The coming new year...

What's inside the coming new year? What will develop? What is to come?

The future sometimes seems like the destination of a roaring freight train: as long as the train stays on its tracks, as it most likely will, it is destined to reach its destination.

Then again, sometimes the future appears much less destined.... Sometimes there is simply no clear view of it at all.

The new year, for me, is unclear. It remains a mystery. A box that cannot yet be opened.

But there are those around me whose new years are much more clearly visible. They may've just become engaged, or they are in the middle of a job they've had for years, and will have for many more to come.

The truth is perhaps that life is never really like a train on the tracks, it just looks that way. It looks that way until something completely out of the blue happens that washes away your once perceived reality....

Merry Xmas from the California Grudins.

ubuyama no tomodachi, yoroshiku!

Every now and then my mind wanders to my little town of Ubuyama, the only little town I've ever really been a true citizen of.

And if you are possibly reading this, dear Ubuyama chugakko, shogakko, and hoikuen teachers, dear eikawa class ladies, dear Mieko-san: I wish you happy holidays, and despite my poor skills at staying in touch, I have not and will not forget all of you. That goes for everyone else too: Hanae, Chris, Vicky, Austin, Tomoko, John, Miyuki, and many more. You guys were wonderful to me and I will always consider you my friends.

Sometimes I also wonder why I would leave such a stable, well-paying job with so many perks. The easy answer is that I do not like jobs with time limits, especially if those jobs require you to be completely isolated for 2-3 years. The more difficult side of the question is the human one: I never wanted to say goodbye to the people that were part of my life. And to that I say that sometimes life gives us little choice in these sorts of decisions.... That I had to do what I had to do.

Decisions can be too final. Saying goodbye to that little village was one example. No one leaves Ubuyama unscathed. I fear the scar from leaving will never fully disappear - that I will always feel my traveler's heart yearning to return. But return only for a short time?

Time is limited. And yet airplanes devour the circumference of the globe in only a little more than a day. What voracious beasts airplanes are! They travel so unnaturally fast. How can the human heart survive such a thing? Is it because the heart has been numbed, anesthetized, before the travel even begins? Or are we like the dogs who ride in back of trucks, eagerly awaiting potentially unknown destinations?

Happy Holidays!

The other day I was wondering about cuteness... I was thinking about how even stuffed animals can be cute... Doesn't it seem funny to you that an inanimate object can elicit a response? Shouldn't we be smarter than that? But no... We usually aren't.

And without cuteness where would we be? We certainly wouldn't be such caring mammals as we are. We love cute things and we take care of them sometimes solely because they are cute. That is just part of who we tend to be....

So many of the things that we do have no good moral, or even realistic, foundation. We are mysterious creatures capable of incredible, and incredibly unconscious, acts. Bravo!

Just some pictures from my time in SF. I have since moved to the east bay and bought a ten-year-old red stick-shift Jetta for way under blue book. Now the all the vast Americas are just a drive away....

Photos from days of yore.

LA TRIP

This weekend I saw artifice that stretched for miles and miles, I watched the perfect movie for occasion (Science of Sleep), and I saw people that bring sunshine into my soul.

Concrete, metal, rusty metal, smooth trains (Metrolink).

Griffith Park, Claremont foothills, Santa Monica sand.

Stuff, stuff, stuff. Artifice. Waste, creation, destruction, and all the emotions involved. Alive.

(picture not from this trip, but must plan l.a. photo trip soon)

In the end, we are primates

pri·mate /ˈpraɪmeɪt or, esp. for 1, ˈpraɪmɪt/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[prahy-meyt or, esp. for 1, prahy-mit] –noun

1.	Ecclesiastical. an archbishop or bishop ranking first among the bishops of a province or country.

2.

any of various omnivorous mammals of the order Primates, comprising the three suborders Anthropoidea (humans, great apes, gibbons, Old World monkeys, and New World monkeys), Prosimii (lemurs, loris, and their allies), and Tarsioidea (tarsiers), esp. distinguished by the use of hands, varied locomotion, and by complex flexible behavior involving a high level of social interaction and cultural adaptability.

3.	Archaic. a chief or leader.

There is much to be learned from what it means to be a primate. Phenomenons like American Culture can be understood much better with this particular learning. Environmental crises can also be understood much better.

Understanding, however, should not mean justifying our actions.

Additionally, we should try to prove to be the primates who are best able to not act narrow-mindedly and ignorantly -- something we fail to do so much of the time (especially in the case of George W. Bush).

Irrationality, xenophobia, and partisanship seem to run in our sub-order (see definition above).

Think about it.

City of Angels

One weekend; wish I could stay longer!

Why do we hide so much from each other?

We must be more honest, and we must have more emotional integrity, as my friend Thishi says. Poems, even works of non-fiction, too often obscure what people should be saying outright.

America has serious problems. Vietnam created a large group of homeless, sad people in our cities and now we are making a similar mistake with Iraq. Not to mention the fact that we are polluting the world far too much (stemming from our over-eating and wreckless energy abuse).

I wrote a whole year of blog entries on my time in Japan and, more often than not, did not write about what was really on my mind. Instead, I channeled those thoughts into much more abstract pieces.

I am going to work on being more honest with myself, and to other people, even if it hurts to do so. Being honest means more than you might realize.

A life without words,
Persists inside us,
Silence, muteness, deafness.


The tears of this world
Flooding -
At the loss
Of sentience.


It is lack of feeling that makes us vile beasts,
It is the loss of sensitivity that makes waste of human life.


