Lonesome Day With Nostrodamus

How does it feel?
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone…
-Dylan

This is the first lonesome day. I mean soul clenching loneliness. It’s one of those days when you realize you will never be famous, no films or books made about you. It’s not like aspire for these things only a day like this such toughts strike you. A day when you realize nobody will know you except a small smattering of people on a spinning rock in the cosmos, many of whom have already forgotten you. If I were a drinker these words would flow with whiskey. If I were a smoker the ashtray would have a graveyard of crumbled butts and ashes and another stick would be smoking on the lip. The day is gray and it is raining and suddenly I realize that nobody knows me here and my internet doesn’t work and I don’t understand the television. I try to shower the feeling away but it will not wash into the drain like the soap bubbles and the shampoo. I am lonely today and that is all there is to it so best embrace this dismal knowledge and put on some sad songs, old bluesy Tom Waits is perfect, and curl up on the couch near the heater with my bleak thoughts and solitude on this gloomy Monday.

Of course, the depressing sentiments expressed above may just be due to the low fever, enflamed glands and running nose. It looks like I was no immune to the virus floating about and it was just incubating until last evening when in the time it takes to fry an egg my throat became a pulsating harvester of pain. I have not spoken all day. Trying to sing in the show made things worse. Besides, I sound far too much like Louis Armstrong for my liking. Yesterday the headache had passed and the feeling of illness from the previous day had subsided but, really, it was only waiting in ambush for when I least suspected it and today the trap was set, baited and I walked blindly into the net. Aching muscles soothed by hot water return to their abnormal state and all joints decide to join in the fun by locking up making me move like an un-oiled Tin Man. With another dreary day outside the window and my body a sickly mess if I were every going to feel totally alone out here today is the perfect time to do so.

How does it feel to be on your own? Well, Bob, it feels pretty strange because I am a man who enjoys partnering with only himself on the lone prairie of life. I’ve mentioned this before and it will probably come up time and time again but my ability to be without companionship was one of the defining fibers of my being. Only know I wonder if it were every there at all. You see, I have never been truly and utterly alone. There have always been people to visit be it the sleepy eyed McDonalds below me in Ottawa or the friends across town like Megs to walk with, throw salt at and toss into parked police cars. Good times…good times. There has always been a phone to pick up as well but here there is no international payphone until a few stops down the line. Then there has been the internet, my constant time waster, my friend and enemy, giver of knowledge and sucker of life. I have been without this little luxury now for nearly a week and I am starting to get the shakes. So, yes, there have been times when I have returned to empty rooms, no smiles and how was your day and no arms to hold, and I would be content in the silences. The thought was always at the back of my mind, I guess, that companionship in its varied forms was always a button bush, phone call or a bus ride away. Calculated and measured solitude in intermittent doses is what I had. I was far from the often dreamed off empty cabin in the woods. There were people in the forms of telephone conversations, emails and coffee shop strangers. Somebody was always around.

With no direction home. Bob, that’s not entirely true now, is it? We’ve all known from the outset that I’d be returning within a year. Am I returning home? You raise a good point, imaginary Dylan. I really don’t have a home to return to, do I? Somebody else has already moved into the old apartment I’m sure and there is that bookcase where my bed used to be. There is a direction, this I know, but the home at the end of the tunnel is an unknown one. There will be furniture at the start as that was sold. No microwave to heat my soup sits in my father’s basement collecting dust. Only eleven boxes of films, books, music and assorted other bits remains with a suitcase of clothes. No direction home…yeah, I suppose you could say that and I suppose, Bob, I’d agree. By this time next year I will be on the path to rectifying that situation but right now I am a homeless man in his home country and a guy with four walls, a ceiling and an annoying crosswalk in a foreign country.

