Yer Spring

or Why Hey Rosetta! is Poised to Take Over the World With Their New Album.

It's the triumphant return of Music Fridays! (I swear I'll retcon in some more interesting stuff soon). This Friday, another one from the Boys (and Girl) From The Rock: Hey Rosetta! Possibly my favourite Canadian band (Hawksley doesn't really count). They made the following video over the Christmas/New Years period in St. John's, I think, and it's got all kinds of Rock culture, from Newfie ballerinas to MUMMERS! It's also, you know, touching, and dance-inducing, and it builds in that same awesome way of so many HR! songs. Check it out. It's beautiful like little else, and it's done a good job of giving me a necessary dose of Canadian.

I hate to be a bit of a douchebag like Alan Cross at the Polaris Prize this year (when he said that he always knew Broken Social Scene was going to make it big) but, for me, ever since I saw just Tim strumming and pianoing alone on stage before a Sarah Slean concert, I've known there was something wild and fantastic about Hey Rosetta! They did pretty well with their last album, "Into Your Lungs...", but I hope that their new disc, "Seeds," is going to be the one that really sees them explode onto the Canadian scene.

Atlantis

(brought to you by Shane Koyczan And The Short Story Long for no better reason than I cried the first couple of times I listened to it, and I still smile when I listen to it again and again these days. Here's the song, but I've also included the lyrics as they make it easier to emphasize the salient bits.)

Your entire body shakes you when laugh,
As if your sense of humour was built on a fault line
And the coast of your heart
Falls into the ocean of yourself
And I'm left looking for this Atlantis.
Left looking for this place
That exists in the stories told by old men
Who were there when mathematics assured them.
Their willingness to believe
Was greater than their determination to dismiss
I'm left looking for Atlantis.
Regardless of the scientist that insists
My efforts would be better spent
Unearthing clues to where the wild things went.
Try as it might,
Faith can't put a dent fact.
So we must settle for science re-enact the world,
As if the universe was curled around this globe
And if we consider that the universe is never ending
Then we're not even a microbe.
We're like a death threat from a pacifist,
We're nothing.
But the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that:
"Nothing is fo' shizzle"
And the interesting thing about that
Is that it ensures that the principle itself can't even be a fact.
But we still act as though
This time we can see the forest through the trees.
Regardless of the soft wood lumber levies,
We fall in line like reforested pine.
It's all straight rows
Were everything grows a little less wild,
A little more humdrum,
Ho, hum.
We come from the mentality
That rarely sees the horror in symmetry
Or the beauty in non-conformity.
We insist that for us,
Everything must be clear cut.
But what about philosophy?
What about the tree that fell in the forest
That no one was around to hear?
It's a little less clear,
A little more deep.
Deep like,
If Oprah Winfrey farts in a bathtub
And no bubbles come to the surface,
Is there an alternate universe
Where the price of gas is cheap?
Possible,
But we can't prove it,
Any more than we can prove
That light can move fast enough
To stop a monster hiding in the closet.
We deposit our faith in fear
But clear our minds to the possibility that
Maybe we as adults,
Still get scared of the dark.
Things that go bump in the night.
And I can't prove that I've ever loved anyone,
But despite the smoking
And the overweight body
I want to grow old with you.
Go through muscle and joint pains
To the point that every time it rains
We can feel it in our knees.
Get arthritis so bad,
That every time we move
We sound like two bowls of Rice Krispies.
We're all "Snap, Crackle and pop"
But we still take the time to stop,
And take the time.
I'm looking for Atlantis.
Letting faith turn this fiction into fact
As if I tracked this missing continent for decades,
And all I know so far
Is that it is somewhere under water.
I'm looking for clues in the most blurry photos of UFOs
And thinking,
If alien are so smart,
Than why don't they start making their spaceships look like airplanes?
That way we'd just point to the sky and say:
"An airplane, how common place and not at all suspect."
We're all shipwrecked on this idea
That everything has to be explained.
But maybe we just need to believe
That lemmings jump off cliffs to prove that they love us.
And sure,
That sacrifice is as empty as the box of condoms
That politicians used when they thought they could fuck us.
But it is nice to believe that somebody up there
Cares enough to plummet onto jagged, back-breaking rocks
In an attempt to tells us,
We're beautiful.
Tell us that as far as life goes,
Our finger prints are like snowflakes.
We leave them on everything
But they melt in the time it takes to touch someone's tongue.
But if we're lucky,
Maybe we're remembered
Along with the sunken cities of a lost continent.
This is for each child
Who is a monument to the one's who came before.
Maybe the best we can hope for
Is that those we leave behind find comfort in knowing
That we're born out of love,
And not science.
That biology explains the how,
Love explains the why,
So in the event of our deaths
We hereby bequeath all of these words to you.
And they are only meant to say that
Uncertainty is something everyone goes through.
And there is not much in the way of proof
But believe me, we loved you.
We held our breaths for your first step,
Your first word.
We laughed when it finally occurred to you,
Lemons are sour.
This is for every time
Love becomes the finest minute and the darkest hour.
This if for those who scour the streets
Wondering where the wild things went.
For the believers who leant us their madness.
This is for everyone we miss.
And this is for the children who were lost.
Sadness is nothing more than the cost of being able to smile
Once in a while.
And grief is the trial we stand to offer evidence
That your finger prints were left on our hearts
And our skin,
And in terms of proof,
Love can be demonstrated in giving.
Our lives consist of the efforts we give
In swimming towards the lost continent
Where you are rumoured to be living.

