A few years ago I found a website that hosted lists of various things. One of them was a list of strange and obscure words. I copypasted the list into a txt file and have been adding words I come across ever since. There were 23 words in the original list. Here are my next 17 words.

24. woolgather
to engage in fanciful daydreaming.

25. brobdingnagian
something of huge size, tremendous.

26. ambergris
an opaque, ash-colored secretion of the sperm whale intestine, used in perfumery.

27. tchotchke
an inexpensive souvenir, trinket, or ornament.

28. daedalian
difficult to understand because of intricacy.

29. abacinate (ll. abacinatus)
to blind by a red-hot metal plate held before the eyes.

30. crepuscule
twilight; dusk.

31. lamister
a fugitive from the law.

32. frondescence
the process or period of putting forth leaves, as a tree, plant, or the like.

33. umbrage
leaves that afford shade, as the foliage of trees.

34. verdure (ll. viridis)
greenness, esp. of fresh, flourishing vegetation.

35. Shrovetide
the three days before Ash Wednesday, once a time of confession and absolution.

36. chutzpah
unmitigated effrontery or impudence; gall. audacity; nerve.

37. braggadocio
empty boasting; bragging. a boasting person; braggart.

38. demur
to make objection, esp. on the grounds of scruples; take exception; object.

39. demiurge
a supernatural being imagined as creating or fashioning the world in subordination to the Supreme Being, and sometimes regarded as the originator of evil.

40. firedamp
a combustible gas consisting chiefly of methane, formed esp. in coal mines, and dangerously explosive when mixed with certain proportions of atmospheric air.

I’ll post the following 17 in some time.

I got off the train in Suidobashi and met up with my Chinese friend outside the station. Yui was dressed in his usual fashion. Pastel shirt, greenish, big sunglasses, and a white jacket with a certain kind of neck strap buckle that seems to be always in fashion in Tokyo. We crossed the river and the street, shamefully avoiding eye contact with the volunteers collecting money for earthquake victims. They have no shame and approach everyone but usually zero in on us. Foreigners are somehow percieved as philanthropists by nature and the charity workers are keenly aware of this fact. They persist in the face of all protest. When the long red light pins you on the street corner, only if you are the most hardened tightwad can you resist them. Near Suidobashi all the alms collectors have awful teeth. When I first ran across them in February, I thought they were collecting for the purpose of having their teeth fixed. For some reason this inspired more pity in me and I gave as handsomely as I could. But, strangely the earthquake victims don’t garner as much sympathy.

We were lucky, the light was green, and we slipped by the almsmen undetected (though, later, on our way home we forked over our change). We headed to Tokyo Dome City, the theme park near the Yomiuri Giant’s home stadium. In the park there is a burger place called Zest Burger. As far as I know their burgers are the best in Japan. They’re made from quality beef, and in fact, you can watch the staff carve up the beef and make the patties. Next to the register there’s a glass partition behind which the meat handler (for lack of a better term, butcher doesn’t fit) unpacks the raw meat slab, sponges off the excess, and chops it up. More often than not you’ll witness the fatty beef being molded into patties ready for cooking, but if you’re lucky you might catch the actual cutting of the beef. There is something fascinating about watching a college-age Japanese chick handle a thirty pound slab of prime cut steak.

Besides the live show, the menu is interesting. Though I’m sure it’s not unique in the world, my favorite menu item which I have not tasted anywhere else is the Avocado Burger. It’s a standard burger with avocado in place of the cheese. Between the juicy ground beef and the soft avocado, the sandwich is a taste bud orgasm. Add some grilled onion, fresh tomato, and lettuce all on a toasted bun, and fries and of course a coke to match, and you have yourself something truly special.

But where the burgers succeed in taste, creativity, and presentation they fail miserably in construction and structural integrity. All but once have the burgers slipped apart on me. The juices from the meat and the onion and the slippery texture of the sliced avocado combine to create one of the most effective lubricants known to science. Something always slips out of the undersized bun. This one caveat aside, I love these burgers and never miss a chance to have one when I’m in the area. For 800 yen during lunch time, and a little over 1000 after that, they’re worth the price.

