Trouserpress

Going back to Douglas Coupland’s JPod (see prior posts) for a moment, I read a passage in that book today in which a character is assigned an essay for her creative writing class: Describe your life quickly

I thought I would like a crack at that assignment even though I am going to earn no credits for it. Here’s how it came out. Hopefully.

–

I get off the train and get on with the 15-minute walk home up the big hill. Despite being the rainy season it’s not peeing down but it is un-agreeably hot and humid. I am as usual carrying a bag on each shoulder. One contains my laptop and the other a bunch of books and stationary and copies of the magazine. I consider calling E for a lift back to the house but also think of global warming and her cold wrath at being distracted from the 20 million other things she has to do. I imagine lying down in the road and being able to roll up the big hill while gravity temporarily reverses itself.

There is a convenience store across the road and I wonder hopefully whether I need anything. I have given up crisps and today is a non-drinking day and, anyway, even if it weren’t, there’s plenty of beer and wine at home and I know immediately that despite this being a non-drinking day I am going to have a cold Kirin Gold as soon as I get back and then I am going to have some wine, specifically a bit too much. I know that I have resolved not to drink Monday through Thursday and I know that at the weekend I got through way too much beer and three litres of red and that I ended up on Monday night in Kanso with Nagaijin where we had six beers and a bucket of lemony fish tails and that there’s no reason in the world why I should be tackling more booze on a Tuesday night.

I set my GPS for the fridge and head on up the hill.

My mind wanders over workaday rubbish and the row I had with E last night about how fed up I am with being a suburban white collar drone and as I get to the leafy, mossy grounds of ancient Tatsuta Taisha I remember how I should be taking the opportunity to think about my novel Rumblebum which is coming on very slowly at the moment. I rehearse the names (good names) and personality descriptions of some of the principal characters, then some of the plot points. I try out some bits of dialogue in my mind. I have an insight and try to follow it through but instead find myself thinking about Smarties and how if you suck them, all the colour comes off and they are just these grey pellets in your mouth. If you suck some more the hard coating softens and cracks and you can suck melted chocolate out. However, if you spit out the Smartie as soon as it goes grey, you can prise off bits of the shell with your finger nails and eating this shell you realize it has absolutely no flavour of its own.

At this point I am at the top of the hill and taking the short cut through the car park of the shrine. I am sure this is disrespectful but most people do the same and even zoom through here on mopeds with cigs stuck in their gobs.

Tonight, I notice a family actually skirting the shrine’s grounds instead of going through the car park. Opposite the entrance , they stop, clap once and bow. This is hardcore. You only normally do that right in front of the orange gate that is the entrance to the shrine proper, not when still out on the street. And most people these days don’t bother at all. It’s like crossing yourself before the altar in a church or dipping your fingers in the font and somehow managing to do both before actually going inside. This family seem very pleased with themselves. I can hear their satisfied laughter.

I reflect on the folly of faith but as I do this every day I quickly get bored and give up. Then I feel nervous. What if these religious nutters are right? What if I die and find myself in an afterlife confronted by a supreme being. After spending my entire life poo-pooing these concepts I would feel exceptionally foolish. Worse, what if E were there. She has bags and bags of faith of the silliest kind (God lives in Mt. Fuji and the people of Okinawa may be the descendants of the Lost Tribe of Israel). What if she were right? I was now passing paddy fields and I could hear her in the next world exclaiming at me “Told you! Told you! You never listen to me! You just think I am a stupid woman!”

I can also hear lots of frogs. The paddies are newly flooded and the rice-lings are planted and in daylight you can see that the water is full of tadpoles. Cranes and storks hunt here for crayfish and minnows and the like. Snakes get in the fields after the frogs. I try to count how many species of frog there are by the sound of their voices. Five, I reckon. Several individuals will be squashed flat on the road tomorrow morning when I pass this way back to the station. I once had a dream of starting a graphics company called Deadfrog Productions.

The frogs remind me that I have to explain to E why I am home as early as 8pm. We had an issue about it this morning when she suddenly announced she needed me back early to look after the youngest and I explained that I had an important editorial meeting at the mag in the evening. I couldn’t explain that this was the actual same editorial meeting that I had postponed from the previous night with crafty ruses an wiles in order to have six beers and a bucket of lemony fish tails with Nagaijin at Kanso. When I postponed the meeting again this morning, my magazine colleague J made other plans before I called back to reinstate the meeting. So I was arriving now two or three hours early, important un-rearrangable meeting bagged till Thursday.

It was like some kind of rehearsal for my arrival in the afterlife.

I just found out today that I broke the law in New York 20 years ago. I knew that I was breaking the law by working without a permit and overstaying my visa. I knew that the forces of law and order may have had opinions about the cocktail of marijuana and opium I consumed on the pavement (sidewalk) of West 25th street and that the snootfulls of cocaine I hoovered up in the ladies’ toilet of that bar on 6th Avenue might have been considered naughty by some. Only today I realized that I infracted this law on many occasions:

Fortune telling is a class B misdemeanor in the state of New York.
Under New York State law, S 165.35:
A person is guilty of fortune telling when, for a fee or compensation
which he directly or indirectly solicits or receives, he claims or
pretends to tell fortunes, or holds himself out as being able, by
claimed or pretended use of occult powers, to answer questions or give
advice on personal matters or to exorcise, influence or affect evil
spirits or curses; except that this section does not apply to a person
who engages in the aforedescribed conduct as part of a show or
exhibition solely for the purpose of entertainment or amusement.
However one should use his intelligence and wisdom while visiting
fortune tellers.[1]

The above is a direct quote from a Wikipedia entry on fortune telling. I was reading up on the subject today because I was editing an article on the subject for Kansai Scene.

