The most exciting news of the week is that the Urban Sage and I found a new apartment! And if you bitches thought Noborito was difficult to pronounce, try this one on: Takadanobaba! It took me like six months of living here before I could get that one straight .... Anyway, this is one of the coolest areas in Tokyo -- it is right downtown, a ten-minute walk from Shin-Okubo (Korea-town, which I love), and a 4-MINUTE train ride to Shinjuku. (!!!) Our lifestyles are going to change quite dramatically, as will the adventures ... Takadanobaba is a very vibrant place, home of Waseda University (a frequent setting in Haruki Murakami's books), has loads of vegetarian restaurants and shops, Tokyo's coolest English bookstore (The Blue Parrot), a river, all the usual amenities Sage and I need (izakayas, karaoke, etc.), plus there is an ICE RINK two blocks from the apartment! It's a 4-bedroom apartment, and we'll be sharing it with a Nepalese girl and a French guy. I move on May 1 and Sage on June 1. Can't wait!
Some exciting stories from the weekend, but they'll have to wait ...
Too long between blog posts again! Highlights from my increasingly erratic life:
(1) Hakone with the Urban Sage! Lots of public drinking, running amok through a 17th Century castle in Odawara, a great and relaxing onsen (hot spring), fun new people in an izakaya, no money for a hotel so we wind up in a karaoke box where I pass out at 2 or 3 and Sage sings alone til first train at 5, then we stretch out full length on a whole row of seats for an hour's sleep on the way back to Noborito.
(2) Nothing to do on a Friday night; Jude the Obscure suggests, "How about *one drink* in Shibuya?" -- first stop the Standing Bar for at least half a dozen drinks -- I meet a sports broadcaster who once worked with Hunter S. Thompson! -- made friends with him and his American buddies, brought them to Atom, met several acquaintances there, including Amsterdam and the Swede -- too much Drink -- great dancing with some fun J. boys but I am in no state to hook up and Jude and I wind up stumbling back to his place in a taxi -- possibly I fell off the fucking fence again --
(3) -- followed by waking up in a state of complete Fear and rushing out to Tamachi to meet up with the Koreans for one of their epic parties. It was a barbecue and I had an awesome time! Especially considering how utterly ruined I felt right before I went (see previous blog entry). They are an amazing, loving, and wholly positive group of people and they like to drink just as much as I do, so I was feeling better in no time. Wound up taking a couple of them with me to Shinjuku that evening, to meet Jude at my favourite izakaya in those parts. Fun times.
(4) Sunday the entire morning is a blank, but in the afternoon Sage and I met up with a bunch of the Kichijoji kids for drinks and conversation at a posh izakaya. I left early to meet Jude in Noborito and what followed was an utterly regrettable MESS that I feel horrible and ashamed of -- it's far too complicated to get into here but basically neither of us can ever show our faces in a certain local izakaya again -- EVER -- and we made at least 6 new enemies and two of these enemies called the cops on us and I actually had to calm the cops down and insist that we were heading elsewhere, FUCK, not our finest night out by any means, but it adds another layer to the friendship I suppose. I shudder to think of the kind of Trouble he and I would get into in, say, Tangiers .... We'd probably get killed.
(5) Tuesday was my last day of work before spring vacation. Kind of a big deal cuz it marks the end of the school year, and while I'll be teaching at the same schools next year, I'll never see the 3rd graders again, who graduated, and a few of the teachers are moving on to new schools as well. I had to give several speeches and got lots of flowers and cards and notes -- felt very special and grateful -- and I was holding it all together emotionally until right before I left and had to say goodbye to Masa. He's an amazing, amazing man -- 45 years old and one of the English teachers -- he COMPLETELY took me under his wing this year, above and beyond what would be expected -- translated loads of stuff for me, helped me with everything from wiring money overseas to buying Rage Against the Machine tickets, gave me advice about the various Men in my life, took me out for drinks and for karaoke, and was basically a super-star, can't even describe how much it meant for me to work with him actually. He's moving on to a new school, and when I said Goodbye he *hugged* me, which is unusual in this culture and particularly in this setting, and I lost it, started crying, he was tearing up also, and I just left. Gah gah. Will miss working with him more than words can say.
