Anyway, this year, at least thw last seven months have been rocky.  From the great kanto earthquake the normal flow of my winter ended.  I went from thinking about where I would go skiing next weekend to which flight I may have to take out of Japan.

In a matter of weeks everything was different and I was on medication to just make it through the day.

And now I am living with someone, not just physically but emotionally.  I yearn to go home just to be with someone I can no longer stand to be without.

At the same time we wore through one of the most difficult parts of our company’s history, and my sense of responsibilty took consumption of my life to ne w levels.  Only this time my heart was stronger and I held fast, almost too well.  At the expense of my art and my personal life, I am in the process of another lost year.

It is tough for those below as it is for those above.  It is tough on everybody.

The project I am on now will mercifully be over in a month or so, but in the past where a small break was the only interlude before another big project’s start, this time I have four or five to look after.  To be honest I am not really that concerned about it now, because regardless I have many plans for the fall.  Raves, camping at Fuji Lakes, and a trip to Europe to say the least.  As well as scrambling to get something artistic put together by December.

I will not go quietly into the third quarter, I’ve sacrificed enough already.

It’s a little bit like being on a mild depressant, novel at first in the unique perspective you gain temporarily– walking straight up, your focus drifting vapidly between objects in the mid to far distance.  There is an odd sense of calm unbefitting of such a tragic erosion or one’s most precious resource, time.

Everything outside of work is sacred, and the slightest hint of compassion almost drives you to tears.  It makes me wonder what kind of man I am to live like this.

To the artist I hope to find something beautiful and more significant than all the hours in and out of the office I spend worrying about that kind of nonsense.

To loving the rocking of a train, the dew that collects in the backs of my elbows, to some kind of magic always around me that I am too foolish to see.  To finding some meaning and something truly worth investing in.

I’ve been thinking about moving recently, to Shimokitazawa, perhaps, to be closer to an active community of young, frenetic artists. However, since I’ve purchased an amazing Presta valve-compatible foot-activated pump for the Trek, I’ve been immensely enjoying riding up and down the Yamanote Line. This bicycle is a golden chariot nimble as a scalpel when slicing up smooth pavement. And the roads at three in the morning are blessedly barren of traffic, so I dart through intersections with the whistle of the wind in my ears.

From my ideally located command center in Yoyogi, in fifteen minutes I can get anywhere from Takadanobaba to halfway between Ebisu and Shibuya on this baby, every sinew loving the efficient euclidean bond between my feet and the Huret drivetrain.

Tonight I left work around nine-thirty, tried to take the Enjoy to Cosmos Cafe in Shibuya (but had to leave it in the parking lot with a flat), taxied up Miyasamazaka to see the Kawaki sisters’ dance, and then sped home to print up more flyers for the show. Around one-thirty I pried myself away from Beer Fest and beat up Meiji Street to catch Mayu’s DJ set at Emotional Signal in Waseda. Now it’s past four and I am almost exhausted. The standard fair six hours’ sleep, and tomorrow I help Okada-san move. Ah, joie de vivre.

I was thinking about it over the past several months I guess, in the back of my mind, but this morning in the shower it bubbled its way up to the surface of my consciousness.

An important part of being professional is detachment. We build software. We’re software engineers. We need to evaluate the software we write and the software we use clinically, and do what we can to improve upon it– as it currently stands and in the future when we write new software. This has to happen objectively. It’s not about who wrote it, or what the person is like. Because I think a lot of my frustration for a long time was about “he/she keeps screwing this up, and that’s why I’m here now.” I didn’t think this actively, but I think the feeling was inside of me somewhere. Whether it was a team member’s code, or the incomplete spec coming from design, or whatever. All the frustration grew out of there being a victim and a perpetrator. Though they most certainly didn’t intend to cause this kind of hardship, by what was produced that’s the atmosphere that developed. Even without the intent though, it was the fact that someone else created this condition, and I had to deal with it. I didn’t sit around actively thinking these things, but those kind of tones were in my frame of mind, and it frustrated me, which in turn made me stressed and tired, which led down that negative spiral.

But you can’t think that way. Not just for your own good, but for professionalism’s sake. And when you realize that it’s not about who did what at all, that actually it’s just about the job at hand, then it’s easy. There is no guilt, no victim, no perpetrator, no right or wrong. It just is. We analyze the software in question, try to improve on its current weaknesses in a symptomatic (bugs) or theoretical (refactoring) aspect and move on. Experience brings better judgment and refined sense. If we can just open our minds to this truly detached mindset of appraising and using software, then there is no cause for worry.

Maybe that’s what my senior meant when he told me years ago that I needed to work without making it personal, without being emotional. I still like to see people have fun, to be able to allow them to have fun. I can feel that, and that’s ok. It’s actually very important when you’re in the entertainment business. But when it comes to the method of my work, of engineering, then there is no feeling, no emotion. It’s just critical evaluation and corresponding action to improve the entire game development process.

“Easy” is a relative term. Everyone has their standards for difficulty, success, and merit, but for me software development has gotten much “easier” since I stopped looking at it as a high school drama of who did what to who and just saw it for what it really was, simple engineering.

Still, things are a mess all over and my priorities are all out of whack. My photography class starts tomorrow, I need to decide what kind of pictures I’m going to take with me to show since we’re supposed to start with that and self-introductions. I bought a license to FL Studio in February, but I haven’t made much use of it yet since I’ve been sucked into Resident Evil 4 (again), and seasons 10 and 11 of ER. I think that I need a schedule again for off-time, even though I don’t have any exhibitions on the horizon. I’ve let communication with too many important people slide in the name of short-term release. Thankfully, rave season starts in two weeks. A return to reflection, to sound and to quiet, and to good people all around.

