So Wait 'Till Your Boat Goes Down - That's When You'll Need Me Most

I Found That Essence Rare

Do you believe in karma? I do - sometimes, or at least I think I do, and then I also believe that it's bullshit: my lingering superstitions derived from an early childhood haunted by some bolt-slinging Judeo-Christian Ted Nugent-lookalike hovering, a mind filled with vengeance, off beyond the cirrus somewhere. Perhaps my understanding of the concept is stunted and inaccurate, possibly malevolent. Or maybe I'm just wallowing in a nonspecific variety of plight - the idea of a fate-directed cosmic punishment does provide a handy excuse for one's own unadmirable inertia. Think hard enough, and all faults become justifiable.

Once upon a time, when I owned a pleasant and efficient Toyota, my housemate had taken his car in for some repairs, and - due to an eccentric and ever-shifting work schedule, I was unable to offer him transportation to work one day. Relegated to bus riding, I remember him later groaning forth the observation that "the ugliest people in the world are on that bus." At the time, I found this evocative supposition to be trenchant, very sharp indeed. I've been paying for my endorsement of the observation ever since.

Many months and a handful of sad strange years have come and gone; the beloved Toyota is apparently reverting to nature. I enjoy my daily worker-bee commute, which involves an hour or so on a combination of busses en route to my lucrative 40-hour engagement with post-global underemployment and ego-scarring downward mobility. There are many, many familiars on my daily sojourn - I spend roundabout half an hour waiting for an uptown transfer. The vibe out on the street is most definitely interesting - workers and learners, loafers and dopers, backslappy denizens of the benighted creative class, always on the go go go, off towards the success, bosses, concepts evolving into presentations, those things that make us all tick: keep your eye on that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, where the good shit is. This is awe-inspiring, of a vaguely anthropological interest to lower creatures like me.

And, in the great yin/yang of the street, there's also a vaguely pathological undertone free-floating, ever ready to coalesce and materialize with instantaneous precision: the tardy tears and a raspy hail of innovative profanities inspired by liquor shakes and ill-timed, midday pharmaceutical crashes may tickle the eardrums from a distance, an impatient soliloquy of vernacular elements molded into one great, rolling, amorphous, syllable. This occasionally will migrate closer, to a more intimate proximity, perhaps accompanied by a more tailored personal request - please bruh o'Lord, help me out with a quarter, 50 cents...my mama died in my arms and I gotta get a heart transplant... Gas station after gas station, banished to the dim periphery of our sparkling village, all haunted by lottery lovers and informal prostitutes and university toilet cleaners howling crack arias into sultry summer sundowns as hybrids and minivans coast smoothly past, each a self-contained world unto itself. I know these folks too - I see them on my afternoon peregrinations, waiting for my transfer, and sometimes they speak, or sometimes I do, and I would really rather not, as I am an incorrigible asshole, and there are worlds around which I'd rather not have as slices of my own world - my aspirations are oriented elsewhere, my habits are far less renegade - but they have jobs too: not allowing me to forget my place, which is on the goddamn bus, me and all the other brown-hued people of this town who rush off at all hours, doing battle with complex transportation systems, so as to spend our hours behind the till or in the golden, sultry sunshine keeping enviable enclaves spotless, well-nourished and smiling in the afterglow of neourbanist fantasias - healthy lads, happy dogs, left-wing Rockwell-isms.

This second leg of the expedition is a serious miracle of efficiency - eagle-eyed doctorals, a healthy-looking flock of them, flooding on at every stop, with meticulous arrival/departure rituals well memorized. The first part of my commute tends to be far more interesting, and far less orderly - I've learned to be out of my humble door early, very early. I start the day on the other bus - the one that's never on time, a slow ramble through that sprawl of the apartment complexes (barracks-style, with a few 1970s-vintage mock tudors and faux-chateaux thrown in for maximum architectural shock) relegated to the unaesthetic and thoroughly utilitarian expressways that skirt the edge of town. Day, night, rain, shine - a slow parade of all the people who'd very much like to be somewhere else, if they could afford it, not a ghetto in the most trad of definitions, but rather a vaguely somnambulistic procession of unfortunates of all varieties, my people each and every one: tirades, imaginary friends, lunchtime drunks, gibberish soliloquies, demonstrative highs, and languid, lugubrious lows. Every bus shelter is papered over with revealing fliers, all of them university studies seeking eager participants, some of whom will be duly compensated for their proud service to knowledge: men who have fathered children with multiple, unknown women, secret junkies, dads who blew rent on lottery tickets and a couple fifths of Orange Flavored Alcohol Beverage, still smoking and pregnant?, bad gums, maladjusted genatalia, rabies, dalliances with prostitutes, halitosis, mange, and every other known malady, abuse and affliction that poor people still manage to get stuck with. The language is kind, gentle, occasionally well-translated, in the most dispassionate of ways, for it is very true that no one really gives much of a shit. But the study of habits has its' benefits - isolate the subject, for however long it takes to craft some sort of dissertation, and the path to future tenure for someone out there has been handily secured.

