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Going Naked
Although it might seem strange to some people, particularly those with a more conservative upbringing, but right up until I was 14 years old I had absolutely no concept of male prudishness. None whatsoever. I literal had no idea that one man might feel in any way uncomfortable at the thought of being in a state of undress while in the presence of another man. I'd grown up in a world where such an idea simply didn't exist. On the base, my world had consisted of servicemen who had absolutely no inhibitions at all around each other. The showered together, they got changed together, and they had a penchant for skinny-dipping together at every opportunity. Outside of the base, I went to public baths and hot springs where communal male nudity was the norm and I showered in school a after martial arts practice with people who'd had a similar upbringing and therefore were similarly without such inhibitions. Even in compound dwellers in Kyoto, for all their strange ways, never blinked at the thought taking a communal bath in the compound's large bathhouse. In fact, it wasn't until it came to taking a shower after gym; during my first year in an American school, that I even encountered the concept of male prudishness. I remember it quite clearly, if only because it seemed so odd. I walked into the shower block and had just slung my towel onto a peg, so that it wouldn't get wet, when I noticed how few other towels there were. I didn't really pay it much heed, until I rounded the corner into the shower proper and realized why this was. About 90% of my classmates had their towel with them, around their wastes. In fact, there were only about 4 boys in the entire place who weren't showering in a towel. Myself, a boy who I would later come to learn had grown up in an extended family where there were so many brothers to a bedroom and uncles to a bathroom that privacy was almost as alien a concept to him as male-prudishness was to me, and two boys whom I later realized were pretty much showing themselves off (as in, puberty had been been a boon time for them). As I stood there and showered, I noticed a couple of other odd things, too. Not only was everybody wearing a towel, but they were also acting acting rather strangely. There was a massively uncomfortable air amongst my classmates and each and every one of them kept their gaze locked on the wall straight in front of them. They never diverted their eyes, not even for an instant. Even if one of them dropped the shampoo or soap, they wouldn't look down. Some of them would short of crouch crab wise on the floor and grasp around blindly for it rather than divert their eyes from the wall in front of them. While other's would carry on as if there had been no soap or shampoo at all, and would head back into the showers afterwards to retrieve it, rather than simply bend down and pick it up while their classmates were in there. Things continued to be strange even once were out of the shower. On the way out, one of the boys who had been towel-less slapped me across the shoulders and cryptically declared “so the rumors about Asian's aren't true”, to which there was a chorus of uncomfortable laughter (I'm sure you're all familiar with said rumor about Asian men. However, at that age, I wasn't). The coach then made some equally cryptic comment about how we should “just keep counting the tiles” before hushing things down and hurried everybody out so that the next class could start. After that first experience in the school showers I noticed that some of my classmates were behaving slightly differently around me. More apprehensive, more distant. At first I put this down to the events of the class itself (in which I had made a slight seen over the coach referring to my using my Mother's family name, rather than my father's. Which is another story entirely). It was only later on that I learned that they were uncertain what to make of a boy who'd happily showered nude, but who wasn't showing himself off. Thinking back, I really didn't pick up on the whole prudishness thing at all, at least not as anything more than a generically uncomfortable vibe. A couple of people made cryptic comments to me, but I'd only been in America for a couple of months by then and I simply didn't make the connection (I've always been a bit dense in that way), and it wasn't until about three weeks later that I found out what the whole deal was, or even that there was a deal to begin with. One day, just after we'd finished showering the school's soccer coach came up to me and tried to delicately explain that I might want to start shower in a towel. I didn't understand, so he explained it less delicately. I still didn't understand. So he came out with it bluntly. Which rather shocked me. He also told me that there had been complaints from one or two of the parents that I was naked in the same shower as their children. Which shocked me even more. Once I got over the shock I felt a little embarrassed. Not because I'd been naked, but rather because of the thought that other people might see me being naked in any way other than it being perfectly normal and natural. After that I tried showering in a towel for a week or so, but it felt unnatural - Like taking a bath with your clothes on or wearing jeans at a formal event – so I gave up and went on as I'd always done. It honestly felt more embarrassing to shower in a towel than to shower without one. On a slightly different note, was also about that time that I started to become militantly Japanese, and turned against anything American which I felt might have an undue influence on me. Once I entered this phase of my life I put aside all thoughts of conforming with what I saw as American prudishness, and I showered naked for the rest of my time at the school. I did this partly out of spite, but mostly because the only thing about my body that I've ever been embarrassed about in my entire life is the fact that I am quite tall. Which is pretty obvious to everybody whether I am naked or not. |
