II.

It’s somewhat commonplace that many people travel or spend time abroad in hopes of encountering new types of experience, perhaps discovering things about themselves in the vulnerable milieus of alien locales, or for once truly seeing what it means to be a person just trying to “get by” through light untinted by the prejudices of the locally circumscribed. Honestly, I’ve never really had much interest in this sort of thing, it seems to me that things are mostly terrible wherever you wind up, but not so long ago here in my municipality of residence, Futsukaichi, Japan, I actually did have my own first-ever experience, the intensity of which was heightened somewhat by a complex sensory onslaught itself intensified of course by various last-ditch hormonal contingencies: loathing and fear but most of all abiding sickness: charcoal nocturnal gloom pierced by dilating pupils of dusk-puncturing light, a cloacal tinge to the bouquet of well-aged alloys, damp soil, rust, cold metal on the skin a kind of keening dissonance in the nauseous balm of the southernmost major island of the former empire’s quartet in its annual summer heat—of witnessing the glissando approach of a Nishitetsu Co. local train from the vantage of the track as I lay on my back with neck aligned for terminal contact on-rail. 

It was a rough night, my memory of which doesn’t bear directly on LeBron James’ record of poor performance in the clutch, but hang on: because while waiting for the train to come, I had a tiny portal of time through which to look back on the day’s other inaugural experience some several hours back, when I’d been driven by a very dear friend to an emergency consultation with a specialist in dealing with the particular condition I don’t see the need to go into diagnostic specifics of here but that manifested this week with tremors and despair, a circumambience of dread, a general anhedonia, and this woman—who is perhaps the closest to a genuinely selfless, other-oriented human I’ve ever come across—taxied me the two hours north it took to reach the offices of the alleged specialist, locally renowned for his gift with helping patients in moments of weakness and need come through their hours of sling-and-arrow terror that on the scale of Historical suffering, appear somewhat paltry when contrasted with say, pogroms, probable nuclear holocaust, the actual Holocaust, Inquisition, genocide, rapine, the rack, the Iron Maiden, burnings at stake, general misery and woe, still feel pretty potent for the sufferer.