Journal: 09 / 2008

Grown-up, alive, awake, and in a bright place, speaking the language (called “love”) only understood by quiet people: we, the Large Prime Numbers sit anti-dead within the computer of the universe.

Together with Vienna Percussion Academy graduate Duke X Alexander, I myself entered a studio with un-straightened hair (how dare I!), a Gibson SG 61 Reissue in Sapphire Blue, a blues driver, some octave fuzz, and various other sound-contraptions, to engage in a literature-esque three-hour exploratory thrashing session answering the eternal question: what if rock and roll . . . had a heart attack?

The answer is as frightening as it is timeless.

Presenting: Rock and Roll Heart Attack: Part One: Rock and Roll Heart Attack is Rock and Roll Heart Attack as Rock and Roll Heart Attack in “Rock and Roll Heart Attack”.



The Pulitzer Prize committee is giving away their inaugural prize for noise rock this year; someone may or may not mention us in a bar somewhere during the ceremony. As an veritable outsider to What Happens At Fashion Week, I don’t see the bitching, the bitchiness, the bitchery and other assorted forms of the word “bitch”. I don’t see the parties and the painful hipsters with their obnoxious neon wayfarers and their “vintage” clothes that they brought for more money than they’re really worth. I don’t see what happens among the prim and proper editors and buyers and occasional celebrities who sit in the front row. All that I see, and all that most of the world sees is the clothes. The clothes have to stand up and actually speak for themselves, they have to function as a piece of design without the use of alcohol, fear, or a reality distortion field.

The clothes didn’t have much to say. In fact the majority were too lazy to bother saying anything at all. The majority of designers this season opted to uh, to do nothing. Alexander Wang was a godawful attempt at something, but nobody really knew what it was. There was pieces of other collections by other designers flying all around the place in his “collection”. That’s fine- there was in Marc Jacobs’ collection too. Actually there was hints of other collections in everybody’s shows. But where Marc Jacobs makes a coherent picture or whatever for us (I refuse to call it “statement”. There’s plenty of statements if you want to look at it that way, but they don’t make the collection. It’s just everything that Marc Jacobs feels like showing this season shoved together in a picture that you could compare to “Tombstone Blues” or another surreal song of the same ilk. All these references, tossed together, but it works.)
But Mr Wang’s references to other designers and collections didn’t work. As I said; they were flying all over the place. They pissed on the on the floor.

I really do adore Alexander Wang- he’s incredibly unpretentious and seems sweet. He just didn’t have a good season.
Nor did most designers.
Ralph Lauren et al delivered the same goods they deliver every year. By “et al” I mean, well, I mean almost every designer who showed at NY fashion week.
Their clothes were mostly wearable, and stuck to the same formula that each designer’s known for.
That’s the problem– they didn’t do anything interesting. Ralph Lauren looked like Ralph Lauren. DKNY looked like DNKY. Carolina Herrera probably looked like Caroline Herrera even though I haven’t even bothered to look at that collection. I will now.
And by golly it does.

And that’s NY fashion week’s problem. Most of the designers are stuck in this very rigid cast that they can’t develop or take risks or move about. I won’t bother asking “why?” because I know why. You probably do too.
They’re scared; or either bad designers. Possibly even both.
I don’t really care that much, though. More success to the designers who aren’t like that. It’s just a terrible bore when an entire fashion week almost entirely consists of boring clothes.

There were two really good collections. Marc Jacobs and Calvin Klein. Some so-called “fashionistas” have called the Calvin Klein collection a rip off in 10 different ways (and a rip off of 10 different designers). Calvin Klein looked like what I thought Calvin Klein should look like when I was introduced to that particular brand when all I knew about fashion was that there was a load of snobs in it; Armani was the best designer ever (in fact he was the only designer I’d ever heard of at that point); and that fashion costs a lot.
Now I know that Armani bores me, but “fashion” or more accurately “good clothes” cost a lot.
Whoever told me about Calvin Klein called it “minimalist” and then I saw some CK clothes from that period and they weren’t really minimalist. They were clothes that the “cute” guy who runs might wear. They were clothes, goddamit, but they had no identity. They could be from anywhere.
The minimalist vision in my mind was destroyed. CK became a Tommy Hilfiger-like label for me- yes, a label– not that I’d heard of Tommy Hilfiger at the time either (I was ten and my parents weren’t Penguin Hipster Magazine Curators or anything like that).

What Calvin Klein was at the time of my introduction to it was a factory designing a collection. Now it’s an actual designer designing what Calvin Klein minimalism should be. White, white, white. Origami shapes everywhere. Folding and pleats. Refrigerated fabric.
I don’t need to write more about Marc Jacobs because I’ve covered that in a previous article. Here I’ll ask any girl that’s reading this and can afford it, to go out and buy some clothes from that collection because you’ll look fucking great. The uniform of the girl in NZ at the moment is neon, obnoxious t-shirts with really big writing, sunglasses, and tight jeans and/or tights. If you’re a “fashion” girl you probably dress in horrible floral that’re vintage-looking but they’re more like a week-old, and probably wearing ballet flats. It’s actually appalling to the eyes. I guess they could do worse: start dressing like it’s 1989 for one (oh! Some of them do..)
The point being buying some Marc Jacobs clothes would shake up fashion rat race- the actual people you encounter in the (concrete) street, rather than the gold-plated streets of Paris Fashion week.
Maybe some manufacturer, somewhere, will do some Marc Jacobs knock-offs and those girls will stop wearing obnoxious slogan t-shirts, and you know, go out and buy a jacket.

She (he?) just acts like we just never have met, NY Fashion Week. She has some other kind of lover.
Stage right is the businessmen in their Armani suits, and Stage left is the designers busy counting their money and running away. In the middle is Marc Jacobs and Calvin Klein. Nobody’s yelled “Judas!” at them yet. It’s impressionism. American impressionism. An American in Paris- Marc Jacobs.
Even though “Rhapsody in Blue” played during the show–quintessentially American–it’s not the actual music to “Rhapsody in Blue” that matters here. It’s the fact that with “Rhapsody in Blue” Gershwin tried to fuse “Classical” music with Jazz. Here, Marc Jacobs is trying to fuse America with Paris.
There are people out there who’ll say “nah man, this ain’t got any Paris in it at all”. It’s not so much the colours and patterns and fabrics- it’s the cut. The silhouette.

In “The Big Picture” of things, this whole show with its mirrors lining the runway (immediately brings to mind warm-lit images of Chanel’s mirrored staircase), with its models walking out in some kind of coherent form–it’s more a Tone Poem than a Symphony. Where Karl Lagerfeld is fashion’s Bach–yes, I did just compare Karl to Bach–Marc Jacobs is more fashion’s Debussy on a bender. No, Debussy stark raving drunk whilst taking LSD and more experimental chemicals. Debussy with plenty of funding from patrons- LVMH. Debussy the rock star living in hotel rooms.

…In the Big Picture of things, this collection is damn good simply because it’s a nuclear bomb to the petty collections that have been churned out at NY fashion week so far. It’s the streaker. The damn hot streaker. And among a crowd of bare-boned, anaemic collections, it’s gorgeous. It cannot be anything else than gorgeous because it’s so delicately obnoxious; it ain’t boring. It’s essentially Edie Sedgwick–except it isn’t dead yet and there are some pieces here that’ll lurk in the wardrobes of those that dare to buy pieces from this collection (how many people with money and good taste?) for a long time. Maybe they won’t wear the piece for the longest time, but they won’t be able to throw it out. It’ll cling to them because, on some level, they believe that it’s going to be an important piece. Really, it just has that look.

