Sugardisaster

Hopefully the beach you wind up camping out at is like this one

If you’re like me and you find yourself sleeping in parks (or should you be lucky enough to be on some coast, the beach), perhaps you should widen your horizons and stretch out that hitching thumb to get bound for parts (and parks) unknown, because if you are really like me and you have already donated, burned or stored all of your worldly belongings (except your camera, flask, flashlight and a change of underwear), then you may already be noticing a different world than that which the evening news programs speak. The world slows down and the sights change, sure, but it’s more than that. It’s the lesser senses which are more greatly affected when setting out on the open road. They get enhanced as it were: smell and hearing specifically. When in the fall those crisp winds begin blowing the leaves across sharp blue skies and all you can think of is pumpkin pie and finding someone with a warm bed for the coming winter, yeah, it’s that old chimney smoke smell of fireplaces reeling you in again. A call and response with mother nature and father time. Come the warm winds of spring it’s time to stretch the legs and set out again. Here are a few rules to live by:

The first step in hitchhiking is to lose oneself in the road and allay all fear. That sounds a lot like some esoteric Buddhist precept whose punchline ends in, “…and don’t look down…” in the middle of crossing a spindly rope bridge one thousand feet above a jagged rock crested gorge. Nonetheless, this is true. And not at all harder to accomplish than reading these words. Just as Gautama Buddha taught the path to the Way rather than teaching the Way itself, so too must we approach the mindset necessary to successfully hitchhike rather than concentrate upon some supposed concretized set of values ascribable to any and all situations. The tree which bends with the gale wind survives the Typhoon, and not the mighty, inflexible oak.

Second, as implied above, you may need to reinvent yourself with each prospective driver, assuming you can speak their language. The first thought being the purest, usually works best. I have portrayed, all within a few hours of each other a: Aloha-shirt clad tourist, journalist, expectant father, wandering priest, drunken government consultant, wayward fiance trying to reunite with my soon to be betrothed, yakuza-hunted whistle-blower, and almost boring by comparison, a photographer (though all of these at one time were likely true). This again depends on your ability to communicate, so cultivating imaginative gestures cannot be underestimated. Carry lots of candy too.

Third, act the fool. It’s a playful game for you and an exciting new adventure for your chauffeur, who will be telling this around the water cooler (or teapot) for years to come. I suggest alternatively smiling, whistling, making faces at the kids, bowing, tap-dancing (perhaps oddly or not, this has always gotten me a ride very quickly, maybe because I look more like I have Parkinson’s disease than just being a weird American…), anything short of taking off your clothes or cursing the majority of passing vehicles who will not only not stop for you, but likely wouldn’t even help an old woman if she fell in the street.

Fourth, in the event of being stranded (though that is the goal, there is a gray area between being nicely stranded within easy reach of a convenience store, which means you’re ten minutes away from another ride, and being dropped off by a wacky tourist on a lonely road at dusk, i.e. screwed), unsure or feeling at all like this road is not the way you need to be going, make for the nearest convenience store, which are the lifeblood of the successful hitchhiker. Above all keep hydrated, keep the blood flowing, keep moving, it’ll keep you warm in winter and breezy in summer.

Fifth, start early. Hitching after dark is difficult and dangerous. Plus the likelihood that a generous family or some rave-going hottee will pick you up and offer you comfort, food and shelter for the night significantly drops alongside the setting sun. In northern countries in the summertime this is not as much a problem as it is in Japan for instance, where at the summer solstice daylight peaks at 7:45pm. All that considered your chances of being picked up by some friendly neighborhood Yakuza do increase the darker it gets, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on how many fingers you have. You may want to spread out your sleeping bag on any patch of grass you find and hunker down with your flask for the night.

