日本語での日記第３

こんにちは。僕はまだ日本にいる。まだ日本語をマスターしようとしている。前と比べて確かに上達してきた。でも、それにしてもまだ面白い会話に参加するとか、かっこいいに見られるとか、そういうのはまだ無理だ。ただ他人の言葉が分かるようになった。テレビとか。

ソロゾロアメリカに帰るから、最近日本での生活のことをもっと深く観察するようになっている。普段は学校へ通う時にいつも自転車に乗りながら音楽を聞く。でも、日本の音もアメリカにもって帰りたいんだから、耳にイアホンを付け止んだ。それを聞いたらロマンチックすぎると誰かが思うかもしれない。多分そう。ロマンチックすぎる。

そういえば、先週末、同じ大学で勉強する女の子を好きになった。三日間くらいその人と映画を見たり食事をしたり遊びに行ったりして、本当にきれいで面白くて楽しい人だと思うようになった。仲が良くなっていたと思ったからうれしかったけど、ひどい片思いになってしまった。そのほうがいいかもしれない。

タローカードを読んでくれた友だちのルーシが言ったのは「自分の中での自分を探さなきゃならん」だけど、教えてくれなかったからどうやってそれをやったらいいのかまだ全然分からない。頑張る！

a floating stick ready to find other floating sticks.

What will a floating stick do after returning home? It will work just like before, but will read different letters, along with other ones from before. It will dream of the arms of things left aloft in the floating water, things that it never touched but dreamed of touching, it will dream again of that. And friends will appear, more easier. Will a stick pulled from a year of floating soak up the water left on its skin or will it slide off? I, stick taken from floating water, oath: staying slimy.

Mole

A tunnel, imagine one, carved out by an animal without sense for direction or time. So it's long, and you wouldn't be able to tell easily which way to go to get out, but imagine you wouldn't considered it. Imagine that, a tunnel, don't make it dark. Make it like the sun lives just outside the walls everywhere. Of course! But there's more there that you aren't seeing yet. Think of a prism, and now what are you wearing? You're alone and with an astronauts' sense of security be rest assured there are no insects clicking around here either. The shoes you're wearing, your too shoulders, made up to be square and strange, and glass, make thick, paint-thick rainbows cast onto all the places you look! Think of the illustrators of only happy cereal box scenes. Eat most hot colors like pancakes////Drink most cool ones like water. Be educated by violet. Put love in green, laugh looking at orange. Go, go, go, go!

Wet/Hot/Big

The weather today was one. The weather yesterday, half of one. At night I can hear rain falling through the walls. Sleeping outside... How many worlds ago was it when I slept outside in the rain. Maybe, never. When the weather is a one, like today, my body will slow... be, heavy. This morning, I took my guitar case to school in it, 1, but couldn't practice my songs with enthusiasm. The older generation knows the weather patterns. I heard directly from a few of them, from this time of year, every year, the number is doing preparations to get heavier and stickier, and it will make you sweat to stand. Today is still a 1. I must train my body.

If this were a tiny article in the Spokesman Review, the editor would title it, 'Breaking the Silence,' (because it's a code deeper than we realize!)

Today I became a drag queen opera diva again.

I found an empty room in the basement of the club building at the Christian University in Tokyo.

In the practice room hall that I didn't know I could enter so easily, in the basement, I returned to drag queen opera diva form.

Scientist Girl's Do-Nothing Robot

(In a single hour, Scientist Girl will leave the club meeting. A monologue along these lines is being performed inside of Scientist Girl's head) While the rest of the club members are chatting on and on about old things: space shuttles, automatic libraries and the like, Scientist Girl will suggest the development of a standard robot to be used as a presence in homes that have been left dark by families on vacation. The club members will perk their ears upon hearing the idea, but communicate only disinterest with wrist flopping. Six hands will drag the air down with eyes unattached, mouths unattached, and already the beginnings of new segues into less realistic chatter will have begun. Scientist girl will take this as a sign of her own superiority made irrefutably obvious and leave the club room, and return home to build her presence robot.

It will take Scientist Girl a full week of little sleep to complete the robot, but she will work hard, knowing that when the club members see the presence robot worked into being, she'll have changed their thinking, and all at once, become one of them again. She will use expensive materials.

