Mr. Beast #2

Driving up a mountain, on a narrow road, wind pushes inside the car and lifts my hair! Is it ok? The feeling is good. Mr. Beast has his window down, but its only a little, I don't know why. The view looking out from the mountain to our right is beautiful. But it’s too big. It’s almost saddening how little I can put in my eyes at a time, seeing everything and only see a little of it. Like being spoken to but only recognizing a few words. Anyway, I feel calm. And wonderful, like a germ in a watercolor painting. The trees are changing color this season, and so we came to watch it. ‘Now is the best time to be here,’ one of the photographers said. Mr. Beast stops the car on the side road near a sign. I can’t read the sign but Mr. Beast does it for me, out loud. I nod and pretend to understand. We walk up a gravel path overlooking the crevice where two mountains meet. The shape of the land, all the lines and dimples and dots, it’s naked bodies. I think of my own. At the top of the dirt path is a little park! Mr. Beast has run ahead. Of course, he had found another bathroom. Mr. Beast had used every bathroom that we’d passed on our way up here, each time upon his return saying, ‘They’ve got very clean bathrooms.’ We take picture of each other near the yellow trees, trees with leaves aflame in red too. So beautiful. Unreal. We say stuff like that. Meanwhile, my eyes are sore. My pupils get closer and closer to collapsing. ‘It’s bright!’ I say to Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast was quiet. After that, I said nothing, and everywhere was silent. We got back into the car, shut the doors and continued climbing up the narrow road toward where we saw hang gliders taking off from higher up.

心の使い方

心の使い方を教えてください。

そうですねえ。それはむずかしいでしょう。初めからが一番かんたんと思います。では、もし、好きな女の人に会いたったら、手紙を書かなくては行けません。それに、ひるご飯に、クラスの間、この女の人のとなりに座ったほうがいいです。

その時、どうしたらいいですか？

その時、かのじょにしつもんを聞いたほうがいい。たといば、「どんな映画が好きですか？」とか「家族は何人ですか？」。その後、電話番語をあげます。あなたもかのじょのをもらいます。

それから？

さいごの事は、あなたの目で、しんせつでかのじょの目に入らなくては行けません。でも、入った時、音をしてはいけません。音をしたら、このきれいで、げんきで、おもしろくて、うれしくて、好きな女の人と結婚しては行けません。

覚えなかったら、まだ帰ってもいいですか？

覚えても、帰っては行けません。

気持ちが悪くなっている。。。

The Private Quarters of a Bald Magician

Here is my song for the upcoming 'I Know Alot About Magic' compilation cd!

you can go to here to hear it: www.myspace.com/davidplellbro

the song:

I saw my card slide from the deck, the man’s eyes had been trained in LA by a had-been actor.
I stole into his dressing room, after the act there was no one around to catch such a serious boy.

I wanna be a magician myself. A real magician.

When Mother came inside and saw me floating off the ground and how she screamed. Yeah, she screamed so high that I could hardly bear it.

‘What kind of monster are you, taking up the body of a little boy whose body won’t do much. What is this demon magic? Would you rather take my husband, surely he’s the better one to haunt.’

I let loose all of my tricks at once, the colors came all of a sudden vomiting from my sleeves the room filled with elephants monkeys and parakeets and my mother’s eyes got so sugary. Surely she became proud!

(something in nogawa park a few days ago)

A woman doesn't keep her diary on top of her pillow. It isn't neat like every other thing in her room, I imagine. So where does it go? In the wastebasket, I imagine seeing the binding of a book stretched by clumsily gathered papers (hundreds) sandwiched between covers. I walk over to the waste basket to investigate my hallucination - My hands are carefully lifting used tissues away like dead skin from someone's body. Beneath the tissues there are lots of things - crumpled receipts, old assignments, a plastic bread bag, empty pill packets, empty beer cans, empty deodorant, this is all typical. Near the bottom, after carefully emptying half of the waste bin, the hallucination occurs again. I see a corner of some think paper cover. From my crotch a surge runs upward, through my body like carbonation and fizzles over my eyes and in my ears. I throw the waste can over like a lever and the whole loot within sprawls the room, sliding across the tacky green tiles stained by dirty feet no doubt. But not everything has been thrown into the room. Something remains in the waste basket. At the bottom, a flat stone. There, at that moment, I heard a noise and had to escape the way I came in. Afraid that someone was coming, I couldn't clean up.

