old, I (perplexed) held

her down on a schoolyard bench

and kissed her hard. Same

year a friend (?)

told me:

“Get another

girl: she’ll kill

you.”

Five years old. I heard said

“promise”:

What

we

despised about adults was

grown; growing within

us.

that the idea of youth

of a rainbow of opportunity was

immature, and

had focused in for

the target.

Remedies for writer’s block (and its analogues):

Subject yourself to something excruciating. It doesn’t have to be physical pain — in fact physical pain is the most simplistic option — and preferably it ought not cause any long term damage.

The alternative — and it’s a better alternative — is to have a very uplifting, comforting, and reassuring experience that puts you back in touch with what you love about life and humanity. But this is of course notoriously difficult to do on command.

Finally, you can always cut yourself off from whatever sources of amusement have become reliable and habitual to you; and if that doesn’t work, you don’t have a creative bone in your body.

When editing or re-writing, do the opposite of these things — that is get comfortable, feel safe and secure, and do it when you aren’t particularly capable of being moved by anything.

When I got to the escalator I could hear the train above grinding to a halt, but my legs were tired from so much biking and walking that I didn’t feel like running. On top of that, there was a tall, older gentleman in front of me, dressed in all black with a golf cap, who could just as easily have been an elite businessman as a university professor as a yakuza don; weighted down as I was with winter walking wear and all the accoutrement, and carrying a large plastic bag with an electronic sampler in it, even if I had wanted to run I would have had to pretty much shove past him. And it’s not the possibility that he might have been yakuza or someone otherwise important that forbids that idea, it’s that civilized human beings do not shove past old men or women unless it’s to save them from harm’s way, or unless something a lot more critical than having to wait for the next train is on the line. On top of that, they may inherently be amblers and slow walkers, old men, but you very rarely see them getting to the platform just as the train’s pulling away, or really being late for anything. So if he’s going to the same place I’m going, and he’s not rushing, why should I?

I can be kind of a fast walker, when I have a destination and time is a factor — even if time is not a factor that can be influenced by my walking speed, just the knowledge that there is some overarching deadline or that the quicker I get to wherever I’m going the more time I’ll have to do whatever it is I’m doing there (even if that only means taking a bath and sleeping) for some reason makes me walk faster, or bike faster, or drive faster. I think it’s something about being in transit that makes me want to get it over with to get on to the part that is supposedly the “real” living. Maybe a product of growing up in a home where we were always running late, or often running late myself, or just a disease of the modern culture of scheduling and deadlining and time-saving. Maybe a kind of unconscious insecurity factors into it too; the occasional panic of being around strangers, of not being able to blend in, making me want to cut solitary involuntary exposure time to a minimum. I don’t know, exactly. Anyway, I have to consciously slow my steps sometimes, and this was one of those times. Other than me and the old man, there was one guy further ahead of us, already halfway up the escelator, and maybe two or three people walking through the station behind. In this level of non-crowding, it’s pretty rude to bunch up behind someone while they’re walking.

By the time he was stepping onto the escalator, I’d slowed to a shuffle. And then he started to crumple in front of me like he’d been shot, a black mass of shuddering fabric suddenly no longer supported by that tension and positioning of muscle and bone we take so thoroughly for granted.

He stepped back onto the step beneath him to steady himself, but it was no good, because in trying to keep his balance he’d gripped down on the handrail and slumped against the sideguard — one of which was moving in time with the steps beneath his feet, and the other of which was of course stationary. And what it turned into was a perpetual backwards stumble — he continued to step back, down, but he couldn’t get his feet to compensate at the same speed as gravity was tugging his upper body back and down, because every step he found footing on was moving forward and up, and if that wasn’t enough he had to keep releasing his grip on the only handhold he had to avoid being contorted into an even weirder position because it too was moving forward. So I stopped and waited for him to get his balance, but after four, five, six more steps back it was pretty clear that he was going to remain suspended in mid-fall for eternity, or at least until strength or will gave out and his back and head met the moving ground: escalator one, old man zero.

The fact is if you go out in public at night enough in Japan, particularly crowded streets or train stations or anywhere people are coming and going and mixing, people stumbling and falling isn’t exactly common, but it can get to where you don’t think much of it. I might think differently if I wasn’t a drinker myself, but hey, it’s just alcohol, they just had a little too much. Or maybe not even that — you figure if you get enough people passing through a given place things like stumbling and falling are bound to happen more frequently, just by probability. More cars on the road, more crashes are going to happen. More feet on the ground, more hands or shoulders or faces are going to hit the ground too.

