I suppose that the net sum of all of Currie’s lyrical admonishments was an impression that the pursuit of love would  yield prolonged misery, and yet would somehow still seem worth the trouble. To be sure, he never actually said it was worth it. But when you follow a guy’s lyrical career and fifteen years later he’s still talking about the same stuff, you make the logical leap.

When you go in with that tempered expectation, though, it becomes a very different kind of game. I may be admitting too much to say that before long, the breakups felt more romantic than the relationships, in the same way that scars become symbols of glory even when you lost the fight.

Maybe I was just bored. Maybe mid-’80s Glasgow and early-whatever-we’re-agreeing-that-decade-was-called suburban America weren’t all that different. Not that I went out looking for new scars artificially like some dudes do with tattoos. But again I cite the kid with the severed arm.

There’s one.

So I guess when you stack anything I’ve done in my entire life up to this little cherub, the stack doesn’t reach half his height. And really we’re all just molecules floating endlessly and aimlessly through space.

But we Western young men for our part do grow bored quite easily, and hence rock ‘n roll, hence punk rock, hence post-punk rock, hence this blog.

The few more romantic tunes on the “lower-case days” album (because, you see, it’s “del Amitri” then and only then) had a sort of capitulating acceptance of nature to their lyrics. “Hammering Heart,” as I previously said, proclaimed, “Hey love is stupid, but I’m not bigger than it.”

Similar in hypothesis but different in tone were “Former Owner” and “Deceive Yourself (In Ignorant Heaven).” The former (ha, that’s neat) laments the imperviousness of people’s baggage, with a simple metaphor that, I feel, is really quite good. “The former owner always keeps the keys.”

Lyrics:

So who was first? Obviously not me.
She’s locked up inside herself
And I can’t get anything free
So won’t somebody tell me please
Why the former owner always keeps the keys?

There’s no bubbles to burst
No bursting out crying nor dying of thirst
She’s utterly tied to somebody else
And it seems he got there first
And no, I’m not untying
The reins around her neck that she feels
And I won’t try to prise out of her the truth anymore
When she lies about the things that she sees
Because the former owner always keeps the keys
There’s no calling “Come here, you’re necessary to me”
There’s no excitement in her face when I implore
“Corrupt me and confess to me some more”
And when we hear trees falling
Or see people disappearing
Her emotions won’t be reached or released
Because the former owner is keeping the keys

Like a ticket inspector running for a bus
Irony’s revenge surrounds us
And it’s ironic that he promised you, he’d never let you go
When he’s left you used-up and disturbed
And I said, “Just as the early bird catches the worm
The early cat catches the bird”
But that former owner is keeping his word

The opening line has an uncharacteristic, leaning-again-the-windowsill sort of wistfulness to it that immediately sets up the song as one of the more vulnerable moments of, hm, I guess Currie’s entire career. But particularly of this record. Absent is the confrontational sinisterness found throughout the majority of it. But still, Currie seems to conclude that despite being aware of the misfortune that will befall him, it is a natural inevitability to which he must succumb. “Just as the early bird catches the worm, the early cat catches the bird.”

“Deceive Yourself (in Ignorant Heaven)” continues that capitulating theme with its title alone. If it weren’t for the title and one curious middle verse, this would come off as the album’s one and only true love song (which would remain a rarity throughout the singer’s entire career). But as it stands, it fits right in with the rest of the album. “This is self-deception; but it’s heaven all the same.”

Lyrics:

The World 
and the surrounding stars 
might change completely in the space of an hour
but not an eclipse of the sky nor a colliding car 
will turn me back now that I’ve come this far. 
Not a shotgun blast nor a shooting star 
will bring her down from her stubborn tower. 

It’s a kind of madness, it’s a kind of sin 
To live in the state of mind I’ve been living in 
Her face imprinted on my sight 
Her voice resounding in my skull at night. 
If there is a living goddess on Earth 
It must be her from the heaven highlife 
It takes this girl to realise what you’re worth 
and I’m worth nothing if she’s worth more than my life. 

But there’s more to me than simple devotion 
I won’t just crawl at her feet and utter a plea 
And if she refused I wouldn’t walk into the ocean 
Just because my world was left all out at sea. 

So it was in this cafe when we eventually met 
And I wished I had sunglasses or smoked cigarettes 

The World 
and the surrounding stars 
They changed completely in the space of an hour 
When over the table and two cups of tea 
She told me she felt the same way about me. 
And not an eclipse of the sky nor a colliding car 
could have shaken our attention from each other’s face 
As we both stepped down from our stubborn towers 
We jumped into the ignorant heaven that is the lover’s place.

Tonally, both songs fall most fully under Currie’s much-later description of this early work as “complete teenage diary stuff,” while I feel that description doesn’t do justice to the album as a whole–that or I don’t give teenage diaries enough credit. I do feel there’s a sort of reverse wisdom or insightfulness we have when we’re young and fresh, because we simply think and feel more intensely before becoming complacent to replace these experiences little by little with drink and convenience. I guess that’s the upside of being young and bored.

I suppose young Currie probably intended this album’s lyrics to be criticisms of human nature, but there’s a sort of zen-like positivity to their frankness. Embrace the suffering, because we all must suffer. Indeed.

Afterthoughts:

“And it’s ironic that he promised you he’d never let you go
When he left you used-up and disturbed”

Is it? This line always bugged me.

There’s a sort of momentum to the rhyming and imagery in “Deceive Yourself” that I’ve always liked a lot.

“But not an eclipse of the sky nor a colliding car
will turn me back now that I’ve come this far.
Not a shotgun blast nor a shooting star
will bring her down from her stubborn tower.”

. . . .

“And not an eclipse of the sky nor a colliding car 
could have shaken our attention from each other’s face 
As we both stepped down from our stubborn towers 
We jumped into the ignorant heaven that is the lover’s place.”

I also love that the final line and the music that accompanies are so climactic. “We’ve arrived.” Not half bad for a bunch of bored kids.