Buddha says, From here carry a flashlight & a flask

Overall, hitchhiking is a pretty solitary pursuit, some would even say boring. You get used to being alone, walking down roads you have no idea of where they end, talking to yourself, drinking, urinating, bathing in public. It’s a strange kind of amusement. One night on the pacific coast of Shizuoka while drinking a bottle of Bass Ale (somehow cheaper than the domestic brands) on the corner of the main square after a long day of hitching, I overheard:

Three old men shuffling by half-soused, pointing to a coffee can on the bench next to me, “See, Shimizu’s a good town. They have ashtrays for the people.” General nodding (Um Um…) and agreement from the other two.

From an old couple passing the opposite way carrying plastic grocery bags and the man nodding in my direction says to the woman: “So, those kind of people live here too?”

“Huh?”

Either he meant people who drink beer outside the station at 9pm on Thursday nights or white guys in their 30s, although both are not out of the question. So starved as I for any kind of human interaction my mind immediately jumped to possible alternatives I’ve heard mentioned previously:

- Handsome, gay Italian ex-pats.
- Goatee dye models
- Anyone with one extremely unruly and overly long eyebrow hair that has a habit of creeping down and playing footsie with the eyelashes.
- People who sit on benches adjacent to unsuccessful fortune tellers (automatically bad for business, but shouldn’t he have known that?).
- Nighttime readers of Salman Rushdie (The Moor’s Last Sigh).
- Guys who at some point ponder masturbation as the high point (dinner’s dessert if you will) of the evening, then reconsider, citing public exposure ordinances, only to flip flop (at least) one more time if only because the thought of getting sand everywhere is a turn off, then thinking that this might actually be kind of sexy, gritty maybe, but passing out in the sand before getting anything done.

Old Kyoto © Manny Santiago

“One is not to admire the cherry blossoms only when they are in full bloom, or the moon only when it is uncovered by the clouds.”

- Yoshida Kenko – Tsurezuregusa

You remember The Trip, don’t you? Initially a ferry from Osaka will serve to reach Shanghai, after which point I will begin traveling in a westward direction overland across China, into Mongolia, past Lake Baikal and deeper on into Ekaterinburg and other Russian territory, ending in St. Petersburg (the end of the Trans-Siberian Rail) where I will begin the difficult journey of avoiding the expense that Western Europe presents, jumping over to Helsinki (or heading south into Estonia, Latvia & Lithuania) and from there to Copenhagen, which is where The Trip will get interestingly tricky.

I had initially planned to go by boat through to Seyðisfjörður in Iceland (I don’t know how to say it either), which is possible via Bergen in Norway, Esbjerg in Denmark and Scrabster in Scotland for way too many €uros. A few problems presented themselves since researching The Trip west from Iceland and onward into Greenland, Newfoundland in Canada and the continental U.S.

• Iceland is prohibitively expensive. The cheapest price for a hostel I found was €55, which would be about $75. No wonder their banks failed first and were hardest hit in the economic “downturn” of late 2008, their Big Macs are $10 apiece…
• Apparently there are no connecting ferries to Greenland, because, also apparently, no one wants to go to Greenland. The world has found out about Iceland’s ruse of misnaming the big, roadless block of ice as “Green” and decided that, well yeah, actually, why would we go there? And if we did, why would we take a boat?

Help Bring Manny Home - Donate Today!

So with the looming possibility of conquering China, marching through Mongolia, rouletting Russia, and skirting Europe to make it all the way to Iceland, only to get stuck in one of the coldest, most expensive places in the world, doesn’t seem as attractive as it did, well, hell, even before writing this (despite the solid research time already put in, I’m kind of winging it here). So the question remains: How will I cross the Atlantic Ocean?

Therefore I am attempting to put together media sponsorship for The Trip, which will begin on April 2nd (departure for Shanghai) and am seeking to find out as much as possible about alternative sea routes from Denmark or Germany through Scandinavia or other parts of Europe, and across the Atlantic to mainland North America. I will be a writing and photographing fool along the way and therefore, I am open to any suggestions and / or other possibilities, of where to procure revenue:

• Is the Atlantic hiring ex-patriot gadabouts to write about artisanal production of Airag (fermented Mongolian mare’s milk)?
• The wealthy Chinese widow market must be booming. Contacts?
• Buy a photo?
• Donate to the Cause?  (All donations are tax deductible. Ask for a receipt!).
  

