grand wishes not completed

i had this idea that i'd get back into blogging this year, slam fingers on keys and put my footprints in the sand of history. somehow, i got busy doing nothing and find myself at the end of another year with nothimg added to my almost faded blog. so, this coming year all i can do is hope stronger that i will be able to get those weak blogging muscles growing again, get back info the groove somehow... but will I?

another year rolls past

This blog has been more of a yearly update thing. That's not what I wanted for this last year, I hoped to get back into flowing my thoughts into words and pushing them into the digital semi-imortality of a blog. But I got busy doing nothing, and never got around to it. I had many topics that came to my mind, but nothing that I actually spent the time to create. So here's hoping next year I get back into the habbit of forming words into thoughts I can share and express.

cherry blossoms and epidemics

I have been meaning to get back into this diary writing thing; my proverbial footprints on a sandy beach. Momentary fragments of who I am or who I was, etched into some sort of shifting historical memory. There are many things I have experienced, but never put into words here yet. I want to change that. One thing that has really triggered that feeling even stronger is the current epidemic sweeping the globe. Like a silent pandemic of fear, nobody knows who has it or what will happen if they get it. COVID-19 is in our minds not just our bodies. It feels almost like the embodiment of the fear of mortality itself. Memento mori. We are all mortal husks of life, and yet we try to ignore that with many of life's sweet nectars, but in the end we all have our short dance on this small rock shooting through the fairly empty void of an almost eternal darkness. The universe is more nothing than something, and yet our collective consciousness fire, along with our own individual fires of awareness, burn however bright they might burn. I hope to continue forward and not let fear or mortality end my dance too soon. The world unfolds as it always has and always will.

another year

I keep thinking I will get back into writing a regular diary/blog thing, but I never get around to it. Just always end up doing something else. Maybe next year I'll finally be more active on this blog thing. It was an eventful year, went to Malawi (in Africa) and all sorts of things I should have blogged about. Maybe someday soon!

moments swept away

At the end of the year I always start to regret being lazy with my diary. It's important (for me personally) to keep bookmarking moments along the way on the fast moving stream of life. This is one of the Buddhas me and K & R saw in Nara the day before yesterday. A very touristy town, but also a town full of ancient temporal anchors. That's somewhat what I'm trying to do by writing a diary....!

shake and think

We just had another earthquake shaker here in Tokyo. It happened while on the train. First one person's warning alarm went off, and then the train was filled with a chorus of phones warning to seek cover. They happen a lot, but incidentally I forgot to turn off my "fail safe blog" and it posted just around that time too. It made me think about what would happen if that had been the big one that they say is coming to Tokyo someday? What will be the words I leave here in this digital space. Odd thought. I'm blabbering I guess though.

Summer is coming early this year. It is already hot and humid and it's not even June yet. It's gonna be a scorcher. I don't really have much to say, but I'm trying to get back into blogging my life. One step at a time. These are my footprints in the sand.

blabbering

It's morning, riding the train in a just-woke-up fog, suddenly I think I'm going the wrong way and wonder what day it is, I slip out my phone and glance at the cracked display. Like watching a slow motion video of blast waves erupt from a bomb, my meta-mind watches as first the thought TREE DAY in an abstract non-word way hits the edges of my mind because of the visual meaning of the Chinese characters burning bright white on the display, next my native language comes booming in THURSDAY THURSDAY THURSDAY and finally like the fading echo of thunder in the distance, the Japanese reading of the characters slide into my mind before it all fades into the torrent of thoughts I had cooking in my mind. This is every day, every moment, as a non-native speaker living overseas I guess. I wake up with foreign words still wet on my lips from dreams of jumbled places plastered with placid phrases. I catch myself thinking in Japanese, but as a non-native it is a broken strange twisted contortion of the "real" thing. Even speaking, I am a flickering shadow of what should be said in Japanese by a person of my age. Living life as a non-native in a faraway land is like that, your identity contorted and controlled by an evolving pile of words that will never equal the shape or colour of your native tongue, and yet this broken twisted contorted chunks of meaning become (gradually without a concentrated effort) comfortable inside the caverns of the mind. It becomes easy to speak, to think, to hate and to love inside a shriveled mesh of thoughts. There comes a point when words are just words, and all of that falls away when you look carefully inside deep enough; you can see beyond that tangled maze to a mind pulsing with emotions and concepts deeper than any phrase could ever attempt to express.

past-present paradox

I was at the airport, a sunny day in Seattle. I was about ready to go to Japan for the very first time, I was going to spend a summer there that would quite literally change my life. I hadn't seen my own father for a long time, but for some reason that I can't remember now, he met me at the airport. Maybe he sensed this was the start of a lifelong journey, I'm not sure. He gave me a small pack of single use film cameras as a parting gift. This was before digital cameras were main stream, before most people carried around cellphones with cameras and video built in. This was the ancient almost pre-digital past. Shortly after arriving in Japan, I broke my glasses. Film cameras could only snap a few quick random shots, but they are my eyes from that time. The sharp reality of light captured in a small plastic lens. Someday I'll find time to write more about that first time in Japan, but this is not that time. Recently I found the old random snap shots I took of the neighborhood I was staying in. In 2014 (yes, I've been very slow to use this blog) I went back and tried to recreate the shots I had taken well over a decade before.

