here comes the vibration function monster
I have a new layout. It's not that the old one sucked or anything. And it's not that the new one rules. I have a new one just to have a new one. I can deal with it as well as you can.

This entry is not intended to be spectacular. If it ends up spectaculating anyone, I apologize in advance. Apologizing in advance, along with beating up old ladies, is one of the things I do.


fun trivia: did you know that, in japan, "rushmore" is called "tensai makkusu no sekai" -- "genius max's world"?

METAL GEAR SOLID 3 KEEPS COMING BACK:
THE REVIEW: PART THREE

I had a dream the other night where I was waiting outside the Marui department store in Ueno with a woman who I once met a long time ago, in front of that very department store. We were waiting for another woman, who I also met once in front of that department store. In real life, these two women would never meet each other. We were talking about the earthquakes in Niigata, and she said, "If they build up to something terrible, that'd be very interesting."

And I asked, "Why would it be interesting?"

And she said, "Because it'd make worldwide news. It'd go down in history. Everyone would remember the big earthquake that was born from all those small earthquakes. It is usually the case, you know, that big earthquakes are born from small ones."

I told her, "Is it that important to make worldwide news? Would that make you feel anything at all? Would it make you feel more important?"

She replied, "Feeling more important about one's self is a small part of life. In my life, that part has ended."

I replied, "Yet, if the large earthquake comes, the small earthquakes will be a mere footnote in the history books."

She said, "And if the large earthquake never comes, then the small earthquakes will be nothing."

As of this writing, the small earthquakes in Niigata have ended. This does not mean, of course, that a big earthquake isn't coming. Let's remember that on a geologic timeline, no human life lasts longer than a hundredth of a blink of God's eye.

"Are you saying that only truly horrible things are worth recording in history books?"

"Yes, that's what I'm saying, in general."

The sound of a train echoed in the rainclouds above us. Without warning, a meteor of terrifying size and colored like fluorescent spaghetti sauce blazed through the northern sky and hit somewhere in Higashi-Ueno. A red ring of heat spread out. I turned to face it. The woman turned to face it as well. She had her hand in front of her mouth.

The ring encompassed us. With a prickly pins-and-needles feeling, everything went hotly red, then black.



GAME OVER

The words flashed before my eyes. In a second, I was looking at a television screen from a fixed, immovable angle. Each of the dots on the television were big and harsh and flashy. It was a charcoal-colored background. I could feel a controller in my hands, yet I couldn't look away from the television. My face was pressed to it. I could press a control pad, and I could hear a cursor moving. Only I couldn't see what the cursor was pointing at.

The cursor sound was the same as the cursor sound in Final Fantasy VI.

Soon, after clicking enough times, I saw a long rectangular menu. Above it were the words:

REBIRTH: CHOOSE SHAPE

The shapes on the line included a triangle, a square, a circle, Buster and Babs Bunny, and Plucky Duck from "Tiny Toon Adventures," most specifically "Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose" for Super Nintendo. I stared at Plucky Duck, thinking.

If only horrible things last in history, what does history mean to the lost victims of horrible things? The answer is precisely nothing.

酷いことにならないと
歴史に残らない。
百年たったら
何も残らない
俺の東京
俺の東京は
他の人の
持てない
ことだ
俺の死は
この世界の終わり
時間は全て
俺のもの

THE GANGSTERS ARE UP TO NO GOOD, AS ALWAYS

I have a cellular phone, as you may or may not know. I bought it back when I got my first burstwad of money from magazines a while back. It wasn't a bad wad of money. I spent the shit out of that money. The phone I bought happened to be a Sony-Ericsson au-kddi phone. It was a nice phone. It was, of course, stolen when I was in Korea. By a Korean person, no less. A Korean kid, no more, and one that hung out in an internet cafe.

Well, he couldn't use it for nothing. He could have used it for a couple of minutes as, say, a digital camera, until its waning battery died. However, until that battery died, he could do no more than simply take pictures and look at them on the little screen. In order to see the pictures on a computer, much less print them out, he had to email them to a working PC email account. He couldn't do this, of course, because the phone got no signal in Korea. What he ended up doing with the phone doesn't matter. If he flew all the way to Japan immediately upon finding it and racked up a couple of hours calling prostitutes and talking to them about kimchee, more power to him. I applaud the little rugrat's ingenuity.

