeping Beauty? In a sense it's all three. Well, maybe not so much the first one, but bits and pieces of the other two. It seems to be a universal human thang to want to make one's wedding a magical, exciting production, and it's no different on this island. If you're willing to shell out the cash, you can get married on the top floor of the ACT tower, the tallest building in Hamamatsu, in the Sky Chapel, a room painted to look like it opens into the heavens and is decorated in the puffy cloud sort of way that would suit a visiting choir of angels. A nice place to tie the knot, closer to God so that he can hear your vows better, I suppose, but if your wallet isn't quite so fat, or maybe if you take a slightly darker view of the almighty, you can get together and get legitimate in Wedding Central Park at the Castle Perilous. I didn't go inside, but I imagine it's done up in tattered tapestries, guttering candlelight, cobwebs, and the scent of Satan that only an old Catholic church can provide. Of course, it's not really a Catholic church so they probably won't get that part quite right, but I do think I heard the vampiric stylings of My Chemical Romance coming from inside, so at least the soundtrack is spot-on.

I saved the best for last because this is the fucking shit. What the fuck is this supposed to be??? Somewhere on their journey into the human heart the engineers of Hamamatsu uncovered proof of the the existence of aliens! Because this technology is far too advanced for even the Japanese. Flanked on both sides by some sort of runic inscriptions that must have been designed either by Neo-Futurists or creatures from the planet Zebulon is the real prize of the city's public works projects, the creme de la creme of Hamamatsu's collection of obscure, fabricated archaeology. Backlit by what can only be described as the eery green light from some unknown, otherworldy isotope is... well.... it's fucking like.... it's kinda like The Cube but it's circular, and there's pieces missing.... And it's not very well hidden, so Megatron would have found it a long time ago.... Wait, that's it! It's not The Cube, it's a Transformer that got stuck in mid-morph! No, that's not right. See the green crystal thing in there? Maybe it's a Jabba the Hut sized interstellar turd encased in carbonite? Too easy? Yeah, I'm not even really trying anymore. I don't know what that thing could possibly be, I'm defeated by it, but I'm also entranced by it. More research is required, I think. Did I mention that it's right in the middle of the train station?

Untitled

It’s nothing more than an uplifting shape
Made out of wood, but looking at it, along
About and inside it, I feel myself stretching
And ascending its leafy heights, wooden
Bones lengthening and creaking upwards with gritty,
Flex-and-extend satisfaction, my suddenly many fingers
Splayed out and fluttering at the casual insistence
Of the wind. I am a synthetic composition of bark
And blood, a symbiotic cyborg crafted of man and tree,
Determinedly reaching beyond the afflictions
Of one, the dumb limitations of the other.
It’s a majestic thing to feel my muscles spread
Out and harden along the wide, hard branches
Of my Vishnu arms, gripping the wood tighter
And tighter until you’d think it must pop and
Shoot arm-pulp out in every direction.
A beautiful and strangely primal instinct makes
My soul dance along the balance-beam limbs
Of this pirouetting tree, wrapping myself around
Its curves, filling the empty spaces with my
Escaping, vital leftovers. It’s just a shape made
Of wood, it makes a thump if you knock on it,
But inside, it’s a living and growing ark, a form
That stands outside the universe of man and earth
With the perfect potential to transport me out, to
Sit beneath it in eternal darkness or super-terrestrial
Light.