Mr. Beast #1

I went to a city where apples were being sold beneath colorful, striped awnings that flittered and snapped in the wind like carnivores. The shops came every 20 meters with the same signs, the same product, the same table with slices of each type of apple for customers to try. Incentive. Mr. Beast couldn’t get enough of them; standing in his hunched way, bound as if by defiant muscles into a rigid shape. He finished all of the green apple, snatching up one slice after another, then moved on to others once it disappeared. Watching him, it seemed to be he were always hauling some invisible weight behind him. When he moved forward, with his hands in his pockets, he moved as a refrigerator moves, awkward, as if not meant to. Sometimes his hands weren’t in his pockets. Then it was because they holding chopsticks and a bowl of rice below his chin, or holding an apple and a knife, quickly stashing things between his lips where they’d disappear. Mr. Beast loved to drive. When the bus from Tokyo dropped me off in Nagano prefecture, he was prompt and waiting, stopped in his car near the bus stop.

We had met once before.

We had stayed in the same little cabin on the base of Mt. Fuji one weekend. I had finished stowing away my luggage near my futon when I first met and began to fear Mr. Beast. He was sitting silently in a chair in the living room, gripping the ends of the armrests with his long, brutish fingers as though he were prepared to be tortured or put to death. His eyes seemed to reflect nothing, the way a dead person’s eyes do nothing. I sat down, across the low table opposite from him to look at a book I had brought from home, Dave Eggers. Mr. Beast made no reaction to the new company I made for him, he only continued to look (if you could call it looking) diagonally downwards into the ancient wooden table top between us. I couldn't read a single sentence. I had hallucinations of him lunging at me with a knife. I expected he hated me, resented me, would risk anything to destroy my life. Later, in bed, there were more hallucinations. He would be waiting downstairs for everyone to fall asleep and then climb up, one step at a time, each thump heard only to me, and then he would step over the two men sleeping near me, and, careful not to wake them up, he would choke me to death with his huge hands and there would be nothing more to hear than the hush sound of a sleeping bag being dragged across the floor and into the forest. Though I was prepared and waited for him, he never came up the stairs to kill me. The next day everyone went to the tennis courts down the road. A wonderfully kind old couple gave me a small tennis lesson wherein after they tossed a ball at me I would count ‘ONE, TWO, YAMA!’ and hit the ball over their heads, toward Mt. Fuji. But for most of the time I sat on the sideline, on a bench watching them play together. Watching Mr. Beast play. He was magnificent! His arms could hardly bend past a 90-degree angle yet his power and precision with a tennis racket was supernatural. His body moved as if thawing and yet he was a fabulous player. That night, I imagined Mr. Beast climbing the stairs again; this time carrying a tennis racket to bludgeon me and to then stomp my skull like a carton, and then, to mash the rest of me up with his stony fists. To my pleasure, the next morning, I was alive and it was a beautiful day.

Breakfast

As soon as I was awake, I had forgotten my dream.


“Good.”

“Why ‘good?”

“It was just a dream.”

“It could have been interesting. It could’ve been something I’d have wanted to write about.”

“Like what?”

“There was something surprising in it… but I can only almost remember.”

“Have you remembered many dreams?”

“Of course.”

“How many?”

“Maybe a hundred.”

“How many pieces of toast do you want?”

“Just one. I get stomachaches when I eat this early. What a treat, the sun hasn't even eaten yet.”

“The Sun? When do you think that happens?”

“When it falls on the ground."

"Well what, then?

"Plants and people and everything. Imagine how big things would get if the Sun weren’t constantly eating away at them, little by little, like a gentle acid on growing mold, or spontaneous wind on a spider-web.”

“Here’s your bread. I think you’re making this up.”

