(To Reiko Suzuki-Pennington, who understands)

The shattered dawn finds me on a barren corner: I gather the fragments of the night.
Nights are dark, crystal, haughty things; deep heaving oceans rich with sunken treasure, heavy with possibility and redolent with desire.
Nights are playful in their cruelty: They give and take away with equal ease, offer love and adventure which vanish with the dawn. Nights are that way, you see.
The current, that seanight, left me stranded on a familiar shore, marooned with strangerfriends to drink with, enka music to kill cats by, the aftertaste of bitter pickles—things my aching heart has had enough of.
Then the nightsea brought you….
Words, words, the sound of your voice; you so self-assured and beautiful among us, wittily bored with your own worldliness, yet somehow strangely naive. We talked and only I remember that nothing was said.

The deserted dawn finds me wasted on a street of this city which can never be mine.
Your face in the bar half-light, the characters that write your name, the husky rasp of your laugh, your half-closed eyes: These are the impressions you have left me, toys for my amusement.
I hold them up for examination and lose them in the light of the dawn; I search for them among the few stars which brave the morning, the darkness of your light….
I must have you, no matter what: I throw away these toys you have left me—they are no conciliation. I want that secret look, your awakening smile… that sad but lovely smile which only the morning knows.

What have I left to offer you?
Can I tempt you with empty streets, resigned sunsets, a faded moon over a bifurcated mountain?
Or with the lonely sorrow of a man who has lived too long beneath the cold and heartless stars?
Or perhaps with those whom I have known before you: Men who living were indistinguishable from those dead; or women whose sole concern was what I could give them, show how much I loved by mirroring their desires? Would these interest you?
I could give you my heart—or what is left of it to me—which somehow has clung to those dreams that words and time, joy and sorrow have never touched.
I shall tempt you with a memory: A sunset redder than a rose, seen beside an ocean long before you were born.
I shall reveal you to yourself, write you stories about yourself, tell you shocking yet truthful rumors of yourself.
I shall give you my prized solitude, my darkness, the despair of my heart; I shall buy you with ambiguity, with secrets exposed, with sorrow.

Tsukuba, 1991

Just to let anyone interested know, I survived the earthquake and am currently hanging out in my house in Iwaki, watching the nuclear power plant and trying to keep the B.O. stink down.

There was very little damage in my neighborhood, but our water is still off. (But the city is slowly getting that restored, and they’re saying they hope to have some kind of water supply to every home in the city within a week.) I’ve had electricity the whole time, and the gas has been back on since the day after. I had water drawn in the bathtub and plenty of food in, and since the quake I’ve only had to make one trip down to the water plant to get drinking water. (I’m planning on making another past-midnight run tonight to get more in—they’re running several places twenty-four hours a day—hopefully enough so I can boil some and take a more spashy bath than the wipe-offs I’ve been making do with.)

It looks like they have the reactor situation up north more under control; the radiation levels published on the city website are way down from what they were—not that they ever got up to dangerous levels down here.

Anyway, I’m OK for the time being. As soon as the gasoline situation improves and I can make a round-trip down to Mito, I’ll run down and see what the damage is at the office. (As it stands, the university was closed most of the week and even after our building was judged structurally sound—which it should have been after all the inconvenience of rebuilding it to make it more quake-proof a few years back!—they were still letting people in for only two hours at a time. So there wouldn’t have been much point in me going down anyway.)

Babble, babble, how I do go on. All for now. More later!

That’s right, they’re back and making the rounds! Checking to see whether your office or classroom thermostat is set too high! (Just right is 19 degrees, according to the little adhesive notices they spend who-knows-how-much for several years ago to print up and shtick under the thermostat of every room in every building on campus. … And presumably on the Hitachi and Ami campuses as well!) And if it is, they turn it down for you!

Service with a smile. And an audible in-sucking of air!

Sorry, folks, but if we’re having to pinch the yennies this freakin’ hard, WE ARE IN SOME DEEP SHIT.

But you shouldn’t have expected me to come if you couldn’t be bothered to send it until a day or two before the RSVP deadline.

Sorry, but I’m just funny that way.

(Or am I supposed to be happy that you remembered me at all? Fuck that.)

The spammers have found the new blog and seem to like it! Ha ha!

What do y’all say?

I think I’ve had enough of my ever-green theme. Besides, since that Avatar shite, BLUE is the new green!

That’s the catchphrase from a TV commercial for the Rosetta Stone language learning software that’s been playing over here for a few weeks now.

Gaikokugo-ga bokokugo-ni naru: “a foreign language will become your native language (lit., mother language).”

The commercial itself is kinda fun, starring a cute little bappa whose Aomori dialect is thick enough to necessitate subtitles in the standard language. Just as she is telling you about how they’ve started getting orders for their apples from Brazil, the phone rings and, guess what, she starts talking in Portuguese. You eventually get to see her sitting in front of the PC using the software to study, and after the pitch the “CM” ends with the catchphrase.

Since I speak neither Aomori-ben nor Brazilian Portuguese, I can’t say how good she speaks either, but I imagine the actress has an interesting story or two to tell.

I also haven’t spent enough time in the States recently to know what kind of ads Rosetta Stone runs there, but I can only assume that they aren’t as silly or immoderate in their claims (past a certain age, a person will not be able to replace their native language with a foreign one) as this Japanese one is.

Update: You know, when I heard this thing again afterwards, I think maybe what the catchphrase in the title actually said (what they actually used in the commercial) was 「外国語を母国語にする」 … which is a much more active idea, if no less silly:

“Make a foreign language your native language!”

Ah, well.

I’m back (I think), I’m whack, and even more pissed off than ever.

The old blog is here, in case anyone’s interested.

For now, that is all.