Adventures in Reggae

Have any of you ever been to a reggae festival before? Maybe, but even if you haven’t there’s a certain something you’re kinda programmed to expect. Summons up images of summer-time, marijuana, colorful clothing, slow, sunshine-soaked tunes, Jamaican flags, maybe some weed, dreadlocks, darshy frat-dudes, free love, and uh… well yeah mostly just a lot of doobie smoking. When I hear the word reggae, the image of Bob Marley wearing a grill-full of joints and a wreath of sticky-icky-icky gently wafts across my eyes, a tropically infused score of Jamaican accents and electric guitars filling in the spaces obscured by the smoke. It’s a vision which leaves me feeling relaxed, serene, and strangely hungry. It’s OK, you know, not really something I like feeling (I prefer being nervous, agitated, and hella full at all times), but that’s what reggae is, you know? Why fight it? Don’t worry, be happy and all that.
But in Japan? How could a reggae festival exist without its most important ingredient, its staple crop, its ambassador, its biggest draw, its muse? It’d be like going to a Creed concert with Scott Stapp passed out in front of the microphone instead of awake and singing into it (bad example, Scott Stapp doesn’t give a concert any other way); how can I go see Creed knowing that I won’t be able to hear With Arms Wide Open, and how do reggae fans go to a reggae festival knowing they won’t be able to get high? And they won’t be high, not in this country. Here they have robot dogs that can sniff the merest thought of drugs, and if they smell such a scent upon your mind then you can say hello to a jail cell real quick. I think I read somewhere that it’s a capital offense to know somebody who has seen Harold and Kumar go to White Castle (which I think is surprisingly fair). So obviously, once I heard that there was a reggae festival in the nearby town of Bentenjima, I considered it my obligation as an armchair sociologist to attend.
We were promised massive crowds, live bands, rivers of beer, barbequed meat hanging from the trees and generally just a kicking party, so I was pretty interested to check it all out. Unfortunately, you can’t always believe everything you’re told. We stepped off the train at Bentenjima to a cozy little fishing hamlet being pummeled by the summer sun; it’s a fair-sized town of rivers, dingies, weepy-green willows stitched into the patches of dirt mixed into the patchy concrete streets, and, today, a reggae festival in 95 degree heat. Pretty random, but I’m learning to roll with random.
It was like a twenty-minute walk from the station to the festival, but from looking around I figured that unless there was either a worm hole or a port-key nearby, there was no way we were going to wind up at a kicking party. A tide-pool, maybe, or a whaler’s convention, but not a massive party.
As it turns out, there could have been a massive party there, but there wasn’t. There was a tent. Well, maybe if I were being generous we could say there was a pavilion, but it encompassed about 2% of a field the size of an airport. And live bands? Not quite. There was just a DJ dropping phat beats. Imagine a group of about 200 Japanese people dressed alternately as rainbows or extras from a T-Payne video, and now imagine them grooving out to Brandy, Christina Aguilera, and Shania Twain. All of those things happened. The DJ called out something really bad-ass sounding, the equivalent of “yo, yo, check it!” or something like that, and then proceeded to put on “I Feel Like a Woman.” It was about then that I thought to myself… this is a place in which you can never live. Nonetheless, the weather was great, the scenery colorful, and the company not half bad, so I count it a good day.

Infocalypse

You never fully appreciate language until you find youself in a place where they don't speak yours. It seems a fundament human truth that when you're walking around town you'll be able to read all of the signs you see, open a rental account at Blockbuster without breaking a sweat, tell somebody you'd like your Big Mac without pickles, please, ask directions with the assurance that you'll be able to understand the answer, and generally live amidst a coherent stream of more than one out of every five words. There so many words, so many words and it's sometimes amazing to me that we as humans have constructed the sort of complex social frameworks that need so many words to hold them up. It's pretty badass that we live in societies that require words like "contract," "monthly fee," "unlimited text package," and "comprehensive service agreement" in order to run smoothly. I bought a cell-phone today, and the dude at Yamada Denki threw so many words at me I didn't understand that I can't even guess what they might have been. I set out trying to test myself, to see if I could sign up for a cell-phone plan in a foreign country without any help from anybody else, and I was pretty sure I could handle it. How hard could it be? I've studied Japanese for like eight years, I can do it. Well, turns out that there are some undertakings in these societies we live in that a working knowledge of the language of basic likes and dislikes, foods, drinks, menus and personality traits, in other words the tangible words of tangible objects, won't help you with. I can tell the man behind the counter which phone I like, how much I'm willing to pay for it, even compare its size, shape, color, functionality or popularity among pre-teens with another phone, but when he tries to tell me something about something else about it, all I hear is a big expanse of white noise punctuated here and there with a word or two I can say "hai" to and look like I know what the hell is going on. It's pretty spectacular in a way, and puts the power of language and communication in a different light. I've tried to debate with biology nerds about what's more important, biology or language, but somehow whenever I try to bring in the effect of public discourse upon the construction of identity, they counter with some stuff about cells and blood and molecules and amino acids that doesn't really make sense to me but amounts to something I can understand: without all that shit we'd all be dead. Well, in that case I guess it doesn't really matter too much how Fox News portrays Barack Obama, now does it?

