i am dead

I am dead,
cause everywhere around me
I see pictures of
you. I was
good. I was good. Then
you came back
into my life & I
started dying right after
you left me
again. I was
good. I was
good,
I said.

I quit those things
you hated
about me. I left
that place that
you hated
to be.
I got somewhere
new.
I got somewhere
new.
I lost
40-fucking-lbs
thinking of you & I
got someplace new, just
to be so lost again now
thinking of you.

So
I go
to my door to get
inside
my silvery green leather
(it smells
so new),
slip my head inside
my golden knit
cap &
I pull on
my white Chuckie
T's.
They are so so white & that's
gonna change
- gotta be - &
I leave
the smoke of my place &
I drop this
lighter that makes music &
I cross the threshhold
& breathe for
the first time
today,
in peace.
There.

That lady I passed, she had a smile on her face.
Who was she thinking about, that lady? Secretly
I wish it was me.
Finally, there's no
you.

I cross over &
watch briefly
these ramen goers leaning over
steam &
slurping away.
I don't know where I'm going
but I see a red-painted door. There,
the grocery store &
donuts & cakes. No,
no
not them today. But fried chicken,
maybe.
So many good things that are
bad
for
you are really cheap
today. It's a Xmas sale but
I don't know
what I want. So I'm just gonna
feel this
avocado.
This guy's ready
& so is this one too but
no not you.
Maybe
in a few days,
baby.

There's that chicken I was
maybe looking for. But
I have some
at home &
I wanna
cook that up like
I used
to do
for you,
wrap it up, like
you used
to do to
me,
but with soft skin &
no,
not with this bag of lettuce
in my hand.
I think
I'm gonna squeeze
a slice of this fat
tomato
in, too.
That should be good,
& that California red over there.
Soon I'll be jumping on the grape train,
drinking & then
thinking of
you,
till the end of time.

(But suddenly now wishing of
drinking
to this new
you
sometime.)

I walk outside.

You know the music in my
head
makes me scared - like
Yusef once said - & now
Liam says how many special people change &
how many lives get rearranged, where were
you -
yeah where were
you
baby -
where were you when we were getting high?

(But then
you,
so where are
you
now?

Cause
these Neptunian colors
paint pictures in my mind &
the music we dance to
plays on until
time
stops.
You
should
know.)

So then this other you just slipped into the sunshine & gardens over there & out through the doors of
my head.

(I feel alive
cause I'm thinking of
you.)

I must've stopped being dead. Or maybe
(I'm lost
somewhere in Heaven.)

why i like flowers

They last only a little while, coming in spring, but dying soon after. So they come back again & life feels clean. (Smells good, too.)

They come in many colors & they make girls happy. (I hope so.)

And they have exotic names that I can't remember. But their scent lingers with me sweetly, long into the night, long into this cold winter.

They are the greatest thing.

(I feel like a bee right now, ready to go home & make honey.)

Flowers, that's what they are.

in a little while

(photo: a heart-shaped rock I pulled out of the Itadori River in Gifu)

I just want to forget that anything happened. But then, that wouldn't be right. It was an experience, that was all.

One day I will carve out a place in this world, but now I'm all over. I think I'm going to the sea, not to get away from, but to get closer to me.

TD asked me to write about love for the Feb issue of his magazine. So I've been thinking a lot about it recently. What is love? So I asked BusyBee. She said,

It makes me feel alive.

That's perfect, I thought. I have been a zombie, the living dead for a long time. I wondered what it was like to feel like she said.

BusyBee's man is in France. I met him. He's skinny & tall but she says he's sexy. What she likes most about him is his strength, but it's not physical. "All these guys who talk to me are afraid of you," she said. "But he's not." Then she said if she doesn't see her guy soon she's gonna die. She was serious. Life for her is love & sex, pure & simple. So she bought a $2500 ticket & will stay there just eight days. She said she can't hold out much longer.

I too wanted to feel alive, so I went out & tried. And it worked. Then soon after I had music in my head & my stone heart started to melt.

But now I'm thinking of the sea, getting away from here, getting closer to me.

People either push you forward or hold you back. They lead you where you should go or hold you where you shouldn't be. This new one taught me to keep moving, so I go, never still, don't slow me down & let me get out of here.