We ate our burgers at one of the tables outside, underneath the ferris wheel, the roller coaster, in sunlit shade. As we ate, we eyed the beauties that like to hang out in Korakuen on a sunny Thursday afternoon.

There’s yet more to this wonderful day.

09.10.08

misery carved into our faces
	we line the platform
waiting for the train
	sunlight happily smiling down
oppressive heat
	igniting humidity
as we try desperately to look
	tortured to be alive.
I look behind, down the terminal
	at the standing masses
stretching for eons
	and see decrepit cripples
clutching alms
	corpses rotting in the rain
cadavers and bones
	strewn like Froebel gifts
dust blasted by dry winds
	onto our granite slab
receding into a shallow sea
	its frothy surf washing up
the dead.

the train arrives, the doors hiss open
	and choking on a sickly sigh
take my step check my watch
	quartz hearts resonate with ours
the door gulps closed and we depart.

08.02.20

You know, I wonder why it is
	standing on the edge of certainty
toes curled over the brink
	eyes open head high sunlight
beaming all uncertain down in waves
	lungs heaving in and out
knuckles cracked shoulders loose
	lump in throat heart beat
spasmodic erratic pupils
	dilated mind collapsed and then—
the words jam up my windpipe
	I smile and listen walking
side to side those boots and mine
	crunching salty ice flows breath
condensed in puffs
	smoking dragons eyes
behind darkened glasses
	black pearls and then—
lay in bed ears swooning jazzy grooves
	if only I could
improvise a sentence
	open up but doubt sets in
my jaw clenched tight
	I'll be sleeping alone tonight.

All my life I had a direction. It was always to graduate, to go on to the next tier of education. But now, on the eve of my final one, I don’t know what the hell to do. Where do I go from here? It’s not even a desire to stay on and go higher. I don’t particularly like it at school anymore—it all seems so fruitless, but maybe that’s just a consequence of majoring in English and writing. So, I leave, degree in hand, and where do I go, what do I do? What does anyone do?

I guess get a job, and then? Work. I really took it for granted that the course for the future is always so obvious—learn, keep going, do well (though that’s not always the case) and then: gratification. But I just don’t see it, there is nothing really gratifying about earning a degree. I suppose I’m just spoiled. So many people have no access to an education and when I get one I complain and ramble on and on about a lack of direction and ambition.

Nonetheless, I feel like I’m going to end up in a dead end job with no career, working just to fill a void—have something to do. There is nothing I really desire except new experiences, but that is such a vague desire that it’s almost inconsequential. I feel trapped with the prospects for my near future. Is this how everyone feels at this time in their lives? It seems like so many people have a dream they want to fulfill, but what if you have no real dreams?

It doesn’t seem like my dreams were ever shattered or broken. No catastrophic event in my life ever ruined them. I didn’t finalize my fate with vice. Instead they evaporated leaving behind an unpleasant residue. One day I woke up and ahead of me there was no dream, no nightmare—just a gray monotonous landscape of shit. I am at a loss.

The final anomaly is that I am not depressed. I like who I am. My life might not be the the most desirable, but it goes. What I don’t know is where it’s going from here. I am a lizard wandering alone in a vast desert. Is this what the rest of it will be–a long march toward a grave across a barren landscape shrouded in the lengthening evening shadow of youth?

I hope not.

The train rushes along the remnants of the old river. Buttoned up sararimen sway and grimace in the afternoon rush hour and tiny school children in white pith helmet-like hats amble on and off the train at every station. They all look full of life and darkness, all with jet hair and smooth cheeks. I lean, tired, on the door and eventually disembark at a little busy station in the suburban commercial borough of Koganei. The Tokyo eventide slams me in the face with all its heat and perfume. I cross the platform, down the stairs, and pass through the gates like one of a million complacent cattle. From the station I make my way past the sweatshop drone of the pachinko parlor and gradually into a more verdant territory, lined less with ramen shops and parked bicycles and more with family homes and trees. It’s here that they catch up to me, those old cicadas.

continued on scribd.

