Today

Illness, illusions, delusions, and random stories.

I'm still sick, but I'm beginning to feel a little better. The cold in my chest is migrating north to my head, where it is quite happily taking up residence. But I have better meds for that, so... Slowly but surely. A nice girl called me today to check on my health, even offered to come over for a visit, but I said I was still too sick to receive visitors. Sad; she's such a sweetheart. We decided to make plans for a little later in the week, when the threat of contamination is lower.

Last night was to be the second of Welcome Camel's Japanese Tour '06, but alas, 'twas not to be. Luckily, the murkiness of mind that accompanies a disease helped to dull the disappointment. It sounds, from a few sources, that a lot of people ended up going anyway, to see the band we we supposed to open for. Rock and roll. Anyway, I need to go talk to the bar owner later this week to see if there's a chance of us playing there sometime in April. April would be cool; sakura (cherry blossoms) and all.

I really need to get out of the flat.

Still torn over whether to go home in June, or to stick around for another six months. My Japanese is still crap; thanks in large to my personal laziness. If I stick around, I can up my Nihongo and, hopefully, my savings account. Sounds good, but it means not seeing the kids at home for that much longer. 'Torn' is such a good word to describe what I feel. 'Riven' works well too.

Been reading Murakami's "Wind-up Bird Chronicle" in between bouts of coughing; despite being sick, I'm really enjoying it. The style took a little getting used to at first, but once in, it's really good. It blends so many stories together (which I like, since that's what I want to do with my Japan experience book), and has a sort of existential mystery tying them together: a every-man middle-achiever tries to sort through and make sense of strange circumstances that arise in his life. A good read.

Last Tuesday I woke up around 9:30 and decided that I would do much better if there was fresh coffee ready for when I got out of the shower. So I got out my bag of precious Caribou Coffee beans, Fireside Blend, dumped some into my handy-dandy coffee grinder, and took it into the bathroom. I did this (the last part at least) because my handy-dandy coffee grinder is from the States and has a polarized plug (i.e. one prong is wider than the other to prevent electocution) and the only polarized outlet in the flat is in the bathroom. So I went into the bathroom, ground the beans nicely, and proceeded to drop the container into the sink - spilling the nicely ground coffee all over the inside of the freshly-cleaned sink. So I did what any perfectly logical young man would do in my situation: I vacuumed out the sink. (Then I cleaned it properly, of course.)

Now, whenever I vacuum my bedroom, it smells like the Caribou shop I worked in in Minneapolis. Nice.


Okay, that's it for today; I've done quite a bit: read, cleaned up a bit, tried to kill germs with mind-bullets (the jury is still out on this), and even cooked dinner. Now I'm going to go to bed; I must must must go to work tomorrow, and I'm dreading it already.

Peace,
thom
















Holy Mochi! Me holding mochi (pounded rice cake the size, shape, and consistancy of a hockey puck). Tagata-jinja, 15 March, 2006.

On War, Creativity, and the Nature of Literature.

Wednesday, 22 March, 2006.

**NOTE: This is a fragment; I haven't finished fleshing this out all the way.**

I'm currently reading Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" and was struck by how literature, especially good literature, boths draws us in and shows us our own world through new eyes. For example, this passage about the Japanese Army's advance into Manchuria (China) in the late 1930s:

"'I don't mind fighting,' he told me. 'I'm a soldier. And I don't mind dying in battle for my country, because that's my job. But this war we're fighting now, Lieutentant - well, it's just not right. It's not a real war, with a battle line where you face the enemy and fight to the end. We advance, and the enemy runs away without fighting. Then the Chinese soldiers take their uniforms off and mix with the civilian population, and we don't even know who the enemy is. So we kill a lot of innocent people in the name of flushing out 'renegades' or 'remnant troops', and we commandeer provisions. We have to steal their food, because the line moves forward so fast our supplies can't catch up with us. And we have to kill our prisoners, because we don't have anywhere to keep them or any food to feed them. It's wrong, Lieutenant. We did some terrible things in Nanking. My own unit did. We threw dozens of people into a well and dropped hand grenades in after them. Some things we did I can't even bring myself to talk about. I'm telling you, Lieutenant, this is one war that doesn't haveany Righteous Cause. It's just two sides killing each other. And the ones who get stepped on are the poor farmers, the ones without politics or ideology. For them, there's no Nationalist Party, no Young Marshal Zhang, no Eighth Route Army. If they can eat, they're happy. I know how these people feel: I'm the son of a poor fisherman myself. The little people slave away from morning to night, and the best they can do is keep themselves alive - barely. I can't believe that killing these people for no reason at all is going to do Japan one bit of good.'" ("The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" pg 143.)


