GALL BLADDER SOLILOQUY

No doubt the blogosphere is on tenterhooks (interesting word, that) regarding how at my age I am so quickly overcoming the insidious attack of the giant gall bladder without resorting to physicians or hospitals, surgery or conventional drugs.

My progress toward normalcy is thanks in no small part to a strict M&Mless diet (no Snickers either, though I still steal a cookie or two when Echo isn't looking) along with the usual vitamin/antioxidant supplements, but the main factor in my turnaround is the big gun that Echo dragged out of her cornucopia of alternative therapies, an ancient Chinese panacea: a horse-pill-sized ball covered in genuine gold leaf that costs 30 dollars a pop and consists largely of cow gallstone. Did you know that only one in 2000 cows has a gallstone? You learn something new every illness.

On the first day of the attack of the bladder from another galaxy, Echo took one of these golden cherry bombs out of its special box and wrapper and cut it into four pieces; I was to take one piece after each meal (she has a supply of them for medical emergencies). It looks and tastes like a chewy gold-plated caramel containing licorice, ginseng, powdered deerhorn etc., with the scent-flavor of exquisite temple incense, a bizarrely sensual combo that right away takes your mind off of any illness you might have had in what just a moment ago was your entire body, and has your very existence puzzled in your mouth.

After taking it I couldn't exactly pitch 100mph fastballs while rehearsing Riverdance, but why quibble? It was close enough for someone my age. Soon I'll be 25 years old again. On second thought, I think I'll just go back to when I could still eat M&Ms.

TOBOGGANING IN MEMORY

Looking through the LL Bean winter catalog this morning (I'm a big fan of LL Bean boots and moccasins, used to visit the old store in Freeport Maine every time I went camping up around there back in the 60s and early 70s) I came across a photo of a toboggan, of which there are none in Japan and that I had tried to describe to Echo at some point in the past (it's not easy to describe a toboggan to one of a tobogganless culture) so pointed this one out to her in detail.

This naturally segued into various tobogganing tales of my youth on the snowy hills of upper New York State, back when there was no tv and every decent slope for miles around was full of children in squealing bunches sliding down and climbing up, steaming hot in the freezing cold, and how what a big hit was a toboggan, a long toboggan, when ten kids could go down at once in a roiling scream of instant camaraderie that tumbled all together at the end, those vivid memories leading inevitably to the final derring-do toboggan ride of my brother and myself and our friends Marty and Mac during our college days when we went to New Hampshire for a long winter party weekend and at some point one evening decided to toboggan down the empty ski slope before the sun set.

We'd had a few beers and a lot of tobogganing experience under our belts, so we scrambled way up the empty icy slope, arranged ourselves on the toboggan and started off, very quickly reaching about 400 miles an hour – my memory recalls something about the sound barrier, but that may be spurious – at which speed we couldn't turn or stop as the big building at the bottom with all its concrete stanchions loomed closer and closer in the dimming light, so in desperation we leeaaannnneeeeeddddd as far as we could but despite all our expertise we hit one of those concrete stanchions in mental slow motion like live crash test dummies.

Actually, the back of my left thigh hit the stanchion, and my knee broke one of my brother's ribs; the other two guys went on tumbling for some time. My brother got taped up and I had to use a cane for weeks as I hobbled from class to class. We were young, we were insane, what can I say; that’s part of what college is for. But tobogganing remains golden in memory, since we survived. Even now, we survive. The toboggan, though, was not notably damaged. They made things to last, in those days.

ROUGH SEAS, SMALL BOAT

Lately I've been a bit short-tempered gruff brusque moody edgy sarcastic churlish testy cynical surly grumpy scathing etc. what have you and whatever pick a word, use your thesaurus, don't interrupt, it's not my natural inclination certainly which is kind and gentle, indeed often basely altruistic, to the point where I am perfectly willing to give an arm and a leg to a friend if need be. Ask me later.

Anyway, it's not really me it's not my fault it's all those M&Ms. The candy kind not my granddaughters (Mitsuki and Miasa, aka M&M). Because of all those M&Ms my gall bladder hurts, though not directly; nature moves in many devious ways but one of the most devious is called 'referred pain.' Which in the present case is not justly referred to the gall bladder lying sinisterly there beneath the liver, whence one might get a clue as to an appropriate rate and volume of M&M consumption but noooo, instead this bizarre right shoulder/back pain shows up one day out of nowhere and radiates thobbingly down my right arm like the leggy sciatica, thereby rendering me unfit for coherent gardening firewooding typing shaving toothbrushing punctuation M&M consumption you name it.

