Day Trip to Tokyo (Part 1)

After school, we get together on the slant of the popular grass mound. To watch the on-campus dormitory presentations- a group that's large enough to fill a dormitory with themselves and their stuff stands in crane-ish formation on top, headed by white dudes in costumes. These guys are taking turns to walk forward, destroy their own costumes in some slap-stick comical way, and then introduce themselves (and continue being surprising or comical) screaming in Japanese. I know the fat American guy inside the cardboard ballot box, he, the loud, sloppy, terrible stereotypical American student, doesn’t speak Japanese. In Japanese 2, he curses it every moment he’s trying, every moment he drowns out the voices of everyone with his jabbing, wet, forceful pronunciation, it’s like he’s being dunked in water and popping up to gasp and deflate of his terrible, wet voice. I know this guy. He doesn’t know shit! Yet, he’s doing it, introducing himself. He’s regurgitating what he’s been told to regurgitate. After a rant, he backs up the hill, back into formation.
Nick and Rachel are watching with me. Today we’re going to the Imperial Palace. Soon, it’s over, the boys, white dudes and all, run away screaming and flailing. We leave the thing and walk to the bus stop, up the long runway entrance road to the college (which used to be an actual runway for planes before the college). The bus comes and gets us, we go into the ear and I pay my coins (210 yen) 1 (100), 2 (200), 3 (210)! GREEN. We sit in the back while the bus moves to Musashi-sakai and I worry about my bike. I left it unlocked. There’s a little key that you’re supposed to pull out of it after parking so that the spokes are blocked by a metal loop. All bikes have this. This morning though, I came crashing into the parking lot late. Trying to shove my bike between others, parked bikes starting falling over to the left of mine. Dominoes! Grabbing the furthest fallen bike in fall, I stopped the chain. And in all this embarrassment (there’s more that I won’t go into), after it was resolved I forgot to take my key with me. We arrive at Musashi-sakai and I call my host mom to ask what she thinks. She says it should be ok and I’m relieved. I didn’t want to go back for it, the Imperial palace closes at 4pm! (it’s 1:30) and the center of Tokyo is about 30 minutes away by train.
We get on the train together. Watching the outside- the buildings, so massive and decorated and numerous, mostly decorated, like they’re wearing armor. Everywhere. So many buildings. Watching the river the runs along this railway, my stomach is getting sick looking at it. I look away, at the white guy opposite of me in the train. Always surrounded by Japanese people. He’s probably not here for long because he’s giving me that look like, ‘hey, I bet you speak English, let’s discuss something.’ Which is a thought I have had numerous times since being here. But somehow I manage to feel in power. ‘I’m not here to baby you! Foreigner!’ I manage to politely think at him. We get off the train into Tokyo station where there are so many businessmen. Salary men. They’ve been described elsewhere, you probably know them though, if you’ve ever thought of Tokyo. But if the term is strange, here’s my perception of them: They wear nice clothes, work overtime in them, drink heavily in them after work, are exhausted, think of love hotels, think of boating, think of drinking heavily, work often, more often than anything, sleep while standing in the train across town. Seem sad. Seem miserable.
Nick, Rachel and I cross the salary men, who are all stopped before the end of the shade like vampires, and stop at the edge of the crosswalk. The buildings here are gods. So heavy. The Earth can’t hold them. How can it? There are cranes in the middle of them, building them higher and higher. We’re walking under them, unnoticed by them, toward the green. Outside the imperial palace there is a gang of policemen at every entrance. We avoid them, trying to find the right entrance but then have to ask, time is running out, the place will close, we’ve come a long way. The closest guy in a uniform, who has been watching us so cautiously as we approach, says, ‘This is a private entrance, the public entrance is back where you came from.’ ‘Thanks’ I think we say. We’re running back to where we came from past foreigners who aren’t running. ‘What fools!’ I manage to gain power again. ‘This isn’t America! Where running is uncool! This is Japan, everyone does this! This makes more sense to do! Jesus! Run!’ We get tired at the bridge and cross it walking. We cross the bridge looking at the Queen of England’s swan, floating in the giant mote. We get inside and go under an old metal/wood gate. I know its old, the metal looks like wood! Or is it wood? It’s cool. It’s big, that’s why. We get a free ticket from the kiosk and begin our walk inside the walls of the Imperial Palace. After turning a handful of times and walking for a while past neat things, we come across something unthinkable. It’s unthinkable that this exists in life. An expanse. Of flat, green grass, cropped hugely into an organic shape, round. It’s like a cell from god’s eye. Forever, there is green grass. And above, everywhere above, thousands of dragonflies. I feel here, but it's hard to believe. It’s really beautiful. And here people some people are sleeping on the grass, one man’s journal lies open while he does tai chi beneath a tree. Further up, a little girl roars into the air, surrounded by grass. Her dad watches from ten feet behind, crouching. The imperial palace will close soon. We walk around, posing for pictures that we take, enjoying the green, enjoying the contrast of the vast garden we are in and the machine-ish horizon, with the massive armored buildings that are being built higher by cranes from their centers jaggedly discomforting the sky. But the sky is blue and beautiful. The sun is getting emotional. It’s time for us to leave; there’s something else we want to see today. We walk back to Tokyo station.

