The Foundry

Change of Address

2011-09-30T18:57:00.000-07:00

When you move it's only polite to inform people, so here is where I've gone: www.rewordingotherpeoplesdiscoveries.blogspot.com. I'll keep this one around for reference and maybe throw something up every now and again but you can expect most of my communications to be beamed onto the new one. I plan, ambitiously perhaps, to post two to three times a week thoughts on good books and science related stuff. To pilfer and reconstruct a phrase from Sam Harris, my brain has been in a state of constant firmware renewal over the past few months, and I'd like to see what it'll spit out if I turn it on. Who knows if it will come out intelligible, but I'll do my best anyway. Rock on.

Enlightenment, You Say?

2011-09-24T16:28:00.001-07:00

I've been reading a fair amount about Buddhism recently, because as a white dude living in Japan and trying to feel out various cross-cultural ways of conceiving things, reading a fair amount about Buddhism is sort of an inevitability.

I confess to having grown up with a keen interest in the supernatural. Not really the sort of interest you'd get from reading some manifestation of scripture or sitting in some kind of pew, however. No, my fascination with the supernatural was largely informed by the vast stretches of time I spent playing video games, especially fantasy role playing games. Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, Lufia II Rise of the Sinistrals, Golden Sun, Tales of Symphonia, Ogre Battle 64, Fire Emblem, the list goes on, composing a library of other titles that I can't remember yet still exist in my memory as flashing images of pixellated mages and dark-matter spewing dragons on the black screen of my mind. Like a lot of kids I was easily captivated by tales of magic, spirit realms, and sword-wielding, prophecy-confirming young heroes rising from obscurity to save the world from misguided middle aged dudes drawn in by the dark side. That's pretty much how they all go, because whatever the twists and turns the stories take, deep down their appeal is simple and the same: what budding young nerd wouldn't like to experience military triumph on the tip of the Flaming Sword of Argorath alongside a party of hot anime babes? If Nietzsche is right and one of the primary sources of human motivation is the will to power, there is no better (quicker, safer, more reliable) way to step into the shoes of the ubermensch than to turn on your PS3.

Of course, after you reach a certain point, you step out of your own adolescence and into an awareness of the outside world that poses an existential question: will you continue to seek moral perfection (for being unshakably and unquestionably right is a baseline function of many, though not all, RPGs) and self-actualization in the determinist matrix of medieval-themed computer programming, or will you look to level up in the infinitely more complicated and less-likely to bend-to-your-summoner-skills external world? I'm still nostalgic for video games, and every once in a while I pop one into my Nintendo DS, but I generally end up turning it off after fifteen or twenty minutes; I find myself increasingly unable to marshal my attention for something that just isn't real.

Which doesn't mean that the desire for vitality and electric transcendentalism video games used to satisfy in me has died. Like most people lucky enough to have been born into a culture that services your essential needs more-or-less with a smile, I've always been on the lookout for colorful lights to string in the sky and pulses of plasma to pump through my veins. For a long time, plugging into a world of digital angels and mythical weaponry was enough, but it's not anymore.

So where do you turn? I listen to a lot of Dragonforce, but that's pretty much like video games on tape, palatable because you can do something else at the same time and a song lasts six minutes instead of 60 hours. I tried painting but I sucked at it. I tried Japanese calligraphy but I didn't have the patience. I tried guitar theory but the best I could ever get was competence, which is cool but nobody ever beat the Final Boss with competency. You need your ultimate spell, the enchanted sword of a dead legend (who you may or may not be the reincarnation of), and probably some kick-ass magic resistant armor. A working knowledge of the pentatonic scale just doesn't cut it.

So where do you turn? Do you turn to God? Part of the reason that video games are fun is that they simulate a world in which god can actually exist, and you get all of the badass stuff without having to worry about the stuff that doesn't make any sense. I looked for God, but the only place in which He seems to fit is on a laser-disc. And yet, and yet, what about the Buddha? Eastern religion is pretty hip these days, and from what you hear the Buddha isn't quite like every other deity on the block. Turns out he's not really even a deity. What about Enlightenment? What the hell is that, exactly? From a boy who was always fascinated with the possibility of revelation, of spiritual sustenance, of being whisked off into a fantasy world where magic is real and legends tell the truth I have grown into something close to a man who sees through the improbability of such things. Nevertheless, I wanted to leave no legitimate stone unturned, so I started studying about Buddhism, and what I found, while not evidence for a spirit realm, was still pretty interesting. More to follow.

What are books for?

2011-09-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you read a book and it pisses you off. I read Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth when I was a Junior in college and threw it against the wall of my living room because it seemed to me like a four hundred page waste of my time. No doubt there was something in there of worth, but I read books hoping for a punch in the face and all I got from that one was a spiny powder-puff. Not to say that it was actually worthless; I'm sure from the right angle it was revolutionary, but I wasn't at that angle. A classic it's not you, it's my twenty-first century white male perspective sort of thing. At any rate it sucked.

Sometimes you read a book and it melts your face. I read John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and almost threw up at times, partly out of sheer unfamiliarity but partly because I just didn't know what the hell was going on and the last resort of incomprehension seems to be ameliorative vomiting. "Nothing lasts longer than a mood," one of Barth's broken-down, unidentifiable narrators once said, and if I've written it before I would write it again: no line I've ever read has stuck with me like that one. For whatever reason it got below my skin and said something my bones could get down to. Bummer that the rest of the book was deconstructionist bullshit.

Sometimes you read a book that changes your life. Sometimes you read a series of books that change your life, and you find yourself in a slipstream that leads logically and inexorably from one thing to the next like falling out of an airplane. You're in free-fall and download one title after the next like flailing your arms at a rapidly diminishing Cessna. Is that a parachute on your back? Are you eventually going to go smack on the ground? Or do you just fall forever, pulling volume after volume from the ether in an attempt to know everything you need to know to qualify for a safe landing.

It is in just such a free-fall that I find myself at the moment, having discovered a trail into terminal velocity that starts at the physical sciences and ends in a graveyard of dead gods. Passes through the graveyard, I should more properly say, because the point of the whole thing is to find out what lies beyond the demon haunted cemetery, to makes one's peace with the universe so that one might better utilize the rapidly dwindling time in it which one has left. As I fall through degrees of things taken for granted, what are the names cut into the plastic straps of my potential parachute? They are many and perhaps they are well-known to most smart people, but for me they are new. Though others who have fallen from similar heights might put the names in different order, for me the most recent come first: Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens, followed by their predecessors who I have since started to dig up. Spinoza, Hume, Bertrand Russel, Einstein, Hobbes, Mill, etc etc, the list goes on but ultimately the point is the same. What are books for ? They should be for helping you think better, and if over the past four or five months the only thing I've done is read, well, I hope that my brain is the better for it. Only time and continued writings will tell.

他不是吾

2011-05-27T01:22:00.000-07:00

他不是吾。 Ta wa kore ware ni arazu. Simply stated, people do different things.

There are impulses that ought to be ignored, let's call these your automatics, and then there are others that are generated in a different place and should be heeded. "Ah, that hamburger looks delicious, I want it!" "I'm tired of these shoes, I want new ones!" "I need an iPhone." These are your automatics, unintentional, conditioned responses to an environment for which they weren't forged. They're just your body engaging evolutionary survival instincts or reacting to culturally implanted social norms.

Then there are the other ones that surface in your mind from time to time. "Ah, I have to mail that letter." "I haven't spoken with him in a long time, I should write him an email." "this bathroom is pretty dirty, I should clean it." These are impulses that push you towards the things you know deep down you have to do, and if yhou jump on them you will feel great. If you push them away because someone else tells you to do them later, or because you think right now isn't the appropriate time, or just because you're lazy, you will create gap between what your subconscious mind knows you have to do and what your conscious mind will let you do. In those gaps there is a lot of pain and stress. Follow those little blips of inspiration wherever you can, though, and you'll find yourself falling into fewer ravines.

人人悉道器

2011-05-26T04:24:00.000-07:00

Nin-nin kotogotoku, doki-nari. Everyone has a soul to forge, so forge it.

I've been really into some Japanese proverbs recently so I thought I would introduce a few that I found in a book.

Everyone has within them the innate capacity to turn themselves into something amazing. ”人人悉”　 "Nin-nin kotogotoku," all people with no exceptions. Regardless of who you think you are, where you're from, whatever limitations or disadvantages you think you have, these words are for you because when you clear away all the webs we have culturally, socially, or intellectually strung ourselves up in you find that underneath it all you're still fresh and clean and capable of nearly anything.

”道器”　 "doki-nari." This is both the thing you can become and the way in which you become it. 道. "Do." this is the way. Everyday we're walking a path towards something, but if you don't know where you're headed you're bound to end up somewhere you don't want to be. If you are aware of the stones beneath your feet and you continue to put one foot in front of the other, no matter how difficult it may seem, slowly, painfully, in fits and starts but eventually you will find yourself somewhere, holding a cup filled to the brim with all of your labor. 器. "Ki." You find yourself at the end of all the steps you've taken, and the form of your vessel is the result of the work you have put into shaping it, nothing more, nothing less.

本来無一物; a Proverb

2011-05-25T14:51:00.000-07:00

Honrai Mu-Ichi Motsu

Deep down, you are nothing.

It's all in your head.

Everything you know, everything someone's told you, is telling you, all of your evaluations, all of the expectations of and rules you have for your everyday life are learned scaffolding built up over whatever it is deep down that you started with. Those parts are all interchangable; none of them are essential to your existence, no matter how much you've convinced yourself otherwise.

As such, whenever you feel yourself suffocating under the weight of various stresses, if you just remember that it is all removable and what's underneath is still clean and fresh, can't really ever be dirtied, actually, then you can just tear it all down and go back to where you started; having nothing and needing nothing.

After the Earthquake

2011-03-25T01:30:00.000-07:00

There are many things I could say, some that I might, others that I probably won't, but for the moment here is something I penned out at my desk in one of the days following the big Tohoku earthquake when it seemed that the world was coming apart, the plates were quivering in the anticipation of another big one, radiation was in the air, the waves were crashing down and carrying people out to sea and in general things seemed pretty fragile. Life seems real precious when it's fragile, and that was a feeling that I didn't want to lose even after things went back to normal.

So, what am I going to take from this? If this isn't a life-changing event then what is?

We love people whose lives are in danger, we care for people who have lost big, our hearts go out to those in crisis, and we should, right? We rise above everything when we do, but if we had seen those same people a day earlier, of course, we wouldn't have felt a thing. Just, you know... people you don't know.

Why?

We think we've got issues, go problems, go all sorts of challenges we've got to face but when a massive earthquake hits and a tidal wave washes our homes away we realize that all the other stuff was real little after all.

Why?

When we rebuild our homes will our insignificant problems crop back up? When things go back to normal will we go back to passing those people up North as if they're just random people on the street? Sure, they probably will, and we probably will. It's the way we're are.

But does it have to be?

Tragedies can bring out the absolute best in humans beings, if human beings caring and selflessly helping other human beings is the best they can do. I just wish it didn't have to take a tragedy. When some natural disaster levels cities our boundaries go down with them and we feel free to love and give and fear and worry and pray and care and express the simple, natural, in-born compassion of one person to another person at full blast. In these scenarios, you can't help it. Because someone else has a real need, then I feel it's ok for me to get down to them on the realest of levels.

When someone is stripped of all the labels of everyday society they go back to just being a simple, human being like you, like me, and that fundamentally exposed identity is one we can interact with on such a meaningful level. Just that simple connection is enough to make you feel so good, to give without wanting something back, to be an agent of positivity in the world. To be real.

Why can't we strip away all the bullshit by ourselves? This earthquake has shown me that it's there, so why can't I strip it away by myself? I want to create a world where you can get down on somebody's level just like that, stay there, and make something special happen? How? Where there's a will, there's a way. It's time to lose the bullshit and keep it off.

Thoughts on Daniel Bachuber's Thoughts on TKE Initiation at Whitman

2011-03-07T03:15:00.000-08:00

The other day an expose-esque article on TKE initiation ran in the Whitman newspaper and it got me thinking about my fraternity experience. Then a familiar name from my past, Daniel Bachuber, posted his own article about Initiation and I got to thinking and to talking and then eventually to writing. I don't really feel it necessary to address any of his specific points, some of his facts are correct, some of them are not, others are partially correct but significantly incorrect. Doesn't matter. There was a point in time when I would have agreed with a lot of the stuff he wrote. That time is in the past however. I wrote a comment on his blog and he posted it, to his credit. Still, this was something that I had to work out for myself and so I've reprinted my conclusions below.

Hi Daniel, my name is Chad Frisk and having also participated in TKE initiation at Whitman and felt many of the same things you did I thought I would reply and offer my take on the process.

As I'm sure most Whitman students can identify with, I came into the school with a very negative view of fraternity life formed out of the nebulous haze of popular opinion, rumor, and the topic's depiction in the social media. As you might expect becoming a frat boy and pinning upon myself all of the accompanying labels was pretty unappealing for me. However, I did the rush stuff and for the most part what I actually saw of the fraternities at Whitman bore surprisingly little resemblance to the arrogant asshole image I had built up in my mind and was so resistant towards.

I was still pretty troubled about joining a fraternity but when the time came I made a snap decision to participate in Initiation, even though I hadn't committed myself enough to the house to feel like I belonged there or to get a clear enough image of what the people there were really about. I went, and I really really really hated it. At the time it might have been the worst few days of my life. I had spent a semester battling violently with my preconceptions of what a fraternity was, and having made a very tenuous peace with that decided to dive in only to have that equilibrium immediately shattered as you do experience things that SEEM to be motivated by all the senseless disrespect and meaningless hazing you hear about from fraternities at big schools.

I finished Initiation because I viewed it as a battle of will-power that I would not lose, but I did nothing to see the value behind the stress itself or to admit the really objectively positive moments embedded throughout the whole thing. My fragile trust had been broken and from that moment forth I refused to see the process for what was actually going on, and instead, in a self-righteous, never-been-through-an-actually-tough-time-in-my-life sort of way, I chose to fit it to the negative narratives I had devised in my own head.

Years have passed and having been through it multiples times on each side, I have slowly, slowly, every so grudgingly slowly revised my opinion of the process itself and what I was once convinced was a meaningless charade of wanton disrespect and degradation now shines out as an undeniably positive moment where I overcame a challenge the likes of which I had never seen, the intensity of which I have never seen since. I'm really grateful for the guys who put me through that and gave me those references. I now believe there is no thing as an intrinsically bad experience, only intrinsically neutral ones that we paint with our own values and opinions.

If I had never been through Initiation at the TKE house at Whitman College I would be an appreciably weaker and less complete person that I am today. I'm sorry that it hasn't meant the same thing for you, it's certainly not for everyone and I identify with where you're coming from. If you'd like to talk more about I would love to share. Thank you for putting my post up and keeping the dialog open and honest.

Thoughts On Teaching

2011-02-21T00:52:00.000-08:00

It's nearing the end of the school year here in Japan and as such the teacher's meeting season is in full swing and my school has been gracious enough to offer me the chance to sit in on the meetings and so of late I've been doing a bit of thinking about exactly what you have to do to be the kind of teacher who really moves lives. There are a ton of teachers out there, we've all had a few of them, I suppose, and I think we could all probably agree that while there's nothing worse than a bad teacher, there's nothing better than a great one. What does it take to be a great one? What do you have to do?

There's different ways to be a great teacher, but lately I've been thinking about what to do with the kids who just don't really give a shit. In every class there are a few kids who are all-stars, a lot of kids who are doing alright, a handful of kids who are floundering a little, and then a few kids who either have no chance or prefer to be a wrecking ball. As a teacher, those last one's are the most frustrating because they are not only bringing themselves down but it seems like they're on a mission to tear down the whole production. All people are pretty much consistently engaged in ranking themselves (unconsciously, most often) upon various social totem-poles, but no humans are more attune than middle school aged kids, and so if the big dogs on the top of the pole are out there ready to take a bite of your hide if you step up then you're far more likely to sit quietly, take your notes, keep your nose clean and get out of there. Which isn't the way to greatness.

Oftentimes it seems like there's nothing you can really do about this, but I'm not satisfied with that answer. There is something you can do about this, there has to be, and first you have to start with trying to understand why class clowns and bullies and dropouts to be act the way they do.

I believe that all behavior can be understood. With the exception of people who have serious cognitive disorders I think there is reason why people do the things they do and if you look hard enough you should be able to figure it out. Why is it that some students don’t do their homework, don’t care about their grades, and in general do far more to disrupt the learning environment than to contribute to it? There are many factors, of course, but I think it all boils down to this: they don’t consider themselves the type of person who is a good student. In every class there are some kids who will succeed regardless of the task placed in front of them.. Regardless of the teacher, regardless of their classmates, regardless of all external factors they will turn in their homework on time, perform on tests, and be generally positive forces in the classroom. Why? Because, consciously or not, they base their identity upon it. When I was in school, especially high school, my identity was probably too powerfully linked to my image as a good student; the thought of not doing homework or performing poorly on a test or paper would make me sick because it was not who I was. I considered myself a perfect student and getting less than a perfect grade would have been an assault to my identity. As a result, I did the things necessary to get the grades I considered acceptable.

Where did that identity come from? By the time I was 15 it was firmly in place and nobody had to tell me that I had to do my homework because I was incapable of doing anything else, but why? That sense of self had to come from somewhere. I guess there are a lot of places such a thing could come from, but in my case it was pretty simple. From as long as I can remember my mom wouldn’t accept anything less than the highest results. At first I was motivated almost assuredly (at least partially) out of fear that my mom would yell at me if I got less than the best, but what I didn’t realize was going was that my little mind was being programed to believe that it was capable of the best. For that I can only be eternally grateful because that pressure, that expectation to perform at the highest level was slowly ingrained into me until it became natural and unquestionable. While I could come up with some counter examples (once I got into college my expectations and standards dropped some, I didn’t believe myself capable of science so those grades weren’t so good, etc) for the most part, least as far as school and studying was concerned I never went into any endeavor expecting or even accepting less than the best.

The problem for me now is expanding those expectations to all aspects of my life, a process which is fully in process.

But how about those kids don’t give a shit about school? It’s likely that they either a) were never really pushed to think that school was important, or b) were never really told that they were capable of exceeding at it. What’s going to result in that? A kid who either sees no value in the stuff presented in school (and therefore only hassle and pain), or a kid who doesn’t think he or she is smart enough to get anything out of the stuff presented in school. Either way, that student is not going to view him or herself as an “A student” and so, or course, will not exhibit any “A student” behavior. None of this stuff is relevant to my everyday life, why should I care about it? I can’t do it anyway, so what’s the point of frustrating myself and making myself feel stupid and worthless by trying? My parents and friends don’t care anyways so why put in the effort for no reward? These are the kinds of excuses for not studying that teachers hear on a daily basis, and while they are frustrating, in order to move past them I think it is vital to realize that they are also very defensible and rational from such a student`s perspective. If in fact those are the beliefs towards school that a kid brings into the classroom, you will have no success getting him or her to learn unless you FIRST CHANGE THOSE BELIEFS. It’s that simple. You can keep kids after school and punish them for not working and yell at them all you want but if none of these things change the way the kid thinks about school (and in fact it seems like few of these methods ever do) then you won’t get the results you want. You might get the kid to turn in his homework, though it’s likely to either have been copied from a friend or done sloppily, neither of which is a good way to get to actual understanding, or you might just make a kid hate school more, reinforcing her image of it as a place of tormentors and bullies to be rebelled against at all cost. I think for a lot of kids school seems like just such a place, but it’s not because teachers like to be mean to kids. They’re not being mean and in the vast majority of circumstances they have no malicious intent; the reason they are harsh is because they think that is the best way to make their students better. Don’t get more wrong, I’m not saying that there is never a time for a harsh word; sometimes there most certainly is. However, and from working at a school for a few years I am convinced that all of the teachers at my school believe this, a teacher’s job is to get the most they can out of their students, to help them see their weaknesses and get past them, to be a bigger and better person when they leave the school then they were when they came in. It’s that simple. Sometimes, though, the prescribed method for changing a student is far from the most effective one. All teachers want to help.

