October 23rd 2007
I’m sitting alone at a place called Milky Way. I heard they had a good salad bar, so I thought I’d check it out. There are may people in the restaurant, but everyone is spread out fairly well. It does not seem crowded.
In front of me is a glowing red neon sign reading: SALAD SOUP
I am in the smoking section, which is oddly placed right next to the salad bar. Any health code inspector in America would shit bricks if they saw a place that let people smoke cigarettes a mere yard or so from uncovered food at a buffet table. This country never ceases to bewilder me.
Sitting near me are two women, probably in their forties. They are chain smoking and talking about insurance. I can’t tell if they’re just discussing it, or if one of them is trying to sell it to the other. The conversation seems rather informal. One of the women has disproportionately thin legs. The top of her body is stout, barrel chested, like she might have trained as a competitive lumberjack. But her legs are tiny. There is no fat on them. The veins and muscles bulge through her skin. She could probably put a foot through a front door with little effort. She just got up and walked outside.
The woman she left sitting there is coughing up phlegm. I could hear her swallow the yellow goo from my booth next to hers. We both lit a cigarette at the same time. The people here seem to be of all ages and backgrounds. Groups of women in their twenties, sitting in sets of two or three, laughing about whatever. A salary man with his tie loosened, eating alone. An old couple sitting in silence. A young couple, looking high and in love. Then there’s me. Who knows why I’m here.
The stocky woman just came back inside. She’s carrying several booklets and papers. Now I can tell she’s definitely trying to sell the coughing woman insurance. I don’t know much about the world of insuring. What? there’s life insurance, home insurance, health insurance, auto insurance…probably lot more, I’m sure you can insure anything. Point is, if I were sitting in front of somebody, trying to buy insurance, I probably wouldn't be smoking. Just seems like it would work out to your advantage. Whatever. It’s none of my business. She’s signing the papers now. The deed is done.
***
Yesterday I was sitting at home after work and I got a message from Michael saying to meet he and Rich at Purnima at seven o’clock. I changed clothes and went for a quick run as the sun was setting, then had a shower and rode over to the restaurant. I was the first one there. I went inside and said hello to Baba, the owner and chef. He’s a middle aged guy from India, always wears brightly covered turbans and tunics which do little to mask the belly he’s grown from years of drinking beer. He always asks Rich and me how we stay thin. We tell him it’s all the beer and curry. This makes him laugh.
I sat down at the usual table.
“Hey Foley,” said Baba from behind the tandoori oven where he was forming a massive piece of naan.
“How’s it going tonight? Keeping busy?”
“Oh, you know it man, sometimes we slow, sometime we busy. It’s fucking cold outside but this kitchen is always hot.”
“You like it hot Baba, you’ve always said so.”
“Yeah man, that’s sure thing. Who else is coming? Any beautiful ladies?”
“Not tonight. Just Mike and Rich.”
“You’re so young man, you should always be with the ladies, you know. Before you get fat like Baba.”
“I’ll work on it. No one really piques my interest in this town. These country girls are afraid of foreigners, especially Americans. Our reputation precedes us.”
“That’s no good man. Say, if it’s just you guys tonight, we hookh later, okay?”
I glanced at the corner of the Indian restaurant towards the massive waterpipe on a shelf. Strange trinkets and talismans dangled from it, like a relic of some spiritual significance.
“Yeah, smoking the hookah sounds nice. It’s been a while. But for now, while I’m waiting, I’ll have a beer.”
“What kind beer? You want Indian beer or nama beer?”
“Nama.”
Then, switching to Japanese, Baba shouts towards the kitchen where the restaurant’s only other employee is waiting: Sumimasen, nama biiru hitotsu onagaishimasu!
I finished half the pint of beer before Rich and Mike turned up. They bought Nas along with them. She had recently gotten out of the hospital, where she was held for a week as the doctors tried to figure out why she was having piercing pains in her stomach. They let her out a week ago, after the pain died down. I was surprised to see her.
We sat talking about the weekend, all recalling hazy memories of the enkai we threw ourselves on Friday night. Historically the Iwaki Board of Education throws an enkai when the new ALTs arrive. But this year there were so many of us that they couldn’t afford it, evidently. So after two months of waiting, we took it upon ourselves to all gather for a night of booze and food. Good times were had by most. The ones that couldn’t hold their liquor might have regretted paying 3000 yen for the all-you-can eat and drink event.
