she's your problem now
by 108;04282005;1126

         **Dear Friend X**,

I write out of desire to kindly inform you that the girl you are fucking is kind of a whore.

As a man who, as a boy, desired to one day be a lawyer, as many good little children do, I assure you I do not use words like “whore” lightly. Let us explore the legal definition of a “whore” before presenting the evidence. We all recall the age-old yardstick, do we not?

A whore fucks every guy at the party.
A bitch fucks every guy at the party except you.

A prostitute, technically very different from a whore, is a girl who gets paid to fuck. A hooker is a prostitute you might find lurking outside a dime-store or an automated teller machine. I don’t dare call the girl you’re fucking a prostitute, because as far as I know, you aren’t paying her every night. If you are paying her every night, well, regard the rest of this letter, or else read it for enjoyment.

Now. If a “whore” is, as a rule, a girl who fucks every guy at the party, am I insinuating that your girl fucks every guy at every party? Don’t be ridiculous. There are exceptions to every rule. A girl can be a “whore” without fucking every guy at the party just as surely as orange juice can be “fresh-squeezed” when the oranges used to make it were actually pressed. Exceptions to every rule. The only rule with no exceptions is the rule that states “there are exceptions to every rule.” Except for sometimes, when it has exceptions.

Your girl doesn’t fuck every guy at the party because, theoretically, the “party” is kind of a vague term here. I personally haven’t been to a party, per se, in six months. I’ve known your girl on very limited speaking terms for just short of four. She, you, and I live in a world called “Japan,” where, as guidebooks warn tourists, walls are paper-thin and girls live with their parents, so having sex with them at home is out of the question. They come to your place, or you meet and run off to an hourly hotel. This system works. It’s a booming piece of an economy. Nobody really complains.

If you’re wondering what brought this on, let me refresh your memory. No doubt you’ve just awoken in a gutter in Roppongi stinking of vodka and stumbled into a smoky internet cafe to check your god damned eBay auctions, and you’ve probably gotten bored and stumbled over here, and the first line grabbed your attention so hard you just knew it was about you, and you’re right, this is about you, and even though you’re sharp enough to know I’m writing about you here, you don’t remember why. Well, here’s why: you called me, on the telephone last night while I was in the middle of important business, to lecture me for a half an hour on the state of your fucking relationship (the previous gerund here is no mere emphasizer) with this girl, which has been thrown into turmoil because I talked to her for a half an hour several nights prior. “It’s taken me until just like three hours ago to get this all under control,” you moaned. Before we continue, let me say fuck you: “Fuck you.” Far be it for me to throw around sweeping statements (heh), though hell, if something like your girl talking to a guy who’s not you about that guy’s girl, who’s not her, is enough to make the two of you impossibly angry at each other, maybe you should kill either yourselves or each other, because evolution has clearly fucked up somewhere. I understand that you were trying to sleep when she was talking to me. She was on her way out to smoke a cigarette on the veranda. I took this to mean you’d already just fucked, because damned if movies haven’t always shown smoking to be something men or tough women (usually whores) do after having sex. I didn’t know what else was going on in your room. I was busy entertaining your guest in your living room the whole time when she came out in her pajamas and asked me how things were going with the girl I was seeing lately. So prodded, and being in the middle of writing an email to that girl at that exact moment, I gladly elaborated. Halfway through our conversation, you came out and told me you were going to bed; you then disappeared. Minutes later, I was still talking to this girl, and I told her she should go talk to you or something, and she said, “He’s probably asleep.” Then she kept asking me questions. Far be it for me to not answer a girl’s questions, especially when that girl is asking me about girls. I’ve been thinking a lot about a specific girl lately, so of course it was understandably interesting to talk about this girl with another girl, especially in Japanese, because speaking that language is as fun for me as playing a videogame or reading a manga or some shit (LOL).

This apparently infuriated you in a way you explained to me on the phone, shedding light on a despicably, unforgivably moronic facet of your personality which, quite frankly, makes me want to never see you again. I will return to this subject in the second part of this letter. For now, we will dwell on the conversation and the girl. First of all, the girl: your first indicator that your girl is a whore should come when you acquire the girl during a drunken party, knowing full well that she knows full well that you know full well she’s still engaged in a long-term relationship with a guy she knew in high school. Your second sign that your girl is a whore should be when she’s still with that guy three months after she’s already started up a fucking account with you.

