12 March 2017

Chained to the rhythm

The sun is starting to come up earlier behind the house on Victoria Road. I’ve been sleeping better, without waking up to wander around in the middle of the night like I had been in January. This morning though at five fifteen, I woke up naturally, shut off the alarm and looked out into the darkness from our back window, thinking about spring, and the frame of the neighbours old green house that fell down in the storm a couple of weeks ago. There is now no fence between us either — the storm took that as well. I would have been concerned about that when I was thinking of buying this house earlier last month.

On Friday morning, after I dropped Theron off at New Street, I stopped at the Esso station by the university, needing to buy something, although I wasn’t quite sure what. I’d fallen into the trap of eating bread and sugar, and I went in feeling guilty. It was just after five in the morning, and the whole place was full of drunk students. I bought a hobnobs breakfast bar, and a chilled coffee and went to the front, where they have pulled out the self-service machine and forced everyone to interact with the woman behind the till. A drunk student and his girlfriend were buying something and speaking loudly to the cashier: How can you work all night long, I’m so impressed. They were both white, and the cashier was not —  she smiled wearily at them. The back of the leg of the kid's jean had a rip — he went on and on about how amazing it was that this cashier could work all night long.

With some petty Foucauldian archaeology, you can trace back to moments of diversion if you try. For me, the moment of diversion, when that thing became this thing happened in 2008, in March, nine years ago now. I was in Vientiane, in Laos. I had bought a sickle and hammer t-shirt in a market as a joke, after riding over the border from Thailand in a tuk-tuk with some well meaning university-aged backpackers. I was sitting in the back of a van, and someone was driving us to the Lao-American College. We were talking, a bunch of men from the West who were teaching English in Japan and were married to Japanese women. I was talking about the future, about what I was doing and where I might go, moving on to the UK to do my PhD or staying in Japan, teaching and studying by distance. That was the plan that I upended, those three or four weeks in August of 2008 where we packed everything up and just left Shibata and that little job I had at that little university. When Yoko made more money than me and I didn’t worry about much of anything but the future.

I drove home from the Esso station and thought I would do some work, but fell asleep back in our bed, with Yoko and the girls sleeping in the front room. The alarm went off at some point and I kept sleeping, while Yoko and the girls got up and got ready.