Two days.
Sixteen hours open to the public.
Three and a half for installation.
Thirty minutes striking the set.
+300 visitors to the booth.
Twenty-two acquaintances.
Six times asked if I was a professional photographer.
One conversation with an art magazine.
One potential hire for band publicity photos.
6400 yen in sales.
5000 in contributions from benefactors.
One hell of a time.
こんにちは。今週末私のブース、「複視」に来て頂いたの皆様、どうも有難うございました！
写真が好きでしたら、是非私のネットギャラリーご覧ください。いっぱい面白い写真が載っています。何かご意見や質問があれば、いつでもメールしてください。fukushi@ichigoichie.org.
Do you remember my eyes? How they shift between blue and grey depending on the weather? The amber ring in the center that catches the sunlight?
Yes, the circumstances have changed, but my eyes and the soul behind them are still the same.
I’ve been slogging towards another milestone at work, the third such hellacious one this year, and less than thirty days since the last. I lay down new features and design revisions to my libraries as fast as countless legions of content creators can swoop down on them, testing little and barely carving out the absolute minimum to make it run. And it comes in an office where the thermometer reads 95 and builds are broken all day long from a trail of bungling and sufficient specification all the way back to 2006.
But, as they say, the show must go on. And it will go on, and I do all that I can in the 80 odd minutes between getting home from work and brushing my teeth for bed. Only an angel keeps me together and my dreams alive with an eyedropper of hope.
Here are some pictures I took with the Holga last year and just managed to get scanned the other day.
せっかく日記を復活したけど、二ヶ月が過ごして、連絡していないね。ごめん。普段は毎月10-15回くらい書きますが、今年はなかんか余裕がない。来月はまた展示会があります。しかも、固くて決心しても今回が一番中途半端になっています。仕事はきつい、毎日23：30ごろ家に到着してる。なぜか、ライフがもっと複雑か、年取っているか、毎日～6時間の睡眠が足りなくて、だるい。
とにかく、今日も、明日も、仕事ですが、深夜製作中．．．
1983. Annie closes on Broadway after 2,377 shows. Gandhi wins Best Picture as Return of the Jedi picks up steam. Pioneer 10 becomes the first man-made object to leave the solar system. The De Lorean Motor Company ceases production, and the McNugget is introduced. I am three years old and love Ernie. Konica also produces a charming little pocket rangefinder with auto focus, shutter, and film winding, all for the low, low price of 47,800 yen.
For some time now, I have wanted a lightweight “junk” camera that I can always have with me and throw in any number of bags. The A-1 is too versatile and valuable a piece of equipment to have jostled around in my backpack all the time. The 70-210mm zoom lens is also intimidating to a lot of people.
Anyway, I didn’t want to put a lot of money into said camera because that would defeat the purpose. So I’ve been coming flea markets and Akihabara back alleys for a couple of months. I finally found what I was looking for last weekend while helping out the Nihon Furosato Food Festival. I bought shiny, black, brick from a kindly, well-traveled old man who spoke way too much like a used car salesman. But the camera was impeccably well kept, spotless and hardly a scratch on it– inconceivable for a 25 year old consumer shoot-and-forget camera.
Though I have had a decent array of camera bodies for a while, this marks the first time I’ve ever had film bodies at the same time. I realized today how nice this was when shooting the annual hanami raves in Yoyogi park this afternoon. The weather was a real drag, frigid, raining, and dark. But having 1600 Natura pushed to 3200 in the A-1 and 400 Presto in the Konica, I felt confident that I could handle any number of shots without feeling the pressure to finish a roll for switching stock.
For the first time in a long time I have a considerable scan backlog now, so once I get through my slides I’ll make an album in the Gallery dedicated to Konnie. 
I left work today at four because I have a cold. I have a cold and I’m tired. I also had a planned holiday for working a couple weekends ago.
It’s raining, and still light outside, much warmer than before but I can still see my breath in front of the window. Today feels, surreal. Whether its the drugs or the rare circumstance of leaving the office before it’s pitch black, I feel sleepy and incredibly excited at once. So much beauty to record now…
お久しぶりです。日記には、最近あまり書いていないけど、それより表示されていなかったでしょう。長い間僕は何をやっていただろうか。
とにかく、見えるからのぞき見興味ある方心から喜んでください。ちょっとずつ環境も更新しています。今一番目立つは壁紙でしょう。それと左にあるサイドバーにランダム写真が表示されます。全部は素敵なギャラリーに入っています。どうぞクリックして、見て、暇なら良き昔の思い出に連絡してください。
ではまた、
How many reasons do I have to have to explain the way that I feel well maybe I don’t have to or it doesn’t matter if I do or what or not and it’s done by me not you and old still something new left alone on my on with friends under the sky on a highway in a train by myself with fields of grain rice and mountains beyond to the oceans with sand and towels and people I don’t know but laughing it looks so much fun it’s just a part of the things that make me smile and laugh and it’s okay if you can’t understand it because I’m sure you feel it too it’s just inside and bubbling through in a different way because we’re both human and I love you no matter what happens to us and that’s just enough for me.