Servant that I am, I cannot help but lapse into tantrums of judgementalism. Strive though I might for transcendent humanism, I have occasionally felt the obligation to say thank you to individuals who - a second earlier - might have explicitly called me a liar. All in a day's honest, respectable work. Unsurprisingly, warm feelings have become an exercise, like sit ups or cereals made from pseudograins - you know they're good for you, but there is that effort, that massive effort, herculean. Everywhere I look, I see an intricate cosmology of angst, so ubiquitous that it has lost any semblance of the personal. The semiotics of need - a universal accumulation of personal failures, crises, spectacles, ruts, ditches, disappointments, breath held, and no one (save for the alcoholic, homeless couple who spend drinky, drowsy afternoons riding from liquor store to liquor store) is relaxed. On that great slide to points beneath you, how on earth do you forgive yourself?

Every breath, an avenue of potential commerce: profit, loss, opportunity, debasement.

So Give Give Give Me More More More

Everybody's Got Nice Stuff But Me

So there's this great moment in the world of customer service: you're completing a transaction, and it's usually not an especially impressive one, when the guy in question - in a moment of grand, high theatre - snakes his arm around the credit card terminal, a fat shield of flesh manouvered to prevent your (that is to say, my) prying eyes from making the mental notation of his PIN number.

Dirty peon or not, I've been the victim of nefarious deeds digitally perpetrated upon my damn-near worthless plastic, so I can definitely understand the sentiment. But c'mon - thanks for the confirmation that we co-residents of The Most Progressive Town To Have Ever Existed (someone, somewhere, stand up for a pat on the back) have sunk to such an elaborate and theatrical level of callous assholism, as a raison d'etre. Those yard-mowing half-wit grocery-boy types, mouthbreathers, dumb as fuck; we're either the kind of people Randy Newman had in mind when he wrote "Roll With The Punches" ("Nice shoes little boy - can you tie them yourself?"), or perhaps the kind Dylan was really thinking of when he dreamt up "Idiot Wind" - it is indeed a wonder that we still know how to breathe.

Customer service was a snap choice - most likely a bad one, the way that most quick and unconsidered college decisions tend to be, calculated as a means to generating some extra spending money (this would be the 1980s, back when college students were from an economic sub-strata that might actually need or desire a side job for spending money). In retrospect, it was a real Faustian bargain, sell your soul kind of stuff. Once you drift over to the dark side, you're already - young and bright-eyed - moving down the path of turning into your job: you are stuck, this is you, and this is not impressive at all. "So...what do you do?" "Well, I ring up things for important people (an importance well-advertised, colossal, great brains, great projects, great greatness), and then I thank them as they slip away, muttering conference details into cell phones, power point, drafts, dots, motes, sketches of the concept, quadrilingual pre-school offsping (Ohayo gozaimasu. Dozo yoroshiku. Tomorrow, we start with Ni hao, wo shì David, and build from there.) in tow." I don't build things, design things, knock 'em dead on college radio, have subtitles streaming below me, or hold a doctorate in post-structuralist pataphysics; I make a petite amount of money, but not enough to count. A varietal of humility (not necessarily the most idealized one, which gets no real-time respect anyway) - it does give me something to work for - I have come to know, to bask in the amber glow of The Good Life, which is the carrot dangling before that tired, tired horse, at three or four above minimum wage, but there must be hope - onwards and upwards. Previous generations toiled until they died in stinking shacks in ratty sections of town without giving up, but hey - at the end of the day, a shack is a shack.

Another busy holiday comes, and then it goes - gotta love those holidays; they do have a phenomenal way of running you into the ground, which I do celebrate when payday rolls 'round - and I put my hours in through the majority of it - slow, sluggish days, followed by the sudden appearance of wave upon wave of the freshly tanned, all radiating health, a conspicuous lack of the kinds of minor gripes and grudges we lesser mortals tend to pass along to our own kind. This is the paid escape (a short, 3-day weekend, so this is a quick trip to the beach holiday, not a Christmas on the Mediterranean holiday), and I should be fair - I'll get mine soon enough, though I'll not be running off to anywhere - money's a little tight at the moment. Fair enough I suppose, for I am tired, and I am weary, and I could sleep four thousand years.

