A man deserves to be treated well.

The above headline was my final word to one Miss Leslie, who has proven herself beyond the shadow of a doubt to be 100% crazy as a motherfucker. And you know I like to be slightly silkier with my prose than that, but man, all I can say in this case is motherfuckin bitch has got to go.

To boil a long preamble down to its bare bones: some several weeks ago I meet this Miss Leslie, and we dance together through Zlatne Uste's Balkan brass music party, the Golden Festival, in Brooklyn. She professes to fall for me in some capacity, and proceeds to engage me for a date on the following night. So, down at Barbes that next evening we dance, we glow, we make out raunchily and publicly, more raunchily in fact than I have ever done publicly (except for that time with Oona). But then the bomb drops: sad as she is to say it, she must cancel Part II of our date, wherein we sojourn to Pete's Candy Store, because right now at Pete's Candy Store there is, it appears, another boy who is waiting for her--a boy to whom she's already promised herself for the final part of the evening.

Now, to tell you the truth, I'm neither as cynical nor as unflappable as I may generally let on. So initially, I don't see what's really the only appropriate response to this delightful new bit of information. No, really, I'm pretty confusable and sensitive, so instead I say lots of things that pretty much amount to, "Oh. Well, gee." Because at the root of it, I have no idea how this great girl who danced with me and invited me out on a date (she even called it that! repeatedly!) and who singled me out of the billions of great folks at the Golden Festival and who bought me whiskey and poured it from the glass into my mouth giggling as we danced to Aurora's Western swing band in Park Slope, and who pressed her mouth into mine on the freezing cold street corner and undid my belt as her jaw swam smoothly past my lips, shark-like, as she dove to kiss me roughly on the top of my neck, I have no idea how she's suddenly leaving me here like this.

And then the embarrassing part happens; I don't understand what I'm supposed to do, how to handle this, and I'm still starry eyed and stupid from the sheer force of her professed attraction to me. So when she says we should ride the train north together, I agree. And when she wants to be kissy on the train, I agree. And I don't lash out, I don't question, I just resign myself to this less-than-ideal outcome. We ride the trains, I speak cleverly and eloquently about yes, how curious the universe can be in its capricious sense of timing, oh ho ho. Somehow though, while during the course of this she continuously tries to conversationally corner me into a position where I'm supposed to state my case for why she should take me, here, at least, I do not take the bait. Because a man has got to have some dignity. I'm not about to argue my reasons for why someone should like or choose me, a) ever, to anyone, and b) certainly not when the girl has already chosen me and then shelved me for some other asshole.

...more in the middle here. Me feeling heartbroken, followed by my feeling furious. Just furious. Terrible texts back and forth. My attempts to talk to her to try to sort something out, and her lashing out at me because of it. Then, more of her lashing out. Then, a deluge of cruel texts from her, a biting rain that carries on for a week after I've stopped responding. Then, God bless them, Robin & Jen Snead and my sister telling me that I'm crazy to be heartbroken, and opening my eyes to why this girl's a crazy ass vampire cunt. Agreed. But those texts keep coming.

And then Tuesday, this week, when a text comes in saying, "Want to start over?" I do not respond. Because really, what could I say that would be useful to say? You can't argue with crazy people.

So tonight, Friday night, at 11:30, my phone rings. This is and says when I pick up, "Oh, you picked up!" Yes, I say. "I guess I can take that as a good sign," she says. I say nothing. She says that she is calling not to talk, because she's busy tonight, but to see if I want to talk at some other time. I ask her to say that again. "Well, you know, I was in a bad place emotionally last time we were together, but things have been going really well this week, so I thought I'd call you tonight and tell you that we can talk." I am flabbergasted by the audacious one-sidedness of this. "Why are you being so quiet?" Well, I say, I'm being quiet because I'm not quite sure what the right thing is to say. But no, my answering her call doesn't mean that I'm interested in talking with her. "What? Why not?" Well, I say (as evenly as I can muster) because you treated me badly and I'm not interested in more it. "No no," she says, "you don't understand, I don't want to talk now. I just want to know if you want to talk later."

Now, you reading this might be wondering something along the lines of What the hell does that mean?, and I will tell you that that is a very reasonable question to ask, and one that I, fortunately for you, have, in my recent hard-luck experience, not only learned the answer to but learned how to summarize in one crisp, resonant word. Crazy. My friends, what she means is, "I am a lunatic. Let me prove it to you in a way that's as emotionally manipulative and painful as possible."

So, I say no. No, I would not like to talk later. I don't want to start over. I don't want to continue talking with her. She shouts, and she sounds hurt and indignant, and she demands to know what I mean, and she asks me if No, then Why Not. "Well," I say, "you treated me badly. You didn't treat me with dignity, even though you expected nothing but dignity yourself even after you treated me poorly. But that shit's a two-way street. And I'm not interested in more of that one-sided stuff with you." No no no, she says, I have it all wrong: "I was in a really bad place then. Things are different now. But wait, you don't understand, I don't mean that we should talk about it now; I just wanted to call about talking later. I wanted to see if you wanted to talk." I tell her again that I can't see a good reason to want to. "I don't know what that means!" she says, "and anyway, I can't talk about this now, I'm working a party tonight." I want to ask her why in heaven's name she called me to talk if she can't even talk, but think better of it. This would, after all, be violating one of Daddy Bisker's three golden rules: You can't argue with crazy people. "So," she persists, "can we talk later?"

"So let me get this straight," I ask, although not quite like that, because that's one of those phrases you only use when you're trying to start a fight and I'm really trying quite hard not to. I can already feel the weight of this in my gut, a hollow heat in my diaphragm like I was gut-shot, and I know that a fight would just hurt like hell and leave me crying and sore. Because for one thing, her horrible, myopic self-centeredness is hurtful and bewildering in the same way that your very faith in mankind is tested by seeing an I-had-no-idea-he-was-sociopathic child pull the legs off a grasshopper; and for another thing, I am still just hurt, personally, me, by the way her words pull at the very many, very deeply piercing hooks she'd sank into me. "So let me get this straight. You only want to call and see if I want to talk." That's right, she says. "But you don't want to talk about why." That's right too. "So really you're calling to see if I want to talk but only as long as the answer is Yes. That's not a question at all. You're only interested in knowing what I think as long as it's what you want to hear. If I say no, then you ask why, but you don't really want to know why; you don't even want to hear why, let alone know why. You don't want to talk about it. You only want to talk to me to tell me that I'm talking to you. But I'm telling you no, I don't want to." She curses, she yells an attack, and she hangs up.

I'm not sure what she expected to happen here (again, crazy people). But I do feel that this time, closure will be my friend and a tool I can wield and wield well. So this is my final kiss-off text message to her. I tried, and by that I mean I tried very, very hard, not to attack or lash out at all...not that there isn't a lot of opportunity (and a lot of good reason) to do so. But. I wrote:

People who DISlike each other still treat one another with more dignity and equanimity than you seem interested in or capable of approaching me with. I deserve much better than that. Start over? No, thank you. You would never treat me well. I mean you no ill, sincerely, but I'll be damned if I open up my throat again for you to bite. A man deserves to be treated well.

Suck it, bitch.

Guest Houses

W/T, St. Vincent's Guesthouse, at $20 a day. A gorgeous property with a great salt-water pool and nice desk guy, but shitty dirty filthy scummy-peopled dorm rooms, roaches, and beds like medieval racks. Lower Garden.
F/S, The Burgundy at a negotiated rate of $70, down from $90, for a private room with a queen bed and private bath, and a free loaner bicycle included. Foubourg Marigny, on Burgundy Street between St. Roch and Music.
Su/M, hopefully staying for free on Amelia's couch...!

New Orleans! Too!

This is a pretty fabulous place to be.

