Cherry blossoms at 3:30 pm this afternoon (March 22nd) in the park across the street.
Yesterday was the vernal equinox national holiday. Of course, it was dank and rainy...mild enough, but a bit of a disappointment by mid-afternoon. The streets were pretty barren in the morning, as it seems most people were inside, glued to the WBC baseball semi finals. The Japanese team snatched a stunning victory from what looked like the jaws of certain defeat in the last 15 minutes of the game. The Mexican squad looked stunned. I usually don't give a rat's arse about sports, but there was something compelling about this year's team, and their series of matches were all hugely entertaining. They went one further today, and claimed the world championship...knocking out the Americans on their home turf. I think everyone over here needed this. It's been a fucking rough three years.
It's officially western calendar spring, and the bone penetrating chill we've been saddled with since just before the solstice appears to have finally taken its leave. While deep winters here are quite a bit shorter than those at my point of origin, they can be brutally cold. The last three have been particularly nasty. Today it was sunny, and 23C. As warm as early May. While the weather is still pretty inconsistent, it's a far cry from what it was even two weeks ago.
I've spent the balance of the last three months bundled up like I'm going on an expedition to the Antarctic...and that's while I'm in the apartment. We've had to be a lot less liberal with the gas and electric heaters than we've been past years. A couple of hours in the morning, and a few hours in the evening, and that's it.
Thanks, Putin...you fucking fuck.
It looks like more bad news is coming on that front as well, with prices set to increase again just before summer kicks in. While the arrival of spring proper will bring a short respite as far as the power bills go, come mid-late June, we'll have to fire up the AC. There's no way around that.
On a positive note, the Ape City koji (construction) crew finally pulled down the shell of draped scaffolding that had enclosed our building since mid-September. Six months without sunlight; watching the world go by through a lattice of pipes, steel grating and porous grey/green tarp is enough to make anyone wanna hang themselves. No peace, no privacy. Like paying to live in a militarized ghetto or concentration camp. Of course there's still some intermittent drilling and hammering going on. Apparently the courtyard will be an unsightly mess until sometime in May, when those loathsome gorillas finally pull down the fencing surrounding their compound and decamp to some other unfortunate locale.
Mina must have been on the phone complaining to them once or twice a week for the duration.
It's pretty safe to say no one in the surrounding danchii will be sorry to see them go.
One finger salute to the Ape City Wrecking Crew. Thanks for six months of living hell.
Hopefully they do something about the landscaping between now and then. They cut down the few small cherry trees that sort of made the north side of our building look a bit less...grim. Coming into sakura season, their absence is glaring.
Last Sunday, as we were getting ready to venture out in to an uncharacteristically mild late-season afternoon, talk turned to the matter of another cold season finally behind us. Mina openly wondered how many more winters we had left.
This gave me pause.
"Fifteen...maybe?"
Maybe.
She didn't like hearing that.
I turned, shrugged and tried to put a more optimistic spin on things.
"With any luck, as many as we're able to squeeze in, then a few more for good measure... "
Odd coincidence.
An old friend from my formative years back in Vancouver had said something sort of along the same lines just a few days earlier. We were texting back and forth. I hadn't heard from 'Mick' since just after the New Year, when he suddenly dropped off the radar. I guess that he got tired of hearing about my long COVID travails, and was on to greener pastures.
Understandable.
People like amusing anecdotes, and lighter, frothier fare. An attentive audience. Nobody wants to be subject to bad news, or someone's grousing and whinging. He'd gone through his COVID thing the Christmas before, and it had laid him and his family out for the balance of the holiday season. It had been a worry, and I'd made a point of texting him daily, just to lend some moral support until he seemed to be firmly on the mend.
Needless to say, he was pretty much over wanting to hear anything more about 'the virus' by the time we got it... so there wasn't really much of a reciprocal 'sympathetic ear' on offer.
Oh, well.
Having missed the previous Christmas, I'm sure his priorities were more geared toward doubling down on seasonal festivities than commiserating with me on Messenger. To be fair, I felt like a sack of shit, anyways...and probably wouldn't have been a very good audience. All I really wanted to do was convalesce on the couch and be left alone.
Wanna clear your Messenger Feed? Drop some bad news. Tell everyone you have COVID.
Or cancer.
Friends and acquaintances tend to fade in and out of my life. More fade out than in, actually.
I'm not really big on pursuing the fade-outs.
People will come back around if and when they feel compelled. In my experience, most don't bother. 'Mick' and I have been friends since I was fifteen. He's pretty much the last man standing, and the only legacy friend that bothers checking in now and again. While there are sizable chunks of time missing in the forty-plus years we've known each other, when we do manage to reconnect, we pretty much pick up exactly where we left off. The same anecdotes and small talk. In a lot of ways, we're essentially the same as when we were sixteen or seventeen.
Most of our discourse revolves around reminiscing. Trading stories about our gloriously misspent youths in the Vancouver of yore, and lamenting the passage of time. It's nice. Two old guys on the whine. We're both media obsessives, so there's always cud to chew over old music, games, comics, TV shows or movies.