I ended up with a new phone, anyway. Only it wasn't new. It was old. It was the old model Sony-Ericsson, the one with the Motion-Eye camera and the really high-quality speaker. The camera has a light on it, and its email is as convenient as ever -- being a Sony-Ericsson, it has a little scroll-wheel on it that helps in touch-typing. Being an au, it allows up to 10,000 characters in emails, which equals roughly seven pages of Japanese. They gave me this phone for free. They even gave me the same number and email address.

Funny things started happening, though, soon after I received this phone. This was about a week before Tokyo Game Show. I was waiting outside Ikebukuro Station for my good friend Jules, from Wales, when it happened the first time. I got a call from a number unknown to me. I answered it. I only answered it because that week there were a lot of British / Welsh / French / Korean bastards in town, friends of mine, ones who I told to call me from whatever phones they could get their hands on. So I figured I might as well answer every call. Well, this call was odd.

"Hello. Who am I speaking to?"

It was a Japanese guy's voice. In Japanese. He sounded like he was, at the moment, smoking a cigar in the back room of a creepy arcade. Me, I was sitting with my back to a pillar in front of Ikebukuro Station. I was waiting for Jules, who was taking his bloody time. Even though he wasn't late. I was just early as all hell.

"You're quite rude," I said to the guy. Before buying a cellphone, I'd never been this audacious.

"You're quite rude, to tell me when I'm rude."

"I don't even know who the fuck you are and you're asking me who the fuck I am. I'd say that's rude."

"Look, kid. I'm a detective."

"Oh, no you ain't."

"Y-yes, I am."

"No you're not."

"H-how do you know that?"

"If you were a detective, you wouldn't say you're a detective."

"I--I?"

"Fuck you."

This last line was a scream, sort of. And I hung up the phone. A police officer was looking at me. He came up and leaned forward, with his hands on his thighs. He opened his lips to say something. I looked him in the eye, and spake,

"なんでやねぇん？"

He ran away. The phone rang again. I picked it up on the second ring.

"Yeah?"

"Hello. I'm a detective."

"FUCKER BASTARD!!"

I hung up again. Jules showed up directly. We went to a little shop I knew and ordered some curry. Soon enough, another phone call came. I wrote about this on my Japanese blog, the one I don't link to on here, because I have a whole other set of fans there and it's kind of like flipping into the bizarro world when I post there. In that post, I said,

"俺インドカレー食べてるうちに邪魔するなよ。"

"Just don't fuck with me when I'm eating Indian curry."

So of course when I picked up the phone, I picked up the phone angry.

"Hello! I'm a detective!"

"You're a liar."

"Look, look, just hear me out, here. You're obstructing justice."

"Alright, alright, fine."

"Okay, here's the deal -- I'm a detective, right? And you have been, uh, well. Your phone number is 080-####-####, right? Email address #########@ezweb.ne.jp, correct?"

"Yeah. And?"

"Well, see, we got a complaint from a company that you registered on their pay dating site, and that you racked up an impressive bill of around 80,000 yen. They're a little upset. This is, for the most part--"

"A fucking lie. Shit, don't try to scam me. I've got American blood. I know this shit. Bye."

I hung up. He called back. I didn't answer. In fact, I gave him a personal entry in my phone memory. His name is "クソ野郎". "KUSOYAROU." "SHIT-MAN." "SHITTY BASTARD" is a good translation.

He was calling from a Docomo cellular phone.

He called again from the same phone on the first day of Tokyo Game Show, while I was in line for my press pass.

"Hello, I'm a lawyer."

"No you're not, ass."

And I hung up.

He called again, this time from a land line, when I was busy getting my pass.

"Hello, this is a lawyer."

"Shit, man, I don't have time for this. I won't ever answer your calls again. Just fuck off. Go steal an old lady's purse or something."

He kept calling. Hundreds upon hundreds of times, he called, over the course of the next couple of days. He started emailing me from an @docomo.ne.jp address, pretending to be a guy searching for a sex friend. I replied, saying I was a man. I didn't know at first that it was the detective. Sometimes, emails get crossed around in the skies, and sometimes I get the wrong email. Anyway, the guy emailed back a couple of times, asking me who I was and where I lived. I said I was an American. He told me I was a liar; he told me to send him a picture. I sent him one.



