sekkarashii

dog eared

2007-03-28T10:46:00.000+09:00

came home from a night out the other day to find that The Moose had managed to knock the barrier that keeps him from the main room down, and then proceeded what looks like a very thorough blitzkrieg of my book collection. he obviously doesn't rate truman capote, so much so that he completely destroyed and then pissed on both in cold blood and breakfast at tiffany's. he seems to feel the same way about hemingway - the old man and the sea got a savaging and a drenching too. in fact most of my american lit got battered.

(then again, as he devoured most of capote and hemingway, maybe he does like them?)

graham greene got off lightly, just a nibbling. and he didn't even touch my japanese grammar books, the fucker. i reckon there should be a new category in the world of publishing - 'dog lit'.

the little git. i was not impressed.

life?

2007-03-01T11:08:00.000+09:00

in a class yesterday i gave a sheet to my students filled with questions, intended to have them express their opinions (dangerous ground, that). one of the questions was 'what's the meaning of life?'.

i heard one student say 'oh i know that! it's seikatsu'...

which, quite literally, means 'life' - in japanese...

if only it were that simple!

the consultant

2007-02-21T00:46:00.000+09:00

chapter one my mother’s son

-it’s never enough is it?
-what?
-one. it’s never enough.
-no.
-it’s not is it? you have one, you want another one. kids in a bloody sweetshop….

3.40 in the morning. sat in an empty back corridor of a cavernous club. we’re the only foreigners in the place, along with dan, whose gone missing. probably wandering the labryntine rooms jabbering to himself, or to anyone who dares to catch his eye, any of these nice people, girls with angelic bodies wearing massive round sunglasses, big boots and miniskirts, guys with mad hair and dayglo faces, looking like they've just tripped out of a manga cartoon, a happy, sweet cartoon.

-and then there’s that thing I was on about earlier, that thing about parents
-what?
-parents, the way… don’t you remember?
-no
-I was on about parents, the way that every parent in the world tells their kid the same stuff
-like what
-well, how many people do you know that know the same stuff? all those little facts, not like some trivia king, but the stuff everyone knows, that you can never amaze people with, cos, they all know it anyway?

this is mark, my buddy for the evening, of many an evening. off his face, and talking shite. or at least I think so. you never know, when you’re in this state, suddenly what sounded a moment ago like utter bollocks can be transformed into the most enlightened utterance.

-like what?
-like, ticks can jump ten times their own height. ants can carry twenty times their own weight on their backs. or um, the nile is the longest river in the world.
-ok, now you sound like a trivia king
-no, ok, well I can’t think of good examples now, but there is this sort of inherited knowledge, this kind of received wisdom, if you want to call it that, cos it’s just the repetition of fact, really, but it just tickles me to think–
-tickles you?
-aye
-who the fuck says tickles me these days?! brilliant
-thanks, anyway, it tickles me to think of these parents, our parents, not necessarily particularly dumb nor overly intelligent people, but average, if you will, normal -god forbid, like us? –
-speak for yourself
-to think that they have kids, and they wait for years for the right time, when jabbering drooling little child becomes sort of, I don’t know, sentient? to begin to slowly divulge these facts that they themselves learnt from their own parents, to their own kids. and they love it, they love saying things like ‘did you know…?’ to their little kids, to see the wonder in the kid’s eyes, cos they can’t tell anyone else their little facts, cos everyone else already learnt it all from their parents. do you get what I'm on about?
-uh, yeah… I think I do. and it might be brilliant! so if your theory is correct, we’ll be passing the same stuff on to our kids that we learnt from our parents
-yeah, like –
-like, the sky is blue cos of the reflection off the oceans! elvis died on the crapper! maybe that’s why we all think our dad’s are the smartest people in the world
-exactly, for a while anyway, like um, china has the largest population in the world, you can see the great wall from space, or all about the titanic, ‚the ship that couldn’t be sunk‘, all that banal stuff
-banal but, interesting banal stuff
-oh definitely. stuff that we all need to know! thank god for parents eh
-it must be shit when it all runs out though
-yes!
-cos then, well, you’ll probably be fearing the day your kid realizes that you in fact know very little about the world
-god yes. all-knowing dad becomes, well, just another bloke. if you went back in time to the stone age could you make a match? something as fucking simple and necessary as a match?
-not a chance, bit of sulphur, a stick - that’s all I know about matches. and that they’re often made in sweden… odd that. iut’s as if 95% or so of the population of the earth actually have no idea how it all actually works – including us
-you know, a friend of mine once said to me, when you’re a kid you think - so long of course as some uncle isn’t abusing you and robbing you of your childhood innocence - you think that all the grown ups have got it sorted and know what’s going on, and you just potter about playing with barbie or building forts, climbing trees and what have you, thinking, or rather being allowed to think, that everything’s hunky bloody dory, and then – then, you grow up and realize that, lo and behold, no fucker has any idea what in the heck is going on, and that everyone’s just making it up as they go along
-hallelujah brother, speak the truth
-I will!
-did you know that when you type in ‘barbie’ on a computer, when you’re using Word, if you don’t put in a capital B for the first letter of the word itself, the computer automatically changes it to a capital anyway
-no, that is disturbing
-I know! I mean, how did they remember to do that? and does anybody need it? where’s danny?
-dunno. how the heck do you know that anyway? anyway, if you think though, barbie is probably the most popular doll, toy even, in the world, there’s probably a whole gigantic sub-culture of barbie fanatics, all ages, that write ‘barbie’ probablly very often. it’s probably very convenient to have the small b turned into a big one automatically. barbie, the world’s most popular toy, that’s quite depressing come to think of it. shouldn’t kids want more than a miniature person to play with? maybe not though. ‚here my child, become god!‘… I wonder if any parent has ever actually called their kid barbie?
-brilliant. I’d pay to meet anyone that has. somewhere in texas, a barbie is walking about, a living breathing, most likely rotund and spotty faced barbie! I’ll bet they’re proper fucked up. ‚i‘ as well, as soon as you type in ‚i‘, as in myself, that comes up as a capital too. maybe though i don’t want to be an I?
- ‚i don’t want to be an I!‘ sounds like a rallying call for this fucked up generation! here’s something else you’d pay for, another friend has a great dane, and he reckons that one day, when they were out walking over some fields, the great dane jumps a fence and kills a calf
-what?! kills a baby cow?
-so he reckons
-hang on, is he trustworthy? are we talking a mauling here?
-he is, and yes, I’d say so
-god, I would pay to see that. front row. I mean who wouldn’t?
-maybe we can film it, get him to do it again, get it on youtube, we’d be overnight sensations

we’re interrupted from our musings by a mashed up looking japanese girl who stumbles through a door. she looks like she’s about to collapse at any second, she staggers down the corridor to fall onto one knee right next to mark, wipes her hair from her face to reveal a pretty smile and wandering blue eyes, seems to be about to speak but instead produces a stream of green vomit from her shimmering orange lips that brings back fond memories of cheesy horror flicks. mark looks at me with a surprised smile and I know he’s as impressed with this as I am, to have witnessed this most beautiful of vomitings– suddenly I'm reminded of bowling one night, long ago in Bangkok, a bowling hall full of handsome petite women wearing those wrist protector things, all metal and leather, and their own cute little bowling shoes spinning pristine, swaying, arabesque curved-swords of strikes the whole deep, sultry night through (‚my heart is your polished aisle‘, I remember drunkenly thinking), there was something so beautiful in that - and damn, that vomit is green. sure, you wouldn’t want to kiss her right now, but there was a definite, dare I say infinite grace to the way she did that. mesmerising! now she’s got one hand on mark’s shin, forehead on his foot, her hair is mopping up her projected bile, and she’s dry wretching – which is really not so pretty. maybe her name is barbie, I find myself thinking. then, is she okay?

mark’s just about to place his hand on her back and to no doubt ask her that very question when three guys appear from the door this vision just came through, three of the unfriendliest faces I’ve seen out here, three figures looking so out of place in this club of fluorescent limes and pinks, manga boys and space girls, three ugly shaved tramlined heads, shite Gucci copy wide-as-a-cadillac sunglasses, fat arse jeans and massive t-shirts. I really do hate the wannabe hip hop scene here. it’s all about being a cretin, seems to me. they’re all looking at the girl, and at us, and the vomit, possibly, but more likely at and mark’s hand hovering above her bare back an inch off that neon blue butterfly tattoo, which I just now notice, kind of common but well done, and they don’t look impressed. one, the biggest, shouts

-yukue! yukue! get your arse over here!

yukue lets out a groan, some spit, and a last chunk or two of whatever she ate for tea. then

-go fuck yourself, Shit Drip

me and mark look at each other, then at Shit Drip. mark chuckles, just a little, but he definitely, audibly, chuckles. Shit Drip looks at his pals, says something, then leaves – perhaps to go fuck himself. you never know. he may be very obedient.

yukue, for her part, is again smiling. a trooper. she stands up, straightens her hair, mumbles a sorry, adjusts her mini, and staggers off, rather elegantly, it must be said, for one wiping sick from the corners of her mouth, every minute detail of which is watched attentively by mark and myself. she pauses just for a second to look back at us over her shoulder, then pushes a door open and disappears. something in me - almost imperceptible – almost, but not quite – tingles, ever so slightly.

-well.
-well indeed.
-what a woman!
-I'm using this word too much tonight, but that was brilliant. truly. brilliant.
-ShitDrip!
-ShitDrip!

we eventually haul ourselves up and go for a bit of a dance, I bump into koji, a good friend of mine and dan’s, we have a hug and a quick chat, but the energy is dissipating rapidly, so after saying our goodbyes to him and some others we know, we head out into the streets again, those quiet lanes of early morning Tokyo, to find a ramen shop for some much needed sustenance, not that I feel much like eating at all. as we leave there’s still people queueing up, more of the dayglo kids but now some heavier looking folks too, the dance til noon gay crowd, a couple of girls with matching hair and matching cuts all over their forearms (that’s a very niche clique – being japan, you’re never sure if they mean it or if it’s more of a fashion statement), then a bunch with faces covered in varying lumps of metal and gel-slicked fringes, and some more of the hip hoppers, probably carrying supplies to hold the crowd inside through til lunchtime.

we’re beginning to come down properly now, at least I am, though mark looks like he’s with me. that tiredness of movement, the heavy lids, loosened beyond weary limbs, and there above us that hint of the city dawn, smog-subverted matisse-like colours, wrapped up in the dying neon particles being spewed out into space, the inevitable, merciless dawn that makes you just a little ashamed to be your mother’s son, out at this time, in this state, at this age. we put our backs against the wall of the club, down the side away from the queue, and I roll a cigarette. through the wall and through my bones I feel the thud of the bass from the club’s sound system, thudding like a tumor in my ribcage, and it saddens me, not just a little. I know what this place is. this place we’ve emerged from after six hours of mayhem, a box, a giant thumping strobe-filled box of lost and stoked up souls, stoked up to the gills on chemicals designed to accommodate release - release from me, from you, from anything real, from anything that can touch you – from everything that does touch you. I dunno, maybe there’s a service being provided here – in fact I don’t doubt it for a second – it just feels so hollow. I used to think that all this really was something essential and human, that yeah, something was happening. but not anymore. I wonder now after every night out why the fuck I do it. I'm at the point, we all get there eventually, where the down outweighs the up. I'm not religious at all, but the guilt that accompanies me on my comedowns these days is catholic in nature, catholic with a big C. it’s like I have my own personal Comedown Pope to feverishly beat the guilt of being into me…

-fucked

says mark

-too right

says i

and I close my eyes, take a long drag, fill my poor lungs, then exhale, see colours pour out of me through membrane and tissue, escaping my fleshy border, pouring out much like the seratonin that poured into my receptors the wrong way round earlier, now reduced to a trickle - the abuse our bodies can stand up to never fails to amaze me. I just wonder if the mind is made of stuff as stern. no, I know it isn’t, what am I on about. I open my eyes at the sound of a boot crunching gravel and catch sight of some black object hurtling towards my stomach, just enough of it to realize from it’s direction and velocity that I am about to be beaten in the gut, it hits, this thing, whatever it is, a pipe maybe? and I tense doubling forward and catch the laces of a big boot before my distended eyes, head whips back violently from the force and hits the wall behind. and the last things I remember are the words ‘shitdrip that, bitch’.