  Alms for the Perambulator

  Cool $1.00 Thanks $5.00 Very Nice of You $10.00 I Can Eat Today $20.00 Amsterdam Here I Come! $100.00

  

Unsure of how much information possibly exists “out there”, but if anyone knows of any methods (including possible employment opportunities), commenting would be greatly appreciated.

“To while away the idle hours, seated the livelong day before the ink slab, by jotting down without order or purpose whatever trifling thoughts pass through my mind, truly this is a queer and crazy thing to do!”

Yoshida Kenko – Tsurezuregusa

From the rooftops of Tokyo...

I woke up in the middle of the night thinking it was raining and the clothes I had hanging outside to dry were getting wet. I sat up in bed and, listening to the stillness, I heard the definite pitter-patter of raindrops on the window, the trees, the pavement below. Yet when I went up to the roof to quickly claim my clothes, I found nothing but a chilly greeting from the wind, whistling its shrill laugh for having tricked me. Feeling that I might be in a kind of somnambulant danger of jumping off the roof at the wind’s prodding, I grabbed my workout clothes and plodded back downstairs, which upon arriving I found I couldn’t go back to sleep.

So I’m writing this. An autobiographical confession of sorts. Please bear with me.

A couple weeks ago I met a 42 year-old 5th generation Mexi-Americano from Whittier who looks 28 and tried to challenge me to a contest to see who could drink more on the street while attempting to pick up on Taiwanese hookers in the pouring rain. Normal Tuesday night in Tokyo. Though not really going any further than talking to the Formosan beauties beneath their wide umbrellas (because I don’t actually agree with prostitution- for myself anyway- and have, for the record, never paid for it) in order to get backstory for a short piece of fiction I’m working on, his- let’s call him Sancho- wherewithal proved more than suspect. That and any regional respect got thrown out with the rainwater when he ran off grinning sadistically without so much as an “adios” into the 3am downpour, leaving me alone with my snubbed Taiwanese princesses and their toothless pimps leering at me dubiously. Does that seem at least mildly childish to you? Taken out of context and out in, L.A. for example, we would likely be having this conversation in our 3rd street cardboard hovels ala Downey Jr. & Jamie Foxx in The Soloist amidst discarded needles and broken Ripple bottles…i.e. that kind of behavior is more akin to people without any kind of “Christian moral fiber” where “we” come from, yet over here, amidst all the neon and rain, the noodle joints and garter-wearing women, no one cares, or at least doesn’t pretend to. Is that a hint of something more or less?

So, Tokyo is great is the greater gist of all this, correct? As with everything in Japan, on the surface, yes, yet upon deeper inspection…

It’s interesting to note that I am one of the youngest of the group of people that I occasionally am lucky enough to hang out with in this metropolis of solitude. Almost all of whom are married and go out to what has become the “where everyone knows your name” Cheers-esque hangout on Friday nights to get away from wives and wind down the week hanging out with other Ex-pat photographers and roust-abouts, i.e. “the boys”. What is, on the one hand, nominally a photo collective of more than merely interesting individuals taking photos on the streets and in well-lit studios throughout the city, has, on the other hand, become a pub night where we all put our cameras on the table and talk about what we or other people are shooting or writing or planning, or what we would like to shoot, write or plan next given the opportunity. I speak for myself when I say that the ritual of it all has become commonly integrated into a lifestyle which tends teeters too much on the brink of normalcy for me.

Normal? If this be normal, then what would be strange?

Welcome to your future...

