California Screamin'

Wow, it's so nice to be back in beautiful California where the weather is idyllic, the language understandable and everything makes sense again. Ahh...
Oh, wait...

It's hellishly hot in the smoggy San Fernando Valley. Even the palm trees are trying to go underground in an attempt to become tubors and avoid the scalding sun.

The language understandable? So far, I've only heard a few people speaking English and, based on what I eaves dropped on, I'd much prefer to NOT understand the banal chatter.

Everything makes sense? This morning I went into a 7-11. Thought I'd get me a coffee and maybe a banana for breakfast. The place was packed with early-risers, filling 40 oz. cups with florescent slurpees and piling their cradled arms with family-sized Dorito bags and dozen packs of fake chocolate donuts. Did I miss something? Did Arnold Muscleman outlaw proper consumption proportions while I was gone? Was there some kind of genetic change in the population that would necessitate the institution of such absurd eating habits?
Will I be left in the wake of my state's progression if I do not adhere to this new diet of over-consumption?
If so, I think I'll take my chances...
I have a developing theory that someone high up is slipping some kind of brainwashing elixir into those MountainDew Splash Slurpees. Who's to say, I won't wake up tomorrow to find everyone around me waddling around like ducks, howling at the moon, plastering red, white and blue stripes across our forests and backing up their arguments with reality T.V. references...

I'll take a small, stale black coffee, thank you very much.

Getting tongue at the bus stop

You know those horrifyingly happy couples you sometimes see beside you on the subway, lovingly pecking at each other, sharing saliva like it were the last bit of oxygen in a drowning Pontiac, licking cheese-dripping sweet nothings into each others' ears and linguistically regressing into baby-talk..?
Well, there's a name for those in Japanese. They're called 'Baccapuru' which translates to 'stupid couple' and means loosely Inappropriate-Maker-Outer-in-Public couple.

I've spent most of my life staunchly advocating the eradication of such defilers of personal space, relying on my omnipotent interpretations of the Constitution to protect those of us citizens in no (or less-than-ideal) relationships from these disgusting Baccapurus.

How, then, can I justify having spent my last month in Japan, involved in such criminal indecency? What do I have to say for having made old Japanese women bump into walls because they couldn't scrape their eyeballs from the foreign sex-ed course at the stoplight? What tasks is Lucifer creating for me for having forced a family to move to the other side of the train to shelter the eyes of the innocent? What can I say to the Lonely who, upon seeing us, plunged deeper into loneliness?
I'm tempted to say "I'm sorry. I'll keep it behind closed doors from now on." But - no - I say
F*ck it!

*Warning: The following statement is not suitable for those accustomed to the jaded humour characteristic of Up the Creek without a Platypus:

Life is too short and love too precious to waste even a moment.

Ooohh. Just typing such a cliche sent shivers through me. Someone toss me a mop for the sappiness and then a rope. I've fallen and I can't get up!

Vampire Mosquito

You know that feeling when you're swimming vulnerable, unclothed in a dark lake?
The breath of the Unknown licks at your ankles and you fear that the horny trout beneath will head for the amusement park between your legs...?
The depth seems more incalculable than Pi and
fright's red-crotched step brother holds a machete in one hand and a samurai sword in the other...?

and yet...

You can't help but feel more exhilarated than a blood-logged mosquito, sipping beside a Mediterranean sunset...
and everything feels more alive, and beautiful and real...

Well, anyway, that's what I've been touching tongues with recently...

Every night camping and every stop along the hike have trapped me in this transient yet eternal Moment; A Moment fatter than a bloated blowfish, mis-cut and blowing its load... Fatter even than an award-winning pumpkin on defense during the final determining point of the Super Bowl...
Probably fatter even than Pooh Bear honey-hugged and stuck inside the doorway...

But

now it's time to leave Japan.

I'll be diving from one lake of gnarly, uncharted water into the next
in two days.

Just glad I learned the breast stroke as a child...

Vote Newton for Resurrection!