Like a complete unknown. Bobby, now that one’s the kicker. Kicks me square in the gut it does because I am a complete unknown here. I’m by far the invisible man, no Claude Rains here, folks, because people still stare and gaze and the foreigner walking into their supermarkets, eating in their restaurants and boarding their train cars. This last week I met with my first potential racist. Racism takes many forms, this one took up residence inside the slender frame of a Japanese woman in a business suit. I was on my way back from work and I sat down next to her in the car. I always ensure now that I am in a car that is for both sexes so what was to follow could not be accounted to my ignorance of train car policy. The woman got up after a few seconds of me sitting next to her and walked over to the doorway. I didn’t pay it any mind as I’m sure she was just getting off at the nearing stop. I happened to glance up two stops later and she was still there. In fact, she road the train standing up as far away from me as she could get without climbing on the roof for the remaining 35 minutes I was on. When I stepped off the train at my stop I watched her walk back to her seat. Had this happened before? I started going over my rolodex of memory and found other similar incidents that I hadn’t paid as much attention to. So, no, I am not invisible although it appears as though some people here wish I were. When I write that I am a complete unknown it is because nobody here knows me, really knows me, passed that white guy on the train car or munching his Mr. Donut. I can’t saunter down the block and visit any friends. I don’t run the risk of running into any acquaintances here. The people in my training group, the only people I could consider friends, could be in another country on a night like this, scattered about around the islands as they are. The Japanese teachers are hardly seen, if at all, and the closest other teacher near me was not very approachable at our recent staff meeting. There is only me and my noisy trains and those other teachers who are supposed to be turning this town into a foreign colony but again they remain to be seen. I am starting to wonder if they are some local Lock Ness Monster myth perpetuated by size 10 sneaker tracks in the mud and a trail of Big Mac wrappers.

I am, after all, a gaijin (foreigner) in their land and we have been very much excluded from Japan for most of the island’s history. Japan was under forced isolation for the rest of the world for many years and, thus, has resulted in a populace that is leery of outsiders. With the influx of foreigner teachers populating the small areas these fears are become more lax, especially in the younger generation. The older lot, however, still have feelings of forbidding about anybody from the outside. Right now there are talks to loosen the knot of Japan’s strict immigration policy with the declining population. Such talks have reached an standstill however and remain only talks. As it stands now, only 1% of the population is made up of immigrants and the UN has stated that the country needs 600,000 immigrated citizens a year if it wants to combat the low birthrate. If the current state of things continues without more outside presence in the streets and in the work force by 2050 one in three Japanese will be at the age of retirement and the population could very well be halved by 2100. Thank about that next time you don’t want to shar ea bus seat, lady!

But sickness is a strange drug, a hypnotizer of your conscious and I am sure these thoughts will pass by the dawn. The inflammation seems to be subsiding. I have taken some proactive measures to ensure, though, that should these feelings of loneliness arise again I will be armed and ready. Tomorrow somebody from the NTT company will come and install my phone line. By the end of next week I should have the internet again. Yes, I am a man who enjoys swimming alone in his ocean but I am also a man who likes to know that there is a life raft or two within his reach.

There was one good thing to come of this melancholy Monday. Today I found Nostrodamus. The week I moved in I spoke to the former resident of this apartment. I’ll speak to him quite frequently. He’s my supervisor. He said something in passing when I mentioned my annoyance with the crosswalk clanging. It was something about shutters. I figured he was talking about the curtains and off that bit of information went into some mental crevasse until it was needed again. Last night when I returned from my historic walk I glanced up at the apartments next to mine. I pass them nearly every day but there are things in life you never notice even if they are right under your nose. You could not see into these apartments and it was not because of drawn curtains. There were large black shutters covering the entire length of the window. Shutters, now where had I heard that word recently? The puzzle piece clicks into place. This morning I opened my window and sure enough I had these shutters tucked away at the side in a small little sliding compartment. There are three of them made of some nice thick steel and you slide them individually across the window until all lock into place. I closed the window and sat down to wait for the train. Success! These things drown out the train cutting the sound down by at least 70%! When the crosswalk goes to its muted tone I have to really pay attention if I want to hear it. Is it wrong for a grown man to want to kiss a set of window shutters? What if I wanted to use tongue?

I have called the shutters Nostrodamus because of their ability to predict an incoming train. A few seconds before the crosswalk starts up the shutters will knock against each other making a small clacking sound. At first I thought it was a fluke, the wind or a passing truck, but this has happened every time and so my shutters have become the prophet of the train tracks giving me ample warning of the impending clatter. Seriously, this is a wonderful thing because I can’t tell you how many times the sound of the crosswalk has scared the hell out of me while I am trying to get to sleep between the silences. You think the last train has passed for the night and then an hour or so later bada-boom, bada-bing, bada-bang, clang, clang, clang, eyes shoot open in fright, heart races and I am up for another two hours. Not only are the sounds now nearly none existent but the predictions of Nostrodamus assures less staining of my bed sheets.

Today and was just me and the prophet. Honestly, these days will come with the long periods of travel if you make the journeys alone. Loneliness is a necessary evil sometimes when you set out a’globetrotting. You just have brave the gray days and look forward to the sun. These days are small prices to pay when you’re like a rolling stone. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Actually, I’d have it without the throat infection.

How does it feel, Bob? It feels like it’s time for bed.