Life In Japan: “Let it snow . . . let it snow . . .” | John Rachel

Understandably, with my thousands of friends, millions of acquaintances, uncountable fans and followers, I am overwhelmed with curiosity about the details of my life here in Japan. Here’s one question I’ve gotten . . . well, hmm . . . taking a microscope to the past thirteen or so years . . . I’d say at least three times: “What’s the weather like there?”

Granted, this query might on the surface seem rather superficial. Which if you think about it is where superficial things reside . . . on the surface.

But let’s face it. Weather determines everything from what kind of clothes to wear, to the fecundity of food crops, to maintaining excellent hair styling and make up, to how much Chapstick to pick up at Walgreens, to how much over the speed limit you consider driving. Obviously the challenges generated by weather may not result in very deep, profound philosophical questions about life, the nature of the Universe, the competition between fate and free will, the epistemological trappings of solipsism. But without any doubt, we pay a very high price for not posing the right weather-related questions at the right time, with an abiding passion for uncovering the truth: Should I bring an umbrella? Is my toupée glue waterproof? What’s the difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning? Is that a cumulus cloud or a radioactive mushroom cloud?

I’m not going to get into all of the nuances of weather here. I’ll just say that it’s almost identical to the weather of my last home town in the U.S., that being Portland, Oregon. Keep that in mind and a quick Google search will provide all the weather stats you need.

At the same time, rather than have you leave empty-handed as you mount a demoralized point-and-click escape from this page to surf the latest TikTok videos, pit-stop Facebook to see how many friends deleted you today, tweet Photoshopped pics of Donald Trump naked in bed with Bill Hillary Clinton, or better yet, to Google ‘weather Portland, Oregon’, let me take a minute to share with you a little meteorological joy we’ve experienced over the last couple weeks.

It’s been snowing almost every day!

Yes, this is quite unusual. We typically get snow at most three or four times over the entire course of winter. But it’s really been coming down! Just about every morning, we’ve gotten up and our already beautiful valley is white from one end to the other. Several times it kept on snowing well into the day. Here’s what it looked like . . .

And here . . .

There you have it. Glad you asked?

Stay tuned for more stories from the land of the rising sun!

(If you can handle the excitement.)

[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . https://jdrachel.com ]

Life In Japan: “Let it snow . . . let it snow . . .” | John Rachel

Squeak . . . woof . . . meow . . . tweet

I thought Facebook was a wasteland.  Then I discovered Twitter.
I'm now at over 7,000 tweets and I can't say anything much in my life has changed, except I'm a little older, and perhaps more convinced that the human race is irreversibly beyond redemption. It's increasingly evident that it's just a matter of time before we are overwhelmed by our own irrelevance and dissipate like cigarette ash in a typhoon.

But this is the time of the year to gaze back with weepy sentimentality and try to milk the last twelve months for everything good and wonderful. Thus I will try to look on the bright side of the hundreds of hours I've spent trying to be clever and witty, in order to attract the attention of the ADHD Twitter community.

Not that this justifies the enormous squander, or represents anything like a reward for all of this pointless effort, I will say I have mastered the art of the text bite. After spending all of my life aspiring to both a deep appreciation of and a level of adroitness with my mother tongue, I have traitorously spurned the English language as a tool for profundity, majesty, nuance, beauty, splendor, power, discovery, insight, grace, and learned to say something -- albeit of highly dubious value -- using only 140 characters. I don't know if I should weep and hang my head in shame, or puff up my chest, hook my thumbs in my imaginary blue suspenders, and smile like I've just found out that Hillary Clinton is a man, as I've been saying all along.

Whatever the case, some of my 140 character compositions have done better than others. 'Done' means gained acceptance, even acclaim. So here, based on how many times they were "retweeted" or "favorited", are some of the more popular verbal excretions that I spewed into the swirling torrent of Twitter burble over the past year.

 

PHILOSOPHY, CREATIVITY AND RANDOM HUMOR

To be stupid is forgivable because it's genetic.
To be ignorant is unforgivable because it's self-inflicted.
There are many roads to the truth but they all end up in the same place.
A candid look at a day in the life of a writer.  http://jdrachel.com/?p=5728
Creating memorable characters.  http://jdrachel.com/?p=5765
Writing poetry.  http://jdrachel.com/?p=5797
Canadians are scary!   http://jdrachel.com/?p=927
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." Groucho Marx

POLITICS

Rationalization is the evil step-brother of rationality.
These arrived without my consulting a burning bush.  http://jdrachel.com/?p=5679
Broccoli Is Free Speech and Tractors Are Persons.  http://jdrachel.com/?p=4135
From Bill To Hillary With Love  http://jdrachel.com/?p=4942

"THE MAN WHO LOVED TOO MUCH"

The boycott of my new novel is a 100% success. 
Eat your heart out Marcel Proust. Bleccch! 
No one drowns or is decapitated. 
No diseased spider monkeys. 
In this novel, S&M is a thrift store. 
Water boarding is not surfing. 
No can of beer left behind. 
Detroit…where attitude means survival. 
Stoicism is not the same as a coma. 
No vampire breath spores. 
No faeries or zombie debutantes. 
No injectable transgendering nano-robots.
No neural-net proto-spiders from outer space. 
No secret covens of neo-Nazi Wiccan cheerleaders. 
No self-assembling world-destroying kitchen appliances. 
No Angelina Jolie doppelgängers. 
I actually thought my book was a pile of garbage. 
What is it about men? What is it about women?

