IS THERE LIFE AT DESKS?

This is a question of tremendous significance for our day, when there are more desks in the world than ever before in history. Thus the profound resonance of the worldwide ongoing scientific research into whether or not a deskic environment can support life in any form. Investigations thus far strongly indicate the negative, some experts being of the opinion that life as we know it has never existed at desks, despite apparent indications to the contrary.

Earlier in this century, having examined thousands of deskic artifacts from throughout the deskbound universe, including scrapings and fossils, as well as petrified, atrophied and mummified remains, researchers tentatively agreed that desks might harbor some sort of paperpushing life form, but it was later determined that all of those studies, themselves performed in large part at desks, were therefore seriously skewed by sedentary bias.

Subsequent highly specific field analysis showed that the deskic specimens had in fact never developed to the stage commonly acknowledged as "truly living"; yet even now, millions of people each day leave their homes to sit at desks for hours at a time, in the irrational conviction that at those desks they have a life, despite the mounting scientific evidence that tells us this simply is not true.

Still, people will be people; many also believe that there is life on Mars; but if these earthly studies tell us anything at all, it's that Mars is very likely covered with desks.

MOLEHOOD

Every once in a while, because I have been too long at a desk in an office in a building in a city or some other abnatural state of existence and feel as though I am about to dissipate in a cloud of dark vapor like an occult being about to be exposed to sunlight, I step outside the house into the weekend morning garden onto actual earth to existify amidst the sensual actualities of the very nature that begot every basal aspect of my existence, and am surprised by the luxurious softness of the ground that formerly was as hard as winter.

Which is my roundabout way of getting to the subject of the ecstatic Mr. Mole, or Mogura-chan (Molie) as I call him. This morning Kaya and I were outside getting spinach and stuff from the garden when we noticed that over by the stone wall beside the steps Mogura-chan had run around underground in loops and whirls of no particular destination like a madmole, but given the naturalness of his life he was more likely having a party or had just fallen madly in love, it wasn't organized at all-- not that moles have to be organized like a guy in a office or anything, its just that judging by his moundy tracks he looked like he was really letting off some sort of funsteam down there, whirling through the earth like Fred Astaire across a ballroom floor, having the time, essentially, of his life...

Molehood is a worthy ambition.

OWNING MONDAY

For the next two weeks, because of office vacation scheduling I have to switch my off-day Monday with my usual working day of Tuesday, i.e. I live beneath the weight of an icy phrase I never thought I'd hear again: I have to go to work on Monday.

Which means, among about 700,000 other things (mostly little) that for two unending weeks I don't have my beloved three-day weekend. It means 33% off weekend garden things, sky things, weather things, chill things, loafing things, all in the lovely and always welcome elasticity of time as it stretches out before me on Friday evening, week after week, like little tastes of Eden.

It also means that all day Sunday I have to go to work on Monday, which has been the bane of old weekends throughout my office life, which I must say has been mercifully short, for which I am grateful. But I thought that once I left the five-day work week, it would never come back in any form. Never. Yet there it is, in one of its worst aspects: "I have to go to work on Monday." What a dreaded phrase that has always been for me, I suddenly realize, like something said by an immigration official in a nightmare.

I have had Mondays off for nine years now, which isn't all that long as paradise goes, but new and goodly habits die just as hard as dirty old ones. Thus it was that all day today, over and over again I have been feeling a bit 'off,' then realizing that I have to work tomorrow, and saying to myself in uncomfortable disbelief: "I have to work tomorrow; tomorrow is Monday," just like I did during all those office years, which in retrospect I don't know how I got through, working five days a week is that insane or what, it was for me, a two-day weekend are you out of your mind.

Fortunately it is also in the nature of habits to come right back when you call, so in a couple of weeks I shall revert to a state as close to normal as I can expect in such times as these.

New habits live easy.

