September 22nd, 2003
The things that make life sweet
I’m tired. Pretty tired. And I haven’t even LEFT for work yet. Well, tomorrow is holiday, so I’ll just try to pound a little caffeine and tough it out until 8:00 today. It was worth it though.
So I had a thing yesterday. A friend of mine and I braved the typhoon and went to the Mandarake in Shibuya (an emporium that deserves its own entry), and afterwards hit up the usual mania that is department store food shopping in the basement of Tokyu. This was in preparation for a hack of a meal, my FIRST attempt at cooking while in Japan this year [note this means I ate out for every meal for four months].
It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t fabulous…but considering I have _a_ bowl, 1.5 plates and three chopsticks, it was tolerable. I can’t say I really want to do the DISH now, but, eh….why invite our exoskeletoned, multi-legged friends in for feast while I’m at work?
We drank an impressive 2.7 bottles of wine of monotonically decreasing quality and ate half a bunch of friggin’ weird “grape-like” fruits, as she put it. At some point I put on the soundtrack to Laputa, prompting her to exclaim after 7 bars “I wish I could see it now!” Subsequently we did just that as I have nearly every Studio Ghibli film tucked away in one digital cranny or another. However, I think we got half way through, paused to do the bathroom rotation, and then fell asleep/passed out on the bed until next I discovered it was 1:40a. Oops. Well, not really. I don’t give a damn, I’m already home. Kinda nice.
So we brushed our teeth, I grinned at myself in the mirror and gave her a hentai nurse t-shirt to wear and we retired for the evening. I probably slept less last night than I have in weeks, _despite_ the lousy work-delerium mess at the beginning of the month. But I don’t care. Some people are just a bouquet of stimuli to assuage the big five. She tastes like autumn and her scent reminds me of the passenger seat from some sedan I sat in on several random cold days from the 80s. I must have roused two dozen times to slide my arm around her fine-boned porcelain frame and sigh.
Hell I didn’t want her to go, and I sure as hell didn’t want to go to work today. But I’ve started the day, and walking to the station with her I had to sing old John Lennon songs, because the matted hair and recently-arrived chill wind were like an afghan nap in a leather chair; so decadent I had to beam. On the way back home I noticed for the ten-thousandth time all the corny campaign posters for local council members and felt a laugh rising in my haggard body — I should gank a bunch of these things and wallpaper my room with them…my pals making Sendagaya a better place to live.