I've always really liked the saying:
"Where ever you go, there you are."

There's something very comforting about it. It makes me feel secure in my skin, and in my place on this big spinning planet.

Yup. It feels good to know that I came here to Japan, and - low-and-behold - I'm in Japan. And, as I sit here on the porch, I sit here on the porch. And, as I hold this pen, I hold this pen.
That's why I'm starting my new religion: Seventh Day Newtonian Physics Resurrectionism.
I desperately hope (and, therefore must blindly and faithfully believe) that Newton will be reborn to us and save us from the evils created by mankind's sinful quantum physicists. For, these monsters of Satan have polluted our reality and robbed us of our Security of Self.
My religion's core premise will be:
Don't trust anyone with a living dead cat in a box, a flashlight that spits out surfable waves AND partyable particles, a pet electron that simultaneously hangs out in multiple atomic shells, or who has an Uncertainty Principle on their bedside table.

We can't afford to fall victim to such heretics!
If we do, it might come to be that
I came to Japan, and find myself in Uzbekistan. And, as I sit here on the porch, I sit here on an antelope in heat. And as I hold this pen, I hold a four-foot tapeworm.
Rather disconcerting if you ask me...

"Where ever you go, there you might be... but, then again, maybe not."

Does the suit suit?

When I was a kid in the '80s, I used to wear florescent stretch pants (usually hideous shades of pink and lime green), topped with three layers of different-colored socks, bunched to perfection.
It was a truly frightening sight, I'm sure.
...In fact, if I saw someone dressed like that today, I might just alert the Amnesty International Branch of Aesthetic Rights to come and canvass and collect petition signatures against abominable fashion abuses...
Because, really, those things and colors just don't go together...

But... here are a few things I think DO suit each other well:

1) the salivation-inspiring scent of Japanese festival foods like tako-yaki (octopus balls), tori-karage (fried-up chicken), and grilled bad pick-up lines ("Where are you from? Let's enjoying together!")

2) Fireworks accompanied by irascible lightning

3) laughter, smiles, and sleep

4) a quick blog entry and bed

'Night!

Schlong Shrine

Have you ever been in a dimly-lit, dank room crammed with penis statues?
***

You know that "cooking rut" phenomenon...?
It's that inexplicable phenomenon that rears its slanted head every once in a while and grunts:
"Tarzan, you must cook and eat the same meal for a week!"
For me, it usually achieves its orgasmic zenith when I decide to buy a dozen eggs.
Once the purchase is made, it's all over..
I'm in for a marathon eight days of Spanish omelettes, sunny-side-up surprises, scrambled sarcasm and tabasco-spiked over-easiness...

I only mention this because it's somewhat reminiscent of the surreal, drugless trip phase that currently powders my hours.(I just can't excape fantastical experiences until I finish the whole dozen...)

My friends and I just went camping and hiking in parts of Gunma, Japan more invigorating and beautiful than the most memorable Himalayan sexual ascent.
And, on our way home, we stopped for what we thought would be a quick bite at an old-school Japanese noodle restaurant.
But then
my old friend, Magical Realism, took front stage...
Just behind the restaurant's bathroom was a

Penis Room!

I'm not kidding.

This room was a shrine filled with thousands of penis sculptures!

Most were wooden; carved sticks that smiled in all shapes and sizes. Some were ceramic and attached to characters birthed in Japanese folklore..Others were phallic stone-carvings worthy of adorning Zeus.
Or Goliath...

Anyway, traumatized and intrigued, we paid the sweet old grandfather for our soba noodles and left with a photocopy of Kama-Sutric positions and a container of nipple-shaped chocolates...

Man... Just when I thought Japan was getting boring...!

Surrealism in the Spa

I think I've caught something pretty severe.
Luckily, though,
I can't pass it on to anyone through naked spanking in the sack.

I've caught
a Reoccurring Theme in my life.
It's the I'm-constantly-being-abducted-and-dropped-into-surreal-worlds-
and-then-spit-out-again-only-to-feel-like-I've-been-sucking-pipe-with-
Edgar-Allen-Poe-for-either-ten-minutes-or-ten-years Theme.