Eventually seeing that he wasn’t gonna be able to do anything about it on his own, I reached out with my winter-gloved hand and put my palm against his back. That’s really all it took, I didn’t even really have to apply force, and then he was straightening up and standing, thanking me before he’d even turned around and then that — oh look, it’s a foreigner! — face. He really didn’t seem drunk at all, nor could I smell anything on him. He thanked me several times, while I was taking out my headphones to hear him, and I said, no don’t worry about it. I mean, I was in this case moved by sympathy, but even if I hadn’t been, I couldn’t have ever gotten to the train if he’d kept falling like that forever, taking up the whole escalator, could I have?

I guess out of embarrassment, he said he’d be more careful from now on, and I said it happens, and then we got to the platform and the train was still there, and we paused to gesture each other to the door first, like the two overpolite chipmunks in the old cartoons, and then he got on, and I got on, and we went to our separate seats and he slept while I read a book and listened to sad songs, warming my feet on the under-seat heater vents, and some stories do have happy endings for everyone.

(or Impoverished Minds and Cultural Drought)

It’s always tempting for people of a certain disposition to take a few events or phenomena that seem to be falling into a pattern and extrapolate them into grand sweeping assessments of some aspect of “The Big Picture.” For some people it’s not temptation, it’s uncontested practice. For me it’s tempting, very tempting sometimes, but a temptation is by definition an impulse to do something you really don’t want to do, or else want to be really moderate about doing.

It’s the way the human mind works — generalization is as much a survival skill as a sense of direction or having hands is. And the spirit of its simple wisdom is echoed in maxims that still see regular use today: Better safe than sorry and Better to err on the side of caution. If something seems threatening, those who assume it is have in all likelihood had a better survival rate and were thus more able to pass on their genes (and memes) to later generations, thus cementing the tendency into our species. And how does something that is unknown or not well understood seem threatening except by resembling things that we know from experience or even hearsay to be dangerous?

It’s also a cognitive shortcut that frees up mental energy to move on to the next thought, and to avoid becoming overwhelmed at the complexity of things. But since one of the faculties we make room for with this conservation of mental energy is consciousness itself — the ability not only to think, imagine, evaluate and reason, but also to turn these powers on ourselves in the act of introspection — we should be careful to keep some part of our minds on regarding out personal experiences and observations as what they are: personal observations and experiences, limited by time, place, person, perspective, suggestion, and expectation. And how much more for second- and third-hand information, which in addition to having all these same limitations, suffers the quality degradation of successive hearings, interpretations, and recollections — the act of human communication is by no stretch a lossless transfer of information, nor is it very often intended to be.

Thus we have to bear in mind what an infinitesimally tiny portion of “The Big Picture” any one individual (even the smartest, best-read, best-traveled or most “cultured” among us — which with any reasonable grasp on reality we can quickly ascertain is not oneself, whether you or me) is ever really able to make contact with in their life.

That said, I have been thinking a great deal about education; specifically the role of society — from parents to teachers (both as individual influences and as agents enforcing the mandated and structured influence of the State) to peers and other vertical, horizontal, or diagonal social influences associated with schooling — in fostering developing hearts and minds. I currently am an elementary school teacher in a foreign country, so this thought is not difficult to indulge with all kinds of observations that are constantly ready at hand to be made.

Let’s start with what’s easy to agree on. Feeling capable is a critical part of human development. The knowledge or sensation (which are two slightly different things) that one is good at something, that one understands some complex idea or possesses useful and interesting knowledge, or can do something many others cannot, builds self respect and confidence in a way that is neither cheap nor fleeting. Any first-hand appreciation of the hard work that it takes to acquire valuable knowledge, develop a skill, or master sophisticated thinking should necessarily forge a deep appreciation for the strong skills, knowledge, or thinking of others and thereby instill a sense of respect for them. The more one knows, can do, or can think complex thoughts the more one will gain respect for others’ knowledge, abilities, and complex thinking.

Practiced mutually and on a large scale, a society which regarded all individual abilities, knowledge, and complex thinking as virtues would move simultaneously in the direction of greater humility, greater self-confidence, and greater mutual respect for self and for others. Not to mention the very real gains that would be made in knowledge and ability.

The danger of unanimity in these values, of course, becomes excessive performative pressure from all sides. But one should mitigate thoughts of this danger with the consideration than unanimity in any set of values carries the same danger — in a society, for example, that unanimously values not committing murder or rape, certainly those inclined to murder or rape will suffer seemingly unbearable peformative pressure from all sides to act contrary to their native impulses. This, of course, assumes that there are such things as native impulses.

Since we can assume that this state of affairs, where murder and rape are widely discouraged not just by legal but also cultural forces, is a worthy trade for the stress placed upon murderers or rapists, or would-be murderers and rapists, it follows that a notion on unanimity of values (which in practice cannot exist, so what I am referring to is near-unanimity or vast majority agreement) must not be intrinsically disregarded as an evil.