But check it out, in the case of the infocalypse, moving across the world to a world of people you can only barely understand, then biology becomes pretty irrelevant too, because if I can't convey anything to anybody else, then the vast complicated body of cytosine, kinase kinase kinase, and mitochondria that we are all falls down; language is the bridge between biology and epistemology (sorry I fucking love that word) that makes it all make sense, and it is on those strangely steady cobbles of interlinked words and shared concepts that society walks and our systems run. I seriously can't remember anything that guy at the cell phone place said to me, because much to my surprise it was mostly meaningless, full of words I've never learned, up until now never knew I had never learned, and it's a good thing I studied the Soft Bank (my new service provider) booklet really thoroughly and knew exactly what I wanted so I could just interject a few "hais" in the right empty silences, because hell yeah I walked out of there with a phone, even though I'm not entirely sure how much I paid for it. Boy I hope this nation is honest.

Some Seious Filler

Ack, I'm in Hamamatsu now (my place of residence) and a lot of shit has happened, but it's all kinda boring/ I'm a little rushed, so instead of writing about anything that acutally has been going on with me, I will begin the serialization of The Epic. A brief point of explanation: I spent about four years writing this monster, it's about 100 pages, and it's a little fucked up. Nothing horrifying, nothing Hollywood hasn't already done, but if in fact anyone random that I don't know stumbles upon this and begins reading... well, let's just say it'd be awkward if we every met. For anyone who I do know who is reading this... this is some me. Just a little more violent. It's generally about the ideological transfer of religious power from the polytheistic pagan religions to the monotheistic ones (mostly Christianity) and it winks at the way in which so called "new" religions often just recyled and recast stories and figures from preexisting myth, but it's also (hopefully) more interesting than any of the those themes, which are potentially the most boring shits ever. So here it is, a couple pages from my Magnum Opus, completed before I was even 21. A second notice: I put the entire first book down there and it's real long, so don't be daunted, and feel free to read it slowly at in many sittings. Third notice: I wrote a lot of this just after graduating high school, so it's a little... retarded. But I promise it gets a lot better as it goes on.


This is a tale of the end of oppression
and through my devices shall it be written
down. The Muses are my sisters and have
no place to inspire me to tell any story
for my power is greater than theirs.
Instead of invoking their assistance,
I ask for thy attention, to heed
the last words of a changing god
and from his own mouth take the truth
of the fall of the glorious pantheon.

Legends tell of a youth, born in
obscurity and raised there in secret.
The best he was of those two fabled heroes,
a brilliant blend of the Adventurer’s
wiles and Achillean might. He is the thread
woven within every myth, the true pattern
of Life’s eternal quilt, but the subtle needle
which could alone perform his
special stitch has been lost within
a hay stack of night and time . Yet the
time has come for humanity to know
the truth, and mine is the only hand that could
handle the needle and thread such a tale,
so have it, and forget all the foibles
of legend.


There was a time, immemorial at the
most recent, when this land was rife with
spirits, and it seemed that one couldn’t
but frown without transpiring a god of
some power or less. In the flowers they
slumbered, spreading wing before the wind;
they were as the crust on the earth and the blue
in the sky, the green in the grass and the gold
in the sun, each separate entity a vivid
and bright spot leeching vivacity and
brightness from their allotment of creation.
Because, you see, being lords of peculiar
nature and blessed with mastery of their
specific element, they grew dominant,
and laced with gluttony they lost their way
from ennobling the land, to controlling it.
It is in these inversely dark days
that lived a youth who loved the elements
for what they were and not the gods
who lorded them.


He went one day down to the
sea, those mild waters of verdant
aquamarine that usually blush golden
before the gaze of the sun, pleasantly
intentioned to have himself a swim.
Only this day found the sea unburnished
by sparkling Phoebus’ rays, though he was
present on his aery throne, and the
mild waters seemed tousled, as if shaken by
some angry hand. Was swimming out
of the question, he worried, needing
a cleansing, a baptism in those turbid waves,
and in that case, by which gauntleted fist were
they beaten so miserably?

Swift feet ‘lighting upon the troubled banks, he called,
the youth, questioningly to the rumbling seas; “O
once pleasant waters, why turns your face so wroth
and dark? Wherefore do you flex your terrible
strength, and rend your own skin with heavy swells
and wicked frenzy? What is this unholy
shadow that descends upon your glassy face,
hard mask over gentle features; or worse, is this
your true form, hidden and suppressed for long,
now violently sprung forth and sundered
from imperfect bonds of conscience, so much
the worse for captivity. Is it now
with furious glee that you sport so destructively?
Please, allay my fears, though I fear these fears
already confirmed, and tell me that some
illness infects your waters, some mean bug,
and that this is not normal, and soon
normal you will be, again.”