“Look at your cheeks, you were at the dog park, reading on a bench all yesterday, weren’t you? I met you there at sunset and we talked about our studies until the Sun took back its tentacles, off from our planet, and we got growing again. Couldn’t you tell?”

“That’s just a sun burn. The sun isn’t eating anything. It can’t. All it’s doing is exploding out far away and its energies go everywhere, not just here. Do you disagree with that? That the sun’s rays shoot off in all directions?”

“They go all over, 360 degrees.”

“What about where there is nothing but space? What is the point in sending out a hand where there isn’t anything if you want something to eat?”

“We have to think that, having only two hands. It’s sad, we have to be so precise. It matters to us because to catch a fly we have to be careful not to miss it. Remember that couple we saw?”

“In the bathroom. We saw them sneak in together from that bench, we waited to see if something would happen. Ten minutes later, they came back out, the guy first, and then one after the other they saw us watching them in the distance. They shrieked and ran off laughing! I couldn’t help but laugh too, even though it was awful. If they hadn’t run off laughing, I may have felt upset. But because they did, it was sort of cute.”

“It had to have been planned. Not well planned, but do you remember that silly signal the boy made when he came out of the stall after looking around?”

“Yeah! How funny! Like a ‘Ha!’, and then the girl crept out looking careful too, it was then they both saw us.”

“The sun eats everywhere because it has to, because it cant decide to explode in just one direction. That boy and that girl are catching flies, hiding in ditches, wearing dark clothes, seeking out bridges to go under, lying in wet grass, imitating sleep. Probably, they’re spending all their free time imagining themselves without clothes together, soapy-bodied, floating in hot water, or maybe dry, someplace warm- someplace ridiculous; inside an old train car parked at a historic platform that ceased use, in the cabin of a docked submarine, in the back seat of a limo driven by a robot. But they have to choose always, and plan even, to find privacy, which they want, somewhere, and in a bathroom of all of the dirtiest, infamous places to be alone in... They aren't at all like the sun, who eats everything at once.”

“How fun! It doesn’t seem that sad to me. So what if you’re never in the sun? You don’t get eaten, right?”

“Yeah, that must be right.”

“Hm.”

On this day Lovers prevailed!

The kids outside sound like cats. Those have to be cats. Or are they kids...

the elbows of administrators and my plan to stay

I decided to keep it up. The way I speak in Japanese is idiotic! It’s got to be! The things I say are all in the wrong tenses. And who am I talking about or even to? I forget to use the correct particle in a room with no one else but who I’m talking to and its confusing people. If I can help it, I shouldn't leave Japan in November. Not with knowing that I’ll just have to come back again later, when things have become harder, more inconvenient, more expensive, more distracted. Of course I want this! How sexy bilingualism is! My skin is glittery sometimes here. On either side of my nose its sometimes brittle like a butterfly’s wing is. Snap-able. I have thought of home and thought, it’s hard to be away for so long. I love the soil at Mom’s house. The carpet. I’ll be back so soon. And I should do this. It’s this or that. That. That school in the middle of nowhere that, for now, is culturing the new flu. But that’s not my biggest concern there. I don’t want to drive all that way in no where again yet. I can never forget the smell of the warm summer air as long as I live. Is it the same anywhere? Today, on campus, lying on that vast grass garden of the flat would-be golf course, little kids were riding their little bikes all over the place. Bikes so little that they didn’t need real, rubber tires. Their drivers, tiny, are toys themselves and so their wheels can be plastic. Their game of rock, paper, scissors can be called something else because they speak this new language I’m learning. ( ????, ???, ????! –those little kids playing the game). I really enjoy the thought of understanding something I never would understand otherwise, unless I tried so hard and spent a lot of time. It isn’t long, really, even. I would write stories in English here, I would compose songs and get a broken heart and write good and then bring all that stuff back to the United States with me and my new cool trick I’ll have learned if I stay. Anyway, I put it into motion. I want to stay and take advantage of the adventure that’s begun so easily. One other thing, Mom. In 1955, Japan became so rich. The economy went flying upward. Before then, people here used to eat lots of rice, vegetables, some fish moderately, and meat rarely. Since then, food culture here has become internationalized. Western breakfast is popular. Bread with jam and butter. A banana (Yum!). What this is all for is… people eat lots of meat here. Here, it’s almost impossible to eat only vegetables unless you come up with some plan, make connections, and cook yourself. Protein is something we've talked a lot about… And hey! I had forgotten about that milk thing in America! That incident where for five years they were injecting cows with a hormone that they didn't realize affected the growth of kids. I was part of that generation of kids! I wonder what if I have any unrealized abilities. Super strength, or x-ray vision. I hope things are well, I love you.

