Rainy Tokyo Walkthrough Blues

Rain falls on the screen-lit streets of Tokyo. Cars pass the flashing storefronts. Billboard trucks, illuminated from within, trundle by. Lanterns cast their glow over scooters parked in alleys. People, sheltering under mostly transparent umbrellas, ignore each other except as noticing them is necessary to dodge and weave around other pedestrians. I watch the video and wonder where everyone could be going.

These walkthroughs are apparently popular on YouTube, where my boss downloads them for us to play on one of the in-house TV channels that my coworkers and I program and maintain. We've shown forest walkthroughs, downtown walkthroughs, lakeside walkthroughs, desert walkthroughs, park walkthroughs, beach walkthroughs.... Whether one exists I can't be sure, but about the only kind we haven't shown is a space walkthrough.

Seoul, South Korea, on a quiet snowy evening, was one of our most popular. It's been requested by several different people to replay since we first broadcast it last year on Relax. Relax is the channel where we show all of this type of content. (All of our channels have an X in their names, a tradition I claim to have started but the groundwork for which can technically be said to have been lain before I ever came to work at XSTREAM.) Some of the other things that play twenty-four hours a day on Relax include landscape flyovers, trippy fractal patterns, outer space photography, steaming cups of tea, nature footage, closeups of burning incense, and vacant jazz coffeehouses. We try to keep things varied. Walkthrough videos are probably a lot more popular where I live — in prison — than in society at large. At least out there you (theoretically) have the option to visit another place whenever you choose to do so. My options are more limited. Glimpses of the outside world, such as those offered by walkthrough videos, can be as refreshing as they can be melancholy. As I observe the people on Tokyo's wet streets, I also observe myself and consider the nature of my watching. Am I watching because Tokyo has been on my bucket list forever? Am I watching because of all the pretty colors? Am I watching because I miss the unique type of human contact that only takes place in a crowded metropolis? No matter what the specific reason, I recognize my watching as a symptom of WITBO — wishing it to be otherwise. Rainy Tokyo Walkthrough caught my eye because I'm dissatisfied with my current situation. I wish for something other than what is. I wish here and now to be there and then. Can you blame me? Part of Buddhist practice involves cultivating contentment and equanimity. For all my personal and spiritual development, for all the comments people make about my so-called enlightened state, I doubt I'm anywhere near Nirvana. I watch videos of nighttime in a Japanese city and dream of the sound my shoes would make splashing along its crowded crosswalks. I fantasize about the food offered in its intimate little restaurants. I ogle its huge billboard advertisements. I'm a prisoner of not only the state but of the masochistic workings of my own human mind.

The best thing to do is turn off the TV and turn inward, to sit awhile with the ember that is my humanity, let it smolder, let its smoke sting my eyes, let it slowly, at a pace impossible for me to measure or even conceive, exhaust itself.

Thriving

I do a lot: President of the Speak Easy Gavel Club; head of the prison media center (aka XSTREAM); host of Real Talk, a televised forum about issues affecting imprisoned people; showrunner for several regular TV series; producer of a daily news broadcast; events coordinator for monthly speaking engagements, graduation ceremonies, and concerts; liaison for the ERDCC book club; and more.

Day to day, I fill several roles that demand a high level of performance brought to life's little stage. There's showmanship in what I do, but I'm really using the word "performance" here to mean "engagement" — attentive dedication to a task.

I make time to breathe. I do stretches in the morning, before leaping down from the upper bunk, because I know the day won't afford time to do them later. Moving forward, I keep a natural pace. I try not to rush. Sometimes I even dawdle. But my time is limited and other people's needs are frequently great, so discernment is required. You have to recognize the difference between a necessary pause and a waste of time. Amid the passing of hours, I weigh every moment, then lean as close as physically and psychologically possible in the direction that keeps me most balanced. The key is not to tip over. People think I do a good job of staying on an even keel. There was a time when ANNOYED was my default mode when interfacing with the world, so its fascinating to me that I'm now regarded as a chill dude. "I never see you look annoyed," an acquaintance said to me last week. A lot of the time I'm just too busy to be irritated. When you operate on a higher plane because some driving purpose compels you forward, there's no incentive to get lost in the weeds, obsessing about tetchy details. You literally can't be bothered with little shit when all your concerns relate to matters of sizeable significance.

