Sugardisaster

One Thousand Grasses

The girl, of course, is good. They all are. In some way or another. Curvy and funny, smart with big, bright eyes. Their hair is great and they smell good and when they smile everything is ok. Even if it really isn’t. Then again, in some way or another, they are all bad as well. This is why stamina is key. The good part, which is so good at the beginning of getting to know the girl, goes so fast. It is like driving a red sports-car during a cool, sunny day on the coast highway with no one but the birds flying and the waves doing their thing. Sooner or later the clouds come out or the cops show up or you just run out of gas. If you are anything like me fellow driver, it would not be strange at all if your car stopped one day, looked at you and said, “I don’t think this is going to work out,” and just drove off. That happens all the time in my life. I guess in some way how jobs you wear khaki to in office buildings are to me is how I am to girls. Some girls. Hopefully not all. Though I am quite good at meeting specifically this sort.

One Thousand Grasses

The Great Buddha at Kōtoku-in (高徳院), a 13.35 meter high, 93 ton bronze statue of Amida Buddha cast in 1252, represents a high point of Jōdo shū Buddhism during the Kamakura period. The mudrā seen here is the Dhyana (上品上生), normally practiced during Zazen (坐禅) meditation. Besides ushering in Jōdo shū in the 12th century, the Kamakura period introduced a form called Rinzai- largely influenced by Fa-tsang’s Hua Yen Sect (Kegon) and the earlier Yui Shih (Hossō) or Consciousness Only Sect-which is the first appearance of Zen in Japan. 1227 dates the arrival of Sōtō Zen with Dōgen Zenji, introducing the kōan tradition to Japan. Lucky us.

Oddly enough it is the Rinzai Zen school of thought, brought alongside tea from China by Eisai Zenji, which mainly employs the use of the kōan as a method of meditation, while Sōtō sticks to shikantaza (just sitting), though many practice both. The flourishing of Buddhism and introduction of Zen to Japan is, in part, largely due to the breaking away of the powerful shōgun Minamoto no Yoritomo from the old tradition of Korean and Chinese-influenced Kyoto to the new militarism of Kamakura. It is during the Kamakura period that the invasion of the Mongols by Kublai Kahn’s troops is attempted in Fukuoka. These troops, thought to be one of the largest naval operations in history, were twice rebuffed by what is now the infamous kamikaze (神風), later invoked by suicide bombers during World War II. Between the first and second invasion the samurai at Hakata built a wall or series of walls, which served to do two things: 1) to cut off landing access to the invading Mongols thus making them vulnerable to typhoons (aka divine wind) by lengthening their time at sea and 2) to cut off Japan from the outside world. The invasion was largely due to the shogunate’s continued brush-off of numerous warnings to pay homage to the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty rulers. The literal actions of this period can be seen in retrospect as the metaphoric rise of the desire to consolidate and concentrate internal power toward a greater realization, i.e. the spurning of the outside world (repelling of Mongol armadas attributed to Shintō thundergod Raijin), the building of walls (literal and figurative), and the flourishing of Zen as well as other forms of Buddhism. This is the Japanese people looking inward for all their answers, whether physical or mental, artificial or natural. Talk about cultivating one’s own garden.

Excerpt from a forthcoming article on Wabi-sabi & The Ruin of Nature in Japan.

Chinese philosophy: Wu Xing 五行

• Earth (土: tǔ)
• Water (水: shuǐ)
• Fire (火: huǒ)
• Wood (木: mù)
• Metal (金: jīn)

Japanese philosophy: Godai 五大

• Earth (地 Chi or tsuchi)
• Water (水 Sui or mizu)
• Fire (火 Ka or hi)
• Wind (風 Fū or kaze)
• Sky or Heaven (空 Kū or sora)

Aristotelian Physics

• Earth, which is cold and dry.
• Water, which is cold and wet.
• Fire, which is hot and dry.
• Air, which is hot and wet.
• Aether, which is the divine substance that makes up the heavenly spheres and heavenly bodies (stars and planets).

Buddhist doctrine describes five aggregates

• “form” or “matter” – rūpa: external and internal matter. Externally, rupa is the physical world. Internally, rupa includes the material body and the physical sense organs.
• “sensation” or “feeling” – vedanā: sensing an object as either pleasant or unpleasant or neutral.
• “perception”, “cognition” – saññā: registers whether an object is recognized or not.
• “mental formations”, “volition” – saṅkhāra: all types of mental habits, thoughts, ideas, opinions, compulsions, and decisions triggered by an object.
• “consciousness” – viññāṇa: cognizance.