Kids have to know that school is a place for them to grow, not a place for them to be yelled at by an annoying adult. Sometimes it turns into a place to be yelled at by an annoying adult, however, and once you get into that frame learning sort of stops and resistance takes over.

One last thought. Everybody is pretty much looking for how they can get the least pain and the most pleasure out of any given environment they are in. Humans are complicated but I think it’s a highly defensible claim that all human behavior stems from this dynamic. Why then, do some kids play dumb in class, or in some cases even take pride out of being dumb? In some classes I go to it’s a recurring theme that some kids will puff up over getting single digits on their test scores, or in not understanding vocabulary words, or in making the topic and the teacher presenting it seem weird and/or stupid. Why? First off, think about what they get out of that. Mocking the subject matter or the teacher, feigning stupidity. In some ways, not being emotionally affected by things makes someone seem cool. If a kid doesn’t know the answer to a question and breaks down and cries because of that he’s not going to be labeled as a cool kid for obvious reasons. However, if he doesn’t know and clearly doesn’t give a shit that can be seen as kind of cool because it conveys the image that he is above English or above the teacher’s demands. A free spirit. A freedom fighter standing up to the Man. He (this character is usually a he) also gets laugh. His peers think he’s funny, and in the short run he gets a lot of value out of refusing to study. If, on the other hand, he tries seriously to study, because he’s not smart, he goes from being the funny rebel to being just a failure. If you’re that kid and you don’t think you have a chance in hell to actually be successful, which option are you going to choose?

If your options are to evaluate your sense of self by standards that will make you small, or by standards that will validate you, most people are going to go with the latter. Of course, in the long run choosing ignorance is the worst choice you could ever make; however, the problem is getting kids (and people in general, myself included) to think in the long run.

Bringing Down the House

2011-02-21T00:48:00.001-08:00

The Whitman Experience. How many pages could I write about the Whitman Experience. Going to Whitman College was and continues to be an extraordinary learning experience for me, but not, perhaps, as you might find it described in the pages of a visitor’s pamphlet. I have learned and grown as much, in fact vastly more, moving beyond Whitman than I ever did working within Whitman, but for that very reason it has become an incredibly valuable reference point in my life. It’s a complicated thing, and by no means do I wish to throw mud on the college because my time there was amazing and many of the TOOLS I acquired there have proven invaluable in carrying me to this point in my life and will continue to carry me forward ever forward into the future; however, many of the VIEWS I picked up at Whitman were less than empowering, and far from serving as the bastions and pillars of a dynamic and prosperous worldview were in fact roadblocks to the development of any such thing.

‘Tis a complicated web composed of many threads. Let me first start by saying that in no way is Whitman at fault for the shortcomings I took away from it; the fault rests solely with me. The way I interacted with certain aspects of the small liberal arts college environment brought out not the worst in me but but certainly weaknesses and warped them in such a way that I perceived them as strengths. Warped them in such a way that I perceived them as strengths, let me repeat that one more time because it is very important. My perception of the Whitman experience amplified my weaknesses and made me think of them as strengths.

Whitman is something you take with you and move beyond.

Whitman is small. Whitman is insular. Whitman is about being as smart as you can, as critical as you can, as insightful and academic as you can. At least that’s how I saw it. They say that Whitman is a bubble and it is. They say that Whitman is a fantasy land and it is. They say that Whitman and the Real World have little more than a tangential relationship and if they do then you have to remember that what seems to be true is only true on a single solitary point on the endlessly streaking line that is larger life.

Allow me to explicate.

Or forgive me for failing to, whichever the case may be.

How about I spell it out straight. I began to judge value based purely on perceived level of academia. So-called stupid people I shunned, anything that I could understand was too simple and therefore slightly contemptuous, all pop-culture was shallow and meaningless, all big business (perhaps even all business in general) was trying to sell me my soul pinned to a price tag, people with money into money who thought about money were also shallow and meaningless, people who used anything but the most esoteric of writing styles were below me, Republicans were shallow and meaningless, people who believed in things were trying too hard because, well, to put it simply, I knew everything and in the end everything boiled down to being pretty much shallow and meaningless.

Is this the natural outcome of the liberal arts education? No, but it’s where I left it, with a sharp brain that was focused with laser precision on the holes, the cracks, the flaws, the problems with things, and furthermore, with inventing the ways in which those holes cracks flaws and problems rendered the remaining whole unfit for much but the discard pile. I had a discard pile miles high and not much left that I could call a treasure.

This, luckily, is who I used to be, because Whitman is something I used to get past myself.

Whitman took those elements of my personality that I brought with me to Anderson Hall in 2004, insecurity, uncertainty, negativity, fear, and turned up the volume on them. That’s not to say that I brought only negative things with me to Whitman, or that during my time there only the negative parts of my personality grew; I’ve got plenty of good points that received a similar boost. However too many key pieces of my reality were put together of negative components and the truth is I DIDN’T EVEN REALIZE IT. I thought I was just being real. All of the aforementioned thought patterns seemed to me inevitable objective conclusions to be drawn from the things I was studying. That’s the way the world actually was and a faint sense of futility was the only thing you could logically or perhaps even responsibly take from it all.

Those were my conclusions, but it turns out that they were neither impartial nor by any means inevitable. I learned a lot at Whitman, but I never really learned about the weaknesses that riddled the foundation of my being. If you don't fight those kind of things face to face they’re never going to go away; in fact, they are far more likely to just pilot you from the shadows. I got a lot of good things from Whitman. I got a lot of great friends, I got a lot of great experiences, I learned how to begin to think, I grew a lot, I challenged myself a lot, I had a lot of fun, I got a lot of dicking around out of my system; however, my failure to really address my own limitations kept all of those things from being as meaningful as they could have been.

And yet, paradoxically, because an inability to really get down to business at the time has led me to the greater understanding I have of my own fallicies today, everything about those four years, everything good and bad satisfactory unsatisfactory fulfilling unfulfilling easy challenging happy or sad can only be viewed as vital contributions to an incredibly positive experience. There are no bad experiences because anything that didn’t go as you planned is only great feedback for getting it right the next time. Or the next time, or the next time. Or maybe the next time. Doesn’t matter as long as you’re moving in the right direction.

Ruby Red White Gold

2011-02-19T01:56:00.000-08:00

Let's run with the metaphor from last time because it's high time to brush aside the dust covering up the things in my life that should be giving off the most light.

When I was contemplating the events that had the biggest impact on my life my relationship with Japan popped into my head immediately, as one might expect. It's difficult to imagine where I would be had I never gotten into Japan, both geographically and emotionally. Japan is an amazing place and has been an incredible source of personal growth for me. Even as I write that sentence, however, I sense a familiar flicker of uncertainty in the corner of my mind's eye and I know that it's time I finally confront the vampire that's lurking there.

Sometimes we think we've grown up and outgrown things only to realize that if we don't confront them head-on they only give the impression of having disappeared and instead persist on the periphery, potent as ever, perhaps even more so. I don't really believe in Satan, but that does nothing to the fact that the greatest trick the devil ever performed was convincing the world he doesn't exist.

When you're a nerdy kid and you spend a few formative years of social ineptitude as a result of it, after you pull out of that nosedive and start making friends you find that you'll do almost whatever it takes to keep that old label from reattaching itself to you. It's all in your head, but when I was a middle school student coming out of homeschooling and was super socially incompetent I was also a huge nerd. Homeschooling was the best thing that ever happened to me in some ways, but amongst other things it also left me with a lot of free time that I dedicated almost solely to the delights of various fantasy lands. When you're a twelve year old kid with very minimal human contact and almost none with kids your own age on a day to day basis you'll do whatever you can to find something to immerse yourself in and for me it was Star Wars, Role Playing Video Games, fantasy novels with dragons and wizards, and a wide host of the usual nerd paraphenalia. For two years that was pretty much all that went in, and so that's what I was into as a little guy, which, I want to mention is totally fine, great, cool, no big deal, fundamentally irrelevant to anything and everything, but when I went back into school, man was I terrible at all forms of interaction. Why? Because I liked Star Wars? No, I just didn't know how to interact with people. All I knew was Star Wars. So, I'd talk about goblins or something in a not-cool I just spent two years with my mom kind of way, get weird look, feels shitty, and link that shittiness to NERDINESS, not to what it actually was which is merely an inevitable lack of social ability.

Fast-forward to when I got older, got more experience, got at socially tolerable, got kind of cool. Did I want to give that up and go back to being that hopeless little guy again? No I did not. What was it that made me that hopeless little guy? Being a nerd. Did I want to be looked at as a nerd? No I did not. As a result did I stop liking nerdy stuff? No I most certainly did not. I still loved video games, I spent the majority of two summer vacations doing nothing but read the Wheel of Time, I memorized the entire three hours of the Fellowship of the Ring. THREE FUCKING HOURS! I could do every line. I was a nerd. Which is totally cool, but I still linked nerdiness to uncoolness so what happened to my nerdy pleasures? They becames sins. They became secret things that I wouldn't admit freely to people, or things that I felt shame about if I did admit them. If somebody made fun of the nerdy things I liked, maybe I didn't show it but inside I took a blow. I took a blow.

In addition to loving video games and Jar Jar Binks I also happened to love Japan, and oh boy was that ever an exercise in cognitive dissonance because if you were to ask the average American to draw a circle around the nerdiest region of the Earth it would go around Asia, and then if you gave them a push-pin and asked for the epicenter they would probably plop it right down on Tokyo. Just as like will gravitate to like, nerd will find nerdtopia.

So what did I do? I drew distinctions between the people who liked Japan for it's cultural heritage (temples, tea ceremony, art, re: cool) and people who liked Japan for it's anime and manga (nerd; uncool). I went for years like this, and even as I got more interested in Japan, went there, enjoyed the culture, the people, et. al, there was still a significant section of my brain that refused to legitimize my interest in Japan. It developed further into a guilty pleasure to the point where I felt like I couldn't really take anything of value from Japan into my everyday life because it was somehow too tainted by the quote-un-quote nerdy aspects of its culture.

So I write above that coming to Japan was one of the most influential events in my life. And it has been. I've grown in so many ways since I've been here and learned so many things about myself, people, life, evolution, guitar scales, the one-handed backhand, throwing a bowling ball, how to handle kids and people and far beyond that, but even up until today there was a little niggling in my head, a little unspoken niggling in my head that because I learned all that in Japan it somehow.... doesn't apply. I don't know why, but I do know that it's time that I recognized that out-dated remnant of my insecure past for what it is; an out-dated remnant of my insecure past. I like anime. I dedicated at least 6 months of my life to One Piece and maintain that it's one of the unqualified best things I've ever seen. Manga is good. People read it, they aren't all hopelessly awkward. Japan is a real country like any other, with real people doing real things. It's not an alternate reality, it's my second home and the things I've learned here are every bit as valuable as they would have been had I learned them on the streets of New York.

Get Out Your Scrap Metal

2011-02-19T01:21:00.000-08:00

If you ever want to read a book that will change your life I can recommend one. It's called Awaken the Giant Within, by Tony Robbins, it's unabashed self-help, and it is the single most influential book I have ever read. I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone, because if you read it with an open-mind and make a genuine effort to think it through the rewards could be boundless.

Get out your scrap metal and bring it on down to the foundry because it's time to make some amazing shit out of it. I don't know about everybody else but I know I have carried around the stuff of my life in a dirty sack, unrefined, unappreciated, largely unacknowledged but undeniably heavy and undoubtedly an unnecessary burden. We've all lived for however long we've lived and everyday we've picked up stuff along the way, sights sounds tastes smells successes failures moments of pride moments of shame moments that seemed like nothing at all and in truth most of it goes in the sack. Some of it, however, goes on a shelf and we look at it all the time. We look at it all the time, and the thing is, it's not all treasure that we often end up displaying. Of all that raw material we spend everyday knowingly or unknowingly collecting the stuff we look at isn't always the stuff that looking at would make us feel good. I don't know about you, but for far too long I've littered the shelves of my consciousness with symbols of defeat, of inferiority, of hopelessness and helplessness, all the while thinking I was doing myself and the universe a justice. That to see the world as it is is the only way to live, and that an uphill trudge through dross was the world as it is.

To see the world for what it is is in fact the only way to live; thing is, what I thought was reality couldn't have been more distorted.

Let's get back to the sack for a minute though. The matter of the mundane, the scattered scraps of the everyday, little bits and pieces of getting from here to there and back again unscathed went in as junk, not necessarily as things bad but certainly as things unusable. Truth is, though, that there's no such thing and diamonds in the rough are everywhere you look. This is the Foundry, this is the place where we take your tired, your weak, your hungry, your poor, your dented, your flawed, your scratched and beat up and remake them. This is the home of the Alchemist, where we take your lead and transform it into gold because while it's beyond us at the moment to realistically rearrange molecular structures words my friends bend to our wills and the gold that blooms in your brain is worth far more than any hunk of metal.

Turn to your sacks, take out the trash within and transform it into the treasure it could be. Turn to your shelves and let not the wicked idols enshrined there any longer have any power of you. Realize that they, too, perhaps they especially, the remains of failures of embarrassments of shames of guilts of insufficiences long past are in fact objects of the highest power shrouded only in cursed clothes cast like shadows from you own mind. Clear the shadows away and see what's been hidden within all these years.

A Wave of Reason ... with a splash of irrationality

2011-01-14T06:11:00.000-08:00

This is the soundtrack for my life these days: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PT90dAA49Q&NR=1. Watch it. That's all I can say about it. It will change your life if you let it. I mean, it will work in concert with a bunch of other things to produce an actual change in your life if you are willing to put in the necessary commitment. That's actually my favorite thing about my current life in Japan. I love my job. I love my students and I love the growing and blossoming daily interactions that I am able to have with them. I love my friends, I love bowling, I love playing tennis on Thursday evenings. I love onsens. I love a bunch of stuff about life right now, but more than anything I love the opportunity that Japan has provided me to re-write myself as I would like to see myself re-written.

What exactly does that mean? When you find yourself in a place you've always known, it is very easy, extraordinarily easy, to surrender to what you've always been; however, when you find yourself in a place that's almost entirely new, then you notice that the cords that bind you to your past suddenly have acquired a new sense of slack. In that wiggle-room between who you think you are and who you think you can be there is plenty of space to make moves that need making.

And yet that's neither here, nor there, even as it just so happens to be everywhere. For a long time I've been looking for something. I remember sitting in Dick Mastellar's office, trying to discuss a Hemingway novel with him. He wanted me to look at just how artfully Hemingway had constructed a world or despair and defeat, and I wanted my reading material to provide me with a world of hope and victory, regardless of how crudely it happened to be rendered. I'm sure he was very frustrated with me, because anyone who has actually studied English Literature knows that such a world is really nowhere to be found.

Which doesn't mean that such a world doesn't exist.

For the longest time I thought I wanted to be a writer. Then I gave it up. Now the sinusoidal phases of the universe are on the upswing and I wonder again if I don't have something worth writing locked up in this brain of mine. In truth, it's beyond wondering, because I think I may have found that thing I was looking for and slowly in the deep, milky recesses of my brain coalesces a something that is not the icy shore of a lake in war-torn Europe. I'm not entirely sure what it is yet, but it might just be a bottle and it might just bear flame.

A Wordsmith is Reborn

2011-01-07T17:59:00.001-08:00

It's a new year which strikes me as a convenient time to make this a new blog. No mission statements but I've rediscovered something I lost and I feel the need to wave it across the sky like a flag of flame because if that's what I want it to be then that's what it is.

If that's what I want it to be then that's what it is. Background? Just what you need. In high school I had a really great teacher, maybe my favorite ever, and on his wall he had a quote from some old dude which essentially made the claim that in poetry there was beauty, and in science there was death. This was something I identified with for a long time. Words, my friends, are the substance of life, the primary means of transmission of love of strength of courage of fear of hope of dreams of death of despair of the whole far-flung spectrum of the human experience whereas science, science is numbers on a black-board. My whole being boils down to some random gravitational constant, you say? I am nothing but polypeptide bonds nd nucleotides scribbled on cell walls, is it? POPPYCOCK!! Give me the Word and I will write you a Hero. Give me nucleotides and I will flush them down the toilet.

I have come a long way since then. Words would be tough without nucleotides, for one, and there is a vast and iridescent gallery of worlds which you cannot access with words alone. It turns out that the poem is not the final authority on what is, and Science is far from the outstretched sterile arm of death. We are products of a natural world that is far more than human, yet armed with Science we can be more than what we always have been and diligently chart our location in a universe that expands far beyond the limits of the mind. It is, of course, with the mind that we comprehend the universe, but only if it is turned out into it.

But where does that leave words? For a while in the dust. For a while in the dust, but in my quest to figure out what exactly it is we are and what exactly it is this is they have risen again like an endless spectral host, shimmering in the sunlight and shapeless against the stars motionless yet poised to move at... a word. Science has taught me that reality is fixed, that it moves according to patterns, rules, laws of nature, and IT DOES! It does those things and moves as it does, IT'S REAL! But reality is also a great and barely bound swirl of potentiality waiting for a wordsmith to come along and command it to move. Nature has laid the groundwork and the backdrop over billions of years of slow, measured churning, combining and recombining, trial, error, the slow, gradual accretion of complexity where it is warranted, and it continues to. It will continue to somewhere perhaps endlessly into the farthest reaches of time. But here, in this moment, in my very human life, WORDS CONSTRUCT REALITY and what I say goes if I say it loudly enough. Remember that for that is now what this blog is about.

Old Questions, Old Answers

2010-08-30T03:08:00.000-07:00

Recently I’ve been possessed anew of an old question. In some ways it’s the question that all other human questions must reduce to, or at least should reduce to, because when the world snaps into focus it is ultimately the only thing that fills your field of vision. In classic American terms, what’s the good life and how do we live it? What do we have to do to get the most out of life? It’s such an often repeated phrase, ‘get the most out of life,’ recycled through the increasingly unreliable and various organs of cultural transmission so many times that it seems to have been infected or at least slimed over with a film of bullshit, but just because the question has been co-opted countless times to sell Oxy-Clean and nose jobs and Ab-Gliders doesn’t mean that the question itself has been corrupted..

What’s the good life and how do we live it? The reason it works as such an effective advertising strategy is because it's the question we're all looking for an answer to. It seems like QVC and Toys'R'Us don't have the right answers, but there are right one’s, there have to be, and if Hollister and Tommy Hilfiger have exploited the question for profit, a long line of thinkers leading back into the primordial mist affirm that it’s worth asking. I think a crucial component of the answers we’re actually looking for proceed from the simple question ‘why?’.

I’m proposing, of course, nothing complicated here. I’m rephrasing old questions in old terms, presenting nothing new and offering nothing revolutionary. How do we live a good life? Seek the foundations upon which life rests, and then when you understand why, maybe you can go from just life to something good. It's not terribly complicated, but I think in formulating my world view up to now I’ve neglected things that seemed simple because somehow I got the idea that they weren’t enough. No enough either in the sense that they weren’t sufficient or that they weren’t trendy enough, that the answers we’re all looking for are strung up in layers of neon tugged into hieroglyphs into postmodern oracular smoke, that a seemingly complicated world needs an equally complicated codex to read it. That a simple answer is a boring answer, a blasé answer. And yet, maybe there’s a little string we could pull somewhere that’ll bring the whole thing down, and maybe that’s pretty cool. Maybe there isn’t, and maybe it isn’t, but just maybe we can figure out what we’re supposed to be doing here.