Much to his surprise, for never was a
response he expecting, the waters shook,
and from those turbulent depths sounded
a resounding roar, sonorous and distinguishable
from the ambient tumult as speech from below the
waves; “ Pray, boy, would one whose might
is clear as mine deign to speak to one whose
forehead lacks the holy mark of high heaven?”

Slightly shocked by the issue from the sea, the
boy raised a hand to shade his face and spoke,
“Thought that I spoke only to rough water,
of itself given no power to discourse,
only to find now that some other
spirit rests within. Please, dissemble no longer,
and show yourself to me. Humbly I ask, nay, lowly
I beg, for I would see the obvious power that
animates the sea I have known since my birth.”

It seemed the plea had no effect
on the possessor for his reply could only
be guessed at in the scornful roll and break
of white-capped waves. So the youth essayed
to affect guile where open sincerity so lately failed:

“I see, Lord of the Ocean,
that I am unworthy of your mighty aspect,
and certainly I have not the capacity
to command anything of your greatness.
Never before have these waters moved so
powerfully, never before the breakers
so strong. Each crashing wave is like the end
of a world, a sudden crash of apocalypse,
and the sound alone compels my knees
to the ground and my soul-voice to sink orisons
to your great depths. What could you be, that even
Phoebus, whose visage always takes a piece
of these waters for his vanity cannot control you,
though it is his wont and whim?”

“My only regret, Lord, is that I shall never
see your truest form, for I shall henceforth
be unable to relate its splendor,
and when I tell of this experience
(for how can I not?) I will be able
to give only the vaguest natural
impressions of an event and a will
that is obviously to me supernatural.
The people will give then credit, due you,
to other forces, lowly Hesperus,
brutish Boreas, or worse yet, ubiquitous
Zeus, for the current agitation of these normally
gentle waters. This, I fear, will come to pass,
to my great lament and your great injustice.”

So spoke the son of man, and the spirit
of the sea was not unmoved. Mention of Zeus
undid him, and he decided then to reveal
himself to the youth of unknown birthright,
in turn opening a box more deadly than ever
was Pandora’s.

Slowly, the cacophony of green water
and foamy caps began to ritard,
and the din settled as though at the low’ring
of a heavenly baton, settling
into a placid sheet of fleetingly
inconstant emerald. Like a curtain
is drawn from center stage, disclosing performers
behind, and the lilt and voice of their song
becomes clearly audible where before
it was only background, and muffled by the screen,
so the waters of the ocean inlet
swung open in giant swathes, from which vacancy
a trembling geyser rose, bearing at mid-swell
a coral throne, shining in varied hues
of blue and green, softly burnished around
its edges with pearl, piping from its flues
the crystalline lull of the surf.
Whose throne, whose marine seat could this be,
other than the lord of the sea, Triton,
son of Poseidon himself? It was that deity,
seated upon yon throne, who staring down
at the youth, golden trident in hand,
terror wreathing his wide brows, spake thus:

“Child, thou grease my ear with silver words,
fair though no less fawning for their truth,
and so I appear to show thee how far I exceed
thy mortal aspirations. Pray, I charge thee pay tribute
through the lands to the great power that is mine;
the power that calls the sea to roll,
and the waves to crash. ‘Tis before my hand
that these waters are troubled, powerless
of themselves to shake. And think not thyself safe
though thy feet now grip solid earth, for these banks
are merely as the lip of a bowl over
which my waters could surge, tossed I them sharply
enough. Now go, and speak to the masses
of my glory, as I bid thee. Make haste
lest they needs bear witness firsthand.”

“Child, I am not a talking fish in the sense that
thou must think me. I am no talking fish but
neither am I a stray cough from out the mouth
of an ailing Zeus, for I am Triton, master of the
sea, and it is I who keeps this water smooth
as glass. But glass is boring too, unless it is blown,
and I have decided to breath life and energy
into this water, to show it what power can lie
beneath a placid surface. Now boy, you must
go, you must go and tell your friends, your mother,
your father, people you meet on the roads and
people you see in your dreams, tell them not
that today you met a fish that could talk, but that today
you met a god in full splendor, dropping waves
as if they were boulders, throwing the sea as
easily as yon Zeus throws his lightning.”