Food/drink/music update:

I may have had the best breakfast of my life today at a place called Surrey's Juice Bar on Magazine Street: a spicy crawfish omelette stuffed with avocado and brie, and covered in pink crawfish scallion cream sauce; fresh buttermilk biscuits, strong and bottomless coffee, and a shot of wheatgrass to help it all go down. Think about the man-hours it takes to catch and shuck those crawfish. A lazy mindset would kill it all. It's like a perfect micro-lesson in human industriousness leading to better things for mankind: even though it would be easier to not go crawfish catching, and just have some toast and spam instead, the motivation to go out there and do it lets us have the best omelettes on the planet. Live life to the hilt.

Dinner was from a place called The Quartermaster, chosen not because it's a legendary destination or anything (although the beans, BBQ brisket and potato salad were good enough to bring tears to the eyes), but because they delivered to the bar that I'd ended up at with people from the Galactic concert at Lafayette Square. Galactic was awesome. One of the trombonists from the Rebirth Brass Band (Corey Henry?) was with them, then Cyril Neville got on stage, and then they had an elementary school marching band (who were fucking awesome) join them too. So much dancing! So much groove! I danced and danced with this smoking hot lady before some man pulled her away, then another girl came and made out with me on the field, right after a bartender dude welcomed me to the city with a free, strong, fresh mixed margarita, and right before some dude I was dancing near decided I should share his bowl with him. This is a friendly city. If I can get my hands on a bicycle, there will be no stopping me. I should learn how to skateboard -- that would be the ideal way to get around, because you could still taxi back to where you're going at night.

Apparently I pass for local enough around here; the cabbie last night asked what way I wanted him to take to get back to where I'm staying, the cute girl at Surrey's asked if I wanted to come out to somewhere tonight (can't -- going to see Kermit Ruffins tonight at Vaughn's), the dude at the hostel even asked where in town I usually live. Ha! Apparently I also pass for gay to anyone of that persuasion--I think that it's my new ridiculous facial hair (I decided to go funny-looking after losing my job, cuz hey, why not, but I think that it looks gayer than I'd thought). And people here are super direct! Worse than me! A guy says, "Hey, come say hello. I'm Christopher." I introduce myself and he says, "it's nice to know you. I'd like to get to know you better." I was like, "I think we probably know each other about as well as I'm gonna want to." Ha! This is an awesome town.

Time to go jump in the hostel's salt-water pool to cool off, shower, and hit the town.

New Orleans!

Well hot damn, here I am on the road again. It feels marvelous and freeing and energizing to be out and free again, although it's embarrassing to quickly realize how much travel savvy I've lost in the last two years of relative stability. In a kind of Fibonacci Sequence of unfortunate realizations, I've become aware at increasing intervals of things I forgot at home or simply forgot I should pack at all: one block out from my door, I simultaneously realized that I'd forgotten to put my sneakers into my bag, and suddenly remembered where I'd put my headphones and why I'd been unable to find them at packing time. On block two, I remembered that I'd forgotten to pack my bathing suit. Block three: my gold lame headband. Block five: a Metrocard. Block 8 (actually inside the subway station at Bedford): travel umbrella. Uptown in Manhattan: travel guide. Before going to sleep: online flight check-in. Landing in the awesomely named Louis Armstrong Airport: a lock for my valuables. I swear.

And I used to be a professional! Literally, a professional traveler. I worked for that barrel of monkeys over at Fodor's Travel, writing for their Japan guides: the whole swoop of life for me was about being a savvy traveler (the necessity of a frugal and cunning mindset was made all the more acute by the fact that Fodor's didn't really pay anything...despite writing a travel guide for richies, I was sleeping in a tent in the park and dodging police). Since finishing the Fodor's job I've been more stable than not. A trip to Israel toting my baby cousin on a horrible Birthright trip, a whip-crack tour of Northern California college campuses with the same cousin, a trip back to my people in Japan. But no solo travel--no making it on my own--and I, apparently, have lost the groove.

With the travel, as with other aspects of my life, it seems like I need to confront the current moment as one of "starting fresh again." I'm in circus skills classes again for the first time since December (and oh my god, I suck), I'm ukuleleying again for the first time in ages (ditto), aikido has begun to re-enter my life in a way I hadn't thought possible after my heart hardened towards it at the dawn of 2008 (holy jesus lord is it hard), I'm writing again (this one I'm still good at...and I even got a job doing it! a real job! writing all the time!), I'm starting to take photos again (kind of at a loss for what to shoot) and, finally, here I am traveling again. Thinking about any of these persistent passions of mine, I can take a small step back from my immediate self and see that I've lost most, if not all, of the momentum that I'd built up with it. For some things, like aikido, I think that I've undone the work of years, thousands upon thousands of hours. And if I want to continue with any of them, there's no recourse for picking up the strands I'd let go slack. It's not that simple: the old ties have decayed entirely, and if I want to go back in, I'm just going to have to begin entirely anew.

If I've lost the momentum I had once built up with my hobbies though, it's probably good for me to remember that momentum isn't everything. We often build momentum at the expense of stability, solidity, centeredness and poise, and perhaps these are qualities I've been cultivating in some respects while my forward motion has flagged. I have felt cursed for a few years now--since living in Matsuyama broke my spirit--with a lack of passion, a cold furnace in my chest where once I burned white hot for the things I loved. I'm the Tin Woodsman. To keep working, the woodsman replaces his body parts one-by-one with machine parts as his cursed ax chops each of them off; once he trades his body entirely, however, he finds that he no longer has the heart with which to love like he used to. He was lucky enough to have a Dorothy and an Oz...maybe I have an Alita and a Sean and a New Orleans. Oh my.

Quick-n-dirty food, music and sights report: all I've had so far are a cup of excellent coffee--which may or may not have had chicory in it, but I don't know the taste and was too sheepish to ask the stone-faced girl at the counter--a slice of fabulously flavorful lemon bundt cake, and a cool glass of fresh lemonade. As for music, I've only been here a few hours and haven't seen anything live yet, but Professor Longhair did burst into my headphones (my dads' headphones...see above) to wake me up RIGHT before we got the "going to be landing soon" announcement--the song, you guessed it, was Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Like something out of a movie. And I'm still bike-less but views from the bus windows and the small strolls I've taken have been jaw-dropping: this is a pretty, pretty town. Peering down some streets you'll feel like you're looking into the display cases at a fancy cake shop or window shopping in a bridal store for Disney princesses, with house after house in improbable, heart-warming, clashing pastels dripping with lacy bunting, beautiful scroll-work, home-made or scavenged sculptures, tooled cornices and ornate iron railings wrapping two and three stories of romantic balconies. I am happy to be here.

４月２２日

I'm sitting at 15th Street and Prospect Park, facing the trees in the traffic circle and the movie theater with the sun in my face as it sets, sat on the steps of one of those two gorgeous pillars here washed in sunlight along with the stone, both of us gilded and brilliantly monochromatic from its touch. Teenagers play catch with a football somewhere behind me, as evidenced by the ball bouncing crazily on the asphalt when it slips through this end's guy's hands, jumps and shakes and hops and always improbably changes course just before it would lead him into the traffic heading around the circle. In my periphery the teenagers wander in and out of view with older brothers and never-made-good neighborhood friends, gabbing and jumping with both legs out over the belly-high steel posts set into the blacktop path, like they're leap-frogging them. People go by on bikes, other jog with headphones. Buses stop to unload passengers coming home from their workdays; no one new gets on. The air around me is damp but not too cool, and the corners of pathways and ponds' edges are ringed with fallen cherry blossoms: it is spring.

