Japan

Japan . . . that enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a Big Mac pocket.

For those of you who've never been there, I can only say that in your wildest dreams, Japan is not going to appear. Nowhere have I been more correct than when I once wrote, in an account about my five years there, that stepping off that plane that first night was like stepping onto the surface of Mars.

And I've lived in a LOT of places. India, Africa, New York, England . . . but no one can predict Japan. Not even the Japanese can explain Japan.

*Sigh* and I am now inexorably tied to Japan for the rest of my days . . . I will never be able to muse about "my time in Japan . . ." as if it were a diminishing past. It is permanently in my future. The rest of my family all live in California. But technically, there's nothing that says I'll HAVE to return there one day. But I will have to return to Japan. And that's not such a nice thing, to be obliged to have to go somewhere you don't particularly like.

What's not to like about Japan, you say. What's to like about it, I say. These days, about an hour after I've stepped off the plane in Osaka, I'm ready to get right back on. Trouble is, it's so FUCKING FAR AWAY. I never really appreciated just how far it was when I actually enjoyed being there, when plane travel was still fun, when the thought of just being there didn't fill me with dread.

But it's really, really far. It's geographically far, but it's mentally far, too.

What's In a Name Part II

Umm . . . do you really trust an adult who calls himself Tommy? "Bobby" is reeeally pushing it for me.  People have . . . uh . . . occasionally referred to me as Nicky, perhaps in some deluded state thinking I might appreciate it, but, uh . . . I guess I . . . don't.

Then again, the reverse holds true. Um, calling yourself, or allowing yourself to be called, uh . . . Robert, is, I'm afraid, Pushing It, in my limited world of experiences.

Ya gotta EARN the Robert, dude. That's maybe why Robert de Niro actually goes by the name Bobby. Or maybe he just prefers it.

Lol. I thought I'd throw out that in there, appear to have something in common with the Internet hordes, or is that spelled with a "wh?" Whordes. Good one. That's where u got me, where ur really cool.

Imagine Winston Churchill, for soem reason being awakened from hypersleep and being asked to comment on the language of youth today.

What's In a Name

I've often wondered: what is it that seems to strike the terror of the Lord into all of us when we hear some Islamofascist's name? Why does the name "Abu Muammar Saad" strike us as so . . . sabre-wielding, so turbaned and alien? So absolutely terrifying? When all he is is a two-bit warlord wannabe who spits in the street and grunts when spoken to?

What if he were more familiar to us . . . what if his name were something we recognized as being familiar, one that we could quickly categorize and dismiss, like the petty thug he really is, instead of some romantic, "Allahu akhbar" shrieking dervish on camelback, come to roust us from our tents, rape our women and pillage our village, so to speak?

Abu Mazen Al Jihadi, AKA Vinny "Bags" Manolo

What if his name was Eddie "No-nose" Gallucci? Or Nicolo "Nicky the Pin" Canutti? See what that does? The very familiarity of the thuggish nature of those names doesn't strike fear in our hearts, it sparks a sneer of recognition. ""Omar Qadr Ibn Al Hajj" might sound scary and terroristic, but what if it was Mike "Southside Philly Donuts" Mignoli? Would you be terrified by a name like that? Hey, basically, they're both thugs. Admittedly, Southside Philly doesn't walk into bars with bombs strapped to his chest and blow up women and children, but he loan sharks on West 18th and Shepperton and has a stable of hookers and has, like, "Unfriended" a couple guys here 'n' there, you knows?

WHAT is the fucking difference?

Next time you hear the ominous-sounding "Mullah Omar" just translate it into "Joey 'Two-chins' Copoli" and you'll get your perspectives a little straighter.

The Bar: Pt. 1.

A cowboy walks into a bar and orders a whiskey.

The bartender delivers the drink, and the cowboy asks, "Where is everybody?"

"They gone to the hangin'," says the bartender.

 "Hangin'? Who they hangin'?"

"Brown Paper Pete," the bartender replies.

 "What kind of a name's that?" the cowboy asks.

"Well," says the bartender, "he wears a brown paper hat, brown paper shirt, brown paper trousers and brown paper shoes."

"Seems like there ain't no harm in that," says the cowboy. "What they hangin' him for?"

The bartender leans over the bar and says "Rustlin'."