CHERRY MOODS

Yesterday was a day off, and when I walked out into the garden in the early morning the cherry tree was like a different person, it was so polite and considerate in its pinkly fluent majesty-- not a trace of irony anywhere in its blossomy mannerisms or the gestures of its elegant limbs; its perfume even had my name on it.

As I worked in the garden in the rich morning air the tree's blossom-clad limbs hovered over me considerately, shading me from the sun, the entire tree emanating a magical light blended effortlessly from the basic materials of sun and blue sky-- it made working in the garden even more of a pleasure than usual.

But then this morning, when again I had to head downmountain and off to work in the Big City, as I passed through the village the arcade of blooming cherry trees that lines the road to the station looked pretty flippant, flaunting their whole roadful of perfumed beauty in the same saucy and ironic way they had on Tuesday.

The cherries have really been moody lately. Either that or the mere prospect of an office can warp reality.

CHERRY TREE SARCASM

As I was climbing on the motorbike early this morning for the trip down the mountain to await the high-speed train that would take me encased in steel to a girdered office high in the heart of the big city where I would spend all day wrangling with billions of bytes of bits, the newly blooming cherry tree in our garden stood in majesty beneath the pale blue sky, pink blossoms alight with the gold of the morning sun, their delicate fragrance borne to me on the same soft spring breeze that moved the tree's blossom-laden boughs in what I took to be a distinctly sarcastic gesture under the circumstances.

In the mockery of rich morning air, laden with all the Spring countryside fragrances that take time and focus to fully distinguish and savor, the tree persisted in waving to me, its arms derisively full of soft, short-lived blossoms, in effect saying in its arboreally ironic way Goodbye, Bob! Sorry you have to miss all this! Have fun in the office today! I'll take care of all the beautiful and fragrant things while you're hacking at important keyboard stuff or whatever! See you tonight, in the dark!

Cherry tree sarcasm can be vicious.

NEOGAMBARU

When I first came to Japan nearly 40 years ago I was impressed that Japanese of all ages were such a hardy bunch of folks in any situation, just having come through the devastation of war, and with their traditional lack of central heating and their uninsulated houses (I used to wake up on Tokyo winter mornings beside little snow drifts that had blown through the cracks between the thin boards of my house). The grammar school boys back then used to go to school in the iciest weather wearing thin jackets and short-shorts. Wow, are they going to be hardy when they grow up, I used to think.

In the broil of those summers as well, everyone bore up without complaint in their unairconditioned, sweltering, breezeless big-city cheek-to-jowl neighborhoods. They simply adjusted, as they always had, in the bushido way, to whatever conditions came along; old pictures of Japanese standing around in the snow in their shin-high kimonos and straw sandals come to mind. Gambaru was the word.

But since then things have changed in unexpected ways. These winter days, when I head for the office in the Big City I am sanely dressed for motorcycling down an icy winter mountain road and waiting on a blizzardy train platform, then a walk though blustery city streets to the office, where it is so hot you could grow orchids. This is an institutional example of what I call neogambaru, in which one pays to suffer, in this case via artificial discomfort achieved through high heating bills. (Another retroexample is to pay for and consume junk food by which one's health deteriorates.)

Then after a confusing seasonal retrotransition we segue into the summer version of neogambaru, when I come in dressed for an afternoon on Waikiki and after the train you could chip ice off my shoulders, then you could break icicles off my desk. Everyone has shawls over their shoulders and blankets over their knees, the modern, expensive version of standing out in the snow in kimono and straw sandals. Paid for in the form of airconditioning bills. (Another retroexample is paying for exercise to offset the atrophying effects of offices.)

I'm not proposing that everyone return to kimono and straw sandals in the snow as a way of life, or give up artificial exercise as a way of counterbalancing some of the patent shortcomings of current living. I'm aware that we must progress, we must improve our lot, elevate our situation, raise our comfort level I guess, and even go mad now and then if we want; but this much? Do we have to be winter orchids, for godsake? Or summer popsicles?