It makes me wonder, like PJ Harvey in her cover version of Peggy Lee’s 1969 original: “Is That All There Is?” I guess the whole marriage and kids thing hasn’t been sold on me, which makes the whole “love” argument a bit weak. But I’m not convinced, not yet. Having survived the Jesus-death-age of 33 I now know that the scripted human side of Christianity is bullshit and thusly want to give “it” another go, (“it” being “Life”), hence The Trip, which looms closer and closer. It may seem odd to you imaginary reader (as it does to everyone I talk to over here), but for me, the lazy thing to do would be to stay here with the crazy Tuesday nights, streetcorner drunks, prostitute interviews, where the lack of amoral judgment is The Way Things Are. Lazy because I don’t have nor do I need to have a job, I don’t have to work to support my lifestyle of writing, photographing, hitchhiking, shoplifting fine cheeses, running…it’s all so easy. But I need another challenge. Despite all the reasons I give to stay, I feel myself turning into Kilgore Trout.

So I ask myself what would be the opposite of lazy, or as a good friend puts it “maybe it all comes back to your fear of being normal?” So I ask myself, “How about getting back to all that good west coast Mexican food without the aid of the airplane and almost no cash?”

The reason I’m obsessed with my workout clothes getting wet, when during the rainy season for example I didn’t care at all, is is probably because I have this daily need to exercise and if I don’t, I feel bad. More than just physically feeling bad, I feel like I have wasted even more time than usual writing this bullshit out into the ether. So it’s a delicate balancing act, the writing (best done in the early morning light), the running (also best done at this time due to lack of people and the overall quiet of the empty windy streets), the friends who want to celebrate till too late (at my behest) and at too many fancy places (anywhere that charges).

I always told myself I needed to get out of L.A. in order to find a place where no one knew my name in order to actually get to the business of writing, so easily distracted am I. He who writes almost exclusively about single male characters who smoke and drink, Haruki Murakami, once said in an interview that young authors have no real clue just how much energy smoking and drinking take out of them (hangovers, feeling lethargic, procrastination, etc.), and as that’s not a problem for me anymore (not in denial, just well-managed…) I’d like to think I could relate his quote to just how much energy other people can ask of you when you are living within driving distance…luckily all the people I know here are married and (not really interested in seeing me too much…too many beers on the streetcorner in winter gets cold I suppose), surprisingly enough, I don’t really know any women, proven by the fact that I have tickets to an upcoming concert and no one but the aforementioned married brethren to invite along (one of whom has already turned me down). So I have time to write too long emails and autobiographical internet postings in the morning, eat fancy French cheeses and listen to Bill Evans’ entire discography…only after running 10km though…clothes again safely drying outside, to the chagrin of the calling wind telling me to jump.

Read about my cheese addiction {fullscreen}

Downtown Los Angeles From 1000 Feet

Jack Bauer can do it with his eyes closed, TC from Magnum P.I. makes it look easy, Murdock on The A-Team was supposedly insane and he could do it, yet flying a helicopter is anything but easy. Once you get up there, over all the little two-legged ants running around their infernal mazes in gas-guzzling SUVs, you realize that you have the potential to project yourself faster -in any direction- than you’ve ever gone. You, in a 4-cylinder rotor-driven machine with no doors that doesn’t actually want to fly. No, all it wants to do is to spin like a top and explode on something. It’s quite something to go up in one as a passenger and hang out the side snapping photos from 500-1000 feet up. Yet it’s quite another to do it with the childhood friend you used to cut classes with to go guzzle bottles of tequila while parked in a big brown stalker van, who intermittently breaks into NWA lyrics flying over Compton and wonders aloud if the seatbelts will hold (while making hard right turns over power lines, vats of chemicals and the 405 freeway).

The pilot

Meet Matt, gentleman, scholar of life, helicopter pilot, born two years 1 day after yours truly. During my last trip to the the west coast he was generous, wily and resolved enough to get the two of us up in the air in the two-seat Robinson R22, usually hovering at around 500 feet, over Long Beach, the RMS Queen Mary (the white dome situated next to which was the onetime home of Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose), landing us in an airstrip in Compton, and finally circling the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles at an altitude of well over 1000 feet.

