The cafe No Such Thing As Love in Shimokitaesther. A screaming yellow bunker with Bass Ale on tap. Tiny little Gerotan waitresses interrogation with me avoiding eye contact.
Why do I always come here?
Weird women parked at blue little tables, staring blankly out the window-wall and scribbling in almost invisible schedule books. In the northeast quadrant lingers neurotic traumatized Chiaki Kuriyama lookalike. Thin box tryin' of ladies’ cigarettes hover in her orbit, drawn in by a military issue black peacoat draped over slumped shoulders. She could be an ageless 18, 23, 36. The pencil does the evil work of whatever spirit that possesses her: composing double suicide love letters to Kojiro Abe. I can’t imagine what her face would look like with a smile affixed to it, if someone came at her with a hand puppet and a high pitched voice.
Seen on a night walk through Inokashira park: Pink sludge gathering around the rocks in the ink black stream below. The final resting place of all those cherry blossom petals. Pedro Edogawa dumb enough to think his first O-hanami would last forever.
From the pink, into the stink. Enormous half mountains of trash parked in rows for the homeless and crows to fight over. Park after dark: filled with blue tarps, lit by portable butane ovens, punctuated by white Sapporo cans. What must be several hundred people getting shit-faced on a Thursday night. A tent pitched up over by the bridge. Old time photo of a fire department, sitting in stubby little rows: a Godzilla Counter Measures Task Force defending us from Smog Monster insurrection. Matt says they are there mostly to make sure that no one chokes on their own vomit.
The real cops all in Shinjuku now. Funny how the Government of Darkness always tries to fuck with your favorite places, making you miserable-scurry, clutching at new cover. I saw it: half a dozen hosts shaken down by a legion of abunai deka. The sound of the batting cages in Kabuki-cho all that night, like wild animals clubbed to death, timed to the sound of a rusty whistle blown every three balls. So Tokyo stretches north. Yanagi says all the police stations in Ikebukuro have turned into yakitori stands.
I don’t wear the sunglasses anymore, I just don’t. My face has to hide itself. Eyes down. I’m not really here in your cafe for eight hours on a single melon soda. Just a camera set on record, a pair of hands flipping through last week's notebooks. I have my deadlines and hangups, but Weird Chiaki Girl, what keeps you writing in that schedule book of seeming meaning?
Transference. Cafe society because there really is no other choice. Waiting for the Taishomei era to begin again with the days alternating between winter and something like spring. Freud wrote off the human race as trash before he died.
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