An entry for me.

Ellie says I should write about the things that have been bothering me being here in Japan. I kinda been going nuts lately. Just overwhelmed. It's systemic here, inescapable, this unbelievable idiocy that seems to govern everything you could ever hope would be slightly less than completely and totally retarded; here, all of the things on that list turn out to be, well, completely and totally 100% retarded. "Give examples," says my sister. "Talk about what you mean." Well.

I took some first steps in a number of different directions and failed to make any satisfying progress. Which story do I start telling to feel better? Troubles with time off? Troubles recieving medical attention? Troubles in school? Troubles with teachers? With friends? Troubles with xenophobia? With smallmindedness? With groupthink? With newspeak? Boy, I been having some trouble alright, trouble keeping my brain from shorting out my mind from snapping. This insane place.

So which story do I tell? It's taken a while I suppose, but I've realized that I need to write something about breaking up with Yuu chan, because that's the big thing that's screwed and skewed everything else up. I want nothing more than to stop feeling sorry for myself about it, which is why, I think, I haven't written about it. I just want to stop wishing I were still with my substantially and for sometime now ex-girlfriend, but god damn it, I just don’t know what to do to make it stop feeling sad and broken and lonely. And I’m sick to death of feeling so awful. I have swallowed a piece of coal. It scraped and scratched me and now it’s stuck deep inside and I can’t move without feeling the weight, and I don’t know what to do to burn it out of my system.

It was just all so good. I think I had just what I wanted. How many times can you say that? And then she just stopped. It’s like her whole heart stopped, like she just cut a switch and then there were no more feelings for me. We were so close with each other and then she turned her heart off. And then dropped out of the world. A quick switch for her but a very drawn-out and confusing thing for me; it took me weeks to even realize we were finished. There I am, emailing and calling and she’s already cut her losses and quit; I'm talking to dead air and cyberspace, and she'd never say a word back. All this happened forever ago and I’m somehow still not over it.

It all went wrong very quickly but we'd had it so good before. Then one day we had a museum date and I was on my way to the station and got hit by a car. Flipped clean over the hood and landed on the other side of the thing, landed steady on my feet and landed holding my bicycle in both hands, steel frame now buckled just rearwards of the handle post. Holy thank you aikido ukemi: this was a straight up, textbook style aikido forward-roll, saving my life in a car crash. I called Yuu to cancel our date, spent a full day at the hospital with my supervisor, got more x-rays than I believed I had bones to look at, and finally made it home to call her again. By the way, there’s no led bib for your cajones here in Japan…and they all wonder about the declining national birthrate, the meshugahs.


Stay tuned, neh. I will finish this story.

Up, Up, and Down

Once I cliffjumped off of a 9 meter rock into a river because I am a goddamn superhero.

That's a Signpost up ahead...

WRHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is the sound of the screaming inside of my brain. I am in the Twilight Zone. I must be in the Twilight Zone. Rod Serling should be standing in my school’s staff room, invisibly explaining to you that I’ve just departed from the ordinary world I knew.

“One Mr. Joshua Bisker, who knows he is a stranger in a strange land: a member of the other, set in a world of samenesses. He’s come here to sound a new note in a dry, old score, to shout surprise and solace above the sinister symphony of similarities. But Mr. Bisker may be in for a shock to his own system, for the music of this world plays to a slightly different tune. That’s because today the rising sun shouts its song to one new face, in the Twilight Zone."

Then you get to watch the thought provoking story unfold as I go slowly insane from the inexplicable and unassimilable shift in a basic reality I’d taken for granted.

More Discoveries

I have also discovered that you are supposed to clean out your trash cans regularly. There are very good reasons to do this.

Swimming with the Fishes

When it comes to cleaning my apartment, I have discovered that I am like a shark. This is of course not to imply that I'm either sleek, deadly, or violently efficient. It's rather that the second I stop, I'm dead in the water.

Bizarroverse

So when it's winter in Japan there's mever any way to escape the bitter, withering cold that bites at your fingers, face and feelings no matter where you go--there's no insulation, no indoor heating, and every window and door is habitually flung open to bring the old air in. We let the cold into our homes here like a cowardly Russian welcomes the ravaging Mongols. There is no hope of escape from the ferocious, relentless cold.

On the flip side it's now early summer in Japan, and I find myself with no way to enjoy the warmth. It's even legal to drink alcohol outside in Japan, but there's just nowhere to go drink it at; there is not a single place in my city where you can go get something to eat or drink and sit outside with it. No cafe with outdoor tables, no resteraunt with a patio, no picnic tables in the park. No ice cream truck. And all the places keep their windows shut to the breeze. In winter, indoors=outdoors, but in summer outdoors is all shut out. I don't get it. All I want is to go have a cup of coffee and a sandwich somewhere and sit outside in the shade with the cool breeze on me, then read a book and float away. Perhaps it is because this place does not have a lot of tolerance for "float away" that they do not enourage such locales. I think I want to be in Paris with cousin James.

I Wonder If This Cave Is Not Entirely Stable

Waking up this morning I walked into the kitchen and could not help stopping for a minute to look around at all the mess. How do I manage to live like this? There are clothes both dirty and clean strewn everywhere, not to mention the food products, dirty cups, dirty socks, plastic bags, toys, games, bowls and plates, papers, overturned picture frames, fallen down houseplants, a broken dish…it looks like there’s been an earthquake here, and if my place didn’t usually look like this then it would be easier to tell that, in fact, there was. An earthquake. Here, this morning, an earthquake.

Now, the locals seem more or less unfazed by this, and yes, it wasn’t a real big deal of a quake. Certainly no catastrophe like the awful news from Indonesia. How many dead? Boy, if there is a God then he is spending these days being angry with the world…tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, plagues, and now all the frogs are dying. How’s that for a sign? All the frogs are dying. If I were a spiritual man, I’d be reading the writing on that wall alright: “God said a fire not a flood next time,” neh?

But today’s earthquake, or jishin in the Japanese (which turns out to be a homonym for confidence, as I found out under bizarre circumstances recently), was nothing on the biblical spectacle scale, really more of just a small tremor. Still, it was a scary small tremor. I woke up at 5:15 in the morning with the sensation of being about to throw up, but the feeling wasn’t coming from my belly. It was coming from my floor, and my walls. And Everything around me. It is a most surprising thing to wake up and discover everything stable in the world you know to be moving wildly out of your control. Perhaps it’s always true, perhaps chaos is our true but hidden status quo, but usually you can discern for yourself some small measure of control, at the very least in the stillness of your own body: the world may always be spinning, but you can still sit in one place.

This is untrue during an earthquake. There is nothing stable. I will admit that I did not a one of the earthquake safety tips I’ve learned through the years from sources like school assemblies and the Animaniacs; I did not go to a doorframe, I did not crawl to a “triangle of life” next to a bulky piece of furniture (though this one has debatable merit anyway), rather, I stayed glued to my futon hoping that it would pass quickly and not get worse and thinking thoughts along the lines of “holy crap!!! AhhhhhhhhHolycrap!” It stopped after a few minutes, and quickly making up my mind that I could do nothing either preventative or preemptive should it return before work-time, I went back to sleep till 7. When I woke up again, I might not have even remembered it but for a few extra things on top of the pile of mess that had in last memory been safely on top of cabinets. “Now why is that on the floor?”