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.