05.29.07

Cold—

cork shoved up one nostril
leaky faucet in the other
bundle of razorblades in your throat
double knot tied in your forehead
aches in your muscles
itches in your flesh
snotty tissues stuffed down your pockets
eyes swollen, sockets pallid
nose flushed sanguine
lukewarm fever sweat dripping incessantly down your brow
and above all your head lost in delirium—
nothing seems real, are you awake or asleep?
		*aughuaghm*
	you cough—
	you're sick.
Phlegm piles up in your throat,
nowhere to spit—
give a cringe as you swallow.
	Through the window, a ray of healthy sunshine
	washes across your despondent visage—
	you look outside and the city hums about its day,
	as the people bustle, and the trains run along,
	and the summer cicadas strum their lutes in the trees—
		*aughuaghmuaghm*
	—you cough.

        There I was, soaking it in. The cold air still and thick; smooth as silk I dragged it. And off we went—little did I know. The park was vast and empty, the great barren expanse between us and them. But soon that all changed. The park cruelly turned on us, became claustrophobic, panic ensued, I was trapped. “Toss it! Toss it! Toss it!” My chest caves in, my guts fall into an abyss, I feel like vomiting. Do I run across the void and abandon my confederates? No, I try to act cool; show my face casually to my judges, like I just emerged from the womb: innocent. There I am, there they are—the proverbial deer and the headlights it stares into. “All of you get your hands out of your pockets, and come out here. Stand in front of the car.” I stood and waited for a blink of an eye in the scope of the headlights, my pupils huge, scratched by the light. He went around for a look and came back. Flash light in one hand, his other hand loosely clasped I felt relieved. “They got nothing on us,” I thought. Then I see it, my cheap source of pleasure. I don’t even have the decency to be rebellious or defiant—search for escape or dreams. I have nothing to rebel against or escape from. I’m merely selfish. That’s all I’m in it for: me.

        They knew what we were doing, there was nothing we could say to convince them otherwise. They could smell it the way a dog smells fear. Besides, it was thick as muck on us. One of them questioned me. I spoke with the scent rich in my mouth so I avoided his face. I kept my composure somewhat, the adrenaline helped with that. They checked us all for the shit. Came up empty. That’s what saved us. We may have been stupid, but not quite that much. They turned up nothing, and they either decided we’re not worth the effort for our meager amount, or they were just lenient. There was a point where I was pretty sure I was going to be sleeping on a hard bench that night, but that feeling was far gone, replaced by humility. I felt more pathetic and dumb than scared or worried.

They knew very well how to fuck with us—make fun of our product, rolled by amateurs. “This is some home grown shit, and so little. Must be tough times for college kids, huh?” I smirked at that one inside myself. But I was all death on the outside. No emotion, the grimace is all I gave—that look that a dying man has. Some girls were passing by, seniors or juniors. They waved them over and asked them what should be done with us. One of them stood up for us, and rallied her friends, but a lone one decided she would like to know what we did first. “We can’t tell you that,” the captors said. I wanted her to just shut the fuck up, so we can be let loose and go, with our tails between our legs, on our miserable ways. They kept it up for a while, then told us to grab our wallets and such and run the fuck home. “You got three seconds. I’m already counting—two!” By this time I was ready collapse in a chair and sink a thousand feet into oblivion. But I had to give one more spurt of energy to make their night. We ran out of there, their tires squealing behind us, both of them likely laughing. With a good story to tell at the doughnut shop they disappeared. We got back to our hive, and rested. Rested for a hundred years, and felt glad. Glad because it was all worth it. A lesson learned, a tale to tell. Until the next weekend.

