The major pastime in Tokyo, as I’m sure you can guess, is shopping. It’s the perfect thing to do on a date, because it takes the pressure off conversation. Across an aisle, over a display stand, your eyes meet, and you smile, and you begin the process of falling in love. 
I have one friend who I have gone shopping with many times. Often, at the point of purchase, she takes my cash, and pays with her credit card instead, because she gets points. I always wondered what she got with these points, and I couldn’t believe it when she showed me the catalogue. After all these times using her credit card, she gets to choose between a corkscrew, a pouch, or tupperware, as her 1999 gift from the credit card company. I nearly died laughing, nearly cried from laughing too hard. And so while she ordered in her choice on a pay phone, I leaned against the next phone over in the busiest train station in the world, feeling like I was in a movie I always wanted to be in, my own. 
I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s actually nothing to do in Tokyo, but shop. Spending money is like breathing here. Money circulates. It gets around. Fortunately, the shopping’s pretty incredible. Tokyo seems to break down into different districts which specialize in their own product. There’s Akihabara for electronics, Asakusa for Japanese traditional items, and of course Kabukicho for soiled underwear and other garments of Tokyo legend. My favorite area is Ochanamizu. There’s about two blocks with music equipment stores stacked one on top of the other. Then, there’s about four blocks of snowboard stores. No joke. I swear there are more snowboards on this block than there are in Canada. Finally, there’s a neighborhood of used bookstores. Apparently, there used to be a university near here, so these are used bookstores that are really old. I thought I’d look for a bargain paperback, but this was stuff for collectors, serious collectors – early 20th century editions, like an original copy of Oscar Wilde’s Salome in a glass case. What was strange is that I was all alone in most of these stores. And I wondered who in Tokyo could possibly be interested in these obscure books. Nobody even reads Somerset Maugham anymore.
 In the same district, there’s a used CD store named Disk Union. This particular locations is about 5 floors. But it’s not like the Tower, in which the whole building is a Tower building. This is more like a regular building with separated rooms intended for different stores, but instead every room is Disk Union. I went to the second floor for reggae, but ended up in a room filled with bluegrass, and was directed across the hall to the reggae room. This is the first store I’ve been in with a used Tango section. 
Somewhere in Ochanamizu, I’ve heard about a CD rental store, where you can get Bjork bootlegs and other obscure recordings. I’m getting an 8track and a CD burner next week, and I may never buy another CD in my life.

A few nights ago, I visited a British friend. On our way back to his place, he picked up a used record player at a junk shop. All it needed was a needle change, but before I knew it we had the whole turntable arm in pieces. After much fucking about, we got the record player going, but at a very low volume. If nothing else, it would be a good decoration, I thought, as I watched a green slab of volume spinning around peacefully. Vinyl’s a pain, but it’s got a future. Vinyl’s got wa, it’s got inner life qualities. Original editions matter. But as far as CDs our concerned, a burned copy is as good as the original.



(The Strange Dreams A Traveler Has … continued … This was written from 3:55 AM to 4:20 AM in my bedside notebook.) By candlelight, I’ll try to recall some details. So much of what I dreamt is inexpressible, hyper-dimensional — these bits of pieces of image left in my mind seem to travel in flashes, and though the images are still fresh, they don’t even seem to belong to a dream narrative. And again, as I have before, I ask, is it possible that we dream more than one dream at the same time? Maybe we dream in different channels and perhaps sometimes these channels collapse into one another. 
So, a friend and I were walking in an underground network of passages, not unlike the kind of web I walk through in Tokyo everyday. My friend was smoking the strangest brand of cigarettes – they seemed to come from the pockets of a surfer – there were bits of sand in the pack, and the cigarette tubes all seemed to have the appearance of having been wet and then dried. I grabbed a cigarette, but as is my custom, I suggested we find a better place to smoke in the open air. I guided him out of one of the many possible exits, insisting I knew a good one. We emerged from the exit to such a wonderful sight – across the small street, not more than 40 feet away, waves were crashing against the rocks and we stood in the seaspray. The waves were so strong – it seemed an ordinary day, judging by the skies and the feeling in the air, but the waves were spilling over onto the highway. Above and behind us, there was a steep bank. And during high tide, I got the impression that the ocean would rise up this bank, placing the road 20 or 30 feet under water. Now, the strangest thing, the reason I’m telling you about this dream (cause it’s true that most dreams are unremarkable enough that they’re not worth further discussion) – water creatures could be seen swimming through the air, as if they had not caught up to the tide, as if the low tide had left them behind. And then, I, myself, was able to float in this air that seemed to be haunted by the memory of being water to the point that it exhibited the same properties. I had to kick my legs to get back down to the level of the road, which was by now mostly covered with water and sand, since the tide seemed to be rising. If I stretched my body horizontally, I floated upwards, hovering at the same level as the top of the bank — I guess you could say, it was the surface at which air meets air. A girl, a fellow traveler in this strange scene, panicked because a strange sea creature got caught in her hair. And how strange this creature was – about the same diameter as a plum, it seemed to be a hybrid of a furry spider and an octopus. But a surfer I barely remember speaking to later in the dream insisted it was quite common for these creatures to get in your hair, and that they were in fact quite harmless.
 And now fortunately after 30 minutes of writing and straining to remember, I have faithfully recounted the contents of the dream. And now I excuse myself to return to sleep, though incredibly hungry. I’ll wake up again in 5 hours, and instead of exiting sleep and ending up near an ocean, I’ll simply be in the same place as usual, and bravely I’ll have to face everyday life, the scariest thing of all. 