4 Noble Truths

• The Nature of Suffering (Dukkha): “This is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.”
• Suffering’s Origin (Samudaya): “This is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there, that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.”
• Suffering’s Cessation (Nirodha): “This is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, nonreliance on it.”
• The Way (Mārga) Leading to the Cessation of Suffering: “This is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is the Noble Eightfold Path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.”

Four Noble Truths → Suffering → Aggregates → Form → Four (or Five) Elements

Ta da! Well, now that that’s settled, we can get down to drinking…

G

Guilty pleasures. Everybody has at least one. Ask around. Your family and friends aren’t likely to spill it that quickly. It takes quite a few cocktails and not a little bit of tact to get it out of people you know well. Which stands to reason, after all, you know them. They have to face you again, likely soon, and knowing that you know what makes them tick is a bit, well unnerving. Strangers on the other hand, that’s another story. People you don’t know, that don’t know you, are more likely to tell you the truth, and quickly. Would it surprise you to know that, under the guise of Psych 101 experiments back at university I used to ask all the volunteers what their guilty pleasure was and, quicker than Musashi in a sword fight, people were willing, no they wanted- got excited in fact- to tell their secrets to someone, especially their dark ones. I recorded quite a lot of the following:

• Deep Fried Sushi (deep fried anything really)
• Sex with Fat people
• Dessert at Breakfast
• Porn (Kind of generic yes, but best to keep it safe as people tend to get specific on this one)
• Making Porn
• Chocolate
• Listening to Oasis

Admittedly most guilty pleasures, according to western Aristotelian / Freudian ideas of “Guilt”, have to do with the basic drives: Food, Sex, and the occasional oddity showing up to validate Chaos Theory, but hearing all these stock responses pop up again and again made me wonder what exactly it takes to activate the reptilian brain. Then I moved to Japan. The rest was easy.

Call it the summer of 2005. I had been living in Fukuoka for over a year and was feeling the sort of inward glow of a white man on safari, but in a good way. I was speaking the language with some fluency, dabbling in the arts and only dating one woman (not one of my students), a girl of natural beauty and, not being from the city, old-fashioned virtuosity. It being a run-of-the-mill summer in Japan: humid and full of cicada din, fireworks and little responsibility for the local non-Japanese community, of course I drank regularly with several gentlemen from London who were interested in changing all that I had going for me, specifically the one girl part. It was they who introduced me to the supposedly sanitized underworld of the Paid Clinical Trial Volunteer. They, the Sick Crew as I had dubbed them (we went boating a lot), kept mentioning large cash payments, few questions and repeatedly, Russian girls. That was the clincher for them, Russian girls, whom of course had little understanding of the English language, low morals and standards and would be plentiful in the southernmost prefecture of Kagoshima where the trial was to be held. As the beers flowed from the tap into the that long, hot July night and we concocted our stories to get out of a week of work- paid of course- I went along with the bulging eyes and exaggerated fish tales, along with the visions of crystal blue-eyed Muscovite princesses on holiday at their Japanese dachas, welcoming us international rabble with open arms and feeding us fresh Beluga caviar and ice cold vodka from sensuous matryoshka dolls until we were sated. At the end of the night, a pact was made. Sputum was expectorated. Blood was shook on.

What's your guilty pleasure?

In reality, in Japan at least, the paid medical trial volunteer gig is a lucrative and widespread phenomenon that is eerily clean and bereft of the toothless guy you meet coming out of the bar at 4am yelling “Masaji, masaji…Cheap!” or any other devious intention, at least so far as I knew. Imagine any part of legitimate Japan that interacts with the body: visits to the doctor’s office, acupuncture, reflexology, facials, manicures and pedicures, the shiatsu massage and haircut combination. Choose any one of them and visualize the sterile detail. Everything is painstakingly clean and sanitized. The practitioner is soft-spoken and well-versed. You are guided with polite smiles and well-placed cues toward a sense of extreme security and relaxation. There is a strong feeling of otherworldliness present. You can allow your worries to drop away as you are guided toward the floating world and the pure land via the true word.