After studying the menus we ordered four vegetarian curries, two of the famously giant pieces of naan and more beer.
Right as the food came out Nas grew incredibly ill. Her color faded and her usually cheery face sunk into a grimace of pain. She said that she felt like she did before she went to the hospital, which was evidently pretty shitty. She tried to stay with it, to keep herself in the conversation, but it was no use she was not doing well. She called work and said that she was sick again and that she would go back to the doctor in the morning.
She rode her bike about 30 minutes to get to the restaurant. I told her to ride to my apartment and rest there until she felt better.
“It’s just 5 minutes away,” I said. “The door is unlocked. You can rest on my couch, watch the TV. When you get there, go into my medicine cabinet and take out the orange bottle of pills. Don't take more than two.”
“What are they? Will they make it better?”
“They’re 500 milligram tabs of hydrocodone. I take them recreationally, but they’re quite powerful and good at taking away all the pain.”
“Okay, thanks James,” she said and left the restaurant, not touching her food.
Good thing we were hungry.
“Hey Rich, what are you doing over Christmas?” said Mike.
“I dunno mate. I might go back home.”
“Want to come to China with me and Nas? We’re going to book tickets at the end of the week, once we get the quotes form the travel agent.”
“What are you going to do?” Rich said.
“We’ll wander around. Probably spend some time down in Hunan. Still ironing out the details.”
“I reckon I better go back to England. I haven’t been home since I’ve been here.”
“I’ve never been to Europe,” I said. “I want to go to France.”
“Why?” said Rich. “Everyone there is French.”
“I dunno, if I had to pick a European country to visit, it would be France.”
“I’m done with English speaking countries,” he said. “I don’t want to travel to any more of them. Except maybe Antarctica. I saw an advertisement in a magazine for a job there. The best job ever. Extreme Mountaineer. Wouldn't that look awesome on your C.V.? Five years. Extreme mountaineer.”
“What would you do?”
“Be a research assistant. Climb ice covered mountains, risk life and death.”
“I heard that you can go and live in an Antarctic compound and basically get paid to hang out. I think a professor told me about. No one is in the Antarctica except for scientists. They’re all holed up in these compounds, hundreds of them. They have to have someone to cook the food and clean things up and whatnot. So you can get a service type job down there and make a killing. And where would you spend any of the money? You’d come back home with lots of cash.”
“Maybe we should go?”
“Maybe.”
We ate our dinner. Nas’s too. There were few leftovers. Afterwards Baba brought the hookah to our table, along with three cups of chai.
“Thanks,” I told Baba. “What flavor did you put in?”
“Rose. I was gonna do melon. But I think that’s too sweet with the chai.”
We started smoking.
“I’m going to Thailand in December. I’ll be there for Christmas and New Year’s.”
“You’ll like it,” said Rich. “Just stay away from Phuket town.”
“You didn’t care for Phuket?”
“No, it was a shit hole. I got there and left right away. It’s real seedy. My hostel had holes in the floor.”
“I’m flying in and out of Bangkok. I don’t know if I’ll make it down to Phuket or not. I’d like to see at least one of the islands.”
“I had a great time in Phuket when I was there,” said Mike. “My friend and I stayed in a cheap hotel and hung out on a private beach with a friend who was staying at a resort with his family. Once we went to a girly bar and saw some weird stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Girls doing crazy things with their vaginas. Like peeling bananas and smoking cigarettes. This girl would stick a cigarette inside her and smoke half of it, then pass it around the bar for the customers to smoke.”
“Did you smoke it?”
“No, I don’t smoke cigarettes.”
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
This morning I put out too much instant coffee in the mug, so much that the beverage became super supersaturated and thick as tar. I drank half of if and left it on the counter and went to work. Ever since I came home, I’ve been filling the cup with hot water. I’ve drank several cups and between that and a healthy amount of cigarettes and squares of dark chocolate I am sufficiently wired. At this point, my beverage is more or less hot water tinted with the brown hue of what was once a mug of coffee. I don’t think more caffeine will do any good, it’ll just keep me up later than it already is. Drinking hot water is not something I usually do. It’s sort of odd, but adding tea or more coffee or just drinking water from the tap doesn't seem right. The cold is creeping in. Along with the darkness.
