BRUSHWOOD DOGS come in a variety of colourings...







In the "old Nagano dialect" where shiba-inus come from, shiba can mean "little" (as well as its mainstream meaning of "brushwood") so 柴犬 shiba-inu can be translated "little brushwood doggie"...

... according to Wikipedia.

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I DIDN'T POST yesterday because I had nothing to say. Me and my "symptoms" went down the methadone clinic where I had little to say. Luckily I managed to change the subject off myself by talking about my efforts at Japanese.

On the way home I bumped into a schizophrenic I know who was having a psychotic episode. He seemed to be in a very Elevated Mood and was burbling on about God and the Devil. Then my Worker phoned me up about what Nutter Clinic I was supposed to go to. And this guy was blaring away down the phone about religious matters (but not in the matter of a country vicar sipping tea at Miss Marple's house; more manic street preacher style). I think my Worker thinks I have really peculiar friends now.

Deshane is coming by this afternoon. I'm depressed from trying to put together a to-do list in my head. The list seems un-do-able. Every time I feel like giving up some inner spirit kicks me and says Come On!

My council tax is in a complete mess, unpaid and seemingly unpayable. I wish I'd ticked the box now saying I was Severely Mentally Imaired. The Student Loans Company who I'm also in default to, wanted me to make a similar declaration of severe mental illness a couple of years ago, but I didn't think I WAS mentally ill. At least not in the way they said. Now I supposedly am ill but confused about the whole matter. A lot.

Deshane the home help key worker person is coming and I'm trying to keep positive. That's not very easy when something is slipping through my fingers. I don't know what's slipping. I just know I need to GET A GRIP.

Staying alive is the absolute bottom line; but what then? I feel confused now. I decided to continue my home clear-out. I have 3 typewriters. 2 are electric and just unusuable. The 3rd is manual and might be handy in a powercut, or if I decided to write a novel on a desert island. I have 3 dining chairs all retrieved from the street. 2 have to go. A whole bunch of Nigerian DVDs for the charity shop. I must have had a compulsive hoarding thing going on but I barely noticed it. See what I mean about living in a whirl. Whenever I try and make sense of things I'm told I Think Too Much. But without thinking, All is Nonsense. See I don't know. I just don't know. Did anyone except Mr Furtheron notice yesterday's last Shiba-Inu was a soft toy. The label on the back left leg gave it away...



Anna Grace's book I Hate Myself and Want to Die is available from Amazon. The American version has it in stock at $15.04; Amazon UK charge £9.86 and say they'll order it in.

The Tale of Hachikō... & I had an Onken

忠犬ハチ公 HERE'S THE STORY of a great Trotterdonkey Doggie named Hachi, which means he was 8th in the litter, who met a professor of agricultural engineering in Tokyo sometime before World War II who faithfully followed the professor home every night. Each evening, Hachi used to wait at the main railway station for his master to return home. When one day the professor died suddenly of a heart attack Hachi refused to accept the death and continued to show up, every single afternoon at the appointed time. Thin and bedraggled he was fed sandwiches by the Japanese commuters... All attempts at rehoming him failed. The faithful furry simply ran back to Shibuya Station and continued his vigil.

After he died, a statue was erected in Shibuya Station in Hachikō's honour. In 2008, a Hollywood film was released, starring Richard Gere. This is the story of Hachikō's life. Original Japanese version. You don't need any Japanese to follow this; it's all set to music:~~~~~~~

ハチ公物語 Hachikō Monogatari ~ The Tale of Hachikō



Top illustration: the original Hachikō...

Here's an Akita-inu tied up on the way to the dog show. Same coloration as a brushwood doggie; much bigger. Then you get to see lots of Japanese people down the precinct.



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I HAD AN ONKEN this afternoon. Vanilla yogurt with chocolate flakes.

Not much else to put. Not feeling too good.

8pm Hey I'm having "psychiatric symptoms" ~ "racing thoughts". I keep hearing the most random ideas spoken each side of my head. Down the library this afternoon I heard some woman whispering my full name, which irritated me. Then this other woman continued to have what appeared to be a pretty detailed conversation about me. The cow! I told myself I was "just being paranoid".

