STAGES

We got off pretty easy as it turned out, typhoonwise; during the night some heavy rain that made a lake out of the air, gray skies issuing stiff breezes in the morning and throughout most of the day as the typhoon, roughing us only with the tips of its wings while rending its savage way across Kyushu, snailed up the Japan Sea threatening at any minute, for some unknowable typhoony reason, to take a sharp right turn east and bear straight down on us once again, so all day no one could really relax in the surety that the windy beast had gone.

But now it IS gone and the air is as still as only post-typhoon air can be, so the insects and frogs are even now combining their choirs and getting two or three nights worth of pent-up chorale work done all at once, turning the air into more of an actual feeling than the mere combination of gases it generally is, sort of like listening to Koko Taylor live, only not the blues and with a stage the size of the landscape. Memorable.