autumn tactics

Change comes whether you wish it or not. You can try to hold back change, but ultimately it will always best your efforts. You can try to precipitate change, and in a tangible sense this is quite possible for many worldly elements.

I didn’t really plan on things changing this fast, but they are. It’s a big change, so naturally I’m nervous. I’d probably be a fool if I wasn’t. Well, I’m a fool anyway but that’s beside the point.

Tomorrow I’m going to take my driving test. America doesn’t have an agreement with Japan like most industrialized nations that permits the simple conversion of a license. I’ve been talking about making this change for years, but it all came together in the last three weeks. Now I just have to pass the test, which is fabled among expatriates for its difficulty.

Bigger than this is that today it was also decided that I’m leaving Shibuya, my beloved home of eight years. Eight years of living in the shadow of the greatest metropolitan center in the world. Eight years of living alone, returning home each day after a long battle at work to spend a few humble hours in quiet. Eight years of making selfish decisions solely for my own comfort. Eight years of bachelorhood.

A new chapter begins June 14th, a new chapter of no longer running around with the freedom to do solely as I please with no one to answer to. A new chapter where I discover myself from learning about someone else. A new chapter where my worth is more than just what I can accomplish with my own two hands.

For a person who has spent so much of his life planning, waiting, and drawing up diagrams to explain it all, in the end the biggest changes are made not with the mind, but with the heart.

So I sit on the sofa, alone, in my quiet. With a microbrew in my hand and Music for Airports on the Hi-Fi, I start the goodbyes to the decade of my mind, before I start the welcomes to a decade of my heart.

I bought a potted rose because I had heard they were among the hardest plants to keep, a flower that required daily care and attention to reach its fullest potential. Falling prey to a variety of diseases and parasites, if I didn’t have the rose on my mind every day, and act accordingly, it would die. I’d kept dozens of varieties of other plants before. Some I purchased at full bloom, others only tiny specks of seeds. Some withered in the summer heat and perished quickly, others hung around year after year, contributing little but requiring virtually no maintenance whatsoever. Some started out nice enough but I let them grow wild, and they choked each other out, fighting for nourishment in the soil. I bought a rose because I was so bad at appreciating what I had, because I went through so many lesser flowers halfheartedly. I bought a rose because I needed to practice love.

Love is not a seasonal custom, or a pleasure to enjoy when one’s in the mood for it. Love is everlasting labor, and reward. It’s appreciating something special for what it is, and what it brings to you every day: in the pleasure of seeing something thrive, and the grace from having a chance to make something better of yourself, to make something other than yourself better. I’ll probably live to be eighty-four and still not fully understand this.

I bought a rose with the hope that we could grow together, and I’d gain a strength inside that I’d always lacked. I bought a rose as training for something more precious than the life of several thorny stems in earth. I bought a rose and watered it, put in the sun, talked to and fawned over it. After some time had passed, it gathered white spots after a week or so I skimmed some articles on-line which led me to buy a fungicide at the department store. I sprayed it on and walked away, later bothered with how long the milky chemicals glazed the once vibrant leaves. Branches grew brittle and snapped off, petals fell to the ground and every new blossom that formed was smaller and more anemic. From time to time when I had a minute and it would catch my attention I would prune away a little of the worst areas; laundry caught on a thorned twig quietly pleading for help.

Winter came and I was left with three meager sticks and dozen sickly leaves. It looked like I had lost again, and I was fated to never learn from my self-absorbed egotism. For the first time since high school I spent a cold winter alone, truly lost in an empty house.

Eventually the spring came and the warmth of the sun returned to my balcony. The same old uninvited vines clung to my railing planters and I began to think of how I’d eventually have to lay down some new marigolds and turnips to cool the summer afternoons. But one day when I wasn’t expecting it something changed. As I was sweeping the cruft from the last five months down towards the drain spout I bumped into that simple brown pot in the corner of ground. The long barren and unforking stalks of my rose were different– over two dozen chartreuse buds had appeared, and in those tiny, meager shoots I found more joy and surprise than all of the last year put together. The rose had taught me a lesson, though it wasn’t the one I thought I was looking for… love was undying, and had given even ungrateful me another chance. If love can keep hope for me, then there must be a way for me to keep hope for it.

At the beginning of my first serious foray into online presence, I had three things: a portfolio to get a job, a blog, and a Friendster account. The first became largely irrelevant after I was hired and moved out to Tokyo two weeks from graduation, and the latter was fraught with a lack of relevance and style, which quickly led it to obscurity. However, the blog, is something that I’ve more or less kept at faithfully for the better part of eight years. I began writing of my explorations in this fantastic land, and quickly supplemented that with the angst of trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be. If it was one thing you could count on it was my endless stream of diatribes yearning for import.

