We're Not Alone!!!

Now I have two (count 'em -- 2!!) Friends In Blog. A veritable army. We could take on the world, if it was smaller and had less people on it. In it?

Not much else to say, really. Read Rob's shit. It's funny. Kinda. And all those pictures he talks about?? They're real. Really.

I'm planning to buy a digital projector this week. Am I getting too home-theatery? I'm studying my ass off for the level 2 Japanese test. My girlfriend, who is a native speaker of the language, struggles to answer the questions on this fucker.

Started an play-by-mail Call of Cthulhu campaign with a bunch of friends scattered across the globe. Momma I'm scared! I play a 42 year-old Morrocan truckie/former gun-runner and I look like Harry Dean Stanton from Paris, Texas. That's the scary bit.

On another note, my friend Wendy in Italy was recently told to be careful of people claiming to have seen the Virgin Mary because some of the stories are not actually true.

Unlike THIS, which is totally genuine (they guarantee it, see!)

Splattered rice and a drift to the Right...

A little while since the last post here.

Work has begun again full swing, but my Uni classes have gone into their exam period so I get to play World of Warcraft instead. Tauren druids are fun.

Last weekend I made Mochi with Mizuki and a bunch of her friends from the mountain climbing club of her college. Event organised by the always supergenki Emiko. It was fun beating little rice grains to a pasty death on a clearblue icy day.

Damn it's cold.

OK - Rant Mode On

I am reading Herbert Bix's Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan and it's fascinating. The complexities of what the Americans did here during the occupation astounds me. The way they 'set up' the Emperor as a British-style powerless figurehead as a way of manipulating the hearts and minds of the Japanese people...I am constantly reminded how 'set up' this entire country is.

But things are really changing. Everything from Koizumi's Yasukuni visits to the SDF's forays into Iraq...this year is the 60th anniversary of the end of WW2 and the demilitarization of Japan, and it seems the country is on the verge of some kind of major seachange. I was talking to an old lady today who had seen Michael Moore's film Farenheit 911 and I guess wanted to talk to a foreigner about it. She said with a pained expression on her face "It seems old men like to make wars for young men to die in." The phrase really stuck with me all day.

Just today a minor scandal broke in the papers about a government minister interfering with a national broadcaster and attempting to censor a documentary on the war crimes of the Showa Emperor. Everywhere I go I hear stuff about how Japan must "regain it's sense of national pride" or "reassert itself as a major international power" and this kind of rhetoric. To me this kind of talk is disturbing and a little saddening. But people will deny that any kind of right-wing shift is taking place, despite the clear warning signs. This shift I think is occurring at a global level.

As a teacher who sometimes works in public schools, I have to deal with another hot topic: the Tokyo state governments introduction of compulsory singing of the National Anthem and bowing to the Rising Sun flag at the beginning of each school day. Large numbers of teachers protested this and even striked last year, leading to retributive punishment from the Ministry of Education in the form of pay cuts and even terminations. The big twist came near the end of the year when a conservative politician asked the current Emperor at a press conference what he thought about it and the Emperor said he thought it was a bad idea to force students to be patriotic. This kind of threw the right-wingers (who continue to worship the Emperor as a divine being) for a spin.

Whatever...Rant Mode Off

Chichibu

The snow was deep yesterday. Thought I'd write about my Christmas trip to the mountains.

Mizuki and I took an early express train to Chichibu on the morning of the 24th. Chichibu is a town in western Saitama prefecture, about 1.5 hours north-westish of Tokyo. Saitama is often known as "the New Jersey of Japan." It's close to a great city. It's a suburban commuter area. And it's profoundly unfashionable. Adding the syllable Da- to its name gives you Dasai-tama, or Unfashionable Ball. Don't ever mention this to people who live there, though. The only cool thing about Saitama is the Saitama Super Arena, where major sporting events are held (including the year-ending Otoko Matsuri (Man Festival) on Dec. 31 where lots of big scary dudes from around the world beat the living bejeezus out of eachother in a square-shaped ring. Oh yeah and the Urawa Reds, who are apparently a good football team (don't ask me; I just teach them English.)