He believed it, then. Then I realized . . . something was wrong. The phone calls kept coming. I grew paranoid of any and all unknown numbers.

Two weeks ago, I met a man named Ron in Sangenjaya, and sat with him in front of a karaoke parlor until we decided not to sing karaoke. He lived in the area, at any rate, and we met at the top of the tallest building in the area. I sold him some crack, he gave me some cash, and when the disaster was over we went and looked at used records. I told him, before we parted and before I had something of a side-story adventure involving the girl who works at the Sangenjaya Tenya (I learned, through an odd event, that she likes me in that kind of way, which is, by this point, sad and creepy, yet sexy), I told him about the phone calls. I told him how I looked it up, how the fuckers who do that shit are running rampant all over Japan. I told him, I told him like this -- au, who runs a damn fine phone service 364 times out of 365, is dumb enough to have a semi-public directory of all their customers' phone numbers and phone email addresses. The email addresses is the important part -- because, theoretically, that information shouldn't be released to any kind of public, even a semi-public public. That kind of information can render anyone a person who knows a complete stranger's phone number and email address, which lends them a kind of authority in the conversation. It's like a telemarketer calling a lonely old woman, knowing from the beginning that the person he's calling is female, seventy-nine, and a childless widow. He knows, kind of, that he's going to make a sale. The reason those two differing kinds of information shouldn't be released by phone companies is because it creates an aura of subtlety that scammers of the Japanese mindset and linguistic background are able to twist around into creating a thick cloud of mournful uneasiness in even the cleverest listener.

"You should write something about that."

"I'm thinking I will. I just can't, yet, until I get to the 'and then one day . . .' segment. Until the story comes to a head."

And then, one day, I went to Minami-Senju. I had to pay my phone bill, and they have an au phone shop there, beneath a Saizeriya and a Daiso and in a generally good-feeling area with crisp autumn wind and a view of a silo for some kind of grain. My phone bill, normally 3,200 yen, was different this time. It was 310,000 yen. Which is about $3,000 American dollars.

"What the fuck is this?!" I asked the guy at the counter.

He stuttered five or six times before giving his reply.

"P-p-p-p-p-perhaps you are using some . . . p-p-p-pay websites?"

"The fuck I ain't! In fact, I never even so much as used this thing to make a phone call!"

The guy leaned forward. His brow was sweating. He leveled with me. "Look, there's a problem with the service. We can't do anything about it. Please accept our deepest apologies."

I walked out without paying my bill. I couldn't hate the guy. I knew I couldn't do it, because the guy had that sweaty-brow look on his face, which indicated to me that he knew something was up, and he couldn't do anything about it.

I still had a week left before they cut my phone off. Eventually, they cut my phone off. Just two days ago, I went to the au shop and told them to fix my phone. The woman's eyes bulged when she looked on the computer screen after asking me for six forms of identification.

"Your bill is . . . 397,000 yen."

I put four thousand-yen notes on the counter.

"No, three-hundred--"

"No."

"Sir, there's a . . ."

"Look, I looked this up. I know what's wrong. I'm not paying that much goddamned money. I don't have that much money, anywhere. In fact, not only do I not have that much money, I'm on a restricted plan wherein I'm not even allowed, in the first place, to go over 4,000 yen in usage every month. So I'm giving you 4,000 yen, and you're going to turn my phone back on."

"A-are you sure you didn't use pay websites?"

"You have a record right there. You tell me."

She did not look away from the screen. She knew what was going on as much as I did. She got out a phone and called someone. Over the course of a half an hour, she worked her way up the ladder until she was talking with the vice-president of the company. She gave me the phone.

"Hello?" I said to the guy.

"Yes," he said.

"I know all about wangiri," I told him. "Back in America in the early 1980s there used to be these petty crooks who would call up random people from the phone book and then connect their phones to 1-900 numbers, racking up three or four dollars a minute for every second they kept them on the line. I do believe that your company is having a similar problem as of now."

"Yes. Yes."

