So the Mrs. is out visiting family this weekend and I'm at home, free to run wild. Took a bunch of naps this afternoon. Almost went to Kyoto but didn't have the energy. And it's after midnight and I've got a tumbler of brandy, watching something or other on cable and missing the cat. Back 25 or more years ago I was living with my dad, working the midnight shift so I found myself awake in the middle of the night with a glass of something sitting in front of the cable in the basement and the cat would come and hang out with me. He watched 20 minutes of Milo and Otis one time with absolute focus and attention, but generally he was just content to sit on my lap and get scritched. He's been gone for a long time now. Not as long as I've been gone, I'm sorry to say. I wonder if he knew I wasn't just going to work or dinner that last time I stepped out the door. Really wish he was here to watch TV with me tonight.
So last night Mrs. A and I stumbled drunkenly into a 7-11 in search of snacks and more booze. Among the things that I grabbed was the last pack of donuts. 7-11 donuts are pretty good. Especially when you're drunk. But when the cashier scanned the barcode there was an error, so he went to check the shelf. The donuts were expired. Yes, convenient stores in Japan register when the shelves were stocked and have a time barrier beyond which the baked goods can't be sold. Because they're worried that drunks might get donuts that were less than perfect. Not moldy or anything, mind you, just that that particular pack of donuts had been on the shelf more than eight hours or whatever. He could not sell them to me. Nor give them to me. They went in the trash because it is better for me to have no donut experience than a less-than-perfect donut experience at 11 pm on a Friday with a couple liters of beer and chu-hi sloshing around in my stomach. So I drank my way to the next 7-11 and bought a pack of donuts there, then left them on the counter overnight because I'd passed out after drinking my way back home (no open container laws, each leg of a weekend evening trip involves one 500ml can of 9% alcohol). I was going to have one of the donuts for breakfast but there was a knock on the door. It was some men from 7-11, come to repossess my now-expired donuts for store credit.
Late August 2008, wife's phone rings around 8am. She's asleep. It rings again. Then mine rings. Mother-in-law asks to be put through to Mrs. A. I tell her she's asleep. “Nobunaga (the little dog's nom-de-morte for this post) is died.” I wake up Mrs. A and put her through. We have a proper Buddhist funeral for the dog at a veterinary (?) funeral home and I learn the forms I will need later. Mid 2014 Mrs. A's mother goes to hospital. Mid-2015 I get the message from Mrs. A. “Mama died.” It's in the middle of my last class of the day. Like, I'm teaching. What would Stephens do? I set a task, go into the hall, cry quickly, send a message to my boss that I'll probably be absent the next day, and return to finish out the lesson. July 2021, 0615 or so, I get an unfamiliar ringtone. It's my cousin. “Call your stepdad. Right now.” I know what it is. After confirming that my mother is dead, I text my boss and let him know what happened, that I'll still be able to finish out the day and the last week of the semester. I'm unable to get back to America for over a year, and that (recently finished) trip is a disaster. But this post isn't about me. We all joked over the years about Charles sitting around waiting for the Queen to snuff it, but all I can see now is an older man who's trying to put on the stiff upper lip demanded of him by centuries of tradition, not in front of twenty-three college freshmen but in front of the whole fucking world. I wish him well.
I know that this is a form of denial, but I've got this weird habit whenever someone emotionally close to me dies where once all the social forms have been carried out, the funeral has been had or not, the body has been buried or burned or fed to the vultures (not a practice anyone I know has managed to arrange, and in decline, but I kind of like the idea) I get this instant urge to call them or message them or whatever and ask what they thought of the whole thing. Y'know, like a Yelp! review of their death and associated functions. And it's not a playful or wistful urge, it's something I have to stop and remind myself is. not. possible. But I always imagine them talking about it not in a sad or scared way, but more like you might describe a movie or a party or a meal that had some good points, some stuff that was fun, and other bits that just didn't work the way they should have. "Aunt Grace looked nice, and I really liked what she said about me, but what the hell was Uncle Bill thinking? I mean, he probably won't show up to his own funeral sober, but couldn't he have kept the flask put away for duration of the sermon at least? Oh, how was the chicken? I know you probably didn't notice but it looked nice. Anyway, nice talking to you again but I gotta go now, catch you later maybe." So I guess that's my eulogy for the day. Maybe something better later, maybe not, but I'm fifty and my mother died last year and my buddy died last week and I just realized that's pretty much the way it's going to be from here on out, one major death a year until it becomes two until it becomes three until it becomes my turn and for fuck's sake I didn't want to be the first but I don't want to be the last either like the Lady Sharrow whom I recently wrote about, just book me a seat somewhere in the middle, thanks, and feel free to send me a message when it's all said and done, four out of five stars but won't be back again.