So anyway, we went Inaka (Beyond the Black Stump.) Out in the sticks in the uncoolest place in the country. Why, you may ask? Why oh why oh why?

Two reasons, and good ones:
God and Hot Springs.

Goddess in fact. In Chichibu there are a series of 34 temples dedicated to the Buddhist deity Kannon (Kwan Yin in Mandarin Chinese.) There used to be 33, which is a holy number, the soul spending 33 years in limbo before transmigrating to a new incarnation, but then this group hooked up with two others (in Kyoto and Wakayama, I believe) and added an extra to give a total of 100. Thems a lotta temples. Kannon is a Bodhisattva, an enlightened soul who has forgone the bliss of ascending to nirvana in order to help all other souls find their way thenceward. She is the goddess of Mercy and Childbirth. One of the temples we visited (perhaps number 6 or 7; I can't recall) actually has a strikingly out-of-place and Madonna-like statue of her holding a small child to her breast. It is thought that this statue, donated by a rich noble in the Edo period, was secretly crafted by an underground Christian group and surrepetitiously 'smuggled in.' Christianity was outlawed by the Shogunate of the time. Kannon is quite beautiful. She has a serene face, and sad eyes, filled with compassion for the sufferings of the world. But my deepest and most lasting impression of Kannon comes from the Sakai Masaaki TV show from the 70s: Monkey! She saves his hairy pink ass on many an occasion.



So we hiked around to all these temples, and our feet got REALLY sore. Up mountains and down valleys, past schoolyards and cement factories, disused warehouses, quaint cottages, gutters full of toxic slime, railyards, traditional inns, decorative glass-blowing manufacturers, five hundred year-old olive trees, maples, a forest of cedars and soba restaurant after soba restaurant (a local specialty, apparently.) At each temple we entered, we stopped to make an small offering and a prayer, surveyed the grounds and architecture, then had a chat with the monk on duty. While we talked he would, in beautiful ink-brush calligraphy, inscribe our books with the temple name, date, and a poem.



The days were short, so we retired early as soon as the sun dropped behind the looming peaks to the west. And then onto the onsennatural hot springs, the only other reason to come to Chichibu in winter. The hot springs were hot and springy, which is to say, just the way they're supposed to be. Which is a good thing. Really. And anyway, greatly relaxing after a day-long pilgrimage in the freezing December air. Scalding hot milky white water and steam so thick it feels like you're drinking when you breathe. We had roast chicken and salad and vodka for Christmas dinner (no turkeys out in rural Japan I'm afraid,) surveying the mountains and icy river below our hilltop ryokan inn.



One last thing about this town. It is dominated by a mountain. Buko-san. Quite an impressive monster. It looms so hugely on the sky that you cannot help but feel its presence at all times. It casts a long shadow over the valley. In times past the people of the Chichibu valley had two major gods: the god of the mountain, a male spirit; and the god of the dark wood in the center of the valley, a female deity. At the famous Yomatsuri (Night Festival) on Dec. 2nd each year the god of Buko-san would descend from his mountain seat in the form of the head priest's ceremonial staff, make a procession to the shrine in the center of the sacred wood, and meet his bride. The staff would be ritually placed in a hollow on the back of a turtle-statue to complete the symbolic union. This ritual continues to be practiced today, and the staff and the turtle are still there.

However....

Buko-san is destroyed. After the 2nd World War Chichibu, like all small communities in Japan, was pressed to find some kind of industry to help the economic recovery of the nation. It was found that Buko-san, the seat of the god, was largely made from limestone and stone perfect for the manufacture of cement, so prized by the state-supported (to this day) construction industry. So the mountain was cut down. I shit you not. I have never seen anything like it before in my life. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the top of the mountain is gone. Just cut out. The scar is quite plain to see. Most of the mountain is stripped bare of trees. Great tiers of grey stone can be seen from tens of kilometres away. It is a vast ugliness, a scar beyond reckoning.