The One The Awl Rejected

I wrote a piece I hoped The Awl would publish but they didn't. Maybe I should have aimed for a somewhat more sober site. So it appears here instead.

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The Stolen Children

“In total I have lived in Japan for 11 years now. I have recently married another lady (2012 feb) and we found out she is pregnant. We were  both very excited about it and I supported her throughout the pregnancy and birth. 

“After the baby was born, my wife started acting very different. She acted distant and not interested in our relationship anymore. When I say ‘After’ I mean the day she came out of hospital. 

“She would only ever talk about the baby or her family or money for this and that. She started getting very angry if I even tried to interact with her. 

“Then one night I was feeling ill and went to bed early. I woke up to find she had gone with the baby and left no note or any form of message. I panicked, I didn't know Japanese law regarding children but I know the UK law and the UK says it's illegal so I went straight to the police station (koban) at 3am. 

“They told me to go and see the central police in the main office at 8 a.m. They said they would look out for her but can't do anything right now.

“It got to 5 a.m. and my wife's father called me. He said my wife is on the way to Hiroshima with the baby. 

“I went back to the police again to let them know and they said there is nothing they can do at all. 

“That leaves me at today. Her family are telling her to divorce me and keep the baby. I am not allowed contact with my child according to them. 

“I feel completely helpless. It seems Japanese women can just up and leave any time they want and take everything with them. Nothing according to law can stop them doing that.”

Have a cigar, kid, and go have a few drinks with the boys. Then go home and stumble into bed and sleep the sleep of the damned. Then wake up, take two aspirin, and try to forget about that bizarre dream that somehow seemed so real. Shake it off, and then proceed with your day.

Actually, if that had been the real response I wrote to the writer of that sad tale, I would have changed the line “proceed with your day” to “proceed with your life.”

No, this isn’t a joke column and that isn’t a joke letter. Word for word, it’s exactly what I found myself reading this morning after popping half a Mirtazapine with my coffee. Mirtazapine is supposed to be a serious weapon in the fight against depression but in case you’re planning on suggesting to your doctor that he prescribe it to you, let me just assure you that it doesn’t work very well.

Nothing works very well against the kind of depression I have. I had to give up the love of my life, drinking, around 10 months ago, because it was either that or a future liver transplant, which would probably not only be messy and dangerous but something someone with my finances would have to transact with a Chinese lifer. But pills are the only weapon I have against the depression that I suffer, day in, day out, knowing that today is another day that will go by in which I will have no contact with my 11-year-old son.

And our dear old new dad up there is going to have to make very good friends with a doc who hands out prescriptions like candy, if his life goes the way I predict it will. 

It’s just too bad I wasn’t in on the thing when he kissed the bride and danced an ersatz Western-style dance in an ersatz Japanese Western-style wedding; too bad I wasn’t there when he excitedly confided to the world that he “was pregnant!”

He may have been pregnant, but he was pregnant with what was to turn out to be a “ghost child.” At this point, not being privy to 100% of the facts, I can only predict with 99% certainty that he will never see his child except from a distance and even that will be highly unlikely. When the child turns 18 there is the off-chance that he/she will come a-knocking but even that is a pipe dream if what I know about these things is even half true.

Our friend — let’s call him Alex, for want of a name better than “Suckaaaahhhh” — is now the proud parent of a bag of flesh that shares 50% of his DNA and will suck him mentally, if not financially dry in the coming 18 years or so.

He is the parent of a half-Japanese child. His “wife” — probably more accurately termed his “sperm-processing machine” — has just kidnapped their child in Japan, has fled to the haven of her parents, and the chances are very good indeed that Alex will never see his child again in his lifetime. And there is nothing that he, his country of origin, his local embassy or F. Lee Bailey and a Dream Team of lawyers can do about it.

Japan is one of those nations that has chosen not to be a party to the Hague Abduction Convention, which “provides an expeditious method to return a child internationally abducted by a parent from one member nation to another.”

One would think that Japan, a “stable, highly developed parliamentary democracy with a modern economy” according to the description provided by the U.S. State Department website, would be party to most if not all international conventions with regards to the rights of children and their parents. But one would be very, very wrong. Egregiously, badly, sadly wrong. One thinks of countries like Saudi Arabia and Sudan as being the primitive backwaters and safekeepers of medieval laws that shouldn’t apply to the world of the 21st Century, but one would never suspect that one would have a better chance of getting one’s child back from Burkina Faso, Africa, than one would from Japan.

