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.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Saturday, August 30, 2008
I Think I... Believe in Something?
Change. It's a word I've been hearing a lot of lately. At least when I listen to the things coming from the Barack Obama campaign. It sounds nice. Hey, yeah, change, Ok, I could go for some of that. George Bush is stupid! Whooo, I went to a liberal college and now believe firmly in blue things and things on the left. Yeah, poverty and big business sucks! And screw war. That's totally wack, dude. Ah what? Health Care? Sure, I'm 20 and covered by my parents, who gives a fuck, but yeah Change!
I admit I haven't been much of a politically minded person, well, ever. I didn't even vote in the 2004 election. I spouted the same old stuff I remember a lot of other people saying: the candidates are the same, my vote doesn't even matter anyway, who cares, what can the president really do, no matter who wins my life won't change much, blah blah, apathy is cool, blah blah. I didn't vote, and it turns out that, technically it didn't really matter after all. John Kerry won Washington, lost the election. Had I voted, nothing else would have changed. And it certainly wouldn't have Changed. Still, I've gotta think that my heart was in the wrong place. And yet, to continue qualifying myself here, I'm not too ashamed. I was 18, which is young, and having just recently come from a place where my biggest social concern was where in the South Lot I was going to park my car in the morning, all of a sudden affecting a massive political interest would have been just that; an affectation. I wasn't ready to vote because I didn't believe anything because I didn't really know anything. So I didn't vote.
However, you go to a school like Whitman and you can't help but suck up a lot of ideology. And that's good. That's what college is for. You're supposed to learn about the injustices in the world, about the way things should be in a perfect world, and about how far in actuality we are from such a perfect world. It's good to feel, to sense what's wrong out there in the great wide open and put on a drive to fix it. If you don't leave school with a little bit of a bloody heart then, well I won't say you're doing something wrong, but I will say that it's good to soak up some sense of social justice like a giddy human sponge and hold onto it like the sort of sparkling water you one day hope to see the world reflected in.
I wouldn't say I ever really became a massively politically minded sorta dude, but yeah, by the time I graduated I had a better sense of what's right and what's wrong in the world. What we're doing well and what we need to rearrange. Of course everybody thinks George Bush is a dummy (speaking here not for the whole country, just the vast majority of Whitman's admittedly small, admittedly liberal population), and so of course I'm going to vote democrat, because we need a Change, and Obama's gonna give it to us. However, as my first paragraph-paraphrase of my first take on the Obama campaign suggests, maybe my appreciation for the actual meaning behind that capitalized word wasn't really that great. Maybe I was more of a body surfer bowled over and helplessly swept away by the wave of Obama-mania surging through that little liberal community than, to persist in a tacky metaphor, someone who had ever stopped to think about what sort of kinetic energy that kind of a wave actually possessed. What it could actually do.
Now? I guess I'm not that much better than I was. I didn't even know Joe Biden was the democratic VP nominee until a week or so after it was announced. I'm in Japan, a little separated from the epicenter of US political activity, and I'll admit, that old political apathy was starting to seep out from deep within my bones again. Yeah, I'll register for an absentee ballot eventually. Whatever. But, today I watched the speech Obama gave at the DNC, and I had to reevaluate a lot of stuff. I always figured I'd vote for Obama, but unfortunately my sentiments listed heavily in the "just because" direction (dereliction). Well, he's a democrat. Doi. But I watched that speech today, and I now know I'm going to vote for Obama because look at what he could possibly do.
