So... tired... can't... blog....tsukareta! Class and prep and then nihongo class have kicked my ass. And my reward-myself-for-a-hard-day-sushi belly isn't helping. This is something I wrote at the jazz bar the other day. I like to write there.

So strange to listen to the standards in Japanese. "Autumn Leaves" they're singing, but the sounds are just on the other side of making sense, and the singer bends notes through the middle of words. The underlying sense is missing, and in the end it sounds as if the singer recorded the song in reverse and is playing it forward. Like the midget in Twin Peaks.

Didn't do anything today. Grey sky overhead and just that color of light makes it hard for me to leave my little cubby hole. I guess... maybe I just don't want to be a tourist anymore, but I lack the skills to be a member of society. The result - I hole up. Of course this just makes me feel I'm wasting my experience here. But when I go out sometimes I feel like a ghost. Even with other other people we seem to all be ghosts. In another parallel world.

Went out last night to watch the world rugby cup. A strange experience. Watching rugby in Osaka with some Brits in an Irish bar. In a little ghost bubble of culture. Everyone singing their football songs. Japanese punks in leather and mohawks drink Guinness and talk with a group of Russians by the elevator. After the game an Irish folk punk band plays. Look at all these people. Young and old. Laughing and hugging and talking in many languages. Passing out. Look at this scene from a distance. There, up there on the sixth floor of that building in that shopping gai in Umeda in Osaka in Japan. Next to the ramen shop and the kareoke bars. Near the pachinko parlor and the coffee shop. Crowded between and beneath and on all these things is this little wedge shaped ghost world. I imagine very thin red threads tied to all the people in the bar and all the places they lead. From thousands of miles away to this room. Pull one and what would be on the other end?

When I leave a place like this, sometimes I'm shocked to hear Japanese.

"What are you doing here?"