FROM: JIT SYSTEMS PROSE, 83712,2467
TO: Paul Veracov, internet:pvedit@u.washington.edu
DATE: 11/28/93 3:17 PM

------------FORWARDED MESSAGE------------

TO: EJS Psych Lit, INTERNET:Psychnet@GALLUA.GALLAUDET.EDU
DATE: 11/18/93 12:57 AM
RE: Copy of: old headaches on rainy days

Something I fell across in one of my notebooks. The last prose I wrote around my first or second week at John Jay. I remember how painful it was to write. But now, as I re-view it, I find it has out-distanced my memory. Behold: it has become its own.

Paul:

(I originally sent this out to the magazine in DC. I'm forwarding it to you because your last letter mentioned something about virtual reality and sensory deprivation. I wasn't sure if you were commenting on this prose or whether you came up with the phrase independently. In any case, it was interesting to see the two concepts used in one sentence and for music to eventually end up as its transcendental third. Such opaque-it was the frame work for this piece. I couldn't give in to my headache at work, so I worked through it. It hurt so much I could barely concentrate on holding the pen and keeping one eye in focus. So somehow it became music painfully approached by words, obliquely in images... Any way, enough of the doubled preface.)

Aimee:

There are parts here that remind me of the ending to The Yellow

Wallpaper. I wasn't really interested in the psycho-analytical angle. I think what is invested here is a cognitive psychological aspect. Please check with APPLE CORE for their battery of test and measurements to confirm.

There should also be a journal listing of the following events in the dream seminar program for Fall '93.

The DC systems operator should have a record of the entire transcript.

Thanks.

---AARON---

"In the forgetting

Numbly counting seven on

Haiku five is done."

I wish I could think in music. I have dreams of numbers floating down - like bubbles in a breeze. When they pop, I hear music. So, there I am swimming through this marginal subterranean surface playing music by flight and touch.

When I studied at MIT, I had begun work on this icon-based treatment. The concept had come out of research for the improvement of LEGGO. The idea was that a piece of LEGGO is an object for imagination. Alter its shape and you determine the amount of excitation it will have in the mind of a child, or an artist, or whatever.

Then, we stumbled upon sensory deprivation tanks and virtual reality landscapes. These are sort of the limiting bookends of sensitivity. And suddenly, I started having dreams every night about flying through a sea of music.

Pieces of these images float behind my memory like white sails in a fog. They remind me of the monks' intoning hum and the bowl of mushrooms and wild rice they gave us to eat. I had sat outside the monastery for what had seemed weeks. Stolid and firm. - More like stuck to my spot. Rigid and locked in one single-minded thought. -And I can't even remember what it was. -The white sails in a fog.

Around the edges were a kind of pink and blue, which upon later reflection were probably just my eyes. -The point at which my eyes press upon the "outside" and convect it unto myself. -The funnel of vision.

My new glasses often slip to a point on my nose where I start seeing things in fours. The neat little oblong prisms had been chosen by an Asian optometrist in Manila, who had insisted that my Western doctor had prescribed my lenses incorrectly. Since then, I've seen my eyesight completely disappear. Or rather, detach from my being. I pay it no more attention than the watch on my wrist or the underwear I put on this morning.

-But if you push this presence of emptiness, this absence of consciousness, vision kind of disappears into a void of everything. And again, those white sails and pinks and blues diminish. Expand. Distance abounds and I think again of the sound of music being played

underwater - pressing the rising surface of multicolored bubbles.

When everything has been outwardly turned, thought too eventually exhausts itself. And this emptiness, that void, tasks the most opaque form of memory, the heaviest form of recollection worth mustering.

In this tunnel, burrowed underneath years of roots, is a sifting and a drifting of what seems to be the hardest things set in place.

-What comes to mind is Sisyphus with a concrete yo-yo tied around his neck. Roller-blading on a short suspension bridge - bungie brained and tongue tied to his livered fate.

In the museum I last visited, Monet was on display. And as we carefully walked our way between walls and walls of color, I began to drift. In the Northeast corner, Monet's palette of colors washed over itself. And there, behind each wall was a dancing figure that moved behind the scenes - from wall to wall and back.

At first, this seemed startling. As if it were lurking behind the canvas waiting to devour my scrutiny and bewilder my senses. But later, when the glimmer of its first acquaintance had diminished, I found it was weeping.

Outside, the fall leaves and autumnal scents whisked about reminding one that this was indeed the only season worth mentioning in The City. There was indeed something about the seasonal cycle of death and winter's cry pre-conditioned by waning sunlight and oblique shadows before sunset.

There were changes in the air and in the sound of feet - and even traffic seemed to redden its last clutch at Indian Summer and the azure of approaching snow.

There are, aside from museum walls, spotted colors of things behind scenes - of beings foregrounded by their invisibility. Tangible by their absence. And it was with these, their lessons, their thoughts, their traces, that I found my home. In a world of ghosts who demand illusion to sustain our dialogue, I awake to the rising colors of sound.

Silence on the field

No wind for my kite today

Thought is floating still...

It isn't really because I'm shy or anything like that at all.

In fact, I confess just about everything on a regular basis.

It's more that I suffer an intolerable loneliness from time to time.

You know how it is, you get wrapped up in something long enough that you call it "Your work," "Your lifetime goal," or something like that. Eventually, if you keep it up, you call it progress.

Well, this is a work in progress.

Actually, it's more of a scrapbook, cliched, pastiche of a collection. Some of it is new. But most of it is just plain old. It's the memory that's fresh all the time.

I don't know why I'm putting it all together. I guess, if I didn't then it would all just sit somewhere and collect dust, or something. And I just knew, for everyone involved, it was worth it to put it all down.

Just the other day, I was working on some stuff for a petty musical that's been loitering in my mind, and I realized that getting it down, in any format, was the very first step toward anything...My lifetime goal, at the present, is to just get it all down...

In New York

Vacate the premises now...

I had finally finished the strange work of thesis #1 and completed my first tour of duty in the Japan Society. It was then that I took on the added blessing of apartment sitting. I figured I'd hang out on NYC's upper west side and rest a bit. There were several ongoing projects that I could also catch up on there.

I had to review for my next Japanese session beginning at the end of September. The weekend of August 7 had an anniversary and birthday to celebrate. The weekend of August 15 had a trip to Boston and Wash, DC in the works. I had a meeting with the consulate general of Japan at park avenue to set up, my political science files still needed to be picked up at Fordham University...Lori and I had some cards to cash in, I still yearned from time to time for a talk with Miya, my computer needed some memory cleansing. My guitar was itching to be played, etc. etc. etc.

So I took on what I thought would be a relaxing apartment sitting job for a friend of mine who was going away to visit his girlfriend in France. From day one on however, it proved to be a little more than a problem.

First, no outgoing calls from the phone line. My friend had been delinquent on payments. Then, his land lord came by asking for August rent. Well, without Rene around, all that could be done was put up the apartment for rent and use Rene's deposit until he showed up to take his stuff and leave.

All I have to do now is not get caught here by the landlord or his son with my pants down while they show the place to prospective renters. I also have to make sure that I'm out of here before I get stuck helping Rene move his stuff out. Although, I would like to have his shelves. Anyway, I suppose I can give them up to save myself the backache of moving someone else out. Besides, I just finished moving out of my own apartment - mostly by myself - and I have no desire to go through that packing and unpacking madness again - especially since I'm not even really done my own unpacking.

Well, that's all just another pizza in a different thaw...

Trick # 1

Learning to forget your in NYC while your there. Suddenly, the outside becomes so different. Like rose shaded glasses fading into a dirty window pane.

Finding the fear has passed.

Darkness has fallen, and somewhere in the glow of the lights

Humanity comes round again to hear the Match girl sing.

Little snow-fallen on a princess

Like a worn out record of listings

A tremolo so manifest.

Beaten down the birds wing

A flight again in music

That which swims so close to sight

But behind the eyes grow the ears.

Full, onward spent.

Oars mimicked by the kettle drum and fire cracker.

WFUV hums German tunes to fallout behind me.

And Auschwitz comes back on line again.

Recall, the soot fallen from bombs astray.

Like Dresden only older baked and half clayed out.

With potholes for kitchen soup,

And the thrusted and upturned innards of a pig being slaughtered.

These are the images that will make them say:

What did he see ? What did he see ?

In that incredible moment where the dog leapt from the ground

Sending the fear and flight into the terrorized eyes of the innocent.

In wartime the rules change upwards.

Spirals in the sky with a symphony of sirens.

When the air raids came, whole shells shocked memories outward.

And the ground learned to swallow its remains,

Traced its bodies by subsuming them.

Deep beneath the peaks and waves of rock hardened years,

Your old shall rise and speak again.

Your youth will be plagued by their dreams.

Their pitfalls shall flow upon us in a FLOOD.

Be not afraid of such things,

Placed as they are between plug and socket.

One finger for each ear.

Unbelief of sound that sight forgets its senses.

Whipping posts for beasts and chains.

Deep throttled and downward.

Gunning a rhythm at your fear.

Terrible plate of pathos

In your insidious wisdom grace thy table.

Pour wine deep into wounds you were once so proud of.

Show us the tears on your face and not the wailing of our voices.

I pity you not - for you are already dead.

Yet, see what trouble you have left behind.

Because history became such a naughty word.

Historical Jesus more offending to the hysterical woman

Nonetheless, I question.

Sarcasm has lost its way amongst your sad drivel of truth and peace.

Anger reigns down while the rage simmers beneath your crown of thorns.

I place you not in plain sight.

I place you beneath and behind all things that bleed

Now and forever.

Place thy devotion in a check while time goes unchecked.

Amidst duet you exchange third hand parties with second-hand information.

Charlatan of bread and water -

May we have cheese with our wine ?

May we have rice on our plate ?

May we worship you tomorrow instead, for today we have our dead.

[Insert page break here]

I seem to have forgotten my rhyme there a moment.

No matter now as the click and pace of step locked, unrattles yet again.

Page by page walking along hallways stretched out

Dissonant like a piece of missing parchment.

Finding the question hooked more in the pauses

Then out there.

ON TV AND RADIO NOW

Organ music backed up by TV proclaiming a video history of women

And there we find ourselves face to face again with media loops.

The radio announcer has just unclogged his last sinus passage

Lost in east orange with his music.

Find WFUV now.

Going off line.

Today is the 10 of August. The radio is talking about global population. A global cooling of species outputs: "...terrorized by conservative religious groups." Demographics: 2 children per couple - population leveling.

They need to reach young children before they start child bearing. Mexico is a sign of success. Wide distribution of condom information. America is so "prudish in our attitude toward adolescent sexuality." It is Sarah Camm, who hopes to foster information and discussion.

"Demographers now believe that if we do not make the changes to meet demographic availability, we will essentially have missed the tide for population control...If we do not front load family population planning we will miss the demographic power curve.

Environmental problems are a direct result of rural population growth. We are unstable from an environmental view - not to mention quality of life.

Why is this the decade of decision ?

A large coming of age of reproductive groups. Do we know the sustaining capacity of the world ?

Carrying capacities are usually based on animal populations under the assumption that humans can innovate in order to change the capacity.

Population control at the lowest level is a no regret strategy that saves women's lives, allows them to explore self-determination, is mindful of their health.

Should mobilize the world for early population stabilization.

"The idea that Bangladesh could benefit from more people is appalling."

We can always produce more people if we need them. "These people don't seem to be too concerned if Africa was to disappear. We believe in innovations like space colonies...

Family planning, programs, access to contraception.

Of course I didn't know this until I did the follow up on some ongoings from a public phone at Rockefeller Plaza. Yet another friend moving out of an apartment. Lucky for her, it's literally just across the street. All she had to fend off were the zany repetitions of walking a grocery cart back and forth from one side of the street to another.

"So you're working the street," I kidded her. She laughed.

And I finally got in touch with Miya. Calling from a public phone at 10:30. On a street corner on the upper west side. After devoting an evening to a bottle of red wine, some cheese and Italian bread.

She said she felt full. Full of Italian food herself.

We talked. It was fun. Almost like a premature autumn, stolen while the Perseids flew above. I told her I was going to Wash, DC. "Alone or with your family," she asked. "With my girlfriend." I told her. That's nice - I think she might have said.

So was it all for vindication and information. Still we set up a week's time for tea. I asked her when she was free, and she again reminded me, or perhaps re-rehearsed the phrase to me that her free time was the only time she had with Alexander - like I didn't understand. Which I did. And still, what the hell was I doing.

Somewhere in the back, I have already played out the setting. To say to her at some moment in answer to "Do you love her," -- I have trouble answering that because the last time I set it, I said it to you. And what that sets in motion...

Nothing really. And everything silly. Like, suddenly, yes, I'm afraid and unsure. Suddenly, the words have become so charged with the density of their previous use, that their value has receded deep into declaration, ladened silver with hesitancy. Suddenly, I can weight my decisions, by the time I take to decide.

Why always me ? Again, weary of this choice of burden, this burden of choice.

So I'm splitting again. Setting up baited encounters just to keep myself sure that I have a destination - a locus of hope. Meanwhile, the Japanese in my mind rapidly fades into the gurgle of a baby's first words. Of my memories coming to voice.

I told myself tonight: Back in WWII, my relatives were Pilipinos,

Back in WWII, I was Japanese.

And who isn't from WWII.

Just the American who is beyond that history. Dulled and forgotten by the new images it clusters.

And how should I berate them for their mindlessness?

Tell them that their whiteness is like a blank spot for another age:

Grey for snow forgotten on dry sunny day,

Baked in like clay drying into ink stone.

Breathless wonder of soaring rings

Eye of eagle to trust in GOD.

Is it so hard to speak of missing.

Sentimental is what they will say.

Of what, the unknown and the could have been

Rolled like a two sided dice betting on the six

And when the spaded hearts came out to ace the table

Glittering like a full breath of eight on skates

Flipped back around into the screen, behind Mickey's wand

Above the floodwaters and in the throats of primal song.

Gutterballed, in the throat of Inuits singing

Blurted out between commercials of ice-cream and automobiles,

Soaring across the sky emblazoned on winged dragon.

Butterfly meet lightning.

On the snow top, row like the wind is beneath your sail

And when the whistle speaks frost onto your thoughts

Think of it again.

The heated drum and fire's thong.

Though night grow long and the stargaze thin

Though ice may turn water sweet again

Dripping as it does through crack and nook.

When birds perch onto the tree of yesterday

And find again nourishment in the roots.

Take these feasts, these times and task them upon your thoughts.

Carry them like leaves to the stream.

There, set them free.

Holding on one by one

As they go free.

My love, speaks only when it dies,

And turns memory once more

From the glass of distance

To the sparkle of softened tears.

Photographing a Mime

The camera clicked faster than my mind. By the time he had finished all his POV's and angled shots, I had only found a good place to sit. The man with the ripe oranges began to hand them out. I had to decline, telling him, "It makes my hands sticky."

A girl on roller skates whizzed by and it seemed like every man noticed her front, then her back, and finally, the smell she left in the wind.

--When he stopped moving, he looked so real. Yet each time he did so, my mind raced on with imagination, pinning my hand in silent motionlessness. He moved his white body again, and I remembered where I was. Washington Square Park.

The smell of pot smoke and the distant hip-hop music blended quite well. The Sound.

There was a group of children who continued to run in a pattern from parents to pigeons, to the hat he had left out for money. This motion did not stop. Hence, I paid attention to it no more.

--He shifted again. So his sign changed.

Traveling...

I have returned from the south only to find that indeed, part of me - of something - and almost all of her was left behind there.

I had not time enough to cry, let alone even a small longer than usual hug.

I think she whispered something.

Something she only mouthed silently when I first left.

Only this time, in full and plain daylight - she whispered something.

Something I didn't reply to - and sadly met this intimate encounter and glance.

How fascinating to be in the deaf community,

To have her sign to several people that I cannot adequately converse with that I am her boyfriend.

That perhaps they talked more about me than I even saw, just their attitudes and gestures to guess from.

And how mixed and delightful it all seemed.

So close to home, so far from everything known.

How new and exciting, and how difficult:

The recognition was so clear of a commitment to 5 yrs. of study

And so specific too, reminding me that impending was the sign up ahead,

And tremensity commiserate with strain.

O silence, yet again.

13 days of Rain

A witness discounted, dis-avowed, and forgotten, came I to the door to knock. The wind and rain fused blue veins to white knuckles that rapt the door and clenched a cloak.

No answer.

Just the drip, drip, drip of the icy winter rain. Drip. Drip. Drip.

No answer.

A phone rings somewhere deep inside and I hear her voice. She comes down the stairs and looks at me through the window. She is laughing, but I can not hear her words. She keeps talking any way.

I want to hold her, to touch her. Seeing her isn't everything. The door finally opens and I feel the warmth and can hear her now.--She wasn't saying anything much, but it doesn't matter.

Tiredness brims beyond my eyes. The forehead wrinkles as I stamp out my wet shoes. I go to hug her, but she withdraws...

"God, you're all wet!"

Tired and lonely, I trudge to the shower and mutter sweet poetry to the sound of warm rain. And the silvery sounds of eloquence trace a path with the suds down the drain.

Downstairs. Discounted. Dis-avowed and forgotten. We watch the fire in silence.

The sun did not wake today. With closed eyes, I greeted the dawn. A bird whirred in my groggy head and glossed over a bruised surface that still buzzed with a recent headache. I clutched the sheets, but they offered no purchase, no sense of security.

The alarm was set to go. Any second. But, too afraid to open my eyes and check the time, too tired to prepare a reaction or a mental excuse to combat the encroaching issue, I rolled over and pulled the covers over my head.

I was conscious of two things: my breathing and my rapid heartbeat. Then another lucid feeling emerged. Hunger. This was not all together well. Hunger was not a sensation tailored to restful sleep in defensive procrastination of an impending day. It required physical strength beyond any that my body could possibly harbor. And yet, it was there.

The kitchen, a floor below, was too far to imagine any sleepwalked journey to. Too far to even contemplate the posited steps in my mind. And through this all was a backlash tension that knew an alarm clock ring would make the decision to ruin my day.

Not quite. The arm outstretched on its own and flipped the switch silent time's demon, but not its measured pace. In slow motion of not quite conscious concession, I rolled far enough to end up on my back to contemplate the ceiling.

"Ho, hum." I lost track of time. The day came and went. I was no longer hungry. I felt nothing, but a sluggish desire for something that sleep was quickly reducing the desire to have.

In New York again

...the bike cuts fresh tracks in the dirt and as he switched from gear to gear, he pretended he was a deer, moving ghost like through the woods. Up ahead there was the slow moving curves of an early morning jogger. The blue lycra danced in the sun and the fall leaves kicked up behind the pair of feet. He moved up slowly not wanting to startle the runner. As he approached he was amazed at the well defined calves that broke out with strength with each stride--

she's such a horny catholic, thought Aaron of Camille..

that's such a funny thing to say. I mean it's better than being a repressed catholic. And if you're a horny repressed catholic than jesus, what are you ?