My own character comes into question here, and I lay it out on the line. I myself, I suppose, am a whore. The exception to the rule in my case is that I’m a guy who would, if possible, fuck every girl at the party. We can tool around with semantics and say “okay not every girl — just a nice majority of them.” Scholars as early as eighth-century Daoists have bottled and marketed this phenomenon that dictates why certain men will have sex with nearly any woman. I can put it into Japanese-comic-book terms, and say it’s kind of mostly like sparring, building up one’s personal power-level statistics, and evolving as a character in a real-time fantasy world. In martial-arts terms, it helps me gain a better understanding of my surroundings. I lament rather humanistically that I have to put these things into such words, siphoned through such points of view. The first cavemen to desire to kill mammoths with clubs and eat their hairy flesh did so without putting any of it into words; a caveman longed to grope a cavewoman’s flesh without the word “boob” popping into his head even once, because he had no words for the thing he wanted to touch while touching something else. He merely wanted, longed for, waited for, struck out at, and did. It was when the first caveman enunciated some syllable in greeting directed toward another caveman he wasn’t really a big fan of that humans began to evolve into a non-animal animal. We’ve written and passed things down ever since, collectively longing that we never forget what the people who come before us remembered through making mistakes.

Slightly-good sir, I am here to say that I come before you, and I am here to teach you something, and that something is that your girl is a whore. Sexual affairs with women have been the catalyst for many great wars we won’t name for fear of accusations of not listing enough details, names of warriors, or scenes of battle. I have read all of these stories and considered them vaguely for nearly two decades, and this has engorged me with no desire to, ever, start a fight with another man over a woman. I used to have a girlfriend who told me she’d fuck Russel Crowe or Harrison Ford (during his Indiana Jones years) if offered the chance; she said, sneering, that, if offered the chance, she’d give up everything she had, her whole relationship with me, which was like destiny in how we’d built it up between the two of us, if Indiana Jones told her he wanted her for his own. I didn’t even have the historical bravery or courage to pick a fight with her. If I’m not going to fight a man over a woman, I’m most certainly not going to fight a woman over a man. Other people’s mistakes have taught me most of what I know. It’s a little invigorating and a little irritating.

As a whore myself, I know how whores work. I like girls and will have sex with them if the opportunity presents itself. There are more men who think this way than women. Let’s get serious here — I’ve read women’s magazines that go on dispelling “urban myths” about how “the whole thing about men wanting sex more than women — no way sister!!” Yes, I’m very certain that’s all well and true. I’m not denying women the right to want sex, because every one I ever have sex with seems to want it a whole lot, even from me. It’s a momentary state of mind and genitalia, is what it is. No, no, what I’m saying is that men do want sex more. This is because we don’t get pregnant. It’s a hormonal fail-safe. This is, I repeat one last time, not to say that girls who want and crave and need lots of sex are rare, unique, freaky, weird, or even bizarre. They’re just . . . there. Only there are fewer of them than there are men. Arguing with me on this is like suggesting to me that there is a perfectly equal number of men and women on this earth, a perfect fifty-fifty split. I’d reply by telling you, well, yeah, and half of all numbers in the universe have two as a prime factor. Does this, however, make it a more recurring factor than three? Of course not, for the sea of numbers is infinite.

Let’s put mathematics aside for the moment; what we’re really driving at is semantics. What makes me a lovable, gigolo of a whore is the semantic blanket I use to cover myself. That is to say, I find it easy and enjoyable to have sex with any girl who will have me, because I never call one my “girlfriend.” I used to call a girl my girlfriend, and then one day I stopped, because she stopped first. This does not, otherwise, make her a whore, though that’s what I called her while we were still going out. We thought it was funny. At the moment, it was. Now, it’s not really funny anymore. Memories of its being funny are like the files in the Recycle Bin on your Windows PC desktop; they used to be real. Only there’s no “restore” command in real life.

Your girl has/had a guy she calls/called a boyfriend, while fucking you. She said she liked you, probably, and this is wonderful, and I figure it makes a man feel about three-quarters as well as it makes a woman feel. I tell girls I like them all the time; it’s usually true, and it’s usually right before touching their breasts or neck for the first time. It’s not much of a lie, really. I find myself quite optimistic when I have an erection. I’m willing to accept the beauty in even a girl who smokes too much, or drinks too much, or eats too much, as long as she isn’t entirely revolting. I’ll go so far as to tell a girl I like her for two weeks; if I don’t get action out of her by then, I pack up the tackle box like a good fisherman and go buy a marked-down croquette at the supermarket. Catch a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime; give him a coupon for a free hamburger and he’ll develop a taste for McDonalds. Et cetera.

