My family.

My friends.

Sara.

If you've been reading this blog for a while, and haven't ever posted a comment before, I urge you to come out of hiding and simply say something in the comments of this post, even if it's only "Hello."

And even if you have posted a comment before, I always like to hear a friendly, "Hi." :)

I just have to say:

The entry before this one doesn't do justice to what may have been one of the most incredible nights of my stay here in Japan.

That's all. I don't know. There's nothing I can write.

It too bad that music can't be incorporated into a blog post, or that feelings can't just be transferred directly from one's heart to a blank piece of paper. It's too bad there's no easier way to give you the feeling that I feel.

Writing it down doesn't really capture it.

For this to work we need a lot more than just black lines on white. We need electricity, we need a black sky illuminated by neon; we need drunk college students, Yakuza, Sumo wrestlers on their way home, an ex-pro boxer and Freddy Mercury.

We need Kabukicho.

We need Roppongi.

We need the prostitutes--female and male--we need the sound of a hundred thousand feet pounding concrete. We need taxi cabs and motorcycle engines and the guys passing out Kleenex. We need music pumping from every storefront. We need high-heels clicking and clacking.

We need a Friday night in the bowels of the biggest city in the world.

Because that's what it was. Another Friday night, and again I found myself beneath the statue of Freddy Mercury, drunk, watching a boxing match between a ex-pro-boxer and a Japanese salary man, on the streets of Kabukicho.

For ten-dollars you too could have one minute to box him.

His manager, clearly Yakuza, looked me over and informed me that the boxer was 40-years-old.

"And how old are you anyway?"

Well, 22, pretty young.

"C'mon then, you're American. Only 1000 yen and you can try to hit him," the words sort of sprayed out of his mouth from somewhere deep behind his gold teeth.

No thanks, I'll watch.

Clearly dissatisfied with my response he made a beautifully offensive clicking sound with his tongue and walked away, keeping his left eye on me the entire time--his sweat suit swishing off toward the next customer.

I'm no boxer.

But my new French friends happened to have one in their company courageous enough to take on the pro; for a minute, at least.

He loosened his tie and took off his suit coat. He laced up his gloves and went to the center of the square. He took off his glasses. He stood encircled by a ring not of ropes, but of human beings.

Somewhere up in the sky there was a moon, looking down into this corner of the world, into this mass of cement and metal and flesh, into this crowded square and at these two gladiators.

For 60 seconds we cheered, in English, Japanese and French, and afterwards we celebrated a classic match with a round of beer, courtesy of our five French, computer programmer comrades.

The story of the night of course doesn't begin with boxing in Kabukicho, which is actually more of the middle of the story where we lost track of time, and realized that our final train had already departed, and thus had to head to Ebisu, from which we walked to Roppongi.

No, it begins, of course in a bar, where for $20 dollars Takayuki, Mina and myself enjoyed all the beer and French fries we could drink and eat, respectively, for two hours.

Then was the boxing beneath Koma Stadium and the statue of Freddy Mercury.

And then we met the French computer programmers.

And then we met two Air Force pilots from America who had 24 hours in Tokyo and only found their way to Kabukicho because they had "Rode the train until the buildings started lighting up the sky like daytime."

That's how they knew to get off.

They wanted a place to go for the evening, so I referred them to Roppongi and wished them a safe flight home.

Little did I know that I too would watch the sun rise from the streets of Roppongi--though you honestly don't even notice the sun has come up until you crane your neck 180 degrees to the sky and actually look. The neon, of course, keeps the street itself blazing at all hours.

But that's where I ended up.

We missed our train home, so what was there to do but go to the place that doesn't sleep. The place where you are supposed to forget what you do. The place that isn't... real.

We walked from Ebisu to Roppongi and at about 1:15 a.m. we arrived.

"So Brett, are you going to enjoy your last time in Roppongi?" Takayuki asked.

It hadn't crossed my mind that, yeah, actually, this was probably it.

I was under dressed.

I left my $2000 suit back at the apartment.

But I danced and I danced and I drank and I drank and I did what you do when you go to the place called "Roppongi" which is bounce up and down and sway left and right and only come back up to the street for air.

And though it doesn't really cross your mind unless you actually stop to think about it... about where you are and what you are doing and just what the hell this life is; this life that you are ACTUALLY living, it sort of shuts your mind off.

For the past year I've been living life like it doesn't matter.