-if you care to read more, comment!

what's he drinking?

2007-02-10T02:10:00.000+09:00

yohei

2007-02-08T00:03:00.000+09:00

inu shiki a.k.a doggy style

2007-02-07T23:55:00.000+09:00

on fire?

2007-02-07T23:52:00.000+09:00

river stones

2007-02-07T23:45:00.000+09:00

dog god!

2007-02-07T23:36:00.000+09:00

green leaves

2007-02-07T10:48:00.000+09:00

moose in the snow

2007-02-07T10:46:00.000+09:00

snowy river

2007-02-07T10:44:00.000+09:00

beatiful

2006-12-12T14:25:00.000+09:00

trojan

2006-12-11T23:26:00.000+09:00

lit

2006-12-11T23:23:00.000+09:00

mr. yohei shiki!

2006-12-11T23:05:00.000+09:00

went to see a band, ini shiki, on thursday. top drawer. proper good. this is them.

paddington blue

2006-12-03T14:35:00.000+09:00

nuts and bolts

2006-12-03T14:32:00.000+09:00

defeat

2006-12-02T03:00:00.000+09:00

rikishi

2006-12-02T02:43:00.000+09:00

...

2006-12-02T02:41:00.000+09:00

snap

2006-12-02T02:40:00.000+09:00

blue tunnel

2006-12-02T02:37:00.000+09:00

wedding rickshaw

2006-12-02T02:35:00.000+09:00

say what?

2006-12-02T02:33:00.000+09:00

gravity

2006-12-02T02:29:00.000+09:00

it was all yellow...

2006-12-02T02:27:00.000+09:00

through the window

2006-11-29T17:36:00.000+09:00

this was taken from a little onsen up in the hills near my house

the inn

2006-10-29T23:15:00.000+09:00

the pub at wastwater, the lake district, and the hills.

traaaain

2006-10-06T23:41:00.000+09:00

country crossing

2006-10-06T23:40:00.000+09:00

dead bird

2006-10-05T10:15:00.000+09:00

a shot from geneva. wonder what happened...

the forest

2006-10-04T00:20:00.000+09:00

a shot from the woods up behind my house

yes. a tree. no less.

2006-09-27T01:40:00.000+09:00

another shot from the hike, as is the shot below.

shadow plant

2006-09-27T01:33:00.000+09:00

view over neuchatel

2006-09-27T00:24:00.000+09:00

a foto from switzerland. it was taken just at that time when the sun hits a certain low angle above the horizon, and everything gets bathed in that beautiful amber light. this day the rain had been coming down, and this was the first break.

this was also the day, as i found out two days ago, that we got snapped by a speed camera. a week ago i discovered i'd also been snapped in england. and yesterday, would you believe it, i got pulled over by the japanese police (ever so polite) for - you guessed it - speeding.

3 times in 2 months - and never in the past 17 years! who said they didn't believe in luck? oh. me.

cash cow

2006-09-26T12:47:00.000+09:00

this and the next foto are from a hiking trip i went on yesterday, just an hour or so up a mountain, hako-san. hako-sen is the most revered mountain in kyushu. though not tall at all really, it is beautiful, haunting cedar forests and incongruous rocky outcrops adorning its slopes.

i'll put some more up tomorrow.

geneva cathedral

2006-09-24T23:10:00.000+09:00

freeganism!

2006-09-24T00:33:00.000+09:00

http://freegan.info/

'First, a little background philosophy. Freeganism is not so much a cheapskate's excuse to avoid buying dinner as a deadly serious attempt to challenge society's boundless consumerism. The ideology is spelt out, in all its radical austerity, on websites such as freegan.info: rather than condone our "wasteful, profit-driven, mass-production society", freegans pledge "a total boycott of the economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations". In other words, instead of singling out individual businesses as "ethical", they seek to avoid buying anything at all "to the greatest degree we are able".'

joyfull

2006-09-24T00:01:00.000+09:00

married a couple today. didn't have my trusty, never opened bible on me however - a frantic search through the rubbish on my van floor turned up a copy of austerlitz - a rather chunky, bible-sized novel, which has a photo on the front of an austrian prince, maybe about 6 years old, circa 1890 - he's wearing what appears to be a silk suit set, with plus fours, a cape and a puffed-up hat.

what was i going to say if i'd been caught with that? 'no, it IS a bible. that's what god really looks like'. who knows? god (should he happen to exist) may well be a diminutive austrian prince clad in a silk suit set with plus fours, a cape and a puffed-up hat.

crucially, no-one can prove otherwise.

with some deft hand movements though, i managed to get away with it...

morecambe bay

2006-09-23T23:57:00.000+09:00

paddington full

2006-09-22T00:39:00.000+09:00

suguru the samurai

2006-09-22T00:28:00.000+09:00

euston rd, london

2006-09-20T22:15:00.000+09:00

dem apples

2006-09-20T15:46:00.000+09:00

bay light

2006-09-18T00:49:00.000+09:00

churchyard

2006-09-18T00:31:00.000+09:00

seen through

2006-09-18T00:08:00.000+09:00

doggin'

2006-09-15T17:32:00.000+09:00

gonna get a dog. looks like it'll be a black lab or a golden retriever.

i can't wait to get one, it's the fulfillment of a long-held dream. i'll be off into the woods with him (should be a him, really) every day, on the trails, throwing frisbees, mauling goats, stopping for a werther's original or two, maybe a pipe and a bit of mild shag, ahh, then returning home with a pocket full of pheasant for a sit in front of the fire with a mug of cocoa and a half pint o' whiskey.

i bought kanako a budgie today, she was well chuffed. i hate the fucking things. brightly coloured vermin, nowt else! you're not fooling ME with your bobbydazzler colours and your ability to mimick the human voice.

but has to be said he's quite sweet. she's called him rodriguez. brilliant.

which all brought back fond memories of the time my mum's budgie got cancer - it had a lump the size of a pingpong ball under it's neck - i couldn't even look at the thing. it literally made me sick. i'd start wretching whenever it tried (and failed) to fly about. he was a bit topheavy. anyway, she did all she could for him - and then one day - she suffocated him in a towel!

she said his little body went tense, then soft, and that was it - the assisted (heavily) suicide of a budgerigar. she sat on the sofa and wept, holding him in her hands - then put him in an 'i can't believe it's not butter' tub and buried him in the ironically named Hope Park, at the end of the street.

some poor child's gonna dig up that tub in years to come and get the shock of its life...

wast water

2006-07-21T01:19:00.000+09:00

i wrote this last nite when i was drunk... it's staying though....

it's been a while, but i have excuses - last days at school (almost as pleasurable as last days as a student at the stuffy Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, the environs of which were designed i'm sure to bleed dry the spirit of every boy that ever trudged through it's dreary, malignant gates), hmm, what else, running around teaching the eikaiwa students, hitting the hills on the bike, and-

oh yes!

getting prepared for the trip home.

ah, home. currently sweltering under the 36 degrees heat, the land of bovver boys and empty beer glasses in the face, the queen, dog crap on the streets, graffiti, muggings of the aged. brilliant!

and of course my lovely mum!

but the big thing - meeting the boys! raucous rawlins,
wobbly wardleworth, beautific barnes. the closest i've ever got to a crew, the lot of us spending what seemed like endless university summers stoned up to the gills on homegrown northern lights in dean's attic, wandering the moors above rawtenstall town on herculean hits of locally grown mushrooms (rule when picking - one for the bag, one for me!), acid acrobatics on desolated, moonlight-starved county lanes, wandering with a rucksack stuffed with bong, kite, camera and flask full of sweet yorkshire tea and sausage rolls, from dusk til dawn, sat atop heath and bracken overlooking the toy town below, lights aglow, people a-flow, musing on the futures that are now upon us, the hearts we would take, the wealth we would forsake, the claims we would stake. kings one and all, on fire with the promise of youth - fires, i might add, that we have all kept burning!

did anyone ever say 'you are only as young as you think'?

they should have.

and so, for the first time in over 10 years, the four of us, my brothers and me, will all be together again. on the hills again, this time for a week above wastwater, the lake district's most remote lake.

here's a link...

http://www.visitcumbria.com/wc/wastwtr.htm

ok, i can't get the link to work. take the time to copy and google, it's worth it...

i cannot wait. off on sunday, be in london on monday, off to the lakes on tuesday.

i'll try to mail, but don't know if words will do it justice...

i'll be missing kanako, but she'll be there after a week...

take care, whoever reads this, i hope you are all well and good...

sekkarashii

2006-07-21T01:18:00.000+09:00

nowt

take me home...

2006-07-12T10:18:00.000+09:00

good lord.

our new neighbournood is very pretty. winding, narrow roads, beautiful gardens, old houses. and a sense of community too. thought quite what sense, i`m not sure. this is what we had to do the other day...

we were informed by a fone call from the local town office that the `area leader` was a certain fukio san. and that we had to go to her house to introduce ourselves. so against my mild protestations and grumblings, off we went with a box of cookies and straining smiles, literally kow-towing all the way. i`d exhausted my japanese platitudes after about a minute of what seems like little more than a heavily structured custom designed to allow two parties to stand at a doorway for up to 5 minutes on end saying absolutely nothing of any consequence whatsoever...