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything on this blog. I told myself that I’ve been too busy to write anything. That’s a lie. I have plenty of time. I just can’t find the motivation. It’s getting dark earlier and earlier. The sun goes down before 530. It sinks down below mountains, dropping off the horizon to shine upon a new part of the world. It leaves behind nothing. There is no twilight. Just midnight black. It’s as dark at 6pm as it is at three in the morning. This darkness is crippling. It has taken control of my mind. It keeps me indoors, unmotivated and imprisoned in this cell of an apartment. I’m free to come and go as I please, but I can’t muster up the effort. Going anywhere means spending money, unless I just take a walk in the dark.
Reality is setting in. The vacation is over. Welcome back to existence.
The dishes and garbage pile up in sinks and on the floor. Unfolded laundry, both clean and dirty, rest in corners and strewn about on the backs of chairs and furniture. When left to my own devices, this solitude is a messy thing. It can make a literal mess: dirty floors and sinks. Or it can make a mess of the mind. I was scatter brained long before I came here. That hasn’t changed. I can’t focus on one task for too long before distraction or boredom or slumber takes hold. I pick up a book, I fall asleep. I try to write, and I start fucking around on the internet. I try to study or learn something new, then suddenly the guitar sitting in the corner seem much more interesting.
I stopped drinking for a while, took a whole week off. Didn’t write a word. Started back up again one Friday night and by Sunday I remembered why I took a break in the first place. I can’t find any balance between the extremes.
My mind has been too saturated with stimulants and distractions. It’s been one long paid holiday since I’ve been here, and I’ve been living in a dream or a cloud or something equally opaque, something that prevented me from recognizing the other side to all of this.
Over the weekend I went canyoning. This entailed traveling about 6 hours away into the mountainous region northwest of Tokyo. The water flowing down the mountains was cold as ice. I had on a full-body wetsuit padded with about 15 millimeters of rubber and it was still cold cold cold. I set off into the mountains with a group of 12 and two guides. We’d jump into the mountain streams and let them carry us down the path to waterfalls, which we’d jump off of, landing in deep pools of water. Anything too high or steep to jump off of was abseiled down. I had never done anything like this before, it was quite amazing.
It was on the bus ride back that I realized something was missing.
I sat alone in the back, as the bus sped down the dark highway. I was listening to Explosions in the Sky on my iPod, staring out the window, looking at nothing. My mind was somewhere far, far away. It was thinking about home.
Home for me is a strange word. It is not concrete. America is home, in a broad sense. But to get more specific than that requires a lot of explaining. I tell everyone I meet here that I come from Kansas City. Most assume Kansas City to be in the state of Kansas, and even though it’s mainly in Missouri and I was technically a Missouri resident, I don’t bother correcting them on the details.
At school, when ever I teach a class for the first time I give a self introduction. Since I have five different schools, each with six grades with and at least two classes per grade, I’ve given my self intro a lot.
I tell them I come from Kansas. I tell them about the sunflowers and the Wizard of Oz. I show them pictures of tornadoes and of the prairie.
I don’t mention that I only lived in KS for four years or that I’ve never seen a tornado and that the wizard of oz is something I’ve only seen once, long ago.
I do this for simplicity’s sake. It’s not necessary to give them my life story. But what about the people I interact with outside of school? Other English teachers, Japanese friends? They don’t necessarily get the whole truth either.
Nobody here knows me. They don’t know who I am, they don’t know what I do, they don’t know my story.
It works both ways too. I don't know any of their stories either. Sure, it takes time to build relationships and develop trust and everything. But as I was sitting on that bus looking out into the darkness, I realized the full force of this notion.
When I think of home, I don’t think of a place. I think of people. I think about their faces and their eyes. They way their hair looks. Random nights and moments we shared together, some of great significance, others so minute that I have no explanation for why they linger in my mind. But all these thoughts and images and memories form what I call home. Home is not a place. Home is people. Going home means returning to those people.
My eyes could see nothing, but in my mind everything was exploding in a blurry chaos. Through the swirling torrent of faces and memories, I landed on one moment in particular. My last night in America. Nicole and Chad’s house. Most people from the farewell send off had left and I did not know when I would see them again.
It was time for me to go too.