Maybe those Snickers bars had a hand in it too who knows, the scientists tell us nothing specific about the things that really matter at the personal level, it's all DNA and string theory, statistics and generalizations. But this sciatica of the arm (I’m sure there’s a proper scientific term for it you can look it up if you want to I’m gonna let my arm just hang here for a while) also makes my thought processes kind of rough, like this choppy effort - to say nothing of spelling with a game arm - since I can only effectively think between throbs which makes for rough creative seas in such a small boat as mine is.

You see already the metaphors are flying all over the place out of control (can creativity be wanton?) and all I can do is watch and wait for the current nerve-as-firehose to pass then leap one-armed back into the tempestuous text from a newly vacuous perspective, who has time for editing when you have to write a sort of desperate morse code as it is? Enough. I’m going to lay my arm on the desk.

Needless to say I've had my last ten bags of M&Ms. Maybe if I ate just one M&M at a time...

FROM "NO WAR" TO "YES WAR"

Well the only major nation in the world without a standing army just couldn't stand it anymore, being so solitarily peaceful (it's boring and unmanly; what good is power if you can't wield it however you want to, like other bastions of freedom?) and wants to have armed forces that can legally invade other countries and stuff at the whim of some fraudulently elected incompetent, like the big guys are doing… not that they will, of course, they say, nothing of the kind, that's the furthest thing from our minds they say, until one cannot but think they protest too much...

But the LDP – I mean Japan, the one-party democracy – clearly wants to do more than just some inyerface war shrine visiting once a year, more than just refuse compensation to comfort women, more than just deny in high school history books that the Nanjing Massacre ever happened with the last army Japan had, and all that stuff you're reduced to doing when you've had no army for so long you can't even remember what war is like, so they've come up with a draft of a new constitution that drops the famous 'no war' clause in favor of what must logically be a 'yes war' clause, so if the draft is approved by the still largely group-think populace, in a few years the politicos can just import a few of those handy Diebold voting machines and Japan too can elect some cryptovicious undergrowth who just loves having an army with other people's children it it; who knows where that will take the world?

I'm so old I can still remember when "We the people" used to mean something...

GRANNY D ASKS A FAVOR

Hello Friends,

Doris Granny D Haddock would like us all to do what we can to help the reform community in Connecticut get some traction on their effort to pass a Clean Elections bill this coming week. There is a critical window of opportunity. If you live in Connecticut, please see the link at the bottom of http://NewEnglandReformSchool.org (Granny's new project). If you can send this message (or that link) along to any friends in Connecticut (including students!), please, please do!

Your friends may have friends in Connecticut, so please send this out as widely as possible.

Very sincerely,

Dennis Burke

NewEnglandReformSchool.org
http://newenglandreformschool.org
Cobb Meadow Road
Dublin, NH 03444
USA

"Students! Maybe you should take over the world a little early
---while there's still some ice at the North Pole and some fish in the sea..."

Granny D on NPR

+

Election-related matter:

"The latest critical confirmation of key indicators that the election of 2004 was stolen comes in an extremely powerful, penetrating report from the General Accounting Office that has gotten virtually no mainstream media coverage."

The Free Press

HAVING AN EMPEROR IS NO PIECE OF CAKE

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always gotten along very well without an emperor. Just sort of a personal quirk I have. Of course living here in Japan I am covered, I suppose, by the imperial umbrella, but somehow I don’t really feel that it’s raining.

There are frequent signs of quotidian imperial activity in the newspapers and on tv, some member of the imperial family waving stiffly through a limo window at an emperor-dependent crowd or giving an archaic speech and cutting a ribbon to open a canning plant, but personally I don’t see the need for an emperor in my own life.

Still it is of curious interest that the long male imperial line (which goes back only a few thousand years to some fairly recent gods, in comparison to everyone else’s genealogy, which stretches much further back, to the first humans) has reached a royal cul-de-sac: the next kids in line are all female. So the unthinkable has been proposed by a committee: let the Crown Prince’s little girl (gasp!) become emperor after him! She’s three years old at the moment, which gives all the stodges time to seek an alternative.

In a kind of imperial desperation, one scholarly panel has already suggested a way to avoid having a female on the Crysanthemum throne, but something tells me that the Japanese people themselves, comprising a majority of women, would welcome such a change after a millennia of male monotony, though the issue is not as simple as people without emperors might think.

