Category: Chillin’

Yes, I’ve been watching too much Band of Brothers again. All I can say is, what a damn fine series. Along with 24 (go Kief!), Freaks and Geeks (/lament), and Firefly (/sob), this series on DVD helped keep me a bit saner this year.

A month or so back, my brother and I found a spot from which to escape from people. Most everybody, that is. It’s a dam up in the mountains just a few miles off a major road, but apparently not very well known. We went there both Saturday and Sunday for a few hours of fishing and just to get away from it all. Saturday I caught a reallyreally small largemouth which attacked a lure not much smaller than itself – and that was it as far as our catch for the weekend – but it was enough. Being out on decently sized lakes with no one else in sight was a reward unto itself. Last week was kind of a tipping point for me, you see. I’d had just about enough of the world, I think.
It all started out on Sunday, when I watched an old man collapse in a pool of his own blood and guts on a white tiled floor. I looked into his eyes after calling for help and saw neither fear nor acceptance – just confusion. That disturbed me on a level I hadn’t experienced since thinking about post-death consciousness every night when I was ten or so. His wife cradled his head and sobbingly pleaded with him to stay focused for the twenty minutes it took for the paramedics to arrive. When they came, they put on surgical masks and gloves before touching the old man. When they left, they tracked bloody footprints out the door. I left out the back exit and felt strangely sick when the sunlight hit my face.
Tuesday I left for a business meeting in Osaka as documented in my previous post. I feel more and more apologetic as the years go on for having to explain why so many of my fellow countrymen are brash, ignorant, racist dunderfucks. On a side note, do you know how much compensation I get from the company for having to spend a night away from home plus 6 meals? Around ten bucks. Ten bucks, as in, fuck me, may I have another? Fuck me. The really sad thing is, it used to be around twenty bucks and people feel really cheated about it having been cut in half. Shit, the last time the union reps came around, I contemplated throwing a handful of pennies at them and saying, “dinner’s on me, assholes.”
Wednesday I came back from said business trip on a bus directly through a fairly major typhoon. Luckily, I was tired as hell and the huge bus windows amplified the lightning into a trippy ambient light show. I zoned out to this and stopped watching the realtime destruction reports on the TV mounted in the center aisle. Crossing over the longest suspension bridge in the world to my island in heavy winds was kind of tense, though (Bus driver on radio to dispatcher: “Advise others to turn back. Brakes are sluggish and we are moving forward even though I’m not using the gas.”). Cool.
Thursday, the pipes under our kitchen sink decided to burst. Fortunately, my girlfriend and my little brother took care of it and I only saw the aftermath: Everything previously under the sink on my kitchen floor, cupboards being dried out with electric fan. Yes, Nam and Adam handled the crisis and my late arrival/presence was superfluous. Genuinely cool.
Friday I got in a huge fight with my girlfriend, but I sucked it all up because I was so tired and in a “gee this isn’t fair, but beat me up emotionally anyway” state of mind. (By the way, the whole fight was probably all my fault, even though I’ll never admit it.)
So by the time Saturday and Sunday rolled around, I was ready for 12-hour slumber sessions followed by the Nature Boy routine. Our new hideaway did not disappoint. Bunny rabbits, deer, and baby bass. And on Saturday, I even forgot to take my cellphone.

This weekend, when asked to describe a burrito to a SE Asian man (probably my future father-in-law, if such things matter), I described it as a “Mexican springroll.” Sometimes I just have my moments.
That got me hungry, so I made fajitas for us all.
In the age of Teflon-coated, feng shui-infused, drop-forged-in-space cookware, cast iron griddles still kick ass. However, my newly-purchased titanium wok (purchased at Jusco, 2000 yen) positively 0wnzz0rs for black bean sauce stir fry, garlic chicken, and the assorted curry dishes I have tried cooking in it. It heats faster than steel and is light enough to perform street tricks with (I’ve tried the Jive Nelly and an inverse limp-wrist 720 sinkgrind-to-deadfish ollie fazer and although splattering myself with excess olive oil, actually managed to land both tricks! Don’t try this at home, kids.). I also suspect it could be used as a conveyance back in time if one could be bothered to hook up some spare power lines to the clock tower one stormy night…
Fresh limes are the fulcrum of a kick-ass grilled meat dish.
Fresh limes often cost a dollar each in Japan, and are sometimes smaller than a “D” battery (“D motherfucker, D!”).
The first person who correctly guesses the origin of the quote above gets a fajita in the mail; leave a mailing address in the comments as well as your meat preference (chicken, pork, or fugu).
*If you live outside of Japan, I’m sending it by surface.
**If you live in Japan, just come by the house sometime.

Although me and mine (thx Kev) were unscathed, I saw a lot more damage around town as I drove to work today than I thought there would be. Some roads were being repaired, with fallen trees and bicycles being removed first, then the actual paved surfaces being refilled in areas. As seen above, many cars can be seen with broken windows patched over by cardboard or trash bags. In the gravel parking lot I use for work, there were piles of window glass and shattered sideview mirrors all over. I feel kind of sorry for the owners of the cars, but they really should have known not to leave their cars there during a massive typhoon. Around town, many store windows were broken, and – thankfully! – my neighbor’s annoying-as-hell wind chime appears to have been blown away.
Typhoon #19 never even touched us as far as I can tell, so we came out just fine this round. Everybody is really nervous about the next big earthquake, though.

Everything is OK.

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.