The questions are old, the proposed answer is simple (or at least the algorithm for exploring it is), but there is nothing to reject in things that we have seen before or in things we can grasp. I am alive, sooner or later I’m going to die, I want to live in the best way I can. How do I do that? The most important, most pressing question we’ve got. And the most potent answer I can think of to that question is a simple injunction to think about why. About why things are the way they are. About why we do the things we do, why we want the things we want, why we react to things the way we do, why this is this way and why that is that. If you get that, then you can manipulate the matrix. If you don’t, then you’re drowning in it, casting around for the sort of life-preservers that keep you in the water with the same efficacy that they keep you afloat.

I try to live life to the fullest, I want to get the most out of life, I want to live every day like it’s my last, blah, blah, blah, blah. We’ve reached a strange impasse where the most important resolutions we can make have also become the most empty. It’s crucial to make the resolution, but the resolution itself, alone, without anything to back it up, is worthless. Why? Think about it I guess.

Sometimes You Need to Put it Somewhere

2010-08-29T04:17:00.000-07:00

Some ass named John Barth once said that nothing ever lasts longer than a mood, and maybe I'm bipolar but I think that of any line of anything I've ever read this has resonated with me more than any. Nothing lasts longer than a mood and we flash from one to the next on the rise and fall of crashing and soaring and plummeting and flat lining chemical reactions in our heads, and for a while I couldn't handle that but who gives a fuck, we are what we are and what we are can't change that, doesn't change that, and if somewhere there are enzymes catalyzing the rush of whateveryouwantocallem's through our veins like so much water through so many canyons, if it's these little chemical process pulling the pulleys and booms behind the scenes of what we think of as our selves, what's to lament about that? I am a massive machine that's nothing more than molecular ups and downs but those molecular ups and downs are all that I am and why not fold them in rather than force them out?

Nothing lasts longer than a mood they say, which means that nothing lasts after the adrenaline fades away, resolution rides on receding streams of dopamine and we are (are we), as it were, at the whim of our brain chemistry, but sometimes, when a mood is real good, you need to put it somewhere. Somewhere you can get to.

Brain Chemistry. It moves the pulleys and booms but, can I tell it where to move them? A silly question, or perhaps the central question. Someone else said I'm never the same person when I go to sleep as when I wake up, as when I wake up, but when I go to sleep a figure of flame do I have to wake up a thing of stone? Can you bottle fire? Can you keep it? Can you put it somewhere secret and safe for the night and open it up in the dim, sputtering critically flawed 9mm film of the early morning and have it come rushing out, the only spear you ever need to meet the day, the only shield you ever need against whatever tribulations the world might send your way? Can you make a mood last forever? There are times when I'm as the ebb and flow of a steely gray sea; slow, incessant, largely irredeemable, a sullen stagnation with too much momentum to gain any. But there is a flame inside me to scorch that world in streaks of whatever it is for which light seems to be the readiest and most overused metaphor. I'mma find turn that shit into ink and write it on my bones.

Roger Federer is the sweetest dude in the world

2010-02-01T05:29:00.000-08:00

I love this man.

http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/tennis/aus10/news/story?id=4876370

Because Why Not

2009-12-06T03:45:00.000-08:00

I just read that last post I wrote, and it's really good, I'm the shit. So, I find myself motivated to do it again. The question, however, is what does one write about when one's life is largely devoted to scrounging the internet for Mariners' news, thinking up new and creative ways of butchering Chone Figgins' name (just now I thought of CHUUUUUNE FLUGGINS!!!! and I wish I were a season ticket holder (who lived in Seattle) because I have at least 81 others that I would love to put on signs and try to get an interview with Mike Blowers or something. The impending absence of Beltre means that there will be a void opening up in the crazy fan section at Safeco once filled by The-Beltre-Guy, and I would love to be that replacement. The-Chone-Figgins-Guy. That could be me. Or should I say The-SHWAAAAAAYNE-SHWAGGINS-Guy?), watching infuriatingly melodramatic Japanese sitcoms on the internet, and occasionally scouting out Marshall's facebook page for pics of his girlfriend? Not much, that's for sure. Which is why I have just decided to write whatever it is I'm going to write in a language most of you probably can't read anyway. Because why not. It will also spare you the pain of reading it.

　　さあ、どうしようかなぁ。日本語ででも、書きたいことはあまりないじゃん。ええと、たぶん、なんだろう、あっそうだ！　あれか？あれにするか？はい、ということで、あれについて語らせていただきます。すごいな、あれ。まあ、やっぱり、やめた。実はこんな内容のまったくない話は続けられないな、実力足りないし。というか、エネレギたりないだろう。いや、つまらなすぎるから。　いずれにしても、さっさと本題に入るか？でも、本題って、まだ決まってない。わかった、わかった、スピッツについて話そう。スピッツは、どういうことというと、私の大好きなバンドです。そうそう、こんなにつまらないことをみんなに聞かせちゃいます。どうかお許しをいただけますよう、お願いいたします。本当に日本人がこれを読んだら、やばいかも、自分でも何を言っているかはさっぱりわからないから。まあ、そんなはずがないので、安心しましょうか。ごめん、話がちょっと飛んじゃったね。だけど、スピッツだ！すごい気に入ってる、最近。この前BEST　HITSみたいなアルバムを買って、まじで絶え間なく聞き続けている、ずっと。夢にも出っている。もう、ちょっと、やめたいなと思っているところだけど、絶対無理。現を抜かしている。やめようにも、すぐ体が震えだして、髪が抜け始めるとかかなぁと、心配しているから、まあ、しばらくでもこのペースで持続。どうせ結局、飽きちゃうからね。たぶん。　何でそんな気に入っているかいというと、　ぴったり九十年代の音楽の雰囲気にはまるから。たぶん初めてでも、日本語まったくわからなくても、聞いたら、すぐ”こいつ、九十年代のものだ！”とわかっちゃうと思うよ、間違いなく。なんでだろうな。何で聞いたらすぐTHIRD　EYE　BLINDのことが思い浮かぶのかな？不思議だな。だけど、幻でもない。確かな現象だ。音というか、雰囲気というか、どこかが、”これは九十年代に作られたものだ”と宣言しているように聞こえる、この馬鹿私に。えっ、やばいな、自分の言葉本が当にわからなくなちゃった。日本語的に文章があっているかどうかこいつを見てもらえる人はどっかにいるかな。ま、いいや。　ここらへんで、締めるか？もう、ずいぶん長くなってきたし、思わずに。はい、ありがとう、バイバイ。

Wow, that was ridiculous. Don't be impressed, though, it's very likely that none of that makes any sense. I mean, maybe it sort of does, but maybe I was just mashing keys together. I think it makes sense. Doesn't actually matter.　It was fun. Ok, well, it's nine forty and I haven't eaten yet. I've got some old lettuce in my fridge, maybe I'll go make a salad.

When the Past Bubbles Up

2009-09-17T03:24:00.000-07:00

Because sometimes out of the dross of the present it does. Mysteriously. Who knows what it is that dislodges a long forgotten face, landscape, or abstract but verifiably temporal emotion out from the massive, sedimentary shelves of our memories, but sometimes a word, a glance, a shaft of light summons memory from the deepest mausoleums of our minds and reanimates them before us, alive, full of blood, and none the worse for time and distance. Sometimes it's hard to remember who you used to be, sometimes you feel like you've changed so much that you shouldn't even recognize your memories as your own, but then a breeze will strike your face from a particularly resonant direction and you'll find yourself standing on the sidewalk of a twenty-three year old life as a momentary eleven year old, not bothering to wonder how you can reconcile the briefcase in your hand (sike, I don't use a briefcase) with the long forgotten porch of a treehouse you feel yourself standing on. It's a bizarre experience, but it's also enough to remind you that who you always were is who you always will be, even if only in sporadic and unpredictable spurts and splashes.

When it happens to me it's usually pretty random, but there are a few things, a few magical items, that exist as the gatekeepers to these strange mental corridors between the past and the present. Musically generally serves to link me, and I would expect many others, to the earlier versions of myself, but not every song unlocks pockets of images of the same intensity. Many of the artists who hold the keys to my past I would strongly resist calling artists at all if it weren't for the fact that somehow the crude lines and jagged, reckless shapes they've scribbled in hasty power chords and melodramatic screams resolves into an image of myself; the Beetles may be incalculably better musicians, but their music is a white shapeless sheet that falls from my shoulders, whereas the frazzled short-circuiting of The Used, Creed, and Dragonforce fit my body like my own skin.

That said, the song that is for me the most retrospectively potent is actually really good. I don't own it, though, strangely. I don't really know why I don't own it considering that I have an album by the Jonas Brothers, but that's all beside the point. The point is that this song hits me harder than real-life every time I hear it. I don't know what crashing of chemicals in our brains bestows upon memory the power to be more real than the present, but I would swear on the light and my hope of salvation and rebirth that this song recycles my memories and throws them before my mind's eye more vivid and more powerful than I ever lived them. I don't do it nearly as well as the originals do, but as I'm singing it I'm all over Whitman campus living all sorts of different lives. At the center of it all, however, is a bathroom on the second floor of Anderson, a CD player, and a CD that a guy named Vince Booth left behind when he moved out. I can't hear this song without remembering that bathroom, and longing for it.

A Career in Review: Roger Federer

2009-07-07T01:16:00.001-07:00

Strangely I find myself very by intrigued by my new-found appreciation for Andy Roddick, a thought that I by all rights never should have had, but the world is a crazy place and so, doffing my cap to said craziness, I will leave Andy for the time being and look instead at what yesterdays Wimbledon match did for my opinion of Roger Federer.

My opinion of Roger Federer... Have I ever had a higher opinion of any other public figure? Of all the human shaped stars in the sky, none shine brighter for me than Roger's. For years now he has stood Herculean and indomitable amongst the planets and nebulae and seven foot power forwards of our devotional sports galaxy, a figure too large for the relative obscurity of his sphere and too bright to be missed by even those who wouldn't normally see the world of tennis through a telescope. Where the majority of tennis players wink out before stargazers have a chance to wonder if they're even a trick of the light, Roger Federer blazes in the empyrean field of professional sports like a distant sun, and his presence commands the same sort of attention as a Lebron James or Tiger Woods.

Or so I like to tell myself. I'm not so delusional as to think that Roger draws as much attention, renown, or worship from all corners as somebody like Lebron or Tiger or Tom Brady, but I do know that of all the athletes I've watched I've only had one idol, and he comes from Switzerland. No other athlete inspires the sort of undying, unconditional, boundless love from me that Roger does, to no other athlete do I assign the same sort of unshakable loyalty, and given the choice of watching any single athlete in the world play up close, I would hands down in the blink of an eye without hesitation say Roger Federer, Centre Court, Wimbledon and wipe my hands of this world. Roger is a god to me.

But why, you ask? The answer is simple but gets more complicated: he plays a game I love, a game I hate, a game I didn't quite grow up with but grew into, a game that defined me and defines my starkest sports memories, with an unearthly beauty that is shoddy misdirection for sheer ruthless destruction. I admit that I love dominance, I love power, I crave the strength contained in competitive annihilation, and for years Roger stood on one side of tennis courts and banished opponents from his presence with a game that was simply undeniable and entirely beyond reproach. He was an archetype more than a human, an avatar, an earthly manifestation of a Platonic ideal rather than a fellow creature of blood and bones and dirt. He was so much better than EVERYONE that I looked forward to his matches not to cheer him in overcoming challenges but to bear witness to him incinerating his opponents (who were themselves unimaginably good tennis players) like dry bundles of straw before a wind of flame. He was a magician, a sage, a hero, and tennis was his Art. Maybe I've made my point already, but allow me the indulgence of saying that Roger played tennis in a way that seemed to stretch it out to the furthest limits of possibility, as if the game were designed with the prophecy of him in mind, and I couldn't get enough of the fulfillment that was pretty much every summer.

But then, into the golden light of his glory came a fleet-footed youth with a massive left arm and an inhuman will, flying into the sky of Roger's supremacy on black wings that churned sun-streaked blue into thick masses of lightning-shot black and gray, hanging in the air like the guillotine of the future that I never thought would call for Roger's neck. Fucking Rafa. If I love Roger with all of my heart than I hate Rafael Nadal with all of my soul. In my head Roger is white and gold and Rafa is the color of blood. Rafa came into Roger's perfect world and, somehow, tore it all down. All of a sudden, Roger was beatable, Roger wasn't going to live forever. Roger was our supreme champion, and... he couldn't beat Rafa. It started slow, with the French. Roger had never won the French even before Rafa, so even after he first lost to Nadal there it wasn't the end of the world. Nadal could quarter the market on clay because grass, hardcourt, and whatever shit they play on in Australia were part of Roger's kingdom and no army could storm that keep. They all said that Rafa didn't have the game to win on any of the faster surfaces. Yet. Yet is an insidious word, however, and faster than it seemed possible Rafa got better. As if some infernal engine fueled his ceaseless motor, Rafa got better and better and better up to the the point where patrick mcenroe and dick enberg were lowering the hard court odds to 50:50. Rafa never felt pressure, Rafa never stumbled, Rafa never gave up, and in situations where other men would crack, crumble, choke, and lose, Rafa never showed even a shred of fear, never once revealed to anyone his humanity, hit forehands and backhands and serves in a way that nobody else could, or arguably ever has, and won.

Even during Rafa's rapid ascension I still had confidence that Roger would overcome him in the end, but as trophies and plates continued to be doled out it became more and more clear that Rafa was Roger's kryptonite. I'd never imagined that Roger had weaknesses, but Rafa emitted deadly gamma rays that blasted through all of Roger's defenses at the speed of a falling giant, and turned him into a shivering, shaking, crystal thin shell of his former dominance. When Roger lost in the Finals of the French to Rafa in like ten minutes, losing all but four games in three sets, I was shaken. When he lost, a mere four weeks later, in five of the best sets many argue tennis has ever seen at Wimbledon, on GRASS, I was shattered. Number one was long gone, and the impetus produced by Nadal's already horrible victory at the inner sanctum of Roger's power seemed to me too extreme for Roger to ever reverse. He was number two in the world, and still incredible, but Nadal had thrust him from his pedestal of immortality, and when the new year brought the Australian Open Final I thought I could feel my idol of old hit the ground and break into a million pieces on the blue neo-styrofoam surface as Roger lost to him again, never, I thought, to be put back together again.

For all that, however, deep deep deep way deep down, I know that Rafa is no demon. He's not a bad guy, he's not a villain, he's not driven by the souls of a thousand demons. He's just.. really fucking good. Really amazingly good, and Roger couldn't beat him. Up until Rafa, Roger never really had a rival. He pretty much mopped the floor with everybody else out there. Rafa gave Roger his foil, his enemy to vanquish, but, unfortunately for Roger, he never really seemed to rise to that challenge. Roger could beat anybody else, but Rafa warped Roger's mind and stole his confidence like it seemed nobody ever would, and in the end was just too tough.

But the end for whom? I'm really running out of steam here and don't want to continue this post, sadly, but Rafa seems to have pounded his body to a pulp, only the uncertain future will tell whether or not he will ever recover, and in his absence, at the French, at Wimbledon, Roger has reclaimed the seat of preeminence that I thought he had abdicated forever. The future will tell how the narrative of Roger's career is ultimately received, how we will read the destructive meteor that was (is) Rafael Nadal. Will Nadal recover and resume the process (seemingly already well in hand a few months ago) of changing the guard? Will he fade away like a star shooting through the blackness of night, though leaving behind a much more tangible memory of his passing than a contrail in the sky? Will he come back and never be the same? Who knows, but just as his arrival altered the path of Roger's career and legacy, so to has this momentary passing; it is clear, however, that though Rafa has been out of sight for the past two majors, he won't be out of mind for the rest of tennis history.

Pausing for Greatness

2009-07-06T01:12:00.000-07:00

In a world where professional sports have taken repeated hits from scandal after scandal and appear before us as the bruised, battered, dented recepticles of competitive spirit that they once were, it becomes more and more difficult to appreciate the products various leagues put on various fields and courts without first having to forgive the product in question some sort of ethical or competitive shortcomings. In almost all of the major professional sports leagues there are serious flaws we as fans have to endeavor to ignore in order to affirm the legitimacy of the objects of our support; in baseball you have to overcome the anxiety that your favorite team might be powered by a guy (or guys) that is a mutant product of test-tubes and needles; in basketball you have to ignore the specter of a corrupt front office looming over the court like a vast, shadowy puppet-master, using a legion of referees to block and construct games not quite as if they were Broadway productions but certainly as if somebody not on the court has designs on what the scoreboard says when the buzzer sounds; in football similar concerns about the humanity of it's superhuman participants arise if we forget to suspend our disbelief at the 300 pound man chasing like a sprinter after a quarterback and stopping just short of ripping his arms off and bludgeoning him over the head with them in taking him down. In cycling, it's hard for anyone to win a race without the guy he lost to (and everybody watching) crying for his pee in a cup. In all of these sports (except, perhaps, for cycling) the demon of commercialization time and again steps out from behind the curtain and further disrupts the illusion that the pageant of professional athletics is motivated solely, or occasionally even largely, by the sheer will for success and pride in team and place that it is in amateur sports. Athletes frequently invoke the old axiom that "it's a business, too," and unfortunately we can't help but suffer the intrusion of the business side of the game(s) upon the other side we care about; sports unite and inspire us, but you have to be willing to sift through the taint of bloated salaries, greedy, soulless owners (and sometimes players), and the invasive barrage of commercial sponsorships in order to get to that inspiration.

All of this isn't to say that I don't follow sports, that I don't root for my teams, that I'm not uplifted by their successes and downcast at their failures; the Mariners lost their way through 100 games last year and I vomited through September; The Mariners won 116 games in 2001 and I distinctly remember being violently depressed when they lost a game to the Cleveland Indians in which they were up by like 9 runs with three innings to play. I think I snapped and punched my baby sister in a fit of rage, that's how much that team meant to me. I love sports, I think sports are an intrinsic part not only of our culture but also our humanity, which is why it strikes me as so unfortunate that they seem to be debased a little more each day by scandal and mishandling to the point where a fair percentage of people seem to see professional sports as little more than grimy idols to greed and dishonesty.

Which brings me to the shining beam of light that lanced into that semi-dark sky this morning from a stadium at the center of a complex of chalk lined strips of grass in the middle of London and stayed there, pulsing, for something like four hours and 19 minutes. Today's Wimbledon final was a transcendent moment nearly ten years in the making that struck a decades worth of waving, wandering, and unraveling narratives of wild success, simultaneously unfulfilled and thwarted potential, glory, the loss thereof, and its redemption like a godly hammer out of the realm of the possible and into the realm of substance, giving it form as surely as a blacksmith turning raw iron into metal with meaning. Today a red-hot history in limbo was thrust into a four plus hour pool of cool, refining water, and what emerged was a redefined narrative of struggle and triumph that, in my eyes, redeems sport, and reminds us all of why, exactly, we are fans.