Saw a crow feather.

I want to remember something about being small.

I am walking on top of a small plain of dark soil near the cafeteria (every flat surface is geometric, an aesthetic treat for crows) beneath the reaches of heavy trees. Here, there is something I’ve touched before, at one time, a thing exactly like this, that’s below me now, was in my small hands, spun by my treaded fingertips. A black feather- pressed down into wet dirt with it’s white stem, a bone, curving up, praying without a sound or movement. No song. The tiny black lashes which make it up... once in my fingers. 'Little by little,' Little Fist, pulling up the lashes again. Little Fist, holding the white stem with its messy, mangled black lashes (like they'd just woken up in a scary place), pulled upward so hard to make them pretty. I would find the last black lash sometime later stuck on my shirt sleeve. The spine became alone, became an unimportant piece of something. Something not necessarily unfixable, but uncared for, less, unthought of. The feather, whole, how pretty. But, the stem, like plastic, probably garbage, probably someone’s litter. Terrible, ugly. How strange- while playing, while petting and twirling a feather, I never once thought the feather, a crow.

Kichijoji festival/Dancing with Strangers

Today was a festival. I don't know exactly what it was. But what it was, was those robes everybody was wearing, those thin blue cloaks with some kanji printed on the back like a team name. Like everyone had the same last name. It was all those hundreds of people with the cloaks lifting the same big gold throne on their shoulders and yelling and choppily walking, dancing down the street together, and somewhere else there were taiko drums, I felt it on my skin. That vision of their arms… Those flailing arms! Banging those two thick sticks on the center drum, making it loud! The flute, the chime, the simple hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit behind it. So consistent. It was beautiful. I’m in the back row, watching the arms of men flail like crazy making sounds of tension, taking turns keeping the drum going, I am smiling like crazy and drinking my can of beer I have bought. It was those same people, in the cloaks, smashing sticks into drums, that are wearing small pants. If they were men, they might have been wearing no pants at all, just one thick, white rope. Babies were wearing this white rope, blowing whistles, running around, others chased them with smiles. Above us, lots and lots of those red paper lights hung on wires along both sides of our narrow streets. The exciting streets. We get another beer. More beer. The police eye us, us sitting, us speaking, us sipping, eating a small sandwich at night when the festival has wound down.
At the park in Kichijoji, we are drunk. We are thinking in our heads of cuddling with each other somewhere but know there's nowhere. We’re sitting, facing the water. Behind us, that guy is still playing guitar and singing. We want to dance! There is a Japanese girl dancing there alone! We get up and act silly in front of the music player. His voice is so hard and broken and so persistent. Like someone always driving their car with one tire missing. It is unbelievably silly. We are (some of us) not so drunk. More drunk Japanese strangers join! We’re dancing around, laughing at everything. Everything is funny. The music is funny. The dancing is funny. The people are silly. We are silly. We speak some Japanese. They speak some English. They tease us. They want our girls. But they won't. It is so nice.

