JABBA THE HURRICANE

So here we all are, all 130 million or so of us living here in the big J, the entire country, all the prefectures bright red on the weather map, bright red meaning big-time torrential rains, carrying on with or lives as best we can beneath the vast rain muffin that comprises whatever number this typhoon is - already a bit early but maybe not, since it’s been a wet summer anyway hard to tell the difference but whats new, some kind of prepping for weirdness to follow.

The strange thing is, this typhoon doesn’t move -- it just sits there right on top of the country like Jabba the Hurricane, slithering wetly maybe ten feet a day toward China. It delayed the trains in Yamashina (one end of the Rashomon path) on Friday night and its still here on Sunday afternoon, will be here tomorrow and for who really knows how long thereafter, hanging around blocking the light, puffing a bit here and there, blowing some stuff around, looking into the windows like a big wet wild creature you shouldn’t have fed, now it’s gonna hang around and drench everything, bring down mountainsides, flood villages and cities, rain rain rain on everything, no exceptions.

It does produce bit of wind at times so it can earn the name Typhoon, it shows up round and whirly on the weather maps, has an eye at its center and all that, but. Even now it sits atop the mountains, the fog of its being slowly drifting down over our house toward the lowlands... I cleared the rain gutters this morning, and yesterday was out in the rain-blustery garden propping up the toppled tomatoes that were burying me in tangly wet dripping green, when I was just trying to save them, get them up there where they could catch the most sun, if they remember sun, if there still is such a thing that will ever reach the surface of the earth again if Jabba ever moves before all the green things just say the hell with this we’ll give it another try next year, maybe there’ll be sun at a new budding...

THE SONG OF BREATHING

The rain arrives in the early night and comes down hard in the dark, all the louder for being unseen; after a time the air grows cooler as the rain drifts away on softer and softer notes, when from a tiny sound swells the insect chorus until it replaces the song of the rain that has gone, all those lives had been waiting out there to sing again into the dark, sing to each other each their own song, the same song we carry, in our own version, in ourselves, that we cannot always hear, but it is there-- we move to it even unknowing, responding in our light to the song of breathing, the song of heart beating, the song of walking, the song of loving, of dancing, we put them in our poems, we dance them to our moves, we sing them with our lives, or try to, when the rain has passed...

THE NEANDERTHAL SEQUENCE

When I was a teenager I was often called a Neanderthal by Mr. Rapazzardi, who generally sat on his front stoop keeping an eye on that nice front lawn of his that I used as a shortcut. For my part, I felt that Mr. Rapazzardi was the Neanderthal. Turns out we were both right.

Later, in my college years, I smirked at the academic puzzlement over whether or not the noble Cro-Magnon, crafter of superb arrowheads, pure high-browed ancestor of those strong-jawed subjects of highest nobility, known as "us," had ever, ever deigned to couple with the bestial, low-browed hairy chipper of nothing but hand axes: the Neanderthals next door! I smirked because, well, I was in a fraternity; we were much closer to how reality actually worked.

So all these decades later I was not shocked when the scientists announced that, like all non-Africans, I am part Neanderthal, and so was Mr. Rapazzardi. There have always been certain ancient cave-dwelling propensities, have there not, certain primal feelings in taking a risk, hefting a stone, sighting a wild animal, gathering around a fire, spotting an untrod lawn...

So what does this mean for us modern human folk, this Neanderthal quality so many of us share, even without reference to certain reality tv programming? It could explain some major anomalies, such as creationists, Wall Street financiers and certain folksy politicians, who are torn between the progressive abilities of one ancestral line and the inviting stolidity of the other, between malignant greed and staunch integrity, complexity, simplicity, pride, humility, the list can be found in any "holy" book, whichever from wherever. Familiar mixes that are especially stressful to politicians and financiers, for example, who as a way of life must appear one way while acting the opposite.

No real need at this point in these exciting revelations to mention that I am also very likely a descendant of King Tut, who was probably also part Neanderthal, as are you, maybe you have the Tut part too, all of which means more to me, such as it is, than the Adam and Eve agenda I was heir to, but there you are-- people are impressionable are they not, yearning as they do for admittedly mythical roots, even as they carry the actuals in their very genes, with far more lineage than any mere king.

So now, thanks to science, we mongrels can at last perhaps begin admitting who we all really are, begin finding, studying, facing and accepting the many gifts and glitches we have inherited from the Cro-Magnons, Neanderthals and Denisovans, among all our uncounted forebears - including King Tut, where applicable - and so get past the dark sides of politics, finance, other bipolar activities and evolve at last into the beings that have been trying for so long to be.

