hello

Every now and then I come across blogs about the writer's relationship with xanga. I expect you do too. A lot of us go through very similar experiences here and it can be fun to learn that others are going through the same kind of xangan navel gazing. So I thought that I ought to tell you about these xangan panic attacks I've been having recently. Actually, they're not really panic attacks so much as cold, clammy, wake up in the middle of the night but although your mind is awake you can't get your body to move at all and you lie there helplessly wriggling and squirming inside your head kind of attacks.

So I thought I'd tell you about them, but then I cogitated some more and thought fuck it, I'll tell you about the Rolling Stones instead.

Some of the more wide awake among you may have been able to deduce from my last post that I went to see the Rolling Stones last week. This was the penultimate date of their tour of Japan and I’d been looking forward to it for ages. I wouldn’t say that I am a huge fan of theirs but it’s the Stones fer chrissakes, they’re bloomin’ rock and roll legends, innit?

The plan was to drive down to Osaka with three Japanese friends, see the show and then stay on and see what trouble we could get ourselves into in the big city, then in the early morning grab a couple of hours kip in the car before driving back.

Well, that was the plan.

What actually happened was something like this. The guys eventually came to pick me up around 2:30 in the afternoon. It was a beautiful early Spring day; warm and sunny and not a cloud in the sky. A perfect day to go for a drive, enjoy a little somethingorother in the car and kick back with some killer tunes as the miles flash by. A perfect day for all that.

So when I got into the car, the first order of business, naturally enough, was sorting out that somethingorother; once that’s organised, everything else sort of falls into place quite nicely, if you know what I mean.

Cut to a few minutes later and stoo’s kicking in very pleasantly, thanks very much, and I turned my attention to the music that was playing on the car stereo. Now what’s this? Sounds a little too ambient for the kind of trip I'm hoping for. This stuff’s for the early hours of the morning after a hard night’s bump and grind; listening to it now would be like rolling over and reaching for a cigarette right at the beginning of the date, so I respectfully suggested that they get that shit off and slip in something with a little more bite. This was then followed by one of those silences that they call pregnant and then we had an open and frank discussion, the outcome of which was the realisation that this was the only cd in the car and that due to a communications mix up (nobody had said a word to me about it), they had been expecting me to bring music and that more importantly we had driven up onto the highway a few minutes ago and there was no turning back now...

However bleak and desperate life may seem at times, keeping things in perspective and maintaining a positive outlook can do wonders in situations like this. Sure, on the one hand we were trapped with nothing but elevator music to keep us aurally satisfied for the next three hours, but on the other hand, I had three buddies with me and we’re all off our trees and the sun’s shining away like a bastard and if that’s not a recipe for a good time, I don’t know what is...

Except of course, this recipe only works if all parties are up for the party, as it were, and when one party falls asleep and another might as well be and the driver is using up all of his conversation by keeping his eyes glued to the road, then it's not much of a party. So when I piped in with my great idea for a long journey in a car game, you can imagine what a rapturous welcome it got....

Happily enough, we arrived in Osaka and somehow managed to find our way to the Dome Stadium. For the sake of brevity, I'm going to gloss over the bits where we had to stop and ask directions from old men and for the sake of my reputation I'm going to gloss over the bit where I accosted some young girls at a highway rest area and asked them if I could ride the rest of the way in their car.

Anyway, so we found ourselves inside Osaka Dome with about half an hour to go before the show and forty thousand other concert goers in front of us in the queue for beer. I take my hat off to the organisers for the logistical feat they pulled off in getting us to our seats with paper cupped beers in hand just as the screams went up from those in the mosh pits down at the front and the grandaddies of English popular music took the stage.

In the really good concert reviews they always tell you what songs the band played, because fans like to know about that kind of thing, but since this isn't going to be a really good concert review, I'll just say that they didn't play enough of the oldies that I could have sung along to happily and that Keith Richards singing a song just the one time would have been enough. Other than that they put out a professional show and it was just what you'd expect from a band of their mural sized proportions.

One other thing of note about the show was that our seats were almost at the end of a row, with just one empty seat on my right and that seat remained empty during the opening number. Do you remember how in a recent blog (the one in which I told you about meeting Claudia Schiffer), I told you about my brain synapses when I see expensive sports cars? Well, I was having similar feelings about that seat. I leaned over to my friends and said, "A fabulously gorgeous nymphomaniac is going to come and sit next to me soon..."

I don't think I need to go into any descriptions of their reaction when the seat was eventually taken by a generously overweight middle aged man in too tight shiny black slacks and carrying a briefcase. I saved the day, however, by singing "he's a gas gas gas!" really loudly in his ear, maybe even during the right song.