The football goes PUHNK as it hits the ground and I can see it slipping just over the teenager's outstretched fingertips in my mind's eye, brown hands with tan palms stretching towards it in the sky. A jerky, spinning hop takes it into my field of vision and a cry goes up from the teens behind me--some several more in number than I'd thought, judging by the voices I can hear chiming into the sudden shout. The ball hops one way and then jumps improbably high, hitting the other column across from mine, where a different group of teens is holding court on the shallow steps, stoop-style. The ball thwacks the stone above their heads and all contract their frames, pulling hands over heads and heads, turtle-like, towards collars. A girl standing amongst them doesn't even seem to reach out to catch it, but suddenly she is cradling it in a bough of spread fingers, as easily as if she had been holding it the whole time. There's no tension, no weird issues of honor like many a stranger might suppose about strangers and inopportunely bounced balls. Fists are bumped, first greetings exchanged, and some of the stoop teens leave their perches to join the catch.

More 30-somethings job by. Other 30-somethings walk toddlers by or wheel strollers. A boy in bright blond curls and of not more than two bobbles by, his mother pacific, indulgent and decisively pregnant. I can't hear him, but I see the expression on his face, and I hear her confirm: it's a football. Those boys are playing football. I think I have the same urge to play with them that he does. Something causes a big laugh and a commotion from them, but they're out of sight behind the pillar I'm leaning against. Fancy bikes whizz by with spandex-clad alien-looking riders. My bike is here by my side, root beer brown on the side I can see, and gold like me on the side the sun can see. As for the sun, it has been sinking lower this whole time, and I can see shadows on my notebook and from my hands that a few moments ago weren't there. It's still above the buildings on 15th street, and has grown temperate enough by this time of day, just moments away from setting, temperate enough to let you look right at it for just a split-second. You can stare right at it. Less than a heartbeat, but it's long enough to see the perfect, shockingly perfect, circle it makes in the sky. How can anything have such a perfect shape? And then Robin is here to meet me, and I am looking at her shoes past the edge of my notebook.

Ye Olde Doughnut Shoppe

GUY IN WHITE: “I’m not gonna tell you you’re beautiful.”
LADY AT THE COUNTER: “Come on, don’t I have a cute little button nose and everything”
ME: “You alright.”
LADY AT THE COUNTER: “Ha!”
GUY IN WHITE: “Do you know why?”
LADY AT THE COUNTER: “Oh here we go…”
GUY IN WHITE: “Because,” he drawls, “I’m not attracted to you for you for your beauty.”

A is a disgustingly fat man, one with a skinny chest, neck and face, and a body that pours itself out below the line of the table into a bulbous sack of swollen, strained clothes, a shocking bag of stretched jersey cotton that divides somewhere and leads, somehow, to a pair of worn-in white sneakers. My eyes can’t avoid making a quick survey of him, pinned as he is behind the skinny table (or does it just look skinny?) next to the doorway to the street, facing into the shop with his back to the window and his ample body propped like a supersize sack of grain against the wall. His friend sits caddy corner to him in a nearby booth, nodding and silent; except for some obvious markers – his green jacket and obvious latino-ness, not to mention the setting – he could have been davening. The fat man’s girth is such that it’s a wonder he remains ambulatory, although I suppose that this is a presumption on my part: since I come into the donut shop with him sitting there, and since when I leave the donut shop I leave him sitting there still, it is possible that he just can’t move. Did he walk his final steps and heave himself, thanks God, into a 24 hour dinette? Or did he arrive there a thinner, healthier man long ago and gorge and distend himself on all the donuts? No reason to stop eating them I guess.: 24 hours, 7 days a week. a place He could still be there today. It is a very good endorsement for not getting a donut, but this is what I came here for.

LADY AT THE COUNTER: Waddayoo want, honey?
ME: Could I have one of those glazed ones, please?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Sure honey. Seventy five.
GUY IN WHITE: Because I don’t think that you and I would work.
ME: Could be he's smarter than he lets on.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Ha!
GUY IN WHITE: Because you’d never appreciate that I love you for more than your beauty.
ME: (to her) That’s not very sporting.
GUY IN WHITE: How many kids you want again?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: This, this I have to deal with every day.
ME: Beats working at a donut shop.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Ha!
GUY IN WHITE: I love you. We could have a beautiful family.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: You staying? Siddown.
ME: You know, why not. It’s not getting any dryer out.
GUY IN WHITE: You want a lot of kids.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Four. Four kids.
ME: That’s a lot of kids.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: I want four, but you know. Every year a year goes by, and I get a year older and I’m still not working on making no four kids. And, with that, you know…
ME: Your bar kind of sinks a bit?
GUY IN WHITE: So you think I'm too old to have four kids with you.
ME: Well hey, look, there’s lots of kids running around in this neighborhood. Just go take a few.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Ha! What, just go take some of 'em?
ME: Sure, who’ll know? There’s lots of the things running around around here.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Right, I’ll just give ‘em back at the end of the day, huh?
ME: You can, if you’re tired of ‘em. Who’ll know the difference. It’ll be like at the dog shelters.
CUSTOMER 1: (enters) Jelly.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Dollar.
GUY IN WHITE: I guess you don’t think it’ll work out.
ME: You know, you go rent a dog for a day just to walk it. They should do that with kids.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Ha!

I’ve thought this for a while, actually. At orphanages: their adoption rates would spike.

GUY IN WHITE: Well how old do you think I am? You think I’m older than your father.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: What are you talking about?
GUY IN WHITE: Am I younger or older than your father?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: He’s 54. My father

This is amazing. She must be in her late 30s. I guess it’s like Laurence Fishburn says in Boys in the Hood.

GUY IN WHITE: So! So, I’m younger than your father. How much younger do you think?
ME: He can't be no spring chicken himself.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Jeez, I dunno. Two or three years?
GUY IN WHITE: Ten years!
ME: Oh, well then.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: This I have to deal with, all the time.

At times like this I remember a story I read in Hampton Bays, where my mom’s mother had a vacation house whose disarray and decay were a surprisingly accurate reflection of the state of her side of the family. The town had a little library that had all of its charm and mystery renovated away when I was probably 8 or 9, but I remember getting a book out of it called Seven Scary Stories, or Nine Horror Stories, or Ten Stories About the Devil or something like that. There are two stories I remember from it; in the one that comes to me most often – in moments like these, that is – a man bothered by the fleetingness of life’s happy moments sells his soul to the devil to receive a magical pocket-watch that can stop time. Its button, a button like a stop-watch’s, can only be pressed once. The devil explains to the man that he should wait to press it until he’s in the happiest moment he’ll ever experience, and then with that one click, the pocket-watch will freeze, preserving him, and those sharing the experience with him, in that happy moment forever. He must wait until he finds that perfect moment of happiness, and then he can stay in it for all time. The catch is (there’s always a catch) that if he doesn’t use the watch by the time he dies, then the devil gets to take him down to hell in his train full of sinners to roast for all time. Moments good and bad fly by in the man’s life: young loves and heartbreaks, marriage, births, milestones of graduations and weddings, deaths timely and untimely, oldening and graying. And the man never uses the watch. He keeps holding out to see what life has in store for him around the next corner. So, going to sleep as an old man at the end of his life, he wakes in a train car. It’s raucous and full of energy, and he’s surrounded by scamps and scoundrels of all kinds, from the led-astray to the truly nefarious. Dice are being thrown, bottles passed around, songs sung, and stories told. When the devil sits down next to him the guy isn’t surprised, and the devil tells him with satisfaction that he knew the guy would never use the watch. It’s an old scam. No one, the devil says, ever uses the watch – how can anyone trade in their curiosity and hope for an eternity of sameness? He laughs, and holds out his hand to take the watch back. But the guy looks out the window at the I-don’t-know-what going by, and he says to the devil, “well, you’re right about a lot of it. Life was grand, and even though its joys were fleeting and its sorrows too numerous to count, it was good, and I’m glad I lived the whole thing through. But just now, Devil, I'm looking around me, and I think I’m as happy as I’ll ever be. I’ve had all of the living I’m going to do, and here on this train car things couldn’t be more jolly. Folks are gambling and singing and drinking, not a care in the world but to have a last hurrah and die as fully as we lived. So why not stay here a spell.” And with the Devil’s eyes round and wide with horror, the guy pushes the button on the watch.

