autumn tactics

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.

Under the burgeoning work-to-rest ratio expanding at work, I’ve been spending some time thinking about reality. For me, it’s perception. Of course, there are physical limitations which resist argument in many cases (death, taxes), but outside that, what I get out of life is proportional to what I put in and how I interpret that. So, if reality is for the most part my interpretation (and the aforementioned attitude), then what does it matter so much how other people view what I do with my life and how I evaluate its quality? Now, there’s several billion persons more or less like me on a biochemical level, so we have roughly 6×10^9 versions of reality coexisting on this planet of gods, money, pleasures and suffering. How does that old saying of self-affirmation go? “Do whatever you want to as long as you don’t hurt anyone (+/- yourself).” This dictum stands in several formats throughout psychology, religion and politics and it is (or isn’t) an interesting conundrum that dovetails with the whole capitalist-society work-for-someone-for-money-for-your-freedom (which is in itself a paradox, 9 to 5 [or in my case 9 to 11]). Anyway, I know this is disorganized but the music has changed bands so many times in the last twelve minutes that I’m not even sure what I was set to talk about…. oh yes…

So I lived in Seattle in the golden waning dot-com summer of 2000 and worked for a software company. The skeptics would have me believe that I’ve forgotten a good deal of what happened in those storied three and a half months and that I polish the memories much more than I should. However, if we are to accept any of what I said in the preceding paragraph, I should have sufficient room to maneuver when I say blankly that it was probably one of the highest quality and well-rounded summer diversions that one (similar in my preferences) could ask for (if not the paragon). Allow me to paint for you…

A large world of wonder, vast and teeming with life…a port, two bridges, football, baseball, fresh fish, sunshine, sprinklers on perfectly trimmed lawns, evergreens that dwarf even the city skyline, invigorating air that makes every fibre in your lungs swell with life. And that’s just the city. The highways are exceptionally wide, the speed limit is 70, (most) people drive slowly but don’t get in your way, it’s three hours to both Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, British Columbia another two striking gems of the Pacific Northwest….and the whole way is down the sprawling, glorious I-5 snaking through the forest.

My job was at least as energizing…the best pay I’ve ever received (despite being an intern!), free beer, juice, and food every day. Offices bigger than my bedroom, dedicated everyone, thousands of people, dozens of clubs, sports, parties, socializing and program management. In between the other arts, away from a computer screen always in-between buildings and offices…the place where I truly thrive with GANNTs, design decisions and software design.

As if the raves, incense, underage drinking, maid service and company car weren’t enough, I had the most maintenance-free and satisfying relationship of my life. Everyday after leaving work (at an exceptionally dependable 4-6pm), home cooked dinners, Smash Brothers and 2 hours of “Married…with Children“. I could go on and on about that person for a while, but it’s better to see the look in my eyes when you ask me yourself.

It’s worth noting that despite this idyllic paradise I stumbled into, I destroyed most of it in typical tragic-hero Rusty fashion, but what’s past is past and I learned some of the most powerful lessons I’ve yet to realize in the course of it all.

Will I go back? I talk (and think) about it quite a bit. Could I be happy making (at least at first) productivity software again? Quite possibly. Seattle is my Olympus, and like Promethus I’ve spent my life among mortals for my sins, but perhaps through my own efforts or an angel’s, Hercules will be sent to show me the way back to that place again, much wiser and keen on respecting every revolutionary minute.

[Note: at the end of writing this blog, Winamp has come back the the New Radicals from which I started, framing this entry with a band that will always remind me of her, and of the summer I grew the most.]

Senior year in high school I was just beginning to get the social politics together that I’d depend on all through college. A card-carrying thespian and Associate Editor of “The Governor” (playfully called the Patriot Missal), I had opportunities and the motivation to get into some fun stuff. One such event was the first “Mr. TJ Pageant“. Put together by the thespians, Mr. TJ was the chance for the school’s most outgoing (and egotistical) men to compete for the title of archetypal male student. Events included the tuxedo competition, the swimsuit competition, question and answer, and of course, the talent competition. Though I may have not had an adonis-like body or the best tux (inventory problem at my tailor), I felt I scored a hit with my talent…

Equestrian Showtune Dancing.