There I was again. Wiser this time, but unlucky. I was in some hovel, a few blocks from my last encounter. I wasn’t planning on anything more than having a few drinks and calling it a night. But the herb was thick in the air. I could see it on half the drone’s faces, and I wanted it too. I found the man, and grabbed a bag for ten. He showed me and a few of mine to the room, handed me a piece and told us not to steal anything. There was more than I paid for since it was the last of his and he wanted to be rid of it. I and mine indulged, and we were merry.

Soon we were outside, heading home. But nature was calling so I dove back in for a few. When I came out there they were, and there I was. They rolled up slowly, sneaky like. I recognized the one of them, the same from before. Like I said: “unlucky.” Somehow I kept my cool, and walked on; he didn’t recognize me. My pace quickened as I rounded the corner and some others around me quickened, too. Then we were running and everyone ducked into a passage between two buildings. Without turning around I knew they were right behind me. I’m running—the dead end. Knowing I was done, I threw the rest of it in some bushes and turned around to face them. But there was no one. So I walked off safe again. The rest of my evening was spent carrying home a drunk who I’ve only just met. Then finally bed and the crash.

But before all this I had to swim.

Shot out of a cannon the race was on. Pitch black—I had to race. Race for the finish. I wasn’t in it for glory or for fame. I was in it for the rest of my life. If I failed… No, couldn’t have; I was the strongest. But that was my first mistake. Then I was safe, but only for the time being. Eventually I was loosed upon the world with nothing but my wits. And those, I was sure, were sharp—my second mistake. I don’t remember any of this of course. Likely, I just read it about someone else somewhere and assumed the same happened to me. What else could have been? There was a time when I wondered, but now I know it doesn’t matter. I used to think that one should know the vessel before one could know the way. Or was it the origin? In any case, I now know this to be untrue. But for the sake of knowing–

The oldest thing I can recall is busting my head. The sidewalk showed no mercy to my young noggin. I like to think that it took pleasure in tripping me, and then bludgeoning my face with its jaggedness. That just seems like something sidewalk would do for fun. What else does it have to do, all day laying around in the sun, in the rain, the snow and the sleet; while people trample it and ride their bicycles. Perhaps out of frustration, that it can do nothing to change its fate, it seeks the occasional revenge on an innocent passerby. No, not innocent, just a passerby. I was one of those, but it was my fault, for not taking caution of Sidewalk’s traps. I should have been more vigilant and have more carefully placed my feet. But I wasn’t and didn’t.

The tears. Not the pain—the tears. Acidic, burning through my cheeks. No not quite, more like alcohol (the rubbing kind not the numbing kind). We never had a refrigerator back then—no cold meat to slap on my swelling face. No Ice. Best thing she had for me, my mother, was the cool metal of a spoon. That worked so well.

There are other things, but I can’t place them before or after the sidewalk and the spoon. And besides that, I don’t believe they are of any importance. I didn’t know it at the time, but I learned that day how to hurt, and how to remember it. Remember it real good, to learn my lesson. Keep in mind, every time I face Sidewalk, to be more clever than him. That was the only way.

I was told that I once stepped into the street. Not a big deal unless you consider a speeding bus approaching the same point in time and space that I so egotistically occupied. It might have been a car or a truck for all I know. I was merely told, after all. Of course my inevitable savior did the telling. Maybe it was a only a bicycle, or nothing at all. After someone saves you from yourself the standard procedure, apparently, is to punish you for fucking up. Isn’t that what they do to you if you like to get high, or try to make hole in the back of your heard using a not so subtle piece of lead barreling at a few times the speed of sound out of a steal tube? I was told that I fucked up, so I got punished, too. For being so selfish and claiming that particular point in space and time for myself when it rightfully belonged to the bus or truck or whatever.