Look at where America is now. The rest of the world hates us, but much worse it's almost become expected that we hate ourselves. I'm speaking largely from a liberal viewpoint, but the past few decades, and particularly the past eight years, have introduced an infusion of national shame into our collective bloodstream, and we can't hold our heads up in public unless we do it with a sheepish look on our faces. Whoops, yeah, I'm American, yeah we suck, sorry. This is especially true for those of us in foreign countries, but I'll get to that. The National Anthem has picked up more than a minors and discordant resonances, and it gets harder to look at people waving the American flag without wanting to cringe, to look at it without feeling that the red parts are died in blood, the blue part mostly melancholy, and the stars either ironic or just more rows of soldiers waiting to fall into and get lost in the blood. I see that flag and the last thing I want to do is smile, the last thing I want to do is salute it. Because how can I, when America is rapidly becoming synonymous with a host of words far less savory than liberty and independence for all. Even "freedom" has been hijacked as a word we can believe in, has been slowly beaten and broken down, reprogrammed so that now it's just a shade of what it used to be, just a shade we hide behind when we go out into the world and do something for our own sake. The national lexicon is changing, has changed, and, though I hardly need to say it, America is far from the global angel it once was (a title which is itself intrinsically flawed, but gets to the point that people used to like us more than they do now). At this point, it feels like we've fallen out of the international sky and crashed straight into hell, only it's happened so slowly that only now are we noticing the horns poking out of our collective forehead.
That's where America is now. Living in a foreign country makes it worse. Sure, I'm in Japan, and if there is one country that would stand next to the US if it managed to shit toxic waste from the Florida coastline it's this one, but I spend a lot of time around people from the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (our... allies?) and hating on America is something of a pastime around here. We played this silly game called Typhoon the other day, where you get points for various things and if you pick a particular card you can wipe out a certain team's points. We played it where different teams were countries. At one point the US had zero points, Canada had 1,500,000, the UK got the obliterator card, and I'll give you one guess whose points they whiped out. "Uh, we'll whipe out the US's points." "Don't you dare, we'll bomb your asses." "Sorry, we're taking your zero points anyway" "Oh it's on now. Japan was the last country to bomb us and you see where that got them" And so on. It was all banter, all done with irony in mind, but it proves the point anyway that the rest of the world bashes on America, and America has no choice but to bash on itself in the face of it.
But is that how America has to be? Do we have to be a country of fat, rich, trigger-happy assholes that nobody likes? Do we have to do all the shitty things to ourselves that we do? I think for the past few years I've resigned myself to the fact that America sucks, and all I can do about it is be aware of and apologetic for that fact. But. Can we actually change what we've become? Is that what this whole Change thing is really about? Taking America in our hands like potters clay and remaking it in the beautiful image of what it could be, of what we want it to be? It's hard to think of an America I can actually be proud to belong to, because for as long as I've had a consciousness of national identity we've been shitty. We've been a bully. We've been sloppy and sordid and untrustworthy and that was that, all there ever was, all there ever will be. But just maybe we have a chance to take on decades of dishonesty and slough them off like old skin, and maybe underneath there is still a place that sparkles. Maybe we can never get our wings back, but, well, then again maybe we can. When I think about it, aiming any lower than that is to underestimate the message of Change.
Hope some of that was readable.
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.
Friday, August 29, 2008
My First Day at Work
So you want to make a good impression on your first day of work, huh? I did. Wanted to, I mean. Sure I've been coming to this school for about two weeks, cheerfully popping in @ around 7:55 ( a full 15 minutes before work starts (which is expected)), sitting down at my desk for a couple hours and working diligently on, eh, well I guess I've been studying, but considering my title is "English teacher" I feel like Japanese student doesn't necessarily fit the job description. But with nothing else to occupy my time, that's what I've been up to since I've been here; lounging around an empty teachers' lounge, reading books, occasionally drinking the other teachers' things from the community fridge, and generally using up oxygen and freon (it's like 100 degrees in this city and the teacher's lounge has AC).
Yeah, I've been making a good impression. Every once in a while if somebody is here we'll exchange a word or two, they'll praise my Japanese, I'll smile demurely into the carpet and that'll pretty much be that. However, today was supposed to be the dawning of a new era, and I was supposed to be able to make my first impression for real.
Yep, today was the opening ceremony for a new term, a requisite part of the Japanese School year. You guys remember fighting back tears as Jean Carwile Mastellar showered us with some over-quoted Emily Dickinson some four odd years ago @ convocation? Yeah, well, here that happens three or four times every year. And it starts in middle school. But, hey, different country, different customs. And if it means I get to make a speech (which it did), then I'm all for it.