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9/11 2007
Each year, when 9/11 roles around, my company holds a memorial service for its American employees and any of our American client who happen to be in Japan at the time. Even though I don't consider myself to be American the fact that my Mother is means that I'm permanently on the guest list, and I make a point to going out of respect for those who lost their lives on that day. For the most part, the company memorial ceremony is usually nothing too fancy. A 10-15 minutes of memorial with a basic religious ritual, then a 20 minute buffet and networking session afterwards. All conveniently timed to coincide with lunch. so that employees can meet, greet, and eat, and then be back at our desks without breaking our normal working routine. However, things were a little different this year. However, in 2007 things were a little different. 9/10 I was just finishing up work on September 10th when my manager approached me and asked if I'd heard the news about the memorial ceremony scheduled for the next day. I hadn't so I answered no. At which point he told me that there had been a last minute schedule change. Apparently, the usual memorial had been determined to be too simple for a company of our standing and was therefore being upgraded. Instead of being held in the building at lunch time, the memorial was to be held at a rather expensive hotel, and instead of being a 45 minute affair it was to last the entire morning. We, myself and the other attendees, would be treated to a full length memorial ceremony replete with a cleansing ritual and a eulogy to those who died, followed by a long lunch at the company's expense. Whats more, we need not come into the office before the memorial, and after the lunch was over the rest of the day was our own. We wouldn't' have to make up the hours later on, or take them out of our paid vacation days. Which was almost unheard off in the history of the company. At least for staff of my level. I must admit that I was a little taken aback by this. It was rather unusual for my company to go to such length unless there was a business opportunity involved, and I doubted that even my corporate superiors would have tried to use a 9/11 memorial to shake clients down for more business (after all, that's what the holiday season is for). 9/11 Still expecting an ulterior motive to emerge at any moment, I went along to the memorial ceremony only to find that it was rather good and apparently free from any nasty surprises. It wasn't a sale's pitch for our clients, or even a face gaining display aimed at making them think that we cared a lot more than we did. It was a genuine and respectful ceremony. There was a video presentation of the events of 9/11, a eulogy from a senior leader in the company, a couple of religious ceremonies by priests of various faiths, and a symbolic period of silence. All followed by the kind of meal that one would expect from a 5 star hotel. More than this, throughout the ceremony my fellow employees and myself were treated as guests rather than as organizing staff. Which was a pleasant surprise indeed. 9/12 Still in a slight daze from the events of the 11th; mostly the surprise of finding that the company had no apparent ulterior motives, I went into work as normal on the 12th. Only to find that something wasn't quite right. There was a distinct atmosphere in the office. One which was quite hard to pin down, but which was nevertheless still there. My Japanese colleagues were unusually quiet around me and appeared to be embarrassed about something. My Korean colleagues appeared frosty (well, frostier than normal) while my American and European colleagues were utterly bemused because they were noticing the air, too, but weren't sure why it was their, while my Chinese colleagues appeared to be their normal oblivious selves (a common defense mechanism for anybody who grew up in the Mao/post Mao era; Where noticing things could get you shot). Eventually, my mind having worked my way through all kinds of paranoid scenarios as to exactly what might be going on, I cornered some of my workmates and wrung the story out of them. Apparently, according to the gossip chain at least, the memorial ceremony hadn't been upgraded as a gesture of sympathy, or even as a way of impressing our overseas clients. It had been upgraded to ensure that nobody remotely American was within 10 miles of the office on 9/11 because we were a “security threat”. Security Threat You may or may not remember, but I earlier wrote about my paranoid Korean neighbors whom worked themselves up into a state of paranoia over the prospect of terrorists targeting my apartment block because I lived there, well, apparently, they'd struck again. Apparently, on the 8th an agency representative for our Korean employees had marched into a senior managers offices and had told him that the entire Korean team was going to boycott work if the the company 'put them at risk' by making them work near 'potential terrorist targets' on 9/11. He then produced a letter from a Korean Radio station detailing said station's plans to broadcast interviews from Korean workers in Japan who feel that their companies are making them a terrorist target by employing Americans or making them work near American businesses and military bases. Owing to the fact that we do a lot of business with Korea, and the fact that our Korean employees outnumber our American employees 5-1 (not to mention the fact that having your company badmouthed on Korean radio was bound to be bad for business) the manager relented. Finding this out kind of took the shine off of the memorial event, and made me more than a little angry that the paranoid fears of our Korean staff had won out over both reality and the dignity that befits a memorial to the murder of almost 3,000 people. Of course, having held such a lavish event once, there are quite good odds that the my company will have to do the same again next year, if only to maintain appearances for our clients. |
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Bedtimes
