the traffic lights of a rain spattered sunday

I have been composing this blog all the way home.

It began in amongst the rain soaked lights of Shibuya. The flashes of people, the mixing of drinks, the heady grime of a sunday night and the fact that this could have been any night of a thousand annonymous faces in amongst a thousand glimmering sky scrappers.

I wrote lines that summed up our curtained room at the top of one of those towering gleaming tower blocks, I meandered through adjectives in the bare basement celler with the painted black walls and small doll-like friend of a friend who sang for us, teetering on heals, with red fish nets up through the black sarfety pinned rag she wore round her waist to cover some dignity. I chewed on thoughts of 'lost in translation' and its bizarre romantic picture of seedy, slightly naff locations that in some way are supposed to highlight all that is exotic and 'japanese' about 'tokyo'.

I rumminated on what an ngo for salary men would look like. Along with the kindergartedn teacher, the modeling agent and fellow daiwerite I was with I pondered the bizarre nature of hostessing here. Someone paid for the art of conversation, like those other exotic creatures we espouse as 'japanese' - the geishas.

I rode the metro home with my music from my home blaring through my headphones into my skull and round my rain soaked self - a protective layer of my own particular unique exoticism.

For the first time in ages I ran, skipping and stuttering through the people, flying through my station, my connecting metro route, along past the 24 hour konbinis, the manic umbrella carrying bikers, the late-night romancers to my bike - and all the way home, as my heart pounded madly, my wheels spurted water, skidding to either side of my trail I marvelled at that sense of disconnection. I indulged in stepping outside of this body that clumsily negotiates its way round the city and a language it does not yet understand - and I glided, in a spray of flickering lights and darkness home.

I thought about my own romanticism. The picture, that I paint of my world, my friends, my life. The ideas and concepts of what life should be that I fall in love with and claim as my own dreams, or indulgences or world. Just as Lost in Translation takes a mimickery of the exotic japan that we all in some ways know: the Japan inside our own heads, so too I take ideas and stories that I like, or enjoy and make them form and shape my own memories of my past and my present. This blog is just one part of the creation that I daily make of who I am. And each time I tell someone that, 'oh I'm a hopeless idealist' or 'I'm just too impulsive' - it becomes truer - and in part, not because it neccesarily reflects who I am, but because it reflects who I want to be.

I wrote this blog in my head in a thousand shrapnels of overlapping memories and thoughts - when I thought it - there was a thread and a path to it - and yet now, as I sit before the computer it all evaporates into the blatthering of disconnected thoughts I have just purged -------------- A patchwork of an evening with no direction except for this moment, sat here in my soaking wet clothes, my hair stinking of smoke, the traffic lights that flash into my room, every night all night, lighting up my fingers on the keyboard and a feeling that even though in five hours I have to get up again - just now, this rain spattered night feels eternal and I feel outside of all the laws of what one should or should not do. And I kind of like it.