For such a momentous occasion I figured I had to put on my Sunday best, so I woke up early, brushed my teeth, pulled my Dad's old suit from the wardrobe, fastened my tie nice and tight, and stepped into the late August sunlight with the words of my upcoming speech fluttering meldiously against the walls of my skull like little puffs of silver wind through church bells. Hmm, I just realized I'm using a lot of Christian iconography here, which is totally inadvertant. But anyways.
However, true to form, this is where everything stopped going according to plan. Immediately upon stepping out of my apartment. And I had even eaten breakfast, too. The late August sun is pretty hot, it turns out, but being the mach man that I am I decided to ride my bike to work. Which was my biggest (and in fact my only) mistake. But it was enough. Have you ever tried biking twenty five minutes to work in a full suit in 95 + degree temperatures. Aesthetic perversions aside, it's a great way to turn yourself into a human stream of sweat. So here I am, lost (did I mention I didn't really know how to get there?), pitting out in ways even BK could never imagine, and starting to freak out. At this point, the fact that my blue suit was so dark it was sucking in matter and crushing it to nothingness within the cavernous maw of the sweat-stain opening up in my lower back was probably the least of my worries. I had to find where the shit I was. Ok, landmarks, that's what I need. Street signs, anything. I just gotta find that one, building, with the, kanji.... on it... o fuck i'm fucked.
My heart sinking to the squishy soles of my shoes, I took a left and started mentally preparing myself for the impeding loss of my pink (seppuku isn't quite an appropriate punishment for a first time offense), when, Holy Amida on a sunbeam I recognized something! Yes! A landmark! I knew where I was, and now I just had to concentrate on getting my butt to school as rapidly as possible.
I surged past the trundling groups of my soon-to-be-students like a speedboat past clutches of ducks, splashing them with twin streams of sweat that must have spread out behind me like a wake, and with about a minute to spare I made it to the teachers' lounge, my shirt transparent, my smile triumphant. Sure I had to introduce myself to all the teachers looking like I'd just gotten out of a swimming pool, and sure I gave my speech with my nipples clearly visible through my clinging white shirt, but, I rocked it all. And maybe now they will never forget Frisk-Sensei, the speedy, sweaty foreign wonder.
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.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
New Material
Hey I just wrote this! I haven't written a poem for a little while, maybe a month or so, and this one I kinda like. It's about food though, which sounds pretty dumb, but I found a way to make it transcendent, which redeems it completely. That's my trick to try to sound smart (I stole it from John Keats): if you make anything sound transcendent, you sound like a G. I could probably write a poem about fuckin, like tying my shoes or something and with enough prodding and use of delicate (if pretentious) language make it seem big and momentous. Which, may I add, isn't necessarily synonymous with good. So, without further compromising my poetics, here it is!
It all runs down a river of red, of blood, of sweat,
Of dusty ages spent underneath the earth and locked within
Slick green walls of glass, a single polymorphous stream
Of sublimated grapes and transubstantiated soil caught
In the momentary swell of a bottle, the briefest blunted whiff of
A cylinder that is a glass I raise to my health and turn into a sip
That is more than red and more than wine but is some mysterious
Sum of flavors drawn from an earth that is some mysterious sum
Of mysterious sums, countless complicated sums that have little
To do with math but add up just the same.
Short and sweet. This isn't part of the poem anymore. It's just me rambling, and turning this post long and bitter. A quick disclaimer about that thing you may or may not have just read: I used "sublimated" incorrectly. However, I really like that word, and so will use it in just about any context, even if it that means it must be used inappropriately. "Hey Chad, how are you doing today?" 'Oh great, I just sublimated the lawn. It was getting shaggy.' Or, "You know what, I think I really sublimated that test today. Turned right to gas in my hands." Hm, can you sublimate a solid that doesn't have a liquid phase? You can't turn paper into a liquid right? If you heat it just burns. Straight to a gas. Nothing to skip, ergo unsublimatable. Well, I realize that I don't actually know what the word sublimate means. I also realize that I should avoid the barest mention of science, lest I give my own stupidity away. I do know this, however: kinase kinase kinase. I'm out.
