Small in Japan

Baby and I just spent the week in Tokyo … in what remains of the Edo Period’s red light district … namely Yoshiwara … the true gutter of Tokyo … bums and madmen … rows of vending machines with men obsessively checking each returned-change pocket just in case … just in case … scavengers … all men … the only women there are beautiful … beautiful because they’re paid to be, or beautiful because they’ve survived … sitting at the end of the bar, the oldest one there, history stamped on her countenance. At night the men line the arcade, some drinking, some too drunk to keep drinking, some in eye glasses, moustaches, reading, like they just left a lecture hall, all lined up together with their cardboard and their blankets and awnings … they sleep early … why is that?
One night we went to the seediest bar we could find … it was just like my teens when I’d seek the lowest, most profound amongst us … it was just the same, but in Japanese … the emotion, the wild mood swings, the love and the violence … and the stink and the alcohol and the crescendo of insistence … in something … I couldn’t understand, but I knew the routine … we left as a fight was starting … same old story.
I loved that place, I’d like to stay a while ... all those humans.

Vanity fair

Baby has a high school reunion next January so we are in training for the event. To start out with I’ve become a recovering alcoholic again – this is a sure-fire way to get rid of that unsightly ‘spare tire’ flesh that is becoming a constant pest. I thought maybe it had been a month or two since I stopped being a filthy drunk, but actually it’s been only 2 weeks. I remember last time it was 40 days and 40 nights and by the end I felt like some kind of lean, sexual python, slithering down Hubba Hubba Street. This task is, frankly, tedious, but it’ll be worth it in 6 months’ time. I won’t let anyone accuse me of not knowing the sweet poison of conceit.

I decided to draw with my left hand today even though my right is functioning pretty much as normal. I was a little disappointed to discover it seems to be exactly the same as drawing with my right, just slower. Perhaps I’m ambidextrous. Or perhaps I’m just not very good. Or perhaps my old suspicion is true after all, and god himself is moving through me.

Forget the oxygen

This weekend, an eight year old girl opened her conversation to me with, “Do you know how it is that most of us are probably going to die eventually?”

“Well, probably, I guess so.”

She went on to say she’d like to go by a manta ray encounter, Steve Irwin style.

I’d like to go out like Chopin – “Forget the oxygen, get the champagne!”

And I’d like my memorial plaque to read the last line of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” – “La commedia e finite.”

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I have about a week left of being a recovering alcoholic and I’m thinking of going the whole hog – extending it to the full 40 days and 40 nights. I don’t miss all that poison, but I do miss the reckless self-destruction. I survived another party this weekend, this one at a bar – no big deal. The tough one will be tomorrow when I fly 16 hours to New York. Sitting with nothing to do, while beautiful girls bring me food and wine.
My biggest problem, though, is that I’m becoming quite svelte – all lean and slinky. The cruel fat brought on by the gradual decaying of my aging body is slipping away. My clothes somehow look cooler and my gait wilder.
Maybe I need to stop drinking altogether … and start drugs.