All hyperbole- and Russian girls- aside, it was that week that I found my guilty pleasure: I love to be poked and prodded, attached EKG suction cups to, tickled with stethoscopes, weedled and needled for blood, more blood, more and more blood, urine, stool, hair, mucus, saliva, nail clippings, x-rays, and awarded with motherly grins, cold hands, candy stripers, sponge baths, warm hands, chupa chups, happy face stickers, three-a-day bentō meals, cat-napping, clinic-issued sweatsuits, doctor-led seminars on pharmaceutical trials, vending machines, Bikkle, and of course the equivalent in Japanese Yen of 3000USD.

Arranging paid leave for the death of my beloved, though imaginary, brother Miguel had been easier than previously thought. What has been difficult since then is getting out of that world. It’s a syndicate. It’s a cycle with its own regulars who roam from north to south regular as the seasons. You come to recognize familiar faces and slowly conversations emerge, though names never do. You are a part of something bigger than yourself. Syphilis testing in Sendai. Nausea in Nagoya. Tokyo Tuberculosis. You become a number on a roll sheet, a face on a card, an undergarmentless Caucasian with a BMI of 24 and Triglycerides in the Michael Jordan range. The paid monetary incentive for volunteers of the clinical trial, with which the four of us, having had to pretend we had no idea of the others’ identities during testing, drank our fill for the three-day weekend we had before trekking back to Fukuoka for work on Monday, made us- and the surrounding community (often in awe of the veracity with which we consumed the local favorite- Imo Shochu)- a little richer, but it was something bigger than temporary cash in hand which made me wiser than before. It was a sense of community, of donation, of blindly giving oneself to science, as well as the reassuring realization that despite my body being of certain scientific and therefore monetary value, I am special in a way that cannot be forced from me, but merely whooshed away by softly-spoken, foot-massaging, gently-caressing female Japanese medical workers of a median age of 25-40 and a smile so pure and eyes so warm, the angels speak reverently.

As seen in Japanzine August 2009 (Click to download pdf)

Everyone loves a good confession, be it the confessor or the confessee. We all crave the telling of tales and to be the teller of tales, so much the better that it involves our own selves in some such way. In our vanity we consider ourselves the end-all be-all. We are the World. The World is Us.

It is thus that the following thoughts occurred to me during my ritual 7:30am ride from my dormitory style apartment to the high school of my employ, beneath the seething clouds, fat with rainy expectations prodding my inner voices ever onward.

A bit of background first. Recently I have been awarded the position of Designer for the Fukuoka Prefecture JET Guide To Life in Fukuoka (a bit redundant, yes) and being sole recipient of that previously two-person role, I have had my work cut out for me. But only since June, that is, as the editing of this 250 page collection of Fukuoka’s buenas vistas and bonnes repasts has gone past deadline, thereby truncating my own allotted design time to less than a month. Thusly am I entrenched in the good fight with complicated design programs and convoluted map layouts in all too little time so much so, my personal life of late has, unfortunately, taken a back seat.

Pedaling through the narrow rice field roads and pushing past the lolly-gagging students on their way to school, I pass by absentmindedly, my conscious biking mind negotiating the well-known route on rote, while my subconscious wandering mind meanders like the wind blowing through the rustling green bamboo surrounding me.

“Finally,” I think, “something to do! A real job. An actual design job. Finally someone has seen my work and decided to bump me up, has seen me for what I am worth, has seen fit to give me a place of power, worthy of my talent, to give me what I deserve. At last they (those powers that be) have deigned me to join the fray and see what I have to say.”

Though it should, this does not make me smile. Though it should, this does not make me happy. Though I am extremely contented by the fact that I have a job, that I have, finally, something to do, I am fearful for two reasons, contradictory in nature: 1) That the Guide is Not Enough and, all too soon, it will be over, a done deal, relegated to the dusty piles of accumulated works of nameless so-and-so”s who deserved what they got and 2) that the Guide is a Great Opportunity and all too soon the job will be done and I will have nothing to do. That I will no longer be contented and safe in my secure corner of the world, hunting and pecking away at basically – in the grand scheme – a meaningless thing. Once again I will be worthless.

Turning a corner I see a small construction of Cranes wading and hunting for bugs in the recently flooded paddy of rice sprouts, what last week boasted a king”s harvest of Barley this week reminds one of a mirthless bog of mud. Thusly does my tack change.