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.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Karaoke: Something of a Sociological Survey
If you’ve never experienced Karaoke, then you’re really missing out. Well, I guess I should qualify that statement a little bit by saying that it’s the Japanese version of karaoke that you need to experience, because they do it a little different here than I suppose we do it back West. When an American thinks Karaoke they can’t help but react negatively to the offensive smell of truckstops, stale cigarettes, cheap whiskey, Journey, and public humiliation that hits their imaginative nostrils. Karaoke back home is generally performed in wide open rooms in front of (potentially) hostile, and (almost certainly) wasted audiences ready to rip you limb from limb if you can’t hit the high notes on Don’t Stop Believin. Doesn’t seem like much fun, does it? Getting up on stage in front of a bunch of people you don’t know and trying to belt out song lyrics as performed by actually talented musicians is a pretty daunting task.
Karaoke in Japan is a different story, however. Not entirely different, of course. There are two things that are common to Karaoke anywhere in the known universe: booze and Bon Jovi. There’s really no getting away from it. I’m not entirely sure who put it into the collective unconscious that Living on a Prayer is a fun song to sing, but I’ve been to Karaoke plenty of times and I don’t think I’ve ever escaped without having to listen to some drunk fuck(s) scream about being halfway to somewhere. Maybe sobriety? At any rate, there’s no use trying to fight it, because unfortunately people get upset if you try to put in A Whole New World on repeat for three hours. You’ve just gotta swallow a couple pills of South Jersey angst before you can get back to singing stuff from the Lion King or N*SYNC. The alcohol and 80s masterpieces aside, however, karaoke is a much kinder, gentler creature over here. Worried about getting up in front of a bunch of people and signing off-key? Well, say goodbye to the spotlight, because most karaoke places here are actually just warrens of corridors and private rooms, which you rent out with just your closest friends. Hmmm, when you get down to it I guess that’s the only difference, but it’s a big difference. You don’t have to worry about being heckled by drunk bums, you only have to listen to a couple songs you don’t like so much, unless of course you go with me, in which case you’ll be singing Linkin Park and Third Eye Blind all night, and, well, the rooms are generally pretty well sanitized. It rules, which is probably why people do it here at least three times a week. I wouldn’t be surprised if some Sarari-Men spend more time with the microphone than with their children.
As I suppose you might have guessed, I went to karaoke last night. It wasn’t your normal night out on the town, however. This party had a planner. His name is George, and calling him a character doesn’t quite get down to it. The first time I met him was at the Reggae Festival, actually (which you loyal readers will recall intimately). Yep, George is the big fat liar who promised us a day with Bob Marley and delivered an afternoon with the Dixie Chicks. I don’t think he cared much, because he was totally wasted. Said he’d been drinking since 3 AM when we met him at around 5 PM, which I find highly suspect because who starts drinking at 3 AM. Ah, yes, there goes the alarm, time to greet the moon with a nice pint of Sake. No, I guess that George had been drinking for about 20 hours at that point, a guess which is at least partially substantiated by the fact that he a) plopped himself down in the midst of our little group and asked my friend Luke if he “wanted some pussy,” and b) was seen doing doughnuts around the field in his mini-van shortly after.
But those little quirks aside George is actually a total baller. He lived in Seattle for some undisclosed period of time, (I want to say in Wallingford, but I’m not so sure), so he speaks great English, and he’s basically a dirty 18 year old beach bum in a 50 some-year-old Japanese man’s body. Yes, he might be 50. But he sure dresses young, and is really friendly. He organized last night’s get together for us with a bunch of other older men (one actually celebrated his 36th with us) dressed like their much younger, hipper counterparts. 5000 yen, all you can drink, all night, karaoke and good times. Sounds expensive, but not for this country. And there was a live band! A fucking Jazz trio in a karaoke room. George sang some Frank Sinatra. If you’d told me maybe four years ago that my post-graduate life would entail hanging out with drunk Japanese men old enough to have sired me, listening to them sing Rat-Pack hits I would have smacked you upside the face with my copy of the Odyssey, but life is strange. And I no longer am shocked by such turns of events. In Japanese they say arugamama, or shikataganai for things that you can’t control, and yeah, I guess that works. It’s just the way things are. Of course people drive their cars on the sidewalk and eat fermented bean curds. Arugamamada.
