autumn tactics

…Originally recorded August 14th…

So I’m performing a ritual that was one once rife with teenage puppy love and urgency: the express train ride from Takanohara to Kyoto. Today the air is filled with as many ghosts as my mind; it’s unseasonably cold and raining. The rice fields look all the more vibrantly green against the grey water-coloured sky and the mountains which sang to me yesterday now hide in anonymity, obscured by fog. Telephone and power lines spread in spidery directions over all planes in my 16-bit vision. I find myself wanting to crawl through the pumpkin patches and paddies, soaking up the raw honestly, freeing my conscience of the industrial grime and tendrils that have festered and sprouted on my skin. So many small rivers fall before my eyes in between clumps of weathered earthone houses. Like a salmon I want to navigate them all to the sea. But blind poetry has me jaded, and perhaps I’m too far gone.

In a cloudy world do we find drama – the dark eyes and hair of a candy-lipped nymph, I begin to think myself spoiled to pine for such pet-bottle innocence long lost in the crow’s feet of my face. Fitzgerald and the color green spring to mind, echoing “symbolism! symbolism!” from my literature teacher’s bobbing throat. In perspective foreshortening does our idealism grow, for smaller things farther out of reach have less flaws. There’s enough hidden energy on these rooftops alone to keep my gnarled form breathing.

Rusted numbers stand ungarnished golems in a sea of weathered, carbon-copy apartments, and the rice fields and mountains become occluded by gambling dens and billboards. But Japan doesn’t have enough money to keep all the scenery fresh, so walls crack unpatched while sprawling weeds and moss attest nature’s perseverance over paving.

More and more tall beige buildings loom over the cockeyed, stained houses. The feeling ebbs from my legs as I slide further down in my seat from the train’s gentle rocking, and with the numb paralysis comes the end of my train ride. In a few moments I’ll disembark into the monolith of human self-effacing achievement, Kyoto eki….a place large enough to make even the most jubilant of lovers feel small, for you take it all at once….mammoth, blue, and vaulted.

To all my devoted readers, please forgive the week without news. It was summer vacation in Japan and I was away from PC. However, I did do some writing in my paper journal and as a gift to you my dedicated fans, each day this week I will transcribe one of those entries. Enjoy my introspective journey with a shocking surprise set of events in Friday‘s episode!

Even the most barren of places can feel alive with the right music. To accommodate my prehistoric MP3 player, I mixed down about four hours of Brian Eno, Paul Oakenfold, and Tiesto to radio quality. It’s not nearly as impressive in this form but it works. Home…at Space…in Ibiza. I wrote a science fiction story in gritty noir style to this set. Today it’s with me in a Shin Omiya business hotel; tonic in my hair and Lancome perfume on my neck.

Two plans fell through for tonight’s accommodations/activities, and for a while it seemed as if I really would be sleeping in Nara Park with the reindeer (and mosquitoes). But things worked out effortlessly as I insisted they would (save another 5700 yen). Kerouac (and myself) have written that “the muscular gum of sex is such a bore.” Yet I think that all depends on how hung over (physically or emotionally) one is at the time of writing. Seeing as how Kerouac and I both have done our share to prevent (the senseless waste of) alcohol abuse, I’d say it’s a fair statement under the right circumstances.

Though the last train has run and I am alone in a small commercial district of early closing bars and pachinko parlors, there is life yet in this town. My unary state only amplifies the drama in my head in concert with the verve weeping from my fingertips. In a summer of nights built on dreams and foreign wonder, the menthol haze lulls me to the half-sleep of a broken economy; with every nick in the room adding to the lip-biting tragedy.

It’s the middle of summer, and obon (festival for honoring of the deceased). I’m on my way back to a place that strangely feels like home. This is my first time on the JR Nara line; it’s cheaper b/c my shinkansen ticket is good for a JR ride after my terminal [it was later discovered this is only the case for travel in the bounds of the departing or arriving city]. The train is old and strange. I think I can smell the smoke of 25 years in the upholstery, or maybe its just my shirt. I had to ride in a smoking car on the shinkansen because it was so crowded. People were standing deep into the aisles of the non-smoking cars. I almost wish I had done the same.

This country is beautiful. I feel a sense of serenity from the endless rice fields and blue-tiled roofs. The mountains are always close enough to have their magic make my heart feel cold and lonesome but I’d hurt if they were any farther away. Space is more densely filled and buildings closer together, but there is still a sense of vastness and solitude as nearly every scene is vacant and enchantingly silent. Just looking out the window I know I’ve done the right thing.