And again, describing the Mongolian steppes:
"...When I thought about Japan, I began to feel as if I had been abandoned at the edge of the world. Why did we have to risk our lives to fight for this barren piece of earth devoid of military or industrial value, this vast land where nothing lived but wispy grass and biting insects? To protect my homeland, I too would fight and die. But it made no sense at all to sacrifice my one and only life for the sake of this desolate patch of soil from which no shaft of grain would ever spring." (Wind-up Bird, pg 146.)


(And, just for the record, Murakami's masterful description of this landscape and the characters' feeling is just that: masterful. Utterly beautiful and brutal.)


This is why I love literture; because someone of a different age, a different time, a different culture, a completely different set of circumstances, can speak directly to a feeling or situation or time that you, yourself, are feeling/in currently.

It makes you, forces you, to realize that history, people's stories, are cyclical; that there is nothing new under the sun.

And, in one aspect, that is extremely comforting: someone has gone through the same thing(s) that you yourself are going through, with minor variation. On the other hand (what a deliciously bizarre cliche), it also makes you realize that all of your original creative thoughts aren't all that original or creative.

Which really isn't all that bad; there is still a reason to say/write what you think/feel/experience: there is always someone somewhere who needs to hear that they are not alone; that somewhere in this crazy, broken, confused, painful world of ours, there is another soul who feels the same way.

To end on a Chestertonian note, as I'm known to do, I'll leave you with this:

"Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick." -from "Wisdom and the Weather"

Amen and amen.

New Writings, part the first

Okay.

I haven't updated in a long time. A lot of things have happened. Good things and bad things. But here's a partial update taken from writing that I haven't gotten around to uploading. More coming soon, hopefully.

Here goes:

Tuesday, 21 March 2006.

Welcome Camel, or How To Fail and Then Recover From That Failure By Eating At Denny's

Hmm...okay, a story by request. For Becca. Here goes:

Well, my "band" - Iain and I - played our first gig as Welcome Camel last Tuesday in the little city of Inuyama. To put it mildly, we sucked. I sucked into a microphone, so all the more suck for me. And it was mostly me; I was crazily nervous, which made me forget words in almost every song. The friends who made the 45-minute trip for this 40-minute mistake said that we did well, minus a few mistakes.

But then isn't that what friends are supposed to say? [sigh]

So needless to say, I'm not too happy how it went; which makes me all the more worried for the next show this Saturday - it'll be bigger and more of my friends/acquaintances will be there. I'm practicing every day, but I'm getting more and more nervous. I'm afraid I'm going to freeze up or have a nervous breakdown!

Anyway, after the debut-debacle, I proceeded to the bar:
Thom: Kei, whiskey kudasai (please).
Kei: What kind?
Thom: BIG.
Kei: Jack Daniels?
Thom: If it's a double, it's fine!

So after a rather generous serving of Mr. Daniels, I started to calm down a little. Fifteen minutes later, I was feeling decent again. Iain got back up and played a few covers, which I could finally sing along with pretty well. After that we played some drinking games, which I handled pretty well by knowing an inordinate amount of famous people's names, with the kids who stayed around.

[Moral of the story: Drink the whiskey first, rock the house second.]

I met a cute English girl (not the vampire one) named Megan and we started talking. Things were going really well, I somehow managed to say funny things and she laughed at them and kept touching my hand. I was golden. Then she asked me where in the States I was from. So I told her Minnesota. She said, "Oh, my boyfriend is from Texas. Is that near Minnesota?" Double dog damn.


We finally left around 4am, Megan decided to head home with Iain's flatmate Darius, and Iain, our friend Mitchell, and I went to Denny's...

