Melancholy

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?