"exactly," said Camille.

the boyish grin of an acolyte left to wander Jerusalem on his own away from the tourists. only to find himself in a French cafe smoking cigarettes. when mother came back she was too angry for words. father was shocked speechless, and he felt like he had found his first true love.

somewhere in that darkness and swill there was the movement of speech that ran at such a pace that all that mattered could just as soon be dropped and forgotten and yet mattered like the precious drops that rang from glass to glass and pressed flush cheeks to his.

the warmth faded as he passed into the smoke and steam of the jogger's breath. his bike clicked away. he shifted gears again and left the runner behind him.

atop the next incline he could easily view the last twelve years of his life. knowing too that if he pedaled hard enough that the aching in his legs would make him forget everything except the linear rhythm needed to rise above the next plane. the forward momentum driving his stale heart up into his throat. at the top he would always let out a noise.

sometimes loud like there was no one else to hear. and other times he scooted it under the clouds and rain and let it spit out of his teeth and grip their way through his lips. like clattering the unspeakable and hurling it back out into the sky.

Today, like all those other days, he let out his triumphant hurrah. It startled some birds from the trees and was immediately caught up in the stiff breeze and thrown skyward: ENOUGH !!

That night he slept with windows open and the cold wind on his back. He awoke to frost clinging to the ground. He took a shower and shaved for what seemed the first time in a month.

"I swear it's the moon."

The emergency room rate goes up 70% on nights when there's a full moon in the city, especially on nights when his vegetarian diet sent him reeling in hunger out to seek fresh meat and fantasizing about knives and crying "let me suck it or I'll kill you."

It was also the fog that made him feel that way. Like he was back in London talking with that unreal accent that made everything tediously civil and tight lipped in that blasted little community. It was positively ridiculous, this formality of queen's talk to king's English. Rook takes queen like a knave on a horse. The king rocks gently behind the holy bishop and secretly a pawn sneaks between and asks for its own crown.

That's what they were. Locked on a chessboard like two kings that couldn't stand next to each other. Somehow more petulantly antagonistic than the suffering powers of the queens. Powerful and magnanimously slow. Impotent and dreary yet so adamant about separation.

She had once made some rather silly talk about how much they were like horses. They could jump over things and run away. but they really never got far enough away from each other and found themselves smashing into other things.

She often plodded back and forth like a silly castle. Bringing with her memories and things from unlocked closets - tales of missing dresses and a litany of old boyfriends' clothes. She had even spread her tastes out onto him. Found him taking a liking to softer shirts, more vibrant colors. actually matching clothing with mood and season.

And he expanded his vocabulary. Started buying wine and investing in candlelight. Like it was a momentary dream vacation. It was in those tender moments that life was sweeter and love didn't

show up like an embarrassing situation. In the meantime, the memories of more intense intimacies trickled beneath the water bed and flowed under the bridge into sleep and forgetfulness.

Their hands seemed tied to their situation and yet how little they touched each other. It was only in the missing that all these things began to recollect themselves.

Hello, I want to try again. Or maybe that's completely the wrong way to go about it. there's no again when it's decidedly over. Or better yet - say it never happened. Though I never know what it is that we run around and away from. Like between us there's this unmentionable space that tells us about what we diminish between ourselves, demean in each other and thrive on for our existence. I don't need you for that. We don't really need most of what we think we so gratefully offer.

But she was beyond that already. She had learned how to move fast and decisively. Turning her back with enough power to make the wind follow her. Grasping after her or leaving her to rot didn't matter to her at all once she had made up her mind. Made up her mind to leave. And even to come back. To torment him into wondering if this wasn't all just one more game. Couldn't they ever bargain out a peace or at least take a break from each others' head trips and mazes ?

They'd get lost sometimes and forget about all the relevance of anything they had been discussing. They'd grow silent and just wonder. Silently they'd touch something or fall upon a little rock or something and everything melted into a new bout with another topic and another round of friendly speech. It was only when they hit all the angles just right that things rekindled and the sparkles began to reappear. But now and then he'd remember too and all would be forgiven and forgotten.

He had learned to forget all that silliness that is stirred up between youth and recollection. The distance grew year to year and still it appeared in memory as white picket fences. Stumbling blocks and hurdles along life's little valley of tears.

between the ages he couldn't decide which he hated more, forgetting or the remembering.

token nods of thought drifted in and Aaron went back to sleep.

****

I miss my dad sometimes. funny that this social function got eclipsed by the change in focus. Not remembering overly oppressive figments of fatherly power. an occasional belt that no longer stings. left with a well meaning and articulate ghost offering a strange and dated friendship. he became more glowing and happy in later years. angry only when disagreement cut so deep. and yet he learned to find other things to discuss. not asking if I went to church, just trying to find more moments to rekindle pride - even as I grow more disappointed in how the years have neglected him.

I wonder what things would pay him his due. his birthday approaches and I have not time to write poems like I used to and stuck in the rut of knowing greeting cards never say what he brought up so well in me. yes, I miss him sometimes.

Tracings...

It's so hard to keep it out of sight and out of mind. All he had to do was look around and see that the world around him wasn't his-wasn't the way it was to be remembered. Hoping memories of leaves tucked in with snow, and colors that I no longer have words for.

I am told to thumb my nose at the smallness of space in Japan. While at the same time I am told how beautiful the space is.

Depends on what mountain of whose mind your eyes are asked to perceive.

I'm going back to the place where gifts come from.

To the culture that became PC enough in the history of my life to matter.

Because Flips will always genuflect, and I can most be away the closer I get to what no one sees as Home.

What does Ursula LeGuinn say: If home is nowhere, you are always coming home.

It's strange to think how long I've survived on the blindness of memory, on the vision of forgetting. Only to realize-again-that some things will always be there.

And sadly, we drift because there is never enough time

Just farther Away.

What was it I wanted to Say ?

Something only I can say.

Kept out of sight and out of mind. All he had to do was look around and see that the world around him wasn't his...

So I sat and waited. And waited. And waited.

It wasn't like lateness didn't figure into all of this somehow. Sometimes minutes and days blurred together and it was only in the passing of age that these things could be counted.

I remember my 21st birthday more for its radical hype and stress than for any other reason. My parents had bought Chinese food and had insisted that I join them. And instead of a tributary toasting of alcoholic legality, I dove headlong into several term papers. Escaped to NY to meet my brother and watched an evening of madness at the Shakespeare Theatre.

And so that was 21...

Years passed. And as my grandfather would say: by and by...

Home for the weekend over memorial day I helped my Lolo build a bird-house. I built a lamp from some spare parts and brass tubing. It was all too simple and yet not really what I wanted to be doing. When I finally bought my bike, my family looked astonished as if all they could see was that I wanted to get away from them...again.

When one thinks of the family as traveling half-way around the world, it's hard to think of things as being settled. Yesterday's arguments coalesce with memories of even younger days with different tongues and different lessons to be chortled through present speeches and Catholic devices.

One gets comfortable, or at least has to deal with all the spaces in between things. Time becomes a silent member of the family. Sits at the head of the table and mimics the tick and tock of the dusty grandfather clock.

My last visit home brought me to an old Victorian castle- hued by the nestling colors of a setting sun. Bright and yummy like mango ice-cream and magnolia flavors. Sweet air like sampaguita flowers came through the screen and touching the newly washed linen.

But inside, the wave of guests fluttered close to the catered table of Chinese food. Aimlessly filtered out onto the porch and found itself alone with the guests and hosts.

I told my girlfriend that it was another Gatsby moment. Out there in an America before Rockwell beat Polaroids to the screen. The crowds slowly gaining acquaintances by remembering they had met last year, or perhaps the year before - in the same manner, in the same house.

And still they grasp slowly the names of foods and relatives. Slowly place together the script of the house with the litany of family histories. And as I silently made my way from friend to friend, and to even those absent, I realized it was no longer my house, nor even my parents. Its sheer size and weight had captured a hint of an antiqued reality and frozen a large portion of landed history beneath its belt.

My Lolo wants to build a shrine outside at the behest of my mother. I chide him that it would be silly to go through all this work just for a white virgin. Perhaps we should go upstairs and dismantle my mother's collection of Madonna and child. Mix their bodies together to bless the fruit of the loom. He tries to compromise, telling me that he'll put in a zen rock garden and some Japanese lanterns. And I look at him as if to ask, what does this have to do with Christianity. And then again, what is it that my mother really wants. To absolve some piece of history by

the erection of a virginal site?

Perhaps to bring pieces of catholic churches from the Philippines back here to the US to litter their aesthetic backyards with the rubble that houses beggars and madmen half-way around the world.

I really don't mean the intensity of the sarcasm. I'd be much happier with an understanding for this post-modern religious depravity. This mix-mix of old and new in a world that could really care less. It means little to America what religious propensities stir us. Why then, do we commit ourselves to such forlorn faith. And for whom?

In the Philippines my Tita runs a center for the empowerment of street children. The words strike the ear in slightly less PC rhythms. "We" being used to empowerment in strifes preventing Black men from making comments on women's breasts. Out there, the words "Suffer the little children to come unto me " had a meaning.

And as I stare at the little patch of ground that Lolo has consecrated to plow out holiness, I smile as I remember years ago that this little plot of land was my animal cemetery. The ground is not hallow but rich in animal memories and youthful distinctions.

I wonder how the virgin will sleep at night protesting the company of rabid souls. Perhaps she will join the remains of St. Francis of Asisi birdbath and hold out offerings to nature's creatures. And I know too that in three months the effort will sink back into the enormous plot of earth and slowly await the arrival of the sea.

[Rene, I'm still waiting. Where are you? Are Pilipinos always late ?]

It's almost 7pm and your hour of running late has run far off the page into flip time. Will you bring a note for tardiness or perhaps a few slices of well-oiled pizza will make amends.

I have watched the day dimmed behind shades and the speed of biking. I have coaxed the lingering warmth off the pavement and tuned it to the colors of the setting sun. And still you have not arrived. I picture a clock on two oblong legs hopping down a street filled with jeepneys and the smells of pig entrails and the sounds of roosters crowing. Mostly through the dust waiting for it to settle, I spy through the greyed heat the outlines of my grandfather slowly making his way up an incline...

In Baguio late at night we had to form a search party to look for the old man. He had wandered off while I had been riding horses with my sisters. At night in Baguio it gets wet and cold. The mountains lay claim to the vast difference in temperature. And as I nursed my horse up an incline, I thought it was peculiar that I was looking for him when this country was all his. As if I wasn't more lost in the darkness than he. Especially, this place.

I rode out into the darkness for about half an hour. I inquired at every little hut if they had seen him. One or two pointed in contradictory directions and I moved on. I circled the main settlement from time to time and was almost at the point of fear that he had gotten lost and glee that he had probably found a game of mah-jong and la banoog to drink. Then, out of the middle of the dirt road there came a shuffling and the sound of familiar coughing. My horse was almost upon him before he almost magically materialized.

"Ho there Pa ! We've been out looking for you."

"Yah, Yah." he says almost like the beating of a slow drum.

Funny thing is, my Lola tells the story of why my grandfather goes for long walks and comes home drunk. During Japanese occupation he was on his way out for a night with his companions. He was a block away from their favorite bar when an air raid blasted the tavern to the ground.

Lola ends the tale with "He saw all his friends die."

Apparently not all. Or perhaps my grandfather was courting old ghosts up in the hills. Who knows. Few people are much older than him. Or perhaps, most people in the hills are. Back to time again.

[Rene is here, bitching again.]

I've been pulled down corridors all my life. not because time was after me, but there was always a bell or a whistle or someone telling me whereto go. and now I'm not a leader or a follower. I'm just lost. Sometimes I think I give myself these pep talks just to jog instead of burn.

Camille

A- (softly cutting in) What do you want to be when you grow up ? That's what I want to hear now. God, I need to know if you're leaving me.

C- stop it. Not now. Don't ask now. You'll make me cry.

A- But I really need to know.

C- What ? I can't hear you. There's static. Aaron...

A- What? Hello...Hey...

[Aaron is staring at a spot above his bed reflecting on spam or sausage with garlic fried rice.]

A- I really like being Filipino, I mean, I don't know anything about the culture, but I really like being Filipino.

Cluttered and down. Those were two words worth repeating. His room was cluttered and down. Silent and bathed with neon background and the sound of late night traffic. The clocks bargained time away and the irritating reds of the alarms slowed his pulse rate as he dreamed.

He was thinking of the first class he would teach. He'd hand out pairs of sunglasses with razorblades for lenses. He'd instruct the class : we shall begin by wearing these. To begin, one must go blind.

[Wake up, you lost it ... he didn't know what to do next, so he called back Camille.]

C-hello (disgruntled)

A- please, don't hang up. I really need your help. Please...

C- (drone like)I'll do anything you want me to, except make love to you...

A- No. No. Shut up a second. Last night I couldn't see. My glasses ...There was blood on my glasses !

C- (uninterested) They say if you do that too much you can go blind...

A- No. I'm serious. What happened ?

C- what do you mean blood on your glasses, Aaron ? (changes her mind) I don't have time for this. You're setting me up, and you know that I always go for it ... in no time at all you'll have me telling you God knows what.

A- Last night, I had the dream again. You were there but I couldn't recognize you. I followed you down this dark tunnel and the further I went in the more I started gasping for air. And then I started crying like a baby, but I couldn't see my tears. And I lost sight of you. I couldn't see you through all the tears ...covered in blood. I was covered in blood.

C-(Sarcastic) Sounds like something you should ask your mom about. (more gently) I think you should call her, Aaron -- I mean, life is life. In other words, strange things do happen.

A- No. That's not why I haven't contacted her, it's just that she confuses me--treating me like mud to treating me like gold in the same minute. It's too painful to pay that price for her love -- and I know that she loves me, but just in a very strange way. In the way she knows how and as best as she's capable of-and I guess that's all you can ask from a human being-the best they know how.

Aaron couldn't help thinking that even though they were both at an age where they could communicate, they had nothing in common except emotional scabs that shouldn't be peeled off. Always in moments like this he truly felt like crying. As if remembering that in youth crying had been no immediate cause for shame. Lucky enough to remember having cried many times. And yet, in older days, there only remained the memory which was sadder than shedding tears.

Mother called often enough. Enough to hit that moment of nagging concern. Enough to be too much. And enough to plague him with his sense of history and belonging.

A mother's command is such a wonderful thing. Perplexing as its meandering coherency can be. Remembering bits of recipes along with talk of who moved away, who died, and who was still worth trusting. It wasn't merely idle gossip, but vital information. It was often depended upon to keep things together.

His blind grandmother had often with intense knowledge smelled her way about the kitchen. Mixing herbs and spices and leftovers to create each new meal.- With religious precision, it began and ended with the cooking of rice.

The rice cooker was the strangest machine. It was almost like an egg timer with its one glowing button and its singular function. But how efficient ! It started Lola's clock and set her tastebuds on a roll.

As years passed, the rice cookers changed and outgrew Lola's finesse. Keeping pace with the microwave and the electric Chinese wok. Everything changed. They even started canning Mexican foods. Chef Boyardee and adobo became a household spice. Lola continued to cook, but the spice rack seemed to back up on her. Her foods always turned out too spicy, or salty or hot. And the rice started to get soupy, or worse, burned. You couldn't trust the timers anymore. They worked on foreign voltage - said the electricians. But it was basically that Americans didn't know dick about rice. Like it grew in a plastic bag, needed to be surrounded by cardboard and cooked in 20 minutes to be served next to chicken wings and goya beans. Or worse yet, ladled into paper cups and douched up with butter lumps.

Lola was downstairs now and his memory of the whole thing vanished like a dream. For long periods of his life it was like Lolo and Lola never aged. They were always the same for as long as he could remember. And it was only after each sporadic but serious operation that mortality faded back into the picture.

Blood in the toilet again. Fear that one morning he'd find Lolo's bladder sticking to the flap in the drain.

In comparison to the world at large, Lolo had had three world wars. First, there was emphysema of the lungs, then he lost one of his kidneys, and now he was nursing cancer in his bladder. The blotches in his skin slowly turning the changing purples of the changing world map. All this and still a decent golf game, an occasional cigarette and some soothing beer after an alcohol rub. If life had been any better, he might have had reason to complain.

Then there was chasing ducks in the backyard. When they had lived by a pond. His Lolo got him up early one morning to chase some ducks for dinner. It had been sort of fun though he had wondered if the whole act wasn't somehow illegal or absurd. He remembered watching his Lolo break the bird's neck. He cleaned the bird well too. And mom had frozen it in the freezer. But no one had eaten the poor thing. Blood was just as thick as frozen water then, I guess.

Aaron had been trapped under ice for eleven minutes when he was a child. They said it was a miracle he survived. He was lucky. His body had frozen him into stasis. Sometimes he thought that was why it was so hard for him to warm up to anything. Why the cold fascinated him so much. Why when he was restless and anxious, all that could calm him down was that blasted cold and darkness. He could see the shadows above the ice and hear the muffled voices. But somehow comfortably trapped beneath, unable to be harmed by the harsh closeness of the ones who had pushed him under.

Peaceful. So peaceful.

Later on in life, it became so peaceful that he would fall asleep in hot tubs and awake minutes after being submerged. Like there were moments where his existence was so marginal that he could literally drop dead off the face of the earth from time to time. And he went on. Day to day, confused by his frantic rhythms with everyday life.

Dial Tone again...

Conversations are words that do not belong to me but must be given to the appropriate receptors. Carrying unfinished conversations for too long leads to an overwhelming need to unload.

Knowing how to unload is necessary. What one must accept is that if conversation is to have continuity, it must acknowledge that it must stop at some point even if it is not yet finished. And it can never finish what it starts. Only in silence, bred from a final end of transmission, can it be said to be finished.

One must prune and care for conversations during the absence of receptors. One must realize and effectively use time allotted for conversation dispersal.

Remember honesty--knowing how far a conversation can go. Learn to recap or re-package events. Learn to follow narrative threads. To guide a conversation. Do not be fooled by comparative re-positioning. You are not the person you are talking to. Do not let compassion lead to confusion. Keep your critical distance. Learn to heal not to conceal or disappear. Your commitment is to practical understanding and purposeful exchange of information.

I can't seem to remember the first time we met. No matter now as I sit here waiting for the check. Her hand retracts and falls momentarily on to her empty lap. The reds from her blouse strike me as I follow their calls across her shoulders and down to her waist, then tracing down to her slender legs through the mellow curves of a quite feminine pair of slacks.

Her fingers tremble as she traces a line of sequins up to play with the pearls about her neck. Her neck is thin and accentuates the striking beauty of her face, and the fiery comfort of her gaze. She smiles now as she notices me watching her. I think I might have blushed, but then quickly ordered more champagne.