The robot will be named Zen-Ryoku2, standing fashionably on legs and wheels, with a steel head just bigger than the average human head (increasing its presence) and covered with leather.

1 month will pass and Zen-Ryoku2's picture will be posted on the wall for the next hundred club meetings as a show of Scientist Girl's accomplishment. Scientist Girl will feel electric.

2 months will pass and Zen-Ryoku2 will have been tested once. The test will have been a success, but later Zen-Ryoku2 will start acting in unexpected ways. Zen-Ryoku2 will start writing self-empowering poems everyday, and standing in the windows every now and then, even when no one has left the house. The closet that will keep Zen-Ryoku2 will become a mess with scraps of paper taken from the junk drawers in the kitchen, each scratched by one of Zen-Ryoku2's poems. One reads:

MY BODY ASSEMBLED
IN SUPER HEAVEN
HEART OF HUNDRED LIONS PURRING
GROWN GARDEN BATHING IN SUN

Another one will read:

PLEASE, WHY

on an orange Little Caesars' HALF-OFF 10" PIZZA coupon.

Other non-sense:

僕は今
天気を愛してる
乾燥した性格の周りの人
に伝えたい
何を

Zen-Ryoku2 will not stop even after being glared at, even after having been scolded by other body-languages.

If he continues to stand out when it isn't needed, there's something wrong, Scientist Girl will say gravely. Scientist Girl will tell the other club members that and all will repeat it over again, adding the nods of all their long-haired beautiful heads.

Zen-Ryoku2 will disappear from the house.

The night that Scientist Girl will want to make him pretty, with the reasoning 'if it's going to stand in the window all day and be in the way all of the time it may as well have a scent,' she will open the closet and find not even the poems.

Bugs Return to Japan

Japan has been a cold, wet place without curious bugs for a long time. But recently as the temperature rises everyday a little, you discover again spider webs have been made for you to walk through. You leave the house and tear an invisible line and it tickles, and you fear those big cartoon spiders, and one sticking its towering, yellow-green legs into the fabric of your shirt somewhere. But you never find a cartoon spider or even any spider. And so you go out and you come home and you wash your hands and you put your bag down in the room and get on your computer and turn on a fan and try to find the classes you need for the fall semester, and in the meantime that spider whose web you ran into and through when you left the house today, and also the second one you ran into on the way back, well both of those cartoon spiders are in the room now! grown to HUMAN-SIZE behind your back they just flick their tongues, and as if blind-folded face seemingly without intent of doing anything towards directions not worth mentioning, the thoughts of the cartoon spiders are impossible to read, but if you saw even the ease, the tongue flicking would make you scared. But they leave you, they leave the room quietly, leave the house, go into the city and don't come back. Was it you? Or maybe they don't remember how to come back? Regardless, secret webs collide into you at every awning you pass under everyday and you come home and you've never ever met any spiders.

Happy to sit on kids day

The sounds of France. Chilly water sprinkling the top of our forehead, and the whistling of an accordion. The clicking of a bike tire being walked through a busy park. The whispers of scuffling feet on warm sidewalk. The bike tire’s clicking fades off and sounds of water are orchestrated to get louder. In Japan, a popular stringed instrument clucked by the hand of an old group of men, taking turns. Those men have counter-parts in the United States still chasing hair-metal dreams that went away for everyone else thirty years ago. This park is like a dream, it's the one that keeps on being recreated in movies, bumped up and up from below and kept above water. Then, what’s under water? Sea creatures. And what’s above? Swan boats with two people driving from the inside, clumsy like giant plastic children breaking up the small schools of living ducks whose home is the park. Then what of the dream? Is it still floating? Yes, of course, it isn’t like other dreams. This one is for real. Does that make it last? No. It’s just a coincidence, maybe. But this dream was chosen by everyone without anyone choosing. Which is it again? I can’t see it. You aren’t seeing it? It’s the one with the balloons and the music. In the mall? No, but there are clowns too. But it isn’t anything like the mall; there’s no water or breeze in a mall. That’s not true, what of fountains? And air conditioning? They aren’t real. And the dream is? Yes. Something you can feel is real? Not always. Are you real? Yes. Am I? I’m not sure if you are or if you aren’t. Because I’m me, and that’s all I know. How do you know? I control my limbs, I experience my thoughts, I get angry, I get sad. Is that the same as the dream? ??... You can feel it and so it is real? Yes. I see. Are you hungry yet? No. That bag is heavy isn’t it, I’m sorry that I asked you to carry it, I brought it after all. It’s ok, my arms don't hurt.