October 1995 - Bedtimes I know that there is a lot to be said in favor of living in a small community like the Midwest town in which I found myself. From my years spent living on the base as a small child, and from the time that I lived in small town America, I can well appreciate the support that a small community can give you, when it comes together to rally around you. However, I have also seen exactly what can happen when such a community rallies around against you. During my time in the Midwest I noticed that, when it came to my increasingly dysfunctional family, there were three kinds of people. There were those who saw what was happening in my family and tried to help Lucy and myself as best they could, there were those who seemed to be utterly blind to our plight, and there were those who came together to mercilessly attack anybody who tried to help my sister and myself if that person dared to disagree with our Mother. Over the years there were quite a few incidents when the local towns people came together, in the face of reason, to defend my Mother and her lifestyle, but the one that I think that I will remember the most, because of its snide viciousness, was the vendetta that was launched against a local school teacher simply because she suggested that our Mother’s children might want to get a little bit more sleep at night. When my sister was six years old she had a new teacher, fresh from wherever it is that teachers in America train to be teachers. She soon began to notice that my sister would often fall asleep in class, and that she spent much of recess sleeping instead of playing. Not wanting to jump in blind, she asked a few questions before saying anything, and quickly found out that it was not just a problem with my sister, but that I also had trouble staying awake in class. This caused her to become slightly worried about the both of us. She then asked a few more questions, this time to Lucy; most of which were answered with, “Because Mamma says so”, she then became a little alarmed. What Lucy’s teacher found out was that, both Lucy and myself, were subsisting on about 6 hours of sleep a night, sometimes less, because we were getting up at 5am; when our Mother got up, and going to bed at 11pm: when our Mother went to bed. Something that is not healthy for a teenager, and is exceedingly bad for somebody of my sister’s age. Needless to say, Lucy’s teacher immediately called a meeting with our Mother, to tell her that her daughter was so tired that she couldn’t keep her eyes open in class, and needless to say, our Mother reacted in exactly the opposite way to any conventional Mother. When my sister arrived at school the next day, with sagging eye lids and a flask of hot coffee, her teacher immediately requested another meeting, only our Mother didn’t go; I did, and from then on our Mother simply sent me along in her place to every subsequent meeting with at Lucy’s school, right up until I left for college. Soon after word got out about the first meeting, and of how a teacher had suggested to a parent that their lifestyle might be harming their children, the town started closed in around Lucy’s teacher. Things began as muttering in the school corridors and quickly became rather nasty rumors being spread among the parents, not just at Lucy’s school, but also at mine, about a bleeding heart teacher who liked to interfere in other people’s lives. It turned out that, in towns like ours, family was considered to be very important, and the one thing that you didn’t do was to tell somebody else how to manage theirs; especially if it meant telling them how to raise their children. Despite the insanity of my Mother’s working hours, and the way that she dictated that we only slept when she slept, people leapt in from all sides to defend our Mother and her lifestyle. They seemingly put aside the irrationality of forcing a 6 year old to get up at five in the morning just because she did, and keeping her awake until eleven at night, for no logical reason, and blindly jumped into the fray. From that point on, nothing that Lucy’s teacher said was good enough. Even when she tried to agree with people, or to back down all together, townsfolk jumped on her as if she were making rampant accusations of cruelty and violence. Thing went even further when Lucy’s teacher suggested that her sleep problem was being exasperated by the after school clubs and sports that she took part in most days, and said that maybe she should do something a bit less energetic instead. Rumors became jostling and jostling became open hostility, and then school politics became involved. Several of our sports teachers and coaches, most of whom, like the gym and the sports fields themselves, were shared between the local schools; because individually they were too small to have full time positions, actually stood up and accused Lucy’s teacher of making unfounded accusation to try to undermine sports and clubs, so that arts and languages could siphon off money from the education budget for themselves; drawing yet more parents into the fight with them. Things reached the stage where the bus drivers refused to let Lucy’s teacher on, and she had to ask what few friends she had left to run errands for her, because local store keepers, many of whom were also parents, simply refused to serve her. Throughout this entire debacle, the one person who should have been at the center of things, our Mother, just carried on as normal. She was barely even aware of what was going on and didn’t really care anyway. She just ignored the teacher’s suggestions and got on with her life, and the townsfolk rallied round in her absence. Such an extreme reaction from the townsfolk might seem strange, especially since our Mother didn’t actually do anything to encourage them, but most of them couldn’t see things in the same way you can. You see, most of the townsfolk saw a very different side of my Mother to the one that you’ve been reading about here. They didn’t see a cold calculating woman who worked every hour under the sun and who controlled her family without any consideration as to what