Beautiful Things and the Souls Who Send Them To You

From these two beautiful people:

Four Points Day 7: Rausu to Okoppe

Distance: 245km

I had the bright idea for us all to get up at 5am to watch the sun rise over Kunashiri island from Rausu. I'm pretty sure the majority of the car wanted to murder me when I dragged them out of bed...that was until they saw it.

Party Boy Neil Gaiman Jr. was not impressed that we left him in Ben's apartment while we all went and watched the sunrise.

Howdy, pilgrim.

Just Watching. This was in the window of one of the many Shiretoko tour boat operators who told us it was far too wavy for them to tour us along the coast of the peninsula from Utoro. The boats are one of the few ways to see the wildest parts of the peninsula other than if you hike in.

Kevin: our third (fourth? Does Kyle's empty apartment in Nemuro count) and final ALT host for the four points tour, and one more member of our Toronto JET crew that set out for Japan back in August of 2009. He took us out to his favourite Izakaiya in his town of Okoppe, where they bake chickens whole and sling delicious pizza. They also told us that the only way we could see their full menu would be if Kevin recited it to us.

I'm a Lumberjack, and I'm okay

This past weekend we made the long, long 5-hour drive up to Nakagawa for the HAJET Northern Welcome party. It's only about 300km, but when you remember the Hokkaido speed limits are set at 50km/h year round, that is a long, long drive. Even when you feel like pushing that speed limit, it's hard to do so as even the toll expressways in this place are mostly just one lane.

And, there's always the cops, as Lindsay found out rather unfortunately.

Despite the distance, I was determined to make it out to the party. It was a modest, camping thing until the ALT in Nakagawa offered to host it, and her town backed her 100%, offering to make us food and to even move their town festival up by a month in honour of the attending ALTs. To take the ridiculousness even further, Nakagawa's mayor turned up to welcome us to the camp site and to give us advice for the log pushing even that some of us had signed up for the next day.

Nakagawa Sue's glorious mexican cuisine.

God damn, I miss mexican cuisine.

The pretty nice onsen hotel beside our campsite because no one roughs it in Japan without a hotspring bath on hand.

Sue's hero of a supervisor who spent all of Friday fishing for us and Saturday night cooking us chanchan yaki and yaki soba. Delicious.

Roz, me, Kevin, Lindsay, Mark, and Brian. All of the 2009 Hokkaido ALTs from Toronto. We all recontracted for a second year, and this is the first time we've all been in one place, really, since Sapporo Orientation last year.

With welcome parties come drunken bake sale auctions to raise funds for the HAJET-run Hokkaido English Challenge/Camp/Home stay program. You'd be surprised how much someone will pay for western baked goods in Japan when they've been drinking. I paid $60 for a pumpkin pie.

God damn, I miss pumpkin pie.

The food that Nakagawa served up was phenomenal and got us log-pushers good and energized for the competition we'd blindly signed up for at 9am on the Sunday morning. I'm pretty sure the two teams of guys and one team of girls signed up for a laugh, thinking that this log pushing would be fun and not too challenging to us big, burly gaijin.