So the question I have is: how does this psychologically affect the people who live in the shadow of this mountain, their own god whom they ravaged and destroyed in the name of industrialization? Every day, every minute, the corpse of this decapitated god looms on the edge of the valley, his body broken and torn. Shinto is a religion deeply connected with nature, and the Japanese people will tell you that they are deeply respectful of the gods of the natural world. I fear the shadow that lies over this valley. The murder of a god is not without consequences.

Pepper, briefly; The Field of Autumn Leaves and pubic hair

so i was talking to Paul C the other night on msn and got R. Lee's script for pepper. very nice. Michael Palin would have been great. loved the cat/milkman thang. and Pete Townshend.

P.S. Rorschach Publishing should be renamed Raw Shark Publishing, for bonus geek watchmen obscurity points.



---

on a unrelated note, i can't buy World Of Warcraft in Japan, which is shitting me to tears. i spent two hours after work today hunting through the nightmare otaku cat-piss land of Akihabara ('Field of Autumn Leaves') for the fucking game. no luck. the US amazon won't ship video games to Japan apparently, and amazon.co.jp doesn't have it in stock (yet?) arg. i'm a consumer, goddamnit! i want to consume! let me consume! i did manage to see a genuine Japanese albino otaku girl skulking around the shojo racks, though, so the trip may have been worth it after all.

had nice shio ramen with Mizuki tonight. she is prepping for her final practical test of fourth year medicine this coming sunday. next year she starts her internship and has to cut people up and shit. lovely.

--a note on Japanese RPGing. totally obscure here, in the table-top, paper-and-pencil form. so obscure that in an area the size of greater Tokyo, with roughly 20 million people, there are only 2 shops of any size catering to the hobby. entering one of these (the Yellow Submarines in Shinjuku and Akihabara), i get the feeling i'm diving into some deep, dark core of deviant niche weirdness. the people in these places are quite a few notches higher on the nerd/geek scale than those found in shops in western countries. Or maybe not.

my mate Rob B. told me a story once of a trip to gallery opening of some kind (he does commerical art-fuck shit like redesigning the monkey character Monchichi to have disturbing, bloodshot staring human eyes -- digital images of Rob's own) where he met some porn startlet who was signing her photobooks for fans. Rob got one, and included was a complimentary pubic hair in a tiny plastic bag taped to the book. what a freebie! anway, that's the kind of place Akihabara is.

enough, work tomorrow.

we gather to forget the past year, x 3

Last week was a goddamned trial. Penultimate and all I guess it should be expected. Thursday night, Bounenkai with the Ikebukuro crew, minus Mari who was sick which is a shame as she usually manages to create some kind of havoc. David turned up and regaled us with tales of his new dream-job in Hakone. 5 and a half months paid vacation a year the MOTHERFUCKER! :)

Friday night saw a dinner party at Ryan and Miki's, with Graf, Sarah and Mizuki in attendance. Lots of geek talk and good Mexican-Japanese hybrid cooking. Sarah it turns out is a poet who won first prize in a national tanka contest (this?) year. Mizuki and I had a slightly weird experience on the quaint tram ride back when an old man angrily demanded we not sit in the priority seating despite the fact that there was almost no-one else in the carriage.

Saturday and Mia-sensei collapsed unconscious in the teacher's office at Omiya-ko. She came to her senses after a few seconds, but just lay on the floor for 2 hours and refused any help and demanded that no-one call a doctor. Very weird.

Saturday night saw another Bounenkai in Omiya with my business classes headed by the irrepressible Jim. Small talk and shochu. Lots of shochu. High points included the announcement of Saiko's engagement, talking with Harumi about law school, which kind of cleared things up a bit in my own head, and a parting conversation with a medical researcher about the human nervous system. I managed to get the last train back and collapse in exhaustion.