-please be kind to me!
-and you to me!
-i`m sorry!
-no i`m sorry!
-no i`m sorry! we moved in!
-no, i`m sorry... don`t know why... but i am! really terribly sorry!
-i`m such an obstruction to your peace!
-no, `tis i! i`m the one causing you trouble!

and so on and so forth, til you lose feeling in your face and slaver starts to slowly seep from your slack jaws. as i said, i ran out of platitudes and ended up for the last 2 minutes just standing in the background saying the japanese equivaloent of a very dispirited `yeah... thanks... whatever`, over and over, as the indefatiguable leader and unyeilding kanako out-polited each other with the vigour of a pair of samurai fighting fish...

amyway, it transpired that we should (see MUST!) go and introduce ourselves to the other 16 houses in our `group`. naturally, we should take along a little offering to ease the burden of these pained introductions (whereby we alone gave our names! and half of the doors only opened a few inches to reveal terrified housewives looking like nocturnal african dish-eyed rodents greeting sunlight for the first time) - little offerings that seem pretty cheap, but times the price of a single box of decent cookies by 16 and you`re looking at 40 english humming pounds...

i had one of these cookies later, tasted quite bitter...

it goes on... on saturday and sunday classical music is piped over the gardens from a loudspeaker up the street, as an ethereal voice inspires us to `do better`...

once a month one person from each house gather together to do a garbage collecting blitz - it`s over in quarter of an hour, there`s no garbage whatsoever in the first place, yet if you don`t send a house representative you get a bill for 1,000 yen at the end of the month...

ah, the neighbourhood! a place for community and belonging. but what price if it`s forced? don`t get me wrong - i`d take this over our disjointed `community` back at home, where OAPs get battered for their pensions, but well, you know... just tastes a bit wrong...

aaaahhhhh....

2006-07-06T09:44:00.000+09:00

here's some pics of our new place...

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for real?

2006-06-30T09:07:00.000+09:00

jean marie le pen, the leader of the french national front, says a couple of days ago that 'too many of the french team are players of colour'. lillian thuram, the great french left back (who is black), responds in an interview by saying that le pen is himself archaic, and that he has no grasp of french history.

last year the spanish coach is caught on camera saying to one of his players that he can beat 'that black shit', referring to france's thierry henry.

and recently the coach of the ukraine national team said that it's good for the national side that more ukrainian (ie 'white') players are making it into the first teams in the ukraine domestic teams, rather than someone 'that's come over from mumba-zumba land, straight out of the trees'.

before the recent game, spain vs france, some spanish supporters met the french team bus as it neared the stadium with monkey noises.

i find it shocking, absolutely stunning, that in the 21st century these people still feel able to express such malignant views, without fear of immediate censure or even imprisonment. what did we let go of? what have we lost, if we haven't yet educated people to the point that they grasp that we all have to co-operate, and that whatever the colour of your skin, you suffer, breathe and bleed just like every other creature inhabiting this miraculous globe?

i waver constantly between believing that education is the key, that we can eradicate these repugnant views, and the alternative option that those that profess these views should themselves simply be eradicated.

and tell me, where have all the white players been, where did they disappear to, when these great tragedies are being played out? when samuel eto at barcelona is being pelted with bananas by travelling supporters when he takes a corner kick, when ashley cole gets bombarded with monkey noises for the entire 90 minutes of a european game? where have you gone, you fucking cowards? why aren't they walking off the field as soon as they here anything? 'ah, but we don't want to give in to the racists', they say. nonsense. utter twaddle. get off the pitch, even before the black players, scare the shit out of the club directors, who will (possibly literally) soil their pants there and then when they see their revenues being hit by decreased ticket sales and bad press - and finally, when you speak their language (money), they'll have to root out the imbecilic pricks berating these black players - these human beings.

france, by the way, won 3-1. one goal was scored by a white man, one by a black man, and another by a man of algerian descent.

allez les bleus.

so anal

2006-06-30T00:05:00.000+09:00

just heard a brilliant observation on telly. this guy is talking about alien abductions. he says

-you know, every time there's an alien abduction, there's always an anal probing involved. you would have thought that if the aliens had mastered interstellar flight, the ability to make huge ships disappear in the blink of an eye, and telepathy, no less, that they'd have better things to do than look up our assholes.

geography lesson

2006-06-29T09:29:00.000+09:00

never mind viagra withdrawl, i've got world cup withdrawl. last nite was the first nite in two weeks that i haven't sat down to watch at least one of the games - cos there's a two day break til the quarter finals begin.

i've got the shakes. how can they do this to us?

so i spent last night watching world cup highlights on whatever channel was showing them - fortunately there was an almost never-ending stream. kanako stood by and mopped my brow, after she'd nailed 2x4 planks over the windows and flushed all the cleaning products and related pharmaceuticals down the loo...

what am i going to do when it's over? will i be on the streets offering fellatio for a '100 great world cup goals' video? who knows...

ah, but the tour de france starts on saturday, nicely overlapping with the football fiesta, and going on for 3 weeks. 7 hours a day, live, without commentary, on sky 306. bliss. it's like watching fish in a tank. only these fish go up massive mountains doped up to their heaving gills.

which rather neatly (for once) brings me to this - for those of us of a certain age (let's say around 30), we have these halcyon memories of days gone by when our sporting heroes weren't being exposed for being on streroids, blood doped, etc. ben johnson, if you remember, was the first athlete to get caught that was really in the spotlight. what started as a complete shock slowly became a trickle, then a brook, then a meander, next a tributary, then a river, and now we have an oxbow lake that threatens to become an ocean. cheats, the lot of them.

sure, they were probably cheating back in our days too - there's one famous case from the 1960s where a journalist asked the then tour champion jacques anquetil, a legen of the sport, what his secret was, how he managed to fly up the mountains. 'i'll show you my secret', he said, and opened up his lunch kit. there, wrapped in little pieces of wax paper, were parcels of cocaine. the days without any drug controls whatsoever.

nice.

but we didn't really know. the media exposure wasn't anything like what it is now, and for sure the massive majority of athletes in tennis, football, etc, weren't on anything. these days, young kids who are into sports must look around at their idols and wonder who isn't on stuff. what must this mean to them, to have this perspective?

remember how when you were a kid, it seemed that all the adults knew what was going on? but then you grew up and realised no one has any fucking clue? that they're all making it up as they go along - from your own parents, to the teachers, right on up to the goddamned (sorry god-chosen) president?

well, i wonder now if we aren't denying our kids even that mercy, to grow up feeling they are safe and that adults really are taking care of things...

cheating motherfuckers. they are the main reason i stopped cycling, when i was 19. everyone i'd loved, adored, the stars who'd i watched dancing and suffering like angels up the 16 mile alpine behemoths - one by one they became embroiled in drugs scandals.

you have to consider though, that if we increasingly demand from the athletes superhuman feats, then they will have to become superhuman to satiate our spectacle-lust. but nontheless, a cheat is a cheat.

they lost something, along the way.

thay are the destroyers of dreams.

but still i have my world cup. cynical players, erroneous refs, hooligans on the streets, but still the most beautiful thing in the world. let's just hope no-one gets busted...

cut me up

2006-06-28T23:46:00.000+09:00

nowt

green

2006-06-28T09:36:00.000+09:00

how much time do we collectively spend in our measly, wonderful lives worrying about money? i know that i for one profess to hate the stuff (true), and to not give a rat's arse for it (untrue) - though the fact that i give a rat's arse for it is underlined by the fact that i don't give a rat's arse for it - if that makes any sense.

what i mean is that really, in all truth, i couldn't care less about being rich. i have no desire for a mercedes benz, a dickhead's watch, or a bling bling necklace so big it comes with a hernia operation discount offer. i want to make sure i don't starve, that i can support any family i may have, and that i'm not left wearing the same shirt and trousers to work for years on end... (oh, wait - the last one i'm guilty of. i blame japanese sizes, but to be honest the thought of paying £40 for a work shirt petrifies my already fibre-depleted stools).

but all these years of not giving a rat's arse, of seeing my bank account peak each year at three figure sums, then perilously dwindle like a viagra-addled grandad's pecker in withdrawl, has meant that nowadays i HAVE to give a rat's arse.

as i hit my mid-thirties, i look at my bank account with trepidation. granted, in this last year it's started to look a little rosier (a bit like one of those miniscule green strawberries you see in allotment plots, or by the side of wind-bitten country lanes, that fleetingly turn reddish - deprived of the steroids and the GM injections, woefully undersized but nontheless somehow encouraging), but it's still a good way off raising-a-family figures. not that i'm thinking of it, yet, but well, these things do happen...

there's a guy here, bit of a financial wizz-kid, josh - worth thousands, hundreds of them - when he asked nme about my portfolio, i thought i'd left my work file in the last bar - but no, he said, your financial profile. ah, he's talking about the bulge the coins are making in my pocket, i thought. (boom boom! sorry, had toast and a bad pun book for breakfast!).

anyway, when i finally told him what my 'portfolio' had in it, he just flat-out refused to believe me. i'll never forget his final exasperated words -

- but you're
34!!!!!

anyway, things are looking up, got some decent work lined up for after august, and then there's the JET programme pension refund (a month's wages for each year you work on JET), though things flatten back out a bit when you consider the cost of moving onto a new house.

in japan, when you move into a new place, things get amusing, then scary, then just plain ridiculous.

first we have to pay shikikin - this is the equivalent of 4 months rent. this is basically a cleaning deposit. 4 months! roughly £1400. if anyone has any ideas how i can do £1400 worth of damage, other than torching the place (it was built 45 years ago - ancient by japanese standards), please mail me. for surely i won't be getting more than a penny of that back, and i intend to get my money's worth.

then we have fire insurace, changing the locks (why? i have nothing to steal! the estate agent didn't even smile when i said that, he just serenely blanked me...), and of course the equivalent to one month's rent that i have to pay the estate agent for services rendered.

then we have to reikin. rei in japanese means bow. kin means money. so this is literally 'bow money' - or 'politeness money' - a non-refundable, cash gift that i have to give to the landlord to thank him (too profusely) for letting me live in his house. in other words, far less subtle, a fucking bribe, my chums. total cost, about £700.

then the two months actual rent, for rent, would you believe - another £650.

grand total, £2,322.

from which, as i see it, all we actually get is two months rent paid. the rest feels like (and mostly is) a gratuity.

oops, hang on - what's that, feels like vomit, it's around the area of my rear-most molars... ah that's it, I'M SICK TO THE BACK TEETH.

dick fucking turpins, the lot of them. how do i say 'where's your mask?', in japanese?

hang on, dictionary check... "fukumen wa doko desu ka?"

that's it.

so, here's where we are. as ever, thinking about the moolah, and getting robbed by the landlords. where's the russian revolution when you need it, eh?

sekkarashii

2006-06-21T00:41:00.000+09:00

you should watch this. yes, YOU.

it's japanese tv at it's finest...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjUkS63mfVY&search=silent%20library

happiness or bust

2006-06-20T11:12:00.000+09:00

well, as some of you may know, i got married yesterday. in my lunchtime. as you do. got married, had a sarnie, went back to work. the king of romance, me.

tits up

2006-06-16T11:17:00.000+09:00

between having my mind numbed during my harrowing schlop of daily classes, i like to stare as dumbly as possible at my computer screen. today i found this gem. it almost shook me from my coma. almost.