It bubbles and we laugh. Somewhere in the room, somewhere others are playing the same games. The room begins to spin and my vision tries to counter it. She is giddy now. Funny how inexorable bliss is so close to the edge of nausea.

She has grabbed my hand under the table and we are clasping them in a maddening intensity. The lights begin to beat out a pulse that we seem to share. She no longer is laughing. Her eyes are closed and I am perspiring. I close my eyes too but can still feel the room turning. And that's all.

That's all. A turning room and an excited palm pressed tantalizingly close to mine. We rub down a simple rhythm that accelerates and dwindles, though her breathing is longer--deeper. I can feel her whole body quivering, shaking.

The room spins faster, faster. We can't stop ourselves or slow down. On and on. This is absolutely mad. Faster. Faster. More and more...Stop!

"Oh, god!" she says, "I'm going to be sick."

While she goes to powder her nose, I order on last drink.

Christmas 1989

She was often careless in her capricious way. She often came in like a cool breeze and left in thunderous rage. We could negotiate karma by the furrows in her brow and admire how they pranced about like clouds across the sky. We were much in love.

It didn't seem to matter that we were doomed. Sunrise, sunset. Darkness is never permanent. The grass that is here today is gone tomorrow. Or for that matter, even a rose.

I had not time to always sip my wine. Dinners often ended before the candles burned low. Advances were often stifled by a new inspiration. My muses knew no manners, but I paid them heed. I would give up momentary love for literary bliss. Married to the drafting table, enslaved to ink.--And she was in love with me. In love with writing.

How could she love someone whose entire life was in turning away? To place a pen on virgin paper, to caress pages instead of her fair shoulders, to turn tales instead of bed sheets. To flatter a universal insanity, processing wit into literature. A man who wrote and did not love.

If she had read more carefully, she would have known. I could see the plot unfolding long before I even entered the final chapter. But we were friendly enough to bargain to the end. To trade tantalizing moments never shared intimately for some paltry symbols of our excused existence together.

She left me a dying rose. "Beauty never stays. It only leaves," she said.

I gave her my leather jacket. "Comfort is in solitude..."

She kissed me.

I kissed her.

We were very much in love.

HDTV praised Shadows of Velvety Sensuality. And within me I awoke with dreams of wet snow, a melting mist of droplets and my red sports car beneath the apricot tree.

The filmic view was overexposed - mainly by the warmth of my dreaming. So clearly despite the logical fogging of my lenses. It was indeed a memory of an Unreal moment.

Parking a car where today it would block the virgin statue. Its placement making the yard bigger because remembering it made the corners of vision recede. That in itself was a swatch of memory clinging there without words - only something that perhaps a bit of Japanese might attach itself.

car - kuruma

sports/supotsu

red aki

Tree moku

SNOW yuki

I imagined vibrant reds against white skin - flushed cheeks. Cheeks full of glowing sake. A breast of a girl described to me by the man she often slept with.

Back in my mind, in the time of sweaters and dampness. Of reddish mud and school colors. Of collegiate days - the red days of my life - Of his life. The student that I barely remember.

He was a Lit student - Comp Lit student specializing in lit theory. He had studied under several psychoanalysts and for that penchant he was lucky enough to perform music and direct in a local theater.

And yet, that too faded. As if the beret had to be put down along with the slow soft hand that no longer trembled because it no longer held cigarettes or coffee cups. It no longer supported a head full of thoughts. It no longer touched piano keys - faltering steps of Black and white.

He had forgotten all that and moved on. In fact he had completely changed and disappeared. Only parts and fragments remain. What's strange is that I knew him well at one time. Not that we were so much alike, but more that we spoke to each other often. Whenever the traveling group disappeared - like on the long car rides to Canada, or in between classes or rehearsals. I only asked questions. He seemed to talk - not as if he had the answers, but certainly because he had something to say.

His last stage manager used to tell him to shut up a lot. Wrote it down in a Christmas card even. (Next year she said Hope.) It was a joke. But he did talk too much - had too much to say for the space allotted to him by the ears that presented themselves.

It was strange too. Not that he was so self-enclosed. In fact, so much of him was up front in his words, in everything he said. But I can barely reconstruct the echoes. God knows, I tried. I looked for old letters or documents, interviews, papers - anything

that would remind me of what he sounded like. But I can't remember.

The trouble is, he always spoke as if there was a specific worldly audience that he was addressing. But as that slowly dismantled, disbanded - moved on, his voice spaced itself out. And eventually drifted.

I miss him very much - mainly because he never listened to himself. He was always thinking and it was only his voice that we got - always feeling like there was more there. And now, without the voice, it just leaves us puzzled.

There's also the other side of the relationship. He always gave me a direction to go. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say I followed him. But that's no longer with us and - I guess, I hope that an attempt to understand the magic, may kindle something worth following again.

I thought I saw her yesterday. His girlfriend. His x-girlfriend. They hadn't been together for years - But if I remember correctly, she meant a lot to him. Like a key or piece of a puzzle. Or more like mathematics. Like there was an equation he was trying to piece together. It had something to do with selfhood. With self and other collapsed on to the sexuality of encounter.

It had been rumored that a few of his other love interests had crossed gender-lines: popped out of closets to explore their new found sexualities. Conversely, he turned inward. With a semi-Buddhist tap-d'ance of effacement, he side-stepped the issue. Was more interested in sensuality over sex - of being over body. What was his joke: I'm not heterosexual. I am omnisexual.

That was his experience. He'd turn around a moment by breaking it up into a hundred new angles and then throw them back at you as if to say: I don't have what you want, I have more than what you asked.

I remember now what it was. It wasn't the girl that took him for a spin - although that did upset him for quite some time. - No, his moments of deep solace+silence were after his second feature length production. In fact, his inward shrink had diagnosed him as increasingly withdrawn. He had had a conversation that no one remembers, either with the costume designer or his co-director. He had looked the woman in the face with his usual intensity and said: "When I go, you'd better be damn sure about who you send to bring me back."

But as the situation would have it, he needed to get away but never got the chance. The co-director abandoned the project and took flight to the stage. - Joined the actors cast exacerbating the Us + Him dichotomy. And she wasn't even as loyal to the show as she was to her new found love.

-Alas, love is always someone's joy - and someone else's problem.

I suppose if he had been simple enough to love, it would have been that much easier. No matter. After the show ran, he took his money and skulked away. Several months later he left the Jersey Shore and returned to New York.

He left behind a strange wandering record at Rutgers, where his pathway in Comp Lit had branched out into French language, Japanese Lit + Film and American Studies. On top of this was a smattering of womens studies courses. - Topping it off was his first semester back in NYC: Kramer, Sexual Identities.

It was like a cycle-psychical joke.

Oh, I almost forgot... As karma would have it, he also failed a class in Rutgers.

The class was Buddhism.

On the Sidewalks of New York...

After a little chortling of an inebriated coaxing, the young dragon awakes to spread its wings and yawn...

I had been thinking again about when my voice began to change. Not really the traumatics of adolescence, but more recently with this talk of a Filipino voice. Not a trace of an accent they say. Which means what exactly...that I sound American?

Curious.

What I really wanted to say at the beginning of all this, was that I don't really have any Filipino friends.

I remember when Rene said it to me, "You're my first Filipino friend." I felt it so strongly and yet the other part too, the part that made him reply only moments later, "I know that sounds corny, but I mean it."

I look back on the gaping hole of month's left open from graduating a school that left him behind. And I think of those words differently. I don't have any Filipino friends.

I have relatives, I have a brother and sisters. I have parents. I don't have Filipino friends. I don't hang out with them. I hang out with one, apparently.

Relatives and family don't count in the friendship field - by definition: one outside the family. Yet, the other hand that contradicts the construct is Filipino=family. Hence, by the ethnic/social-cultural construction, it's impossible to have a Filipino friend. They're all family. They're all related.

Funny now, so damn obvious it comes straight home...hahaha. Like dogs???

How can the Filipino really move on if progress is so incestuously constructed. The very use of ethnic identity begins to deconstruct itself.

And again my writer and friend, we come across the outside again. But outside what? It's like we've discovered the third term that makes us obligatory and silent, bereft of the word to call the other two who apparently made us yet only really speak to each other.

Parenting the US and Eastern relations, more like the baby-sitter who grooved out on cartoons and let us into the pantry filled with Jam and Cookies that we overlooked.

I never really grew a sweet tooth for certain things chez americain: Junk Food. Fast Food. Movies. Home Video Games.

Funny to think what that includes then: Gas stoves, fireplaces. Cinema/what's the difference, home stereo components, and cars with tape decks...only things for the ears and eyes, apparently.

A Parent really ?

I leave this parting note to you for awhile:

Dear Rene:

You have really taught me a lot about persistence and relaxation. How to dispense with time and adjust to your own linearity with productive neurosis. How to contact and address someone new, someone of family. The time that goes by, the book that awaits, perhaps the options number differently with this new approaching year.

Somehow, I do continue to write. You should see how well it looks from my end. Keep writing out all your things. The product will come. I hope to god it is still connected.

Arrivals and Departures

I hated this place too much to get stuck in it like this. It was almost like the cliche about NYC. The people were great, the place sucked. Although, at this point, I'm not even sure about the people. What I do know is that standing inside Brower Commons, I had an overwhelming urge to kill myself rather than walk that old memorable route back to the hospital to check in.

Part of it was being surrounded by college students in various stages of exam period and Winter recess escape. It actually hurt to be there. Mainly, because nothing they could be wrapped up in could possibly involve him anymore. He really could not care less than he already was - in his apathetic state.

There was also the memory of bumping into her on that little rise over there-between the CCACC and the Theological Center. But I think what hurt most was the sheer size of the entire place. It was designed to make you feel European and immense. Flanked out in snowdrifts and brick buildings, steeped in New Jersey clay, mud and colonial heritage. But to him, the identity pulled something out of you, gave back an image larger than yourself, and hence, not you-just largely and terrifyingly other.

When he closed his eyes, it was almost as if all that otherness, those memories, those things, came crashing back.

Did I really abandon this place, or did I just leave it in great haste ? Does it matter now, since I no longer chase a bachelor's degree ?

I suppose it hurts most of all, that somehow all that time got erased. I left, so it didn't matter to me. So it disappeared. And with it, all the parts of me that were there too.

It does hurt being here. My girlfriend when she's "closer" is in New York-in another state. It takes two hours to get into Manhattan and then another hour to traipse out to Flushing. Funny, when she's at school in Washington DC it takes four hours by car to drag myself out there.

I don't think Japan really makes things any better. I don't think the hurdle of passing years makes it any easier either. I cried last night. Mainly because this relationship is hard and we both hit our lows separately. And dealing with that alone is worse than trying hard to live the other person's spirits.

I'm no longer sure how to gauge the sorting of all this. Her sister talks of how and when and why she'll marry her boyfriend. Her best friend is vacating to Atlanta for new futures with her lover. When I got sad at the bar, I couldn't quite express it. When and if I leave for Japan, it becomes official: I have no home any more. I simply move from place to place as the job goes, as the academic promises blossom, as the financial aid leaps and bounds. It felt very terrifying then, I'm not sure what it is I feel now.

I do know that I'd rather be in school again. Although, after pacing steps back through the cobwebs of my Rutger's existence, I am fearful of entering another University whose geography I'll never domify. When you think about how well you can network the NYC subway system and

cover all that territory, it becomes stultifying that I never even understood the building where I got my meal card and my mail.

Today, most of it is being rebuilt, relocated or re-organized. And still, as it's exterior gets a face lift and begins to look more like something scholastic and less like something warehouse like...

The space here is momentarily intruded upon.

I was waiting for my artist friend at his place of work. While I wrote and waited, another older acquaintance dropped in.

She was noticeably surprised and suddenly became chatty and noisy. Calmly, though I'm sure she did not hear, I told her to give me a few seconds to save this mess on my laptop before I lost my place.

Instead, she decided to interpret this distance as anger.

"Hold on," she said to a workmate, "Let me say hello to the gentleman over there who's mad at me."

"Am I ?" I asked. I was too surprised and slightly annoyed that I had to stop writing, nothing more.

"You are aren't you ?"

"I don't think so," as I think to myself if I should say the truth: "You've disturbed me, now go away."

I hand her my laptop as I open its carrying case. "What's this?" she asks, holding it like it was something between a handbag and an office tool.

"My life," I say directly into her eyes, knowing again that my words have completely missed her ears.

As I compose myself, Rene appears and is ready to go. I pause momentarily so I can think clearly. I turn to Miya and say, "Anato no kazouku wa do desuka?"

I compose myself some more and say slowly, again into her eyes: "Your family, how are they ?"

"Oh, they're fine." she replies leading the conversation out the door.

"Your hair has grown longer," I say, finally noticing something that isn't way out there, but right in front of me and part of her.

"A little," she says, "but not long enough."

The grammar is unmistakably Japanese, though I know that isn't really what she's thinking. Modesty would be the English equivalent. And suddenly, beneath the sun that is starting to come out of the clouds, the wind falling below kite standards, the reds and clays of Rutgers come back - the disappointment of getting your feet wet - caught in a College Ave. Storm:

"At least you got that red dying crap out of your hair."

It hits her squarely on mark.

"Yes."

"You should keep growing your hair," I say, as I turn around and leave.

Rene and I cut through a parking lot to his car. On the way, he tells me that he plans to visit Ireland. He's chasing after a new release by "Crowded House".

In a few moments we are by his car, then in his car, then stuck in traffic going nowhere. A few moments latter and we are back into mediated reality buying tapes and cassettes for our multi-media holidays.

Back at Douglass in the Com building, I watch him put together his film from hi-8 to VHS transfer. I listen to Pat Metheny play along the roads of Rene's soul. Actually, I played Pat's music out of my walkman into a labyrinth of extraneous equipment. Stuff I could have done in my room at home. Stuff I ended up doing back at my home before the Christmas Holidays.

Anyway, that was all back then. It took me a while to find this file on my laptop and to bring it up to date. But now, as I approach a new term in my Japanese studies, I can put this to rest and go on with my new year.

Oh, I almost forgot. When I arrived home that night, there was a Christmas Card from Miya placed at my setting on the dinner table. It was a large green and gold formal thing with a simple message inside.

An apology.

My brother laughed when he saw it, as if to say, "Tis is not the season to be penitent."

She stated that she was a bad friend and asked for forgiveness.

"You forgive me don't you"

...MASEN KA? is the Japanese turn of phrase.

Part of me just thought that it was all-wrong. I don't want to grow old with some squirk who picks out cards once a year to tell me that she's sorry that our relationship has fallen behind - has faltered - has turned into nothing but a card once a year.

I didn't bother sending her anything for Christmas. The whole process just angered me. Out of date, out of touch.

It's just plain stupid.

Forgot how to talk to each other, and that definitely wasn't my fault.

"If I have the right gloves", she replied.

That Christmas, I gave her a pair of boxing gloves.

When I finally called over my break, we talked for twenty minutes about dry and wet cat food. I can't believe how badly that went. And without loss of pride or whatever it is that my younger self thought was under attack or in risk of injury, I haven't regrouped and attempted to call again.

A memory: Sherri Divane.

We talked almost everyday. We were supposed to go out in 5th grade. Had the last 8th grade graduation dance with her. Went to high school and that all disappeared. Then I joined track and suddenly the late bus was letting me off by her house everyday for the latter part of my freshman year. She had even met my cousin on some binge out in Lakewood. That was a fun year. The last year that I lived anywhere unconnected to a car.

Then she moved. Virginia wasn't it ? Became quite fond of vodka, if I'm not mistaken. I remember when she left. She called me. It was the only time she ever called me. We had this silly relationship carried over from 5th grade. She'd say she'd call me right back, or after dinner, or whatever, and never would. And it definitely wasn't because she didn't like me, it was just a habit she had developed early with me and decided to be persistent about it.

Anyway, she called me once. To say goodbye. I remember how short the conversation was, and that she cried. She said something like, "You didn't think I would actually leave without saying anything to you ?"

I forget the rest. We wrote every now and then, but her move south changed her completely. After all, New Jersey ain't the south.

The other thing I remember is this letter she sent to me. I forget exactly when. Somewhere in my room there's probably a little pile of all the nice things she did for me. Really nice things, especially considering our age.

But the letter was really funny - so to speak.

The two of us had this mutual friend. An interesting fellow who just also happened to be a local drug dealer. So we were all friends. He was her friend, she kind of liked him, and I liked her -we got along just great. Except every now and then the drug thing would be an issue.

The guy sold drugs partly because it was a way to get back at his father. Both he and Sherri came from divorced families so that was a bonding factor too, I guess. Back in those early days.

Any way, it was kind of groovy. "Dad pissed me off so I'm going to send away for some pot plants from California and charge it to his credit card." Whatever.

Anyway, they'd often get into some really miffed up fights. I suppose she was trying to reform him, and he was just getting off on the attention and it gave him something to argue about and vent - excuses to either quit or light up. It's really all the same.

Well, back to the letter. It was the most peculiar line:

"I realized that when I was the most angry at him for whatever reason, that's when I missed you the most."

I guess way back when, there really was all this arguing going on. It's what me and my friends did. And it really wasn't directed at each other, although the barrage eventually added up and some kind of emotional release and make-up had to occur.

It's just funny to remember that and see it all over again, but differently.

"Joseph" the last community theater gig I directed was supposed to be about that kind of forgiveness. It was kind of hard to miss that onstage with all these people hugging each other by the end of the play. But, I never felt it. I mean, I definitely saw it out there on stage, as an act. But I never felt it.

Well, somehow I started in Rutgers and ended up back in my room, at my desk with my laptop, conversing to you on-line. It's a completely different time. But I'm glad I remembered her. Some of the people that lived near me were so much more than anybody I've ever experienced or knew anywhere else.

I miss the days of biking and feet. It was so much warmer then. Even more heated. More loved. More something.

Everything is different in time.

It's just so funny how little all those things can eventually become. It used to be me. Then it was in me. Now it's just memory - and it's not really in me anymore. It's not a part of me. It's more like something I can take out of the closet and put on - or maybe put away or outgrow.

I have too much to say now. So it's the perfect time to stop.

Blue Grey Smoke. Partly from cigarettes, but mostly from muttering mouths talking to themselves. Aaron contemplated buying a pack of smokes for himself, decided against it and turned his face to the wind.

The 6 a.m. sunrise mixed with the early winter wind had that peculiar habit of making tears collect in the side of his eye. He sucked the cold air in methodically, thinking slowly to himself. One thought. Much time.

I'm leaving...

Suddenly all he saw was an endless procession of good-byes. Smoke rose. Cigarettes extinguished. People passed, met, shook hands, and walked on. The clock ticked. The taxis came and went. The wind swept through the litter, conversed in circular motion with the corners of the station and raced on down the platform.