Sunday Mizuki and I went skating in Edogawa-ku. It was great fun, I think my first time (if I did it as a child I can't remember the experience) and I found that I had a kind of natural talent for it. After the first 10 minutes or so of teetering about uncertainly and flailing and scrabbling at the wall for support, I was soon off and racing around the main rink at a reasonable pace. Mizuki fared less well, and after a couple of hours, she slipped and smacked her cheek on the ice, which called an end to proceedings. We tried to take a bus home, got stuck in a traffic jam behind a road accident, and finally got out and walked to a subway station. That night we watched the Woody Allen film Everybody Says I Love You which was quite excellent, though lighter in tone than what I usually enjoy from him.

Also saw Kubrick's Barry Lyndon which was beautiful and grand.

I have started two painting projects:

the first being my idealized impressions of the Australian destert landscapes I remember so vividly from childhood. Crumbling ochre and rust reds, hot black ironstone, poison spinifex, twisted old mallee trees, fragrant sandalwood, the blue sky empty and comforting. Perhaps the odd road, a broken wire-and-post fenceline, a decrepit windmill and corrugated tank, paddy melons exploding in the sun, the goannas and cockatoos and black trap-door spiders. Perhaps a distant plume of smoke like the line of drunken painter's brush, cutting across the azure plain.

the second being images of the urban residental districts Tokyo, in particular the old-style shitamachi towns which have been swamped and twisted by more recent architectural pestilences. Narrow crooked sakamichi (steeply-sloping alleys) overgrown with potted-plant jungles and tangled nests of cables wires poles and god knows what else. In these places, you're lucky if the sky is a narrow strip of blue: a glipse into an unreachable dream world of sun and space.

Recently I am reading Bob Dylan's new autobiography, which is even better than I could have hoped, Jack Vance's early stories, and I'm about to start a biography of Django Reinhardt. Just waiting for the Christmas break to begin....

train groping: the national pastime

Tan-tan Men for dinner...gooooood.....

The other Saturday night with Junko and crew at the Red Dragonfly contained an interesting conversation about chikan, or 'train molestation', that most Japanese of perversions. Apparently all 4 of the women present had been attacked, a total of about 100 times between them. Their complaints had an air of resigned frustration. A total of zero offences were reported to the authorities. The 4 Japanese men present (all in their late 30s or 40s) expressed attitudes ranging from shouganai (oh well; can't be helped) to kanchigau (you're misinterpreting things.) The two gaijin (myself included) were...outraged is too strong a word, but it's getting close.

What the fuck is up with that shit!?!

Anyway, the last week was pretty quiet. I went shopping in Koenji on Sunday. Bought an old Pulp album (His N Hers) for 300 yen, some cards, a new mouse, and had a great Thai lunch. Mizuki has a plan to go skating. Tomorrow I want to buy an easel at Hands. I'm sick of painting on the floor.

Howl, a UFO, Gingko leaves, hundreds of men all sporting the moustache of the Emperor

Saw it! Very good, even Kimura. Tokyo Tower was beautiful in the dying light. We thought we saw a UFO. Passed some true architectural oddities on the way there, including the Tokyo Masonic Lodge and a red-bricked cylindrical tower with no doors. Tuesday was the Icho Matsuri. German sausages, Sanuki Udon and Beer. And the Meiji Emperor's memorial museum. Alternate histories. Watched Mystic River. I am not sure the ending really works. Looping guitar lines spiral through my room. I bought an RC-20XL. 16 minutes!



Here's a story I wrote in about 1 hour Monday night. The challenge from Misaki; 3 kanji; 矢、木、真珠。 Arrow, Tree, Pearl.

Hatsumode

On January 1st I was alone. In the morning I woke early; perhaps 4am, it was still black outside. I ran a hot bath and scrubbed myself clean of the night sweat soaking my sleeping robe. An old crumbly bar of yellow soap, scented with eucalyptus. The water was steaming; I filled the cypress bucket and poured it over my aching shoulders. I shaved in the cracked, steamed-up mirror glued to the concrete wall. Cut my neck, let the blood run down the drain in a crimson spiral. I dressed in a warm wool robe, carnadine orange, with a wide black sash. I took my knife, and my grass-tree staff, and my wool hat from beside the door.

