Random late night thoughts in a blizzard

It's been snowing here for approximately thirty days and thirty nights. The winds howls. The glacier that was once a street growls. In another week or so I'll start rounding up two of every creature in the neighborhood. After that, I'll probably start eating them.
It's a little known fact that the Eskimos are the most paradoxical people on earth. For example, an Eskimo will say something like, "It's so cold in here I'm sweating to death." Or, "I love the polar bear like a brother, sometimes like a wife. This is particularly true when I hunt and kill polar bears." One might conclude that Eskimos lack logic, but that would be missing the point. Eskimos view the world as a totality; every single thing is more or less the same one thing, and yet, pardoxically, there is a nearly infinite number of ways to express it. Which may explain why the Eskimo is notoriously taciturn.. At the same time, I know virtually nothing about Eskimos. Are there still Eskimos out there? If there's a good (and at the same time bad) Eskimo out there, I could sure use one tonight.
Another little known fact is that Fairbanks, Alaska is, on average, the coldest city on the planet. The name Fairbanks is actually a loose transliteration of an Eskimo sound uttered in moments of abysmal joy, literally translated as "The worst best heaven in hell, where you will live long, die young and have the skin of a beauty queen resembling a walrus."
Hey, who wouldn't want to live there?
But getting back to my own extreme weather, the nicely horrible thing about snowstorms is that not only do they erase the landscape, turning the tediously familiar into an unknown zone of impossible to realize potential with neither a history nor a future, they also affect short term memory in humans and to a somewhat lesser degree in animals, and can under certain unimaginable circumstances cause delusional behavior. Yesterday, for example, I hiked out to the local trading post for supplies. First thing I noticed was that all the vegetables - which by the way all looked the same, as if every vegetable had somehow mutated back into its prototypical, Ur-vegetable form - were watching me. The same applied to the meager selection of fruits. Not only watching me, but also, I suspected, coming to some conclusion about me. Needless to say, I did not venture into the fish section. I walked over to the shop owner, under normal conditions a burly, mean-looking Japanese named Takahashi, whom on this day, for reasons which remain a mystery, I addressed as Mamoud the Merciless.
Tell me, Mamoud the Merciless, I said to him. What's the story on the fucking produce?
Mamoud visibly tensed, twisted his head in the direction of the hypothetically rising sun and mumbled something to the spirits he assumes are responsible for keeping him thus far out of a lunatic asylum, no doubt asking them to either make me disappear, or burst into flames. As neither occured, he looked back at me, grimaced and said, You fuck it, you buy it.
Meanwhile, who would have guessed that Mamoud, aka Takahashi the greengrocer, even knew the fuck word?
And why would he assume that even I, a foreigner with the demeanor of a blue-eyed Antichrist and a penchant for ironic asides, would want to have sex with his vegetables?
Let me put it this way, Mamoud, I told him. My present feelings are so much the antithesis of anything that could even remotely be described as erotic that even if your gorgeous daughter, Sheena of the Desert, appeared at this moment wearing nothing but the flimsiest of semi-transparent kimono made from imported Chinese rice paper and engaged me in explicit sexual repartee while suggestively stroking one of your ridiculously overpriced bananas, I would be hard pressed to get from the state of terror I am currently in as a result of being singled out and probably plotted against by your produce to a place where I could respond appropriately to her advances.
Yes, I don't see, he said. And who is this Sheena you speak so fondly of?
Exactly what I'm talking about, I yelled back. You're dull, demented and overworked. You don't even know your own daughter. You couldn't pick your wife out of a line up. For all I know, she's hanging back there in the meat locker. When your son gets out of prison, you'll ignore him too.
So you want vegetables, right?
I'm guessing that listening to your customers is not a big priority for you.
If any of this was really happening, it might be.
A good point. Score one for Mamoud.

But getting back to my original thought, which I seem to have forgotten....

I left the shop with a new bottle of sunscreen and a brand of cigarettes I never smoke. Then I couldn't remember where I lived. I knew and I didn't know. I knew everything I needed to know, while at the same time knowing that there was nothing I knew that could possibly be worth knowing. A sorry state, to be sure. Like an Eskimo with amnesia. A somnambulist on Saturn. An Alzheimers victim in Antarctica. I understood in this moment, wrapped in a blizzard, as lost as the ancient key to the alchemist's book of dreams, that it's only the fragments of our experience which are relevant. We like to assume an intelligible wholeness for convenience sake, but by doing so we miss the seemingly insignificant pieces which are the true source of inspiration.
Hence the high degree of disillusionment, not to mention schizophrenia, among Rationalists and, sadly, Eskimos.

When I finally made it home, I found the dog sitting in the car with the engine running. How she managed this is anyone's guess, but I'm assuming that at the same time she was forgetting who and what she is, she began thinking that she might be me. Not that I minded. I often wish there was someone else who could be me, if only for awhile. Anyway, I gave her the pack of cigarettes I'd bought and we both went inside to have a drink.

As they say in Fairbanks: In the winter, none of us start drinking until the sun goes down. (think about it)

To quote Neil Young: When the change came, I held my breath with my eyes closed.

And Charles Bukowski: It's better to be an asshole than to smell like one.


Thanks to all of you who have wasted your time writing comments. It's very much appreciated.