So I belong to a Facebook group for my hometown. It's a place I ran screaming from repeatedly and will probably never live in again, but there was a Dorsai short story about the most beautiful place in the world that some might recognize. And a 98 year-old woman from that town recently passed away. Preceded in death by her parents, her husband, her sister, and one of her children. And her entire high school class. She was the last living member of the class of '41. I have friends who are younger than me, but to outlive all your friends, your earliest friends, would not seem to be a blessing. "Do you remember that time when...no, I suppose you wouldn't."
So today is the twenty-first anniversary of my arrival in Japan. 42% of my life spent here, but who's counting and I'm just a little overwhelmed with it all. Paths not taken. Castaway, Lost in Translation, Sliding Doors and this fucking thing comes up and reduces me to tears. I noticed right off the misuse of "cool," but what I don't think the filmmakers would have spotted in their own work was the sounds of barking dogs and insects being not quite right. No, the dogs would be fine. A dog is a dog, as long as they weren't extinct, but every time I go home in the summer and sit on my buddy's patio at night the songs of the bugs hit me like a fucking hammer right in the chest. Japanese bugs, barring the cicadas, don't sound wrong; they just sound like night bugs. But the evensong at *home*, no matter how long and how far I have roamed, is slotted into some part of my brain that's right down there with scent and the fight or flight reflex, I just never know it until I hear it again. This MC, adrift in time, will never hear that sound again. The bugs will still be there, but in their rapid and multitudinous reproduction they'll have evolved tunes beyond and outside of the ones grooved into his regrown memories. So what's left? Another long slide into senescence and death, or have they cured that too and he just gets to wait around for however long it takes to make up his mind to shuffle off to the Thanatorium and choose Glen Miller and videos of the '68 Democratic convention? How much longer?
So there are two trials going on in the states now where armed men claimed that they had to kill unarmed men because if the unarmed men took their guns, the lives of the potentially unarmed men would be in danger. If you're so scared of the gun that *you* brought to the fight, you're definitely doing something wrong. Kind of shades of "Tunnel in the Sky" where the MC was warned against bringing a big gun with him because it would only give him the illusion, not the reality, of safety. That's all, just some unfocused musing.
So a friend of mine recently laid down his bike, breaking his elbow in the process. He's had his surgery, got his pins installed, and it's actually a good thing that his bar was already closed down by the state of emergency; his days were going to be "off" anyway and he's getting a government subsidy for the lost business. An old schoolmate of mine just finished paying his debt to society for the sort of thing that Gordon Sumner wrote a hit song about. He'll still have to register for the rest of his life, and teaching is kind of off the career list from here on out. My mind slips so quickly into the special pleading arguments of "Well, she was nearly..." but no, no, and fucking NO. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, and I hope everything turned out okay for her. I got an email from my dad this morning. He had to have his cat put to sleep, general old age stuff culminating in a refusal/inability to eat anymore. Just like my mom at the end.