The truth is, my friend, that in this paper-thin-walled game we call life in Tokyo, “The party” consists of you, her, and the one she calls boyfriend. Is that clear? I am revolted by many things in this world — it’s what keeps me going — and I’m most revolted by the memory of the time I revolted my best ex-girlfriend by finding another girl and announcing to her, in mid-vacation, that I didn’t want to be her boyfriend anymore. I had yet to fuck the one I chose over her. I did eventually. The world was yet a big place full of things I’d never done. The first girl loved me deeply, the second one shallowly, with deepening passion. To the first girl, I was as good as a whore. I grew up thinking I’d be a film director, a lawyer, a famous novelist, a robot engineer, or any of many other things, only to grow up and be hyphenatedly called a “mother-fucker” by a beautiful, big-breasted Korean girl in a three-star hotel in Venice, where they had linoleum-tile flooring even in the bedroom. I got a terrible, chilling feeling then, one that vanished with passing weeks and came back, two years later, when it was all over. In Japanese poetic terms we call that 汚れちまった哀しみ. “Sullied sadness.” The beginning had been flawed. It had been all fucked up from the start. How far could I go with this girl? How much had I really expected to respect her, knowing full well that she had, as far as the only three important people on this earth were concerned, taken me from someone else? A thief of love! That’s what Shakespeare would call her. Yet even as such she was adorable, and I adored her until I’d drunk down everything she had that was new, and I was left with tarnished sad memories of the way the one I’d promised myself to had made the one who’d promised herself to me think about the self I promise to myself. It was a dirty mess. Yet there you have it. I ran away from that girl, all around the world, saying I was keeping my promise. I kept the promise until the end; the running away, in the first place, had assured that the situation was going to end someday. It’s a real shame. Lots of things are.

Your girl has, for four months, constantly, relentlessly complimented me about everything. It’s damn maddening. It’s damned tactless. It’s damned repetitive. She tells me, oh, your hair looks good like that, oh, I like that shirt, oh, you have good fashion sense, oh, you have such interesting jobs, oh wow, your Japanese pronunciation is so perfect, oh you could be on television, oh someday you’re going to be so rich, I just know it!! She was telling me the other night, during The Conversation That Would Not End, that I’d have to take her out for yakiniku when I received my first salary for my manga-translating job. I told her I didn’t eat meat and she just laughed. How Japanese is that, to immediately suggest going out for an expensive meal just because you’ve earned your first salary at a new job? What strange traditions this people breed over here. Another Japanese tradition is complimenting people even when there’s no reason to. With regards to this Japanese tradition of complimenting a guy just because he’s sitting on the sofa under a blanket writing an email, I say there are two types of Japanese people, those who speak these constant compliments and those who don’t bother. This says nothing of the reasoning of those who do speak these compliments. They might be doing it to be polite, or they might be doing it because they seek to gain something. Know, sir, that every word in this human concept called language is positioned to a purpose; we don’t speak in vain, even when we’re lying or writing fiction. People fulfill themselves or others through words; speaking the words “Yeah I’d like some noodles” to a waiter, for example, results in noodles being set down on the table in front of you. What purpose does telling me my new haircut looks great serve, in the context of human hunger? You and I came to the conclusion during your screaming at me on the phone that your girl kept talking to me, kept asking me questions while I sat there on the sofa, because she wanted to be polite, she didn’t want to interrupt my speaking. You say this is what she told you when you screamed at her for her talking to me, she said she wanted to be “polite”. Yeah, well, fuck that, you fucking retarded asshole. There’s some guy on this one internet forum about videogames, I don’t even remember who he is, other than that he’s an asshole, and his signature quote says something like “there is no means of manipulating men so effectively as through women,” and it’s attributed to some guy I’ve never heard of. Yeah, real smart quote there; I think of people who feel the need to attribute fluffy little bitch sentiments like that to people that regular(-ish) guys like me have never heard of, and in my mind I draw a picture worth zero words, of this confused kind of hate. It’s like a racism, is what it is. This girl told you she was being polite to me by letting me talk; the truth of the matter is I was saying bizarre things. The truth of the matter is that I have some problems lately, and that I’m rethinking a lot of events in my past and my future is at stake. I’ve got something I’m going to do, and I relish the opportunities to bring it up to strangers, like people in the supermarket who catch me speaking Japanese and compliment me, and then ask me what I’m doing here and if I have a girlfriend or what. Your girl is on an informal enough level with me to pull me away from a couple in the supermarket — they were telling me about a rock practice studio in Toda-Koen, really close to my guitarist’s house in Ukimafunado, like, walking distance, and only like eight hundred yen an hour for two people, and this girl of yours is like “Leave these poor people alone!” She then looked at them and said “Don’t be alarmed by him, he likes talking to people.” If she could say such a thing about me, in front of me to people she doesn’t even fucking know, why couldn’t she say that to me? She kept asking questions, kept suggesting I take her to yakiniku, heard my story of my fateful final English lesson, suggested she’d pay me for an English lesson, kept suggesting it when I said I was through with teaching English, and, well — what kind of politeness is that? If that’s the politeness that they teach kids in middle schools here, then I think I understand what’s wrong with the Japanese economy. If this kind of pointless and crippling “courtesy” is “correct,” then, well, I guess that’s about as understandable as the legality of signs outside a 600-yen-an-hour internet cafe that say “100 yen an hour.” This is Japan, right?