I made up a little intro on the back of a program about how I discovered this rare wedding ritual while in the backwater districts of nearby Uniontown and that it signified fertility and good fortune for the lucky couple. However something this nonsensical could of course only be spawned from my own mind. So my friend in the art department and I made a cardboard and papier-mache’ horse head while another friend and I dyed a jumpsuit and some socks brown. Then I got my friend Adam to put on the ridiculous getup and dance around with me on stage to lip-synched version of “I Don’t Need Anything But You” from Annie. I choreographed all kinds of leaps and body gestures, Adam’s improvising made it even better. But the element that really put it over the top is the introduction of my best friend Mark riding around stage on a bicycle wearing a straw hat and Hawaiian shirt while the MCs started a cancan stage left. Random doesn’t begin to describe it. It rocked.

Anyway, the point of this blog is I heard “My Girl” at lunch today at the aurally ecclectic Furansu steak house. While the judges of Mr. TJ were deliberating, the contestants performed a well-choreographed dance number to “My Girl” courtesy of Dija Pathik. It was pretty good, we all had our personal corny solos. It was such a memorable event that whenever I heard that song now I always think of Dija, and the guys hamming up her dance, and a horse…and the laughter.

So it’s about 4:00p, and I just finished my first meal of the day. That’s not good for a lot of reasons, but it’s usually the way things work on the weekend since I have no kitchen. What did I eat after fasting for 30 hours you say? A lamb wrap from a foreign (meaning non-Japanese) street vendor. I think 90% of the street vendors in Tokyo are foreigners (maybe American), which is kind of funny when you think about it (if you’ve ever been to New York). Anyway, the funny part of this story is I’m looking at the menu (written and Japanese), and make my choice. Here’s how the dialoug went.

Vendor: [coolly, slightly blase] Hey, how’sitgoing?
Me: Uh, fine. I’ll have a normal [size] wrap.
…
Me: How hot is the “hot” sauce?
Vendor: [nonchalantly] Not hot.
Me: Ok, I’ll take that.

It’s the kind of banter I think Sword would appreciate. It had the cadence we respect with familiarity.

So I was in Akihabara. Akiba is dangerous in similar ways to Kabuki-cho, but from a different angle. Regardless, in either place you’re [I'm] likely to walk in with the intention of just a pleasant stroll or some window shopping, but you end up walking out feeling good having received more than a few things you really don’t need, and with a lot less money. As my friend Rodney once said “In Kabuki-cho you’re not in danger so much physically as you are fiscally.”

I haven’t been to Kabuki-cho since the eventful “Night of Sin” last summer. I’m not going to write about that here, you’ll have to email me for the mortifying details.

Anyway, this time though the end result was the same, the threat was an abundance of cheaply priced electronics stores, discount video game dens, and eight-story figure and otakumono purchase palaces. I think I was pretty good all things considered. I stuck to my promise of only five minutes in Aso Bit City (on the first floor mind you), and I didn’t even go _into_ GAMERS. I did, however, pick up Mr. Driller: Drill Land and the much-debated Zelda: The Wind Waker for Gamecube. Only cost me 3900 yen, that’s a DAMN good deal, even if they were used (which they weren’t).