So if you are the father of a half-Japanese child, and the child holds a Japanese passport, if the child’s mother decides one day in a crowded shopping mall in downtown Harajuku, Tokyo to have a shouting match with you and then take your child into the subway, move out of your house with the child and refuse to let you ever see or contact the child again, she is not only perfectly within her rights to do so, but you would probably be arrested and possibly deported if you attempted to go against her wishes.

You can hire a small army of lawyers, either in your home country or Japan, you can get custody judgments giving you 50% custody of your child with the according visitation rights form your local family judge, you can get a signed, framed decree from the Prime Minister of Canada demanding the return of your child to you, but the only thing you can depend on is that if your child’s mother wishes it, on any grounds whatsoever, you may very well never see your child again or have contact with him/her until he/she attains the age of 18 and decides to track you down.

According to the U.S. State Department, “Abductions to Japan represent one of the largest portfolios in the State Department, Bureau of Consular Affairs, Office of Children’s Issues and are among the most difficult to resolve. Japanese law and custom favor one parent having sole custody, making it extremely difficult for foreign left-behind parents to obtain the return of or access to abducted children.”

Furthermore, “Foreigners have been arrested for attempting to flee Japan with their children.”

So what does this have to do with you? Probably nothing. But it has a lot to do with me. I consider myself lucky; I married my Japanese wife in 1990 and she moved with me to Canada. We had a son in 2001. In 2004, she decided she no longer wanted to live in Canada, and moved back to Japan after having met a Japanese man on the Internet. In Japan, she married the man and had two children with him; after that, he met another woman on a business trip and the two were divorced. Apparently her second husband, although Japanese, never contacts her or attempts to see his children.

My son, who is now 11, lives with his mother and her two children from her second marriage She earns money from a part time job. She recently refused to allow my son to leave Japan, citing “school obligations,” but does not disallow contact. Thus, I am able to travel, at ruinous expense, to Japan during his summer “holidays” and interact with him, have him stay with me at my hotel, and so on. He no longer holds a valid passport, although he is a legal citizen of three countries: The United States (I’m American), Canada (he was born in Montreal) and obviously, Japan.

Unlike our friend Alex, I’m fairly certain that when my son, who is well aware of his predicament, attains the age of 18, he will choose to move permanently to Canada. However, his English reading and writing skills will be severely lacking and only a supreme effort of study will bring him to a level in which he could function in a job here. It remains to be seen how that will play out. And every single day that goes by is a day in which I don’t see my only son play, learn, evolve.

However, to our plaintive Alex, the only solution I was able to offer him was to do exactly what I described at the beginning of this piece: Go out with your buddies, get horrendously smashed, wake up the next day and pretend that that “whole Japan thing” never happened. Because that’s pretty much the only thing that is going to get him through the next eighteen years.

Japan Diary

Video taken in 1997. Music created in 2000 using Reason for OS X. Click for 480p resolution.

Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife

An interesting read particularly as it comes from a neurosurgeon.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/10/07/proof-of-heaven-a-doctor-s-experience-with-the-afterlife.html

also his book
http://www.amazon.com/Proof-Heaven-Neurosurgeons-Journey-Afterlife/dp/1451695195/

Ivy Through the Years

A few years ago I started training the Virginia Creeper that adorns the sides of my building as it finally began to reach my balcony after years of growing. If you remember, the asshole who lives below me decided one day that he didn't LIKE the ivy, which at that point festooned my entire balcony from top to bottom, providing a forest of green during the summer and a beautiful red paradise during the fall. He cut it at the level of his balcony, which completely killed my entire ivy forest. But due to my careful training, it's back!

It's fading a bit now and after the first frost or so will all fall off but it's beautiful now, neh?

2009

Last year

Today

A Post A Day

See? I promised at least one post a day and I've been doggedly sticking to my rather ambitious plan for almost . . . uh . . . has it already been four days? Wow! That dusty bottle of Le Creuzet-Pomfeld '02 will definitely have to be dug up from the lower layers of the archaeological dig at the Battle of the Somme so we can celebrate. Assuming some damn German shell didn't shatter it in 1915, that is.