they might want. They saw somebody quite different. To much of the town, our Mother was a hard working single mother trying to hold down a demanding city career while she raised two children far away from the perils of city life. The local men saw our Mother as a crack shot from a patriotic family of service men, and the women saw her as a single mother trying to maintain a family and a career in the wake of a vanishing husband. The weekend men saw our Mother as a hard working female executive who commanded twice the salary that most men could ever make, and the local businessmen saw her as a big spender and a good customer. Our was also a one woman economy, employed somebody to clean the house, somebody to tend the garden, somebody to wash the cars, and somebody to mow the law. She also frequently employed local carpenters, cabinet makers, electricians, and sundry other craft men to improve our already impressive house in a different way on a near weekly basis. In short, our Mother was very popular, and Lucy’s teacher, in so many words, was not. Fortunately, my sister was too young to really understand what was going on at the time and she didn’t really get involved in the argument, even though it was largely about her and for my part, I was largely unaware of what was going on until it escalated, because I was in another school, and because I had become so disillusioned with life in America that I was largely trying to deny that there was a world beyond my bedroom door. I knew that there were rumors and arguments about my Mother’s lifestyle, and that people kept coming up to me and telling me that they were on my Mother’s side, but I didn’t really pay any attention to them. People in America had always come up to me and said strange things like that; I just shrugged it off and ignored them. It was when I was waiting outside Lucy’s classroom, ready to attend another meeting that our Mother was supposed to be going to, that I found out exactly how far things had gone. Somebody who recognized me, but who I didn’t know, stopped next to me and said, “You’ve come to sort the little home wrecker out in person have you, give her a kick in the head from me while you’re in there”. Naturally, this shocked me and I asked Lucy’s teacher exactly what had prompted somebody to say something so harsh. This was when I found out what the local community had been doing to stand up for my family. By the time that I realized what was going on, there was little that I could do to calm things down. I didn’t know half of the people who were involved, and most of the ones that I did know just brushed me off and said that I didn’t have to be courteous when somebody was interfering in my family life, and that they would sort things out for me if I was to polite to do it myself, because much of the town simply thought that I wasn’t getting angry about the issue because I was well mannered and naturally quiet. Of the three groups of people in the town, those who tried to help my sister and myself out when they could kept their heads firmly down. They put in a quiet argument when it was safe but they knew all too well that, if they jumped in to defend the teacher, the town would turn on them too; cutting off any what little they could do to help us when our Mother was not looking. Those in the town who were largely blind to my Mother’s antics, turned out to be the spreaders of the most virulent and vicious gossip, despite being the ones who protested the loudest that you shouldn’t interfere in other people’s business, and those who attacked Lucy’s teacher, you already know about. All in all, the abuse went on for almost a year. Starting in late October, soon after Lucy started her school year, and finally dieing down at the start of the summer break; though some of the rumors would persist in town for a year or two to come. Thing reached their height just before spring break, when somebody slashed the tires on Lucy’s teacher’s car, and the rumor began to circulate that she had been hired by our father to discredit our Mother, so that he could get a more favorable alimony deal. To her credit, Lucy’s teacher stuck out the whispering and the name calling, and ever bore the rumors about her personal life that began to spring up. She finally left the school while I was in college and began working for one of those companies that designs text-books for elementary school pupils, and she still is still working there today. Every since that episode, I have always been far more wary of small towns, and of the small town mentality that can build up. I took extra care in college because of it, and made sure to keep some of my opinions firmly to myself in later life in case they grew out of control; like the simple suggestion that a 6 year old child should get a full night’s sleep. |
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Traveling without moving
August 1995 - Traveling without moving In geographic terms, I was well traveled boy. By the time I was 16 I'd been around the world a couple of times on planes, boats and cruise ships. However in real terms I'd managed to grow up with a rather stunted experience of what life is like in other countries. I knew what other countries should be like but only because I have read about them in books had seen pictures on them on the television, and with the exception of Hawaii and Spain, where my family draws its non Japanese roots, my experience of other countries can be summed up as being like looking at the inside of a plush hotel. Which was exactly where I'd spent much of my time over seas If I hadn’t been well read, and raised in Japan, I might well have grown up thinking that everywhere from Sicily and Paris to Vancouver and Macao was pretty much like one continuous hotel suit where everything was written in English and where every restaurant was part of a chain that served an ethnic variation on the same menu. Why, you might ask, way this so? Well, although our Mother insisted that the family traveled great distances for its holidays, which she arranged up to three times a year, she maintained the