The story goes that red boy was born as a lump of meat, which was cut open with a sword by his father, and from which the child emerged wearing red silk trousers which glowed with light and a magic golden bracelet on his right wrist. He was an incarnation of Ling Chu-Tzu, “the Intelligent Pearl” and when he was seven years old he was already six feet tall. He performed many miraculous deeds and defeated the dragon king’s son, for which he was shamed by his father. Red Boy responded by cutting the flesh from his body in remorse until he was reduced to nothing. Seeing the suffering of Red Boy, Guanyin appeared and covered his remains with lotus leaves, which revived him and reconstituted his body. From that moment he became a dharmapala, a fierce protector of the faith.

When I was 19 my father was diagnosed with Pick's disease. At the time I was living in Tokyo as part of a study abroad program. My sister emailed me the news. At first it didn't mean much to me, a possible explanation for the strange and inconsistent behavior that my father had been exhibiting, but mostly it seemed abstract, something to be dealt with later. It was on Christmas day that I received a call from my brother and sister and dad, hanging out, laughing about their experience in Church the prior evening, where a talking Darth Vader pen my brother was carrying broke the staid silence of the Christmas Eve ceremony with "I want them alive!" At first my dad tried to tell the story but his confused ordering of events got in the way. My sister took over and I understood. That spring I received a letter from my father, the first I had ever gotten from him, a single page ending with the line, "I'm so proud of you."

_

Things began making more sense after that, thinking about the past and making the appropriate revisions to my memory and the logic behind events. My dad and I wrote each other emails when I had first left to Japan, until one day when he wrote that if I wasn't going to write back than he wouldn't write anymore. Later, when somebody showed him how to check his in-box, he apologized and continued writing, sometimes strange stories about the dogs and the farm, pouring gasoline down snake holes and his adventures with Susan. At the end of one of these emails, he concluded, "I hope you find something funny everyday."

_

When I came back my brother said I had changed, that I was acting too much like Nate, who my brother thought to be arrogant and aloof. My brother, dad, and I were all staying at a house my sister was taking care of for the summer in DC. My dad's odd behavoir was more pronouced now, and he would burst with non-sequiturs, anger, confusion, and clarity at uneven intervals. While driving back to Wisconsin, I put some music on in the car; Stereolab, a droning rock band with a french singer. He mumbled something in the back seat and then exploded in anger thirty seconds later, mocking the singer's voice, "la la la la la, la la la la la, turn it off or I'll throw the goddamn tape out the window." My brother and I smiled at each other but I felt embarrased.

_

It feels odd to me that I should reflect on these things when I'm not really that far removed from them. My dad is still alive, mute and damaged from the disease; but he's still alive. I'm very much still in a post-college haze in many ways, unsure of my place and how I should spend my time. Is it healthy to dwell on the not so recent past? Have I earned any perspective on the matter? Am I different in any way? My dad always told us to be ourselves but more often than not I'm absolutely confused as to who that is. I've been teaching the last three months and with each class I get more and more lost in other people's expectations of me, how it seems impossible to distinguish what I want from the wants of those around me.

Two Wednesdays ago I asked John three times about the same thing because I didn't believe him when he told me; a debate about a little detail on an ivory piece, a detail that I believed to be a turtle (not a minogame, a kind of mythical turtle like creature). He got angry and said I was stubborn, go away. I left the room and sat back down at my desk. He came after me, yelling, This goes to show your ignorance in Japanese mythology! Later, John conceded that Japanese mythology was maybe not the problem, and instead, our disagreement was simply a matter of buisness judgment. He told me that I was only interested in facts. I am still coming to terms with this assertion.

Poetry Is a Destructive Force

That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.

Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own...

The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.

-Wallace Stevens, "Parts of a World"

I was invited to stay in Leeds by Molly and Barnaby on my way up to Scotland for a family gathering. On the last day there Molly and I accompanied Barnaby to conference at a local college that Barnaby and his fellow performers were invited to participate (a movement and sound improvisational method) in. While they set up, Molly and I wandered around the massive sculpture garden and park that was located on the campus. It was a nice afternoon talking and playing around. After the performance demonstration, during a question and answer portion, I snuck off the bleachers and found a good spot outdoors while I waited for the event to finish up, laying on a steep slope introspecting or whatever it is one does on a steep slope. Molly and Barnaby came out of the building, along with the other performers and started up the hill towards me. I stood up to greet them, a little nervous as the group approached I began to think about all the things I could possibly say to them, things like "Hello how are you."; "Nice Job"; ask a question; prepare for the question of what I was doing in England; what I do in general; etc. Sensing my unease, I guess, Bob, a larger man with hair almost to his shoulders reached out his hand, palm down, and said softly but pointedly, "you're alright, you're alright" and instantly I fell out of anxiety. We chatted briefly and excepting Barnaby and Molly, the performers got in their cars parked behind us, and left.