GUY IN WHITE: I don’t think you’re beautiful.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Oh god, I’m stuck here.
ME: That’s true for everyone.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: No, I mean I’m not supposed to be here!
ME: See, exactly.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: She laughs. “I don’t mean I’m stuck here in the world in this life. I mean I’m supposed to be on my way home already! My replacement ain’t here. Paulo!”

There’s a ding from the back, and a line runner brings up a circular tin-foil box with greasy fries and something oily and beige inside it, and a plastic cover steaming up inside. B packages it in a bag with napkins and hollars to the back.

LADY AT THE COUNTER: Manuel! Delivery to go out!
GUY IN WHITE: What’s in the box?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: He’s talking to you.
ME: Huh?
GUY IN WHITE: You got an instrument in there?
GUY IN GREEN: He want to know what is the music you have in the box.

Jeez, I'd forgotten he was here! He's not davening then. Or he's finished, anyway.

ME: Oh.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Manuel!

Now she speaks into a microphone attached to a PA.

LADY AT THE COUNTER: Manuel, delivery to go out.
GUY IN WHITE: You can play a song in here, right now. Play some music.
ME: Nah, it’s just a box. Empty case. Conversation starter.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Ha!
GUY IN WHITE: Oh.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Manuel, delivery to go out. Just this. Come back again sometime.
Manuel: Si, si.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Bring us back something nice.
ME: Whaddaya want he should bring you?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: The money from the order!
GUY IN GREEN: No, it’s a…whaddayacallem…a violin?
GUY IN WHITE: “Play us some of the, um...” the fat man makes a violin motion with his arms and fingers.
ME: “Sorry, actually it’s not one of these,” I make the same motion, “it’s one of these,” I make a teeny strumming motion.
GUY IN GREEN: Oh, it’s a how do you call it, acoustico.
GUY IN WHITE: What is it?
ME: It’s a ukulele.
GUY IN WHITE: “I saw…I saw my cousin, and he plays a little guitar. Couldn’t be more than this big.” He holds his hands about a foot away from each other. “In the park.” Now I know where my competition is I guess.
CUSTOMER 2: (enters) One sugar donut.
ME: Boy, no one says please anymore, huh?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Huh?
ME: So how come you don’t use powdered sugar?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Who. Where.
ME: On the sugar donuts. There's powdered sugar on the jelly donuts but just normal granulated sugar on the sugar donuts.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: You know, I dunno.
ME: They’re way better with powdered sugar. Whadda you say, lady?
CUSTOMER 2: Well, my son loves them this way.

Well, I think he must be some kinda yutz then, but I guess it’s a free country, so I don't say anything.

ME: So where you going back to anyway?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: To the Bronx.
ME: Wow, what for?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: I live up there!
ME: And you work down here?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Commute every day. I gotta be back at six in the morning.
ME: Whatsa matter, they don't have diners in the Bronx?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: That's what...
GUY IN WHITE: That's what I said to her.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: That's what everyone says to me.
ME: Well?
LADY AT THE COUNTER: No. They all closed down.

This, I can kind of believe.

LADY AT THE COUNTER: Paulo! I need some coffee.

Paulo watches suspiciously as she her pour the coffee into her travel mug. Apparently they have to carefully control the stuff...coffee and donuts being the precious contraband they are.

LADY AT THE COUNTER: I gotta stay awake on the train.
ME: Why? You're not gonna miss your stop. You got like two hours till you get home.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: I never feel safe on the train! Who knows what could happen.
ME: Man, I don't know from the Bronx, but you should be safe for the first hour of the trip anyway. You need an alarm clock more than a travel mug.
LADY AT THE COUNTER: Ha! You're sweet. Be good.
ME: You too.
GUY IN WHITE: No song?
ME: Sorry man. Empty case.

I heart Chowhound

Back in Aikido Action

Kicking ass, taking names.

Not that I'm sure, but...

I am one with the wind!

Hallelujah! With the help of this completely awesome walkthrough, I have fixed my iPod! I have music again! Thank you, CrunchGear!

According to the article, a lot of people's more dire iPod problems have to do age effecting the way the iPod casing grips the hard-drive, the upshot being that when the hard-drive isn't held as tightly in as it needs to be and wobbles minutely as it spins, then everything stops working. But this isn't death for your iPod: all you need to do to fix it is open your iPod up and wedge something in there so that when you close it again, the casing grips the hard-drive more securely. And presto! It spins like it wants to spin, perfectly orbiting its axis and at an insanely high speed, and giving you music. Huzzah! I tried this once with paper that was too thin and stiff to be a good material insulator, and had to re-do it with a slightly spongier strip of thinnish cardboard (torn from some box that something came in), but now it's holding true. I even took it jogging the other night, with no drama. Fucking. Awesome. Thank you CrunchGear!

Who is a black belt in Aikido? JOSHU!!!

Warrior Woman

My girlfriend, Sachiko. It's our six month anniversary in just two weeks. Crazy, right?! I'm going to get her some of those russian dolls that fold into each other, which aparently she had as a child and wishes she could have gotten at this Works of the Hermitage exhibit we went to recently at the prefectural museum here (or to be more accurate, to the Works of the Hermitage exhibit which I recently went to without her...it's a long story and involves a dog, but anyway she's nuts for these dolls and hopefully is secretly hoping that that's what I'm going to get her). So that'll be nice. There is one small hitch in the anniversary plans, which is this: On November 26th, Josh will be here in Matsuyama, in good old Ehime on good old Shikoku, but where will Sachiko be? Sachiko will be in Fukuoka, over on Kyushu, care of our friend Kouji and his generously including her in his company's Mandatory Company Travel event (a staple of the Japanese business model), even though Sachiko isn't a part of his company...not that I don't want her to go or anything (hey, a trip to Fukuoka, right?); it's just that Kouji is one of our more overtly infideletous and vaguely predatory friends of ours, and he's had a thing for Sachiko since small times and I don't entirely trust his motives or anyone else's as far as laying-groundwork-for-when-Josh-is-out-of-the-picture or the feeling that I get when folks are doing that. That happens in about six months, by the way. It's nuts with a capital N! Nuts! Anyway, where will Josh be when Sachiko's in Fukuoka? Right where I always am. Why did Kouji not call or mention this to me at all? Am feeling a bit obtuse about the whole thing? Or jealous? This is not the right choice of words. Well, jealous of the time that I don't get with her, sure, and miffed and more than slightly smug, sure and sure again, but it is what it is. And I've got more time to get my hands on those dolls.

Plates

You know how they say that eating too late at night isn't good for you? Well, here I am at ten minutes to two-in-the-morning and I find myself still with a lot on my plate. This mostly has to do with me trying to record a radio show for a city I don't live in anymore on a computer which isn't mine and doesn't work using a program which eludes me at the last, last possible minute to get it all done. Currently a program called Audacity is telling me that it's a few minutes from finishing the encoding on a chunk of my radio show, the Kessel Run for its broadcast early tomorrow morning on FM Bari Bari, and this is good, but when it's finished then I'll still have to record and encode another chunk or two before the program's finished and then figure out how to upload them all onto the internets somehow and to let my sponsors at the station know how to download them and play over the real live airwaves tomorrow. I somehow thought that continuing the radio show in Imabari even after I'd moved to Matsuyama would be, if not easy, then at least not the total pain in the ass that it has been so far. I also thought I'd have a working computer to use to this end (and others) but this has been another (and possibly the most fraught)(besides the job) part of the re-settling in. No working computer. Hence: no blogging, no Flickr uploads (we also have No Camera to help account for that one) and no YouTube/Podcast/Music, all of which were project goals in moving to the big city and gaining some free time to use creatively. But maybe tonight will prove to be the great first step. For tonight, we make radio!!!

