no chance of boredom

Hey everyone.  Here is another update.  I’m playing Surreal Life the home game still and its not feeling normal just yet.

Today I arrived to a third grade class to find one boy with his pants completely off and his shirt hanging on by one button.  The curtains to one window parted and a boy smiled through.  I didn’t know it at the time, but there was a fire escape on the outside of the window.  You can imagine my surprise even just up to this point.  He closed the curtain again and dove out of another window with mask on that resembled those of Mexican professional wrestlers from circa 1978 Telemundo.  “Holy shit,” I said in a conversational tone completely inaudible over the children shouting “Spiderman! Spiderman!”

The lunatics have taken over the asylum.  This is third grade of Junior High in Japan at its funniest.  I half dread and half look forward to this particular class.  The teacher just shrugs through that one and noone can blame her.  Spiderman flying in through the window and into the hall while at least a few children are partially disrobed sets the tone for the next fifty minutes.  The class has been commandeered and there is no getting it back.   Events sort of unfold in the same fashion despite your feeble attempts to control things.  If I had filmed the whole thing I would just sell it as fiction.  I don’t even bother trying to convince myself that this is all real. 

The one with the pants off is actually one of the best students in the school.  That’s the kicker.  Which one’s the honors student?  Oh, of course, the one getting naked.

One of the Japanese Language teachers at Hara invited me to her wedding party.  I almost declined because the buffet will cost ¥7500.  About $65.  I am in NO position to spend that much money on dinner.  That’s about as much as I spend on consuming and imbibing on a weekly basis.  And with the two transfers, my daily commute is actually more expensive than riding to Tokyo and its not a very long trip.  Dakara… I am in financial shit.  I was already buckling down for this long month of ramen, but I said okay anyway.  She said “I want to be your friend, so I can let you pay me back later.  I can’t do that.  Its her wedding, and it would be nice to mix with the Hara people outside of work, where I am barely noticed.  I’ll buy her and her husband some sweets for a present.  I am so fucking sick of living in the economic tropics.  The place where you are either above or below the equator of a zero balance, but never too far in either direction.  It can get pretty hot there, makes you sweat.  I hate having to do math on scratch paper every time I make a decision, making high and low estimates like I’m predicting the weather.  Looking at a theoretical paycheck and slashing it to bits to satisfy myriad creditors.  I have too many of them.  I can’t wait to execute them all.  It’ll feel like an ironic fuck you to the ones taunting me.  To give them that last cent, that last yen, last p, whatever.  It didn’t bother me so much in New Brunswick, where numbers are either small enough to pick a fight with or too large to even imagine.  Japan is like a school of tiny piranhas devouring a whale.  Everything is tiny but they build together until they’re shaking one giant communal middle finger at the world. 

The last two weeks were taken up by golden week, the celebration of Children’s Day and Constitution Day.  One week and I taught two days.  A total of 250 minutes of actual work.  Regular pay for the week of about ¥60,000.  I love Japan.  I didn’t get to enjoy it too much going to Tokyo or anything.  I decided that a good cheap thrill would be to ride my little piece of shit bike all the way to the ocean.  I did.  By the time I got there my legs were cramped because I can’t adjust the bike seat to a proper height. This bike I have is made for midgets that get picked on by other midgets in the second grade. 

The weather was nice.  I stumbled upon an island called Enoshima.  It’s a paradise. An overcrowded paradise.  Imagine the heard-like exodus up the Seventh Avenue exit in Penn Station being located in a jungle.  Its like maybe some devil is photoshopping physical reality for kicks or I am on some serious drugs.  The juxtaposition of nature and modernity is the quintessential Japanese art and it finds its starkest expression on Enoshima.  It reminded me of the movie version of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, the movie that had very little to do with the actual book.  The guy would open a window in Tangiers and see the backside of a Garment District loft with all of the gorgeous noise of New York invading without Ol’ Bill taking much notice.  So this island is like a big craggy rock covered in beautiful trees and all.  Waves crashing against rocks.  Temples and gravestones of samurai.  Its sort of like a mountain.  Whole thing is pretty steep.  So dig, you can pay ¥100 and take an escalator to the top to get into an observation tower for a pretty sweet view of the ocean, the land, the Hakone Mountains and of course, Mt. Fuji.  Read it again, it’ll say the same thing.  An escalator going through a mountain.  Impossible, a trick of light, a hallucination.  In a word… Japan.

