And you and I

Scott, since you can't call Japan drunk, I promise very soon I'll find a way to call you drunk. And not coherently drunk, as you were; I'm talkin seriously drunk, like I probably won't even be in Japan anymore. I will have hopped a ferry to Thailand where I'll get busted for drugs and end up in a terrifyingly unsanitary prison surrounded by the dregs of society and Claire Danes. Abe Vigoda will be probably be there too. I of course won't remember how I got there, but I'll wake up and wipe the drool from my chin and I'll tell one of the guards that I have to call my supplier to score me some more horse. Then I'll tell him I'm just kidding, I really need to call my lawyer. Then I'll call you; I'll talk all kinds of nonsense, probably say your my best friends in the world (there are two of you now...no wait, three) and then probably something about ex-girlfriends and missed chances there, I'll tell you I'm in love with someone neither of us have ever heard of, and a word or two about libertarianism, then I puke, then the guard takes the phone away from me and asks who I was talking to and I tell him I was just joking with him, it really was my supplier. That's the last thing I remember for awhile, until I wake up in some soggy rice field, having been sold to a plantation owner in Laos and forced to pick rice until the end of my days. Don't you worry how I get out of this one, buddy, you just sit tight and take solace in the fact that I'm a good enough friend to place a call to you this drunk.


Yeah, don't mention it.

This evening was a lazy evening, a ruminant evening, a brooding evening. I searched through my CD collection for music to match my mood and stumbled across an album of contemporary works for Harp, flute, and viola. These three instruments--but in particular the former two--sound so homogenous, so quadrated with one another, so apropos in harmony that it's as if they were made for one each other's company, made to be uttered in the same breath.

*God, what I thought was cucumber in my sushi is in fact natto.*

I went out on my balcony to smoke my pipe this evening, glissandos washing over me, con brio, when up came the opening measures--marked by a forte major 7th-composed glissando (I believe, though I'm out of practice and my ear's not what it used to be)--of Dream Steps, a work by none other than former theory and comp. professor, Dan Locklair (incidentally, his first name is not, in fact, Daniel; to err in this regard would invate a barrage of snippy comments, santimonious berating, and rather deflated marks). And oh, the memories came flooding back, memories of warm spring afternoons spent with Scott learning to smoke beneath the Scales annex, constantly reassuring ourselves between intermittent coughing spasms that, yes ideed, we were cool. The sweet miasma of smoke would curl about our faces as we spoke with such earnest abandon of the wonders of love and life, the curiosities of women, and sea of possibilities that awaited our imminent, live changing, post-graduation decisions. The oyster was primed and waiting and we were the shuckers.

*Oh sweet mother this stuff is terrible.*

I had such dreams then. Part of my decision to come to Japan was based upon my uncertainty, my innability to state with any certainty what it was I wished to do with my life, what in fact my life's calling was. I thought I had some mild talent for writing music, but that desire has since flown strait out the window and splattered itself about the whitewashed community center across the street, where it lies suppurating in the sun, sustenance for the homeless and other deluded dreamers. Occationally the kids in the park poke at it with a stick; I tell them to stop, but they don't speak English. I guess the major problem is that I have so many interests and so many talents--if I may be alowed to toot my own horn here--but am not overly perspicacious in any one field.

*Why am I doing this to myself?*

When I was at home a few weeks back, I was talking with my bro-in-law, Andy (I don't know why I link this site, except perhaps in the wild hope that it might coax him into updating), and he told me that our minds reach their primacy in our mid 20's. Supposedly geniuses accomplished all their great deads in their mid 20's--Einstein's best work being produced during his 20's as a patent clerk, the bulk of Newton's work being done as a university student at Cambridge, nearly all of Mozart's and Mendelsohn's works being written before age 30 (by default), etc. Granted geniuses tend to mature mentally more quickly than most (and socially sometimes not at all), but it got me thinking. This may very well be my prime intellectual time, and I should be taking advantage.

That has a nice ring to it: "Prime Intellectual Time"; sounds like the title of some sort of brain brawl, maybe for WB's Thursday night line up....And all the way from his mother's basement, weighing in at 110 pounds and a towering 6'2' frame', Chester Milksop!! Chester enjoys spending his time watching reruns of Babylon 5, creating 3-dimensional computer models of the Star Trek's Deep Space Nine station, and translating his Magic the Gathering cards into Elvish...
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Anywho.....well, regardless of whether or not this is my intellectual peak, I still need an intellectual pursuit. For a time it was economics, then it was law. Not that my interests in either subject have changed, it's just that I could pursue both studies in the States; I want to take advantage of my time here, take away something with some permanence. After dwelling on this matter for sometime, it only made sense, being in Japan, that I study Japanese.

Now I can speak a bit, enough to get me around the town and communicate on a very base level, but I'm talking real proficiency, a deep understanding of the language. I signed up for classes this past week and am considering asking for more. I've borrowed several books on Kanji (the Chinese characters) and have begun study--I told my teacher that I want to take the third level proficiency exam in December, with the audacious goal of knocking out the second the following winter. The second level (otherwise known as the ni-q...no relation to my ghettoized name) is required by most businesses and law firms for international work, and if I can learn all about law or business at law or business school, then I should save those studies for their appropriate places of study and pursue the appropriate study of Japan--Japanese--thereby making the most of my time here and making myself all the more marketable.

Ah, the breeze is warm and the evening is lovely.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I've just crammed down about six spoonfulls of stringy slime that smells approximately like my foot, and I need to use the restroom.

I received the internet at my apartment. I think I'll roast a boar's head to celebrate.
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I checked. No boar's head. I'll be roasting instant raman noodles to celebrate.

I know I said I would only be taking a 2 week break from blogging--two weeks spent relaxing at home with family and friends--but I lied. Sometimes people lie, like when Jim Jones promised his children a tasty beverage guaranteed to deliver salvation, or when Stalin promised gulag sentencees a camp made of ginger bread and candy canes. Get over it.

So what brought me back you ask? Well I had no idea I'd so many fans and readers. I received a flood of emails, impassioned pleas to resume my crazy half-truths about life in the Orient, like this one from my sister:

Nick, we all miss you very much. Please start updating your blog as we've no idea what's going on in your life. Mary Katherine's so loney she's started taking heroin. Love Mer.

Or this one from ousted British Tory leader Ian Duncan Smith:

Oy! Write more blog posts or I'll put my arse in your face. Yours truly, the Dunkster

And, in an act that flew in the face of 500 years of scientific discovery, Modernist poet Ezra Pound rose from the grave to type up this little e-diddy:

Your mind and your words lie upon a digital sea,
But the Orient has swept about you, and the song it sings
Is shining ships of thought that leave you this or that in fee:
Ideas, tales, and oddments of all things,
And if you don't start writing again, I'll bite your ear off.

--E

How could I refuse such inspired, such perfervid petitions for my creative genius? I couldn't, so I'm back, reinervated and galvanized by the visit home, and full of new little tidbits of wisdom which I will dispense in due time. But if there's one thing I've learned in all my years on the stage, it's always leave your audience hanging, wanting and waiting for more. And so I