Ulla of Vinmark

Today is a wonderful day, a marvellous day, a GLORIOUS day that celebrates the coming to power of Aungreb III in what was then Westphalia, back in October, 604 A.D. You'll remember him as the mighty warrior who smashed the tribes of Upper Galicia in 601 A.D. and whose son, Aungreb IV, almost destroyed Nebunaggarh II and his entire kingdom in the year 618 A.D. (The younger Aungreb was killed by a bout of food poisoning rumored to have been instigated by his personal physician, Maximilien the Righteous, bastard son of Ulla of Vinmark, who went on to become Nebunaggarh III's personal physician).

(No, the bastard son of Maximilien didn't become the personal physician to Nebunaggarh III, Maximilien himself did.)

Just wanted to set the record straight and in da groove.

PTSD

You know what that is. It's a word bandied about. That's about all it is: bandied about. But if you think of your own, non-military/non-police/non-emergency responder life you still think about "what happened" to you.

You got in a fight in the schoolyard when you were 13. No big deal, right? Wrong. I still remember being forced -- forced -- to box in what was the equivalent of whatever school people go to when they're 11. As a boy of 11, I was forced -- made against my will -- to "box" with some other boy from my school whom I didn't even know. In front of all the teachers and the rest of the 84-boy school.

I did NOT want to box. I was afraid, afraid for myself and afraid for the other kid. It was quite obvious he didn't want to box either. we had no real "training," just a pair of boxing gloves. I must have weighed all of 65 pounds, if that. Him too. Next thing I knew, we were boxing. Yelling from the sidelines, and one thing I knew, I didn't want to hit him in the face. Anywhere but the face. But somehow, something went wrong and he must have moved wrong, because next thing I knew, his nose was bleeding. I was horrified. I stopped and dropped my hands to my sides and looked around, bewildered. Wasn't someone going to stop it? The boy looked as if he were about to cry. I was about to cry.

They didn't stop it. "Come on, Robinson, don't stop because of a little bloody nose," admonished one of the masters. Oh yeah, they were called masters. This was, after all, British boarding school.

I don't remember what happened after that. maybe I put it out of my mind, I have no idea. But I remember people coming up tome afterwards and saying things like "You really bashed him up good, didn't ya!" and feeling fakely proud of myself.

But I don't feel proud now.

And that was over 40 years ago. I'm still on a guilt trip about a boxing match that happened when I was an 11-year-old boy, where there was a little blood on some other boy's face.

Imagine being an 18 year old boy, just seven years older than I was then, shooting a man in the face with an M-16. Or seeing someone you were talking to moments before with half his head blown away.

Or being in an unpressurised tin can hurtling along at 250 miles an hour at 30,000 feet with massive explosions going off all around you, for ten minutes at a time, at watching a plane nearby explode and go into a death plunge with people you were having breakfast with that very morning.

Well, those sorts of things tend not to happen to people who read blogs like this but they do happen. They have happened. To lots and lots and lots and lots of people.

Do you think those people are normal now? Do you think these are people you can hold a normal conversation with at the grocery store? Can you imagine going to bed tonight not with the memory of seeing blood on a boy's face when you were 11 years old, but the image of a child with both its legs blown off, still alive?

I don't think you would EVER be able to rejoin this world, not in any sense of the word. You would forever be a prisoner in your mind, a mind full of images and memories that could and can never be taken away from it.

If my dad had PTSD, he sure as fuck hid it well. 25 missions at 45,000 feet bombing Germany MUST have done something to his mind, but we never cottoned on to it.

I would be very afraid to meet a veteran from Iraq or Afghanistan. I would be very, very afraid. Not because he or she seemed so normal, but because of the knowledge of what was probably going on inside their brains.

PTSD is simply the carrying of an unpleasant knowledge or memory around with you 24/7, for the rest of your life. It can happen to someone who is watching a loved one die of some horrific illness. Once the person is dead, does the memory of it magically go away, do you just rejoin the world as if nothing bad ever happened?

PTSD is beyond real; it's a plague. Things that happened to me during my childhood, while not anything anyone normal would call unduly traumatic, nonetheless changed my brain. I very much still think of that boy, 40-odd years later. I think of him all the time. And I wonder if that's why I get irritable a lot about small things these days.

