day one: boy meets world, ponders happiness, gets rained on

Okay, so here’s the thing:

As most people who read this will already know, I’ve decided it’d be fun to capture certain aspects of my upcoming travels in words, pictures and (hopefully) sounds.

The odyssey kicks off in Japan, where I’m stopping over for just four (i.e. way too few) days in transit to Russia. As I write this, I’m sitting in a Ryokan – semi-traditional guest house/hotel type thingie – on the outskirts of Tokyo, on a chair with no legs in front of a desk that’s about 15” high, just breathing in the straw odour of the tatami floor and enjoying the way the light falls through the rice paper windows. (Actually, I imagine it’s probably mock rice paper, but I’m too much of an ignorant western tourist to know for sure, and it’s pretty cool either way.) As if to intensify the general rockingness of this place, here I am in a city of 20 million people – or some insane number like that – all of 100 metres from the nearest railway station and ten metres from a busy suburban shopping street, and yet all I can hear are raindrops, crickets and the rustle of palm-fronds.

I just read back that last paragraph. Reads as though I’m embellishing a little towards the end, doesn’t it? Well … I’m not. No, really; it’s crickets-ahoy here as Tokyo wades through the tail end of the monsoon.

Hmmm. There’s a sentence I’ll never write again.

Anyway, the title of this message is sort of a joke. I don’t plan to annoy people by ‘diarising’ every single damn thing that happens &/or every day that passes. But that said, I knew there’d be an entry today, and there’ll probably be one tomorrow and one the day after that. Yeah, sure, that’s how it always goes with journals and the like: out of the blocks at a frantic pace, slowing to an eventual standstill. But in this case there’s a specific reason for the initial outpouring, which is this: within an hour or two of arriving in Tokyo, I’d concluded beyond all doubt that this city is an utter marvel.

More about this soon, no doubt. Meanwhile, let’s cut to a flashback:

About five days before I left Sydney, I vacated my house in Camperdown to move in briefly with Maya* before heading out into The World (as I like to call the bits that aren’t Australia). I was fairly stressed by the preparations and in need of some ‘downtime’, which was how I found myself lying face-up in Camperdown Park, just smoking (choose your preferred meaning of the verb) and looking at clouds, listening to a bee, thinking nothing in particular. I don’t know how long I’d been there when an Airbus suddenly appeared on the horizon, roared overhead and interrupted my reverie – as I s’pose a multi-thousand tonne jetliner will tend to do. But it brought on one of those moments when you realise some aspect of your future that you’ve been talking about in an abstract, hypothetical way for a while is actually about to happen. It was my “hang on a second, this is all starting to get a bit real” moment.

I had a few more of those in the ensuing days, and they were scary. But in some cases, they were scary because they were good. Like this one: the day after the Airbus incident, I went with Maya to see the Hitchhiker movie at Govinda’s cinema/restaurant in King’s Cross. What an experience! I love that movie. Maya and I had seen it once before, and both of us had had our brains suitably pummelled by it, as by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. (Sorry for the gratuitous Douglas Adams reference there, but it was more or less inevitable.) Having the chance to see it again before I left was thoroughly marvellous, but also sad. It was another item crossed off the mental list of things to do in the lead-up to my (possibly permanent) departure, and it brought all kinds of emotions with it.

I’m not sure I have any great point here, but in case there is one let me tentatively label it Quasi-insightful Observation #1.

Q.I.O.#1 basically states that emotions are usually not parcelled up into discrete packages; you don’t often get to open the Scented Envelope of Happiness and sniff it euphorically until the perfume runs out and it’s suddenly your turn to have your head iserted into the Excrement-lined Bag of Blinding Fear for an hour. More often, you get the warm brown bag and the scented envelope together. They’re tied to one another; almost inextricably, it sometimes appears.

Suddenly I feel as though the above observation should lead to a moral of some kind, like “So, folks, don’t be holding out for that moment when the Pure Scent of Happiness comes along and fills your sinuses, without even the tiniest hint of reeky fear lingering in the background. Seize the Happiness, whatever else it’s wrapped in”. Or something equally trite and silly. I don’t know – is that a fair point, do you think? I’m not sure. Maybe the things I’ve related to you here add up to nothing more than a bunch of stuff that happened. Besides which, I know there are such things as moments of undiluted happiness that drown out all the emotional background noise. They’re not even all that rare, in fact, if you have great friends and you know what you like. Which I do, and which I do.

So I really don’t know. But I think I am saying that the happy/sad, comforting/scary, frustrating/funny moments have been up there with some of my most memorable recently. That should prepare me for Russia. And for a lot of things, actually. I hope so.

Blah. I promise that most of this blog will bear absolutely no stylistic resemblance to the aimless rambling you’ve just been reading (assuming you’ve made it this far). Maybe all the tatami and green tea herbs are just making me feel too Zen for my own good.

Hopefully I’ll find out the answer this weekend. I’m visiting Kamakura, the reputed birthplace of Zen Buddhism, on Saturday. I’ll let you know how it goes.

One hand gesturing obscenely,
Anthony.



(* So, er, who's this "Maya" person? Short answer: until a couple of days ago, my partner. Now ... my 'ex'. More about this in a later entry.)

(And about the dolphins: they're on the wallpaper in my bathroom - yet another reminder of how Douglas will always follow me wherever I go! Fellow 'Hitch Hiker' fans will be pleased to know that I'm teaching them how to sing 'So Long And Thanks For All The Fish'. They're getting quite good ... )