November 14th, 2006
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Dead Man
When people ask what it’s been like working in Tokyo, I am at first at a loss of words. Stumbling over what should be said, or what the topical accoutrements of life in a metropolis of twenty million are like, I make apologies for my slackening grip on the English language. But the truth is I can’t really say what it’s like in any language, because there aren’t any words for it. But having been back for a handful of trips and a dozen encounters with faces from the past, I’ve finally generated a stock answer, which sums it all up: humility. Just that: how small I am, and how ineffective at changing anything I can really be. Humility to the point of only an eggshell-thin ego.
Look out the window. And doesn’t this remind you of when you were in the boat, and then later that night, you were lying, looking up at the ceiling, and the water in your head was not dissimilar from the landscape, and you think to yourself, “Why is it that the landscape is moving, but the boat is still?”
I look at the world. I look at a lot of things and think. I think a lot of things. I see things and think that they disgust me. Sloth disgusts me. Failure disgusts me. People who weakly indulge disgust me. People who turn to fat, processed sugar, alcohol, and perversion disgust me. They disgust me so, and yet, I am one of them. I too, race home from work every day in frustration, frustration for what I didn’t get done, how today was like every other day, how nothing ever changes, and I am powerless to alter that. Frustrated, I race home reckless and selfish, loathing the construction and the cars and the stoplights which I pass in a fury, always one honk or stumbling pedestrian away from a fitful explosion of all this disgust, failure, and rage. And then, just before home, at the point of my “sanctuary”, I think of trash, of the trash my body craves (or is it my soul), the filth of things processed, cheap, and satisfying for all of five minutes. The masturbation of mankind that I need to push the nagging stench of my own failure out of arm’s reach for an hour before I give up on the things I said to myself that I’d absolutely do; to go to bed in exhaustion, oversleep, panic my way to work so my boss doesn’t give me a hard time and I can do it all again for another fourteen hours.
The hypocrisy of my own bigoted standards is as putrid as my outlook. I ride down the street, sweaty, my mind terminally broken to the point of not being able to concentrate on anything, and thinking of a dozen pedestrian things that will drown out any flicker of a noble idea. Then I see the broken souls. The shuffling, inebriated, dregs (foundations) of society that live in a bottle amid stained flannel, searching for the same five minutes of ignorance, hoping that two and two makes five and another shot of cancer-inducing sordid anesthesia to numb out the realization of now.
No, when I go back to the States, it’s all just a facade, and I don’t even try that hard to keep it up anymore. What difference does it make what anyone thinks anyway?
