“That I could look forward to consistent growth of perception till I die” -Les Spann (Quoted in a book by the baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, who was incredibly rich and knew just about every famous bebop jazz musician. She would asked all of these musicians what their three wishes were and kept a journal of them for 30 years. I found this wish to be both beautifully concise and complete and have reflected upon it often ever since.)

This past week I had to be a speech judge on two separate occasions. On Friday, as I was walking along limping to the competition (the limp will be explained later), I found myself behind a very nicely dressed man in a suit who I presume was on his way to work. All of a sudden he stopped, bent over, grabbed something from the off the sidewalk and put it into his mouth to eat. I am 90% sure that my eyes were not deceiving me, but regardless of what actually happened, I laughed the whole rest of the day over that intensely bizarre moment. The actual speech contests were also a big practice in self control. I remember a similar sensation from when I was a child and my family and I went to Pennsylvania for my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. There the entire extended family gathered at an ancient Amish couple’s home who insisted on providing us with some good old fashion singing entertainment. It was the most off pitch and horrible singing performance one could imagine and all of my cousins and I were shaking trying to hold in our laughter. The speech contest was a similar experience for me. Some kids were brilliant and blew me away with their naturalness and writing ability. Most kids seemed to have stolen their gestures from the flight crew that directs airplanes on and off the tarmac with these dazzlingly exaggerated arm gestures and eye contact. Another girl wrote a speech about animal cruelty that was so sad and intense it made her cry uncontrollably cry on stage. Another girl chose to not say any r or l during the entire speech which is quite difficult to do without very serious practice.

I was limping walking to these competitions because of the bike tour that Ben and I undertook the weekend prior. We rode for three days from Chino in Nagano to Tenryu in Shizouka. Outside of Hokkaido, the northern island where we biked for a week, it was the farthest away that we have been biking so far. The plan was to bike 200 km on a road which parallels and sometimes cuts into the mountain range which is referred to as Japan’s Southern Alps. The trees during the first two days, because we found ourselves at a higher altitude, were at the peak of their autumn color. I have never seen trees that vibrantly colorful before in my life and it was further exaggerated because they were found on towering mountains. It was hardest bike tour we have taken to date due to the huge mountains that the road followed. The first two days we climbed up continuously for almost 3 hours. Of course the downhill was exhilarating and November 11, 2013 worth the intense effort taken to climb up that high. Already at the start of the second day my right knee began to ache a bit and by mid day I couldn’t put any real pressure on it. There was no place to stop though to catch a train without riding another day so we kept on climbing up and up, me with one leg. That night we had assumed that we would be soaking early in a nice hot spring in the mountains but rather found ourselves at 8 at night in the rain still trying to find a place to sleep for the night. We finally decided to ride back 3 kilometers and try our luck at a roadside stop (道の駅), and clandestinely pitch a tent for night. We found our spot behind the building, nice and in the rain, and police kept coming for the first hour or two but oddly never got out of their car to say anything to us. We were too tired to be too bothered by either the possibility of a policeman coming or by the rain that was splashing though the supposedly waterproof rain fly. Our next day though, which we decided to cut to cut a bit shorter due to my knee, was full of sunshine, 98% entirely downhill and followed a stunning river that cut though the mountains. My knee feels pretty good now after a week of resting and going back to the same type of Japanese rehab center I had frequented last year when I had problems with my knee also. I found a new one right around the corner from my house and the older man who is the doctor there is certified to do acupuncture and moxibustion, both of which I am very curious to try.

This past Saturday our school had an open campus for prospective junior high school students to visit classes and afterwards for our PTA to have a gathering. The theme this year was world music and I was asked to play my guitar and sing. I was a bit nervous but excited at the same time to have the opportunity to perform again. I chose to sing Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” and one of my all time favorite songs called “Soledad” by Jorge Drexler. My performance got a big cheer and lots of people took my picture, and next I found myself dancing next to one of my 16 year old students who was teaching the group how to hula dance with her 14 year old sister wearing but a bit of grass around her waist and a coconut bra. The whole family had lived for six years in Hawaii and her mother had brought in a bunch of really interesting traditional instruments and the daughters did a demonstration of how to hula dance. Of course it ended with me being pulled up on stage and being taught how thrust my hips and pelvis around in a circle by these mostly naked underage students to the applause of their mother and my boss along with 40 clapping middle-aged woman doing the same thrusting motions and mostly failing to an embarrassing extent. I was told I was a natural. For some reason the whole event seemed perfectly normal to everyone but me.

For Halloween this year our group of five decided to go as a puzzle. I painted Hokusai’s Red Fuji wood block painting on cardboard and cut it to look like puzzle pieces which we wore as our costume. The most exciting things of the night were these guys dressed up like Mario and Luigi who had these spring stilts that allowed them to jump incredibly high and do back flips in the street and also the other Mario and Luigi who somehow procured and drove go-carts through downtown Tokyo. The majority of the other costumes there were just sexy variations of nurses, devils and wild animals who just looked cold all night.

In between all of these big events I went to school every day and started teaching again and even got to teach for a day at a junior high school which was fun. I’ve also had some great dinners with my friends and with some very nice dates with Chika. We got to go to Nikko for three days and almost got killed when our hostel owner started to point out the stars that he liked while he was driving at an already dangerous speed down a winding mountain road with oncoming traffic. Also I began to sell my journals, read, practiced guitar, sang, did laundry, went to cooking class, planned for my parent’s visit here in December and my friends trip back to Hokkaido for the snow festival in February, listened to some jazz with the occasional Hanson to break it up and received some great letters from my friends around this world.

Already in the dark at five in the evening but trying to stay positive about the impending winter,

-James