8:55pm the "psychiatric symptoms" have died down. I've been having them all day. I feel ill. I nearly went to bed just after 6. I don't know whether to see a dr. I don't see what a dr can do for me. I don't know what to do.

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HERE are some 柴犬 brushwood doggies, some shiba-inus in the snow...

Ideas

I SLEPT AND SLEPT and slept and slept and slept in really lake, till past 3pm. My phone was chirping and chirrupping like crazy, but I turned it down so I could dream some more. I dreamt I was on a long train journey, where I accidentally dropped my methadone bottle down the side where it smashed; then I was up in the woods with exotic birds hopping towards me; then I woke up and supped cup-a-soup in front of the telly, wondering how I was ever going to engage with the day.

I made such a hash of trying to explain why I wanted to write my memoir didn't I? All I was trying to say was the idea came to me when I was feeling really negative; but I still wanted to go for it. Making lemons into lemonade type of thing.

I need to keep my story as short and sweet as I possibly can. Apart from Anna Grace's, the only drug memoir I know is Kate Holden's In My Skin. The tale of a middle class girl, very similar to me, who gets drawn into the seedy world of heroin, eventually takes to prostitution to fund her habit. Rather than feeling exploited, she talks about prostitution as a process of self-realization. I never went that route; I begged money off strangers. Heroin was a lot cheaper in London than Sydney so you could fund a habit of over a gram a day on £30 or £40. That's $48 to $64 a day in American money.

I've decided to continue with the NA. They talk about the same issues that bugged me: resentment at life not being set up to cater for the needs of the opiate addict. Which makes me want to throw in the towel all together. I don't think there's anything wrong with taking heroin, but I'm fed up of going against the flow. Something's making me want to stop. I cannot put my finger one what it is, but whatever it is, it niggles and niggles away and now I want out.

If I did get any money from my memoirs, I want to use it to clean myself up and leave the country. Burma, the most fascinating foreign land on earth for their mysterious beautifully scripted language, fried hornet cuisine and opium farming tradition is of course completely out of the window. Burma is the world's foremost supplier of high grade 97% purity white heroin. So I can't go there. Fortunately I've had a fascination for all things Japanese for about as long as I can remember, so I would go there instead. Japan is really expensive travel-wise, so I'd need an international bestseller to afford a trip there.

The other country I can see myself visiting is Morocco, where I've been before. It's like an African India. Very exotic. Very cheap. Yes they do happen to be one of the world's foremost producers of hashish, but I loathe cannabis more than any other psychotropic substance, so that's no temptation. I'd use Morocco as my personal alternative to rehab. Instead of talk talk talking about drugs I'm no longer taking, I'd take the opposite tack and let my wounds heal by leaving alone. I do think excessive counselling can be a psychological equivalent of scab-picking. Not good for you. There's research that shows that disaster victims who go in for talk therapies are more likely to suffer from post traumatic stress disorder and to suffer worse than people who are allowed to heal in quiet. "Least said, soonest mended." This is why I want to write my story BEFORE I leave the drugs behind. And to me, methadone is every bit as much a drug as heroin. It might be legal, but it's more addictive and less effectual. And I just want away from it. If they're going to insist on giving that to addicts they should at least give injectable amps. But you need a private doctor to get those. So a private doctor is what I intend to get. I'd need to write a book to pay for one.

My head has gone resonant yet again. That means I'm hearing words in the air. Not voices as such, but psychic emanations. This gives me a fear of going mad abroad. I need to make my own money so I can get away from mental health services. No travel insurance I know of covers mental health. If I had to pay doctors' bills myself I just wouldn't see any doctors. So that's nice and straightforward.

Hey this naturalist on the telly has picked up a tubby little vole. It's rambling about on his hand. Fully wild, yet strangely tame. Tamer than a roborovski hamster, that's for sure. Now some naughty baby short-eared owls are gobbling dead voles. They're on the island of Skomer in Wales.

Well I'd better go; it's nearly half past nine already...

TALES OF THE RIVERBANK

THE RIVERBANK CLOCK
"What can Hammy and Roderick possibly be doing?" asks Johnny Morris, the narrator. As Hammy patently obviously sits there washing his ears (again...!)



