Shine on me

This street used to have these wonderful lamps that you see in the photo, but a year or so ago, they were all replaced with ugly little LED ones. I guess that the old ones ate up a good deal of electricity, but they sure were pretty. The bike light is nice and just by chance it lit up the manhole cover to create an additional ball of light. I didn't even notice it until later.

I have some good memories of the shops on the street. The square light in the lower right is for an izakaiya that I used to be a semi-regular at. You don't need a members card or a secret knock or anything, but there is small sign on the door that says only those with a proper introduction are welcome. I was introduced around the turn of the century by a friend who took me there, and the master said I would be welcome to come on my own. Not sure why, but I always went there to start the evening off and never found out who the late night clientele was. I have some ideas, but will keep them to myself. 

There was also a kind of convenience store. This was before convenient stores were like mushrooms, popping up all over Japan. The place was called Lics, short for liquor. I think it started out as a place that sold booze, but then started selling food and other stuff. Lics was the last chance for me to buy something on my way home from a night on the town. I occasionally scarfed down niku-mon, washed down with beer that I scored there and they stumbled back home to Teramachi. There was also a proper sakaya-san (like a package goods shop, just booze) further down the street. I remember for years they had a massive faded billboard of Randy Bass drinking Maltz Beer. The owner used to give me dirty looks, so I only shopped there a few times.

The street also had a simple two story apartment building where a girl I knew lived. I walked her home a few times and had an incredible crush on her, but she shot me down. This was like in 1995 or so, way before I met my wife.

Anyway, that is all the memories I got for today. The bike light is nice and just by chance it lit up the manhole cover to create an additional ball of light. I didn't even notice it until later.

 

Windbraggery and humblebrag

I enjoyed this piece by Fiona Merrideth. In some ways, it is what I was thinking with my fake plastic blowfish post a while back. It is the first time I have heard of the term humblebrag, and plan to add it to my lexical pallet, as I often encounter what she describes as "an ostensibly modest or self-depreciating statement whose actual purpose is to draw attention to something of which one is proud." This little video also crossed my radar and make me chuckle. Funny, because it is so true, especially for aspiring musicians, but you could imagine the same for writers, artists, photographers, poets. and just about any creative field.

Speaking of attention seeking, many years ago, I picked up a book by the legendary advertising executive Paul Arden that made an impact on my hard head. He pointed out that awards create glamour and glamour creates income. However, awards, he argues, are given to things that are fashionable. If you create in order to be praised, you are chasing a fleeting thing. Being original means that nobody has had the time to judge it as fashionably accepted. 

Not sure exactly what I am getting at, so let me shift my attention to the photo. It was taken on a slope just on the Teramachi side of the Sakura-bashi (bridge) of the Saigawa. The roofs in the background are no longer there. They once topped some banquet type restaurants, but were torn down about 18 years ago. I am not sure, but I think that the old man was a retired doctor who lived somewhat close to me. It had just stopped raining and he was closing his umbrella when I made the exposure. 

I remember around that time, I got a call from a newspaper that was interested in having me take some photos for a story about noh theater. I can't recall the details, but I was introduced by a graphic designer, and I met two writers at a family restaurant (actually, it was the infamous Gusto branch in Kanazawa, that was later the scene of a yakuza murder...but that is a different story). I brought 20 or 30 prints to show and I specifically remember that the two guys both stopped and looked at the above photo a long time. This to me was validation that it was a good piece of work.  I wound up not doing the assignment (they wanted color and indoor lighting), but the value I got from watching them react to my photos was worth it.

So, without much of a conclusion, I bid you peace.

Ages hence

The above is the real deal:1950 or so Mercury. The name is not really important. The machine needs no name. Seeing this car, in this century, still cruising, is just a wonderfully authentic thing. They don't make em like this no more. It transcends the evolution of automobile design and still stuns. Like the great shark that she be.

Authentic is what we all try to be, right? Nobody wants to be a poser. I love the look of the car, but if I drove this around town, I would certainly feel like a phony, as I know nothing about cars or how much work it must have taken to keep this one alive. I am not worthy of the  title of ownership. Apart from that, it is just not my look. I love and respect the design of this beast, but it would certainly not fit my somewhat preppy upper-main-line Philadelphia aesthetic sense.

