Posted Friday, December 13, 2002 by Robert Brady

SNOW COUNTRY

It seems we live on the southern cusp of yukiguni (snow country), where the winter sidewalks are basically tunnels through the snow, though it never gets that bad down here. Some mornings, though, I get on the train from our blinding blizzard, go through a tunnel or two and the sky is blue, the sun is shining, birds are practically singing, butterflies...it's like Dorothy going from Kansas to Oz, only as an older guy with jeans on and no dog. It's another world. Then when I return, a tunnel or two from the sunny blue I click my bootheels twice and I'm back in the howling black and white again. There's no place like home. To me it's all just as miraculous as it sounds, but none of the locals seem to remark upon it. I guess in the right place even miracles can become quotidian. Some winters yukiguni comes right down and covers us all with a meter or two of pure white weather; other winters the line is drawn farther north, and the weather is rather mild here. The first winter we innocents were here, in the fall there was a plague of kamemushi (Halyomorpha picus; "stinkbug" (note to future innocents: do not allow stinkbugs in your salad) ) and the locals said therefore the winter would be severe. Sure enough, right around christmas we got 80 cm in one night, and soon after we were isolated by meters of snow for most of the winter, had to walk up the mountain pulling sleds of supplies. It was great. This year there were only about 50 cm worth of kamemushi, I'd say. But then I'm not really a local yet, so who knows.

Posted Friday, December 13, 2002 by Robert Brady

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First real snow this morning, woke up to that deep quiet, silvery predawn light that comes with the thick pearl-gray of snow clouds roiling in from the far north, tumbling down over the mountains, sprinkling the land and the folks with diadems, making all noble. Rarely is pure silence so exciting.

Posted Thursday, December 12, 2002 by Robert Brady

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TIMES TARDY

As I departed the station this morning and the train man handed me my little slip of paper, the first little slip of paper in quite a long while now, the thought struck me as it does each time I get handed one of these: how very very strange, even incomprehensible, it would be to the US mentality to be informed that the people and the trains of Japan, the entire country, are so specifically and precisely and expectably and continually ON TIME that when a commuter train is a couple of minutes late a whole system-wide apologetic support apparatus swings into gear, and the train men stand at the exit wickets handing out little slips of paper with ?e10 minutes?f or ?e20 minutes?f or ?e30 minutes?f punched out on the edge to indicate the maximum range of time the train was late (usually due to earthquake or accident), these late allowance slips to be signed and presented to the respective employers, in conjunction with the late-punched time card, to justify this aberrant lateness that is otherwise unconscionable and embarrassing in a nation so punctual that every other nation is way late by comparison. And how bizarre the very idea (especially to Long Island commuters as I recall), of being so able to count on the punctuality of trains that you can set your watch by them, or that the authorities can have such slips printed because train lateness is so rare, and that such slips will be used and honored, indeed never looked at askance but by a latecoming foreigner like myself.

Posted Wednesday, December 11, 2002 by Robert Brady

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Firewood always knows where your toes are.

Posted Wednesday, December 11, 2002 by Robert Brady

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NATURAL THANKS

Yesterday we used the woodstove for the first time this year! Until then layering and sweaters had been enough to keep us warm (best to keep the body's own furnaces fine tuned as well), but a big thick white slab of pure Siberian weather slid south, and today the mountains are like sugarloaves in a very big clear blue bakery window. Perfect day for the task the weather itself makes essential: firewooding. Out there today in the crispness, splitting and smalling slabs of oak, selecting some bucked cedar for quick heat, getting the firewood place ready just outside the door before the snow comes and buries everything, making fine tuning impossible. Even after all these years, it still delights me to see a fire in the stove; it still amazes me here at night, with such cold outside, how warm just one single wood stove can be, how well it can heat a house. We have a loft upstairs, where I sit now inputting this, and not long before bed I'll just open the doors to the bedrooms and they'll all get nice and warm real fast, just from that fire down in the living room, burning the wood I cut last year. There is a deep reward in such cycles, so many of which we have put by the wayside in our march forward, cycles involving nature and natural exercise, natural thanks for warmth fully earned and appreciated many times over.