Rising up from Long Beach Harbor, where the moist ocean air meets the dry desert wind it’s hard to tell if it’s smog or low-lying cloud cover you’re flying out of as the rush overtakes you. Suddenly you can see the whole picture, you can take in the whole view. You can see the true desert sprawl of Los Angeles county, ranging from the watering post port of Long Beach (the world’s largest), the rusted wagon wheel that are the oil derricks and processing plants of Long Beach, the flat cellblock architecture of ghostown Compton, the recent development of subdivision communities in what used to be orange groves, the old railyards and storage facilities rotting like a wasteland of metal and dust, over the merciless postwar housing boom, the showdown on main street of the Wilshire Corridor and there you are, approaching the hills to the north, there is the oasis of downtown shimmering in the heat.

Truth is, once taken in from the sky at 100 mph, these seemingly fragmented and disparate wastelands coalesce into a kind of monument to human adaptability. Of stamina and the will to overcome the elements. Hemmed in to the north by the forested hills, the east by the Mojave and the west by the Pacific, LA has always attracted the best and the wost of all things: weather, natural disasters, riots, sports teams, etc. Now long since established, the trick will be not to merely overcome the elements (mudslides, wildfires, smog) as the next generation of Angelenos awakens to this desert bloom of a city’s socio-political, environmental and economic problems, but rather to harmonize this area the Spanish first named, “Bahia de los Fumos” (Smoke Bay) as far back as the 16th century, for the next 500 years.

Thanks for the perspective Matt.

So, here I am, saying all these things about how I love LA, how I hate LA, how I am obsessed by the Ocean and the Desert and all the in-between that makes there there, that makes it here inside me at the same time and how I”ll never come back. Yet by saying that, I’m saying I’d rather do nothing but come back and that’s when it happens. Something subtle but not. I read the Times occasionally for more than just the crosswords and I come across this to which I cannot stop shaking my head to, like some damn toy dog.

He says, “It never hit me: You can’t run, so why not succumb?”

I say, I’m too young to give in. I haven’t written a screenplay or published a novel. My mother wasn’t murdered.

I get good advice, good commentary and I think of all the good advice I give that I don”t follow. That I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole. That I run from.

So, I dream of Laos.

I dream of Yak meat grilled spicy sweet in banana leaves over a lean-to fire by the banks of the Nam Song river in the middle of some damn jungle outside Luang Prabang.

I dream of spelunking with candles through half-submerged leech-infested Tham Pha Man cave with spiders the size of Cadillacs and no way out but the way ahead where the roof gets in close to the floor and you crawl and things crawl on you and you are Indiana Fucking Jones.

I dream of sidewalk stall mamas smiling big and toothless doling out bowlfuls from shooting steamy old pots full of rice noodled Keng Soua, spicy green and riddled with garlic, cilantro, galanga and then there’s Laap, the Southeast Asian answer to Ceviche.

…I dream of the shady refuge of dusty tin markets and tailors who sleep on cots of $20 patchwork suits, of the right-of-way Yaks innately possess when roaming through town, of warm beer Lao and Swedish/Israeli infestation, of bananas falling from the sky, of Duoc monkeys screeching at transvestite hairdressers in their own secret, shared language.

I get lost in the hazy heated shade of my dreams, searching for the correct vine to swing on into the big mud-red Mekong once again, to try and get that man-sized catfish everyone talks about with an awe as of having seen the Great Buddha himself swim up that river. Maybe it is Him calling me back. Maybe it’s Him telling me these aren’t dreams, aren’t just memories, but are the future.

Again.