Outside the wind was bitter as I made my way to the little shrine behind the house. I passed by the old street man’s leaning shack. Even he wasn’t up yet. Very quiet. My wooden shoes on the bitumen, the distant crowing of a cock. Just me and a few ugly old crows, hopping around the garbage piles and glaring at me sideways. Down the alley smothered in pot-plants, a turn right at the stone wall of the tiny graveyard, and then the stone steps of the shrine before me. No one here yet. Perhaps I am the first of the year. As I slowly clattered up, the stone guardian dogs seemed to howl as the north wind blew a flurry of long-dead pale leaves and urban debris in a vortex to carry me through the gate the color of my robe, of my blood.

At the fountain I washed my hands in the ice water spewing from the corroded bronze dragon’s mouth. The water a little pink as the warm blood from my neck trickled down through my sleeve. I touched the red-green water to my lips, blood-rust and verdigris.

I bowed to the ancient cedar girded in the white rope as thick as my thigh, then turned to the tiny building at the far end of the yard. Approaching with my clattering shoes, a cloud of diseased pigeons exploded, then blew away like smoke. I tossed a coin the same color as the dragon into the offerings-box, and gripping the rope, this one black as coal, shaking the bell, I prayed. To the god of War. The dove is his messenger. With blood in the soil, the crops grow tall and golden.

One old man stirred nearby in a small out-building. “Happy New Year,” he growled in a voice like that of an ancient toad recently woken from countless years under the mud. I approached and said “How many of these New Years for you, then, father?” He just grunted as if to say “more than enough” and gestured at the wares spread out on the table before him. A few assorted charms, talismans, wards, amulets, tokens and postcards. A fairly paltry collection to ward against bad luck, or jealousy, or demons, to bring wealth and fortune and love and children; to past tests, to win promotion, to hit the jackpot. “I need something stronger.” I said, indicating the wall behind him with the staff in my hand.

He glanced up at me for a moment, then with a sigh heaved his old bones off his stool and moved to the wall. It was covered in arrows, white and red, tasseled and bound with charms and wardings strong enough to bind and imprison the terrors of the world.

“Whatcha tryina kill?” He grunted.
I said “My love.”

He paused for a long moment, then turned back to me. “Your love?”
“An old love.” I said. “It won’t die.”
“By all the gods, son, that’s a tough one. That kind of thing don’t die easy, you know.”
“I know. I came to the god of war, of death and new life. Where else could I turn?”
“Hmmm.” His eyes became vacant. “OK. Wait. There.” He said, indicating the place where I was already standing.
He slowly made his way off to the main shrine building, entering through a side door I hadn’t noticed before. I followed him with my eyes. The pigeons had returned, were pecking around the sandy yard. I thought “what on earth can they find to eat there?” and then the side door swung open and the old man trudged back to the shop, grumbling all the way, carrying with some difficulty a long, flat box of dark wood.

He cleared a space on the table and gently clacked the box down. The sound was heavy. “Here you go.” He said. “This be what you need.” And he opened the box. Inside, on a bed of old crimson silk, lay a white wooden arrow, a full 3 feet long and with a vein of orange-red spiralling like the blood in my shower from one end to the other. Three feathers, white, red and black. The arrowhead a sharpened milky-white stone, viscous and cold in the early morning light.

“This is mother-of-pearl.” He gestured to the arrow. I wasn’t sure if he meant the arrowhead or the whole thing. “Is that its name?” I whispered, reaching to pick it up. He ignored me and continued, easing himself back onto his stool. “Used to kill love. There’s an old story that goes with this.”