Technology is a funny thing. I don’t understand it sometimes, and this results in much amusement (at least for me). For example, last summer I thought my apt. had a rice cooker, so I filled it with water, set it to hot and dumped some rice in the main receptacle. After wondering what the large round button on top was for, I pushed it and discovered it made the water bubble about and through the gauge on the front. After some more pumping I saw the rice go zipping through the translucent pressurized conduit like a Mr. Wizard experiment. Ok, that was interesting. It wasn’t until several months later when I saw someone use a similiar device TO PUMP HOT WATER INTO A TEACUP. Ok, so it wasn’t a rice cooker. I wonder if the next person to use it after I moved out got two-month old rice in their tea. Hmm…

Ever since my 10-year old Land’s End sandals disintegrated after running full speed into the train station steps and falling (cheap pieces of junk!), I’ve been wearing the same pair of shoes all summer as I couldn’t fit any more in my baggage when I first came. So I’ve been wanting several, if not at least one, new pair of foot protectors for a while. Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it sounds. People are smaller in this country. I found an AWESOME pair of shiny brown leather shoes (looked like Indiana Jones‘) at a department store near Akiba’s eki, but alas it wasn’t meant to be.

Me: Konno kutsu de wa, ni juu kyu sento saizi ga arimasu ka? (Do you have these shoes in size 29cm?)
Vendor: Ni juu kyu?! (29?!)
Me: Hai. (Yes.)
Vendor: Nai desu yo! (Hell no, are you nuts?)
Me: [meekly] Ni juu hachi? (28?)
Vendor: Konno kutsu wa, ni juu nana made desu. (This shoes only go up to 27.)
Me: Honto? Sumi masen. (Really? Uh…sorry.)
Vendor: Hai. (Ok.)

Yeah. It was like walking into a miniature poodle shop and asking if they had any shetland pony-size models in stock. They just don’t come that way.

Speaking of dogs, early in the day I witnessed another poor victim of Japanese people’s attempt to over cutesify things. I can’t overstate this point enough…Japanese develop dogs the size of rats, in MULTIPLE breeds. It’s not like they’re all chihuahuas, it’s just that every daschund, welsh corgie, terrier and shih-tzu is about the size of a Skecher. And they’re all constantly dragged along against their will by people of all sizes and age, or humiliated by being put in purses, bike baskets, or shopping bags. There’s even magazines endorsing putting suits on them, perming their hair and all other kinds of insane modifications. Like they’re Barbie dolls or something. … This pitiful creature in particular was especially abused, its white ears were dyed hot pink and it was being pushed in a baby carriage.

So while standing in line to get the train back home (the pink-eared dog passed me again), I chose my line to wait in carefully. Carefully of course means the one that ends with a girl that has about as much fabric on her body as I have cash register receipts from today’s meals. She was especially brown (for a Japanese person), and her little yellow shirt stopped a couple centimeters below her ribs leaving a wide swath of flesh before her incredibly low jean shorts started and ended a hand’s length later. And she had this way of standing…of bending one knee and crossing her foot over the other, pooching out her hip. It said “Gee, I sure am wawwying if I will eva eva get an interesting email on my pwetty cell phone (in Japanese).” Yeah. I wasn’t sure if I turned on or repulsed. I think the majority of men standing in line around me felt the same way from the looks on their faces. I sat next to her because I had to, but unfortunately she got off two stops later and I never got a good look at her face/front. Oh well. It made me grin anyway.

The last thing I’ll talk about [my neck really hurts now], is how ridiculous Southern accents sound in Japan. I could make a CD and it would sell a million copies just by adopting an absurd Jeff Foxworthy-voice and saying “KO-NEE-CHEE-WAA”. Maybe I should put up a .wav file or something. There were two colorful, NASCAR-loving individuals on the train home. I wish I could have recorded their embarrassing drawl as it spilled over every mispronounced syllable. But then again, I shouldn’t talk. Just yesterday someone I talked to asked me if _I_ was from a particular region of the US because my Virginia twang was peeking through. Ugh. Good thing no one here has heard me on the phone to home.

With that, I’m watching an episode of Mahoromatic and going to sleep [how the frick did it get so late?!].

Man I was just having the BEST fuggin’ dream…. it was so funny that I woke up laughing and pounded the wall next to my bed; right about where the girl next door is sleeping.