Parts of it feel like Broadway Porn. Here’s the obvious nod to Yves Saint Laurent–the hats, straight off Broadway. Americana as interpreted by a Parisian (Yves Saint Laurent) and then quoted by a American living in Paris. It’s all American though–he clashes the hats with shoes, pumps, stripper heels out of a seedy bar. The exaggerated bondage through the crisscrossing on the legs of the models.
–The models you don’t really notice. Last season I said they were models out to murder someone. I suppose they’ve done the deed now, and they’re sort of being meek and unnoticeable. Maybe they were once showmen–maybe they were once superstars themselves. But you’d never know it.

Is the time of the model over? When I see the set–the mirrors, the warm lighting, the wooden floorboards–I feel like I’m viewing a collection in one of the saloons: a small showing by Chanel; Yves Saint Laurent; Monsieur Dior. I feel like it’s really the clothes that matter. It’s this attempt to create intimacy in a frenzied, party-like atmosphere. A brilliant juxtaposition. An attempt to reinvent what modern fashion is, in essence.

It’s a step along the way. It’s possibly the first 21st-century fashion show. Or a throwback to a Couture saloon showing. It’s both. It’s mostly Debussy on a bender whilst listening to “Highway 61 Revisited”, smoking a cigarette, and holding Yves Saint Laurent and Coco Chanel in high regard.
Not the collection of an outsider–it’s the collection of an American designer. An American in Paris. It used to be that I was in the enviable position — enviable to myself — of escorting a girl to my house who was so recognized as beautiful that I found it not at all out of the ordinary to have sex with her right in the entryway of my apartment. I’d open the door, and there, between chilly aluminum and the ceremonial wooden step, as she’d stop and bend over to undo her boot buckles, I’d realize what a thing temptation could be, I’d pick up all the signals, and I’d answer the ringing phone in my testicles, and I’d greet the breathless phantom on the other end with the formalest perfunctory greeting. “Rogers Private Investigators. Tim Rogers, Detective of Love, speaking.” I don’t think a single case was ever solved, which didn’t matter because no one was ever found dead. If my life were the reign of one of the more boring Roman emperors, it’d be only a twitch of an eyelash before I coined the phrase “a murder mystery in which no one dies”: it was that near-silent moment months after the fact to end all facts where that schizophrenic little sister of the girl whose averageness only reached from dermis to bones called me at three o’clock in the morning, asked me how I was, received an answer of “decent”, and fielded the question of “how’s your sister” with a groan, and then “she got married; I’m tired.” She hung up. This was the first time the words “a murder mystery in which no one dies” occurred to me. It wouldn’t be the last.

Sex in the entryway of an apartment — it matters not with whom — that level of spontaneity is the thing I presently envy. Or, at least, I only envy it today, after waking at pre-noon and departing at post-noon, arriving in my office at the tail end of a freak rainstorm, and arriving back home to find a paper slip from Pelican Courier Service jammed in my door. My Contact in the United States has sent me my new credit card, and he has sent it EMS, meaning that I need to sign in order to receive it. The postman no doubt counted to thirty very quickly immediately after ringing the doorbell before he tapped his fingers together like a greedy thief fluffing a doily and proceeded to rip the package open and scan all the documents therein with a portable document scanner. I call the number on the receipt, only to find that all their operators are busy being at home, and I am forwarded to the 24-hour service line, where I supposedly can arrange to have the “package” (an envelope) delivered tomorrow morning. I’m still in my shoes. I still haven’t entered my house. I’m not going to enter my house until I feel good about having finished something. Eventually, “for privacy purposes”, I’m told to enter my name, typing it as though I’m writing it in hiragana using a cellular phone touch pad (which I just happen to have in front of me). It keeps telling me my name is too long: it must be within ten characters. Well, it isn’t within ten characters! What the hell! The paper in my hand has a case number, a tracking number, my zip code — why can’t it just prompt me to enter these, instead? The tracking code is eleven god damned digits — I’m pretty sure there isn’t a single other active customer with the precise same tracking number anywhere in this archipelago. Eventually, I hang up, click the application button on my phone — still stamping on the backs of my shoes, still not yet stepping up into the apartment — and enable the QR-code reader on my phone. I scan the code on the receipt. I access the ultra-slow website. I have to register as a “new customer” because my previous registration (two months ago) has expired. I get all the way to the name entry phase; I try something radical. I enter my name as completely random Chinese characters. It works. They tell me my package will arrive between 9 am and 12 pm tomorrow. I step up into my apartment. Not an eye-blink later, I transform from a “product of the outside world” to “a man in his home”. I am twenty-nine years old, as of one month ago, and as of one month and one week ago, I’ve known about as much about turning thirty as a man turning twenty-nine can know.

My goals of late have nothing to do with sex or even money; I have had much of the former and hardly need more of the latter. Self-preservation and self-perfection, from this cool distance, appear to be the same thing. If I were one step closer to being able to identify myself as being on the verge of a philosophical crisis, I’d be up to my eardrums in a philosophical crisis. There’s that nagging issue of how I’m supposed to throw my garbage cans away — what I’m supposed to put them in in order to communicate to the garbage man that I don’t want the anymore — and it sounds so fake, like something from a Raymond Carver story. My life’s issues are boiling down to such boring things.

Really, all I want more than anything else is to have lettuce and red onions to eat every day. Is that too much to ask? I’ve fallen into a sweetly cyclical existence, lately: I’ve trained my muscles and cardio-vascular system to about as close to a marathon-running physique as a lazy man can get; I look positively gorgeous; merely existing, standing or sitting still, in a state of nice weather is more than enough for me to say I’m getting “What I Want Out of Life”. To some, this might sound depressing. Not for me! Of course, no moment of universal existence is free of conflict, and mine is that the owners and operators of my local supermarket are mentally sick people for not stocking the Only Food I Absolutely Need To Eat Every Day. This would be the patent-pending “Bag of Delicious”, a plastic bag consisting of decently chopped iceberg lettuce and shredded red onions. I like to pour two of these bags (100 yen each) into a large salad bowl, toss in a handful of peanuts and a couple of black olives, splash on some olive oil, cheese, and balsamic vinegar, and tackle it like a man. However, four days a week, on average, my supermarket doesn’t stock this fine product. Why not? I suppose I could purchase a head of lettuce and a red onion and make this salad on my own, though this would seriously disrupt the balance of my existence. Chopping vegetables for a half an hour a day just isn’t something I want to make the time to do, what with the current deadly balance my routine hangs in.