LIGHT AND DARK AND LIGHT

Here and there in the grains of the photos that remain from that time you can see the blurred outline of a person, sometimes with a child or even two, walking where the way was once familiar, but that now was the bottom of an incinerator the size of their city, that still burned through them even as they walked, perhaps to escape the heat of all the nothing that remained...

At other places in the mass of the ashes of a hundred thousand lives turned into wind and rain you can make out the speck of another one still living, bent over searching, sifting in vain through blackened flakes of what once was life, once a place of daily living, where now nothing stood, where all was flat and dark, dust and fragments of death...

After the fires died, first they came seeking their loved ones, one mother searching for her daughter who that morning had gone into town early so she could pay the rent on her way to work, but the mother never found her daughter...

That mother and all the others - fathers, sisters, sons, daughters and brothers, wandered for days, weeks, the rest of their lives in their hearts in those ashes of a city of families, passing by in their dreams those passengers on the train who were charcoal statues in their seats, or those still just alive who wandered also, in search of death that waited not far away, or the ones who had left those instant white shadows on the darkened stone of the bridge or building where they'd joined the unseeable light...

All of it on that August morning-- every ash of bone, every unheard scream, every sear of pain or cry for love, every tear of life, every atom of vapor that had been a person, all of it, is in our voices now...

GOYA

No, not that Goya, the big-G Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes, the renowned Spaniard who painted such works as The Third of May 1808 or Saturn Devouring His Son and who sadly never in life tasted the small-g goya that is this ramble's subject, also called the bitter melon, which originated somewhere in the tropics, has long been enjoyed throughout Asia, Africa and the Caribbean and could, I don't see why not, also be grown and enjoyed in the USA but isn't yet, as far as I know.

Now that we're past that bizarre but subjectively necessary opening sentence I can get right to the topic at hand, the wondrous goya. I first tasted that crisp and uniquely astringent fruit (the bitterest on the planet, Wiki says) on Okinawa in the early 1960s. After leaving Okinawa I didn't have goya again for decades, since it was then unknown and ungrown in the USA. Even when I came back to Japan, the wonderful veg was unavailable in central Japanese supermarkets until a few years ago, but by then I was growing my own. It's one of those produce items that has to grow from low-class food to high cuisine.

The reason I'm rambling about this now is because on Saturday, after two non-gardening days spent in the big city where little grows, I found that those many little tiny baby cucumber-sized goya had, in the two rainless days since, grown to include 4 full-sized gourds hanging there in hefty beauty. Goya don't fool around when it comes to growth and prolificity, they don't sometimes curl up to hide behind leaves and try to avoid being seen, like cucumbers do, they just hang there on their strong vines, heavy and straight down, saying Here! Here I am! I'm ready, pick me! Went out again this morning and among the 2 dozen or so small to midsizers yet on their way to maturity, 4 more had grown to size overnight! For just a few seeds and a high vine-climbable surface with southern exposure, you can have them all! Fresh! And tasty! And property/action rich!

Because I put up the high net fence (ca 3 meters) (and thereby tripled my growing area!) I began to grow climbers there-- cucumbers, pumpkins, climbing squashes, runner beans -- cukes love getting up so high, waving their tendrils around to bring their bright yellow blossoms even higher, but the goya has a special wild viney quality about it, it grows left and right and up and down, covering the whole surface. This year I planted just two plants, about two meters apart, at the foot of the northern wall, and those two alone cover the entire wall and beyond (one vine reached out and got into the chestnut tree!) with palm-sized translucent jade green leaves, here and there a butter-yellow blossom that more often than not turns into a tiny greening gourd that grows like blazes; this morning I harvested four of the biggest ones (well over a foot long; they biggen fast, the biggerer the bitterer). Now there are about two dozen of all sizes remaining, with about 6 weeks of growing time left to go!

The bitter melon is also a beautiful plant. Hardy as well, once it gets going. And the gourds. Crunchy, nice bitterness, they don't dissolve into a mush, great in salads, stir fries, tempura etc. I bet Western chefs are about to come out with some great new goya discoveries. As for the health aspects, the bitter melon is pretty miraculous; Dr. Wiel praises goya too, it is a wondrous health veg full of salubrious goodies yet to be detailed, or even discovered!

Here's some recipes from Todd, an organic farmer in Wakayama.