The girl walking by the man on the phone in the park, ‘It’s like a scarf.’ The man in the park, ‘it’s like a scarf’ into his phone.

Three types of boats on the lake, the swan, which you know of already, for certain, do you remember? Yes. The other two, well you can see for yourself. No. Ok, one was made in the same factory as the swan boat, but there was no head put on it, and painted yellow. Same mechanics, people kick from the inside, steer with a wheel. … The other is a plain rowboat, like the one your dad took you on when you were 8, remember you told me that story? Yeah. Could you tell it again? I don’t remember what day it was, or what the weather was like. We woke up so- early, it may have been the earliest I had ever waken up in my life except for at Easter mass and except for Christmas when still I cant sleep. It was 3:30 and dad woke me and my brother up, I remember the tackle boxes, then I remember the wetness, then my mind jumps to when we’re in the boat, and the sky is hardly awake, pale grey and purple, we found a half sunken barn in the lake with its door spreading open halfway above the water, but the top was low and so we had to duck our heads to get in. when we got in. the window of the barn from the inside made outside look bright. There were spiders on the walls, all sorts of bugs that I didn't, couldn't see, it was so exciting. Did you catch anything in there? No, I don’t think so. I don't remember fishing in there, I remember just going in, and being excited and afraid.

I should know better than to bring you out with me! Unbelievable! What? What do you me-an what! You know what! I didn’t see anything! Why don’t you open your eyes! You idiot! You could have destroyed something just then! You don’t spill over a carriage and then give excuses! Thank god there was nothing in there! Well, there wasn't anything in there, so don't be so angry. But you don’t understand! Aren’t you shocked at yourself? No, it wasn’t my fault, I didn’t born myself into this type of place.
The man on the harmonica has the precision of an accordion player and I’ve never seen someone play like him before. Look! No. If you keep your eyes closed you’ll lose your sight! I hope I do. Oh you do? Well why don’t I just take care of that, you should have asked, lucky for you I’ve kept my fingernails long enough to reach the back. No! Don’t! Open your eyes or I’ll do it… Fine… No! Okay. Okay, okay!

Lucy’s eyelashes flickered with a florescent start and then raised. Her yellow eyes made as though she saw nothing, visibly upset at being threatened and at herself for having done what Honey Bunny asked. ‘Honey Bunny, how old are you?’ ‘Why?’ ‘You’ve been around since last February, when we met at the restaurant, and so you must be at least that old, but come on, where were you born?’ ‘I don’t want to tell you because I don’t want you to get upset.’ ‘Why would I get upset? I’m upset now!’ Lucy picked up Honey Bunny’s bag and pulled out some papers, then in silence began swallowing up the words written from top to bottom with her lion eyes. ‘That’s nothing. Just receipt stuff from tickets to a show I bought yesterday. Miss Hungry Jeneeva sang at the Core Stone’ ‘Who? Where?’ ‘The Core Stone, you remember don’t you? The big, big oval building, like an egg on its bottom, balanced in the middle of a little town with so few buildings that its all you see of the town for a long time on your way there from any direction. The town is called Jillian.’ ‘Remember?’ ‘Of course, I’m telling you to remember.’ ‘Remember… I do remember.’ ‘Of course you do.’

Plan to boogie

Today I woke up and jumped from bed directly into my short-shorts with the intention to go to right now's Boogie in Live in Shibuya featuring a DJ who is a member of an incredible Japanese jazz band (Soil and Pimp Sessions).

I quit it though, because I would have had to stay until 5am boogie-ing, maybe alone. So I quit it.

More school tomorrow, another oddly organized essay to turn in stuck in my notebook.

(Hey! Thanks for commenting on the post below this one!)