Where to begin. Perhaps with a brief admission that tennis isn't immune to some of the negative pitfalls that beset other major sports. There's a lot of money involved. If you win you will get very rich. There's the sort of scandal that Tim Donaghey would be proud of. Nikolay Davydenko has been accused of pulling punches (or should we say shanking forehands) in order to influence betting. Drugs aren't entirely out of the picture; recently Richard Gasquet was suspended a year for testing positive in a drug test. For cocaine. Yes, tennis isn't without it's flaws here and there, but the thing that sets tennis apart from its counterparts is its intrinsic individual nature. The problems that arise in other sports are largely institutionalized (greedy owners, greedy unions, greedy commissioner's offices), whereas tennis tournaments are composed of individuals coming to a single place to go one on one until there's only one. There are no contracts so there are no agents to hate, there is no free agency so there's nobody to betray, and no one's expectations to fall short of except your own, ultimately. There also seem to be no drugs to speak of, discounting the recreational ones Marat Safin snorts off the ass-cracks of Russian prostitutes. In the end, tennis is an every man for himself sort of game that is more reverent of its winners and merciless to its losers than any other game, and in this removal of all the extraneous shit that bogs down other major sports tennis shines.

Furthermore, the intrinsically individual nature of the sport allows for more compelling personal narratives than pretty much any team sport can offer. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to say that they are compelling in a different way. Certainly we love to follow teams, and a franchise like the Yankees or the Patriots or the Lakers accumulates stories over time until it's history becomes vast and complex in a way that no single man or woman's life ever could. When Jeter puts on a Yankess uniform he stands beside the Babe and Dimaggio and Gehrig, whereas when Andre Agassi picked up a racket and stepped onto the court he was pretty much just Andre Agassi. Of course, that is a bit of reductionist statement, as I will get to, but it is undeniable that a franchise with a hundred year history can come to mean more than any single person ever could.

And yet, the history of a franchise is composite, whereas a tennis player stands alone, not only as a competitor, but also as a figure that receives history. Sort of. He takes his meaning, of course, from the people he beats and the people who beat him, but compared to being member of the San Fransisco 49ers, Carlos Moya definitely stands alone.

That said, there are a lot of individual narratives that flame out without ever meaning anything. Ashley Harkleroad, Daniela Hantuchova, Janko Tipsarevic, Guillermo Coria. Ever heard of them? Not if you don't follow tennis rabidly you haven't. But then there are others. James Blake; his story starts in promise, nearly ends in tragedy, but comes back like Lance before fading into the obscurity that awaits most every professional tennis player eventually. Top ten in the world, Blake bashed his head on a net-post challenging a ball, broke his neck, got shingles, and lost his father to cancer in the same year. That's a real shit storm of bad luck (particularly the shingles) that you might not expect your neighbor the pencil-pusher to ever fully recover from, but miraculously Blake was back roughly a year later and reached as high as number 4 in the world. Gustavo Kuerten, or if you prefer(which I do), Guga, owner of the sort of curly fro Matteo Legget could only dream of and potentially the most retarded grunt in the history of sports. Patrick Rafter, last of the serve-and-volleyers (I loved this guy so much I chose my racket just because he used it, even though serve and volley was the furthest thing from the game I played), the Aussie you could identify by the streaks of white sunblock type stuff he spread across his face like warpaint, if not by his endangered species of a style of play. Others. Tennis has an incredibly colorful cast of characters.

Which brings me to the two names I've been keeping back for all of this time, the two names who this morning, at least in my eyes, played the sort of career, maybe even life, -defining match that happens only very very rarely in sports, and should be recognized when it does. First, and most obviously, there's Roger Federer, the sort of mythological figure who comes once in a lifetime at most, and for my money challenges, and in fact overtops, even Michael Jordan as an awe-inspiring superhero of the sports world. And then, perhaps even more interestingly, there's Andy Roddick, a figure who was supposed to be the savior of American tennis, the next Pete Sampras, who had the bad luck to be born into a world where the next Pete Sampras already lived and breathed and dominated. I've been pretty violently anti-Andy Roddick my whole life, calling him nothing but a big serve and an ugly, brutal forehand, a three year-old child at the net and a ninety-year old grandmother on the backhand side. Today, though, he proved something to me; he played the most spectacular match of his career in the biggest moment of his career, and agreeing entirely with an article I read that described his effort in defeat today as heroic, looking back at his whole career with today as the lens... I think I love Andy Roddick. I'll be back later with why.

Completing the Nod to Bukatsu

2009-05-30T03:05:00.000-07:00

So I've returned to answer the question, "Why do I think Bukatsu is such a cool thing?" Well, before I answer that question, I've got to revise some of the misleading impressions I may have given with my previous post. The Way of the Middle Schooler, I translated Bukatsudo, likening it to the complicated, seemingly unbreakable set of rules governing the lives and honor of samurai. No doubt Bushido, the path followed by the samurai, was stringent, demanding physically and mentally, and utterly uncompromising in its delineations of what a samurai must do and how hard he must do it. What about Bukatsudou, however? Initially, I approached Bukatsudo as the modern manifestation of Bushido, only as applied to Hello-Kitty-loving, cell-phone-toting, pokemon-watching 13 year-old children as opposed to man-slaughtering, self-sacrificing, ultra-dedicated vassals of old-world warlords. I figured the Way of the Middle Schooler and the Way of the Samurai, while obviously divergent in many critical modes of application, were at least resonant ideologically. If, in the event of defeat, a samurai must take his own life to ease the sublime shame of failing his master, I figured that the Middle Schooler, while strongly discouraged from killing him or herself after a poor showing on the hurdles, for example, is at least obligated to go　精一杯, full-spiritedly, at practice so that a poor showing at the 大会 becomes less likely.

That's certainly how it goes at baseball practice. Maybe it was because my first brush with The Way of the Middle Schooler was with the most overly serious of them that I assumed it would be that way across the board, in fact it most certainly was, but at any rate after a few weeks of baseball practice I figured Japanese Middle Schoolers had the sort of work ethic to shame a navy seal. The first time I wandered up to a baseball practice, anxiously stepping through the gate in the chain-link fence after about three minutes trying to figure out how to open it up, I heard a hoarse voice call out from across the field and all sound ceased (that was Shuhei, he's the baseball captain and recently he was told by a doctor to stay quiet at practice for a few days because he had yelled his throat raw). Startled I looked up to find the entire team looking at me. Moments later, Shuhei yelled out again, Rei, Rei, Rei, and as one they bowed to me three times in quick succession. I was pretty confused by this. Awkwardly giggling I stumbled over to the bench, trying to ignore the way the kids doffed their hats and bowed to me whenever I passed them.

Then I got a real shock. The kids went back to practice, and what they did was run bunting drills for about an hour and then do an around the horn drill where they had to, well, throw the ball around the horn like fifty times without messing up. If a kid made a bad throw, or another dropped a good throw, both guilty parties would bow and apologize to the rest of the team before everyone started all over again. The most impressive thing? There was no coach to be seen. Nowhere. I could imagine American Middle Schoolers running bunt drills on their own, for an hour, without the barest whisper of a coach for miles, but it would take a few generous hits of payote. This Bukatsudo shit is fucking serious.

But that was just the baseball team. Those guys actually are little modern samurai. My mistake was thinking every group was like them. My misconceptions were corrected when I met the track team. And the ping-pong team. And the computer team. Don't get me wrong, there are serious teams out there that don't whack around balls with sticks; the volleyball team, at least the girls, take their shit pretty seriously, and I imagine it's probably not a good idea to fuck around with the kendo club, considering your coach wears armor and carries around a heavy stick, but EVERY kid isn't like that. The track team, which I have been a consistent 'member' of for the past few weeks, proved to me that in Japan the Way of the Middle Schooler isn't necessarily paved with stones of dedication and back-breaking commitment. No, goofing around and dicking off are prevalent here as well. The other day my buddy Shunsuke had to run in normal shoes because he had somehow managed to throw his spikes on top of a storage shed. I was asked in between sets of sprints by a group of girls if I would rather eat poop-flavored curry or curry-flavored poop. I thought about it for a minute and eventually came to the only conclusion possible: curry-flavored poop. I then observed that Japanese girls seem to really like poop (which they do), and things went downhill from there. I brought sunglasses to practice the other day, and suffered the subsequent penalty of twenty or so minutes of "cool" looks from half the boys team as they all tried them on. I've eavesdropped on multiple conversations about hopelessly unrequited love that I had to do my best to take seriously. Unable to resist the temptation to have a point, I guess, I have to conclude that this venture into Bukatsudou has given the humanity, and more importantly, the adorable frivolity, to the students at my school, and that sir, rules. Put simply and without an eloquent flourish to round it out.

A Nod to Bukatsudo

2009-05-15T04:32:00.000-07:00

The phrase "Bukatsudou" literally translates to "club activities," but were you to take a more holistic, emotive approach to the translation, you might come up with a much longer term that sounds more like a way of life than a good way to waste a lunch period. There is a character in Japanese, 道,　"Dou," that essentially means "path, road, way," and it can express either the most plebian patch of concrete you've ever set foot upon (歩道 (hodou) for example, means sidewalk), or the other kind of life-governing "path," the kind that often, perhaps even necessarily, tend towards the transcendental (武士道 (bushidou) means, roughly and ineptly translated, "the way of the sword," or perhaps "the way of the samurai.") The "dou" in Bukatsudou (部活動) is not that "dou," but I want to suggest that it probably should be. If I were to spell "Bukatsudo" in Japanese, I would spell it 部活道, and I would translate it as "The Way of the Middle School Student."

Clubs in Japanese schools are nothing like clubs in American schools. When you think of clubs in America, you think of eminently marginal, fringey little unions that meet once a week at lunch somewhere and maybe occasionally plan a weekend outing. When you think of clubs in America you think of Debate Club, Environmental Club, Key Club, Anime Club. You think of them generally as a way to boost that extra-curricular section of your college applications, or, alternatively, as a way to goof off with a theme. Critically, you think of them as being fully separate from the much more visible, generally more serious team sports category of after-school-activities. Sure you've got your Swing Club and your Dinosaur Club (I just looked up a list of club activities at my high school because I couldn't come up with any more and they actually have a fucking dinosaur club), but compared to say, the Football Team, or the Basketball Team, who cares? Not only are clubs second tier socially, but they also just lag as a commitment of time and energy.

Enter the Way of the Middle Schooler. Clubs in Japanese Middle Schools take sports teams in American Middle Schools and bludgeon them over the head with a kendo sword; I'm not even going to mention what they do to clubs. Part of it is just a semantic difference, however. Club activities in Japan encompass all after-school activities, as everything from the Brass Band to the Soccer team fall under the umbrella of Bukatsu, whereas in American schools there is a stricter delineation made between the kids who spend their afternoons painting pictures and those who spend theirs kicking balls. Semantics aside, however, clubs in Japan are pretty much across the board a bigger commitment than anything American middle schoolers participate in, be it a club or a team.

I could go on like this forever, cutting cultural differences out of the fabric of my afternoons, but by this point I'm fairly sick of turning my life into an unending comparative anthropology classroom, so as much as is possible, I want to look at the Way of the Middle Schooler without overtly filtering it through an American consciousness. Whoops, I'm writing this so I guess that's an impossible task, but, Bukatsudo is fucking sweet and I don't want to taint it by punctuating it with an incessant, and ultimately misdirecting, chorus of "In America, we do it THIS way, but!"'s. Who cares about American Middle Schools anyway, they suck. However, this post is already horrifically polluted with them. I guess there's no escaping cross-cultural analysis in this post, so I've decided to finish here. Let the next post deal with the natives as they are, not as reflected off of the colonizers. Stupidest line ever.

In summation, clubs in America suck and aren't really a big deal, but clubs in Japan are EVERYTHING and are pretty awesome because of it. Stay tuned if you'd like to learn why.

An Event that Defies Explanation

2009-05-11T02:11:00.000-07:00

I mean, it probably doesn't, but I'm not really feeling like words at the moment, so I will insert (moving) pictures instead. This is what I did last weekend. You only really have to watch the first twenty seconds or so unless you want to see an oldish man bite it and get laughed at. I get bumped out of the picture by a drunk dude posing as one of those wind-up cymbal-clashing monkeys and never make it to the fore again. I'm not really sure what happens in the second video.

Strangest Dream Ever

2009-03-30T13:09:00.000-07:00

I've been home for about five days now, which has been great, but the jet lag has meant that I've been sleeping at very strange hours, and while this may or may not be a result of the jet lag, the dream I've been having have been as weird as the times in which I have been having them. Last night I woke up at 4 AM, wide awake and unable to do much besides lie in bed and count sheep, while around 2 PM in the afternoon I am usually hit with an unassailable wave of exhaustion that requires a bed and a couple hours of necessary, if torturous, mid-afternoon naps. Never been a fan of naps, really, they always leave me feeling as if my world is breaking up like some prehistoric supercontinent, separating out into a vast, uncharted ocean of bizarre dreams.

But that's beside the point. Sometimes those bizarre dreams are like nothing you could ever experience in an unfractured waking reality. Like one I had some time between 4 AM and 12 PM this most recent sleeping period. I stumbled out of bed this morning/afternoon to make lunch for keelie and her friend who is over for the day with the mild sensation that something remarkable had happened last night, something epic spanning continents, epochs, mythologies, and ultimately human existence, but I couldn't summon up any concrete details. As I was cutting the girls' peanut butter and honey sandwiches into little squares, however, a few ragged images surfaced in my mind, and now that the sandwiches are being consumed in the lair of keelie's room amidst the frenetic, tinkly sounds of two dueling Nintendo DS's running some Kart, I will try to put those pieces together into something that suggests a coherent whole.

Of course that's impossible because dreams of their very nature are wildly incoherent, and this one beats many I've ever had, but at any rate let's get down to business. As far as I can remember, it all begins in a tower. The sort of tower where they usually keep Princesses with extraordinarily long hair, or socially dangerous physicists, or some other type of Old World fairy-tale character. However, despite those associations it was clear that though this was a long time ago, it was also in a galaxy far, far away. I was a prisoner of Darth Vader, trapped in the tower of an enchanted castle that looked a lot like it could have been an extension of the Japanese fortress I visited about a week ago. It was also clear that I was Harry Potter, and that if I could just somehow escape this castle and make my way to some unknown destination, I would be able to rid the world of some unspeakable scourge that was probably Darth Vader but later metamorphosed into something larger. I was scheduled to be executed in a very short amount of time, however. I had to escape. The fate of the world, of the galaxy, of Hoguscant, the Death Snitch, Princess Leimione, Ronbacca, counted upon it, but here I was, trapped in a white walled wooden tower with no discernible way out.

Flicker. There's a guard lying unconscious behind me and I'm climbing a really long ladder (turns out I was in a basement instead of a tower?) out of my prison and into... downtown tokyo! That was also New York. After a few close calls, I managed to make it out of my prison, and into the city where I immediately made my way for the closed shinkansen (bullet train) station I could. I knew that by boarding a bullet train I could make my way to my destiny and the liberation of the world from the Voldemortian Empire. Eventually, I made it there, and with some key assists from various Hagridian/Dumbledorian figures, I made it onto the right train, dressed in a purloined Darth Vader suit, for cover, apparently. You'd think this would be the worst possible disguise for someone trying to hide from Darth Vader, I mean, you'd really stick out, and you'd have storm troopers (who in this situation looked a lot like Japanese ticket takers) asking you for directions, and you'd have to make your voice all gravelly and choke people with the force and stuff (which I couldn't use) and you'd probably be found out almost immediately. HOWEVER, turns out the dream dumbledore is just as clever as the one living in JK Rowlings imagination, because this very train happened to be carrying a massive group of people in full costume headed for a DARTH VADER CONVENTION!!! I feel like the real Darth Vader would never allow such a congregation, but thankfully in this bizarre world I was able to slip into the crowd and avoid detection for some time.

Of course, the authorities knew I had gotten on the train, so even if they had to check every Vader look-alike they were determined to find me... I had to think of something, fast. The scene spasms and I find myself in the bathroom, facing my reflection in the mirror and praying for something. I look at the scar on my left hand, the blazing sunshine that was left there when Vader tried to kill me with force ligthing as I young child. I had shielded my head with my little baby hand way back when, and somehow, it had repelled the attack, sending it straight back at an astonshied Vader, effectively shaving his head and etching little bird-feet into this stunned, parchment white scalp. With a fervent prayer directed nowhere in particular, I threw my hands about and accidentally turned on the water faucet splashing water all over myself. Cursing absently, I went to whipe the water off my hands, and lo! the scar that had been so clearly engraved into my skin for 11-16 years or so came off as if it had been inked in wet jello. My eyes going wide, I realized the implications of this, and drawing back my forelock to expose the lightning bolt scar I received in some parallel universe, I went to erase that mark, too. Now, they would never be able to recognize me. I would be home free.

I guess it worked, because the next thing I knew, I on Mount Olympus, crossing some bridge of the gods on my way to meet Zeus in order to activate some ancient prophecy. Perspective had changed a little bit though, because while scarless Harry Potter was still a part of the party, I was no longer occupying his body. Instead, I was some impotent incarnation of Hermes. As I, together with a party of gods, led Harry through the screen of deadly snakes overhanging the bridge like willow branches, I remember pointing my staff at things and trying to say magic words to make something cool happen, I recall being able to summon up nothing more than the sensation of a spark-plug misfiring. Then Keelie woke me up. Which is good, because that dream wasn't going anywhere. I don't think dreams ever finish, I think we just mercifully wake up from their endless metamorphizing.

What a difference a day makes

2009-02-27T00:27:00.000-08:00

As a white dude living and working in a Japanese school, you can never really be sure when something you do is going to cause a stir. Maybe one day word will get out that you've successfully managed to use the Japanese style toilet in the teacher's bathroom and you'll hear nothing for the rest of the afternoon except praise for your squatting abilities. Maybe another day you'll go to the gym during recess, make a lucky shot from the free throw line, and then be held up as the second-coming of Michael Jordan. I think one time I put my hood on during lunch with a class of Elementary schoolers (Japanese schools are butt-fuck cold in the winter and dress codes are lax, so I wear a hoodie a lot of the time), and the entirety of the class collapsed into hysterics and walked around hooded and cloaked, or, if they had neither, just with their shirts pulled up over their heads, for the rest of the meal. Sometimes, it's fully absurd the sort of things that impress Japanese kids, to leave the teachers out of the mix entirely. That being said, I was pretty sure that the hair cut I got yesterday was going to cause a real fuss today. Typed out, that sounds like potentially the most egotistical thing ever spoken, but consider the situation for a moment: 1) Japanese people pull absolutely zero punches when it comes to talking about physical appearances (cases in point: I've repeatedly been told by kids and adults alike that they want my eyelashes, the other day at the gym one of the trainers said I wasn't as fat as I used to be (asinine statement for multiple reasons), when my brother came to my school countless kids (boys and girls alike) came up to him and told him how attractive they thought he was, etc etc etc) 2) I stand out like a sore thumb 3) They make a fuss over me when I do nothing, and yesterday I did something that changed my look in dramatic fashion. When you put those things together, it means that you're in for some strange moments at school.