He remembered lingering words from parting conversations. "See you during the holidays!" "Write to me." "I'll call." And he heard her faithful words through the din. "I'll not forget, " she said.

He looked at his watch and realized it had been just another thing she had said. What people just say. Things. It seemed to matter less than the cold wind that seemed even colder now. It gripped his aching thoughts tight and close. Froze the moment and crystallized the scene deep inside of him.

The train was coming. One step off the platform either way, he mused, would bring on many changes. How silly time could be. Several hours from now he would be in a new place ripe with potential memories. So many things to hold. So many things to be forgotten. It was such an incomprehensible mass to dwell upon. Clean breaks only come to dead things like rock fissures or glass fragments. The chiseling of a human soul was comparatively more arduous. Like raking leaves against a bitter wind, he faced the oncoming train.

It was enormous and loud. Smoke poured out. Wheels shifted their pitch on the rails. The smell of sulfur and diesel pushed out the winter in the air and the startling presence of the train intruded upon the last holding ground for hopeful thoughts.

In one swift motion, Aaron collected his belongings. He took two quick steps toward the train, amazed at the tremendous crowd that had now gathered, moving in many directions. He stopped suddenly. He smelled her perfume. He did not turn around. He merely touched his hand to his heart and closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was already on the train.

I think she wanted to learn how to fly. As if each breath she had taken in flight and measured against a rainbow sky had not been enough. Wanted and having were farthered apart, like the penchant pendulum attached to her glowing breast. Beaded flowers brought back in the wintery cold...cloudy rain. Please, learn to speak again...

hajimete - hajimemashite.

Time puckers out like a willow's kiss. Weeping down in torrents of wind a rain blind tears sting. Bringing back soft lips of saline. White petals blown afresh in crimson and purple haze. Blue Mondays and Gloomy Sundays...onward. Forward. Spent.

ii tenki desu -- I lie because my tongue twists upon its soul.

Dona gokaigo o hanasu kota ga dekimasuka.

What mother's tongue will you place in your mouth today?

What worm shall I pit against unshakable memory.

When it changes into dark shiftless shades that will not bleed down. Will not stain a shadow and dust a frame or bookmark for mantle or page.

At the last turn in the road where the fences and wet leaves swept up into the shadows, there leapt a fistful of grace - dying before the paleness of the oncoming lights.

And Death passed by. Time slowed and paced out something less warm, something taut, like ship's rope bracing against the sea squall.

Matching rhythm of a flagpole chattering. Link on link, dripping with soft grey traces of powdered age, of withered placement. The colors are slowly fading to the bottom of this glass, to the hour of this log, to the dripping of future icicles. Coldness wets our lips. Numbness brightens our whims. Cheery faced to the moment of shut-eye. Of warm blankets and soft kisses. Of candlelight and snowfallen mittens.

I cannot follow your grace as swiftly as I used to muse. I am trapped now between webs of misplaced afterthoughts and a hundred reversals I feverishly placed. One foot. One foot. As if graveness could pass by and forget to knock. Clinging on to a frozen piece of heartfelt warmth. Thawing out a log for a patch quilt and warm tea.

When I throw the cold out the door, there is a moment where everything begins to dance. And there, upon a light frosting, there is a new sheen of atmosphere.

The last time I stopped, everything turned as grey as the tombs and dust I saw outside that village. Late in the evening when church bells rang. And beneath a full moon a woman prayed the Rosary over a loud-speaker while dogs howled in the air. Her echoes hit the darkening sky long before our headlights turned about and found our blessed dwelling.

While we ate dinner, I counted the small lizards perched above our plates, wagging their tails as we crunched on pig's skin. I waited for one to fall. I was hungry enough to be that playful -that careful.

Apparently she was a school teacher. Or perhaps some relative of Lolo Joe. I'm not sure. I remember most how you had to step down into the house from directly off the street. The road dust and people traveling by on foot - all going on above the front door. And when you fell in, it was a small cottage-like enclosure that grabbed your senses. Burning wood, a smell not uncommon throughout the Philippines, pervading the air.

Somehow it shifts all the time back to somewhere else. And even though it's not Christmas in the West, snuggled images of Boston snow compete with the images I have of air raids coming down the street. But, of course, I'm the only pitiable one trying to connect everything back that far. At the table, we are all interested only in eating and saying hello. "Hello, we are all related."

Shokuji o shimashita. Nan ryori ga daisuki desuka ?

I didn't want to write about home again. I wanted to talk about where I was coming from and why I was leaving. Nihon-jin wa kono noto o yomimasen.

Miya-san wa shibaraku desune. Kyoo wa ju-ichi gatsu ni-ju shichi.

Enough. The words rumble down. I see where the walls of the language close in on me. And I don't have the strength to force through.

I just wanted to leave something for you for a place I haven't been yet. And if all this ever turns into is a Christmas card I never sent, it won't matter.

I start wondering what indeed, letters on theme paper actually look like now.

Theme paper indeed. There were perhaps only three or four themes on each of them. Something I could have matched up with some kindergarten art supplies...

She said she was surprised by the butterfly. That was her comfortable assessment. Not willing to volunteer more, answering only because I had asked. Things like that make my sister call her ungrateful. My sister, who yells at me from time to time for letting her treat me that way.

I suppose part of it was also that I was stupid enough to be treated that way. I don't know how many words I didn't waste, but most certainly lost along the way.

"The speech in my mouth fades..." wasn't that it ?

Or was it from that haiku I wrote back when there was still sun in the skies ?

Speech in your mouth fades

Frozen moments forgetting

First line missing here.

Silly novice.

I lost the most favorite packages I ever made, because no one ever really learned how to open a present. Surprise so graded like a thank you after a welcomed please.

Rote sequences of shocked surprise.

I'd get dizzy if I kept on.

I almost called today. Okaa san ni hanashitai n daga.

"Rai nen, Nihon e ikitai desu. Jitsu wa, Nara to Wakayama to Hiroshima wa do desuka."

Ima demo, what am I doing spinning here in space.

Just more to edit I suppose.

Floating somewhere behind the sideways conventions of my mortality

Behind eyes that singe with their recollected phrases

Spinning out the logic that ties it so

Tightly drawn without the vision of a resting stop.

ENDLESSNESS.

EncØunters briefly...

The age of Explanations.

it was a time of Authority. And an age of doubt.

Thus all good circles begin.

Today I search frantically for a simple book of verse,

A readable account of Zen practice.

For my love.

Caught instead in another's web

Another's glancing glaze

As the author presses close to page

So close to the reader's ear

Whispering more voices than lies.

On the rim of the sea,

beneath the dripping of an air conditioner

I sat.

Reviewing a summer gone by

Ear chat by milli-memory.

paused to Hear,

The ocean draw near.

Draw far.

Beneath the hum of discordant rhythm,

the night played on.

underneath the chord of fear

Behind the music path of enchantment

Something I always trip over in great haste.

The subtle grain of Faith.

Forgetting that not everyone breathes the same

Even less aware of it at all.

Believing in complete.

Aware.

It is July again. Again it is July.

And there are a thousand of them at least that I could compare this to. I am here in Iowa. Of all places. 6 days away from a grand departure. And am lucky enough to find this again. Here in the memory of an 80 meg lap top. Linked up to e-mail and ghosting three or four different user names.

Among other things I had forgotten to bring, music, which is collecting dust in my bedroom in New Jersey - is still somehow singing inside my ear.

"And the fog melts over the earth,

And it softens the pages,

And I begin to write..."

In the Dead of the Night.

Slowly, on the parchment, and in the back of my mind, I feel the

remembrance of warmer days. Of the heat on my back as I pushed forward into a new paragraph - and moved headlong back into some depth of emotion.

Beyond spark of time.

Aimee called me today. Finally.

Said she had sent two e-mails ahead of her. But perhaps my desktop back at home already picked it up - making my portable with its bag of tricks, somewhat superfluous. And ironically so. But nevertheless, it was better to hear her voice instead of grifting through the saga of her day through a modem text event.

She tells me she went to a Grateful Dead concert. Of all things. Me in Iowa and her floating in a cloud of smoke and haze. Said it rained and poured.

"I'm all covered in Mud. I'm COVERED in Mud."

It sounds so adorable in my ear. So much so that I don't really have any words for it.

She asks me how I've found this place and if I'm getting along with my hosts.

Well. The guys went out today to shoot guns. Apparently there's a place where folks bring old appliances and such and then riddle them through with ammunition. The prize catch of the day was blowing the head of a life size Bart Simpson lawn ornament.

But aside from those sundries, it's very quiet here. They tell me that all there is out here is the university and the hospital.

It's funny as I recall that this is exactly how one would describe Rutgers. Although New Brunswick is much more urban and about 40 miles from NYC. About 30 miles from Iowa City is Cedar Rapids, which aside from being its own space and time, it is also where my plane landed.

The University itself was hard to gauge. It's summer and so there aren't many students around. I am slightly depressed by realizing that the job availability here is very scarce. Except, it seems, for some select cushy academic jobs.

So what am I left with?

A University, a hospital and a cushy job.

It's sounds really nice. But admittedly, the east-coast in me misses "the scene" or a scene. When you take away the three things above, you are really left with the stark realization that you are Nowhere. And that's sort of a weird contradiction to some kind of resonating American ethos. As if somewhere between the grain silos and the manure scent of the water, between the small duplexes and the plethora of chugging automobiles, there's supposed to be a more serene sense of Walden, or an awareness of a greater simplicity.

I am told that it's very liberal here, but at the same time the existing structure is very much thrown back into the 1950's. Of course I'm getting this report from people slightly older than me, who have spent most of their lives here. So I'm not entirely sure what effect that has on the regional accuracy. And I become so painfully aware as to how far I've come from to end up here. And I wonder indeed what I'm doing and where I am.

Today I was going to work on a CV to hand in along with my interviews. I had brought my resume with me, but realized that this was more attune to getting employed than in documenting academic achievement and the like. I realize too that my weakest point here is that my official statement of purpose is somewhat more vague. While at the same time, my e-mail correspondences are far from general, are so abstract or specific that I run the risk of getting the flat - That's interesting, but why do you think you can do that here? With Us?

And then I'll have to confess that I haven't really a clue as to how one goes about all this official stuff. And that after being here for one long and unproductive weekend - on the verge of leaving the country, that I haven't a clue what to expect or want. If they were to say to me that I'm accepted and that they look forward to seeing me in a year, I don't know if that would really make me happy now.

I suppose it was the prestige that came with just applying to University of North Carolina. Or the esteem it took to blaze through the jargon of the Comparative Lit. department manifesto of Duke. But also underneath that tarnish was a stodginess and a stagnation of knowing that it was such an elitist kind of thing - or that the razor of my intellect would

have to turn self-destructive again to have a cutting chance of survival. Then there's always the comfort of American University. The opportunity to get into the Film Industry, be in an international zone, and work near my girlfriend. But there is part of me that wants to get away from the east coast "scene" but I really don't feel at this moment that Iowa is the supplicant for these needs. Anyway, off to sleep I go. It's a long day into the crux of this.

Adieu.

I watched the little spark go off in a Record World today. The sloping dip and deep hormonal tone of a pubertal teen age boy as he slowly tried to introduce himself to a gumming girl in braces.

"Yeah, uh. You come here a lot."

(giggles) "Uh, no. First time."

"Oh yeah ? Uh, what's yer name..."

"Jenny."

"Jim."

Jenny's friends are tugging at her. But she and Jim are in some other world. She can't keep her feet still or her jaw which keeps tugging away at her wad of gum. He's got his eyes almost permanently glued to the record jacket immediately off from her left shoulder. It's almost eye-contact, but it wouldn't really matter if it was on target. He's lost in a world of anxieties he probably doesn't even have names for.

As I wander on the other side looking for a copy of Zooropa, I feel for him - and her. But am even more intrigued by the blithe atmosphere that surrounds them. They're not even sure what there in, but I know it - and find it peculiar how this moment and many other half moments and irresolutions like this - turn into the twenty-something of my life and the lives of my friends. It's painfully funny that I recognize what they are only experiencing as bewilderment.

Jenny and crew take their leave. Jim stands where he's been left for another 5 minutes. He's still staring at the same record jacket. By this time I have located my CD, but it's going for close to twenty bucks. I turn around to leave and almost bump into a small group of hovering girls. It's the same three girls. They have decided to regroup no more than 20 feet away. And yet to both groups, they are already in separate worlds.

Jenny is giggling again, but something about her air indicates that she has already processed the situation.

"I bet he thought I was a senior."

I am looking at Jim now, trying to recollect whether he looks like a senior at all. (Junior, tops.)

I remember when she told him that she was a sophomore at Long Branch. I hadn't even seen her face, but suddenly all I could hear was the gum and giggles. When she turned around, I remembered long hair and braces. And the look she gave me.

I was confused about the whole age thing. I was so caught up in their high school moment that I had forgotten I had ever been there. High school had been so long ago.

Funny that if I was still there, I would have been much more professionally dressed than I was at the moment. Nothing matched on me and I was wearing stuff more suitable for bed time than 3 in the afternoon.

What did it matter. I couldn't number either of their ages, just that they were no longer part of my world - and I was pretty invisible to theirs.

That Record World is a funny place. I'm not sure how they justify their prices. And the overhead must be tremendous. Three different workers, sporting three very different looks, asked if they could help me. As if the right hairstyle might incite me to buy something.

Even the labeling of the store was irritating. The jacket for a collection of Peter Gabriel videos was hyping up silly things like Kiss that Frog: the only video to be turned into a ride. -What big deal is that supposed to be ?

Later in the evening when I have already purchased Kate Bush's Red Shoes and Zooropa, I pick up a write up on Z on my computer terminal. Some guy is raving about the multi-media of the release, prophesying it as a quieter sided out take from Achtung.

So basically ACTHUNG was ACT ONE ?

After reading the hype and recollecting Bono's mega-mania Fox Network event for AB, I gave the CD a whirl. And am disgusted with it. The out takes from AB are definitely better than either disc. But the hype remains. And so too is Bono's little fire.

At the Grammies he openly professed that he no longer understood what was up with today's rock n roll. "Can't relate to it anymore." But that his advice to youth was that U2 would continue to abuse their position.

Billy Joel balked. Sting remained contemplative and unmoved with his hand pressed to his chin.

The CD was supposed to be some masterfully engineered piece of surround sound - made to be listened to with ear-phones.(As if that wasn't already a technological contradiction.)

And when I think of what the writer meant to say, I think instead of Q sound and Roger Water's Amused to Death. When I think of hyper-media, post-modern cynicism, and a totally augmented state of audio soundscapes, I think of him.

But I guess Bono is more marketable than a Big Nosed Brit who still relishes the adolescence of his sun glasses.

Bono squirks his face to the side as he lights up a stogie

inches away from his bristling face. It's a Clint Eastwood pose out of place. -Unforgiven.

It was a silly night.

But this isn't what I wanted to say at all.

I've been caught again at this place that has no name, that I work away at. The other day I attempted to ink a paper with some verse, but failed. Even tried to write a simple letter, but couldn't. I'm beginning to realize that my speech isn't directed anywhere in particular, and that it used to be.

I've been reacting to lousy e-mail to. Been greeted with silly things like Sup? on the wire. As if the techno movement of reaching out didn't bring with it anymore thought or ability than a dangling phone line. Transmissions end. All the wires needed to reach out where you really had no intention of being, but can leave a silly note to say you've paid your visit.

Enough:

Aimee called to relate to me her sadness over distances. Her best friend from childhood, her best everything is drifting further away. I handled the conversation pretty poorly. Which was pretty honest considering how I have ended up handling my own distances and spaces.

I remember a rebuke I received on a paper long ago, when a teacher questioned how well I could have known a friend. It was only a year, she had said. You only went on a date once...

Under that criteria, it's no wonder why so much of the past has slipped away - into unmeaningfulness.

I am standing on a single point right now surfing through a tremendous world of change. I don't know if people understand that. So it's hard for me to sympathize with them, because I'm not handling my own changes sympathetically. I've been methodically un-excited about the whole process.

I've been madly searching for the fast forward on it so I can speed up the down side for everyone I can think of. I don't want to hold someone's hand through something that I'd rather blur through and emerge on the other side - whole.

I guess.

I don't know.

Anyway, I'm supposed to be putting together a portfolio for grad school. I should be at another terminal, doing another setting. For now, peace to all within hearing distance of this piece.

Fall then to sleep,

Beneath the whirring of my C drive

And the slumbering mutters of half finished conversations.

There is far too much Rock Proof memories

Unwound in the silvery moments of passing.

Too many to forget, but not enough to recollect.

I think of Danny's leaves that he would let go

How he told that story and I could only laugh.

His budding was just too slow.

And I think of Aimee who I can't tuck in from here.

And of the child in me who has long since gone to sleep.

Oyasumi nasai.

Good Night.

Long week-end. Listening to REM waiting for Night Swimming to come up. I want so badly to learn it before I go. There are about 15 songs that I want to be able to perform before I leave. Things I want to perform before I go. Things I may want to perform in Japan. And still looking for Gabriel playing HERE COMES THE FLOOD in Japan. Did he even play it there ? Somehow I see it as so appropriate - for a night club in Hiroshima. Really.

If I could only know that I'd have time to write and learn a new instrument while I was there. To bike and immerse myself in film.

Adding it on again.

I have started tutoring again. This time it is in Middletown in a nice neighborhood of kids. I work with a very intelligent chinese-american. Talks like my cousins - except when he's speaking mandarin. Good kid.

On our first day, we worked for about an hour and then spent the rest of the time out in the yard. We played a bit of soccer and then passed a football. Then he, Timothy, finally convinced me to play basketball.

I told him it had been a long time since I had played and when he asked how long, I was surprised to find myself saying 1976. Surprising because Timothy wasn't even alive then.

The next day that I drove up into his part of town, there were so many kids out. It was such a neat little thing to see. Me whizzing through the 25 mph zone originally doing 45, and slowing down long enough to notice that I was cruising by unnoticed through the early childhood of these suburban kids.

The first group was laughable. It was like seeing a pack trying to separate something from the herd. Four kids on dirt bikes with tires no larger than a foot or so - reeling in circles about this other kid who was geared up in roller-blades. Looked to me like there was a clash between styles of coolness. Riding with the gang, or fagging out in padded Day-Glo.

But the funniest thing about it was the kind of ferocious short-spanned attention that the whole moment stirred up.

My guess was that they really were all one group, and this latest addition of differences was weighing in. But there's more.

As I drove by, I saw the bikers sort of chasing the roller-blader. Part of him was scared and a bit confused as to why this was all happening. As if there was somehow this new law that made it clear why he had to wear so much protection: the streets aren't safe. There are biker gangs out there...At the end of the herd, was a slightly younger boy on a big wheel. Seemed to me that the two were brothers. The older out front trying to stay alive and the younger one, oblivious to the dangers, crying and just trying to keep up. At the last moment when it looked like the kid on blades was a gonner, he hopped off the street and started running through the grass. The bikers pulled up and tightened their circle. They whizzed around and around until they suddenly forgot what they were chasing. And then it was time for another game. All friends again.