There were two things that annoyed me as a teenager: disaffected, cynical teenagers; and just about everything else. The irony of this may have been lost on me at the time, but without  emotional contradiction, adolescence is just one long series of trips to the shoe store. Other annoyed teens in my midst drowned out their own screaming brains and gasping hearts with slacked expressions and screamo punk that to them was the only real music, or else radio rap so over-produced, under-thought, and distant from anything that could be defined in good conscience as music that it would form a glaze of apathy over them, hardening with time.

I couldn’t stand a cliché. At least, not once I’d noticed it. The frustration for me came from lack of recourse. Every type of emotional reaction felt cliché to me. I couldn’t stand the scripted timbre of a person’s voice when they’d say things like, “Apparent-LY!” Or worse, the lines peers would lift verbatim from TV and movies and apply to their own banal lives. “You don’t understand me!” or “You’ve ruined my life!” Fuck off, your life is fast food and field hockey. Some little kid somewhere just lost his arm and now he’s got to find a way to work the fields without it.

Years later, I would conclude that we are all artists working in a medium of scripts, that these clichés are sometimes unavoidable but can be reinvented at will, just as actors rewrite their own lines without rewriting them. But that was years later.

At the time, I was frustrated to find ways to express myself freshly. I strove to find others who did so as well, be they contemporary comedians or musicians of ancient yore. Without question, this is what drove me to study Japan, and also what drove me to obsess over what seemed to most a rather unremarkable UK rock band. Of course, it was the mystique of these things that compelled me, but mystique is what you get when you only see the shore of a new land. The harshest lesson of my time in Japan was that Japan and likely every other place in the universe are just other places with the same trappings. I who was so obsessed with not locking myself to a rail, had become a complacent JR (Japan Railway) patron.

These, though, were lessons which came much later. In the summer of 2000, and indeed the surrounding several years, Scottish band Del Amitri was, as I say, my huckleberry. Their first album, completely different from any of their later ones, was also completely different from anything else I’d ever heard. Deeply alien, and yet more relatable than any of the music with which I was involuntarily saturated daily (man, it really was like being a born-again Christian!). Vocalist Justin Currie has said in recent history that the album was “just complete teenage diary stuff,” (see ~13:20 of this video) although a separate interview from shortly after the album’s release  reveals that a fair amount of it was embellished or written from an imagined point of view. But then, maybe that is teenage diary stuff.

—-

“Somebody said that all the lyrics are revenge trips against old girlfriends,” blushes Justin. “Actually, very few are intended to sound like that. There are lots of personal snippets thrown in there, but half of them are about fictitious people. For example, the chap who’s singing ‘Keepers’ certainly isn’t me, but the chap on ‘I Was Here’ is.”

—-

“Heard Through a Wall,” I figured, was probably somewhere in between, but it was the odd, brightly invigorating musicality of that song which initially captivated me. The subsequent track, “Hammering Heart,” however, seemed firmly planted in the vocalist’s reality, and certainly spoke to mine.

Lyrics: 

I suppose love lives in a dustbin behind the garden wall;
You have to grovel on the ground and be pretty disgusting to find it at all
And I suppose that it grows on you, standing there with no clothes on
And I suppose because there’s beautiful girls in this town, I’ll stay here ’til I’ve chosen one
I suppose life’s like a hunt, really, the hounds have fun until the fox gets bagged
And not one girl in this town will ever fall in love with me–they’ll get dragged.

Her heart speaks to me, says the room, the room, the room beneath her dress
And I suppose that it beats for me, like a hammering moon pulling tides through her chest
Suppose she says that she owes me all that she owns and all that she is
It seems to me, I suppose, that her heart’s not enough and her love is a swizz

And so, suppose love lives in a mansion
How in hell do I get over the wall??
But if my rope’s not stretched the right tension, I won’t cross this Grand Canyon at all
And I suppose that it grows like a tumor,
Spreads like a rumor like the grass grows an inch in every day
And I suppose that before I even know it,
The time will start flowing and the drum beneath my jacket will say: 
“You know you need her everyday.”

There’s the cliché of “love,” and then there’s the inevitability of getting dragged into it. When you’re young, or even when you’re less young, it’s easy to come down hard on yourself for buying into what you know with your brain to be a sterilely overproduced concept. But your brain can’t well stop your heart from yearning any better than it can stop your literal heart from beating. Fight all you like, but you’ll never quell your own biological appetites, unless of course you self-destruct. And that’d be just as silly.

The song seems to me to be a begrudging acceptance of one’s own human weakness–”This is dumb. But it’s science.” The positive outcome of this kind of meditation, of course, is that you can at least try and figure out how to make something you find dumb less dumb.

Later that year, I began my first romantic relationship. It was pretty dumb. When it ended a short while later, I was so immediately and thoroughly consoled by a headful of Justin Currie lyrics that it practically felt like cause to celebrate–”Now I know.”

=========

Afterthought: There was an alternative take of “Hammering Heart” which included an eerie alternate ending with additional lyrics

Additional lyrics:

The time will start flowing and the drum beneath my jacket will say:
“She is the moon.”
“She is the house.”
“She is the moon and she showed you her face.”
“She is the house and she opened the gate.”

I quite like this version.

The summer of 2000 was pivotal. Having survived the Y2K scare unscathed, I found myself free to explore the spoils of adolescence, which lay buried thinly beneath the more oft-publicized layer of adolescent frustration–I couldn’t yet grow a decently Hasidic beard;  I couldn’t yet adequately express myself to a girl despite wanting to to any girl; I couldn’t yet act upon my ambitions solely by my own means. But I had another kind of freedom that only young people have. Adolescence is, to be sure, a magical and privileged time.