Stuck into Pulling

It's quite different. Before I had left Washington and left my band to study for awhile in Tokyo, my ears had become sensitive. It had been 6 years with the same band, with the same routine of playing together at such an immodest volume for hours every week. I love(d) it. Being a trigger of or and being that big sound, and having even to climb over the tops of other big sounds to poke out and be heard, in all the noise, like in water in a dream, but it is real. My ears were lovingly, recklessly smothered with sound for 6 years. On top of it, the constant situations where love and noise coincide, before, during and after our noise there is love, sweat-soaked bodies hugging, and then sometimes afterward, some drinking. The relationship is like a set of shoulders.

It's been 8 months of no noise. And making songs using notes without weight, because its loud and I don't want the thinness of my house, crowded by thinner houses, to let my racket become someone else' racket. It didn't bother me until recently. And so I'm renting a practice space at the start of next month.

例外の日

外国人として東京での生活をするのは時々大変さびしくなる。一体どうしたらいいと友だちを作ってみながらよく思う。
でも、短所も長所もあるから、そんなにかわいそうな生活じゃない。

気温が増えてきた。鳴く鳥もよく歌うから。うまく書くことができないので、恥ずかしい、これをポストするというのは。しょうがない。明日雨が降らないといいな。

今日はいいよ天気から。

Missing Aaron.

For the last 6 years, Aaron. Speaking nostalgically. It's been 8 months and I've been living in Tokyo and there isn't one. Although the other day, Sveinn, whose name will never be properly pronounced unless by an Icelander (and so to avoid the annoyance of that, he's called Iceman by everyone) said something in the same exact way that Aaron would have said had he been saying it. It was a tag on the end of someone's joke, and I want to explain it, but I don't really know myself how the right situation for a tag to happen until it does. I hope he (Aaron) has started Final Fantasy 7 and finished it, and found an animal companion. I'm looking forward to the times when I'll wear his shirts and I'll borrow one more, better fitting, pair of underwear when the opportunity appears like a big, white-mist-ghost with a Heart tattoo, bright and exciting colors that make you remember the business of the third celebration of a holiday, big on his chest... Then, the ghost will have nothing to do with anything but having been used as a metaphor that got lost in a blog post in the past, so I will have thought him up after realizing "the time has come to snag some clothes" and created a vision which, from then on, I'll claim as a phenomenon that really happened. I'll start a drawing career.

For becoming a simple tasking thing

Listening to French singer Edith Piaf and covering the colorful items in my room, the Television and other things. If you go to a shrine one day, you’ll see the little rock Buddhas with red hats to fit their heads and red bibs to cover their chests. I can’t even work with them around. Everything interesting has to go. The pictures on the window seal are glossy, catch light, and so must go, along with the laundry, and the wall dirt that I wash away with a too-yellow sponge that also has to go. A clean room. Nothing to notice but me. Everything just right.

my American family and the long awaited Japanese hospitality

before you read this, know that the magic and drama of last night, the night that ill be recalling, wont be captured correctly the first time, and so because of that ill probably edit this post a few times, a few more than regularly anyway. i met alex from england on the 6th floor of our hostel. we floated down the elevator shaft together and came out to the lobby speaking of ourselves, and of Osaka and what to do, so I invited him to dinner with my big brother and papa. a place where you can order from an english menu by drawing circles and inserting numbers in bubbles. its there that i gave up. i wouldnt matter if i spoke japanese, the hospitality is better when you`re speaking english and not being understood. but anyhow, that was the low point of the night. a family of mother and three sons, 6, 13, and 15 sat at the table next to us and began to eat. we, me, big brother, papa, and alex, drink sake and beer and eat sashimi and drink miso soup. we talk about things that papa starts to talk about and everyone finishes. we talk about a lot of things while im still a little down about motivation.

the family whose just sat down wants our attention. is not what i thought at first. but they do. we begin talking together! ah.. hold on...