I started this post to kind of talk through the awe that I sometimes feel at how busy I am. Sometimes I ask myself if I'm a workaholic. As long as I can continue to answer "no" to that question, I figure I'm good. It's just that I get to fulfill so many useful purposes through my job, to be creative, to exercise some agency during my life of confinement, and to make money on top of it all. May I be forgiven if I like these things too much.

Four Books I Read This Winter

Without the book club that I joined last year, this and the previous post about my reading habits would probably be shorter. We used to meet biweekly. Since December, to accommodate the professor's teaching schedule, our meetings went monthly. I read at the same pace, but now I eagerly anticipate the second Wednesday of the month.

Our club's selection this go-round was actually one that I suggested. I'd wanted for several years to read Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison's novel about the identity and status of a black man in a society that only sees in him what they find personally or ideologically expedient. The other members of the club assented, and Saint Louis University bought enough copies of the book to supply our needs and then some.

From its opening pages to its harrowing epilogue, satire, symbolism, and seething anger suffuse Invisible Man. In between, the unnamed narrator recounts the long series of ordeals he's endured at the hands of people who seem to have more control over his life than he himself does. The man is villainized, fetishized, and bullied at every turn, and only in the final scenes does he come to a crucial realization and act in his own best interests. The book was written in the early 1950s but remains relevant. It fueled long, trenchant conversations with my fellow book clubbers and made for an enriching, eye-opening read. At several points in my literary travels over the years, I encountered references to a highly regarded work of social criticism, Amusing Ourselves to Death, written in the early '80s by a man by the name of Neil Postman. The author published a number of books that decried television's deleterious effects on society, the declining quality of education, and the ethical poverty of news media. I had to read it. Amusing Ourselves to Death sat quietly on my wish list for years before I found myself in the mood for a media studies text. (You know, as one does.) Since no one else saw fit to do so, I eventually just bought it for myself. The method that Postman uses in this short, sometimes quite funny book, is a systematic one. He first describes how our minds are shaped, then lays out his theory that TV is ruining both our attention spans and our expectations of what media should be, as well as eroding our receptivity to education. After that, he traces the history of American discourse from the highly literate pamphleteers among the American colonists, all the way to "PBS News Hour." There are times when Postman's subject matter will raise skeptical readers' eyebrows. Not sounding like a cranky old fart is hard whenever you're arguing that time has changed things for the worse. Postman fights this fight unflaggingly, however, and those who stick with him, even through his fartiest-sounding claims, will eventually be won over. It's difficult to disagree with the rationale of his ultimate conclusions. There's a reason that Amusing Ourselves to Death is still assigned in colleges today, decades after Postman wrote it. If anything, he's even more relevant in our current era of the listicle, the news blast, and the fifteen-second commercial. The now-deceased writer David Markson came to my attention through a David Shields book that impressed the hell out of me thirteen years ago, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Shields's book implicitly asks readers what they think about when they think about literature — what forms, what meanings, what rules? The two books I read by Markson ask these same questions, ostensibly in novelistic form. Both This Is Not a Novel and its sort-of sequel, Vanishing Point, try to be works of fiction without characters or plot. The degree to which Markson succeeds depends on what you think fiction is and how you define "characters."

This Is Not a Novel starts off with the line, "Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing." There's nothing quite like ennui to fuel a good book, but Markson doesn't give two shits about narrative. He writes it all ("with no intimation of story anywhere") from notes on index cards collected and meticulously assembled by the character he names Writer. This was clearly Markson's method, also. And Vanishing Point does the same thing all over again. The smell of metafiction is strong on these books. There's also a lot about death. Assuming that Markson did good research and isn't trying to dupe anyone, we readers learn from him that Darwin wrote of being "nauseated" by poetry, that Italo Calvino died of a cerebral hemorrhage, that Mitsubishi manufactured the torpedoes used in the Pearl Harbor attack, that Abraham Lincoln never saw Europe, and a thousand other seemingly random facts, quotes, and observations that comprise these two weird little books. I've got another one still waiting for me, Markson's The Last Novel, the final work in a triptych he completed before his 2003 death.