1. Wake up at 5am
2. Work like a dog on my big-money-making “side-job”
3. Play guitar for one (1) hour
4. Do push-ups, sit-ups, wail on pecs, triceps, biceps, delts with 10kg dumbbell (20 minutes)
5. Drink Muscle Milk ™ Brand Vanilla Creme protein drink (America’s Best-Selling Protein Supplement)
6. Enter shower
6a. Rinse hair in cold (~22 celsius) water
6b. Lather hair with Bed Head (R) Self-Absorbed ™ shampoo
6c. Rinse hair
6d. Lather hair with Bed Head (R) Self-Absorbed ™ Conditioner
6e. Lather face with Men’s Biore (R) brand “Double Scrub” face wash
6f. Insert one squirt of Dove cucumber-aloe body wash into foofy white thing, scrub body
6g. Put Colgate (R) Total ™ brand toothpaste on Oral-B toothbrush, begin brushing
6h. Stare at wall for three (3) minutes
6i. Rinse off face, hair, body, stand up, turn off shower, apply Neoamino ™ hair treatment to hair
7. Exit shower, immediately fill sink with very hot (~44 celsius) water
7a. Dip genuine badger hair shaving brush into hot water
7b. Let brush drip dry, dip into Taylor’s of Old Bond Street (R) brand Avocado Oil Shaving Soap (made with Avocado Oil)
7c. Beat face with brush in vertical strokes for thirty-five seconds, until very soapy and smooth
7d. Immediately begin shaving, in single, quick strokes, with Merkur-brand German-made stainless steel solid-body safety razor
7e. Rinse face off, splash with Nivea (R) brand Q10 Lotion
8. Enter living room, begin drying hair with Vidal Sassoon (R) Dual Shine Ion Plus ™ ionizing hair dryer
9. Switch on Vidal Sassoon deluxe ceramic plate straightening iron
10. Read Kotaku.com while straightening hair
11. Stand up, put on some underwear, put on jeans, put on a T-shirt (selected at random from my growing retro T-shirt database (today’s is a cartoon Madonna kissing a cartoon Warren Beatty))
12. Equip iPod Shuffle (Purple, 2GB)
13. Enter kitchen, take key from ring over sink, clip it to my jeans, enter entrance hall, slip on flip-flops, step outside
14. Walk to Ogikubo Station (three minutes)
15. Enter grocery store, take escalator down to lower floor
16. Breathe through teeth at the absence of lettuce / onion salad — the only salad of all the salads that’s completely gone, much less more than two-percent gone
17. Continue through underground passage to train platform (90 seconds)
18. Get on train (car #2)
19. Get off train (three to six minutes later, depending on train departure time)
20. Go up stairs
21. Enter office building
22. Enter elevator
23. Exit elevator
24. Enter office
25. Stand with hands on hips and Starbucks coffee stir in mouth, slowly rotating (six hours)
26. Throw hands in the air, groan, exit office
27. Enter elevator
28. Exit elevator
29. Exit office building
30. Go down stairs
31. Enter train
32. Get off train (three to six minutes later, depending on train departure time)
33. Continue through underground passage to grocery store B1
34. Breathe through teeth at the absence of lettuce / onion salad — the only salad of all the salads that’s completely gone, much less more than two-percent gone
35. Walk home (three minutes)
36. Take stockpiled lettuce / red onion salad out of vegetable crisper
37. Prepare salad
38. Let salad sit for twenty-five (25) minutes while running like a psychopath outside in the park (sensitive teeth)
39. Fry two (2) eggs, heat up one (1) Gardenburger Philly Cheese Steak Veggie Burger, slather latter in ketchup and mustard
40. Sit on sofa eating and watching a selection from fine library of illegally downloaded non-Japanese dramatic television programs
41. When food is finished, wash bowl and plate, wash hands (Kirei-Kirei brand hand soap)
42. Open guitar case, remove guitar (Gibson SG ‘61 reissue, sapphire blue)
43. Continue with the television programs while noodling on various scales (one to two hours)
44. Eventually, all the lights are out, the guitar is plugged in, the headphones are on the head, and very loud, serious playing commences
45. Deathly, dreamless sleep, stark naked, at just before midnight

Saturdays are almost the same, except step #25 usually consists of my standing with my hands on my hips for more interesting reasons, and eating something different for dinner. Sundays have most steps involving trains, elevators, and hands on hips replaced with steps involving guitars.

As an amateur detective, I have attempted to solve this case of the missing salad without doing much work. For starters, I conducted a search of the Ogikubo residential community on Mixi. I discovered that the Seiyu grocery store had previously adopted the strange practice of closing on Thursdays. Why in the hell? The Town Seven building, which houses many deliciously ordinary daily needs, remains closed on Thursdays to this day. The citizens of Ogikubo apparently revolted against the Seiyu’s Thursday closures — with good reason: the Seiyu is the only large supermarket in town. Seiyu retorted by reopening on Thursdays, though changing their everyday closing time from midnight to 9 pm. The cheek! They also, apparently, did away with the customer comment box. I can imagine the liver spots and coal-tar-caked platinum teeth of the manager, so livid with the thought of getting customer comments re: Thursday every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Thanks to there being no more customer comment box, I can’t write my letter: “Please stock more lettuce/red onion salad bags.”

Who the hell is buying it all, anyway? Some local restaurant that tosses half in a bowl with some cheap-as-sin sesame dressing and charges 400 yen? I remember me and my friend Stabo were at this Mexican place a couple months ago; Stabo begrudgingly ordered a Coke, because he wanted a Coke even if they were 400 yen. He knew full well that the Coke would be in a glass that consisted of 90% ice, and that refills would be out of the question. Still, when the Coke came, there was a surprise: the menu had promised “Coca-Cola”; the Indian man running this Mexican restaurant in Japan, however, didn’t give a shit if we knew that the true identity of the drink was that shitty 100-yen-per-liter stuff they sell at the supermarkets for poor people. He brought a glass full of cracked gray ice over, thrust it down on the table, popped the cap off a half-empty, bubbleless bottle of “99″ brand (”99″ as in “99 yen”, as in “less than a dollar”, as in, sold at a shop where everything is less than a dollar) “American Cola”, poured around four ounces into the glass, and walked off without thanking us for not punching him in the scrotum. We could have tried to argue with the guy, though you know what? People with that kind of audacity usually can’t even be talked to, much less argued with. The record stands, right here and now, that there indeed exists a clear line between carelessness and bad taste. This world, when it comes time to buy or sell it, is not expensive. That is putting it lightly.

Here’s what turning thirty means to a man who has recently experienced the question of what it means to turn twenty-nine. I guess we can call this one

“rubik’s cube for the blind”
or, “a murder mystery in which no one dies”

I took it upon myself recently to obtain a subscription to Diet A&W Root Beer.

