a mixed bag
honestly, this is a mixed bag. the last weeks are a rolercoaster of emotions. i find myself laughing to myself in the park and with tears in a museum looking at a photograph from okinawa. usually i am, it sounds harsh writing it down, ok with leaving people behind. taking “the next step”, looking for the new always was of importance. today i feel different. this also has to do with the recently bought plane ticket. i can see the end of a year in japan. with this, the temporary pause of relationships with people met here. sure, there is instagram reminding you of their lives once in a while. there is the message once in a while. maybe a call once in a while “i saw you in a dream recently, how is it going?” but really, this is not like body to body, face to face, eye to eye. watery. in the end, being sad to leave means i had a good time. a very good time. yeez getting real spiritual ying yang here. enough of this for now. i still have two months to enjoy this place. there are also some light, short thoughts on life in the bag. so, here we go:
1 if you look at a chewing gum package, you will most likely find ingredients and a table stating the products calories. in this case, very troubling. is it stating the calories when chewed for 30min or swallowed and digested? what does consuming mean in this case? especially in japan, where trash cans are as rare as the caucasian meerkat, i pledge for two separate calorie listings.
2 and then there is one of my phisics teacher in middle school, during the break. out of the blue she starts telling me and two friends, she likes the german army surpluss. not because of the army, but because when she wears it in the woods, when taking her dogs for a walk, the ants don’t crawl in. its these odd things that set a hook deep into the matter of my brain for i would like to know why this is.
3 a dream: i was walking in a train station looking for the toilet. the toilet was hidden way back behind many corners. from one of the booths a familiar face appeared, closing a pen. it was a graffiti guy writing “ecy”. he just finished tagging. it followed some talk about how it’s important to always go into the shitting booths to do some tagging on the toilets hidden far away.
4 stitches kill riches? one of humanities recent innovations is this: if your sweater gets a hole, sell the old piece at a second hand store. they will in return price it out as a cool used item because of the defect which has been transcended into a feature. after a while, someone who likes to confidently combine ragged clothes like homeless while smelling like d&g, buys the thing. after the piece is shown two or three times at various blue bottle coffee branches, worn for a picture snapping underneath the new tadao-ando-architecture and a visit to the museum of photography, it is returned to a second hand shop and sold. this circle continues. as the defects pile up, the garments worth multiplies indefinitely.
a different kind of circle is exemplified on the detroit jacket sold by charhart. it is bought by the thousands and shipped in from the us by container. the jackets are then distributed across the hundreds of recycling stores across tokyo. since a couple of years second had fashion went stigma to sigma, from shame to fame. japan is considered a heaven for thrifting and people come for this purpose. well, and americans are among them. they find the charhartt jacket and feel nostalgic seeing it in japan, used, with a familiar name written in sharpie on the lable. after buying and failing to cram the bulky jacket into the overhead compartment of the plane, landing and taxi at chicargo ord. another circle is complete.
a word on the magic of the second hand market. as shown above, there is an increase in value with increased use - surely something fairly odd for time-travelers from the past. the change of value was made by the use of an archaic mechanism. just like thousands of years ago, it still seems trendy, cool and fashionable to decorate yourself with the armour of your enemy like hector wearing achillie’s iron mail after robbing the dead body of patroclos. to wear the skin of the lion you hunted or present the scalp of a killed opponent is plain cool. now read warren buffets famous words “there’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” this might explain the popularity of work-clothing which is worn by people who spend their day in front of 16inch retina displays. showing your superiority through the display of your foes features and appearance. a perverted mimikry.
5 another dream: my university professor in weimar is sitting on a chair, surrounded by us standing students. among us, opposite from me, there is an japanese exchange student who seemingly had just arrived. as it is custom, he brought a small gift from his home. the squarely folded handkerchief lying on her lap. like a detective, visiting a fresh crime scene, finding something suspicious, she plucks a ball point pen from her shirt and carefully unfolds the cloth. her face contorts. the exchange student is nervous, sweating, clenching his hands, he wants to explain the image. i would like to help and support but both our mouths wouldnt open, smothered by the sheer look of disgust on the professors face. everyone can see now what is printed on the small towel. pikachu. (explanaition: pikachu, the most popular character of a very famous video game and animation called pokemon, where people catch rather cute monsters (pokemons) and let them fight against the pets of other “trainers”. a friend told me, the problem was how obvious the choice of pokemon was. everyone knows pikachu, it is not very personal or creative. it is the print, american japan-enthusiast display on their shirt when visiting harajuku in tokyo.)
whats next? lets see. kunde