yuzu peel, like the peel of lemons from frontyards in los angeles and various crispers ive become familiar with
just like lemons from home but stronger,
they were given to me by a student, with a bottle of local sake made by her friend, wrapped in newspaper.

i cut it on the old wood board in our kitchen in small one inch - no centimeter its centimeter liter gram here- strips, dropped into the teapot with shaking hands -

fuck, i need to get some toyu (read: kerosene) for that damn heater yet, damn i need some kerosene damn i need some heat
damn i need some

damn i need some



need some what ?

did i come all the way over here for -

for that?



as usual - where the fuck am i? this isnt the middle east. this still isnt the middle east.

i look up. wood walls. abandoned house. greaseboard with various american and japanese idioms scrawled on it.

--


Here we are again - again, the numbers adding up every day in some kind of off order. The Thai girl in New York trying to get me to sell her plastic coasters from her bangkok factory to the Japanese equivalent of the Pottery Barn, since I am up and running there soon. Her name is Nantanee, she has a daughter and a failed marriage and an MBA and yet shes working as a waitress and her Visa is dying and shes sitting across from me in Bryant Park and she is saying to me -

"Cem, this is life, dont have to ask why you are going to Japan, just go."


--


Ride the trains. Ride the trains - watch the boys and girls - eyes locked onto their mobile phones - sway to the shape of the tracks. They are so quiet. See the boys dressed in the Prussian uniforms that their great grandfather thought would encourage discipline; the girls in their impossibly appealing sailor outfits; the salarymen flipping through comics with schoolgirls on the cover and school girls tied inside; watch the impossibly beautiful women, graceful and ashen and polished and so well put together - watch them stand in twos; listen:

"Oogaki. Oogaki des."

Ride the trains. This is life. Just go.