NOWHERE-NOW HERE, HECTOR CASTELLS TRAVEL JOURNAL – CAPSULE V
HIROSHIMA DRAGON
What the American men really wants is two things: he wants to be blown by a stranger while reading the newspaper and he wants to be fucked by his buddy when he is drunk. (W.H. Auden)
Elon-D-Must-Trump are opening their obscene mouth on the HD TV set of the Nippon Zen Master, who gets increasingly disgusted before striking down the supremacist-marketing- pornography show with her remote. She promises not to turn the TV ever again and suggests driving to the seaside. It will be some sort of Sunday American detox before I travel to Hiroshima tomorrow to meet the physiotherapists —aka the Aikido black belts.
Nutty Dread
It is another scorching morning of the hottest September on record, and nobody dares to complain about dehydration, disintegration or climate change. Before leaving the house, I ask if I should bring my swimming suit.
“Are you nuts? When it is THIS HOT the ocean is overflown with jellyfish! Don’t even dare it!”
We drive the burning asphalt and the wheels of the vintage Volkswagen slide through the pavement with sticking voracity. It feels like driving Trump’s lukewarm sperm over Elon’s Mouth. I consider saying it, but thankfully I don’t. The NZM looks at me suspiciously and parks the car. We get out and walk into a little shack overlooking the glimmering coast.
Jelly bluff
The water is full of swimming bodies. I wonder if they are immune to jellyfish when an old lady greets us with tea and nuts and offers us a seat. I say arigato gozaimasu, and next thing I self-immolate a back molar with the chew.
“This is not for eating! They are ornamental sea pebbles!” She untimely says.
I quietly spit the shards of my broken pearl, and ask if it would be okay to go swimming with my underwear on. The disgusted grimace on the NZM will never be greater. It is the most hopeless MAGA Japanese face on record. Next thing, she teaches me a lesson by saying “What time is your train tomorrow. I’ll give you a lift.”
We stare at the sea in dazed silence until she says that the whole stereotypical narrative portraying the Japanese as stock market maniacs is nothing but an urban myth. Next thing she checks her financial app and howls like the last wolf of Humanity. “The lift is on stand-by: if that motherfucker wins, I won’t get enough cash for petrol ever again.”
“The motherfucker always wins,” I reply. It is a borrowed line from the song attached here, “The Luckiest Man Alive,” by The Next New Low.
Lift Less but…
Coming morning I leave the house before the NZM wakes up. I want to avoid her the pain of giving me such an expensive lift. Xmas is coming and Trump-Must are becoming. There is not much hope outside the obsessively neat and furious borders of this island —except for the train.
It is my first bullet ever. I see its white mouth slowing down before the station and I can’t help but remember Falkor, the dragon in “The Never-Ending Story.” Their arrival is greeted with the most corrosive high-pitched loudspeaker in the beloved history of trains. Inside there’s a seat with my name on it. I bow to my neighbour, and engage with the reading of my broadsheet.
The Unquiet American
My neighbour is the unquiet American, and as soon as I seat he starts avidly reading my copy of the Japan Times. I’m 600K and ONLY two hours away from Murakami Sensei, the 79-year-old man who said: “When I was young I used to train every day, but now that I’m old I only do it six times a week.” It happened last year, on the day we met, during class, just before devouring a plate of fried jellyfish and gulping down a box of 24 beers with the help of his students.
I remember the story and I inevitably text the NZM: “I’m inside the Falkor bullet and I have just remembered that Murakami and I wolfed a plate of jellyfish exactly a year ago. I guess the moral of the story is that “you must eat what you can’t swim?”
Cuntent
I fold the newspaper and stare at the unquiet American. He looks out the window. The landscape melts like content dripping from the peak of Mount Fuji into Elon’s Must mouth. It is the beauty of high-speed trains: you move steadily at a vertiginous speed that defies physics and angles, until realising that you are not travelling a straight line but a circle
The unquiet American is eating a sandwich and checking his phone with a circumspect face. I extend the copy of the Japan Times and he cancels the ingestion. The breadcrumbs and the mayo are smearing his pink polo and yellow slacks. He is a dusty blonde of steel blue eyes and rosy lips, and I immediately consider fucking him in the five star moving toilets. I start the pre fucking survey:
“Are you a Ralph Lauren model?”
“Ha! I wish!”
“Injured tennis player?”
“Are you a writer?”
“And you?”
“Yes, I am. I used to edit the piece of broadshit you just gave me. It still unnerves me to see it. It is like cracked cocaine, you know?”
“Maybe if you elaborate…”
“No matter how high you get, you’d always end up hitting the next new low.”
Becuming
Before Trump-Must there was William Randolph Hearst, the first media tycoon that tried to break and enter the White House. He had employed Mussolini as a correspondent for one of his many infamous newspapers, the FOX News of its time. Unlike Trump, he had rivals who could articulate more than one sentence without frantically scratching their noses —namely Roosevelt. Orson Welles colossally demolished Hearst in “Citizen Kane”, a phenomenal movie that the magnate hated as much as Trump hates “Succession.”
I give the unquiet American a few minutes to consider me and forget the history of journalism. I glance at him with a hard-on that defies jelly and perhaps fishes. It is his turn to conduct the pre-fucking survey.
“So what do you write about?”
“Mostly about what I talk about with strangers…”
“And what would that be?”
“Right now? It could be jellyfishes and toilet-fucking with Trump-Must citizenshits.”
The silence is prodigal. We use the Japan Times to disguise the protuberant walk to the moving jax. Once inside, after a glorious friction, he says “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” and then we both becum.
Before I pull up my trousers I notice a breadcrumb perfectly resting on Elon’s Must crumpled mouth.
“It looks like a piece of tooth to me,” Ralph Lauren says. “Weird, ain’t it?”
“Happy new weird, indeed.”