As a recently diagnosed diabetic, I have come to terms with the idea that I could suffer a coma or blindness if I continue to drink sugary beverages. This is why I quit all beverages containing sugar nearly two years ago. For a while, I’d been drinking skim milk — I figured calories weren’t a problem, just as long as the drink didn’t contain any fat. Skim milk did me good. Eventually, the Coca-Cola Corporation released Coke Zero, which comes in a can that looks much like a regular Coca-Cola can, only black. Diet Coke, in contrast, comes in a white can. Coke Zero is better than Diet Coke, objectively, because it tastes more like Coke than Diet Coke. Back when I was in high school and mathematically incapable of being laid, it struck me many times, and fiercely, that I could probably stop being fat if only Diet Coke didn’t taste terrible. I wouldn’t allow myself to “get used to” it. When Coke Zero came out, I decided to give it a go, and found it close enough. I realize that Coke Zero can’t just replace “Diet Coke”, because there exist thousands of people who have gotten used to the terrible flavor of Diet Coke, and convinced themselves that they “like” it. the worldwide marketing division of the Coca-Cola Corporation then decided, that in order for two no-calorie chemical approximations of Coca-Cola to exist simultaneously, one of them needs to be “for men”, and the other one needs to be “for women”. They decided Coke Zero would be for “men”, because it doesn’t have the word “Diet” in its name. The marketing was somewhat invisible. A year later, in Japan, the local branch of the Coca-Cola Corporation, operating out of a water-damaged basement in a pachinko parlor next to a used DVD shop somewhere, decided to launch an “anniversary campaign” that involves putting postage-stamp-sized stickers that read “One Year Anniversary!” on the side of every can of Coke Zero. In every vending machine, in front of Coke Zero, another sticker: “More men in Tokyo prefer Coke Zero!” Well, there you go. They’ve gone and said it. On this same day, quite coincidentally, they put Sarah Jessica “Sex and the City” Parker’s graphite-drawn face on every can of Diet Coke. Well, there you go. They’ve gone and shown it. Not a while after this, the “Sex and the City” movie would open in Japan; every girl with a wallet that cost more money than will ever reside inside it would tell her boyfriend she wanted to go see it. Toho Cinemas in Roppongi Hills showed the film on an amazing four screens. (They’d shown “The Dark Knight” on just one.) Every episode I’ve ever seen of “Sex and the City” had struck me as something made purely out of a desire to play to the modern mama’s boy’s fantasy. Moreover, every episode I’ve ever seen has featured at least three references to female pubic grooming. Without dipping into rudeness, I’d like to wonder how so many people whose spend more a day on shampoo than food can claim something as their favorite TV show and then not try and be exactly like the people portrayed within. My quickest guess is that all of these people aren’t actually paying attention. Being a Japanese girl and saying “Sex and the City” is your favorite television show ever is like being a highly respected pop artist and saying your favorite band of all-time is Joy Division. Besides, the typical girl in Japan resides in a Mixi community such as “I like guys who are kind of jerks” (this community has around 80,000 members), and sitting #1) in the dark #2) in silence #3) in public is about the most you can do with such a man without a social worker getting involved. These brown-tanned bastards shave their legs and carve lightning bolts in the sides of their mullets; they glue rat-fuzz to their upper lips, and my recent gym membership reveals that, owing to the generally straight nature of Asian hair follicles, they all possess carpet-dense pubic hair exceeding a miraculous six inches in length. You’d think that would make it hard to wear underwear. By the way, I should probably mention right here: when I signed up at my gym, they asked me if I had any tattoos or piercings; I said no. Then they asked me, point-blank, if I was gay. In Japan, it’s not “don’t-ask don’t-tell”, it’s “if asked, lie”. One of the men at the gym, gray-haired, bowling-ball-built, body rippling like molasses, comes in every night apparently at 9pm, just to take a shower and bath. His pubes are impossible. I was standing in the shower stall one night, maybe my second time ever in the gym — the shower stalls have shoulder-high doors, and stand right in front of a frigid-cold shock-bath. I heard a horse breathing over my shoulder. I turned around. There was this man. He snorted and turned around. I went back to my shower. Seconds later, the man dumped a bucket of frigid water over my head, made a fierce tongue-clicking sound, dropped the bucket clattering onto the floor, and turned his attention elsewhere.

My experience with Coke Zero has opened me to a world of artificial sweeteners. Once you’ve gotten accustomed to the taste of one fake drink, trying another one isn’t difficult. Diet Coke, while not at all delicious, isn’t impossible to keep in the stomach, not anymore. I noticed this during my trip to America, which would be nearly a year ago now. Eventually, the chicken, egg, or evolutionary ancestor question comes into play, with deafeningly postmodern results: how did I ever come to enjoy Coca-Cola in the first place? Was it the caffeine? Or the slogan?

Either way, I ended up open-minded enough to try a can of Diet A&W bought from a corner market in San Francisco. It was excellent. I couldn’t believe how delicious it was. “Why don’t they advertise this?” I wondered. Why had I never heard anything about this drink before? The answers were immediately obvious: root beer wasn’t a mainstream enough beverage for people to care that much about it, and even if they did, the market had been sullied by the likes of Diet Dr. Pepper, whose slogan simply advertises the drink as “Diet Dr. Pepper Tastes More Like Regular Dr. Pepper”. More like Regular Dr. Pepper than what? Than ocean water? Than urine? Than it did previously? If the makers of A&W Root Beer were to make a television advertisement saying that their drink tastes very close to regular A&W Root Beer, people would groan; they’re used to being lied to. This is the marketing environment People Like Me have to deal with; this is why everything is going viral. You can’t sell a drink by saying it’s “good” anymore. You can’t sell a Coke by simply telling people “Enjoy Coca-Cola”; you can’t sell a Pepsi by saying “Have a Pepsi”. It has to be bullshit or nothing.

In the midst of this maelstrom, here I am, enjoying Diet A&W Root Beer. I don’t care what anyone thinks. I don’t care what society thinks. I don’t care what my parents think — they can’t tell me that I’m limited to two sodas a day, anymore. Here I am, in the real world, and alone, and considering the logistics. I suppose this is what love must feel like. If this were America, I could see my Diet A&W every day. I could drive to the nearest Vons and be done with it. I could keep these canned bastards forty-eight deep in my mammoth refrigerator. However, I have made the nearly adult decision to live in a country clear on the other side of the globe. The people here walk great distances every day; they can and will smoke eight packs of cigarettes every twenty-four hours and still live to see age ninety. Obesity isn’t a problem here, it’s a misdemeanor. I live in a nation of third-world marketing practices and zeroth world life expectancy. I’d be a rube to fool you into thinking those were related. What I’m saying is they don’t care for diet beverages here, really, because they don’t need them. And here I am, suddenly sixty pounds lighter thanks to the doctor’s identification of my Little Problem with sugar. I arrive back from a trip to the old country with a newfound thirst. I ponder all the logistics.



There’s the Foreign Buyer’s Club, which will sell me a case of 24 cans of Diet A&W for 2,307 yen. They will arrive between 32 and 36 days after shipping (literally, on a ship), and I will pay 2,400 yen for each case shipped. That just doesn’t seem cost-effective. I’m rich, to be sure, though I certainly didn’t get rich by wasting money. The most mind-numbingly simple and cheap way to get Diet A&W appeared before me on an early morning this January: Yokota Air Base, in West Tokyo. With the help of a friend who owes me a series of favors and possesses military credentials, I am able to infiltrate the base and purchase cases of Diet A&W tax-free and discounted. The only drawback is that it’s a ten-minute walk from the BX on base to the station of Higashi-Fussa — and then I need to change trains anywhere from three to six times, going up and down stairs in train stations too old to have escalators or elevators.

The first couple of runs to the base earned me three cases of A&W per trip, at the cost of a humbling realization of precisely how weak I grow. The mornings after my back and arms were sore. I filled the massive shoe-closet in my apartment building with cans of Diet A&W. I can’t imagine what else to put in there. Seriously, who owns 96 pairs of shoes? Seriously? Not any single man I know, nor any married woman, either. Months passed on, ice melted, dew dried up, my hair changed color twice, I obtained a pair of glasses with solid gold studs, and I now possess something of the world’s most fashionable mullet.



Every time I go to the Air Force base, I present myself as an increasingly abstract vision of that man who came here all those months ago and first walked away with cases of Diet A&W. Stephen King could likely write a novel about the girl who runs the cash register at the Taco Bell there, as she starts to suspect that when this man with the Diet A&W leaves, it is to another world, where the rays of the sun only make a man pale and more gorgeous. Somehow, the discipline required of ritualistically infiltrating a US Military installation and carrying out national treasures has seeped into other aspects of my life. The simple art of getting on the right train so as to make it to the final changing point without having to wait nearly sixty minutes for the last train (which goes one stop) has deepened my already respectable sense of punctuality in ways I had not imagined possible. I appreciate the lessons the Yokota ritual has taught me the way a hard-time-doing prisoner’s triceps appreciate hard labor: after many months, the benefits are clear. Still, it’d be nice to be without the hassle.