-David

The arrival of a dangerous Typhoon

From your bed, you can hear it rain. Now is the same as it has been for four days; you walk into class 2 minutes late with a chilly, wet head and soaking clothes like you were standing in a shower, the windows are all blurry, that sound is always there, every leafy thing outside is tremoring. Some people have become real worried. A typhoon has been meant to come. The rain has made my bike wet, my notebooks have gotten wet. The bikes at school, parked in their rows of hundreds of them, looking like such junk, all get wet. Tonight it’s here, the enormous typhoon is outside the window and I can hear all the rain hitting from bed. I’ve heard things about it (the typhoon), like that it roughed up Thailand and flooded everything and killed people. It's out there now, wanting to flood my pretty, narrow neighborhood, my tidy ant-farm that I live in. The ambulance is screaming tonight, like every other night, with that loud-speaker-voice that is saying something like, “This is an ambulance, please stop your cars and let us through, we are an ambulance.” Eventually people do pull their cars over and people beneath umbrellas do stop crossing the street so it can get by. The ambulance’s whine sinks away and goes beneath the sound of 10 lb. rain carried down onto the cobblestone, the whistle of wind, and the thud of potted-plants falling over. My eyes have barely opened from coming out of sleep, it isn’t enough to be afraid. There is only that terror, and I am nowhere yet.
The morning comes and I wake up at 9:20, but, as always, it is a small failure. My alarms are set at 7:50, 8:20, 8:30 8:50, they’re scattered like proximity mines that I always manage to disarm. I need to find a better way to trick myself. To have myself believe that there is some emergency, that “GET UP NOW!” or else. I climbed out of bed and put on my pants that I wore the other day and picked a shirt from a hanger in my temp. closet, the same as in the basement of the house in Spokane, Andrea’s. I am dressed now, and I walk through the laundry room and into the living room and there’s a conversation at the table. Renato has come again for an interview at Konami, except that in Japan they don’t just give you an interview, they have these pre-interview seminars where hopefuls submit lots of documents and answer questions and the like, and then after that, out of the hundred applicants maybe ten or twenty are picked. Renato’s Konami pre-interview seminar is today at 2:00. Okaasan is there at the table with Renato and they’re talking. I’ve stepped into something. Hana-chan (this may be the first ever mention of Hana-chan in this blog), the cat, is lying next to my feet. What I’ve stepped in didn’t come from Hana-chan. White, warm Sunrays are coming in through the glass slider-door to the little garden. Looking from Hana-chan to the outside, the sky drops like a curtain into my vision. Unbelievably blue. I think of machines flying through it infallibly, making straight white lines. The leaved things are still shaking around in spurts. The wind is still here. It’s sweeping away every speck of cloud from up there.
I get on my bike, then I'm at school, gliding into the bike parking lot that's to the left of the building where I have my class. All the bikes in the lot, save a few small clusters, lie on their sides on the ground. Almost every one, vandalized. Junk again. The men who tidy up the bike lot aren’t righting the bikes, they’re not around like they usually are: standing together observing the students or formally spacing each bike in the lot. It's a diligent job. They must have given up against the wind. I don't know where they go. How sparse the bikes are today, there are less than usual. The trains stopped running this morning. The Chuo for sure has stopped running. The sky is swallowing me as I look up into it. It is fully over the top of me. BLUE. I’d like to bring it closer, looking so kind. After class, Rachel fights me on the neat grass lawn, the vast one, with trees placed conveniently for shade, with cicada skins, shells, like ghosts!, lying here and there to trick you, scare you, fascinate you, make interesting presents for your friends who like bugs. The Sun feels warm. Before the lemonade can that I bought empties, I take the last sip of all pulp and, while lowering my head again after its all down, a tiny Japanese kid stumbles by in a blue jumpsuit saying some strange words, sucking on his hands, not looking where he’s going.