So, there we were...
three enormous, sweat-melting foreigners in the midst of grandfathers in yukatas at a village festival.
Out of ecological respect for the environment, we decided to dive into the free public bath house on the main square. You know... to prevent our bodies from releasing any more pungeant toxins into the clean, country air...

And that's when I realized I'd gotten the "Magically Unreal Experience Disease".

I bowed through the curtain with the kanji for 'woman' and passed through the gate into a psychadelic world worthy of an Asimov novel. Or a Tom Waitts song...
Before my eyes could adjust to the sulfur-scented haze, I was surrounded by a flock of nine Japanese women who cooed "little sister" at me and sang what I can only describe as a hip hop-cum-gospel Sirens' Song.
I undressed and floated over to the hotspring pool where women with multiple stomachs poured bowls of water over me.
Then, they led me into a cauldron of boiling water that no sentient being should ever enter
unless they plan on becoming stew...
or roasted foreigner on a stick
with lightly toasted rice balls on the side....

It was kind of like entering a Salvador Dali painting when you are expecting to go to the zoo and see panda bears and monkeys throwing feces...

But, anyway...
I've frequented Japanese public baths (onsens) for about three years now,
and this is the first time I have ever thought:
"Hey, maybe I'm not just some scraggly-haired girl from California... Maybe..just maybe... I'm the roast pig at the annual county fair..."

Rationality's minion strikes

Since am still in a state of skipping over transitionary bridges, I have no time to sit down, get drunk and stare at a computer screen and make a coherent post any more. So here's the M-16 Power Word Summary of what's been going on:

-got pulled over for going down a one-way street which (32 upstanding police officials later) was declared NOT actually a one-way street
-sat for seven hours against a wall in one of Tokyo's stations, making up life histories to fit every grandma wearing a Playboy shirt that passed before my eyes
-got lost in the hills and the cops took me to use the internet in a smoky, cacaphonous casino-style pachinko parlor (I mean, where else would you go to check email?)
-went camping and met a moderately deranged Irish expat whose leprechaun character has already inspired my next three novels
-hiked to a natural spring that was guarded by an S&M Buddha who held a paddle in his right hand and a whip made of lotus plants in his left
-got offered a job and actually started considering staying in Japan (that is, until Reality's horseman and Rationality's minion came and beat my brain back into shape)
-spent a week laughing with two of the most positive, witty and slightly off-center friend/artist/musician/writer(lunatics) in this half of the Milky Way galaxy
-passed out dreaming of the moment when I can check out all my buddies' blogs

-sigh

Under the bridge

Maybe I have a deeply repressed Japanese law enforcement agent fetish crammed somewhere in the recesses of my little toes. Maybe I secretly fantasize about inefficient, logic-devoid hotties in uniforms who forgot to pick up the bag of critical-thinking skills on their birthday at the hospital...
'Cuz, really, why else would I have shared two lovely encounters in the past week with the Japanese federales?
The most recent one involved two foreign dimwits who got lost in the mountains, strolling through rice fields, under bridges, and zig-zagging their way across hillsides.

In order to puff up their chromatically-colored Idiocy peacock feathers, our two protagonists decided to embark on this Odyssey without the address or telephone number of their home.
So, this left them with no choice but to put their future in the hands of uniformed officers with little more intelligence than a dung beetle testing Tim Leary's chemical cookies.

Yup... so we toured what had to be about seventeen counties in Japan in a kind man's taxi and a cop car. And, no less than 7 hours later, we were home.

Good times, new psychological playgrounds and new fetishes off the bargain rack...
Good stuff...

Moral of the story: Don't leave new homes without a map and at least a sliver of functioning cranium.

Coming Spoon

Please forgive recent vacancy where posts should be. Currently finalizing a move, and homeless without internet. Please stick around, I'll be back soon!