So, on the subject of worthiness, I have been wondering about my own. As the blog's subtitle says, this space is about the beginning of the the end of the middle of life, or in other words, I will soon no longer to be able to claim rights to a mid-life crisis. As I get old and crusty, there are times when I wonder if I was sold a bill of goods in junior high English when presented with Frost's The Road Not Taken. Now that I am somewhere ages and ages hence, has my journey made all the difference? And...do I really care?

Logical choice

 

Since April of last year, I have abstained from alcohol. The halt came after taking a walk with my son and, with a bit of a hangover, I mentioned that I should take a few days off from drinking. He replied with the question of why not just giving it up all together. His tone was more of an inquiry than any kind of judgement. It seemed that he didn't care that much if I drank or not. It was an honest question of my logic of continuing to do something that made me feel bad the next day. I don't remember exactly how I answered, probably something like, "yeah, maybe I should just give it up." I had no intention at that point of going more than a few days.

But his question remained even after I resisted the urge for the rest of the weekend. What logical reason could I have for continuing to drink on a daily basis? I do not want to get into any definitions of what being an alcoholic means; living in Japan makes that a more complex thing to define, as it is socially acceptable to drink, even alone, everyday.  So, putting addiction aside, why was I drinking? To help me unwind? But what does that mean? Most of what I unwound was all wound back up the next evening.

Was I drinking because of something connected to the actual taste? When I quit, I was into bourbon, but did sipping some good whiskey really give me some connection to happiness via my taste buds? Maybe the taste just became an association with the feeling. The aroma of say Maker's Mark triggered off the hundreds of other times I had drank it on my way to drunkenness. Did the ability to attach some ridiculous adjective to a certain type of alcoholic beverage make me a deeper person? Does drinking a buttery, velvety, salty, smokey, woody whiskey with a hint of peat and nutmeg make me as deep and complex as that sounds? Sure, good whiskey is preferable to bad, but mostly because it is easier to deal with the next morning. I never woke up feeling more cultured and that my world view had expanded because I had a shot of some really expensive booze. You could apply the same for wine and nihon-shu. There are loads of folks out there that think they are experiencing some culturally significant act if they let some special alcohol pass their lips. Being an aficionado of anything, I guess, can just be a hobby, but for some reason I have never been impressed with one who spouts knowledge of the characteristics of alcoholic beverages. If anything it seems a bit like someone bragging about how many books they have read or how many countries they have visited, as if such vanity will prove they are intelligent or worldly.

Was it to socialize? Perhaps. I was doing most of my drinking at home, but I did enjoy a Saturday afternoon routine of sneaking away to one of the few bars in town that opened from noon. I liked chatting, and the place had a mix of patrons, but it was the booze that kept us there. Most of us would probably bore each other if we were hanging out drinking coffee. Covid also threw a big wrench into any social aspect. Suddenly there were no more work related parties or other chances to go out to an izakaiya to get all liquored up. 

So I really didn't have a good answer to why I was drinking. More importantly, I had loads of reasons not to. Booze, especially bourbon, can get expensive, and I was spending most of my monthly allowance (yes, my wife gives me an allowance) on it. I also drank a good deal of beer, which was making me chubby. And, on occasion,unwinding led to becoming a big ball of knotted up twine and I became a bit more of an asshole than I usually am. I sometimes did or said stupid stuff that I regretted the next day. Most of the time it was just silly stuff, but I certainly crossed over into being a mean drunk on occasion, especially when the so-called unwinding hit a snag halfway through the process and I had to confront some nagging stuff that the booze couldn't wash aside.

So, that is where I stand now. I have promised myself that I will go a full year. When the cherry blossoms bloom this year, I am reserving the option of rethinking this experiment, but the way I feel now, it makes sense to just stay away. By the way, I hold no judgement at all on those who do drink, and am not preaching sobriety for all.  It just seem to be the most logical choice at the moment.