"When men take testosterone in large doses, it changes into oestrogen and they can develop a condition known as gynaecomastia, which causes them to grow breasts. Some even produce milk," he said.

he said. as he breast-fed the baby.

................................

as you may be able to fathom, particularly uninspired this week. you know those weeks when you think 'when was is that something genuinely funny happened? can't remember...'. having one of those. not bad, not great, just fuzzy.

renoooooooo!

2006-06-12T12:24:00.000+09:00

someone told me i look like jean reno the other day. it was supposed to be a compliment... it ranks up there with the elton john comparison.

retired husband syndrome!

2006-06-12T10:48:00.000+09:00

About 60% of Japanese workers say they experience fatigue and stress associated with long working hours and run-ins with colleagues, compared with 30% of US workers.

In 2004 they put in an average of 43.5 hours a week, second only to the South Koreans. And while the official figures take into account paid and unpaid overtime, "They do not capture the unofficial time spent socialising with colleagues that is such an essential component of the Japanese work culture," said Jon Messenger, a research officer at the International Labour Organisation.

In addition Japanese workers take only 8.4 days off a year, less than half the number they are entitled to. Last year they notched up an average of more than 12 hours of overtime a week.

Japan's stress problem isn't down only to overwork. Taizo Kato, a psychology professor at Waseda University, believes the slaying of two corporate sacred cows - seniority-based promotion and lifetime employment - has created a new set of rules that few understand.

"More Japanese businesses are putting results first," he said. "They operate an American-style meritocracy that has put their employees under intolerable stress because they have no idea what they are supposed to be doing. Before, everyone knew their place."

Last month the National Police Agency said more than 32,000 Japanese committed suicide in 2005. Men aged over 40 - statistically the most susceptible to stress - comprised the biggest single group. While most cases were attributed to ill health and bankruptcy, a cultural resistance to discussing personal problems is also to blame.

"Men are especially reluctant to talk about problems at work," said Yukio Saito, director of Inochi no Denwa, a telephone helpline in Tokyo. "They don't want to expose their weaknesses. By the time they are middle-aged they are at their most uncommunicative."

"Japanese people take affairs of the heart very lightly," Prof Kato said. "They like to think of themselves as tough, and have no time for mentally 'weak' people. Companies regard people who suffer from stress as expendable."

It isn't only in the office where stress levels are soaring. In 2004 more than 6,000 teachers took extended sick leave - three times the number 10 years earlier - with many blaming the pressure of coping with unruly pupils.

Stress is afflicting people even as they enter their supposedly carefree twilight years. More than half of older women reportedly suffer from RHS - retired-husband syndrome - whose symptoms, such as rashes, are caused by having to spend time with spouses who are bored and dispirited after decades of devoting almost every waking hour to their job.

from the guardian

wonder beneath the waves

2006-06-11T19:34:00.000+09:00

· Sperm whales dive as deep as two miles below the sea surface and stay down for up to an hour and a half. Their brains can weigh up to 20lbs, the largest of any creature, and they sleep upside down, with their heads pointing towards the bottom of the ocean.

· Blue whales grow to more than 100ft long, six times bigger than a brontosaurus. A blue whale has a heart the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. A newborn is around 20ft long and drinks 50-150 gallons of milk a day, adding about 8lbs to its body weight an hour.

· Humpback whales sing 'love songs'. In the mating season, the males sing to the females. Those who sing longest are most successful.

· It's difficult to tell the sex of a whale on sight. Its penis is called a dork, which has become a term of abuse in some parts of the world.

· Killer whales have such a good sense of touch that if you dropped a pill into a bucket of fish and fed it to one, it could eat the fish and spit out the pill.

· The 'strapped toothed' whale is named for the two teeth in its bottom jaw which 'strap' the upper jaw, preventing it from opening very much. How these animals eat is not known, but one theory is that they stun their prey with high intensity sound.

· Whales use layers of water in the sea to communicate with each other over long distances. Fin whales talk to each other while 2,000 miles apart.

· Most whales have five fingers in their flippers.

· Whale products included animal feed, industrial oils, fertiliser, perfume, soap, shampoo and margarine. George Washington's false teeth were made of whalebone.

· Whaling fleets are equipped with sonar, helicopters and long-range explosive harpoons. The whale is killed by a 6ft long iron harpoon shot from a cannon. The harpoon head contains a time-fuse grenade which blows the whale's insides apart seconds after impact, though this does not usually kill it immediately.

· In the 1930-31 hunting season 30,000 blue whales were killed. By the Fifties the species had practically disappeared.

losing perspective

2006-06-09T11:14:00.000+09:00

don't normally post whole articles, but this is very interesting. calls into question the mindsets of climbers...

also, the guy this is about, lincoln hall, happens to be the father of the best friend of an exchange student in my school. on the day this happened, the kid called me in tears, telling me hall had died - that must have been from his team leaving him and coming down to say he had perished - which was reported on the net and on the news - then 8 hours later or so he staggers back to base camp with the americans.

anyway, here it is...

Italians passed us by, says Everest rescuer

Jacqueline Maley
Friday June 9, 2006
The Guardian

An American mountaineer who saved an imperilled Australian climber from certain death on the slopes of Everest has told how his party was refused help by two Italians who pretended they could not speak English.

David Mazur, an American climbing guide, has spoken for the first time about his rescue of the Australian, 50-year-old Lincoln Hall, whom he found sitting on a ledge halfway up the mountain in a psychotic state brought on by exposure and lack of oxygen.

Article continues
His revelations about the actions of some of Everest's would-be conquerors come weeks after British climber David Sharp was left to die on the mountain by scores of climbers who passed him by.

On May 25 Mr Mazur was guiding two paying clients to the top of the world's highest peak when he came across the Australian, prone, disoriented and freezing, at an altitude of 8,600 metres. Mr Hall had been left a day earlier by his own guides, who pronounced him dead after he had shown no signs of life for two hours. He was without gloves, a hat, oxygen bottles or a sleeping bag. His thinking was disordered and he apparently believed he was on a boat and had pulled off some of his clothes.

Mr Mazur and his team spent the next four hours pulling Mr Hall away from the slopes and plying him with bottled oxygen, food and liquids.

But as they raced against dwindling oxygen supplies to save his life, having abandoned their own hopes of reaching the summit, two Italian climbers walked past them towards the peak.

They asked the Italians for help but the Italians protested that they couldn't speak English and kept climbing. When he returned to base camp, Mr Mazur discovered that the two men could speak English, after all. "I don't know why they did not want to stop to help," Mr Mazur said. "I hope when I am there, in that state, and someone passes me ... I hope it is someone like me."

The incident comes after a season that has claimed the lives of at least 10 climbers. British climber David Sharp was left to die by up to 40 passing adventurers, leading many to question the ethics of mountaineers.

Sir Edmund Hillary, who with Tenzing Norgay conquered Everest for the first time in 1953, was damning about the callousness of modern climbers and said human life was "far more important than just getting to the top of the mountain".

"On my expedition there was no way you would have left a man under a rock to die," he said. Other climbers say when it comes to mountaineering, it is every man for himself, and to help others is to risk your own life.

Mr Mazur said he had no regrets about the action he had taken.

"It was very disappointing for me to miss my chance at the summit, but even more that I could not get my job done," he said. "[But] it was worth it. You can always go back to the summit but you only have one life to live.

"If we had left the man to die that would have always been on my mind ... how could you live with yourself?"

Mr Hall escaped from his ordeal with severe frostbite, water on the brain and a chest infection.

rain on me

2006-06-08T22:23:00.000+09:00

it's been raining since i got up. absolutely chucking it down. i was sat there in the english club today, with one student, waiting for the others to come. we were watching the rain streaming off the roof across the way, torrential it was. i said to him

- so, rainy season has started then!
he looks at me, straight faced, and says
- no, it starts tomorrow

do you feel happier?

2006-06-05T09:42:00.000+09:00

arse terrorist.

had two jehova's witnesses come a-knocking at my door on saturday. you can understand, perhaps, that after my recent economic disaster at the hands of a devout christian i was even less charitable than usual with these rabid beasts. i asked them if they wanted to get closer to jesus, they said yes, so i offered to crucify them both up on the roof...

why can you always spot a JW from a mile off? no matter what country you're in?! do they all use the same catalogue to buy their clothes from? is there a wharehouse somewhere in arkansas full of floral-print, lace-embroidered, hyper-creased clothing? they look like the stepford wives-cum-travel agents circa 1987, prim, crisp and utterly fucking empty, needy glazed eyes suggesting souls like ancient aircraft hangars, cavernous and vacant, echoing with their plaintive plea - which i imagine must be something like 'please don't tell me that i'm all alone in this world'.

i can think of no more disastrous way to choose to live, performing tricks in your own mind like a monkey in a big-top, all to be fed tidbits by the master's hand - fed with fodder containing absolutely no nutritional value whatsoever.

anyway, i mentioned the visit to kanako, who told me a story of when she was living in tokyo, aged 19. she went up there alone, on a whim, to find work. this she did, after a week or so. one day on her way out to lunch, some christians stopped her in the busy area of shibuya.

so this christian approaches and says

-hello! i'm a christian! are you happy?
-yeees
-well, would you likie to be even happier?
-i guess so, yes
-ok, i just need 3 minutes of your time!
-um, ok

so the christian then places his hand on kanako's head, and starts chanting something in a very loud voice. thousands of people streaming by, looking at this strange scene. the guy keeps on chanting, kanako's stood there thinking 'what the fuck is going on here...', but far too polite and a little too green to complain, and the guy keeps going, sure enough, for three minutes. at which point he stops, open his eyes and smiles fanatically, shouting 'do you feel happier?!?!'

kanako says 'yes! bye!' and legs it, vowing never to trust a christian again.

absurdity

2006-06-05T09:13:00.000+09:00

more from albert

-everything that exalts life at the same time increases its absurdity. in ther algerian summer i learn that one thing only is more tragic than suffering and that is the life of a happy man.

many, in fact, feign love of life to evade love itself. they try their skill at enjoyment and at 'indulging in experiences'. but this is illusory. it requires a rare vocation to be a sensualist. the life of a man is fulfilled without the aid of his mind, with its backward and forward movements, at one and the same its solitude and its prescences...

if there is sin in life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the impacable grandeur of this life... from pandora's box, where the ills of humanity swarmed, the greeks drew out hope after all the others, as the most dreadful of all. i know no more stirring symbol; for, contrary to the general belief, hope equals resignation. and to live is not to resign oneself.

the sky will last longer than i

2006-06-04T22:24:00.000+09:00

today was one of the nicest days. just hanging out with kanako, looking at sofas (would you believe), eating candies from the bowl on an estate agent's desk, lying with my head in her lap on a bench in the park, looking up at a canopy of leaves and a stone-grey sky. at one point i was listening to kanako humming some tune or other, watching a dad ride around the park on his little daughter's bike, with the kid chasing after him, aware of the leaves flowing in the wind, and just at that moment i caught site of a caterpillar up above meandering its unknowable way along the back of a leaf, and i felt just for a second, that everything was alright.

that's all i need, you know, all i ask, just to know that everything is alright.