It's my first time trying to record the show on the computer instead of in the real live studio, and if the learning curve seems a bit steeper, so too do the possibilities. I'd been planning to give this a try for quite some time, and when I finally got my computer back to operational status two few weeks ago I'd been getting psyched to try this, but just two nights ago I found myself suddenly hamstringed once more by the great beast Windows. And I finally thought I'd fixed it all, too. By Sunday night I'm either able to fix it once and for all or I'll order a new Macbook and be done with it. I will buy a computer sooner than I wanted to and acquiesce to trading in my technological troubles for fiscal ones. A new computer will set me back a bit more than I'd like to be spending all at one time right now, especially with expenses being what they are in the big city--rent is up, dojo fees are up, pay is way, way down...but my food costs are down, going out costs are way, way down, and commuting costs are down; although with gas prices on the rise, I'm paying half of Sachiko's fuel cost when she comes to see me in Matsuyama to be nice, so it's not like I'm totally done commuting--but having a new computer will, I think, let me be creative and fun in all the ways I want to be right now, so maybe it's worth it. Anyway, back to the radio show, already in progress...

A weird way to come back in, but...

Oh my god, stop this man.

Holy Crap!!! ただいま!!!

Holy crap! I'm in JAPAN!!!!!!!!!!
Against all predictions to the contrary I'm back in IMABARI and I'm enjoying the crap out of myself! I have survived my first week of work! I have begun acquiring furniture for my apartment! I will have bookshelves--BOOKSHELVES!!! BOOKSHELVESSSSS! Why am I so excited about bookshelves? Well, last time I went home to America I came back with two suitcases full of food. Peanut butter, nice jellies, wheat bread, tortillas, pinto beans, indian spices, canned gefitle fish, the whole megillah. THIS time, I came back with books. Got me some Dickens, some Graham Greene, some high lit, some low trash, and so many comic books that I had to stuff about four graphic novels into my laptop case like contraband just to make it in under the weight limit for flying. And now i have nowhere to put any of them! But now: BOOKCASES!

And now I'm in the radio station in Imabari recording a marathon of Kessel Run shows to fill out the September schedule, and I'm thrilled to be here. Right now we're listening to Gang of Four with Damaged Goods...and oooo! yes! we just NAILED the crossfade into Gold Lion by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. And here I am in a window box recording studio overlooking the dustbowled shopping arcade in Imabari at ten in the morning dancing my little back-in-Japan booty off for the old ladies and tumbleweeds rolling along neck in neck across the concrete tiles like snails and turtles racing and it feels SO GOOD to be here right now! Yes! YESYESYES!!!!

Moving Update!

Moving SUCKS. In one week I'll be home in America, and then a month later I'm coming back to Japan to a new job and new house and new life in Matsuyama. So I'm packing up now in preparation to be homeless for a month with a million things to stash somewhere or other. And there's so much stuff!!! I've thrown out about thirty FULL trash bags in each of our three trash categories, from Burn Me to Don't Burn Me to Really Don't Even Think About Trying To Burn Me. And now I'm in the final throws of the Things Go Into Boxes stage, in which things go into boxes and then more things go into more boxes, and then even more things go into even more boxes, and THEN I have to go GET more boxes from the supermarket and I end up seeing and playing with my lovely students who are really as of now my former students and then I get all sad and locate consolation chocolate for myself since I'm still in the supermarket anyway and might as well leave with some chocolate, and then when I get home it's become late in the day and I'm sad and fat and I STILL have to put more things in more boxes!!! Braaaaaaa! This is moving.

A piece of truly great one-in-a-million luck has come my way today however...although it is just the kind of Hooray for Friends in Imabari thing that brings it back home how sad I really am to be moving away (which I am; very sad about it). So here's the short, short, super short-version: recently I've become friends with the scion of the towel corporation that owns the apartment building that I live in, Tamai-kun, through boxing. Two weeks ago at a boxing after party in his cool rec-shack he said that he'd let me store all my things-in-boxes at the towel factory in some unused corner. Great! But yesterday a new and even better plan came up: Tamai-kun said that instead of at the factory I can stash all my stuff in an unoccupied apartment right down the hall from me in the building I'm in now!!! Hooraaaaaay!!!! It's going to be so simple and so doable!!! I can even keep my bed and my carpet and my kotatsu table now, all of which I was going to have to sell to my predecessor for lack of storage space! Hooray!!! So just now Tamai-kun dropped by and opened up the place for me (it's seriously only three doors down) and showed me in, and it's HUGE!!! It's this HUGE and beautiful place on the street-side corner with these big windows (I have no windows in my place) and white walls and a huge entranceway and a big big kitchen with counter space and cabinets and a working bathtub and a tokonoma in the bedroom and just this crazy amount of space....what in the hell!?! If I had been living in this place from the beginning maybe I wouldn't even be moving! It's so big and lovely! I know that this is just crazy talk and that the last thing I needed would have been more space to be messy in, but hachi machi those windows! Sigh.

So now to hopefully go put the final putsh into the Things Into Boxes stage. And then I'll be done with moving prep and can move on to other finishing touches to my life here. Crazy. Wish me luck, and a special thanks to Robin and Ellie and Jim sensei for their congrats on my shodan test! It went really well--I saw some video from it and I look pretty good! And how about that picture in the paper, huh? So I'm a black belt in Aikido now! Hooray!!! OK, back to business. BYEEEEEE!

Aikido 達人！！！

Yesterday I got my blackbelt in Aikido!!!!! FUCKIN ALRIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!
It took six years and lots of being thrown around a lot, but YUSSSSS!!
The test went pretty well and I can post some photos and stuff from it soon, but for the time being here's a link to the dojo's blog, which has a picture of me from last week throwing one of my teachers, Murakami san. What's with this picture, you ask? Why's it so grainy? Because it was scanned from the newspaper!!!! I WAS IN THE NEWSPAPER AGAIN!!!! It had a whole interview about why I aikido and stuff, and this awesome picture: and now I'm a blackbelt! Whoopee!!!!!

Braaaaaaaaaa

Life proceeds at quite a clip these days. I haven't had much time to blog about anything, but here's a little slideshow about some of my recent adventures:

Picasa Pics

school and teaching, a house party at my place, planting rice with my kids, boxing and after-boxing, and a cool jodo demonstration! Enjoy!

I got hit by a car! Again!

Here we go again: I got hit by a car! Last night on my way to boxing, side-swiped off of my bike. It's not as bad as the last time this all happened, because my bike's OK and I'm okay, but now I have problems from insurance and actively negligent police to deal with(you'd think that "actively negligent" would be an oxymoron, but where cops are concerned I guess any kind of moron is fair game. We're actually lodging a complaint about how they treated us last night, which is a terribly un-Japanese way to do things but it all was so completely atrocious that we're going to go through with it anyway).

There was damage to the car though, and it's all complicated because the driver turns out to be a mom at one of my schools; after the crash, one my little kids jumps out of the car hollering "Josh sensei! Josh sensei!" Actually the kids were totally awesome about it all and were a big help in telling the cops how they had got it all backwards. I was coming down a hill/exit-ramp kind of place below Tamagawa's community center after eikaiwa class and a car came turning up into the same ramp. The ramp's narrow and windy and cars can't really stay in lane, and even though I moved over to the shoulder and slowed down, the driver didn't see me and cut the turn much too sharp and swiped me. I had been on the left side of the road coming down the hill and the car cut in too close to its right coming up (remember wedriveon the left here too). Its right side fender smashed into me as I tried to break and swerve out of the way; it didn't help any that this had been a rainy, cloudy day with slick roads and low light. I managed to jink just left enough to avoid getting plowed right into, but my bike's handle scraped the fender and door of the car, the body hit my right leg and pedal, and the car's side mirror collided with my arm and shattered. Hang on a second though and read that again: a collision with my bicep broke the mirror off of a car. It didn't break my arm, didn't even really leave much of a bruise, but I broke the mirror off of a car with my bicep. I am Thor.