We occasionally veer into the here and now, but that's where the connection gets a bit more tenuous. Our current realities are starkly different.
This time around, he was talking about his travel itinerary, and a trip to New York he was planning with a mutual art school friend he'd kept in touch with all these years. Despite the fact that they live on opposite sides of the country, he manages to find time to fly back east so they can hang out every once in awhile...and maintain the connection.
He said that he'd unintentionally really upset her the last time they spoke by offhandedly figuring that they'd probably only be able to get together, "maybe another dozen times", unless they 'stepped it up'.
Kind of like my, "Fifteen more winters" thing.
While he felt bad for upsetting her, he insisted that it was true.
"It’s hard to even see people from across town let alone other geographies, so I’ve determined to spend more time at it"
It's a noble cause, to be sure. Funny...I'd never heard him talk like that before. Like he'd become keenly aware that the sand in his hourglass was limited. I never used to look at things in terms of their impermanence, temporal nature or transience, either.
We're generally never aware of when we're seeing someone for the very last time. There's no fanfare or anything. It's almost always something that we reflect on sometime later.
"Wow. I had no idea that would be the last time we would ever see each other", and so on.
In any case, he's lucky that he has that option. Fortunate to have the time and resources to be able to maintain those precious legacy friendships.
Mina and I are lucky to get out of here once every ten years. The last time was for five days back in 2016...and as things look now, if we're somehow able to make maybe one or two more trips abroad before I shuffle off this mortal coil, that'll likely be it.
If I'm going to be comparing the brass tacks of my reality to what I see everyone else posting about theirs on social media, I suppose it can all feel a bit disappointing. It's easy to get on Facebook or whatever, and see the seemingly endless string of vacations and parties that appear to make up the bulk of some people's lives, then look at the mundanity of ours and start feeling like a failure. I guess it's human nature to compare and contrast.
It can be a slippery slope, for sure.
Some people seem to revel in rubbing their affluence and good fortune in everyone else's faces. I don't know whether they do it consciously or not. I guess it doesn't matter.
Mina and I - and the small circle of people we know - are mostly all in our late fifties now. More road behind us than ahead. In ice hockey terms, 'third period'. Things can change so fast. Like my recent skin cancer diagnosis. Everything going along fine and routine until there's a bit of bad or shocking news, and it suddenly all changes.
The optimism and endless possibilities of our youth are long gone. The sense of unlimited time. Enough to piss away, to waste and make mistakes.
How many more winters, indeed?
*****
The skin cancer diagnosis was a tough thing. Totally unexpected.
I ended up having the surgery on Wednesday, March 1st, two weeks after my initial appointment at Meidai University Hospital.
As luck would have it, it seems that I'd picked up some kind of viral infection that developed into a nasty case of sinusitis the Friday before I was booked to go into surgery. In light of my condition, I suppose I should have postponed, but I pushed ahead with it anyways. I simply wanted to get it done and over with.
It took just under an hour. They gave me a local anesthetic, and it managed to hold until almost the end of the procedure, when it finally started to hurt a bit. The attending doctors were really young, which was a bit nerve wracking.
One of them made some sort of off-hand comment about 'Blackjack', a legacy Osamu Tezuka (Atom Boy) Japanese manga character whose hallmark is a long, vertical line of stitches across the right side of his face.
While my Japanese listening comprehension definitely leaves something to be desired, I can get the gist of a lot of things through simple context, and latching on to 'key words'...either through the smattering of Japanese vocabulary that I know, wasei-eigo and gairaigo (appropriated foreign origin 'loan words), or otherwise familiar names and terms.
Osamu Tezuka's famous 'Blackjack' character.
It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what the 'Blackjack' comment was referencing. It really bothered me. When the surgery was finally done, the young female doctor who'd conducted the procedure held a mirror up so that I could see what she'd done. My heart sank. It was so much worse than'd expected.
I figure I looked more like Christopher Lee's Frankenstein (from those old Hammer films) than Tezuka's rakish Blackjack character.
A more accurate representation of how I felt when we peeled off the bandages to have a gander at the damage post surgery.
Hideous.
I guess being disfigured is better than getting leukemia, and having my lymph nodes removed, or worse yet, being diagnosed with an untreatable stage three or four cancer somewhere down the road.
I think my brother said something like, "Don't worry. Chicks dig scars." in an attempt to make me feel better, or something. I mean, what's anyone supposed to say? I greatly appreciated he and my sister reaching out and checking on me. A few other old friends relayed some nice messages, as well. Their concern and encouragement really made a huge difference.
Mina took me back to the hospital a week later to have the stitches out, and pick up a month's worth of 'chemo-cream' for the other less advanced areas on my nose and forehead. I have to have that stuff applied to the affected areas three times a week for a month. We should go back in mid-May to follow up and have everything checked over again. If they decide I need another round of cream, I'll have to wait a month, then start the thrice weekly treatment again.
Failing that, I guess I'll be in for some more slicing, stitching and facial disfiguration before the year is through.
Better a scarred and stitched up face than the infinitly less appealing alternative, to be sure.