Over the two years of high school that had preceded, the Scottish band Del Amitri had wormed its way into my heart as the Official Band of Greg’s Adolescence. I listened to them the way a born-again Christian listens to Christian things. I quoted them in day-to-day life the way a collegiate quotes things by mandate in term papers even where no quote belongs. I did sit-ups to their CDs at night, and greeted the day to them, albeit begrudgingly, in the harsh high school mornings. Forced cups of orange juice burned like upset bile, I tell you, but the Dels’ sweet, maudlin melodies rang true and filled me with emotion beyond my own means as a middle-class American teenager.

Frontman Justin Currie’s lyrics were my formless guide into manhood. Some Jewish kids had bar mitzvahs. I instead discovered “Change Everything” and then did so. I was only half Jewish.

By the summer of 2000, I’d discovered and internalized the bulk of the band’s repertoire stretching from 1987 to the present, spanning four albums and some fifty B-side tracks. This was the tail end of the Napster era, but I’d spent months scouring the ether for anything from this band that I could find. It was the first time I’d ever used the internet to truly feel like I was accessing other parts of the world. The kinds of rarities I was finding online were things no American could have just had in his or her record collection. I was P2Ping with Scots, Germans, and beyond to fulfill my interests. The more I discovered, the more addicted I became to discovery. The quality of these songs that didn’t even exist in any tangible form in America made me realize that sometimes it’s worth delving beyond what’s presented at face; an important lesson for a young man.

Fred Partington’s Daughter

↑ This was the kind of cleverly touching track that was nonchalantly slipped on the back end of vinyl singles in the UK, never to see the light of the day in the States had it not been for the intensely illegal efforts of the Napster community.

I’m not sure if it was the creepy, unplaceably old-looking cover art or the lack of online discussion about it that deterred me to that point from investigating the band’s eponymous debut album, but I hadn’t. It was the last remaining destination for conquest. In the summer of 2000, I finally arrived. My brother and I had gotten in the habit of making pilgrimages to the now-irrelevant Tower Records. Though it would soon go the way of Napster (which would soon go the way of itself), Tower still had a few full moons of life left in her as the premiere location to discover “CDs,” “DVDs,” and “Generation Xers” with “body piercings.”

On one particular day late in the summer of 2000, we went on such a pilgrimage, and though I had passed it up countless times in the past, this time I stopped on Del Amitri’s “del Amitri.” I picked it up, examined it.

There it is. A stark contrast from the entire rest of the band’s catalog, where every album featured a photograph of the band looking maudlin, muttonchops flapping in the artificial photostudio breeze. What is this even a picture of? What is that creepy little dude in the corner for? Why is the image completely devoid of color save for the woman’s dress and the man’s pants? Why is the woman in that position? Is the man forsaking his live, fellatio-ready girlfriend for a ghost? What gender is the ghost? Is that a ghost? Or is it some sort of Japanese nun rendered Ukiyo style? Why would he forsake fellatio for a Japanese nun? That certainly isn’t in line with the band’s platform. Are the photographs of people on the TV photographs of the people on TV?

Nearly thirteen years later, I still don’t know what the relation is between this piece of art and anything ever.

The backside of the jewel case revealed an equally odd and alien track list, in no way reminiscent of anything else I had seen from the band.

1. Heard Thru a Wall
2. Hammering Heart [Yes. Yes.]
3. Former Owner
4. Sticks and Stones, Girl
5. Deceive Yourself (in Ignorant Heaven)
6. I Was Here
7. Crows in the Wheatfield
8. Keepers
9. Ceasefire
10. Breaking Bread

While the rest of the band’s repertoire had seemed vaguely “Scottish”–as my untraveled mind perceived “Scottishness”–by comparison to the American music it was clearly emulating, this album, even at first glance and prior to first listen, seemed to draw its influences from a quaintly eerie place with which I was wholly unfamiliar.

As a rare privilege my brother let me immediately put the CD on in the car; I’m not really sure why he allowed it this particular time. Either he noticed my exceptional level of excitement, or he too was curious about this oddity.

The opening of “Heard Thru a Wall” was immediately different than any other Del Amitri song I’d heard, of which there were about 100. It started with a lone guitar, clean as clarity, descending a scale. And again. And again, now with a comping secondary guitar. And again. And now with drums. And again. And again. And again. And now with a lead guitar melody, syrupy as sap. And again. And now vocals, unhusky enough to make me doubt it was even the same vocalist. And yet, the finest threads of familiarity.

“Like it or not, you’ll see my face soon,
I’ll force my way up into your room!
The things I say will soon make you swoon:
I’ll point to the sun and say it’s the moon.”

This was the black, cynical, and bafflingly omniscient humor that had pervaded all of Del Amitri’s lyrical career.

“So: You needn’t fret, I’ll get in your life yet,
Make you sit back and enjoy the touch of a boy
Lie over relaxed with your hands in your lap.
Just give me some time so I can work on your spine.”

Fast, frantic, unpredictable, and yet infectious. If you really examine the lyrics, this may be one of the most sinister songs of all time, and yet all of the instruments weave together to create something vibrant and uplifting. By the song’s culmination, you’re sea-deep in a tidal wave of vocal harmonies and sunshine licks.

As a debut album for a band with whom I was otherwise thoroughly versed, it was comparable to rooting through old photographs of your father only to discover he was once a bounty hunter or something. It was definitely somewhere in the Top 5 list of Times I’ve Really Meant it When I Said “Wow!” Loudly. I was really wowed.

Full lyric:

Like it or not, you’ll see my face soon
I’ll force my way up into your room
The things I say will soon make you swoon
I’ll point to the sun and say it’s the moon

So you needn’t fret, I’ll get in your life yet
Make you sit back and enjoy the touch of a boy
Lie over relaxed with your hand on your lap
Just give me some time so I can work on your spine

I’ll turn into jelly by being so kind
I’ll love you to death before your first grasp for breath
I’ll open your doors and take what I findYour heart is gold, it’s just a matter of time

Give me that gold and I’ll melt it down
Give me the tears that I took from your eye
You are not getting so far or going back home
Without regretting that I got your backbone
I’ll turn you into a love lump chum
Come on, submit, why not become one?
It’s just a matter of time

The past bubbled up for a few brief moments last night as I joined my Japanese and Japanese well-wishing colleagues for a “Deisui no Kai” at the best local izakaya (note: izakaya is fast becoming a legitimate loanword, and will soon be assimilated to the point that it will no longer call for italics. But until that day–italics), which is of course Ginji, regardless of your system of beliefs. While there are many ways to translate “Deisui no Kai,” I believe I will venture “a Getting Housed Assembly.”