"11 - 11 - 11"

I write trivial garbage to clutter the world with nonsense,
Makes great kindling for your Kindle!
Great deal! Only .00001031 cents per word! Less than the price of one of Kim Kardashian’s brain cells.
Unclutter your mind. Pulp fiction as a brain laxative. 

"12 - 12 - 12"

If I get 1,000,000 likes for my video, I win a lifetime supply of kettle corn!
If I get 1,000,000 likes for my video I win two front row seats at a Carly Rae Jepsen concert!
Life is what you make it, with what you can manage to borrow.
Coming to a bathroom wall near you.

"BLINDERS KEEPERS"

Everything makes sense except when it doesn’t.
Even when the cookie crumbles, you can still eat the crumbs.
"Blinders Keepers" is to politics what macrame is to string theory.
The greatest work of literature since Valley of the Dolls! 

"AN UNLIKELY TRUTH"

There is strength in numbers and only weakness in apathy.
Blessed are the blissfully blank.
The fool hears silence where the wise man beholds the roar of an epiphany.  

This is the stuff people thought was worthy of the 7 milliseconds of the time it took for them to point and click their approval?  Granted, some of it is cute.

 

And, like a little kid standing on the coffee table in the living room dancing and mugging in a frenetic attempt to get everyone's attention, I appreciate any pleasant nod in my direction.

But I've arrived at a profound epiphany in terms of social media.

I just don't get it.



[ This originated at the author's personal website . . . http://jdrachel.com ]

Squeak . . . woof . . . meow . . . tweet

Values of the Rich

 

I've always considered it important to thoroughly understand other people, in order at bare minimum to know how to act towards them, but more importantly, to learn to appreciate their values, and see what drives their choices in life.

As a successful blogger __ by golly, I have almost 5,000 Facebook friends! __ many of my closest, most intimate buddies are fabulously wealthy. Predictably, the rich regularly devote the major part of their day to Facebook, and hanging out on other social sites. They don't have to work a real job. They jump online, there's my stunning profile picture, they click 'Add Friend' . . . Bingo! Another billionaire for my growing list of ultra-wealthy connections.

So, despite the holes in my jeans, the t-shirts that I wear __ which look like they've been dragged by an 18-wheeler across twenty-three state lines __ I can offer some very valuable insights into the .01%, the folks who are actually pulling the strings here in America for the puppet show we endearingly call the Land of Opportunity.

The other day I started thinking about the way rich people see the world. I was shocked to realize how much we regular folks have in common with them __ how much the filthy rich value the exact same things we do.

Restraint: The rich are conservative. They are emphatically for restraint! They want us to show restraint so they won't have to. If we regular folks go squandering the nation's wealth on silly and unnecessary frivolities __ like food and clothing, education for our kids, a car which doesn't look like it was in a demolition derby __ there won't be anything left for them to buy a Greek Island or sponsor a coup to overthrow the elected government of a country. And OMG! Have you checked out the price of cosmetic surgery these days? Why, it's simply frightening! Liposuctioning away that unsightly inner tube and getting dermal abrasion from head to toe is cutting deep into the money that was going toward buying those beautiful art works stolen by the Third Reich. How frustrating!

 

Turning the other cheek: The rich definitely believe in turning the other cheek! Let's say there's some homeless bum standing on the curb. What an eyesore! Talk about ruining a nice day, having to look at that. The rich will understandably turn the other cheek, thereby averting their gaze. Now they don't have to look at this poor, hungry slob, who probably was laid off from the factory they shipped to Vietnam. This meets the "letter" of Christ's turn-the-other-cheek mandate, if not strictly His intent. It's all a matter of interpretation anyway. Let the Biblical scholars nitpick the thing to death, if that's what they have to do.

Love thy neighbor as thyself: Absolutely! Of course, they mean their neighbors, not ours. Their neighbors belong to the same private clubs, and are less likely to be infected with some awful STD or Ebola, or whatever. There is even evidence that poverty is contagious. Being anywhere close to any common, low-life losers, why all the hard-earned fortune inherited from daddy could go up in smoke . . . just like that! Better safe than sorry.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you: To be completely candid, the wealthy are as confused about this one as the rest of us.  How do you give a blow job to a woman?  So basically they ignore it.

Whew!

Thinking all these deep thoughts is giving me a headache.

I'll just cut to the chase.

I can sum up the whole ball of wax by just laying out for you what I consider to be the basic ethic __ the defining value system __ of our ultra-wealthy class of aristocrats. Here is the simple, forthright maxim I believe sums up the world view of the ultra-wealthy. By the way, this is from page 92 of my recent book on taking back our democracy . . .

"It's all mine!  Screw everybody else."

Now, reach deep into your hearts, folks, and tell me you haven't felt exactly this same way at some point in your life.

Your mom has just taken away from you a huge bowl of candy you grabbed from the coffee table. The bowl is full of the white chocolate bonbons and caramel squares she has set out for arriving guests. You want them, like really bad! So you start kicking and screaming and throwing a window-rattling tantrum.

"I want it!  It's all mine!

 

There you have it. Just like rich people.

Granted . . . you were only three years old at the time.

But you know the feeling.



[ This originated at the author's personal web site . . . http://jdrachel.com ]