In a little while, I'll be there, falling into the sea. It's that pure & simple.

coin laundry

It's been a year since I read that book, the one that got me to quit smoking. I lasted four months & had given the book back to Kentaro before I needed it again. I smoked & couldn't stop. I asked him for it back, but he told me that he gave it to some Africans. Maybe they were his neighbors or something. Kentaro never read the book. He still smokes.

This morning on my walk to work I was wondering how I did it. It was all mind control. The guy said to just think about it all. It's an addiction. People who smoke are drug addicts. I think maybe 35% of Japanese people smoke.

I remember back to that school I taught at two years ago in the bad part of town. Some of the kids smoked in class & they were junior high students. The teachers would nudge them to put them out. Some of these kids never wore uniforms, they rode their bikes through the halls & spent most of the time sitting outside on the school grounds, smoking & chatting with the teachers. At this school, each yanki (yankee, or bad student) had a teacher who'd follow them around. These teachers were huge, bigger than me, & they had a lot of patience, more than me. Often they'd gather behind the trees outside of campus, smoking away, out of view of the kids. I remember that one kid who hit me & I heard that he got a job at a gas station after graduation. He was happy. I was happy I finished that school, too.

. . .

Back to my walk. The air was so clean, the sky so clear, the rice paddies long barren. I started reading signs. Katakana is easy enough. ラーメン　(ramen). コインランドリー (coin laundry). I thought how cool katakana is. It makes Japanese more interesting than Chinese. Then I saw this old house with a wooden horse girdle, those things they put on a horse to pull a cart. It must have been hanging there a hundred years.

Mind control. My mind is out of control. How did I do it? I need to find that book & stop thinking about the signs I've read, the music in my head. Slow down my beating heart, slowly, slowly love.* The sky is clean & blue. I wish I could dive into it.

*U2 from In a Little While

thoughts

Something sleeps on the surfaces
Solemnity dug down beneath
Bestial shapes of beauty snug
Safe between waves of words

Scenes so scary they transcode
Forms of profane speech to color
Becoming song
Becoming song

xmas cake

BusyBee, she's a girl I know. Twenty-nine years old & ready to marry. She's tired of playing the field. She says she used to be an expert at it. Now she's getting excited about Xmas.

When she was a little girl in her small hometown, she used to wake up early on the 25th & bake cakes with her mom. Last year she was living at home. On Xmas day she baked cakes for both her parents. They had to work.

Now she has a tiny little apartment next to the station. We stand out on her balcony sometimes smoking cigarettes, drinking beers, talking about life, watching the train go by. She has a pot of tomato plants & some herbs out there. I'm not sure what kind, but she uses them in her cooking. Sometimes we see one of those dark trains go by with no riders, like a ghost express, & BusyBee gets scared. It's kind of cute.

The other day she told me, "Vandelay, my microwave sucks. It's too small & I can't bake a cake in it. It doesn't have ... how do you say ... an oven." She says it so sweetly. I can't imagine her saying anything mean to anybody. She's like the opposite of me.

It seems there aren't any ovens in Japan, at least I haven't seen one. There are lots of fish broilers. My microwave has a reinji ("range") function, so I can bake up stuff, but I never do.

. . .

I walked to another pond today, during lunch. This one was not quite as nice as my pond. There was a chain link fence surrounding most of it, a sign saying "Dangerous. Do not swim." I imagined someone diving into those muddy waters. But on the other side the water looked less murky, & there was a new walkway, fresh grass. Two old guys were there fishing. One pulled up his rod with three minnows squirming on it. I'm not sure if that was what he caught or if it was bait.

Anyway I walked back through more rows of vegetables. Wow, the broccoli plant was huge. I was tempted to grab one & put it in my pocket. Broccoli Rocks. I saw some nasu (eggplant), cabbage, lettuce, radishes, etc. All of this made me want to be a farmer.

(I know this isn't so interesting. I'm currently fasting during the day & I feel like shit. My tongue is rough & I have a bad taste in my mouth. It's the toxins. I can feel my liver repairing itself. My body just wants to sleep. Earlier it wanted to eat & I nearly gave in. I grabbed a can of tuna but stopped just before opening it.)

On the way back, an ambulance went by, loud sirens, a man's voice in the loudspeaker probably said something like, "hey get the hell out of my way!" & the cars actually pulled over. In Japan, I've seen police cars, ambulances, firetrucks trying to get around idiots that won't pull over. Many just keep driving, not a care in the world. (I'm kind of pissed off at Japanese drivers now cause I nearly got hit twice on my walk.) That's why they use loudspeakers, I guess.

