'Dreams being the direct impression of an affect, they represent nothing.'

A more vivid dream last night than the usual.

A girl (whom I'll call Genoise) lies face up, hands crossed, on the ground we all (we all who?) sleep on every night. She looks to me as I support myself by my hands to get a better look around, and smiles. Smiles despite the oddness of the situation, the shameless blasphemy the situation renders her individuality, up to now a supposedly unique and irreplicable soul within the expance of humankind. Only a few feet away from her on the other side of me lays a copy, another Genoise. This other of her holds an auspicious air to it, as though it were the expression of an irreconciliable betrayal to physics and sociology, a break in ordinance far surpassing even any resemblance to the nature of twins -- a bug in the realm of the possible. And of course, there is no guarantee that I'm not mistaking the 'real' Genoise for the copy, or vice versa. That's obviously how copies work.

And yet, whether from an unprecendented confidence instilled in me by the former's patient smile or some sort of intuitive sense of order (chronologically, universally), I feel unwavering in supposing who was who. Perhaps it is her disposition toward the essentiality of souls that has some effect on me I am unaware of, but I feel all the more sure that it is because I understand my love (the person and the emotion), a love as it may be that endures through whatever event of these circumstances, wherever love is tested by things that represent, imitate and replicate but ultimately cannot replace, cannot overcome, their predecessors. This love firmly, violently if it must, deters anything that appears foreign to the assemblage it moves (is moved) toward, that it is itself part of, symbiotic (when not parasitic) to. For the first time in my life, I seriously consider the idea that love-in-action is preventative of copies, isolationist, directly opposes the assimilation of copies (unless perhaps they become positively simulated, become simulacra proper). (Which is not to say that love is necessarily monogamous by any means, only that it is a [self-]limiting act, a function of the limit. Love embraces an abundance, an excess, a diversity, of flowers, but it despises plastic replicas.)

Even as I turn to look at Genoise's copy in the face, the original Genoise's smile never fades. She trusts me; she trusts me to be able to recognize the difference and make the correct decision. I have already decided to ask her to marry me (although-- no, precisely because I don't need to. For love, if it's successful in its endurance, is far more able to ward off threats of immitation and replication [replac-ation] than any merely formal legal act of binding.) I aim our trajectory for the moon and prepare to make our great leap together, even while we sit alone beneath the protective branches of pines in the North Woods, caught up in their swaying by the slow breeze, and reciting a foreign alphabet in unison that makes our mouths tickle.

So what does Genoise represent here? Nothing. She is the affect, the embodiment of my experience from a time past of deep love, a God-incarnation (which I guess goes to say that God equals love-kinetic). Who will be the next great affect, I cannot possibly know or expect -- only await. (Perhaps that's where religion fails to fully understand love, love as affect in the coming of something [w]holy other and unidentifiable.) For the time being, this dreamly apparition I saw last night quietly but earnestly obliges me to be patient and simply open to anything.

No thing com-pairs...

to you

「あなたとの関係を終わらせたい」

The beginning to the last conversation.

I don't understand (oh, but I do) how we could go from such sweet and salty memories, like our drive around Nio together, our lunch in the cafe overlooking the sprawling beach of crabs together, our night on the pillow-covered floor watching Jack Lennon's romance film together, a dream of our first apartment together -- two-gether, a sharing.

From that to today, not even a month later, two days after the break up (one day after the break down), me sitting by myself on a hill overlooking more hills, in the back corner of a coffee shop, on a bench at the docks of Takuma writing this, singularly -- al-one , quietly squirming with a part of me open and vulnerable and another part missing,
like the lizards that sleep in the window frames whose tails break off and continue to move separately, somewhere, on their own unforeseeable accord.

Broken (in), I resent knowing that I will find myself later staring blindly out the window, having wandered home to a place for one -- a heart-less home, a non-home -- wondering for now how those savored memories will taste after one more day, and then one more, without
her.

Moondance 06.12.07

This is a cartoon I made two years ago at the height of my dissatisfaction with the Americocentrism of the foreign language departments of the Japanese junior high schools I worked at. Why a Nepalese girl? Well, she was also in the textbook, so....

My journey, 2010

from:Kanonji City, Kagawa, Japan

to:Seoul, South Korea
then to:Kagoshima, Kagoshima City, Japan
then to:Taipei, Taiwan
then to:Hong Kong, China
then to:Phnum Penh, Cambodia
then to:Vietnam
then to:Bhutan
then to:Kathmandu, Nepal
then to:Chang'an, China
then to:Moscow, Russia
then to:Ukraine
then to:Turkey
then to:Athens, Greece
then to:Rome, Italy
then to:Lyon, France
then to:Cork, Ireland
then to:Sydney, Canada
then to:Quebec, Canada
then to:Sudbury, Canada
then to:Duluth, Minnesota, USA
then to:Deadwood, South Dakota, USA
finally to:Seattle, Washington, USA

(See on Google map here.)

A friend has reminded me to pack a lot of underwear.

It's a tentative plan, and likely to change in time. There's no guarantee, for example, that it won't end in Turkey with me flying 'home' straight to Seattle. ...But I doubt it'll happen that way. I need this time -- not for collecting oodles of "cultural capital" or any of that garbage. I need to see what it is that people are doing "out there." What is it that exists "there" that I'm not getting through 64 bits of news media footage through the internet or television. And is it really that different from what's already "here" (read: me).

Better yet: I'm going to see how far I can go without any planes and using only social networking communities like CouchSurfing.com. Being green and not spending green.

To commence next March.