September 19th, 2003
The park
Lying on a park bench in a small gravel playground, I get to think. As usual I’m bushed from two until about six. Functionally, I’m trying to sleep, however, I’m probably getting more out my mind running around than actual rest. It’s these delirious tired moments that my memory is prone to cough up something I haven’t thought about for years. Hell if I know why, but it’s usually the kind of events psychologists say forms your personality.
Anyway, lying on this bench completely beat I think about the kids that may come to the park while I’m there. They’re almost always little kids, and accordingly are accompanied by their moms. I can imagine the little Japanese children seeing this 187 cm tall shaggy dude in wore out thrift store clothes, sprawled over a bench, perhaps dead. It would probably freak them out, I think it would bother me if I was a little kid and some sketchy dude was in the park unconscious. So I think about the kids running to tell their moms, the moms worrying amongst each other and telling a shopkeeper, the shopkeeper calling the police, the police telling the immigration agency, and the immigration agency calling the embassy to tell my consulate to get my bony ass out of Japan, because you can’t sleep on benches in parks in the middle of the day. I actually envision the electricity going through the telephone lines from Japan to Washington so the local authorities there can be made aware. [I later think they probably don't have telephone lines strung up over the ocean, so it must be done with satellite, but before satellites how did you call Europe during the war? So there must be lines under the ocean, so I think of all the video games I played where you had to go under the ocean to find something and how freaky it was...etc...you get the idea].
After an ambulance drives by with sirens on a couple streets away, I jolt out of daze and start thinking about something else. I remember how nice playing in the park was in summer when I was a kid, and subsequently how I don’t remember being so tired as a kid, but then again playing ball in the park near the local elementary school. So I think about playing ball at all kinds of places: the park, the field behind my high school, the quad in front of my first year dorm at Virginia. In all these places I think it was always me and like one of my friends. Neither of us were very good at the time, and I always had a complex that if other kids came by and wanted to play. Virtually every boy was better than me and more aggressive in sports, and the ones that weren’t didn’t like chucking the ball around anyway. So I was always worried that some big kids or older kids would come and ask if they could play too, or worse invite themselves in. Then they’d throw the ball too hard and I’d drop it, and I’d get all choked up and throw it weak, or in some crazy direction. And when I wanted to go, they’d want to keep playing, and I’d be afraid to ask for my ball back, so I’d have to wait until _they’d_ gotten tired of it and left already. This was a very serious problem for a number of years, but hell if I haven’t even half-considered it since I was 17. Anyway, I can throw the ball decent now, not great, but decent. I’m not afraid of people asking to throw with anymore, but they never do so it doesn’t really matter. It’s probably a big part of my subconscious and my confidence stuff. Probably.
Anyway it’s been like over 20 minutes now I think I better go back to work, so the boss doesn’t notice I’m gone, and so the little kids and moms can come back and play in the park; and so the immigration office back in Washington doesn’t get that phone call, because I _know_ they’ve got enough stuff to deal with already.