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Welcome to Takatsu Station in rural Kanagawa prefecture. This is where I spent the summer of 2000. This was my first overseas journey, and I hadn't saved a lot of money. In fact, I had a total budget of about 500 yen a day. (That's about USD$5.) So I mostly walked around the neighborhood and enjoyed summer life. The hotel behind the station is exactly the same, but the station building itself was completely rebuilt.

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Exiting the station, and walking to the left I looked for the fire-station. It was completely changed. It was a weird feeling, kind of what I suppose it feels like to step into an alternate reality. I had walked this street countless times, the old fire-station tower was burned in my mind. But it was nowhere to be found. The white pole and manhole were still there though.

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I turned around and went to the right of the station, I think hoping to somehow find something that I could recognize. This street was made from recycled tires (thats what those flecks are) and I remember being fascinated by it. Without glasses and quite illiterate, traveling around my neighborhood had been quite an adventure. The first time I found this old street I had felt like I had discovered a new area in my domain. Almost nothing was left. The sign board on the right and the green overhang on the building remain though, existing in both of these realities.

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Finally! About 10 minutes from the station, there is a pedestrian bridge that offers a good view of the area. I would sometimes go up there and watch time evaporate in the summer heat (there used to always be a young homeless man sleeping on a cardboard mat there too). This view was almost the same. Proof that I was in the same universe, I suppose.

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I had never seen a Japanese summer festival. I thought then, and still think now, the portable-shrines look a lot like the arc of the covenant. Looking at my past picture now, I was startled to think about the age of the young boy in the red hat now. It's quite believable that he has settled down now and started a family. Dear red hat boy, I hope you had a good childhood.

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I'm not quite sure why I took this picture. I suppose it was the sudden down pour of rain on a hot humid summer day. I still enjoy the smell of the rainy season in Japan. Big fat drops of water smashing into hot asphalt. The thundering sound of a million little cloud-droplets, thundering with a warm intensity. I still enjoy walking around in the summer rains. This building still remained how it was, but you'll see that now someone has tried to take off the gold lettering. If you look closely you'll see that the shapes of the letters, resembling what they looked like in 2000, still remains. I guess that's a bit like how our memories work. Time takes most of it away, hides the past in a layer of misremembered slosh, but somehow the imprint of past events lingers on in us. Our past marks us and shapes who we become. I suppose now I have to go back again around 2025 and see if anything remains. Maybe, if I look hard enough, I can find the boy in the red hat next time.

life force

You ever have that feeling after you cut yourself by accident and realize you are looking down at your own Life. Blood is what pumps through your body keeping you alive, of course. But it is all too easy to go about your day and forget about how mortal you are. Blood to dust, we are existing for only a quick blink of the cosmic eye. Its weird to imagine this body, this bionic machine, breaking down and some day failing to work anymore. I don't know what I'm trying to say, though. Memento Mori.

hello wayward soul

I've been quite delinquent in the blogging department, but I'm not ready to let laziness swallow up my journal of thoughts. Oh no, not yet! I always feel like I should push something up here for future me to look back at, but I'm never sure what to go with. Fragments are all that remains between when I updated last and where I am now... what comes to me now is going down to Shimane for new years and going out over to Nikko a few months ago. Hot springs on both occasions. Maybe I'll write about it in a later entry. For now I'm just trying to get back into the groove of writing my thoughts out. Here I go, forward, next, here I come!

travel juice

Random people coming up and trying to talk to me in heavily contorted English... A man walks into a subway with a big boombox and starts playing a cheesy popsong while trying to sell CDs to the passengers who all don't even notice him... People taking crap from me and moving it around to "help" me without asking... Noisy, noisy, noisy... Food so spicy it adds fire to your brain cells... Yup, that's right, I'm back in South Korea. I'm only here in beach-city Busan for a few days.

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It's fascinating how traveling can stimulate your creative juices. One moment you are living your day to day life like a zombie, the next you are in a new place and everything stimulates an urge to describe.