Of course, Thor's foot and knee got a little roughed up and they hurt somewhat worrysomely today, and last night was certainly no Valhalla. I had to go to the hospital instead of to boxing, which really sucked, and the whole ordeal was pretty awful thanks to the cops. But there was a pretty great side to all of it. My awesome girlfriend Sachiko really came through and turned out to be a realy star. She totally rescued me and bailed me out of all the trouble I was in without my saying anything more than "I don't think I can meet you later, because I just had a car accident." She came to where I was in like two minutes (and later had to call a friend to have them turn the rice cooker in her house off, since she'd left mid dinner-prep) and her older brother and sister arrived about two minutes later, and then each of them telephoned about a hundred people for advice or assistance from anyone with a connection to the cops or the insurance companies. Sachiko's kin totally rallied up the whole town to help me, and her brother was my hero in standing up to the awful, awful cops. He understood exactly the things I wanted to say but didn't know how to and he did a great job of saying them for me, and it was the first time we'd ever even met! And he's the one that's lodging the complaint for me too. I'll have to tell about the cops in a whole different post; it's really insane. But Sachiko and her family were all just really wonderful. They stood by me and they translated everything from incomprehensible Japanese to comprehensible Japanese for me and answered questions for me and kept me in a really good spirit throughout the whole thing. After cops and kids and mom drove away, the brother gave me a much needed cigarette (and Sachiko was way relieved that I'd asked him for one instead of her; it's a secret from her family that she smokes), and we all talked about how awful the cops were. Sachiko had talked to my boss for me on the phone and she had called Yasu, my boxing friend, to tell him to tell me that I needed to go get checked out at the hospital. I acquiesced and she drove me out there and she fielded the desk clerks and the paperwork and hung out with me in the waiting rooms until midnight when we were finally released, and then after we left the hospital she brought me back to Yasu's house because he wanted to see if I was OK and give me a feel-better beer and yaki-soba snack. And all this in her nurse's uniform, not even changed from work. I tell you, things with her really beat the hell out things with Yuu chan during the last accident I had. In the last accident I wrecked my bike, needed fifteen x-rays instead of two, and ended up getting totally fucking abandoned by my girl in my hour of need, instead of totally taken care of. Life is funny in its cycles; last time I really needed someone and they let me down, hard, and this time I didn't even ask for help and I got huge huge support. As my sister said when I told her about all of this, Yay for people coming through. But even despite Sachiko, it's not all roses; I've got an achey leg and foot and arm and I need to get my bike looked over and I need to deal with the police and the insurance companies and my boss and I need to somehow add this all in to my already frantically overloaded schedule, and I probably need to not go to aikido for a day or two (starting after tonight's class). It could be a whole lot better, but I guess it could be worse too, and thank god for good girlfriends.

Total Recall Death!!!

This is a picture of Josh and Allison dying excruciating, tongue-popping deaths a-la Total Recall. As you can see, we had suddenly found ourselves on the surface of the moon. AAAULAAUALAAHAGAAAAAAA!!!!, as Schwarzenegger would have shouted. Click on it to view it in a bigger size or download; it's a much funnier picture at a slightly higher resolution. This was in Bako national park in Malasyia, an incredible jungle preserve that we stayed in overnight. The mountains in part of the park are heavy with iron particles, but the iron is distributed unevenly throughout the other minerals in the rock. High concentrations of iron on the surface will resist erosion by the rains and sea, and over thousands of years it's the sections of rock that are less heavily laced with iron that get washed away, leaving the raised skin you can see in the picture above. Scarred flat beds of iron hovering above purple rocky sand; it really felt like we were on another planet. One with no oxygen. AAAULAAUALAAHAGAAAAAAA!!!!

Belly of the Beast

This photo was taken from inside the colored cloths making up the lion's body in the Japanese shishi-odori, or Lion Dance (roughly). A bunch of men hold up the cloths from underneath and billow them out into the air following the lead of an ornate lion's head mask at the front. The billowing is grunt work, but doing the dance with the lion's head takes the stamina of an olympian and the training of a Balanchine star. The lion's head leads he body around every which way, usually following a pattern someone's great great great great grandfather devised to scare off demons. The mask is usually a big wood and lacquer job bedecked with a flopping jaw, lolling tongue, bulging eyes and a neat mane of jangly brass bells. It's heavy, and the dance is extraordinarily demanding. But inside the lion's body I learned one secret of the lion dance, and that is this: throughout the dance, as the lion moves and snaps and its body writhes and humps, the men under the cloths are constanty rotating who controls the head. Everyone takes several turns at controlling the head so that no one gets too burned out during the course of the dance, which can continue for hours and hours through the long, dogged afternoons of a Japanese summer festival. And the way they do it never breaks the pattern of the lion's movement. If you're watching the dance as a spectator from outside, you'd never know that the change was taking place. Only by descending into the belly of the beast did this secret become revealed to me! BWAHAHAHA!!!

A Day in the Life

In the middle of a wonderful day, with only a moment to post about it before running off to make a train. My friends Yasu and Kawamura took me hiking up a mountain in the morning with a crazy old karate man who had us do some several thousand crunches at a rest point in the middle of the trail, and I learned new words for the different parts of a tree in Japanese. I totally heart Yasu and Kawamura--I think I can say pretty definitively that they're among the best things I've had in my life since coming here. After mountain climbing, Yasu and his girlfriend and I went to this event by the sea side, where a huge part of the ocean had been netted in and a bunch of fish dumped into it, and they gave you a net and a mesh bag and set you loose to go catch as many fish as you could find and scoop up. It was great! Yasu got the first catch, then Toshimi got one, and right when I started to think oh no, is this going to be one of those days where everyone but me tags something?, I caught two big ones right in a row. I got two more later for a total of four, and Yasu and Toshimi ended up with two each. When you caught a few of them, you brought them to a man in a boat and he STABBED THEM THROUGH THE BRAIN WITH A NAIL for you, and then you could put them in your bag without them flopping out and could go trolling around for more. It was great being out in the sun and fishing and stuff, and it was neat being at this big normal summertime community event--lots of parents and kids, lots of teenagers and old folks too, everyone just having fun. It was like Coney Island in rural Japan. Yasu and I also dug for clams, but all we found were these disgusting mud worms and one skippy mudfish that got away before I could net him (can you eat those guys anyway?). We went out for a great lunch too at a fisherman's sushi place with the biggest sushi slices I've ever seen, and ate more than our fill of deliciosity, and I'm sure I was the only foreigner that will ever enter that place between now and kingdom come. It was a really great afternoon, with people whom I really love, and now I'm going into Matsuyama for aikido and staying over at another friend's place to play all day tomorrow too, since I'm skipping work (don't worry, it's cool...I think), and to top it all off, I think I've got a new girlfriend! What a good day! Wooooo!

Image Respond

My pal John Tozzi tells me that he's also teaching himself image play using a pirated copy of Photoshop and a handy dandy book, and apparently he's making miles more progress than I am! Here's a dinosaur project he did. Good job John! Does anybody else have cool photoplayed images they've been working on? Send them in! It'll be a thing!

It should also get noted down for posterity when my awesome stencils are the next Friday night, that the whole thing started up thanks to times with Robin and her DIY, modge-podge sense of fun. Specifically, this came about from a procratinatey introduction to stencilrevolution.com in the King computer room when we were both immersed in crazy paper writing during a finals week in spring, too many years ago (boy, if I coulda majored in procrastinating I would have been at the top of the class). The stenciling never really went further than the computer room for me, but a while later Robin surprised me with this amazing stencil she made and gave to me, a very sweet photo of the two of us having times in London that she printed on brown cardboard in crisp black ink. It looks great, and it was just a really lovely gift--way high up there on the best presents ever list. It's even hanging up in my house right now, in a nice green frame right by the door (and was always a source of consternation for my last girlfriend, Sayo). So yeah, should my stencilized glory score me any big points in the future, the first few should get chalked up on the Times with Robin tally, for anyone who's keeping track. Yo it's cool, I'm happy to share!