(6) That night Prince Harry and I went down to the canal to drink a bottle of wine and look at the cherry blossoms (sakura). This whole cherry-blossom season is called Hanami and it's a huge deal in Japan -- for the next week we'll be going to loads of Hanami parties. (see Facebook for a few early pics) Very fun night. I shocked Harry, who is American, with tales/memories/experiences with Canada's rather liberal drug laws/practices ...
(7) The next day a group of us headed out to Yoyogi Park for the first proper Hanami party. It was a gong show from start to finish! The pics tell the story better than I could, so check 'em out.
(8) Awoke the next morning rather dazed, and the Urban Sage and I went out to Takadanobaba to check out a couple of apartments. We'll be moving soon and can't wait! Didn't find what we were looking for today, but we have a kick-ass realtor (who will be joining us at the Hanami party on Sunday), so we feel quite optimistic and excited.
(9) Met up with Prince Harry for sushi after, and random wanderings around Noborito.
Not quite sure what's on the burner for tonight .... It ought to be good though. :)
What have *you* all been up to, pets?
(written in panicked black ink this morning)
A crazy man
speaks in tongues
as I smoke dazed cigarette
in fast food outlet
hungover Saturday-fest --
the brilliant gold
seat covers make
me want to SCREAM --
how in Tamachi,
how this hungover,
how to be charming
and conversational
when I meet the
Koreans in 35
minutes? I've not
properly slept yet!
Breathe and
speak English: that's
all ya gotta do.
But all I gotta do
is clearly never
enough: all I
gotta do is walk
in a straight line,
say something
fascinating, comb
my hair, give a
good blow job, write
prose of an intrinsic
nature, wear more
wool, stop insulting
guys from Amsterdam,
blink beautific and
blue-eyed in the sun,
but EVEN WITH
ALL THAT I wind
up crying in a karaoke
box or trembling in a
convenience store as I
buy sandwich and
beer -- judging my
own smile -- indulging
in personal health paranoia,
falling in love with
the wrong type of
beautifully dressed
personality, contemplating
the nature
of mathematics drunk
and wide-eyed in
Shibuya Friday
night. I am -- fuck it --
still drunk,
don't know if I
can handle the Korean
thing, don't know if
I can handle the
Joy thing actually --
almost asleep on
this table -- need to
pop speed or something --
I am obsessed
with the physical beauty
of my friends; the
Urban Sage's vivid
red curls and Jude
the Obscure's tortured
brown eyes and Prince
Harry's delicate
porcelain profile and
Rawluk's sexy smirk
and D.'s big white
Australian teeth and
Naoya's dimples and
Shin dripping sex from
every nervous smile
and Mr. Vice's dreadlocks
and cock and
the Transport Analyst
standing tall as Cassidy
as he bites his lip
and breathes out
elation.
Really there's nowhere
to go -- falsehood --
must go back to
Tamachi station and
meet up with S. -- I meant
nowhere to go in
an emotional sense,
no new personality
to try on, brands,
everywhere I look
I see brands and
trademarks and
advertisements and
how long until
we market the
soul? Hey, Canada,
this is quite
serious. Really,
I am not fucking
around here, I am
completely overwhelmed
by the fact that my
brother had three
kids by the time he
was my age and
that Ginsberg
hallucinated Blake
by 28 and the
only thing I hallucinate
is pure pristine Heartland
beer in a
glistening green bottle
poured with Masta's
unsteady hand as he
pierces every conversation
shrewd as a druid --
it's quarter to 11,
this dastardly sunny
Saturday -- Sunday? --
it's one or the other --
oh Tamachi, whence
fate, why you and I
here and now? Last
darkened your streets
January 2007 and
I was a completely
different person,
shattered and incomplete
in a boring way
whereas now my
massive flaws intrigue
me and make me want
to delve, to revel,
to soak it all up
with a can of chu-hi
and masturbate with
DJ Krush on the
stereo and stumble as
I navigate the
unsteady lines between
home and bar and
train station.