DO YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW?

According to the McDonald's PR, out of sheer integrity (we can't stand keeping the consumer in the dark even one second longer than 50 years!) the burgermonger is at last going to tell its customers exactly what they're eating, right on the wrapper. I kind of doubt it, though.

Surely they're not going to say that this very quarter-pounder you're about to add to your body comes from cattle raised on factory farms where the animals have been weaned on cow blood, injected or medicated with antibiotics and growth and other hormones and fed genetically engineered corn, soybeans and cotton seeds laced with slaughterhouse waste and tainted animal fats while standing and sleeping in their own waste for two years?

I don't think that'll wrap the Mac. The wrapper will say in tiny letters (that no hungry scarfer will ever pause to read) scientific-sounding stuff like: Big Mac Calories: 560, Carbohydrate: 47g, Total fat: 30g, Saturated fat: 10g, Salt: 1.3g...

What the labels should say in big red letters all over the place is simply "Believe us, you don't want to know."

OCA

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Alphabetical listing of those who gave everything

CHAOS IS THE PLAN

As I was ambling off the train into the city this morning, zoning through the train station rush madhouse thinking about the predictably disastrous appointment of Bernanke to head the private money-making machine that is the Fed (can things get worse? yes indeed!) vis-a-vis Japan's 723 trillion yen public debt (with annual tax revenue of less than 50 trillion yen), my mind was gratifyingly but bizarrely distracted by the young woman escalating in front of me who wore, starting at the top, reddishly bleached hair in the latest just-saved-from-drowning look, which hair straggled down to a clipped white fur bellhop jacket, below which a pink satin belly band trimmed with white lace, like the lowest ten inches of a slip, edged over green camouflage multipocketed army pants tied around the ankles and bottomed out by chartreuse high heels trimmed with green ribbon over slightly higher white socks, when I realized that fashions are reflecting the state of the world to an alarming degree.

BOBBY VALENTINE SHOWS 'EM HOW IT'S DONE

EVOLUTION DOESN'T EXPLAIN EVERYTHING, BUT
INTELLIGENT DESIGN DOESN'T EXPLAIN ANYTHING.

Death Watch at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

One of the tolling bells: Patrick J. Fitzgerald's new website

WHERE ARE THE SNOW MONKEYS OF YESTERYEAR?

I don’t know about you, but I haven't seen any monkeys lately. By 'monkeys' I don’t mean those manic creatures in the zoo, but groups, tribes, hordes of wild monkeys, as it was in the monkeyful days when I first moved up here to the mountain. Why, there were times back then when a brown simian cloud would flow through here, as I saw with my own eyes when I was present and could fight for my vegetables, or as I judged from the onionic and other debris when I returned, as recounted here in varying degrees of dudgeon. At least the furry brigands don't need garden tools, so far.

Lately, though, there's been an ominously refreshing absence of the scurrilous creatures, which though on the one hand is delightful, on the other hand what the hell is going on? I know that Japanese humans are tending to postpone marriage and having fewer children, to the extent that one day a single struggling youngster will have to fund the pensions of ten elders who live to be 150, but that's tomorrow; by then I'll have taken my pension and will be purring along the genuinely highways in my heavenly red Ferrari with Nefertiti riding shotgun...

Oh yes, the monkeys. I've begun to wonder whether they too are undertaking radical social change similar to that of their human cohabitants because my last three monkey sightings, weeks apart, have been of solitary individuals. It would seem that they no longer travel in groups, but are exploring the vagaries of existentialism, beginning to question their surroundings, the meaning of existence and so forth. We all know where that can lead. Hence my recent experience with the monkey at the end of the tunnel, in which we looked each other over pretty good, as though he were studying my style, such as it is, for future reference. I was half expecting him to come right out and ask my thoughts on religion. I suspect things might be getting serious.

Another sighting was a solo monkey sitting thoughtfully in front of a very old 'library' we pass on one of our favorite walks over the ridge. The place was a big knowledge center around here way back during the Edo era. It's pretty much unused now, but I suppose researcher monkeys have to begin somewhere; I doubt if they could get a card to the Kyoto U. library. On another mountain walk we saw a solo simian loping along the edge of a rice paddy where the view of the Lake was excellent. The monkey wasn't going out on a date or hurrying home to the family or community, he was just enjoying himself in the wild, the way college students do, as I recall vividly even today. So I began to wonder about monkey careers after college and so on, which led to this undisciplined protoessay and me with no time right now...