Todd also provides a link to lots of good-looking recipes

at the National Bitter Melon Council's (who knew?) website

And some goya recipes from Okinawa (Beware sudden music)

"HONEST JAPANESE RETURN $78 MILLION IN CASH FOUND IN QUAKE RUBBLE"

SHAKESPEARE NEVER MADE IT TO JAPAN

Bill was an eclectic guy, he mentioned slings and caldrons, hawks and bodkins, arrows and handsaws, everyday tools and devices all over the place, whenever they fit a niche in one of his plot structures, but as far as bootjacks go, despite their undeniable convenience he never mentions them even once, as far as I know. And there’s a reason for this; it came to me in my genkan a few days ago, which I'll get to in a moment.

Fact is - to stay off the main track for a bit the way Bill often did, though in his case for dramatic purposes, I'm just rambling - Bill was a borrower as far as plots went, so he had to go with what was at hand; still, to never even once mention a bootjack... He himself had a bootjack, if he had boots (and who didn't, back then?), and if he wasn't a noble-- they had their own living vassally hands-on Jack-of-boots, who gave the device its name.

And if you have a bootjack, despite its well-worn humility you know how much it means to you, bringing such ease and decorum to an inelegant task; same for Bill, yet he never mentioned a bootjack, never let it strut it its moment upon the stage, never made it a star, never gave it a bit of well-deserved fame; why might that be? I here hypothesize for the first time in history that it was because, despite his broad reading and deep familiarity with travelers' tales, Bill himself never really got around much. (Who had the time, wazoo shows a week, and writing them, too!) No, he never really got international, deeply intercultural, but mainly he never lived in Japan, which is why he never saw the bootjack for what it was.

These kinds of realizations come to one here in the Orient, particularly Japan, as happened to me one evening a couple of weeks ago when, as I returned from work the Trio of Brio was waiting to rush me at the genkan, where in Japan you take off your shoes before entering the house. I was not realizing anything of bootjack level at the time, it was just genkan city, plain and simple.

Where they stood on the floor-edge of the genkan, the girls were poised to pounce as soon as I slipped off my shoes (as 99.9999% of Japanese persons do, upon returning home). I, however was wearing a pair of rodeo boots I got in New Mexico some years ago, and did not simply slip off my footwear and step up onto the floor; rather, I bent way over...? reached under the shoe cabinet (there's one in every genkan)...?? and pulled out my old and trusty...? bootjack?!

The effect upon the vibrant Trio was like pulling the plug on a house-sized generator: a large and deep silence descended as they gazed wide-eyed upon this object from another reality, this long piece of looked like wood, of alien shape, with a wedge cut for some reason into the wide end, whose edges were trimmed with soft leather-- and underneath there was a single cushioned stub jutting out at an odd angle...

I stood there with the exoplanetary device in my hand, tilting it this way and that, like the steering wand of a spaceship, so that those young and hungry eyes could view it from all angles; I turned it over slowly in educational silence so they could study it. Then I handed it to them, so they could examine it closely, in detail, and determine... no, this did not seem to help; proximity did not clear their eyes of the mystery that was there. Sharp senses and hungry minds were not providing an answer. The purpose of a bootjack does not come easily to one who has been raised in a historically bootless culture.

Six wide and puzzled eyes looked at me for the answer: What was this thing? What was I doing instead of just taking off my shoes like everybody else does? What was the point of this theater? (Bill slipped into thought at this point.) Six eyes went from me to this piece of wood, then back to me, back and forth, looking for answers.

As Bill has demonstrated so well with his many characters, like Hamlet (who could never decide whether or not to bother using his bootjack) and Lady MacBeth (who bootjacked daily, offstage), plus Rosencranz and his buddy, coming and going (rabid bootjackers), timing is everything. The tension built... the audience of big brown eyes looked at me; I turned the object slowly, then suddenly dropped it on the floor! Hooked my right bootheel into the wedge, placed my left foot atop the wooden slab, pulled my right leg upward, and-- VOILA! A boot was standing there empty of my foot, which now stood bootlessly elsewhere!

Amazement filled the genkan. There was a loud and multivoiced kiddy version of all those adult shockwords that were frequently given voice during Bill's presentations at the Globe... Whoa!! What the ***? How the ***? and so forth, in this case followed by Lemme see that, I wanna try that, Can I do that! Me too! And so for the next 15 minutes the little stage that is the genkan was crowded with auditioners, trying on all the boots of all the kinds in all the genkan, shoes too, just to see how that went, and now all three understand and are greatly impressed with this radical new concept and cultural item from the Occident (a place Far East of here), called a "bootjack." Some day it will find a place in their plays, I'm sure.

