Ruby Red White Gold

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love this man.

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