I managed to put down enough beers and delicious food (there was fruit, which is like gold in this country, so I probably got my fifty bucks worth in pineapples and kiwifruit) in five hours to satisfy me, and though I think we had the room until 3 somebody put on Bon Jovi again and I had to walk out around midnight, serenaded by the sultry sounds of the South Jersey shore as I disappeared into the gently winking Japanese night. Thanks George, always a pleasure.
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.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
The Deluge Part 2
Well, it seems it takes more time and knowledge to post a video on this thing that I thought it did, but I'm trying now, so we'll see what happens. If I do manage to get it up, the video will appear on the last post where it was supposed to be. Eh, now I'm going to post some more poetry, per my promise. This is book three, maybe, I think? This part blows kinda. It's about Iesous wandering through the woods and being whiny. He eventually goes home and blah blah blah, stuff happens but it's not that tight. Initially, he had only had a father, but I thought a single mother made more sense, keeping all metaphors in mind. But yeah, of the crappy parts I think this is the second to last. The next one is silly, too, but.... it's smooth sailing through violent waters from there on out. Trust me.
Let us not with our special ability
to fend off shock lose the scope
of the occasion, for it is not even
infrequently that a man dominates
completely a god in arms. Never
is it that he achieves this unnoticed.
Yet it happened, on the banks of
a small bay just off the Aegean sea,
achieved by a young boy of unobvious,
yet readily apparent strength, achieving
the glory of Diomedes, Tydeus’s son, without
the subsequent curse.
Even while the Dethroned King
of the Sea was chasing his sanity,
and by all accounts trailing
miserably, the source of his suffering
crossed under the dappled eaves of
an enchanted wood. There the light
was a gentle blend of green and gold,
at least when dipped in Phoebus’ ink,
and silence was friendly. Most often
though, the air ran with liquid music,
the symphonies of varied birds or the
bow of the wind pulling over nature’s verdant
strings to provide a score for the forest.
Yet, for all the contented caroling and
sweetly blooming flora about him the self-titled
Arbiter saw it not, and though it usually warmed
his heart, on this day his heart was foundering too
deep under a darkling sea to make out any soothing
sound. As his feet stumbled unconsciously onward,
a single thought like a winged iron spike flew
around his head, another rooted deep in his stomach,
one thumping, in-out-again, the other held fast, a thick,
expanding root bearing fat, poisonous fruit.
“ That was a thing I had never expected,
But the rest aside, I didn’t kill him, I can
kill a god, but I didn’t kill him, and I don’t
think I can kill a hundred gods at once.
I don’t know what I can and can’t do, but
I am pretty sure of what they will do when
Triton finds them. It will be like a shower
of fire and lightning and whatever else
they can put into it falling down and down
on my home and my friends’ and neighbors’
homes until there’s nothing left of them at
all, not even the memories. They will hit
them so hard that they will erase our pasts,
and there’s nobody to blame but me. To think,
a spear, to think, me? I did it though, I did
what none of the ones they tell about could do,
not even Ajax, and I could have done more,
but I didn’t and now I will die more completely
than anyone ever has. Stupid! You live one
day at a time, you should take it one god at
a time, however impossibly silly that is.
Stupid, I don’t want to die yet, and I don’t
want anyone else to die because of me
being stupid!”
Occupied completely by these thoughts of self-
reproach, he wandered deep into the forest,
entirely mindless of where he set down each
foot, until by many a random step
chance found him at the secret gates
of his forest home. Reaching high into
the air before his unseeing eyes were
spires of cedar, their woody boughs conspiring
to form an interlocking grille so cleverly wrought
as to appear natural at first glimpse, but upon
closer inspection proving intentional and carefully
made. Continuing his aimless wandering, the youth
trudged on, neither knowing nor caring where he was,
even until the needly boughs of the gate scratched his
smooth face. Momentarily startled, he stopped short,
and stepped back, slightly surprised.
