So I complained to Mike (I should really use the second person because you're the only person reading this anyway) that I have no one reading this blog, except for us two. I have tried to remain positive about life, but it is quite difficult in my second year in Japan. Every once in a while, a gem of a moment comes out of nowhere to greet me in love and give me peace of mind. I have written about too many of these moments in my less legible, hand-written journal, which spans almost all of the time that I have lived in Japan. For the sake of my life, I will not rehearse this trivial sublimity once more. I will put it in a shoebox and leave it in the closet of my apartment for all of posterity to discover and judge for themselves. It is a blessed thing, to think back. If only more people could do so and not think backwards. That is, examine the words we speak and the words we hear. Falling asleep here. The leaves, unlike the line in the poem I wrote a week or so ago in "Autumn Prayer," have started falling and continue to fall throughout the slightly warm, dry afternoon. A sense of wanting nothing has come over me, which is frighteningly fulfilling.

Well, this is as personal as it gets, right? Here at the edge of the sensible, the comprehensible, or, the reprehensible? Should I write about the sense of an ending that looms over one when faced with the reality of another 4-year Bush reign? Or should I post pictures and websites of things of I have done, evidence of me leading an interesting life? AM I of interest to anyone, including myself? Maybe I should write something shocking, abrasively intellectual, underscoring my talents as a literature major whose tongue has fallen out of his mouth (could it be living in Japan, the land of winter mini skirts, which has stricken me down to the level of a shell-shocked dilletante, if at best)? Or how about I start again on a novel I will never publish, never finish, never start. What are your opinions? A Japanese teacher was discussing a presentation that we (increasingly becoming I in a matter of days) will give, and said of the Board of Education's coordinator: "He fucks me," but meaning "He faxed me." I didn't laugh. How about that?

How about this?