In general, it is a good policy not to generalize. To talk about what is typical or normal or usual; it is best to avoid harping on the average, predictable, foreseeable or calculable. Life being so full of ferries whose engines stall then, in the face of unexpected typhoons, capsize, killing 600, or earthquakes that unleash a cascade of boulders down hillsides that crush the lone fisherman who happened to have risen at 4:43 a.m. in order to seek out that precise spot after a year and a half of Sundays angling to claim it ahead of any other angler.

Life being unpredictable; un-reasonable; never twice quite like that; always and forever and infinitely distinct.

So, when I say that I sat in a typical sushi-ya when I visited Tokyo the other night, we share understanding, right?: there probably was nothing typical about it, nothing from which we would be able to generalize about human experience. It was what it was – nothing more or less – all things being equal (although they rarely are). It just happened to be a place serving sushi, around that particular corner, near Meguro station, in Tokyo, that particular moment that I happened to be hungry, with that random group of friends and acquaintances, that certain Saturday night.

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—tjmHolden

As you may recall, my last post took up the matter of lifestyle. For those of you who didn’t read it, can’t recall what it said, or are always looking for the easy way out, let’s review . . . lifestyle was held out to be akin to culture, only with more attitude. That’s because it isn’t something we simply assume and let wash over us; it has to be recognized, contemplated, and intentionality engaged. Like culture, though, lifestyle can be located anywhere and comes in multiple manifestations—often in the same place. In the last post, a list of Southern California possibilities was provided, but homed in on the beach. That was fun—at least for me; refreshing, and it put a little color on my cheeks, too. I don’t know how it was for you, but that really doesn’t matter now because I am about to touch upon a second lifestyle pursuit. Unless you are a porpoise (or even if you are since they are purportedly smarter than the average human being) you can probably infer what I’m going to talk about, based on the pictures above.

Yup: baseball.

Maybe that word alone carries clout sufficient to induce half of you to immediately stop reading, but wait, take heart: this post isn’t really about baseball, at all. It is actually about existence (and not just because for some, the latter is predicated on the former). So now I know you’ll want to keep reading; for who among (the non-suicidal of) us isn’t interested in existence. Right?

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—tjmHolden

In Santa Monica you get your coffee from The coolest places on the promenade Where people dress just so Beauty so unavoidable everywhere you turn It’s there I sit and wonder what am I doing here? -- Savage Garden, Santa Monica

There are three things that make up any human outcome: time, place and circumstance. Sometimes this last element gets amended (by the Donald Trumps and Sun Tzus of the world) as “opportunity”.

In June I find myself in Southern California, USA. A stone’s throw—or at least a freeway hop (which amounts to the metaphysical equivalent)—away from the beaches. So, you got your time, you got your place. And, given that I find myself with a car (an indispensible item if one is to do anything of substance in the City of the Angels), you got your opportunity. Sure, it costs four bucks a gallon now, but the drive’ll cost me, at best, six-fifty. So, we’re talking a bargain—I mean, if you consider what you get in exchange . . .

A lifestyle.

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—tjmHolden

Whatever gets you through the night ‘salright, ‘salright It’s your money or life ‘salright, ‘salright Don’t need a sword to cut through flowers oh no, oh no “Whatever Gets You Through the Night”, John Lennon

Getting through a journey is a lot like that. Maybe. Depending on how you take John’s meaning.

One way I take it—whenever I find myself on the road—is that there are always simpler ways to solve life’s conundrums than may, at first blush, spring immediately to mind. And ways more rewarding than calling on a corps of engineers to erect a bridge when a raft wafting lazily down the river might just as easily work.

Well, at least, it’s something to keep under consideration.

One of the points of this blog is to remind us all that one of the points of the peripatetic life is to enjoy the journey—to keep our eyes open, our ears attuned, our noses aware, to ensure that our brains are engaged—to treat, in short, the journey as if it is the purpose, rather than a means toward some other purpose. Because if we treat it in the alternative, then we won’t abide by any of these sensory commandments and then our trips merely amount to work. They become transformed into a grating on the psyche; a waste of 8 or 10 or 15 hours in our finite store. They become a metaphysical equivalent of the stack of books planted in the path of ants heretofore trying to move from Point A to B. Sure, give them a little time to get over their astonishment and they’re guaranteed to find a way over and around the books—no doubt about that—but for what purpose? Merely because they were forced to in order to join the begnning with the end point. Maybe greater social concord will result, but it is unlikely that enlightenment or moral benefit will follow.

Even so, for me, there are times when my various peripatetic forays reduce me to that state of anthood. One more queue to join, another form to get processed by another functionary with a worn atttitude and a badly frayed uniform. It is times like those when I counsel myself to abide by Lennon’s lyrics: do whatever it takes to get by, make your way through. Any way you can; just get through it, as simply as possible.