Now let’s make this all about me.

I used to know a guy, a Russian guy and a right moose-like motherfucker, who once emailed me because I mentioned him very discreetly in an article on insertcredit.com. He informed me that I had a man named “Tim Rogers” on my website writing “slanderous” things about him and his vegan girlfriend. He told me wasn’t suggesting I fire Tim Rogers — just that I, maybe, talk to him about his tactics and the way he thinks and behaves with people. I replied to him with what I think was one of the best emails I’ve ever written. In the end, I told him Know full well that I do not care what you are. I make the same bold request of you before I say what I’m about to say. This moose-man, it should be told straight off, was one I met through a girl I met at a videogame store in Indianapols. His girlfriend was mousy and quirky and funny, and liked talking about her various illnesses, so we bonded. She was not, otherwise, my type. Not at all. When I needed a ride down to Bloomington one weekened and she offered to take me, she and her boyfriend got into a huge fight, one which ended with the boyfriend taking me aside, putting his hand on my shoulder, and saying, “It’s not that I’m afraid you would try anything — it’s that I’m afraid she would.” (This man would later take to chatting with my ex-girlfriend about how horrible a person I am and how she should consider forgetting about me, yet not hesitate to contact him for a “cup of coffee” if she was ever in his town or he was ever in his; she sent me transcripts and we laughed, and it was a real tragedy, in the end, because he had a bit of a right to say a lot of things he said, I mean, why didn’t he, he was a man.) I disappointed him by scoffing, which probably sounded rather ugly. I told him, “Man, she ain’t exactly my type.” He regarded me with hate and spite forever, until he died, an aged man of a hundred and seven. He broke up with the girl about three weeks after I told him the truth about my feelings for her; she was fucking three of her ex-boyfriends, is what it was. Vegans know how to pork.

I feel the same way about your girl. Man, she ain’t quite my type. As a man-whore, I tell you up-front that yeah, I’d fuck her if I didn’t know her name. I’d be sure to ask her once the docking procedure was appropriately completed and I was stroking her hair back behind her ears and kissing her cheekbones or whatever. (I actually don’t even remember if your girl has cheekbones, to tell you the truth.) What this little bit of non-fantasy should indicate to you is that your girl does not, in any way, repulse me with regard to her aesthetic projection. It doesn’t mean I like her, or much less care about what she is. Yes, she is “kind of a whore,” like I said, and you can believe me when I say that because I don’t care about what she is. Remember that! Remember that until the day you die, you stupid motherfucker!

Now let’s make this all about me.

My friend and guitarist Drew Cosner won’t take so much as a sip of Coca-Cola from a can that someone else has sipped from. I find this kind of silly, because you can’t see the germs, really, and they’re probably not even there to begin with. Though I guess I certainly wouldn’t drink a Coke after someone just slobbered all over it, or maybe it they cut their tongue on the rim and there was blood all over it or some shit, I certainly don’t mind taking a deep, knee-buckling sip of Coke after a guy says “I can’t finish this” and hands me a half a can. “I CAN FEEL IT IN MY BALLS!” I like to scream. It’s quite a rush.