ええねん!
It’s two o’clock on Thursday, I’ve been in the States for roughly seventy-six hours so far. I’ve been more agitated by minor things than I really think I should, it’s a little surprising and disappointing, actually. But there’s a lot of Buddhism-inspired analysis that can be applied to that. I have new socks (beer mugs and shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day), and a nice clearance sale oxford from Old Navy. I’ve eaten cheese, drank Coppola wine and Harp Ale, and eaten for sustenance but without much thought.
I’ve been able to meet several of my friends from graduate school, including Elan, Shawn, Ray, and Brenda. It’s been a road of minor, mild successes and learning, but I think that’s really all I could hope for. Although, it really bothers me to be relegated to using a fork for eating salad. I really should have brought some chopsticks with me.
I’ve been up and down on the kigen scale today…small victories including getting my monochrome Visor working with keyboard, small failures including not correctly updating my email or contact information when HotSyncing. Yes, I can blog, yes I can take notes in session (eight megs free and padicty on the fritz). I love trains and the Keisei line. Okada-san and I talked about many things foreign and domestic. No, I did not bring ukon with me, no, I do not plan to get drunk. Yes, I type HTML tags into my entries directly, yes the plane took off an hour late due to malfunctioning weather report software at the Narita control tower (thank you Windows).
I’m performing the dustpan-organizing that always happens when travelling or making a visit to doctor… receipts and bank statements to the trash, blog entries from curled pocket notepad to Visor. Ah, but so fresh, so new, so many old things reoccurring. No, there’s hardly a soul to meet this week, but a wander, some exploration, some photos, a lot of listening, and hard, stingy hotel mattresses.
At least I have Masa’s Eaton vol. 11 mix to see me through it all.
I have decided to make my blog public again, for various reasons. I’d like to make things more readable and improve the presentation, but rather than wait for a grand overhaul, I’ll just tweak it piece-by-piece. The first part of this is the replacement of the background image, which I’ve used for the first five years of the blog. We’ll see how it goes.
Entries from last November to now will be migrated in, dated retroactively over the next couple of weeks. If you’re really interested in catching them all, I recommend again the RSS feed, or obsessive daily checking and scrolling back to catch entries just before this one.
Peace, happy 2008.
Hotel Locoz, Royal. Hotel Chapel Christmas. All of the Hachioji love hotels hanging along the opening stretch of the Kanetsu expressway, so many garish, sordid havens calling to tortured lovers, tempting with the poorly cloaked promise of two to four hours’ escape from prying eyes and questions.
Shuffling through the Dogenzaka rest stop idly for the tenth time, I look at the tsukemono, I look at the over-sized nikuman, slowly taking in all the chain-mall glory of the Japanese highway system: surreal, smug. They aren’t actual products I’d ever consider buying; it’s QVC and a sideshow. So many hours of saying nothing but thinking so much idly, it’s the closest thing to switching off that a neurotic medical journal entry like me can manage.
Sometimes a man meets a woman and is sure of his future in an instant. Sometimes it takes him his whole life. I used to believe that there was a certain way to fall in love, but as the years have passed I’ve grown to believe that there is no correct way to love a person. Change is eternal, and the only unifying constant in the world. I will be what I was but more and never less, forever.
What frightens me is what I don’t understand, and what may be. But I can’t predict the future, not from reading a thousand books or running a million experiments. But I can choose how I live and who I am, every day from now until the last. It’s nothing unique in its existence, but the actions I take are.
I am independent, and a voice, one of billions but one nonetheless. I have no more right to my own pursuit of happiness than any other, but no less either. My freedoms and privileges are immutable and as natural as the force of wind. These things are to my mind undeniable, so perhaps that is why the founders of America declared them as such. Be it God or chance, we have been given these infinite possibilities. So quick to favor ourselves and shift doctrine to ego, being human is certainly a challenge. Though we can identify with the ideals of freedom, truth, and love, they are not automatic. However it is said that nothing of any value comes easily. These beliefs number among our greatest strengths, our instinctive and unflagging desire to challenge, grown, and learn. So flawed is man, but so beautiful. As troubled in petty ways as I forever may be, I have never for a moment wished to be directed as to be infallible and not make decisions on my own. Life is hard, and it’s the hard that makes it great.
May all the buddhas of love and compassion always give me strength, so I may share it with others.
Thank you mother, thank you father. Thank you all.