Down the block I see two other boys sizing each other's hoola-hoops in a driveway. A big pink one, a smaller blue one. They stand sideways on the driveway facing each other -bewildered by this big frame that they look through to see each other.

As I pull up to the curb of Timothy's house, I see him in the driveway shooting hoops. I take my time to get out, not wanting to disturb the mixed-music section I'm in the middle of. As I come around to the passenger side to get my stuff, I notice this adorable little ball beneath my tire. I pick it up and realize that it's a Burger King kiddie football. I'm not crazy about the logo, but I like the soft material and am thinking about keeping it. I'm about to toss it into my car, when I remember that this neighborhood is filled with kids. And I'm suddenly paranoid that if I toss it into my car, some block mother will come screaming out with a rolling pin and call the cops on me or something.

But something even more bizarre happens. I'm about to toss the ball into my car - thinking all these thoughts - when I look up and see a 6 year old Persian kid standing on the edge of his lawn on the other side of the street. I toss the ball - not into my car, but on to the top of my roof. The motion sends the little boy's arms up into the air - he apparently was ready to catch it.

A ha !

I point to the ball and look at him. He starts nodding his head. I'm now caught in a peculiar moment. I'm standing by my car listening to my music, chilling out with my shades and this wonderful ball that I just found has just been claimed by some toddler on the other side of the street. (Feels more like a river now.) I'm thinking - I've got age, I've got size. And dammit, I want the ball.

But of course that's out of the question. But now, I have to completely capitulate and return the ball to his side of the street. I'm thinking, why doesn't he come and get it - and then I remember, he's only six.

And then suddenly the whole neighborhood changes shades on me. I look at the kid and know he's Persian because he looks so much like my Persian cousin I used to tease. The kid was such a whining loser. But this kid, he's standing there waiting for a ball in the middle of this enormous yard. And I notice - that he's all alone.

I think of Timothy, and I realize that for the most part, aside from studies, I'm staying with this kid because he's alone. And then I remember what growing up is like - and I remember all the games that you play alone or that you get someone to do with you who may one day end up in a fist fight or something.

the neighborhood turns into this grand map of boyhood waiting for age to show them something that their busy fathers and mothers can't give them. That this nice neighborhood of houses can't necessarily provide. And of course, as I throw the ball back across the street, I wonder why the hell am I here ?

The session went well. Timothy and I even did some French and ordered pizza. We didn't play any sports, but I did find out that he has a guitar. So perhaps we may do music instead of some of the more boring aspects of English and Math. - Since it all comes down to music for me anyway.

After the lessons, I go home and put my mind to REM music. By the end of the night, I've learned almost every song on Automatic For the People. And I was correct. The chord progressions were just what I needed to spark the guitar back to life. Even Nightswimming is a restless challenge for simple piano skills.

But I digress.

The whole reason that brought me to this board tonight is another kind of restlessness. As I sit and wait to hear from my host institution - have already received word that I'll be in Hiroshima. The theme park city to the Bomb. The Wailing Wall and Golgotha of my childhood trials...

I keep bumping up against this emptiness. Of people I want to see, of people I haven't seen for years...and the space of unrecognition that keeps me at bay.

I was so close to so many different people. And then I just trailed. And it's hard to come back to that when I think of how things left off. And more confusing in some cases like Cassie, who I left because Aimee and I decided to be serious.

I really miss Cassie, who I pursued long enough to feel comfortable with. We got comfortable with me leaving my advances in the back of my mind. But when I dropped them completely, it was like something drastically changed and there was no word for it. I could have easily explained with something like: "Oh by the way, I have a girlfriend. In fact, I've been going out with her for over a year now." It's just that dinners with you are very enjoyable - and a host of other things it seems I'll never have the time to explain.

But every time I hear Kate's Moments of Pleasure - I know exactly what lines you were thinking of. It was how we first met - the night you gave me your boxers and your stuffed rabbit to sleep with as the storm passed by overhead.

And I think for certain, that if we were closer now, you'd make up for the distance between here and DC.

I have to keep asking myself if I'm having an affair. But it's more a case of realizing that there are certain women whom I've befriended and mean so much to me. And I don't get to see them enough.

That's about all that New York is to me now. It's the place that all the women that mean something to me - got left behind.

Such drivel...

So, from 2 am to about 6 every night I lie awake or go for a bike ride and think about how I will take my exit from here. How I will say good bye to all of them, when it's been so long since our last hello. And then Marlene, my cousin from Canada called.

First moves always tickle me. I wasn't even expecting a call from her. And yet I am gladdened to find that our rhythms still collide - hers just at a younger pace.

Between her and Lisa, who is 27 - the two bookend this space -have brought me to all the different levels that I appreciate and will miss. They are in fact the only kinds of relationships that strike me as interesting or lasting. And as I sit here in the space of Jersey, I can't for the life of me figure why NYC, Brampton, and Tokyo can't be somehow more here than inside me - the one who travels to all these places.

I fall apart in Jersey because I just can't tolerate the pace of these in home homestays coupled with forages out to the town tavern. I can't believe how many trails and lakes haven't been tapped. But instead, we blow smoke up at the ceiling to raise our spirits.

I'm so bored here. I can't wait to be somewhere else closer to the ones who mean something to me. Who make it a point to touch my life.

It's the headache and grumbling stomach. This isn't what I wanted to say.

Semiotics

It's funny to think that the precipitating incident of this weekend was exactly this drivel which I had forgotten about. Played it out almost like a phonograph to Miya.

But it ended up falling in her ears because I had already lost the time to call upon the woman I had made a date with the previous Wednesday. I decided not to call and let it go. Off to her summer semester and August engagement - or something like that.

Besides, the one that was so close to be really missed was the one I was too afraid to call. And Miya, friend that she is, lame in other respects did not provide the comfort or understanding I wanted. But did invite me as had others to a memorial weekend down in south jersey - and I declined - marooning myself and my loneliness dead on the spot.

I figured, if I traveled that far south I should have ended up in DC - should have driven my sister south to her Mormon frolic in King's Dominion and visited my girlfriend. Instead I petered out a Friday and Saturday - and ended up biking a helluvalot.

Sunday was tremendously weird. Biking from my old high school to Middletown. From Middletown to Freehold. Driven by Ted from Freehold back to school and ending up taking my car to NYC. Frolicked about from Holland to 23rd then flying through Jersey back roads only to end up back at the same Freehold bar that we had both promised we'd avoid.

Perhaps the best part of the evening (the rest of the day was just silly and enjoyable) Enjoyable and silly because it kept occurring to me that this was a Sunday - a day of rest - a day before a holiday - and yet I was outputting more energy than the entire week. But the best part of the evening was strapping my bike back onto my car in the dark. A different car, a different rack setting, a different everything. But I knew the straps and cords, knew the distances and where to clamp the lock. I didn't need the light to gear it on right.

And then it was back out into the woods again, following state troopers about as they decided to chase other cars with broken tail lights. Onward and home to the red waning moon. By the time I sized it up in my view finder, it had shrunken to a smaller silver glow.

I decided to stake out a DWI stop until they finally pulled someone over and I got bored and left.

But today - the actual day of Memorial - touch down of some dead soldiers and other peaceful actions that put the stark red and white in our stripes and left us a bit blue in the field...

Today I spoke with Rachel and it was with such joy that her bounciness greeted me. She had been away in the Hamptons. Babysitting. And attending her mother's conference on Anais Nin- the lover of Henry - from Henry and June.

Had spent the day with a bunch of Comp Lit. professors and had more than her fair share of Marriott food and semiotics. Her mother, a woman that I must meet when I travel to Japan - she and her husband both PhD's in Comp Lit, both graduates from UNC.

But it was even more funny the way her weekend unfolds in my ear. She's recalling how this 85 yr. old man kept referring to her mother as the wise and kind friend of Anais - who she suddenly remembers having met when she was really little. "So there," she concludes giggling.

And then later in the call she whispers to me Cassie's work number and says with the usual Japanese clip of "Zenhi..." By all means, you should call.

And I finally do and Cassie is so happy. Promoted to supervisor, which means that she wears six keys around her neck on a chain. On top of that she handles a plethora of calls - putting me on hold once or twice.

When it becomes apparent that

1. it's hard to talk right now and more importantly

2) No, I'm not in Japan yet, I get a glimpse of her days off and make plans for a Thursday meeting - open ended as usual.

I'm tickled to go to the east-asian exhibit at the MET, but it always ends up being a funny experience when Rachel accompanies us - the prodigy of Asian History and silly old me becomes more wide-eyed and American than I've ever been as she corrects my Japanese grammar.

But perhaps, Tabun, who knows ?

Ah, Cassie. I will miss the curve of your smile and the way your hair lights up with your eyes when you're just about to tell me something else about you. Without the clumsiness of statements or the adornment of pretense, but simply in the glean of being in the same space as you when you speak. That, is what I'll miss most of all.

We talk about Kate Bush before we go and plan ahead again.

"Semiontics." That's what Rachel had mistakenly called it. But I laughed because it sounded so much clearer that way - what she heard, what she understood. Later as I re-read some of my own writings from Comparative Lit., I think of it more as Semi-antics.

I am in Iowa. Yes Iowa.

I leave for Japan in a week and I am spending five of those days out here in Corn Valley. Things are quite different here and I'm really beginning to wonder exactly how and why I've marooned myself here for the week.

Back at home, there was another Canadian fly-by meeting. I spent two hours with my cousin in which time we managed to get me an international driver's license and a brand new hollow body guitar. Neither of which are doing me a hell of a lot of good now.

It seems too that all the work I brought here to do is either the wrong work or work that I'm just not into. I suppose if I had footed the extra $200 to stay in my own hotel room instead of shacking up with some grad students here, I would have been more comfortable with my own space and would be getting more work done.

I've been left alone here today, mainly because I declined an invitation to go out and shoot guns. I guess the appeal of firing a 12 gauge or a 22 is somehow lost on me. I had been accustomed to using a .22 caliber periodically to rid my house of overpopulating pigeons. -But that's no longer necessary now.

In any case, I guess this short passage here is an attempt at some kind of closure. An apology for all the different ways I didn't have time to say good bye.

I used to come equipped with speeches and little epithets. And then the last two years of undergrad with all my meta-feminist twists, seemed to send me in a direction where I buried the last fibers of the dying gentleman. No need for flowers anymore. They are like sweet entrapping lies. No need for sharing music - it will only become anxious foreplay.

I must confess that I am somehow at a loss at how to relate, when I cannot love - in my terms, and in my way. Perhaps a bit aggressive or downplayed - but mainly because I've been noticing that it cannot be any other way. And as we all grow older, we vacillate back and forth between accepting and denying ourselves the appetites of such things.

When I went to my meeting in DC, for the first time, surrounded by DC diplomats and what not, I finally and briefly came into my own. The small enclave of JET participants finally and briefly solidified into a collective unit of young professionals about to embark on the beginning of the rest of this moment.

And the contacts I made.

I already have the next three months of social engagements tapped out. Am excited about a biking date in Asakura - about two to three hours away. There's a hot springs engagement - and a ski trip I turned down.

And more recently, there's the new Celebrity Ovation guitar I bought. The action on it is very crisp and when it was plugged in, the cleanness of the high end almost sliced my vision into fours.

But none of this has to do with farewells.

I felt like I owed Miya more, as she and I parted ways after Sarah McLachlan tuned the evening into deep and soft hues. She was lucky enough to go back stage and meet Canada's sweetest, but was trying to act like it was no big deal.

I was sorry that because I had requested a CD player and because no one can seem to leisurely accommodate my strange pace of movement, that I had to leave her company with a simple thank you and some other sundries.

Not what I wanted. But certainly what I helped create.

I have a card for her. Have been holding it for almost three years now, never certain if and when it would be precisely right to send. I remember how I entered the card shop looking for something with the colors of Charlotte and ended up leaving with one card for Miya. And how I had to do this strange mental flip and force myself back into the card shop to look for what I had originally gone in for.

And now, I still have Miya's card, and Charlotte and I no longer talk to each other. She says its because she doesn't know how to. That as much as she cares about me, she never believes she'll understand me. And so she left. Called me out of POLITENESS to tell me this.

I suppose that was a good-bye too.

Micky's Irish Pub, Iowa city, Iowa.

I'm about half a stone's throw down from a bookstore I almost fell asleep in. I tried too hard to make the very large zen book section yield the book I haven't seen yet. Almost compromised with Zen Catholicism, but upon reading parts of it, found it almost more distracting than this kind of ramble. Only here, I don't plague you with sinewy half passages footnoted, for what reason, I'll never know.

But I suppose I should comment on the very first day of encountering faculty at Iowa. I had my first meeting with Stephen, who just happens to be the head honcho of the Production Studies dept. Not my field and yet somehow amidst the jargon and technical stuff, I barely managed to stay awake. And then we encountered an incoming undergrad sophomore - and I suddenly realized that it wasn't that I was unimpressive or whatever, but more that Steve has a very short attention span for fascination.

After all, he's hooked up in his little office with his desktop stuff just rambling away little shorts that are flawless marvels of Macintosh technology. He's partly responsible for the design of the building, and along with the engineers, completely responsible for the upward and downward compatibility of all the rooms in the building. My god, you can synch just about anything going on in the building with anything else. And then of course there's the satellite hook up and the fiber optics that are just waiting to be fired up.

But truly, it's all a bit out of my area of expertise.

So then I fell upon meeting number two. Paul, a very small statured, rather young looking professor, who straddles both Film and Comparative Literature and we hit it off well. He has a brother teaching at a university in Japan. Hiroshima to be exact. No kidding - we exchange e-mail sundries.

I guess the only downer is that my GRE's aren't high enough to send him vaulting off to find the forms to get me a full-time fellowship. But he tells me that my prior experience teaching, puts me in a an excellent position to teach Rhetoric as an assistantship. And I suppose the breakdown is about even.

Fellowhips go to PhD's and just about clear them for tuition and leave them with about $6500 to live on. The drawbacks are twenty hours of work per week on top of their PhD course work.

Assistantships work for Masters program. It breaks down to ten hour work weeks and the pay is exactly half that of a fellowship - which means you end up clearing about the same amount of money to live - minus your tuition. Which for me, who isn't even in the PhD program works out about even.

He seemed impressed by how I quickly melded lit theory to present day concerns of how to use film in the intercultural setting. Said with no uncertain terms that they were looking for people exactly like me to fill out their hold in Asian cinema. And advised me that the single most beneficial thing I could do was crack the language barrier -in AS MANY languages as possible.

Without a doubt, the most polymorphous and broadly based and applied department is the Film Studies group. And they are the most reliable for future employment, international exchange and mutual support.

I'm sorry, but Bob Dylan is roaring in the background and my beer just kicked in...

But lastly, I met with Adam who I had forgotten throughout the entire time I spoke with him, that he was the head honcho of the film studies dept. And at the same time, he was also full-time faculty in the French dept. Which means I had a very vague, somewhat less than satisfying French experience.

Apparently in my formalistic trade off with Japanese, I have carved my intellect in such a way that French people - or maybe just French intellectuals, just don't get me entirely. They try to get me to elucidate in a way that will spark their French gears - after all the crux of my theory comes from France. But somehow, I leave them hanging.

Perhaps it may be because my entire consortium of French theory lets me down in my understanding - so I can't articulate beyond that disappointment. And perhaps, they listen to me and hear the Asian in my perspective, the empty form that refuses to say more than what is there at the moment. Meaning, if you'll accept me on the spot, I'll try to impress you.

But then again, all the faculty admit that they really don't remember anything, unless jogged.

So I have a list of jogging to do.

Steve, should probably do some down time with him to leave on a good note. Perhaps tell him about canning shows for ASL format. Paul, should get him a copy of my transcript, my present e-mail address, and my address in Japan. The main point is to keep him fresh as a person to recommend me for an assistantship.

Adam, seems fascinated with my association with Deaf Culture. So I should keep on top of that, but more importantly should keep on top of the language situation. And I should do something to change his conception that I don't like to read. It should be rather a case that I've read too much.

Overall, the most positive experience was with Paul. A person who labeled himself as a person weaned on the Mast and Cohen generation-my master text into Film. Also affiliated with Asian film. But I suppose I should network with the real honcho there in Japanese cinema, Matsuhiro Yoshimoto. There's also someone in the Institute of Cinema and Culture who is supposed to be immersed as a student in that genre. Michael someone. We shall see.

The day of this quirk.

Hello. I speak to you from abroad. I am in Hiroshima Prefecture. I have been here on this island for almost four days now, I think. It's hard to recollect from the airline runway to the landing in Tokyo. To the three days in the culture shock proof hotel and the night life of Tokyo and Shibuya. To here.

The first and second day spent in utter dizziness with mangles of people. Spouting remnants and utterances of some perfect and some indiscreet Japanese. Slowing my English from time to time to play fair sport with the locals.

I spurned a bit too much on the Biiru. Not wanting intoxication and hangovers to be my first two memories of this place. I relaxed in my mansion - my apaato. My place and pad. Had one Japanese woman as a guest for one night, until the last ferry pulled in and we played under the lights in a parking lot, waiting for a large and hairy spider to get off her little car.

She was a happy progressive woman. Perhaps even a student of mine in the future. Certainly one in the past. She wants to go off to France and then later to visit Arizona. She had already been to Boston and DC. And the east coast isn't all that exciting for her.

But when I ask her what she wants to do in France, she doesn't know. Apparently, she is young enough to drag her five inch clogs about the continent, a bit more free from other concerns.

I notice how out of everything else, it is her breasts that catch me. That and the way that our tired Japanese often collides in the most touching ways. When I ask her difficult questions in English that make her fight for the words, I apologize in Japanese and we try to go at understanding it that way. And she is almost at the point of laughter and tears as she realizes there are so many ways to come at an answer for me - and yet so many ways to not be able to finish a thought. But I suppose in my first week of faces and newness, it doesn't really matter.

I remember back in Tokyo, how the last and final hours brought about this rush of western pathos. Grabbing at friendships as they passed. The mad scramble to get addresses down.

For a moment, on the shinkansen, I was almost desperate enough to play a pick up game. Could have sworn that I had seen her before. Not in the orientation, but somewhere else. Like on stage, under lights or something. Or maybe it was in the rain on one of those NYC rainy day walks.

But no, emphatically she tells me this is the first time she's ever met me. I had overheard that her grandmother lives in Hiroshima. She is slightly shocked by my intrusive ears - and I apologize for the bad habit of hearing too much. But then it is time for her to step out into the large assembly and be claimed by her host institution. She is nice enough to say that she would really like to meet me again, and I remind her about the Miyajima fireworks festival.