Once we had to show up to weigh in and saw what we were in for, I think we all got a little worried:

(sorry about the Photoshop photomerge munching the log)

Those Kanji across the back there actually proclaim this to be a sumo competition, and you wouldn't doubt it once you saw how seriously some of the teams took the competition. It's a reverse tug-of-war, where the goal is to push harder than your opponents and to drive the red centre marker on the log over their baseline. Oh, and the log's pretty heavy, even with ten guys on it. Teams are weighed in as the limit is 400 kilos per team. Our own team came in at a cool 389kg.

Back before we realized we had anything to be afraid of, we came up with a jaunty, setting appropriate team theme: The Lumberjacks.

Chi, Alan, me, Brian, and Spencer. The MIGHTY LUMBERJACKS!

That would, of course, be the Monty Python Lumberjacks, complete with women's clothing (compliments of Simon Daly and the Engaru Free Store) and a bra (compliments of Heather...strangely no photos of that have showed up yet).

The other team of ALT guys went up first.

...and got rocked as they had the unfortunate pleasure of drawing the team that would eventually go on to win the whole thing as their first opponents. To give you an idea of how hard core this other team was, that dude on the end of the ALT log in the pink shirt, who's barely touching the ground, weighs about 110 KILOS, to say nothing about the rest of his team. Thankfully, we were able to learn something from their defeat (stay low, get as much of your skin on the log as you can), and when it came time for us lumberjacks to get on the log.

We knocked the fancy-coloured pants off of our opponents from Hokkudai University.

We weren't so lucky when we faced The Architects in the third round (we'd had a by into the second). Though we denied them a sweep by taking one win from them, they beat us twice and went on to the next round. Still, with the other men's team and the women's team having been defeated in their first match-ups, we were pretty proud of our showing in this event we knew nothing about and had signed up for as a bit of a joke.

Just before we were defeated by The Architects.

Though we were all kind of concerned about splinters, what with rubbing our nakedness up against a log, the log was pretty damn slick--hence why you needed your skin on it for traction. And traction there was as, writing this now on Thursday (I'm retconning it back to Monday), I still have a fairly livid bruise under my right arm from all of the friction of the log.

"I want you to occur to me daily..."

Friday seems to be music day, so here's some more of what I'm listening to over here.

I stumbled across "Apology" by Shane Koyczan and the Short Story Long in a CBC Radio 3 Artist Series Podcast, hosted by Dan Mangan. I listened as I mindlessly repaired flash cards today in the junior high school office, waiting for my 15 minutes of work as a human tape recorder for each grade's English listening test after lunch.

The lyrics of the song (can they be called lyrics? the poetry of the song?) struck me almost immediately, and before it'd finished playing on the podcast, I'd already bought the song on iTunes.

It might be one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard.

Give it a listen, if you're interested...but don't do it while you're doing anything else. Give the words the consideration they deserve. I've reproduced them below in case they move you as much as they moved me. There are a lot of them, though.

Oh, and Shane is--of course--Canadian, and Dan made some mention of him having performed at some point during the Olympics, if you remember that kind of stuff.

i’m sorry, i’m sorry that i keep saying that i’m sorry. i know it’s strange, strange in a george w bush hasn’t been assassinated yet kinda way. but i say i’m sorry for stupid shit and trivial things and she sings the sweet logic that apologies should grow like trees, only able to bear fruit if it’s root is planted in the soil of genuine sincerity. but i somehow manage to parrot each apology by speaking it before i react. and the fact is that i’m not really sorry that i completely dig degrassi, because it was yick and arthur who got me through wet dreams and puberty. lady, i don’t expect you to understand the reference but i’ve been into this shit ever since the casting director said fuck physicality, give me some reality. gimme kids who can’t act and are ugly: they’ll teach the world about beauty, lady—i can relate to this.

because before i met you i used to want to lock myself into a vault just to feel precious. but now with every kiss hello and good bye—i feel a self worth no banker can tally. and, my heart is a protest that i let rally against my ribs ‘cause i want to build my bones into cribs and lay my reluctance to rest. test what it would be like to live frenetically, to hold you unapologetically

to plant a giving tree on my front lawn, so that when you’re gone it can give you back to me. and i’m sorry that when you sleep next to me you’re forced to listen to the symphony of the unplugged nostril. and, i’m sorry that one time, for some reason, i called you ma’am. that’s fucked up. fucked up in a ‘i just bought a pair of speedos so i can go swimming with you’ kind of way. and crazier than that is the fact that i’ll play at being brave. because doubt is about as useful as a fire escape when you’re trying to dodge a tidal wave, when you got no time to save anybody yourself—you better believe that you’re worth it.