I also saw an interesting sign. It read, "No hunting in this area." What?! I was still in a residential neighborhood. The sign was official. I've never seen a gun in this country. I've heard of hunters here, but thought they were myths. Like Momotaro, the boy who came to Japan in a peach.

. . .

BusyBee tells me about the "illuminations" in Japan, how wonderful they are. She's right. They brighten up the city & it kind of feels like Christmas. Couples stroll through the lights holding hands. It's romantic.

Xmas here is for lovers. They drink champagne, eat cake, & other stuff. I imagine the love hotels are booked months in advance, but there are so many of them. Even if you are out in the sticks, I'm sure you can find a room.

a missing screw

An old man just fixed the door to the tissue culture room. The giant button that slides the door open was missing a screw. So the button, strangely, kept tilting.

This old fella saw me & got excited. He spoke to me in English:

"My name is Yoshiharu. I'm a maintenance man."

He bowed & we shook hands. It was an international moment.

He then started speaking to sensei in Japanese: "I used to work at Expo 2005. I was in charge of all the air conditioners. Every night I partied with the foreign people. I can't believe they drank vodka straight out of the bottle."

Sensei was translating but I could understand every word. This guy was real. The language he spoke was simple & to the point. And he gestured like he had latin blood.

"I had many girlfriends, black, white, yellow (Sensei lies & translates girlfriends as friends). All the gaijin had a Japanese girl."

Yep, that's what we do. Gaijin & the J-girl. Oh yeah. More on this topic another time.

. . .

So I want to write about the last two days. It has nothing to do with anything. But it might have something to do with me.

(The lunch lady just came & delivered a bento ("the boxed lunch"). I used to order them but don't anymore. There's an older lady that usually comes & she always smiles at me. She asked the secretary about me, "who is that foreign guy, why is he sitting there?" I thought that was funny so I started talking to her. She's always speaking quickly, passionately, so I can't quite catch what she says. I do grin & nod a lot. This makes us both happy.)

Anyway, my head has been pretty messed up recently. After I moved out to the inaka ("the sticks"), well close enough, & stopped dating that cool local chick who spoke clear English (she was just a station away), all I do is sit in my place & drink. I used to go to the gym a lot. But now I'm tired & just like relaxing at home. It's my escape. But I realized two days ago that I've gone completely insane.

It started with a dream, actually a nightmare then a dream. The first woke me up at 2am in shock, you know how terrible dreams are? And the second was the most amazing dream I've ever had. It was visual, exciting, an adventure through time & space. I wanted to make a movie out of it, but unfortunately I had to wake up & go to work. I forgot most of it.

I do realize that I'm living in a dream. It has been a nightmare & an improbable adventure, something like a film projector rolling a fairy tale behind my eyes, obscuring what's really in front of me. (This is going nowhere.)

But even a drunken begger on horseback goes somewhere, right?*

. . .

So yesterday I walked to the supermarket during lunch. The whole army of housewives were out, picking through the vegetable sales rack, admiring tomotoes, collecting tempura for dinnertime. And there was me. I got some tuna for my diet. Some tomotoes & saba ("the mackerel", so delicious here). Then I saw some pizza & grabbed two slices. Oh well. I can always eat healthy tomorrow.

On the way back I kept thinking about things. All the crap I've done, the jobs I've had, the places I've lived, all of it amounting to nothing, really. All those old goals, & girlfriends, the transitions, the new paths & "fresh starts" - all of it just nothing. Where is/are it/they/that/those that I really wanted?

But suddenly I realized that it all led me to the place where I was walking. I was walking down a street lined by vegetable gardens. The day was sunny. I could smell manure, but only briefly. It was perfect.

(I walked to the grocery store during lunch. That was all. And I really didn't want to be anywhere else. Really. Not wrapped-up in some woman's candle-lit bedroom. Not behind the wheel of that black Mustang rolling through the desert at a hundred. Not in Jack London square watching the fog fall into the bay, me making friends with those damned pigeons. No, not anywhere else but there, walking my manure-scented lane.)

Now tell me I'm crazy, that I'm missing a screw.

*Thomas Wolfe, from You Can't Go Home Again.