Through a different lens, I guess this could all be considered good fortune - in that it's diagnosed and on their radar. The whole thing is really beyond my control. The best I can do is wear the strongest sunscreen I can get my hands on, be vigilant, and continue to follow up every few months.
The good news for now is that the doctor claims to have successfully excised all of the cancerous cells from the affected area, meaning that there is no need for any re-surgery or follow-up treatment on that specific target...for now, at least.
I've been advised to keep it taped up for as long as I can. The doctor said that if I could manage it for three months, there would be a better chance that the scar would heal thoroughly. Otherwise I may end up with a thick, raised pinkish white 'keloid scar'. The surgical tape that I'm using tape is a convincing skin tone, so from a distance I look almost normal. I wear a mask in public and when I teach, anyways, so fortunately, no one needs to see it.
Needless to say, this whole thing has really taken the wind out of my sails. The last six months have been so draining, on so many levels.
Fortunately, it looks like our bi-monthly old lady minding tenure is a thing of the past. I don't know what I'd do if I had to contend with her on top of everything else that's been going on.
There's even been a bit of a thaw between Mina and Mayumi. Things had gone pretty sour toward the end of December, and a bit of a deep freeze set in. For now, it seems that the old lady has settled in to her new routine, and Mayumi's crew have adjusted to having her wonderfulness around full time.
I'd imagine that she's also happy not being shuffled around every second weekend like an unwanted suitcase.
Of course, things remain irreparably bad between okasan and I. We thoroughly despise each other...and that's fine. The more she hates me, the less she'll be inclined to want to come over again. I don't see any imminent rapprochement between Mina and Surly Sumo Son (aka Debu-hiro), either. That means there likely won't be any invites to uncomfortable family gatherings pending. I still think he needs a punch in the face.
The most important fences appear to be on the mend, though... which are those between Mina and her sister. If they can have a civil relationship, then all is basically good.
My twenty-eighth year over Insecthead's wrapped last Tuesday, and as predicted, there were no tearful good-byes from any departing teachers at the bottom of the term's final hour.
After class, the fifty-odd outgoing five year old's presented me with a small poster they'd cobbled together, with little handwritten blurbs scrawled in hiragana (which I can't read). Everything went straight and by the book, which was fine. The teachers did an acceptable job of masking their contempt for me, and made everything as civil as possible. We all did our best to smile for the curtain call photo, and that was it.
Of course, I'd liked some of the kids...but the group dynamic had been irreparably hobbled by the un-necessary attack that Long COVID, Erratica and that loathsome Filipina, 'Miss Bianca' had decided to launch on me during our first class last April. From that point on, the pool had been poisoned. Kids are sensitive, and they pick up on even the smallest amounts of dischord.
For everyone's sake, I sincerely hope that Insecthead has a better team in place when the new term kicks off the third Tuesday of April. It'll be a real win if I never have to lay eyes on any of those loathsome bitches ever again.
Cycling back from class, I decided to take advantage of the mild, sunny weather and swing past the used record store I always dig around in near Kanayama Station. As I rounded the corner to park and lock my bike, I was more than a bit disappointed to see that it was GONE. There was a new Domino's Pizza take-out/delivery venue under construction in its place.
Fucking hell.
I hadn't stopped in since the beginning of December, shortly before I got COVID. Soundbay Republic had been in that location for as long as I can remember. A quarter century or more. It was always busy. I'd spent countless hours rummaging around in there over the years. Found some great stuff, too. Sad day.
Speaking of 'the plague', COVID numbers have finally started bottoming out. I think Friday's local count was just under 500. In an odd move that may effect a reverse in this encouraging trend, the Japanese government decided to issue some odd and confusing new 'rules' regarding the wearing of masks in public, and in places of business.
The thing is, there were no real 'rules' to begin with. Up to now, people who didn't want to wear masks simply didn't bother, and gave not a single shit what anyone thought.
Now it's all apparently 'optional'.
A recent survey conducted by the local TV station indicated that around 55% of respondents said that they'd continue masking up 'for the time being', with 35% saying that they'd just 'follow along with what the majority of people appeared to be doing', and the remaining 10% contending that they were going to ditch their masks completely. With spring cherry blossom viewing parties (hanami) just around the corner, this could spark the beginning of what may well amount to Wave #9.
Fingers crossed it doesn't...but I think we've been here before.
As for me, I'll continue to avoid trains, buses, restaurants, bars, theatres and live houses for the time being, and be masking up in retail spaces, or crowded areas, as usual. I have an unsightly scar to cover, and I'm in no hurry pick up another dose of COVID, anyways. The road back from the virus was fucking long and hard. I still have bouts of that brain fog shit.
Every thought in my head suddenly merges and turns to mud. It can take a few minutes to shake it off.
That's where we'll leave it for now. There will likely be another dispatch in around a month's time, give or take. As I said, this whole skin cancer thing has taken a bit more of a toll on me that I thought it would. Weather permitting, I'll be out trying to shake it all off up the canal side, and hopefully be feeling like a bit more of a semblance of myself before too long.
Until then, it's well worth remembering that no matter where you go...there you are.
There, and nowhere else.
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