Twenty of us assembled to get housed and eat small dishes of food, cleverly dubbed “Japanese tapas” here in the Americas. Fried mochi, meat sticks, octo-balls; when all was said and done, it had added up to more than $1200-worth of finger foods. Whatever. If you consider the fact that these occasions rarely come around anymore and factor in all the money I’ve been saving on drugs by not buying any, it’s really not that bad.

What was that bad, if you’ll bear with me, was the hauntingly feeble act put on by Flirtygirls 1, 2, and 2.5 at the second housed-getting venue, aptly named “Attic” because it’s above a thing. For reference, Attic is a place from whose spinning walls I once emerged so staggeringly deisui‘d that I managed a forty-to-fifty-second conversation with police officers before noticing they were police officers, only to then notice that I recognized one of the police officers as a country-singing acquaintance. Want to get a police officer to blanch a little bit? First you gotta get him to show you his studio demo. Then you gotta refer back to it while he’s on duty.

For the record, though, I think he’s a pretty good country singer and cop; two things I wasn’t sure existed before him.

Right, the Flirtygirls. I apologize in advance to my girlfriend, whom the following account may make a bit squeamish.

I should also preface that I wasn’t actually all that housed this time. Only enough, perhaps, to turn tragedy into edgy art. Because you see, they are anagrams. 

One of the many spoils of being, as they say, “spoken for,” is peace of mind, permitted by a relative lack of desire. Relative, I mean, to the natural state of man. Young men and even youngish men and especially young or youngish me, require about as much affection as your average born-in-captivity Fennec fox (which, for the unfamiliar, is approximately this much), and, deprived of this, will in pondering how and when and where they can obtain this and why they have not yet obtained this, exert an amount of energy so great that its heat can produce readings from space after also fueling the craft that got you to space to take the readings.

A man in need will, by necessity, forsake his own superpowers of judgment, reasoning and self-respect in favor of immediate opportunity. Scottish band Frightened Rabbit will repeatedly tell you that “you won’t find love in a hole,” but it’s still better than being, as Scottish band Del Amitri puts it, “out in the wind.” Curl up in there with a bottle of whiskey and your favorite CD, and you’ve got yourself a half-decent refuge for the night. It might even make a youngish man feel young.

Just so we’re all on the same page here, I’m talking about sex with strangers. Oh, courting in this modern age of ours.

Let it be said explicitly here that I am not this man. When I threatened to become this man, I hated the notion of it, hated every prospect accompanying it. The problem, I discovered, is that when you waive the above pursuit for the sake of pride, you become an old man. Instances of affection are limited to sympathetic, capitulating encounters with “the leftovers,” by which I mean suicidal or not-actually-suicidal girls, wrist cutters, the severely anxious. Or else blind strokes of dumb luck.

This post is not about how I was eventually struck by that stroke of luck or how indeed most of the important aspects of my life past and present have been born out of extraordinary luck. The post is about Flirtygirls 1, 2, and 2.5.

—

In Attic, my Japanese colleagues sat around a deisui no kai-sized table with a hammered copper surface like a gong that’d changed occupations. The youngest man there left and returned with ten shot glasses of tequila. “I’ll hand it to ya, guy,” I said, “you’re nothing if not dedicated to a motif. Deisui kai or not, I thought we were winding down.”

“Well, things should be what they are,” he said. “Otherwise they’re not much of anything.”

“Drink to that.” Before taking the drink, though, I stood to get a glass of water. I’d promised myself no more cop run-ins, if only to avoid another awkward reunion with the next Travis Tritt (I do, for the record, wish him well).

The bar had a Friday night crowd so I sidled up to wait my turn. It took an exact twelve seconds for one in a trio of attractive-enough girls seated next to me to attempt engagement. Before you indict me and this post for egotism, note that in approximately twenty-eight-and-a-half years of being alive, not once have I been both single and engaged by a trio of attractive-enough women nor a quintet of homely young men. It’s a plight faced by many–you can not have what you want; you can only have it if you stop wanting it. Now that I’ve stopped trick-or-treating, I have more candy in the house than I know what to do with. As a bonus, that is literally true.

Having already been well-versed in this truth, it was only a delight to see it faithfully realized like a clock chiming on the hour. I should have wagered money on the concept with my philosophical tequila friend.

Less delightful, however, was the engager’s strategy of engagement.

“I want to see what your hair looks like under that hat.”

A single line, though I don’t think you’d call it a pick-up line. To fill you in, I was wearing the following hat.

Now let’s get one thing straight: I’m comfortable with my hereditary hair loss, which began at age nineteen and more or less (well, decidedly less (lollll)) finished at age twenty-two. I’m comfortable with the idea that some sort of hormonal shift caused most of my most prominent head hairs to precipitate, follicle and all, into a shower drain located in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I’m even fine with people knowing about it. But from an aesthetic standpoint, a bare scalp really only goes with certain outfits. Notably, any time I’m wearing shoes, my silhouette loses any sort of vertical balance, thanks also in part to a substandard-sized head. Jackets, too, often provide too much mid-bulk for not enough top weight. It’s the same reason you’d give a hat to a snowman, even though he’s literally made of cold.

So, being thoroughly comfortable with my place in life, I wasn’t hesitant to admit the truth.

“Not much hair there to see.”

“I want to see it,” she said. Flirtygirl 1 was most certainly the most flirtiest.

I pulled off my hat, revealing everything.

“Oh!”

“See what I mean?”

“Well, that’s okay,” she said. What a relief to know it would be okay. “Bruce Willis is sexy and he’s starting to go bald.”