same aura of cultural isolation that she built up in Japan, and I rarely got to see much of the places that we visited. We lived in hotel suits, sunbathed by hotel pools and ate in hotel restaurants. If we ever ventured outside the hotel for more than a few minutes it would be on prearranged hotel excursions where we would shuffle off to a famous building or a local scenic spot, stay just long enough to listen to the guided tour and to take a few photographs, before we shuffled back to the hotel or on to the next destination of the tour. The only exceptions to my mother’s rule of not actually coming into contact with the local cultures were Spain and Hawaii, which my Mother treated as her own back yard despite these countries arguably being as foreign to her as they were to me. In the distant past the European side of my family came from Spain, though I have no idea how long ago the left or even of where they lived, and neither does my Mother. All we know of our shared family history is that one day some of my ancestors arrived in Hawaii and settled down to raise a family, letting on nothing more to their children, or to the local population other than they, or their forebears, came from Spain. But this snippet of family history, and my grandfather’s insistence that he was Spanish, was enough for my Mother to claim ownership of Barcelona, which she declared to be our ancestral home, and which she strutted around as if it was her old neighbourhood. More recently though in our history as a family is Hawaii, where both my American grandparents, and thus much of my family were born and raised, except my Mother. My mother has never admitted it to me, and never will, but unlike her brothers she was not born on one of the Hawaiian Islands. Though she has tried to ignore it and even mentally deny it, there is a faded album hidden in my grandmother’s attic showing my Mother in the maternity ward of the Okinawan hospital where she was born. Like myself and my sister, my mother is Japanese; she has full Japanese citizenship and a Japanese passport because my grandfather had a lot of influence and had long ago made sure that, no matter what the fortunes of America were, his family would be able to stay in Japan even if America didn’t. Though my mother treats Hawaii as her home, she was raised in a succession of family complexes across Japan and its islands as my grandparents moved around during the post reconstruction reorganizations, and when my mother was old enough she was sent to live with an aunt in New York state where she was to be sent to a school for officers children. My Mother only visited her brothers and grandparents in Hawaii during the summer and has never actually lived there. My Mother’s cultural personality is a front, and from the way that she acts you would never know that she is as much Polynesian as she is Spanish or that she had never lived in Spain or Hawaii for more than a few months at a time. I suppose that you could say that this lack of personal roots was the reason that my Mother felt that it was so important that I became an America, as America was the only stable home that she has ever known, but this didn’t help very much when it came to saying that I didn’t like it. It was out of this puzzling mixture, where you could choose your heritage based on the experiences of a distant relative or a summer vacation, and where every country is identical except for the name of the hotel restaurant, that I grew up, and as you can see I grew up to be a rather confused little boy. |
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Gadgets
January 1995 - Gadgets Actually, in Japan we tend to live far simpler lives than our American counterparts and, unless they’re ‘cute’, the gadgets seen on the television in America are usually reserved for a few city dwellers and ‘hip teens’. When it came to gadgets, or even electrical appliances, my childhood existence in Japan was very simple even by Japanese measure. Downstairs we had an icebox, an electric whisk, an oven and a vacuum cleaner, and upstairs we had an air conditioning unit. Apart from a couple of telephones and four lights, this was it the sum total of electrical appliances in my home. We didn’t have a computer or a television and we certainly didn’t have a Tricorder or a household robot as many of my American classmates had expected me to have. My Mother felt that we didn’t need anything more, and because neither she nor I actually spent any real time in the apartment, there was little reason for either of us to think otherwise. Unless you counted the time that I spent sleeping, I spent far more time in other people’s homes than my own where I would go to study or to play with my friends my friends somewhere that I could keep a watchful eye on my baby sister (or where I could get a good meal, because other people's mothers tended to like feeding me) and the rest were outside the compound in places that my Mother didn’t even know existed, and it was in these houses, both inside and outside the compound, that in between eating and doing my homework, I would be exposed to home electronics. If I wanted to watch television I had a hundred friends with televisions, and with mothers who insisted on feeding me while I was there, the same went for video games, electric race tracks and all of the other things that we didn’t have at home. In contrast to my life in Kyoto, America would be a time of gadgets, home electronics and more electrical devices than I knew existed. My Mother, the woman who had no need even for an electric hairdryer in Japan, suddenly became a collector of home appliances. She seemed to measure herself by the things that she could own on her high salary that our neighbors either didn’t care for or couldn’t afford. She stacked her office with computers, scanners, fax machines, and even a video conferencing suite. If a faster computer came out, then she had to have it, if a bigger VDU came out, then she would buy it, and if somebody combined the telephone, fax and Xerox that she already owned into a single machine, then she wanted one