I've been doing what I want and going where I want and spending money how I want and moving through this world like it's some kind of lucid dream; a place where limits don't exist and whatever I imagine can ... be.

Since last September I've lived this life, and it's not a real life.

It's a life of food that isn't real, people that aren't real, clothes that aren't real; buildings and clubs and trains and everything... not... real.

And I'm totally absorbed in it.

The lights from the club--a club literally BURIED in that concrete--flashed and flashed from sundown to sunup and beyond, and there I was in the middle of it, living...(?)

And then I found myself holding a Japanese fan, sitting on a rail beneath Roppongi Crossing, just cooling myself off and gazing at the guy passed out by a pile of trash.

Just sitting there for a moment, meditating before migrating to the train and joining the masses for the ride home to Saitama or Kanagawa or Chiba or Ibaraki...

And then the two pilots I had met earlier appeared out of nowhere.

"Man! This is the most amazing place on the planet! You don't understand! You don't understand! This is... indescribable! I've been everywhere man. I fly a military plane, man!"

"I've been to Germany and Iraq and Saudi Arabia and China and Korea. I've been to France and Thailand and Taiwan and everywhere in the U.S. and Canada. I've been everywhere, man!"

"I've never seen anything like this! I've never seen anything like this!!"

"Thank you!!"

He hugged me a drunk hug that people who don't know each other hug at 4:30 a.m. in Tokyo.

And though his speech was slurred, he was dead on.

...

He's really, really right.

It's indescribable. It's unreal.

It's Tokyo and I don't actually live here.

And though I'm used to it, and though it's mundane... it's still... not... real.

I need to deal with this.

Sorry about this horrible entry. Just had to write what happened, I guess, even though I left out half. I can't really think straight still. Blah.

On the outside of her shirt, there was a girl, walking down the street--wearing a bra.

Pink with tassels over stark white sheet--strutting--Shinjuku; brown curls falling up and down, propelled by pink shoes stepping... stepping...

And on the train, a peach-haired orange-shirted tan-skinned extra-hypenated boy stood next to his college comrades enjoying how cool they were. Hyphens on a train full of periods.

The peach-shirted boy.

His baggy pants'd jerseyed-out tilted-capped friend.

Then there was tilted-cap's friend: Pierced-up-and-down. There were about ten of them in all. Upside down smiles. So unique.

A bright light on a train that was riding through a tunnel.

Trains are the center, really, they are.

The hyphens and the periods ride them together.

After the clubs, the clubbers ride them, too. Messy hair and makeup horrid. Sparkly shoes sparkling in the Sunday sun, rising slowly for the morning trek to Saitama.

...and then I'm sitting on a bunch of rocks around a grill that has some eggplant on it.

My friends are around me, and they feel like my friends.

And I can speak Japanese.

And what the hell is actually happening here?

I'm looking at this girl, the one with the freckles and I'm saying "My god she looks just like..." and it's unbelievable.

Because Kato looks just like... too.

And Megumi laughs.

And I'm really on a riverbed somewhere in the country and I really just got off a raft and I'm really grilling eggplant and drinking a beer brewed from rice at 2 p.m. on a Sunday.

And somewhere the green-toenailed clubber I saw on the train is sleeping off her hangover, toenails still green, of course, just like I used to paint mine on marathon day.

But after ... all ... I ... live ... here ... and I'm going to say good bye to it all in one month, exactly, from today.

Say good by to my peach-haired train-riders and my perfectly-jet-black-haired students as well. I'm going to cry a little tear for the salarymen and the OL's alike, and I'll tuck my head into my cap again just like I did last time, and drift into oblivion, 30,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean.

... and then life begins again in Nebraska.

Was the world just on PAUSE for the last year or was the world moving in FAST FORWARD? What is now, what was then, and what will become?

The future is terrifying, I'm not afraid to admit... alas there is nothing we can do but head bravely forward... or plunge forward with our eyes closed...

Because though our dreams come true, always in the way we least expect, dreams end, as the must, and when we try and describe them to others, well, the words just never come do they?

"I had this crazy dream last night, it was like.. well..."

And then you are fifty-years-old and then you are sixty-years-old and then you look back and say, "I had this crazy dream last night, and it went something like this..."

And the words just don't come.

And you remember all the things you should have done in that dream that you didn't do... all the chances you didn't take. The chances you should have taken.