ICU Health Examination

You talk to the guy in the hall to get the cup. The one in the lab coat. When you see him, his arms are filled-up (full with clip boards and one long stack of white cups, hugging all inside his elbows), he pulls one cup part-way out for you and then you pinch the rim and hoist it out. It’s the cup that was there at that wedding you were at. That white, thick paper-cup that was waiting in numbers at the table with pink juice and bubbles in it. This cup you have is empty. You know what to do with this cup.
Today is a health examination for all the new students at ICU. If you look into the big room where most of the testing is being done, you see all the stations. They will take your height, your sight, take your pressure, your blood, your hearing, and lastly, Station #9, a woman will wait behind a curtain for you. But for now, you aren’t even okay to get in line yet. You know what this cup is for.
The cup is for the woman at station #1, which is just in front of both bathrooms. You are there, in the full bathroom. Facing the urinal, putting your penis half-way into the cup, you pee a little into the cup. They just want a little! Outside of the bathroom, the line is an accordion of co-ed kids holding open Dixie cups of their own piss. In the front of the line, Lady #1, in a mask and gloves, dips a pH stick down through your pee and lays the stick across the top of the cup. Looking into your cup, it’s obvious that your pee isn’t as dark as the guy who is just ahead of you. You become proud. Your pee is in Lady #1’s hands briefly and she drags the stick through, lays it on top, writes down numbers. (The stick is green, which, universally, is good. Right? Green means go.) You take your form that she has written something on that has your name printed on it and take it to the big room with you, where the other number stations are busy processing the perpetual line through. After having your height taken by this cute machine that comes down from the sky and gently pats you on the top of your head once before climbing back up to its starting point, you are ready for the musical chairs! You’re actually still in line. But now the line is a snaking chair trail where you scoot one or two chairs forward every time someone gets up at the front. At the front, you’re asked to sit down by one of the two people doing the eye check. You look in at little ‘U’s and tell them where the opening is, for instance, up, down, left, or right. For this ‘U,’ you say ‘up.’ If the ‘U’ actually opens the direction that you think you see it open as they get smaller and smaller, you get proud. Next, your blood pressure is taken by a woman in a mask. “When did you eat breakfast?” “I had a little lunch, a little rice” “…When did you have that?” “An hour ago, is that okay? I didn’t know we weren’t supposed to eat anything.” “It’s okay.” There is no winning here, just sitting and being squeezed by this arm thing. Next, a long line again. People have seen this coming. This is the one that hurts. People think about past experiences that they’ve had. Peoples’ eyes are glassy. At the front of this line, two women get blood from your arms with needles. They want three vials of it! Once there, you sit down and they shake the vials in one hand to kindly show you how much. It’s a wrist rotation, not a swinging, not involving the elbow or shoulder, their hands roll back and forth. Your arm is down. Belly up. It’s soon. Something sharp will poke you! Aa--- She is the best you’ve had. She is fantastic. You want to tell people about her. You need to sit down now, with the others who have bandaids, and apply pressure to your hole for 5 minutes. In 2 minutes, they’ll ask for you at #8, across the hall. They’ll get you, bring you across the hall. #8 is the listening thing. Press the button with the rhythm of the quiet beeps. Tch-tch-tch. Tch---tch---tch. You get better as the sounds get a little higher. You get your form back from her after she’s written on it. Your form is almost full of numbers in boxes you cant read the labels for. You don't even have an idea of your own height or weight because you were raised counting inches, feet, lbs. You're clueless! It’s ok. It probably hasn't changed a lot. Your weight. Your height. 145lbs. 5’11’’. The woman behind the curtain labeled #9 calls people in. She’s wearing a mask. You think that she wants to test your genitals, to make you cough. You listen to see if people are coughing in there. You walk in through the curtain when it’s your turn. She asks you questions in English because you didn’t try to act like you could understand Japanese like you did before with the blood pressure woman. With English, she's blessing you like some adorable spirit-woman. She wears a stethoscope. It’s about to happen, something wonderful. The connection proved to be possible between humans that makes your rib cage feel like melting mint. She asks sincerely, closely, behind thin glasses, gazing kindly, through a surgical mask, “May I listen to the sound of your heart?” "...Yes." She softly presses on my chest, through my shirt, on four separate inches of me, listening through those tubes. I feel like peppermint. The corners of my lips are uncontrollable.