Got a great story to tell about an interaction with Japanese police over what was not actually a traffic violation, but took no less than 15 cops, to "discuss" road signs in order to resolve. Coming soon!

Sooner than you can recite the invertabraes in alphabetical order, really!...

Japlish Extended

Cleaning my place and came upon another great Engrish t-shirt. It reads:

Laughter here!
We smile
It can live by peace as long as laughter always here!
It is looking at the horizon
which becomes far by two
persons the morning
sun also begins to illuminate
us today your smile
it is very wraps me gently.

Brilliant, I think! There's nowhere else in the world you can be wrapped in sunshine like that!

A breadbasket of bees

What do you call a group of bees?

I know it's not a “gaggle” or a “school”, and I'm fairly certain it's not a “herd”.

Maybe, it's just a “swarm”.

In any case, I'm in such a state of euphoria, exhaustion and ecstatic relief right now that if the most powerful and influential Leader of Semantics knocked on my door now, it would be a trying Sirens' Song test of will-power to not throw the Book of Mormon at his kneecap and a toothbrush at his left eyebrow.

A “swarm”(?) of tiny old Japanese women bees just showed up at my apartment with sponges and mops and soaps and hoses and funny little striped yellow gloves. They whipped through three years of worthless crap and grime in under three hours, like they were a “flock”(?) of humming birds, and my apartment was just their early morning pollen appetizer.

The Japanese really know how to get physical labor-leaning tasks done fast. And impeccably! But, throw anything that requires an amount of actual decision-making or a pinch of critical thinking in, and you'll be tit-deep in paperwork and meetings for the good part of a century! Just another one of Japan's beautiful contradictions.

After the buzzing “crew”(?) of bees zipped out, I sipped humid air in a room of red tape for an hour. Sign here. Fill out this form. Join the International “I love Japan” club. Write your contact information on seventeen different forms. Are you now, or have you ever been a member of Korea?

But, honestly, though… A big Cheers to the Bee Team! Had I asked my friends to help me clean, we would still be sitting around, joking and musing, and occasionally saying “Yup…that over there… it'll have to be taken out to the garbage...
sometime.”

Thanks Kato -san for having introduced me to th Bee Team!

Emotion Large on the rocks!

Yesterday:
“Hurry up and write a Japanese Goodbye Speech!” screamed the crowd, as I frantically ran circles around them, sweating like a Japanese baseball team member, running miles in the unnatural heat, trying to get a “hole in one” in a million-holes goal.

(crying over an Asahi beer…)

Today:
“Surprise! Here's a beautiful Japanese yukata from all of the teachers! Put it on, and speak in your retarded Japanese to everyone, as we ooh and aaahh over what a foreigner looks like in our women's traditional wear!” The microphone was ceremonially passed in front of thousands of eyes.

(crying for every kid you know… without an Asahi beer…)

This evening:
Too many sincere compliments fell on “foreign” ears, too many truths were told from all sides. Too much. Too sad. Too happy. Too overwhelmed…

(crying over personalities and experiences…)

That's all.

Until next time when I can gain more control over my essential sarcasm over tears…..!

Joy of t-shirt smile

The t-shirt I'm currently wearing reads:

"JOY OF SMILE
Laughter rushes into
munch world!
Always laughing
at everybody
is important everyone all surely
consider the
same thing happiness
is come by smilling."

Spot on! I couldn't have said it better in my language!

Sun-Spanked

Have you ever gotten a good Sun spanking? I mean, like one of those spankings that leaves you red and pulsing with heat for days, wishing you had been able to convince your neighbors to go in on that aloe factory in the stairwell…?
If you have, you know the drill.
It starts out with a few mild, maternal taps administered by a fiery star hiding behind the crowds. Then, the innocuous taps turn into soothing massages, and then the massages into naked baths….
And, suddenly, you wake up to find that you have become

A giant, ripe tomato.

It's a bit like Kafka's Metomorphosis, except that instead of waking up to realize you are a giant cockroach, you fall out of bed and realize you resemble a tasty red fruit. (It's a good thing you're not in Greece, where you would be immediately directed to the salad bowl. Or, even worse, in America, where you would nap on processed bits of cow between ketchup-soaked bread buns.)