HAMMY THE FLYING POSTMAN
A terrible thing has happened; the post-boat has sunk. And now Hammy is trying to get the letters back... in the diving bell.
Then Hammy goes flying. And looks really entertaining doing it...

A Busy Day: Odds and Sods

THIS IS WHY YESTERDAY WAS LAZY. It's all happening today. Too much to do!

AKH I'VE GOT TO GO OUT IN A SEC. Got an appointment with a woman down a disused mine or somewhere. She's sorting out my paperwork re the council..? Something. If I'd been "all vague" like that a few years ago I'd have just not wanted you to know. Now I just do not know. Haven't a clue about any of it. Fed up of being an adult baby (not in the fetish sense though ~ you ever seen that one? I saw it on telly. Grown woman putting a man in nappies (diapers). Most hilarious.) Now what was I saying?

O yeah I've got to run out. Gotta go chemist. Gotta see this lady down a disused dripping mine shaft to sort out my paperwork. I can't remember where I actually see her. Somewhere I have a map, but it's gone... I can get their phone number. From somewhere.

By the way I must complain about the voices in the German version of ghost. Now either I was hallucinating floridly through the auditory "faculty" or these really were the voices coming from my telly. They all sound like TV presenters! With that Standard German Accent, which is like standard English from Britain or the USA. Whichever you think of, it's pretty characterless. I expected Whoopi Goldberg at least to sound like a True Berliner, but no! Sounds like she's just knocked off a shift reading the 6 o'clock news on ARD. Plus they didn't sound anything like the original actors. Whatever dubbed film you watch the actors always sound the same.

At least British dubbing has some character. Greatest dubbed drama of all time is the NHK-produced Monkey（aka Monkey Magic), a Japanese rendition of Chinese traditional Buddhist folk tales. It was on childrens' TV in the 1970s. It was on nighttime telly, where I was again glued to it, in the late 90s or early 2000s. My favourite characters where Trippy-something or other [Tripitaka] (young woman playing a little boy) and Pigsy who's more interested in eating magic dumplings than actually saving the day...(!)



PIGSY'S 10,000 LADIES 1/4 you can view the rest on my random blog here.




LYNN: i made a real hash of my answer to you last night. I meant to say:
~ sorry I don't know about GPs
~ supervised is not a good way of getting control over your dose
~ you shouldn't feel ill mornings
~ then again they want you not to do gear; you crave it; they're giving an inflexible dose, so what are you going to do except use on top...?

hey that's better!



AGE OF LOVE: AGE OF LOVE (SVEN VATH MIX)
this is beautiful, that tune that goes "come on dance with me, move your body..."
better mix than that long jam & spoon one, or the official video

The train to China!

THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT is planning a transcontinental high speed rail link that could take passengers from London to Beijing in as little as 48 hours!

Now I know where I wanna go by train next after Berlin!

When I'm in Beijing I'd love to take the Himalayan express to Lhasa in Tibet. At 15000 metres it's the highest railway in the world, with oxygen tanks on all trains in case passengers get altitude sickness!

As well as the Euro-route, the Chinese government are also planning a line via Korea to TOKYO.



The future's bright. The future's on rails!

Salad Anniversary

IN THIS future (I was talking of yesterday) I finally want to see Japan... then all those hours doodling mysterious characters shall finally pay off.

My Cambridge Encylopedia of Japan, picked up for £2 in a library sale, covers just about everything Japanese. Each section was written by an expert in the field ~ society ~ economy ~ politics ~ arts ~ geography and so on. The history section tells of fascinating encounters with Dutchmen in the 1600s and there are some beautiful landscape photos of Japan's mountainous interior.

The flora and fauna section even gives an oblique mention to Akita and Shiba doggies:

many family dogs are of a breed which has the dense coat and face of a husky...

the furry swines!

The literature section quotes excerpts from a 1987 haiku sequence by 26-year-old schoolteacher Tawara Machi 俵万智 entitled Salad Anniversary. The book was a roaring success, selling 2.6 million in the first five years:

"Call me again" "Wait for me"
Your love is always spoken
in commands

Glancing up at the falling rain
Suddenly I want
your lips

Escape from a shower into a street stall
and drink a glass of cheap saké ~
fun to be alive

The woman at the stall
calls me your wife ~
and so, for a while, I am

The encyclopedia is edited by Richard Bowring, Professor of Japanese at Cambridge, the man who replied to my email asking for titles of the best language textbooks. I was well flattered that a man of such accomplishments should bother with a nobody like me.



