Doldrums continued

Destroyed. The demolition process continues. I think it started after my innards were compromised thanks to food poisoning/ virus (from gnarly, unwashed hands of a highway stop restaurant worker. That was mid-Feb. I still have aches and random pains and the tofu and broccoli that I once gulped up has been keeping me up at night.

My knees were on the verge of destruction with the abuse of months of cold in my joints; pounding on the basketball court as a center on winter nights; 20 days on the slopes; the 6km I ran without an ounce of preparation just to save face with some middle schoolers in their marathon; the continuation took the form of hiking umpteen km all around Okinawa prefecture- some with a heavy pack and some without. The biking everywhere… it’s been tough.

I did go to doctors to remedy both of the problems, but my body and mind are out of whack, out of synch and out of control. I don’t know how to control it or understand it- the dysfunction that is. I am a mess. And I am accepting it. Step one.

Step two… continue the destruction process. Instead of trying to fix it up... let it break down…

Plan a Seder for 15 people for the first night of Pesach. Cook all week in order to be ready for it… 2kg of beef, 3 pots of chicken soup, arranging transportation for friends, get others to help cook and lead the service…. By the end of Saturday night I had the worst headache I’ve had in a year… somehow the apartment was clean by Sunday morning thanks to my amazing friends.

Step three, have another Seder. Cook everything for that one too. Another pot of chicken soup and some baked chicken, add the green beans- oh, how about a potato dish too… 10 people, why not?

AMAZING SEDER. Both of them, for that matter. In the process, I was a maniac in getting everything together. And, in the process I cooked/prepared a bunch of new things for the first time and they all came out well- at least, so the critics say. But that process was the end of me… I am completely destroyed…

I am picking up the pieces now. I am trying to find all of them and put them into some order. But maybe that’s part of it. There is no order and the pieces aren’t necessarily even mine. So, there are now a bunch of scattered fragments of an old identity and a new-forming one. The weather is warmer and today was absolutely gorgeous. The azaleas are in full pastel bloom of magentas and violets and brilliant white. Lots of green and even the cicadas, who disappeared last September are making noises outside my windows for an hour in the evening.

This blog is in pieces; it is a reflection of the writer. He is torn between future and past and ideas and passions and depressions and goals and aspirations and nihilism and scrutiny. And all sorts of things. Torn up in the dualism of the Western thought process that will never fit into an Eastern mold of organized chaos. In a place where it is all grey, I have been searching for distinct blacks and whites but they don’t exist.

The school year started a couple of weeks ago and on Friday I went to a school I frequented last year. However, the vice-principal is new and so I had to go through the introductory steps with him. And he asked me a question that I hadn’t heard since September… “WHY JAPAN?”

I didn’t have an answer for him. I made one up on the spot even though I didn’t mean it. Something about traveling in Asia. This is just my first stop, I said.

Is it insulting that I said this was, “just another place” for me? Is it bizarre that I didn’t know what to say – after being here for nine months (next week)? To put the question to myself now, away from that interrogative moment, do I have an answer?

It is one of the pieces that lie somewhere in between bits of crumbled matzo on the tatami mat floors in the office (my bedroom in the summer) that will soon be my sleeping room again.

I want to write a lot more and I am stuck. I mean, I’m not stuck, but I am in the Doldrums… Stefane told me in Caleta Tortel, the mystical town in southern Patagonia- a brief hitch from the Carretera Austral between Puerto Yungay and Cochrane- that no wind helps a sailor who has no direction. The wind is stagnant, poised to strike my sails, but I am in the flat right now. Waiting for that wind to come. But, maybe that wind is on hold because I am not pointed in the right direction. Perhaps, when my bow points towards the right direction, that wind will come and onward I will sail.

Until then, I must be patient, even though it seems like far too long.

(It will be fun to read this later, because I just blacked out for an hour while writing this…. PUBLISH!)

[Finally a real journal entry in the public realm.]