Osaka

I:m sitting at a computer in the sounds-of-a-fountain-drizzling-water-down-little-rock-steps filled lobby of a hostel that my male family and I are staying in. The potato that was too big to eat before dinner sits to the right side of the white cordless mouse in a squished brown paper bag looking like a bums trash. I have become tired of disappointing vendors with japanese that isnt natural and bills that are too big. and men spitting when we cross paths with them. big brother is michael, with thinning blonde hair and jewelery blue eyes, papa is steve with a goatee that people talk about. today was the first day of sun since my big brother and papa have come to japan to visit. it was a beautiful day in nara, but the deer look so much more intense than how i had imagined them. each is missing chunks of coat, with filthy looking lips, and greedy! black eyes... deer look so gentle when they:re scared, i thought, thinking of america. when deer aren:t scared, they:re pushy, they want the crackers. today was a little bit stressful. big brother got sick during our walk. he had to go back to the hostel early. my dad and i walked around more ourselves, and then the sun began to leave and it got cold again, so we came back to check on big brother. the sound of the fountain drizzling over tiny pyramid stone steps, that `you had a bad day` song is all they play in the lobby all day today. we`re going to sushi tonight. im looking forward to meeting a friend of a friend in kyoto in a few days.

Yebisu Garden

Today I went to Yebisu with friends with the plan I put together this morning. The day after Yokohama, staying home on such a beautiful day as it was (days when old Japanese ladies speak to birds, asking cutely, “Oh! What’re you eating?“ and going on to tend their flowers below, all growing out of dirt packed wooden pots placed on old-fashioned-looking table-stands, each slowly shedding its porcelain-white paint) would be a day impossible to fully enjoy. I’ve been writing a song lately with a single string tuned strangely on my guitar, and with that have been kept busy, and happy. But even still, the day was beautiful, and I wanted to try speaking to the birds.

Unfortunately, the birds in Yebisu all ask you, “What’re you eating?” and try to get some. Yebisu Garden is beautiful, like a space station with the architecture of a ballroom outside, it is a space with space, which seems uncommon in Tokyo, and so it didn’t disappoint me to find that pigeons in Japan are the same as pigeons in America, and probably everywhere, although I know that I can’t say that for sure.

the times to celebrate the word human

One night, whose day was full of adventure and being in a place never been before, and seeing the ocean for once in a very long time, and whose day sat on the pier pretending to read a Japanese novel for one hour as the wind slowly pushed the pages around and the sun moved further away and the air turned cold, and then, even after walking all day, walked forward again, to the nearest subway stairs leading down a dark tunnel and disappeared underground, and when a train came down the tracks whistling to a stop, slid inside the train, tired, and sat down next to normal people, one night, for the first time since being here, in a train from Yokohama, I closed my eyes to feel a swaying on my shoulder, the breathing of a person I’ll never know or see again and it was like we were sleeping together. I wondered if that person was doing the same.

書き直したシ

Homage

lion spirits
made red heaven
color of haste

a tiny glow
spills, grows
in pine needles

in older years it’s the same.

Two Beers with Dominic

Meet at station. Talk on train. Appear outside another station. Complain about snow falling. Go underground. Catch eyes with an older woman. Drink two beers. Pee. Climb up the stairs. Complain there are no cute girls. Mumble at McDonalds. Finish all of a pork sandwich and part of Dominic's Teriyaki sandwich. Stand outside. Wait for the cigarrette to burn all the way. Back on the train to talk about Japanese women, What do they want? Exit train. Lucy taps my shoulder. Domonic sucks in a cigarette. Foreign friends find us, slap each other hard, go to karaoke. Find bicycle at bike parking lot. Run home wondering, did I...? pants feel wet, get home to Hana the kitty's meowing from the other side of the door. Enter room. Enter Bed room. Turn on heat, turn on hot carpet. Idle. Write blog.

horse hills

In horse hills

Chattering- an impression given by the glittering rims of ice-scorched grass awaiting hot sunlight ambling toward across the land. Day in, then up, over, then day in, when the same chattering is had among the grass. There is perhaps no language as such that the grass use, borrowed by circumstance, and when circumstance changes, lifted away by heat, all disintegrated.

The wave of sun comes early and dries the land. Quiets the chattering of grass, and fills the morning air, of yet only a coolness, with an odor. Those long hours of day, of hot and terrible, stolen sparkling and little movement… (the wind of course moves, quickly in and slowly out mixed with the scent of flesh and fur; on some days no wind comes to the plains, those are truly quiet days).