Akihabara/Meeting Alex

In the morning, I get up. Renato is ready to go. Wearing that one suit that he wears to his meetings with people. It’s something I am beginning to notice in Japan. People often wear the same clothes, generally have one nice outfit. Which is lucky for me, because I only brought one with me. I walk out of my bedroom, through the laundry room, into the house. The living room is asleep beneath a blanket of cool, pale light. It’s let in by the sliding doors, it’s coming through the transparent curtains. Renato talks with me at the table while I eat the morning yogurt (Okaasan makes this yogurt herself, I don't know what it’s made of, it’s bland until you put in honey and bananas). I have put the honey into the yogurt, laying it out in a spiral, the way I store the garden hose below the window outside of my house in Spokane. I have sliced the banana into inch-fat circles. I have an inch-fat banana circle impaled on the tip of my spoon. We need to walk to the station soon, we need to get there by 10:00. The time now is 9:30. The station is about 15 minutes away. We’ve walked there before together. Yesterday. But when the phone rings and speaks, the plan changes, and now Okaasan and Otoosan are coming back from their tennis game, they’re going to drop us off at Musashi Sakai station. The door knocks. It gets open. There they are, with their visors. No rackets though. I’m not finished eating. I finish quickly. Wash dish quick. Brush teeth quick. I get in the back seat saying, sorry sorry sorry sorry. And then Musashi Sakai is there again; a building that I have seen on the LIFE game board. I know that once I’ve held this place in my hand, upside-down. Renato and I walk through the maze of up stairs, down stairs, lefts and rights, stairs that go up and down, and then we get to the platform. I have put 2000 yen more on my Suica, my train pass, just to be sure. The train hisses politely coming in. Something becomes airtight somewhere. That sound is there. The doors open and in twenty seconds we are leaving Musashi Sakai, standing on the train toward Akihabara, Electric City. But it wont be electric city in the morning. It’s too hot and too bright. It is hot again. We’re going to meet Renato’s Welsh friend from older school days in England or Scotland. We meet him outside the main exit of Akihabara station. This is Alex. Short dark hair. Fair skin. Some eyes above his white dress shirt. His eyes are blue. His cheeks are red despite his fairness, like he’s cold. Like he’s got something in there. Our goal is to sell back Alex’s little laptop computer because he just got one for free. Now he’s got four and doesn't need all of them. “My apartment looks like the bloody Batcave!” (he said bloody, right? I saw Boondock Saints!) So we go around in the heat, back and forth, in and out of computer stores. They are more like aisles, the stores. Akihabara is a place where tiny electronics sellers have tiny stores all over at every turn on both sides of the street and up ontop of those stores and on top of those stores, more and more stores. You can buy all kinds of cheap (and expensive) junk here. Renato pulls a little device that beeps when you whistle (so you can't lose your keys) off its stem while Alex watches another computer guy frisk his tiny laptop. There’s a little squeeze whistle that comes with it too, so if you can’t whistle yourself, here you go, use this thing, the squeeze whistle. The guy frisking Alex’s computer now is a lean bean computer nerd. He’s offering 4000 yen for the computer, about 40 dollars. Our offers so far have been: 100 yen ($1), redirected, redirected, 0 yen ($0), and now, this. This is good enough. Renato has been having to help. Alex has lived here for four years but can’t really speak Japanese, “What is he saying?” to Renato. Alex works as an English teacher for something called Gabba. Anyway, the guy wants Renato’s information, why? I don't know, it’s not his computer, but he insists. He says he’ll need 40 minutes for the inspection. We go to the ‘Excelsior’ Café (which seems silly to me, the name) to get some lunch. A potato salad and tomato and some other meat sandwich is what I buy for 350 yen. Alex has, along the way, along our long walks around into old video game cartridge stores and action figures collectable places, some really cool stuff has been seen this morning, but it’s also hot, it’s tiring. But Alex. He's bought a Transformers action toy and opens it up at Excelsior café at the table. Renato and Alex and turning this ice cream truck into two robot-killing robots. “They’re supposed to be twins.” In the show, they speak with ebonics, which Alex says became controversial, but shouldn't have. Renato has a meeting soon, so he’ll be leaving. It’s 2:00. Renato, Alex, and I walk back to Akihabara Station with one less computer and one more action figure and say our goodbyes. I am alone on the railway after Renato gets off in Shibuya or somewhere. Next: Musashi Sakai, is what it says on the screens in the train.