Mel Gibson once said that “Every man dies — not every man truly lives”. Which, then, is the “goal” of life? To die, or to truly live? Deciding that death is the goal is the easy way out; trying to truly live will only end up confusing, because there’s always room for improvement in everything.

I look at myself in the mirror lately, and I think about how all I really want is to look nice and not feel discomfort. I want to sit and listen to delicious music and eat delicious meals. As the goal draws near, tiny things become huge. The more content I become in my life — the fuller my cupboard becomes with Diet A&W Root Beer — the more intensely the small things frustrate me. Just the other day, I nearly screamed at the miniature pine tree that stands on the other side of the high wall in front of my apartment building: whenever I walk by, at a high speed, eager to Be Home, that tree whips by in the corner of my peripheral vision, and I always mistake it for a microsecond as being a loiterer. Summer came fiercely, and I realized that I only ever really feel hot during summer if my feet are hot. I started wearing flip-flops everywhere, and summer essentially evaporated. With this victory, however, came the small issue of my jeans occasionally getting stuck under my heel; sometimes the flip-flops flip up into the jeans, and I stumble a bit, and nearly scream. Whenever I’m in my kitchen anymore, things keep falling down, like at the end of my favorite Raymond Carver story. My cutting board slips when I’m cutting vegetables. That bothers me. So I bought a little plastic container about the size of a red onion. I only ever use a quarter of a red onion when I cook anything requiring a red onion. So now I can just dice a whole red onion and put it in this air-tight container. This reduces the number of distinct occasions during which I wrestle with the cutting board during a week. Some problems still can’t be fixed, like how Gmail keeps logging me out every ten minutes, so that I get back from the bathroom and have to log in again. Then there’s MySpace, which won’t keep me logged-in no matter how hard I click “Keep me logged in”. Then come the things I can’t do anything about, like the rain — out of nowhere, it began to rain; the Apple Weather Widget went from showing six days of clear skies to six days of rain; the weatherman said we have nineteen days more ahead of us — or press releases I read reported on news sites:

“Tokyo, September 2, 2008 – Sony Computer Entertainment Japan (SCEJ), a division of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. responsible for business operations in Japan, today announced that it would release Bluetooth® installed Wireless Headset for PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3®) on October 30th, 2008, in Japan at a recommended retail price of 5,000 yen (including tax).”

That just creeps me out on so many levels.

Little by little, it occurs to me that not only have I already become an adult, I have been one for some time, perhaps for most of my life. For decades, men have known that men have known for centuries exactly what being an adult entails, and for just as many decades, many men have figured out for themselves that most of the rules don’t apply to them. I saw a report on “60 Minutes” recently about the clash of the old adults and the new adults. The new adults are children in the age of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”, constantly told they were special, given trophies merely for participating in little league. The old adults, with their “rules” and dress codes, find the new adults’ flip-flops and iPods disgusting; the new adults stress that they are more important than their companies. The old adults hire consultants to teach them how to talk to the new adults. I found the report fascinating, because it applies to me as much as it doesn’t. Some companies hire lecturers to explain to kids how to eat with a knife and fork, or keep their tattoos covered. I watch this, breathing invisible sighs of relief re: my own common sense. That’s not to say I can’t be pegged as something I’m not. I wear a tank-top and basketball shorts and flip-flops on the train in the morning, with my guitar between my legs; the old bastard in a suit sitting directly across from me doesn’t realize that I make about twice as much money as he does. He thinks I’m some freeloading bum; I’m not. I’m a pretty serious person, in real life! I have a toilet-paper-roll-long list of tofu recipes in my head, for example. Still, I wonder who, somewhere, hates me for who I actually am. Maybe nobody hates anybody for who they actually are. Maybe that’s stretching it. Some people really are despicable, I imagine. I’ll ignore them to the best of my ability.

The world has changed, as far as I can see without squinting. You make one effort to solve the diet root beer problem for the rest of your life, and just like that, it’s got you. Self-perfection rises above self-preservation. Before I know it, I have a sports club membership. It would have been 12,000 yen a month for permission to go in any time I want, seven days a week. I paid 8,000 for the right to go in after 7:30 PM on weekdays. It doesn’t bother me. I go to the office in my workout clothes, three days a week. I’ve considered buying lighter running shoes so that my bag won’t be so heavy. And then a lighter bag. I think I’ve read roughly a handful of thinkers pointing to the irony of a person in a trendy gym taking an elevator instead of the stairs, though after going to a gym for a month, I got the idea. I wish I had an elevator to take me from the locker room in the basement to the gym on the third floor. Eight flights of stairs is a bit much. Besides, most of the reason I got a membership to the gym is so that I can mentally prepare, and spiritually know that now is the time for working out. When someone destined for a date with a Stairmaster takes the elevator, they’re not being lazy, they’re knowing their own strength: forty-five minutes at 90 RPMs on that elliptical trainer in that place, and I sure as hell can’t climb those eight flights of stairs again. Why waste energy before the workout? All this really shows me is that economists are probably not all lean and ripped individuals. I think Yukio Mishima said once that no writer should not attempt bodybuilding.

Man, Yukio Mishima was fuckin’ ripped.

Now, here, in the future, I say that if I were the president of a company, I would require all job applicants to bring their iPods to the job interview, so I could assess their taste in music.

Meanwhile, the old adults still have their way, every once in a while, with the new adults. A man draws breath in my office, these days, younger than forty and still possessing the preclusion that he absolutely must not rise from his chair at lunch break; in the Japanese tradition, he must lean back in his chair, and cover his face with a white towel, pretending to sleep, on the rare chance that The Boss might walk by and look at him and think, “This man works hard”. Little does he know, The Boss here doesn’t think in such judgmental sentences, and even if he did, his first thought would likely be “This man never removes his terrifyingly unfashionable hat”.

Forward-minded as my means for acquiring income might be, every once in a while I come face to face with some remnant of the old adult world. We had a party a few months back, celebrating some gravely important event; it was held in a giant stone building with red carpets. Sneakers were absolutely against the rules, though smoking was allowed in every corner of the establishment. That says something right there. I found myself with no pairs of shoes that are not “informal”, and no pairs of pants that were not “jeans”. I scraped together a pair of gray trousers and some horribly uncomfortable sapphire blue Italian shoes. I wore a magnificently rare T-shirt. I skated by on the lowest end of the dress code; everyone else around me wore tuxedos. What a bunch of quitters. On the way home, I stood alone on the stone, anomalous outdoor subway platform of Yotsuya Station, peering into the tunnel the train was bound to barrel out of. The tunnel curved sharply not fifty meters in. The curve of the tunnel, the way the lights gradually grew closer together, reminded me of the bottom of aroller coaster. I thought about the detail in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall”: as a child, his family had lived in a house built beneath a roller coaster. You don’t stop to think of how ridiculous that is the first time you see it. These days, in this Age of Blogs, of anyone’s life being News or Entertainment in its own right, something like a house built into a roller coaster would take center stage. I felt positively horrible in those shoes. The blisters would put me off running for three days. The breeze was nice, it being still pre-summer. Something about the sadness of the bottom of the roller coaster of that moment prompted me to be hungry for some kind of affirmation. Within two weeks, The Boss would be wearing a white towel around his neck at all times, because this is something Japanese men must do during the summer. Not two days later, every other man in the office aside from me was doing the same thing. Two months would pass, and I’d be sitting in a magma-hot bath in the basement of my sports club after an excruciating and excellent workout, and one man after another would get in the extra-large tub, fold a white towel into a square, and place it on the top of his head. I can imagine these same people covering their faces with these same towels at their desks at work; I can imagine them causing pain for everyone in the office with their detailed and apologetic emails regarding their most recent perfunctory judgment calls: “I took it upon myself to decide that the priority rankings of each item on the spreadsheets should be color-coded differently. ‘S’ rankings used to be purple; they are now red; ‘A’ rankings used to be red; they are now orange.” Nothing is hardly as fake as a square folded towel on top of the head. What function does that serve, really? We have cubby holes for towels right outside the bath. You’re not allowed to carry any fabric into the water. You might as well leave the towel outside. No, they put the towel on top of the head because hundreds of years of wood-block prints exist detailing Japanese men with folded-up white towels atop their heads, in baths. Ancient caricatures have become a Thing To Be. In five hundred years the President of the United States might be required to have an affair with his secretary every Thursday night in front of a live studio audience.

