Where do you want this?

I’m not sure where any of this goes:

Glaciers on opposite poles have been holding a tenuous argument for millenia; a representative of the North Pole faced — well, any direction, really — and whispered a terrible lie; it would take a hundred years to reach the south pole, and what happens then, no one born nearly thirty years before yesterday has half of a right to imagine. The sky over Los Angeles was the color of recycled newsprint, late one night, and formless rumors kicked up inexplicable action and sound. A cat yearning for something unshapeable, a vintage record player playing a dead jazz lady’s not-best work on a rooftop far away, police sirens looking for something by making themselves heard; me sitting on a sofa listening to the sound of the needle of the cosmos in the record groove of the earth, everything distant reduced to a near-mute wailing treble squeal. In several weeks’ time, back in Tokyo, I’d arrive at the somewhat-adult, existentially horrifying decision of how, precisely, I’m supposed to throw away my garbage can. Seriously, what do I put it in? Back on that night, with a window open, a diet root beer, wildfire smoke clouding the Hollywood sign, the full moon beating like a human heart, the minute ticks of the earth’s second hand came within audible range. The shotgun holed up next door, contemplating suicide and unable to bend his barrel to fit his will, instead took it upon himself to begin reading the phone book, in as soft a voice as he could manage. The sky shook subtly with the passing of the months-long words of glaciers.

Days later I’d be stopped at a shoulder on US Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, confronted by the inverse of existence, at two in the morning, maybe mere miles from Santa Cruz, with less than a tenth of a tank of gas. We turned off the headlights; after a few minutes, the stars were all over the place. The ocean roaring two thousand feet below, barely a guardrail on the road, no electric lights, no passing cars. I recalled something I felt like I’d overheard, though really it was being presented to me as a paying customer at a planetarium that shared the top floor of a shopping-building with an aquarium that looked from the outside like all the glass within was green: out by Ayer’s Rock, down in Australia, late at night, they’ll escort people out by candlelight and serve them a full-course meal; at one point during dessert, they blow out all the candles, leaving the people alone with the stars and feelings, resembling memories, of everyone else around them. The narrator, back then, had recommended this to me, if I were ever in Australia, and the suggestion — as I wrote earlier — felt cheap, and immediately impressed all the experience of having worked as a busperson in said wild outdoor restaurant for three decades before giving in to some coincidental cancer. More often than not, these days, in this information age, a good idea is more than just that: it’s a suggestion of a life spent in its servitude, carefully waiting for it to show you something. That night under the stars on Highway One, there were other problems more real even than the sound of crushing waves thousands of feet below, like “not enough gasoline”, or “no towns in sight”; times like those really make you wonder about what it’s like when you die, like, if you’re still worried about your taxes. Surrounded by the suck of nature, focused on the blow of everyday living. The revelation of how many thousands of stars, exactly, we beings unable to squint through the haze we deal with every night in our convenient metropolises, however, was, in hindsight, more than a little interesting.

An hour later, there was a hotel involved, and then a diner in Santa Cruz with vegetarian omelettes; seven hours after lunch, we were looking for parking spaces on Hollywood Boulevard, and it occurred to me how fierce are these peaks and valleys of life. San Francisco had been lovely, like something out of a movie where you keep thinking somebody is going to die, and eventually, somebody does, and you’re all swirly for a few hours as you drink your coffee and look out a window on a world with nothing shinier than glass, and the sun’s gone down; days before that, we’d been accosted on the way to the Delicious Robust Vegan Breakfast by two organic-looking females who said they worked for Greenpeace, and said this with confidence just two days after we’d purchased a fur coat for seventy-five dollars.