Unlike a lot of what I write, this is in no way tongue-in-cheek. A little bit late, but serious. Mrs. A and I watched a bit of the Tokyo Paralympics these last couple weeks. It was on directly after the news, and we seem to have reached that age where watching the news feels important. The progress of the pandemic and state(s) of emergency directly impact how and where I'll be working, so I like to keep abreast of things, but this post isn't about that. Fuck the Olympics. The IOC is an utterly corrupt racket that leaves a swath of destruction in the cities it descends upon. It has managed to convince nations and cities that there will be a massive tourism bump that will pay for all the investment they have to make to get the Games, but that bump is all smoke and mirrors, a complete illusion, and the costs of upgrading infrastructure and building facilities far outweigh the amount of money brought in by the spectators, leaving cities with bills that have to be paid down out of taxes for decades. But this isn't about that either. This is about the Paralympics. Fuck the Olympians. Goddamn lebensborn mutants with the right genetics for height, proportion, and muscle mass for their sport. Yeah, a celebration of human potential at the bleeding right edge of the bell curve. Whatever. But the Paralympics, dude... We watched people people that it should be a felony to allow onto a pool deck zip through the water faster and farther than I ever could. Blind? No problem! Paralyzed legs? No problem! No arms and one incomplete leg? No problem! Basketball games played on regulation courts, with regulation height hoops, where the players couldn't have topped 4 feet, couldn't jump at all, and still sank perfect shots. 111-95? No, but it was a damn good game with a clear winner anyway. Beats the fuck out of watching the ball not move in football (either version). A lady who worked her way from quadriplegic up to paraplegic after the 2005 JR West train derailment competing in archery vs a person without arms using their teeth to pull the bowstring. The beautiful symmetry of someone lacking legs below the knees using synthetic legs to compete in the long jump. Bocce. That's an old man's game, right? Watching a dude in a wheelchair with some sort of non-standard hand and arm formation and muscle tremors absolutely do something perfect (I don't know the rules, but the announcers just about shit themselves when he did it) and win a gold. This is the pinnacle of human athletic achievement. This should be the main event. Spoiler: Unanswered questions There are some things I don't completely understand which I'll note without taking the standard asshole "That's not a fucking problem! Why do they get to compete?" attitude. For example, in the more-sighted categories of vision impairment, the swimmers walked their way, unescorted and detouring around obstacles, to their starting benches. Obviously they have some vision, and that was reflected in their disability class, but how important is good vision to swimming? Without my glasses but wearing non-prescription goggles the world is pretty much a blur when I'm in the pool. I dunno. The other one that I wondered about was the (and this is the way Japanese TV translated it to English, apologies if the terminology is wrong) athletes with "intellectual disabilities" category. One in particular who stood out was a Japanese swimmer with autism. He found his "thing" in swimming and was able to apply a great deal of focus to becoming a good swimmer. He was interviewed on camera and, had Mrs. A and I not stepped in late, there would have been nothing in his speech or mannerisms to clue us in that he was autistic. He spoke clearly and with assurance, and she informed me that there was nothing in his language usage that set him apart from any other random Japanese athlete. We saw similar people in a couple running events. I'm uncertain at what point in athletics one goes from "disabled" autistic to a merely focused and withdrawn personality. But my main point stands: The Paralympics were a much better display of achievement than a bunch of goddamn mutant Super(wo)men showing off how perfect they were to keep a bunch of geriatric sports oligarchs in coke and hookers.
Sometimes I realize that in the 34 years (roughly) since I learned to drive, I've really only been "a driver" for about ten of them. Four in the Corps straight out of high school, then 20+ here in the land of nod, with two-week driving opportunities set a year or more apart. And I really enjoy driving. Back when I lived in the world I'd head out of an evening to "beat the bounds" of my dispatch area, or touch Lake Shore Drive for a few blocks and back to the burbs. Another life, a lifetime ago.