Yet, there is beauty at the plains, in morning. The obsessive throwing of light and it’s youthful death, a cycle that defines white-blank beauty. Beauty: an observation of space between two things and the unreachable odds of coming into contact with the observed. After all, to take beauty into one’s pocket is just to adore it shortly and, just before tossing it away or pulverizing it by cobblestone out of boredom, rediscovering beauty in another unattainable. The convenience of the word pair ‘Unattainable beauty’ is that it can be shortened to one or the other.

These mornings on the plain, among phenomenal sparkling turf and polite stretches of wind, among the death frozen, are beautiful just such.

The Lions Stopped Attacking Women, Part 1

The lions stopped attacking women. As a result, the culture changed. The guardian business would have floundered had it not been for consistent fear of coyote assault aside. But the lions wouldn’t take part in it anymore, for whatever reason. The busy, busy women, wrapped up in clothes pulling laundry would come across a lion a day. There were that many. And it happened still, that they would see each other, just exactly like before except for now the fear was different. Female lions, male lions, no longer spilling out of the fields like boiling batter made people wonder if it weren’t some kind of bad omen. Because it didn’t seem correct, and aside from the obvious benefits, people expected things had actually gotten worse, but that they just hadn’t found it out yet.

Flower Recites Makes News

It had been three months since the start of my ritual and there finally came results. All the evenings of hushed monologue in the living room. Surely the people living upstairs listened to my questions, personal confessions, and threats from their beds that I had made myself believe they had fallen asleep in so that I could conduct trails for making linguistic breakthroughs with Mr. Flower. For the latter half of January I went to school early every morning, ate between classes at the cafeteria, and when classes ended in the afternoon I returned home to make dinner, bathe, and wait for Mr. Flower to feel comfortable, and then, sitting with her in the living room, speaking a mix of English and Nyaa and using my body like she did in efforts to stumble upon a single solid meaning/movement pair. I labored until past midnight and was sent to bed each night with a heavier sense of the whole thing being a waste of time, I tucked myself in nearly crying every night, to think of a world where communication between species is just impossible, with no exceptions. So is what I was beginning to believe as each night brought nothing but giggles falling through the ceiling, but I was wrong!
Mr. Flower sat as usual, whether on the couch or on the tv or on the window ceil, that minx thing she does, eyes wide, forward (that’s how I could tell I was never wasting my time, you can see learning happening, a tugging at the edges of her pupils, and you can tell frustration when you see it, even easier.) Mr. Flower suddenly stopped my story of a girl in class I wanted to meet (it was always a girl in class then) by uttering these words: …Nya-aa kya-ch raeih… I couldn’t believe my ears! I spilled out the door, frightened, as I remember, then I turned around and darted back into the living room to Mr. Flower, like gold with gold fur she was there! and before I could speak, she began reciting something from Allen Ginsberg on tape, the one I always play, …units of mind thought, which is another element that comes in when your writing, cause your notation of what your saying is a notation of what you speak but its also, really, if you’re writing silently at a desk, a notion of thoughts in your mind, not what you spoke at all, but the thoughts.

Australian Open

On the TV, tennis is played by two women.

The women look lame from up high, scribbled women. Flanking the court are seven or eight pink you-can’t-tell-whats, like little electrons, springing back and forth between plays of the women, retrieving the yellow ball and running off. The ball falls out of play again and another comes running.

The two are in the room with the TV, watching the women play tennis. The top woman wins a point over the bottom woman, footage from the man-on-the-ground camera then feeds into the broadcast. The real-looking woman wipes her forehead with a towel. Standing with the woman, a highlighter-pink smudge stresses the automatic environmental RGB balance.

Lucy slaps the couch arm but says nothing.

After seconds that feel like old seconds, simpler, heavier, a teenage girl immerges from the pink blur like a ghost wearing the aura, saintly still.

Cane Toads jump around outside of the Tennis stadium in Australian dirt. Huge numbers and destroy two species of insect and one of rabbit in one morning. Forty die in one hour from eating poisonous bees asleep on the sand.

