9. Covid-19/Personal hell begins (2020)

Well you sit here in this room

Waiting for nothing...

--Room ('20)

2020: The "Covid Years" (Part I)

After finding two part-time teaching jobs, I endure a loss of work and income due to Covid-19 (one of my two jobs becomes impossible to continue, albeit temporarily, with no online teaching option at the time) as, in March of 2020, the virus becomes an issue, the government recommending (and then more-or-less requiring) that its citizens not travel for long distances by train, to work from home, to stay at home, and to do what is called, in Japanese, jishuku (自粛), self-control, or self-discipline. Do it not only for yourself, but do it for those around you who are maybe not as young or robust as you are as well!!! The virus is a killer, they say.

Perhaps even worse yet, for me, and on a more personal level...

Within months, what I had feared would happen more than anything else finally arrives. Or maybe it is what I had anticipated would happen, and/or had created (and/or worsened and/or expedited) to some extent by my overreacting, not shutting my mouth when I should maybe just have kept it shut, agreed even when I did not or could not agree, or at least had I not resisted things, not openly disagreed, and/or if I had been able to endure the most unpleasant of moments together, swallowed down my pride, put the expectations I had had aside and the doubts and the suspicions, and maybe had I also stayed completely sober, stayed calm, even if/when the other party was unable to, and also (etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.)...

But then, one night, indeed, the shit did finally hit the fan. Hit it hard.

Boom...

Snap... 

Break/broke/broken...

Like the fragile branch of the tree on which accumulated snow suddenly becomes too heavy for it to endure the weight any longer

The straw that broke the camel's back...

And, of course: the stressful, bitter break-up, the insults, the accusations too...

Following, of course: the anger, the regret/s, the confusion, the painful repetitions...

And then, later, and once again: the self-flagellation, the self-questioning, self-hatred, loneliness, and also fear...

Did she lie? Was I played like a fiddle? Were those comments he wrote on SNS just bravado, or proof itself of what I had suspected…

Running from the things that you don't understand

Running from the things that make you hurt...

-- Running (‘19)

Well, I moved out, "ran away"

Always running...

Ran from myself, only to find myself staring me straight in the face, once again, as before I had run...

Now, we are in our first-ever State of Emergency in Tokyo. It is early summer, 2020...

Wearing my mask, worried about everything and half-crazed, in a taxi with some clothes in my little travel suitcase-on-wheels and my computer in a box, off to a monthly rental room, all electric/gas included in the fee, a bed, a cheap desk, a single electric burner for cooking...

Not my home

Only a half year has passed since arriving in Tokyo full of hopes of finally starting a new chapter, the hope of finding a new, stable university job (or else some other, preferably creative job), if possible a long-term contract (this still, at the time of writing, has not happened), if not an opportunity for permanent employment (i.e. "tenure track," and this, too, has still not happened to date), coming to Tokyo together with my "partner," thinking that somehow it will just work out, that we can make it work out, things will somehow... Just, you know, somehow...

Wear your mask! 

Stay at home!

Keep social distance…

Will I ever find love again? Will I ever perform live again? Make friends again? Meet new people again?

Can I afford to pay my bills with such little work and so few opportunities during a pandemic?

My mental state now devolves rather drastically, and quickly, too. Very very fast. 

Frighteningly fast.

In the midst of my break up and moving myself into temporary housing, where I'd stayed, sleeping most days and eating very little, for over two months, I had managed to compose and record a rather dark LP, one of the darkest of my musical career to date. I entitle it, simply, "Untitled." Sunny ultimately contributes guitar to one of the tracks he takes an immediate liking to, what became the opener of the LP, a track called "Room," sending me his parts via file sharing to mix into the already-finished track, on which I had played piano (via Midi) and sang, accompanied by slow, menacing electronic beats and some synth noises. 

The LP "Untitled" is itself filled with long, dark pieces, and the pieces that make up the bulk of the album -- apart from "Room" and the closer, "There Is a Light," a more hopeful tone prevailing within its quiet string arrangement -- are rather abstract. The vocals and vocalizations are themselves fairly abstract as well, all lyrics on the album improvised on the spot, and I think most of the pieces on the LP do not come across so much as bona fide "songs" as they do soundtracks to someone's nightmare, perhaps everyone's nightmare at the time; in other words, it is the soundtrack to living in a time of uncertainty and fear during the first wave of COVID-19, the mysterious "Wuhan virus" that has infected the entire world.

"Covid" (with animation from Takeo Udagawa)

Two Masks and a Wish

When Will They Let Us Out To Play...?

-- Two Masks ('20)

Moving into my new apartment, finally, at the beginning of July '20, the apartment where I now still reside at the time of this writing, and having officially "broken up" with my ex...having also gotten all of my stuff out of her (now it was "hers," rather than "our") place (this after myself having moved into temporary housing twice before finally finding a place of my own to settle into, an exceedingly small but also rather clean room, with three gas burners for cooking, a nice bathtub, and double glass sliding doors leading to the balcony for extra insulation...), I recorded more Covid-themed work whilst struggling with the lingering aftereffects of the breakup, with depression and loneliness during the excessively hot, sweltering summer of '20, blasting the air conditioner nearly 24-7 that summer (I couldn't sleep without it; I would wake up every night sweating profusely and was forced, time and again, to put it back on in order to sleep at all). This was a time when every week, it seemed, there were more deaths reported, more warnings, more shut-downs, if not full "lockdowns" (these are not legal in Japan, though the government "suggested" staying at home as much as possible, over and over, and they continued to call for further restrictions, forcing businesses to close early and so forth)... 