(from the "Tokyo Notebook" files, written last August)
So I defended Tokyo. Said, "I like Tokyo."
Carl said, "Sometimes Tokyo feels as though it's simply hours of riding on the train, only to disembark and go into a little room."
"It is like that," I said. "It's like a series of boxes."
A few months ago, Carl and I both read Peter Mayle's "A Year in Provence" and decided to move to France one day. I pictured a large house like the one in the book, lots of food, lots of dogs. I don't know what Carl pictured.
When we were teenagers we spoke of one day travelling across Europe in a green convertible, just us and a case of beer in the trunk. "That's all I need," Carl said. "You. A case of beer. Europe. Just that."
In July I mentioned this, something about the green car. Carl said, "You know, that dream has been dead to me for a long time."
It surprised me because the dream had always been his, and me just an accessory, a quiet presence cross-legged in the passenger's seat looking at Poland and Spain. It was a very odd feeling to be in someone else's dream, to get used to it, and then to learn that the dream had died some time ago -- only you'd not noticed. Thought the fading colours and blurred road signs were merely fatigue, or twilight.
And it's funny because the dream I'm sleepwalking though right now -- Tokyo -- makes me feel very uncomfortable a lot of the time. On the 14th floor of the Odakyu department store in Shinjuku I look down at the maze of neon and concrete and want to jump: not down, but up -- above it -- to the left of it maybe, to a piece of the margin. I don't even know if the sky has margins; I've only been in a plane three times. But I imagine there is a bit of the sky that is not quite like the other bits, that either doesn't fit in or fits in too well, and Tokyo often makes me want to seek out that place. I imagine I would know so many more things, from that perspective: I would look down and understand the man who befriended me just now on the sidewalk outside MacDonald's, led me through the streets with sign language and awkward smiles. Was he taking me to a ramen shop or a love hotel? I never learned.
Saturday was indeed Trouble -- of the nicest kind, of course -- Nichome with a 21st Century version of the Wolfeans (Aussie American Canadian Japanese), too many drinks at Advocate, more at a convenience store, then *that club* for a scribbled 3-way group poem (The balloon was filled with heroin / which made it magic / collated into Charlie Chaplin misunderstood / bleak unanswered expression query nothingness / in nothingness everything lost and found / a smile only warfare by the perception of the voyeurist / the prettiest vice / we weep into whiskey as final punctuation suicide) and dancing and more drinks and kissing someone -- briefly -- whom I shouldn't have and old crazy faces from the past -- the Press Analyst, the Honorary Big Brother -- and chocolate and brand-new lesbians bright-red lips in neon walkway blur and then 4 a.m. everyone is gone but the Urban Sage and I, we wander confused through Shinjuku and collapse in an izakaya, order loads of salad and -- unwisely -- more beer: she disappears in the washroom for an extended period of time and emerges, shaken and drawn, to find me passed out on the table amid the chopsticks and bits of lettuce -- it now 5, we try to find the station and get more lost, a soft-spoken woman rescues us and stands patiently by as Sage buys a ticket and I, miraculously, still clutch my train pass -- it's a local and Sage immediately passes out in my lap -- through super-human effort I stay awake the entire 30 minutes, notice when we stop at Noborito, and manage to carry her to the doors and shove her out before it's too late.