Many years later, thousands of miles away, that bus would catch up to me in the form of a mini van piloted by a hick while I was ignoring a very straightforward message: “don’t walk.” “Fuck it,” I say, “we’re walking—why stop?” There was no reason to. Except, of course, a hick in a minivan, but I didn’t know it. Some car manufacturer must have made thousands of minivans much like this one, and some people somewhere must have made thousands of hicks, also much like this particular one. But this minivan and its hick were special, they ran into me on a certain street corner on a certain day. I wonder now if the van and the hick were made only for the sake of meeting me that day, and then soon after, their purpose fulfilled, disappeared from the face of the earth. I certainly haven’t seen either of them since. As far as I’m concerned, their chief role in the history of the universe was played out on that corner on that cold day, trying to occupy the same point in space and time as me.

But all of this came to mind after. At the time I only knew that the asphalt was bitterly cold. I knew that my face hurt. “Why does my face hurt? And why am I on the ground?” These questions needed answers. It’s amazing how little it takes for the mind to lose touch with reality. One second I’m checking if my bus pass is still valid and the next I’m on the ground, bus pass gone from my hand and my mind, wondering how I got from the bus pass to the pavement. A moment of my life gone from my record. I get up dizzy; my comrade lost in his pain; the others lost in their helplessness; me dazed and wondering.

Could it have been karma; not the bus from long ago? Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown eggs at that bum house. Trying to set the river on fire might have caused this. What would you do if you found a half gallon of charcoal fluid right on the bank of the river? Nine out of ten times my immediate reaction would be to blow something up with it. We’ve seen those oil fires on the ocean. Those are fun, no?

We were all little pyromaniacs those days. My father found the shabby dollar store Zippo I used to light my fire crackers and assumed I took up smoking. “If I catch you smoking I’ll tear off your legs and beat you to death with them!” I’d call him a hypocrite, but he just didn’t want me to end up like him.

Of course, we thought we were so fucking smart. No one ever realizes how stupid they are until later, when it might have been too late. “Who cares if the warehouse burns down—its abandoned.” On a city block buildings are a few inches apart, or touching entirely. A warehouse in flames is bad news for a family living next door, or a bum sleeping inside. Even bums have the right to live. But none of this was going through our heads, we had a more important agenda: buying matches at the corner store not half a block away (my Zippo wasn’t mine anymore). Even in a bad neighborhood people are suspicious of a couple of 14-year-olds buying a pack of stick matches. The clerk must have been thinking, “What are these little bastards up to?”

The warehouse had a bunch of neat junk in it, including a 30’s or 40’s Mercedes and a corvette. Both were hunks of shit covered in ages of dust. Next to these was a boat trailer and its boat. When you climbed up on top it would rock side to side. Like I said: “neat.” some glass blocks awaiting an installation that was never going to happen were sitting around in two big piles on some wooden pallets. We needed to free the pallets from their burden so we could sell them for five bucks each to the stock yards across the street. The popping sound glass blocks make is really neat, too. But not quite as much as the popping sound of fluorescent light bulbs when you throw them like a cavemen trying to spear a dear. That’s how we threw them.

We tried busting the windshields on the cars but they proved too hard to break. So my friend found some paint and drew a Swastika on one of them instead. I don’t remember why he did that. Between the blocks, the bulbs, the cars and the boat we had plenty of stuff to break, but eventually this wasn’t enough. This is where the matches come in. The paint we found laying around proved to be a great fuel. We’d spill some and watch the flames spread over its glossiness from our matches. It would burn for a while and we’d put it out with an assortment of devices: derelict buckets of sand, a big piece of plywood, and urine when we had it. Inevitably it got out of hand of course, like anything we indulge in.

There were two ways out of the place. One into the street, one into the alley. The three of us got split up. I and another went out the back, while the third was cut off by the flames, now up to the sky light. We assumed he’d go out the front and meet us back at one of our places. We didn’t see him again till the evening news—dead.