Rebirth, when we halt our neglect.
The daisies in the rain await our attention -
Each moment should not be
A moment lost.

Rotting remnants of well crafted verse,
Scattered among the new,
The era of relevance
Leaped into

Vapid dexterity.

Longing for that age,
When summers were to cherish
Animals to admire.
Thrown into, instead, myopic cycles.

Natural deterioration has no patience for
Contemporary dementia -
Wasting life.

Loquacious and lackadaisical,
Your heart in a thumbnail.

When I opened the red curtains to the bright morning sky,
All that I could see were the birds so ready to fly

And then I stepped back in awe,
Where to little raven?

She circled my head in my dreams
And then pounced on a squirrel,

But only to share some tea.

Lifting strangeness with fingertips,
Etched manicured perfection.

Seeking some hollow church
To fill with substance,

Concrete and metal,
A delicious meal.

Finding manual affection
In the blackness.

Left with blind feelings,
Unsure of dimensional weaknesses:

Confusion is
The highest of mental states.

Ubuyama-mura

Corrugated metal roofs, springtime flowers,
Miniature cars in old short sheds.

Cars slide past village and industrial trucks,
Kids play the street: matching yellow hats, school packs.

Butterflies, birds venture tirelessly,
The farmer looks on.

Heat of summer in the air, stillness,
Mamushi snake nipping at your heels.

Birth Mountain village.

The winter of frozen toes,
Seeking kotatsu.

Begging for her warmth,
Suffering for her warmth.

Loudspeakers calling,
Meetings, then speeches.

Desolate branches and the evergreen bamboo
Sprouting.

Patches of life, bleeding oil,
Stations of gas, shochu.

Hours of numbness, yearning,
The lonely soul.

Eugene

Old stained wood scent
Flying down stairs, orange lit corridors, redwood walls.

Crying, hair follicles strained:
Brown with hint of blond.

Rose splattered face, wet with tears,
Then respite – stained light tan carpeting, black Labrador.

Quiet Douglas firs stand
Next to steep driveway:
Capital Drive.

Once was tire swing, swinging, falling.

Sunny summers, hay fevers.

Tree forts, bird watchers.

Golf balls resting among tired graves.

Prefontaine’s last run.

Quiet now.

Her face still like mountains
Then tumbling down the sides
Moving like avalanche.

Her tears invisible as drops in the ocean.

Each conversation drifting carelessly,
Into inanity, a kind of insanity.

Cat-like confusion drifting on the horizon
Of a dog’s life, the slower, less confused,
Hand-to-mouth life. The canine.

The feline adjusts, calls the name, quells the name.

Her voice shrill into the silence;
Left empty, dial tone.

Aching, smiling, beckoning, joking, twirling, playing
Like a cat with a dead mouse.

How many lives...

can one live in a single lifetime? That is my question.

I remain alive, albeit in a different location in the bay area.

Every now and then my mind reaches back to past times, mostly yearning for them.

I look around at the present place and time... I see broken communities, people so individualized (or individuated) that they no longer exist in any form of group.... And then I also see wonderful individuals all around me that seem to keep the entire universe inside themselves.

I see an ecosystem that suffers from various diseases.

But mostly I just am, like everyone else.

I remember my friend, who, seeing this display of insectual love, wondered "are they kissing?"

Life is real, at least. Life remains real despite the modernizations and technologifications. I thank life for that.

America the Young

It has been a while since I have written you.

Life has finally come to a strange balance in the San Francisco bay area. I feel relaxed; everyday I appreciate the ideal temperate climate that this area has to offer. I still enjoy my rides on the Bay Area Rapid Transit. And I appreciate the valuable time I have with my family.

There is no question that this is an outstandingly beautiful metropolitan area. In every direction there are places of enchanted natural beauty and I am thankful for that. Perhaps people can say the same about Seattle and Vancouver in the north, Los Angeles and Santiago in the south. Cities that don't forget just how beautiful the rest of nature can be. And yet San Francisco is beautiful by itself when you see it, for example, from Alamo Square at dusk, all the lights and towers spread out before you....

Yet the society, the culture, the artifice, have not yet been here long enough to have learned the wisdom from the land. The houses, for example, are still not yet ready for the earthquakes that are surely to come. The culture of the people here (many of whom are temporary transplants) has not yet learned to embrace the full splendidness that exists here.

Yet there are individuals here, if not small groups of people, that have learned to truly enjoy their time and space.

This is all on my mind partly because of an email from my friend in France who wrote this of Europe:

"There is a passionate, deeply embedded love affair with food -- and with nature -- here, and the curve of every landscape tells the story of the people who have come before. Walking in the wilderness is like stepping into a storybook fable: I had never realized it until now, but the scenery and images most cherished in childhood, the colorful landscapes that accompany every child's fable -- what seemed so imaginary, such a flight of fancy at the time, having never seen them -- I now realize is the beautiful product of thousands of years of the relationship between humans and the wild. Without covering every square inch of land with asphalt, highways, strip malls, and row after row of identical, vinyl-sided houses, Europeans have managed to preserve themselves in the world around them, and thrive, while still creating a dynamic landscape in which one can still feel the wonder of being lost in the woods."

The descriptions remind me of (the best sides of) Japan as well... and they make me feel what most of America does not yet have, if it ever will. And yet I want to live a life with that 'deeply embedded love affair' with food and nature here in America. And yet, can I when most everyone else around me is not? It takes so much effort and care to have to create a culture in your life that does not exist in the society around you! What are we to do?

Holiday flowers for you!