Drink It Black

Not blogging has become my habit of late. It's easy enough to do, after all. But that's my main problem, really. It's just a lot easier not to produce things than it is to produce them. And yet I do have this feeling that there are things for me to produce. And while I may write good emails from time to time, those don't really count. They may be useful in my evolution as a writer, but I can't feel as proud of them as I would of, say, a finished screenplay, or even a short story. Or a blog post. Because, as much as these posts are not necessarily great works, they are a great exercise, and then there they are, 'published' in a sense, sitting there in cyberspace for anyone to read, should they come across them. At this moment I'm grateful to an unexpected comment on my last post by someone called Morioka, which is also a city in Japan not far from where I am now. I'm in Japan, did I mention that? Not that it necessarily matters where I am. But what's interesting is that this comment from the city of Morioka (perhaps Morioka has a city representative who scours blogs and comments on the ones he finds interesting?) came while I was somewhat unexpectedly in Japan. Which one might take as some sort of sign. To where does that sign point, one might ask? Well, that's not particularly important. It's at least less important than my geographical location. But as Japan figures largely in my life, it seems fitting to me. And then there's the fact that my trip to Japan came into being in a rather interesting way--one night the week before last I was contemplating buying a very cheap fare which popped up for LAX-Tokyo, and then roughly ten hours later, in the morning, I got an email with an offer of work in Tokyo, for roughly the same departure date. So suddenly I not only had a good reason to go to Tokyo, but I could fly for free and get paid to be there, and I was able to tack on six days at the end of the trip to visit my father. Quite unbelievable that it worked out like that, and yet here I am. So you'd better believe it. As they say.

Not to mention that I made more working for four days in Tokyo than I would have done working as a waiter in LA for two weeks. So that was a nice bonus.

Japan is such a strange place. But that's no secret I think. Everyone seems to have at least a vague notion of how strange it is. Especially after "Lost in Translation." And speaking of that, I spent a lot of my time while in Tokyo at the Park Hyatt, which is the hotel featured in that movie. I kept hoping I would come across Bill Murray and never did of course, but even without Mr. Murray I got plenty of enjoyment out of the views and luxurious surroundings. I've heard that Sophia Coppolla has called the hotel "a floating island above the city" or something to that effect. Which is very true. Tokyo, as vibrant and interesting as it is, sprawls so completely and endlessly, mostly in the form of grayish concrete buildings, that it can be somewhat overwhelming to be amidst it. And since it was fairly hazy on all the days I was in the Hyatt, that sense of endless sprawl was heightened, for in every direction there was nothing visible but endless little buildings, roads, and a few trees here and there, stretching out to the point where they disappeared in a grayish fog. Leaving Tokyo on the bullet train, therefore, offerred a kind of feeling of relief. To me Tokyo, when I'm in it, feels somewhat inescapable, like that sprawl will just keep going and going and you'll always be on some little street in the maze, never to find your way out. When you take into account that there aren't any street names in the city, and that even cab drivers don't know where most things are, you'll have a better sense of this feeling. It really is like a maze. Which is not to say that I dislike Tokyo. It's a great place in its own way, and I hope to have further chances to explore it, preferably when I have a lot of money to burn on cool, stylish clothing.



Drug stores here are severely lit with bright fluorescents, and chemical aromas float towards you from all directions. I feel a little bit ill whenever I step into one of those stores. Restaurants play astoundingly bad synthesizer muzak, a little bit too loud. Grocery stores offer similar aural offences. Everything in the cities is bright lights and colors. Outside of the cities, things are rusting and dilapidated. On the commuter trains, men sit and stand looking utterly beaten and depressed, wearing drab and cheap-looking suits. What went wrong here? is the question I sometimes ask myself.

And yet, I love Japan, despite these things. I'm just glad I don't have to be one of the men on the trains. If for no other reason, I love Japan for its sixty-seven varieties of canned and bottled coffee, all basically the same but with varied and wonderfully amusing names such as "Coffee Boss Rainbow Blend" and "Drink it Black." Then there's the ground staff at airports, whom I dearly love, especially being an aviation-crazed type of person. When a plane is pushed back for departure, the two men handling that flight, dressed in lavender-colored jumpsuits, will stand on the tarmac and bow to the pilots once they have given the all-clear to proceed. They will then stand as the plane begins to roll past and wave for as long as it takes for the entire length of the plane to go past them. What could be better than that? Especially when compared to the attitude of airport workers in the US and elsewhere. Take for example the woman attending a roped-off entrance which I wanted to enter through at LAX the other day. Once she had ascertained with a series of grunts that I was allowed to pass through said entrance, she, looking blankly at me, unhooked the rope and let it drop to the ground in a gesture that said "I so don't care about you or anything...."

I'm going to get back to drinking my Georgia Original canned coffee now. Here's to the blog's exit from dormancy, and lets hope I'll be moved to write more going forward.