Friends/Shibuya

I am walking away from the house and heat is in the air, trying to get into my body. The sweatshirt, which is a lump in my backpack (which Okaasan said wouldn't be necessary to bring because today it will be hot all day and night) is collecting warmth and handing it off as sweat onto my back. Renato and I are walking the 15 minutes to Musashi Sakai station from Kusamasan’s house, we’ve just started. We turn onto a main street and balanced down our side’s narrow sidewalk, pushing against the fence to let bicyclist by. My fingernails have become very long. Maybe the shape of them makes it hard to fingerpick my guitar, maybe the long, flat sides that cling to the strings are the reason that my having finger-picking finger nails makes finger picking much more difficult. On the corner is a 100 yen store. It’s fine with Renato if we go in to the 100 yen store so I can buy some fingernail clippers. So we do, and I do (though yet, I haven’t used them, I will use them now… I feel better). Renato is British sounding. Though he was born in Peru, he lived in England for 8 years, before immigrating here. He is the eight years former exchange student of the Kusamas, and has been living in Kyoto for five years getting a sociology degree at Kyoto University; he is very, very good at the Japanese language. And at languages in general, I suspect. He is fluent in Spanish, English, and Japanese. And probably something else. He is clever. He is British. He has that British charm. Looks good with a mustache (I’m sure), although he hasn’t worn one since I’ve known him, which has not been long. But his “five-o-clock shadow” gives a pretty good idea of the type of facial growth he is capable of. It’s all very classy. Classy chap. Really good guy. Renato. We arrive at musashi-sakai station and meet Rachel and Gwen and Eva and Ericka, and Maud (Who is from France and who, interestingly, I think, speaks almost as little English and she does Japanese. And so to communicate with the other girls, they mix English with Japanese and get the point across. And her chest is pierced. Not her nipples, you know, just on top. We don’t really communicate a lot yet.) We get on the train to shibuya with all of us, Renato too. Renato is meeting someone at Yoyogi park for business opportunity, networking sorts of stuff. The rest of us all are going to Shibuya to walk around. Shibuya is one of the places you see on television, with the big intersection and the big, huge TVs built into the faces of buildings. It’s tremendous. It’s enormous! The height of the buildings is dizzying. We’re out of the crowded train (Which, by the way, was crowded. Though Rachel says that it isn’t usually so crowded, now is the most crowded she has seen since she has been here. Inhaling in that train… you know the feeling, you can feel the sickness of someone else going down your throat when you breathe it in, it’s sort of a minor scratchy, itching feeling. That’s what breathing in the train became after 5 minutes of obliviousness, although altogether it was a short ride.) So now we’re outside, in Shibuya, faced by these mountainous buildings screaming advertisements that I don’t understand. Mostly. The streets are narrow and crowded in Shibuya. The six of us… six?... me, Rachel, Eva, Ericka, Maud, and Gwen. The six of us are trying to follow each other and are losing each other, getting separated, getting partially reunited except for one person, being alone and searching for the others (me once), being separated while walking, because Rachel and I will walk fast but the others won't. Everyone is stimulated. Ericka is afraid to get lost, so she will always stay next to you. She has lived in Northern New York state her entire life but has never been to New York City. It has been a few hours. We ate. I ate salad, because I wasn’t very hungry and it was cheap! 100 yen! When night comes, it’s just Rachel and I because the others decided it was best to go back and have free dinner. Rachel and I eat at Mos Burger (we shortly mock the name as we enter) I have the TERIYAKI BAGA and she has the SOMETHINGSOMETHING KATSU BAGA. She is usually vegan. These Bagas are small. Afterwards we think to go to Yoyogi park, because a Brazilian festival is going on there! Maybe Still! We don't know which way is North, so instead we go sing Karaoke. We’re on the 6th floor, in room 601. Our two ‘presents’ are a pineapple filled with pineapple ice cream (hers), and an apple filled with apple ice cream (mine). The drinks are unlimited, but we paid for it. We didn’t really make the unlimited drink thing worthwhile, and we didn't have songs in mind to sing part of the time. It was very very fun. Shibuya is exciting. Partially having-had-some-alcohol, we get back into Shibuya station and we go into this train. This is the first time I have ever sat on the train, there are lots of empty seats. There are very few people on this train. I get back to Musashi-sakai at 9:30 and walk toward where I think my home is at. I’ve never walked to the station from home except for today with Renato. It’s dark and peaceful. I am comfortable here. (Most) People are to themselves here. I don’t look behind me much. I am not paranoid much walking into the dark alleyway alone. My house should be close. A few lefts up (I know only one street name, ‘Nishino’), I see my house. I open the gate. I close the gate behind me. I unlock the three locks. There is laughing inside.