Excuse me while I undress for the office winter tropics, and explain to you my simple compound solution. Henceforth, let's just decree that summer is winter indoors, and that winter is summer indoors! Sort of a seasonal savings time. That way, we'll all be able to stay suitably dressed for the occasion, and not feel insane. Hawaiian shirts in winter, down anoraks in summer: that should be easy to remember.

I've also devised a groundbreaking program by which, for a modest fee of 2000 yen per hour, anyone can come to my house and split and stack firewood for as many hours as they like, to ward off the chills of popsicality and melt away the lassitudinal layers of orchidity. Monthly rates available.

BIG HOT CITY RAMBLE

You talk about heat island syndrome as only happens in the big city, well just go outside at 10:30 a.m. from this Big City office where I'm working today - during Obon, no less - and you wouldn't believe how the deadstill air, dense with reflected sun from the tall mirrorglass buildings around here, can make this worse than Death Valley, it's like a solar oven, you could fry an egg on your cordovan wingtip, not that I'm wearing wingtips, actually I'm wearing some great pull-on sneaker type shoes I picked up in the States where they have my shoe size, they're really convenient for living in Japan, where you have to take your shoes off all the time and then put them back on, but an egg would just make a mess on these, I don't even like to picture it especially in this heat, they're sort of netty and cool, lots of openings for air, makes them perfect footwear for heat island syndrome here in the big hot city, but noway suited for the fried egg thing as I say, whereas the image of a fresh egg broken over a superheated cordovan wingtip holds a certain charm for me here, highly polished cordovan as well furnishing a superior surface for frying an egg if you think about it, let's not get all psychological over this, it's not your shoe, it just makes a good metaphor, a cordovan wingtip, nor did I say a Manolo Blahnik stilletto heel or anything - which now that I think of it might work as well, if it was patent leather and not open-toed - but I'm just talking about the intensity of heat island syndrome around here in the big city, actually I think it's frying my brain...

THE BIG NICKEL

Yesterday was one of those splendid spring days, as I noted wistfully, peeping at the merest slit of it through the blinds in the office, thinking "this is typical office weather" and wishing I were at home to enjoy the beauty of blue sky, warm sun, balmy breeze, the fragrance of the actual earth...

Then this morning on a day I was spending at home it was cloudy and threatening to rain and I thought: "typical at-home weather, this kind of weather is office weather, seems it always happens this way, why couldn’t today have been yesterday?"

But then, my mind plunging offroad on its own as it is sometimes wont to do when I let go of the reins, I remembered last Thursday when I had to go to the office it was raining torrents, and I’d thought: "Boy, I’d sure rather stay home today, curl up with a good book and listen to the rain." Of course, the nickel rarely drops at such times, even though it’s one of the biggest nickels ever minted: the fact that it isn’t the weather I’m complaining about, it’s the office.

For the truth is that, rain or shine, I’d rather be at home than in an office, because as the increasingly looming presence of the huge nickel indicates, humans were not meant to be in offices: they were not meant to sit in, work in, anything in, offices; they were designed, physically, mentally and spiritually, to be out in the world beyond windows and blinds. All other behavior is acquired, including the inability to reflexively drop the big nickel.

A love for Structured Investment Vehicles, for example, is not inborn, as is, say, the desire to sit under a leafy tree in a flowering meadow and let one’s thoughts run free, preferably napward. Practical complaints about the weather have always been with us, from the time we stared out of caves at the rain all the way until we invented the plow and beyond, but it wasn’t until modern times that we were pavloved into big-nickel retention.

COUNTRY WINDS

Seems like the winds of March have all been compressed into the past three days, both in power and constancy. Worse than the mistral. You haven’t heard mountain wind till you hear it hissing its towering cargo of energy through the big field of winterdry mountain bamboo out front, whose leaves and stems have evolved to dissipate the effect of all that passing power not only by bending as much as necessary, but by bunching those dry-tipped papery leaves together in a million white-noise rattles. Powerful stuff.