If only the same thing could have happened to Bill when he was a kid...

PURE LAND MOUNTAIN SUMMER DAYS: Season 10, episode 42

Headed out for the cherry tree his morning to add some kitchen garbage to the compost pile that is currently nourishing the cherry tree, the Baron, his harem and his offspring, plus the smaller herbivores (no meat added, other than occasional fish bones), who all make good use of the leavings and add their share, leveling it all out with their rooting searches (likely the occasional wild pig too, though I've never seen one there). Crows and other birds also find goodies in the pile now and then, the crows being particularly fond of the rare pineapple crown, which they pick utterly clean; watermelon rinds are also a summer favorite.

When I went out there this morning, though, my approach prompted a big WHOA!, as a cloud of semi (cicadas) burst into flight all around me. (Some time when you've got a minute in your good pants, just try frantically dodging chunky buzzing lifeforms while carrying a dodgy load of drippy compost.) The semi had been convening not at the base of the oak, the chestnut, the other cherries or the cedars, but that particular cherry tree. The compost therefore must have been of some attraction for them, though it couldn't have been as food, since semi are the ultimate fasters, being mouthless and so not taking a single bite in their entire lives (Do not try the New Semi Diet!), staying alive in this form not being their purpose, their actual lives - such as we call life - being spent underground as larvae, in which lightless phase they get to be teenagers, yearwise; the rest comes later in the aboveground semi part that we're familiar with, a sort of pre-heaven for them, a quick agenda to perpetuate the race, leaving their lifeless husks lying around afterward, in some ways like the human teen age, though without the junkfood.

As I approached, the semi hadn't yet begun their daily waaa-waaa-waaa chorus, and were silent apart from the perennial morning background music to this unsponsored reality show tacitly titled Pure Land Mountain: Summer Days (audience too low for rating), which thankfully has nevertheless had quite a long run. This familiar buzz and hum was why I approached without knowing any creature was there. There was just a low busyness all around, as at a human conference. It certainly appeared that the semi were having some sort of convention, so many of them together, and as I neared their venue they began bursting away from the base of the tree in roaring sporadic dozens, zooming past my head WHOOM! WHOOM! WHOOM! as they took off, rudely interrupted, perhaps in the midst of some kind of mating meeting, an insect orgy, my sudden presence thus causing countless coitus interrupti. I couldn't tell exactly, but that is what they live for... Sorry guys.

Next time I go that way I'll cough loudly first...

MOSAIC

So there we were on a perfect blue-sky summer afternoon, all of us out on the deck, Echo napping on the big futon spread out in the shade while the Trio of Brio sat on the edge eating fresh watermelon, I standing near the door sipping iced coffee watching the far thunderheads rise in skycolumns of crisp white high above the blue shock of the Lake, over here the deep air itself flowing softly over us bearing the rich scent of summer growth-- blossoms and catkins, grass and trees, swelling rice heads in their imperial green robes nodding with wealth in the long late sun, the bamboo and weeping cherry branches swaying at the direction of the breeze. As I sipped and the girls giggled over their sweet afternoon snack while Echo slept, calm in the embrace of all outdoors I could not help but think that paradise is not a place, but a time, a moment, a mosaic of moments...

Citizens go

$2,400,000,000,000

deeper into trillions of debt -

politicians applaud

A National Debt Of $14 Trillion? Try $211 Trillion

TRY THAT, MERE HUMAN!

I was out in the garden this morning adding some kitchen garbage to the compost pile under the cherry tree when the warbler began his dawn concert, to which I always delight in whistle-responding as best I can; I suspect we featherless bipeds all have a bit of warbler in us somewhere.

Although I am a good whistler (frugal traveler entertainment) and love to take part in warbler performances - in a kind of duet, extended roundels, syncopation or whatever strikes my fancy - on occasion I have the feeling that the warbler involved finds it irritating. He often seems to sing more insistently, like a parent might talk louder over a noisy child. Or he tries something more complicated. Which is understandable; the warbler is the pro here, no question about that-- but still...

Sometimes with just a simple basic warbler riff I can fool the wee bird into thinking there's another male about, at least for a while, which can be fun with a warbler new to the neighborhood, as he bounces here and there singing irritably while looking for the upstart intruder, only to find that there's nothing around but one of those wingless, songless humans...