Japanese crying television show

A narration. A man’s voice is rolling over the video feed of watermark images spliced with a panel of people listening to the story, watching the watermarks on a separate screen. Everyone is holding back tears. The camera zooms slow in on their faces. It’s one and then the next. It’s trying to pull out their sadness to let us see. The watermark becomes a boiling bowl of yellow soup, strips of meat floating in like memories. A box in the corner screen shows the panel, they’ve all receded to let the watermarks become frontward. The panel will watch from the corner with lips pursing… eyes blinking… triangle faces, base side down, dragging downward. They cry. Every one of them does. The video comes to an end. They sigh, relieved by a joke. Then all together dig spoons into the soup and feed themselves. The video is over. Tears are still stuck to their cheeks. Next, a dessert. Someone’s tragic story (I assume, I can’t understand Japanese anyway) ends with the consumption of what was his favorite meal. This is a metaphor for life. Isn’t it? The video feed switches, commits. But to who? To what? It can’t decide. We see, The Faces. Then, a golden Dessert. Then the faces. Then the dessert! The faces! The Dessert! More Crying! What in the hell is happening?!

typhoon day

I am on a shore watching tsunami swells roll toward the house. We rush to the basement (my mom’s emergency advice for tornado) and the weak window breaks open, and I knew that it would after remembering it’s one broken latch. We hold our breath underwater… Slowly decide that we must get back outside, it should be safer outside. More swells, a wave pool in an empty aircraft hanger. I’ trying to move away from the wall, where waves go to punish, kamikazes heavily fall onto the aluminum, then get quieter and quieter. I wake up from my dream. I’m dry. I need to pee. The floor in the living room and then in the entrance way is all groaning wood. It’s making my presence known. It’s ok. Today a typhoon will hit Tokyo. There is rain. But things are still. Could it have hit last night? Did I misunderstand? All the leaves outside are stone, asleep. The wind is not pushing. I take a Vitamin C and Centrum with a glass of water and a peanut butter flavored granola bar.

Bus/Kusama

I get out of the plane. I get through immigration and customs in ten minutes. It’s all so easy. They don't look in my bags even! There isn’t a flood of people waiting for us at the narita airport, just flocks here and there. I try to figure out phone numbers from my Verizon phone which only will work at this airport. I buy a ticket, I talk to Okaasan for the first time, she is a baby chick, she is so kind. The bus stop that is mine is #9. The Bus to Kichijoji Station comes at 5:35 sharp, I have been in line for 20 minutes and have mistaken only one bus to have been mine. I take my guitar on the bus too. When it comes, I give my bag to the baggage guy who places it into the body of the bus, I walk into the ear and cash my ticket, fit my guitar up in the shelf, and sit down next to a window on the right side near the back. I meet Mike in a minute. He asks in very proper English whether it would be alright if he sat next to me and I say yes. He is married, a father of children, a businessman of business, a young father, my tour guide. He shows me the names and ways and reasons of the city on the otherside of the glass and of the bus itself, what the bus driver is saying. Apologizing for the traffic. There must be an accident. A police car with a red spinning siren rushes by. Rainbow bridge passes without us over it, the usual route. This bus driver is going another way trying to dodge the traffic probably. It’s gotten dark and we pass ginza. Very expensive, he says, the most expensive place in Tokyo to buy. Kichijoji is close, I think of waking Mike (I have his business card in my wallet), he wakes up on his own. Outside, the air is the coolest Japanese air that I’ve felt in my life. A woman is saying my name, she is mine. She is with a man who shakes my hand. He is mine. They take me into a taxi just before a group of girls. The woman, Okaasan, talks to me in Japanese, sits with me in the back, I try hard, I smile, stop, I stop a lot. We’re home and I enter between them. Soft, low bells ring on the other side of the door, fixed at the top. My room, past the laundry room, is beautiful, and I move in. I take a shower, then we have a first dinner, tonkatsu, pork cutlet. The house favorite I think. There are adventures that I have to write about in hindsight, the first two days have been spent recalling the first day. Note to self: remember the bicycle ride, the college campus, the gym, the grocery store, the restaurant, the next day, the bicycle ride, the college, the department store, the rain, the cellphone store, the umbrella, the parking garage, the music at home.