I got 'em. To be fair, though, I did look a lot different. For the last seven months or so these kids have been gotten used to looking at this sloppy, ugly-ass mug:

But then, out of the blue, I showed up to school looking like this entirely different and mildly threatening human being:

They didn't know how to respond. I mean, things are always awkward the day after you get a big haircut. It really stands out, you know, and people have to comment on it. "Wow, nice haircut." "You look really different." "It looks good." The English language is rife with such stock phrases to deal with just this situation. In Japan, apparently, the same rules don't apply. I guess in Japan you just scream, or stare at someone like they've just recently been shipped over from a different zoo, or maybe you run up to the recently shorn, vigorously shake their hand, and express your desire to be better friends in the future. All of those things happened to me today. A couple people tripped and fell in the hallway; one girl stood slackjawed staring at me in the teacher's room until she was ushered out; another girl asked why Chad's brother was back in Japan; a boy who has never shown me anything but mild hostility and disdain came over to tell me I looked great; another group of boys asked me where I got my hair cut and how much it cost; yet another boy stood in front of me and pretended to masturbate. To be fair, I'm pretty sure that boy has some serious mental disabilities and should probably be at a different school. But still, it was a pretty eventful day at Maruzuka Junior High. And even though I don't really want to admit it, I guess I have to say that I kinda liked it. Even though I said earlier that they make a fuss over a lot of little things I do, I guess I should say they used to. Recently I've been little more than a blip on anybody's radar, so it's nice to come roaring out of obscurity again, even if it means suffering a lot of awkward compliments. I'm pretty sure everything will be back to normal on Monday. Unless, of course, I decide to shave my head on Sunday.

That was Also Awkward

2009-02-12T00:35:00.000-08:00

I'm really on fire these past few days, let me tell you. I went like six months without anything too outrageous happening to me (if you're willing to turn a blind eye to the occasional noisy boy-fire escape copulations I have to sit through), but in the past three days or so I've been awash in awkwardness. To be fair this one has been bubbling up for at least a few months, but what is usually a timid, momentarily flash of banshee-like uncomfortableness today grew confidant and smacked me right in the face with fully unanswerable questions and, potentially, a lawsuit. If we were in America, that is. If we were in America, however, this probably never would've happened. Nevertheless.

Let me give you some background here on this whole thang: amongst the generally rowdy, silly group of first-year boys I occasionally pall around with during passing periods, there is one King, or rather, one Court Jester with at least mild behavioral disorders, who is constantly doing really stupid, but hilarious, things. I don't really care about protecting his identity, but I ought to, so I'll compromise and call him Atsy. Almost his name. So, in his natural habitat, Atsy can often be seen walking around the little lounge area on the top floor of Maruzuka Middle School with his blue athletic shorts around his ankles, his brilliant yellow Tweety Bird boxers on full display, smiling like Dopey on a heavy dose of morphine and screeching like some demented osprey at people who happen to come close to him. He likes to alternately lie down or jump around on the benches in the lounge area with his shoes on, which, let me tell you, drives Japanese teachers fucking bananas. They hate that shit so much, and every day, pretty much without fail, you can find Atsy flopped face-down on the benches, his face reposing in a pool of sunlight, beaming like a spastic cherub as three or four teachers try their best to get him to sit in seiza and contemplate koan, or whatever it is Japanese kids are supposed to do during break time.

This kid pretty much hates studying in all forms, but he does like one almost-English sentence: "Do you like manko?" He asks me this on a very regular basis. He prances over to me all googly-eyed, his boxers flashing in the sun, and, "Do you like manko?" Then his brain explodes and he dissolves into paroxysms of insane laughter that, blessedly, mean I don't have to respond. He usually satisfies himself with the question and the utterance of the sacred word, manko. Turns out "manko" means "pussy." Not girls, not vagina, pussy. Real down and dirty. For a long time I didn't know that, and so I figured he was asking me if I liked manga. To which I would always reply, no, thank you, I'm not a nerd. He was understandably never satisfied with that answer. At least he wouldn't have been if he would have stopped laughing at his word choice and listened to my response.

That's how it usually goes, however. He pops over, asks me if I like manko, and then disappears into a tattered shroud of Wicked Witch of the West-esque giggles. It's fine. Today, however, things got very real. I guess he's gotten really comfortable with me or something, because today was crazy. I sat on the bench, per usual, and he bopped over, all evil-eyed and barely sane, and cawed at me, "do you like manko?!" As he giggle, I said, no, actually I prefer papayas (always trying to dodge the real question.) It didn't stop there. Then he said, "do you play sex?" This has happened before, and my usual defence is just to correct his horrid grammar. Have. Not play. He's not interested in learning. After I try to play the consummate English teacher for a second, he skips over to another teacher (who takes his antics with much more aplomb than most) and says, "sensei, do you play sex?" I can't believe this is acceptable, but the teacher in question just sort of shrugs and raises his hands in the air as if he doesn't understand. Not bad. Then Atsy asks in Japanese, "have you ever had sex?" The teacher's response doesn't change. The kid next to me says, "no way that guy's ever had sex." insightful little 12 year old.

This would be enough to register as strange, but it gets worse. Atsy comes back over, sits next to me, and points at his junk while asking me something in Japanese. I've never heard the phrase before, but I know what he's saying. I just really don't want to believe he just said it. It sounds like he's asking me if I play tennis, so I say, yeah, I love tennis. He's not saying tennis. He's not going to let it go either. So he puts on his lecturing cap and starts to teach me some things about the human body. "Down here, (pointing to his crotch), you have a cock, right? (He actually says, "Kokku" Japanglish for cock). Right? A cock, a chinkou, a penis!" I can do nothing but grudgingly admit that he's telling the truth. He continues, "Well, has it ever gotten BIG (pantomiming getting a massive erection)? Has your chinko ever stood up (terrible literal translation)" He's asking me if I've ever had a boner. What, exactly, is the proper way to respond to this? I can't say no. No, I've defied all physiological probabilities and made it to the age of 22 without ever achieving an erection. No, I'm a eunuch! I could resort to the story I used on 13 year olds on World of Warcraft message-boards once, tell him I'm the Death Emperor, asexual, standing outside of this world genital-less in the void and stealing the souls of sinners in the night, but my Japanese isn't quite that good. Also that's not the image sensei are supposed to convey. So, after a few moments hesitation, I go with the seemingly reasonable, well, it's natural that all boys get boners. To which the insightful boy next to me responds, quite natural, yes.

Then a teacher appears, I quiver in fear, he yells out "one minute to class!" the kids disperse, telling their teacher what Atsy was asking me, and I dash down the corridor to my next class trying to look innocent. Am I? Yes? I hope Atsy is satisfied. I hope I don't go to jail.

That was Awkward

2009-02-09T00:18:00.001-08:00

Boy did I ever just have an awkward experience. The most awkward experience of my life? No, I can think of at least three thousand things I did in middle school/ high school that were more awkward than this, but nevertheless, yikes. As most of my stories of late seem to center around my various misadventures in commuting, let us return once again to the bus. This time I didn't bring anything incriminating onboard with me. Well, nothing except for my self. Which, for various reasons, is sort of a constant recipient of unwanted attention and otherwise undeserved embarrassment. To the point: I hopped on the bus today, expecting nothing more than the usual fifteen minute chug from the Maruzuka Chugakko stop to the Sougouchosha one, though I may say that I was wishing to make that trip in Seiengakuen-less comfort. Seiengakuen is the private all girls school that sits in the direct middle of my commute like some sort of madhouse of giggles, Hello Kitty key chains, boy gossip, and more than anything, a sheer flood of girlmanity. Girlmanity? That sounds kinda fundamentally incorrect, but nevertheless, every day the first half of my ride home is made in the leisurely, silent company of maybe three or four old ladies headed to the nearby hospital, or maybe just to the station and home from a day of whatever it is old ladies dressed in kimonos do on weekdays in Japan, but as the bus rounds a bend and the Seiengakuen stop comes into view, the line of white cardigan, blue-pleated skirt wearing girls snaking at least thirty segments deep down the block, I sigh, stuff my backpack between my legs to vacate the seat next to me that I swear to god I will fucking vomit on my principal in the middle of an assembly if anybody ever sits in, and settle in. This morning, by some strange stroke of luck, the bus I took to school was luxuriously vacant of all Seien students, so I was able to enjoy a full bus-ride of repose as opposed to half of one, and I had the naivety to hope that I might enjoy another comfy ride on the way home.

Fat chance. I made up for that relaxing ride this morning with the most awkward one ever this afternoon. So I'm sitting there, crossing my fingers as we cross that fated corner, but sure enough, waiting at the Seien stop there's a big indecipherable blur of blue cotton and cream cashmere (private school, quality duds), and I'm a little bit stunned, because it's actually a bigger blur than I've ever seen before. The bus stops and sooo many girls get on the bus. I couldn't see because there were too many fourteen year-olds in my face, but I'm pretty sure the bus driver closed the door and pulled away before all the kids could get on. But, there's currently a shit-load of fucking kids on this bus, but strangely, not only has the seat next to me remained vacant (当たり前でしょ？）, today the two seats in front of me are empty too! Weird, these girls must be extra shy today or something.

Or were they? One of the girls keeps shooting me furtive little glances, which I sort of ignore, sort of return in the manner that is distinctly peculiar to the blond-haired foreigner on a bus full of little Japanese girls, but eventually more fools try to board this bus that is rapidly becoming a death-trap, and Shiori-Mc-Peekers and her bespectacled companion find themselves forced into the open seat in front of me. I figure that's the end of that. Nope. Shiori continues to look back at me occasionally, though she at least has the decorum to mask these looks behind the facade of talking to two of her friends that are standing in the aisle next to me and the seat apparently occupied by my imaginary friend. I guess it's not a facade though, because the four of them, Spectacles, Shiori, and the two other tag-alongs enter into a fairly intense conversation about how you would correctly ask the question, "where do you live?" In English. Fuck, they want to talk to me. I don't really have any idea what I want, so I just sort of sit there and give up trying to keep a shit-eating grin off my face as these four little girls alternately sneak peaks at me and try their hardest to formulate a very simple English sentence to ask me. The English teacher in me is fairly appalled at the attempts they bat around ("Where, なんだっけ？, live?, なになになに、You where? あっそうか。 Where living do you."), the human being in me really confused about how they can be blatantly having a conversation about me that I am physically in the middle of and somehow manage to not acknowledge my presence, and whatever part of me it is that wants to engage these kids unsure about whether I should try to play the role of English speaker or just tell them in Japanese that I know they're talking about me, and that I'm from America.

I chose to just sit there. As the bus pulls into the station, one of the tag-alongs says to Peaks-A-Lot san, "you better hurry up and ask!" but she only replies with something that I didn't really catch, something about being stupid and not understanding English, and then one of them says "Well, how about just bye-bye?" To which there is no response except for the familiar flurry of giggles. This is where the story flops, because the bus pulled into the station, they said nothing, I said nothing, and then everybody got off the bus.

That's not quite the end of the story, however, because after I wait for the bus to clear out and then approach the front, I notice that my flock of would-be-interrogators are waiting not far from the door of the bus, scrunched tightly together, giggling, pointing towards the bus and apparently getting up the necessary courage to say something to me. I shake my head, smiling, pay me fare, hop off the bus, and give them the old wave and "bye-bye!" as I walk past them. They explode into giggles and a chorus of bye-bye's, and I walk out of their lives but perhaps not their memories. Two of them didn't get enough the first time so they followed me said bye-bye one more time, which I graciously indulged. I guess they don't have an ALT at their school to say hello to and then run away from every day. Maybe this is the beginning of some new friendships? Who can tell? God regular not middle school aged Japanese people must think I'm a perv though.

The Pitfalls of Good Citizenry

2009-02-01T23:59:00.001-08:00

Has a good deed ever blown up in your face? Well, I guess one didn't blow up in mine today, but nonetheless I did have one kind of go off like a stink bomb in my hand. In my backpack, to be more precise. Every day I stare at this sign posted to the two bus stops I sit at waiting to be ferried from home to school and back again, and it says, essentially, "please help keep our bus stops clean! cleanliness comes from individual effort!" or, that last part in japanese, "mana ha hitori hitori no kimochi kara." Alright, yeah, that sounds good, I'm down with being a part of a cooperative community, let's do it. So this afternoon, I rushed out to my bus stop a few minutes later than usual, looking down the street to see if I can see the bus yet. Not quite, so I'm about to sit down on the bench and relax for a minute when I spot a smashed beer can shoved up against the little cement wall behind the bench. Yes, "mana ha hitori hitori no kimachi kara," now it's my opportunity to participate in this great community beatification project I read about every day. So, wondering which one of my passed out students' hands this semi-crushed up can fell out of this weekend, I bent over to pick it up and pop it in my backpack for momentary safekeeping. Oh fuck, this either belonged to Mi-chan or wounded soldiers aren't really a big problem amongst Japanese middle schoolers (or, more likely, bums) because there was a fair amount of beer in the can and as soon as I picked it up it fucking spilled all over me. Oh crap. Now what. Stealing a glance down the road, I see that the bus is almost upon me and there's little to do except try to pour the excess beer out of the can, shove it hastily in my backpack, and get on the bus, hoping desperately that I haven't been wetted to the point that I smell like the resident wino as opposed to the resident speaker of English. So I did, and nonchalantly pulling the ticket that keeps track of your fair from the dispenser, began my effort to look like I was innocent of any contact with alcohol. I mean, of course I was innocent in the sense that I was just trying to keep the bus stop clean, but I certainly had alcohol on my hands, and I could think of no easy way to briefly and satisfactorily explain that to affronted Japanese folks aboard a bus. I sat down, and everything seemed fine. Then the lady in front of me looked back with disdain on her face, and about five minutes later vacated her spacious window seat for an aisle seat next to another woman a row up. And it's not like they were just friends because they didn't talk. I smelled my hands. Yes, alcohol. My bag. Not too bad really. Then we passed the private all girls school, and like 50 12 year old-girls got on. Like usual. I huddled closer in my seat, hoping that by becoming as small as possible I could hide my hoppy scent, and in so doing keep my job. Sadly this is where the story ends because I quickly got off without further incident, but I'll actually be pretty surprised if I don't have to answer some awkward questions tomorrow at work. Old ladies are fucking nosy in this country, especially when it comes to dastardly, foreign alcoholics who are supposedly teaching their kids English. "Mana wa hitorihitori no kimochikara." Ne!

Sato Sho is Peace

2009-01-28T00:20:00.000-08:00

Not quiet, necessarily, but I actually really authentically enjoy going to one of my elementary schools. sadly, I don't go there very often, but every once in a while I do and it's a beautiful place. The classrooms are new, furnished in mostly blond wood that smells of cedar (potentially. nice-smelling wood at the very least), and while from the outside it exhibits the same brand of rectangular, crumbling century old concrete inspired architectural squalor that all Japanese schools are famous for, on the inside the lines are smooth, attention to aesthetic detail apparent, and everything is generally both clean and cozy. Which is rare. My other elementary school exhibits all the attention to aesthetic detail of a fall-out shelter that didn't get its door shut in time; maybe at one time it looked nice, but that was before the bomb turned it into a heap of, well, crumbling century old concrete. I realize now that this is an entirely inappropriate description of any Japanese building, let alone an elementary school, but I will keep it posted with a nod to it's impropriety because it's gets at a truth. Japanese schools are generally sorta ugly and look blown out.

But this one isn't, and it's not just the inside that shines. The kids are great too. I don't I played some silly game called fruit basket in class that isn't really very intellectually stimulating but because the kids are running around bumping into each other all the time they don't really notice. The best part of the day is just bumping around with the kids outside of class, because they're cute. Simply put. In the morning they do this thing where the whole school runs around outside on the track for like ten minutes, and the asked me to join. I said yes, and while it was exhausting I didn't regret it one bit. I was running around in a shirt (not a tie today however) and slacks amongst a fucking sea of white T-shirt, green shorted little kids, the late winter sun shining cheerfully on the prow-like triangular faces of the school buildings, struggling to keep up with the frantic sythesized version of some Aladdin song they were piping in over the loud speakers, and for a moment, things were good. Things were real good. And that's where I'll leave it.

A Couple Words on the Loss of a Lot More

2009-01-10T21:06:00.000-08:00

I haven't been posting much lately.

I guess mostly that's because I don't have a lot to say. My everyday life is ushered along quietly humming conveyor belts from bed to school to class (occasionally) and back to home to bed again, with little to punctuate the droning intervals except for vocabulary words from textbooks and characters from the books I read that I can't quite get all the way absorbed in. You'd think with nothing really to fill up my days except books I would find myself fully immersed in them, but instead of rough, sure hand-holds to grab onto and use to climb into worlds of mystery and magic, the caste-system and fluxy, shifting reality-paradigms (i just read the god of small things and am well on my way to finishing up this little mind-fuck of a book called the lathe of heaven), I find myself mostly grabbing at air. Alas, the crags and crannies of these story-shaped mountain-faces are still mostly sheets of teflon that don't really allow for much purchse. Such is life, for the moment.

However, that's not what I explicitly meant to write about here. I wanted to write a cautious obituary for the death of my epic. In fact, all the poetry I've ever written and never printed out. I lost the flash-drive that had all of my stuff on it the other day. Fell out of my backpack when I was cycling, only barely consciously, to work one morning. Forgot to zip up the pocket it was in and, whoops! Now years and years of work are lying in a gutter or a sewer drain somewhere. Maybe some Japanese person will find it and use it to learn English with. There's some hope for all of it, there might yet be files waiting to be salvaged on my old, beat-to-shit Dell that I think Keelie is currently playing with. Maybe. Just maybe all that stuff isn't dead yet.

But maybe it is, and I guess there's nothing for it but to pick up and write a bunch of new stuff. I've got some ideas. I made mention to "the kid who humps fire escapes" the other day in the GBN blog, and that gave me an idea. He's a real kid. He humps fire escapes while yelling out "OH BABY, OH YES!" really loudly during passing periods. He sits on benches and pretends to penetrate a mysterious someone sitting on his lap. He laughs uproariously wheneve I say the word "six" in class. To him, there's really no difference between the short "i" sound and the short "e" one. So, I think maybe I'd like to write some profiles of my sillier students. For posterity and such. They sure as hell can't read english, there's no worry about them stumbling across my blog and understanding it. Maybe someday, but not while I'm around that's for sure. So look out for that on the horizon, and know that it's not because I'm embarrassed or something that I'm not posting any more of my poetry on this bitch. It's cuz I don't have it anymore.

Japan Does Christmas?

2008-12-25T02:22:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm about to sit down to open my presents from my mother, and I was struck by just how Anti-Christ(mas)y this day has been. Actually, that's a lie, it's been slamming me in the face at odd intervals all day long like poorly timed blows from some laboring Asian Paul Bunyan who keeps forgetting that he's supposed to be pretending to be Santa Claus. Give me presents, Saburo-san, not blows to the dome with your othersideoftheworldly hammer! Ok, that's all silly, but the words are flowing right now and I don't give a damn if they make sense. That whole Japanese Christmas as the Anti-Christ thing? Well, I was going to say that it's fully unrepresentative of how my day went, that I just liked the sound of the phrase, but now that I think about it...

Ok, let's get down to brass tacks before I get down to opening my stocking. Maybe today wasn't Anti-Christmas. It's not like I woke up, went over the the Satanmas tree (which is red and thorny and strung with laced together clumps of feces and dismembered puppy parts (nobody said worshiping the devil smelled nice), drew a few pentagrams, sang a few unholy dirges, and then spent the rest of the day lounging in the luxurious sins of roast fetus on the dinner table, naked goats in my bed, and fuck this is foul, I think those are ample luxurious sins to get my point across. No, it's not the fact that Christ wasn't a very big part of my day that made it weird. It's a very well documented fact, but, hey, Christ has been largely replaced by the Corporation in the American holiday, and X-mas is making a very good name for itself. Kick Christ out the door and replace his name with a screwy manifestation of the thing we strung him up on. Such is life.