Standing there in the entryway, Nicole, Jenna, Ryan and I. A sad song was playing on the stereo and it was appropriate. Tears and emotion and sadness were held back all night. There was no time to react as the guests were leaving. Even as I said goodbye to the girl I love, giving her a hug for one last time before she left, there was little emotion. But everything that had been building inside me all summer, building towards this final moment before I took the last step and went out the door, ending another chapter in my life, all of that emotion and feeling and joy and sadness came out all at once. Jenna and I hugged for an eternity, embracing with such force it broke the levy. Flooding. Tears. Sobs. Everything erupting, coming to the surface.
This vivid memory came back to me in full force sitting there on the bus. It made me very happy and very sad.
It’s wonderful to have people like this in my life. But it’s terrible that they’re so far away.
Having people you love and trust and enjoy being around is incredibly important. It’s a key to survival.
I’m sure this can happen here. But it hasn’t yet, at least not to me and I’m beginning to doubt my ability to survive on the island. Maybe it won’t be as easy as I thought.
The more I think I know, the more I realize I don’t understand.
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything on this blog. I told myself that I’ve been too busy to write anything. That’s a lie. I have plenty of time. I just can’t find the motivation. It’s getting dark earlier and earlier. The sun goes down before 530. It sinks down below mountains, dropping off the horizon to shine upon a new part of the world. It leaves behind nothing. There is no twilight. Just midnight black. It’s as dark at 6pm as it is at three in the morning. This darkness is crippling. It has taken control of my mind. It keeps me indoors, unmotivated and imprisoned in this cell of an apartment. I’m free to come and go as I please, but I can’t muster up the effort. Going anywhere means spending money, unless I just take a walk in the dark.
Reality is setting in. The vacation is over. Welcome back to existence.
The dishes and garbage pile up in sinks and on the floor. Unfolded laundry, both clean and dirty, rest in corners and strewn about on the backs of chairs and furniture. When left to my own devices, this solitude is a messy thing. It can make a literal mess: dirty floors and sinks. Or it can make a mess of the mind. I was scatter brained long before I came here. That hasn’t changed. I can’t focus on one task for too long before distraction or boredom or slumber takes hold. I pick up a book, I fall asleep. I try to write, and I start fucking around on the internet. I try to study or learn something new, then suddenly the guitar sitting in the corner seem much more interesting.
I stopped drinking for a while, took a whole week off. Didn’t write a word. Started back up again one Friday night and by Sunday I remembered why I took a break in the first place. I can’t find any balance between the extremes.
My mind has been too saturated with stimulants and distractions. It’s been one long paid holiday since I’ve been here, and I’ve been living in a dream or a cloud or something equally opaque, something that prevented me from recognizing the other side to all of this.
Over the weekend I went canyoning. This entailed traveling about 6 hours away into the mountainous region northwest of Tokyo. The water flowing down the mountains was cold as ice. I had on a full-body wetsuit padded with about 15 millimeters of rubber and it was still cold cold cold. I set off into the mountains with a group of 12 and two guides. We’d jump into the mountain streams and let them carry us down the path to waterfalls, which we’d jump off of, landing in deep pools of water. Anything too high or steep to jump off of was abseiled down. I had never done anything like this before, it was quite amazing.
It was on the bus ride back that I realized something was missing.
I sat alone in the back, as the bus sped down the dark highway. I was listening to Explosions in the Sky on my iPod, staring out the window, looking at nothing. My mind was somewhere far, far away. It was thinking about home.
Home for me is a strange word. It is not concrete. America is home, in a broad sense. But to get more specific than that requires a lot of explaining. I tell everyone I meet here that I come from Kansas City. Most assume Kansas City to be in the state of Kansas, and even though it’s mainly in Missouri and I was technically a Missouri resident, I don’t bother correcting them on the details.
At school, when ever I teach a class for the first time I give a self introduction. Since I have five different schools, each with six grades with and at least two classes per grade, I’ve given my self intro a lot.
I tell them I come from Kansas. I tell them about the sunflowers and the Wizard of Oz. I show them pictures of tornadoes and of the prairie.
I don’t mention that I only lived in KS for four years or that I’ve never seen a tornado and that the wizard of oz is something I’ve only seen once, long ago.
I do this for simplicity’s sake. It’s not necessary to give them my life story. But what about the people I interact with outside of school? Other English teachers, Japanese friends? They don’t necessarily get the whole truth either.