Disorder in the world; the slippery slope of social whatever somehow lands me toppling onto the doorstep of Costco.

Costco has several locations in the Tokyo megalopolitan area. I tracked to the one closest to my home, thinking maybe they had Diet A&W Root Beer. The punctuality my Yokota ritual had enforced in my everyday life seeped all over everything, leaving my time pre-micro-managed at every possible microsecond. I no longer had time to wait for trains every second Saturday. I figured I could end the drought with one trip to Costco every two months: for just 500 yen, I’d heard, you can ship a giant box full of food or whatever directly to your home. I’d figured I could fill up maybe five boxes with ultra-cheap root beer and let that be that.

They didn’t have root beer. They did, however, have something else I didn’t know I couldn’t live without — super-cheap cans of black beans. I loaded up and had them delivered, along with some two-liter bottles of Pace Picante Sauce. In addition to being minorly disappointed with how Costco miraculously only stocks one variety of every brand of anything, I was momentarily taken aback by the high ceilings and the thuggish appearance of every customer. In Japan, to crave value is something of a venial sin. An upright citizen is supposed to respect a merchant by paying them as much as possible for their services. The people in Costco were of a different breed — they of lightning-bolt-mullets and near-black tans and diamond-studded cellular phone straps and rat-fur glued to their upper lips. I was surprised at the range of ages in positively loaded Japanese thugpeople. They all have such amazing wives, with balloon-like breasts, scalpel-sliced eyelids, bleached hair, ketchup-stained five-hundred-dollar D&G T-shirts. Two months later, the beans proved not enough, so I returned to Costco for more deep depression, more goods (got cranberry juice, too), and more pizza. The pizza is delicious, and violently cheap. The downside is that you have to eat it sitting down at these slippery plastic picnic table benches. Aforementioned Amazing Wives will sit at these benches with positively flabbergasted scowls on their faces for hours on end, their children screaming for no reason. It’s hard to get a place to sit when you need to eat that pizza already. I’m not kidding — the last time I went to Costco, every seat at every picnic table was occupied by a Japanese woman who looked like she’d just had her ability to be not disappointed surgically removed, all feverishly writing something on her cellular phone. A scrounge around the warehouse would reveal several soccer-teams’ worth of street toughs putting their backs into filling a shopping cart with premium steaks. I never felt more out of place in my life. One such man paid his bill and rolled his cart up to the food court. The man couldn’t have been taller than five feet, with a glittering zirconium in his nose. A woman and her six children between the ages one and seven stood up without being told. They left their dumpsworth of garbage behind, and followed the man. They must have owned a fucking bus. My friend and I seized the vacated table, threw away the nobles’ trash, marked our place with our bags and receipts, and went about ordering pizza. Minutes later, I was filling my cup with Diet Coke (80 yen for unlimited refills is a concept that actually doesn’t exist in Japan), pressing the paper cup to the metal bar, the Diet Coke just shashing out like a surprised tomcat. Two speeds exist for Coke spraying from a finely tuned fountain: zero, and huge. My cup was filling at huge speed. A woman wearing Dior sunglasses larger than her head and a baseball cap that was, quite frankly, probably impossible walked right up to the soda fountain, cellular phone pressed against her ear, not speaking, with a cup in her hand. My Diet Coke was three-quarters full — a second away from being completely full — when she nonchalantly pressed her cup against mine, hesitated for a millisecond, snorted in her nose, and forced my cup out of the way. She stood there filling up her cup. I stood behind her, kind of twitching, eyes narrowing to evil slits. What kind of person does this, really? In America, she’d have been punched in the back of the head. Probably killed!

She turned away, without looking at me. She went back to her table, to join her gaggle of screaming children. She kept the phone pressed against her ear. Maybe she was listening to her horoscope for the next six months, updated every five minutes. I saw the front of her T-shirt. It read “MICKEY MOUSE 1928″. No picture of Mickey Mouse — just the words “MICKEY MOUSE 1928″. Something told me that this T-shirt was probably more expensive than every other T-shirt in the gift shop at Tokyo Disneyland. In an hour, I’d be sitting beneath a great stone halfpipe of a train station, thinking of rollercoasters.

A day later, I was telling a guy at work about the Diet Coke Incident, about how this woman ate three foot-long hot dogs without removing her hat or sunglasses, and how in a Russian prison camp she’d have been bashed in the back of the skull for that. He picked this up as a reference to the novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”, and then flatly reported to me that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had died the other day. Far more than I was amazed at the death’s having had occurred so recently, I was amazed that I hadn’t known Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was still alive.

In less than two weeks, I’d be ankle-deep in a plan to bulk up. My first weigh-in at my new gym revealed the sickly fact that I had dropped to less than 120 pounds. The trainer told me to eat 2,500 calories a day. I was making do on a diet of beans, nuts, and vegetables (a diet some people might find impossible) for about two weeks before the nineteen days of rain began. Unable to do laundry because here, everything must dry by air, I bought a bunch of small white tank tops. The Boss asked me what the hell had happened to my upper arms. I guess I’m looking alright. I have something like forty more pounds of muscle to gain. I’m guzzling these shakes, and veins keep popping out everywhere. It strikes me — rather violently — that this is indeed the closest a man can get to being pregnant. You look at your triceps in the mirror and feel them up, then twitch the muscle a little bit and feel it move, the way a mother must feel her son or daughter kicking within the womb. Only, no conceivable miracles occur; we are alone, and we are our own. The only child that will be born of this endeavor will be fully-grown. He will be a complete man. More than anything else, I’ve felt this trend, lately, that I am my own child. A greater (or lesser) man might see about making children the natural way, with penis and vagina and tubs of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream and Clausen pickles and nine months of yoga classes. They will watch a child grow for a long time, impressing upon it a dream of conquering the little league field. Maybe they’ll grow distasted of the way the umpires call the game if either team is leading by more than six runs at the end of the third inning; they’ll be torn between considering their child a pansy and being scared that otherwise he’ll just learn to hate the world. Around fortysomething comes the “mid-life crisis”. My generation — we of iPods and flip-flops and dreams of being CEO by Friday or you can take this job and shove it — possesses Mister Rogers-watching, mouthbreathing latte-sippers, and then people like me: indistinguishable from the pack by the old, we will go on to understand every possible outcome of a mid-life crisis despite our never having children, despite our being under thirty. Entertainment has taught us well.