Whatever we were worried about, Bruce Willis had it under control. After all, if that’s what “starting” to go bald is, then hey I guess I just started too. In fact, if that’s the kind of time table we’re on, I guess that also still makes him an “up and coming” actor and me some sort of embryo.

Even with birth and my entire life still ahead of me, though, a man has to be humble. ”Yeah, but he also works out profusely,” I said.

“Well, that’s easily remedied. You just have to pick up heavy things.” It was further relieving to know that my ailment–not lifting as many heavy things as budding actor Bruce Willis–had a simple remedy, and I was grateful for the young lady’s soothing counsel. We’d known each other less than a minute and she was already making strides to change me for the better. I wondered if it was another stroke of dumb luck that I’d gone up for a glass of water then and there, or if she were in a habit of seeking out and offering sage advice to all thirsty men. I wondered what a man who’d actually gone with the intention of interacting with her would’ve been prompted to show and tell.

Flirtygirl 2 chimed in. “You feel like having a drink?”

“Ohh shee-it, she just offered you a drink, man!” said Flirtygirl 1. I took a look around the bar at all the other little clusters of men and women interacting. How many other people here were just masturbating at one another? More people than there were bibs–I was sure of that. Did other people have the same electromagnetic repulsion to this approach that I did? Grab a disinterested bystander and pretend he’s trying to impress you, then pretend you’re being charitable by granting him an audience?

“Oh, um, no,” Girl 2 said. “I just meant, are you drinking tonight?”

And then being really bad at being charitable??

Maybe these young ladies noticed that I had been accompanied moments before by the entire population of Japan, maybe they didn’t. Whatever the case, they seemed intent on making me the squawking ground for this harpy raid. Was there no solace for the water-drinking man? Was it my own lingering reverse culture shock that made this encounter so perplexing? Why were they so confident in asserting their authority? They didn’t actually have authority. This was a chess game with three players on White and no players on Black. “Your move,” they kept saying to the housecat. Meow.

“I’m actually just up here for a water,” I said. “Party down.”

Flirtygirl 2.5 said nothing audible, and–no criticism or hyperbole intended–was comparable to a parasite.

A distance spread between us until, without pausing or looking up, the bartender sprayed some water into a glass and slid it over to me. I realized that one of the girls had alerted him to my request without making a show of it. Thoughtful. As I started to turn back to my brigade of colleagues, I overheard 2 say to 2.5, “This is your breakup party and you’re not even drinking anything!”

It started to make sense. Having once achieved Relative Lack of Desire, 2.5 now found herself thrust cruelly back into the wind. Her friends, perhaps swallowing their own pride or perhaps flexing it, were shielding her, shielding themselves from the chill as best they could. “Men will work for us. You’ll see.” I could  just as well have been a housecat. My display or feint of interest, my looks, intentions, impressions, and company all were irrelevant. The entire night was a gesture–a shape. There was no heart on the line  here; just a cocktail napkin folded to look like one.

“You ladies have a nice night,” I said and returned to my place.

The to-go cup. The inner wall is round so that to anyone inside the cup, it would appear to never end. Sealed in by infinity. Black industrial lid with no fewer than two logos on a single surface lets the consumer know we’re talking business. This is business, guys.

When it comes to coffee, I’m not a big fan of the to-go cup. Even if in this case it is made entirely out of recyclable or compostable elements, the fact remains, like a mastodon in the corner of a roomful of elephants, that this manner of cup will in all cases destroy the soul of the drink.

The more I think about it, the more I feel that I am, on an abstract, figurative level, kind of an animist, per that one other post I did on the matter.

I’ve got a weekend coffee routine, see, wherein I order a big ol’ mug of cappuccino, and, when the timing is right, drink it. I don’t suppose it’s the most remarkable routine, but it’s one of the few routines in my life about which I get excited rather than fetal and quivering.

One essential element of this cappuccino is of course the glazed ceramic mug in which it comes. The mug, like the routine, is not remarkable, save for the fact that it is a mug. Solid, weighted, glazed. It makes a “clunk” with each return to the table. The color compliments that of the coffee. It tells the drinker, “Stay awhile. You won’t be going anywhere with that thing.” That’s what I want. By contrast, the to-go cup with its “recyclable” symbol and “CAUTION HOT!” admonishment says to the drinker, “I literally can’t wait until I am trash again” and “You don’t even know what coffee is.” Neither of these messages should be revered as mottos for aspiring receptacles.

To say nothing of the displeasing aesthetic. The color of the cup neither compliments the color of the coffee, nor can the drinker even see the color of the coffee.

This morning they were out of clean mugs. “Do you want, like, a to-go cup?” the barista asked. It was the most conflicted I’d felt all week, and on Thursday I had a vasectomy. Not really. But let’s have a laugh, can we?

Anyway. Some better things out of which to drink coffee:

↑ A mug.

↑ A hand-made Japanese mug with wabi-sabi tendencies.

↑ A huge freaking bowl.

Open to other suggestions. That’s what them comments are for.

Anyway, stay tuned for my next installment, “Drinking Coffee Out of a Glass – I May As Well Have Worn a Bra to Work Today, for Fuck’s Sake.”

There are two life-enriching things that are said to become much more challenging after college: meeting people and discovering good music. In my own experience, I have found the latter to be true and the former to be the opposite of true: false.

I can swallow the sentiment that it’s harder to meet interesting people when you no longer live in a veritable colony of peers, but to be sure, I spent most of my college time in isolated obscurity.

As a result of the above, however, I was constantly discovering great music that spoke to me. This was because at that time in my life, to do so was a necessity. It was either that or notice the ever-present silence. I’ll also admit to having had the occasional friend who would introduce me to something good.

Now, some six-plus-change years later, I find myself spoiled with peers but still mindlessly pounding through the same ancient stuff on my playlist. Bands like The Thrills and Little Barrie have great personal significance to me and are a joy to listen to even now, but neither of them are relevant anymore. The Thrills are long gone and Barrie’s become some sort of surf rock band. I can’t secondhand smoke to that.

