autumn tactics

Today I finally made back to the beach.  Sunday is my day off, but the weather has been difficult to make it work.  This mornig I slept in, but as soon as I woke up, just one word filled my mind: hot. And it was sunny, so I threw together all the beach essentials and barely made in time for the limited express to Fujisawa.  I haven’t been down in Enoshima since last summer, when I was gathering photographs for my exhibition.  There are so many words for this place, so many memories.  Like an old lover you only have the chance to meet once in a long while, Ennoshima has surpassed the realm of precious memories and obtained a humanlike quality.  To me Enoshima isn’t a place, it’s a living person.

More on that later, first beer and some low tech relaxing.

I have talked before about natsubate, which fortunately I seem to be immune to.  The fact that I have beeb eating extremely well the last month does not hurt much either.  I do however, get overloaded with thongs to do and kind of just get into a languid lull, from time to time.  When you only have one day a week off outside of work it becomes even more difficult.  My mentor Randy Pausch spoke well of time management, I have kept to the slides of his talk and try to keep priorities sorted, but it doesn’t help me plow through the doldrums of mental burnout.  I am always looking for an antidote to that, and all I can ever come up with is to live healthier, and that will giveme the energy and drive to escape the sinkhole of guilt-filled inaction.

Maybe I can run tonight.

There comes a point where the mind can no longer deal with so many tasks, pressures, and concerns, and extraneous thought is all culled subconsciously. It’s no longer about winning, losing, or fighting, normal operation is put on hold to keep sanity together until the siege passes.  This is the time where you experience the most memory loss during development.  ‘Where did those weeks go?  I don’t remember doing anything that season at all.’  You do not remember anything because there wasn’t anything worth remembering, you’re just a machine that replies to emails and ticks off tasks.  I don’t know if this is what they call burnout, it’s probably just north of burnout, somewhere in the moors of primordial coping.

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.

To see the one you love suffer, to matter how little, is unsettling. Regardless of guilt or cause, something inside gnaws at the conscience. While waiting at a lover’s bedside, one is given to dwell on such thoughts.

Electrons, light, sound, current.  Time and power flow like a river, through the ageless forest and branching into streams of my consciousness.  The beat unheard but felt in the wind.  A source long rooted, the branches that sprout through my mossy dreams.

The last few days we have had a typhoon pass through, and is normally the case, the weather has imprpved afterwards.  However, iddly thistime we have had a apell of coolatumn like weather, with breezy temps in the 60s at night.  It is fantastic, the ideal temperature for me, it reminds me of Seattle.

In my new Kichijouji home, for the first time I am living in a house full of wonderful natural smells.  The bamboo, the maple, the wet concrete of my balcony.  All such wonderful smells, so pungent and invigorating.  I feel like I could take on the world.

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.

Regardless of how many times it’s explained, some things in life just never make sense until they happen to you.

It’s called “lovesick” because your every thought, your every action is irregular. Like fever bringing a wave of delusion, you are not yourself but more, guided by unseen forces. You just can’t realize how ridiculous you’re acting, and even if you have a shred of composure left to, you don’t give a damn anyway.

There are many solutions to any one problem. Ultimately it comes down to a matter of cost, which is a subset of a matter of will. If only will were infinite and nor organic, then life would be simple. But will is a muscle that must be trained. To be precise it is the only muscle that really requires training. When will is supple, everything else falls into place.

To be so close you can taste it. To feel all that you’ve felt at once, somehow your whole life coming together to a tipping point where what happens doesn’t matter as much as how certain you are of something you feel inside.

I’ve thought, and thought, and thought about it, and I’m now at the point where the thinking gives way to doing. The kind of doing that gives way to done.

I don’t care what happens tomorrow because tonight is all the belief I need to live forever.

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.

The perfect storm of Kanto’s migration west coupled with a three day weekend traditionally reserved for visiting ancestors’ graves in the countryside has backed me into a corner of the Nozomi Super Express for the ride back to Tokyo. I should have had the foresight to buy a reserved ticket before I even left the capital, but it’s not that big a deal. I’ve had worse returns. It remains to be seen how packed things get at Nagoya, it’s possible I won’t even be able to sit in the corner then, so I’m taking advantage of the time to write now.

I wasn’t alone this weekend hardly at all, actually. I figured coming into town with two days’ notice would leave me wandering around a lot, but to my chagrin I spent virtually the whole weekend with Nobue, going around to her various appointments with her, meeting father and mother each twice.

No temples, but I did more than a fair share of praying at Izumo Daijinja and Kitano Tenmanguu. For the most part I was able to avoid gloomy conversation concerning the earthquake and the hot controversy spun around the nuclear power industry, which has been bane to efforts to improve my spirit over the last ten days.

Yes, there are going to be lingering issues darkening life in Tokyo for months, conspiracy theory talk, rumors of radiation tainted vegetables and rolling blackouts that ensnare the faltering economy. But it’s neither cathartic nor a positive use of my time to spend another second thinking about it so the monologue ends here. I appreciate the problems we face as a community but it’s my nature to focus on the positive, on the future. There’s a life to live and countless victories yet to be won with my blinding resolution.

The fat bass, the breakdown, some ethereal chorus over a pad that’s been used over and over for the last twenty years. Snap and it picks back up, analysts would say that the predictability of trance is what makes it so soothing to people. Of course we’re going to like what we know. I never accrue a tolerance to its potent formula.

Thirteen years and it grips me all the more. To the crowds, the cheers, the crackling energy spread across a network of hearts desperately yearning for release.

What we all need now is a little planned chaos, what we all need right now is a rave.

Trance will see me through crisis again.