I'm a mad dasher, I might as well admit it. I'm more comfortable running around, packing in the activities, losing myself in action. When I wake, I feel an urge to move, the stress of stillness...
Eerily quiet on the Hibiya line. Not a single voice heard in the packed subway car station after station. A girlish utterance absorbs into unforgiving human forms. What are these clean, self-contained, silent individuals on the express train thinking about this weekday morning...
The girl powdering her cheeks and limning her eyes smiling happy in her pouty prettiness. The guy massaging his temples. The advertisement banners hanging down from the center roof of the train that would never fly in New York; people'd put their heads through the paper ads like door curtains. The little subway dance, when someone needs to disembark around you, and you have to shuffle with tiny steps, like dancing with a six-year-old. People are more careful, quiet, and considerate here. Less of the closed-in fear and stressful almost-shoving induced by seemingly imminent door closings. I lean against the ‘back’ door and then it opens at the next station. An unexpected reversal. My logic proved faulty. Touché, subway...
What Manami said: there are two Japan's. Tokyo is not Japan!...
Japan, even Tokyo, is more structured and ordered . There's less of the disordered vibrancy that characterizes America; also called diversity or mix or "low" culture. Consider the ubiquitous umbrella, the occasional parasol...
Perfectionism is the opposite of fatalism...
Onsen tubs. Reed brooms. Raised train lines. Sea to mountain declines. Street fair food stalls. Monstrous insects. Sylvan shrines: Miyazaki...
At 5pm exactly monks ring temple bells all through Kyoto and people leave offices. Sidewalks throng with men and women in formal wear and black shoes. In some quarters, some women wear kimonos, white socks, wood sandals. They nod to smartphones waiting for the light to change...
The assumption now is that travelers will go on, are in the middle of long-term vagabondings. It wasn’t always like this. I remember the first time I heard about someone picking up and running off, how it surprised and titillated me. Now it's par for the course. Ever more wanderers...
Back at the hostel, the Italian says, “Where can I go to meet the girls!,” laughing and leering at the young Japanese woman, Siuri, staffing the hostel at 10pm. She’s says, “Why are you laughing? Haha. Too Italian!”...
Monstrous coy and carp jockey for position in the park pool. Feed me!...
I'm going to see some thing. I'm already imagining taking photos of the thing, showing those photos to other people, and how they will react to the photos. A mind divided upon itself will fall...
The vampire of regret sucks joy out of the present...
I grasp my walking stick and plan each foot-plant on the mountain trail. The wind blows the tree-tops; I think the trees are breathing. I follow their lead, take a deep breath and then another. I think, “The forest teaches you things. How to breathe, how to be patient, present...”—I blunder face-first into a spider web, drop my stick, and clutch face and hair in mortal fear...
I feel like I can hear horns, long-blowing harmonizing horn voices almost surrounding me. Then a block later, pause again: what, are those woodwinds? Flutes calling me north? Then I'm tuned in to the sounds all around, the bass rumble of construction trucks, the lowing of a garage air-conditioning unit, the clink of chains, the percussion of a nail gun. Mystic music rides on the wind...
The lateral free flow of ideas. The streaming consciousness. The lambent association. The courageous vocabulary. The broad to the specific description. Dust hills and trailer park sabotage. This is what David Forster Wallace does best...
Concrete jetty. Smokey jazz. Sapporo. Serene deer. Mountain forest. Gion alleyways. Waves of Shibuya. Totemic skyscrapers: Murakami...
At my hostel, the Dutch guy tells me about being propositioned and harassed by Asian men. In India, a busboy grabbed his balls. He's cycling across the lower-half of Honshu, Japan's center island. On his first night, he camped at a playground in Narita. A middle-aged guy arrived, invited him to shower, then whiskey, then pulled nunchucks out from his shirt. Kevin was like, "Whoa, what's that!" He then excused himself and sat unsettled and unsleeping in his tent while the guy walked around swinging the weapon for an hour or so...
An acorn stuck in a spider’s web...
The Japanese don't use acronyms, because they don't use letters, but they do shorten and compound words: Japanize smart phone and application and you get smaho apuri...
Revel in names: Naka-meguro. Hibiya. Hanzomon. Aoyama-itchome. Oedo line. Shinjuku. Yoyogi...
At the festival in Kyoto, the girl hands me a map and points out Main Street then says, “Thank you, bye bye!” waving her hand back and forth at face-level like windshield wipers at full speed...
When the 5:15 AM train rolls into the last stop on the Hibiya line, about a third of the passengers are sleeping. Half appear to be returning from a long night out. There's the over-the-hill blonde boy-idol wannabe. Two conductors jog the train to clear it, meet in the middle where a guy is still sleeping in rumpled suit and hair. The conductors nudge him awake and shepherd him off the train like a dazed bovine. He gives himself fully-trusting to their ministrations.