A few hours sleep, then it's too-bright Sunday afternoon. Sage, Prince Harry and I head out for Italian -- a glass of cheap red hair-of-the-dog, plus pasta, salad, toast -- back on the Hello House stoop, beers, we're meant to be drinking with D. and he calls to say he's just befriended a 56-year-old Japanese man with a mohawk who desires us to come drink in his home -- off we go -- Bloody Mary in a can -- a beautiful traditional Japanese house, tatami, garden, all the rest, the man can't speak any English aside from "butterfly" and "ash tray" and yet somehow, somehow, we get that he is trying to explain chaos theory to us -- he shows me a book of photographs from Saskatoon, published in 1979 -- Sage and I go off to meet her private student for an hour of conversation practice -- come back, rescue D., who had found himself near sleep in an upstairs bedroom of the Mohawk Man's house -- we go off for more Italian, at a different restaurant this time, and request crayons so we can colour the place mats. It's a design of little girls in dresses and I make mine all different races and we'd been discussing immigration laws and how I'm a firm supporter of an open-borders policy and Sage connected these two details with my choice of lovers -- amazing pizza, salad, gratin, beer -- but it's too much, back in bed by 10, slightly Fearful sleep.
Trapped in a metaphor you wrote yourself. Mental collapse: the gasp of pleasure it brings, the empty wholeness. Obliterating direction, internal cartography. Banshee howlings of the Fear, tales of Helen on a motorbike in Vietnam, or future projection of Jude the Obscure in San Francisco miserable and fully alive in a dead-end job as he achieves morbid sainthood. Rawluk writing sexy rebellious robots against poverty backdrop West Coast and drumming long fingertips on laundromat counters or the covers of comic books. Mr. Vice's young wild years in Trinidad, breakfast whiskey noontime rum wake up train station early evening friends carry him back to the bar, joy ride car flipped on roof before midnight.
It's finally springtime in Noborito. Cherry blossoms soon.
The Urban Sage and I hosted an epic Italian Feast party last night -- primarily a thank-you to the Japanese boys from Yellow for their nabe party last week, but attended also by a bunch of hungry Hello House rogues. A good time had by all! The videos having thankfully been destroyed. On that note -- the video camera on my phone is utter shit, as you saw by the clip of D. and I dancing, but I'm in the mood to start making short films again, and am shopping around for a cheap but awesome camera. Stay tuned!
Trouble on the burner for tonight.
As a little girl watching soap operas on Silver Star Mountain and running around barefoot in the bush and going to figure skating practice, I never once imagined myself in my mid-20s trying to cook breakfast in a gaijin-house kitchen/hovel right after the Landlady went on one of her Purges and threw out half the bloody kitchenware, including not one but ALL of the egg flippers, resulting in my flipping my eggs with an ice scraper. It's odd the turns one's life takes.
Want to frighten raindrops and alienate people more. To write profound, pretentious, fictional. Be Ezekiel. Quote Keats. Cry by myself at chic parties, explain things to homeless people, walk a straight line through Tokyo, decipher expressions, draw pictures for the emotional thesaurus, discover the Cartographer, teach the Indigo Children how to chew tobacco properly. Read people like books. Mimic weather patterns. Sing with cicadas, eat campfire beans from a tin 40 years ago, design handbags, be a renegade diplomat, get lost in India for years and years, etch poems into my enemies' faces with a razor blade, touch every inch of a body with just one fingertip, get shipwrecked and die beautifically of exposure, be known as the Storyteller of the Damned, travel back in time to when my father was a child and suffering of scurvy -- walk barefoot in the rain through a small Okinawan town, sit cross-legged in a factory stringing beads onto wires as I daydream -- marry into the Royal Family -- never have headaches -- be Rahab the Harlot, abetting spies -- fall asleep on the waters of the Pacific Ocean and float to whichever country happens next -- levitate -- fully document my past lives -- colour coordinate my levels of rage -- ride in a hot air balloon.
Just another drunk Noborito Sunday afternoon .... Possibly the first video in history of me dancing. I use the verb loosely.
Lunch at D's yesterday -- he is eminently quotable -- best one was, "You don't eat meat, DO you. That's a pain in the ass. Cuz I'm going to beat the shit out of some chicken with a wine bottle and make SCHNITZEL!"