and you are worth the time it takes to take the time to get to know you. we’ve managed to muddle through the awkward stages of i like you and you like me, and when we both said ‘yes’ life became a multiple choice test, not knowing anything we became each other’s best guess. and, holding your hand is less like exploration and more like discovery. lady, i don’t have to study you to be sure. you’re the choice i made before i knew what the other choices were

and, like the best idea i’ll ever have, i want you to occur to me daily. and, i’m sorry, but i want to kiss you every time you have something incredible to say. but you’re beautiful, beautiful in a you kinda way. you’re like the long lost vinyl of louis armstrong, and i wanna play you until it, /until it/ skips. i wanna tell you a secret and i want you to listen with your lips. i want my hands on your hips like they were their final resting place. then, put that funeral under paper so that you can trace their lifetime back to the fact that i’m more inclined to find a space in your heart to haunt for as long as you want me to, lady, i’ll rattle chains up and down the halls of you.

and, this isn’t the greatest romance the world has ever seen. let’s face it: we’ve been making out to songs about break-up and heart ache. but i’ve come to realize romance should be less like a flower and more like an earthquake. and i’m not saying that i wanna shake cities to the ground, i’m not saying that i want the ruble that remains to be come a lost and found where we find the kind of tolerance it takes to rebuild in the face of tragedy, because I’m tired of living in a world that says people only come together when faced with catastrophe.

i want you
to want me
to be the me you see when im free to be the me that got me next to you,
and as for romance? well i want that too.

i wanna fall asleep next to you 100 times a night so i can no you 100 times better before we hit the daylight. and in spite of all of this i also want amnesia, so i can relive each kiss with a perfect newness that leaves me smashed in the arms of rapture. i want the sky to fracture under the impossible weight of an apology, because i’m sorry. i’m sorry that i want so much. i’m sorry that i’ve been using i’m sorry as a crutch to lean on for so long, but if you sing me that song of sweet logic again, then i promise to make the effort to stand on my own.

theres a reason that our hearts are more like a muscle and less like a bone. i’ve known so many people who’ve grown up flexing in front of the mirrors as if falling for their own reflection would be adequate—and that’s bullshit. because we only get from now until the time we go, and if they’ve only got time to love themselves, then no one’s going to be around to hear the sound of their heartbeat echo. so, lady, don’t expect an apology when i tell you i’m only held together by a heart that pumps glue, it’s the strongest muscle in my body… and i’m flexing it for you.

- Shane Koyczan and the Short Story Long

Oh, and this, too:

Brothers & Sisters

In Japan, on a thing like this, you make your own family. Relations of blood get replaced by relations of proximity and of commonality. The only history you can hold onto is the group of people who accompanied you on the plane from home to here, and you find yourself praying to god that at least a couple of the cool ones wind up in your backyard.

I can’t comment what things are like in other prefectures, but on this New-Brunswick-sized northern island of ours the JET family seems pretty tight. Realities of size and space mean that some of us are—at best—distant relatives, but when we all come together for the semi-regular reunions, you wouldn’t know the distance to look at us.

Among all of these people, I’ve been fortunate enough to cling to a few small pieces of home. When we all came over last August, the shallow bits of history I hung onto took the form of Mark and Lindsay, two Toronto JETs (though they’d tell you they’re Georgetown and Mississauga JETs, respectively) who wound up being placed, essentially, in my backyard. For all our common geographic origins, I never thought that we’d wind up being much more than fellow Canadians over here. And yet, here I am, writing about these two as pillars of this experience.

Mark

My first thought when I met Mark at the Toronto orientation, and I found out that he would be placed near me in Hokkaido, was “what a dud.” Between the glasses and the ginger hair, the gangly frame and the weird suit/tie, Mark had “dork” written all over him. At that early point, what verbal interactions I had with Mark failed to sound his true depths, and what I’d seen of his sense of humour left me more confused than anything.

But it wasn’t long before Mark made himself known. I think it went down some time at Tokyo Orientation, when I was forced to share a room with him and Brian from the Toronto group. Victims of the hideous jet lag, Mark and I woke up almost simultaneously at 5am one morning, and when it was clear we weren’t getting back to sleep any time soon, we fell to discussing a shared love for Chrono Trigger, heedless of Brian trying to sleep in the next bed. Throughout the day, our conversation continued and ranged onto other topics, eventually turning to Mark’s university days and the mad, booze-fueled antics he’d gotten up to at the time. Rather quickly, I lost my first impression of Mark as some kind of square, replacing it with an image of him as a wild party animal.