However, I have a strict, no-nonsense rule about so much as shaking hands with a girl if I know she’s shaken hands with a guy I know, or even a guy whose face I’ve seen. To have sex with a girl who has had sex with a friend of mine first would paralyze my spinal cord for life. This is not because I respect the guy too much; it’s because I, myself, am that kind of man. As a progressor, as a mover-forward in the human experience, I care deeply about what I am, even if it means not caring in the slightest what other people are. This is not a bad way to live; it is merely the best way to live, and I can prove it because I am not yet dead.

Yes, I have the Conqueror Gene. I like to crunch on new snow. As a vegetarian, as a man who has never smoked a cigarette and never tasted alcohol, I have principles that live and breathe in dark, violent places. I will never kiss a girl who has hugged a friend; I will never fuck a girl who has shaken a friend’s hand. If my friends end up shaking the hand of a girl I’ve fucked, by the way, I don’t mind at all. It adds texture, so long as I was there first. My personal sexual conduct rulebook-writing machine is laid out like a sequence of funnels and cafeteria trays. It’s very childish of me, though, for the most part, historically and future-historically, guys never have and never will have trouble with me moving in on their girlfriends. Guaranteed. I am as incapable of having sex with a friend’s girlfriend as I am of going to Shinjuku 2-Chome and prostituting myself at a gay bar. Much as the Japanese promise me I can make hundreds of thousands of yen in a few hours, and tempting as that sounds, I just can’t do it. I’m not wired that way. Suggesting that to me as a career path is like like asking me to unfasten a bolt with a Philips-head screwdriver. This is a trait of mine that I consider very tragic and very human all at once; at times I quite like it and at others I find it quite inconsequential to anything. You needn’t worry about it; you needn’t care about what I am.

This letter winds down starting now.

You, good sir, need to grow up a lot more than you might have. Do you remember that day, years ago, when, having noodles after a movie, we were talking about that project that failed? You told me, “There was shit going on behind the scenes that you could never imagine, that you’ll never have to know about.” I told you I could very well imagine anything that could have possibly gone wrong. You told me I couldn’t have. I shook my head and said that your very way of thinking had you imprisoned; to deny another man the imagination he wields with careful regard to everything he’s come to see and experience is to deny one’s self any potential for maturation. I said something like this, and you nodded, flicked your eyes up and to the right, took a breath in your nose, looked back at me, and said, maybe I was right. Whether you know it or not, you started to grow up a little bit since then. You were a kid with dreams, some of which had been crushed and others of which you constantly held beneath your Converses, ready in case something went wrong. Your dreams have changed while mine have remained the same. Yours gradually have come to resemble mine, and I’d consider that a shame, from one man to another, if I didn’t have so much going on on my own side. All that I can offer you, in light of this argument that roused you to use a Japanese cellular phone for half an hour and roused me to relative apathy, is to tell you that, in the years since our above conversation, you have grown up. Yet the goal you held then is about twice as far from you now as you’ve progressed since then. Also, I’m typing this on your computer, and the document you have on the desktop is aptly named.

THIS IS WHERE I REVEAL THE MAGIC TRICK, WHERE I FLIP OVER YOUR CARD, THE TWO OF HEARTS, AND YOU’RE LIKE “WHAT THE FUCK”

There are lies in this writing. The above paragraph is rife with them. Only you, the one to whom this is addressed, will understand all of them. You will understand where all the lies came from, and you will be able to stand at one end of them, grip them on the skinny side, and see what they’re pointing at and where they lead to. Try it one at a time. I’ll help you out — the computer I used to type this is actually not yours. It wasn’t the computer where you have a Beat-poetry-filled document on the desktop with a filename “shit,” either. It was another computer. Yet I’ve seen that document! And I’ve used that computer!