But, no, it's not the secular nature of Japanese Christmas that threw me off. And that's because there wasn't even a secular nature to the damn thing. Christmas doesn't actually exist. Sure there are lights hanging from the eaves of the train station, and there's a big fucking electric tree in the plaza nearby, shedding softly incandescent holiday cheer on people commuting back and forth to work and school, but that shit aint Christmas. It's just window dressing, you know? It's kind of beautiful, in a way. It's Christmas as it could be in America once it's reached the terminus of the road of secularization and commodification it's currently traveling. Stripped of everything except the barest notion of lights, trees, and the obligation to buy your significant other or kid a present, Christmas here... well, what else can you expect, really? Of course families don't make a huge fuss about it, nobody gets work off for it, kids only get school off for it incidentally; it's just another in the host of countless things that has floated across the Pacific on the wind, an imprecise, barely recognizable shadow of it's American self once it reaches these Far Eastern shores. Japanese people take these indistinct shells of America and fill them with something that is distinctly their own, and that's one of the most fascinating things about this country. Just how good they are at bastardization. Or maybe I should say Japanification.

So yes, I went to work today. Sat around, did some studying, stared out the window and watched cars go by. I almost napped. It was nice. But was it Christmas? Nope. Christmas turned out to be just another thing that seems universal, but fails and dies once you cross the invisible cultural boundaries that keep it alive. Well, time to go open my stocking. Happy Christmas.

A Word on Wordiness

2008-11-19T04:59:00.000-08:00

Enjoy.

Actually I can't be content with just one. This section of the epic is the corniest and most forced one one there is (you will quickly notice the part where I most explicity and inexpertly wove in the theme of religion as senseless violence and fratricidal destruction), but, immediately following it is the one where Iesous goes into hell, and I'll be fucked if that one isn't hella awesome. So, perhaps the proper word on wordiness here is "gaman" which means, grin and bear. Suffer through. Stick it out. Nut up and be a man. All of the above apply to this book five (?).

(A brief refresher: Iesous recently talked to his mom who told him he was born for greatness, he nearly realized the true power hidden within him but then he left his village to sit in the woods for a while, and then Triton killed himself and his loyal sea nymph, Joanna. The scene opens upon Iesous in the woods, waiting for the apocalpyse of the Olympian Gods to fall on his head)

Time went by, and there was no retribution.
The little village in the trees held its lease longer
than any who lived there could have hoped, and
the storm they resigned themselves to bracing for
did not come. The woman in the house at the head
of the road had felt the great surge of energy that

was the release of Triton’s soul, and for some time
she feared the end was near. But as it became apparent
that the apocalypse was averted, again she hoped
that her boy would find his feet walk
them along his path into the sky.

What the woman didn’t feel, however, was
the assimilation of the energy bolts by the
amulet around the boy’s neck.

He was sitting alone, contemplating a means
of entering the netherworld of Hades’ Dominion,
when suddenly he was struck by what seemed
a giant wave quivering with electric
currents. An immense power rushed into
the amulet around his neck, and it overpowered
the symbols etched therein, glowing the deep
blue of the open sea.

Any lesser being would have died immediately,
as no normal mortal could successfully absorb
a god. The boy, however, was far from normal,
and what would have been a fatal seismic
oblivion to any other, he hardly noticed. So
deep was his concentration that he sensed
nothing spectacular until his gaze turned to
the pendant ‘round his neck and he saw it
burning blue. Seeing and feeling it around his
neck, he knew that Triton was dead. Nodding
to himself, he continued to puzzle out how he might
unbar the gates of Dis, and slay the keeper of the
dead.

So long he sat there seeking a means that
an observer might have thought him turned
to stone. Upon a rock he sat, elbow upon
knee and face upon fist like a piece of art. He
passed up plan after plan, each more impossible
than its parent, and still he had no idea how to
proceed. He was nigh upon ripping the earth in
two to create a clear path to the deeps when he
felt some persons approaching. Nimbly, he jumped
off the rock, and hid himself behind a nearby tree.

Proceeded by angry cries and cracklings

in the underbrush, two men burst into the clearing,
grappling and gouging and yelling incoherencies,
in between gasps for breath, harsh whisper
of a knife being drawn from a leather sheath, two
men entered the clearing, one advancing upon the
other with the offending knife upraised. The other
had a bright sword strapped to his thigh, yet it
remained secured within its scabbard. It was
clear that an argument lay between them,
and it came to the boy on their loud voices.

“ Would thee not see the light, however brightly I shine
it in thy eyes? Does not the glory reflected by the
tip of yon knife convince thee of thy folly?”

“ No blade could dissuade me. You are blinded
by the might of your gods, whereas I see
clearly through it. May they smite me where I
stand, I will not worship the despotism they represent.”

“ Still no, brother? Would thee not
change thy mind even knowing that thy
impiety will likely invite the wrath of god
upon our family? Would thee not change
for that?”

“What god worth praising slays believers
for the crimes of the wicked? Are
the bolts of Zeus so treacherous? So difficult
for him to aim? I should think not. He
cares not for those who love him, until
they disrespect him.”

“ I will stand for no more of this. Blasphemy
flows from thy mouth like poison, and
every word of it stings my soul. Draw
thy sword, and we shall see whose
position the gods favor.”

“ You would fight me, brother, for them?”

“ My god is my life.”

“ I will not draw. Strike me down if
you must, but I would not fight you no

matter how many hosts of heaven
stood at my back.”

“Then may thee meet thy scorned maker,
and suffer his most severe punishments for
all eternity. My lords’ wills be done.”

With this final utterance he drove the
wicked knife between his brother’s relenting
ribs, twisting it until it ruptured his stolid
heart. Before the black wind closed
his eyelids, the slain man said to his brother,
“ I hope only that your gods do not forsake
you like you have forsaken me. Eternity is a long
time to spend reliving a betrayal from one so dear.
Peace, my spirit quits it mortal casing, and I can fly,
at least for a little while.”

Just so, he died. His spirit fled the ()
hindrance of its flesh and hovered above
for a moment, bewildered at the separation.
The other man saw this not, nor the angry
rash spreading across his forehead like a brand,
and wiping his brother’s blood upon his coat
he walked away. The boy, young Iesous,
saw both though, snapping his fingers at the latter,
but in seeing the first realized his solution to
the puzzle of the hidden underworld.

Quickly forgetting its former limitations,
the tint flowed away from the scene
of it’s body’s end and flew out toward
the distant sea. Leaping up, the boy
pursued, his feet cutting the wind as he
outpaced it. The soul took, as his condition
made quite easy, the path of least resistance,
and the boy had to take the country in switchbacks
to follow. His feet nearly burning stripes in the
ground, he sprang over boulders and down
steep slopes in a furious effort to keep up

with the speedy shade. Closer and closer
the two came to a giant promontory over
a turbid sea, and still the boy followed,
fast as ever. Suddenly,
as it appeared the shade would plunge
headlong into the sea and down to some
watery end, it stopped and stood a modest
hole before the edge of the cliff. The boy
stopped to watch. After a moment, and with an
air of resignation, the shade entered the hole and
did not return.

It was clear to the boy that he had found the
entrance to Erebus, and so he made much
haste for the hole. Upon reaching it’s gaping
mouth he jumped in, landing on a stony floor.
There was no light in the cave, yet the boy
could make out a giant door of mysterious
metal, worked all in flames and bones.
At its center loomed a helmed god
on a sinister chariot, his hands reined to a trio
of dragons, their maws open in the act of a throaty
scream. In his other hand he claimed a sceptre
mounted with an obsidian skull. The gate to the ever-after,
firmly shut in the boy’s face.

A calm power rose again in the boy’s blood,
and for the first time since his father’s home,
he drew back a bit the shade over his spirit.
His eyes blazed like the apocalypse, and he
clenched two mighty fists. Like a savage
earthquake he struck the gates of hell, and
they crumpled before him as a child’s
castle will before the sea. They fell to the ground,
and the sound they made when they struck
was like a lone bell, dark and without an echo.
Once they had settled, he stepped over them, and
descended into the tangible darkness of Hades.

And scene.

Just a little Something to Pass the Time

2008-11-08T17:51:00.000-08:00

It's a sunday morning and I'm sitting here in my apartment waiting to chat with my parents (for the first time in over three months, actually), and I thought I'd splash some random words onto the internet until Six Thirty Pacific Standard Time rolls around and I link up with the motherandfathership, so let's see. Hard to say what exactly I want to say, considering the biggest thing on my horizon right now(pretty much the only thing on my horizon right now, actually) is a little under two months away and furthermore nothing relavant to just about anybody who might be reading this blog (wink), but there are actually two kinda neat things coming up this week that I can detail some. The first is something the kids are doing, and the second is something I hope I can make the kids do. On thursday they got this "Talent Show" type thing, but I'm not expecting a small little affair in the gym composed of groups of kids performing sloppy karaoke or imitating Kojima Yoshio (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1utN8BWudf0&NR=1) (this guy is fucking weird as shit, but was a total phenomenon over here for a while, which makes sense). Nope, there will be nothing impromptu or shoddily performed about this particular talent show, considering that the kids have been practicing for it for since about May, at least twice a day during lunch and after school. Not to mention the time they spend during fifth and sixth period studying recordings of themselves practicing.

Let me back up a moment to see if I can't get this to make some more sense. On Thursday, my school will have it's Gakkogei happyokai, which roughly roughly roughly translates to Talent Show/ Chorale Contest, and as my translation makes clear it is split up into two sections. The first part I am a little unclear about, but think that it involves individual students or perhaps groups of students performing something, anything, they've prepared by themselves and proved to the powers that be to be of high enough caliber to show to all the collection of parents, administrators, and local daimyo who are going to be filling up the 1200 seat auditorium they will be performing at. I think during this segment of the performance we will get to see anything from sweet guitar solos, to a performance from a band or two maybe, probably some piano pieces, speaches in English (shudder), probably speaches in Japanese, and maybe a dance or two thrown in for effect. That will be fun, but it's all just stage dressing for the second part of the show, which is what everybody is looking forward to. In Japanese middle schools, the kids are all divided into classes called kumi, and instead of traveling around the school to rooms occupied by different teachers, the kids stay in the same room all day and the teachers come to them. For this contest, each kumi is given a song to perform, and they compete against the other kumi to do perform their song the best and win points for their color. Let me explain this, there are five colors in the school, not unlik the four houses in Harry Potter other than the fact that there are five of them and they just have colors instead of the names of the schools founders, and each color group is composed of a kumi from each grade. So for example the Aogumi (blue group) is made up of a kumi form the first, second, and third year students. At various events throughout the year, they compete against each other and the different grades can win points for their color kumi. There's a board in the front of the school displaying the points. So exactly like Harry Potter, basically.

Well, I think this contest is one of the bigger point getters for the whole year, so the kids are bustin their balls to be the best. I, however, have to go put a shirt on some I'm decent for my family, but, check this link out to hear one of the songs they sing. It's called, Adventure in the Carribean Sea of Dreams (basically), and it rules. I'll translate it later. These aren't my kids, by the way, there is just a very select number of songs Japanese kids sing at these contests. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mngzBdQeDEs

I'll finish this shit later.

Jump into the Time Soup

2008-11-02T23:32:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you go places and say to yourself, definitively, I'll never ever be here again. But sometimes you go back. What does that mean?

When I left Kansai Gaidai a couple years ago, it was lugging a pair of maroon suitcases into the Mid-December light, calling over my shoulder to a group of softly crying friends "This isn't the end. We'll see each other again, someday, so you don't even have to say goodbye." I hate saying goodbye. But even though I said I was sure we'd all meet again, was there a part of me pretty convinced that this sunrise was also the sun setting on Hirakata City, Japan? I'd be lying if I said there wasn't. I went home hoping I'd make it to Japan again one day, but I also went home pretty sure that even if I did, the Japan I'd make it to would be entirely different from the one I'd left.

Well, I made it back, and even though I staggered into the coutnry lugging behind me the same two suitcases I'd left it with, I guess I was bringing my baggage to a place that knew nothing about it. My bags were the same color of maroon they'd been sitting in the closet in my dorm room, most of the clothes inside of them were two years older but of the same stitch and thread they'd been sloppily spread out on the tatami of Sem II, but when I got it all out on the (wooden) floor of my new apartment, something just didn't look right. What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that even though I was mostly the same person I had been two years prior (and had all the matching stuff to prove it), Hamamatsu was not the Japan I had left, the Japan I had expected, and certainly not the Japan I had signed up for. Some times it didn't even feel like Japan at all. Finding out I was placed in Hamamatsu, the larger, optimistic part of me tried to say that it would be fun to see a new place in Japan, experience some new sights, sounds, tastes, what have you, but there was a darker part of me that knew Kansai for home and didn't care one bit to settle anywhere else, even if it was only for a short time.

I don't really care about Tokyo. I went to Akita, and it was nice, but not for me. Okinawa sounds pretty, but, meh. Hiroshima is cool. To visit. Yokohama's got a sweet Chinatown. I hear Hokkaido is famous for its summer wildflowers. Hm. Now that I think about it, I actually want to go to Hokkaido, and summer wildflowers sound heavenly, but fuck Hokkaido, and fuck summer wildflowers. As far as I'm concerned Japan is (one end to the other) about two hours on trains, and has only two cities (and their surrounding areas) that matter: Osaka and Kyoto. I've been fighting it, trying really hard to give Hamamatsu and Kanto a chance, but fuck 'em all, when you're from Kansai like I seem to have become nowhere else matters.

This is going to get out of hand if I keep going at this pace, so let me cease blasting 95% of the Japanese landmass and get down to business. I went to Osaka and Kyoto this weekend! It was great. It felt like Japan for the first time. I like soccer. I don't like natto. I am fine, thanks, how are you? Whoops, sorry, slipped back into my English teacher role, there, but for the moment we're discussing nothing that has to do with my life as an educator and everything to do with my life as a student of Japanese. I first came to Kyoto when I was 16, and, in the middle of a long day touring various Japanese cultural landmarks, we stopped in at a place called "Heian Jingu," a large shrine famour for it's largness, orangeness, oldness, and four lovely gardens you can walk through. One of those gardens has a large Koi pond in it, and running along the edge of the koi pond are a group of stepping stones you can use to cross like a bridge. Of course, to a still culturally nubile 16 year-old mind, these stones were perfect for pictures posed in the kung-fu and zen style. Somewhat amazingly, I found a couple of those pictures deep in the memory banks of my computer, so I'll dust 'em off and here they are:

Oh what the fuck? This isn't right? John English turned into a little Japanese girl? And what, I didn't have a beard... Or a pony-tail for that matter. What the hell. Oh, that's right, these photos were taken yesterday. Not 6 years ago. But other than that they are the exact same. It's unreal. I don't know exactly what it means that my life continues to meander through the same points on the map of a distant land, but maybe it's just that I like those places. After we took those pictures, I went and made myself a little medallion to replace the one I'd lost 5 years ago (thankfully the imprinting machine was there), and to bring the deja vu a couple years into the future, we walked around Sanjo, a pretty, but mostly exorbitantly overpriced shopping district that we came to from time to time two years ago. Time goes on in a straight line, but I'll be fucked if life doesn't go around in slowly expanding circles, each of us sucking new people into the vortexes that are our lives even as we are sucked in by others until the ripples all overlap and you can't tell which one is yours and which one your neighbors anymore, but it's all good because the point is that we can all be connected if we spend a little bit of time in the same pond. Though I could say a lot more about this, and will later, perhaps tomorrow, I think I'm going to end the transmission here. I really really can't wait to pull a few of my friends from back home into this crazy pit of light and sound and agelessness that has one index of my life for the past god knows how long. Throw 'em into the pond and watch the ripples spread.

In Anticipation of a Flash Mob

2008-10-27T01:07:00.000-07:00

Nothing spectacular to report today, at least nothing spectacular that happened. I sat at my desk for about six hours, picked my nose, stared off into space, slept, picked my butt, slept while picking my butt, woke up to teach a class, then went back to sleep until it was time to go home (a disorienting day, but not surprisingly I feel pretty rested right about now), so outside of the number of stairs in my school (176), tiles in my classroom (12), or urinals in the third floor boys bathroom (4), i can't really say much about my day at school, except for that I now know that whistling in class is most definitely against the rules, even for teachers.

However, I can briefly say something about something cool that is going to happen sometime soon. Cryptic, yes, but it's kind of a secret. I hate secrets though. On Wednesday November 5th, from 5:37 PM until 5:42 PM at a McDonald's nowhere near you, myself and a few brave souls are going to participate in the greatest social experiment to take place in Japan since somebody showed them a white person. What sort of experiment, you say? Well it's largely to see if we can draw out the deeply seeded Japanese belief that foreigners aren't actually human beings but are instead some sort of animatronic nonlifeform with no feelings and no known ability to use chopsticks that might either explode into random violence or shut down entirely at any moment. Well, there's really no way to get them with the random violence thing without having to face some sort of jail time, so we're taking the other route. Have you ever heard of flash-mobbing? I hadn't, but I'm finding out everyday that being from suburban Washington makes you more of a country bumpkin than I had suspected so I wouldn't be surprised if you already knew all about this (except for those of you who also grew up in suburban Washington and then went to college in rural Washington). But, while it comes in many shapes and sizes, it ultimately boils down to a large group of people seemingly randomly engaging in a bizarre coordinated something in what would otherwise be an incredibly ordinary place and situation. A large group of people suddenly freezing in a crowded bus station and staying that way for five minutes before walking away like nothing happened; a mass of people pulling out pillows from shopping bags in the middle of a shopping center and having a huge pillow fight for a few seconds before calmly putting the pillows back in their bags and going back to their business; a huge group of people sprinting down the length of a train platform as if they're late and desperately need to catch one, but then stopping and breaking off into small independent groups to chat once they get to the platform and there's no train there. It's crucial that you catch as many innocent bystanders in the middle of the spectacle as possible, because part of the fun of a flash mob (I'm guessing) is messing with people and getting them to think there's something big going on that they're just not in on. Their everday reality, catching the train, buying christmas presents, eating in a restaurant, gets turned on its head for a moment, and something crazy happens that you would never ever expect to. If it works, if you've done it right, then people leave wherever they were thinking, "what the fuck just happened? Did that just happen?" Not just, "damn kids."

We're going to go with the easy one first, freeze-framing it for a pre-determined amount of time, and then coming back to life and moving on like it was no big deal. Just robots that ran out of juice for a minute, you know? And we're going with McDonald's not to make a political statement about how McDonald's isn't the sort of fuel you'd like to put in your body if you'd like to live a healthy life and not have full body breakdowns every now and again, but more because that's where all the kids hang out, and they might react the most strangely. At any given time you can find elaborately dressed girls standing in front of wall mirrors, doing their make-up or refashioning their hairdos or maybe even doing a little improptu plastic surgery. Boys hang out after school in their uniforms, looking tough in their mullets and mohawks and military themed duds as they sip on a blueberry oreo mcflurry (drink of the month and it's great). If well executed, it could be great. We'll see how it goes, and if we manage to get a video of it, well, you can see it in action. I'm hoping there's a computer hacker amongst us who can hack into the McDonald's security camera system and like divert the feed onto the internet or something, but I'm guessing that's impossible. This sort of thing looks better from all angles, though, you know?

Beyond International Emo

2008-10-13T00:41:00.000-07:00

Remeber how I said I was going to a festival last night and that I might have something to write about it later? Well, I've got loads.

I had never been to a festival before. Well, one, but it was just a few food stalls arranged around the "quad" (a rectangular patch of beaten up astroturf with a couple basketball hoops stationed around the perimeter) of the school I went to here a couple years ago, and the main attraction was watching their large cheerleading squad build a couple pyramids to the blare of vintage Brittney Spears coming from an equally vintage boom box. So it was lame, is what I'm saying. As such, I didn't have extraordinarily high hopes for this one.