I was at a party. A college party. Do you know how insanely hard it is to find anything involving hard liqour and 20-somethings at someone’s house with loud music and stupid costumes here?! College here is NOTHING like it is in America. Dammit. I want to go funneling or drink some nasty blue liquid with my housemate Brandon. It was a party that was occuring this year at school…I’m sure one is just about to happen now, as it is Friday night of the first week of school in Pittsburgh. Fernandez is probably already mixing his red drop extract with tap water and Vladmir.

The reason I was laughing was that I was really buzzing and telling Brandon and Enorme’ (Fernandez) about how I had just come back from spraying Eddie Murray’s name on people’s houses…in PAM! It was hilarious. One of the girls I met last year and I had been talking…this was yet like phase 5 of the dream that had already taken hours. I introduced her, let’s call her Regina, to my brother because they’re both like 19. I used to sleep with her (so young!) but I pissed her off or something (in real life) so we didn’t talk to each other anymore. More exactly, I didn’t call her and she didn’t call me. But it wasn’t happening so I left my house where she was visiting and went off to get a beer and do the Eddie Murray thing.

But at this party were people from my fraternity at Virginia. [Yoda voice] “Old friends, long gone.” Andy was there (he’s like 28 now), and Kuang. The guys that gave me my sendoff when I visited northern Virginia for the last time this May. NOT the guys that got married and act like dicks ignorning me now.

Anyway, so the house seemed different, like the locale always does in my dreams…an amalgamation of places I lived while at Virginia and Carnegie Mellon. The uber college party residence. It was cool. I wanted to get my sweetass Cerwin Vega speakers back, but they weren’t even using them. I was kinda laying over a piece of furniture, maybe an end table, and Brandon the housemate kept dumping beer and stuff on my stomach, then giving me 50/50 rum and coke Long Islands or something to drink. For some reason there was this mystery liqour called “Limejew”. I have no idea why. It was great…. 50% R-E-A-L, real liqour schnapps, real not tap water…I don’t know. We were all laughing insanely (as Fernandez, Brandon and I were wont to do) about nothing, except me shouting out in the stupidest Jersey gangster accent over and over, “You fawck!”

Yeah, falling over into a girl’s lap, drinking more, and following other critical steps of The Five Stages of Drinking on old, ratty, carpet. Man I miss college.

Cheers, guys…I hope you have a great one tonight for me.

PS – HOT…HOT…HOT…EEEAAAAHHHH!!!!….

Do you remember those digital scales from AP physics and chemistry in high school? The ones that had the TARE button on them to reset with the current weight? But of course you were thinking “TARE? Stupid Oxford Metrics or whatever idiot science company in Connecticut…first of all it’s T-E-A-R, and second this has nothing to do with paper or assholes so why is this button on the scale? Why don’t they just say “ZERO” or “RESET”? Crumby moron eggheads failed English.”

I think that was a rather inefficient way of saying we’re moving on, so TARE a new page off in your mind before reading on in this blog.

Damn it, I forgot what I was going to write about. Oh yeah. Miles Davis. So there’s the jazz fanatics, the casual listeners, the idiots that put Kenny G on the Weather Channel local forecast, and there’s me. Yesterdays. It’s a good piece. I recommend you find it. And when you do, read the following poem aloud (and ideally have a glass of bourbon on ice with a steamy summer night). The man makes me think things. Lots of things. I miss writing.

Enjoy.

From Eight Years and Ten Thousand Miles, the early works of Steven Rorrer…

Yesterdays
Steven Rorrer

soft and dear your face
on the brim of my mind so late at night
how can I best describe
the way you hang around my thoughts

here every night at this time I drink alone
but you join me just the same
I wonder where you are; are you sleeping
or up late alone as well, sitting there with me

There WAS a time when I would drive around in my ice blue 1987 Dodge Charger listening to Mr. Big very loudly with the windows down.

That time is not now.