Over time I began to find my place, through the kindness of others and the occasional burst of learning from my own stubborn demands that the world fit my narrow-minded vision of right and wrong. I moved from writing about stray cats and working on weekends to endless, repeated praise for trance music and what I quaintly cherished as community. Then at some point I decided to start doing something public with my photography, whether people recognized me for it or not, and thus we arrived at end of the decade. In the time since ubiquitous computing (to use a word that was en vogue with SIGCHI when I was in college), the fragmentation of platforms, portals, and people has made it harder and harder to be noticed, with each microtransaction of communication becoming far and far less meaningful, any rare original thought swallowed in a sea of chaff.

Sheepishly I now realize that I’ve probably driven away the three or four actual people I had reading this public journal with the advent of my adoption of that watered-down sinkhole of information exchange Facebook. I say so much more often so much less, that it leads me to wonder in twenty years’ time will my children find interest in reading my journal or my tweets? The answer is probably neither, but just the same I’m glad I took the time to sit down and actually think about what I was doing before six months went by and I was scratching my head why 2011 felt so much more empty than any of the other years in recent past.

It’s most likely not a coincidence that the speed and density of my current background music, The Plateaux of Mirror, is likely nearly half that of the floor-rattling trance I usually have on at this time of night. Thank you Mr. Eno for helping me collect my thoughts and appreciate the last forty minutes a little more.

Now the real irony is I started this entry meaning to write about love… but there we have it, the attention span of mankind pared to a millisecond.

There are forces buried inside of me that I cannot comprehend; laying dormant, inactive. I could live a lifetime never knowing they exist were it not for a chance combustion. Music as a concept as a pure rod of unscored metal, a blank key with limitless possibilities. From the moment we are born until the day we die, we could listen to every composition ever conceived and not find the exact match for the signature of our soul.

But there is a flash, a moment, when that discovery is made, and all of the tumblers fall into place. The combination is complete– a maelstrom of fervor and ectasy is unlocked. The discovery of a lifetime, the infinite sequencing of the mind dissolved. My eternal key is Mat Zo’s 24 Hours. [Right around the three-minute mark my restraint unwinds....]

舌を巻いた。

I feel…alive. I am so alive that being alive is more than alive and I can’t stand it. And it’s not even high, it’s like a me and being here and seeing and feeling, touching, listening, tasting it all and I can’t stand it. It’s like that movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, if you’ve ever seen it. There’s the scene where Jimmy Stewart is young, and he’s walking around Bedford Falls and feeling restless. He meets Violet on Main Street and asks her if she wants to go out. His eyes go crazy, rolling like a maddened horse, and he speaks with passion, with passion and verve, talking about walking way out up to the mountains, up to the hills, barefoot through the fields of dew and climbing the waterfalls, watching the sun rise and being alive. That is how it is, sort of. I knew I was going out; it was eight o’clock on a Saturday, I’m alone of course and not doing anything. Recently, the hot thing for me is not doing anything at all… because I’m always doing something so nothing is an incredible big deal, it’s like playing canasta your whole life and discovering checkers, where there are no cards.

But like I said I was doing nothing, and I was all worried, worried about worrying like, “I should leave my watch at home because time doesn’t matter“, or “I’ll take my film canister of change, because my wallet means I may buy something significant (over ten dollars), but to have no money, I’m sure I’d regret it,” like I regretted not having my pencil and paper with me. Okay, so I made a conscious decision to not have my camera, but I should always at least have my pencil and paper, or my voice recorder, because I was so into things when I got there.