Posted Tuesday, December 10, 2002 by Robert Brady

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REACHING FOR THE STARS

Deep in the night I am awakened by a strange thrumming-drumming--outside, I think dreamily in the dark--it has the yearning quality of sensual signaling from male to female, likely an insect (unlikely for a human of either sex to be hanging from the eaves and thrumming--sleep blends these realities with soporific fluidity). Then for a less sleepy moment I think it might be some kind of a bird, maybe an owl, when I realize that it's too small to be an owl, too rapid and insistent; it must be some insect trying to get in through the screen. Then more awake I think: Trying to get in through the screen? Makes no sense; there are no lights on in here, and now that it's winter there are no screens on the windows! But that part of my brain that doesn't want to sleep (admittedly the minority of me) is nevertheless trying to make sense of this in that persistent dichotomous pain-in-the-fundament way minorities have, so okay what the heck is it? Then I realize it's coming from the closed skylight above my head: squinting with one eye, I can make out a dark silhouette against the mid-night starry density: it is a big black stealth moth trying to reach the stars, drummm-thrummm. How in the dark can I not sympathize with that noble ambition? I reach up and open the skylight a crack, then fall back asleep unworried that a sudden blizzard might come during the night and make a drift of me. The free and star-bound moth saw to it, and in the morning there was a blue sky.

Posted Monday, December 09, 2002 by Robert Brady

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THE GENJI LOOK

Anita Rowland by way of Jeremy Hedley notes Japanese males' eyebrow altering behavior. This is but one aspect of a cosmetic change that has been going on among young and fashionable males here for some time now. Most Japanese males could not by any stretch be called hairy, but I began to notice even less hairiness back in the late eighties, when college guys began to look quite androgenous in the summer, removing their arm and leg hair apparently in response to young women's expressed preference for less body hair on their men. The reason for that suddenly stated preference goes very deep, I expect. Perhaps it augurs a return to the epicene male fashion of Genji's time. Can pale white makeup and very high painted eyebrow-dots be far behind?

Posted Monday, December 09, 2002 by Robert Brady

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PHEASANT RESTAURANT

In the bright slant of sunrise, two fat hen pheasants waddle through the garden getting fatter on the wild seeds they pluck from plant and ground, dining fastidiously around my winter lettuce and mibune without touching them, completely disappearing now and then when they enter a patch of fallen leaves and pause; skittish in the slight morning down-mountain wind that can hide sounds of danger, now and then they stretch their graceful necks up to scan the surroundings that look just like them. Then they move on, dining with great delicacy. The male pheasant in his neon raiment is nowhere to be seen; in that getup he probably has to hide in the bamboo. In the spring, the pheasant mamas will bring their chicks to picnic on the chickweed.

Posted Sunday, December 08, 2002 by Robert Brady

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R.I.P. Philip Berrigan... Wood's Lot has a superb tribute to a man of peace.

Posted Sunday, December 08, 2002 by Robert Brady

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SLICK SIMIAN OUTLAW

I'm not the only one with monkey problems. From the description of the culprit and his apparent IQ, I think he was in my garden last summer, trying to borrow books; specifically, police procedurals.

Posted Saturday, December 07, 2002 by Robert Brady

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Important comments on a world-healthy diet, a subject dear to my heart...

"With some 780 million people suffering from chronic hunger worldwide, and with 40 million people at risk of starvation on the African continent alone, it is ironic that the people with the power and financial resources to do something about it are feasting 21 times a week. They are themselves dying, succumbing to the diseases that once afflicted only overindulgent kings and queens." More...