.....

my compadre peter sent me 5 little books recently for my birthday, one of which was a series of essays by albert camus. i would like to share this excerpt. it had me thinking about its content for a good while...

- i learn that there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside the sweep of days. these paltry and essential belongings, these relative truths are the only ones to stir me. as for the others, the 'ideal' truths, i find that i have not enough soul to understand them. not that one must be an animal, but i find no meaning in the happiness of the angels. i know simply that the sky will last longer than i. and what shall i call eternity except what will continue after my death? i am not expressing here the creature's satisfaction with his condition. it is quite a different matter. it is not always easy to be a man, still less to be a pure man. but being pure is recovering that spiritual home where one can feel the world's relationship, where one's pulse beats coincide with the violent throbbing of the two o' clock sun.

more from albert tomorrow.

bollock pain

2006-06-01T08:54:00.000+09:00

i've just received a hefty kick in the nuts. not literally, but just as painful in its own way... the wedding company of Aihara & Fuckwits Incorporated have just announced bankruptcy.

not that they told me until i called them. one of the other weekend ministers called to warn me, so i called the ever-wracking aihara - she says

-hello!
-...hello...
-ah lee sensei is it? ah good. so this saturday you have two weddings, all ok?
-ah... well i just heard you're going bankrupt and that we might not get paid...
-........ah.....yes.... well...

and then again at the end of the conversation she says 'so can you do saturday then?'

hmm. so you owe me £1250, for the past 2 months of work that i've done, i might not see a penny of that (i have to call a lawyer today to see what can be done), and yet you want me to work for you on saturday?

[doubled up in pain caressing nads]

sing it

2006-05-30T10:45:00.000+09:00

another weekend, another round of weddings…

another one of those days, too. it’s a saturday. i have to get up at 8am to get to the wedding house by 9, with the first of 3 weddings to begin at 10. it’s grey. the drizzle in the air seems to matt-coat everything, a gloss-free 2D photographic image of what I remembered to be real – surely this isn’t life. as I drive over to the chapel I'm thinking about the dry, passionless affairs I am about to preside over, these weddings where the adherence to the rule book means that the human element gets dwarfed, forgotten, discarded – the couple get bombarded with such a flurry of instructions during the rehearsal that they end up be4 me looking like 12 year olds stood be4 the pope… and the kisses! well, the kisses are such awkward, cringing affairs that I dare hardly watch – but I do, for the same reasons I look at car crashes, to be relieved that I'm not involved - that, and to guage how painful the wedding night is going to be…

so there I find myself, stood up by the altar, decked out in my black frock and purple, gilt-edged stole, looking every inch the committed blasphemer, when the side door swings open – and rather than seeing the billowing nether regions of the bride’s gown, as I usually do (the dress usually arrives a few seconds be4 the bride), there’s nothing but a few heavy clunks, as something bashes against the narrow door, then a pause, and then the front wheels of a wheelchair come into view. in the wheelchair is the father of the bride. he’s pushed in by the bride’s brother. then come the bride and groom.

the groom comes to a seat near the front, the bride, her father and broither stand at the top of the aise. I shout “shinpu nyuujou!” (‘enter the bride’), and the three begin their slow procession down the aisle. one of the wheels runs over the bride’s dress, the brother doesn’t realize, the bride struggles to move, one of the staff shuffles over to help. the brother at last notices, bows repeatedly, apologises. I'm wondering if this is going to get messy. I look at the bride, and she’s beginning to well up, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. I look at the father, who’s clearly the victim of a massive stroke – his head is to one side, he seems only able to move his left hand. I look at his face – his mouth, which had been closed before, looking quite calm, is now pulled open a little, he seems too to be getting teary.

the three eventually reach the groom, who has stood just before me waiting, he bows to the father, who manages a bow back, and takes his bride’s hand. we run through the steps to follow, the bride and groom go into a little room, and I sit and wait as the guests come in to take their seats.

on the groom’s side there seems to be a lot of young men, no doubt his friends. as we start the ceremony, I ask the guests to sing a hymn as the bride and father enter. usually this is a limp affair, sung with no conviction, but today the groom’s friends belt it out, a deep, beautiful, coordinated baritone rumbles out, the staff look at each other and smile, the older guests laugh, and amongst this din the clumsy trio enter. as they approach I see now the bride is really streaming, rivulets of feeling running her mascara, the brother is misty-eyed too, and the father, the father, mouth contorted in a silent scream, tears cascading, a maelstrom of emotion, but emotion for what? for his daughter who is now to be married? is he crying for her? or for himself, anguished that he is unable to walk down the aisle, that he has to be taken care of, protected, pushed around by his own son?

an explanation isn't needed. now people are crying all over the place, women, sisters, aunts, brothers, some of the groom’s friends too, and all the time this wonderful noise reverberates around the chapel. the hairs on the back of my neck are bristling. something is happening here, right now, something is being expressed in these voices and in these tears, something that couldn’t be spoken, couldn’t be uttered – something so simple, so human. we know, people seem to be communicating – we know.

well, by the time the groom and bride get to me I'm welling up too. my eyes are full to the brim, it’s all I can do to gather myself and to look them in the eyes – and when I do they look at me with a hint of surprise, then something akin to recognition. I smile, they smile, and we begin.

as if this all wasn’t enough, the kiss is the best yet too, he grabs her by the waist and half-spins her, planting a big wet one right on her mouth. a brilliant, beautiful ceremony that leaves me invigorated, inspired even. fantastic.

ebbing

2006-05-29T12:23:00.000+09:00

jesus, he thought. this is where life has been hiding...

in a world where only drowning men see god, you have to question why.

he had been asleep for so long.

they'll tell you, eventually, if you harangue them enough, that whole continents suffer because they don't understand how to believe. the mother praying for the life of her mangled, paper-thin child is just not doing it right.

he'd traveled for so long only to reach a point where he realised what he didn't have.

the world outside of our heads has its own reality. we simply can never know it.

and there, on that street, watching a boy of 4 run to greet his impoverished, dust-covered father, he suddenly knew.

so this is where life has been hiding.

mind games

2006-05-25T22:09:00.000+09:00

ooh. research - some folk did experiments - showing fotos of faces in diff states of expression. had ten yr olds as one group, and another of slightly older kids. difference was that one was going through puberty. anyway, sat two kids from each group be4 a monitor flashing faces - kids had buzzers with diff choices and had to guess the emotional state of the person on the screen. and they found, intriguingly, that the older kids lost out when the scores were compared.

and the reason for this, the researchers concluded, may explain why teenagers are considered generally to be poor at understanding other people's emotions and reactions to their own actions - and the reason is in the frontal lobes. here, in the teenage head, as puberty hits, lots of new receptors are shooting off, growing to forge new connections - but this takes years, and in that time, these receptors kind of blow around in the lobes for a bit, not really sure what they're doing, firing off, looking for connections, and messing up the signals the teenager recieves from the world around.

a well-rounded human adult has a head in which these frontal lobes are full of good, healthy connections. which raises the question of whether happiness can be linked to genetics, as intelligence is - well, it doesn't even raise it - it's a given. this doesn't mean of course, that if you're parents are miserable gits that you can't be happy - just that our parents dna could pre-dispose us to happy states of being, very much in the same way as suicidal tendencies run in families.

there's also the possibility of training yourself to be happy - perhaps content is more appropriate - though 'training' is the wrong word - what people who meditate, who train their brains, are doing is strengthening the connections between their receptors, buffing up their frontal lobes, clearing pathways.

i just wish i could be arsed to sit meditate, to be honest...

filums

2006-05-18T09:10:00.000+09:00

i'm gonna post pete's comment as a post, it's been a good long while since i had a decent discussion on the flicks...

pb...
No annie hall is not the best film in the world. Have seen raging bull twice recently around oscar time. still brilliant. I remember watching OLJW with my dad once and we both loved it - it's probably his fave. watched it with DYC and she fell asleep. Two more films that I haven't watched for a while and then I saw were goodfellas and Trainspotting. Both still very good. oh how Anzacs let me down. You missed out escape to victory as well.

me...
anzacs, yeah that MUSIC! brilliant if your wearing your orange day-glo headband and zippy snow-washed baggy jeans, coked up to the gills and beyond in an LA electro-disco club circa 1982, absolutely SHITE if your watching a movie about the australian contingent being slaughtered in turkey during the first world war...

definitely don't watch strange encounters again. let it stay as a great film in your mind. who would ever have thought that an £11.99 casio electronic keyboard (from tandy's) would provide the lingua franca of the ever-expanding universe?

not me!

goodfellas, good not great. maybe if it was filmed on grainier stock, or made in the 1970s! or black and white. it's good though.

but have you seen the apartment, the jack lemmon/billy wilder film - beautifully shot, great direction, funny, tragic, lovely.

that's another reason i love annie hall. just so funny, constantly, over and over. he's such a sarcastic git, and he's american. as they say, go figure.

and along with the apartment, as a beautiful b&w film, you've got manhattan. another woody allen film. the camera fornicates with new york in that one. script not so great though.

anyone else, please wade in...

annie

2006-05-17T16:18:00.000+09:00

been away a week or so. been busy. life!

just watched annie hall again, must be the tenth time. still laughed, still got emotional, just a brilliant film.

i think, and i thought i'd never say this, that it may have supplanted raging bull as my favorite movie of all time. having said that though, maybe i need to watch raging bull. now there's a film in which every shot is absolutely necessary, not a second too long, just perfection. still, for its sheer humanity, annie hall gets the nod.

oh.. clean forgot about the outlaw josie wales... hmm...

meander

2006-05-12T09:42:00.000+09:00

the red hot chilli peppers. i was just listening to their new album, well, a song off of it. when are people going to realise how crap they are? so twee! twee twee twee! they have the odd catchy tune amidst a general, numbing, blanket blandness, half-decent tattoos, and famously had hard drug habits, but have now recovered, as they hit the mid 40s and sort their lives out (it's that or die, though, isn't it...). this motley combination seems to mark them out for high sycophantic priase from reviewers, and millions of sales...

the name of the album is stadium arcadium. must have been up all nite thinking that one up.

i don't know. blandness. mediocrity. does my head in. these people get paid, for fuck's sake! it's a bit like harry potter, or the da vinci code, or tim henman - if everyone likes it, something must be wrong with it! does that sound like snobbery? maybe. have you tried reading harry potter? and did you enjoy it? really? well you must have a mental age of 10. take this fork and go play with the plug socket.