Journal Practice 2

今日はくもりです。雨がふります．今、寒くて、くもと雨がある．私の日本語のじゅぎょうは毎日十時十分から、十二時四十分までです。時々そのクラスだけがあるけど、今日は後でほかのクラスがあった．このクラスはたいていとてもつまらないです．四時間です！午前はたいてい家でテレビですもうを見ながら、しゅくだいをします。それから、さらをあらって、行きます．学校に行きますね．そうですね。あっ！草間山にメールをまだおくりません！いいね．メールを送りました。明日、吉祥寺でラメンを食べて見ようと思います。アメリカのラメンと日本のラメンはぜんぜんちがいます．アメリカより日本はおいしいですよ。おなかがすいた時、たいていあまい食べ物を食べにいきます．たといば、ケーキとかアイスクリームとかチョコラトでしょう．でも、それで、おなかが痛くなります．安い食べ物を食べた時、おなかが痛いでしょう．させぼはおいしかった．友だちと行って、アボカドバーガーを食べて、お酒をのみました．後はとてもつかれたんだ．

Practice Journal

明日は友だちが新宿に行っている間、私は家にいる．多分、おふろに入いったり、食事を作ったり、こえんでさんぽうしたりする。この本、このさっか、エッガルズ、とても面白くて、よく読みたいけど、最近は少しいそがしくて、よく読めない．日本人の友だちを作りたいので、日本語が上手になりたい．たといば、『こんにちは！もう食べましたか．じゃ、一緒に上野でよるご飯を食べに行きませんか．ほんとにおいしいでしょう！このレストランはピザを作っています。りょうりするの人はイタリアから来ました！だから、このピザはとてもおいしかったよ！友だちをつれって来てください。先週の週末は上野に初めて行きました。三人の友だちと電車に乗って．。。しかし、ひるご飯を食べに行きませんでした。美術館ではたくさん古い事を見ました．たといば、この大きいかおの近くインドから来ましたの人のしゃしんを取りました．今、コンピューターを売っています。でも、コンピューターを打つのが好きだと思います。電車は便利ですね！いいえ！不便です！トイレは大きいですね！行きたいです。もちろん。

Musashi-Koganei and Kids

Once I went the other way of Musashi-Sakai station. Musashi-sakai is on the west side of Tokyo, and so when I go out, I’m always going east. Rachel found this park in Musashi-Koganei that was supposed to be nice. We had a day off of school on Thursday and there would be another international student retreat, where they would be playing yard games at the moment we were standing on the train to Musashi-Koganei. Because of the day-off, the park was full of kids and parents. Not at first. At first it was just trees and lots of shade and an old train platform and more long and dead grass, but past a few bathrooms, past the empty tents and the empty stage with just a latter on it, and past the place where I discovered how inhuman Rachel is with how high she can kick her legs, and then past where we lay down in the grass and ate her little sushi’s. We saw some playground stuff with kids on it. Then we saw a bigger, more complex hill of slides and climbing holes and things and we wanted to go on it and took pictures, and in that same spot we finally uncovered that this park was a huge fun party for kids! Hundred of devices built for fun! Kids sliding through the air clutching two parallel rope swings, getting back on again and again and again! How fun! Even a baby wants to! The babies here understand. The babies point upward to the height tabs, wanting it, whatever it is, wanting to jump up and try to slap it like the bigger kids and the two white foreigners who are adults and who are taking pictures of babies because they are so cute! Their mothers are cute! The way they interact! Rachel lights a cigarette. It’s funny, we thought nothing of it at the time. We thought it was fine because there were no ‘No Smoking’ signs on the road in the park, so it was probably ok. But, in hindsight, I think that the campaign against public smoking that happened included in its argument that cigarettes are held at eye-level with children and that children were being burned. At present, here we are at a children’s park play area, burning the end of a cigarette and trying to kick the highest point of the sign that doesn't say “No Smoking." She kicks a plastic water bottle off my shoulder in a dress. An ambulance comes into the play area whining and red and drives almost past us. Just around the corner, you can see the tops of little people’s heads stopped and looking at something, who were always there waiting for the ambulance to come with their heads poked just over the hill for us to see but we haven’t noticed until now. The ambulance parks with it’s top half visible to us. People are running under the hill where we can’t see what has happened. Adults wander, kids sprint to see what happened to who and we are watching from afar. Rachel’s cigarette is burning up and shriveling and she's squinting. Another ambulance comes. We walk on a little, away from the ambulances, away from the other side, the giant grass/stone-step sled hill that kids are still sliding all the way down, and we walk to some flowers. We wonder about going in them- there’s a little bar between us, all the way around. And the bees are working in there.