Going into it I had little to no idea of what to expect. Other than a few whisperings I had overheard in the hallways about a "dangerous" festival coming up this weekend, I'd heard nothing at all. Why was it "dangerous?" What does that even mean? I've come to disregard most everything the Japanese call "dangerous," because 15 mile per hours winds and drinking too much apple juice fall under that category, so when they said the festival was "dangerous" I figured it could be, but only if if a swat team of angry Chinese assassins with Uzis happened to crash it. Even as we were driving there, I had no idea what was going to happen. I asked the Japanese lady driving what kind of festival it was, and she said it was some sort of harvest festival. Something people do all over Japan. Not necessarily the most explicit explanation ever (to be fair she did mention a couple other crucial things I would understand later but at the time didn't have the vocabulary to comprehend), but I did start to get a little nervous that the "danger" involved little slips of paper, a single black spot, and one unfortunate soul getting stoned to death by an angry mob of superstitious farmers.

Luckily my slip of paper was clean. My shoulder is a little sore this morning though.

JK I didn't kill anybody. But here is what happened:

After stopping off at my Japanese friend's house to pick up some happi coats for the occasion, we set off into the night, following the mass of humanity making it's way towards something I didn't really understand. We wound our way through the darkened streets for a while, gradually getting closer and closer to a fuzzy source of light and sound lurking in a grove of trees like a slowly awakening beast. Hypnotized by the interwoven call of flutes and horns, attracted like curious foreign moths to the foggy glimpses of silver and gold revealed in gaps between tree trunks and leaves, we eventually made it to the "fair grounds" I guess you could call them, and then everything made a little more sense to me. Yoshimi, my Japanese friend, had said someting about these things called "yatai" when she was explaining the festival to me, and that's a word I didn't know and one she said she couldn't really explain any better. Well, having seen them, neither can I, put luckily seeing, in this case, is understanding, so this is a "yatai"

Hmm I don't know if this is going to work... And I was going to rave about how amazingly liquid the world becomes when you can translate a little piece of it into pixels of color and light that sit on your cell phone until you email them to yourself and post them on the interent for anybody to see, but whoops, there goes that little ecstatic moment for technology. Fuck you technology for ruining yourself for me. (Unless it actually worked in which case I'm the uber idiot).

It worked (I'm revising and editing right now), but you can't see it very well, so here's another:

But, back to business. The first part of the festival was held on the grounds of a local shrine in what I suppose we could call a cul-de-sac of revelry. At the far end of the holy "U" shape stood the shrine building itself, sitting quietly in the darkness and leaving the spotlight to the real stars of the show, the yatai (which, for that purpose, were lit up with artfully placed halogen lamps and some sort of incadescent article placed inside of lamps attached to the sides of the thing (this festival must have been incredibly dangerous in the past because I imagine they must have put candles in those lanterns, and with the way they get tossed around in the process of pulling the yatai around town (something I will get into later) I bet back in the olden days there were yatai burning down left and right, filling the night with flames to go along with drunken dancing and chanting (which sounds really nice, actually)). Along the sides of the U, where the houses would usually be, were set up a shit load of little stalls selling everything from buttery baked potatoes to candy apples; there were chocolate bananas, yakisoba, takoyaki (fried octopus balls), okonomiyaki, dozens of other sorts of yaki I'd never heard of before, shaved ice, ice cream, probably even ice sculptures somewhere in there, basically any sort of festival food you could ever want, and it was all contained in the otherwordly golden haze that demarcates the realm of memory from the present moment, or just indicates spectacular mood lighting. I'm convinced at this point that Japanese people know how to manipulate light better than any other culture, they've got a really finely tuned photo-aesthetic eye, that's for sure.

It was in this ethereal landscape that the festival operated. For kids it must be the best shit ever. Speaking of kids, this festival was held pretty much right next door to my school, so I was basically every one of my students there, munching on some sort of yummy snack of another. Our encounters followed one of two patters every time: If I noticed them before they noticed me, I would stare at them until they did notice me, and then they would have a minor convulsion at the sight of me, look sheepish, say "hello chado" and then get out of there; if they saw me first, they would point at me, look really surprised, laugh, (this is all according to Yoshimi), poke me, say "hello chado" and get out of there. That was pretty funny to see them out of the classroom setting, I kinda liked that. But yeah, every neighborhood within the Hamamatsu area has a yatai, and the first part of the festival involves the yatai, ostensibly pulled by members of the town with ropes but actually powered by generators secreted within the shrines' ancient bellies, doing a processional from their berths near their stationary superior and out into the streets. I watched this for a while, looking at my kids, rocking out to the tunes of the flutes and the trumpets played by the lucky elementary students that got to ride inside the holy things and the parents that followed nervously behind, and it was good. But then, I found myself being led out of the magical cul-de-sac and into the decidedly prosaic night, and I was a little disappointed, because I thought it was over.

Not so, however. Not even by half. For the next part of the festival, everybody splits off and follows their particular yatai on a merry jaunt around the kinjo (neighborhood) chasing after it like pilgrims following an ark (sorry for mixing up my ideography, I don't can't help but bring everything back westward) past shops and houses empty because their owners are all out enjoying the evening. Along the way, the yatai stop from time to time and people hand out free beer and free food that the revelers then consume while they rest and prepare to revel some more. In between bouts of consumption, while the shrine is still stopped and waiting, somebody pulls out a bullhorn and starts yelling "O ISSHO" which apparently is the signal to dance around like a maniac for thirty seconds. It's like a dance party in the TKE house, except less grindy and dingy and more mosh-pitty. Everybody participates too, young and or old. Fathers dance around with toddlers on their shoulders and beers in their hands, grandmas get in there and raise their hands with the 20 year old dudes and chicks, and everybody is really just getting down. And then it stops, suddenly and without warning. But about ten seconds later it starts all over again. And then it stops. But then it starts again. Then it stops. Then it starts. Then it stops. Then is starts. Then it stops. Then you're pretty sure it's done but it starts and stops at least three more times before the shrine gets moving again. It's a workout, that's for sure.

We ended up following the yatai around for maybe two hours, "dancing," eating, drinking, dancing, and generally just thanking kami-sama for another good harvest. It was great. At one point I got sucked in by these drunk, entirely unintelligible old men who tried to tell me a story about how much they hated Ichiro because he's not good at baseball just fast (not true but whatever) but at the time I was pretty freaked out by them and so didn't understand what they were trying to say until like an hour later. At another point, in the mosh-pit, I found myself getting backed down Andy Huntington style by this random drunkass Japanese dude who spoke a lot of English. That was awkward, so I just turned around and we bumped butts until the crowd cleared and I could get out of there. It wasn't me, because after I escaped he found another victim. When the full moon comes out some people just get crazy I guess. Whoo, well, that's about all I got there, and boy was that ever an epic. Speaking of, the next installment coming soon. Thanks for coming.

Something about an International Language

2008-10-12T01:11:00.001-07:00

That's right, music. We're going to do another of these I post a video of myself doing something embarrasing with a guitar in my hands things. This is a little different from Garden State and T-Tones covers, however. Well, it's still most definitely a cover, but this time I'm not singing in English. This is a Japanese song that I think is pretty sweet. I'm trying to think of what I would compare this band to, and I guess I would say that while they have the sartorial style of Pearl Jam, they are more musically aligned with a band like Lifehouse or something like that. They're totally a product of the mid 90s, though, that's for sure. It's nice to know that we were all going through the mushroom cut, sloppy flannel-phase at the same time all over the world. It's a point of unity, you know? So here it is. I'll translate the lyrics below, though I can't be entirely sure of a couple parts...

The song is called "Sora mo Toberuhazu" which roughly translates to "I Feel like I Could Fly," and here's the best I can do on the English translation

While unable to make my little fever go down,
I feel afraid of God's shadow
The hidden knife eased my out of place self
with silly songs

As the color fades,
as it all starts to break apart,
I call out for a sparkling escape

I feel full of the miracle
that was meeting you
For sure, I ought to be able
to fly right now

When the tears that soak my dreams
wash out to sea
I want you here smiling next to me

I'll tear up the transparent lies
I used as the aces up my sleeve
on the evening of the full moon

To the smell of hair
fluttering hollowly in space,
I wake up from a deep deep sleep

My heart is full
with the miracle that is meeting you
For sure, I ought to be able
to fly right now

Even though this world glittering with trash
rejected us,
I still want you here smiling next to me

Oh yeah. That translation sucks a little bit I realize, but it's Ok. It's a trickier song that I thought. Ok, I'm off to a festival, maybe there'll be some more to come later.

Coming out of a Dry Spell

2008-10-08T01:54:00.000-07:00

My posts were really few and far between last month, but it's a new day and I guess I gotta get the update train a running again. This one's mostly for you Dana, though anyone else who has been foolish enough to attach this blog to their google reader (here's lookin at you Michael) can give 'er a look too.

Today's topic is the adult english conversation phenomenon. All over Japan you can find different establishments whose sole reason for existence is to cater to old people who want to come in and speak a little English with a foreigner. They come in all shapes in sizes. You've got your standard, somewhat formal English schools for adults, which seem to be fairly reputable and worthwhile for the people who come in to polish up their conversations abilities. You've also got your more informal "conversation groups," which equate to a few old people, one English speaker, one hour, and a lot of inane/unintelligible babbling. I've never done one of these before, but apparently the old people just like to tell people they've spoken English with a foreigner, while any fly on the wall at one of their meetings would have to disagree, and say they've spoken at a foreigner in Japanese about their cats or perhaps the local weather patterns. There are also these things called English Conversation Cafes that employ a resident foreigner or two to come in and chat with patrons. A lot like hostess bars, except for that the company you provide comes in exotic (culturally and linguistically, not sexually, though there probably are English Conversation Hostess Bars) flavors. Last time I was here I was propositioned by a man in a black van to work a couple hours a week at just such an English Conversation Cafe, and even though I am a little leery of the potential link between the mafia and english conversation in this country, I regret to this day passing that up that opportunity.

Which is probably why I was so ready to accept a similar invitation this time around. Granted, it came through more official channels(straight from the local Coordinator of International Relations), but I still felt like this was fate offering me a second chance. I said yes. To be fair, I don't have much else to do (the most entertainment I get on a standard weekday evening is watching strange people lift weights in skimpy clothing at the gym (there's one guy who I'm convinced is the gay ancestor of the Norse warrior Sigmund (look him up, then imagine him doing calf-raises in booty shorts), but nonetheless I was excited about this.

It's officially termed an "English Conversation Exchange," this thing I'm doing, and it certainly falls on the unofficial side of things. After I agreed to participate, Bonnie (the coordinator for international relations) gave these two men looking for a chat my information, and from there it was up to us to determine the where when and how of our exchanging. I wasn't sure exactly when to expect a call from these guys, but promptly a few days later I received a call from an unknown number that I was pretty sure was from my new Japanese friends. Well, actually I received about 4 calls within about a 20 minute period (I was working at the time and couldn't really answer my phone). I guess they were really excited to start the chatting. Well, later that day they called when I was actually able to talk (I believe I was sitting on my toilet at the time) and after a quick exchange of Japanese we made plans to meet the following week.

Well, the following week came up yesterday, and at a little before six I stepped out my apartment to go meet my new friends Gonda and Yoshida. Ten minutes later I found myself in a smoky little cafe, the three of us arrayed around a cozy corner table like participants in some strange Omiai without so much as a whiff of a bride. Plenty of cigarette smoke, and I guess we did discuss girls at some point, but, well now that I think about it I'm not exactly sure how it was like an Omiai (which is the first step in an arranged marriage where the dude comes to check out the chick and see if she's worthy of him) I just liked the idea of the metaphor, and it did seem a little homoerotic at first. Two older men take a young man out for coffee so that they can chat and get to know him a little better. Sounds like ancient Greece except for a little classier. Can you imagine Achilles taking Patroclus out for a cup of... what the fuck, did they drink anything except mead and wine those days? to discuss his hobbies and educational history? I can't either.

But back to the topic at hand. It was supposed to be "English" conversation exchange, but it Japanese was most certainly the main meal. I think there was about a 3 minute garnish of English thrown in there for coloring, but mostly it was Japanese all the way. Which is perfect, as far as I'm concerned. It was awesome. Sweet dudes, sweet practice, sweet everything. They asked me most of the awkward questions I had always been told I would be asked but never had been (which are more beautiful, American or Japanese girls (a stupid question for many reasons, one that I was able to manage with the eminently diplomatic response "well, there are pretty girls all over the world, but of course my girlfriend is the prettiest" (sappy blog shout-out to girlfriend count: 1)) how much money do you make? how much do you pay in rent (not that awkward I guess)? how many centimeter is your penis). Just kidding about that last one, but they did ask me (well after we had been through whether I was a butt or a breast man) if there were any hot teachers at my school, to which I replied, "go fuck yourself." Luckily they didn't catch that and the conversation proceeded without much of a hitch.

Whoo, yikes, I realize I'm trying to make up for a month hiatus with one massive post, but bear with me even though most of the good shit has already passed. But yeah, we really hit it off which was great. It's pretty impressive that you can have an hour and a half conversation with total strangers in a foreign language and it's not awkward or strange at all. All the credit to Japanese people on that account. I was trying to imagine my dad and his boss or somebody taking a 22 year-old Japanese guy out for coffe and conversation, and try as I might I just couldn't see it happening. I'm certainly not giving my dad enough credit here, for even though he probably couldn't hold up the Japanese end of the conversation as well as these guys held up the English end of ours, he's a great guy and could easily flow through such a conversation. But the fact is, we just don't do that kind of stuff in America, which is one of the really cool things about Japan. They're willing to take in random foreigners off the street and invite them to play volleyball with them on Wednesdays (I'm doing that with Gonda next week), which is crazy! I've also been invited out to drink sake with them and eat food at their respective homes, so shit I guess they liked me. Or maybe they just thought I smelled good.

Classroom Dynamics

2008-09-21T05:38:00.000-07:00

I can't remember the last time I wrote something that actually dealt with the day to day realities of my life, and so I think it's about high time to get into the nitty-gritty. I'm a teacher now. Ha. Let's define "teacher" for a second here. Someone who is old. Check. Someone who knows things. Uh.. check I guess. Someone who stands in front of an assemblage of students on a daily basis. Sure, yeah, I'm still following you, check. Someone with the ability to convey something of worth to said students he or she stands in front of. Ah fuck, nope, I can't do that.

I "teach" four classes a week by myself, but I think on the kid's schedules instead of "Eikaiwa" (English Conversation) some cheeky little bastard at the Shokuinshitu (teacher's room) substituted recess. Or maybe nap-time? The kids certainly converse, but rarely in English, and rarely when I want them to. To be fair, this is due mostly to a combination of my poor abilities as a teacher and Japanese society's hesitance to prescribe Ritalin, but yikes I've had some worthless classes so far, that's for sure. The other day I was trying to teach them about Mt. Rushmore (my first mistake) and a host of other noteworthy American landmarks (including the Alamo, I was really trying to pick the most impossible shit I could, I guess. I don't write out what I'm going to say in class before I go, I just kinda wing it, and so imagine my surprise when I came to the Alamo. I have a difficult enough time trying to convey the names of fruits and vegetables, let alone facts about the Mexican-American war and the conception of rugged individualism as it relates to the old west. Fuck, I was like, "uhh, and then I went to the Alamo (the whole presentation was framed as a massive vacation i went on), which is... an old building? Ok moving on... Disney Land!"). That lesson went well, except for when I looked at my students. I try not to do that anymore. Just pretend they're not there and everything will be fine.

Some good things do come out of my lessons, however. During the first week I got a lot of attention from my female students. I remember back in middle school all the girls had huge crushes on Mr. Bruns, the social studies teacher, (two bits if you remember that dude), and boy was I jealous of him. He was like 26 (?) and all the hot chicks were totally into him, while here I was, appropriately aged (13), and floundering in a sea of never having talked to a girl ever. To be fair, part of me was OK with that, but another part of me wanted to kick Mr. Bruns in the nuts. Oh how times change, because now I have become Mr. Bruns. And you know what, it's not that tight. I feel for the poor guy. But I guess I feel more for myself, because when you get down to it I'm sure the girls who were into Mr. Bruns were a little less forward in their appreciation. I wonder if they ever walked up to him and said "you have beautiful eyes." Or, slightly more unlikely, hollered from the back of the class, "cute boy!" No, I'm quite sure that never happened to him. But it does happen to me, and I guess there's nothing to do about but luxuriously sweep my hair away from my eyes and act sheepish. There's no other appropriate response. There is one girl who asks me her name every time I see her, and after a fifteen second struggle with my recalcitrant memory and I finally find myself able to bring it up, she collapses into a paroxysm of delight that I can only respond to by turning my back and running away at full speed. I'm going to have to do something to let those poor 13 year old boys know that I'm not trying to steal their potential girlfriends. I think I'm going to stop showering and or shaving and or wiping my butt and see how long it takes for a) the infatuation to fade away or b) for me to get fired. Only time will really tell.

A Long Time Gone

2008-09-19T02:37:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since I've posted anything, I realize, and while there are a couple things bouncing around in my head from the past few weeks, I just can't seem to get to get it up right now (gross) so for the time being, how about some more of the epic??? Sorry this part sucks too, I think the editorial comment at the end of the selection speaks for itself, but I swear it's the last lame one of the bunch. Then it gets rocking for real.

The truest thing about divinity is that it

cannot hardly separate itself from pride,

and for Triton it was no different. Though

his wound was already closing, he felt the

pain of it steadily growing. Like a lunatic

blood poison it traveled through his veins,

bypassing his vena cava and heading up, thirsting

not for his heart but his mind. Slowly upward

did it flow, and even as Joanna was heartened

by the apparent regeneration of his Divine health

his mind grew closer and closer to insanity.

And so they swam on, she unaware of her dire

peril, he unable to do anything about it.

Some time along, the poison now very near

to Triton’s brain, he stopped, seemingly needing

to catch his breath. The nymph, still unaware

of his degeneration, happily obliged and the

two of them sat on a rock. Triton looked

up into the sea and the sky above that, and

spoke to the naiad, lost somewhere deep

inside his slowly twisting mind. “Dost thou

see the stars far up? Dost thou see them?

Mine eyes can pierce those heights, and

to me they seem to waver. Fleeting and

inconstant, whose were they before

they gave themselves to the Olympians?

Zeus made them not, and neither did that

glorified smith, Hephaistos. They were there

flickering before Ancient Kronos and likely they

will long survive me and thou. Why do they

waver so? Do they mock me in my

frailty?”

“Lord, do not speak so, it makes no sense.

Thou art strong as thou hath ever been. The

stars do not waver, ‘tis merely the watery

filter through which thou see’ests them.”

“Nay, they waver, and they would

do so for me even were I to see them from

the solid earth. Has thou ever known a

god to die? I think it must be possible. Does

our power come from ourselves? Clearly not

entirely, for what power had Zeus before

he took it from Kronos?”

“ Enough to fight back the Titans. But wait,

why do you even ask? What a morbid subject

for one so mighty...”

“My might bled out of me when that boy

smote me with his weapon. So much

strength, and so inconspicuous! From

whence has he descended that he

should have grown so strong so soon, and

without anyone knowing?

Yet Zeus hadn’t lightning bolts before they

were gifted to him, and even Gaia

came out of Chaos. We are nothing in

ourselves.”

“But thou are so much to us! Didst thou

not feel the sea’s wound as it reflected

thine? If you died would the sea die

too?”

“My fair nymph, I may be the sea while I

yet live, but was there not a sea before

there was me? Were there no waters

before I was born to Lord them?