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I'm sitting on the sunny beach in Busan, watching time evaporate. A strange old man comes up to me holding a large open bottle of beer, a paper cup and some chips. "Hey drink some." he says in Korean, I surprise myself by still understanding some Korean. None the less I'm not about to drink from this mystery bottle. I ignore him, but he keeps pushing. "No way!" I say in Korea. He pushes a little more, but I just repeat myself, and finally say "Thanks..." when he shoves off happily, clearly already intoxicated. Later I walk past him passed out on the beach in a corner, hardly moving, embraced by the blinding blur of his vice.

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On the ferry over here, I was happy to notice that a lot of the staff could now speak Japanese, compared to my first time on that boat 8 years ago. Or at least they did at first, but it seemed to dissipate the closer we got to Korea. At first they helped me and explained things in Japanese quite a bit. But as the minutes rolled us closer to Korea, I couldn't find any staff who could speak proficient English or Japanese. It's as if the Japanese speaking staff went into hiding as we approached Korea... I'm standing at a counter on the ferry, filling out some customs forms ahead of time. An old man, who holds himself like a Japanese man, comes up and is clearly confused. I hand him a form and say "These are the forms for Japanese people." and he says "Thanks, but I'm a Japan born Korean." and I say, "Oh these are the forms for Japan born Koreans." and he smiles and thanks me. I should work on the ferry.

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I had a few more memories the next day, but instead of adding them to a new blog I'll just add them here.

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I met a German guy at the hostel, and started walking around with him downtown. We went to a fish market and had some great grilled fish. He also tried living octopus. (I didn't, because it's expensive.) After the fish market, he wanted to go to an amazingly designed theater but we got lost. I stopped a random Korean lady and said in Korean "Excuse me, do you speak English?" and she said "Uhm.. no not really." and so just in case I said in Korean "Do you speak Japanese?" and she switched to Japanese and said "Sure, how can I help you?" and I proceeded to have a clear conversation with her about directions. She was using the wrong register often, but other than that, she was quite good at Japanese. She pulled out a Japanese map and showed us where to go. She then gave us the map. I couldn't help but wonder why she had a give-awayable map written in Japanese in her purse.

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I go into a market and see a zipper tie that looked nice. The salesman comes up and offers it at three times the price of what I bought them for in Seoul. I know I hadn't been back in Korea for awhile so prices might have changed a bit but my instinct told me it was a "tourist price". So I said "You crazy?" in Korean. And got ready to leave the shop. He took that as bargaining and dropped the price in half, which confirmed it was just a "tourist price" originally but at that moment the local cultural demands to bargain just bugged me so I kept trying to leave the shop, and so he dropped the price yet again but I was already heading out kind of annoyed. At the end of a long market hallway, I found a little old lady in a booth with nice looking ties. She offered me one at a little too expensive of a price, but she was nice about it. She took the time to take them all down and show them to me and discuss each one in a Korean/English mix, she told me what she thought would match me, and everything. I decided I should just buy one. As I turned to leave after buying a flowery one, she said in Korean, "Wait a minute." and went behind her counter to grab a can. She said "Coca-cola" and handed it to me. It was a can of a local brand energy drink, not coke, but it was still nice of her to share.

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That's it for now, just thought I would capture a few moments on here before they fade away.

episode of the surreal

A few days ago, I got dressed for work and walked out on to the stairs in front of my place. Immediately my eyes land on some guy at the base of the stairs. He was filming the stairs and mailboxes with a small black HD camera. This seemed so odd and out of place. I looked down at him and said sternly but politely, "What are you filming?" in Japanese. He didnt answer. He pointed his camera down  but just looked icily at me quietly... So I said "Explain yourself!" A little more harshly, but he didnt reply. And so I yelled "Hey, you want me to call the cops?" He kept looking up and just said quietly "Call 'em..." and I found that quite creepy. On the other hand, I had to jump on the train to work and I didn't have time to call the cops--- if I did, I would have to give a statement and everything that would make me late for work.  I didn't know a good route, so I just got noisy; yelling at him to get lost or I'd call the landlord. Seething seemed to change in  his attitude and he quietly came up the stairs and hissed in a strange husky voice "it's a video shoot" and then went down the stairs again. I swore at him but i had no choice---I left for work. But that wasn't the end of the story.


I came home and read an email from that land-lord's daughter. Apparently the creepy guy was an undercover police office, and he was looking for an illegal immigrant that had been hiding in my neighbor's house. My neighbor is a legal Chinese resident in Japan, but his "girlfriend" was a "lady of the night" that had been stealing money out of customers wallets and other devious things. Apparently the police were undercover trying to prove she actually was living there. I almost blew their cover by yelling at them. They arrested her now though, so that's the end of that odd story.