This time though, as soon as I repeated the warbler’s standard initial riff, he departed from the old songlist and performed a completely new number, a flashy and soaring glissando composition that had just arrived in warbler world, and it was a doozy. No way I could imitate that one, that was way beyond my ballpark, that was out among the stars somewhere. What a solo performance-- it just went on and on! I've never heard anything like it; I was struck dumb, whistlewise. If I could have seen that maestro, I suspect there might have been the hint of a smile on his beak at shutting me up so effectively, but it was worth every note to be so wonderfully humbled.

Warblers are evolving fast up here; got to get to work on my repertoire.

SPECIAL REPORT-Fukushima long ranked Japan's

most hazardous nuclear plant

"Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant ranked as one of the most dangerous in the world

for radiation exposure years before it was destroyed by the meltdowns and explosions...

After the earthquake, contract workers at Fukushima were sent in without radiation meters

or basic gear such as rubber boots. Screening for radiation from dust and vapor inhaled by workers

was delayed for weeks...

But that kind of stepped-up review never happened in Tokyo, where the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency remains an adjunct of the trade ministry charged with promoting nuclear power...

Because of Fukushima's high radiation, Tokyo Electric brought in thousands of workers each year,

often to work just a few days on the most hazardous jobs..."

More...

HEY, THAT'S MY LEAF!

All my life I've been nice to various species, Ever since I got past the frog-snake-salamander-catching age, it's been live and let live. Even in gardening, a worldwide battlefield, I say let's go organic, no insecticides etc. But when I walk out to my quietly growing garden and observe that many of my tomato leaves look like antique lace, gnawing at the edge of which lace is not a cute little aphid-devouring ladybug, but a Bob’s-tomato-leaf-devouring bug, to whom I say "Hey, that's my leaf!" but I'm talking to myself, they never listen, so

I amble back to the house to get some liquid detergent, pour a little into a cutoff PET bottle, then add hose water to 2/3 level to get a good head on it, after which I make my rounds from laceleaf to laceleaf, tipping and flicking the not so lucky notladybugs into the frothy mixture, where they can enjoy a warm bubble bath and come out all clean and dead. While I'm at it, I do the same for the weasely weevils on my peppers, who also love a bath, and dive right in with a little prodding. I do two rounds to be sure. A couple days later the tomatoes and peppers are taller and healthier; the bugs are clean and together with their gods.

It is a service I perform for the vegetable world, which rewards me with its delicious and nourishing fruits, some of whose seeds I save for the following year; it's a deal we got going. As a vegetable vassal I help the scarlet, emerald and golden nobles grow, and they help me get from year to year.

Now if I could get a bubble bath that would hold a dozen monkeys at a time, we could move on into the Renaissance...

LONG NIGHT OF ANOTHER KIND

On my routine way out the routine doorway to routine work this routine morning, as I closed the heavy dark-brown paneled routine door in that part of the routine, the corner of my eye noticed something non-routine, something that was - how shall I say it - different, something that broke the obsessive continuity of the quotidian.

Nature loves to do that. Some kind of reality insistence was being foisted upon me, something that was on the door and that resembled the door, but that could not be of the door, as my eye corner - which gazes always outside the routine - had insisted. This kind of thing is meant to grab your attention and save you from a conventional bout of zombosis, if you have any attention left.

It will snap your head and focus your eyes, make you lean in closer, make you say What the fenk? To a door, for godsake, all of which I did, excepting a letter or two in the last part. There was a lump on the door. A brown lump. A granular, mottled lump, doorlike in color and texture but not conforming to the panel molding. It shattered my zombie mode into a random number of little pieces that lay scattered invisibly on the ground. I stood there for a take, then hunkered to look more closely at this door tumor. As I got closer and put on my glasses I realized it was staring at me.

I found myself staring into the two onyx eyes of a large, dark toad, in whose mind I was of no importance whatever. He was precisely where he had decided to be. He had climbed up onto what he didn't care was a door, conformed his color to that of the wood (in the night!) and there he was, Jabba the Toad, fully in charge, focused and ready for the day when I zombied out in the grip of routine and found a chance to step out of mode, for which moments we should all be thankful, that's why we love nature so-- not just because of her beauty or wisdom, vast as they are, or because a few of her countless secrets led to the miracle of tv and suchlike artificial distractions, but because she rescues us even from ourselves, breaks the zombie spell, brings us back again and again to where we actually are, if any of us is still paying attention.

As Jabba indicated by his austere presence, there ARE other ways of living and being, and we should be aware of them just in case, the zomboid way being nowhere near the only way; the ways are countless; but then again, he who speaks of the way etc. In any case, you never know when we might need a big cosmic door of a kind to hang out on throughout a long night of another kind; besides, the cool shall inherit the earth.