And then you see that peach-shirted hyphen-boy again in your head.

And you wonder where he is.

And where are you?

And what are you going to do?

And what really matters anyway?

We are what we are, and we are born this way, and clocks will tick until they are broken and there's nothing we can do but listen to that sound... that tick, tock. And we can be annoyed, or we can not be annoyed.

We just have to live our lives, simply because they are our lives, and there is nothing we can do but live them.

Thinking about them is pointless.

They are not on PAUSE or FAST FORWARD or any VCR SETTING.

They are simply drifting toward midnight.

Like a boat sinking to the bottom of the ocean I sleep, slowly and surely; and I dream horrifying dreams and beautiful nightmares, and when I wake up I say to someone...

"I had this crazy dream last night..."

Where I met a girl in a strange place called Nebraska, at a house with no address, a beautifully calm, dark night it was... we slept there, just like that, in that darkness, the sounds of the house surrounding us... and isn't that always the perfect time?

The time when the night isn't ready to give way to morning yet, and you still feel like infinity is in front of you because really, truly, it's the beginning of SOMETHING...

And the stars shine in the sky

It must seem normal to you, the dream.

And though I can't describe it that well; and though you'll get bored listening to it (because well, no one likes to hear other people's dreams); and though even I know it's pointless to describe...

And though...

And though...

And though...

I still have the feeling, and it's my feeling, because it was my dream.

And you have your dream, too.

And do we ever sleep?

And do we ever wake up?

A dream isn't a dream without a beginning and an end. Otherwise it would just be, well...

Now hear this.

There's a few students here who I'm absolutely in love with.

I would teach them for free, for hours and hours if they would let me, because, well, they are perfect and cute and wonderful and everything I love about this school.

The only thing I love about this school.

The students.

...Though this semester my visits with them have been few and incredibly far in between...

Today talking with Yumi, Eriko and Midori, three sophmores now--who happen to share the exact same names as three of my former friends from last year--was an absolute joy... despite being quite painful as well.

It reminded me I'm going home soon.

It made me wish there was something I could do to see them more or talk with them more or to become better friends with them, somehow. Something I could do to make up for lost time.

But, after it all, they are truly my friends.

They always give me their undivided attention, and though they beg me to speak Japanese to them, I can't. I won't cheat them out of that part of their education.

They are glowing.

It's strange.

I guess.

How I feel.

I'm not really a teacher, but I think right now I'm feeling a bit of the same feelins that real teachers must have when their students finally graduate, or when they, the teacher themselves, finally decides move on.

I hope, somehow, I see them again.

So after a baseball game the streets and trains in the area should be a bit more crowded.

But they aren't.

It was after that baseball game--a game where both teams happened to be sponsored by local ham companies--that I realized the sheer size of this city.

Finally, I realized how big this place is.

30,000 plus fans emptied out onto the streets, and the difference in pedestrian traffic was negligible.

And though the ten homeruns I saw were impressive, I guess the realization of how crowded this place is was just a bit more overpowering.

But I have to sleep now. I'm getting on a train in four hours (at 5 a.m.) to ride for three hours so I can go white water rafting.

Woo boy.

When you are drunk you feel like one of them.

Well, even when you are tipsy you do.

The reflection in the train window is, different, somehow.

And on Friday nights, the ride home is like a party, a mad departure from the usual weekday commute. It's lovely. It's loud. It's actually animated and people's faces are finally... alive.

But this isn't a story about the three salary men riding the train home drunk, pulling on each other's ties and stumbling left and right with the roll of the train.

The ride home is just the end.

This, my friend, is why we live.

Out of options on a Friday night I found myself in the biggest red light district in Japan--smack in the middle--bored, lonely, strolling in no general direction with all the time in the world and a Saturday to recover from any decadence...

But alas, I simply sat there, alone, friends to busy to "play."

So I sat in a large square beneath a large statue of Freddy Mercury and a large TV, playing advertisements for "Queen" the musical.

The college students nearby were puking so much that even the homeless people stopped to look.

The air was warm, so was the pavement.

The square I sat in had a pulse.

"I want to ride my Bi-cy-cle!!" came roaring from the huge TV monitor.

I just sat, debating whether I should go home, go talk to the puking college students, go for a walk or just go nowhere.

"Do you speak Japanese," came the broken English from my right.

I was going somewhere, but not home.

"Yeah, I speak Japanese."