So many twisted dreams going on now involving all the people I have issues with. ::sigh:: Work is never-ending and it’s nothing but responsibility I cannot manage without significant pain.

So my business trip to Los Angeles ends as quickly as it began. Fifty-one hours of Pacific Standard Time. It was educational, warm, fully of tasty things to eat, and garnered a few more memories to weave into my sterling silver bachelor’s band.

I got into town at eight-thirty Tuesday morning, seven hours earlier than when I left. Having a good amount of time on my hands before I could check into the hotel, I took a cab to Venice Beach and walked up Santa Monica to enjoy the weather. Along the way I met a pair of recently discharged Japanese office workers from Kyushu, and stopped at Big Dean’s for a ginormous double burger with fries and a pint of Sam Adams at the lovely body clock time of five a.m.

In between meetings I picked my way along the walk of fame and spent a good deal of time in the hotel conferring with coworkers back east. In some ways I think I could get used to living on the road: my room was about three times the size of my apartment and had a pretty decent view of the sunrise and Hollywood Hills.

Oddly enough my good high school friend Adam who I’d seen once in the last twelve years lives about five minutes’ drive from my hotel. We walked the dog, talked about old times, and his fiancee made us some lovely Cuba cuisine.

It was a short trip, but well-balanced and even had a good degree of intrigue and romance. Ah, the two carry-on lifestyle.

I board the train to the airporte at Shinjuku and impulsively swallow down an inari and tarako onigiri set with takuan. Wrestling off the cap of my blythe green tea I take a few strained belts. Muscles still coiled from the rushed disarray of morning, I put on m hopelessly broken headphones and try to calm myself down with some Final Fantasy piano concertos. The start of a journey and so much angstful longing for the good old wandering romantic me, I wish I were riding the train in the other direction, back to my ramshackle commuter bicycle. But this is the start, thirty hours of travel and forty-nine in Los Angeles. Four days of a businessman’s solitude.

Hirota-san says that when you’re really buried in a project, you not only lose track of time but reality as well. Riding on a crowded train, or walking through the city, you don’t pay attention to anyone. Your mind is so involved with work that nothing else even exists.

Hoka no hito ga ittemo, imi nai; kankei nai.

Even if other people are around, it means nothing. They are not related to what you’re doing and might as well not exist.

It’s not an intentional thought, or a position of haughtiness. Your reality simply collapses to the minimal set of conditions required to achieve the goal, whatever it is. (Most likely having lost all meaning in the process, you probably couldn’t explain it even if someone asked.) I think this tunnel vision is some kind of instinct, a primitive defense mechanism to conserve energy and prevent one from going insane. If you actually stopped to contemplate about how your mortal coil is all but evaporating out from beneath you, you’d probably literally get sick.

I’ve come out of one of these tunnels now… my entire summer was devoted to an already ridiculously intense project, and I have not a single summer memory aside from the one time I went to Enoshima for a few hours on the first train after pulling an all-nighter. Now, everything is nothing, and even coming close to thinking about it incurs some sort of queer cloister phobic-like panic. All of the unused tickets, the skipped concerts, the people I never called back… Now I’m twitching in withdrawal from that unhealthy work addiction, staying at the office doing almost nothing but feeling reluctant to leave. Almost unconsciously, I filled every single weekend for six straight weeks with multi-day events. Hertzberg on the 27th of September, Toyama the weekend after that, Gentenkaiki this weekend, Natural Smile the following weekend, a photo exhibition at Drop, eight days in Europe, and then Design Festa in the beginning of November. I supposedly have a birthday somewhere in there, but I won’t be near anyone who knows me for it so I don’t really think of it as happening.

Sitting now on a bench cross legged in the massive east wing of Messe and looking out into the vacant dusk sky, it’s pretty much still as Hirota-san says, hito ga ittemo, imi nai. Kankei nai.

Even if we’re together, I’m not there.

Today I’m at the Tokyo Game Show, the first I’ve attended in four years or so. Makuhari Messe is a convention center way the frick out in Chiba, past Tokyo Disneyland and near the end of the Keiyo Line. It takes at least a good forty-five minutes to get to from anywhere in the center of the city, a long, noisy train ride rolling through vast, unbroken stretches of warehouses and danchi (apartment complexes) below an eternally overcast sky. But, it’s a work day.

Seeing what the competition is doing is helpful to a degree; games are on display here a good several months to half-a-year before they are released to market. For me mostly it’s a reference to see how well other companies’ developers are taking advantage of the hardware. My job is to be sensitive to the representation of light and motion in particular. Jagged lines and rough approximations of shadows aggravate me, partly because I know it can be done better, but mostly because these are vivid reminders of the pressures of game development in general, and how many sacrifices in quality are made along the way due to project management blunders and an unskilled staff.

More or less though, it’s the same every year. Implementations of the same interaction systems pile up, most of them chaff. The truly excellent titles still stun, but these are usually the ones that show up at least three or four years in a row, a painstaking exercise in dedication and stamina. Sometimes I’m a little disheartened to think of what it takes, and how little appreciation and understanding there is for the art. But, it’s arrogant to think that most industries aren’t like that. Almost everyone has to work this hard to make an honest living, and that’s what’s really depressing.