The fire wasn’t that severe, it was put out in less than an hour and no one else died. My fallen comrade apparently got lost in the maze of offices in the front of the building. The rooms were filled with smoke. He couldn’t see—breath. He died in there that day, at that particular point in space and time. No one ever found us—the survivors. I don’t think they even looked for us. No one saw us go in or out. They figured he was a victim of himself, and he died, so it didn’t matter. I don’t feel guilt. I didn’t leave him there. He was well on his way out. There was nothing I could do. He was a casualty of the grayness of his own life.

Colors fade—sounds too—you get bored. So you push it; and sometimes you self destruct. We all move about, painting the gray shale over with shabby colors, only for it to fade again. The problem is it fades faster than anyone can paint, and that’s when you overdo it and drown. Or it’s all so monotonous that you can’t see the difference between faces or everything else. You forget the colors. They forget you.

This particular point in space and time had lost all its luster and I was sure I wanted to leave. So I did. There were many ways out, but they all led to the same thing. Chemicals in the blood and the brain telling me I’m somewhere else in another time, another person for a few hours. The alertness of adrenaline when shoplifting or smashing windows or tipping portable toilets and the subsequent euphoria. The sensitivity and faded-ness of a high. Numb and a dizzy in a drunken stupor; I departed regularly. I was seldom around. Eventually, like everything else I grew to love, the wading pool of my mind turned gray and dull so deeper I had to go. The fire, the destructiveness, the intoxication—merely the beginning.

The walk was short—a few cold wet blocks. Then an indistinct apartment. The place was small but plenty big. I paid—he cooked. The paint was hot and ready. The world poised to be vivid once more. Sucked out of a grimy spoon and into my vein, the new me was in my skull. Here is my new consciousness. The couch a deep pool of the coolest water. The air clean and crisp as a diamond. That couch was my roost for a thousand years as people came and went, joined me and left me. I recognized only a few, but I doubt they saw it on my face.

The time came for me to leave, so I did. But in the ensuing weeks and months I was asleep more and more, and awake less and less. I knew my mind inside out, but the world was a monochrome blur. More and more—indulgence. I didn’t know anyone anymore, just the good doctor, and our relationship was merely about business. My money, his medicine. Now I’m here, deep in the abyss. Stuck in an endless dream crammed into the infinitesimal moment after the drowning but before the darkness—I wonder. I wonder about how I got here, and how this all came to be. “Too much,” the medics would later say. “Much too much.” Eyes rolled back in my face. There I was.

01.01.07

So, there was this
		yellowjacket,
	that landed on my windowsill—
the screen was up,
	and the storm window open,
and so that's how he must've
			gotten in.
	I
	took no notice of him there,
closed the window and
		went about my business—
time went by as usual,
		waiting for no one.
				And eventually
I found it stuffy,
		and thought it would be nice
	to crack
		the window,
			let in some air—
and by chance let out
			a guest.
				But
	unbeknown to me
			the wasp
		struggled for an hour
	against the glass
in futility.
		He flew against the pane,
	over and over again
unable to comprehend
		the staggering force
	that kept him sealed
in my room—
		a mausoleum for a
			variety of creatures
		with segmented limbs
			and exoskeletons.
He bounced pathetically off that
	amorphous solid
		till every ounce of life
			was gone from him.
And he lay there
	when I found him—
		and when I freed him,
			he did nothing.

12.05.06

We used to play on the old farm,
chasing cats and chickens,
eating apples and chucking
their cores into the beat fields.

We'd go into the barn,
and jump around in the hay,
look at the cow in its stable,
swatting the flies with its lashes.

We were afraid to climb the ladder
into the attic in the barn, not
because it was dark up there,
but because the ladder was high.

We went into the farmhouse,
old and rundown, and played
with the ancient sewing machine,
left all derelict and abandoned.

We ran the hall with the specters
of the family that lived there,
their stove still warm, the house
still filled with their toil.

We cried when they tore the house
down, to make way for a new one.