And then I was on my way to a bar with two students from the Tokyo University of Agriculture.

And then I was riding a train home, thinking about how a night that started with nothing turned into an evening to remember.

Some people are built to be quick language learners or have beautiful afros or be good at chess.

Some people have eyes shaped like crescent moons that blaze when the light hits them, while others have poor vision masked by cute glasses.

We are all unique.

Right?

There's something we are all good at, something we were made to do; all of us have that thing about us, whether we like it or not. It could be the way our teeth are aligned or the way clothes hang on our body. It could be an innate ability to perform arithmetic in our heads. It could be the number of fast-twitch muscles in our legs.

It could be anything.

There are some clothes that look appropriate on us and some that don't. There are some hairstyles were were made to grow and some we weren't. There were sports we were made to play, and sports we weren't.

There is something unique to all of us.

But only when we accept what we were given can we truly become beautiful like the girl with the freckles who decided to finally stop hating them and just smile, or the really tall skinny kid that only stopped hating his body after he picked up his first basketball, or even the girl with the red hair that decided she would never dye it again.

Though, of course, we haven't all accepted who we are yet.

There are those of us trying to steal other's given abnormalities and make them our own, like me trying to steal the kink in an African's hair. I wasn't built for it. I want it.

It's kind of stupid.

Like a kid I knew in grade school who had that super fluffy hair that grew out all blond and thin and soft. He hated it, and constantly kept it short, but when he finally let it do it's thing in high school, he became himself and people loved him just just for who he was.

He just had to accept himself, and what he was.

And though I recognize this,, I'm still trying to live a life not made for me, and I'm jealous of those for who it was made.

I'm not talking about my hair.

I'm not talking about my desire to learn Japanese.

I'm not talking about all those failed races I ran last year.

I'm not talking about my poor writing ability or my poor photography ability.

I'm not talking about any of that, necessarily.

I'm just saying.

What do those of us with nothing special become?

What abnormality do we have to accept?

Must we simply accept that we are nothing special? We don't have that quirky ability to throw a football extremely well, we don't have that amazing talent to play the piano without trying, and we certainly don't have a tongue made to learn all the languages of the world with minimal effort.

Are we resigned to accept our mediocrity at everything and blend into the crowd, or are we forever to fight against that fact that we were born completely unremarkable, and thus spend the rest of our lives trying to be someone we can't become?

I'm not sure what I'm asking, exactly.

But I'm searching for an answer.

To the Seven-11, grey-jumpsuited-out, my two wheels spinnin' slow, blingin' beneath the late night moonlight; bicycle seat low, head cocked slightly to the side, pedalling the pedal that a man pedals when he's feeling on top.

Yeah, it's gangta. Yeah, it's the life I live.

Pay for my nori-tama and melon-pan with 30 ten-yen coins and scoot back to the base, nothin' much on my mind... the evening, the breeze, the way my Champion brand sweatsuit wicks the sweat from my skin...

...And then, suddenly, my ridiculous gangster-grocery-getting fantasy is interrupted by a memory of something even more bizarre...

Takayuki stood there at the bottom of the steps, holding a fake rose in his hand--one he had received from a GAP sales person just moments earlier as part of an advertising campaign.

"Will you marry me," he said to her, in the most beautifully broken English these ears have ever heard.

He proceeded to present her with the flower, which was about as real as his desire to become engaged to someone he couldn't communicate with.

Regardless, it was one of the greatest first introductions ever, probably in the history of the world.

It was when Takayuki met Sara, and it was at the Southeast gate of Shinjuku station, the busiest station in the world. The station that I seem to always be going to or coming from. That station that once was so intimidating, and now is so welcoming. The station where the homeless sleep, the drunk puke and the commuters commute.

And after so many train rides, coming or going, it still boggles my mind when I realize the seat next to me is empty, and there are 20 people standing in the train car.

Just what the hell is going on here?

Is it because people just want to stand?

Is it because they are getting off at the next stop?

Is it, as my dad might suggest, because I smell?

Or is it for a different reason. Like the girl who rushed onto the train at Ikebukuro: her eyes frantically darting everywhere searching for that elusive seat and finally spotting it directly to my right only to sigh and resign herself to standing--leaving that plush, comfortable cushion completely vacant.

The change in her body language after spotting the seat and then spotting me, a foreigner, was just lovely. It made my body smile.

