0000015

Tackling the Big subjects is a symptom of small ambition. God, World peace, the Good, the meaning of life, all that shit.

Intricate procrastination.

Well, that's my big subject for today...

0000014

I will leave Tokyo. I don't remember whether it was me or my wife who decided - leaving is that important to both of us.

We both play with little fictions of where we'll finally end up (but for the real mean time, we'll end up in England). My wife wants to live in Italy, me the south of France - we, at any rate, dream about a life lived on the continent.

Yes, life is better over there. I speak from experience as a European. There's no place for relativism in my view about this, subjectivity is no shield for Japanese narcissism and their sclerotic bureaucratic character to hind behind. Continental countries are as fucked up as any other place; but at least you can finish work at 5 and don't have to settle for the pastiche version of anything foreign.

It's television - that's what has turned me off Japan. The excellent rainbow skittles world of evening television can't make up for the the god-awful rainbow skittles world of morning television. We have no clue about revolution in Iran, body counts in Mesopotamia, or swine-flu in the Americas from the morning news; instead, we find out which fame craving bimbo has changed her hair, and what that implies for her relationship to other fame craving bimbos. We learn about so and so who has apparently asked so and so to marry him, by all accounts, over our morning cereals poured from stingily small boxes, before we're subjected to where so and so and so and so from the previous month went for their honeymoon, and most importantly - how much it cost. The odd report of a Japanese athlete coming 23rd in the golf, or a case of a Japanese man who kidnapped, raped, tortured, and killed a young school girl gets a mention. Then back to the new release of a single from from an actor that can't act, or sing, but looks very good. I'd say I don't expect the World, but I do. And I won't apologize for it.

Sooner or later you see the morning in the night. The game shows and variety shows are populated with the same maddening peacocks as the breakfast shows and gossip corners. Evening dramas have as little sense for drama as the celeb stories of the ante-meridian; late night comedians wear suits but their bargain basement hair dye and cheapo colloquialism start to feel as depressing as the gaudy perspex sets and disney-baroque design of 10a.m. telly. You begin to sense it's all part of the same thing: what Japan thinks the good life is.

It's a hideous vision.

TV is probably as violently bad on the continent too. I actually think not. But, at least in Florence you have the buildings to look at. In Provence the pastoral landscape. In Surrey the rolling hills and the odd silver ghost. There is escape outdoors, or, in the worst case scenario, consolation in properly portioned cereal boxes indoors.

Step outside in Tokyo and find no escape. Yocals in Donald Duck tracksuits walk about with Louis Vuitton hand bags; Legoland residences and machine-made entrances fill up every possible eyeline; the sides of the street are a notice board of dumb smiling models advertising banks, pouting gay-boys advertising manly hair gel, and wordy cartoons ordering some anal civic duty. White car upon white car passes by sun faded advertising from 2 years ago in the empty over made boulevards of the provinces; in the city proper, sports car upon sports car trundles by thick columns of people walking about shopping streets not knowing where the fuck they are going - Ferraris howling at 5mph as their 40 year old Japanese drivers in polo shirts with pleading Italian flags sown on the arm steer them between zippy delivery trucks parked in the road. Trees are a nuisance; cockroaches and rats run riot amongst the prized concrete which store owners water daily in the summer - never even offering a splash for the cleavered curbside bushes. Squads of policemen guard guarded buildings, work-shy gangs of Africans and over dressed low-tier criminals guard busy wank parlors. Supermarkets wrap individual vegetables in plastic. Japan's horrible insides are all over its out.

How can a lasting happiness here be possible...

The good life for Japan is comprised in wearing a pink cotton jerkin over a mall-store golf shirt and owning a fake-leather massage chair. Having a battered wife make you green tea, served in a faux pottery cup on a look-a-like lacquer plastic saucer. Mickey Mouse toilet mats and cookie cutter cars with doors precision engineered to make a nice sound when they whap shut. Perfect handwriting and indecisive words, a degree from the top university and a safe job as an automaton. The idea that Japan is really the best of all nations.

I don't want it. Neither does my wife.

0000013

Be honest: learning to lose is a lesson that never gets done. The things we talk about when we talk about losing are "losing is a tough lesson", or "learning to lose is one the hardest things to do." Well, words like that are the easiest things to do; and most people using them haven't switched off the truism autopilot long enough to have done any learning at all.

Yes, I support Man. Utd, and yes, yesterday we lost...

But no, I don't pretend that I've learnt some lesson; I don't pose with my hands on my hips and talk about how hard it was to get over, and how I accept it and it was a tough lesson, but you know what - I learnt it. That seems so condescending! What would I really be saying with that: actually I'm the real winner because I've gained something from loss, which as the nominal winner my opponent never can. And what would I be reasoning: there is more dignity in hardship than glory, therefore there's a truer glory found in loss than in victory. Instead of this pleading egoism; why not just say "I lost, but I want to win - even now." That's the only intellectually honest answer I think.