"Now I wonder . . . how does my opening ten emails from one person result in my phone bill getting charged up by 50,000 yen, exactly? And how does talking on the phone for one minute result in my owing you the equivalent of three thousand US dollars?"

The vice-president's voice shrugged.

"We have a security problem."

"More like no security at all."

"Right, so we have no security at all."

"You should do something about that."

"We're working on it."

"You're the only company who has to, it seems."

"We're working on it."

"Turn my phone back on, first."

I paid 4,000 yen, and got my phone turned back on.

You who read this -- Japan is not a heaven of electronics. It is more like a growing purgatory, with no locks on the bronze gates.

For some reason, I was making fists that night, while making udon. Something about the whole thing was getting to me. A girl was telling me that I shouldn't have reacted the way I did. That I shouldn't have gotten angry. I said, with pride, taht I wasn't angry, that I hadn't been angry. I was merely reacting the way a human being is meant to react. She said no. She said I was wrong to demand service on something, even something like being raped with a cellular phone.

"You could have been a little nicer."

"They could install some security measures. And sever their ties with the God-hating yakuza, for Chuck's sake."

(That's . . . not actually what I said.)

"Now, now -- they're not in league with the yakuza. Everyone's in league with the yakuza, according to you."

"Yeah, yeah. I guess you could say the yakuza is just . . . my metaphor for all the wrongs in the world."

"The yakuza isn't wrong all of the time, though. Since organized crime went illegal in 1995, the yakuza have changed. They're no longer people who do low and dirty things for money. Rather, they handle simply the jobs that no one else wants to handle. Things like pachinko parlors. Soapland shops. The amateur pornography industry. The jobs that don't exactly make people's lives easier, they just keep them from getting a lot worse, or too much worse. They help maintain the balance now. The people who you are angry at are just common theives, is all."

I sat and thought it over. Certainly, those guys in frosted mullets in front of the West Exit of Ikebukuro Station, those guys who ask every passing girl with the most miniscule Pretty Rating if she wants to get naked in a hotel on camera for a thousand dollars, aren't exactly plucking out babies' eyes just to see what happens. They aren't shooting grandmothers of grandchildren, either. They're simply doing things that no one else wants to do.

In the Tokugawa period, it was wrong for a man to handle money. A man was supposed to be noble and upright and free of certain worldly desires. A samurai, for example, would never touch money. This lends much intrigue to the story of the ronin Miyamoto Musashi's killing one of two hired theives who lock him in a bath house and leave him for sweat, by throwing two large golden coins (called ryo). One of the coins smacks the bad man in the back of the head and ends him. Two men touched that coin in that example -- one was a masterless samurai badass, and one was a common fool who died immediately upon the money's contact with his skin.

Among the main characters in Mori Ogai's masterpiece novel The Wild Goose is a man named Suezo, a moneylender whose wife feels useless. The man cooks and cleans for himself, and at the start of the novel, takes on a mistress. He lives in Ueno, near Tokyo University, and his clients are mostly university students. He's an old man who gets rich off younger men who theoretically should have more money than him. The man is also an outcast amongst other men because he handles money, something a woman should do.

The yakuza used to be about honor, about life and death and respect. Money was simply one of the things they were respected; I hear that they were outcasts, originally, because they were, if nothing else, men who touched money.

Where does the greed that leads to wangiri arise from? What purpose does it serve? Where does that purpose go? The answers are simpler than you'd think. It's a man's dream, evolutionally, to live without moving. To be like a stone. A Taoist proverb states ironically that a stone is the most evolved of all beings. This is ironic both because a stone is mostly inorganic and because Taoism is a way of life that concentrates on "walking the right path." Stones do not walk paths. Stones walk no where. They roll, occasionally, though when they do, they gather no moss. Moss, of course, is a green, fuzzy, living plant-like thing. We won't talk any more about moss, because that would make stones seem more alive than we want them to. We're talking about this: people don't like working. People don't like moving, sweating, or thinking. We are, by nature, those of us who arrange our thoughts into writing or music, suffering beings. We suffer when we speak ("You're not listening to me! You never listen to me!!"), we suffer when we walk ("My feet hurt! My corns! My calluses! My new shoes!!"), we suffer when we try to pull udon out of the big hot stone pot with long chopsticks, and they keep falling down and splashing up kimchee soup onto our hands.