It said, "Oh, god, I guess I can stand, then. If that's how it's going to be."

She wasn't the only one standing, either, but that seat, however, that one-of-a-kind seat: empty, and directly next to a big ole' foreigner, just couldn't seem to attract anybody.

Two stops later though, a pleasant old woman decided to brave the ferocious dreadlocked foreigner and sit down.

I didn't bite her (but I thought about it).

Trains are really the greatest.

Trains are people places, and you have nothing but time to stare at them all, smell them all, and depending on the hour, get more than your fair share of touching/being touched by them.

I like riding the Sobu-sen home at night, blasting Duran-Duran in headphones much too large for my head, while trying to spot Japanese people who look like my American friends.

So far I've spotted an uncanny Billy DeFrain and about 15 Dana Meiers, though it could just be a similar taste in clothing that's fooling me.

Either way.

I'm riding my bike back from the Seven-11 now, trying the newest of about 25 Kit-Kat flavors that have been introduced in the past 24-hours.

Today's flavor is yogurt.

It tastes about like you'd expect it to--which is about half as good as yesterday's cafe-latte flavor tasted.

But I eat it.

I eat it and I watch my TV.

Tonight on "Ainori," O-se finally hooked up with Bukuro. It almost brought a tear to my eye. They flew home from Egypt to Japan together. Cute.

I'm watching reality TV in Japan and liking it.

...

What the hell's happening to me?

Am I really wearing a Champion sweatsuit, eating a yogurt Kit-Kat and watching a reality tv show called "Car Pool"? At the same time??

It's the life I live.

The next few weeks before I come home should be dandy.

This weekend I will be going rafting in Saitama with Megumi and friends.

Three weeks from now I'll be going to Osaka with Shi-chan.

All for now.

I'm not a slave to this kind of thing.

Looking out the window on a trainy day, riding the rain...

And there goes that station that is going to be gone in about 6 weeks, but oh--there it goes. Gone now past the window, goodbye.

Then there's the destination, and you walk around and your feet are just so light; it's sort of like tiptoeing around around Heaven when you know its going to be a graveyard in just a little over a month.

Well, not a literal graveyard. But dead to you, at least.

What happens when a place dies in your mind?

Does it live on, like Neil says, when you close your eyes?

Do the lights still shine down on you when you sleepwalk?

Does that neon shine down...

When it's dead does it do anything but scar your dreams?

Sitting there looking out that rainy window, you know it's all going to be gone, and you can't dwell on it. You just live it, and you keep living it, and you forget about it, because you aren't a slave, and whatever is going to happen is going to happen, and tomorrow the sun will come up, and tomorrow you will smile.

And it's going to be a good smile.

Because even if this place dies, you don't.

And you can't forget, the best thing in your life is waiting for you at home.

And she's beautiful.

To balance the negative, let me type some positive.

Beautiful kids everyday asking me nothing more than for my voice, listening and sharing everything with me in a 2nd floor room from which, on a clear day you can see Mt. Fuji in the distance.

The way udon made by hand tastes.

A Thai Restaurant in the bowels of "Ginza 5" somewhere beneath Tokyo Station.

The way a cute old Japanese couple fights with one another when teaching a foreigner how to make Udon.

Fireworks in a spring sky after a festival in which a house was burned down.

"Same Shit Different Day."

The train from Saitama to Shinjuku.

The way Sawada-sensei smiles.

7-11 Oden.

The noise of the alarm after someone pushes the "Emergency Button" and your train is stopped on the platform at Kita-Senju for a half an hour.

The French guy that Shi-Chan and I met in Shinjuku and led to the wrong Disk Union.

The way the Saizeriya at Shinjuku's West Exit tastes on an empty stomach.

That time Yuho tried to run up the 4 floor escalator from the bottom of the Roppongi subway stop.

The bit of puke that landed on my leg after that girl decided to lose it all in the train between Shinjuku and Shin-Okubo.

Getting drunk with your boss.

The greasers and their lovely dance in front of Yoyogi-koen.

The Domo-Kun Pelicula at NHK Studios.

Hiroshi.

Bobbi.

Aoki-san.

Walking around in Aoyama.

Kappa-zushi in Harajuku.

Having kids guess your age, and then finding out they think you are 32.

Waiting for Takayuki infront of the Gap at Shinjuku, and then having him arrive only to say, "Ah, well, so I guess we should go home, right?" Every. Time.