And I think the reason I thought Mark a dud when I first met him in his business duds is that Mark isn’t meant to wear business duds. Mark is better suited by blue jeans, bush jackets, and bandanas. This was a man who had lived and worked for months in the northern reaches of Canada, where us soft, whities of the south often fear to tread. He had become a part of Inuit communities and had drank his way through the midnight hours of neverending days.

Pretty much as soon as he got set up in his high school ALT position over here in Hokkaido, Mark set to work trying to press the limits of the smart business attire demanded by the high schools. He bought hideous skinny ties and scratchy wool cardigans.

The cramped confines of his monkey suit on that first day also hid Mark’s madness. I have heard more “your mom” jokes from Mark—honestly delivered—than from any other source, and this stream of misogynistic filth seems to inspire similar outbursts from me as I try to keep up with Mark.

The lion’s share of the adventures I’ve had in this place, I’ve had with Mark. He seems to be the very definition of “ride or die” as he comes up with new, crazy ideas for adventures daily, and he’s rather good at convincing you that you want to accompany him on them. Mark’s the reason I climbed Rishiri, and Mark’s the reason I fell in love with Shikotsuko. Mark’s been my wingman since before I realized I needed one, and Mark gets a Best Supporting award for one of the loveliest things to yet happen to me out here.

Once I started to get the hang of Mark, one of my first thoughts was “my brother’s going to LOVE this guy.” However, it wasn’t long before I realized that my brother WAS this guy, and this guy was my brother: some strange ginger echo of Craig, as he’d have turned out in some alternate reality. Though they’re different enough to be distinct, Mark and Craig’s areas of overlap are more than a bit unnerving. I guess that’s why it’s not such a stretch for me, now, to call Mark my adoptive Hokkaido brother.

Lindsay

Though I was never blessed with a genetic one, I seem to pick up surrogate sisters wherever I go. I also seem to pick up Linds(a/e)ys. The name, for me, has become a bit of a signpost—a hint or, perhaps, a warning that this person is meant to figure heavily in my life; that, if I’m not careful, this person may just be the end of me.

From fairly early on Lindsay struck me as an echo in my life: when I met her, I felt instantly comfortable with her and I felt a bit like I’d known her before. When I met her at Toronto Pre-Departure Orientation and when we would run into each other at events after it, we always seemed to fall into a kind of chill rhythm with each other. Even as she yakked in a plastic bag next to me on the bus from Keio Plaza to Haneda airport after orientation, and I bought her the Japanese equivalent of Gatorade to hasten her recovery, we were chill.

So, yeah: Lindsay has definitely become my surrogate sister in Hokkaido, but she’s been known to play the part with the hard-nosed, don’t-take-no-shit attitude that one might more accurately expect of a brother. Hell, she has taken to calling me “Princess” when the time comes for us to be out the door, but I’m still busy faffing about.

Though Lindsay might not be as ride-or-die as Mark, she’s definitely a close second. The majority of those adventures I’ve had with Mark have also been adventures I’ve had with Lindsay. When Mark and I scaled Rishiri with our hiking packs and hiking boots and rain gear and extra clothes and emergency food and at least 2L of water, Lindsay made it up with us (and made it down faster than us!) in skater shoes, a school bag containing a couple of onigiri, and a hideous jacket she’d picked up on clearance.

Lindsay can pick up Japanese guys with the deft skill and non-challance of a strapping Gaijin lad picking off giggling Japanese girls, and then she’ll go and surprise me with just how big her heart is when it doesn’t work out. She’ll dress up nice in heels and a dress, only to speak to you in a language written in video games. She’ll make you a card from scratch for your birthday when you all go out to celebrate, and then she’ll drink you under the table. She’s also one of the few people I know who actually reads this blog and seems to like it as much as I do, for which I’m very grateful.

One of the most profound things Lindsay ever told me about her and I and this whole JET experience is that, no matter what happens and who stays for how long and where they wind up along the way, when it’s all over her and I still come from the same place. And, should we ever find ourselves pining away for Japan in distant years, we’ll likely have the benefit of each other to reflect on the wacky foreign experience we shared.

They're fine folks, the both of them, and I look forward to the hijinx we'll get up to in the coming year.