"GRRR!"

"Let me get that!"

She takes the chopsticks, and tries to get the noodles out. She does less of a good job than I do. A splash of hot kimchee soup gets into her eye and she starts wiping her face and crying "HOW MUCH HABANERO DID YOU PUT IN HERE?!"

I look at my half-bowl of Udon of Anger, and think hard. I'm sitting on my knees on a straw mat floor, with the Flaming Lips on the stereo singing about blowing your boss's head off, though only in your dreams.

"I'm going to find these people. I'll email that kusoyarou, get him to meet me at Nippori Station. He'll bring some thugs, and I'll bring a couple hard-hitting white men, and we'll have ourselves a rumble, and I'll kick him in his groin while he's on the ground."

"Oh, come off it!"

"I'll do it. I'll find it!"

She kept on rubbing her eye.

"Come on! They're playing you! You email them, and say you want to meet, he'll email you back, and then he'll never show up!"

She was right. Surely, a man who aspires to be like a rock, and reap money while moving as little as possible, couldn't be bothered to come to Nippori Station for some Tempura. My way of thinking is, I'll admit, sometimes wrong. The anger I showed that night was mostly not real. I was calling it out of nowhere, just because I had nothing else to add, and I didn't want the argument to end. My way of thinking was wrong. Then again, all ways of thinking are wrong, when you boil them all down.

This was around when I realized that my story, regarding wangiri, would never come to a head. In this day and age, nothing, really, comes down to a head. The communal pool of literature has taught us that confrontations are no good. They only end up in someone getting physically hurt.

My ears hurt, right up until the end of the earthquake activity. My ears hurt like all holy hell. Ten seconds before an earthquake came, my left ear would seize up with this generic kind of tragic-movie-hero fierceness that would leave me wide-eyed and almost on the floor while a girl shouts "WHAT'S WRONG! WHAT'S WRONG?! 誰か助けてください！世界の中心で愛を叫べ！"

The same girl freaked out, jumping from sleep when I was playing Ace Combat 5, which, yes, I received for free from Sony.

"I thought I was having a heart attack! The vibration function!"

"You heard that?"

"I -- felt it. In my heart!"

That was mildly interesting.

METAL GEAR SOLID 3: THE REVIEW: PART FOUR

I had a dream where Solid Snake was freaking out on acid in the park across the street from the Senzoku Moulin Rouge [sic] gentleman's club. He was sitting on the back of a plastic rocking-duck with an eyeless baby doll in his hands.

"My baby! My baby!" he was saying.

"What--what did you do to your baby?" I said, crouching down on my knee and rubbing his back.

"I . . . I plucked her eyes out!!"

"And . . . why did you do that?"

"I . . . wanted to . . . see! What happened?"

(Feel free to use this and other MGS3 bloggings on your own site, especially if your name is Paul!)

SO I KIND OF HAVE A PSP



I'm getting it soon. As soon as they manufacture the damn things, in fact. I get one of the first ones made. I'd elaborate if that wouldn't rob me of that mystery that makes me sexy.

Either way. I'll then write a review of some sorts on Metal Gear Acid. Or something. Or I'll just keep it to myself. I have other good news to report to you, actually, though . . . well. I'd rather not mention it yet. I fear that'd jinx it, or something.

In the end, though, I guess it's time to go to bed. There's little else to be said. I am kind of thirsty, though I'd better not drink anything. You know.

I wish I had a punchy conclusion for this. Or maybe the punchy conclusion has happened already, somewhere in the above mess? Life is like that, sometimes. Like John Mellencamp once said.

Oh, here's something -- that new thin PS2? There's a commercial running for it in Japan right now. It shows the new PS2 on the left side, and various objects, many of them copyrighted, on the right. One of the objects is a bottle of Tabasco, and the background music is The Blue Hearts "Kisu shite hoshii".

Yeah, I kind of had something to do with that. Heh.

This entry was brought to you by Punk Rock Salad. Just shred cabbage and pour on a little aojiso, Tabasco, and black pepper. Then eat. While drinking Coca-Cola.

Punk Rock Salad. Nobody likes to throw up. Yet some people have to.