October Bike Ride

Out in the daylight hours for once. Not sure I can take the vampire life much longer. 

Autumn smoke. Gutted house. Freedom by the riverbank on an October bike ride. The world is being de-spiritualized.

Kinmokusei, susuki, goldenrod — shock the landscape with bright yellows, wave hello with lazy palms from the roadside, candy the drying air with fabric softener perfume. Sun shines down, mixing in with the brown and gray, lazy-floating clouds. 

Leaves begin to change. 

I listen to Giuliani denigrate the cult from a phone in my bike basket. I wish everyone understood how gentle the world is. Laugh all you want. 

Mt. Yahiko looms across an infinite void — somber space. The clack of skateboard wheels reaches my ears from the skate park below. The bright blood of Shinto gates. The stone Buddha that never talks but always seems supportive — I go to cross the bridge. 

There’s nothing like a Niigata fall.

Jesus cursed the fig tree out of season. But this quiet resignation towards death is so nice. With comforting gray skies, rental DVDs, and an abject landscape of soothing melancholy.

It takes me to a place I can’t get to, and that more and more they’re trying to rip out of the world.

A place where life is lived, and feelings are not just denigrated commodities — where humans are home, and not just farmed manpower for the gaudy, Sci-Fi fakers.

The bright orange kaki — Halloween surprise. 

I’m nature’s son. 

(Lou Reed might correctly chime in: “And I’m the only one”)

Red dragonflies congregate in zoomy, cheerful patterns above my head as I ride, Gomadō mountain sits quiet in the lofty distance. 

On the way back home, legs getting tired and tailbone sore from the seat. Ink black crows comb the golden grass of a former rice field. Now sullen and muted, but full of 

presence. 

The lonely drone of a truck on the road rattles me:

Soon it will be winter. The abandoned, slate gray, empty-ramen-shop Sundays of desolate Niigata highways, stretching from nowhere to more nowhere endlessly — abject comfort, dismal confusion. Icy-cold rain blasting sideways under meaningless clouds. It’s all coming soon.

Though, through all these things, somehow, my loneliness is eased.

Not even the psychos can escape this depression. Not even Jesus could force the fig tree. And nature’s more than just rain and leaves, it seems to me. But nothing less.

For now though, the sun shines, and autumn is grand. And it’s time to drink my cold green tea. I saw a man in a farmhouse window on my ride home, face bathed in the half setting-sunlight, sitting seiza in traditional clothing, lifting his small porcelain cup of hot tea to his lips. At least I think it was tea. 

Could have been coffee. All the same, he was beautiful.