Nobody here knows me. They don’t know who I am, they don’t know what I do, they don’t know my story.
It works both ways too. I don't know any of their stories either. Sure, it takes time to build relationships and develop trust and everything. But as I was sitting on that bus looking out into the darkness, I realized the full force of this notion.
When I think of home, I don’t think of a place. I think of people. I think about their faces and their eyes. They way their hair looks. Random nights and moments we shared together, some of great significance, others so minute that I have no explanation for why they linger in my mind. But all these thoughts and images and memories form what I call home. Home is not a place. Home is people. Going home means returning to those people.
My eyes could see nothing, but in my mind everything was exploding in a blurry chaos. Through the swirling torrent of faces and memories, I landed on one moment in particular. My last night in America. Nicole and Chad’s house. Most people from the farewell send off had left and I did not know when I would see them again.
It was time for me to go too.
Standing there in the entryway, Nicole, Jenna, Ryan and I. A sad song was playing on the stereo and it was appropriate. Tears and emotion and sadness were held back all night. There was no time to react as the guests were leaving. Even as I said goodbye to the girl I love, giving her a hug for one last time before she left, there was little emotion. But everything that had been building inside me all summer, building towards this final moment before I took the last step and went out the door, ending another chapter in my life, all of that emotion and feeling and joy and sadness came out all at once. Jenna and I hugged for an eternity, embracing with such force it broke the levy. Flooding. Tears. Sobs. Everything erupting, coming to the surface.
This vivid memory came back to me in full force sitting there on the bus. It made me very happy and very sad.
It’s wonderful to have people like this in my life. But it’s terrible that they’re so far away.
Having people you love and trust and enjoy being around is incredibly important. It’s a key to survival.
I’m sure this can happen here. But it hasn’t yet, at least not to me and I’m beginning to doubt my ability to survive on the island. Maybe it won’t be as easy as I thought.
The more I think I know, the more I realize I don’t understand.
Monday, October 1, 2007
this is vane & boring. don't read it.
I took a week-long hiatus from drinking and smoking.
I was prompted to do so after a horribly long and booze filled weekend which started on a Friday with cocktails in hand on a train bound for a birthday party two towns over, and ended at 7:30 am on a Sunday as I walked out of an unknown bar and into morning rain, trying to convince a 23 year old Japanese woman who had been talking with me all night that she should leave her 43 year old American fiancé and come home with me. I was unsuccessful, which is for the better. She had horrible teeth.
I decided that I needed to cool it off, that my life is not going anywhere good by drinking all night on the weekends and less heavily in between. So, after I crawled out of bed at 2 in the afternoon last Sunday, I decided that these horrible drugs had to go. At least for a while. I took it as an experiment, a test to see what would happen to my mind and body should I suddenly deprive it of the heavy blend of nicotine and alcohol that has been requisite to feel normal for the longest time. As an added control to this experiment, I eliminated masturbation from my daily repertoire as well.
So after a week, what has happened? What effects have I felt? What is for the better? What is for the worst?
Surprisingly, I did not crave the evil temptations. For the first two days of the project, alcohol seemed repulsive as a cheesy vaginal discharge and cigarettes are easy enough to limit when I’m away from alcohol and other smokers.
I’ve been going running semi-regularly with a couple friends in town. One of the routes we run is quite hilly and takes about an hour. They’ve estimated it to be about 10 kilometers. Naturally, when we went for the 10K on Wednesday, it was significantly easier to do, thanks to not smoking for only four days.
Later in the week, Thursday and Friday specifically, I found that I was able to wake up with much more ease than before. When the alarm sounded off at 6 am, I was more or less ready to get up with it.
The Craving came on Friday night as I was on a highway bus bound for Aizu Wakamatsu, a township about three hours west of me, where I would meet my friend Randal for a weekend hiking adventure. I am most of the way through reading a novel called Middlesex and there was a scene that lasted a number of pages where the narrator in fixating on a teenage girl he refers to as The Object. The Object smokes menthols while brushing her teeth and has enough muscular dexterity in her lips and face to blow a vast array of smoke rings, a different one for every occasion.
This, of course, was described more eloquently than I could ever do myself and also at much greater length.