And then I too step out into the crowd and am enveloped.

My host institution didn't even bother to have a sign or a flag or anything. Suddenly out of the crowd a small tennis looking woman asks me, "Nomi-cho desuka ?" Which should have been my question. And from there on out, it was thirty-six hours of almost straight Japanese - except for when I met the Mayor and everything I learned fell like scared urine on the floor.

The elevated style and form combined with the meishi cards made me lose control and composure. I couldn't even look for help from my translator who was cowering as well beneath the weight of the formality.

But the rest of the evening went fine. I skipped out on going crazy with the beer. Had octopus and a side dish with spaghetti, sushi, hamburger and fish. A lodge special, I imagine.

And for one blissful night the apaato was air conditioned. Probably the incentive for getting lucky with company staying over. Please stay, it's cool here tonight.

But I'm still somewhat marooned here. At the ready with any call from the school board telling me where I'm supposed to be next and what not. Completely bored at times and disappointed with what I have forgotten to bring or what I don't have. Feeling silly and angry for not planning my departure better. For realizing what I have left in that crummy room of mine. What will probably be given away or destroyed before I return.

Anyway. I swam today on a beach. Water warm as any could tell. Sidewalk and sand scorched. And the dollar ice cream was probably the best thing happening.

Spent the day with a Canadien AET and so spent most close to twenty dollars on alcohol. And now I'm home trying to stay sober with my Jack Daniels and nursing my three dollar liter of sprite.

Best buy today was probably $10 on a bottle of gin. Not bad. Hope I don't go blind trying to nurse a bad habit.

But please excuse me now. I was trying to secure an e-mail hookup. But apparently there's a mail block in Japan as part of their regulations. Can't have gaijin talking to each other overseas. We shall see.

Well off-line from here for now. Jaa Mata.

It's hard to fathom that the two week ordeal of Hiroshima Prefectural orientations and Language classes is over now. It was nice, for a bit to mingle with the Jet Crew of the Hiroshima area. But then, from time to time there was the Gaijin tension meter - of Fuck You All, leave me alone.

I started off on a hopping bad foot. Was clowning around about my silly host institution - but the charade ended up turning into -Jay's the depressing one who thinks he's got it worse than everybody else.

Or at least, I've got it just plain and simple - no frills, no special treatment - everything that's up I have to find out myself - In Japanese.

So I was a bit disturbed about getting those wires crossed. I had to spend the last two days convincing everybody that I was okay -I had to grin almost non-stop for several hours and make sure that I kept my mouth shut about dissing my administration - lest I start the trend all over again.

When I arrived on the island, it didn't take long until the prattling conversation snuffed out into a simple more communicable form. "You're geijutsuka," they told me. "An artist." And somehow, in the orient - out here in Asia - the title fits better. It's not the same as a long hair, or a pretentious twit, or an insecure brainiac. It's something else.

The wind blows, and they let you listen to it. But, they don't always give me that space.

On the evening of my enkai - I was practically kidnapped afterwards. I was taken to a family home to meet a daughter, a wife, a grandmother and a son. A guitar was placed in my hands, along with two rounds of beer, some sake, and dried fish. Later, when the room was spinning more, I was placed in front of a piano. They wanted me to play Yesterday. I tried, but everything came out in minor - and while they clapped their hands, I was chuckling so hard at the blurring of the keys. I don't remember at all who the people were. All I remember is their pedigree dog, Yoshii.

That was the last official function I've been to. The rest of the time was sucked up in orientations. But when I returned to the island, I found out that the day after my enkai, a student passed out and died from heat stroke while at a soccer practice.

Pretty somber stuff. And then in typical Japanese, the newsbearer tells me, "By the way, could you please kindly write an 800 word essay in Japanese about your experiences here for the first month?"

After the news of the student settles in, and the old specter of death touches me in that place - not really of FEAR, but perhaps the one place that I know I've run from many times. I guess I figure, each person has times when they have to confront death on a personal level - I usually try to avoid it when I can - I figure there's not much in actively searching it out.

I remember abandoning Aimee when her mother passed away. I had been asked to come to her bedside - long ago, when there were koans and comfort in my voice. Perhaps because I had to keep repeating and rehearsing what I hadn't yet come to believe. And because I knew that beneath the magic of those words was someone who was afraid - I fled.

And it's not like it really matters. It wasn't like they expected a miracle from me and I had refused to multiply and produce. I just got scared.

Well this time, it's different.

In fact, after I've splurged into this keyboard, I should go back again and check that essay. It goes public at the end of this month, and I hope that my attempt to be somewhat literary in a foreign language doesn't completely go opposite and have me offending some shintoist.

The piece I offered told about coming here to Nomi. About how all my life I had wanted to come to Japan. That for me, the history and traditions here, all had some kind of seedling in my younger self. I had studied Kung fu as a teenager. I had learned the Japanese sai, as part of the list of weapons. I had begun my study of zazen in high school. I had carried my studies to Japanese literature and film. And lastly, I had started my studies of the Japanese language. I had come here to be a teacher, while all the time I had been a student of Japanese culture.

I called the student's death an unfortunate incident. A sad occurrence. He would be the student I would never get to meet. The student I would never get to teach. But at the same time, I was not only the teacher, but a student of Japanese culture as well. I could learn what that student would have learned. I could be that student - and for that student, I would try to be my very best.

In any case, I have a language proficiency test in December. My advisor simply said, Ganbate. Knowing full well that my Japanese is ages from anything tolerably Pera Pera.

Of other note: Aimee provided me with the proper link to Compuserve. I am now back on-line. I also have an internet address, although I think I may just scrap that since it seems to cost too much. I received her first letter. Not really her first letter, but her letter in reply to my first one. - The one I wrote on the plane.

Apparently, the air up there must have really done something, because both she and Miya replied with the same reaction. They cried.

I remember getting Miya's letter. It was after I had visited the Peace Memorial park and seen the lanterns go down in front of the A-Bomb dome on August 6. That memorable day.

It was the first time I had bonded with other JET's and at first I was really doing a bummer, but then the evening picked up and I met up with a whole international crowd of New Zealanders, Australians, Brits, Irish - and of course, Japanese.

But it was really something. I had never received anything from her before. Nothing directed to me any way. (Whoops. I guess there's those Christmas cards I mentioned...)

Anyway, it was nice. It kept me up for almost two days straight. I guess mixed in with half memories and other things, I had to mix out of it every soft tone and gesture that our several years of intellectualism had kept frozen. It was very dear, even if there will be a long time coming before that happens again.

But Aimee's letter. What else can I say except that she proposed to me! She proposed to me!

And I am half stuck with words down my throat as to what to say. It doesn't feel right, when I know that the clearing in the woods doesn't even begin to grow toward the sunlight until about four years down the road. But it was quite a vibrant shock to hear it stream through the letter, become trapped there on the first page and lines...

It feels so silly and yet a bit terrifying too. Like I was holding the end of a flash flood. A torrent of tears. That no matter what I had to say, the moment was set to spring - full of emotions.

I don't want to hurt her with what I say. And I still don't know what to say.

She calls this weekend...

My cousin, Sonjaya, from Canada actually broke through to me on the CompuServe line. Another wonderful reconnection. I had just been thinking of him because Aimee and I started sending cassette taped messages to each other. He and I did that all through the tail end of elementary school and the larger part of high school. - Until theater turned me into something more regional and less his speed.

But nowadays, as he sits in his last year of medical school, sooner or later, we will frightfully be out in the same world again. No clicks to shelter us or bait us - and it seems much better to come together again-although being younger seems always better.

We were only in high school when we grew our cynical beards and sat on the porch with our guitars and asked each other, "Hey man, do you remember the last time you were really happy." And we would think and think. And nothing would come.

I don't think it was just that we were too cynical or depressed, or too juiced up on Roger Waters. I think it was because the two of us, in our own Asian/Filipino and Iranian circles had played the elder for far too long. We had piloted far too many courses between Jersey and Toronto. Had done all the grunt work and done all this fill in family time and watched the younger siblings grow up, while nothing got better for us because we were too busy holding it all together.

When we were first introduced to each other, I don't really remember much. I was only about 5 or 6 the first time I crossed the border. The couple years after that, it was more Sonjaya and Peter that bonded. Scientists engaged up to the hilt with the latest in Chemistry and Biology. Music and just being boys was the closest bridge.

And he excelled at the technical aspects of music. Was much more the accomplished musician. I was the performer. And for awhile there, the fact that we couldn't play together was sort of emblematic of our larger differences. We were two very different kind of guys. And yet, in so many unexplainable ways, there are more places that we cross properly than almost anybody else that I know. And at the same time, the differences in who we are, are much larger and intolerable than anyone I know - with perhaps the exception of my brother.

I suppose with family and relatives you become what you don't allow yourself to be anywhere else - and so the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities really come out in all sorts of unbalanced ways.

Not that I've escaped that either. I've become more of the kind uncle to the younger generation of cousins instead of the American cousin. As if I somehow aged because they were allowed to be younger. I don't think I could really explain all that to any one except him. Because there were literally times when we stood in separately or alone for the missing fathers in the picture. We were the ones who at times were going places and succeeding when the Canadian future for our elders

was uncertain. And even today, not every relative that comes over here makes it. And that's a big difference for the ones who were born here. It's a different game. And I suppose the sadness or fear that we share is the fact that all our lives, the pit has been there waiting to claim us.

And our parents or elders talk about success often in terms of religious fervor or maybe are more honest and see it as financial planning. And between he and I, we have more than once felt the money slip from hand to hand. Have had to gnaw a part of our hands off to keep afloat.

I think the bottom line in the equation is that something large and drastic happened to the pillar of patriarchs. And the progressive feminists would say that's good. But they'd be missing the point and all the points of view for this little scenario.

Gendered down, a whole series of power relationships got broken up. And while the power seeped out, the younger ones took on a lot of symbolic work. And as they try to manage their own lives, they still live under the specter of recovery. Of realizing that the reason why they can't remember being happier is that all attempts at recovery are always incomplete.

Nothing is bestowed from above any more, but always takes a chunk out of you to make it work.

It's hard not to resent that. It's hard to just be grown up and grit your teeth, because you know that some of that hurt, some of that disruption wasn't your fault at all.

And I'll have to admit that it's different for me. My parents didn't go through a divorce or a separation. Though my father was away for several years between my fifth grade and high school.

I suppose the mercer house was supposed to be the safe haven of stability. And I saw and lived with my fair share of those well meaning people who stopped through there waiting for a second or even a third chance at setting their lives up again.

So I was lucky, and yet at the same time, I lived in the pit year after year.

When they consecrated that shrine, I was glad that I lived in my own apartment out of its claims. I didn't need to be reminded that the spiritual source that powered that place came partly, if not directly out of my parents. And I saw how I had greyed my father in my own way. I saw how my mother worried about how age was affecting her. And at the same time, I saw her religion fire up her powers, and saw her raise and lower the drawbridge on that pit every summer.

It's her way. And it's wonderfully beautiful and loving. But, I have no more energies to participate in it. I feel guilty if I come back and need its sustenance - signifying that I too am in need like all those others before.

There's something too penitent and too depressing at having to come kneeling for aid. It isn't pride. It's more that forlorn hopelessness when you turn in utter helplessness to someone who will turn you toward god.

And I suppose if I had anything of bitterness, it would be that. That between my mother's comfort and help - the cross of salvation intrudes, and I can't reach toward anything beautiful in that house unless it crosses something to bless it.

And I suppose that's the shortsightedness that I would turn into complaint. That like all parents, mine want to be there to help and to support. But somehow, they figure the highest form of aide must come from God. Must therefore be enmeshed in prayers and best wishes and intentions. In devotions and masses and rosaries.

None of which I truly scoff at - I myself finding the simplest joys in sitting still in meditation.

But there is so much else.

I have seen my writing try to get ELSE out into the subjective field, to stand there along side what we hold to be our own sanctity and thereby weigh it out and see - is prayer the best you can do. Is it really the thing to be doing ?

I have turned away from something - something so absorbing to me in the past that it takes me miles away and years to get by it.

And when I think of Aimee - I often wonder, what does it mean when a Jew marries a Christian. When that Jew marries this Christian. What can that mean ?

What is it that we join as One and agree upon or realize as becoming ? Something tremendous gets reconciled there no ?

Or perhaps, a millennia of half-meant beliefs go scrutinized under foot and we have to suddenly bone up our beliefs that say what?

At best, I've seen both Judaism and Catholicism be prescriptive.

You need it to be saved.

What else can you possibly say besides that. How else can you reply to that without acquiescing?

Deny salvation? Deny sin?

We have to begin again, at the grassroots of what we mean by spirituality. Not what we were taught, but what we mean. Because I am too painfully aware that I exist, that you exist, that we believe things to be, that things are. And all of that.

And THAT is so much different than, here is what the BOOK says. Here is what we were told. Here is what we believe.

It doesn't make any sense if it can't account for this moment. If it can't answer the question of what does it mean.

I think it's a bit overly dramatic to think that this is the first time that a mixed religion ever crossed. But it seems so odd to me that nothing new and meaningful seems to have been produced. Or maybe it has, and I just don't know where religious activism is anymore.

I think Aimee and I have opted for a third. We're seriously looking into Buddhism - looking into it as far as reading and the passage of time permits us.

I don't know what it means to be a practicing Buddhist - I don't think I know of much else as practice besides sitting and "correct" thinking - and I can't really see much objection to that.

But when you think that grassroots ethics have spurned up from something as simply as not eating meat or quitting smoking - why should the rooting of spirituality be anything different. We practice what is healthy, we cultivate what can be understood as such.

I think what you end up missing outside of the long pearly gates, is the sense of history and tradition. The enclosure of its folklore and the ability to somehow intuit a sense of companionship among believers.

I hate to admit it, but if I went to a Catholic youth group out here in Japan, I'm sure my social schedule would fill up. There probably are a lot of x-Catholics out there like me - and probably all sorts of counterparts to that.

It isn't at all that I believe religion is dead or that god is dead. It's more that the space for such deliberation has long been studied by me. At least as old as my senior year in high school. And unfortunately for me, college followed and I could only academically pursue what I could no longer practice.

I supposed in some senses, I'd have to admit that there is no center in my life anymore. Not because of deconstruction or any other intellectual fall-out, but because on one hand I have been negligent in pursuing it, and on the other, it may very well have dried up all its old paths on its own.

I have not been able to uncover a new and vibrant reading from zen. I have not seen a film since the festival that captured the richness and loss that Clara Law found in Autumn Moon.

I know those voices are out there, but what to call them and how to make them coalesce again. That's a search worth my life time. I wish, in my prayer of prayers, a place for all the mixes to match. A place where that third generation Hawaiian-Japanese girl I just met, can talk and not get cursed at by the street peddlers out in the open-air markets. A place where the Anglos can understand what it means to be Asian treated as such by Japanese. Of all people, Anglos can be so blind.

Accustomed to only so many varieties of happenings. Can't possibly fathom or know how to listen to a genre that didn't emanate from them. So comfortable with defining by the rigidity of their own definitions. If they say, I'll be open, I won't be so ethnocentric - they still blind themselves by their open optimism. Insist that it's all attitude that makes things the way they are-as if it's my attitude or the Japanese that makes me Asian.

But I'm drifting off track and it's 11:15. I sleep. Tomorrow I go back to school again.

Last night, my roomie from Tokyo called. it was good to hear his familiar lilt to his voice. A bit of Tom Walsh and NYC in him, but also a piece of some Americana past - like I would have played baseball with him in grade school or something.

In any case, he's coming up from Yamaguchi. Some time on his hands...My first group of guests arrived. The first weekend amongst women at my place.

Geijin over at Aaron's house. What will the neighbors say ?

It's the 27th now, and if it wasn't for the groggies of last night's red wine, I probably could have met Bryan at the station and he and his friend and I could have gone to the museum together.

But, of all things, I should have been on the same ferry as Tricia. Comment on the latter evening.

It went well. I acted the part of the host, and for the most part it seemed to work. Although I was not too commanding in the position and didn't play the role as the active - it is not good enough yet - please excuse my lack of this or that.

Then again on the other hand, I did do all sorts of shopping to make sure that there was no lack: Wine, spaghetti, sauce, meat. Garlic, bread, butter, cheese. Eggs, pancakes, milk, cereal. Even forks - so that they would match. John bought the beer.

Six cans. Not so bad. I think it all sort of works out. If I were to calculate, I spent $10 on each person - no real biggie.

But I suppose closure would have been saying something like, "We should do this all again." I promised to do a dub of Metheny for Angie. I don't know about Tricia. I don't know if I should feel bad that I hung her over, and instead of walking around the village we spent most of the night having a discussion across the dinner table, which was okay, I just don't know if she would have liked to have done anything else.

But we at least got out in the discourse that I knew she had a boyfriend, and I told her I had a girlfriend back in the states. I'm not sure that was really supposed to be relevant information.

Me knowing something that she hadn't told me, me telling something that I hadn't been asked.

And I can't help but fight the notion that all this, can we be this or that, or what are we coupling is just all the same adolescent rubbish that I hated doing and going through as an adolescent.

So it's funny having the slumber party and hosting it - never really did that before. And I guess when you factor that in, I did do the best I could with the situation, and certainly no one left all pissy and angry that they had even thought of coming here.

I guess when you fraternize with the international zone, I-at least play through some insecurities-that I'm not the savvy traveler. That I am pretty small-time. A North American traveler, but not really a world traveler-or even a worldly person.

I start realizing that so much of me is a travel through words before or even in absence of bodily experience.

Mishima had a whole section in Sun and Steel about how he was sure beyond a doubt that he came into words long before he ever experienced the body. My old Prof. C. would argue with that - and of course you can always flip that switch. But the strong point of that observation is that there is all that wordiness - and the worldliness - existing of being in the word - in the talk - discoursing a being through that medium. Weird.

Because now all there is out here is a whole lot of voice. Beyond that and the flash of momentary vision and the bridging of who the hell are you - there's just words to fill.

I guess I do try to rush it a bit. Doing the once over of do I want to talk to you again - will I ever pick up the phone and talk to you again. But nowadays, as luck would have it, it's much more - people who call me back.

Never happened in the states.

The write up on this weekend is more like the beginning of when things started to happen. Corn is boiling and there's an international situation happening in my backyard kitchen.

Arguing for the efficacy of marriage rituals.

A refrain of - I don't want to play by rules that don't stand for what I support.

Unfortunately, I can't fully articulate the position because it relies on a negative pestering - or some liberal belief that as long as you can disagree and be respected - then why co-opt yourself to a larger order -that isn't you for sure.

But at some level, the ragged bones of the roving individual dissipates into something that does occupy more space than it is and becomes more accountable to all sorts of traipse and foibles.

And yes, freedom would be so choice - but is it really there at all.

