The proverbial **** hits the fan.

Tuesday was the vernal equinox day, and a beautiful day at that - I woke up at an appropriately panda-like lazy 11 am, took a leisurely shower (primarily for Denise and Kent`s benefit) and then strolled over to meet some friends for lunch at a beautiful outdoor cafe. I wish I had taken pictures of it - it was gorgeous, with dark stucco walls, wrought copper trellises coated with green patinas, arching gates and crisp white linens on sidewalk tables - there were even real honest-to-goodness grapevines (sporting real grapes!!!) hanging off of the latticework overhead. After lunch we started walking around and somehow must have tripped and fallen into a Starbucks, and having nothing better to do, enjoyed a nice leisurely cup of autumn equinox coffee.

Sounds great, huh? Well it was. A nice relaxing day. Of course, we all know that this is just god`s way of setting me up to get dumped upon. I stop by the internet cafe on the way home and read on Kitty`s blog how she`s just been robbed.

"Damn!!" I write, "how the hell did you manage to get jacked in Japan...!?" somewhat shocked, somewhat disbelievingly. Anyway, playing it all level headed and cool (a scary day when I am the bastion of rationality and calm logic.... *shudder*) I advise her to not shank, stab, eviscerate or otherwise kill any Japanese who might transgress her in the future. I preach the gospel of patience!! The gospel of forgiveness!! The Ghandi-like notions of turning the other cheek!!

Ah poor dumb panda, you should have known better.

I get home around 7pm-ish. As I`m approaching my house in the dusk twilight, I immediately notice that the familiar distinctive shape of my very new and very expensive bike is nowhere to be seen in the front of my apartment where I had left it just this afternoon.

"Oh hell no..." I mutter - but it`s too late. We all know what happened - no amount of frantic searching around corners, behind bushes and beneath the parked cars was going to change what had happened - some japanese punk had nicked my fucking bicycle.

Instantly all the words of peace and patience I had just advised fly out of my head and instead are replaced by a flood of rage and death and the incredible desire to hurt some people very very badly. Stabbing people suddenly doesn`t seem like such a far out notion and I mentally begin to catalouge the various knives I have upstairs in the kitchen drawer.

Anyway, in the end I take a deep breath, chill, and calm down. Then I head over to the local koban (police box) to see what can be done.

So I step into the koban and am confronted by one of the most bizzare sights to date - two heavily armed police officers (they were carrying guns, which is quite unusual for japanese police) who were not only strapped, but also sporting bulky bullet proof vests with full trauma plates, a couple of canisters of some mace-looking substance, big ass night sticks, and what I presume to be a taser or stun gun. Then I look down - and see that they are wearing slippers. One of their slippers has a little brown mouse and bunny on it and says something to the effect of "Let`s enjoy happy cheese life!" in bright cheerful letters.

... I elect not to stare, but wonder vaugely about the advisability of policemen padding around in slippers ("All units, this is dispatch.... we have a code 187 multiple homicide on the corner of 8-chome and izumigaomachi... all available units please respond..." Police Officers: "Dispatch, this is Unit 4, 55-Davis, please be advised we will respond as soon as we find our shoes, put them on and finish lacing them up, over...")

errmmm... I digress. Anyway, I sit down and inform them of the terrible tragedy that had befallen the house of Panda. They exchange sidelong glances, then dutifully whip out the appropriate form. Another troubled glance and then a hesitant.... "kanji, kakemasuka?" (can you write kanji (japanese)?). I nod and take the pen from them and start in on my address.

*Cue the gasp*

The sight of a foreigner who can speak pidgen japanese and scratch out his name and address on a piece of paper proves too much for these two mighty (and in all fairness, relatively nice) slipper wearing riot cops, and they start in on the standard bevy of questions - "how long have you been in japan... why can you speak japanese... can you eat raw fish... etc. etc." and meanwhile I`m steadily losing my patience - what the hell does sashimi have to do with you finding my goddamn bike...!? They practically trip when it turns out that the name on my foriegner registration card doesn`t match the name I put on the registration sticker certificate (the former has my middle name, the latter does not) and it`s only with a drawn out (and very painful) 7 minute explanation on the intricacies of the middle-name system in the west that I manage to convince them that no, in fact, I am not trying to pull a fast one on them. It gets noticeably more excruciating when they try to bust some english on me (which I guess was sort of considerate of them, in a pencil-through-the-throat kind of way...) and I have to sit patiently with a glued-on smile while they sort out the word for jitensha, etc. in english (bicycle).

*sigh*

Anyway, afterwards the hanko comes out of course, and after stamping 72 times all over the paper, it gets dutifully filed in the overflowing tray of "stolen bicycle" reports and I am advised that because my bike is so distinctive in shape and very new and shiney, that I stand a relatively good chance of getting it found, perhaps even as high as "hanbun gurai" ("fifty-fifty", or cop speak for "not a chance in hell"). And with that, I walk home, destined to ride the piece of shit rusting heap with a flat tire and the death-brakes the lock up when you use it once and will only release when you get off and kick it repeatedly bike that my predecessor left me to work the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that. And so on and so forth until I finally give in and cough up the money to get a new, proper, bike.

Regardless of what I may have said in the past - heaven help the poor fucker who stole my bike if I see him or her riding it on the street - I will shove their head through the spokes of the wheel and then ride down the steepest hill I can find.

Your ass, in short, will be mine...

As an aside, as if my life didn`t suck enough, I had to come home the other day from work in the middle of the day so 4 men from the gas company could crowd into my tiny kitchen designed with 1 small child in mind and change my gas system or something like that (I just sort of dumbly nodded when my supervisor was explaining it to me as I was still in a deep depression over the loss of my beautiful shiney method of carriage).

Anyway, they hammer away and get it all sorted, and then leave, after which I start to get ready to go back to work (because on some days I actually work 8am - 9pm). So I`m changing when all of a sudden I hear the doorbell ring. So off I go to answer the door, and there is standing a relatively cute girl in the a gas company uniform, holding a clipboard and some gas-related-looking piece of equipment. So I`m standing there as she`s chirping on about having to do something to the outside gas meter, blah blah blah, the gist of it being that I`m going to have to hanko some more pieces of paper I can`t read or understand. Fine, fair enough. As she`s talking, I notice she`s looking at me very strangely, which, to be honest, is nothing new, since cute girls usually look at me very strangely.

So I go back inside to grab my hanko and as I`m walking back, I happen to pass my bedroom mirror - and notice that my fly is gaping wide open and you can see my underwear. For reasons that are perhaps better left unexplained, my underwear on this particular day is a very pale shade of pink (okay okay, I accidentally washed it with this stupid red hand towel which I got for free from J-Phone and it bled all over my whites, so they`re all pink-ish now...urk..).

Since I am sure you can all imagine how incredibly awkward it was for me to walk back to the door and stamp the various pieces of paper whilst assidiously avoiding any eye contact whatsoever with the cutie in front of me whose mind was no doubt at that very instant racing with all manner of unpleasant thoughts about the man with pink drawers who gas they had just changed, I shall instead just leave things at this.

What a week.

Now listening to: "Good Charlotte - East Coast Anthem"
(On the eastcoast, we ride until we die / You know, / Well there's a place inside my mind / Yeah a place you'll never find / There's a place inside my mind, We'll leave today...)

9:31 am