A cigarette can be an incredibly sexy thing. In his novel, Jeffery Eugenides succeeds in proving this. I’ve also known several women who’s cigarette smoking made them insurmountably more alluring and mysterious. These are good qualities, if you ask me. The Object possesses them too.
I sat there reading about this alluring, chain-smoking creature and suddenly, as the bus sped onward into the darkness, more than at any other time all week long, I needed a cigarette.
This could not happen, since I was on a non-smoking bus. I also had no cigarettes.
There is no denying the merits of abstaining from the booze and tobacco, they are plenty.
However, other ill affects do come from depriving one’s self of the lovely poisons.
Perhaps those of you who are writers can relate to this. During this week of abstention I did not write a single word. I didn’t work on the short story, I didn’t blog, I didn’t even jot down random notes and ideas. The only writing I did was on instant messenger and facebook.
I did not come to Japan to teach English. I happen to be employed as an elementary school English teacher, and I do take my job seriously and given that I’ve only been here two months, I think I’ve done a good job at it so far. But teaching English is definitely not my purpose on this Earth. I don’t know what exactly my purpose is, I don’t think anybody ever figures that out.
But I did come here to write. Whether or not that’s my purpose in life, I do not know. What I do know is that I have to give it a shot. Back home there were too many distractions and not enough time to get any solid work done. Here, my only distraction is myself. I have plenty of time to write. I’m not nearly as social as I was back home. Those of you who spent time with me in KC on Wednesdays at Harry’s and Monday’s at McCoy’s might be surprised to hear this.
Okay, to the point….
This experiment shed light on two things: a.) I feel healthier and generally better about myself when I don’t drink and smoke. And, b.) I need to drink and smoke to write.
Perhaps that is too vague. But let me stop here for a conceit: When I woke up at Randal’s house on Sunday morning, after our day-long hike, he made me lunch and offered me a beer. I ate and drank. Then I had a second beer while we we’re watching an anime. Afterwards, he drove me to the station and I had a third while on the hour long train ride to the city. Then, at the bus station, I had a cocktail before boarding the bus for home. And now, as I write this, I’ve moved on to whisky and the words are flowing easily from my brain and to my hands and to the keys of the machine.
Every entry of this blog has been written under the influence of alcohol, and often at the end of an entry, the ashtray is overflowing with butts of cigarettes smoked down to the very end. Thank god for spell check and its red squiggly lines, no?
Most of the great writers were raging alcoholics with numerous illegitimate children and suicidal tendencies.
Example:
E. Hemingway: had blood transfusion with a bottle of Bacardi; several wives; blew his head off. Won Pulitzer Prize.
H.S. Thompson: drug-addled freak; violent, aggressive and hostile; dead by revolver to the mouth. Journalistic icon, cult literary hero.
F.S. Fitzgerald: notorious alcoholic and chain smoker; drank himself to death by his mid-forties. He was 29 when The Great Gatsby went to press.
So does alcohol makes me a better writer? Probably not. Actually, of course not. I just reread everything I wrote and it came off as vane and boring. But does alcohol motivate me to turn off the music and the Internet and sit down and write? Absolutely.
So what does this all mean? Nothing much, really.
It is what it is.
There’s nothing I can do. Except have a cigarette and go to bed.
I was prompted to do so after a horribly long and booze filled weekend which started on a Friday with cocktails in hand on a train bound for a birthday party two towns over, and ended at 7:30 am on a Sunday as I walked out of an unknown bar and into morning rain, trying to convince a 23 year old Japanese woman who had been talking with me all night that she should leave her 43 year old American fiancé and come home with me. I was unsuccessful, which is for the better. She had horrible teeth.
I decided that I needed to cool it off, that my life is not going anywhere good by drinking all night on the weekends and less heavily in between. So, after I crawled out of bed at 2 in the afternoon last Sunday, I decided that these horrible drugs had to go. At least for a while. I took it as an experiment, a test to see what would happen to my mind and body should I suddenly deprive it of the heavy blend of nicotine and alcohol that has been requisite to feel normal for the longest time. As an added control to this experiment, I eliminated masturbation from my daily repertoire as well.
So after a week, what has happened? What effects have I felt? What is for the better? What is for the worst?
Surprisingly, I did not crave the evil temptations. For the first two days of the project, alcohol seemed repulsive as a cheesy vaginal discharge and cigarettes are easy enough to limit when I’m away from alcohol and other smokers.
