Saturday, May 06, 2006

a new friend







Yesterday I hung out with Abie and we went to he mall and looked at the plastic food there. If you don't know, many restaurants in Japan have these incredibly realistic plastic copies of all there dishes. It is a total mystery to me how they do it. I have ideas, but most of them just don't make sense. There must be a mold that doesn't hurt the food. But who paints it? Where does it happen? How expensive are they? On our walk home we found a “may peace prevail on earth" sign, and a strange white film in the gutter.

Last night was my friend Katsu's 23rd birthday so he came over to my house and we worked on some beat boxing. He tried to say, “It hurts the throat” and found the pronunciation impossible and funny. We met up with a couple of his friends (both drummers) and went to this bar/club hole-in-the-wall place where a friend of mine was dj-ing. The music wasn't very good, although I danced some, and you know how I dance, all crazy like, and many Japanese people got a big hit out of it I'm sure, I felt the rhythms flow threw me like rivers, from my toes to my finders, and then I went outside because the place was really smoky disgusting and out in the rainy night a young, attractive Japanese guy, dressed in an Iowa t-shit and brown pants, with no fancy haircut, or shoes, walked over to me and in perfect Australian English said "hey man, what’s up?" we met, hung out by the entrance to the bar for about an hour, found things in common. He made it a point to say good evening to everyone who went into and out of the bar—a surprisingly friendly gesture. I asked him why he moved to Australia and he proceeded to unpack his life story, juicy with drug addictions, revelations, spiritual experiences, “maybe this is too personal”. He wasn’t drunk or anything, he had to drive his friend home. I asked him what the purpose of life is (jinsei no mokuteki wa?) And he said it was love or to grow in love. And then we talked about how love and sadness seem to go together, and how the more you love the more pain you feel. I told him about spiral dynamics and the evolution of the individual and he said it all fit with his life for sure. And then we talked about heartbreaks; he lives in Australia and has a year old son and he is afraid he is going to be a bad father because him and the boy's mother fell out of love and it is against Japanese culture to have a single parent and will he ruin his son's life? We also talked about Japanese culture and American culture. He said he never really liked Japanese culture. He thought it was all phony. The fashion, the music, the entire “scene” was phony and forced. He said that one of the most wonderful thing that happened to him was when he began hanging out with foreigners in Japan and they turned him onto his own culture, showing him how beautiful and rich it really is. I asked him what he thought about America, did it have a culture, and he said it absolutely did and could be found in the arts, especially music. He said that jazz and folk and rock and hip-hop all have roots in America, making it one of the richest cultural sites in the world. Interesting. He gave me a hug when I left, looked into my eyes, and said "thank you so much." I will hang out with him again next Friday before he goes back to Australia.
Then, Katsu and his two friends came over to my place and we listend to music until about 3:30 am.

2 comments:

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May all beings be Free and in Love.



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