regardless of whether or not she actually needed it. The same phenomenon of technological overkill that was at work in my Mother’s study was also evident in the family room, and the day that the rear projection screen television arrived I sat and stared as the men connected this behemoth of a television up to eleven speaker, inside, while another man dug the footings for the largest home satellite dish that I had ever seen, outside. I also sat and stared when the wide screen rear projection television arrived to replace the old rear projection screen television, and as eleven speakers was increased to about fifteen speakers and three sub woofers. By the late nineties our entire house was rigged for remote control. We could adjust the ambient light level in almost every room using a little white controller with a touch screen. We could turn electric outlets on an off from the other side of the room and set the entire house to come alive with a network of timers programmed from any one of the computers on our own local area computer network. It was far more like the house that people seemed to expect that we'd lived in in Japan than our actual apartment in Japan ever was. Even though I still walked up to the air conditioner to turn it on or to a light switch to turn it off, rather than spending five minutes hunting for the remote control, I was not immune to the draw of technology. Connected to the back of the giant television, first through a jumble of wires, and then though a wireless sender, were all four of my game consoles, the old video camera that I had forgotten about when I was given a new one that I could plug straight into my digital editing deck, and the sound system that I only ever used when my Mother was out of the house and couldn’t hear me playing Japanese music. On starting work at Hank Grey’s computer store my cupboards soon became filled with electronic gizmos that had been sent as product samples or were old stock that we couldn’t sell. And unlike my Mother who, simply brought a new computer every year, I had crammed my computer’s desktop case so full of extras that I eventually had to by a bigger case just to fit everything in. And when I had put in so many gadgets that my computer radiated the same amount of heat as a fan heater, I custom built a cooler for it out of parts cannibalized from commercial coolers that weren’t cool enough. And when I had cooled my computer, I sound proofed it, put blue neon lights in it, and then cut a Perspex viewing window into the side so that I could look at all of the high performance parts that I had put into it. My Mother collected new technology because she was showing off, she wanted all of the other ‘weekend men’ in town to know that she was the queen and to let all of the farmers know that she spent more each year on junk than they did on running their farms. If she brought something it had to be sleeker and smaller or bigger and bolder, and have more MHz per millimeter than anybody else’s gizmos. I collected these things because I was compensating for the lack of emotional attachments in my life and because I was hiding from the world behind an electronic comforter. I was allowed, even encouraged, to have a mountain of home electronics, so I did. But it didn’t make me happy My friends played on my Game Boy more than I did, and then on my Sega handheld, and between them, my friends used up more batteries in my Discman than I did. And we almost certainly had television channels that I have never watched. Technology simply helped to fuel my retreat from the world. |
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Conservatives, Liberals....and mad dogs
Conservatives, Liberals....and mad dogs (1996) Having spent the better part of teenage years living in a small Midwestern town; somewhere out past the boondocks, I have long had a familiarity with the well known killjoy that is the All-American-Conservative. Indeed, I have encountered them, and come to blows with them (usually verbally, sometimes physically), on many an occasion. Throughout that part of my life, the part that I spent in the Midwest, I generally considered said conservative to be the polar opposite from normal. A breed of man (and often woman, too) whom could find vulgarity in purity, whom saw egalitarianism as being a plot destroy their way and quality of life, and whom saw the first amendment as giving them the constitutional right to try and impose their views on the rest of society. However, for all those years, it never once occurred to me that they normalcy was actually a middle ground and that there was something on the other side of it that was actually the polar opposite of the All-American-Conservative. This was until I went to college; at which time I encountered my very first extremist liberals. Contradictions I know that it might sound a contradiction in term, to be both liberal and an extremist, but I can't think of any better way to describe somebody who takes what might be seen as a liberal view and then tries to aggressively force it on somebody else - whether they liked it or not - in much the same way as your typical conservative extremist. Back in the Midwest, I'd known conservatives who believed that sex before marriage was morally wrong, that vegetarians, homosexuals and people who persisted in voting Democrat needed more iron in their diet (or a good kick in the backside), and that gun control advocates were asking to be shot if they walk around all day "undefended". In college, however I was introduced to their opposite numbers. Liberals whom believed that marriage should be banned, that the entire world should be forced to be vegetarian (or even vegan), and that gun owners were murderers by proxy and deserved to be shot, and who, disturbingly, and sometimes felt so included to firebomb wedding chapels, steak restaurants, and gun stores, in order to further their aims. Seriously, it was rather disturbing. Within a couple of months of moving on to campus I'd been told, by various pamphlet wielding class-men and women, that my ownership of a rifle (my Mother's choice, not