“Wait,” I think, “why do I deserve any of this? What have I done? A few photos published here, a few websites designed there, a stupid little Zine and I think I am owed a job doing exactly what I want because of my good looks? Grandpa was right: A quarter and your good looks will get you a cup of coffee. Of course that was back when a cup of coffee actually cost a quarter…Who are the proverbial They who supposedly owe me anything at all anyway? In this case, they are some old Japanese men who have a budget in need of expenditure, one that stipends the printing but not the workers who amass the work. They care not a wit for qualification (and in this case I am actually the most qualified, so the point is moot) but merely, in the end, for a finished product, a done deal, a Guidebook for Fukuoka Jets. Fin. I, in my sagacity, tend to attach too much importance to the whole thing, thereby sparking erratic sleeping and eating patterns, moodiness and daydreaming. I am both addicted to the perfection of this stupid little Guide and the idea of perfection in and of itself. Do I reach too far? Do I desire too much? Am I so full of folly as to miss the point of even the most basic life lessons? Here”s Buddha & Lao Tsu arm in arm, rocking to and fro, crooning in Bing Crosby fashion, ‘Be satisfied with what you have…cha cha…be content within your surroundings…cha cha cha…worldly desires bring only pain…cha cha…’”

Never Be Happy

I never thought I would be quoting Bruce Willis, but two years ago Memorial Day when I saw him play live with his blues band in a tiny bar in Idaho, he had a shirt. A simple fraying gray cotton job with what looked to be iron-on letters reading, “NEVER BE HAPPY.” Midway through the set he held it up and beseeched the crowd to follow its sage advice, saying this mantra had gotten him to where he stood today. While some people may equate his current day standing as a womanizing, hack actor divorced and balding, others point to his various successes (Moonlighting or Hudson Hawk anyone?). But I digress. This isn’t about Uncle Bruce at all. This is about all of us. We are the World.

Just because it’s obsessing and tedious and boring and mood-altering and lifestyle-upsetting and some innocuous little guidebook which no one but 130 people will ever read, should I care less than I would if I were Moses writing the Torah? Would God want me lackadaisically fretting over penning Deuteronomy? Would he mind if I placed less importance on Numbers than on Leviticus? Should I really be questioning all this in the light of a planet wracked with disease and drought, natural disasters and bad politics, condoms and meatloaf? Do any of our problems or failures, triumphs or successes add up to, like Bogey said all those years ago to Ingrid on the LAX backlot, “a hill of beans?”

Not really.

You see, the good thing about confessions is that once they’re out, they”re out. They evaporate into the thin air. Your chest rises and falls. You breathe. Look around. It’s ok. Say your Hail Marys and Jesus Forgives You. Right? Don’t you feel better now? Don’t you like knowing that whether you’re Uncle Bruce with his T-shirt or Moses with the Torah or Bogey trying to get Ilsa out of Casablanca or me with the Guide or you with your thing, that everything is alright, no matter how small and insignificant it may feel? In reality, each with our own hill of beans to contemplate, maybe Never Being Happy means that the chance of tomorrow will always be there, the chance to have your beans mix with another person”s beans, another person with whom you should care for and cook for and laugh with and play with and kiss and hug and joke and talk and run and dance and yes, maybe, maybe even love. Is that not the point of everything Bruce & Moses & Bogey & Jesus were trying to get across?

But that”s just a thought I had, me riding my broken down old bike, simple like, to my simple job in the middle of nowhere Japan. I could be you. In fact I think I am.

Damn…borrowed my friend’s shirt and got hit by a car. Smacked. Have never had so many varying corporeal-alities all painfully agreeing that something is very wrong. Can barely move my arms, got a black eye, contusions all over the place and gotta go see the cops tomorrow. Meanwhile drugs and poetry: Here’s one I wrote on the road:

This is me pretending to sleep
dodging the precious raincloud shafts of light
with well-placed pillows

She’s opened the curtains again
She, who sits some feet away from me,
applies moisturizer with demure patty-cake slaps,
ignoring the cat

Smoke from a lingering cigarette
gently caresses her unmentionables
hanging from plastic blue clothespins above my head

That always worries me.

Just outside waft in sounds of kids
playing with a volleyball I found in the dumpster
as she sighs and steps over me on the futon,
I have a catlike view of her well-stockinged thighs
and my first thought is to puncture them with my claws
To cling.
To bite.

But I don’t. And she’s gone…

Loving the narrow Japanese roads right about now