Who the fuck knows?

The View from the Terrace

 T   his was the view from the terrace of my house in Kinshasa, in what was then known as Zaïre but is now the Democratic (!) Republic of the Congo, 1n 1972.

We watched the moods of the river night and day, calm and stormy, every day for three years. This is at one of the river's widest points at what used to be called Stanleypool, which as you know very well was named after the famed explorer/journalist Henry Morton Stanley.

Normally overrun by the voraciously invasive water hyacinth, this is a portrait of the Congo at her mildest. Over there on the horizon is the city of Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo. I guess they're not democratic. That was founded by some French guy named Henri de Brazza, if my history serves me well.

Imagine that for a view from your back yard.

How to be Like Steve Jobs

Be thou like the imperial basilisk,
Killing thy foe with unapparent wounds!
Gaze on oppression, till at that dread risk,
Aghast she pass from the earth’s disk.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ode to Naples"

The basilisk was a mythical monster lizard that was viewed in medieval times as the "king of the snakes." It's often used as a plot device to denote a feeling of dread: "a basiliskian stare."

What is it about snakes and reptiles that set so much of us off, that provoke such fear in a lot of us? Is it that "slimy" body, which is in fact as dry as a bone, is it that alien, flicking tongue that is so unnerving? Think of another animal that scares the daylights out of us and which doesn't resemble a snake at all: the shark. What is it about the great white shark that's so horrific, about all sharks that one recoils from?

Could it be their eyes? Could it be that they almost never blink? From reading about Steve Jobs, I've learned that at one point in his life, he actively practiced not blinking in a mirror. He could not blink for minutes at a time, and though you never notice that someone is not blinking, at least most of the time, your soul sure does. It gives you the heeby-jeebies, if truth be told. Why is this?

Well, it's elemental, my dear What's-ons. Dead things don't blink. Think about it. Blinking immediately indicates that something is alive. Fish, for example, look dead even when they're alive. That's why when you pull them out of the water and they don't move, you automatically think they're dead. Birds rarely blink, but they do, from time to time.

But humans? The more we blink, the less intimidating we become. So when we encounter someone with a basilisk-stare, we feel immediately threatened, creepy, yet we don't know why.

In the primate kingdom, a prolonged, blinkless stare is an intimidation technique. It can also extend to other large animals. Although I've never witnessed it in person, apparently some mammals, like dogs or the large cats, like lions, don't like a direct eye-to-eye gaze; they feel threatened by it. Great apes rely on it to stare down rivals. NEVER try to stare down a chimpanzee or a bear; you're going to come off on the wrong end of it.

I was reminded of this last night, when I watched a master practitioner of the art of not blinking: Andy Garcia, the actor. Obviously he learned the technique in some method-acting class. But in one scene, he does not blink for at least thirty seconds. Does not blink, and does not look away. Even from on screen, it's unnerving (the movie, for the curious, is called "Internal Affairs").

Think about it. Maybe one day get a mirror and practice staring at yourself without blinking. Try it for 30 seconds. It's hard. That's why organisms find it so intimidating; because it takes a particular force of will (or being a shark) to not blink or look away.

And that's scary. Or is it mesmerizing? It can work both ways. Staring into your potential mate's eyes without looking away or blinking; that can be interpreted as either fascination or sheer love.

In Steve Jobs's case, I think he brought out the Jobsian stare for whichever purpose he deemed necessary. But I'll bet you that he wasn't always like that; it was probably only when he read accounts of himself and his "gaze that looks into your soul" that he realized he had a great trick going and used it to its fullest extent.

Try it sometime. I guarantee that although you may not end up as CEO of a multi- billion dollar company, a whole lot of people are going to be afraid of you. Or love you. Or both.

Failure

S     ee? I've failed before I've even begun. Why? Because I called the project "A Post A Day." I did not call it "Two or More Posts a Day."

That, my friends, is short-sighted thinking -- thinking inside the box (betcha don't even know what the origin of that phrase is, do you? No? It's an old experiment where you have to draw a line through nine dots without lifting your pen, except the nine dots are arranged in a square with three dots to a row. Try it. If you succeed, you will have "Thought outside the box.")