I don’t hate animals, really; I hate the way they taste. I hate chewing. I hate the juices leaking down my throat. I’ve eventually come to not feel ashamed of telling people that I became a vegetarian because I didn’t like eating meat, not because I don’t like to see creatures un-created. It used to be somewhat shameful of a thing; I’d tell people I didn’t eat meat because I was a vegetarian, and that I was a vegetarian because I didn’t eat meat. As the tens digit of my age morphed slowly into a two, however, I found myself surrounded with smarter people, people who asked questions, and so I had to almost entirely give up. I used to tell people — this is when I was a child — that I hated music, for example. There wasn’t really any reason — the truth is that I enjoyed listened to particular songs in three-second segments at a time, absorbing the tiniest quirks of every sound. If people who “liked” music owned a lot of records, I must have been a pathetic enemy of the industry to be fully satisfied with just a crumb of one. Eventually, I realized that I have these Steve-Albini-like ears, and I’ve been too dull to really grasp the meaning of that. In the same way, I used to declare verbatim that I hated the idea of veganism, because it’s just too much paraphernalia. Now I don’t know so much, anymore. After traveling up and down a coast and experiencing the latest revolutions in imitating meat, I don’t find it nearly so silly anymore to give something up only to embrace something that aspires to it. My earliest experiences with vegans perhaps left my eardrums scarred, and I recall that period of a few years, before I gave up saying anything to anyone, for a while, where I groaned at the mention of the Detroit Tigers because a fellow Army kid who’d spent his first speaking years in Detroit had, in addition to being summarily smitten with the team, also once carved a large gash in the back of my neck by pranking me with a snow-boulder on the way home from school. The orientation experience with vegans was about as similar to that as something can be, without involving violence: I was sitting in a corner in the break room at the retail establishment where I worked, reading Eiji Yoshikawa’s biography of Musashi Miyamoto; a pierced and bloated vegan asked what I was reading, and I said it was a slightly fictionalized biography of a Japanese swordsman; the vegan turned up its nose and asked, in dead-seriousness: “How can you read that? Don’t you know what those people do to dolphins, and whales?”

This particular variety of knee-jerking was no one’s fault, really. Years flow by, and I find that vegan meat imitations are basically meat without all of the characteristics of meat that I despise. There are wholesome atoms, and even entire wholesome molecules, that appear in limited quantities in every other herb of this earth, and the vegan, in a desire to eat the essence of life — to eat the condensation of that jewel of creation that makes people believe a cow’s flesh is delicious — they gather it all up, and compress it into something you can sink your teeth into. For the longest time, while never stopping to consider myself an open- or closed-minded person, I’d associated the act of veganism with one ignorant youngster (and that ignorant youngster’s dozen friends): gritting teeth and succumbing to a desire to believe in something, bearing the burden of a restricted culinary vocabulary, growing thickly fat with repeated binges on the one thing that tastes good enough to make you forget where you came from.

The Greenpeace girls wanted me to “get involved”, to donate a little bit of money, to read their newsletter, at the very least. I would have taken the newsletter, and probably read it cover-to-cover, if they had been offering me a free sample. When finally confronted with the question, as to whether I cared or not about what was happening to the world, I answered yes, and though at a certain point I began to ponder what precise sentences would produce the event of these two girls losing their clothes in my presence, that reply continued to not be a lie. I mentioned something about residing in Japan, and they asked me if I had any idea what those people do to dolphins. “They’re not all porpoise-stabbers or manatee-rapists over there, you know”, I managed to imply. These girls took this implication as the most obvious thing in the world, implying on their own that just because everyone doesn’t do something doesn’t mean that no one does do it.

Some five months later, I’d be back in Japan, with new hair, new clothes, a new job, a new apartment, and new problems, and I’d be at an off-shore slice of America, viewing Greenpeace’s motivation in close-up. I was at Yokota Air Base, eating Taco Bell, which has become something of a regular ritual. In between fervent burrito-related mouth-breathing sessions, I saw kindness deep within my heart, kindness toward pizza, and so I purchased a slice of cheese from the food court’s New York pizzeria. Why they don’t have pizza in Japan, I’ll never understand. As nine out of ten “blogs about Japan” will tell you, people “over here” line up for six hours whenever they open a donut shop, and they’re still not fat. I was applying Tabasco and crushed red peppers to my pizza when a woman’s order number was called, and she stepped up to receive her stack of six pizzas. She herself was thin, and somewhat beautiful. I wondered about the skin distribution among her family. She asked the old misplaced Korean behind the pizza-counter: “Do you have any paper plates”? The Korean woman held up a triangular paper plate with high cardboard ridges. “We have this.” Not only that one, she had nearly hundreds more. The woman made a sound like someone had just suggested she just give her baby a tracheotomy now, because it might get in a car accident someday. She swiftly turned around, and was gone.

I sat down with my own Delicious Triangle and thought, semi-hardly, about shapes. The people of the world just generally don’t have a knack for geometry. The woman had wanted a circular plate, because that had been the shape of the plates of her childhood years; for very much the same primordial reasons, the man who had originally suggested that maps of the London subway system be presented as straight lines with names and numbers for each stop was dismissed as a lunatic and thrown to the dogs of criticism. No, said the then infantile London transit authority, people want and need to see the train system as God had intended it, as a map, as geography. Little did the rulemakers know: the age of geography has been dead in the ground for centuries. Now that we know what is where in this world, we no longer need to worry about getting there. Boarding a train is a decision we make: we know why we’re going where we’re going (to Work), and we know how (by train). We don’t decide to go to Russell Square because Russell Square is geographically north-northwest of Holborn, we decide to go there because That’s Where We’re Going. Geography isn’t a product of literature; it’s a tool of the mind. We remember the difference between the resting places of our Bibles and our Shotguns the way the old explorers might have distinguished between an island and a peninsula.