airport/airplane

I do it all. I enter the Portland airport. Walk up to the counter. Scan my passport in a thing. Give my ticket away. Get my ticket again. Pull my luggage to the conveyor belt and hand it over to luggage security goons. Walk one hundred yards east to the D-E Terminal security area. Get through with my guitar, taped kind of shut, and my backpack and now I am clean and can do anything from this point forward in the airport. I walk past the shops on a walking conveyor belt, so twice as briskly I walk, and past the arched sun roof and just past the bronze loiterer, who is a statue in the middle of the way who is the president of something long put away, and it has gotten hot and then I arrive at the end: four international terminals. After sitting for awhile trying my computer, making the airline employees suspicious (they wait for a few customers that haven’t entered the plane yet for the Amsterdam plane and yell out the names, I look up when they say a name and they look at me, I’m not far away, so I look down again, so they continue to wait and yell his name, and now its directed at me), I find the Delta Skymiles club, an elevator, one floor up with the fat man, then we both immerge into the haven of condescending businessmen, mostly white and ridiculously old. Two impatient men having a conversation, having to yell into the others ear repetitions of what they have already said. I hear it all, I am a few seats away. They are bitching about their delayed flight, hoping to catch a sympathetic ear, one would assume one who can give some compensation on behalf of the bastards who flew too slow. I eat here because the food is free. Food is cookies, small dried fruits, nuts, soda, orange juice, coffee, crackers, green olives, cranberry juice. My little black plate empties. My little clear cup empties, except for one orange drop stuck in the round ravine at the bottom. The small trash near me suddenly fills with my empty things. I decide to leave. I look out the glass that overlooks the way below, in the terminal. The people have no idea we’re here, eating free food, drinking free drinks and in comfortable leather chairs all around while we do it, and watching them pass beneath us like small animals in our house! They are human, but so beneath us! Hahaha! I was about to leave. Then, I do. Out of the elevator, it’s still hot in the terminal and people are still sitting in metal stools at high circle tables in front of the McDonalds and the Bruchies. To get back to my terminal I would turn right. I turn and straight ahead, past the bronze statue, more people have come to sit down in front of Gate 15, the plane leaves in 40 minutes.
In the plane now, against the window but still on the ground, I meet Happy, who is a nurse, an old Asian woman with sparse hair but at huge volumes. Her scalp is visible through wiry mesh that rises 3 inches above. We talk off and on throughout the flight but what’s most important is to mention her so that you can know who is there. Because there has to be someone there. You have to know so you don’t make something else up. The flight is 10 hours of daylight. The sun is chasing our plane west, around the earth to Tokyo. Lunch is served, my first airplane meal. The rice and chicken is lukewarm. It is good but gives me a painful feeling of presence within my stomach. Let’s wait. Wait for awhile. I waited awhile with this feeling in my stomach like a knife at my throat! I lose my mind, I climb out of my seat... I am back and feel good. The plane’s intercom has requested that all windows be shut. The movie is one, the pillows are out. The sun is out. We have made night for ourselves. But when the time comes when a solitary curiousity acts on the window covers and reveals the light again, the entire plane is pissed. The light outside is so bright in comparison to our artificial night that people are in pain to see it. We watch four movies in our dark, then some music videos mixed when sitcoms, then another meal. I eat most of my fried rice and half of the fruit, my tongue still hurts. The Lights come on, the window covers come up and we readjust to the light like animals being taken out of the basement.

