everything except himself

I forget why I was thinking about it, but for some reason I had found myself in the middle of looking for a poem from a show called “Blue Sub No. 6″. The poem, as presented in the English version, goes this way:

“Today, today,”
Each day I have waited for you.
And now, do they not say you are strewn
        with the shells of Ishi River?

The show makes an allusion to it being from the Manyoushuu, which is, wait for it, volumes and volumes of Japanese poetry, including thousands of poems. And, to top that off, they’re not written in modern Japanese, since they were written in the 7th-8th century.

So, I looked online and no one had even so much as ganked a transcription of the Blue Sub No. 6 version. Then, I gave up because no one had done the work for me, but, being who I am, I tried looking it up again to no avail. So, I had stumbled across the untranslated version of the Manyoshu at the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center website (here). And so, in a stroke of what I can only call brilliance, I searched for a double-occurrence of the word (in Japanese) for “today” (今日). I found a poem that had it, and began trying to pick out words to translate to see what it was about. It turns out that it was the wrong poem. So, long, boring, frustrating story short, I searched for not only a double-occurrence of “today” but for a second phrase (thank you Virginia) of “Ishi River” (石川). And then I ended up at the right poem, Manyoushuu #224: here (look for the red text of 224).

I made a weak attempt (because Japanese is hard for me, apparently) at the translation of the end note (that’s the part marked by “[ＫＷ]” on the original) and of the poem itself:

I wait for you, saying,
“Today! Today! He will come today!”
Even though they all say
You have become mixed
With the things of the Ishi River gorge.

Type: An Elegy
Author: Yosami no Otome (妻依羅娘子) (a woman)
Description: A song for Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (柿本人麻呂),
her husband, when he was near death at Shimane (島根).

In so doing, I learned more than I wanted to know about “Early Old Japanese”. For instance, how the transcription of the poem into modern Japanese doesn’t do it justice because it uses a completely different set of sounds (i.e. it’s in a markedly different dialect of the language). Or, you know, how the sentence particles are used completely differently. Also of note, the poem is setup having syllables occurring in 5-7-5-7-7. But wait! The modern Japanese looks like:

けふけふと,	kyou kyou to, [sic]
わがまつきみは,	wagamatsukimiwa,
いしかはの,	ishikawano,
かひに, まじりて,	kahini, majirite,
ありといはずやも	arito iwazu yamo

The last line has 8! And, lo and behold, in this dialect, when two vowels occur side by side, one of them gets dropped. Go figure. So, 7 syllables it is. Also, the first line is literally romanized as “kefukefuto”, but I don’t know how you go from “today, today” (今日今日), which I would think turns into “kyou, kyou,” to “kefu, kefu.” Maybe someone can explain it.

At any rate, curiosity thoroughly exhausted.

The whole city knew when the boy had hit the tower: everything stopped. Except those people who were standing, starring, video-taping the carnage, everyone was panicked. There’s some ethereal calming feeling, inherent only to humans, to watching a disaster, like how people slow down in cars to look. Only willing to watch, people stand apart from the mess. They take it in as a sort of chance entertainment, not as they would a book or something of importance but as a terrible sort of sideshow to their daily lives.

That’s when it happened. The maintenance man came running out of the pizza shop in a rush, followed with no real sense of the situation by pop.

“Drive my truck over to where the accident is. I’m going to go do what I can!” The maintenance man tossed pop the keys to the ‘truck’ — really, it’s a white service van with the tower company’s logo on the side. On account of the maintenance man being the only real adult in this city full of children, the maintenance man is hereafter referred to plainly as “man”. Not “super”, not “special” — just “man”.

Pop looked at the keys and then over to the burning wreckage at the tower. He looked back down at the keys, but his attention was on the tower.

By this time, the man was close enough to the wreck to see that nothing had been done at all to help the situation by the onlookers. He saw only one car, and so he headed over to it. The car looked like it was laying peacefully next to the tower, catecorner, taking a nap on its side. In the driver’s side seat was a boy of about seventeen years in appearance, also napping — unconscious — between his driver-side window and an airbag.