Nay! The ocean breathes not through

my lungs, rather I breath through the

ocean.”

“ All the same, what is a city without

a king, and how could we survive your

death. Our love for thee would dissolve

our bodies! (But how could thou die?

Thou are Triton, king of the sea...)

“ Am I so great as to deserve such devotion

from thee? What do I do, save take offense

and subsequently revenge for the actions

of mortals? Does the water love me for

my abuse of it? Does any mortal love me,

or do they merely show respect for fear

of me? Death would be a gift. Would thou

die with me?”

“ So thee is intent upon dying? It seems that

thy wound penetrates far beneath thy mendable

skin. Could no words persuade thee?”

“ My eyes are growing dark and I fear that

the shade is death.”

“ Then I would go with thee. Whatever you

say, I love thee, and a sea devoid of thy

presence would be for me too salty by

far. How could I discern the water

from my tears?”

“ All is well. On this trident let me

take what the Arbiter left behind. Hades,

thou shall not have my spirit, for it belongs

to the sea. Here, Joanna, let me soothe

thy pains with a gentle edge... The cut is

true... Now for me... It’s not as cold

as I had thought it would be.... With my

blood, I make peace. Now let it run forever

in the waters of my ocean... peace...”

And so, almost in sight of Poseidon’s great

palace, for it was beyond only the next rise,

Triton took his life along with that of his loyal

nymph and surrendered his immense soul back

to the sea. Before his eyes closed for the last

time, the haggard gleam therein went out, and

for a moment there were flowing lines of peace

graven upon each iris.

Seconds later his body and that of the nymph’s were

consumed in a startling blaze of ultramarine, and

a blinding light sped out of the ocean and up into

the air, racing for a little grove of trees nearby. The

moaning of the waters ceased, and where two godly

bodies had lain only a brief flash earlier, no trace remained.

(BLEAGHHH, SUCKS)

A Dip into my Brain

2008-09-05T17:13:00.000-07:00

It's strange to stop and notice you're somewhere new, and then to look behind you and see how you've got there. Does the past stretch out behind us like a road, like a wide, straight path, clearly visible all the way back along gently inwardly sloping time-lines that create the impression of distance before they vanish into the dim West, the setting sun that sits static on the edge of our worlds and marks , somewhat paradoxically, where we started? Is it clean, manicured, littered here and there with signposts that we can see that we can read that tell us where we were and when we were there? Can they tell us what it was like to be where we were? Or, is the past the proverbial winding road, short-sighted, obscured by the bends we've just come around, the anticipation of those to come? Does it move up and down, into and out of valleys, onto promontories where everything is visible for years and years around, sometimes coming down and turning strange corners where all around there's nothing but cliffs, big old rock walls on all sides and just a little trickle of a path to crawl through in the dark. Is the past a road at all, is the impression of distance, of a discrete progression through space and time just a metaphor we make up to understand and order the massive glotted mess of memories that are our lives?

I guess it's all semantics because when you get down to the stones at your feet and the old dusty trails in your mind, where we are is where are, and where we were is where we were. It's fun to plot lines between then and now, now and again, however, because that's the only way we can see the extraordinary lines our lives make. What am I doing right now? Sitting on my balcony in Japan listening to Creed, firing neurons into cyberspace and trying to paint a picture of what my life has become, is becoming. What was I doing two years ago? Sitting in my room in Japan, probably listening to Creed, scribbling in a journal, trying to figure out how I was going to survive a semester in an unknown place. Well, I've got about three times as much time to while away this time, and a much wider portal to spit myself out of once it's all done. What was I doing last year? Mostly drinking hella beer, staying up late because, never sleep you silly bitch, playing Settlers three times a day, occassionally reading something, occassionally fretting about something. But with the briefest progression of three months, oh how things have changed. And in so many ways. I'm back in Middle School, wandering the halls of a place that most certainly is not Kellogg, dressed in a shirt and slacks, armed with posters, pictures, and a suddenly most spectacular ability to speak English, waking up at six-thirty and unable to stay awake past ten thirty most nights. Talk about a dramatic revision. But I guess that's what makes this life fun; it's potential for rapid, incandescent, fundamentally revisionist Change. Every morning I wake up and am amazed by how the jigsaw pieces that make up my life have been rearranged and put back together, how elements I expected and pieces I never could have imagined are combining to form an entirely new me that is only a few steps down the road from where I was, but feels, at times, like a man who's stepped into a parallel universe. Are there other worlds than these? Why worry about that, when Earth contains more than you could explore in a lifetime?

I just can't stop

2008-09-04T03:47:00.000-07:00

Ok, I love this song. T-Tones, this one's for you.

Something to Wash away the Faith

2008-09-04T02:33:00.001-07:00

I really can't leave that last post up standing alone any longer. Have you ever cried while watching a person make a speech? Have you ever cried while watching somebody make a fourty-five minute speech about governmental policy? Is you name Kramer Phillips? If not, kill yourself. Whoops, I guess I have. Then I wrote a really long, passionate post about it. What is the world coming to? Not sure, but I need a little irreverence to bring things back to normal.

Uh, let's see here, there's gotta be something.... ..... ..... fuck, come on, something.... I haven't felt this stretched for material since I stood up in front of a class and sang this song: "January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December." To the theme from Splash Mountain. See if you can do that, and then see how you feel about yourself afterwards. I at least got to do it in front of roomful of giddy seventh graders who clapped for me when it was done and were awed at my ability to say "February" without sounding like my mouth was full of marshmallows. It's not their fault, listening to people who don't speak Japanese trying to speak Japanese is similarly painful, and they don't often have the redeeming qualities of being 11 and adorable. It's like being in a classroom of little puppies. Or maybe kitties. You know the website kittenwar.com? Well, it used to be my favorite way to pass 10 seconds, but now it's my life. You do always get that one really ugly kitty every once in a while, which, well, yeah my life works like that too. You can't scorn the ugly child, however. You just have to smile the biggest at them.

Yep, I think that'll suffice.

I Think I... Believe in Something?

2008-08-30T05:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-29T01:26:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-26T04:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-24T16:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-21T04:41:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-18T04:18:00.001-07:00

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?

2008-08-15T06:49:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-11T06:25:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-06T17:31:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-05T04:06:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-04T05:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-02T07:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-01T03:50:00.000-07:00

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.”

“ What’s wrong in there? What’s wrong
with the water? You’ve never been like
this before, like you’re having a tantrum.
It’s like there’s a big angry fish, I mean a fish
as big as a house, a big angry fish in there
just thrashing his fins and beating the ground
with his tail and blowing angry people-sized
bubbles everywhere, and it’s like he’s mad
at the water, like he’s trying to beat it up.
If I were a grown up I’d cut myself a pole
and I’d climb up into the trees and I’d put
a big juicy worm on the line and I’d cast it
out into you, out into the angriest part of you.
Then I’d wait and I’d catch the fish and I’d
pull as hard as I could and I’d pull it out
and then I’d have my mom cook it and I’d
eat it. Then you would be yourself again,
calm and still and good for swimming in.
Is there a big angry fish in there, or are you
just really a big angry pool of water?”

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.”

“ What was that? You can talk, can you?
Maybe there’s more than water in there
after all. Could you really be a talking fish?
I don’t believe it, it’s not possible, but if
you are a talking fish do you think you
could come up, just so I could see you?
Do you have really sparkly gills? Please
come up, won’t you?”

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.”

“ Come on, just a peek? If you don’t want
me to tell I won’t, I really won’t I promise,
but you don’t have to worry because nobody
will ever believe that I saw a talking fish anyway.
It’s just that I would love to be able to tell the
story, you know, and I can’t very well tell my
friends that I talked to the water and it talked
back, they’d just laugh at me. But a fish, a big
old fish as big as a house that sparkled like
the sun and could talk... They would listen
to that, I know it. There’s something special
about you, there has to be because this water
is always as quiet as can be, the only thing
it does is ripple a little bit when the wind blows
or when I jump into it, and even then it’s only for
a second and when I get out it goes back to doing
nothing before I can even dry off. But today the waves,
there are waves!, hit so heavily that they make me
think of the blacksmith’s hammer hitting his anvil,
and the splashes are like the sparks he makes when
the metal is still hot and then he gets it wet.
If you don’t come up, no one will ever know
about you, and they’ll all just say that Zeus
was angry today, that maybe he was sick
and when he coughed a lightning bolt came out
and went into the water and started boiling it alive
and that was why it was like it is. Zeus is boring,
but a big talking fish, that’s something I need to
see and people need to hear about.”

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 (marquess) 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.”

“Poor Triton, if you don’t stop crying you’ll
drown. Do you remember telling me about
the god in full splendor? About tossing
the waves and the wind like rocks and lightning?
I remember, but it’s hard to, looking at you
out there like that. Stop the bleeding, but
make sure you don’t forget who cut you,
because you have to tell everyone all about
it. Make sure you tell them that the Arbiter
has arrived, and he’s using words like doom.
Goodbye, lord, and whatever you do, don’t forget.”

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

Enter the Young Professional

2008-07-28T23:23:00.000-07:00

A few blessed days ago I didn't even own a tie (excluding the neon green number which I wore paired with a wife-beater and a ratty pair of Chuck Taylors on the rare occassions when I felt the avatar of Avril Lavigne and faux-punk descending upon my shoulders) but after a few days here in Tokyo I feel like the full business suit look has become a part of me. As if it were a spirit quest, I entered the electric wilderness of Japan a young boy in surf-inspired T-shirts and ripped jeans, clinging to the freewheeling, no-parents sensibilities inspired by four years of college, but after two days in the woods (otherwise known as the conference room) I have emerged transformed, now a man with a gleaming silver timepiece strapped to his wrist, collars and cuffs worn proudly like the stiff and starched jewlery of a new warrior, with one arm raised triumphantly towards the sky, thrusting the various folders and pamphlets of my new manhood towards the gods at the ministry of education as the dim lights of the boredroom fall around my lightly heaving shoulders. Yes, I made it. Somehow. I climbed through basalt and brimstone on my way up, dodging the words countless CLAIR officials slung down upon me like fiery meteors, slogging my way through marshes of culture shock seminars and demonstrations of how to teach 7 year-old children to count to ten, feeling my way along the lightless passageways of formal dinners and welcome receptions, uttering the same words "where are you from, where are you going, blah, blah, Japan, blah, blah" like an incantation meant to hold the social world together or because sometimes we're all just robots programmed for pleasantries, but somehow or another I've emerged, a smile on my face and a business card in my pocket, ready to do battle with hordes of innocent Japanese children on the pedagogical battlefields of Maruzuka Middle School.

Well, the whole thing wasn't that dramatic, but I sort of wish it was, because if life were more like a commercial for the Marines I think I might like it better. But alas, the Tokyo orientation session wasn't quite a three day treck up a fiery mountain side, and there was no flaming Godzilla demon to fight at the summit. It was, in fact, much what you might expect from an orientation for a teaching job in a foreign country; panels about managing cultural differences, teaching tips, exhortations to persevere through difficult times, testimonials from former JETs, and various other generally helpful talks about assorted aspects of living in Japan. Thankfully I didn't have to sit through any lectures about the shocking custom of taking off your shoes before entering a house or anything, but I don't feel terribly enlightened by anything they had to tell me. I'm glad we had it, because as something of a decompression period it was nice, but I think I'm ready to experience my new life for myself. I'm kinda done being prepared for it, and need to see and touch and speak to Hamamatsu with my own two eyes and mouth. I'll get my wish soon enough, because tomorrow morning we ship out. Normally the 10:15 departure time would have me crying sleep deprivation, but since I can't sleep in past 5:20 AM anymore I think I'll be fine. That is if we don't get too torn up by downtown Tokyo this evening. More to follow.

I think I'll post my first poem here tonight, as well. There's not much of a reason for me to start with this one, it's not my favorite poem, it's not incredibly applicable to any of the stuff I'm writing about, but it's ok. It's called 130 AM, a title which makes sense because it is about writing and thinking at 130 AM. Self-reflexivity's a bitch but there's no escape.

It’s about the late-night-early-morning
Darkness of a sleepless bedroom,
The intangibly thin quality of the air,
And the ineffable settling of the atmosphere
That sets the surrounding black to shivering,
To swallowing me up and placing me upon
An invisible road, a spirit-conduit between
The moons inside of my head. Their lights
Shine upon lifetimes past, present, future;
Upon the overwhelming thinness
Of those lifetimes, this lifetime, which
That light reveals: or, creates confluence
Between, revealing stages of being that are instead
A Silver Running River of strung-together
Time that is all points at once, knowing, touching
The mouth of whatever wide open sea
Awaits from the meager headwaters
Of its germination, just like the Buddha said.

It is in this contemplative, displacing,
Out-of-bodyish darkness that
One, I, feels less foolish in throwing
His intellect out like a symbolic lasso
Over the high points of his life, to catch
The trend and inexpertly extrapolate,
To predict the consequence of blurry dots
And stray, negligent erasure marks
Upon the character or direction of the line;
The all-important, all-encompassing
Two dimensional line that plots
The course of a three-dimensional person’s
Multi-dimensional life. 1:30 AM is the hour
Of resolutions, of defiant promises
To keep the shards of myself and my life
Together; 1:30 AM is the hour of healthy
Fear, of precognition, of decisive plans of action
Deferred to the weaker, complacent hours
Between sunrise, sunset.

It’s the time that exists outside of time,
That doesn’t run out and we can spend
Just to spend; don’t think twice, think
Instead like an itunes visualizer, in streams
Of just barely linked orange, green, violent,
Blue vibrations of the soul.

Curiously,
It’s the only time when who I am really
Matters, when I most want to manifest whatever
Is essential about myself just to see what
It looks like. It’s when a vaguely familiar voice
Or an old chord progression can work like a time machine
To force me into an oddly painful trespass
Upon a better-barred memory-lane;
The magic is in the dark;
The magic is in us;
The magic is all made-up.
It doesn’t really matter, because
At 1:42 AM everything is true, everything
Is false, everything is a beautiful thought
That seems beautiful only until we think
Again in the morning; then, everything
Seems a jumbled, incoherent mess of syntax errors
And melodrama.

Sunrise over Tokyo

2008-07-27T14:06:00.000-07:00

Dammit. I just deleted this post for the second time in as many days. It doesn't get much more annoying than that. Who knew that accidentally hitting the tab button could have such drastic consequences? Well, I had a nice little sappy poetic lead-in to the post penned down, but I feel like I'd be faking it if I tried to do it again, so let's dive right in, sans intro.

I wrote this on the plane yesterday.

What is there to think about when you're strapped into a plane seat for 9 plus hours? Plenty of stuf. Plenty of stuff I should be thinking about at least; 1 (+) years in a foreign country, not as foreign as some but foreign nonetheless, a job teaching children things, hey, having no friends except a computer, a notebook, a couple unexpected stalwarts from the past about to move across this country pretty soon anyway, and, uh, well a shit-load of made-up fools in books (I bought enough books to satisfy a ravenous Hermione Granger for at least six months). What else? Kissing my college and everybody I love goodbye for an indefinite amount of time, kissing, kissing, kissing, well I don't really want to be kissing much of anybody for a while, jumping off a ledge into a misty future with a potentially holey parachute crafted out of assurances and the vague promise of a cushy landing if you can brake through the bumpy landing. Why, hello Real-World, I was under the apparently false impression that you would be less crazy than the Whitman dream I've abruptly woken up from.

But then again, I could be crunching numbers at T. Rowe Price or pounding nails into house frames, or even better, still pounding the pavement looking for a grocery store to lend me a smock to hang up next to my diploma before I crawl into bed at night. So, yes, things could be worse. I could have boils. Or halitosis. Or an artificially implanted aversion to ice cream, night terrors, a lifetime contract with Jiffy Lube, two left feet, two left balls, a monkey surgically attached to my left shoulder, a third arm I can't control, a desire to read Joseph Conrad, and undying love for the musical stylings of Korn. I could be an unloved bastard child, I could be balding at a young age, I could have come of age in the 80's, I could have an outie for a belly-button. Shit, I do have an outie, but the fact remains that I could be bent over in a shower in the Walla Walla prison with a dick up my ass, so all things considered, life aint so bad. Life really aint so bad.

(Still on the plan stuff) I woke up this morning at 7:20, showered away the sweaty sheen of fear covering my body, made a final good-bye phone call, and loaded up, well, loaded myself into the car my father had loaded up for me, and got ready to treck it to the airport. It was a nice quiet ride, which I suppose makes for a nice boring post, but what followed next is more of a series hastily scanned photographs or a slideshow in fast forward than a continuous span of time: NW airlines baggage counter; tickets, passports popping in and out of boxes, bags, pockets; a fruit cup; lines, more lines - slow it down hugging my mom, my dad twice, Keelie three times, crying in an airport again, on an airplane again, fuck, my travel routes seem to be mighty tear-stained of late (there's a joke in there somewhere I'm just not willing to make); Burger King, and then

the big freeze. 9 + hours of it. My only question now, is what happens when we hit the ground and everything thaws out?

End plane entry. Thing is, transit is always more difficult when you're still in transition, so it seems really bad from what I just wrote. It got a lot better though. It got pretty hilarious actually. Unfortunately my computer is running out of battery so I will have to leave you with a sad taste in your mouth and the anticipation of happiness on the tip of your tongue. Tomorrow I'm sure they'll be some silly stuff to say, because Tokyo is a silly place.

Getting my Feet Wet

2008-07-22T12:50:00.001-07:00

Hm. So this is what it feels like to blog, huh? I remember back when blogging was the ultimate in middle-school overdramatics, back when people used to tearfully impress declamations of their love for various fourteen year-old boys or girls into the not-so-secret-and-discrete bosoms of online diaries, and I certainly remember vowing to never post my most personal feelings over the internet, but... well shit. Times change I suppose, because this here blog, which, I admit, will mostly just be a compilation of my favorite anime porn websites, will otherwise serve as a window into my soul, a comprehensive mapout of my emotional state, a public declaration of my deepest and darkest secrets. In short, everything you never really wanted to know.

Gotcha. I kept a private journal the last time I was in Japan, and even that was emotionally stunted, so I don't suppose I'll be posting anything too racy or embarassing on this publicly hosted one. However, you never really know. Well, this first post is turning into something of a mission statement, but as I sit here in my kitchen, T-minus like 4 days from shooting off into the white and red curtained East, I think that's appropriate. I'm figuring things out as I go along, and this seems like a nice way of helping that process along.

So, what am I going to write in here? I'm thinking everything. Funny stories about cultural misunderstandings, reports upon the state of the Japanese educational system, perhaps reviews of my favorite Bed and Breakfast's/all-night Manga Cafe's. It's all fair game. However, in addition to that I'm thinking about trying out something a little more risky: though I always feel like a fairly massive darsh referring to myself as a "poet," I have written a lot of poetry in my day, and because most everything I have ever submitted to various literary publications has been summarily rejected, I think from time to time I will publish them here myself. That's one way to beat the critics, I suppose. The coolest part of this whole thing, however, is the interactivity of it, so feel free to tell me what kind of stuff you guys want to hear. I'm certainly writing this for myself, but if I didn't want to involve all of my friends then I could just scribble my thoughts in a notebook that I keep locked in a drawer in my desk. So let the fun begin! I feel sad that I have to go away and leave everybody, but the beauty of the information age is that I don't have to seem as far away as I really am.

(To my family: I apologize for mentioning Anime Porn. I promise I don't really like it. It's just that it's sort of an inside joke/ a curse I've unsuccessfully tried to shake for some time now, and failing have decided instead to embrace. Maybe I'll tell the story of how it all started later.)