Fortunately, in this case though, I love being a tomato.

It means that we had a great day of sailing today.

Having Japan's #1 sailboat racer as a captain brings Super-Sized inspiration to any sun-spanked tomato! In fact, it begs all vine-hanging red spheres to jump off and learn to sail!

Cheers to all the veggies and fruits with knowledge of the ropes! This tomato is roasted…

Of opossums and testicles

They're not the cutest animals.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that they're pretty ugly.
But, they are, nonetheless, amazing mammals that have partied here for over 75 million years.
Yes, they are opossums.
And, yes, they sport thumbs on their back feet.
And, yes, I've had personal interaction with them.
And, yes, they were family members living in the garage when I was a kid.
And, yes, I love them.

But they don't really compare to tanukis.
A tanuki is a Japanese, raccoon-dog creature who is just as aesthetically questionable as the opossum.
I often see them waddling across my path in the evenings and, more frequently, lying lifeless on the side of the road.

But they are most ubiquitously found in statue shape in front of ramen shops and izakayas.

And from them, always dangle two enormous testicles.
Legend has it that these big balls possess the tanuki's shape-shifting power and a number of other magical propensities.

I am inexplicably intrigued and head-over-heels in lush with traditional tales of the mythical tanuki in Japan. But, I have to wonder whether women played any role in carving out these legends…

“Say, Martha, where, in the body, do you think the central chi, or strength and power origin resides?”

“Why the testicles of course!”

...Somehow, I just can't see it...

I wonder why we in the west don't have legends of mythical opossums with enormous breasts….Big Opossum tits that spout Immortality milk and can take out the enemy with a single tit swipe…

Merverous Times

Though he might kill me, I have to post the email that an adult student and good friend just sent me. It's too sweet:

(sorry, the Japanese characters have morphed into random shapes)

***
“corinne goood morning!!
how is last night farewell party
so many times are party¡∫¡∫¡∫¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡it`s so tough!!
many people want to say ¡Ö°Ëµ°Ëè°ËÊ°Ëé¡Å~¡¡to you
your so big °ËÍ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡
today i will have a camp and tomorrow we will be
volunteer for kaike triathlon. it`s sounds nice.
i`m looking forwad to exiciting about it.
and i`am making a plan for inviting you come to my family
and spending nice merverous wonderful and bra bra bra
they so my family will be also happy¡¥
anyway today starts again. i wish you are going to have a
wonderful time today. and i hope that i also same to you¡¥”
***

I love this guy! I hope I can spend a merverous and bra bra bra time with his family! I wonder, though, if I am expected to bring extra bras….

Rock-a-By Baby

Some days, I think my Japanese is pretty decent. On these days, I glow with the radiance that only an all-knowing, omnipotent master of language can. I am an acclaimed acrobat, skating my way across a tightrope, juggling vocabulary, nuance and witticism like they were sexual yearnings and wowing my listening audience with my adroit local dialect and impeccable intonation.

Unfortunately, these days are few and far between and tend to coincide with days heavily lubricated with alcohol.

Most of the time, I am a pauper in the slums of Japanese language; tripping over every third word littering the rancid streets, eating vowels out of opened bean cans and slipping in every puddle of sentence continuity.
These days, I nurse my Japanese Language Ability like it were my very own little nipple-sucking baby. I read Dr. Seuss to it, play it Leo Kottke acoustic guitar songs, and wipe its butt with love-scented baby wipes.
Only it's not a baby.
It's more like a stem cell.
Well, kind of… except for the fact that no amount of researching and studying my Language Inability Stem Cell can ever save another Language Inability Baby in the future…Unless of course,
AW, screw it! I seem to have imagination-ed myself into a hole here…

So I guess I'll stop procrastinating and get back to writing farewell speeches in Japanese. Ggrrrrrr!!!