Something started me thinking about my roots, about where I come from, about my homeland, and how desolate the feeling is between what I think and the reality which lives so far from me. I don”t know when the last time I talked to a Californian. Someone who knows what it means to drive the freeway with the windows down and the stereo up next to good friend with nowhere n particular to go. Is this an LA thing? A Californian thing? Are we the only ones who call it the “freeway?” Why when I describe my homeland to strangers do I inevitably turn to descriptions of the desert? Why do the sand and the dust and the dry dry cacti figure so heavily in my makeup? Why do those mountains so far off in the smog-smeared distance loom so large in my mind? Do I miss the road that much? Why do stories of Uncle Don calling drunk from a payphone circa 1967 saying he lost his car on I-10 going to Indio and doesn”t know where he is mean so much to me? Is this who I am? A part of me? Am I myself or the place I am from? Or both? Is there sagebrush in my blood? The Pacific? Am I so a part of the great western migration manifesto that I believe only the strongest survived while moving wagons westward yet parts of us continue to slowly erode away like the coastline due to no longer having territory to conquer? Our own inner space spectacles the only place left over which to assume eminent domain, are we doomed?

This may be in part due to the fact that I took a boat ride today on the ocean. That which felt normal…finally. Great in the rare experience way yet good like home. Think about the last time you were on a boat in the ocean and remember how you felt. Recall the smell of salt and the hunger which arose in your belly. Remember the pangs your stomach felt while lurching across wakes of boats bigger than you will ever be. Relive the lusty freedom you felt in your gut while skiing across fluid liquid you can no more define than the inner workings of your psyche. Do all this and then note the ease this big blue aqua beast puts you in while being completely indifferent to your humanity.

Is it Los Angeles, my home, the desert, or the sea, the ocean, the Pacific, that I miss so desperately? Or is the idea of one bleeding onto the other? Do the desert and the sea have a meeting place? Are they secret siamese twins, joined at hidden hips by unknown tissues? Am I a part of that wicked epoxy?

This isn’t well written nostalgia. The fact remains I don’t want to to return to L.A. A year and a half taught me what that”s like: poverty and solitude. This is merely a questioning of my roots. Where am I from? From where do I hail? Is that me? Am I this place? Do we share common traits? Are our common metaphors similar? And finally, will I ever feel at home anywhere, with anyone again?

I never start off well.

Shaky & ineffectual, I felt like a thumbless leper vacillating there by the Tenjin expressway entrance with my kindergarten-level kanji scrawled across the cardboard I’d heisted some minutes before reading, “Karatsu”. There should have been a question mark. I was unsure. Naked. Just me and my cardboard cock fishing in the wind for a ride to this goddamn gorgeous Black Pine Forest buffeting the ocean and the mountains in Saga Prefecture some 45 minutes Southwest. No map. No compass. Just hope and stares. Stares from the mass of cars speedily passing me, some gaping, some laughing, others motioning wildly, pointing. “No No Wrong…”

“Huh?” I check my fly. My cardboard. Looking a ways off I notice the big blue onramp sign reads “KitaKyushu” meaning wrong way. Making my way to a crosswalk and doubling back to a “safe” place for retrieval I unveil my barely legible script to a new generation of drivers heading off to their various destinations and Whabam! 5 minutes and I get a ride with a guitarist from Fukuoka who explains to me in superb English that the IC doesn’t actually go to Karatsu. News to me. But luckily he’s heading there to deliver his boss’ son a package. In my poorly affected Moscow accent I tell him I’m a Russian journalist doing a story on the Japanese side of the Kuril Island saga. I ask him if he knew that Russia and Japan are still at “war”, meaning that Russia never “undeclared” war on Japan after tensions over the islands (north of Hokkaido) arose directly after WWII. As he asks what a Russian passport looks like, I ask him what’s in the package and we simultaneously shut our respective yaps. He drops me at Karatsu station an hour later where I procure a map and head off on foot towards the ocean and the setting sun, wondering vaguely where the hell to sleep.