Here is where I am inclined to move into cultural comparisons between my native culture(s) and my adoptive one.

…(continued)

A dissolution of consciousness. Not a derealization, because in fact the moment, its context, and its sensations are incredibly real. They are immediate, but as if unfocused, irrelevant, insignificant. It’s not a cessation of self because the narrative continues, although its voice is warped into near-unintelligibility. The overall message, though, the drum beat of the plot movement, never loses time.

But in a sense it is a cessation of self. What else could you call that clueless-ness as for what to do next? The inability to situate plans, responsibilities, to-do’s, and free time in a logical and all-accommodating continuum. It’s not that there is no time — there is — and its not that there is nothing to do with the time — there is plenty. It’s that there is only so much free time, and too many things of equally medium importance approaching their far-off (but still incoming) critical masses at the same slow trot. It’s the struggle to paint a flat landscape with a cloudless sky, or a head-on view of the sun. It’s the struggle to narratize any adventure or even a simple mission out of a long disordered list of things that need to be gotten around to sooner or later, when later is just as well.

Then there are those reliable smelling salts and time kills — cigarettes, the squandering of money on things you can make an argument for needing, but not urgently, and don’t really want any more than you want a shower immediately upon waking in a climate-controlled room.

If analogy is to analogue as digital is to digit, can you really digitize the universe with the self?

If an analogue is not the thing itself but an analogue thereof, what is the same thing’s digitalization? A digital analogue? An analogue digitalization? An analogous digital thing? Or can the digital really be said to be composed of discreet entities, do digital “things” really exist? Is not the digital a raw sea of data which takes shape only when processed and interpreated by a certain series of complex mathematical algorithms? And how then is the digital different from the physical, which is a sea of energy which only begins to take comprehensible shape when subjected to the algorithms of the sensory organs and central nervous system?

So now there are three worlds where there had been two, and sometime before only one. In order, whatever it is the order here actually means remaining unclear:

1. The “Actual” World. i.e. the physical, the real, the present.

2. The “Analog” World. i.e. the world invoked in literature and art, in mental, written, and verbal recollections of events which have transpired in the past of the Actual world, in mental, written, and verbal suppositions about the future of the Actual world. This is the world of metaphor, of symbolism, of imagination and memory.

3. The “Digital” World. i.e. the world of externalized memory and imagination. Simulations and projections made not by the human mind but by secondary devices existing in the Actual world, invented specifically to amplify the power and accuracy (as measured against the Actual world) of human memory and imagination. Copies and recordings of real-world objects of phenomena made not as individual human internal memory but as objective tangible external memory.

This is a departure to some extent from the previous colloquial and technical uses of the word “digital” in that it includes some mechanical devices normally referred to as “Analog,” for example film photography, vinyl musical recordings, sound or video recordings on magnetic tapes, etc. But for all intents and purposes these devices were all created with the same goals as modern digital technology, that is the recording, storage, and transmission of that which prior to the creation of such devices was by necessity only able to be experienced as real-time performance or internal memory. It is worth noting that modern digital technology exists almost entirely as a result of a drive for continuous improvement upon these same devices, so even if one cannot accept “digital” as a term encompassing phonographs and flash-bulb photography, there is no avoiding the fact that these things are in fact the ancestors of digital technology. Calling them “pre-digital,” as might be he impulse for the sake of technical accuracy, still puts them on the same trajectory and therefore puts the memories they stored squarely in the world of the digital, external and objective; and not the analog, internal or personal.

It may seem now that this definition creates a problem of scale. So defined, the trajectory of “digital” technology and thus the “digital” world can be said to include even the technology of writing. Writing certainly exists as a result of the impulse to allow for the “recording, storage, and transmission of that which prior to the creation of such devices was by necessity only able to be experienced as real-time performance or internal memory.” And there is actually great value in noting this. Writing, then, may have been the earliest, or among the earliest “pre-digital” technologies. Alongside it would of course be sketching, drawing, painting, and the like; and the accompanying technologies of cartography, chart-making, and architectural planning. All of which, it is observed easily enough, are now carried out digitally more often than not.

The fact is that writing makes use of language, which may arguably also be a pre-digital technology. But regardless of where one falls on this question, writing and illustrating both make use of first the analog faculties of memory and imagination before converting the products thereof into external, digitized memory. And all digital devices themselves were also engineered through liberal use of these same analog faculties. In fact the very state of being able to design or invent or create — that is, knowing how – on the part of the human being, is the result entirely of a self-contained internal analogue world in which thoughts standing in for objects can be manipulated like the objects themselves at minimal cost and no risk, before the desired process is carried out in the Actual world.