FUKUSHIMA STORIES

A FIREMAN LOOKS FOR HIS FAMILY

Often, in moments of doubt, as he scours country back roads and rarely trodden trails, he takes out the photographs of his 29-year-old wife, Emi, and 15-month-old Atsuki and he talks to them.

"I'm sorry," he says softly. "I'm sorry."

w/thanks to Chris

THE BOLT LOOSENS CLOCKWISE

I remembered that, of course. I would have remembered to wake up as well, but all short-term remembrance is in the waking state, and I was asleep.

On Sunday we had the usual bi-annual community roadside manicure in which all able-bodied humans take part from 8 ~ 10 am, the physically capable men with their weedwhackers, the others - from kids to grandfolks - with their clippers, hand scythes, rakes and brooms, and since I would be doing the section up near my house, which involved whacking multimeters of mountain bamboo, I would have to change the whackerhead from the strings to the sharp-toothed blade. I knew all this in advance. Unlike last year, however, when for some reason I overslept, and in my unbreakfasted haste, among a series of lapses forgot that the whackerhead bolt loosened clockwise, as did the universe of that morning, this year I vowed to be breakfasted and ready at 8 with my whacker new-bladed and gassed up, ready to go.

But for some reason I overslept (something I seem to do each year on this day) and was awakened by the growing sound of weedwhackers along the road toward me when fresh from dreams I realized I had to change from strings to blade -- and the whacker was ungassed! But this time, thanks to the mind-branding nature of last year's experience - plus I happened to have an espresso in the fridge - I jumped out of bed right into my workpants, snatched the espresso, opened it with my teeth as I grabbed my workgloves and headed for the toolshed, the sound of whirling blades drawing nearer as I gassed up the whacker, changed the strings to the blade (THE BOLT LOOSENS CLOCKWISE) and was out there already wailing away at that road-leaning bamboo and other over/undergrowth when the village whackers arrived from below.

By ten o'clock I was drenched with sweat as one of the grandpas handed me a bottle of cold green tea as we all stood around there in a morning sunlit crowd overlooking the sparkling blue lake below and enjoying the chance to socialize while dripping sweat.

Also I got to see and greet almost all the village grandmas in one place! It is an ancient joy one feels at the sight of so many grandmas, something way deeper than knowledge that science will never get at. Mostly the local grandmas and I meet and greet occasionally, me biking down the road to the train, they biking up to or down from their fields, just a good morning/afternoon/evening or so in passing, but here we were all out together in the summer morning sipping green tea amidst all those bright smiles of grandmas in their monpe, tenugui draped over their heads, we actually got some conversations going, beyond good morning and how are you, thank you and it's so hot, and well done with smiles as I say everywhere. Later one of the grandmas came to our our house with a big box of fresh onions.

Next year I'll get the whacker fueled, bladed and ready to go the day before and set the alarm clock just in case. The work is hard enough; why pile all that stress on top of it?

Though it's nothing a grandma smile can't fix.

SUI GENERIS

As addendum tangential to the aforegoing, I figure I must also have the largest collection of late 20th century western music on the mountainside, if not in the Prefecture, to say nothing of formats. I have actual vinyl, though I no longer have my turntable; the LP (for the museum-quality term: "long-playing," back from when things had duration worthy of mention) albums are part of my art collection. I have some remnant tapes, but also no player. I have instruments. I am the player. 

I am the only one on the mountain who has ever played Frank Zappa to this air, I am sure. RL Burnside too, and the Pixies, Chet Baker, the Feelies, Van Morrison, Radiohead, Concrete Blonde, thousands of songs... And when I play them, I play them loud, as befits the passion thrust into the notes in the first place, and in the summer with the windows open, the birds love it, especially the warblers.

As the local farmers ride their mopeds up to their greening paddies or come walking up the road with their paddy tools they pass through my broad airy wash of Zappa Pixies Concrete Blonde and although they never actually knock on my door to ask me What IS that album, where can I get it? Who is playing Plastic People or Snake Drive or It's Only Life or Where is My Mind or Still in Hollywood? That sonic baptism is a deeply cultural event for them, one to be found nowhere else in the Prefecture, so it is no surprise that they are muted by the experience. It is a big one.

When they walk into one side of that sonic flux and let it wash over them they do not run for their lives; rather, they walk toward their lives, as though all is now well with the world, if not in fact even better, and when they emerge from the other side of that torrent, richer than when they entered, they are transformed in some way, if only at the molecular level (which includes DNA). One of their progeny may some century hence thrill the world with his or her deeply inspired and unpinpointably original music without ever knowing why.