Years later, here I am, in a country where the sick diamond of the center of its central city is rendered icon-like as a perfect circle; time has shifted, the world grows warmer, and little by little, people become at home loving and knowing nothing of the spaces between places. Every punctuation point where the Machine stops is dear and remembered to us. In this pear-shaped world, there exist no straight lines; we can run in one direction, starting now, and never see the same place twice before we die.

It’s in only in this world that rock and roll can exist. I punctured a frigid winter with habitual finger-warming, and there are a whole lot of things that, for whatever reason, I’m no longer afraid of; I’m lucky that I never realized I was afraid of anything before accidentally surmounting those fears. Only a few fragments need to slide into place before this long reverse slow-motion take pauses to reveal a man taking a sip from a glass of water. I’ve seen and heard many things since the last time I’ve written something here, though at the end of the day, I’m starting to shock myself with my accidental non-desire to surprise anyone else. I’ve been eating protein, and doing push-ups and sit-ups, and straightening my hair. I live, now, in the town of Ogikubo, west of Shinjuku, close to Kichijoji, Koenji, and Nakano — namely, the only three places I ever really go for anything. I’ve recently been employed as a geometry assessor for a group of people I like for simple reasons. It’s amazing how many Microsoft Excel spreadsheets get made in the name of making something or other easier to understand, and it’s doubly amazing how much money people are willing to pay an already-rich man to scream in the face of bullshit. As a rock-and-roller might have sung once (and if he hadn’t, he should have), “No matter what words they use to make you leave the building, if you already have money, you can’t be ‘fired’”. With great freedom comes great freedom: I’m pulling in six figures to, for lack of a better word, wake up at noon. That I possess the gall to still wake up at six in the morning and earn my own money, rendering a workday at an “office” moot, is what makes me what I am. It’s an imploding kind of state of being: in order to be forgiven for perpetual laziness, one has to keep one’s nose to the grindstone. Again with the ancient corollaries, the Red Queen telling Alice she has to run as fast as she can just to stay where she is. Man, fuck literature, for rendering my every toilet-time musing plagiarism.

We call this one

“love in the time of global warming”
『地球温暖化の時代の愛』

A vegan cafe opened near my house the other day, by chance, on the very day I tried to walk home from my company office’s cherry-blossom-viewing party and failed semi-miserably. I realized how blessed I am by being allowed to keep living, long after the gun is empty and the enemies are ghosts; a suburban neighborhood I didn’t know existed, like the remains of a microwave oven excavated strata beneath a stone pitchfork. Prior to this I’d sat and/or stood barefoot on a blue tarp on a rooty half-hillside overlooking a canal into which pink flowers were blizzarding. Just six months after the first time in my life when “Later” turned into one whole year, here I am thinking about dozens of decades at once. How long will it take for this, right here, to get old? There was that samurai in that Tom Cruise film who realized that every cherry blossom was perfect; I say he, and everyone within electrical conducting distance of his outstretched blade, was thinking way too much about everything. There I was, in the presence of the president of a corporation, on a “professional” excursion, wearing nylon Adidas pants and a found Burberry scarf tucked into a stained, purchased-at-disgusting discount Lacoste sweater, lemon yellow. The night before I’d paid a man on the internet $500 for eyeglass frames; it took six hours of dealing with a Yahoo.co.jp proxy computer algorithim, firing blunt missives into the mid-night, making choices from drop-down menus, to which the man replied with drop-down menu choices of his own. He had enabled any and all security protocols: he wasn’t taking any chances. My guess is that he had never had a computer virus, nor had he ever known someone who had. He had, however, known someone who knew someone who had: not only did he not want me to know his name, his geographic location (within a hundred kilometers, anyway), or even his email address, he didn’t want to know me, either. Drop-down menus contained more than enough choices for him to convey the absolute, most horrible, deepest apology allowed by these twelfth-century semantics: the eyeglass frames with solid gold studs in them, which he had advertised as including the original clear display lenses, in fact did not contain the lenses. Through the power of selecting multiple two-Chinese-character items, I was able to tell him that I planned to purchase prescription lenses, anyway, from the very shop that had produced those ultra-rare frames in the first place. The man responded, and the algorithm produced a sentence of startling clarity: “Since the item in question, then, would technically count as an accessory, a lowering of the price of the goods will simply not be a possibility — and our sorrowful regret of these circumstances, on your behalf, fills us with utmost terrifying dread.” I wanted to rail against the machine, and type free words; I wanted to tell this man that, someday, perhaps, I would tire of these eyeglasses the way he had (in less than two months, even) and I would then want to pass them along to the next desirer. To deny me the right to strongly say that something I don’t precisely need is not of value to me is to accuse me of being a beast, an unworthy successor to the title of “object of history”. I wondered for an instant what Nietzsche would have to say about this, and all at once felt ridiculed by the very oxygen surrounding me: the only thing Nietzsche would have to say about all this is the sound of being dead.