Being able to understand Japanese maps.

Kindergarten kids who ask you if you speak "American" and then instruct you to speak it.

AM/PM.

The guy at the bike parking lot who asks me if I'm going to Kabukicho to have sex.

Ikuko, who's English only improves with alcohol.

Telling people I like to hangout in Shinjuku-Nichome. Yeah, it's a notorious gay district. No, I don't hangout there.

My Japanese, which also improves with alcohol.

The playground in the middle of Shinjuku-Nichome.

The who works at Great India in Shinjuku and only speaks two words of English: "Thank" and "You."

TVs in cellphones that you watch on a train after work.

The English ex patriot guy who hands out religious pamphlets in Harajuku and told me he was "Sorry" after I told him I was from America. Jerk.

The Spanish ex patriot guy who hands out Lord Of The Rings themed religious pamphlets, also in Harajuku.

People who start conversations with you at Starbucks after they see you studying Japanese, but then you are so embarrassed that you just fail miserably anyway.

SMAP.

The Japanese national soccer team.

The waitress who used to be a model but now has to bust her ass at a hippie Okonomiyaki tabehoudai restaurant in Harajuku.

Udon.

Drinking the broth.

It's about fun.

It's why we live life. It why we do things like go bungee jumping and ride rollercoasters and jump out of planes at thirteen thousand feet... and.. and... study abroad.

It's why we leave our families and friends behind and put ourselves through thirteen hours of teary eyed flight; so that we can experience that fantastical place halfway around the globe that is supposed to be just so amazing and so wondeful and so just right. So fun.

And it is fun, because like I said, that's what life's about.

But I'm going to tell you the truth now.

It's not all that fun.

And I'm going to let it all out now.

Though it's not a contest, let's start with a comparison.

Japanese exchange students in America have a better time than American exchange students in Japan.

It's a fact that I need you to accept.

The question isn't if Japanese students in America have more fun than Americans in Japan, but rather, why?

Still with me?

This is where you have to dismiss all the stupid things that attract you to Japan, whether they are the video games or the anime or the cars or the women or whatever it is that floated your boat to start studying Japanese. Because we all know you have a stupid embarassing reason.

This isn't about all of that superficial stuff that movies about Japan are made of.

This is about what my Japan is made of.

People.

We're talking about people here. We're talking about Tokyo. Not Otaku-Paradise-Magic-Land where everything is just fucking perfect and dandy if you've got your comic book in one hand, you're J-Pop CD in the other and the TV switched on to a great J-Drama.

And I'm saying things that piss you off.

But I didn't come here for any of that bullshit. I came here for the same reason I go anywhere in the world, even if it's just the coffee shop the park or the stupid fountain behind the student union.

It's for the people.

I go for the people.

And they were a let down.

So let's get pissed.

And now let's take a trip to America.

In America, Japanese exchange students step off that plane into a new world where they can see the horizon in all of its three-hundred-and-sixty-fucking-degrees of panoramic beauty. A new place where people are begging for them.

Where American's are foaming at the mouth for them.

Ask anyone who's done it. Their cellphones don't stop ringing. The boyfriends and girlfriends come like magic, and the popularity is instant. The American's just never seem to get tired of them, even in the most rural of communities.

Their lives are beyond their wildest dreams.

The parites. The drinking. The stars in the sky. The Fourth of July.

They have a great time.

They come home to Japan changed forever.

The girls have an especially hard time, unable to adjust in school and family life. Unable to pry their minds away from that place that they went, that place...

They cry a lot.

For years they cry.

Ask them, they'll tell you.

In America, your friend's are you friends and they treat you like friends.

But now it's time to go back to Japan. Where I am.

Where I am.

Where I am the American. Where I am the one making the plans, picking up the phone and doing the begging. Where I am the one foaming at the mouth.

And though I have friends here that I treasure...

The lonliness I feel sometimes is unbearable and uncomparable to anything ever experienced back home, across the ocean.

When I hear those songs I danced to night after night last year, I want to cry.

When I think back to those city lights under the bus on my first ride in from Narita, my throat clenches in that way that says a thousand times over, "Stop thinking that thought, stop it stop it stop it..."

When I look at pictures of that dormitory... It's the same thing.

And no, this entry isn't headed down the same track as the prior two. It's not going to turn into an entry about the depression associated with coming home.