Like those farmers and their descendants, you heard it here first.

 
TWAIN ON A ZOOK

Talking to a book-loving friend this morning about the gradual disappearance of physical books, and how infants today, growing up into an increasingly bookless world, may learn to read from a kindle or a nook, dook, fook, hook, kook, mook, zook or whatever comes after, and for their children it may be implants.

They'll never learn to love the promise in the heft of a book, portending the words, thoughts and adventures within; they'll never learn to love the scent of pages or the thrill of an entire library-- no exploring the stacks, no class visit to learn about books and how to use the card catalog-- the Dewey Decimal system will go the way of the pen, and cursive writing's ancient grace will have no place in their minds, as is happening already. It may all be MacWisdom by then, with one day the entire politically and academically corrected canon implanted at birth, science fictionally speaking. [There may come trolls who say that life is grate witout reeding or riting we got lots of time for other stuf an joystiks to]

And judging from what is considered worthy reading matter these days, comes the correction of Huck Finn, the dumbdowning of Gatsby, the dispassionate writing-class flavor of modern LitFic and all that will follow as the word bends over backward to accommodate the loss of education that schooling is becoming, I realized that I may well have the largest genuine library on the mountainside... I certainly have the largest English library on the mountainside, maybe in all of Shiga Prefecture...

Until recently it has been a problem for me, what to do with all these books, but now that there are Nooks and the like, which I will not use for hefty mindstuff; maybe a mystery for the train, but I will never read Fyodor Dostoevsky on a Pook or Mark Twain on a Zook, are you kidding me? Some literary efforts and their life-passions require the heft of deep respect; there is something karmic going on here, after all, there is more to books than pixels...

So rather than continue to be burdened as before by the mass of my own tomes, I now realize that my home has become a cultural repository against the looming loss of calligraphy-driven writing, much like the stone cloisters of the Dark Ages, when books were known, scribed and saved from the dark by a passionate few as treasures for the future, when they would be needed. So for you folks centuries hence who can still read and have somehow found this blog, up in that ruin on the mountain you can find Mark in the original.

PARALLELS CAN BE DRAWN HERE

Woke up this morning and as my head came out of my sweatshirt neck I saw out in the garden something that looked as though a large crowd of monkeys had raided my potato patch yesterday, but this wasn't possible, had to be a trick of the morning light, I hadn't seen a monkey for months and months! I rubbed my eyes, but still...

So I got dressed, went downstairs and out there, saw that yes, it must have been at least a dozen monkeys, going along the rows carefully pulling up the plants and scarfing the dirt-encrusted tubers right there on the spot, laying the stems neatly aside and moving along from Brady possession to Brady possession, no doubt noting the greening tomatoes nearby, the baby cucumbers just over there and duly entering the relevant data into their Mpads for about the 12th of the month.

I of course will harvest whatever's even remotely ready before it can ever fall into their thieving paws! But the monkeys already know I'll do that don't they, and have factored that in, you see? Which means that I'll have to act even sooner than soon, and eat my produce way before it's ready, or else! You see what is happening, don't you, as we humans go blithely about our daily lives while... Parallels can be drawn here, you know, but I won't draw them, I have to live here.

[This paragraph is whispered, over in a corner] Yes, there are obvious parallels between this agroeconomic microevent and the global activities of Wall Street, the privately owned US Fed and the US Treasury Department, in re the inside-out pockets of the held-upside-down-and-shaken US taxpayer/pensioner, not to mention the shenanigans of the unnamed country of my current residence, and like the monkeys those entities know where I live, plus now and then I am at the tender mercies of picky-picky immigration and the intimate gropings of the TSA, so I won't go there, you can if you want.

In any case, like the US taxpayer I had once again been suckered by foxy simians who somehow knew I was going to be harvesting some of my hard-earned bounty this weekend - they have spies everywhere, of course, especially in offices, where among many other roles they play pointy-haired bosses and feral officials, you'd swear they were human. I told no one I was growing potatoes, but despite my precautions the ferals found out and got to the tubers yesterday, had me penciled in for the brief window while I was at the office in the big city and Echo was out shopping in the afternoon. They were so efficient as to afford a note of sarcasm, in all the big ravage-patch leaving me one golfball-sized potato, as a kind of fillip.