It’s been awhile since I heard something that was both new and captivating. When I heard Glen Hansard had a new solo album, I picked it up digitally right away, but after about two months, it still hadn’t stuck with me. It’s often the case that an album doesn’t stick out until you’ve “broken it in” with a few listenings, but I felt like I’d well passed the entry phase by now.

Then the following song from that album came on in my car yesterday morning.

If true love is a thing, it might be what I felt in the car yesterday. “YES” I actually said. “CORRECT, YOU! THIS, YES!”

By the time I arrived at my office, there were tears in my eyes.

“Mornin’, Greg.”

“I. . . I. . . “

“You all right?”

“H-h-h-h-h-hhhh. . . . “

“There’s. . . bagels today, y’know.”

“Today is all we have.”

It occurred to me later that day that, aside from not “needing” fresh music to keep me afloat as much anymore, the digital age has taken away from us a proportion of what it’s given. Buying a physical, compact disc of music used to be a momentous occasion. You had to pick up and go somewhere to do it, first of all. Then you had this object that you didn’t have before. It was in your hands. Before anything else–even listening to it–you would read and digest the list of track names. “‘Squeeze Me Macaroni’? Wonder what that’s gonna sound like.” Before you ever heard the music, you had an idea in your head of what to expect. Granted that’s still technically the case when you download an album, but they’ve made it so convenient now that it rarely plays out that way anymore. Here’s my usual music obtaining process of late.

1. At work, it’ll occur to me that so-and-so is supposed to have a new album.

2. I go to eMusic.com, a subscription-based music downloading site. Perhaps I’m behind the times for not using that streaming service everyone uses, but I kinda like “owning” stuff, which is perhaps also behind the times and kind of dumb besides. But that’s me.

3. I find the artist, find the album labeled “2012″ (or whenever I am), click the download button, and the songs are instantly transferred to my iTunes playlist. The next time I plug in my phone, they will be transfered to my phone’s playlist. My phone, it turns out, is more than a phone.

4. Work happens.

5. Sometime during a lull in workload, I decide to either put my twelve-day-long playlist on shuffle or play the album I just remembered I downloaded.

6. Work happens.

7. It faintly occurs to me that at some point, that new album I downloaded came on. Or at least some of the songs, none of which I know the names of.

The song above, “The Gift,” has probably come on several times over the last couple months without my noticing. I’m not sure why it suddenly caught my attention yesterday, but it made me realize that I’ve stopped making an activity out of just listening to music. It’s always a supplement to something much more demanding. I think a lot of people fall into this habit, but I wonder if the younger generation tends to only digest music this way. Perhaps people made the same complaint about CDs in comparison to LPs or even tapes. Each medium change has had a significant effect on how we digest and appreciate our music. That’s worth a moment’s meditation.

But I think there’s also something to be said for just having a physical thing. We tend to discourage materialism with popular expressions like “You can’t take it with you” and “Don’t be a materialistic dick,” but sometimes I feel like there needs to be a frank discussion in Western culture about the inevitability of physical objects and forms having an influence on our lives. Japan, for all its Buddhist roots, has even deeper roots in something like animism, that say each object on this earth is shelter for a spirit. Whether people actually believe that on a literal level or not, Japan has traditionally endowed physical objects with a certain sanctity. Trickling down into modern society, you’re presented with a place where crisps are individually wrapped, people pray to trees, and discarded articles of clothing are thanked for their years of service. There’s an upside to materialism that is neglected in Western culture–understandable when so frequently presented with the overwhelmingly ugly flipside, but it is a bit painfully ironic that this mindset is so prevalent in America, a place whose native peoples were animistic, it turns out, as fuck.

My dad used to postulate that perhaps some things skipped a generation. Of course, he was at least two generations older than me, nearly 43 years old when I was born, so I would always get confused just trying to do the math. But then, generation gaps were always a point of great confusion for the greater Moore collective. Some of us are older than our own uncles or second cousins. Some of us have more years apart from our siblings than from our parents.

Dad and his own dad–Grampa–meanwhile, were so close in age that, story goes, Nana used to joke that they were basically growing up together. It was such a stark contrast to my own situation that I don’t think I could really comprehend the nature of their relationship.

In that sense, Grampa was always a bit of a mystery to me, but if some things do skip a generation (or two, depending on your math), then it stood to reason that we were bound to have some common ground (beyond the legendary “Moore mouth,” which I’ve long asserted is a thing).

Well, the visual aid may not be much of an aid, but I swear I see it. For contrast, here’s a non-Moore mouth:

It can be hard to strike a point of like interest with someone when you’re several generations and several states apart, but as I became increasingly self-aware as a teenager, I found the silences between us less and less forgivable. “Come on, Greg, you can speak to adults. Here’s one you should speak to.”

I’m not sure exactly when I realized it, but we eventually found our gap-bridging commonality through music. The episode that I’ll never forget came at about age fifteen, when the family was having one of its semi-regular sessions of phone relay with Grampa on the other end. It so happened that at this time, I’d been practicing a lot of jazz piano, and before I even had a chance to create an awkward silence, Dad suggested that I play a song for Grampa. I figured he probably didn’t want to hear about the travails of a tenth-grader anyhow, so I was relieved for the suggestion, if not a little self-conscious.

The song I played was Brubeck’s “Take Five,” not at all known as a piano piece nor a particularly emotional one, but it was enough, reportedly, to move Grampa to tears. When I say “reportedly,” I mean he told me himself.

No one can say exactly what Grampa was feeling in that moment, but I wonder if it wasn’t the bridging of an inexorably large gap, if only for a moment. It’s easy enough to show love to your progeny when they’re little and cute, but this was different. It was an adult showing of emotional investment in me, and not just a turning point for my relationship with Grampa, but for my perception of adulthood, family, and legacy.

Not to overreact. But when interaction is as infrequent as it was, you can’t afford to overlook the value of individual moments.