And with a flourish of his glittery sceptre
Triton made as if to exit ‘neath his waves,
but the youth espied a chance, and a fire
kindled in his breast. A divinity
awoke, and rushing forth to the very brink
of the ocean, he called again, eyes blazing,
to the seashell crowned (marquee) of the Sea;

“Halt, pitiable steward!
Disappointed I find myself, having thought
I spoke with your sire. Instead I stand face
to face with his mere offspring sitting on
filial fief. Your meager arms and half-powers
insult his lineage that you
should remain hither in control. If any
tale I tell to the masses, it will be
of your death at the sharp tip of my spear,
your sundering forever from this world.
Prepare yourself for my furious onslaught!”

And so speaking, he unslung hitherto
unapprehended spear and circular shield,
and in an unclouded blaze he sprang at the
irate god, his feet barely shifting the surface of the waters.

And with a flourish of his glittery sceptre,
Triton made as if to exit beneath the waves,
but something had begun that kept him from
getting there. While he had been speaking,
seemingly at random, a thin shaft of light
materialized from out of the clear sky, spilling
onto the ground in a little puddle just at the boy’s
feet. In a decisive moment he stepped into that
shallow pool of light and it was almost imperceptible
but the world seemed to be suddenly canted
at an angle pointing the boy up into the unknown
white and blue of the sky. It was like he was
thinking in a language he had forgotten he knew
or had learned in an instant, and taking a spear
and circular shield down off his back, he spoke
in a loud voice, all the way up from the diaphragm.
“ You will not run away, now. Not since I have
seen you and have seen that you have forgotten
what makes you important. I wish you were only
a fish, but you’re not, and though I don’t have a pole,
it turns out that that’s good because I have what
I need for you instead. There comes a time when
you can’t change your mind anymore, when one
step has become one step plus too many one steps
to go back, but I won’t let you take us there, because
there’s something in my heart that tells me I can stop
you. Here I come, lord Triton, I’d learned your
name but that doesn’t mean I can’t make the world
forget it,” He stood in the light a moment until it
winked out, and he sprang at the irate god, his
feet barely shifting the surface of the waters.


Wretchedly for Triton, the crimson veil fallen
before his ambrosial eyes shrouded also
his antagonist’s sudden celestial
effulgence (somethingelse), and where he might have fled,
instead he greeted his enemy
with haughty disdain; “Thy impudence
I cannot credit, baffling even my
highest order; And also it is unacceptable.
Forgiveness thou should not seek, for it thou shalt not
find. Thy life, now thrown away, wonderfully
could have been lived as my apostle
and oracle; how violently it
shall now end on the merciless barbs
of yon trident. With thy blood, make peace,
for soon it shall run in my sea.”



Swift feet sweeping over troubled water,
the disturbing youth, trailing behind like a cape
a glowing shimmer, the wake of his
mighty passage, caught a savage blow from the
trident on the perfect circle of his shield
and turned it like a prow does smooth lake water.
The deity’s face, a mask of terrible glee
and superconfidant certainty,
broke at the thwarting of his hand’s fatal
blow, and splintered piteously, transmogrified
from scornful godhead into something
childish, the terror it was accustomed
to imparting graven instead within
its every furrow. And lo, the other leapt
into the air, propelled by some unknown
force high above the shattered divinity’s crown,
hanging suspended as if the air were liquid,
and he a deadly leviathan.
Lofting his sparkling spear, the boy thrust it downward,
and he smote debased Triton a wound most grievous,
loosing the divine sinew from his proud shoulder.

Triton howled, the fabric of his reality rent
in twain by the most unlikely of hands,
and as he wept the sea rollicked with his pain.
‘Lighting softly on the unblemished earth,
the youth turned his back, and wiped glittering ichor
from the point of his destructive spear,
calling to the wailing giant for the last time;
“O Mighty Triton, see how you are routed!
How swiftly your angry boasts have lost their
bold timbre for these meek murmurings.
It would be short work indeed for my long arm
and pious spear to gore you and finish the start.
Yet grace retains you your life, so that my rumor
you might carry. Though a winged death I could
have borne you, I’ve chosen life and madness
instead, as gifts more effectual. Please, your Majesty,
rush to your father and other assorted lords,
bearing for a message only this; the Arbiter
has arrived, and his decision is doom.
Farewell, until the end.”


So speaking he walked away from that
momentous beach, leaving there
the first in his trail of broken gods.