The glasses would arrive two mornings after this, and I’d limp to the door with blisters on my feet from wearing sandals during my long, lost, strange walk through the neighborhood everyone had told me, with conviction (and two days late for April Fools), was just minutes from my home. I’d end up lost for two hours, laughed at by police officers (who asked me for my ID, among other things), and finally on a train that took too long to get me back home. Half the world on the walk to that train station was either quaint and half the height one would expect, and the other half was huge, and new. Everything was as though coated in lavender, cashmere-like glass. I didn’t feel glad to be alive so much as I felt sad about not being glad to be not dead. Eventually, there was that Vegan restaurant, inside of which a woman dressed in hemp glared in contempt at me for wearing a sweater and a muffler obviously made of animal clippings. Under the unsettling calm of a Philip Glass composition, she told her two friends that she had a friend coming from America, a friend who spoke no Japanese at all, and who would need to dine exclusively on organic food absolutely untouched by anyone who so much as owns a pet.

I remembered, and briefly, the desire of this age, to always do things as differently as possible from what we’ve grown up seeing people enjoy. I realize that I never write about noise-rock, much as I like paying upwards of 8,000 yen monthly to stand in pitch-dark basements with fax-machine-sounds vibrating the surface of my skin. I don’t talk about this hobby of mine, and Catholic priests don’t give homilies about how much they enjoy masturbation. I’m not going to lie to you, though: there’s most certainly not nothing in the spiked pit called noise-rock that I don’t believe I can’t take away and stand up on a shelf somewhere else. For now, though, I only recall two incidents, one being something I didn’t witness, and one being something that I did. The one I didn’t witness involved legendary noise band Hanatarash, fronted by Yamatsuka Eye, who would later found Boredoms; Eye was known for copious flailing, microphone-fellating, screaming, and object-banging, and after one fateful night in Kyoto of 1985, he was known for having hired a bulldozer to destroy a club in the middle of his act. Of course, the club — whose name, “Super Loft”, is now synonymous with the destructive performance — had to be shut down, and of course Eye was arrested; thanks to people like Eye, dudes who smoke while drinking muddy black coffee are given heroes that never really need to exist outside words, or even so much inside human frames; individual moments of history can and will be our heroes; that’s what noise tells us. The other incident, which I did witness, involved a noise act in Okubo of 2007; a group of boys dressed in fashionable clothes each stood on stage for a whole minute, in silence, before their senior representative stepped to the microphone, and said, with something resembling multi-faceted factual incorrectness, that “We are the world’s first a cappella noise-rock band”. Fifteen minutes later, he still wasn’t joking. Each member of the group screamed varied instrument mimicry into their respective microphones, not a single one of them hearing the same song in their head. I suppose this is as good a way to get laid as any; I’d been boiled hard by years of fear that I’d stand on a stage with a guitar, trying to play some laid-back, skillful classical rock, and get laughed at by all the girls in the world, even though I only wanted to impress the dudes with chips on their shoulders, with great-great-great grandmothers who’d swallowed flies, born staring horses dead in the eye, ready to die. A friend, perhaps under some influence, had told me, “One of these days, you just have to get up there and like . . . fuckin’ do it, man.” So it goes with a cappella noise; the girls they want, the loves they seek to hire, if nothing else, count thoughts above weather, deeds over words. After the show, at the “merchandise” table, where the other acts were selling CDs or stickers or handing out flyers, this group in question had a wad of 1,000-yen bills, fanned-out neatly, with a price-tag scribbled on a nearby convenient-store receipt: “1,000-yen bills: 1,050 yen each”. I suppose that just about says everything about everything, right there.