Downward mobility - what a fantastic (let's all ruminate, for a year ,or ten), axle-breaking pothole in the great freeway of progress we're all allegedly whizzing down. Put forth the idea to me as an 18-year-old; I would have sworn that you had completely, absolutely lost your mind. But I do also recall a flash of very unpleasant intuition, roundabout the age of 18: life is about to be no fun whatsoever. And what a ride it has been - precipitous vertigo drops, strange turns, weird phone calls, errors in judgement that never stop flashing back upon you - oh you will be reminded of those errors in judgement; for they are as strong as titanium - their staying power is phenomenal indeed. The love of simple being that I think I once wallowed in (windows cracked open, the smell of cut grass on a May afternoon as the distant sound of lawn mowers, and the more proximal jangle of Fables Of The Reconstruction merge into a crystalline Idlewild spring) is not often a presence in my day-to-day life now - every second awake has an edge, a hint of hysteria, something will stab through at any second, and turn your week into a fresh new catastrophe. Your lovers will fall quietly away - those soft 4 A.M. accents from Carolina East and West, Cochin or Chengdu are but a fading Fellini dream, a slippery screen kiss that slipped away into the sundown of a decade once lived. Your money will go - log in to the online account, your identity validated by the reassuring authority of technology - and you are now liberated to let your tears flow, anxiety reigns supreme, a spontaneous blizzard of autoimprovisational accounting. Your status - well, your status was a phony, arrogant delusion spawned in a secure upbringing, and your comeuppance will last a thousand years. Meanwhile - you will scramble and run, oh you will run hard my friend, straight into the ground, with the fat hand of fate ready to throw down another slap, just hard enough to get your tired ass running all over again.

I suppose this is very good for writing; there is no shortage of material, though I don't know if I'm able to properly evaluate it's quality (If you're a poor man, your standards must never, ever drop, and you must never, ever be half-assed about anything at all, at any time. Period.). Between legitimate work, and minutes and hours wasted on public transport (I once added up the hours, and multiplied those hours by my wage - we don't call them salaries anymore), I don't have much time on my hands, wedging in a second job is so necessary it's actually evolving into something of a fantasy - the erotics of employment, especially of a variety you don't feel compelled to apologize for. A notebook for the bus - I noted I was getting a lot of great reading done while shuffling from place to place, and it did occur to me that I could probably get a lot of writing done as well. I keep my modest pad close at hand - random moments of calm, strange breaks in the tension, and then the words wash over me, oceanic in vastness and greatness.

So, another afternoon's intrigues and insinuations ebb and lurch towards their logical conclusion. A brief esacpe from tiny armies of Sirk's bleak and lacquered matrons, neo-urbanist refugees questing for exquisite finger foods with French (sounding) names; the multi-lingual descendants, swaddled deep within German-engineered strollers, with flustered nannies walking amok have likewise been left behind. I flee to the loading dock for a quick moment of escape, sunshine. I note a trio of sparrows, co-conspirators creating pop for my ears only - lined up on the soaked and rust-flecked railing, shrouded by the lowering mist that has turned the afternoon into a living Japanese watercolor. The trio improvises, with an intuitive sense of elegant harmony, before flight into the pale skies.

Shinjuku Thief

You Were Born. So now you're free.

1. You Were Born. So Now You're Free.

Just the other day, I was able to enjoy a most unusual dessert. It became quickly apparent to me that this was no ordinary dessert - it had been prepared with great care and creativity. Unorthodox elements - yuzu and rosemary and sasparilla and tamarillo - had combined, in the hands of an exquisite craftsman, or craftswoman, to form this dessert. I inspected it closely, taking note of its' shape and specific gravity, hoping to discern the manner in which these elements combined to generate the unique attributes of this specific food item. The key to unlocking its' magical secrets was apple, a modest little chunk, very carefully sculpted into a geometric shape and mildly flavored with cinnamon; soon thereafter I was able to discern and identify each of the varied components that united in forming this delectable aggregate. Mesmerized, approriately, I left the house, so that I could purchase a second specimen, in order to study its' nature in an isolated, scientific fashion.