[Checking out because this isn't the time to write.]

Fragmentations in China

My body is not left behind.

Blessed Om forgetting nothing.

Yet like dew on petals are tears beneath my eyes.

Eyes.

Hands.

Mouth.

Head.

Heart.

Like a knife, I lament my outcast state.

For her, I'd give myself resolved.

Yet, for her, seems easier to leave my body dissolved.

Freud fragments birth into a troublesome sexuality.

Lacan fights for lost politics of unspoken femininity.

I lament betwixt extremes

Why you cut me so?

IMA

The trip to Canada. Words beyond tiredness could not catch up with half the misplaced afterthoughts and things left unpacked.

The only causality. I forgot my biking helmet. And my sister spilled Chinese food all over my khaki pants.

Then I couldn't find my music video, among other things as I search and search for all the things I intentionally packed and so often misplaced.

The episodes of St. elsewhere. and so on.

I think now I have found the video. I'm going to check before the creeping sags beneath eyes dims this page and soundly turns my sleep.

The apt. at World Trade.

Andy bikes and cracks up the bike neck.

We buy film and video tape.

I play piano and await Mamar's dinner.

We eat, she leaves.

We go to Marlene's and I film her bedroom.

We try to watch Joy luck club, but it gets eaten, but we drink tea.

Back to Toronto. Plans to spend up day and meet Marlene after work to go to Gina's after 4 PM. I suppose it's dinner and a movie.

I travel so much better alone. Although the houses have tightened in different spots and I am too tired to remember pathways - and have found bonding in letting the youngsters become the navigators or even the pilots. As I spin tunes and await the next phase.

Marlene explained the mechanics of the camera to me as we swapped features on our

camcorders.

Andy intoned his favorite saying : DEEP THROAT.

Ari didn't come with us and when we return he is still gone.

Hold on now while I check the footage.

It is PHILS #9 that is also labeled I think this is my video.

But I must have erased it because it seems to be filled with the trip to Baguio on it.

Baguio that reminds Lisa of Nara.

Tomorrow we see Gina and Jody. And Eva. I am tired now and thoroughly downed that the missed stuff amounts to three.

Helmet, tape of Nadine, Marlene and Co. talk at Kelsey's in Canada. And my video. It would have been the perfect thing to show.

Alas, time again tomorrow for a spell.

Kate Bush is winding down in my head - the Song of Solomon.

Don't want your bull shit, I just want your sexuality.

Saw a neat photo of some green eyed blond girl in Marlene's class. Decided her name was Ice Cream Soda.

Marlene tells me she's too young. Her age.

Makes me wonder how old I am.

It's neat to hear them talking about finishing high school and what to do in college.

When that's all over for me.

It isn't age I wanted to talk about.

I think it's the disconnectivity.

I just finished glancing at Mamar's Albums.

Felt like I was intruding upon something. Realizing that she is and was very much herself.

Wondering how much she was a Persian among Flips.

Realizing too, that the woman had a head on her shoulders. A geneticist.

You could see it in the old photos. Her x-husband, my uncle, like a Japanese movie star.

standing there with decked out honey. He with the big lapels, shaded eyeglasses and a sports car spotting the scene.

And her, just glowing beyond the flash of the lights and the action of the cameras.

And now what...

It's strange to see a handful of pictures and memories of a time long ago when a summer and her presence was a regularity. For his sake, my cousin and brethren. But beyond, deeper.

I am going back to the land that spawned their youthful beginnings.

And I am much smarter, luckier, and just plain different from the path that threw them for a curve.

And at last I recall that this sidewinder of a reverie was meant for you - for the phone call I didn't make while I was in the foreign land up north.

But knowing that I love.

"On a windowsill in New York,

It has started to snow.

And I'm watching the broken cane

Like Douglas Fairbanks walking...."

I hear my mother saying:

Every old sock has an old shoe.

Isn't that a wonderful saying ?

Just holding on to the upper tremolo in Kate's voice.

Its startling icicle of clarity. Underneath the lollypop of her scream.

God I'll miss touching you. Because that was so enjoyable as so real.

No pretense, no deepness that wasn't so obvious in the action.

I loved you because I loved you.

because we made love and we Made it.

I miss you and will miss you across that distance.

As I find the scrolling of screen slightly behind me, I see that tiredness has begun to censor the ability to think.

Lights go off inside the blind eye, that wants to sleep and dream.

But wants to nuzzle close to you and wake up by your side.

A king-size bed and a kitchen where you have to rub against each other to get by.

A vacation spot where bikes are cheap and the lull of a day can take you from the Island Music Shoppe to a walk along the sea.

God, I'll miss that everytime I remember it.

I just want to go on with the luck of my life, and love you all the way through.

I want that.

I want that.

I'll miss the summer we'll never quite have.

I'll be thankful for the glorious one that we did.

I think it's the rhythm Kate:

Everytime that I'll remember,

It'll feel like the first time I've loved.

Isn't that silly,

To feel everything new ?

When it's so far away?

Don't take me for a pastime.

I'll still be here waiting with you.

Though it's so far away,

I'll be waiting here with you.

Dream:

At Ted's workplace - back from Japan. Seem to have left some dunkin donut like munchkins off as omiyage. Boxed in some precious looking asian wraperies.

Ted's chinese mother walks through the door and I can overhear Ted talking on the phone. He is initially worried as usual - and then his mother beckons to him about what's up on the phone and Ted chides her that her boss says it's okay for her to take off from work - the joke being like - "Yeah, you never have to come back."

Scene that brings them up into here:

(Scene before)

Crossing streets and waiting for streetcars. Dark outside and it's raining. It's basically Hiroshima streets and the rain. I think I'm with someone, I'm not sure.

As I cross the street in the huge mass of people, I get stuck in the middle - at some junction point (90 degrees) where people have to take turns giving each other the chance to cross.

What's holding things up is that a few motor scooters, keep getting wedged into the crowd of pedestrians and then the swarms of people seem to get entangled with where and when this machine will be next to go.

Unlike people, the machine points in a particular direction and is sort of resigned to traveling that line - in the meantime, people can mill about any old way, so the path for the cycle becomes hopelessly lost in the shuffle.

Twice, as I prepare to cross, some elder Japanese man holds me back. Means to be kind and all that -but it's more of the "Relax and hang out" tone when the fact is, I would have made it across if I hadn't been stopped by the old man.

So I'm there in the middle and one of the scooters is half turned around the curve of the crowd I'm in. His rear wheel is spinning in a puddle about a foot deep. He's spraying water into the crowd and noodling around when he should just get out of our way.

Eventually in a half-helpful and half self-motivated maneuver, the crowd lifts up the rider and his moped and lifts him over his stuck spot and throws him out of the way. We progress like this twice before we are pinned as above.

Somehow, I finally make it to the sidewalk - apparently the street just isn't the place to be if movement is key. But, alas, the street car - which is more like a large bus or truck is

pulling away. The baggage doors at the bottom haven't been closed - so not only is water splashing up on everything, but three or four bags fall out. The passengers can see this, so can all us pedestrians - and at the moment the driver stops and is aware of it too.

Then there's this flashing Asian moment of silence where it seems the implied message was from the driver to the pedestrian crowd: "If you can lift mopeds, then surely you can kindly put these bags back on and close the hatch."

We're thinking, "Well yes, but then you'll still drive away and leave us" -or something more mundane like. "Well that's your job."

The passengers are thinking -"Who's bags are they. Hope there not mine." BUT IF THEY ARE: "Somebody do something."

The pause passes and then the driver just puts (IT) into gear and starts moving away. Sort of like, "Well if nobody took action to the situation, then there must not have been one and anyone who's going to get all upset now will have to explain what he's so upset about first."

There's the grumbling of gears as the bus approaches the same intersection and miasma that the teeming throngs just emerged from. So there's tension and apprehensions combined with - hey what about those bags...

Those of us on the sidewalk feel all this and also feel some sort of trampling of rights or some level of incompetence. Then, I hear some voice emerge from the bus. It's a passenger saying,

"Please driver, please stop !"

Pleading and praying - with all the hope that this gets answered.

I turn from that scene of rain and darkness to the left.

There's a white-washed fruit stand and that's when I see Ted and hear him talking on a public phone. As I'm drawn to the familiar and the brightness, the weather and situation changes.

At first, I'm conscious of how Ted and I left each other when I came to Japan - he lost his temper on me on something completely stupid and hung up on me. And in my righteous pride, I had decided to wait until he apologized or contacted me before putting it behind me and becoming friends again.

So here we are, he's talking on the phone and we're in contact again. I'm not ready to negotiate this yet so it turns me to absorbing myself into his talk-which isn't to me, but is about him.

The conversation on the phone seems to be something about buying a summer cottage, or renting some kind of place, because I get this image of a wooden, cape cod like - on golden pond cottage with new furniture and hard wood waxed floors. Bright sunlight and throw rugs. Real homey kind of feel.

And then I see Aimee lounging on the sofa. I walk to her and pull her off the sofa and onto the floor. We wind ourselves up into a tight and close ball of a hug and are kissing each other. As I work myself down her neck, it becomes apparent that I'm wishing her a happy birthday, and she's accepting.

And then I think, I know I've been away, but didn't you just have a birthday 3 months ago?

And she replies Yes, so?

And then I'm confused, not about the moment I'm in, but what's up with the multiple birthdays. Did you start having them because that's one way to have a party with me ?

It's not a big deal, I just have the momentary flash of what the hell is she doing/thinking that this makes complete sense to her?

I'm thrown from the situation (figuratively) because I'm now in the next room. I guess it's the dining room with sliding glass doors going out to the patio. I'm walking toward the room, but it seems like when I walk in the scene will be a repeat of the above. (i.e., I walk in, I see her at the couch/sofa, I go to her, and we bond.) And then I'll be put in the quandary where I am now, so I might as well stay here and figure it out.

Ted's voice cuts through from his phone call, and it's like he's talking in a different room or something. But he's also talking to me. I've apparently been recognized by him that I'm in proximity.

It's light talk, "Remember that story I told you about the two squirrels that kept pestering us at our cottage out in..."

My immediate reaction is sort of indignant anger, "I don't want to hear this story. He always tells this story and there's never a point to it. And it's always hopelessly irrelevant to where I wanted to be going in conversation.

So it breaks off with something about how they were always chasing each other out on the porch, through the roof , through the house - scaring people causing problems, etc.

By this time, I have followed his voice out of the imagery into where I have left him by the phone. But now the context has changed. We're in an office, and it's as above, his mother walks in, I listen to him joke with his mother and realize the presents I've brought for Ted at the office.

But now the office is an Asian one. And the set up is half of a Japanese office and half a ferryboat. That is, in the back where satcho's desk would be- there's a round patio table and cushioned seats like on the ferry. Some older and hence more respectable and elder-powered looking gentlemen are seated back there observing me, Ted and his mother.

Ted's mother sees the gifts and is trying to figure out what they are for. "You've come back ? You and Ted are making peace ?" It turns into, what ever happened between the two of you...

So she starts abstractly by asking about the munchkins. What are they, where do they come from, how are they made - waiting for me to explain why I brought them...

And somehow the three of us end up sitting at a table eating them. We're merry and all that. But Ted and I still haven't clicked, I guess because whatever situations he's been in while I was away - and him trying to bring me up to speed with it - is basically telling me he's still got all the disfunctions as when I left. Or at least, the same bag of annoyances that if I come about and am fully honest, they annoy me enough to ask myself if they're worth tolerating to have his friendship.

But now he's retelling a story of mine back to me and his mother. I've forgotten this one and it sounds pretty good.

He was telling me how on New Year's eve, I had said that the crowds gather around when they drop the apple.

In Japan, they really drop the apple. It's this (I'm confused here, because I don't remember my story - whatever it was - and it's not matching up to this) There's this big apple, and it really falls on people. So they go running and screaming, and instead of the noise that comes from the pleasure of welcoming a new year, it's this mad panic and rush - memories of having to run from a bomb. World-war II flashes.

He pauses momentarily because he realizes that I've not caught on to something and that I'm getting annoyed (although, now it's beginning to sound more like one of my stories and I'm annoyed now because he stopped) Instead, his attention and mine are deferred to his mother - who was in the war. And he apologizes saying, "I'm sorry. Did that frighten you or bring you back ? Didn't mean to."

And then he quotes my conclusion:

"But there's always this one guy who stays there and doesn't run."

And the pregnant pause is filled with the WHY. What happens to him...

...and the story concludes with:

"So he knows when the New Year has hit him."

I wake up.

It is now tomorrow.

The Flash of fear.

I think fearlessness comes from being in a tremendously ridiculous situation and brazening it. Kind of like charging up that hill into gun-fire. Logically and just about any way else, you ARE supposed to be afraid in that situation - even crazy to run up that hill and over. And the beauty of the Catch 22 is how absurd it is that to be that crazy makes you that fearless and hence the normally brave soldier. But in this case, it's got a bit of Mishima and Japanese antics attached to it.

For me, Mishima as personal symbol of crazy in your face fearless Asian. Fearless about following the razor tip of Asian logic to it's fearsome death and depths.

Like the time that I became fearless in NYC - because I was brave enough to walk about with a full length Katana strapped to my back.

Something strange about knowing that it made the most sense:

"Officer, it's purely self defense. I clearly won't draw it unless I intend to use it." And you can't tell me in NYC, that the need to use it might never occur - if not for me, than for someone else.

That the issue really seemed to be about getting the social sanction to be trusted with a sword. To be good with a sword. To be allowed to carry and wield a sword.

Hell, gun licenses are legal And you don't even need a license for a bow and arrow. Dangerous is just the power of constructing the very grounds of how you can be attacked and defeated, instead of being able to become what the inside of you grows to be. If you are some macho shit, or some paranoid, or some person aspiring to be a marksman, you can opt for the gun.

But the principle of mind that creates a swordsman - that's got nothing to do with defense and attack - It's got to do with the serenity of movement - and the lively imagery of thought slicing - of decisions that cut, and that's just miles elsewhere from the start.

It's hard to believe that from 6:00 the other day it is tomorrow now and I am sitting at attention at a full Japanese meeting.

We just admitted a new Music teacher - the other one "tried to be friendly with someone at the summer camp - and so he quit his job." It was nice to hear and see someone else do her introduction to the crowd in the office, exactly as I did - but I bet she can understand what's going on in the meeting better than me - though she's probably just as apathetic about it - or maybe not.

I'm not really apathetic.

I brought my computer and a whole list of other things to do while sitting here. I figured the computer would be the least intrusive - although the clicking of the keys is notoriously different than the sounds others are making at their desks.

I should comment on the form of the meeting.

Large sheaves of paper are passed out. I'm pretty sure Mori-san (the male not the female who lives next door) prints them out on the computer.) Although many others can do the graphics, I suppose since he teaches economics he's more reliable.

After the introductions, we sit for several hours - about three at least, and sort of read and perform what's in front of us in the paper.

Every now and then -like now - the reader will read out what page we're on so that the sleeping crowds can cue back in. And then at some point readers change. This may be because the new page or material falls into someone else's sphere of comment or perhaps because it's their report that they submitted to Mori to write up. What's funny though, is often there are these pauses while the reader tries to figure out what the paper says.

So sometimes I'm inclined to think that it's more like a reading lesson in school. You've got to pay attention because you don't know when you'll be called upon to read.

So that's the form.

Play things I've brought to get me through the meeting:

Art supplies to finish off my brother's lay out. Maybe do one for myself that lists my hobbies and things. That will always be useful.

But I wasn't too sure that if I went all creative and what not that they'd enjoy me having visions and things in the middle of their meeting.

Not sure if I commented, but yesterday I managed to create a piano, a violin and chemistry set out of some construction paper and the lid to a cookie jar. -Mind you I can't draw, but I found that I could trace things and rotate circles to produce all sorts of shapes.

I think Winston - the Brit friend of Ryan's would have gotten a kick out of the process.(Okay he doesn't want to fully identify with being British and he was after all born in Virginia. Whatever.)

I literally sculpted through the curves of a grand piano and the curves of a violin. The tracing patterns looking like some aesthetic out of the Kodansha of Da Vinci.

I was so excited as I sculpted the midway turn in the grand that allows for the high end strings to be strung. It's this expansive sweep that even on an actual grand you can't help but run your hand over. The slow and quick curves of a violin - or cello - those massive curves that you straddle between your legs. But the most ridiculous time was shaving the proper curve and shape to the scroll - the top of the neck- hence the head.

It was such a silly phallic shape and trying to get it proportionate and powerfully pleasing to the eye required this exaggerated swelling that had to imply Hugeness. But, almost immediately, it had to be cut back to a slender suppleness be fitting the neck of a violin. There's a huge male-female hybridization that occurs as one moves from one curve to the next. Just when I had the shafts looking good, the head would wobble off and loose it's stamina - and then I had to fuss with it and work it back to it's perfect state only to find that it was in far excess and had to be relieved and whittled down.

And of course, part of me was finding this all amusing and the other part of me was just like "Fuck off it man - just whip in to shape already."

So the violin was much more challenging than the grand.

Although it was simpler by shape. Both are made of two circles and then pieces of curves. The violin stacks one circle on top of another, but in so doing, it gets much more fussy when it comes to detail. The piano is just more sagacious and large - it's shape is sweeping and GRAND - not fussy, but just sheer and immense beauty. I enjoyed it.

The layout for my brother is the most impressive. I blew up a map of all the nations and states on the Xerox machine. I borrowed it from Mori-san (female.) It's all in Japanese so it looks very Asian. Then, I colored all the places he's been. Since it's an Asian centered map there's this blossoming of the center outward.

Then I placed the violin I made over to the left where it spreads out from china across to Europe and drapes down over Africa. Then I filled up some spaces in the pacific and in the bottom of the map with pictures of some of our relatives in the Philippines and other world travelers.

The only picture I have of my brother is a picture of him, Cathy and me, holding Grammy awards at a souvenir shop in Universal Studios. So the theme is Asian and it acknowledges my brother and all the anthro work he's done in the east.

I think I'll check out for now.

(I stopped writing because I had finally arrived.)

And am HERE now.

Where shall I go from here Camille?

Mother's Day

"All of Us" she wrote

On packages outgrown.

Churning tilled soil sown

"Hoed rows of broken backs," they said about her.

[The people that milled in and about. Blessing themselves

Once at the altar and once upon leaving.]

It seemed they always had nice things to say

- especially on the seventh day.

Even when cherry blossoms fell out of bloom

-having waited so long to be anointed with rain.

[In the dry season, when the ground is mostly air-born.]

When the particles and scents that trace pieces of her memory come to bear.

Swept as they are into every unseen corner.

Resting, as it were, lightly on a mantle or shuffled under many outward feet.

Matted into place with the design of the carpet.

A piece of one Christmas or one birthday.

A tag.

A one-liner.

A memento.