Some years ago— <you the man dog> never mind how long precisely— <pound the keys!> I had a problem with my computer. I was sitting there on a warm summer's day, burblsmacking along at something or other when I heard a sharp, physical <SNAP!> from the tower of the desktop. No smoke, no fire, no clue. I shutdown and restarted, and life continued as usual for... a while. A year? Six months? I never really noted the initial noise. Maybe it had been a sound effect? So a while later it happened again. Again in a hot season, but this time the noise was followed by a failure, the computer rebooted itself without being asked to, without going through all the motions of “...has not been properly shutdown, would you like to continue?” &c. But it started up fine that time until a Third Impact a short time later, and then things started to get all Hollywood janky. Images not loading, screen flickering, clicks just not clicking whether offline or on. So I took it to the local repair shop a mile up the road. Without a car, that's stuffing a compact desktop tower into your Jansport Mozambique and hopping on your bicycle in the late summer heat. They took a look at it. They said it was a burnt-out fan. I paid them some moneys to replace the fan. But when it came back it still didn't work right. The problems continued, so I took it back to them for another look, and they found out that it wasn't a problem with the fan. It was a problem with some capacitors that had blown. Little aluminum cans, a row of four of them, and three had popped out like the Champagne Popper fireworks I bought as a kid, streamers of brown packing material sprayed across the circuitry. Somehow they hadn't noticed. They refunded my money but told me that those capacitors were an integral part of my motherboard, and that my computer, five years since I'd purchased it, was six years out of date. The told me I needed a new computer entirely; that generation of motherboard was no longer available as a replacement part. So I tried to keep it going, but after a week or two I realized it was hopeless and went down to the electronics store to get a new one. The old one had lasted slightly beyond its projected lifespan, after all, and this is just the way of the world with electronics. No harm, no foul. All of the above is 100% true and factual, to the best of my recollection. I'm two computers and roughly ten years past those events. Spoiler: -Paul Harvey All of the above is 100% true and factual, to the best of my recollection. I'm two computers and roughly ten years past those events. But I don't blog about planned obsolescence. Some years ago, never mind how long precisely, my mother suffered a stroke. And a heart attack, but I don't remember which one happened first. She had been descending into a spiral of cliches anyway (“Life is real, it is what it is, so Vera says to me, she says, Vera says...”) The display was readable, but a little janky. And then last October, right around her 74th birthday, she had another stroke. A big one. It blew the last ten years out of her head. She missed the cats, but the wrong ones. She knew the house, but hadn't lived in it yet. She had been a woman who would talk the ear off of a lamp-post, bragging about her son who lived in Japan. Her roommate at the care facility said “She don't talk much. Your mom's a pretty quiet woman.” I had the chance to go back in February 2020. Coronavirus was just “a disease that had been reported in China” at the time. And last Friday I got word that she'd died. So there we are. No new motherboard available for the 1946 model at this point in time.
That was one of the last movies I saw before I self-exiled, but it's not the topic today. I took the bus to the center of town. Mid-day, not too crowded, so I was able to find an empty two-person seat towards the back. I dunno your public transport, but ours is pretty well endo-caged. Lots of padded bars at levels convenient to both sitting and standing riders of all heights, so the seatback in front of me had a handhold bar, covered in cushioning foam. And there was a person in the seat in front of me. But they're absolutely irrelevant to the story. There was an ant. A very small ant. Not a member of the smallest type of ants I've ever seen, but this little lady (side note: if you see them, they're probably female. I thought I remembered that, so I googled it)... Spoiler: side side note Google's first response was from an exterminator site. I hope when the aliens visit they'll be guided by the same principles. ...this little lady would have been dwarfed by an uncooked grain of rice. If you're the sort who buys "Himalayan" salt to feed to your salt mill, she might have been able to slip through the jaws unscathed. Probably not, but alive? Yeah, could do. So she was walking up and down the Jesus Handle in front of me. And every couple dozen steps she'd stop, rear up, and look around. Definitely. Her head and possible the front part of her abdomen would rise up, her antennae would whisk whisk whisk around, and she'd settle back down and resume her trek up and down, back and forth, over the meter-long by 10cm or whatever circumference of the handle. Again and again. I just kept watching her, wondering what to do. She's a creature of the hive. She was lost and alone. And even if I could catch her, I had no idea from whence she came. Guess wrong and she'd be shredded. Or I could kill her, put her out of her loneliness. As any civilized society would do to outsiders. .... She's alone... IAIN YOU FUCKING FUCKSTICK WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU ANTHROPOMORPHIZING A GODDAMN ANT?!?!?!??!???!?!?!??! Ever see the DARPA Grand Challenge? Autonomous vehicles have to go fucked if I know multiples of their own length without getting lost or catching fire or joining the National Guard or some other equally stupid and implausible thing. And they always fail. My little Antess, with a total body weight less than that of a skin tag I ripped off last week, could complete that challenge (at scale) with ease. Maybe when she lifted herself up and scanned the landscape, she was looking to see if that asshole Jon and his bitch girlfriend Alicia were anywhere nearby. And maybe when she saw that they weren't, she just kept exploring. I let her be. Fair winds and following seas, my little insectoid sister. Flights of angels speed thee to thy rest.