He took out a slightly bent cigarette from a crumpled packet of Parliaments and offered me one. I shook my head slightly. He lit up and continued:
“Once upon a time there was a Lady of the court in this city, who fell in love with a Soldier, and he fell in love with she. Of course they couldn’t marry because her father wouldn’t allow it, but the soldier was a great warrior, filled with a burning passion and a fiery anger, and always and forever he sought to win fame and reknown. From a hundred bloody campaigns he returned victor, and eventually he rose, through feats both brave and barbarous, to a position of power, close to the local Lord. The two lovers had met in secret for years, but finally the Soldier was granted land and title, and the Lady waited eagerly for his proposal, practicing everyday her courtly archery, as was her wont. But the proposal never came, and the Soldier-Lord moved on, marrying a Princess from a foreign land carrying his rage over the seas. The Lady was shattered, and crafted this arrow in secret. From the ash-wood of her dowry-chest she cut the shaft, from a pearl stolen from a sea dragon’s treasure-room she honed the head, and the feathers she plucked from the three birds of the gods, necks cut in ritual before dawn beside the sea: dove, rooster, and raven. Then one day, standing in the very place you are standing now, she shot the arrow far into the air, as high as it would go, and it nigh disappeared into the sun. But down it came, the arrow, at the exact same spot she was standing, and struck her clean through the breast, and she was no more. And so you see this arrow is the killer of old loves which will not die.”

I looked down for a moment at the spot I was standing on. Under my foot, stuck to the bottom of my clog, was the wrapper of a candy bar. I looked up and said, with a dead face, “How much?”

The old man smiled, and as he did so, his eyes disappeared into his mirth.

You aint worth the blood that runs in your veins

It's 1 o'clock. I have work in a few hours.

Recently fascinated with Intellectual Property law, of all things. I teach a private class to a lawyer, Ms. Chie, every other Thursday. She is currently involved in defending a female stalker who is pathologically obsessed with the local 'Kuroneko Takkyubin' delivery truck man. She buys shit just so he will visit. She follows him around on her bicycle and memorizes his routes. Chie is more interested in IP, however. We are currently looking at articles about the patenting of GM crops being sold/pushed on Iraqi farmers by American corporations. Fascinating. How can you patent something which by its very nature is a replicator. That is, the thing itself violates the patent, creates new copies, blows away in the wind and ends up on someone else's property. The seeds are illegal to own, the farmers have to destroy them after each harvest. We're also looking at media IP law, and next week I have chosen an interesting Wired interview with Jeff Tweedy from the band Wilco to kick off the lesson. "Music is not a Loaf of Bread."

All this has sparked a desire in me recently to pursue a legal career. A sudden thing. The more I think about the ideas I wrestled with during my undergraduate degree - in particular the intersection of art and postmodernity - the more I begin to think about Law. That is, in the legal field there exists a practical realisation of some of the theoretical issues I was and am so passionately interested in. So now I am looking at law schools in Australia, Canada, and elsewhere. My first thoughts: I need a lot more money.

This morning I spent doing laundry, visiting the dermatologist as I do once a month, and playing old Dylan songs on my beat-up acoustic. I have tickets to see Howl this coming Monday with Misaki. On Saturday I'm going to Akatombo with Junko and all that crew. Noel said he'd come too. Then Tuesday I promised to go to some festival in Aoyama with Mizuki. Meanwhile I have student counselling reports to write, I have to deal with this weird mother who hits her 2-year-old daughter before class and insists we treat the child 'as you would an adult,' and prepare for my University classes on Friday morning.

PS. I love Firefox. A few minor quibbles (such as no right-click options to change text encoding) but otherwise excellent.

Walking behind the Red Sea

It was my birth-day the other. 26. Fuck!

Mizuki took me out for dinner that night after work. Tried to find a restaurant called Ko-Ke-Kokko (the sound of a Japanese chicken,) but it was out of business. Just a dark pit in the ground. Really. So instead we tried Torigen which was suitably dingy and relatively inexpensive yakitori.

A few days before I had met with Misaki and talked about this comic for a few hours, sitting in a school built in 1921 and designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Jiyugakuen Myonichikan. A quiet, beautiful building. It reminded me of Edwardian Australian schoolhouses, all polished wood and hard chairs and real slate blackboards. I felt transported back to country WA for a few hours. The light was beautiful and we got coffee with free fruit cake and cookies! Yeah!