There was a steep stone staircase crowded with people.  A precocious toddler that didn’t want to go up the stairs was giving his mom a hard time.  The mom said “gambette” to him.  They were right in front of me. The little guy fell down like two stairs before I got my hand under him to stop him from tumbling down towards the stone monument to Basho.  The mom freaked out while the kid sat there on the step unfazed.  He seemed like he was reluctantly making a decision to behave for his mom for the rest of his trip up the stairs.  The lady thanked me and bowed a bunch of times. 

The weather was nice and I was able to enjoy the day in solitude.  When you are alone you don’t have to worry about democracy, you just do as you like until you get lonely.  You can stop and look at the spider patiently hanging between the headstones in the cemetery that nobody seems to notice.  You can avoid spending obscene amounts of money on what have you that you don’t need. You can just sit on the rocks and help a little girl catch baby crabs in the cracks with a chopstick.  Its strange how one can find peace amongst such bustle.  I am completely used to it.  Was to begin with.  I’m not really one for the proper solitude. The Walt Whitman type that involves unpaved roads and shitting on logs.  I need the noise and the light of eight million human souls around me just to keep me awake.  I don’t think that I could survive breathing fresh air anymore.  Once I can burn like ¥3000 I want to just get lost in Tokyo.  Spend a nice Holden Caulfield night haunting parks and streets like I used to back in college in New York.  Take the first train home.  When nobody is around you but strangers its like you’re sitting at an endless buffet and you can’t decide on what to eat.  Chances are you’ll go home hungry but at least you had the opportunity.  You have claws and you aren’t using them.  That’s alright.

I’m sick of living where I’m living.  On a nowhere local stop where the express trains rush by like teenagers hurling eggs from the windows of a used Volvo. Where the trains stop running early.  Dark and quiet.  Far from the stench of money.  Completely fucking boring.  I live in the Fukuda district.  I think that’s Japanese for Fukindull.  It actually means something field.  Everything has a rural name here.  Shibuya has the word “glen” or something in it.  My area, however, actually has farms pretty close by.  On the river (or rather, the shallow stream of half-sewage) that separates Yokohama from Yamato there are tiny farms on either side.  With trains and billboards overhead.  There is another, roughly parallel river a block from me that’s even skuzzier and its completely lined with small farms.  The farms smell like fertilizer and the rest of the town smells like an open sewer.  An almost empty sewer.  I think that the sewage flows right under the rainwater drains beneath the sidewalk.  Once I get off at my stop with all of the other ugly people on the train I smell shit, basically. 

I’m becoming increasingly exasperated with living there. It reminds me too much of Jersey and I know nobody around here, save for like two people that I can’t seem to meet up with.  This and my perpetual money problems have been especially irksome lately for some reasons apart from the obvious.  I’ll tell you why. 

Being cheap is part of the atmosphere that I breathe.  I am just used to it.  Money issues for me are like potholes that I’ve been routinely swiveling around for a few years.  I stopped wondering whether someone will come along and fix them and I sure as hell aint particularly going out of my way to fix them myself.  I just try to do things as cheaply as possible without considering other options.  And nobody has found that to be a fault of mine in I don’t know how long.  Last time I got made fun of for something like that was like, what, 9th grade? On Saturday, I had plans to hang out with Autumn and her friend from Kyoto.  Her name was Lyric.  Adding to the list of offbeat names.  Shes from Richmond/Philadelphia and she was pretty cool.  Too bad she lives so far away, down in the south of Japan.  So I said, hey, I found this sweet spot where you can watch the waves and its not too far. She said cool, lets go. I invited Laura and Ian too.  They all live pretty close to Yokohama Station (bastards) so I found the cheapest way to get to Enoshima from there and we met at Yamato station, right along the way.  That was also the second quickest way by all of ten minutes and about ¥200 yen cheaper each way.  This minor inconvenience was something that Ian would not forgive.  This was also the day immediately after the haircut that I gave myself that didn’t work too well at all.  Ian kept on bashing me for being cheap for the rest of the day and I was ready to explode on him.  I think he just likes to annoy people.  We all have our things. 