Thereafter, Grampa and I were never lacking for a topic of discussion. On family visits, we would talk jazz. I’d play him my latest attempt, he’d tell me about the prodigious talent of Erroll Garner.

“He had these long fingers that would curl way up like this,” he’d say.”

“Hey, I’ve got some of those!” I’d say, flashing him my fingers with pride. “Eh? Eh?”

“Oh yeah, look at those!” he’d say, impressed. Genghis Khan never knew such triumph. Kublai, on the other hand, may have.

The last time I saw Grampa was the day after his 90th birthday. While everyone else was out for a few hours (I forget why), Grampa and I stayed behind and talked music. I plunked out some old tunes on his ancient synthesizer while he occasionally sighed with approval. The preciousness of this time was not lost on me. In Grampa’s long life, wildly different from my own, I’m awed and grateful for each moment that our thinking intersected. Thanks for the lessons, Grampa. They won’t be forgotten.

Years ago, I got into the Japanese film auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa, not to be confused with his non-relative, Akira, toward whom I’m mostly indifferent. I’ve already written at length about the personal impact K. Kurosawa’s “Pulse” (Kairo) had on me, but that account aside, what I mostly love about his movies is that they’re highly thought-provoking and great conversation pieces. What I would not necessarily call them is entertaining. The gratification you get from watching them is delayed and often wholly subjective. You might never get any. These are not movies for date night; they’re ones for your two-month solitary confinement sentence. They require prolonged, undivided attention. Under no circumstances should they be enjoyed while grappling with diarrhea.

Years ago, my friend in Japan who liked action, thrills, and popcorn asked me for a Japanese movie recommendation, and for some reason the first thing that came to mind was K. Kurosawa’s “Charisma,” a low-budget, allegorical movie that even the director now regards as “possibly not very good.” I realize now that the best thing about the entire film is its own elevator pitch–a worn-out detective wakes up in the woods after botching a hostage negotiation, discovers a tree called “Charisma” that is one of a kind but possibly toxic to the surrounding ecosystem, and encounters a series of characters either trying to protect or destroy the tree. The film can be interpreted in a variety of ways, hence makes for great conversation., in theory. Maybe that’s why I bothered recommending it. But I knew from the instant the recommendation exited my face that my friend probably wouldn’t like it. After all, it’s not very entertaining.

Approximately ten months later, she still hadn’t watched it, and she finally just returned the unwatched disc to me. I’ve still never found someone with whom to discuss this great conversation piece.

And perhaps that’s the lesson here. I once read a criticism of Kurosawa on a Japanese site, which I’ll paraphrase: The meaning of his films, the layer that gives them their value as films, is usually thoroughly buried, as is common amongst many Japanese auteurs. However, that hidden layer is unaccompanied by a surface-layer spectacle–something entertaining–to entice the viewer into expending the effort or at least allow him or her to enjoy the movie without expending the effort. Take this in contrast to someone like director Sono Sion, whose notorious “Suicide Circle” was both deeply challenging and full of immediately gratifying spectacle. If you didn’t get the film’s deeper meaning, you still walked away from it going, “Man! That was intense! I’m'onna go tell Billy!”

Of course, what passes for entertaining spectacle is a matter determined by the taste of each individual viewer. I think the best of Kurosawa’s flicks play the line of subtlety very well. “Pulse,” in particular, uses its ghostly imagery to potentially traumatizing effect, depending on the mental state of the viewer and the conditions under which the movie is watched.

↑ Case in point.

More to my point, though, I think I’ve discovered that a lot of the things that I liked are things that simply intrigue me in principle, sometimes regardless of uncompelling execution. The downside of this is that it probably means I’m one of those people who justify modern art that is literally just a white canvas, but I think it’s important to encourage creativity and deviation from convention, because what is convention but a life jacket for both creator and consumer? Let’s grow us some sea legs already.

Well. Shortly before this post was deleted, it was summer. Summer was about four minutes long this year, and all of it consisted of traveling for work. It was June 19th and I said, “Summer is a-coming.” Then it turned June 20th. My birthday. I turned 28, four minutes passed, and now here we are. In that heartbeat of a summer, I went everywhere.

Los Angeles. . .

San Diego. . .

Seattle. . .

Even Las Vegas. . .

And to think, I was content to just stick around home and enjoy a nice, leisurely summer! My travels eventually led me all the way to Cologne, Germany.

You see? A veritable meter of beer. The metric system means it’s German. Cologne, Germany is apparently famous for drinking one and only one kind of beer, labeled Kölsch, which I believe is a German word meaning “unremarkable” or “bearing the qualities of Miller.” They’re also allegedly famous for drinking the beer out of these chic but insubstantial vials.

The city also had a towering gothic cathedral, a true marvel of human craftsmanship and engineering.

↑ Here’s an image of it still existing, some seventy years after the rest of the city was bombed to a godforsaken pulp. A triumph for Christianity, or just bad aim? The debate wages on.

Germany was fine though, otherwise, the German people a delight. Each man I encountered was more charming and handsome than the last, until finally I was face-to-face with an actual Übermensch. It was at that point that I left Germany.

Approximately seventeen seconds later, I made my way to Japan for a two-year reunion. It was a bit of an emotional typhoon. There may have also been an actual typhoon going on while I was there; in these privileged times, I’ve lost all concept of natural disaster.

Emotional, you see, for I was able to retrace my exact steps from the life I’d left behind. With my friend still living in my old apartment, I was able to stay there for an entire week, rent free. I awoke in my own former living room, next to my own former guitar,  greeted by my own former morning view. The heat and humidity was far worse than I had remembered. I spent the entirety of my Japan trip teetering precariously between consciousness and heat stroke. The vending machines, they make perfect sense.

↑ This used to be my view every morning. The elderly neighbor grows her own crops (left).

↑ I learned that last year, my street had flooded with rain. The water reached 1.3 meters, easily waist level for the average man. This sign was marked in commemoration.