Fisherman hanging cuttlefish out to dry in Yobuko, Saga Prefecture

Sleep. Funny notion. I laid my bag down in the sand of the beach as the sun faded, staring out at the blackening ocean and the lights of far-off ships and stars beginning to wink at me in the inconsolable vastness of…Wait a damn minute here! Alright, yeah so I was lonely, but hey, that don’t make any difference when you got enough sake, right. Well, sake & chocolate-covered almonds and a few smokes and all the lovely sand fleas keeping me company. Long story short: woke up just before 2 AM (soaked from the rain and the driving wind) by the earth quaking in her faults. Not an overly big tremor but enough for the word “tsunami” to flash beore my mind. Unable to summon forth the spirit of Robinson Crusoe or Tom Hanks in “Castaway” I scuttled off to the nearest hotel stairwell and crouched in the cement corner until just after sunrise, passing the time by trying to recite all of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Something about an Albatross, right?

And a thousand thousand slimy things

Lived on; and so did I

This echoing in my head as I exited the Saga couple’s silver coupe in Yobuko, a port town famed for its squid, nowhere near anywhere convenient to catch a ride to Arita, the ceramics capitol of Japan. Speaking of convenience, there were none. No 7/11s, Lawsons, Family Marts. Just a thousand thousand slimy squids not living on, as I was to do on my way back to Karatsu, to catch the proper road to Arita, Imari, Sasebo and finally, Nagasaki. Finally getting my hitching balls though. Beginning to see why the “No sunglasses” clause is a big one, as I was told repeatedly I resembled Yakuza whenever I donned my dark American truckstop $5.99 specials once safely inside my next ride. Also learned that the “brooding, unshaven” stoicism so normally affected when seeing fun-filled vanagons watching the latest anime on their in-seat DVD screens pass by me, doens’t yield the desired results. Hence the “telling jokes to myself while tap-dancing a jig” stance I adopted throughout the day, which got me through Arita, Sasebo and to Nagasaki’s Peace Park by 4 in the beautiful afternoon. Admittedly, I must’ve cut a rather schizophrenic figure gesticulating and laughing at my grandpa’s dirty “Pope, a Rabbi & the Easter Bunny walk into a bar” jokes there on the narrow roadside, though instead of discouraging tickets to ride I managed to get into “the zone” and make efficient time to all my destinations, due mainly to the Japanese fascination with the hairy-ass honkey dancing like a crazy monkey…”Stop Honey! Pull over! Let’s help out grassroots internationalization!” Thusly did I make it to the the top of Inasayama and possibly the best view in all of Kyu-shu: Nighttime in Nagasaki.

It’s the Vernal Equinox and it’s raining here in Seoul. A light rainfall around a temperature of about 5 degrees Celsius is usual for the coming of spring in Seoul, even though the Cherry Blossom festival begins next week. Things are as they should be. But how close to disaster do we come with every turning moment? How is it we constantly avert catastrophe by the hairs of our chinny-chin-chins? How did I get here in one piece? I’ve been asking the stars that very question repeatedly since I arrived in town safe and sound yesterday afternoon after flying out of Fukuoka just hours after the biggest earthquake the southernmost island of Kyushu has seen in over 200 years shocked the laconic shoppers in Tenjin just before stores opened at 11am.