“ Uh-oh. Sooner or later, sooner or later,
but it’s just bad. It’s all bad. Still, I have to,
and later never did anybody any good.”
Then he pushed aside the boughs and with tears sparkling on
his cheeks he stepped into the hidden village. Just inside the
gate, he stopped, perhaps to imprint a memory of
this place, before the gods, as he was certain they would,
destroyed it. His feet stood on a path that
became a lane shaded by leafy olive trees, paving
the breadth of the village in lazy meanders. Simple
homes rested along the path, solid maple walls eaved
with handsome beech. Behind some of the houses
hung laundry lines, clothing gently swaying in the
little breeze that found its way into the secret clearing.
In front of the homes and in the soft lawns around them
children, little kids, played, their laughter sweet enough
to deepen the boy’s sadness to the color of
a growing bruise. Yet he was nothing if not
resolute, and though his stomach was busy
consuming itself in nervous acid, he forced
his feet to follow the street laid before them,
his gaze seeking at its terminus the humble home
of his mother.
She had been feeling the tremors for weeks, like
the preliminary rumblings of a massive earthquake,
and from the moment they began she knew there
was no way anyone could stop the eventual release
of pressure. She waited helplessly as she felt the
vibrations intensify, accelerating to an infinitesimally
sharp point before they exploded with terrible
force, seeming to tear the very air in rifts and great
rents of severed reality. She felt clearly the moment
the boy propelled himself through the mortal shroud
draped ‘round his being, a shroud not unlike one
a great sculptor would draw over a masterpiece to
keep it special before some predetermined
unveiling. She felt the moment the boy burst through
his shroud, and passed out from the shock.
When she found her reserves had again filled
enough for her to open her eyes, she perceived
the recession of the trembling; somehow the
boy had managed to gather the tatters of the
shroud around himself and knit them into
a coherent blanket, achieving once again
the concealment of his spirit from the world.
A subtle melancholy pulse was all that remained.
Even here, she felt her son draw nearer, the epicenter
of the great quake that split the sea.
He’s outside her door, and the vibration ceases.
A woman’s intuition is real, and a mother’s
intuition is fact, stretching over the wavy field
of the future like a morning haze over hilly
country, shifting sideways out of the air in
the early dawn and settling loosely upon the rises
and sinking into the valleys, taking in the topography
as if it were brail written in a language of misty
letters and half-dashed words and then gone,
burnt through and burnt off by the rising sun.
She could guess from the way the dew wet the sky
that something was coming, and there had been
that sense of impending bigness, of approaching
heights in a certain place in the air behind her
ears for the past few weeks, towering over and
evaporating around her on again and off again
while she watered her plants or sat in meetings
or when she kissed her son good-night. Then
she heard the door knob turning, and there it
was, no longer the impression of mist but
actuality locked up in dull metallic sound-waves.
Almost struggling against the resistant air,
the door creaked open and the boy walked into
his mother’s home, kneeling in front of his mother’s
chair, putting his hand upon his mother’s knee,
and speaking to his mother thus.
“Mom, I have to tell you something. Something
that will be hard for you to believe but is the
absolute honest-to-whomever-you-please truth.
Triton, the Triton, came out of a pool of water,
the sea where I go, and something has happened
to me. I did something. He made me so angry
and I speared him. I speared him and made
him cry, I know it’s impossible, crazy, but I did,
I cut straight through his shoulder, through the skin
I mean and all the way to the bone. Then I told
him to tell everyone that I did it to him, and I let
him get away. I could have killed him, I should
have killed him, do you hear me, but I didn’t.
Oh, No...... phew... I didn’t. Every time I think
about it I remember Odysseus, and if Poseidon
would put him through that for a few mere word
he will have me and everyone I know wandering
through the lowest levels of Tartarus
until the world ends. Mother, I don’t know what
to do, I don’t have a single clue, but if I do nothing
we’re all going to die. I need your help.”