GIMP Creation #2

Here's the second finished image I've made using the GIMP, an open-source image editing program I'm trying to learn my way around. My goal with He-Man here was to render a cool image that would be suitable for silkscreening onto a T-shirt or spraypainting onto something.
I still have to print it out at school, cut it out (over probably a few trial and error runs) and then make something with it, but I'm pretty proud of myself for just getting to here so far. I had to take the original image, a color photo of a He-Man toy, and monkey around with its color values and edges and contrasts and things, learning how to use image tools like "colorify" and "threshold," and I ended up getting a result that looks clean and cut-out-able, and it still preserves a lot of the cool details from the original. Hooray! And then I added text. Double hooray! Next is printing and silkscreening. Feel free to do the same with it yourselves (download the file from its location and it should print big onto a B5 sheet of paper), and send me a picture of the result to post up on Japandamonium. For anyone who wants help doing this kind of thing themselves, there's a fantastic website called Instructables that's full of How To guides for doing just about anything cool you can think of. I found a few different guides to help me GIMP my way through He-Man over here. And look at where it got me. I HAVE THE POWER!!! Try it out!

Subtext, Subtitles

Couldn't even stand to finish watching this Monty Clift & Liz Taylor movie I got called A Place in the Sun, which looked promising enough went mostly like this and this with a little bit of this thrown in to make things move even more slowly. The one good moment of it is a scene where cops interrupt Monty and his homely non Liz Taylor girlfriend while they're making out in a car on (ah, yesteryear Americana), and there's this great one-off line where the cop's asked what they're doing and Monty says, after one of his poignant, unreadable Monty Clift pauses, "talking." So the cop fires back this one really funny line with a total no-nonsense face: "Look here boy," he says, "they've invented the house. It's a very good place to talk in. You'd better get back to yours." It's the best line in a movie filled with darling, i loved you since the moment i met you...maybe even before i met you. BUT IT'S NOT THE SAME LINE IN JAPANESE!!! Gosh darn Japanese subtitles seem to work hard at killing all the characterizations in our good movies and flattening out everyone's lines to the shortest approximate statement instead of remaining at all true to the intent of anyone's expressions. In the case of A Place in the Sun, this gem of a line becomes simply, "if you are talking, other places are better for doing it--go home." What happened to "they invented the house?!" It's no wonder most locals don't like any of the good movies from foreign countries; the subtitles kill all the substance!

Japan tends to do a much better job with overdubbing than subtitling in terms of remaining true to the original scripts. Of course, dubbing films is akin in the artistic sense to throwing a bag of puppies off a cliff. Besides, it's not like anyone here in Japan would ever dream of suggesting that foreigners watch The Seven Samurai in English or Italian or French, for goodness sakes. It's a Japanese movie, in Japanese, and it's a superb piece of art. Overdubbing it into another language would be like going to a museum and deciding you like blue more than red so they should go ahead and photoshop Guernica for you. Art doesn't really work like this.

Now this all said, there does seem to be an exception where animation is concerned. Japan's famous for its cartoon industry, but foreigners often see them overdubbed into other languages, and this might actually be the best thing for everyone concerned. If you watch enough anime without letting it destroy your soul and social life, you notice that there seem to be about four or five actors doing all the voices in the industry. This isn't true of course, but most anime relies heavily on a very narrow set of voicing archetypes that can make most shows deftly personality-free. Dragonball Z is an incredibly boring show in Japanese because all of the mains sport identical Macho Fighter voices, while the women use Woman Voice #2, and the bad guys all have Baddy Voice, unless they're robots, in which case it's Baddy Robot Voice. Actioney anime can be much more fun to watch in English because our industry tends to have a much more diverse voice acting pool (there are exceptions, to be sure). Conversely (and rather unexpectedly), the voicing archetypes and rote emotional expressions in Japanese are perfect for lots of American animated films. I just watched The Incredibles in Japanese (bus ride, not my choice) and boy, it was great! Who'd a thought? That's a movie whose original voice acting wowed the boots off everyone, myself included. Now, take something less, er, incredible, like Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride--a movie that did almost nothing but make me yawn in English--and it becomes a freaking masterpiece in Japanese! Seriously, it's an unbelievable transformation. Even the songs are miles better--it becomes a real adventure in Japanese. Maybe the language works better for fake people, or maybe the Japanese dubbing industry just needs to get its act together; either way, don't rent A Place in the Sun, but get your hands on a Japanese Corpse Bride ASAP!

Having cake, eating cake...You know how it goes.

I cleaned! Finally, I cleaned my apartment! It's been so long! But now I seriously have a pretty tidy place once again. I even, get this, I even cleaned my porch! It's AMAZING! Do you want to know how derelict my porch was? My porch was so derelict the landlord complained I had had squatters living there! And get this: I DID! Sometime in the last month or so, the pigeons who hang out above the pachinko parlor next door decided that they'd wing over to my side of the big divide, and then they moved in! I had pigeons NESTING on my porch! Nesting! On two eggs! How the hell long could the thing have been there for? The nest was enormous! I guess it must not have hurt that I had a bunch of dead houseplant skeletons and broken flower pots and closet hangers and other detritus to use as nest-making materials. But still, this is my house! No matter how decrepit it gets!

It's not my house for much longer though. I've got just over two months left of my life here in Imabari, and I suspect that it is going to whizzzz past. No luck so far on the job search in Matsuyama, but then again, I haven't really kicked into too much activity about it yet. Which is worrisome. Partly, I'm wondering how long I want to spend in Japan before coming home...I keep getting all these facebook messages from friends who miss me, and god, I miss them too. I miss being loved by a million people. Not that they don't still love me, but that's the whole idea--they do still love me and I love them all too! And I miss them all! And I want to be able to be loved not from a bazillion miles away. Weird. Life is weird. Things can be so nice here and so melancholic at the same time.

I haven't been to much aikido since getting back from Malaysia either, and that has had its ups and downs...aikido's the thing I'm trying to really focus on now, now that I've decided to stay here and move and do all the stuff, but it's the times I put it on the back burner that I enjoy my Life In Japan life a lot more. Like today; today I cleaned my house and made it really nice to be in again, but when's the next time I'm going to spend more than an hour or two here before going to sleep? I've got aikido keiko (class) every day from tomorrow until the end of time. It ends up feeling like a big one-or-the-other trade off: either I do aikido, or I can have a life. Having cake, eating cake; you know how it goes. I guess that's the idea of me moving to Matsuyama really, is that if I didn't have to spend an extra four hours per class getting to and from the dojo (that's not an exaggeration) then maybe I will be able to have a life style that incorporates my devotion to aikido, instead of a lifestyle which gets put on hold in favor of my devotion of aikido. ("your sad devotion to that ancient religion hasn't helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, nor has it given you prescience enough to discern the location of the rebels' hidden base...nor does it let you magically teleport yourself home from keiko anytime before midnight three nights a week, nor does it let you find much peace of mind with the retarded Middle School Empire's archaic nonsense, nor have you been able to Force-talk your way into keeping a girlfriend..." man, choke that muthafucka!) For the time being though, even if it's a good sounding plan, since none of it has yet materialized in any form, it's only the not-real-yet-ness that I'm feeling, and it's hard to get excited about a plan that doesn't exist yet. Braaaa. These better be the droids I'm looking for yo.

Me and My Monkey

Back in JAPAAAAAAAAAAN from Malaysia...whoops, I guess I mean MALAAAYYYSIAAAAAA. It was a very different sort of trip from the Thailand experience, which if you haven't seen some evidence of, you should go check out the photo set over on flickr. That was a great god damn time. Why didn't we just go back to Thailand?