THIS IS WHERE I TELL YOU TO “WAX ON, WAX OFF” AND YOU DO THE MOTIONS WHILE I PUNCH AT YOU IN A FLURRY AND YOU’RE TOTALLY DODGING BULLETS

I met a girl at a kung-fu dojo three weeks ago, or so the story goes. We had a few good sparring sessions. She is an avid collector of videogames starring samurais and/or Chinese warlords. She is studying jeet kune do because she likes Bruce Lee and she needs to lose the weight she gained over the holiday season. She told me, rather up-frontly, that she’s finished with me. I told you about her, told her that I was finished with her, and you said I should send her your way. This revolted me because — you know my thing above, about me not fucking girls my friends have touched? It goes the other way — I don’t want my friends fucking girls I have fucked. At the same time, how could you ask such a thing, only to presume to behave in such a manner on the phone no more than four days later? You are a spotty and inconsistent man, and this is otherwise not a horrible thing, nor is it anything I care about none too much. The first time it occurred to me to erase your name and face from my memory banks was one night in January when you were wasted and talking to some big-haired reggae woman on the street, freaking the fuck out of her. She looked at me with this hateful look in her face, like I was supposed to explain what was going on. You were asking her about her iPod. I took my iPod out of my pocket and said, “I have one, too.” Then I turned around, not able to bear the sight. I didn’t want to be involved. You lashed out and grabbed my shoulder, and spun me around, and told me “WHAT THE FUCK MAN WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU HAVE TO TALK TO HER LIKE THAT?” When she had appropriately run away, you were still screaming. “I WAS JUST SPINNING SOME GAME, MAN!!” You fucking made me fucking sick. I was hoping you tried to hit me, because I would have punched you so hard and so fast you would spin around on one foot like an about-to-explode monster on “Might Morphin’ Power Rangers.” I seriously wanted the opportunity to open up, and I wouldn’t have regretted it. If you can’t see what is wrong with what you did that evening, and if you would still seek to defend yourself, then, in light of recent events, you are no longer worthy of an entry in my mental addressbook. Maybe you’ll grow up at some point and realize how fucking toolish of you that was, and exactly what you did that was so objectively, damn-near-legally wrong. Maybe you’ll pretend deep down that you’ve already learned, and more power to you. Lying to yourself — or even telling the truth — is a healthy agent of change, sometimes. Whichever course of action you choose, I’m sure you won’t end up murdered by a woman for at least a long time.

汚れちまった哀しみ, man. That’s what this is about. It’s about things that are tainted from the start; thinking processes that, like computer viruses, swell and grow until they’re entirely in charge of a situation in the worst kind of way. You need to meditate on your ability to pass what I call “human judgment.” All people possess it. It’s a fun activity to practice. You can do it while lying in bed at night.

You said to me the other night, “You tried to give her your phone number?” Did I? No, I did not. Maybe she told you I did? It is true that I gave her my cell phone email address; however, I gave it to her back in January, when she told me she would introduce me to her sister, the one who works for the big game company. As far as I know, she’s had it in her phone’s addressbook ever since. The last time I was over at your place, before, you know, the time you got angry like that, when she was really drunk and so were you, about an hour after you took me into your room and rasped, “I don’t know what to do with this girl — when she’s drunk she talks to everybody except me”, she invited me to go out and play darts with her and her sister on Saturday night. I told her, yeah, sure. I had every intention of just ignoring her email because fuck if I want to go play darts on a Saturday night when I can go out on a date or something. Though, to be polite, I told her, if you’re going, email me or something. You know my email address. It’s such an easy address to remember. I had really been looking forward to meeting her sister three months ago, though by that day the desire had left me, because it never happened. No bites on the line today. I’m going to go to the grocery store. I didn’t know her sister had a boyfriend, anyway, and she didn’t tell me until a while after she first told me she’d introduce us. That’s what me and your girl were talking about during our outrageous conversation, if you must know. Japanese girls who just want a free white-man ride once or twice. I was telling her that the girl I like at the moment has followed me around for four months, doing nothing irritating, until just recently starting to hold my hand, and I think that’s a great way for things to develop. I think she means to stick around for a while. It’s nice that things slotted into place this way.

That girl tells me she has something she wants to talk to me about. She says she wants to sit somewhere outside yet devoid of people, and tell me a story. I guess it’s going to happen on Saturday night. She’s already told me that when she was thirteen she was arrested and put in a juvenile detention facility for half a year. She says when she got out everyone hated her. Her parents wouldn’t look at her. At school, everyone knew who she was and what she’d done. I don’t know what she did. I suppose she means to tell me. I’m rather alarmed that I’m considering the weight of the situation this heavily before it even comes to pass. How did I grow up . . . this way? I’m not sure. I know by the way this girl kisses that I’m not the first man to ever kiss her. Yet there’s an easiness, and a sadness all together. Kissing her standing up on a crowded train feels like holding a big, bright, wrapped-up package on Christmas morning; I don’t know what’s inside, and it could be a severed head for all I know, though for the meantime, the simple act of holding a package fills me with a warmth that challenges me to believe that human beings can be beautiful for more than just a few dimly-lit, incense-stinking hours at a time.