Which—don’t get me wrong—doesn’t mean you have to do everything in accord with someone else’s agenda. Not at all.

Thinking about it, I am reminded of this woman I spied as I was walking one morning through a subway station in Tokyo:

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—tjmHolden

I’m a sailor peg
And I lost my leg
I climbed up the topsails
I lost my leg
I’m shipping up to boston
(whoa oh oh)

-- The Dropkick Murpheys, Shipping Up To Boston

The great thing about Internet Society is that one can pursue a peripatetic lifestyle and not really have to have left home. Well, at least figuratively. Sure, maybe for simple things, like locating “Almond Joy” candy bars, you actually have to get up and out—go to a specific place—but for many of the most important things in life, nowadays, no matter where you hang your flight bag for a few hours, you can arrange it so that it appears as if you haven’t really escaped the coop.

Perhaps some of you are tempted to wonder: “but doesn’t this defeat the whole purpose?”

To which I can only utter two words: NBA playoffs.

Two words sufficient to conclude any arguments with any locally-sympathetic argumenteurs.

For others, it might be major cultural productions such as World Cup soccer or even the latest installment of American Idol. Productions, we once used to believe were confined to one particular geographic place (probably because we once actually experienced them as such—and probably only yesterday), but now no longer are. Because of our increasing spread-out-edness, the need for more of “what is over there”, away from where I currently am, now exists. And, thanks to the web (and a network of enterprising wonks who share similar passions) there is a solution: many geo-specific mediated productions are now part of the simultaneous global cultural stream. For peripatetics, our globally-organized cultural stream.

Which explains why, although I am currently beyond US borders, I can still watch my very own Lakers on their inexorable path toward the finals (woo-hoo) in real time. Every trey in transition, double-team splitting pick and roll, and flyswat out of bounds. Every Kobe Bryant pirouette, Pau Gasol jersey pop, Phil Jackson scowl, and Lamar Odom left-handed jam. The reason I can perform this metaphysical magic is due to a website which apparently originates in Spain called “Zapateirodot-com; thanks to links they have posted in their ”televisiones gratis en directo” page (and thank goodness for two years of high school espanol!), I can log in from—wherever in the world I might be—and catch Stateside hoops mysteriously lifted from feeds to American viewers via TNT, ESPN and ABC. I’m sure that this isn’t precisely how the three and four-letter acronyms above wish their universes to be, but I am enough of an addict to admit that, when it comes to getting my roundball fix, I don’t really care.

If you are still reading, then perhaps you are the same way.

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—tjmHolden

A cyclone in Myanmar; an earthquake in China.

28,000 dead; 41,000 reported missing in one. An estimated 12,000 perished and 18,000 missing in the other.

Horrendous events. Mind-numbing numbers. Asia’s natural cataclysms have been in the news this week and, as all such disasters are wont to do, they give us pause. It is not so much that they are awesome in their scope (although there is that dimension to them); and it is not just that they remind us that the world is a dangerous place (hell, we don’t need natural disasters to signal that!); it is not simply to hip us to the capriciousness, the tenuousness, the fragility of life (which, of course such news inevitably—and immediately—does). It is also something beyond the fact that they are true tragedies (which of course they are)—featuring astronomical figures of dead and displaced; and a nearly uncatalogueable list of derivative harm and suffering resulting after the fact.

Admittedly, all of the above elements arise when nature strikes, as it so often does, without warning. But more than any of this, what prompts us to take pause is the fact that horrors such as these are constantly in our consciousness. And they are constantly in our consciousness due to one factor and one factor alone: media. Such events have become what Walter Lippmann long-ago dubbed “the pictures in our heads” because of news media. Had the cyclone and the earthquake occurred in, say, 1811, they would not have been any less massive, tragic, awe-inspiring natural events; but their status in the lives of most of the world population would have been far less powerful or significant. What has changed over the last century (and actually, only more like the last twenty-five years) has been the position and the power of such events in our everyday lives. Some of this change is “merely” psychological, and some of it is political, economic, social, and moral. For better and worse—thanks to the globla media—what happens over yonder now is very much a part of our thinking, our consideration and reaction, somewhere over here.

This doesn’t sound like a bad thing, right? The world becomes smaller; we become more and more aware of how others live in the way-beyond-out-there—and, importantly, how they are suffering. A potential doorway, perhaps, into greater sympathy, possible assistance. But, peel that outer layer back and it may not all be to our benefit to have all this constant monitoring, this endless mediation. Consider . . . 

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—tjmHolden