That's not the story. The story is video games and isolation, indifference and cynicism. As if spinning around each other we fail to see another's orbit caught up in the impossible perfection of our own. School administrators are not to blame. There is no bureaucratic congress approved solution for your girlfriend breaking up with you nothing so that you'll only kill two people and then go to prison for the rest of your life. A failure of imagination, as if sadness could be prevented. (If you had gotten an email from an anonymous machine telling you not to go to work would you listen? Have you already?) This is not an isolated incident perpetrated by a crazy lonely man with access to relaxed gun laws and a lack of administrative foresight but the extended static portrayals of the human being and entrance exams marking the location of a scared poet hiding in the hubris of language and pretensions so as not to be heard avoiding the responsibility of being understood. Ideally we hope to take risks but not out of habit. Ideally we hope to respond. There was a student in my class who wrote some alarming sentences I asked the administration if I was legally responsible and they said not really. Simply I spoke to him. While standing in Subway today two kids bounced around without any parents they said they were bored. Tonight Amy and I went to a baseball game we stood in the line sat down and ate nachos.

After many adventures, spaceships to marching band uniforms jokingly but earnestly worn, a party at night in a beer garden, somebody else's neighborhood. A talking robot I think, or maybe it was just a dog and momentum spinning me away from the anonymous group of fellas falling through the sky and into the water. A canyon tall and deep and bright, filled with water as clear as anything like a television show or a mind's conception of what clean is, I realized, after sinking to the bottom. Yes I was dreaming and intentionally blinded my senses to protect myself. I fell out of lucidness with a quick decision and returned to my normal sleep pattern.

Twenty minutes from the Yamanote line, the loop of track that surrounds the heart of Tokyo, I would board the packed train and wedge my way to the end of the car. At the next stop a mass of people would disembark to catch the express, and usually the person sitting directly in front of me was one of them. I would quickly fill their empty seat. Lucky as I was, I more often remember the view while standing, the gradual appearance of fences and signage, bicyclists speeding alongside the train as we slowly approached the station.

On Friday Quintin's place almost burnt down I say almost because the ceiling and roof burned but the rest was mostly okay, parts of the ceiling crashed down on parts of the bedroom and hallway. I walked up the back stairwell, and found Amy standing in Q's bedroom, she handed me a computer's hard drive and I walked down the main staircase and gave it to his landlord, who placed it in a bag to keep the ashy smell from smelling up his apartment. I dug through a pile of ash and found a ring, and a black and white picture of what looked like a grandfather. Q's shrine had taken most of the damage, having been hit from pieces of the ceiling falling into it burning, but most everything else, his bed, desk, was okay if covered with a thin coating of ash. We collected a bag of his salvaged and burnt sacred relics, and gave it two his friend Dean, who offered to put Q up until his apartment is livable again. We left with a bag of Q's work clothes, just in case he can't get back in when he gets back from Atlanta. Amy is going to wash them.

Riding the 72r bus up to work on select days of the week where I need to be in North Berkeley for a good part of the day I see a lot of billboards along San Pablo where the bus runs, from down town through a rough neighborhood, through Emoryville and then into Berkeley. Some of these billboards are movie billboards advertising usually a big time action movie or a horror movie, for example that movie called '300', where the advertisement is usually a bare chested man looking very angry and written across his picture is '300' but written in blood. It seemed excessively violent to me. And then there are the horror movie advertisements, a body being dragged across a desert or a freaky doll or something else advertising 'evil'. For a while I thought it was strange, one of those back in my day they didn't advertise those kinds of things so blatantly because we had values, mid-western values or something like the world is going to end soon in a climactic battle brought on by rising indifference, sin, and greed. Biblical kinds of ideas. But all this was tempered as I have been reading about the first Tokugawa shogunate and William Adams, the English sailor who got in close with the most powerful person in japan during the early 17th century (I write 17th century now instead of 1600's because of the job at the Buddha Museum seems to encourage this). Anywho, reading about the crazy violent public spectacles that seemed to of been common place in japan during that time (think mass public burnings where citizens are required to provide the fire wood), before and after that time, and then thinking about other historical information that we've learned like gladiators or public whippings or executions performed by our ancestors, how our respective societies have seem to of made a place for those kinds of activities to be broadcast, and people show up to watch them. The ad across the track in a subway station advertises a movie coming out, i forget its name, but the web site that you can visit is watchthemdielive dot com which a month ago i would of turned and said see, see what I'm talking about?