On the phone, you told me to think more seriously about how I’m going to “behave toward girls” you “date in the future.” That’s amazing. I’d rather think — correctly, fuck you very much — that I do no wrong in my behaviors, as dictated and shackled by the principles I have laid out above, and that it is you who needs to think more seriously about the girls you are dating in the now. You seem very much to be a man who cares about what other people are, so this is why I have officially informed you that the girl you are fucking is kind of a whore. I figure you will care about her status. My ex-girlfriend loved it when people called her by her first name behind her back. The third-personing of one you have sexually experienced brings that person into a new light. Around a table, one guy says, in your presence, “Did you see the girl _________’s dating? She’s fuckin’ hot,” and you like this sort of thing. So I’m telling you she’s kind of a whore. Be proud that someone is bothering to talk about her in third person, and be like a good Western businessman (who holds onto “as much of the money for as long as possible,” let’s remember) and enjoy her while she lasts. You’ve already apparently set a timer on her. Congratulations, you’re a goal-oriented man.

You must understand that different people speak different truths to different opponents. Going with the “words as tools” motif, we can consider the people we talk to for various reasons to be our “opponents” in life. A woman in bed with a man is the most believable kind of human being. A man will tell her anything and believe anything she says. There are far-reaching, goddess-invoking reasons for this. I won’t get into them. A man talking about a woman as she exists in bed is a mysterious, puzzling thing. You care enough about her to tell me about sexual quirks of hers that bother you; why do you give me this information? You tell me not to talk about you on the internet, as, well, most people — including my whole band and the . . . people I live with — tell me not to do. So I don’t. Or, when I do, I lie violently. However, far beyond the truths and the untruths that lurk in words, there are truths and untruths in actions and existences. I am trying — real, real hard — these past few months to open a door to an honest existence. I have done things wrong, most of them through ignorance, and I’ve paid for things. There was someone who loved me, who I lost because I loved someone else, who I lost because I couldn’t not love someone else, who is gone because she refused to grow up and her parents hate me, and blame me for everything. What I have now is a girl who might have done something horrible, a girl who mortified everyone surrounding her yet behaves like a perfect princess on warm Saturday nights now that she’s grown up. She frightened her surroundings because — and this is the central point of this piece — she exercised her human possibility to be wicked. あらゆる人間が持っている邪の事件を起す可能性が出てきたことあるから。 The man who quits smoking is more respectable in our literate, book-learned society than the man who has never smoked a cigarette. We love patient quitters more than we love impatient children of habits to never try anything new. A person has to earn trust as they earn love and as they earn patience. This is me telling you something you might already know, that you reserve the right to disbelieve a woman or a man who has ever existed dishonestly. Words spoken in the dark from a man to a woman or vice-versa; she tells you about the one on whom she is cheating; the very fact that she does this locks out all possibility that she can be telling him about you. Which is a bolder lie? Not telling a man you’ve been with for years that you’re cheating on him, even though he never asks, or saying “Yeah, my boyfriend works until midnight,” when really he only works until eleven o’clock, and “midnight” just makes you sound like more of an “oh you poor thing honey“? I know this question well; a married woman will, in bed, talk about her husband, I have learned, after the dust has settled. Whatever she says about his wicked ways or his boring job sounds like the gospel. Yet I can rest assured that knowledge of my existence will never find its way into his head. To part from her is my choice; should she tell him about me after I am gone and dead to her, I will not know. She always turns down the wedding picture on the mantle whenever I come over. Once I picked it up. I looked at the guy. It was a good photo, wonderful lighting, both members of the couple caught unawares and smiling naturally. I haven’t been back to see her since then. Maybe I will some day. I don’t know his name and I’ve never shaken his hand, after all.