Years and months before, the Patron Saint of Sons of Bitches had begroaned the then-modern youth’s preference for sex over politics; years and then many months later, and far across the ocean, I wondered what the difference was, really. I sat in a damp wooden box with a low ceiling, in the presence of a sexless woman who had once dropped a twenty-five-pound frozen “spiritual experience” into my shopping basket, when all I’d wanted was to take home a single bottle of mustard; on a TV in another room, yet still visible thanks to geometry, the movie “You’ve Got Mail” played out in monotony. Tom Hanks’ character in that movie has a four-year-old aunt, and a five-year-old brother: “We are . . . an American family” he says, early on. The TV set seemed all the more alien for being small, for being staticky, for being in another room; I for once sat at the adults’ table, listening to four stress-turgid souls grow loose with drunk, thinking that at last there really is no difference between sex and politics, once all the gimmicks of the minute are out of the way. A Spanish man lamented having no visa; two Japanese girls who dress hair for a living lamented being uninteresting; the spiritual presser lamented not being able to speak English. Eventually, an eastern European individual showed up, and began making cutely rude jokes about everyone’s clothes. He pointed at the holes in my jeans, and said “Hey man, it’s not, you know, the cold?” He then squealed in Japanese, touching my exposed kneeflesh: “Samuuuuuui!” “Cold!” What the fuck was that even supposed to mean? The girls erupted into laughter, simply because no one had been trying to say anything interesting, even unsuccessfully, until that point. The eastern European’s English-speaking Japanese friend showed up, and they got drunk and talked loudly, at which point one of the girls said, and I quote, “It’s like watching TV!” I started to wish for a minute that I was at home watching “You’ve Got Mail” alone, which is a really sad thing to think, though sometimes circumstances force desperate measures. Here I’ve been for the past six months, in a new house, and I’ve yet to spend a week’s worth of nights in a row alone. Or with anyone else, really. And somewhere else, behind a curtain behind a curtain somewhere in the world, looking to the internet, to text and feelings, to find love has become normal to the point of tedium. Dating websites exist, these days, where girls you’ve met and had sex with on previous occasions can post testimonies on your profile rating your performance. There’s nothing terrible, or even horrible, about this situation; it just feels, as it always has, sad to see things change. In other news, scientists have proven that light slows down as temperatures approach absolute zero, that it can be slowed to a point where it will stand still, like a sphere in the air; it is very cold in space: years ago people used to stare at the stars and wonder what they were; years after that, they would stare at the stars and wonder how far away they were; years later, they looked at the stars, maybe baked out of their mind on some Delicious Imported Weed, and quoted numbers regarding the facts of light and life, how the stars are so far away that it might take millions of years for their light to reach us, so maybe some of the stars we see at night don’t exist anymore; now, however, what can we think, that the lights of stars we see in the sky represent those fortunate enough to shine through the cold. If we were truly long and wise enough to see everything that ever traveled through space, the night sky would be dead white, and fearsome. Born staring pack horses dead in the eyes, hunger unquenchable, the sky white as eternal death — how can any human being born in the time of global warming not forgive any other for loving more than one something more than once in one day?

I wake up every morning, these days, a son of a different bitch than I was the night before. Much as I try to order my world, disorder creeps up at the laziest moments: I have a system with my iPod Shuffle, wherein I arrange the songs in my playlist in alphabetical order by artist; as I walk the world I listen to music in shuffle mode; if I hear a song by an artist I’d like to hear more of, I’d flip the iPod back into non-shuffle mode, and select another song, and then re-shuffle when I feel like it. On one day that might have been months ago or might have been yesterday, the iPod Shuffle gave me Neutral Milk Hotel’s “The Aeroplane Over the Sea”, then Zazen Boys’ “The City Dreaming”, then David Bowie’s “Heroes”, then The Birthday’s “Alright“, then David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” A day after this — and this might also have been the third day in a row wherein the Apple Weather Widget told me it was going to rain today and clear up tomorrow — it played the same sequence, even after being un-shuffled and re-shuffled. I live thirteen minutes from bed to desk, with a train included; I live at the end of the line; my chariot always sits hovering. I have no need to wander or to roam, anymore; I have a single idea; my technology trusted to be random produces the same precise string of songs six or seven times in a row, and subtly I begin to trust the world to no longer obey its purposes. On a night of perhaps-imaginary celestial events, as cashmere cannonballs enter the earth’s atmosphere and survive, each of them a smoldering miracle, there’s me beneath a soupy sky, maybe in love, or maybe just not dead; I am and will always be a murder mystery in which no one dies; halfway through the walk home I look down to tie my shoe; my cellular phone buzzes, I flip it open before standing up, and it’s an automated mail from Domino’s Pizza, telling me that pizza is cheaper on rainy nights; it’s then that I realize I’m carrying an umbrella, and shortly after that I end up wondering if, tonight, the shotgun holed up next door shall once again attempt a dramatic reading of the phone book in the softest voice he can manage. When I look up, phenomenally, I find that I am lost, and so are you.