Eerily quiet on the Hibiya line. Not a single voice heard in the packed subway car station after station. A girlish utterance absorbs into unforgiving human forms. What are these clean, self-contained, silent individuals on the express train thinking about this weekday morning...
The girl powdering her cheeks and limning her eyes smiling happy in her pouty prettiness. The guy massaging his temples. The advertisement banners hanging down from the center roof of the train that would never fly in New York; people'd put their heads through the paper ads like door curtains. The little subway dance, when someone needs to disembark around you, and you have to shuffle with tiny steps, like dancing with a six-year-old. People are more careful, quiet, and considerate here. Less of the closed-in fear and stressful almost-shoving induced by seemingly imminent door closings. I lean against the ‘back’ door and then it opens at the next station. An unexpected reversal. My logic proved faulty. Touché, subway...
What Manami said: there are two Japan's. Tokyo is not Japan!...
Japan, even Tokyo, is more structured and ordered . There's less of the disordered vibrancy that characterizes America; also called diversity or mix or "low" culture. Consider the ubiquitous umbrella, the occasional parasol...
Perfectionism is the opposite of fatalism...
Onsen tubs. Reed brooms. Raised train lines. Sea to mountain declines. Street fair food stalls. Monstrous insects. Sylvan shrines: Miyazaki...
At 5pm exactly monks ring temple bells all through Kyoto and people leave offices. Sidewalks throng with men and women in formal wear and black shoes. In some quarters, some women wear kimonos, white socks, wood sandals. They nod to smartphones waiting for the light to change...
The assumption now is that travelers will go on, are in the middle of long-term vagabondings. It wasn’t always like this. I remember the first time I heard about someone picking up and running off, how it surprised and titillated me. Now it's par for the course. Ever more wanderers...
Back at the hostel, the Italian says, “Where can I go to meet the girls!,” laughing and leering at the young Japanese woman, Siuri, staffing the hostel at 10pm. She’s says, “Why are you laughing? Haha. Too Italian!”...
Monstrous coy and carp jockey for position in the park pool. Feed me!...
I'm going to see some thing. I'm already imagining taking photos of the thing, showing those photos to other people, and how they will react to the photos. A mind divided upon itself will fall...
The vampire of regret sucks joy out of the present...
I grasp my walking stick and plan each foot-plant on the mountain trail. The wind blows the tree-tops; I think the trees are breathing. I follow their lead, take a deep breath and then another. I think, “The forest teaches you things. How to breathe, how to be patient, present...”—I blunder face-first into a spider web, drop my stick, and clutch face and hair in mortal fear...
I feel like I can hear horns, long-blowing harmonizing horn voices almost surrounding me. Then a block later, pause again: what, are those woodwinds? Flutes calling me north? Then I'm tuned in to the sounds all around, the bass rumble of construction trucks, the lowing of a garage air-conditioning unit, the clink of chains, the percussion of a nail gun. Mystic music rides on the wind...
The lateral free flow of ideas. The streaming consciousness. The lambent association. The courageous vocabulary. The broad to the specific description. Dust hills and trailer park sabotage. This is what David Forster Wallace does best...
Concrete jetty. Smokey jazz. Sapporo. Serene deer. Mountain forest. Gion alleyways. Waves of Shibuya. Totemic skyscrapers: Murakami...
At my hostel, the Dutch guy tells me about being propositioned and harassed by Asian men. In India, a busboy grabbed his balls. He's cycling across the lower-half of Honshu, Japan's center island. On his first night, he camped at a playground in Narita. A middle-aged guy arrived, invited him to shower, then whiskey, then pulled nunchucks out from his shirt. Kevin was like, "Whoa, what's that!" He then excused himself and sat unsettled and unsleeping in his tent while the guy walked around swinging the weapon for an hour or so...
An acorn stuck in a spider’s web...
The Japanese don't use acronyms, because they don't use letters, but they do shorten and compound words: Japanize smart phone and application and you get smaho apuri...
Revel in names: Naka-meguro. Hibiya. Hanzomon. Aoyama-itchome. Oedo line. Shinjuku. Yoyogi...
At the festival in Kyoto, the girl hands me a map and points out Main Street then says, “Thank you, bye bye!” waving her hand back and forth at face-level like windshield wipers at full speed...
When the 5:15 AM train rolls into the last stop on the Hibiya line, about a third of the passengers are sleeping. Half appear to be returning from a long night out. There's the over-the-hill blonde boy-idol wannabe. Two conductors jog the train to clear it, meet in the middle where a guy is still sleeping in rumpled suit and hair. The conductors nudge him awake and shepherd him off the train like a dazed bovine. He gives himself fully-trusting to their ministrations.
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