mine, I might add) meant that I was partially responsible for X hundred child firearms deaths per year, and that there was nothing wrong with posting pictures of store owners' children on the internet (along with details of where they went to school and which little league teams they played in) if they sold steak or fur garments. I'd also been invited to help a groups to break into a boutique that sold Mexican cosmetics that were suspected of having been trialled on animals, and had been cordially asked to join no less than three group whose goals were to overthrow the American government (one by violence, two by subversion) and to replace it with something approaching a dictatorial communist state. Flipside Strangely, or perhaps not, while most of these people seemed to be the polar opposite of the Conservatives whom I had known - with each group, more or less, standing for all that the other hated - they had a lot in common. The all believed that their chosen way of life was the only valid one, that the other party either broke the rules - which was wrong - or that the rules were wrong, but that it was OK for them to break them because right/morality was on their side, and they completely and utterly refused to concede that the other party might have any valid arguments whatsoever (the way that they twisted statistics was horrible to watch. They could take anything and use it to mean anything else). Encounter For the most part, my encounters with such people were limited to me hurriedly walking past their stalls or trying to avoid people proffering pamphlets. On a few occasions, I managed to get myself drawn into confrontations with them, usually when I happened across them in civilian garb (without their placards) and had casually voiced an opinion that was contrary to their own (for example, that there was something not quite right using faked statistics to persuade self-conscious teenage girls that the reason that they didn't look like the centerfolds was because they weren't vegan enough, or telling equally self-conscious teenage boys that eating meat would stunt the growth of their penises). However, once or twice, I managed to get drawn into an altercation simply by being near these people, and not being like them. Of the latter such occasions, one that I remember the most occurred late one fall, just after I'd started my first year in college. It was a weekend and I was on a brief getaway with my then girlfriend to the home town of my roommate. As we explored, looking for somewhere quiet to have lunch, we came across a small group of extremist vegans, about a dozen or so people, protesting outside a local restaurant because of its veal menu. Not wanting to get involved we set our selves to walk past on the other side of the street, and not to give the protectors a second glance. Under most circumstances there wouldn't be much more to say about events, I would have passed by unnoticed; Just another face in the crowd of slightly bemused onlookers. Unfortunately for me I happened to be sporting exactly the wrong kind of attire to go unnoticed. To be precise, I was wearing a leather jacket. Not just any leather jacket, but a duster-style trench coast. Even in the best of circumstances this would equal a lot of leather, but I'm unusually tall (even by American standards) and my jacket was ankle length and double lined, which meant that I was wearing about three cows worth of hide *. Thus, I was an immediately targeted. It happened so suddenly, and was so unexpected, that it took me several seconds to catch on to what had just happened, and I stood there like an idiot as chaos erupted around me. One minute I was walking along quite happily, the next I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye; somebody breaking from the demonstration and running towards me with a bucket in their hand. This was immediately followed by that odd sensation that you get when you're eyes are telling something but your mind isn't quite prepared to accept it and is still asking questions. Fortunately, my natural instincts kicked in while my mind was still trying to figure out what was going on, and I spun backwards just in time to see a wall of oily brown liquid sailing in front of my eyes. Some of which splatter over me, revealing itself (upon olfactory exposure) to be a choice mixture of animal blood, fish entrails, and (for flavor) urine. Yes, you are reading this correctly. A vegan protester tried to do to me what they like to window displays. I was less than pleased. Had I taken the full bucket-load, I'd probably have gone ballistic, and might well have shown them just how nasty an enraged omnivore can get. However, while most of the bucket's contents had missed me, and while I stayed relatively calm, the same couldn't not be said for my companion. She'd had been walking beside me at the time, and hadn't been as fast a mover as myself. Thus, she'd had taken the brunt of the effluents square in the chest. Put simply, she was coated from head to toe. It wasn't a pretty sight, and the stench was something terrible. She stood there for a hand fully of seconds, her arms by her sides and her fists clenching and unclenching rhythmically as foul smelling slurry dripped from her clothes and hair. If she had been a cartoon character her face would have been twitching and steam would probably have been coming out of her ears. She stood there, like this, for a couple of seconds, as the tensions rose. Then, without so much as a warning cry, she went off like a pipe bomb; charging forward and tearing into the demonstrators far more effectively than could be achieved by any mere explosive device. It was a rather impressive sight. A little scary, too. She felled the first vegan with back fist to the jaw, Kicked the second one hard in the groin and the chest before felling him too with vicious handbag to the back of the head. Then she went for a third vegan (the bucket holder); first raking her nails down the side of the unfortunate girl's face, then wrapping her hands around her throat in an effort to choke the life out of her. It