Thursday

I'm not sure how long I can, in good conscience, go on calling this an update when all I talk about are things that happened months ago. So I'll try to pepper my reportage with new stuff here and there. This just in: Sunshine had a dinner engagement yesterday, but I wasn't all that interested in celebrating the anniversary of a successful local grocery chain. My interest? To enjoy soba noodle soup and a perfectly fried egg at my favorite downtown sushi bar. To heighten the experience, I meant to while away an hour or more over it. And drink sake. And read my adventure novel. Everything was coming up roses until I walked into the crowded little joint. That was when I realized I was sort of embarrassed by my book. This never used to happen to me, this worry about other people observing what I was reading. But recently, in the states, I was loathe to be caught out with a certain pop-culture vampire novel some collusion of jetlag and morbid curiosity had inspired me to take up. And then last night I spent a nervous few minutes hyper aware of the mostly naked Japanese stereotype kneeling on the cover of Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice--its title rendered, however inappropriately, in a goofy chop-socky font. Frankly, I don't know why I bother. It isn't as if that restaurant's shelves aren't stocked with pinky schoolgirl horror-romance comics. Plus, it's nearly impossible to ignore the game shows on TV behind the bar, revolving as they do around public nudity, freezing water, biting insects, and, in what amounts to some kind of heroic irony, the act of consuming unbelievably disgusting things. So I laid the book facedown and ate in front of the TV. Like every night. [Cavin]