Yes, Denny's. Across the road from Iain's flat is the Home of the All-American Grand Slam. Note though: Japanese All-American Grand Slams are not the same as American All-American Grand Slams. The Japanese kind contains noodles. Don't ask me how, like many things in Japan, it defies all logic. I didn't get the All-American Grand Slam.

So we sit down, order, start talking. Twenty minutes later, while we're eating, Iain's phone rings:
Iain: Hello?
Darius: Where are you?
Iain: At Denny's. Where are you?
Darius: What are you doing at Denny's?
Iain: Umm...eating?
Darius: Okay, I'm coming over.
Iain: Wait, what? What're yo-
[Three minutes later Darius literally stumbles in, looks around the nearly deserted restaurant twice, and totters over.]
Iain: Are you okay? What happened to Megan?
Darius: Who?
Iain: Megan! The girl you went home with! What happened man?!
Darius: I fell down.
All of us: WHAT?!?!
Darius: I fell down. Feel my head. [starts to show Iain his head through the BLT Iain's trying to eat]
Iain: Where did you fall? Where's Megan? Is she still in the flat? Did you get INTO the flat?
Darius: I don't know. Feel my head.

To make a long story shorter, Darius apparently became a victim of alcohol-induced gravity somewhere in the vicinity of his apartment, the lovely Megan decided that she DID love her boyfriend and went home, I ate french toast in Denny's at 4:30am, and we crashed at Iain's sometime after the sun came up.

The End?

Next Post: Hounen-sai Festival - AKA, Penis Fest 2006.

I'm okay

Hey all,

Don't know if you've heard reports yet, but indeed there was a small earthquake earlier this morning. Actually, it was at about 6:30 am and it woke me up just long enough to think, "Is this an earthquake, or am I still dreaming? Maybe it'll be gone when I wake up." Then I fell back asleep, it wasn't the Big One, the building didn't collapse, and I am fine.

Thank you for your thoughts.

Big post coming, whenever I have the time. I promise.

-t.i.j.

Music Update

Spent most of the afternoon in Inuyama with Iain again, working on yet more music. The good news is that Iain's newest song pretty much rocks the earth. Which is pretty dangerous in Japan.

Anyway, yeah, we're still in the "working" stage; though we need to be in the "gigging" stage by next Tuesday, so that we can play our first gig. Should be fun, at Kei's bar, La Kalavera, in Inuyama. A bunch of folks will be coming up to watch us play, and hopefully they won't be disappointed. We've got a good blend of covers and originals, and some of the covers are obscure enough that we'll need to tell folks that they're not ours. So. Yeah, I need to go work on lyrics some more. My song, "And The Horse You Rode In On", is sounding a lot like something like Wes Burdine might write if he were stuck in Japan, or something I would write if I listened to more Johnny Cash than I do. Oh well. Maybe I'll include something about pirates, that should help; or maybe Chesterton references. Or Palahniuk references. Could be good. But I digress.

My weekends have been recently expanded, due to shift adjustments by the higher-ups. My boss called me about three weeks ago while I was working one of my "help shifts" (classes at another branch). He asked what I was doing, since that day was my day off. I told him no, that was NOT my day off; and in fact, he'd obviously tracked me down, since I wasn't at my usual branch. Odd. Anyway, he was wondering if I could slide my Thursday classes from 1:20-5:40 to 5-9pm. In return, they'd offer me an extra 5000 yen/month.

Um, so what you're offering is to expand my weekend to two and a half days, and pay me more for it? Well, gee, yeah, I think that might work. Possibly. Since the paperwork's already in. Whatever.

So tomorrow is practice/clean/shopping/then off to work day. Should be interesting.

In weather news - don't hate me - it's been in the upper 50s/low 60s for the last few days, and I have been loving it. I'm still planning to get out on some photo expeditions, but recent musical endeavors have been occupying most of my free weekends. I wish I had my camera just about every time I come up out of the subway station near my flat: from the outer steps, one can see the JR Towers, the new Toyota headquarters building, and sometimes even the Shinkansen bulleting by in the foreground. Either day or night, it's a pretty cool view; very Nagoya.

Anyway, it's getting late and I need my beauty sleep. Being a rockstar is hard.

right,
t