which brings me un-neatly on to diana. i heard she'd died, if i remember rightly, as i was sat on the top deck of a double decker bus on my way to work at the photo factory (maybe more on that later - i'd sit there at a machine watching people's fotos whizz by on a cutter, in between 'marijuana breaks', making sure that the fotos and the negatives matched, keeping a judicious eye out for, as the floor manager put it, 'cock and bush' - company policy was 'almost anything goes, but if there's something up the fanny, put a sticker on it' - a sticker so adhesive that when you tried to take it of it would rip the print. i used to pocket the really interesting fotos - never anything porny, just the really wierd ones - what a great job that was!)

where was i? diana - so my mate said, as he the paper read, 'oh, diana's dead'. 'blimey', i replied, and carried on eating my sausage roll. 20 minutes later we got into work and all over the place were grey, grainy photocopied pictures of diana, looking like an under the weather afghan hound, with the words 'our princess' printed at the bottom. we got onto the factory floor and women were in tears, men looked ashen - i knew straight away that something was wrong with this. just like harry potter! just like the red hot chilli peppers! just like tim henman! when a whole nation, or even an entire economic, demographic class, regardless of nationality, suddenly decides that something 'speaks' to them, you know it's dodgy.

like the deluge of emotional outpouring that came after her death. this may have come from an original place, an original grief - which i think is odd in any case, loving a woman you didn't know, who basically did nothing - but anyway - the point is is that the need to mourn, to gather in weeping, teddybear-toting packs as they did, to allow themselves to be manipulated by the media and companies (do u remember the company that made a margarine tub with diana's foto on it?!) - that all said more about our society, about our need to feel like a community, our loss of cohesion, than anything else, more than any reflection on our sense of reason, or logic.

some may think my views on this as cold. i disagree. look at how each anniversary of her death passes by with barely a murmur, with none of the public outpouring that we saw immediately after her death. she had no legacy, no music, no words, no voice, really - her legacy is her death, and its aftermath. we see now, a mere what, 8 years after her death, that something strange happened. something very basic, but not a good basic. not a healthy basic. more a sad, indicative basic, indicative of a people, peoples, indeed, that are crying out for community.

i don't know. seems to me that this need reveals itself in another need, the need to like things together, to find common ground - a commonness based on shifting sands. how else to explain the chilli pepper's success? tim henman's durability? harry potter's popularity?

(here's a quote from a review of stadium arcadium-

-The album - as moreish as McDonald's - is mainstream America in excelsis.

says it all really...)

cock

2006-05-11T11:09:00.000+09:00

turning on the tv this morning as i sat there with sodden cornflakes dribbling down my chin, i was a bit suprised to be greeted by a cheery presenter introducing a cock-fight. now, i've always been partial to a big red cock of a morn, but the last thing i want to see is two straggly, talon-torn, skinny-arsed roosters kicking seven shades of shit out of each other.

the feature tied into these three boxing brothers, all trained by their i-never-made-it-so-you-fucking-will nightmare dad, who are training near this temple - this temple where it's customary to have cockfights. surrounded by about 20 cameras and a bunch of inanely grinning girl fans (for a description, well, not much different to the two roosters), the lads looked on in their matching jumpsuits, and no-one batted an eyelid as the cocks tore into each other.

mad, and sad.

stinking

2006-05-06T23:20:00.000+09:00

today was fun. had three weddings. turned up for the first one at 11 am to be told by the flautist (?) (flute player) that "ooh, you stink of booze".

not good. not when you have to stand two feet in front of a wedding couple and talk for 20 minutes. and not good for your confidence when you're thinking 'they've spent something like £15 grand for all this, and they don't want to be wedded by a vicar who smells like a tramp'...

not a good start...

i've had a few...

2006-05-02T11:21:00.000+09:00

a word to the wise... don't get drunk and then write an angry email to a publishing company when you find out you haven't made the top ten in one of their competitions... you may very well regret it the day after.

sekkarashii

2006-05-01T01:05:00.000+09:00

well. deflated.

i've been quiet. i've been waiting for a result. i entered the 250 word short story 'gasoline colors' into a competition. ther were 1250 entries, and i made the last 26.

i've been waiting for the result for a week...

here it is....

http://www.fishpublishing.com/short-stories-news.php

so i didn't even make the top ten. aaaaaaargh. but check the logo - a christian fish! a story about a deaf woman getting hit by a train maybe wasn't their cup of tea. and look at how many women got into the top 26. at least 17. ah fuck it.

do i sound bitter?!

depressed.

i do

2006-04-26T10:02:00.001+09:00

so, the weddings… i’ve married a grand total of 10 couples to date. with a guess, the average ‘congregation’ size has consisted of about 100 people – so i have in the past two weekends performed in front of an audience of a thousand souls!

it’s fairly nerve-wracking stuff. i get to the chapel, head to a little back room, change into my frock and stole (i'm thinking next of a mitre, perhaps a shoulder parrot), come out, exchange pleasantries with the other staff (co-ordinators, piano player, flautist, singers, the every-ready bunny that is aihara san), then run through my script one last time.

the script is 5 pages long, written in roman alphabet, consisting of about 75% japanese – i only speak English when i'm blaspheming my atheism, with lines like “i call upon the mercy of our lord jesus christ and the power of the holy ghost to bless this couple who stand here before god” etc and so on.

i'm not superstitious, nor even faintly unsure of my anti-godness, but i can't help thinking at these points ‘what a con’… a con all round really, on my behalf, on the aihara corporation’s behalf, and of course on behalf of religion.

anyway…

next, in come the couple, shooed in by the black-suited (and very pretty, too pretty, in fact - usually prettier than the birde - not good) co-ordinators, who buzz like flies throughout the ceremony – the couple never look at ease. the couple rarely smiles. the couple look like a pair of lambs being brought to slaughter, in possession of an inkling of what is coming – perhaps ‘lambs being brought to the pulpit’ is more apt.

that’s when i relax, when i see them – i know immediately that they’re far more nervous than me, that they and everyone else has more to worry about than whether i pronounce every word perfectly, or whether my top lip is glistening with sweat beads (for the record, yes, it is). and here i wonder what the point of this exercise is? i mean, of course, the wedding is important – a ceremony is required, a ceremony of some sorts, that signals to the group the communion being made, the bonds being cemented. this ceremony is central to human societies, and every single society in the world celebrates the coming together, as life pairs, of two individuals. and that’s wonderful, and precious, and not cheesy or sickly – but these things i preside over are exactly that, they’re ostentatious, ridiculously expensive, exhausting for the couple, and so restrictive is the order of events that must be followed that no one involved has anything even remotely resembling fun.

they have to walk just so, stand just there, hold the gloves like this, turn only 45 degrees when exchanging rings, say this like this, raise the veil like this… all of which the result is, two robots performing an unlovable act, passionless – we can only hope that this isn’t an omen for the wedding night, for if it is they’ll be round the drive-through divorce house in a week.

and then there’s the kiss – in the rehearsals, they’re instructed to kiss in such a way that you want to slap them for following the rules – the bride’s veil is lifted, she bends down slightly, the groom kisses her forehead. her FOREHEAD. at this point I want to jump the pulpit and show him how it’s supposed to be done! grab her by the waist, fling her through the air, arch her back over your knee, then pucker up and retrieve the lady’s breakfast.

i have similar rules to follow, by the letter, which, combined with the high-wire tension contributed to proceedings by the combustible aihara san, does nothing to relax the nerves. last week, for example, on my third weedding of the day, i gave what I thought was my best performance yet – i was completely relaxed, smiling, looking at the audience, got all the words right – it was good. at one point, i read a prayer, and have to raise my hands as i do. as we’d finished, aihara san came over, and without a word of encouragement, proceeded to tell me –

-um, your hands, during the prayer, maybe 30 centimetres too low – raise them…. oh and the bible. when you put it back down you left the spine facing inwards. don’t do that.

yeah, fuck ‘em! they can’t sack me now anyway cos i bought the robe (£250!), and the bible (£2.99!), and the black shoes (£9.99!), and because it takes a good two months to train someone up.

the restrictions, the rules, are so indicative of one of the big problems with japanese culture – the lack of spontaneity, of individuality - i'm saying nothing new here, but, well, i'm still gonna say it.... aihara and her husband stand at the back of the chapel scrutinizing every minute of the ceremony – lodged into their heads is a video representation of the perfect ceremony, step by step, action by action. they no doubt fantasize about a cyber-vicar, flawless, eternal, electronic perfection. what they don’t see is that though a little deviation or two may be made from the plan, if the minister is happy, and smiling, and relaxed, then this transmits to the families and friends, and to the couple getting married. what they can’t see is what is the most important – that everyone enjoys themselves.

it’s just like having 700 students and 40 teachers sit in a freezing gym in February to listen to the PTA head drone on for 45 minutes! the individual's needs are deemed unnecessary of consideration. we must fight, we must suffer. there’s examples of this everywhere here. it’s a serious fuck up in the culture. for all that a foreigner might love japan, and i do, you have to remember that in many instances, to be japanese, you are asked to dehumanize yourself, to deny emotions and natural reflexes in order to comply with the rules. i can only imagine what life must have been like here 300 years ago…

back to the aihara’s… i bet they and their ilk have dreams where they’re sat in a messy room – their task is to put the mess into boxes, and there they sit, gleefully tidying. and outside the room, endless corridors of endless identical rooms. with identical messes. they wake up hours later, drenched in their own love juices. sticky and exhilarated, alive, their little buds and shiny apple-red cock-ends all-a-tingle, glistening like heroes in victory’s sweat.

ah, to order the unordered!

to defeat the decay!

to constrict the chaos!

to dehumanise the humanity!

to think anything is more important than love!

stagged

2006-04-24T23:29:00.000+09:00

dreading any form of stag do. it just doesn’t appeal to me at all. i mean, i like getting drunk, a little too much maybe, but the idea of intentionally going out to black-out, or even worse, of being force fed cocktails of tequila and sanbuca doesn’t appeal very much anymore.

who knows what they do to grooms these days on stag do’s anyway? maybe shoot you full of crack and heroin through a dirty needle and tie you naked to a pillar on a pier, to have your back chafed skinless by the barnacles, as the ocean inevitably rises – when full-tide hits, you’re left with nothing above the waterline but the tip of your nose and two nostrils. that’s when your best mates appear in a row boat, swigging tennents superbrew and saying “come on ya soft git! we’re just having a laugh! innit?!”

yeah. can’t wait. bring it on.

wonder

2006-04-24T23:04:00.000+09:00

A tender light flooded the compartments. It would have been possible for a moment to believe that the sun was the expression of something that loved and suffered for men. Human beings floated like fish in golden water, free from the urge of gravity, flying without wings, transport, in a glass aquarium. Ugly faces and misshapen bodies were transmuted, if not into beauty, at least into grotesque forms fashioned by a mocking affection. On that golden tide they rose and fell, murmured and dreamed. They were not imprisoned, for they were not during the hour of the dawn aware of their imprisonment.