The trip had a lot of good things in it. We did have times. Once we were involved in a three way nature battle in the jungle: Josh & Al vs Pit Viper vs. Screaming Alpha-male Monkey. Another time, a ten-year-old Malaysian boy sang James Brown at the top of his lungs inside an ancient spirit cave as we danced to the summit in green light from a rent in the mountainside. This was after the bats attacked us, but before we found the pile of dust-dry butterfly wings, inches deep, the bats' compost heap. We spent three days in the jungles of Borneo, in the care of a tribe called the Iban who may have given up headhunting as far back as a hundred years or so. We stayed in their longhouse and went on treks through pepper plantations, rubber fields and wild, untamable rainforest, minded by a man called "Antelopes" (this was not his given name). My highlight of the trip was when swimming time in the river became bathing time in the river; there was this outrageously spunky, smart, wild and terrific nine-year-old girl named Melissa (mell-EEE-sah) who came down to bathe when I was swimming down with her little brother Monkey Boy. Well, I called him Monkey Boy because he wouldn't tell me his name and because he was a super rambunxious little dude. I'd made friends with him by chasing him around the longhouse on my knuckles like a gorilla, endearing myself to everyone in the tribe. To my surprise, he loved the name Monkey Boy and would go around shouting it to himself to try to make it stick. Wonderful kids. So I'm swimming with Monkey Boy when Melissa comes down to the river with some other girls to bathe. No need to skedaddle; river bathing here isn't nude but done saronged, and isn't a super private thing. Monkey Boy and I were playing on the thick branches of an old tree that had lodged in the river bottom, and I swam over to the shore when Melissa and co came down, and started to splash them. And then Melissa grabbed her bar of soap and handed it to me and held out her hair in both fists, and I got to shampoo her and soap her up; and then she started to do the same for me! It was unbelievably cute and special, that this little girl was sharing this simple intimacy with me after being so aloof for the few days prior to it. It was really endearing and wonderful.

So yes, times. It wasn't all terrific, though a lot of it was great. But thinking back to the little girl in the river makes me feel really happy about it all now, so we'll leave it at that for the evening.

Ittekimasu!!!!

When you shout, "ittekimasu!" it means, "I'm OUT, muthafuckaaaaas!" But also implies you'll be back again soon. So don't fret muthafuckas, in other words.

In a few hours I hop a ferry for OOOOOsaka, and from there to Malaysia, and parts unknown. In the meantime, here are a bunch of pics from Al's and my adventure to THAILAND, though still hightly non-annotated. Sorry. In time, perhaps, we hope. But I got new adventures to be getting on to, so for now ittekimasu, muthafu.............!

Also, a big PS: Thank You! to the good folks at Blogger, who have finally ungraded me to the new version of their software. Blogger Beta has gone the way of the slide rule, and we're high tekkin' it from here on home. Woo!

Proxima Estacion

Next stop....Malaysia!
Malaysia here we come!
Allison and I are leaving on the 26th of April, which is, looking at my calendar, one week and one day from now.
A full-stop, Keanu-like Whoa would not be inappropriate at this juncture.

Whoa.

I better hurry up and get these Thailand pictures off my camera!

And unpack my backpack! The middle compartment is still stuffed full with assorted chazzurai from the trip, including, if memory serves: one recipe book from our cooking class in Chiang Ma; one jar of Tiger Balm; one street-bought copy of this Argentinian guy's journal of his hitch-hiking odyssey through, of all places, Iraq and Iran; several cheap yet totally freaking awesome T-shirts bought at the best street vendor stall on Khao San Road, all the way at the top and tucked around the corner off the main strip; one whole crapload of these lovely little colored straw christmas-light kind of things that I bought far too many of (what, they were like next to free, and all pretty) but haven't figured out where to hang up yet. And my place is, typically, a wreck, and I have all kinds of job stuff to worry about (believe me, I've got the worrying down; it's the doing something about it to STOP worrying that is difficult), and I need to do some laundry and clean up and bring the trash out, and go to aikido!!! Aaaaah! Train to aikido leaves in an hour and 45 minutes, and which of these things can I do by then?!? Braaaaaaah!

The Power of Green

Has everybody read this article yet?

THAILAND!

Take a look at Allison's blog for some pictures of us in THAILAND! We had an amazing time.
A snachet of memory for you from the Muay Thai gym in Chiang Mai where we were getting taught some basics of Thai kickboxing (ie, getting pummelled). Our guy Lek (yes, I know a man named Lek) had taught me how to knee Muay Thai style, and was giving me commands and commentary as he stood there with a pad on his body and I tried to knee him in the solar plexus for about twenty minutes. And the commentary went like this: "Right knee...THUMP...good! OK, right knee--THUMP...good! OK, right knee--THUMP...good! OK, right knee--THUMP...good! OK, left knee--WHACK...bad! Man, come on! Balaance! Riilack! Powaa!" Oh Lek. He seriously was a big sweetheart, and really warm towards us from the very start when he came to pick us up at our guest house on his motorcycle.

On the way to the gym he craned his head around to half face me and asked, "How long you come to Chaing Mai," and I told him it was our first day, which was true enough. We'd arrived from Bangkok two days earlier, but had spent our time in the jungle, and not in the city at all yet. The morning we arrived and found our guest house, which we'd sort of made a reservation for from Bangkok, we waited till the office opened and first thing set ourselves up for a trek out to the jungle, departing about twenty minutes later. The office guy, a wiry-tall skinny guy named Coco with SUZUKI NAOKO tattooed across one shoulder in Sans Serif and cigarette burns across the other, spoke fluid English with the winy and not entirely trustworthy accent of Chinese dry cleaner's female shopkeeper, and tried to warn us off. Coco said, "yeah, you guys both really sure you want to go now? Sometimes people they come overnight and they think they don't need more sleep, but they been partying in Bankok and then they're out in the jungle in the hot and on the elephants and they're so too tired, so you need sleep, we give you room now, you tired, you sleep now today you go tomorrow is also ok, ok?" But bah! Time enough for sleep in the grave! So with only the time to stash our bags and grab a cup of coffee, off we went to the jungle.

But back to Lek and I on the bike. I told him it was our first day, and then I asked him how long he'd been boxing. He said, what? I said, "How long you been boxing? Long time?" And he looks back over his right shoulder at me with a little grin and puts out his left hand, holds it above the road with his palm down as we whiz along through the traffic, showing me the size of the little boy he must have been when he first started. Actually, I later found out that Lek means little, and that it's his Thai nickname; when Thai children are born they get given a nickname in about the same moment they get slapped on the tuchus, so as to beguile the evil spirits who would seek to take their fresh, vulnerable souls. And their nicknames seem to be fairly household words, which comes off as really sweet when you translate it. You get people named Apple, or Shrimp, or Peanut (thanks to Robin for all this culture stuff), or in our friend Lek's case, Small. Which, looking at the man, comes off as one of the better jokes anyone's ever pulled off. Cuz little, he ain't. He's a big dude. Not dopey big, not like Ohio born, corn-fed Grade A American football playing beef big; Lek's big like big pumas and tigers are big. It helps me feel safe while we're riding the motorcyle...which is good, because not only do we have no mirrors, but we're by far the fastest thing on the road (a theme for Al and my week there) in an unregulated melee of cars, trucks, pickups, buses, bikes, charis, tuk-tuks and pedestrians; and Lek keeps trying to talk to me while we're riding, which thanks to the noise of the bike and the difficulty of language and accents, involves him using a lot of hand signals. So here we are, our first day fresh out of the jungle, and at 9:00 in the morning I find myself on the back of a motorcycle--my first time ever on a motorcycle--bursting Kessel Run style through Chiang Mai's rush-hour traffic and holding down a conversation with a massively built and terrifically friendly lifetime Thai kickboxer, who is driving me with no hands on the wheel or handles or whatever it is we've got to steer with, on a bike with no apparent means of braking and no mirrors, which shouldn't really matter anyway since the dude's looking over his shoulder at me the whole time. This, let me tell you, this was a great way to start the day.

Hooray for amazing THAILAND. What an adventure.