A fascinating mural in the main hall was uncovered recently underneath the plaster. Painted by the students, a bible scene from Exodus: 13. A column of fire precedes the march of the Israelites towards/into the Red Sea. Hebraic writing tops the mural, presumably a quotation. I was struck by the oddness of the picture's construction: the sky/sea cuts into the land and the human figures walk behind it. Proto-cubism by Japanese schoolgirls?

Hauru no Ugoku Shiro opens next Saturday: shall not miss...

Thinking about Law...

Karasu, Hato, Suzume

a whole boxload of Jose Saramago books arrived this morning.

[don't know how to make the accent on the e. sorry dude.]

3 whiskeys later and i'm about ready to read them.

winter is gnawing at the doorstep. listening to Wu-Tang riding to Yoyogi, i was cold. and in the park, the fountains were like ice. the fall leaves beautiful and full of regret.



tomorrow morning i am meeting misaki to work on a comic. here's the full text, minus scene desriptions:


***
"Boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence." Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World.

8. One day in fall, I found a crow with a broken wing in the garden.
11. One day, your owner will come looking for you. I'll keep you safe.
15. Have you seen a crow? / I don't know.
16. Why do you hide your face? What happened to your eye?
19. Each full moon my bird gouges out this eye with his beak-
20. and each full moon I break his wing anew. Give me him so I may break him and him me.
22. Why do you do such terrible things to eachother?
23. Because this is who we are. We cannot be other than we are.
24. Don't you want to see? Doesn't the bird want to fly?
25. I doesn't matter what we want. We are.
26. I don't believe you! You must stop!
27. If we stopped, we would have no reason to touch eachother. It is better that we continue; we would be bored otherwise.
28...
>Change is good. Everything changes in time.
-I don't know...all the great changes in my life have felt somehow external to myself, as though instituted by another's hand.
>This sounds like a poor excuse to avoid responsibility. A manifesto of laziness.
-Maybe I can't escape my laziness. Maybe laziness is the unconscious recognition of futility in the face of a deterministic universe...
>Bah!
---
-But you see I don't want to change. I don't want to spend the energy to change. I am subject to inertia. Comfort is a heavy thing. It weights at me.
A)Push yourself! Go out into the cold!
B)No, stay where it's safe and warm.
-I want to be left alone without these wonderings.
-It's like a trance, our routine, we fall in circles like the moon falls about the Earth.
>But even this will change. The moon will one day plunge into the sea and be gone.
-And I shall not be here to see it. For me, infinity is bounded by my birth and my death. Parentheses arc across my horizons.
>Your children's children will see the fall of the moon.
-My children's children shall not be human.
>Aye, children today are not what they once were.
---
>To change, perhaps, you need to die and be reborn. A new page, a new word, a new spot of ink.
>Things are dying and rebirthing infinitely each moment.
-Yes. Humans like to partition their world. The alternative is madness.
>So to change this behavior, you must visualise a line and step across it.
-You sound like a pop psychologist.
>Well, you can't change if you don't want to.
-On the contrary, things change just when you don't want them to.
>Pessimism. Perhaps unconsciously...
-What if there is no unconscious? My mind just crystals reflecting the changing light? No interiors. All dimensions unfolded, the world is flat, a line, a point. There is nothing inside.
>Nihilism.
-Jargon.

29.Bah! I've had enough! Go away!
***

Not exactly a barrel of laughs. Frame 28 will be printed in microscopic type.

...and 2 cactii

Tonight was Graf's housewarming in Ebisu. Unfortunately I didn't get much of a chance to speak to the man himself. But...
I had an extended conversation about linguistics or something on the train with law-schooling Ryan while okusan Miki sat bored and polite.
Nick likes Jack Vance and Steely Dan. The Dying Earth. Aja.
A girl who buys art films from Europe and South America for tiny Japanese theatres. Cool. Chi to Hone mitai!
A girl from Oberlin who favors Obama in 2008 and Argentinian men anytime.
A girl from Auckland who told great stories about being bitten by rabid monkeys and one beggar (on the ankle stepping out of a taxi) in India.
Yuusuke informed me that High Contrast is huge in Japan and insisted on some serious d&b clubbing over the winter.