One thing's for sure, though: if those monkeys ever do learn enough to start using gardening tools, I'll find out where their gardens are, and when they go to the office.

FEMA WAS UNPREPARED FOR THE PURPOSE OF ITS EXISTENCE

'UNCA DICK' THEORY PROVING TRUE...

ONE CULTURE, ONE RACE, ONE INCOMPETENT MINISTER

The actual Internal Affairs and Communications Minister of Japan, Taro Aso, actually said the other day that Japan was "one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture and one race. It is nowhere else in other nations." Despite his high office and apparently accredited education, the guy ostensibly in charge of Japanese communication ignored the far more ancient presence of the Ainu, to say nothing of the Chinese, Koreans, Mongols, Polynesians et al., whence derived all aspects of the folks who historically only recently began calling themselves Japanese on the strength of being here last, and for just a couple thousand years. When government officials start talking about the ridiculous concept of race, minorities should maybe check their passports...

One wonders, though: where in the dims of the world do they uncover these people, and how do they vet them for office?

Related matters from the intrepid Debito

RETIRED HUSBAND SYNDROME

I can’t exactly say that my wife thinks the sun shines out of my shorts, but apart from my slightly substandard neatness parameters, now that the kids have gone into their lives and I am redirected (not ‘retired’; I despise that word) the household situation hasn’t worsened appreciably, so I think I’m doing better than a lot of these fellows. So far. Love to say more but I gotta go do the dishes.

TURNINGS

As I was driving home through the narrow village streets, the sun just about to set beyond the mountain saving its best for the very end of day, the cooling autumn air taking its large place in lives and memories, I passed a bunch of preteen kidguys on their bicycles, racing with all the rush of youth through the last of the light in their desperate afterschool yearning to have some freeforall fun before dinner, the sight and sound of them sending me instantly all the way back to my own boyhood at that age in upstate NY, when the same fire had filled me after school on autumn days with my friends on our bicycles speeding down the tree-arched streets in search of any adventure that would match the life that swelled our hearts amid the fragrance of air turning chill, leaves making crisp new sounds in the slightly harsher breeze, all my turnings thence leading to me here now, passing through a Japanese village over half a century later, filling me with exactly the same excitement and yearning as I felt then - though now I wear it differently - but what a wonderful moment it was, back then - a moment is all it was - speeding toward the future with my boyhood friends, where are they now, down all the roads they’ve followed…

KOIZUMI TO REST OF ASIA: GET STUFFED

Koizumi again visits Yasukuni, memorial to 2.5 million war dead and and 14 convicted Class A war criminals; former members of the Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere are understandably miffed.

I thought Koizumi was seeking Japanese membership on the UN Security Council. If so, insulting China is not a good idea, apart from other historical and diplomatic considerations...


Later, but integral: Japan-China Friction to Keep Shaking Asia

Even later (some things never die): Bad Memory in Japan, A Very Lonely Japan

IT'S A STRONG SOCIETY THAT VALUES ITS ECCENTRICS

Tramp wins right to keep his home in Hampstead

LAUGHING RAKAN

Yesterday went to a coffee shop in the small town south of us to see an exhibition of pottery that, judging from the photo on the invitation postcard, looked very much like Okinawan pottery, one of my favorites, but when we got to the venue we saw from the poster outside that we’d mixed things up; the show date on the postcard was next week; the current show was a series of Buddhist sculptures, so we went in to see that. Never mess with serendipity.

Turned out the friendly young sculptor, originally from Hiroshima, trained as a Busshu (Buddhist sculptor) under a master in Kyoto and now resides in the next village up the road from us. We frequently pass near his house on our walks, and he invited us to visit his studio next time.

There were a number of needless-to-say impressive sculptures on exhibit, a couple of them large sacred-style Buddha statues destined for various temples around Japan after being sent off for gilding (he doesn’t do the gilding or finishing, only the sculpting), but the sculptures I liked the most were his own personal depictions of the rakan (arhats, or Buddhist ‘saints’), particularly the laughing one (all were carved out of camphor wood!).

I asked if he needed any camphor wood, since I still have a few sections left and I’d rather see them as nice sculptures than as objects of my firewood-splitting curses; he said camphor was pretty easy to get since it wasn’t much use for anything practical (tell me about it) like furniture making or carpentry, since it warped so easily. But he had put it to magnificent use. If I’d had some money in my shoe I’d have bought that laughing rakan, to look at while I split firewood.