It turns out that Ian lives in the same building as Autumn and they have never met.  After Enoshima, we went to their place (by Ian’s preferred route) and had dinner, made by John. That guy can cook.  Damn. The two of them wouldn’t stop talking about how great their apartment is and it drove me nuts all day.  I’m so sick of being the bum amongst my friends.  I used to be fine with this state, but Kozashibuya is just too much to take. 

Today, I started writing this at about 4pm at work and I didn’t look up until about 5:30.  Saying goodbye to Yamamoto-sensei got me talking for about an hour and a half.  I think that I taught her a lot about America.  I left work at almost 7pm.  The neighborhood there at night has a cozy feeling to it.  I got on the bus at dusk, embraced by the cool breath of air conditioner. The surreptitious glances at other people minding their own business.  This neighborhood is actually alive and breathing, however boring.  On the train there was a guy drinking a chuhi that stank like cheap Valentines candy.  The cheapest way to get drunk.  The guy smelled really bad.  Of course he was going to Kozashibuya.  I got off at my station to the same old men expectorating from atop rusty bikes.  I can’t stay here any longer than I have to.

I’m a little bitter about stuff like this and it’s getting lonely.  Nothing new, this is how it goes. I realize that my circle of friends in this area can’t grow much more. Until I learn Japanese. 

I am very close to being finished with Underworld.  Laura told me about a top-notch Japanese writer named Hiruki Murakami.  Influenced by Kafka, Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, J. D. Salinger, and my favorite obscure American novelist, Richard Brautigan!  Since the 1970s, I think it’s only me, Marc, Teresa, Kat, and a few scattered others that Marc pushed Brautigan onto that have even heard of the guy.  I am going to go all the way to Tokyo this week just to buy his most critically acclaimed novel, the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.  His prose style sounds like its right up my alley.  I can’t wait to read him!  I think that Murakami can give me a better grasp on Japanese culture.  I haven’t read anything by any Japanese novelists.  I read about half of When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro because I was considering taking a class that used it but when I decided to take a different seminar (and I am glad that I did.  I miss Feminist Literary Theory!) I just sold it back to the bookstore. 

In a stroke of not-so-rare irony, I have been teaching a lot of Japanese stuff lately.  For ichinensei, they don’t know any English words.  So when we played initial-letter karuta, I had to read a bunch of Japanese words instead of the easy English ones that I picked.  For T they picked tsubaki.  Totally different sound than just T.  Back in like the 40s, Matsuda Corporation changed its name to Mazda for overseas exports because they know that tsu barely exist in English.  Mazda is not even writeable in Japanese.  And for third grade I had to teach the kids how to explain Japanese traditions. Failed miserably.

Autumn invited me to join her and one of her friends from elsewhere to a club in Tokyo on Friday.  I think I might decline for lack of yen and the fact that I’ll be spending like ¥8500 the next day on my co-worker’s wedding buffet plus a little bit on presents to boot. And 400 yen each way to get there.  Goddammit I need to move! I’ll be better off just going to my Japanese class like a good student anyway.  Besides, I’ll be waking up at six on Friday for work.  Probably won’t be in the mood to dance afterward.  Kids can tire you out! 

So wish me luck in staying afloat for the next few weeks before my check comes in.  Oh lawd I can’t wait.  I don’t know what I’ll do when I get it.  Maybe I should go get a good haircut and get a new suit and a nice dinner at a restaurant with some good people.  I did a little math and it seems like I could realistically save almost ¥100,000 yen each month if I keep my eye on things.  Which is hard for me.  I’m really cheap, but I’m crap when it comes to saving money.