A lady friend and I used to read Tarot cards for paying customers in New York City. I was an expert on the cards because I had read a book about it in Britain and had practiced a lot when drunk or stoned.

My friend and I used to grab a bit of space on the pavement (sidewalk) on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village with all the other traders of arts and crafts and bits and bobs on a Saturday night. I set out our cards and she set out the kind of lantern that you would imagine a New York loft witch to use. Sometimes we worked bars, with of course the permission of the staff. Evidently none of the bar staff or even the police who patrolled by us on the street were aware that peering into people’s fortunes was illegal in NYC.

My lady friend wasn’t a New York loft witch, of course. She was blond. And she came from somewhere so ordinary in such an ordinary state that I forget where her hometown was. I don’t remember her ordinary name, either, but I do remember that she leaned right over backward like a thirties movie star when we kissed, and given how regularly stoned I was it was impressive that we didn’t actually topple over. She was in New York because she wanted to be an actress.

I don’t normally go for blond women. I don’t go for any women at all now, being married for 20 years and since real life knocked all the stuffing out of me. I wonder now how much of my Tarot enthusiasm had to do with making easy money and how much of it had to do with getting into bed with the lady of the lamp.

We didn’t make much money. Just enough to subsidise our (my) beer consumption for the night. I didn’t ever get to sleep with the woman despite the precarious Hollywood kisses. It seems that Tarot reading is not a great turn on despite all the mystery of the black arts and the black trendy threads of the mid-eighties East Village. I have found Norwegian Troll dancing and planning my funeral to be more effective aphrodisiacs (see previous posts).

Did either of us ever believe a thing we divined from the readings or told our clients? Hard to say, really. I think it depended on how much they liked what they heard and how threatening they became. But given the omniscience of the cards, how come they didn’t tell us about New York State law, S 165.35, eh?

When I set up this blog, one of my objectives was to provoke a good discussion about literature: reading it and writing it. We got as far as voting Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude the best novel since 1945 but no further.

This is a bit of a shame because my few functions on this planet include writing book reviews for Kansai Scene and writing stories that don’t get published. Another important function I have is consuming vast quantities of the written word.

Am I a daddy, a husband, an editor, a writer, a layabout, a cat person or what? I am a reader. I am a literary hoover.

My good friend Sangueuk has a blog on a system that seems to need to know what mood you are in and what you are listening to. True bloggy solipsism and I love it. Way off in Alabama another friend, takumashii, posts on his blog a rumination on curiosity about what people are reading and makes the good point that when you enter someone’s home, the first thing you do is scope the book shelves and the record collection. Takumashii used this observation to give a rundown of his own reading.

Now, I know you don’t give a Justin Timberlake for what is on my bedside table, but here you go anyway.

The first thing I read this year was JG Ballard’s Complete Short Stories Volume 2. Monumentally inspiring. One hundred and ten out of 10 for this one. Imagination unfettered and incisive satire. This man becomes more important every year and demonstrates how to make art from your fears and obsessions.

Apart from that I have spent a lot of time re-reading everything by Iain Banks. Especially Iain M Banks. This year has been terribly stressful for reasons that I am not going to explain here. I have found Banks’s books enormously engaging and distracting and terribly clever. Big imagination and moral/philosophical issues that you rarely find in SF.

A fascinating read was Ray Kroc’s Grinding it Out. Kroc is the guy that made McDonalds and this book is his autobiography (properly a biography written in the first person by a fellow whose name I can’t be bothered to Google. I suppose for the real author that’s an occupational hazard of hacking for megalomaniacs.) Grinding It Out is a painful read and should be compulsory for every underproductive liberal. Kroc is the archetype of obsessive, unimaginative moron-man, an individual like George Bush or Jeffrey Archer whose very stupidity and blandness propelled him to fame and riches. I don’t particularly want fame but I wouldn’t mind riches or an escape from this soul-sapping day job so long as I don’t have to make hamburgers like Kroc or write them, like Archer.

I have also read John O’Farrell’s Things Can Only Get Better, a comic reflection on the Thatcher years. O’Farrell is the same age as me, went through a lot of the same formative experiences but had the good sense to put them down on paper with the help of a bottle of grog. He is also a writer of TV comedy/satire and has done lots for my two fave shows Spitting Image and Have I Got News For You.

I am just now finishing Douglas Coupland’s JPod. This is something I am reading for review in July’s KS. The review is horribly written because I only got the book the day before deadline. The sad thing is that it is very close to and a lot better than my current novel-in-progress Rumblebum. Next: Will Self’s The Book of Dave. After that, I throw myself in front of a fast moving train.

Music: Velvet Underground with Nico and Open Canvas by White Dunes (or is it White Dunes by Open Canvas?) Mood: indifferent. Today’s favourite colour: artery-expanding red. Today’s sexually inspiring age group: early 30s.

Read this terrifying story here.