There's a case for dignity being found in hardship, from which the possibility of meaningful victory can follow in defeat. That's not a paradox as long as the material victory is proven subordinate to this suddenly proposed "true" one. But come on, does material victory not being the bottom line in sport really sound right? Sport is about the final score. Sport is like The Highlander - and as The Kurgan used to say: there can only be one. Then he got his head cleavered off; it doesn't matter if he deserved it or not.

I could approach this in a slightly different way and say claiming some greater victory from a loss (in sport) negates your own efforts in a childish way. After fighting for the best part of half a year through the Champions League, 11 men polarized in one intent: to never make a mistake, to never give up, to methodically knock competition out of the way one by one, and make your way to the final game, then win it - to propose that the sheer cumulative weight of all this effort and work, not to mention the driving dogma that powered it, is counter balanced, and in fact outweighed, with an idea like "the true glory is in loss and learning of unnamed lessons that are intrinsic in the experience" is... well, it's the voice of a cry baby who can't get what he wants - and has invented a metaphysical wet blanket for comfort. If the loss really was so valuable, so much battle wouldn't have been put up to avoid it. We should be badder losers.

So then, is it worth forever holding a grudge, never accepting defeat, shunning the party who bettered you, and swearing vendetta. I think that'd be close to the virtuous response, but obviously too insane to hold water. As above, the honest thought, at least for me, after losing is --I lost, but I want to win...even now-- and I think to avoid slipping into Nietzsche style macho man ethics, like those mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph, tempering this thought with a little more humanity is the correct course. Just coming out with ersatz humility like "it was tough, but I learnt a valuable lesson" straight after losing leads nowhere. What ultimate lesson is learnt from loss? The only one I can think of is strategic: should have done this, made this and this mistake, mustn't do that next time, etc. There's no human lesson in there, where do "losing is a tough lesson" and "learning to lose is one of the hardest things to do" come from? I can't say, and I can't see the extrastrategic lesson either. Most of all though, I can't see the application of all this learning by the people who claim it. Watching them, it seems their lesson is that you have to say you learnt a lesson after a loss - it feels an empty gesture to me.

Two things are for sure though: losing sucks; and you're going to lose in your life. The strangest thing to say now is "get used to it." That would be contradictory: to get used to it would mean to reduce the suckiness, or the pain, of loss, maybe even to the point of non-register, certainly to the point of acquiescence; but we know, consciously or subconsciously, that losing sucks. It really does. So you're never really going to get used to it. What you get used to is that it's going to happen, and it's going to happen to you. That's a certainty worth being ready for, and perhaps this is where previous strategic recognitions taken from loss can help (to reduce losing results to their minimum frequency).

Well that's starting to sound a little more lesson like, but there's still no requirement for words such as tough or hardest things to do. There's nothing difficult in wanting to do better next time.

Until someone figures out a philosophical use in losing, I'm content for it to be metaphysically empty. I begrudge the winners their victory and wish, at their expense, I was in their shoes; but temper that with the thought that you have to call a loss for what it is. This is not a lesson, it's common natural sense. Nothing deeper can be derived. No matter how many times you try.

0000012

I don't know it just seems very Japanese to me. People in a club all facing the same way. Waiting for instructions.

This is just my feeling, but being in a Japanese club is pretty much the same thing as being in a high school disco again. You don't want to just let loose, you can't: no one, obviously including you, really knows how to dance, and everyone is looking at every minute movement of everyone else - instantly latching onto any tiny occurrence to avoid the frank fact that you are in a dancehall and aren't dancing. Oh, shit, look, look, he just talked to her; hey, oh my god, check out that dude's clothes - oh ha ha, etc.

You have to be immune to embarrassment, or mind-boggled, fucked-up on some kind of drugs to dance here. So, unless you're in either of those categories, you're stuck with pretending to be ultra-cool. Pretending to be some kind of dance deity, who doesn't dance because it would sully your excellence to do so in the company of these spackers.

It is, in all senses, projection: loading all your own shortcomings onto innocent bystanders and unconnected third parties. You become so self-conscious, you can't even lift a drink to your mouth without purposefully planning how you're going to do it beforehand. You project your complete attempt at being the shit-hottest person in the club - gimmie-five slap and grasping casual acquaintances like they were war buddies you went through life-and-death with, twisting your shoulders back and forth to the music in between shouting mundane conversation about have you seen so and so into someone's ear, and nudging the tip of your tongue out between your lips and slightly shaking your head in a "no no no" gesture like you're really feeling this beat when you have nothing else to do - not realizing your projection just makes you look shit. Not shit-hot. Everyone else doing the same thing has noticed so, and is talking about you: oh, look, look...