Later, my friend - who is something of an accomplished situationist - came over, and he unexpectedly consumed the second specimen as we listened to Henry Cow's Bittern Storm Over Ulm. He confessed that he's becoming frustrated with a project - he's unskilled at the art of delegation, and the varied underlings charged with combing through academic periodicals in search of strands he can weave into gold are instead devoting unfortunate amounts of time to sexually provocative websites. I informed him that the entire enterprise carried with it a seamy undertone of colonialism, reconfigured into a more professionally pleasing presentation. He snorted the expected disapprovals, and then a short time later, it began to rain, very heavily - an epic-scale deluge accompanied by lightning and small hailstones; a severe thunderstorm warning had been broadcast over NPR (on in an adjacent room), introduced by a strange, screeching tone, followed by a mechanized voice that had been treated with a reverb effect to accentuate its' metamorphic quality. Our conversation gradually turned in the direction of politics.

(photo by Takuya Miyamoto)

2. The Fecundity Of Life

The skyline has been thoroughly, effectively retrofitted, a sleek revision, with elements of travertine and chrome. The greatest manifestation of a town transformed - once, I would never be able to procure such finely crafted dessert, but today, we are so much more! We have grown, we have prospered, and life's rich pageant is a buffet, stretched towards infinity. We have our humble roots as provincials - meat, potatoes, soul food, misbegotten crustaceans yanked from nearby estuaries and boiled alive, with blended spices. But times have changed. People and places - nondescript no more.

Undesirables have been dispersed, nevermore to befoul the glass-smooth and buzzing boulevards, cast instead towards the ranchy suburbs, leafy lanes once the stuff of reassuring prime-time dramas, but now a millennial recasting introduces a more newsworthy quality: mall declines, seedy strips, grown-ups working fast-food, dented siding, a Camaro on blocks used as a closet annex, a lowering aura of shadiness. This atomization of the police blotter all-stars is but one face of a great civic project, shrouded in the celebratory. A new day is indeed dawning. Your ticket up is your ticket out.

As evolving provincials are wont to do, there is the usual shopping: the basket is filling swiftly, elements are on sale, alkali metals that spark to life after detuned soundchecks, noble gases whose integrity remains shaded behind the oaks of a campus green; elements lifted from the continent, and from the subcontinent, and from the dark continent. There's a great proliferation of boutiques, Provence à Piedmont - here the soundtrack is Pavement, there the soundtrack is Debussy; for every scene, there is a score. And as is true in every go-for-the-Oscar moment, that perfect, big score - configured with great precision - must never, ever startle or surprise.

Thus, my findings - as of yet - are inconclusive.

3. St. Cajetan

Let me tell you about the place I live. First, a room: the blinds are ancient, very old, rescued from a garbage pile somewhere. Ditto the carpet, a cheap apartment plush built in to the place, over the standard plywood sub-flooring. An oriental rug (an anachronistic term that somehow persists), a hand-me-down. Empty spaces - the former home of things sloughed off, victims of pressing needs to attend to the power bill, the water bill, or the general built-in costs that accompany living, walking around and breathing. Life is good.

And it truly is - there is the philosophy: less is more. Slough off the excess, the ephemera, the crap and clutter. To a profound degree, it is a philosophy of those who have something to give up in the first - you must be able to afford to let go. So here's what life has become - cavernous, the great chamber of emptiness. Taste is something I can no longer afford, after relinquishing a DVD collection (Italian, Japanese, Taiwanese, French, Mexican - a global tour of the great cinema that - in theory - remains a great passion; one would be hard pressed to find battered and beat copies of many of them in the local video shop, and I'm a few hundred miles off the retro-and-festival circut), and a CD collection (peaking at a genre-hopping several hundred, before collapsing back down to the five or ten no used shop would accept), I am left with books, unsellable as no one reads. Someone else out there, some entrepid shopper has the good fortune of lucking up on those obscure Bengali and Japanese DVDs that never found release in the United States. We've all worked for it, the right to consume, we've all put in our 40 hours, we all have earned the right. But the sand shifts beneath your feet, and what was mine is now yours forever. I have bare walls, dingy carpet, a 3-room apartment a block up the street from a whorehouse, and a rotting Toyota I can't afford to fix. Life is good.

On the daily hike to the bus stop - gotta get to work somehow - I took note of an interesting trend I've noticed before. At 6 A.M., it's especially pronounced. This would be the tendency of the local homeless population to spontaneously burst into splintered, fractured song. It's an impressive spectacle - impromptu performances of Rick James and Sly Stone (what message is being sent here), jazzed improvisationally with liberal doses of profanity and - from the one gentleman a block from the co-op grocery - non-specific threats of uninvited anal sex and breast abuse. Commuters, to work far more prestigious than I've managed to luck into (the use of one's mind and knowledge while working: what a novel, exotic concept!) whiz by, a blur of taillights streaking through the shifting chiaroscuro pastel dawn. The sound of strange, weird song echoes off the walls of non-descript nearby buildings. Perhaps it's folk music.