"All of Us" growing -changing

Sipping pace of re-arranging

Moving faces with different names

have played these games.

A dusted shelf lies empty. Most words spoken find a written place so unwelcome. Forgotten.

Forgot this place.

Where memory coaxes a voice out of the scrap and onto a page.

(An Album.)

"I think as others grow older, they come back here to reclaim their

pictures. Taking them from one place or another, until pieces of here get over there. Pieces from here disappear..."

Home becomes wider than the back door and the scent of this kitchen.

Becomes less familiar than the echoes of the cooks that came and went.

The gossip at the back step and the greetings in the garden.

"At night, most of all...I shall miss the sound of the sea. This sea. This Atlantic.

The sound buried beneath the hum of the air-conditioner next door and the whir of Autumn crickets..."

In Japan, it won't be the same. A different water with a different voice.

Even this voice now changes.

As do "All of Us."

On a night when a silent moon swallowed the clouds and dew refused to form on the grasses, we tossed and turned in our bed struggling with ourselves. Transcendence is irresponsible. Smoking cigarettes is not breathing. Standing on two feet is a dizzy affair. There is no relaxation in sleep that does not come. Restlessness.

Agitated caffeine structures consciousness in a jittery procession. Ant-like futility feasting on forgotten and insignificant dregs. Patches of silence name themselves and shadow the rustling leaves it chases down the street.

Cold trills tap the inner side of breath and freeze the pulse beneath the mind.

Caught in a mixed instant, a ghost slips by and the past presents itself:

There's a shattering wind swept up in a kite spitting its tail.

Are the reeds listening to what we see?

Can they sing what we touch?

Faraway calls a slumbering tide. Coast to coast, we but between. Rocked in a cradle of changing uncertainty. Precision gleans off a moving horizon. The plane of indifference shifts its subjectivity to reflect back its own stare.

My brother sat in the Hewadori of Manila, amongst the Flower Brigade feeding rebel troops that had sought refuge in the throngs of People Power. The Marcos Regime was coming to a halt. A revolution of people had begun.

Caught in the throngs, he wore a necklace made of barbed wire. Like a

crown of thorns. My grandmother tried to pull him from the crowd by that cord.

They both bled.

She fled to safety.

My brother in Cambodia, walks elephants peacefully through the forest.

At times afraid of sniper fire. Last year, he caught fish with his hands from mud puddles. This year, he fasts in the mountains with a group of renegade Buddhist monks. Though this time, he did not cut his hair.

He writes me in Japan. Amused at my encounters, finding companionship

half-way around the world. Tells me, when you say "I enjoy the international maturity mixed with diplomatic sensibility," I can't tell whether you're talking about your friend, or about yourself.

It must have been both.

It was how we both met.

I performed at a night club in Manila. I played Elton John Hits. "Daniel, my brother, you are older than me.

Do you still feel the pain of the scars that won't heal ?"

After the applause, my brother pulls me aside. "That was far too serious."

Later that Christmas, he pulls me aside again:

"...taken to the Crying Place,

Now that's a line."

Oni-san wa ki o tsukete kudasai.

Take Care my brother.

Ima, Demo (But now...)

Windy days are what spark my thoughts out here in Japan. Especially now, with the multi-colored leaves chattering as they follow wisps of smoke up - foregrounding the humble mountains. Sometimes, I actually forget that they sit there. Everyday. Quiet and immense. The sudden cold turning one a bit more inward. Except when the small futon is shared, or the occasional sunny warm days prompts one to put all the laundry out in one shot and sit reflecting on it from the totem-matted floor.

But it's the dreams that get scared up the most. Especially on windy days. Especially on groggy mid-mornings when the flapping laundry assumes subtle ghost-like hues - dancing on the veranda while the rough and tumble of the neighborhood dogs await the 5 am morning call.

Morning whispers are close in my ears and it seems I'm almost always up

before the alarm. In time to fall back asleep and sleep through it. But lately, thoughts and afterthoughts of scenes mix in with my dreams. Pieces of films I've worked on and the half scripts and scrawls of notebooks fading away...

Last night, I had the dream again.

Apparently, I had died.

St. Peter was taking me on a tour of heaven. (I have a brother named Peter. I haven't seen him in several years. Amazingly, while I'm out here in Japan, I'm somewhat closer to him. He, the Southeast Asian Anthropologist living for the last two years on the Thai-Cambodian Border.)

So, I'm on a tour of heaven. It's so Dante-like. And so specifically perfect. Like, if you want time to read all the books you didn't have time to when you were alive, there's a room for that. You sit there. You read. If you wanted to learn the guitar, there's a room for that. You sit. You play guitar. Cooking ? Running ? Singing ? Whatever. There are places for that. You go there. You do that.

It's all a bit absurd. And then we come to the end of the tour. St. Peter turns around and asks, "So where would you like to stay?"

[Jump Cut to the story I'm working on now...]

There was this monk, who upon witnessing several tragedies, looked about him and saw much violence, unrest, and turmoil. It was all rattling inside him and there was no PEACE. So he stepped inward and shut his eyes for several years. Kept them closed until his mind settled and he could think clearly about how to deal with all this bad karma.

One day - his day of enlightenment - his friends brought him a new born butterfly. On that day, he opened his eyes to see a lightning flash of color spreading its wings.

The words flowed as he spoke the Dharma. So intense, he went blind. Enlightened.

[Fade Out]

I'm taking down notes about a friend of my professor's. (My bio book is half filled with diagrams and equations, and anecdotes.) We're supposed to be talking about MRI, PET tomography and brain scanning, but he's relating this story about a friend with a detached retina. Some doctors performed re-connective surgery and his friend, blind at birth, remembers at 17, his first experience of sight. (After class, I return to the editing room.)

[Through the VIEWFINDER in SOFT FOCUS]

In my dream there was this one special place. Up in the crags of a mountain. Out there on a precipice. Out there, an old man sat/stood facing out from the cliff into the wind. Silent.

St. Peter asks, "Where will you stay ?"

"That place. Up there. What place is that ?"

"That place," he says, "is the crying place."

There's just one more thing...

"In heaven, St. Peter took me to the crying place.

He asked me for my eyes."

Changing Lanes

It was the same kind of recurring sound. Bringing up with it a piece of memory in the patches and spaces between. Like clouds foretelling Thunder, and that sharp moment of pain - reckoning the flash of Lightning.

In the August heat of days gone by, there were rushes of Cricket songs and a fragment of a half finished conversation joining the sparks in the sky.

"I came here to air out my memories. And I did. Every one of them. I'm not sure what effect that has in the long run. But nowadays, I run into the problem of having things begin to repeat."

If that was the word for this place. Repetition was worth saying again. And again.

Nothing changes here, just a rise and fall of a million attitudes and inflections. A love and hate for lack of KNOWING anything deeper than things that alter back and forth between their binary poles. Lacking center.

And as the News Dailies come in with their talk of the ever dropping dollar, there isn't much of pounds and pence to hit that rock hard level of modern uncertainty. Like fissures whose very designs are their only remarkable feature. That how we break up things is in turn what is so defining about us. Is how we identify ourselves.

I find in my every increasing talks at railways and ports, at airplane lounges and bus stations. In shared taxis and overhangs in the rain. In crowded lunch rooms and quiet reflection pools. On trails up the mountain and roadway sides to greater highways. All these spaces and places that people flow through here - the same story, the same look of

accepted LOSTNESS in the resolved face of journeying.

We don't look for home anymore - nor pine for something that isn't beneath our feet. Happy that the earth is that flat to sustain that sort of short termed plodding. No promises longer than a paycheck, a postage stamp, a phone bill.

My happiest moment, when the students gather round to sit next to me in the grass. Sometimes quietly, sometimes piously mimicking a bald-headed monk burping his intoned mantra. After a few moments of laughter, we calm down. Become absorbed in the ant traffic through the leaves and rocks - and the rolling sound of the invisible traffic down through the last clearing.

With not enough words for a dialogue, there is more than enough time for a conversation. One in which YOU are more there than your words. Rather the opposite of more mature patterns of politeness - where proper words proceed ALL, and having nothing to say leaves one embarrassed at being there at all.

That quality of productive SILENCE is what we too often miss. Amidst the hiss of what we HEED to get AHEAD.

"Did'ya ever think of the cross walk button as a

conversation piece ?"

The PED X-ing as the Last Frontier.

Our regimented Acropolis ?

We spent an hour picking up green pine needles and putting them in a rusted coffee can. It was the same can that last week we used to collect oversized pebbles, and the week before that to collect large nails for pulling up the deep rooted weeds.

I think she spoke more than me, not that I remember everything she said.

Just that the silence could have lasted forever.

Au no jikan At our meeting time

Chikaku ni kokoro Hearts come closer together

Kotoba nai There are no words here.

Remember?

Alas, Penelope...

Who are you sweet familiar memory that dances quite embarrassed in the light ? So familiar in the distance, who in closeness poses, but does not speak. Watching colors blend apart like intoxicated journeys. Following a trip deep into words and beyond silence. Careful to obscure what was meant as its obvious present.

As days turn into nights and pass beyond my forgetfulness, I come again to greet our own recapitulations. In a split of our decision, a glance alone will do. Yet, there were times when your soul breathed across mine. And lightly touching, you reached deep. You remember what it was to swim beneath the lights. To close your eyes and know that it

was all there where you had put it. So careful, so hidden. So obvious. So unspoken.

Like sunsets drifting over arid deserts. Sprawled across an empty horizon in hieroglyphic daze. Spawned in pools of forgotten youth. A sandbox left empty. A fishing hole turned to a mall. A handshake exchanged for a hug...

Shaking, trembling with echoed laughter that bellied up a ponderous moment. Fatigued with the giddiness of our childhood trials. Like roller-skates that spun too long and the kite that flew.

Somewhere between the trace of distance, beyond the spark of time, the gaze has come back to search inside. My eyes are in your head, your heart beats upon my back. And it is this terrifying closeness that cuts breath like a blanket bargaining with the cold.

An open window lets thoughts coldly out into the night. And I retrace my tired path after it. Away. Far away.

Today, I will stay. Today I will come to earth and love it as home. Today I cannot resist your hand. So far away does time fly - taking with it all evidence that only in memory can I ever hope to remember you.

Today and together I'll forget. I'll forget most of this. I'll say whatever the clouds pull across my eyes. And when I close them, I'll be full of promises that vision will set like a trail of breadcrumbs for winter's softness.

Cut adrift, I have become shy again. Words have run away. Soaked deep. Hoping to grow without tenderness, just enchantment.

When the bottled spirit breathed upon the night sky, I flew again - Chasing the lingering warmth of the last time I held you...

Memory. It is always she that is left behind. Alas...

"Who burdens memory, when Penelope remembers ?"

One for the Road

I called to say...

Hello to your machine.

And it called me back to say

"I understand."

I've been on the roller-coaster of renewal decisions. Cramming my mind with the density of alternatives. Last night, at midnight, American University called to congratulate me. "You've been accepted to the Film and Video Program. What's your documentary about ?"

I must have been dreaming.

It's about dreams. A journey/journal of Dreams.

Yesterday I celebrated 2 years with my girlfriend. The irony of course was that I had to call past 11pm for the lower rates, but before midnight so that we could share the same day. The Irony and Paradox of being together AND apart. (My hand trembled as I thought of another year to celebrate three.)

-----Dichotomies. A dichotomy is when you count to THREE to resolve the problems of TWO.

Last night too, I entered Kogenji, a temple on my island that few locals know the traditional name for. - Still less know the Path of Buddha that winds up and behind the mountain by my school. There are several meditation spots and one or two Fudoin. My predecessor told me

that few people know about that place and even less travel it. But every time I've gone up the mountain, I've been greeted by farmers and older people out picking mikan, offering sweet potatoes, or harvesting bamboo. Up there, in the quiet and the wind, I could certainly spend another year.

But down closer to earth, nearer my hearth is Kogenji. I was invited there by the head priest. He's also a professor of Education and Religion in Kyoto, so his invitation to discuss Buddhism was both gracious and academic.

For 5 long hours of Japanese, we poured over the history of Buddhism, methods of meditations and a famous Shinran Parable. - Mostly though, we transferred mystical issues on to a map of New York. - My old home where he had spent several years completing his Masters. Actually, he quit NYU somewhat disillusioned by its methods. And I confessed too that I had failed Buddhism in college.

And I must confess now that at least another hour or so was devoted to touring the grounds and pouring over antiques and relics. He even showed me a corner of the temple that used to be the first elementary school of the town where I teach now. 800 years ago. I saw photos of his parents and ancestry who minded the shop through the years. -And of course there was the traditional observances of other rituals like reciting the NAME, eating mikan, strawberry shortcake, yakiniku, drinking tea and beer. Red-eyed into the night we talked until the stars dimmed and the night lights stopped pulsing.

The parable we read impressed me. I quoted back the Japanese phrase to him in my translated English: You find yourself on a Path as wide as your five senses.

As a Shinri Buddhist, he opened the door-invited me to the PURE LAND of Buddha. And as a Zen student, I asked instead if I could not just sit and dissolve this sensory place.

He politely deferred saying, "Ah yes, Satori."

"Perhaps you are enlightened," he smiled waving his hand.

"Yes, but..."

"Yes. Go and study and come again."

So between the hectic schedules, kanji lists, a peace conference and the Ekiden I couldn't make...juggling renewal, taming elementary kids, developing a phonics teaching plan and sifting through Grad acceptance letters, the parable SITS.

It goes something like this: On a journey, there is a place where two rivers meet. One is a river of Fire flowing south, the other a river of water flowing north. Where they meet, there is a path 5 inches wide heading west. This is the Pure Land Path.

Going, unconcerned where I'm heading,

Holding praying beads (yet another temple present) I recite the 19th vow: amondoufu doubutsu.

And as the Sunday school children laugh, I hear the winds blow again.

"Go west, paradise is there.

You'll have all that you can eat

Of Milk and Honey over there..."

Natalie Merchant-Tigerlily

A Reading from a Praying Mantis to the Grasshopper

A cloud's cheek flushes while sound is held in abeyance. The mind envisions while the mouth revisions. Words form their thoughts as eyes reflect a blank stare. Silent.

Robes drag dusty trails of history beckoning across the bedroom floor. Bedded activity motions desire to fall into pillowed sleep. A warm, stealth death sinks in a skeletal breath. Smiles inwardly, tasting the depths of conscious surfaces.

Blades of grass sweating shimmering dew. A silver stringed sound that pulls taut the windswept arm. Pulls close an approaching hug that shrugs its shoulder in the dreamy dawn scene.

The wood empties. Dampens the note last struck. A candle traces waxy tears away from candlelight. Orange and blue hues cast music into shadows playing upon themselves.

Ivory.

Improvisation.

Impulse.

Sound.

The bubble swirls vision before bursting. A wet ecstasy of realization. Eyes open as closed mind moves on. Enhancing the dance, gestures mimic rhythm, movement mocks stability.

Epilogue

Pandora Betrayed

In off the sidetrack, where lovers used to walk, was a faded matchbox, placed reverently by an unseen hand long ago. One edge was already wet as it dipped into a recent rain puddle, swished back into the rippled mud banks. Its faded insignia of an apple seemed to age things into a timeless but antiqued perspective.

Aaron brushed back the overgrown weeds and peered in. Already the water was seeming into a hole in his sneaker. He felt it squish when he moved his big toe. He caught sight of the matchbox, the treasure he been searching for.

This had been her gift to him. It seemed trivial enough. Yet, it was all of their experiences and times together, captured in that box. On the day when they had first talked about love and became giddy and serious all in the same moment, they had stumbled upon the box and had understood.

The box had been closed. Yet, they knew that their love was exactly identical to the secret within the box. They did not need to see it or conjecture about it. They just knew that they were truly in love.

But time and weakness may often meld curiosity into brazen boldness, and he had thought that there could be no harm in testing the closeness to which he could come to laying open this hidden treasure. Time after time he would peer in close, trying to see through any cracks. He had touched the box, had gone close and listened. He had felt something mysteriously weighty yet ephemeral and he wondered what could be its hidden secret.

It seemed strange to him that such active intimacy should be shrouded in such mystery. He pressed his inquisitiveness to the point of anxiety and an absolute desire to open that damn box. He prodded it with twigs and threw pebbles at it, but it resisted his advances at the expense of growing older and worn out. Still, it would not yield.

And then a strange thing happened. The girl left him. She said that he had hurt her. They no longer seemed to understand this love they had once shared and been. Aaron said that he did not understand.

"That's just it," she said neither angrily nor quite calmly and left.

As she walked away, he shouted after her, "What did I do?" but she did not answer.

That day--today--he found himself by the matchbox again. He was crying out of frustration and out of an immense loneliness. What was he to do? He didn't understand. He reached for the box and became conscious of his love. "If only I could open this, I could understand."

He hesitated for a moment, remembering how he had desired to know what was inside--how his curiosity had become craving. He remembered too how she had said that it was unnecessary for him to open the box. One day it would soon yield on its own.

Out of respect or perhaps colossal fear, he now opened the box part way. Suddenly things happened too fast. Perhaps it was his foot that moved or just a breath of wind, but the water began to move and churn and it began to fill the hole.

The box began to spiral downwards. It was moving too quickly and he could not see in. It sank into the puddle and was lost beneath the surface. Frantically, he thrust his hand into the water and began to thrash it about. He clawed and grabbed and finally raked the box out. It was completely soaked. The red dye on the corner began to trickle onto his hand. It was an awful mess.

Whatever had been inside was now gone. Disgusted with his butchered attempt, he tossed the box aside. Suddenly, he realized something; suddenly he understood.--But she was gone now. Gone--soaking in the rain.

There was a faint trailing mist that floated over the moss-covered growth. Remnant gusts shivered through the tree leaves, shaking oversized tears downward. Echoes of distant rumbling trembled through the earth and the sun, shyly face still touched by a passing sadness, peeked its way through the moving clouds.

I heard her inhale sharply as a cool burst hit us and I pulled her closer. There's nothing so defining as a cold breeze. You really feel where your body ends. You really see how much you cover up under gloves or hats or coats. As if by an exacerbated enumeration of limitations an epiphany of identity can emerge.

But enough for fragmented tangents. I held her hand and that was enough. There were other sounds that began to emerge as the overhead storm passed farther and farther away. A small fury animal poked up its head, shifted some wet and leafy greenery and came out to share our utter amazement of it all.

The sun was completely out now. Everything was slowly shifting from dampness to warmth. Including me. And there--suspended in the fine mist, exactly tailored to textbook definition, was a widely banded rainbow.

I waited for her to catch its beauty--to confirm my experience of utter happiness. She must have understood.

She squeezed my hand and I turned. For a brief second, I saw the flash of her eyes. And suddenly, wound in an embrace, there was only a singular kind of warmth. Warmth, and that incredible rainbow.