I’ve been going running semi-regularly with a couple friends in town. One of the routes we run is quite hilly and takes about an hour. They’ve estimated it to be about 10 kilometers. Naturally, when we went for the 10K on Wednesday, it was significantly easier to do, thanks to not smoking for only four days.
Later in the week, Thursday and Friday specifically, I found that I was able to wake up with much more ease than before. When the alarm sounded off at 6 am, I was more or less ready to get up with it.
The Craving came on Friday night as I was on a highway bus bound for Aizu Wakamatsu, a township about three hours west of me, where I would meet my friend Randal for a weekend hiking adventure. I am most of the way through reading a novel called Middlesex and there was a scene that lasted a number of pages where the narrator in fixating on a teenage girl he refers to as The Object. The Object smokes menthols while brushing her teeth and has enough muscular dexterity in her lips and face to blow a vast array of smoke rings, a different one for every occasion.
This, of course, was described more eloquently than I could ever do myself and also at much greater length.
A cigarette can be an incredibly sexy thing. In his novel, Jeffery Eugenides succeeds in proving this. I’ve also known several women who’s cigarette smoking made them insurmountably more alluring and mysterious. These are good qualities, if you ask me. The Object possesses them too.
I sat there reading about this alluring, chain-smoking creature and suddenly, as the bus sped onward into the darkness, more than at any other time all week long, I needed a cigarette.
This could not happen, since I was on a non-smoking bus. I also had no cigarettes.
There is no denying the merits of abstaining from the booze and tobacco, they are plenty.
However, other ill affects do come from depriving one’s self of the lovely poisons.
Perhaps those of you who are writers can relate to this. During this week of abstention I did not write a single word. I didn’t work on the short story, I didn’t blog, I didn’t even jot down random notes and ideas. The only writing I did was on instant messenger and facebook.
I did not come to Japan to teach English. I happen to be employed as an elementary school English teacher, and I do take my job seriously and given that I’ve only been here two months, I think I’ve done a good job at it so far. But teaching English is definitely not my purpose on this Earth. I don’t know what exactly my purpose is, I don’t think anybody ever figures that out.
But I did come here to write. Whether or not that’s my purpose in life, I do not know. What I do know is that I have to give it a shot. Back home there were too many distractions and not enough time to get any solid work done. Here, my only distraction is myself. I have plenty of time to write. I’m not nearly as social as I was back home. Those of you who spent time with me in KC on Wednesdays at Harry’s and Monday’s at McCoy’s might be surprised to hear this.
Okay, to the point….
This experiment shed light on two things: a.) I feel healthier and generally better about myself when I don’t drink and smoke. And, b.) I need to drink and smoke to write.
Perhaps that is too vague. But let me stop here for a conceit: When I woke up at Randal’s house on Sunday morning, after our day-long hike, he made me lunch and offered me a beer. I ate and drank. Then I had a second beer while we we’re watching an anime. Afterwards, he drove me to the station and I had a third while on the hour long train ride to the city. Then, at the bus station, I had a cocktail before boarding the bus for home. And now, as I write this, I’ve moved on to whisky and the words are flowing easily from my brain and to my hands and to the keys of the machine.
Every entry of this blog has been written under the influence of alcohol, and often at the end of an entry, the ashtray is overflowing with butts of cigarettes smoked down to the very end. Thank god for spell check and its red squiggly lines, no?
Most of the great writers were raging alcoholics with numerous illegitimate children and suicidal tendencies.
Example:
E. Hemingway: had blood transfusion with a bottle of Bacardi; several wives; blew his head off. Won Pulitzer Prize.
H.S. Thompson: drug-addled freak; violent, aggressive and hostile; dead by revolver to the mouth. Journalistic icon, cult literary hero.
F.S. Fitzgerald: notorious alcoholic and chain smoker; drank himself to death by his mid-forties. He was 29 when The Great Gatsby went to press.
So does alcohol makes me a better writer? Probably not. Actually, of course not. I just reread everything I wrote and it came off as vane and boring. But does alcohol motivate me to turn off the music and the Internet and sit down and write? Absolutely.
So what does this all mean? Nothing much, really.
It is what it is.
There’s nothing I can do. Except have a cigarette and go to bed.
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