Days are rough things. Each one a struggle, a serious battle to not drown in the tide, washed away by the world itself. My eyes open, and I always wonder what exactly is going to hit me today? There's a daily rhythm of being slowly hammered into the ground; it never lets up. I look around and see everything that's gone. You are stripped down to the one final essential - the mind, restless mind, monkey mind, deconstructive mind. It's accounting prowess is incomparable - it never stops the endless, running tally of all that has been cast off, up, and away.

4. Ever Get The Feeling That You've Been Cheated?

Everything, as always, continues it's spiral. The rains begin. They were waiting for me - hail and phenomenal downdrafts and seismic convusions of thunder. Lightning - an impressive storm of it - doing its' dance; there is electricity around me, as always, it would seem. My very own trial by fire. The walk, as usual, goes on forever, and I slow down gradually, tired at the start of the day, worn down and run down already, blasted by the unsolicited harangue of nature itself. Lightning strikes again, very close, and I dart into a building, a big blockish monstrosity of 1960s architecture. Concrete and glass. The storm has knocked me into some place I do not recognize - I have no idea, and this building is vast - seas of cubicles that stretch on for miles it seems, long hallways with little windowless offices, little geometric caverns with glossy painted cinderblock walls. People dart about, papers in hand, distant murmurs, impromptu hallway conferences. I wander. I need help - within seconds, I will be late for work, and this will not be good. The deeper I travel into this building, the less certain of anything I'm becoming.

Still soaking from the storm, which howls and rages apocalyptically outside, I take a tiny eternity to make my way down yet another hallway. I peer into the open door of a randomly chosen office. An immaculately dressed Asian woman sits behind an L-shaped desk, hypnotized before a flat-screen monitor; occasionally she keys a figure into a spreadsheet. I stand, soaked, at the doorway for several seconds, the twin sounds of her typing and the random, periodic crashes and gusts accompanying the storm, which has lost none of its ferocity. "Ma'am, excuse me. I have somehow gotten lost, and I'm very sorry to interrupt, but I was wondering if you could direct me back to the front of the building." She casts a suspicious, inspecting glance in my direction. "I was on my way to work, I walk - and I ran in when the storm hit, and I'm still not precisely sure how I ended up here."

She saves the vast document filling her monitor and slowly turns in her office chair. She slowly crosses her hands and sighs. "I see. Give me one second, and I can lead you back out. For the moment, please have a seat." The office is desolate in its' plainness - the scattering of personal effects on the desk stand out in extreme relief. I slowly scan them all - a ceramic candy dish, nearly empty, with the generic logo of some random tourist destination. A photo of her and her husband, in the driveway of a rather large house. A handful of novelty post cards, simulated pop art scenes with mildly idiosyncratic messages worked into the design, cartoon-style. A coffee mug, with the logo of a mjor comupter company on one side. The cup is full, steaming, I can smell the coffee. "Where might I locate some of that coffee?" Another sigh. "Out the door, turn right. Left at first hallway, then two doors down, on the right. Look - I can lead you out, but I might be a few minutes. Just warning you in advance." I don't have a tremendous amount of choice in this matter, so I stand, and follow here directions, in dire need of fresh coffee. I call work en route, to let them know that I will be late, which I'm sure they've already figured out.

After a melodramatic conversatiion, filled with additional sighs, along with vague warnings to the general effect of "You are aware that David will be in today, right? This is not a good day for you to be running behind schedule - we got a business to run here after all," I find a clean mug (there's a character from an infant's television show emblazoned across the front - colorful creatures that dance and ululate incomprehensibles in an emotive fashion), thow in a quick shot of sugar and fill the mug with the not-exactly fresh coffee remaining in a dingy, globulent carafe. It has that slightly singed taste unique to old coffee, a taste that lets you know that this beverage will turn you into a nervous wreck in absolutely no time, but somehow, you're gonna drink it anyway. I slowly make my way back to the woman's office.

The spreadsheet is gone, replaced by some document filled with tiny print. She's scanning vaguely while conferring on the phone with what sounds to be a multitude of colleagues, some of whom are apparently located on different continents. Another crash from the storm outside. I stand and begin to survey the grey steel shelves at one end of the office. Mostly technical manuals, mixed in with a smattering of

By all means, have a nice day, and do please let me know if I can help you with anything.