The dryness in my mouth roused me before 8 from my capsule hotel slumber. Usually the snugness of the Oyafuko capsules ensures a cozy sleep after a night of rabblerousing in Tenjin, Fukuoka’s slick shopping/nightlife center. Maybe it drinking Absinthe with Matt or maybe the lack of ventilation that dried me out, but after a refreshing splash in the hotel’s public bath I was keened on finding a book to peruse over the hour-long flight to Seoul. I arrived at the 10-story department store as the doors swung open and madeway to the 6th floor Kinokuniya Book Store, whose selection of English books tends to focus on the likes of Jackie Collins and Dean Coontz, but whose translated Japanese works makes up for any lack of less tedious American-made pulp. I perused Haruki Murakami’s new opus Kafka On The Shore but due to the hardback’s imposing size and the ever-shrinking space in my carry-on bag I glanced over to his other works, one of which, After The Quake, caught my eye. This work of “fiction” is based upon the 1995 Hanshin quake (magnitude 7.0) which killed 5000 people and set off the national alarm clock concerning temblor preparedness in general. Something about the tone set me off (not to mention just having finished Salmon Rushdie’s ode to rock n’ roll and earthquakes, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, I had the eerie feeling two earthquake reads in a row might be bad luck) so I plucked up South Of The Border, West Of The Sun, paid and set off just before 10:30 to grab a cappuccino on the first floor before catching the subway for the ten minute ride to the airport.

Sitting in the sparse and well-lit Seattle’s Best (us dupes just across from the dupes at Starbuck’s) over my organic espresso and doodling in pornographic kanji (I’m still learning) the world turned into a 30-second movie, where upon some director of tectonic plates yelled, “ACTION” our sound stage began slamming to and fro, akin to a drunken teenager learning how to roller skate in a darkened sweatshop. The narrow street between the two ten-story buildings, already packed with Sunday shoppers, began filling with hundreds filing out of the buildings as if extras on cue to “Panic! Panic! Look terror-stricken!” which worked. A few began to run, a mother clutching her infant tripped in the middle of the street, people began pointing up and staring, mouths agape as the pieces of building and chunks of glass fell intermittently to the ground (which was no doubt, the work of some clumsy P.A.), that solid ground which, amazingly enough, held together, did not open up and swallow us whole. The world came apart just from above. The phrase, “The sky is falling” passed over my lips as I gripped my corner table, grasping the fact the 9 floors quaking jarringly above my head could quickly cave were it not for those mandatory earthquake-proof standards of modern Japan.

Taking a breath I made to avoid the probable path of the formidable–looking track lighting crossbar overhead and distance myself from any windows and mirrors which I suddenly noticed stood everywhere. Seeing 10 of myself shaking in unison, all with no more fear or shock aface than your high-end S.A.G. actor, during what seemed like an interminably long take. Quite unlike the extras outside running about like so many chicken littles about the falling debris outside. A relaxed feel of Zen overtook me and I entered the little-known “Zone” where death matters as little as bit parts in a crappy B-picture remake of a bad Japanese horror flick. I could feel my body ripping apart as the asphalt surged apart, lava spewing up from the multitudinous subterranean volcanoes roused by our 7.3 big brother earthquake and I kind of chuckled, a small almost unheard voice wondering somewhere behind the calm, “Why is it still going on though? Is this really the end?”

I remember as the face in the mirror stabilized (I swear I heard a “Cut” from beside the well-hidden cameras off-stage somewhere) and the world resumed its non-rolling-skating-sober-adulthood-normality, thinking that this was the beginning of something. And I hate to be morbid, but that this was the beginning of The End. Don’t ask what that means, but maybe just the end of a way of thinking, a society’s mentality. For the people of Kyushu, especially Fukuoka, they are no longer untouchables. Strange living in the world’s probable emperor of earthquakes that some people would consider themselves exempt from all the shaking and rattling going on. But it’s true, one has no idea how many times the phrase, “This is Kyūshū. Earthquakes don’t happen down here.” has been uttered. A way of life for the people of this island was swallowed by the invisible tears in the sky whence came those pieces of atmosphere so many of our chicken littles tried so hard to avoid. Yes, they will get up and brush themselves off and even smile about it, hell they are after all Japanese, but that Horror of knowing that they too are lepers like the rest will never be truly absent from the mirror watching them rock silently to and fro in their uncontrollably shaking world.

So I slurp my noodles in Seoul and watch the cherry blossoms wash away with the rain down the gutter and I wonder when the dragon will awaken for real.