November 15th, 2003
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Ever, Ever Raving
I wish there were more outdoor parties this time of year but I guess it’s too cold at night.
I took good advantage of my Seiyu [owned by]/Wal-Mart bicycle today for the first time. Though my wandering expeditions lose a little something in detail when on wheels, the tradeoff is I get to cover a lot more ground quickly.
I didn’t spend nearly as much time out as I did in October, but I got a little later start and it gets darker (rendering my camera useless) much earlier now. Having spent the majority of my excursions pushing south, I decided to head east today and took my instinctual meandering path up and down through backstreets and avenues, though more or less I followed the Chuo-Sobu line from Sendagaya to Akihabara and then back west-by-northwest to Akasaka, the national palace and down to Shinanomachi to meet my old running route through the Meiji outer gardens.
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A canal off the Sumida-gawa by Ichigaya and an autumn temple on Shichi-Go-San (Children’s Day).
I think that the bulk of my recurring difficulties involve maintaining good physical and mental health (something I’m not used to as my college lifestyle blinded me to such introspective avenues), and as a result, how much difficulty I have with work. That being said, I am quite certain I love Tokyo like a shadowy-eyed girl that gives me equal amounts of bristling fascination and quiet dedication.
Tokyo is a characteristically Japanese product in that it has the uncanny ability to continually surprise you with how much functionality and variety is seamlessly woven into its every curve. Austere parks line the rivers and then fade slowly past police boxes and concrete embankment murals. Thin, slate mosaic walkways skirt unchecked vegetation under towering expressways as the glow of media and financial neon is nearly consumed by a motionless net of trees. In twenty minutes I can buy five pairs of slightly small (for me) socks, go through 200ml of tea in a perfectly shaped bottle, admire a spotless office park and still have time to catch a restless look from any number of powdered service girls in fur.
It’s as if bits and pieces of every great city in the world were copied, shrunk down, and then twisted into neatly drilled holes supported by a canopy of thick-shielded power lines and PA systems. The suburb where I work has started playing “It’s a Small World” over a network of loud speakers seemingly every 15 minutes of the shopping day. Specialty shops carry Winnie the Pooh and Snoopy in Santa outfits as the grand marbled hotel plazas wrap white Christmas lights and hearts around tragically sooted pillars.
Though a little tired and windblown from darting down more than several stone-lined hills, I feel incredibly satisfied with my three hours’ outing and look forward to tomorrow with pedestrian shopping and luxuriously far more time to accomplish my few humble errands than I need. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll lose myself in a cup of hot chocolate and a threadbare corduroy blazer from one of Harajuku’s seemingly endless community of vintage shops.