(Photo Credit for Rachel M. D.)

Shinjuku (Part 2)

Shinjuku is big. At first I wasn’t sure that it was because all the stations, from the inside, look just the same. They all have the same white and something tiles, the same color-coded routes hung from the ceiling (Chuo Line, Yamanote Line, these are mine that I use: Orange and Green), the same little shops selling stuff, coffee shops, the same beeping of the gates where people swipe their wallets across that green circle to get into the station. It’s convenient having that card. It’s in my wallet too. I put money on it when I have to, and just slide my wallet to come in and get out, and there’s never any stopping ever required. Most people use them. In Shinjuku, we’re all still here, the same party coming from Tokyo station: Rachel, Nick, and myself. All of us are so thirsty, but we don't tell that to each other until later. The station is enormous! It’s 'the largest station in Japan!' is what someone told me. We want, are on the streets now, to find the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building for a reason we know. It’s why we are going. The reason. Underground again, we’ve turned upside-down somewhere, we’re jogging on horizontal escalators, hurrying, Where is it! From the street... It’s gigantic! It’s god holding two wrecking balls on top of palms on top of arms reached skyward. Where will they come down?
This is the Shinra Building from Final Fantasy VII. We walk into the all-concrete courtyard, a giant slanted half circle with benches on the aloof edges. We survey the cleanness, the fountain at the base, where a disc would lock into a Discman. There are signs that we follow into the underneath of concrete, towards the glass entrance of the Building. The signs are the same as what we thought. We celebrate without celebrating. We follow them into a door and into a line of people. The elevator that we're waiting for arrives when it comes and opens and empties. It’s empty! We will be in there next.
We’re going to die in here. It’s so stupid! It was irresponsible to have come here… Squished into the corners of the gold, mirrored elevator, it reminds it’s customers of the inside of a crumpled-gold foil space capsule. We’re going up. 10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27… 37,38,39,40… We’re going to die in here! It’s become so hot. We have not water. We are meeting the atmosphere. I sweat. There are only hushed voices. I wipe my forehead like an egg timer because there isn’t room to open my arms... 43,44,45. We are where it's going. The Observation Tower. Cool air rushes in when the doors open… wait, no. Not at all. Cool air only waits lazily as we walk out of the elevator. We can breath well again. Around the restaurant and souveneer shop, we see the metropolis before seeing the windows. 'This building is Shinra.' The city spreads every way forever and fog covers up the rest of the world. 'I’m here, this high in the air,' I’m telling myself. The sun is setting over a huge metal mess. It’s so well organized. It’s so complex. The Sun seems easy. The Sun is turning red, surrounding is pink and purple, some yellow, some blue. I’m in Japan. This is anime. This is Shinra.
At places like these, I would feel here, or I would feel elsewhere, observing myself observing massiveness. Knowing it, I want to become primal to get out of my head. I always pick a vowel, and a consonant, I always pick A, I always like W… No, I decide that language won't help this at all. Thinking isn't touching. I have to feel things. I imagine my feet: they're holding my body up on the 45th floor of the Government Building. 'It's real.' It begins to feel real.