Friday night I was in a deplorable mood (do you remember the Deplorable Word references in "The Magician's Nephew"? What do you think it was?) and the following text best sums it up:
"No. I'm in a terrible mood for no reason. Angst etc. (Angst is the new PMS!) Will probably go to Wara Wara 6ish and if people show up I'll drink with them, if not I'll drink by myself and write. So come on down if you want -- bound to be a blast! God."
But the Urban Sage and Prince Harry wound up joining me, saving me from a sad descent into solo alcoholism, and Wara Wara being the awesome izakaya that it is we wound up befriending the table of Japanese kids next to us, one of whom -- Gen -- told us to tell the karaoke guys that we knew him, and what followed was an evening of very cheap karaoke, trying to sing Japanese songs, meeting up with the newfound friends as they stumbled into our room with FLUTES OF CHAMPAGNE, etc. Nice. Nice also to be in bed by midnight on a Friday!
The next day I caught up with Mr. Vice for a surprisingly cultural day -- strolling about Ueno, accidentally finding the zoo, and sipping beers whilst we walked among the animals. He's a former zookeeper and was impressed with the place, said the animals seemed happy, etc., so that was good and I got to see a GIRAFFE up close for the first time in my life! Too cool!
We met up with Jude the Obscure for dinner, then Mr. Vice left for Shinjuku and Jude and I headed for Machida for a DJ night and wound up getting ridiculously drunk, falling down lots, arguing about Creationism, etc. Sweet times all around! Now it's late Sunday morning and I'm trying to choose between further debauchery and sedate writing in an AREA COFFEEHOUSE. Still a little trashed I suppose.
Gah, it sucks getting behind on the bloggage cuz there's always too much to say and then by the time I'm done saying the shallow stuff I'm bored and neglect, you know, the deeper elements of my life (they are there), the random political commentary, the thoughtful ruminations on angst or whimsy, etc.
That said, some snapshots from the last week or two:
- Korean party! I'd met a Korean guy on the train who wanted me to teach a bunch of his friends English, and suggested I come to meet them all at a party. Sounds suspicious -- so naturally I went -- but it was the truth, this group of 8 fantastic men and women, ranging in age from 20 to 40, who bent over backwards to speak English to me and make sure I tried every single Korean food imaginable. Sooooo tasty, too! I had to use stainless steel chopsticks, which I'd never done before -- it's way harder than it sounds, I almost didn't manage. Jude the Obscure joined us near the end and then we all headed out to a bar where the "English practice" rapidly devolved into sexual innuendo and filthy stories ("Guys, ask Joy if she likes sausages. No, trust me, she'll think it's cute ...." Thanks Jude! Gah.)
- An onsen with the Urban Sage! This is the first time I've been to an onsen and it was spectacular; outdoor pools steaming with mineral goodness, lots of naked old ladies and kids running around, Sage and I soaking away our vicious hangovers and feeling as though we were doing something cultural for once ....
- An evening with Mr. Vice. Certainly picked up some new vices.
- A couple of fun weeknights in Shibuya and Roppongi, wandering around wide-eyed, as drunk off the pure proximity of souls as the neverending succession of beers and White Russians ...
- A nabe party at the home of some Japanese guys Sage and I befriended last month at Yellow. A very nice feeling to be parked in the living room with a beer while boys cook in the kitchen. And the nabe was most excellent! A neat reunion with S, we'll see how that one goes ..... I don't understand the salaryman work ethic quite yet, but there are interesting possibilities.
- Hula dancing on a stage in front of 600 junior high school students. No, wait! That was a goddamn disaster! I'm still mortified!
Please take a look: Stop Canada's Cruel Seal Hunt.
It's very important -- please read and consider participating in the boycott. I don't like to write about this topic too much because it bothers me very much. It's an important issue. Be careful of some of the pics though. :(