In the end, you may be fuming and furious about my posting this on the internet. Pay no mind to your pride; people won’t know who you are. A mass-murderer buying corn flakes, for the first six years or so of his career, probably feels leery that the cashier is onto his scheme. Then he realizes that people, as people, generally don’t suspect each and every fellow man of wickedness. Much as it fills me with apathy to admit, you are not a wicked man. You are merely a fucking asshole who needs to grow up. You will find yourself far more tolerable to deal with, and you probably won’t end up getting cold-cocked by a stranger should you ever visit a port city where strangers cold-cock other strangers just for being so strange. I mean for this writing to occupy a position more like a greeting card than like a piece of literature. I don’t dare want to make literature, ever. Greeting cards are better. Though the cartoon guy on the front of the birthday card has big bushy red hair and a long nose and a load of balloons tied to his arm and you don’t, you must understand that that man is not supposed to be you so much as he is supposed to represent you. There are many ways for you to respond to a birthday card, and far fewer ways should that card contain a five- or ten-dollar bill. The ancient Daoists say the best of thirty-six ways to avoid a fight is to run away. Times have changed for those of us who walk paths in the present. As something of an amateur Daoist, I’m going to let you in on the secret that, in almost all cases regarding words, only one method of response is correct: that way is to truly understand, and to say, “I understand,” and to not pursue the matter further. To do less than this is to risk all integrity. To do more than this is to lose all integrity. As integrity is all you have, I encourage moderation. Go ahead and leave an anonymous comment on the thread here, saying “I understand.” Hell, anyone who understands — go ahead and do it. Let’s make this a group exercise. This shit here all applies to anyone reading this, not just one person.

And I’d also tell you to quit drinking so much, though you wouldn’t listen to that, and I am, as always, not a man who believes in miracles, anyway. Besides, you don’t seem so bad about it anymore. Hell. You know, that reminds me of something I meant to fit in here while I was writing it. It slipped my mind — your little “It sucks to be around sober people when you’re drunk” speech? Fuck you, asshole. Sometimes it sucks to be around drunk people when you’re sober. Yeah, you can argue that “OOOOOOOH, well, I don’t choose to have these sober people here!!” Well fuck you again — I don’t choose to make you drunk. That, and I don’t complain. You call yourself a Sunday-school graduate, and you don’t even have a basic grasp of Christ’s “Yeah, be nice to people 101″ seminar. So fuck you and your one-dimensional principles once again. And while I’m airing out my laundry (both real laundry and figurative laundry, today), this one’s to my main man Kevin (I actually know four Kevins in Tokyo, so, well): get a grip on your situation. And if I’m not the one in your house, warn me next time before you start drinking, maybe write up a contract permitting me to punch you in the face if needs be, because you become an absolute Parkinson’s-syndrome-ish useless mess when you have four beers in you.

A wonderful spring day in Shitamachi, and it’s actually heating up. It feels like summer in this tatami mat room. I have to step out to the immigration office soon; lord knows what they want. They sent me a letter that says no more than “please come here.” Last time they told me they needed some documents. This time, no mention of documents. Just a “please come here.” It could be good or it could be prison. I’m loading up my iPod and listening to the television talking about Golden Week, the big string of holidays coming up next week. Everyone has off work every day next week, so Tokyo makes all prices three times higher, so everyone stays at home with stored-up food. It reminds me of the woman I used to know who said it was best to wait in front of only the most-crowded line at a train station, trusting her fellow passengers to be informed about which cars would be the least full. Never, for example, would you wait at the car right by the stairs, because there’s no way you’d get a seat. This was the Tozai Line, from Funabashi out to Mitaka, far east to far west. “The stairs are in different places at every station,” I told her. “It’s not like the stairs are always in the same place and people are always getting in the train right when they reach the top of those stairs.” I had a good point — according to a large poster-diagram, there it was — the locations of the stairs at all the other stations. “Even if people are jumping right in when they get up the stairs, then, well, every car is going to be full! Why not just go to one of these cars that are lined up with no stairs at no train stations?” This wasn’t good enough for her. The fix was out, she’d read it on the internet — car five, near the stairs at one in four stations on the line, was the least crowded. A near-dead-empty train whipped by, this was at about noon on a Sunday. Car five was empty. We went in and sat down amid a crowd of other passengers who were also mysteriously waiting by car five. She was very satisfied with herself. “See! I was right!” I didn’t speak further. She was satisfied with herself; good for her. I ended up not seeing her ever again, starting not too much later after that. I think back on her self-satisfaction with fondness. She was otherwise not irritating, and kind enough. Besides, what kind of a sad animal have humans become, that we consider “self-satisfied” an insult? I can think of little more that would qualify a person for happiness. That’s a damn sincere notion, I mean it. I mean every gorgeous syllable of it, I really do.