Graham Greene, Stamboul Train

plastic fantastic

2006-04-20T11:02:00.000+09:00

sat with a blank screen... hmm........

i wrote a poem once about the blank page, that had a line about the hushed sound lead makes on a piece of paper – ‘the hustling, irregular atoms of carbon’ - seems redundant now, now that the feel of plastic is all but ubiquitous to the fingertips.

a world coated in plastic.

i wonder how many times a day we touch something that hasn’t been manufactured? even the apple we might eat is (most likely) not natural, in the real sense of the word - the wood of doors and tables hewn and lacquered, and of course, the plastic – steering wheels, remotes, pens, phones, computers, toilet seats! – everywhere, nothing is real.

i remember reading about the khmer rouge – how, when they invaded phnom penh, swarming like fire ants to unleash their hatreds upon the populace, how, as they evacuated the city, they checked peoples hands. those that had calloused hands, those that looked like they knew hard, manual work, were assumed to be peasants, and were marched off to the camps – those that had smooth hands, however – the doctors, teachers, the managers, the intelligentsia – they were marched off to prisons, and usually killed immediately, once the torturer had had his fun. imagine, word of this reaching those who had not yet left, the educated middle classes and the intellectuals, desperately trying to roughen their hands as the trucks roamed the streets with their loudhailers, all the while the khmer militia going from house to house, forcing people out at gunpoint.

i don’t remember where i read about that, but it was such a powerful description that whenever i look at my own hands for any length of time i'm reminded of it.

with all this plastic around us, i always think, all this non-reality, what percentage of us would survive the cull?

it’s too easy to forget that for millennia, this world we now inhabit, that we take so effortlessly for granted, did not exist. that it is, in fact, a mirage, an apparition, a constructed entity that serves, along with a multitude of other purposes (good and bad, thankfully), to remove us from the environment in which all our senses were honed, our instincts developed, our mental capacities nurtured. it removes us from that environment, that ‘reality’, the reality of real things, to such an extent that the idea of decay has become anathema to us, something that must and now can be challenged, even halted, plastic-wrapped and safe from the elements.

and so people too become plastic. fantastic!

and death, when it comes, seems almost unnatural, some sort of a cosmic hiccup to be at best pitied, at worst ignored. and in this age of woolly thinking, of lucky dip, shopping trolley spirituality, this age of plastic, disposable belief, if we ignore death we also deny the acknowledgement that life is impermanent, and therefore all the more beautiful. we allow ourselves to believe not only that the world is permanent and unalterable, but, more damningly, that all human life is not of the same value.

and all this can be summed up, condensed into, denominated commonly by - you guessed it -

plastic!

plastic is the tangible embodiment of the vapidness that surrounds
us, say i!

our plastic-coated existence.

go hug a tree.

relocation relocation relocation!

2006-04-19T09:34:00.000+09:00

there's a bit of a to-do going on at the moment here in japan. basically the americans, who've had a large military presence here since 1945, are planning on scaling back their personnel and moving a large proportion over to guam.

but this won't happen unless the japanese foot 75% of the bill for that relocating. which to me seems a bit rich - ok, the japanese were not exactly the men in white during the 2nd world war, but since then not only have they handed over billions to help pay for the cost of the yanks being on their soil (during which time their servicemen have been involved in rapes, murders and public disturbance incidents), but they've also bent over backwards to accomodate the american requests for land and access.

it's a bit like someone coming into your house, being more of a nuisance than a help, then asking you to pay them to leave.

anyway, here's a excerpt from the article in the guardian....

Though it is not legally required to do so, Japan already pays about 235bn yen (£1.1bn) a year in host-nation support for the US bases - about 70% of the total cost.

Not surprisingly, many Japanese find the additional demands hard to stomach.

"The request sounds extraordinary," said the Japan Times in a vitriolic editorial. "Having a foreign host government pay for the cost of relocating a US military facility and its personnel to US territories is almost unheard of." Similar troop realignments in Germany will, the paper reported, be paid for by Washington.

Critics have also asked how it is possible for a project initially estimated at $4bn (£2.2bn) dollars to end up costing more than twice as much. The answer appears to be that Japan is not being asked to pay for the relocation alone, but to build housing and other facilities for their marines in their new home on Guam. If the Japanese relent, the Americans can consider themselves truly blessed: the move to Guam was after all already part and parcel of the Bush administration's efforts to strengthen the US military presence in the Pacific.

lost

2006-04-17T20:34:00.000+09:00

she's my 'weddings' boss, aihara san. 45 perhaps.

married, to a pushy, fast-talking little fellow, the kind of man that you never see siting fully back in a chair, the kind that you suspect it must be a quiet, constant, grinding nightmare to be married to. abuse comes in many forms. when he' s speaking, if she tries to interject - which she almost never does - he flicks his wrist and opens his palm, showing her the back of his hand, and she stops. a little gesture that speaks volumes. he keeps on talking and never looks away from my eyes, and i see, with a glance, her tiny, bird-like frame crush itself even smaller beneath the matt-black two-piece old bag of a suit that she invariably wears.

they have a son, too, he's maybe 26, 28, silent, forever inhabiting the background, he looks like he's never had a thought of his own in his entire life. this kind of vacant being is more common in japan than anywhere else i've ever been. there's an uncountable army of non-living forms here, suppressing their being, confident only in their invisibility. they are defeated, completely, exhausted, crumpled.

she, aihara san, is a nervous wreck, literally a jumble of nerves. at any pause in conversation, or at a quiet moment in the wedding rehearsals, her eyes fix on an object, they seem to grow beyond their sockets, her hands grip each other so tight that you can see the blood draining, she looks utterly lost. her voice has an edge to it, almost a shriek, and there’s a frantic nature to her speech, she opens her mouth and words tumble out, and just as suddenly she stops, and returns to her fixations.

of course, there’s most likely a multitude of factors contributing to her tensions and her worries. but something that is fascinating for me is her spiritual faith, for she’s christian. i find myself wondering what it must be like to be japanese, to have a head wired for one particular belief (the animistic, largely superstitious theology of shinto-buddhism), and then to have it supplanted (or to attempt to supplant it) by christianity, with all its magic, its miracles, and more crucially, its idea of sin. surely this must create a conflict in the minds of those japanese that attempt to adhere to christianity, in any serious manner - for traditional japanese belief has no concept of the struggle of the soul, of eternal damnation and salvation. indeed, whereas churches in the west are full of followers praying for forgiveness of sins (real or imagined), in japan people go to shrines, many piously, but to pray for financial security, or for success for their children academically, or to have their cars blessed by a priest in the belief that this will save them from traffic accidents.

so would she still be off-kilter if she wasn’t a japanese christian? probably. i can’t help imagining though, that her worries are exacerbated by her faith, that within that troubled skull two very distinct and most likely incompatible systems of thought quietly work to destabilize her sense of being.

bangin' the hoes

2006-04-17T15:32:00.000+09:00

first des'ree's lyrics, now someone else's student's work - whatever next...

but you have to admit that this is brilliant - both gramatically and comically....

[from my friend] -Today I asked my students to write about their favorite songs. note that I added the punctuation. I changed nothing else (other than the odd word for the sake of clarity).

Here you are:

'My favorite singer is Snoop Dogg. He is an American singer. He is black.

My favorite song of his is called "Gz and Hustlaz." He begins the song by announcing that this one is for his "Gz," and then he goes on to say that it's also for his "Hustlaz." Then he returns back to the "Gz" to remind them that the song is for them every bit as much as it is for the "Hustlaz."

Snoop uses many poetic devices in his song "Gz and Hustlas." He tells the "niggaz" that he knows that he is hitting "hard as steel." This is a powerful simile because steel is very strong and hard to break - just like Snoop. If you were a pimp, drug dealer, and murderer do you think you would be allowed back on the street? Snoop was able to survive prison, even though he probably had some very disappointing experiences there.

Snoop also creates suspense in his song. For example, he inquires, "How many hoes in '94 will I be bangin'?" Now it is 2006, so he probably knows by now how many he has banged. But this still creates suspense. It leaves the listeners wondering just how many hoes will need to be banged by Snoop. They will want to listen longer so they can find out.

In conclusion, Snoop is a very powerful singer and one day he will be remembered with such great singers as Marvin Gay and perhaps even Jesus.'

life!

2006-04-14T22:20:00.000+09:00

i have decided to become a songwriter. the impetus came from listening to desree's 'life', today in the car... on the radio. i couldn't do worse. have a read...

Ooh, Yeah
Oh yeah
Oh Life
Oh Life
I'm afraid of the dark
Especially when I'm in the park
When there's no one else around
Oh I get the shivers
I don't wanna see a ghost
It's the sight that I fear most
I'd rather have a piece of toast
Watch the evening news
Life, oh life
Oh life, oh life
Life, oh life
Oh life, oh life
I'm a superstitious girl
I'm the worst in the world
Never walk under ladders
I keep a rabbits' tail
I'll take you up on a dare
Anytime, anywhere
Name the place, I'll be there
Bungee jumping, I don't care

in the park?

toast?

the evening news!

bungee jumping?!

slit your wrists?

please!

can anyone out-crap desree? have a bash...

back to school

2006-04-13T09:41:00.000+09:00

new school year, new hassles. for instance - english teachers who speak english more poorly than i speak japanese. i am not filled with confidence for the future of japanese schoolchildren. what if there's similar problems in other subjects? maths teachers who don't understand pythagoras? japanese teachers that can't write kanji?

oh well, be over soon...

the recruiter

2006-04-12T10:08:00.000+09:00

[i was a recruiter's bitch in london for 6 months, many a year ago. here is a slice from that life]

Darren is literally doing me in. well, it’s actually this job that’s doing me in, but every great tragedy needs its director, its conductor, the shadow that pulls the strings, orchestrates the action, and for my tragedy, the kingpin is Darren. as if sitting here at my desk in this stuffy little office, surrounded by (for the most part) equally stuffy little people wasn’t enough, he has to be here, with that smile, those clothes, that hair! my god, that hair! balding at the front, tufted at the sides, longer at the back, bleached at the tips, splayed out like the back of a roman helmet. i don’t know where he gets it cut, but they must be laughing still.

here is a typical Darren episode.

Darren comes over to complain about a candidate that i sent him for this new job he’s trying to fill. he doesn’t really walk, he bounces, like up on the balls of his feet. he doesn’t turn a corner insomuch as he kind of ballroom dances it, a little swivel of his skinny hips, a squeak from his hush puppies, a dip of the shoulder. resume in hand, held out before him as though to have it nearer would result in contamination, lips turned down in disgust, finnicky wire rim specs sat atop beaky nose, how I’d like so very much to see that face hurtling at great speed through a reinforced double-glazed window.

-oi, uni boy.

iwanttocaveinyourskull

-what?

-what the fack is this?

[cockney, fired out like bullets, hard rabbit turds]

-it’s a cv, i think.

-i know it’s a cv, you fackin cant, but look at it!

-what’s wrong with it Darren?

-why’dya send me ‘im? eh? look at ‘is name! i can’t even pwonounce it! mulabangabanaji? from mumbai? on the river mumba-jumba! you’re having a laff inchya!