Why can’t one experience everything at once, or at least lots of little things? Right now I’d give my week’s ice cream money to have a cold, wet, autumn evening. To be precise…

It rained roughly 80 minutes ago, there is a sharp breeze that comes in gusts from the northwest every couple seconds. I’m standing in a parking lot of my high school or a closed mall, or something at 11:43pm with tennis shoes….yea, Converse low tops. My ‘bowling shoe’ set would work. And I can drag my foot back and forth across the asphalt and feel the soddy gravel and maybe a couple wet leaves. There’s one of those obnoxiously bright fluorescents about 20 feet away, and I’m partially in the shadows. The pores on my skin are open from the humidity and I have just the slightest amount of goose flesh on the back of my neck, partially because of the wind and partially because of a red-haired, starry-eyed girl in a gap sweater that smells like CK-1. Can’t I just taste that for once when I want to?

I’m tired. I want to sleep. I also at this moment want to:

a) write this blog
b) draw a picture of a girl
c) make up some crazy sad melody on a keyboard
d) lay in damp grass
e) drink ice cold Jim Beam and coke
f) listen to jazz music
g) ride a bicycle through a corn field in winter

but I’m tired. And I left work early today (8:00p) so I could get sleep and wake up and kick ass on 10 million things tomorrow like a 1980s movie lead.

But there’s too much _life_ in me to sleep, or do any one of those things, so I’ll just be slighted frustrated and probably lay in bed half-thinking about some willowy angel with freckles and field trips to the apple cider mill.

Anyone have need for a deep personal connection with someone who dreams way too hard?

Have you ever seen the movie Groundhog Day? It’s actually pretty decent (I think). It’s funny, sometimes I think of that crazy Sonny and Cher song when I wake up. I actually have a small cache of morning songs to get me going. I should probably make a playlist or something so they’re easier to get to. My second year at Virginia I was kinda down; understandably so. I was 19, I was still kinda torn up about the whole high school girlfriend breakup thing, engineering had no meaning to me other than the classes didn’t seem fair and were kicking my ass. I was, however, among friends. I lived with three of my fraternity brothers in what we called “The Outpost” a posh little apartment On Grounds just stumbling distance to the happening scene of Rugby Road. Joe Chen had top bunk in our room. He’s one of those guys that’s really smart and doesn’t have to try at it. I was happy to see him spend most of his time strumming a guitar, tapping out a tune on the keyboard, or playing Total Annihilation. Anyway, I’m getting away from the point.

I was depressed. I skipped class a lot. I had my little ‘hole’ to sleep in….shades blocking out nearly all light, bottom bunk in the far corner of the room, and three comforters, two pillows…all I had to do is roll over on my right side and I was in pitch black cold cinder block heaven. So much so that I rarely got up before 11:30 or noon, regardless of when I went to bed. I’d like to believe a boy’s body chemicals change a lot during that time, and I needed the rest. Maybe I was subconsciously storing it up for grad school when I wouldn’t hardly sleep at all. Oh yeah, there was this crazy, cute Greek girl that lived in the next building…what was her name? Karen? I went through at least 30 pages of “A Prayer for Owen Meany” just because of her. Damn it…off topic.

I listened to Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher” and Adam Sandler‘s “Billy Madison‘s Victory Song” to get myself to class a few times a week. End of story. Thank you.

(I want to write a lot more about second year now….but gotta catch the train to work. If only I could blog from my Handspring at a reasonable speed….[graffiti]).

In the words of the immortal blur, “this is a low.” Chalk up another loss for the overzealous gaijin in a land where perhaps he doesn’t belong. I don’t feel like being unambigous right now, so I’ll just say for those parties privy to the Rusty of old (which recently appears quite infrequently…whether that’s a bad thing of a good thing), that two of the leading knuckles on my right hand are showing more than a little blood.

I try. I try everyday. If I don’t try, one of two things happens: 1) I lose my job, or 2) I go on a spree of self-negligence and wanton destruction. Either way, I’d probably lose my visa in 3-4 weeks and find myself guilty of illegal residence and subsequent deportation.

Ha. Life rules because it sucks.