As big as the tower was, the SUV, motionlessly laying to one side of the tower, looked like it was trying to hug a tree. What occurred was that the SUV, in a last ditch attempt to stop, had flipped with such force that the SUV had furiously slammed into the tower with it’s bottom side and bounced off from the force. In a more violent world, you might say that the tower had sucker-punched the SUV.

For all that, the fire that had started at the base of the tower was still in need of an explanation. The man was looking around for the cause, and then, being close enough now, he saw that the control box for the tower’s all-important electric power transformer, which the SUV was using as a sort of pillow at the moment, was crushed flat, stomped like a soda can. To the man, it looked like the destroyed control box was the source of the fire, which screamed of danger on its own and practically yelled itself hoarse to the man that it was only a few feet from the power transformer.

Fearing the worst for the situation, the man looked behind him to find that pop had brought the truck around as close as it could get for all the traffic. Running over to the back of the truck, the man threw open the doors, grabbed his tool belt, and ran over to the SUV. Climbing up the side of the overturned SUV, the man proceeded to open the driver’s side door with his back to the flames. The airbag had failed to disengage. Taking the X-Acto knife from his belt, the man released the blade, covered his face, and slashed the airbag like a tire. In the following moment, accentuated by the “POP!” of the airbag, the man had reached in like the jaws of life and grabbed the boy up out of the SUV.

With a sudden “BOOM!” and shockwave from the transformer, the man knew the fire had spread and the worst-case scenario was in tow. Jumping down off the SUV, the boy held length-wise across his arms, the man landed with a “THUD!” From there it was a short dash to the safety of the backside of his truck. Pop was there, cellphone in hand.

“I keep trying to call 9-1-1, but I can’t get through,” pop told the man.

“Tower’s down.” The man said between breaths as he laid the boy down on the ground. “Not gonna do you any good. Besides, look at the traffic.”

Pop turned around to see cars in every direction — vultures, waiting to eat up the scene.

Standing up, the man drew out a dolly from the back of his truck. Laying the jacket he was wearing on top of it, the man commanded pop, “Help me get him on there.” Pop, while he meant no ill-will towards the boy, just stood there. “He has to get to the hospital. Come on!”

It was at this point that the man realized he was on his own in the endeavor to save the boy’s life. Managing to get the boy onto the dolly with difficulty, the man pushed pop aside to get to a length of rope located inside the truck. Tying both ends of the rope to the dolly, the man got behind the rope and began pulling the dolly like a sled dog in a race for the boy’s life.

Leaving the horrible accident scene behind, the man mushed across the street to the sidewalk, crowded with just as many onlookers as the street, but the sidewalk’s obstacles could be moved. Yelling like an ambulance siren, the man pushed through the sidewalk up the emergency care entrance, which had street access to the main road in the city.

Getting the boy through the double-doors on his own, the man called out with all he had left to the attendant who was supposed to be attending the door.

11×14 I referenced in previous post can be checked out here: link. Total time was about 4 hours, because I had to clean it up something fierce.

So that chirping noise (the tech corrected me from “clicking”) was a combination of my belt, the belt idler, and the belt tensioner. Car runs silent now, though, which is exciting. Of course on the ironic flipside, this could just be one step away from, “Not with a bang but a whimper.” At any rate, the Saturn in Lithia Springs closed down, so I had to go to the one in Marietta. It is conveniently right up the road from school, though. However, the reading material was not as good and I didn’t get my fill of sleezy daytime television. The sleek flat-screen TV mounted on the wall was tuned to Sportscenter. Among finding out that some football coach is retiring (Dungy) and that people don’t get voted into the baseball hall of fame because they’ve used performance enhancing drugs, I also learned a ton of useless information from the January issue of “Atlanta Life Magazine”.

In other news, the day started out with drawing. I forgot how fast I draw since I did it all the time standing post at Regal. I almost knocked out an 11×14 shot in under 2 hours. I had to leave for school, though, and my car was still icy, so there really wasn’t any flex time. Then, after feeling moderately accomplished, I had to pass through Marietta’s premiere construction site (a.k.a. “Southern Polytechnic State University”). As if acknowledging my arrival, 2 trucks carrying dirt and rocks and stuff pass me as I enter. And, further down the road, holes have decided to take up residence in the road. They’ve got a veritable breeding ground there now. Finally passing them, I end up at the parking area: full. So, I go further down the road to park. There were actually a lot of spots open, and I didn’t feel like I needed to be there early on Wednesday. I got back from Discrete Math to find cars on the lawn. I think getting there early is necessary. And now, I am off to a SWE class with a teacher who shouldn’t be a teacher.