This started out as a "What New Word Did You Learn Today" post but the Muse hit me and it got out of control. QC is low to non-existent as I'm slightly above the legal limit to drive but I'm pretty sure I've caught all the slurs and insults. Well this is odd. I have a new word that I unlearned today, or rather learned the correct meaning of, only to discover that what I thought it meant doesn't have a specific term. Early in my time here I climbed Mt. Fuji. Our bus took us to the fifth station (a common pattern) and we climbed from there. Side note: I brought two cameras: a 35mm point-and-shoot, and my 35mm SLR that I'd had for ten years or so. My mother used to be into photography, so she bought me the same make and model she had (Minolta X-370) so that she could share tips easily with me. I dropped the point-and-shoot taking it out of my pack before the climb. The battery door broke and "bricked" the camera. When I got to the top (we left the fifth station around 2100 and got to the top at about 0430 or so) my SLR refused to work. I saw the sun rise over the sea of clouds, I saw the free-range rubbish tip that was the crater, but I couldn't document any of it. At the top of the mountain I saw what I mistook for Japanese オタク otaku geeks wearing what looked like military uniforms. Then I met a mid-twenties White dude with short hair who asked me which unit I was from. A group of American Navy and Marine officers were doing a team-building climb with some of the jie-tai Japanese Self-Defense Forces members. More on that later. But anyway: The word is glissade: I've crossed out definition one because that wasn't what I thought it referred to. What I was thinking of was a mountaineering term, but what I thought it meant was not sliding down the hill on your butt or "boot-skiing." Mt. Fuji is a volcano, which means the sides of it that aren't big broken lava blobs are ash and dust at exactly their angle of repose. So my climbing partner and I, on the way down, did something that seems most closely related to plunge-stepping. However, since we weren't wearing crampons and it was all ash and dust, each giant monster moon-step resulted in a one- to two-meter slide when I jammed my bootheel into the ground. We went down that mountain like cartoon characters. There are two “fifth station” on Mt. Fuji. The trail branches high up the hill, but due to it being a mountain, they're quite far apart at the bottom of the inverted “V” the two paths make. We came out of the woods (below the treeline). I was wearing a woodland boonie hat, an old GI t-shirt, trekking pants, and combat boots. A young Marine corporal, in uniform, with a clipboard, addressed me as “sir” and said “Good afternoon, sir! Can I get your name and unit?” I was thirty, close cut hair, in what looked like GI day-off hiking gear. So I corrected him, shot the shit as one (former) jarhead to another, and then went to look for my unit. Which wasn't there. My buddy and I had taken the wrong fork, as had five or six others from our tour group. Fortunately it was only about a $100 taxi ride from where we were, and oh my god I just remembered back then a hundred bucks was a fucking fortune to me and even though we split it so it wasn't too bad fuck that was an unexpected expense we split two cabs and joined up with the group, went to an onsen public bath with a beautiful view of each other's junk I still can't get used to public baths yes they were gender segregated but no I wasn't comfortable the mountain from a distance. Then we took the tour bus back home to Osaka.
It had been an ugly night from the get-go. The stars were wrong or something and they ended up... She asked him if he knew where the nearest restroom was and when he pointed, headed the other way out of spite. The bar made quite a bit of money that evening, so at least someone came out ahead. And when things came to a head and she shoved him against the wall, slapped him across the face, screamed that she wanted to kill him he pulled out his blade, pressed the handle into her hand and said "Go ahead." Let's call this a work of fiction &c
There's an informal sniper motto that goes: "Don't bother running, you'll only die tired." I often apply that to the folks who bolt out of the one train I take, hoping against hope to make the two-minute distance fit the one-minute connection time. But today...today today today.... the train I was going for, when I was at about the halfway point, decided to be just ever so slightly late. So I ran. I fucking ran. Through the second rush-hour crowd, through the connecting station, down the stairs. I ran as fast as my fat body decently could. And had I been a little more bold, a second faster, thrown myself down those last stairs, I would have been able to slide through the moving doors rather than being stopped, like Agent Smith at the safety-less elevator doors, by a rapidly closing 9 inch gap. But I was fucking panting like a Pomeranian on a hot summer day. Shoulda known better. As is, I got home at 21:37 instead of the possible, maybe, coulda shoulda, 21:23 pm. Tired.