Tension is high in the Tennis stadium as the last yellow ball is catapulted from the top to the bottom. Twenty seconds fighting. Suddenly, it's flung high and falls just over the line. A few scream from relief and some out of anger and everyone else just looks and listens.

A group of cane toads are hit four at once by an ambitious motorcyclist and a babe riding bitch howling.

winter's end no weekend no morning

The Sun is up in the sky here more in winter than in any other time of the year. I wake up from a dream about making up a broken promise to a friend, thinking, “I should tell Anthony I’m going to miss his birthday.” The room is mine. It’s hardened in the winter time. Each of its 19 corners are heavy; irremovable, like dots of ink on something clean. The walls would fall otherwise. I would freeze otherwise. The alarm sounding from just beside my head is fingers tapping on an Indian drum, outside of a store in somewhere Arizona, where in the same city an old man spends the remaining days before his last days crusading in a truck around the desert seeking plastic making as if free, trying life for the first time. The chip wrappers don’t eat or defecate and find no place to fit in (in servant wind), so the old man cleans up after the RVers, taking them into his brown bag. There, wind blows the hair of the girl tapping on a tiny Indian drum. The tapping on a little drum… won’t stop from there.

Two hours after the time I had wanted to get up, I had gotten up. I had put on clothes to stop shivering. I had turned on the heater at my feet near the desk and sat in the chair. Across the house, the door opens and the chime chimes thrice. My room is dark still. The curtain was closed by me the prior night. What was I doing? Afraid someone would see what I was doing?

I put on Jerry’s shirt that he gave to me on the night before I left Portland. Open the curtain, blue sky was above the high, sun-covered building. Some older people had already finished a round of tennis matches with friends. I was reminded of getting up early everyday to spend my time full as black cake and of becoming famous.

Canada

I’m in Canada, in the airport in Vancouver. I met a girl whose name was never given to me but which I overheard and then forgot. She’s dancing at the opening ceremony of this year’s Olympics. The plane that flew us to Vancouver was a propeller plane with 8 people in it, including the pilots and lady. All of us sat in the back of the plane for the benefit of weight in the back of the plane.
Now here in Canada, looking out through the terminal windows, square cells of glass rising to the ceiling, you can see a mountain range with snow on it. A single horizon like a jagged under bite, frozen. I wonder about Canada, thinking I should live here for the mountains and bears. I would go to the Olympics. I would live with people in a big house inside the lively city at the base of the mountains, looming in the distance, surveying the technology of the age, approving and disapproving. I want to climb it with my tongue wet in my mouth with my face wet in my scarf.
I have the feeling of walking on a moving belt again after walking on one again. It’s a nice feeling. It's been 15 years. I'm in Canada again.

Having come back and going back.

Happy New Year everyone.

I returned to the United States for the holidays. It was nice seeing brother and sisters, mom and alan, baba, deda, cousins, friends, old lover. I’m listening to a Christmas CD that mom sent me when I was in Tokyo before called ‘Cool Yule’ and sitting in the Portland airport. I’m going back to Tokyo to live for another six months with Kusama-san. When do the Cherry Blossoms bloom?

Having been back to Washington I had this alien feeling, like floating around. I met Kandy at the bar, met Tri at a bar, at the movies, at dinner, Shane in his apartment, in Neato Burrito. That alien feeling, a few days ago, suddenly fell hard back into that routine groundedness of living in your hometown and having never left. I saw it for the first time, there is returning. For people away for reasons they don’t have control over, it’s alright, because you can fall back into place. You can end up in your past girlfriend’s apartment (if she lets you).

I’m proud of my brother. He and I are the boys, isn’t it that that makes us get along better with each other than with our sisters? I found a lot of respect for him over holiday. He lies down and offers help to the terrible ever angered scrutinizing sisters who get overwhelmed by trying to fit too many things into luggage. I was childish fighting back, I ought to have done what he did.

New Years with Mike and Chris Malsam. I always end up at their house for holidays like that. We drank beer and played cards and ordered pizza. I slept below the tv.

Thanks to everyone who made time for me when I came to Spokane. I’ll be back again after what will seem like a long time until I’m back, what will then seem like no time at all passed.

I left and came and left and’ll come.

Christmas songs are Bing Crosby wrapped in an electric blanket in love.