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!!!