For its part, the wind is powerful enough to blow local trains off local tracks, which receive the down mountain brunt of those big shoulders, so you’d think I’d know better by now, but noooo… This morning I headed off to work as usual, the wind so strong I couldn’t even freewheel down the mountain, the wind halting me like a big airy marshmallow, even trying to push me back up the mountain (it was trying to tell me something, I should have listened) till in my eggheadedness I finally powered my way down to the station and there beheld a growing crowd of fellow commuters just standing around in the lobby, the stationmaster hissing through his teeth at queries regarding the next departure.

After an hour of standing around checking the rural graffiti and the state of the neighboring rice paddies I gave up and wove my way back upmountain through the braids of wind to home, whence I called the office to say that unfortunately due to the powerful country winds there were no trains to the big city so I’d have to work at home today, and how it broke my heart and all. At noon the wind is even fiercer than it was this morning, and there are still no trains passing by down there, as I can see from the warm calm behind the big glass doors facing the lake over the rocking bamboo, with a good fire crackling in the stove and a nice cup of coffee in my hand, as I suffer the typical anguish of abrupt officelessness.

Oh well, I can always look forward to heading in on Tuesday, if I should come to be completely out of my mind.

TIP-TOP OFFICE EXERCISES

This program of simple desk and cubicle exercises will start you on your way to office health, both physical and mental, no matter where you work:

The Münch

While pressing your elbows down upon your desk, press your hands to the side of your face as hard as you can and scream silently, making deep use of the diaphragm. Repeat until exhausted, once each workday morning and afternoon. When after 20 years you become fully unraveled, you can begin The Uber Münch.

The Desk Crunch

While adamantly seated in your chair, force your elbows downward upon your desk while pressing your knees outward against the inner walls of the desk as hard as you can, for as long as you can. Repeat until exhausted. After some years, you will succeed in crumpling your desk into a tangle of bent synthetic materials and can advance to the next exercise level. Repeat twice daily, in combination with The Münch, for maximum effectiveness.

The Wall Hammer

If you work in a cubicle and have already crunched your desk, you are ready to advance to the wall. Several times a day, stand facing any wall of your cubicle and pound on it as hard as you can alternately with fists, elbows, hips, knees and feet while doing The Münch, until you begin to make some dents in your containment. If your boss comes running, so much the better; you can vary your regimen with the exercise series called The Boss Hammer. That will get results even more quickly. Whenever other employees come to see what the commotion is, introduce them to your exercises. They will thank you, for this regimen relieves collective tension, making you a better, more relaxed and productive employee, while helping to shatter that glass floor, enabling your plummet to freedom. Along the way, you can practice such advanced exercises as

On the Carpet - turn criticism into coliseum!
The Rat Race - win this one by running backwards!
The Dog-Eat-Dog - Be better than dog food!
Career Moves - Terminal checkmate is the goal here!
Major Overhead - Start wielding the Sword of Damocles!
Number Crunching - No one can stop those ruthless jaws!
Downsizing - Your bosses will be half their original size!

Once you've completed this series, you can start on our full range of Street Exercises!

THE CLOUD OF GOD

It's just a little Kyoto shrine; a strong woman could pick it up and carry it away. It sits in a niche in a wall on a nondescript corner to an alley I pass by every morning, in an otherwise soulless neighborhood of the kind often seen around train stations in cities, especially that early in the day: monolithic apartment blocks, closed-up shops, empty streets. But there is always a flower in the vase, and sometimes when I'm zoning by in standard commuter zombie mode I'm all at once alive awake amid the fragrance of a wonderful incense like an invisible cloud of god, and am immersed in the faith of another, in the simple but beautiful and sharing act it is to tend this humble shrine for the benison of all passing by, who, without ever saying so, are blessed by this reminder of the beauty that is everywhere and always in the soul, as far as we may somehow seem to get from that beauty, and by the realization that simply passing through a cloud of god can awaken the god in ourselves, at least until we get to the office.

Previously published, in slightly different form, in Kyoto Journal and Tricycle