Category: Chillin’

It’s very close now. Nothing much to report, except that the neighborhood strays are fighting for porch space.

The earthquakes passed and the gigantic wall of water ala Lucifer’s Hammer never came… But someone’s must be doing an effective rain dance because there’s another goddamn typhoon due to hit tomorrow – the weather this year seems intent on beating the shit out of us here.

There was a magnitude 5 shaker in Wakayama earlier this evening when we were in a liquor store – all the stacks of bottles started moving back and forth, which was not the most reassuring of circumstances. A large aftershock came about five minutes ago… It was also a mag 5 but it felt a lot stronger here and they’re predicting tsunamis this time. There’s an emergency broadcast running in English and Japanese… Our little island should be okay. My place is half a mile from the coast so we should be cool. The shitty thing about living on an island is that it isn’t covered in the news… They predict tsunamis in Wakayama, Mie, and Kochi, and we live somewhere in between that plot. I guess that’s what air raid sirens are for (well, that and North Korean missile strikes). Cell phone lines are congested so I can’t get through to friends in Nara. Interestingly enough, land lines are working just fine – so to people who don’t use hard-line phones at home anymore, now’s a time to reconsider.
Shit, now they’re telling everyone living “near the coast” to evacuate. Is that very responsible for an island nation? Then again, we sat though The Endless Summer II yesterday and I have absolutely no interest in finding out what a 20 foot wave looks like coming down my street.

The ending of this film bothered me so much that I had to go looking on the net, totally convinced that I had missed something vital in the 0.5 seconds it took me to throw a tissue in the garbage there near the end of the film during the parade scene.
Verdict: I didn’t miss a goddamn thing.

It occurred to me today that I haven’t been to a public library (not counting my bathroom – don’t laugh, even in an extended disaster situation there will always be enough “paper” in there) for a pretty goddamn long time – ever since moving out to this island, so about five years. After university, there just wasn’t much reason to go, especially since I had my trusty old Powerbook 190 and an Asahi-net dial-up account. Oh, and also because I hate reading books in Japanese since I’m pretty good at it but not good enough to not want a dictionary beside me, and paper dictionaries are heavy.
I love public libraries, partly because I’ve always been a bookworm, but also because I love seeing what other people are reading. In Japan, just like anywhere else, you can tell an awful lot about people by the books they’re reading. For instance, people who come in just to read newspapers are cheapskates (or poor), and generally have too much fucking time on their hands. They often reek of cheap coffee and are comparing ticket stubs to sports results. People who read western fantasy in Japanese are generally to be avoided (not a problem because they are almost always socially inept). People reading novels by Ramo Nakajima (even before he got busted on possession charges) have either smoked weed at some point in their lives, or have grandparents who lived in Manchuria. And people reading Osamu Dazai may be more prone to suicide by drowning than others. Go figure.
I also love public libraries for the same reasons I love public file servers. All those permissions and protocols and hierarchies, I suppose. For such a slob, I sure do love a clean house sometimes.

This new Beasties album sounds really great playing softly in the background right now – the beats are funky and I can’t hear the lyrics. As far as I’m concerned that’s the best of both worlds. A dog that doesn’t shit, so to speak.

Well, maybe the time difference can count for something. Happy Father’s Day, dad, and thank you for not selling us all to gypsies continued support throughout the years. You are a good father and I only hope I can do as well (the time is coming pretty soon I think).

Yesterday being “big trash” day, when one can dispose of the unnecessities that clutter life, liberty, and the, um, American way with impunity – you know, old furniture, broken appliances, the big stack of bathroom reading material that’s been piling up for eighteen months – I made a major life decision and threw away all of my frying pans. Five, to be exact. They were all used extensively over the years and starting to sport bald spots in the Teflon coating or rust spots at the handle joint, so I threw them out. People who know my packrat ways will not be surprised to hear that I found it extremely difficult. It was like parting with old friends, or shooting Old Yeller at the end of the book. Tragic, unforseen, yet in retrospect, inevitable. For that is the sad-but-true way of the world – all good dogs die too soon.
These were, after all, the tools that enabled me to provide fine fare for myself and those I care about for several years. Some of these pans had followed me around since college, you see. One funny thing is that more than anything I couldn’t bear to stand the thought of someone else finding them in the trash and for some digusting reason deciding to take them home and use them. I guess I’m just extremely possessive in that sense – I would have melted them down into stainless steel ingots if I’d had the equipment. As it was, I did the next best thing by cooking garlic-heavy dishes in each one, methodically creating smelly carbon buildup on the frying surfaces, and then throwing them out without washing. Jesus, tossing that shopping bag full of frying pans on the garbage pile felt like drowning a sackful of kittens in the river.
Now that I have used both cat and dog analogies, perhaps we can move on.
My house hasn’t been panless for many a year and as the designated Fryer of Meats, today I could think of nothing except what kind of pans I would buy after work finished. I mean, I know I can be a weird, lonely introvert at times, but I’m pretty sure this was a new low. But hey, I figure that life is short and if getting older entails being excited over the choice of new cookingware, then true feelings I must express. I was really happy to go shopping for new pans.
For the past hour I was browsing the kitchen section of Jusco, feeling the heft of each and every frying pan they had for sale. I compared stainless steel to cast iron to titanium, and coated to non-coated to dimpled, ridged, and scalloped. I evaluated the top contenders mentally on a point scale, and almost ended up with a mixed set of the winners. Then, craving unification, I almost broke down and shelled out 150 bones for a set of T-Fal pans because they have some nice shapes in the right sizes. In the end, I bought a cheapie pan and am doing the nerdiest thing imaginable. I’m doing research on the net before investing in a matching set. And yet, it makes me immensely happy. It somehow provides me with purpose in life.
I am turning 30 this year. This whole aging thing is getting pretty scary. By the time I’m forty I’ll probably be collecting spoons and driving a white Toyota. So if you love me like I love you, you will shoot me sometime before then.

To my Air France stewardess friend, who is coming over tomorrow:
Nothing says friend like a bottle of Chateau Margaux. May I suggest the 1961? But why am I telling you this? I’ll stick to what I, as an American, know best. Crackers and cheese whiz are totally on me.

Well, it looks like Typhoon #2 (Japanese don’t follow the western convention for typhoon naming – on one hand, I suppose it’s kinda nice not having to admit that your cities got “battered by Alice” or “ravaged by Gertrude”) – is coming straight for my island tonight. Last time a typhoon came by I had to drive over the bridge between here and Kobe, and it was like the movie Twister in that I just had to crack my window to see just how strong the wind was blowing. In an instant, every loose toll receipt, shopping bag, hamburger wrapper, etc., whipped out the window as if we were at 30,000 feet and if I’d had the foresight to attach GPS trackers to everything, I probably could have mapped out the eye of the storm (I guess that makes my Silvia “Dorothy” in this analogy but I won’t go there.).
The weather today is what I like to call, “fungus-inducing.” Basically, this is the kind of humidity that causes jungle foot, crotch rot, and the downfall of western civilization. You actually feel dryer in the shower on days like this. I might as well spend the night in there since big storms usually destroy my satellite reception and the last one screwed with my FTTH connection as well.
It totally cracked me up when my Aussie pal told me what a brolly is. And a sultana (as in, “Sultana Bran”). Thanks to William Gibson, I know what a standover is. Damn, I really need to visit Australia sometime soon. After I buy a D70, I think.