Schitz

on the roof of a high class department store

Random Observation/Comment #92: I’ve realized that “new favorite places” is just a quick infatuation.  It’s like a really bad middle school crush that is purely sexual… maybe not.  I think more accurately as love at first sight.  After some time of getting to know her, you find out she’s a psychotic, ex-con drug addict with a huge debt and fake, detachable body parts (Not firsthand experience).  It really takes a lot to become a favorite place.  There needs to be that special quality – maybe a set of emotions that rushes back to your mind that leaves your body immobile.  It’s something about the smell of the surroundings, taste of the air, warmth of the sun, or a feeling of freedom that just makes all the sorrows melt away.  Sometimes when you go back to a place you claim as a “new favorite” you become disappointed at the lack of impact you expected.  There was always something missing – always someone missing to complete that feeling in Japan.  A sigh is appropriate right about now.

There wasn’t a lot of time left and I had so much to relive.  I wanted to go everywhere again and retake all those pictures with new and interesting people.  What I needed was a time machine, and all I had was a camera and 20GBs of pictures and videos.  It would become useful in my recovering days after my trip, but at the time, I knew there were more memories to make.  I had revisited Spa World for the pure relaxation and dropped by Den Den town to actually shop around for friends and family.  After the waterfall massaged my back and I took a nap in the public lounge, I filtered through the exotic stores in the area.  It wasn’t exotic to me anymore and for some reason I felt the same loneliness and seclusion I feel in the city.

St. Mark’s Place is exotic to most tourists, right?  After walking through it for four years every day, it just seems like any other street covered with sex shops, tattoo parlors, yogurt stores, mangled manikins, and butchered Barney dolls – nothing out of the ordinary.  Crazy taxi drivers accelerating through crowds of people and even crazier people trying to cross the street with clear oncoming traffic doesn’t faze me at all.  Double-decker tour buses stop to take pictures and wave at us like the entire city is a living zoo, yet I don’t feel offended.  It was the same thing with Japan.  I stopped looking from the outside in, and the unique flare about the culture was buried in an orthogonal vector (::grin::).

I wanted that part of my brain to switch off.  That memory has done me so well, yet it has dimmed the lights and dulled the colors.  Why am I not trying to read every single katakana and hiragana character anymore?  When did those little things about you stop becoming interesting?  It didn’t bother me that people stared at me.  I didn’t freak out when people helped me for no reason.  The constant inability to fully understand dialogue was just accepted and pushed aside as noise.  And worst of all, I started one of the worst habits I could think of in a foreign country: I listened to familiar music.  I sat there on the bus like a local and felt the drag of a routine holding me back.  It killed one of my major senses and it meant I had been converted.  At this point near the end of my trip, I no longer considered myself a gai-jin.  Sure I didn’t speak the language fluently or follow the customs exactly, but I had found a rhythm that only locals see.  It was boredom, and I hated it with a passion.

I spent one of these days completely alone.  It rained and I was in a weird mood.  This was actually the day I walked around my hotel building like it was a museum.  I shuffled in the slippers they provided, and wore a yukata at 3PM like I owned the building and just didn’t give a shyt.  Nothing mattered.  There was no plan.  There was no motivation to make one.  There was no ambition to be productive.  My camera sat on the desk growling, but I ignored it.  My notepad haunted me by appearing in places I don’t remember placing it, yet I stayed away.

I laid there in my large bed wondering about home – missing family and missing friends.  When there isn’t a sound in the room my mind is louder than ever.  My multi-core unit has pipelining and yet it all makes sense in the end (I hope someone gets it).  Memories mixed with predictions mixed with assumptions mixed with conversations mixed with song lyrics mixed with randomness just became a mush in the end.  I let the snowball roll and then I made a snowman out of it. Hello, Lime.

~See Lemons search for something in nothing