Barry/Taxi

I wait for the cab with my things ready: my backpack, within which I keep this laptop (the one I’m writing on now), a little green camera, sweatshirt in case the plane is cold – and I developed a canker sore overnight, near the tip of my tongue. So I’m scraping that against whats left of my braces – the two wires that they had installed on me, behind my teeth that they want to be there forever. Water, my suspicions: incorrect, hurts my canker sore a lot. So I’m not drinking anything. I also will carry a piece of luggage that my dad forced on me in the target in san diego when I was there a for a week last week, visiting. Between aisles, he show cases the luggage, which to me are excess consumer crap! There are already about ten bags that I could choose from to take with me to Japan. This isn’t necessary. This is excess. This is the epidemic. But he doesn’t think so. And so he force it on me, another tags to have fluttering behind, or in front even, I don’t know how things work with – yes, it will spin 360 degrees like a small robot droid. (It turns out being useful). Anyway, my dad, who buys me this incredible, silvery, sunk-from-the-sky rolling luggage for me, for my trip, has such pain in his eyes. It could be pain or pride or something else. He buys it for me. I have it now, waiting for a cab in my Uncle Barry’s house in Portland. Last night I drank a beer with Barry after deciding against a coke, he was casually more excited to feed me this beer, which had a bad taste and, I believe, was the cause of this pain, inflamement of my tongue. Just two bloated tastebuds! You should see them. Like chubby gerbils close together, rubberbanded around, abdomen to abdomen. They skim over my metal wire again and hurt. The other thing I’ll bring is an acoustic guitar in a case. It is so new. It’s newer than the latest firefox installment or itunes update even. It sparkles. It is tucked inside the cases, cushioned by socks and a t-shirt and a yellow sweater. The guitar is beautiful. Everyone said, because I was looking on the internet for advice on guitar air transit, do not let them check our instrument! Also: loosen the strings. So I loosened the strings. It is in such pain, in there. I know it is. Something is going to get fucked up because of me and not because of them. It needs tension to keep shape! I tape and untape the latches to my poor guitar case again and again keeping watch over everything… it looks fine. But how do I know! The wood is probably splitting very small splits. Swallowing the path of microscopic bacteria from Barry’s bandaid thumb-wound when he took it out last night and played it and left a gooey black booger pulsing on its neck for me to whisk off with the edge of my thumb. They’ve probably moved all around the guitar, are probably being swallowed in tiny ravines of wood cracking apart. These thoughts are so unsettling. The taxi, outside. I wave through the blinds and open the door part ways to get my stuff in the way of it, it closes with a spring, I only struggle a little. She is on the phone. Barry and Anita have called her to pick me up and take me to the airport, saying that they have used them before, that they should call my cellphone, they don’t. But she is gorgeous. Her trunk is deep, my things are lavished by its capacity. I feel good sinking part into it to lower my bag, the guitar, my backpack. Then we’re in the cab. She touches the GPS that is saluting us both and asks me if it is right? I don’t know why she is asking. The airport is not far, 10 minutes away. She fumbles around for a minute, stopped car, and then decides and we start going. Her name is on the flap thing in the car, and so I ask, ‘You Russian?’ and she says, ‘Yes’ and I am right. She talks about my guitar and her guitar and her friend, the guitarist, who is also flying for PDX today with a guitar. ‘Do you like Russian music?’ she asks. ‘Yes!’ We listen to the Russian music and try to talk over it. She is so beautiful and with one mole. The mole is a cliché on her, you know, Russian women with moles, but she is so beautiful with blond hair and soft lips. She used to sing. She lost her voice 5 years ago. Her music is instrumental. She can sing all day. She sang this morning, but not loud. She loves to sing, but can’t loudly. She sang loudly yesterday. Our conversation is sometimes hard to understand. She talks on the phone then. Then she drops me off saying, ‘good luck,’ it was $20 that I am glad to pay, I am at the Portland airport, with my things, with a ticket to Tokyo that I will use in three hours.