SUI GENERIS

As addendum tangential to the aforegoing, I figure I must also have the largest collection of late 20th century western music on the mountainside, if not in the Prefecture, to say nothing of formats. I have actual vinyl, though I no longer have my turntable; the LP (for the museum-quality term: "long-playing," back from when things had duration worthy of mention) albums are part of my art collection. I have some remnant tapes, but also no player. I have instruments. I am the player. 

I am the only one on the mountain who has ever played Frank Zappa to this air, I am sure. RL Burnside too, and the Pixies, Chet Baker, the Feelies, Van Morrison, Radiohead, Concrete Blonde, thousands of songs... And when I play them, I play them loud, as befits the passion thrust into the notes in the first place, and in the summer with the windows open, the birds love it, especially the warblers.

As the local farmers ride their mopeds up to their greening paddies or come walking up the road with their paddy tools they pass through my broad airy wash of Zappa Pixies Concrete Blonde and although they never actually knock on my door to ask me What IS that album, where can I get it? Who is playing Plastic People or Snake Drive or It's Only Life or Where is My Mind or Still in Hollywood? That sonic baptism is a deeply cultural event for them, one to be found nowhere else in the Prefecture, so it is no surprise that they are muted by the experience. It is a big one.

When they walk into one side of that sonic flux and let it wash over them they do not run for their lives; rather, they walk toward their lives, as though all is now well with the world, if not in fact even better, and when they emerge from the other side of that torrent, richer than when they entered, they are transformed in some way, if only at the molecular level (which includes DNA). One of their progeny may some century hence thrill the world with his or her deeply inspired and unpinpointably original music without ever knowing why.

Like those farmers and their descendants, you heard it here first.

 

BULBUL GETS OUTPLAYED

I was outdoors just now hanging some CDs over my strawberries. I do this because of the hiyodori. That's the brown-eared bulbul, who with his small tribe has been ravaging the tsubaki flowers for the past couple weeks there beside the garden, where he can keep a good beady black eye on my strawberries as they flower and swell into the sweet redness that he so loves.

He got squawkingly upset when he saw me doing something near his strawberries: I was putting up some old CD copies to dangle spinning and flashing in the breeze above the deluxe fruity enjoyments that are in fact as mine as anything can be that does not involve monkeys (regarding whom all bets are off when it comes to outdoor mineness), but this was the hi-tech, teachable me vs. a one-track bird who, working on this small portion of my vast ignorance, last year got my strawberries.

This year will be different. He can't read worth a damn of course, so for all he knew this could be anybody from Dylan to Beethoven to Miles Davis to Frank Zappa to Lou Reed; this could be Fiddy Cent, this could be Lady Gaga. Take that, bird. Boy did he screech, so clearly not knowing which was what.

My strawberries look sweeter already...

BOBBY CARROTSEED

I can't believe I'm driving home with hundreds of carrot seeds in my workshirt pocket, I just bought them, and have already planted potatoes, spinach, chard, garlic and plan to plant onions-- onions! in a couple of weeks, can you believe it? No, I'm not crazy, nor am I starting a monkey charity - get the hairy marauders on a path by which they can improve their lives? Not! It's no use trying to redeem those onion pirates, those carrot cadgers, no matter how fundamental you are - no, I have a more realistic kind of faith: faith in fences.

It's that new high antimonkey (and deer and wild pig) fence that's gonna go up around my garden as soon as my shoulder heals, it's changed my view of world fertility, my attitude toward seeds, my hopes for a more amenable and vegetable future - a fresh lettuce, tomato and onion sandwich of the spirit, with potato chips and cucumber pickle on the side and strawberries for dessert - and as the day draws closer I feel like a kid again, I can do anything I want, I'm a superman of seed, I can plant just about anything, I can plant watermelons this summer if I want to, and then I can actually have the watermelons!

I can plant zucchini! And cucumbers and tomatoes too! And pumpkins and squashes, eggplant, green peppers, spring onions, purple onions, green beans, snow peas and and and: I dance in my mind through the garden with my hands in the air, seeds falling from my fingers! No longer will I have to censor my garden menu as I look wistfully at the seed rack filled with a rainbow of seed packets at the farm store while monkeyless urbanoids blithely select any vegetable they want; I am vegetably free, I realize as I drive home with the sun on my cheeks and the wind in my hair, singing "Call Any Vegetable," visions of roots and leaves and fruits in my eyes, my pockets full of seeds that I'm going to put in the ground all over the landscape, everywhere is a garden, just call me Bobby Carrotseed!

AND I THOUGHT JAPAN WAS HAVING EDUPROBLEMS...

"We are [in the US], as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon...

It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad."

There have been signs of this already, in higher office... And I remember in an online forum a couple of years ago, one of the (twentyish American) participants asked: "Anybody here know how to write cursive?" I hope the same thing isn't beginning to happen in Japan...

On the other hand, as Frank Zappa pointed out before he went to heaven, "Stupidity is the basic building block of the universe." So this could be the start of something new and exciting that's coming along... like a vast mental mudslide?

[10.27 addendum: And as if that weren't enough of a problem for the newbies...]

[To say nothing of this...]