-darren, look, he’s called mulangaree, he’s got everything you need, linux, html, the lot, he’s worked for three big companies, he’s educated, and, look at that, would you believe it, he’s english. he’s from tunbridge wells.

-look mate, we ain’t the united fackin nations are we? we ain’t the fair fackin trade organization are we? if we send this boy over he’s gonna get chucked in the bin. I don’t make the rules uni boy, i just play by ‘em. if you ‘ad a good english boy, and a good paki in fwant o’ ya, who’dju pick? the english boy, innit? and look –

-darren, you - for fuck's sake, he IS english.

-stop it. now. i’ve told you once, he won’t get the job, don’t waste my time, awight?

and with that, he's off.

and i'm sat wondering how much force the balcony wondow could take.

hitching

2006-03-28T22:18:00.000+09:00

yeah, so...

listening to the shins, there's a song, 'new slang' from 'oh inverted world', a fantastically perfect, sumptuous piece of pop. the bass line stops me in my thoughts every time, it's nicely brilliant.

finished 'in cold blood' today, truman capote. something else, that book. as is his life story, which i'm also just about to finish.

anyway, all this is just a preamble, for The News. which most of u know anyway, but this is for 'the silent readers', the throngs who don't know me, and never comment, but OBVIOUSLY read. religiously.

anyway, getting married. ! . yes. wow. feels very good. i never knew what it meant to really mean it, to really say it and truly mean with every single molecule in your fibrous being -

this. is. forever.

(well, we hope, don't we? i mean, how many dovorcees thought the same thing?)

but let's be positive! let's put the pre-nuptual pen down and celebrate!

everything, to borrow a line, is illuminated.

bloomin' 'eck

2006-03-23T09:10:00.000+09:00

it's official. it's ohanami time. the cherry blossom have erm blossomed, and so will follow a two-week bout of public drunkenness, as every man and his dog head out to the parks to sit on blue tarpaulin and get hammered - i mean to get their eyefull of the transient cherry blossoms.

generally considered, and rightly so, to be a lovely celebration of spring, it's lots of fun - but not for the new recruits of big companies, who are expected to be out at the park at dawn, or even from the night before, to nab the best spots for the company senpais ('superiors').

i think i'd rather quit...

short short story

2006-03-23T00:53:00.000+09:00

well, i wrote a 250 word story for a competition, here it is.

gasoline colours

A cold spell, cold as hell, descends. Even cows look fearful. Watching gasoline colours frozen in puddles, thoughts tumble out, my mind empties. A bird escapes from bushes, a flurry of white, frost departs brittle leaves, sparkling in sunlight. Beautiful. Silent.

This is how I feel today, skin tingles, nerve ends pinch, a bird in flight.

On fences perch galaxies, ice particles stacked improbably upon one another, a brush of the hand and there’s thousands more, another and millions, one more, nothing. I step from road to gravel, no crunch, though I feel every edge beneath my sole. The tracks, gunmetal blue, parallel, so exact amongst all this randomness.

Wood passes beneath, interspersing gravel, stained oil-black – wood anchored by rusted iron pins, curled over like piglets tails, each identical, once pounded in by giant hammers, held by calloused hands, long before I was born.

Cally signs, “It’s perfect out here.”

I reply, “Don’t come here enough, let’s come tomorrow too.”

I see her laugh.

The sky now is limitless. Had a man painted it, you’d say he lacked imagination – as it is, it’s faultless, not a cloud, not even a plane’s sayonara jet stream, just an alabaster half-crescent moon and immaculate sun.

Thoughts slowly tumble back in, none of them a worry. The day’s serenity is pervasive.

I feel a rumble in my feet, my legs, quickly up to my neck, so quick. Cally signals, she’s shouting, her mouth twisted. I turn. A train. One metre away. I never knew.

............

dedicated to Miss Deaf Texas... that's not supposed to sound glib, really.

proper sekkarashii!!!!

2006-03-20T11:54:00.000+09:00

had one of those 'sekkarashii moments' the other day. it was about 11:30 at night, i was on my way home from the cinema - saw 'syriana', i really enjoyed it - maybe a bit earnest for some, but it made a change to watch a film and to have to think - anyway, as i often do, i had a craving for chocolate milk, so i went to a convenience store. there i find two high school kids stacking the drinks shelf. i can't see any of my beloved van houten choco milk, so i ask...

(in japanese, but i'll translate...)

- got any chocolate milk?

- un?

- chocolate - milk. have you got any chocolate milk?

confused, glassy-eyed stares.

- eh?

-you know, van houten, C-H-O-C-0 M-I-L-K.

by now the frustration was building, and here the scene suddenly became a peter kay sketch.

-choco? [one kid says, tilting head to one side, mouth open, is that drool i see?]

pause.

- [same kid, head tilts again as he speaks] milk?

like it was some alien concept, like i'd just asked him if he wanted to time travel in my boot-pomegranate to 1023 - how could this be? i heard him thinking, the little cogs going whirrrrrrrrzzztkink in his feeble mind, milk AND chocolate? together? melded? like siamese quintuplets joined at the teeth, milk AND chocolate! obviously impossible!

peanut? ......... butter?

butter and.... peanuts? you're having a laugh innit?!

shoe... lace? LACE... MADE FROM SHOES?

i think i might have actually said 'oh you fucking idiots' and then stormed out, for i was excacerbated in the extreme.

i then had to drive to another three, THREE! convenience stores before i found my van houten choco milk. i didn't really enjoy it either, such was the bitter taste left in my throat from the earlier incident...

ve have means...

2006-03-17T01:31:00.000+09:00

truman capote - i'm reading his biography - brilliant. the biography itself, as a piece, is competent - but really, with a subject as fascinating as capote, i don't see how even the most mediocre writer could not write something enthralling - anyway here's a favourite snippet...

capote goes to russia, at the height of the cold war - he's there to cover the american production of porgy and bess in moscow - one day the russian hosts were talking to the producer in the lobby of the american troupe's hotel - and at the top of the grand staircase appears capote, wearing a giant yellow cashmere scarf and immaculate suit - conversation stops - he descends majestacally, as if no-one is watching, and minces his way theatrically through the lobby. still being watched, he goes through the revolving doors and comes back in to the lobby, clicks his heels mid-air, and heads out again - after a prolonged silence, one of the russian breaks it by saying-

ve have them like that here in the soviet union... but ve hide them.

flickroff

2006-03-16T11:05:00.000+09:00

ok, this is going to sound like blog/flickr jealousy. it's not. it's mockery...

so, sometimes i read that some famous person has a blog. i might go check it out - more often than not i am disappointed. and even more disappointed by the sheer volume of people who clamber on the blogwagon and post some sickly, sycophantic comment, like 'you're SO right... btw, i have a blog too! it's at www...' etc and so on.

anyway, today i was reading the guardian, as i do, busy man me, and there i came across this comedian called dave gorman, who writes a column once in a while. he extols the virtues of flickr, and posts his flickr accnt address - and there you find a collection of some good, and some average fotos - but 10 or 20 or so comments, applauding the 'terror' or the 'sheer beauty'. bollocks!

judge for yourselves...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dgbalancesrocks/108210125/

hear this

2006-03-16T09:26:00.000+09:00

and the award for the most tragic, dark and bizarre headline of the year goes to...

Miss Deaf Texas Struck by Train, Killed

Wednesday March 15, 2006 11:46 PM

AUSTIN (AP) - The reigning Miss Deaf Texas died Monday afternoon after being struck by a train, officials said.

Tara Rose McAvoy, 18, was walking near railroad tracks when she was struck by a Union Pacific train, authorities said. A witness told Austin television station KTBC the train sounded its horn right up until the accident occurred.

McAvoy, who had been deaf since birth, won the state title in June and represented the state ``with dignity and pride,'' state pageant director Laura Loeb-Hill told The Associated Press via e-mail Monday night.

McAvoy was to represent Texas at the Miss Deaf America pageant this summer, Loeb-Hill said.

McAvoy graduated last year from the Texas School for the Deaf, attended Austin Community College and then started at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., in January, but had returned to Texas, Loeb-Hill said.

doin' it for the kids! even the ugly ones!

2006-03-16T08:38:00.000+09:00

ooh. so. been a while. i don't understand this ebb and flow thing. one week i write like mad, ideas flood me, the next, nowt seems worth commenting on. hmm!

but i have been busy on the saga (where i live) alt website. we've been having a discussion about the merits of the Iternational Baccalaureate (an educational curriculum designed for the children of diplomats, that's being utilised in the US and UK more and more commonly) - and one american school board's decision to drop it for being "marxist" and too "foreign"... here's an extract...

i don't see how exactly you don't consider that every kid's education is important to everyone else - certainly now it's not seen this way, but it should be. this is a blunt for instance, but maybe those folk that went off to fight in iraq wouldn't have done so had they had a better education?

maybe 45% of americans wouldn't believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so". that's 45% - are they all "dumb, parochial" folk? or could it be that they are educated, but not very well?

maybe too 20% wouldn't believe that the sun revolves around the earth.

also, maybe 37% believe wouldn't believe that creationism should be taught INSTEAD of evolution.

http://www.arachnoid.com/opinion/religion.html

and yes, some board members trumpeting creationism got kicked off, and many others didn't.

asking 'why should we focus on this one praticular place' seems a redundant question to me. that's how we learn, how we shape our ideas. from questioning why these people want to halt the IB, we discuss the merits of it, and bring this issue to people's attention.

either way, whether you support local authorities or more centralised forms, the issue of what we teach is the all-important one. have we completed our evolution, in every sense but the technological? or can we change the way we see the world?

get ready - poster quote, from einstein -

the theory we believe largely determines what we can see

http://www.sagajet.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1338

fire

2006-03-12T22:18:00.000+09:00

the life of a man
burn it with the fire
the life of an insect
throw it in the fire
ponder and you'll see
the world is dark
and this floating world
is a dream

burn with abandon

from the hidden fortress, akira kurosawa

attention!

2006-03-10T14:28:00.000+09:00

a story in the guardian today about a postal worker in england who hoarded 11,000 items of mail! she had 7.5 tonnes of mail in her house, the fucking nutter. it seems that she had that much that she hadn't even got round to opening most of it - so was she doing it cos she was greedy, or cos she's nuts? there's a great quote about the police having trouble getting her front door open, cos there was so much mail against it. she just had it everywhere.

which i think is brilliant, definitely she deserves to be a character in a novel - in fact you could write a whole book about her. there's endless mini-tragedies runn ing through this too, one guy missed his holiday cos she had his passport, another a job offer, another his university results, and countless cheques, cards, gift tokens!

_________________________

also hilarious - a robber gets let off his jail sentence because he has a permanent hard-on - which, it must be said, is better than being a permanent hard-on (you should meet some of my colleagues on this wonderful JET programme), but, well, wow.

check out this article. he looks like a horny dog. i say we start a campaign to get him some very long t-shirts...

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006110472,00.html