From beneath delicate brows the boy’s
mother looked upon her son with
benevolent eyes, for she knew
that sometimes there are fates that
cannot be escaped, that sometimes
all roads converge upon the same
point, and the only way to differentiate
one from the next is by the scenery in
between. With this knowledge
in her heart she spoke to her son.
“ When you burst in here, your face so pale,
I thought you had lost the sheep in the forest
again. Collecting them all up took days,
searching for little puffs of white behind
all the green and brown and yellow, trying
to pick out the bleats from the whistles
of the birds and the creaks of the grasshoppers.
But in the end we found them all, and when
we did you said you would never lose them again,
and that you would learn to talk to the sheep
so that you could always keep them together.
You said you would be the best shepherd ever,
and I knew that you would, but that sheep
were too small. This day was bound to come
sooner or later, and the only question now
is not why it came but what to do now that
it is here.”
These words confused the boy in a way
that gave him hope, because he was worried
that he had pulled somthing out of nothing
in a way he could never do again, or that
he was nothing stumbled upon something
meant for someone, someone else, but if
his mother saw it, he believed her.
“I’m going to fight the gods,” he said.
“I’m going to fight the gods whether
I should or not because I have started
doing it, and with this sort of thing there
is no backing out, unless you mean dying.”
His mother was silent for a moment,
looking into her boy’s face for what would
be the last time.
“ My son, the road ahead of you could not
be more dark, because you are a little boy
in a world of angry gods. Not so little anymore,
maybe, but then again the gods are very angry.
I’m afraid you’ll need more than an umbrella
or a shady tree to weather the storm they
will raise against you. I want to sit you down
and make you eat a plate of cookies, but it makes
me old knowing that I have to direct you somewhere
else. When you have to put down a rabid animal
you must cut off the head, and so this is the same
with a rabid pantheon. You can do nothing but
cut off the head, the Olympian gods, children
of ancient Kronos, for they are in charge, and with
them removed the rest of the headless beast will
fall down dead. It must be Hades first, the
lonely Olympian beneath the ground, who sits
in the dark with the ghosts of the people we used
to be. You must go into the earth to prove your claim
to it, my child, you must teach it the goodness of your
heart from inside out so that it will know exactly who you are .”
A lesser soul would have cast aside his
gloves and thrown down his trowel, learning
that his life’s road could be paved only with the
skulls of the Olympian Gods, and further,
that the first brick was to come off the neck,
off the block of infamous Hades. What hit-man,
no matter how ice-cold, could help but blink
at the next name on his list were it to read
the “Steward of Death himself”? Yet now
resolved to the quest, nothing could deter
the boy, and with an almost uncomprehending
stoicism he nodded, quickly rising from his place
before his mother’s knee.
“Into Hades? I didn’t want to die until I was
an old man, but if I come out again then I
guess I will have been reborn. Whether or
not I will be a different person, only time will
tell, but you’re right, if I am to win this fight
I’ll need the earth on my side, and what
better way to start than by taking it back
from within? My eyes have been opened
mom, and who knows what world they
will see when I look out through them.”
His mother’s eyes were gray clouds sinking
in a quiet twilight, but she raised her hands
in a benediction, and spoke to the boy in
a voice like rain on a metal roof.
“ Your eyes have always been open, and
you see the world more clearly than I.
If you had not the thing which {necessitates}
this quest, I would do all that I might to keep you
here. It is a mother’s job to bring her boy up,
to lead him through tears and chubby cheeks
and cradles in the night to the doorsteps of
his own destiny. The doorsteps are his to walk
through, though, and when she can see their liminal
glow in the distance, she knows that she needs to let
go, and leave him with both hands free to wrestle
the world. Still, she’ll never forget the way the lines
of his palm fit into hers, no matter how time
stretches them out, and even when all I can do
is wave you on your way, I’ll be watching
the set of your shoulders and the bob of your head
as you disappear, even so I’ll be able to recognize
them in whatever world we meet next. Here,
one list thing before I see you off.”
