inspiring prose for '11

14 degrees outside

...but inside? Kinda busy making summer plans.

Brand New Set of Wings

Japan has taught me to look right, then left before crossing. It's taught me to eat first, skip the questions, and go straight to the beer. It has taught me that the old Japanese adage "say one thing, mean ten" is a goddamn lie. It's actually twenty or thirty--sixty if on a Monday, or the third Wednesday of any month. Goes without saying that I've learned a lot in a year.

Sans raucous celebration, today marks the unceremonious passing of my first year in Okayama, Japan. This momentous anniversary actually should have been yesterday, but I missed my flight out of Cherry Capital on that morning. Embarrassing, I know. Ominous karmic foreshadowing to an entire year of missed buses, streetcars, bullet trains, local trains, rickshaws, and pretty much every other mode of human transportation known to the Land of the Rising Sun. If one could physically be "late" for an escalator, I'd probably be the first to make a habit of it. John Candy would be proud.

In my defense though, I made it on the Kyushu to Shikoku ferry on my first and only try, breaking a mean "missed it on the first go" streak, back in July of last year. Not that I'm careless, I simply allot certain measurements of time for "human (re: my own) error," whenever I travel. It's in these flexible measurements that I always end up experiencing a side of Japan that I may not have seen, had I been adamant about a prompt departure. Like the time I missed the last Yamanote train to get home, and begged a taxi driver to get me the 45 minutes back to my hotel on only Y1500 (about $13). Awesome guy. Or that other time my negotiation conveniently skills failed after I missed the last Takahashi train home, had to pay Y13,000 ($120) to a much less talkative driver for his award-winning version of "45 Minutes with a Surly Cabbie." Would have walked, but I had to be at Tokyo Disneyland the next morning. There was even a time where I missed the last Utsunomiya train home, so I threw my wallet and keys in a station locker, and just fell asleep on the platform. Woke up just in time for the first train out. Still had my shirt, and pants, and everything. Granted, in reality Japan may not be as safe as everyone says, but a night on a foreign train station bench without getting raped is safe enough to convince me.

Anyway, are we seeing a pattern yet? Any more 'missed train' stories, you'd probably start to think I just liked the attention. But seriously, the most important thing I've learned here, is that despite the Japanese being punctual to a fault, if you still allow yourself to be late, there's so much more to be experienced in the moments when you fail to arrive on time.

Raise a frosty Asahi, or a warm, wooden box of sake to the months ahead. Damn near a billion trains to be missed.

Stoked to have you along on the ride.

Take my blanket and go

Seems like everybody loves lists. Year-end/beginning lists especially. Be it a bittersweet retrospective, or pathetically optimistic, it's hard to not enjoy a well-conceived and organized list. So, per certain new year's expectations, here is mine, in all its haphazardly compiled glory:

* milk
* eggs
* pop tarts
* ukulele
* cake or death
* Paris
* air guitar
* hot
* kill monsters in the rain
* hump catting
* bear blasting
* ...what the hell?

Ah, I just remembered. I hate lists.
Here's a better idea.

I'm sure by now most of you should be familiar with my smallish gnome friend, Frampton. If not, no big deal--just flash back to my painfully crap** writing of yesteryear, and kindly read about his humble beginnings, before continuing.
While that post fails to actually provide any real information on Frampton, rest assured there isn't actually much to say. A charming gift from my sister, he has since become a strange extension of myself--a kitschy snapshot stand-in, conveniently pausing for photographs at timely major milestones in my life.
So, here he is--in 2007:




** This is not to say the writing is no longer crap, just that it used to be more crap.

Eye of the Badger

Next Sunday is the Hiruzen Marathon in northern Okayama. My first ever competitive footrace, and I'm so nervous, I chewed off all my fingernails just in writing this. My concerns are not in my ability to finish (as often the case with amateur pre-race jitters), but rather in how fast. I want to place well enough to justify continued training for the possibility of a full marathon early next year. Furthermore, I need to prove to myself that I'm not better off in a rocking chair on some porch, screaming for the personal nurse to change my colostomy bag.

But have I trained hard enough? Have I sucked down enough raw eggs? Have I run up enough sets of stairs to warrent air-humping to Eye of the Tiger? The race is held every year on the same mountain (5k up, 5k down), so fair enough. I've been training on my commute route--which, if you remember, requires ascending a goddamn mountain every morning. I've done sprints, I've done stairs, I've ran quick 5k's, I've ran 5k's in sets, I've ran 10k's, and I've ran the 16k loop to and from the shrine every Sunday morning with the team for the last month. I've run backwards and forwards, with weights, and without, in the rain, and in the blazing sun. Sometimes even, backwards with weights in the rain.

My fastest 5 and 10k times are not total shit, but I'm still nervous. I'd rather not be ready, for readiness implies an acceptance that I have reached my limit--that I cannot possibly run any faster. The problem, is that I'm sure I still can. I'm just not certain how to tap into this measure of speed; a measure which I had always believed required first being chased by a shotgun-toting badger riding an angry bear.

Shit. How the hell am I going to legally acquire both a shotgun, and a bear in just a week?

Happy new year, you bastard

Make any resolutions worth a damn? Any intentions of keeping them? Yeah, didn't think so. I resolved to stop saying 'yes'. And 'no'. Actually, I just resolved to stop talking altogether. Some kind of incoherent nonsense like that. Probably like your retarded resolution, no?
Another uneventful Christmas and come and gone. Another tacky Time Square ball dropping on another misplaced year. If each dropped ball brings me closer to something better, I damn sure can't wait to find out what it is. Otherwise, it's just four more weeks to Japan. I'll never have enough suitcase room for all the worthless shit I've accumulated over the last two years in Findlay, but I'm too sentimental, and these memories too fragile to simply pack away into a box, and leave to be forgotten. Or moved.

Thank you Pearl Jam for "Come Back." It didn't bring him back last year...or this year. Probably never will. But for that 5 minutes and 26 seconds, I feel like he just might.

I spent all of today wandering around the new pole barn work site waiting for dad to finish nailing down the roofing sheets, so we could haul him up new ones, or pick up the slippery tools that he dropped every five goddamn minutes. In the moments between picking up screws with a magnet, pvc jousting with Andrew, and carving my bare hands on razor-sharp sheet metal, we shot a particularily idiotic video. No reason, really.

Like the new style? I'm still warming up to it. You, on the other hand, are welcome.