Posted Saturday, December 07, 2002 by Robert Brady

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BRAND-NEW WORLD

On the morning train I saw a poster for one of the local ski resorts, boasting that the resort has been in business since 1964. Noting that the poster featured a picture of two women in the style of the 1930's or so, I at first laughed inwardly at the designer's naivete, until it struck me that it was I who was being naive: this was very likely the way most skiers now, who are predominantly in their 20's and were born in the 1970's, view 1964; they view it the same way I, who was born in 1940, have always viewed the 1930's. And then the exponential rush that this selfsame realization rushes over each generation in its turn, and is what gives older folk that distant look they sometimes have in their eyes; I never knew what that look was until now, when I felt it enter my own eyes: it is the look of once, and only once, having visited a lush land long since lost-- the 60's were now ANCIENT HISTORY. That immediate and ineffably memorable and exciting time of my life-- indeed of all life subsequent, whether it knows it or not-- that post-Screamin Jay Hawkins-Little Richard-Buddy Holly-Elvis rock'n'roll booze Beatles politics Dylan benzidrine Hendrix LSD Stones Vietnam war Joplin sexual liberation Doors mescaline college madness summer of love Woodstock Washington protest march marijuana melange now ranked with the dallyings of Antony and Cleopatra. And so it was exciting, there on the train this morning--the train that suddenly became the express train of history--it was exciting looking out of my own eyes turning antique, at the brand-new world rolling by.

Posted Saturday, December 07, 2002 by Robert Brady

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WHAT JAPAN THINKS

Interesting survey results from The Pew Research Center on What the World Thinks in 2002. For Japan, as elsewhere generally, the responses appear pretty gloomy; I wonder though, if the surveyors took into consideration the general Japanese aversion to overt positivism. Japanese tend not to praise (or condemn) themselves, family, situation etc., at least in public, so I wonder how accurate these results are, Japan-wise. To me, the most surprising finding was that 69% of Japanese respondents felt that the (Japanese) military was having a good influence on the country!!! What could this possibly mean? I have heard nor seen no sign of such feeling, though I can sense distinct undercurrents of change in the public demeanor. Feelings are more on edge as economic troubles loom. Once again, Japan may be the world's litmus.

Posted Friday, December 06, 2002 by Robert Brady

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J>E TRANSLATIONS-2B-EDITED FAVORITES

"As far as the economic consideration goes, the Japanese boats ended up in red ink."

Posted Friday, December 06, 2002 by Robert Brady

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BIRDS, FOOTWEAR

The scientists are doing what scientists have always done, what their long and specialized training has given them the skills to do: they are revising their previous estimates. Now they are saying that global temperatures won?ft be 2 degrees higher a hundred years from now, they?fll be 3 degrees higher, which means I guess powerboats on Park Avenue and pirogues on the Champs Elysee, though I?fll be in heaven by then. Anyway, I can tell you this morning that the scientists are way off already; it?fs six degrees higher right now than it was last year. Here it is December, and I look out my window and the trees are full of birds looking at their watches, singing ?gWhat time you got??h ?gIs my watch right??h ?gIs this December??h ?gWhat are we doing here in December, aren?ft we supposed to be in Southern China right now??h And such like birdsong, depending on the species. The crows just cock one eye to it all and say ?gWhat the?c?h then resume digging in the compost; reality is, after all, reality. The crows do not seem to be revising their estimates. Unlike us humans. I came out of the house this morning and it was April. It?fs very unsettling, like when you suddenly notice that one sock is green and the other is your foot.