The only work of Japanese literature I've read from cover to cover is The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1702) by Matsuo Bashō 松尾 芭蕉. It is a travel diary illustrated with haiku, which are, in a sense, poetic snapshots.

It's a very Japanese thing to capture the essence of a moment. That's what that scruffy-looking calligraphy in the "grass style" is all about.

When I go to Japan I wnat to take the narrow road to the deep north like Bashō, and see what's there these days.

To the north of Honshu, the main Japanese island, is the hilly land of HOkkaido, which wasn'tpropely colonized by the Japanese until the late 1800s. The cultivated land has European-stylefields rather than tiered rice paddies like the rest of Japan. The island is known for its special Hokkaido inus. These doggies are a mid-size compromise between the giant Akita-inu and the tiny shiba-inu, which means "brushwood doggie".

Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido island is famous for its extensive underground shopping precincts, built to shelter the Japanese northerners from the Siberian-style snows of midwinter when the tiny shiba-inus have to wear little bumblebee wing-holder-style doggiecoats, despite their bushy fur, so as not to freeze into canine cobwebs.

Talking of furrydoggies, did y'all like my Hachi story? When I first read the story and saw the faithful furry and the kindly professor saying goodbye, and saw how the faithfull furry devotedly waited at the busy railway station hoping against hope for his friend's eventual return, all set to music, I was nearly moved to tears...

Anyway time's nearly up, I gotta go.


HAVE A CHEERY WEEKEND, Y'ALL!

Link: Narrow Road to the Deep North ~ full online text

Spring's A-sprung!

THE WEATHER here in London is beautiful, but I haven't got a camera. So here instead is the 日本の春 Japanese springtime!

Mount Fuji 富士山 through the famous cherry blossom...



Japan's interior images are serene and beautiful.
Taishō Pond 大正池 in Kamikōchi Valley 上高地の谷, central Honshu 本州. Mount Hotaka 穂高岳, highest in the Hida Range 飛騨山脈, also known as the Northern Japanese Alps 日本の北部のアルプス, is in the centre background.



Sublime cherry blossoms 吉野の桜, Mount Yoshino 吉野山 near Nara 奈良市, Japan's ancient capital AD 710-784:



Isn't this amazing!!

Sleeping... Eating...

THE WEATHER'S extremely chilly. Fallen leaves everywhere in a brown mush. A "nip" in the air, if I can say that without being racist about the Japanese (according to the Official Politically Correct Handbook, not ...)

All I want to do is eat and sleep. Eat stodge, that is and go to bed in the day. And sleep all night into the bargain. And then when I'm awake all I think about most of the time is doom and gloom. This is depression (again).

I saw a documentary on Japan last night. Japan and Japanese things barely ever come on British telly. Well, nowhere near as frequently as I'd like. Of course there are people from all over the world in London and the UK, but no great community of Japanese expats, so Japan and Japanese things are pretty exotic here.

But there was this British man, who motorcycled (and ferryboated) from Sydney Australia to Tokyo Japan. He was on telly last night. Id' seen some of it before, but this was was the last episode, the Japanese instalment. I sat glued to the screen and nearly fell over when a couple of street signs appeared and I could read them!

京都駅: 京 kyō means "capital city" ... this is the same character used in Tōkyō 東京 ("East Capital"). The second character 都 can be read to or miyako, meaning "the seat of Imperial palace" or "capital".) (Kyōto, by the way, was capital of Japan before Tōkyō took on the title in the modern era.) Railway station eki = a horse 馬 (lefthandside) coming to a halt on the right, 駅 where they say the R should be used as a mnemonic for Railwaystation ...


THIS IS IT: Charlie Boorman ~ Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means ...

Procrastination (Japanese Sushibar Video)

I'M NOT MEANT TO BE HERE. I didn't know what to say either: so have a look at this film:~

ANOTHER SUSHIBAR CAMERA VIDEO

You can watch this at work because the dialogue's almost all in Japanese, though I think the people who put the camera on the conveyor belt (who you see) were American...