As I said, I hadn't seen a monkey for months, until a couple days ago I saw from the kitchen window a large male monkey hotfooting it away from my property across the open field on the other side of the road. I figured maybe I had finally put the fear of Bob into those redfaced brigands, until just proximity to my garden was enough to send them packing.. I admit, I relaxed my guard a little at the sight. But that's all part of their plan, don't you see? That's the way they work! They keep you in the dark until one day, just before harvest, all your potatoes are gone.

Globally, quite a few pensioners are about to understand this.

THE FROGLINGS

The tiny green tree frogs are out in growing numbers now that the air itself is wet in the rainy season, there are so many of them but they’re all solitary individuals, prefer to be left alone in some corner of nature with their dark pasts, their jade thoughts. I go and get the ladder to fix something high and there’s a whole disparate committee of the little greenies, steeping in their solitude, each sequestered in a nook on his own ladderstep, just staring at you whatever happens like they know you very well and they probably do; their gaze says they’ve seen it all in their duration on this earth. They probably saw the human race when it was just a baby, so they know more about us than we do and have been keeping a dark eye on us ever since, especially since my own frog-catching childhood. Even now as I go about my gardening one of them is sitting on a tomato leaf watching me with that look of long times.

Elsewhere they jump from my hat, ride on my shirt, doze for hours on my pepper leaves, hide in every little secret place. They know all the little secret places, since that’s their job, but that makes them just the thing for treasure-hunting, doesn’t it, so when the KMM trio came to visit Saturday afternoon Mitsuki right away spotted the bright dot of froggy jade tucked away in the corner of one of the deck railings. After she caught that one, Kaya and Miasa right away set out to catch the microfrogs of their own, and I knew a lot of the best hiding places, one of the keys to grandfather popularity.

So the girls right away had to get containers for their growing collections of tiny new pets, which they gave individual names. Soon the competition turned from mere quantity to who can catch the smallest frog, and the winner for the evening was about 1cm long. He just hung there on the inside of his container unaware of his froggy Oscar and tried to comprehend outside/inside while among more frogs than he’d ever been among in his life, or maybe her life, I didn’t have time, I was helping with dinner and each KMM table place was marked by the respective container of frogs.

During dinner the girls were informed they’d have to say goodbye to their tiny living treasures, they’d have to let them go, which news they accepted without too much grumbling when told that they’d have to start right away to every day catch a nightful of bugs for frogfood. As it turned out they couldn’t bring themselves to set their little friends free, though - I wonder if they’ve seen The Yearling - because before going to bed I noticed by the door to the deck three jars of frogs embodying all those eons of experience, yearning for solitary but still doing time in the crowded slammers, and every one of them innocent. I took the jars outside, one by one removed the tops, and you never saw so much frogcitement in your life: leap, leap, leap, leap, far bigger and faster leaps than normal for such generally unmoving creatures, splat, splat, splat, splat, in every direction, they’d been waiting all dusk and evening for this moment-- they are night people, after all. Lotta green karma there.

By then the girls were probably fast asleep, dreaming of frog happiness, confident that Bob would see to it. Each life must attend to certain tasks, and mine is no exception.

ALONE ON THE MOUNTAIN

I spend great stretches of time alone up on the mountain with the sky on my hands, tending soil, seeds and plants, rearranging rocks the better to suit their natures vis-a-vis my need for stone walls, gazing out at the Lake and its majesty, getting as involved as I humanly can in thunderstorms and hurricanes, learning from them the many small things about myself, my past, my path, and the vortex of truth and illusion.

There is no greater teacher than solitude, as anyone who makes it back from the desert knows. Not solitude in the negative standard 'loneliness' sense, but in the aboriginal magnificent spirit-quest uplift sense. In the city, when you are alone it is a societal matter; when you are alone in the country you are alone, you realize, with everything. In persisting, you learn to listen at last to the symphony of all. You learn the geography of silence, find your way at last to the gate at its heart, and pass beyond into the secret garden. You learn there are places where the soul does not grow.

The need for such knowledge is the reason children leave home and go hungrily into the solitude of their own lives, to learn what is to be learned there. Too often, though, this quest is stifled at the start, even before the start, by societal and parental agendas, derivative teachings diluted to local purpose and contemporary assumptions of morality.

And so in the same nature of things are parents given a second chance when the children leave home, leaving the parents alone at last to learn (or not) what is now there for them to learn. Too often, though, because they have always followed a prescribed path, they do not know what to do with newness, and now is as opaque to them as tomorrow. It will take time, and changes, for them to truly grow from here. But to those who have never stopped growing, there is no change involved; one simply continues becoming.