Posted Tuesday, December 03, 2002 by Robert Brady

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FOGEYHOOD

Long ago, during my formative years on the other side of the world, I was chased off of who but god could possibly say how many perfect lawns by how many cane-wielding fogeys, and out of how many nourishing vegetable gardens and melon patches by how many shotgun-wielding fogeys, and down out of how many lush fruit trees by how many pruning-shear-wielding fogeys, across the length and breadth of my beloved hometown and beyond, in other towns and states, nations even, as time led me into widening realms of fogeydom, and in every instance a major aspect of fleeing said pursuit was the complete incomprehensibility to me regarding the fogic rationale, the sheer, blind fogicity of a person who would chase someone who was having so much football fun on a lawn off that lawn; or in that lush garden out of that garden, where the vegetables and melons and strawberries were far better, not to mention cheaper and healthier, than anything you could get in any market, and fruit right off the tree forget it! Why would anyone deprive another, especially an innocent sweet-faced child, of such all-too-brief bites of Eden? The fact was, as I now understand, that as an inexperienced youngster I lacked perception of the more complex elements of fogeydom that are now as clear as buckshot. And all this realization in a foreign land! It all came together for me this very morning, here on this side of the world, as I was eyeing some kids who were sneaking into someone's garden down in the village, when I suddenly realized I was doing something I never in my wildest dreams expected I would ever do in my life: I was fogifying!! Albeit vicariously. I can't tell you what a shock this was. I, the Billy the Kid of apple trees, the Jesse James of watermelons! I hadn't known fogization was an organic process, a stage in one's growth, a fully natural development. When as a grass-stained child-- tomato or apple in hand or melon in arm or strawberries in mouth-- I'd fled those Eden-destroying old fogeys, I never thought the fogic state would descend upon me personally in a million years. Nor could I have foreseen how much fun it would be to fogify, the fun by necessity covert, since it is patently counterproductive to chase kids away with a smile on your face. In my fresh and steadily deepening understanding of these arcane matters, I feel that am now fully qualified on all counts, fogifically speaking, mainly by age and a general commensurate irritability regarding my growing perception of the fruitless foistiness, ruthless raucousness and wayward wastefulness of youth. In other words, by virtue of some cosmic evolutionary intention, I am now capable of world-class fogification. But can I expect true fogic fulfillment here in Japan, where the children are so polite and considerate, and would never think of steal-- enjoying another person's garden produce? If the monkeys allow me to have an orchard and garden, will Japanese kids come and run rampantly enough for me to chase them away in the grand old fogey tradition? More likely I'd have to hire them. Perhaps fogeyhood is more of a cultural thing. Still, it might be worth a try; it is my turn, after all. So now, in addition to fun-minded kids, all I need is a lushly productive garden, a good variety of heavily bearing fruit trees and a modicum of monkeys. Are you listening, god?

Posted Monday, December 02, 2002 by Robert Brady

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ON THE BEACH

We are having a warm winter here so far, snow on the mountaintops briefly a couple of times, no snow now, here it is December and we still haven't needed the woodstove. Warm as spring this morning, leaves still on the oaks and a lot of other trees (chestnut, cherry bare) and the Carolina Jasmine is swelling with pending yellow blossoms; something deeply strange is going on. From paleogeology we know of ancient and transcendant weather cycles, such as they are, but have little idea as to the vast causation, or the long-term earthly homeostasis involved; so as we injure the delicate process in our many many ways, we have no true idea of what we are letting ourselves in for; it is all one vast and blind experiment, and we are the guinea pigs. Tony Tross at abuddhas memes mentions the amazing fact that his area in the southern Yukon was 10 DEGREES WARMER THAN FLORIDA (!) and refers the inquisitive visitor to HAARP. At this rate Lake Biwa will soon be salt water and I'll be living on the beach...

Posted Sunday, December 01, 2002 by Robert Brady

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY HOUSE

The history of the earth dates back to about 4.5 billion years ago; the first organism appeared on earth 3.5 billion years ago; the first vertebrate 500 million years ago; the Japanese islands were formed 15 million years ago; Paleo-Lake Biwa was created 4 million years ago; the first human appeared 2 million years ago; today?fs Lake Biwa was created 400,000 years ago; man began to reside around Lake Biwa 20,000 years ago, the whole country became Japan about 400 years ago, and my house has been here for seven years.

Posted Sunday, December 01, 2002 by Robert Brady

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MORNING STAR

Up well before dawn this morning, unfresh from troubled dreams, all the windows filled with silence and the blackness of stars curtained by overcast skies, I descended into the dark downstairs and, looking out the window for signs of sunrise, beheld out there in the endless night a moving golden light: it was a boat out on the Lake, gliding through the ancient dark as though a slowly moving star in the night sky, giving depth to all the night. What heart we can take in the darkness, from even a distant light!