I could not perform live, I could not meet people, nor could I "make new friends" in Tokyo. I had, at the time, only been living in Tokyo for less than a year, and was craving some sort of social interaction and stimulation, but it was then impossible. I also could not find much work apart from the few part-time classes I had and was conducting online via Zoom at one university... It wasn't enough income. I drank too much, buying beer at the convenience store or supermarket in my neighborhood, sometimes wine or harder liquor as well, and drinking it alone whilst rather depressed in my apartment room. I vented my frustration and anxiety and fears about contracting and maybe even dying of Covid via SNS; I repeatedly pissed off some people I had considered good friends, realized also that some other people I'd thought were close friends were not actually my friends after all, realized, too, that I myself had acted rather toxic in many instances, pushing people away, and, gradually, as the year progressed, I began "working on myself" more and more, chipping away at my assumptions little by little, tried, as much as and whenever possible, to take a step or two back from myself, as it were; I listened to many, many talks by people much wiser than myself online, to Indian gurus (especially to Sadhguru and to Krishnamurthi, RIP) and to Buddhist monks (the Dalai Lama, some Japanese Zen teachers), started recalling some of the things I'd learned from my studies in Buddhism and Daoism, not so much as a graduate student approaching it academically, but more from the meditative and contemplative side of things, as well as the concepts of, in Sanscrit, shunyata, or "emptiness," and of, in the Japanese language, as frequently encountered in Zen parlance, mujo (無常), or "impermanence," and applying what I could to my at-the-time rather perverted (in the sense of twisted, or distorted) thought patterns, in order to better recognize the mind traps I had been setting for myself for so long now. I embraced Stoic philosophy, tried online therapy for a bit, took long walks daily (mostly at night, since the daytime was too hot, and sometimes for two or even three hours, with music of some sort always in my ears), eventually stopped taking all medications I'd previously taken for depression (the medications had had some rather nasty side-effects, including having gained a bit of weight around the waist for the first time in my life, though I am generally slender of build, experiencing thinning hair, and a host of other awful side effects, too, some of which would last for a very long time thereafter and cause me a great deal of physical, as well as mental, suffering, though I won't go into the details here)... 

And so, slowly, as 2021 approaches, I begin gradually, bit by bit, to start "finding the light," the light which I had sung about on the final track of the "Untitled" LP.

There is a light

On the other side

What lies beyond

All your worries

And all your fears...

--There Is a Light ('20)

The light was there, must be there, somewhere, if only I would persist in my search for it, unwaveringly seek it out...

I would find it.

I had to.

My life, literally, depended on it.

Starting in the summer of the same year, I also took part in a collaboration -- creating an EP together and performing at two year-end live shows together -- with a guy I was supposed to have collaborated with live before the pandemic had hit full-force, at which time our planned performance together had been, much to my disappointment, canceled, a State of Emergency declared for Tokyo, with all of the livehouses temporarily shut down. I was, as I explained above, in a very bad mental state by this time, and it was no doubt quite obvious to anyone who was reading my SNS feed that I was now alone in my small, sweltering apartment all of the time and "not doing very well" either. Not good at all...

And so, one day, this acquaintance I'd only met once or twice at events before the pandemic started contacted me via Messenger and asked me if I'd like to collaborate with him remotely, to which I readily agreed. He sent me some audio files of himself improvising what I considered rather "acid-jazz-esque"; they reminded me of John Zorn recordings I had once upon a time heard. The instrument he was playing was not a regular saxophone, but, rather, what he termed a "reed-sax," consisting as it did of the body of a Western-style flute with a saxophone mouthpiece on it, an idea he himself had apparently come up with. The name we took for our project was Lower Than God, a combination of "Lowe" from my last name, and "Goda," from his (stage) name. I took the chaotic, improvised samples he'd sent me and shaped them into instrumental, electronica tracks. Adding lots of fast beats, mixing and layering and effectorizing the samples I was given to work with, I also added my own piano parts, some samples (for instance, one piece features the voice of Donald Trump speaking about how all Americans had the “right” to choose not to wear masks in public during the pandemic, as "Americans must be allowed their freedoms"), noise elements, and so on. The final track was quiet, almost ambient, with sampled nature sounds in the background, he now playing a standard, breathy flute, along with my improvised piano flourishes, bathed in reverb, and some subtle jazzy beat loops I added. This track remains my favorite on the EP.

Although we had gone into the studio a few times and also twice performed live together in late 2020, along with some rather heavy Covid restrictions -- everyone wearing masks, disinfecting their hands frequently, having their temperatures taken at the door, etc. -- after 2020 we never collaborated on this project together again. However, I used some of the recordings he'd sent me to use for the initial EP (there were still quite a few from which to choose left over in the folder) to arrange new abstract instrumental and/or spoken word pieces that ended up on some of my own solo releases the following year.