But there was a curb, actually a curb on like Rokugodori, in Minamidai, on a curb freshly made so crisp and white concrete, next to Tokyo University’s feeder high school, and with a steiny, that’s a bottled 334 ml Asahi, and yes! Yes yes yes yes yes! No, because it’s not like alcohol is the thing, but it’s like a thing that you do, I mean, I said I’d stop drinking alone, but getting drunk alone and just having one beer on a Saturday night in summer are like two entirely different things. There are still mom and pop liquor stores like every now and then in the middle of all the houses, areas not close to stations where convenience stores have still not taken root. So I passed one, and I thought about the bottle cap that I gave Rob, the Tsingtao from that day at Waseda, that golden day of sun and riding bicycles, so I hoped that they would have it here too. But no, it’s too small, but at least they had the steiny, because chilled liquids out of glass are worlds apart from cans or plastic. Of course we don’t drink beer from plastic, but it’s summer for chrissakes and so I got the steiny and I connected with the old guy running the store. Because there aren’t many customers, because the stores are always just the front of a house in which the owners actually live in the back, and they’re watching TV back there and all, and won’t even come up to the front unless you make some noise scuffing your tennis shoes on the linoleum floor or something. But he was all so into saying, “arigatou gozaimasu” and I was all about saying it back, and doumo and my trademark ookini on the way out the door. Because I get that. Yeah it costs an extra twenty or thirty yen per item, but it’s some guy with a wife and a dog and running his store and not some corporation with rich CEOs whose children are the target of kidnappings for ransom. So of course I pay the extra and help him out, and feel good about the blue collar bond we share, it’s called ninjyou.

But that was just the start, just the catalyst, because I was on the curb of Rokugo and looking through the athletic field at the high school and seeing those Hatsudai and Touchou skyscrapers all ten minutes’ ride off, towering in the Tokyo sky which never gets dark. The best it does is turn halftone blue-grey, because of all the electricity running through the place. But at that point I was in it, I fell into it like I didn’t have any choice, I fell into the everything that was there for me and only me to notice: the construction cone next to my leg that didn’t light up like the others, the way the warning signal silently blinked all the way down the road at the intersection, how much I wanted it to at least glimmer a little on the fender of my beat bicycle; how the seatpost is at a stupid angle, tilting to the back because it’s so far damn out, because I’m so tall, it’s like almost half the length of the seat tube itself. The little bugs walking on the crisp crisp pavement, how their little wings caught the light of the new sallow streetlight, the tiny little nut to some piece of machinery in the gutter with the dead leaves, and the black electric tape strip and the sweet, sweet bulge in the heel of my right beat Thailand green suede Converse which pooched out from my darling outstretched legs. A group of homemakers rode behind me on the sidewalk, talking about how cool it was today (and it was cool), and I understood every single word, every inflection, and rolled around in all of that nothing on the curb in the summer with the crickets chirping.

The sounds overpowered me, I could pick out every one, I heard with perfect clarity the motorcyclist stoking the throttle as the light turned green on Honanchou dori, I could hear the surge of water in the storm drain nex to me, from someone’s laundry machine two blocks away emptying. I heard the playful screams of a child in a bathtub in a house on the street behind the house behind me, and so into all of it every tiny fibre in my sagging shoulders just being there, I realized, “There is a hell of a lot going on the world, an incalculable amount of things to notice. To not notice all of it would be the most incredible of tragedies, but for me to notice it now is the most wonderful gift anyone has ever been given in the world.”

Yes, I noticed it all, and it doused and saturated my heart. It carried and threw my soul into a current, and I knew that today was again something, something so fantastic I just had to come home right now to tell you about it.

Live at Sydney, awash in sun falling memories, Charlottesville, then Pittsburgh. My room, the smell of late seventies carpet, nylon pile, polyester comforters…dust…

Round and round the loop bends, up an octave and down again. Shake and burn the journey haunts me, my face resting deep in those old, trampled fibres.

Time is an infinite place
But it may pause
The tide still falls
My time is an infinite space
Am I on pause
Or will I fall
In love again

Things and possessions and boxes and photos and water rings and towering Cerwin Vegas on either side of the dark walnut shelf I’d known for twenty years.

Why am I fighting a collapsing paper bag with glassy insides, forced to remember every crack in the parking lot at Grady? It’s as if I’m slowly moving downhill, slipping, grasping at bits and pieces of lovers’ keepsakes, statuettes’ arms breaking and plastic bead gravel sliding out from under my feet.

Who is romantic, what is this ideal? How can I not be a lost and weary dreamer? I’m hungry for all of the crumbs and drops that fell between the seat cushions, but what is this constantly pushing forward in smaller circles and only eating bread?

“Where trance meets reality.“

I’m twenty-three years old. Every day, one of thousands, is a string of successes and failures, things learned and forgotten. And behind it all there is a faded photograph, a boy sitting in the backyard with a look of wonder and innocence on his face. Time has left paint spills, chips, wood shavings, wrinkles and water rings over the once glossy kodacolor paper– a tableau of precision, fidelity, weakness and pain. But unchanging are two grey-blue eyes.

I was pissed off at work today after being there until midnight, but lying in my room waiting for the inescapable sleep, I listen to oasis and my heart sobs just a little… then a hint of a wry smile folds across my tired face.