Earlier this year, a man rented a car, drove from some place in Japan that was not Tokyo to some place in Tokyo, crashed the car into a crowd of people, got out of the car, and knifed a dozen bystanders to death. I’m not clear on the exact details; I won’t glorify the man by googling his chaos. Apparently, a group of gun-carrying police officers stood in a rough circle around the man, watching him stab passers-by, shouting the perfunctory Japanese ultra-polite cease-and-desist order: “Please, sir, if you could find it within yourself to humbly stop, it would be appreciated.” This is what you would say to a child who is pissing on a fruit stand, or a homeless man who has fallen asleep in your convenient store’s toilet. The officers did not draw their guns until the man had dropped the knife and put his hands up. He explained later that he had come to Tokyo to kill, actually hoping to be arrested and given the death penalty.

Nights before this event occurred, I watched a movie on DVD that told the true story of an attractive young man who had been accused of perversion by a teenage girl in a crowded train. She said he groped her. He said he was on his way to an important job interview, and of course he didn’t grope her. An eyewitness says she was pretty sure the man didn’t grope the girl. The man is jailed. The police find pornography of the full-grown-woman variety in his apartment. This is taken as evidence of the man’s pedophilia. The man endures a year in prison and multiple court dates, during which eyewitnesses indicate that they did not actually see the man touch the girl. The girl, when asked to look at the man’s face, says she’s “not sure” he was really the one who had touched her. This is a painstakingly true story: the man, after telling precisely the same story in precisely the same words for one year, is eventually convicted and sentenced to three years in prison with no chance of parole, on the grounds that a possibility exists that he is lying, and if he is lying, that makes him kind of a warped person.

Days later, a dozen police officers failed to draw their guns. Days after this, I was fumbling through my bag for the keys to my apartment when three police officers grabbed me, nightsticks in hand, and asked what I was doing at this fancy building. “I live here”, I said, found the keys, and opened the door.

You should see the police officer hired to enforce the “no bike parking” law at the foot of this office building. The building had previously employed a security guard, though the task proved impossible, and it was the local government’s rule, anyway, that bikes not be allowed here. The police officer stationed downstairs is a Yoda-like man with Coke-bottle glasses, time-warped a half-second before a myocardial infarction. He holds out his little doily-fluffing white gloves and stutters “P-p-p-p-p-please?” to short-haired businesswomen in smart black skirt suits as they bounce off their bikes and do the built in locks. At any given second, more than five hundred bikes clutter the footprint of this building.

Every ten feet in the ward of Suginami is a bright red sign proclaiming that absolutely no smoking is tolerated on the streets. Yet the police never stop a single passer-by, probably because they smoke themselves, maybe because they’re afraid of confrontation. Where is the enemy? The enemy is everywhere. The enemy is in the drug store: 4,000 yen for a diet shake box that advertises “twenty different flavors for twenty days”. At the top of the escalator in the department store, with a display proudly proclaiming “All Funeral Goods 50% Off”, black gloves and white pearls and black suits. In the organic supermarket, where every customer still takes milk from the back of the refrigerator. No man who has seen a girl with dyed-blue hair and a vintage “Enjoy Coca-Cola” T-shirt can ever write what Borges would consider literature. Subtlety is lost on us; instead of dreaming of burning suns and the whisper of wind in the willows, we dream about looking at our cellular phones and seeing that we’re late for work, then we wake up and realize we’re not late for work, then we fall asleep again and dream that somehow, Jack Nicholson is dead, and no one told us about it. We wake up in a cold sweat, thinking we should check Wikipedia.

I go to a fashionable electro party in Tokyo, two days removed from the experience that made me understand, once and for all, how and why a man comes to hate young people. A kid I’d never met, who had come to Japan with reportedly no money, who was staying in someone else’s bedroom (the someone else kicked out on the street) asked me point-blank not three minutes after being introduced to me if I knew where he could get some dank ganga. He stressed that he was “good for it”. I emerged from the electro party two days later to see sun on the street. The bouncer chatted me up; he said I didn’t look like I belonged with all the cotton candy inside. One by one girlbubbles floated out, either surprised that the sun was up or uttering the perfunctory single-word conversation of the moment: “It’s so hot out here”. An Australian man with a handlebar mustache and a black vinyl outfit clapped me on the shoulder and told me I was one of God’s children. He was as gay as a potato in a sack of apricots.

In an hour I was on a train, alone. It was the first train. It was full. The train was heading fast at what might as well have been a brick wall. I lived at that brick wall of a town, the last stop. The train stopped at the second-to-last stop. Someone sitting on the end got up and got out. Everyone else was waiting for the wall. They must have all intended to switch to the Chuo Line. I eyed the empty seat hungrily. No one took it. The doors closed, the train moved again. The seat stayed empty. The train stopped in the middle of the tunnel between the second to last town and the last town. The train stayed stopped for two minutes. I took my headphones out of my ears. No driver was apologizing. I looked at the empty seat. I eyed it hungrily. No one took it. There we all were. Everyone on that train was an adult by default. Five minutes passed. I took the seat. I sat there for ten minutes, watching the woman directly across from me hamfist her way around a Rubik’s Cube. She rotated the cube around at all angles, randomly flicking sides. She had no idea what she was doing. She was such a normal-looking woman. Her husband probably spent lunch breaks in his chair with a towel over his face. Why was she on a train at five on Saturday morning? She’d probably stayed all night in the office, making copies of printed spreadsheets for which the higher-up had regretted to inform her he was not authorized to email her the data copy. She wrestled on with the Rubik’s Cube, oblivious to the wrongness of every turn. I remembered two things: one was a moment in a television show I’d watched a month or so earlier, in which a little kid who is actually insane tells a psychologist “no” whenever he thinks “yes” or “yes” whenever he thinks “no”, and is deemed perfectly sane; second was the day my mom bought a Rubik’s Cube at a garage sale, gave it to my little brother, who tried to eat it, and then eventually gave it to me; I got a Sharpie and wrote an arrow pointing up on the center square on one side, and proceeded to solve the Cube in less than an hour. I had immediately identified that the cube was easily solvable if you resisted the temptation to rotate it around. The arrow enforced the bearings with which I had started the process. My mother saw that I had defaced the cube and took huge offense to it, alerting my teacher, and asking my father in perceived private if this might make me certifiably gay. Maybe, at this point, back in the present, I had attained something of a look in my eye. When the train announcer started to speak, saying that we’d be rolling in just two minutes, guaranteed, the woman looked sharply up, and made eye contact with me. This felt like a revolution. I tell you. It seriously felt like something. She looked sharply down to the Rubik’s Cube in her hand, stuffed it into her purse, then stood without ceremony, turned to the right, and dashed for the partition to the next car. She opened the door, stepped in, and closed the door behind her. I sat motionless, now hungrily eyeing her empty seat. I remembered that night in Yotsuya several weeks ago, when a woman on the train home had been crying, and everyone was ignoring her. I remembered the morning two days previous, when my train’s departure had been delayed by ten minutes because a troop of plainclothes police officers were scanning it with a bona-fide Geiger counter. A stereotypical TV detective stopped and stood in front of me, reached to the rack over my head, and removed a stack of four boxes of calligraphy brushes. “Are these yours?” “No.” “From now on, try to report any suspicious articles.” I thought of Costco, and Diet A&W Root Beer, and of protein shakes, and of building muscles. The elements of my ideal nonsense-ignorant existence all lie clearly within grasping distance, as easy to understand as the beat of a bass drum. Actually putting this all together and being content, at this point, however, is like dictating a Rubik’s Cube to a blind person. You’d have to explain what nine colors are visible on every face at every given time. Maybe, if he’d been blind his whole life, if he didn’t know what “Green” was, he’d actually have an easier time than that lady did. Once again, the ancient corollaries float into view: when one sense is restricted, the others snap to razor-sharpness.