In the European parties I've been to, 90% of the clubbers are in those exempt categories mentioned above. By drugs brains are clubbed into jibbering wrecks, while bodies jiggle away; or it's people who are just totally incognizant of a sense of shame. That's fine, that's how it should be I suppose. They both dance, they both let loose.

Whenever I go to a Japanese party though, and let me emphasize whenever I go and not Japanese party, the demographic seems to be turned on its head. 10% are raving crazy people, or raving crazy people; and 90% are sad wall flowers projecting prissy ubermensch aura. In their own Japanese way.

I'm a sad wall-flower. And a poser, and a charade.

I do do it in my own way though.

I won't say "but at least I own up to it", because I think everyone who puts on the aires knows inside that they are crap, and so, in a way, own up to it. But, I am prepared to flog myself publicly on this blog post. Why do I do that? (not why do I flog myself publicly, although, come to think of it, it may have a connection... Anyway...)

As mentioned before there's a definite ego defense mechanism at play here - or several. Projection, isolation (see this blog), and perhaps regression too. Psychoanalytical exploration isn't what I'd like to do though, for one I don't know how, and for two, if anyone actually reads this, they wouldn't appreciate it as much as realtalk.

The realtalk reasons for why I, and loads of others like me, do it is... well, it's easier than talking a chance. Easier than letting loose. Or we're just wankers. But, giving us the benefit of the doubt, mainly fear of letting loose. And still... no, that doesn't yet feel like the whole story though does it. It is something more than just stage-fright, although this is a huge factor; I think on reflection our frustration at the social norm of clubbing being what young adults and cool dudes do is the deeper reason.

We have to get into a little psychobabble now, and mention "reaction" defenses: taking up the opposing view to the latent one, the one domestic, in you. We hate clubs, and clubbers, yet being put inside a club, we decide to out-club the clubbers. We don all their anti-mainstream manerisms, and turn them into an anti-dance weapon, an anti-anti-mainstream death ray, then launch it back at the funky club going clubbers in an ultimate strike of too-cool-for-school ennui, and nightlife high ground snobbery.

If we don't like clubs, why go. Well there it is, but it's the done thing isn't it - like those ski-type wrap around sunglasses in Western society: every fucker has a pair, and every fucker wears them. We just go with the flow. Because if we didn't, those of us who have a mild dislike for clubs would be stuck with dinner parties, and the theatre. Minus those near and dear to us. And then what's the point. So we pretend to be up for the club 110%, over compensating for how not up for the club we are, and go and have a horrible time. Laughing at people who have the balls to dance, just pissing away all our money on pretentious liquor in void-filling chain-drinking, and making shit conversation that goes nowhere, right down the earhole of someone we barely know.

Imagine that in a second language, and you have club night in Japan. For me.

0000011

There she goes. My wife. My life.

I kissed her for the first time 2 years, 7 months, and 21 days ago. And it still feels the same when I kiss her now. Every touch, every smile, every kiss, still works like a drug on me. The more I get, the more I want. Every minute, every day, every time I'm with her.

Her loveliness is a quiet flood rising and rolling over me, washing away all my petty idiosyncracies in its surge, sweeping it all away like broken furniture. There's nothing better than being carried by this billowing current, gliding through life on the heaving force of natural momentum. On love.

Me and my love are going to have a baby.

Besides all the banality, is it a boy, is it a girl, names, places, and people, besides all that, there is us. There is family we are about to begin. The beginning we are about to board. I think about it and realize how beautiful life can be.

3 years ago I was just some guy. I had some money, I had a "cool" job, I had a lifestyle. And it was all just broken furniture. "The unexamined life is not worth living" isn't true - it's "the unlived life isn't worth examining." I'm not some guy anymore. I'm a husband, a father, a lover: what I do now means something. One kiss above a rooftop in Tokyo, one kiss overlooking the warm August night, made my life mean something.

It's a beautiful life.

0000010

 Just married. Yes, I'm married now - joined on Valentine's Day.

This is a big step in a new life:

- Quit job...

- ...to do creative writing ever-ri-day

- married my love

- move to UK end of year

- buy house

- get job

- have kids

- learn to be a parent, a husband, a decent man

- die happy

looking forward to it.

0000009

I quit my job yesterday...

My Boss didn't take it very well.

I feel like some kind of criminal for taking my life into my own hands...which is silly. But that's the way things made you feel around my ex-office: management kick your ass all day, tell you a thousand times this is work, this isn't for fun, so get serious god damn it; tell you you don't really have much chance in the real world, tell you to stop acting like this is a friends club and not a business.

When I handed in my resignation, my Boss told me he couldn't believe I'd betrayed him in this way - he thought we were friends, were all my years of work "just a job?"

We are friends. It was just a job.

I hope he can see that someday.