So that was the Rolling Stones. And now I'm supposed to tell you about the night of debauchery that followed but what happened was that after the gig ended and after we'd stood behind forty thousand people in the queue for the after show piss, we discovered that three of us were a bit tired actually and probably it would be for the best to just drive back home now. One of us tried to keep the flame of hope alive by calling them a bunch of Japanese wusses but he only did that in a mumbly sort of way and under his breath because he didn't want to get stranded in Osaka although he had actually just spotted a couple of likely looking ladies who he thought he could persuade to give him a four hundred kilometre ride back home and if not, they'd at least turn out to be fabulously gorgeous nymphomaniacs who'd take him home and fuck him silly. So he bade goodnight to his sleepyheaded chums and went off with those two lovely ladies and only got back home this morning.

Which is why you haven’t heard from me for nearly a week.

OK?

Driving in to work last Wednesday morning, I glanced in my rear view mirror and saw a lime green porsche.

How many of you can truthfully hold up your hands and say that you did the same? In my neighbourhood, I can assure you, lime green porsches are thin on the ground.

As the lights ahead changed to red, the driver gunned the engine and slipped into the outside lane, then drew up alongside me as we slowed down and stopped at the line. The lime green porsche was making expensive sports car noises over to my right as I turned my head to look at the driver. I wanted to know who’d drive such a car and don’t you go pretending that you wouldn’t have done the same thing.

Now, before I get into the next bit, you need a little background on my psychological state that day. When I was in my early twenties, I used to hitch hike a lot. There’s a story I could tell you about how the land called out to me to travel its length and breadth and when I’d had my fill of that, of how my thumb carried me across the sea to Europe where together (my thumb and I) we traversed more lengths and breadths and met many an adventure and frolicked (my thumb and I) with many a frolicsome wench. I could tell you that story, but I shouldn’t, because not a word of it would be true. Except the bit about adventures and wenches. The reason I hitched was because I was a poor student and couldn’t afford the train.

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that whenever I was hitch hiking, in England or on the Continent, every time I saw an expensive sports car something synapsed in my brain and a message flashed into my thoughts:

“It’s going to be driven by a fabulously gorgeous woman who also just happens to be a nymphomaniac. And she’s got her best friend with her, who also just happens to be fabulously gorgeous and very generous with her favours. And they’re going to see me and stop to offer me a lift and I’m going to get in and they’re going to take me to their house and fuck me silly.”

Now that you know that important part of the story, you’ll understand that in the second or so that it took to turn my head to look at the driver, exactly the same message flashed into my head. That’s what I mean when I talk about my psychological state that day.

So I’m hoping against hope that maybe this time there really will be fabulously gorgeous women in my immediate future as my eyes swing over to the open window of the lime green porsche and see


Claudia Schiffer.


And she smiles in surprise at me. And says, “Wow. A gaijin. Do you live here?”

I tell her that I do, silently begging the lights to stay red forever. And then, incredibly, she says, “Hey, do you fancy going for a cup of coffee?”

Now, at this point I should really tell you about the next few moments in which the lights changed to green and things got a bit awkward and involved horns and angry looks from other drivers, but I’m going to skip over that part and go straight to the bit where she says, “OK, follow me back to my hotel then.”

And that was last Wednesday morning and I only just got home today.

Which is why you haven’t heard from me for nearly a week.

OK?

Cave Uxor


Every Friday I go out for a drink. It's my once a week get together with some gaijin friends and it's also my one chance a week to speak English with people who, while they may not always understand everything I say, at least they can understand the English perfectly.

I do this every week. Unless I'm doing something else. I go to the same bar. I'm known for it. They call me kinyoubi no otoko; Friday Man. I always go there. Call me a creature of habit. And every Saturday morning mrs bln asks me where I went and every Saturday morning I tell her the same answer. We hold on to what we know. We revel in our monotony. I know that she's going to ask me and she knows what answer she's going to get. It may not be much but it's what passes for conversation in my house.

However. This morning I decided not to play that game. Call me obstreperous if you will, but I did. This morning, when she asked me where I'd gone last night, something wicked took ahold of me and impelled me to say:

Really, you know, it's best not to ask me about that. Then I won't have to lie to you. I was out last night doing all kinds of bad things and obviously I can't tell you about them, so if you don't ask me, I won't have to lie, so it's best if you don't ask me about that.

Now, before we go any further, I want you to ask yourself a question. If your husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend or whatever said to you "I was out all night doing bad things that it's best you don't ask about" (and you'd been together for nearly 10 years and were fully au fait with that partner's sense of humour) would you immediately believe that what you'd just heard must, beyond any shadow of a doubt, be true?

OK, now cut to an hour and a half later and I'm sitting in my smoking room (I call it that but what it actually is is a closet with a window that serves as a general dumping ground for anything that doesn't have any other home and the computer room and book storage room and rice storeroom which also happens to be the only room in the house where I can smoke without being subjected to long and uninteresting tirades about why I should quit. So it's my smoking room. And I'm sitting in it and simultaneously trying to rouse myself into some kind of mid morning sense of purpose, shake the previous night's cobwebs from my head and enjoy a quiet smoke when I hear the front door open and mrs bln comes back early. Oh, didn't I tell you about that? She goes out to teach an English class on Saturday mornings; leaves the house at 9:45 and comes back at about 11:30.