Replying to some of your questions

I'm temporarily interrupting the usual flow of this site in order to answer some of the questions that have been pouring in from apparently fervent readers. Questions running the gamut from the mundane, "Have you ever accidentally gotten a chopstick stuck in one of your ears?" to the esoteric. "Do you sometimes feel that you are being stalked by Japanese demons?"
On the chopstick issue, it's fairly common knowledge here that sticking one in your ear is not a good idea, unless you're attempting to commit suicide, in which case it's valid, although clearly on the wimpish side. Japanese with any sense of style prefer a short, dangerously sharp knife, which is inserted into the lower abdomen and moved, slowly, but deliberately, from right to left. ( From left to right is considered in bad taste and will probably result in you not going to the Japanese version of heaven, which some describe as an open-all-night amusement park, while others envision an up-scale department store in which all the salespeople work in the nude. Go figure.) If you're cool you do it in winter, outdoors, while it's snowing, wearing nothing but skimpy pajamas. If you're really cool, you invite a select group of friends to watch. Which raises one question: With such loyal friends, why kill yourself in the first place? And answers another: Yes, that's right, the concept of individual privacy does not exist here. If you can't do it in a group, it shouldn't even be contemplated.

It should be pointed out, however, that irate, Japanese housewives do, on occasion, implant chopsticks in their husband's ears. Not to kill them, of course, but merely to get their attention.
No harm in that.

As far as demons go, I really can't complain. I've had run-ins with my fair share, but have generally found them to be extremely polite. Demons here exist on the periphery of the Japanese psyche primarily to remind people that banality is not such a bad thing. Japanese ghosts, however, are another story.

But to move on to some of your other, more reasonable, questions:

Q: Why did you choose to become an expatriate?

Few expatriates actually make the conscious decision to become expatriates. Unless they are wanted by the law, or, perhaps, in a desperate, potentially lethal, relationship. In my case, it was more a vague drifting off-shore, catching a current and landing in a place that was impossible to imagine, yet somehow tolerable. As long as you don't think about it too much, for as long as you can still think.
Let's face it, we live in a paradoxical world, which, we shouldn't forget, is modern man's way out of not being buried by his own contradictions. With an evolved brain and excessive leisure time on our hands it becomes possible to merge the good stuff and bad stuff into a murky, existential pool of enjoyable discontent. This, by the way, is the key, or at least one of them, to an authentic life. Another is being wealthy and not having to work.
The downside of living in a foreign country is never being able to fully integrate with the local population. The upside is never having to fully integrate with the local population. Hey, another paradox!
One place is pretty much like another. It's not so much where you are as who you are, or who you can get away with pretending to be.
But more on the advantages of assuming a state of total, cultural disconnection later.

Q: I've heard that most Japanese people suffer from mental illness. Is this true?

Sadly, yes, but you must keep in mind that the Japanese are highly adept at hiding. The ability to repress is taught from childhood. Besides, noticing insanity in others is considered very impolite. In addition, large numbers of the insane become university professors, which both secures their madness in an acceptable format and prevents them from doing any harm to others.


Q: How many Japanese women (or men) have you had sex with?

A rather odd question from someone I hardly know. To be honest, I wish I could remember. Not quite sure when Yuko, Yuka, Yumi, Ikuko, Yukari and their ilk all blended into the same delightful, alien body. I can, however, definitely say that I have never had sex with a Japanese man, although I have killed a few of them. At least I've seriously thought about it.


Q: Don't you miss your home country, the good old U.S.A.?

You're kidding, right? Let's just say that I miss the USA that exists solely in my imagination of a place called the USA.
But much more on this later.


Best wishes to all. Keep those comments flowing.....

Welcome to my Blog

Why I have set up this blog:
I'm stranded here in the Japanese snow country (yuki guni) and, at the moment, slightly unhinged.
I need contact with the outside world, assuming something called the outside world still exists.
I'm willing to make that assumption, if you are.
However reluctantly.
I've lived in Japan so long that I'm no longer an actual person. I'm more a composit of impulses, a sensitive relic with a reasonably cool car, although I do remain productive.] When I'm not talking to myself, in the grip of a temporary depression,
arguing with the dog, trying to teach English to Japanese teenage mutants, or figuring out what my Japanese wife (whom I desperately love) is talking about, I write. Fiction. Fiction being our last link to an impossible future, our only antidote, really, to surviving "reality" with some sense of dignity.
To paraphrase Nietzsche, "All we have to go on, assuming we're not total assholes, is what we can make up from moment to moment. The rest is just insidious garbage."
Nietzsche's point? Nothwithstanding his insanity, and total ineptitude with women, he was trying to tell us that it's not enough to be a living human on the planet. Existence is a condition, not a justification for anything. We all have to be artists, to invent our lives as we go, rather than merely subscribing to them with mindless enthusiasm.
The poets, even as banal as most of them are, have the final word.
So try to be a poet, instead of a simple dick head. Or is that one word?
Dickhead.
Call me Dickhead.
Not that any of this has anything to do with the blog that will eventually emerge in this space.
Not that anyone really cares.
Least of all, me.

Nevertheless, this site will deal will with issues that should matter: Writing, philosophy, the mind, sex, society, books, sex, politics, animal rights, tigers, wolves, polar bears, women, sex, dogs automobiles, religion (god help us!) music, guitars, Charles Bukowski, time, quantum mechanics, Japanese women, Japanese psychology, dogs (large breeds only), food, space, interior design, marriage, mindlessness (in all its forms), madness...and others, depending on time constraints and available energy.

I look forward to hearing from you.......