My mother used to exercise at the YMCA. She’d often be there after school, so when I got out, I’d walk down North Market Street and wait for her so I could get a ride home. I forget exactly why, but I think I didn’t like riding the bus. I remember laying under the maple trees between the parking lot sections and feeling the setting sun on my face. For some reason, I always remember the leaves being red and brown, and it cold after the sun fell behind the trees. It was kind of good sleep, but kind of bad…you know the kind where you don’t completely go to sleep because you’re laying in a slightly awkward position outdoors, or in some public place, so you get this kind of slimy-throat mild nausea? It actually wasn’t bad at all. I liked dozing under the trees there. I guess that’s where I got the habit I’d later practice often on the Lawn while attending school at Virginia. What a strange feeling…

Somewhere between pages 403 and 414 of C++: The Complete Reference I began to nod off. Maybe it was the bottle of bad wine and an oversize Kirin that predated the crawl into bed at 3:00 the night before. Or maybe it was just the 3-hour stream of oldies music from my CD-ROM climaxing with Staying Alive.

Causality aside, I was in some kind of daydream. I think I’m almost always under some kind of delusion, but for this entry’s purposes I had an afro the size of Dark Helmet and there was more than one deep, passionate yearning for a velour-covered waterbed.

My monitor and my brain are perhaps too similar…we are both very sensitive to invisible radiation from light-emitting electronics. While my 19″ Mitsubishi has the lusted-for ability to be free of such interference via the binary operation of turning any nearby television off, my mind suffers from far more residual effects; namely dreaming only in 16 byte-aligned granules. It tortures me at night and leaves a fallow haze of nausea over my body for the rest of the day. It’s ironic that the inorganic, digital behaviours I yearn for are exactly those that give me grief.

Somewhere along the way, you may find yourself wondering if this is the idyllic Hesparides you dreamt for. And you may ask yourself…”where is that large automobile? And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house!” Personally, I think we’re lucky to not be living in a Whirlpool box under the 15th street bridge, but that’s just me and my antiquated philosophy.

So we’ve all been Christian, shut out by the one thing we were sure of, the quixotic alabaster tower that was everything we worked for. However, dead or alive, we all have to show up at opening night and find out for sure, even if it means the unexpected death of the ideal.

I leave you with these disjunct mandible spasms.

…stupid Myrtle. Why’d she have to get hit by that car?

So you may have heard I’m going to a rave in the forest this weekend. It should be cool. Last summer about the second weekend I was here I went to a similarly themed event in the middle of bumblef*ck Yoshino in Nara prefecture, on top of a mountain near a village named Tenkawa. Supposedly it was at a “ski resort” but the only thing they had were some cleared sections of forest with a bunch of rocks and a dilipidated metal cord wrapped around a couple pulleys. Needless to say, it fricking rocked. I wrote at least 10-15 pages about it in last summer’s journal.

Anyway, I think it’s going to rule. I bought an awesome hiker’s rucksack on sale at Oshman’s the other day, only 3900 yen for a fullsize Ferrino pack replete with all the accoutrements and straps one could desire (in addition to a 2-year manufacturer’s warranty). As much as I’d like to buy most of my supplies second hand, I think tomorrow I’m going to have to get at least a sleeping bag (though I’d prefer a tent just for privacy’s sake. Probably go to Tokyu Hands or L-Breath to pick one up. I’d like one of those polar jobs where you can sleep in Alaska and sweat through the night, but it’s probably not so necessary (for now) and I don’t want to fork over the cash. When I retire (or take a yearlong sabbatical) and go wandering all through Hokkaido and mainland northern Asia, then I’ll buy the nicer one. But for now I’m a bimbo (in Japanese that means vagabond; bum…you pervert).

So I think I’ll be sorted…I’m getting a little used to these things. Change of clothes, rags, blanket, sleeping bag, water, (whiskey), dried meat, dried fruit, bread, sleeping patch (it gets BRIGHT early here), mosquito repellent, a little cash, my paper journal, my credit card-sized camera, compass, and possibly some headphones and electronica-enabled MP3 player for the ride up. I’m not going alone either, I have a partner in crime!! Huzzah! Oh…don’t forget the tickets (yea, that would suck).

I was quite buzzy earlier, and having very humorous (or was it amorous) thoughts on the train on the way home [god I love capri pants (not for me my mind you)...girls here are so tiny and cute]…but I’ve been playing Seiken Densetsu 2 (Secret of Mana) for the past hour and now I’m just a little stiff. I went to a summer festival in the little village work is at…nice… Very nice. Wore my jinbei. I saw the Power Rangers. Yeah. Pictures next week.

MATANE!! I’m off to shine like a star with the children of heaven on earth…