But it's only 10:30. Why's she back so early?
I call out, "Why're you back so early?" but no answer comes, so I put out my smoke and go to find out what's going on. She's standing in the entrance, an odd look on her face. I ask her what's wrong. She tells me that she crashed her car on her way to class. I ask her if she's ok and she says she is. I ask if the other driver is ok and she says she is. I ask her how it happened and she tells me a long and complicated story about trying a different road which she didn't think had a right side but it did and when she came out there was another car and she wasn't expecting to find it there so she hit it, but it wasn't as bad as she'd thought and in fact there were only some nasty scratches to the paintwork...

Actually, as you can see, it wasn't really so long as stories go, but what it lacks in length it more than makes up for with its ability to confuse me and while I'm standing there trying to understand what exactly it was that happened, she says:

But it's your fault because you said that you did bad things last night and I was thinking about that and I couldn't concentrate on the road...

So I'm putting this up as a warning to any of you guys out there who might be waking up this morning and thinking about indulging in a little bit of flippancy during the day. Don't do it. It's just not worth it. It'll only end in tears...

Excuses, Excuses...

Some of you (at least I’d like to think so) might have been wondering lately about the fact that I haven’t actually been writing anything of note and have simply been posting fluff and frippery in a not very unobvious attempt to keep at least a few of you interested in popping over from time to time.

I’ve certainly been wondering about it myself and have decided that it’s about time that I came up with an excuse, lest you think that code and wotsits are all you’re ever going to get from me now...


Actually, although my gender may cruelly prevent me from multiple orgasms, when it comes to excuses, I can have one after the other quite happily, (sometimes even at the same time) and so this is an attempt to entice you all to believe at least ONE of the reasons I am about to give you for what some people are calling The Long Period When BLN Did Nothing But Play With Code And Wotsits And Never Wrote Anything Longer Than A Few Lines And I Was Thinking Ha Ha He Got Put In The Premium Spotlight And Then Ran Out Of Things To Say Not That What He Was Saying Before Was Anything To Write Home About LOL But You Know What I Mean. Well, apparently some people call it that.

The first thing that you have to understand is that my real passion for xanga is in the commenting, not the blogging itself. I spend far more time reading you guys than thinking about writing and certainly more than actually writing. I delight in finding words for a comment that will cause subsequent readers to think, Huh? Is that guy on drugs or something? Those comments might appear to be the work of a throwaway moment but actually they’re the sweated and agonised over results of me plumbing the depths of my creativity. Add to that the fact that recently I’ve even been trying out some new blogs, breaking my golden rule of not trying out any new blogs because then I’ll get interested in someone and I’ll add ‘em to my SIR and then I’ll have even less time for writing and then people will definitely be saying stuff like that Long Sentence upstairs....

All of the above is true, of course, but not really the reason for what’s going on. What it is, is that my world outside xanga is currently a source of much stress and my energies and attention must be directed somewhere other than here. I have been unable to find a replacement for the part time teacher who leaves at the end of this month and have been busy trying to reschedule classes into gaps in my own timetable. Some classes, however, I simply can’t do myself and I am faced with the horrifying prospect of having students who have paid for classes but no one to teach them. Obviously, this is Not a Good Thing and of course the result of my mind being elsewhere is that I haven’t had the inclination to write anything...

Or how about this? I told you about mrs bln’s crunching a while back, didn’t I? Well, it’s now reached the point where she is constantly crunching ice cubes and I’m having to look after her pretty much full time just in case she does anything dangerous to herself. She has also started another, equally worrying habit. Now I don’t know about you, but when I watch TV, I usually sit somewhere more or less in front of the TV, so as to give myself a natural view of the on screen proceedings. Not her though. No, she likes to sit somewhere about 6 feet to the left of the TV and almost on a perpendicular line with it, as shown in fig.1 below:


Fig.1

Now you try moving away from your monitor in a similar fashion and see how well you can read this blog. Then you’ll have an idea of what I’m trying to get at here. Now, try imagining the addition of non stop crunching noises and you’ll be getting an even clearer picture of the source of my worries. Now factor the following into the equation: When I ask her if she’s OK watching the tv from over there and that I’m concerned that not only is she possibly doing her eyes some lasting damage but that also she might not be getting the full value that the screen has to offer and also slip in something about how I’m a little put off by all the crunching, she looks at me for a moment and then says, “Did you know that your nostrils go all wide when you talk to me and you’re trying not to laugh?” Only, she doesn’t call them nostrils because she can never remember the English for them, so she calls them ‘nostronauts’. So what she actually says to me is “Did you know that your nostronauts go all wide when you talk to me and you’re trying not to laugh?” This is what I have to contend with nightly and it’s taking its toll on me I tell you....