Well, pump me full of lead; I'll be an Iron Man.
Make it a heart; I'll be a lion.
Tear me to pieces for tryin',
But don't go blamin' me for dyin'
For all the things you been a-cryin'.
Gotta get my feet back on the ground and vyin'
For a place that's not so tryin'.
Whatever happened to livin', lovin', dyin'?
'cause loneliness is all I've been findin',
And loneliness ain't much of a finding.
I guess this ain't a happy ending,
More like a rough and awkward beginning.

Today’s just not my day. I guess the shower curtain didn’t like my poem because it fell and tried to take me with it.

This is part of what I’m submitting to creative writing for an upcoming meeting. The rest of it is at home, so I’ll add it when I leave college for the day.

I stood alone at the onset of the part,
Blinded by the spotlight's piercing dart:

"Who can say what a man is?
The choice is only his."

I drew that line from a mem'ry,
Some great fire's puff of smoke caught in a chim'ney,
And now I find myself in a haze,
Trying to think back to those days,
The days that seem so far away,
Like the brief curtain draw 'fore a play.
And though for now it be gone,
It will again shadow the spot I act upon.

Is it greed to want attention,
To want to effect some lasting retention?
Or is it only honorable to pass without mention,
To fade from the forefront into declension?

Before this curtain fall,
I will strike you all;
I will present you with my every day,
And sell it to you in a most colorful way:

I will steal a face from my audience,
Wear it like a mask in every sense:
After a time, I will consume it,
Take another, and assume it.
And, when I am floating in a sea of two-sided faces,
I will call you from your places:
"Here is your trial:
Find yours amongst the pile!"
And I will pick them from the sum,
And hand them out to everyone:
"This is the story's maxim:
Yours is the same as his, as hers, as them!"
And I will take the mask that's left,
And place my face into its cleft,
And just as you will go to interrupt me, burst,
"I am man!" and interrupt you first.

So, you probably don’t know this about me, but I feel like talking about it. My family has had to deal with drugs for a long time. Growing up with my dad has irrefutably shaped me to be who I am today. He wasn’t doing drugs at the time I was born. He didn’t do them as I was growing up. He doesn’t do them now. However, this man, who’s now over the age of 50, has struggled with the effects that drugs have had on him ever since he quit so long ago. He quit cold-turkey, but the immediate effect of taking drugs is not the extent of the damage that drugs are capable of doing.

As a child, I grew up in a household of yelling. I’ve developed this habit, which I still have to this very day, of eating quickly. This was caused because of the fights that took place between my mom and my dad over the dinner table. If I ate quickly, I could run away from it. That never changed the fact that he was always angry, and he was angry about everything. I couldn’t understand his anger as a child.

One of the biggest things I never understood was that my dad didn’t care if my mom cried. It never seemed to bother him, and she’d sit alone at the dinner table crying well after the fight was over. It took someone else who had had drug problems to help me understand.

One day, I got to hear a speaker talk about his own drug addiction and the effects that it had on his life. It was shocking to hear this man’s story: it sounded exactly like how my dad used to act. The man recounted being angry all the time, not being about to make rational decisions, living day-to-day, and the list goes on. This man helped me understand my dad’s position. There was nothing my dad could do about fixing his life by himself: my dad couldn’t be happy. It moved me. This is the only speaker I have ever gone up to and thanked, personally, for telling his story. What surprised me more was how much he cared that my dad had been helped. This man certainly knew, having gone through it himself, how much a real problem drugs can be to someone’s life and the lives of everyone around them.