What is the relationship between the three worlds, then? And to what end does the human being move among them, obsessively building bridges from one to the other and back?

When I get off work, I want to buy a bunch of mikan. And some wine. And then to sit in the bath, peeling the mikan and letting the bright peels collect on the surface of the water, drinking cheap red wine straight from the bottle. I’ll have some chocolate too, but it will probably get softer than I’d like sitting in the steamy bathroom with me, and diffusing melted chocolate in the water will sully the whole experience.

I’d put on some relaxing music too. I don’t know what at this particular moment, but it would be something chilled out. Something that could just groove in the background without asserting itself too aggressively.

Oranges. And chocolate. And wine. I might fall asleep in the bath and drown.

So here’s what it’s like in Japan. I’m alone most of the time. Even around other people. What I mean is that I have no base identity that is implicitly understood by me and the people I interact with, nor any illusion thereof — beyond just that I am foreign, which itself is just a way of saying that no one knows what to assume about me. Especially since I’m fairly quiet and self-contained and, as Saki observed, not particularly self assertive in the way that Americans are internationally expected to be. I can speak all the Japanese I need to in order to make an ass of myself in basic everyday life (not that I don’t still do it anyway — but I speak plenty more English than that and even in America that’s a struggle). It’s like beingperpetually screamingly mysterious to most everyone you meet, very few of whom don’t take notice of you long enough to come up with a few never-asked questions, some un-voiced conjecture, or to swing a wider path as they walk through the grocery store to avoid coming too close as they pass. Because who knows about you. You are the unknown, and only a fool has expectations about the unknown.

Here is what it’s like in Japan. I have, generally, a lot of time to myself. A whole lot. When I say to myself I mean it both in the way the phrase is traditionally used, the positive way — my job is relatively easy and affords me lots of free time to fill with almost any activity I want (that can be done at a desk without making tons of noise, or just to walk around or smoke and think). I also mean it in a way that is not so celebratory — there isn’t anyone calling me up for spontaneous parties or nights out or coffee or let’s-get-something-to-eats, and reciprocally also no one that I could very reasonably ring to do the same. I have no video games but chess and very simple (free) flash toys on the internet with which to burn big swathes of nothing-thought-and-nothing-done into my time. I’ve been reading voraciously, but I am literally now clean out of unread English-language literature. I write a lot. I write until I’m fatigued of writing. I get second winds. I think about what Marquez said about writing being lonely business, or Orwell’s assertion that you have to be at least partially insane to want to write. I spend large chunks of my evenings on wikipedia or youtube. I talk to a certain woman online when I can, and mope and sulk when I can’t. I drink. With people. Alone. More often alone. I smoke a lot. Not a lot in terms of smokers overall in the world, but a lot more than I really want to.

Here is what it’s like in Japan. I have a very small apartment that I still put off cleaning. I have a minimal set of dishes that I still let crowd the sink. I have nothing but time but I am still constantly surrendering breakfasts and dinners to whatever is quickest and easiest. A little rain or wind and I treat my apartment like a bomb shelter, the outside world a radiation-baked tundra. It’s not that I mind rain that much, it’s just, well, was where I was going to go really that important anyway

This is what it’s like in Japan, and I want it to last for a long long time, just as I want out of it, just as I want to do nothing but play video games and go to clubs and bars and concerts and drink and network, just as I want to go back to school and continue my education, just as I want to retire on a houseboat somewhere and smoke weed every day. I want it to last long enough for me to get what I’m supposed to get out of it, to accomplish what I’m here to accomplish, but just as much I want to run from it, make excuses and pretend I’d be happier if I gave up.

But I’m not giving up. In fact I don’t have as much time as it feels like sometimes. Well, I do. Too much to endure when it needs enduring, and too little to enjoy when it needs enjoying.

Neither of these statements is really true.

This is pretty ridiculous.

There aren’t really any janitors at my schools. There are custodians, or groundskeepers, or what have you, but it is not their job to mop the floor, clean the toilets, or empty the trash cans. You know who mops the floors? The students. You know who cleans the student bathrooms? The students. You know who cleans the faculty bathroom? The faculty. You know who collects and washes the lunch trays, who takes out the garbage, who serves the food? The kids. It’s on a rotating, egalitarian, and partial-volunteer basis. They do the loudspeaker announcements. They serve the food. They sweep. They tidy up.

What does it resemble in the U.S.? Not schools. No, this is nothing like any American school I ever attended, or have even heard of. What it reminds me of in America is prisons. And what does it say about a country when the only time institutional groups of people are made to clean up after themselves and learn the value of that automating labor that keeps society running is when they have been convicted a heinous crime? Self- and societal-responsibility, life skills, as a punishment and not a given?