Nothing is strong enough to come between me and my present reality. I cannot concentrate long on any book, any movie, any music. In fact, I haven’t seen a complete movie for over 5 months now. I’m so deep into this Tokyo existence that I cannot for a moment separate myself from it. But, I’m separate from Tokyo itself, a foreigner outside enough that I’m outside of any culture. I’ve been from floating in my own separate realm of thought. New levels of introspection. A kind of solitude I’ve not previously known. I am unable to reach that willing state of disbelief in which the pleasure of art for many lies. Escapism is not an option. And any art of the in-your-face variety seems more like an intrusion into my personal ego space, these days. Wherever I go, I cannot leave the present behind. But it’s an eternal present, a timeless present – the past and future have collapsed. Time’s off its track. The clock ticks in ways unknown. Every sentence I reads ends not with a period, but rather with a space, a space that I stare deeply into for a moment long enough to forget what I have just read. 
For better or for worse, life seems to have become an extended dream. Dreams are neither good nor bad. Things just happen. But whatever happens in a dream, I never find myself reading anything or listening to any music or watching any movies. Everything just evaporates and transforms, melts into air. 
In the Fall of 1998, I watched about 25 movies during two weeks of the Vancouver Festival. I have documented my feelings on this in the introduction to the recent Space Age Bachelor. I would document them further, but it would be at the risk of plagiarizing myself. Since that Festival, it’s been difficult for me to watch movies. I’ve only seen just a few in the theatre since then. I developed a bad habit of getting movies from the public library, and either not watching them or not finishing them, and then having to pay late charges on them. I still owe various libraries money for fines uncollected. 
In the early Winter of 1999, I was excited because there was a run of movies by the Taiwanese director Edward Yang at a Vancouver cinemateque. From the movie I saw, I recall the classic line, “We plant bombs in each other. These bombs are still ticking.” But otherwise the movie, whose title I cannot remember, well, how do I explain my feelings watching it? I couldn’t stand its silences. It seemed to say nothing to me about my life, but rather it multiplied the loneliness I felt in the dark theatre, as if it was moving on a feedback loop. Forty minutes into the movie, in a dark apartment room, a woman, alone, puts on a 7 inch. The camera catches the turntable, and the lovely sound of “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” fills the cinema and the director wisely allows the song to play for its duration. And such a feeling of peace sweeps over me. And I want this feeling to stay. And so I left the theatre, and never saw the end, and never saw the next movie on the double bill. And fortunately I was alone.

(The Strange Dreams A Traveler Has) I’m in this indoor complex with murals of a golf course all around paintings of people finishing the 18th hole on one big wall. On another broad wall, is the 7th hole (I don’t know why I know it is the 7th hole), and a still life of a guy playing a shot out of a sand trap. A female golfer is pictured wearing a yellow v-neck sweater, with her brown hair flowing out of the top of her golf visor. She has a great suntan from a summer spent golfing. As for me, I am putting on an artificial putting green. I am not alone. Behind me, in the middle of the room are white plastic lawn chairs, which spread out from the snack bar/clubhouse beyond. The only vegetation is a vast collection of potted plants. My mind’s eye drifts into one of the potted plants. The dream evolves. The indoor golfing facility is forgotten. And I’m leafing through the pages of a photo book featuring exotic and beautiful women photographed amidst lush vegetation and the breaking waves of the South Pacific. It’s no longer a photo book. The pictures are moving.