On top of that, one of my cousins was just recently taken to jail. He’s out now, but some weeks before going to jail, he contacted his mother (my aunt). She was in tears before us (we were visiting her on vacation there). She was trying to decide whether to let this whole thing play out, to let her son just live his life, or to intervene. She was trying to decide if my cousin was crying out for help, and she was in tears over it for a long time. This woman is not weak by any standard. She’s one of the strongest people I know, and, yet, here she was crying over my cousin. There were drugs involved. There had been drugs in the past. His father had been a dealer at one time. I was at a loss for words, when I should have encouraged her.

Long story short, we had dinner with him before our vacation was over. He went to jail after the court proceedings finished (there was property and other people involved). It meant a lot to me to see him clean up over that short time we were there. It had nothing to do with us; it was all his mother, and I guess that’s the way it ought to be: people that are close to drug users and care about the actual person need to step up and try to help, because that person may want and definitely needs help to face their life. The resilience of my aunt in dealing with her son, my cousin, really left an impression on me.

In my family’s case, it was my mother. She kept trying to get my dad to go see a doctor. She cared enough about him to ignore the hateful things he would say. He didn’t see that he had a problem. It was really his inability to admit that he had a problem which made me unable to understand him. As I came into being an adult, I began to understand, after seeing him able to be happy, that who he had been was not who he was as a person. Really, all the yelling and anger was how his mind had been affected by the drugs he had taken in the past, showing through in his conversation (for lack of a better word), in the way that he would get mad at the littlest things, and how he would not, under any circumstances, take responsibility for anything in his life. The impression that I got from him, before he got help, was that he had obligations, yes, but, beyond that, everything else wasn’t his fault. Thinking back to some of things he said, it was really quite ridiculous. However, there is a lot to say for seeing a person for who they truly are and not losing hope in them and continuing to support them to a point where they can deal with their issues. That was finally going to a doctor for my father, taking medicine until the problem was under control, which was that my father’s brain could not produce the chemicals needed to allow him to feel happy. He still gets angry, sometimes he yells, but that’s who he is as a person; he no longer goes off the deep end; he’s human, and drugs will take your humanity away from you, like it took my father’s. However, care is the greatest thing, I think, that you can give to someone who is affected by drugs. In both my father and my cousin’s case, that’s what ultimately brought them back to a point at which they could be happy as people.

So, we’ve been together for four (4) months now. It really seems like time has just flown by, as it is. I guess it’s because a lot has happened over the course of our relationship, making me not pay attention to the passing time. It’s either that, or it’s because I wake up after noon more often than not. Heh, well, it’s really that I’m not bored with Jess. We spend so much time together, but I’ve yet to find myself wanting to get away from her. I’m not much of a people person after about an hour. Really, I can only put up with so much before I feel like my time’s being wasted with something useless. However, I really enjoy spending time with Jess all the time.

It’s going to be odd to me when school starts and Jess has a job. I realize we spend way too much time together now, but it will still be a change to not have as much of her time as I get now. It’s alright. I know she’ll be thinking about me in the meantime. And I love her for it.

On an entirely different note, other than hanging out with Jess, I’ve just been doing random things here and there with my freetime.

Got a book on Celtic knots and stuff while I was out with Jess and one of her friends. I’m excited. We’re doing fine. Kind of gearing up for school to start back, I guess. I’m ready for it a bit.

1. Jess and I have been together for 3 months now. Honestly, it seems like only a week to me, though. I think that’s because I haven’t gotten bored with the relationship. Usually, I start thinking how much of a job a relationship is by this point. There are parts that make me feel that way, but I think that’s constructive. I mean, put that into the face of a relationship that only seems like a job and hopefully you’ll understand my meaning.

2. Jess’ birthday is soon, which will temporarily place us three (3) years apart. If anyone know’s of a good steak house (other than Outback or Logan’s) let me know. We’re also going to go watch the new Harry Potter movie, since she follows the series.

3. I really like life right now. There are things I need to work on about myself (uhm, like flossing!), but, for the most part, I like how my life is going right now. It doesn’t feel like the world’s crashing down around me like it usually does (I mean, my car’s fuel line broke that one time…) I know part of that is attributed to Jess. Though I upset her because I am champion of the sleepies and never get anywhere on-time, I still see how much she cares for me, and that means a lot to me. Our relationship has brought a very light-hearted addition to my life that I cherish. I have many fond memories.