This is an entry about the people that the picture of that dormitory reminds me of. This is an entry about the people who's faces I see when I listen to that song.

This is an entry entitled "Fuck you last year, and those of you who decided that it's OK to forget your friends. Those of you who think it's OK to abandon someone who put their full trust in you. Fuck you and fuck you and fuck you again."

This is an entry to those of you who think it's OK to ignore every e-mail sent to you. Fuck you.

Like living here is some kind of joke to me.

Like what we had last year was some kind of joke.

--

And maybe I'm letting a bit of "rejection" get to me. Maybe that's the problem.

I don't know.

But today I came to a realization that had been building for the past three months, and I guess it boils down to the fact that I've lost a couple friends for reasons I can't comprehend.

They are only a few friends.

But I treasure everyone that I know, more than most of them realize, I think.

They are gone now.

They won't respond to me.

I'm dead to them.

But I can't take their photos off my wall.

--

So like I said, it's about fun, and most Japanese people could give a shit if foreigners have fun. Let me tell you.

I should probably stick to skydiving.

So now it's time for you to disagree with me

It's that day when nothing matter's, like the hands on a clock at 4 a.m.

The tide pushing you down, down, and down, drifting you go, train tracks headed to the abyss.

Pain is gorgeous and love is torture.

And anyone who tells you different... has never had to try and get their hands around that feeling; that feeling.

Holding on to it.

As that 4 a.m. clock ticks onward--downward, upward, around and around--you move with it.

This is your life and your future and your past and what the hell is it all, really, as you ride that train yet again, looking out the window at those 30 million eyes doing what eyes do at that time of night.

Blinking or winking or smiling. Shut tight, rolled back or blazing full of fire...

And then you blink.

And what was a clear window to the world is now your reflection.

And it is reflecting your eyes.

I can only comprehend half of what my memory stores.

And if I write every bit of every little thing that ever happens... however much I write about this falling sensation is never enough. Never enough.

Let me hold it all.

The feeling of the mud between your toes when you plant the rice.

The feeling of the rain in your hair.

The way your heart smiles at your student's laughter.

The frog he put in his water bottle to take home to mom.

Fighting to remember the beauty of your life, the beauty of every human being who you are lucky enough to meet, the beauty that makes us all unique, the beauty of humanity--fighting, fighting, fighting... fighting against an army.

Solitary I stand, armed with a rock in my hand.

Just me.

We all must die someday.

Is there room in your life for one more trip to the moon?

People burning straw houses at dusk, raggedy anne on the train, a mountain sized grave and all you can eat okonomiyaki in a place called Harajuku. So we're on the moon, then, right?

"Only 6 more weeks" mom says on the computer screen.

Has it really come to this?

Another end is coming down that pipe that seemed so long back in September, and now you're looking at crumpled pieces of paper that are dated this month last year, and you can just say wow. Wow. How far we've come and how much we've grown and blah, blah, blah et cetera on into infinity.

It's going to sting pretty good, that plane ride home.

One of those beautiful kind of hurts that is half-reflection and half-recognition. It's over and it was damn good you say, as you cry and as part of your life dies.

That's how it works.

It was this way and it could have only been this way and no other way, just how it was. Just like this.

The faces of my friends staring back at me in my dreams. The steady march of that strumming man in my head playing his guitar so sad and slow, and so--so just right.

The plains scroll by outside the train window, and life here has finally become mundane, it has finally said to me, "You are part of this place, cease being amazed please."

And though mundane of course isn't right to describe this feeling, what other word quite says "I'm used to it here now. Like, really used to it," besides 'mundane'?

I'm writing because I told you I would.

For you and for me and to not forget.

And though it doesn't make much sense...

I just want to hold on for a bit longer. Because when I go home this place will fade fast, and it will be life again, no matter how much I bite and scratch and scream... all night

America will be shocking, for a week or two. But it will be life again. Mundane and whatnot. It will be what it is, burning straw houses, raggedy-anne look-a-likes or not.

Whatever is in store always becomes mundane. This side of the Pacific or That.

Whatever I do is never enough.

And I'm not sure how I'm going to say goodbye to this part of my life.

Because like mom says, it's over in six weeks, though her calculations are off a bit, I think.

It's this kind of thing that is just impossible to say goodbye to.

Also, about my hair. I think I get to keep it. I haven't wrote anything because, well, I haven't heard anything and didn't want to jinx it...