took four people to haul her off, and even then the haulers came away with a nasty collection of cuts and bruises for their efforts. By comparison, most of my past outbursts seemed little more than temper tantrums. I might have kicked the occasional person somewhere nasty, or twisted the occasional arm, but I'd never had to be dragged kicking and screaming off of somebody's throat. Or tried to claw my way back towards said throat for another go after having been removed from it for a second time. Needless to say the extent of the commotion was such that the police were quickly on the scene. In fact, they'd been sitting in a squad car across the street when it had happened; keeping a quiet eye on the demonstration in case of such an eventuality. Upon their arrival (which was rather slow, given that they were only across the street) They took one look at my companion; covered in a mixture of blood (both human and animal) and filth, with a look of pure murder in her eyes, and one look at the protectors; Also covered in blood (mostly their own), with looks of confusion and terror in their eyes. Then they promptly arrested the latter for assault and disturbing the peace. which probably says a lot about their view of extremist vegans. Of course, this event was the exception rather than the rule. Still it, and my many other campus encounters, certainly were an eye opener. They were also rather educational, and taught me three very important lessons in life. 1) The Midwest is not representative of the whole of America, 2) That people who sincerely believe that their cause is righteous enough to justify misrepresentations, acts of vandalism, and other extremist behavior exist on both sides of the divide, and are just as crazy as one another despite their differing views. 3) That long fingernails can do a serious amount of damage. * It had been handmade made for me as a gift by a local farmer and his daughter and I am very attached to it. In fact it cleaned up rather nicely and I still wear it regularly today. |
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Blueberry Muffins
Blueberry Muffins (December 1994) While my first few year in Midwest were less than auspicious, and lead me to develop to dislike America and most things America on general principle,there were some aspects of my new surroundings that weren't quite so bad. Particularly those involving blueberries. Despite having spent the first 14 or so years of my life living amongst American ex-pats my experience of Western food was very limited when I arrived in America. For the first 9 years of my life I spent more time with my Japanese grandparents than my own parents, and I ate more meals with them too. After that my general desire not to be in the Kyoto compound generally meant that I didn't eat there either (My Mother wouldn't have cooked, even i was there, she simply wasn't that kind of woman), and that I instead lived off of a mixture of food that I purchased from street vendors and train stations, or which was cooked by the mothers of my school friends (most of whom I was closer to than my own Mother, which says a lot about how defunct our relationship was even at that time). I'd eaten burgers and fries, the occasional pizza, and a couple of variations on roasted meat and vegetables, but not much more than that. This was until I moved to America and discovered blueberry muffins. Owing to my mother’s insistence that the entire family had to get up at the same time that she got up, which was criminally early, I generally had a lot of free time in the mornings before school, and I had a much longer wait between breakfast and lunch than most other people, so I often used this time to have another breakfast. This is where blueberry muffins came in. Soon after we arrived in town most of the local residents figured out that, by adding our house onto the school bus route, everybody would have to get up at least fifteen minutes earlier to get to school on time. This caused some rather loud complaints, particularly in the winter, none of which my mother listened to, but which one of the local residents did. In her neighborly way she decided that, since she worked three mornings a week in one of the local stores, and since she had to pass by our house to get to work, she might as well offer me a lift to school, and Lucy a lift to wherever it was that she was going at that particular age, without telling our Mother about it. This meant that, three days a week, we didn’t tie up the school bus, but also that we arrived in town too early for school, but early enough to have breakfast again in the local diner, which served blueberry muffins. While having a regular supply of muffins made me a very happy boy, it infuriated my Mother. Despite working a desk job, my Mother was extremely fit, and I mean in the same way that a professional athlete is extremely fit, and she liked her health food. She also liked me to eat like a professional athlete because it added to my fitness for martial arts. Blueberry muffins, however, are certainly not health food. What they are though is all American. My Mother could never stop me from them; not without defying her drive to make me more American. This infuriated her, which of course meant that I also took every opportunity to eat them, whether she knew about it or not. Whenever we ate breakfast together in the diner, which was actually quite often because of our weekend routine, or whenever we were in any other place that severed blueberry muffins, I made sure to order them. I even made sure to sit very close to the poster in the local diner that had the American flag on it and the words “All America” emblazoned above a picture of a blueberry muffin. It almost made steam come out of my mother’s ears to see her son, the martial art expert, eating a muffin filled with fat, sugar, and who knows what else, in place of a healthy breakfast. This made the experience all the more rewarding for me and more than made up for a lot of the other things that I had to put up with at that time. |
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