And taking from a pocket deep within
her cloak, the woman brought forth
a gleaming talisman. It was cleverly wrought to
hold in the light that struck it and burnish
it as if with a rich and lustrous laquer. Displayed
upon the precious sigul was a bright flame
on a field of shadowy green, the deep red flame
emitting radiant streaks of brilliant white like
rays from a vibrant sun. Above the flame, the
green grew dark, and became a cap of sable within
which little diamonds hung like ornamental stars. A
single ruby shone in their midst, glistening like
blood.
Within and about the flame, like wood for
a campfire, burned an array of detailed symbols;
a giant three-pronged fork, a sceptre the color
of a deadly bruise, a great mithril axe, a giant
hammer, a staff entwined by two serpents, a slim
bow, and a few others which the intensity
of the flames obscured.
At its top, the flame blossomed out like a
rose, its petals reaching up to the stars above.
With a glint of reverence clear in his eyes, the
boy took the sacred pendant, and at his touch
it began to resonate, sending out brilliant shafts
of multicolored light that brightened the
already lit room of the house. It was hot in his hand but
he did not burn, and it seemed that as the light
escaped from the pendant it rushed directly
into his eyes, illuminating them with a beautiful
and terrible energy. Determination drawn
cleanly in every line of his being, he raised the
pendant to his neck, and clasped it there around.
As it settled over his chest it gave out a single
blinding pulse, and then went dim. It seemed
alive around his neck where it had been only a
piece of art in the hand of the woman.
He looked up at his mother and in his eyes gleamed
eternity. For a moment they were every color
and none, like darkness and light entwined and
melded, a shade and hue so radiant and impossible
that his mother faded away in the shower of not-quite-white,
and for a moment she was little more than an outline,
a small smile in the backwash of eternity. Then the boy
spoke two words to himself, “Not yet,” and willed it
to subside. In the breathless calm that ensued,
he bowed low to his mother of old, gently kissed
her forehead, and left the house forever.
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.
Monday, August 18, 2008
A pause- and then some Art
It's strange to be out of email contact with the rest of the world for even three days. Whitman's server has been down since Sunday night for me, I guess, and so I've got nothing but radio silence from the West. My link has been severed! Well, I guess I have gmail, but I don't really use that address, so all I've got there are a few old emails about student loans. Which are pretty funny. Makes you appreciate the internet a little, I suppose. It all seems so solid, but I guess it is fragile. Hundreds of millions of people linked by fiber-optics and binary code, putting their lives into ciphers of ones and zeroes and entrusting that they'll be retranslated into alphanumerics once they've reached the other end of the instantaneous digital pulse that is the send button. Everyday we pack a little bit of our selves into invisible streams of electrons and send them streaming out into the infinite, mutable, and (to me) entirely incomprehensible internet, wrapping up our lives in words and shipping them out in little inscrutable packages that uncountable computer chips handle and chuck unceremoniously through circuits that are the digital, Silicon-Valley-inspired metaphors for delivery trucks, and then somehow anybody anywhere can open the package up, and there you are, smiling, unchanged, and none-the-worse-for-wear for a trip around the world in eigthy miliseconds. I don't understand the internet at all, but I do understand that it's sweet.
But on to bigger and better (well, longer, anyways) things (dammit that sounds like a penis joke): here's some more of my shit!! I'm hesitant to do this; not only is this an unprecedented amount of material i'm about to post here, but it's also my first forray into the world of internet acoustic covers. I'm so excited! Ok, here's what I'm going to do. I'll split it all up into two posts: one, me at my greasiest and most socially-reticent wailing away on a guitar to a song that I'll think you'll be pleasantly surprised to find isn't one of my hits, and then the second a rousing round of epic poetry. There's surprisingly little to blog about when you're largely just sitting in rooms and studying Japanese for 8 hours a day. I could speak to the grammatical expression "ばかりか” for a few moments, but I won't. But yeah, here's me in my room. I'll get a video of the concerts for homeless people and the occasional Japanese passersby i've been doing later, maybe. Sorry about the sound quality. By the way, I just discovered this dude on youtube who sings the male and female parts to A Whole New World from Aladdin. Watch it immediately, it's the fucking sweetest shit ever. He looks like Jasper Lipton if you gave him jaw implants to look like the Dad from the Incredibles.
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.
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