That brings me to another tired old saw of a misused aphorism: the "Carrot and the Stick" analogy.

Most, if not all people think that means "Applying the carrot and the stick" is where you either reward someone or something with a carrot, or beat it with a stick.

That is not true. The origin of the carrot and the stick is the old theory of how to get a donkey to go where you want it to go, because as you know, donkeys are stubborn -- at least that's what they say. Maybe it's because they can't have kids, but I digress.

No, the "Carrot and the Stick" analogy originally meant tying a carrot on the end of a stick and then attaching it to the donkey's head, so the carrot was dangling in front of the donkey. The donkey would naturally want to get the carrot, so it would follow the carrot wherever it was led. It had nothing to do with beating anyone. No, you're thinking of the old Theodore Roosevelt maxim "Speak softly but carry a big stick," when he was talking about diplomatic negotiating.

Do you see how muddled human thinking can become, how completely derailed a simple expression can become, in the hands of a few dumb but well-meaning people? Well, now "Carrot and stick" is almost 100% used to mean a reward (the carrot) or a beating (the stick). In the original, no one got beaten. Beating anyone didn't even come close to the analogy. It was meant as a benign analogy, a way of "a gentle but nonetheless deceptive way to get someone to do something he may not want to do."

Why did beating anyone get in there at all? Because of the brain's automatic tendency to parse things down to their most simple building blocks whenever convenient. In other words, laziness. It was too complicated to imagine a mule  with a stick tied to its head with a carrot at the end of it; it was easier to imagine just using the stick to beat the animal when it did something wrong or give it a carrot if it did something right.

Perhaps I should change the name of the new project to "Exploding Myths about the Meanings of Commonly-used Aphorisms." I like that title because it has the word "exploding" in it. That tends to get the eye's attention, a word like "Exploding", so maybe I should use it to lure the reader into actually reading the post. Kind of like using the word "Exploding" as a "carrot" tied to a "stick" attached to the reader's head.

So in one fell swoop (could someone explain that term to me?) I would simultaneously create a new post, which fulfils my objective of getting the project off the ground, and get people to read it, which is kind of a cool micro-encapsulation of two disparate concepts. An automatic "First success" which seems to me foolproof -- getting a project off the ground. Keeping it up there, that's a whole 'nother story.

A Post a Day

"Let's go to Neptune!"

Methinks I shall enter a new project. I like new projects.

They allow me to say goodbye to old projects, because who wants something old and tired and done, anyway? New projects are a way to organise the flotsam of the mind, to shove to one side (or throw overboard altogether) all the detritus that has accumulated since the old New Project.

 What shall I call this new project? I think I'll call it "A Post A Day For A Month."

That means that I have to force myself each day to find something either to entertain you right here in this space, or entertain myself right here in this space.

Of course, I've tried that before, but it never quite got off to a good start. And I hate projects that don't get off to a good start.

Getting projects to work means making lots of preparations in case they should fail. In fact, that's where most of the planning lies, which is completely counter-intuitive, if you think about it.

Designers of a rocket program to Neptune shouldn't start the program thinking about all the ways in which it could fail. But they do. In fact, they have to. In fact, if you think about it, they have to spend more time thinking about ways to prevent failure than ways to achieve success. Will the rocket blow up on the launch pad?

Engineers planning a project. In this case, Me (left) and my two brothers
(Geoff, lawyer, in the middle, and Chris, deceased, on the right, in Baalbek, Lebanon, c. 1963)

Well, Engineer A is going to say "Look, if we're going to start dwelling on all the ways it might fail to get off the ground, then why bother to even start? We've predicted its failure before we've even begun."

Engineer B will say "This is short-sighted thinking. Of course we want the rocket to get off the ground. We just don't want to rush into it with big dreams, spend a lot of time and effort building the thing, only to have it explode in a maelstrom of LOX, Helium and shards of composites."

Engineer C will say "I love watching explosions. There's a terrible beauty in them." Engineer A and Engineer B will put their cigarettes out in Engineer C's jelly doughnut.

That's how projects take shape, and I'm sure that's exactly what's going to happen to this one, except Engineers A, B and C are all me. You see how that works?

Why? WhYWhyWhyWhYwWhyWhyWHyWhYWHywhYWhy