The Music had Gotten Louder

I stood or a while.  I watched the three men beside me, sitting, talking.  They looked weathered but a step above homeless for sure.  Then to my left I noticed that there was a reason why there was an ambulance with lights on beside me.  What appeared to be an older woman was brought out from the south gate to Shinjuku Station on a stretcher.  I’m sure the woman headed out on a normal day and didn’t expect to collapse.  How long, John . . . how long before its your turn to fall and require help?

It’s a bright, beautiful spring day in Tokyo Even on a Saturday, perhaps precisely on a Saturday, people put on quite a show.  A casual show, a fancy show, a thrash show, a princess show.  I seem to recall being here  in this city in 1994 or so and digging it immensely, of course.  I walked around the circumference of Shinjuku and found it unwieldy and tremendous.  This side is the more corporate side of the sprawl, here at the south gate.  It must be north and east that is the Time Square, salary-man warren.

Life isn’t long enough to live in every city you’d like to, to learn every language you ought to.  But I would do this one.  The Japanese language is only really useful in Japan, I suppose like German or Italian.  Failed nineteenth century empires all had linguistic rollback.  But in this case you’d certainly get a population at least the size of the other two combined to chat with.

I didn’t think I’d have a chance to write a full four paragraphs, but my step son is uncharacteristically late.  I think they were assuming that I would be late and picked and factored the real time as something out in the future.   Here he is. 

And we went to the Louisiana Crab restaurant where they dump food on the table, and lump starch from carts on to your table , and encourage you to eat with your hands.   The music is loud sand the wait staff is perky in the extreme While I was in the bathroom, I noticed that the music had gotten louder.  Returning to the restaurant we could confirm that the music had indeed been turned up to something thunderous and all the staff were dancing about in unified dance steps.

It occurred to me that it would be a bit of salacious fun to jump around with the wait staff in mock dance euphoria, slip one of their shirts on and run from table to table smiling and shoving the heaps of food on every table on to the laps of the diners, skipping, shoving, smiling turning and then waltzing right out of the restaurant and then quickly off into a cab before the mob could form to chase me. 

Saturday, 4/29/17