Cleanliness next to Wobbliness

Before I came to Japan, I never could have fathomed that the hardest part about packing for a move could be sorting the garbage.

Where I live, there are 11 categories of trash into which we must separate everything we dispose of. And I swear to my creator and savior (the boisterous, tuxedo-wearing, mutant pear-eating platypus in the sky) that this is no exaggeration.

The main and most oft-utilized category is the “Burnable Trash”. (It's where you throw your daily waste, like tissues, left-over salad, uneaten fish heads, junk mail, onion skins, and ex-boyfriends' underwear.)
After that, there are 10 more categories like: non-burnable trash, plastics, Styrofoam, cans, glass, milk cartons, Japanese porn comic books, paper, toxic waste, etc.

The difficulty I've found is that NOTHING in my apartment fits into ANY of the categories. For example, I want to toss:

A box of bulletin board pushpins - but… the head of the pins belongs in the “hard plastics” trash bag, the impaling point in the “non-burnable metals”, the enclosing box in the “soft plastics” category and the label in the “burnable trash”

An old canvas wallet - but… the fabric goes in with the “burnables”, the zipper in the “metals”, the ID-covering plastic in “soft plastics” and the Velcro… well, I don't know where Velcro goes (except that I'm pretty sure it goes to heaven).

But, anyway… you get the point.

Basically, I need a full chemist's lab and a team to work my apartment's de-assembly line in order to take out the trash.

If only I had moved in to a paper apartment, had only paper appliances, and eaten only paper for the last three years…

Hermit asses and hiding kids

When I was about twelve, I wanted to be a hermit. I wanted to live in a hollowed-out evergreen, with a little Tolkien-esque wooden door that had to be knocked in a coded rhythm in order to open. I wanted to let my hair fly wild, my calloused feet to grow resilient, and to wear reeds and vines as attire and carry around a little bag of healing herbs. I wanted the stellars jays to be my alarm clock and the beetles to be my contracted house renovators. I wanted to hunt with a handmade obsidian spear, and plant crops by the stars.

If I were a man, I would have been that big, super-size-bearded psycho who exposes his sun-varnished butt to you as he runs mad-man marathon style into the woods, grunting and hooting.

But, I have since abandoned such innocent aspirations.

(This surrendering of my dream happened about the same time that I realized I knew myself too well and could no longer entertain myself with my own arguments. I suddenly realized that I would either have to relinquish my internal hermit, or become schizophrenic and acquire a fourth and fifth personality on top of my first three.)
I went for letting go of the independent, crazy woman within.

This childhood career goal rang the doorbells at the genkans of some of my memory synapses, because I have been thinking a lot recently about a specifically Japanese phenomenon known as
Hikikomori .
It is a strange social mental state under which Japanese kids hole up in their rooms, don't come out, don't go to school and don't socialize with their peers. Every junior high and highschool in Japan has a few of these cases, and it's very hush-hush. It was a few years at my school of employment before I learned that there were actually real live kids that belonged to all those empty desks. They were like these deleted lyrics in each class's aria.

There are lots of theories as to what causes this phenomenon in Japan; none of which I will discuss here.
(Quite frankly, because I prefer to paint the world with little, yellow daisies, pink glittery hearts, teddy bears, and powdered-sugar-covered pigtails rather than depress myself with the reality of it.)

But, maybe there is some silver lining to this sad and analysis-promoting phenomenon. I mean, just think what kind of chaos would ensue if all of these children decided to realize MY childhood dream...

There would be hundreds of butt-naked Japanese kids running maniacally through the shopping arcades of Tokyo, chasing stray cats with fishing spears, cooking subway rats over open fires and sacrificing sashimi to the Harvest deities!

Posts coming soon: Suicide in Japan, random murder of family members, sick and twisted baby-beatings, first-hand accounts of the Hiroshima bombing, and victim stats resulting from Japan's AIDS-talk Taboo.

(*update/edit: for those who don't know me, these last previews are, of course, sarcasm. That, or the prophesies of one of my other personalities who has yet to introduce herself to me...)