It has come to my attention recently that I will probably be incapable of going outside after age forty. They say that, for most members of “my generation”, adulthood begins at twenty-six. Here I am, scheduling a “mid-life crisis” at twenty-nine. From now until then, and even after, I will live forever, until the end, as the faithful steward of a weaker, blinder man inside. My kinked internal monologue these days has come to resemble dictation of Rubik’s Cube faces to the eccentric blind millionaire. It’s not difficult; it’s hardly frustrating. It’s just there. There are occasionally good mornings, where the world is alive like an old pop song, where people-watching isn’t a hobby so much as a livelihood. A man in a short summer kimono and Chuck Taylors, the bank security guard with his white-gloved hands on his hips, the old woman with a black visor covering her face, the man in OR scrub pants and hemp sandals and an Adidas soccer shirt, sitting and sipping beer in front of a restaurant that won’t open until five PM. The sun is shining, the birds are singing in invisible trees. Stabbed into this glistening watermelon of a moment are shards of frustration, reminders of everything I’m trying to ignore. Lately, I’m forcing myself to no longer ignore my body; I’m wearing tank-tops and shorts and catching glimpses of myself in mirrored surfaces. Today, I got stuck behind a woman who was walking — I counted — fourteen chihuahuas, each on their own little string. They scrambled like amateur fighter pilots around her ankles. She stepped high and dainty to avoid them. The dogswarm engulfed the breadth of the sidewalk; a cloud drifted in front of the sun. I looked at the chihuahuas and remembered that I’d forgotten my umbrella. I realized I had an umbrella in my office. I didn’t worry too much. The woman took to stopping every three meters to remove any and all danger of squashing one of her preciouses. She stopped, yanked the bundle of strings out directly in front of her body, inspiring the stragglers. Each chihuahua had a little sweater. There could be no coincidence. She was not a professional chihuahua-dandy: she owned each one. Eventually, my internal atomic clock told me my walk was taking 33% more time than usual. I took to trying to step around the woman. It was difficult. Eventually, the woman’s side-to-side body shuffling came to annoy me as much as the dogs. “Come on!” I yelled, perhaps very loudly, in English. She turned around, and there she was, basset-hound-faced, big, gold, goggle-glasses, liver spots, white-trimmed black bingo visor drawn down. She opened her mouth; she closed it; her nose moved. The dogs were yapping. Two days before this — no joke — I stood at the vending machine on my street, just two minutes’ walking distance from my apartment door. I put 130 yen in a vending machine and was about to select Coke Zero just as my iPod Shuffle died. For God’s sake. I’d forgotten to charge it overnight. I’d have to charge it in the office if I wanted music during my workout. With rock and roll evaporated, I woke slowly to the shape of the world. On the Church Street shopping arcade in Ogikubo, they play classical music from 9am to 6pm every day. The other day, it was some minor Vivaldi. I don’t know who picks the music. They probably think they’re smart. Maybe they are smart. The compositions are always the quiet type. The volume is always booming. The Church Street shopping arcade has been around for over a hundred years. Some of the buildings are new, others are shacks; vacant lots appear from time to time. Opposite a famous ramen shop — often listed in the top ten of ramen experts’ “best ramen shops in Tokyo” — one little knick-knack shop shut down a few months ago. In a day, the shop was transformed, with hot fluorescent pink Kinkos-made large-font signs: “SELL YOUR GOLD AND PLATINUM HERE”. Two days later, another sign — this one hot green — appeared, vertical, standing by the door: “WE DO NOT SELL: WE ONLY BUY”. They pump Eurobeat out of a little cassette radio sitting on the brick sidewalk. The place is an eyesore. The place is an earsore. When you walk by with a dead iPod, and hear that Eurobeat flipping off that bodacious Vivaldi, when you witness Our Modern Times lying on its back and clawing at the underbelly of the past, you can’t help not feeling perfect or in love with anything at all. My Coke Zero vending machine stands perpendicular to the two-meter wide Church Street, facing the service entrance of a kindergarten. A legendary pancake shop across the right hand side of the street. Beyond that, a little curry shanty; beyond that, a 24-hour convenient store. What caught my eye two days ago was happening in the street outside the pancake shop: an old woman with a right-angle spine lay on her side smack in the middle of the brick road, the hump in her back forming an arrow pointing directly at my home. To her left and right stood handfuls of people, some of them murmuring with folded arms (they just as well might have been observing modern art), some of them with their phones against their ears. I sniffed; it was typical, that, even in the case of a life-or-death situation, that vile overeagerness to look “busy” would rear its head. Rather than turn to their fellow men and women and say “I’ll call 911″, they all called 911, independent of one another. This isn’t even the point of the story. I observed this silent hum of approaching death for a full twenty seconds, wondering if fate was about to deliver a punch line. I’m not sure what you could call what did happen: barrelling down Church Street, where “NO SMOKING” and “NO BIKING” signs are glued face-up to the brick road every twenty feet, came a fifty-something man in a hemp rendition of a Panama hat, flaming cigarette between his lips, pumping his bike like it had gone out of style yesterday and he needed to get out of human sight as soon as possible. Something to the right must have caught his eye long before he caught mine. He precariously picked up his right hand from the handlebars, and removed the cigarette from his lips. His neck continued to crane backward. I followed the route between his front tire and the crunched-up abdomen of the woman who lay in an increasingly fetal position in the middle of the road. Give or take a few cigarette-manipulation-related wobbles, he was dead on course. I stood there with my Coke Zero in hand, palm growing increasingly frigid. I sighed perhaps the longest sigh I can ever remember sighing. I had half a mind to stand in the middle of the street, wave my arms, and say “Hey”. The other half of my mind possessed optimism: there was just no way this was going to happen. Just four days previous, I’d been in the supermarket, where a man with a baby in his backpack and another baby harnessed to the front of his torso — a man dual-wielding babies — pushed a shopping cart with his neck fixed fascinatedly to the left. I’d stared at him as I approached, in need of paprika, for a full five seconds, knowing in my heart that any man with two children must have a shred of responsibility. If he was careless, he’d only have one. On second six, I had to sidestep him. He had failed to face front. Three days later, this old smoker on a bike, pedalling harder and harder. Not a single member of the two groups of pre-funeral passersby, gazes fixed respectfully on the crumpled woman, dared to turn around. I let the sand of time fall through my fingers. I could have done something. I didn’t. When the man finally looked forward, it was too late; his bike collided with the crumpled woman’s shins. He let out a yelp. Not a split-second later he lay on his back atop a “NO SMOKING” sign, hat some three meters away, groaning like he’d just lowered his chest into a scalding hot bath, cigarette between his right index and middle fingers. Two of the onlookers went to assess the old man. I thought for a second — I recall this at the risk of being thought elitist — that I’m a better human being than those people in at least some regards. Then again, how can anyone say for certain? Life is and always will be a matter of place, time, and facing direction. More often than not, more than I happen to be in the right one at the right time, I find myself in the not-wrong one at the neutral time. That’ll do for now. Sooner or later, however, I’m almost afraid it just won’t be good enough.

I suppose this is precisely where rock and roll enters the equation.