↑ I had hoped to go on a hunt for my old cycle–which I’d abandoned before my departure two years ago–and then use it throughout my stay, not realizing that my friend had  retrieved it just after I left. Unfortunately, the flooding had rusted it beyond use. It would have been completely submerged.

↑ There’s great joy in simply doing things you used to do routinely but then stopped doing. This Circle K convenience store was about a block away from my apartment, and hence a true crutch and friend during my time there. Look how cleanly aligned all the products are–especially in the jetlagged hours of the morning.

↑ A visit to a favorite local café, Café Liv. I’d never mustered the strength to arrive in time for the “morning service,” so this was both a nostalgia trip and a first-time treat. One of the things I was surprised to find myself missing about Japan was its ceramic ware. Note the little imperfections in the circumference of the lip. Wabi sabi, my friends. It’s a thing.

↑ My old multi-purpose multimedia shop. 50 yen for non-new release rentals? It used to be a steal at 100 yen, and that was supposed to be running for a limited time. The running joke amongst me and mine was that they kept extending the “limited time offer” but wouldn’t just commit to making it permanent. Two years later the offer is not only still running, it’s twice as good.

↑ The “Disgusting, Disgusting Tunnel,” as we used to call it back in the day. Still disgusting as ever. The spider in the upper right was about the size of a nightmare.

↑A reunion with an old friend and former owner of my very favorite place in Tajimi, Kichizato (previously mentioned here). Never mind that I’m twice his size in this photograph. Moments later he beat me in an arm wrestling match.

↑ Shin-san of the Great Hurry, an old hangout relocated. Shin gave me my first taste of vermouth and more free drinks than I’d earned.

↑I even got to see Dai-chan (center), a difficult human being but an excellent musician.

My time in Tajimi was short, hot, and bittersweet, but I suppose I was ready to leave when I did. The heaviest heart weights were all in Nagoya anyhow. I moved on to Nagoya for the homecoming of a lifetime.

↑In my beloved Yagoto district, I passed by the Shall building, where I used to live in Room 501, a single-room place that cost me close to $800 a month. I was amused to see the reggae accessories shop was still thriving on the bottom floor. Who would’ve thought I’d go out of style before Japanese reggae?

↑The main purpose of my return to Nagoya, and indeed, this blog, was to revisit Rosetta Stone–for the first time. What I mean is, while I was out, the Rosetta Stone as I knew it had been demolished due to a mandate by a local college. It had since moved right across the street into a slightly larger place. Above, I show my disgust at this heresy. “This is not what I’m used to!”

↑ The old Rosetta Stone, now replaced by a hideous, hulking wall. Still makes me a bit misty.

↑ Shin was mostly his usual self. When I strolled into his bar for the first time in over two years, he glanced my way for less than a second. “Ussss. Maido.” (Maido means “every time,” as in, thanks for coming every time. As in, something you say to someone who shows up regularly.)

But with the bar a bit larger and a bit more ostentatious than before, he was weirdly more focused on actually maintaining a business. It wasn’t very weird, but it was a little weird.

↑ My visit happened to coincide with an intense, all-night party where many of my old friends showed up. Among those who didn’t was Katayama-san. But I like to think he was there in some sense.

↑ I ended up having to stay at my own bartender’s condo two nights in a row. Days began blurring together. The view from the condo overlooked the Yagoto “spirit garden,” a vast, vast cemetery previously mentioned here.

My time in Nagoya may have brought some sense of closure to the life I’d once had there, though I don’t doubt that I’ll be back one day before too long. I would like to keep all my Nagoya people in my life in some capacity, as I feel that it more than any other place has defined my young adulthood. I’ll tell my grandkids about this, or failing that, other people’s grandkids.

Finally, I departed for Tokyo, where I would switch back into working gear. Well, mostly. It’s hard to visit the Metropolis to end all Metropolises without having a little fun. And get a load of the view:

“And finally you just wake up one day and you ask yourself, ‘Why aren’t I working at a place where they treat you like a human being instead of like a fuckin’ cog in the fuckin’ wheel?’” said my colleague to whom I will refer as B.O. because those were his initials and for no other reason.

That’s “cog in the machine,” I thought. The cog is the wheel.

“And when shit goes wrong, they blame the cog.”

I was getting that feeling in my heart. Shrinking. “So much for the spirit of democracy,” I contributed. We waved each other off and a pulse of headache teleported me to my car. “Okay, man,” I said as I turned the key in the ignition. “It’s okay.” A lilting Irish tune came on and I floated out of the parking lot and down the road toward the local grocer.

My eyes burned holes in the road. Was this the futuristic noir adult life I’d envisioned in my youth? Sort of. Except for the grocer. Childhood fantasies never involved food.

Out of the car, another pulse teleported me to the parmesan cheese and olive oil aisle. I floated down the aisle, eyes burning holes across the shelf, ruining dozens of dollars-worth of food products. “Olive oil aisle,” I recited. “Oliveoilaisle.”

I bent down and clutched  a cylinder of parmesan cheese. “Today is a good day for this cheese. I will eat this and listen to jazz music and cope with my stress and enjoy my futuristic noir lifestyle.”

At the checkout, a sixty-something man with handsome white hair scanned my goods with the carefree gusto of a volunteer.

My total blipped on the digital price-telling marquee. I crammed a hand into my pocket and shuffled around for my credit card. I was done with physical cash in this futuristic noir thriller. I produced and slid my card.

<CASH BACK?> said the futuristic credit machine.

<YES> I selected. Whoops.

“I meant to press <NO>,” I said, pleading for sympathy. “I’m done with physical cash.”

“If you don’t want it, just select that one on the bottom and enter ‘zero’ as your amount,” the old-timer said. I did so and it worked.

“Thanks.”

“See? There’s always a way out.”

I took a beat to look him in the eye. He looked back and smirked as sixty-somethings who treat life like volunteer work smirk.

“Thanks,” I said. “Not for the cheese.” I turned and the automatic double-doors showed me the way out.