arao at night

"if man is five..."

After a few trips to Sendai and a killer Christmas party, I've now been holed up in my apartment a few days. I can't decide which is more exhausting. Sometimes information is a prison, and I am currently full up with things I can't blog about. So, how about another photo to creep you out for a while?







In the area of TMI:

So this photo, in addition to being rather cheerful to look at, takes me back a bit. It was taken in the old apartment where Courtney and I lived back in, what, 2003 or so. Michael will recall being the almost-third inhabitant for several months. I have written and erased some version of "good times" for this (current) sentence several times. The fact is, it wasn't terribly happy. But certainly an intense time for all involved, I think. Drama. I had my weird food-poisoning/lymphoma scare while living here. Also popped a question. That was pretty happy. Revisiting the relationship, I find I'm a bit scarred still.

That is to say: I'm really happy right now, and am having a difficult time trusting that feeling. But I'm working on killing that shit. This monkey's gone to heaven, man... soon anyway.


Further evidence that I'm settling in here: bought two region 2 DVDs, so I had to switch the format on my Mac. You can only do this a few times. I got Casablanca and The Fifth Element. Almost picked up Enter the Dragon, but I think that's one of those films that I would love to own, but would never watch. Pretty good beginning to the collection. Also, I was gifted Nevermind, the documentary of Nirvana's album. By the by, I'm looking for a copy of About a Son... or About a Boy, not sure what it's called, but as yet haven't found it. Ewan McGregor tapped to play Kobain in the bio-pic. Still deciding how I feel about this (while attempting to hide my disgust with the Colts by thinking about movies and pop-culture and old relationship garbage).

New Years Eve coming up. No plans. Hmmm... I'll get back to you on that one.

r.i.p. lock

vilevan one

twelve twenty-four oh nine

Migas and Curry No. 5

I used my last bit of SA-imported salsa to make migas tonight. They were ok. I had to use plain Doritos instead of real chips. Tomorrow, I quest for flour tortillas and avocado... might cilantro be out of the question? We shall see.

Also had some Thai curry. Amazing. I was told that if anyone smells this curry, they want it. Could this be the next major perfume? Again, we shall see. Hopefully we can release a series of short films, starring the likes of Audrey Tautou to market it.

Christmas lights in Sendai. Kiredesuyo! I didn't bring my camera for reasons I have stated in a prior post, certain memories should be allowed to exhibit their own strength, and not be propped up by... well... props. Like photos. That said, here's a grainy iPhone photo of me and some lights and a big bright Hitachi Santa:

further discussion of salt

.
.
to paths only remembered, unreal,
it is always the coarsest philosophies that prevail


the beat-up Chevy Malibu, the two-tone Astrovan,
Sunday morning squabbles over seatbelts,
brothers always jockeying,
varying degrees of disinterest in church,
seeds of unbelief already sewn


quiet evenings of Nihonshu prisms, ice cream,
green and purple Japanese faces,
flashing lights attached to wrists, teeth, foreheads,
and a woman--she steals thoughts,
words right from lips, places them in awkward chairs
for unannounced dinners, and cooks with salt,
and salt


she complains salt,
leans salt,
stories of salt,
and (somewhere that we cannot see)
weeps salt,
an abundance

because winter is the end of something

cathartic romp

Snow had been promising, but not delivering. The wait was its own form of entertainment, but now that it has started, it just keeps falling. A prolonged building of tension between the clouds and earth, enough time to inspire me to purchase a sofa. A release, seemingly just as prolonged.

I started vacation yesterday. A beautiful beginning. Two weeks of teaching with Christmas activities, anticipating rest, now two weeks of total freedom. I am already tired.

I am in the process of transcribing several months of journal-writing onto the computer. Or translating. The transfer is not precise. My journal entries have always been sparse, impatient, containing moments but no real life-breath. I require the aid of a word processor. A few words here and there; fragments really. They are beginning to string themselves together, boil, overflow from the page. No promises of quality, but quantity is always a good sign.

It has been a while in coming, but it is nice now that it's here.

It doesn't feel like a romp, does it? But I'm keeping the title.

divination conducted with common umbrellas

Captain Crunch taught me the value of energy crystals before I was introduced to the idea by that woman from the desert. Exactly one cent. A circle had been printed on the back of the cereal box, along with instructions to tape a penny to the end of a bit of string, to ask a yes or no question and hold the string above the circle as steady as you please, and to watch as the penny began to swing up and down the vertical axis on the circular target--this for yes--or back and forth along the horizontal--for no--or else a circular pattern--indicating uncertainty.

She feathered her hair in the style of the time, at the length of her shoulders, and would later get a permanent that never seemed to suit her, this around the time that she began cooking without salt. It may be no accident that I can only love a woman who pours salt into the pot with recklessness abandon. When I remember that desert woman, she always has her hippie hair, down to her knees, and drives a maroon 1979 Mustang. The recollections are grainy, slightly overexposed, without sound. She inexplicably hated my sister, and so I hated her with a fierceness I could never quite understand at the time. She was usually very kind to me. Confusions of this sort remained hidden and yet obvious; resembling the erections I begged myself not to take with me off the school bus in the mornings (those pleas having produced varying degrees of success).

In Denver, she took me aside quietly and showed me how to use the energy of a crystal to commune with the universe. The captain loomed large, and I said so. This proves nothing, she insisted. Why, I asked, would the universe give a shit about whether or not I'm going to find my keys before the end of the day? Still, interesting exercise in discovering what you wish the answer would be.

An umbrella placed tip-down on the pavement at a right angle will fall in some supposedly random direction. Your instructions are to follow the umbrella's direction until you have reached some kind of destination. In this way you will discover where you truly wanted to be. Or else you will get very wet.

When I decided to come to Japan, I had no notion of the place, no credentials or foreseeable method of achieving the goal, no idea why I had made the decision at all, but I was nothing but certain of myself. I bought a camera and a dictionary. The rest, I knew, would come.

precursors to snow

one is pleasantly sleepy in the morning

quieter music finds its way to the rotation

one begins to dream of NFL post-season possibilities

coffee and socks are thicker

a warm body is desired... and a sofa

one begins to take comfort in familiar objects, foods, movies

a uniform gray descends, and one is undaunted, hopeful even