Talking about ingestion

Straying far from the adage “know thyself” I have at an increasing frequency as of late over-consumed when it comes to the realm of fermented aged beverages, and now twice in a month ended up with my head above a toilet not my own, nauseated not only at what’s coming out of me but what’s already inside me from the night, from before, from always. This is the only pride I had learned to cultivate, my ability to be altered but unfazed, candid but not emotional, and out it comes: failure, failure. I can’t keep track of the drinks anymore how I used to–they put a cup in my hand and I’m back in Pittsburgh, my drink is my bond. One of my existentially confused Japanese friends who, at the tender age of a few years younger than me has already been married in a different country, returned, semi-re-engaged, broken up, flitted between various boys, stood them up, been stood up, and speaks English that’s just fluent enough for you to wonder what’s wrong with her, keeps track of my drinks as I bang a karaoke bar tambourine into my head over and over. Ten she tells me, two weeks later, and that was all whisky–would have been nice for someone to have told me as I dumped it in, ordering two at a time to keep my other friend, who had stopped drinking for the night, lubricated.

Just last evening the culprit was nigorizake, a word I choose to italicize in this case to seem more like the saucy foreign-culture writers who unnecessarily include the ways of saying things in a foreign language and then follow up immediately with a realistic English description: unfiltered rice wine, sweet and cloudy, a present from the kyoto-sensei of my night school–a sort of figurehead authority who holds the power, someone for the workers to admire, fear, grovel to, and secretly hate. Misinterpreting a discussion that we had in Japanese during a night ceremony where we pound rice into sticky rice cakes, I come to understand that we are going to have a drink the following week together. What he actually says is that he is bringing me a drink, which is in this case a two-liter bottle with a shelf-life not much exceeding a week after it’s opened. So last night it comes upon me to in a public forum ask for help making sure I don’t take any of it back home with me, and I end up doing the heavy lifting, paying for it again today. Jessy says I remind her of her father, who can’t help himself, who is just over fifty, and I wonder what he sees of himself in me, or if he’s ever even thought of it.

The people that surround me are my temporarily players and they fill their roles. I meet unique souls every weekend and pass them by on the streets, bits of conversation that make more sense as time goes on like parts of my vision clearing up or drops of water leaking out of your wet ears, and as I assign my probable departure date from this country, even almost two more years from now every girl and guy I know is stamped with an expiration date, best before August 2012, shake well before serving.

The regular forum for my regimented Wednesday night journaling is stale, is known. Even unread, or read by handfuls, the fact that the people who read what I write are actually reading it sterilizes the experience. Like clockwork I look at my life the same time each week, and soulless, come up with the same shit. My poetry is unread but virtually the only writing which satisfies me, there is no precondition for it and it is not part of a greater, incomplete whole like the novel I’ve been stopping for four years now. In an effort to document my life here I document only the surface, preserve only the face I put on–comedic skepticism, sardonic observation at things which are different, and obsfucate what really goes on, how people really think. Ironically I turn now to the place I used to write because I wanted people to see that face and tell me if it was pretty, this very journal, the only place I am sure I can write where only people who have no idea who I am can see it, the only place where it is allowed to be genuine. The problems that came with having no money in the last part of my life now are overlapped with the problems that come with not needing to worry about it: I am distracted instead by the ease of my existence, the lack of emotional friction that allows me to glide past these people without so much as a laugh, tear, or concern. I curse only my own failings, eke out the shame of myself through a disgusted mouth: I’ve let it all go again, and what good am I to anyone, knowing what good they are to me?