Rocklops

I've never quite been able to figure out what to do with this blog; I haven't been able nail down a certain writing style or even any sort of vaguely thematic content. Yeah, the Japanese angle is certainly ripe, but my feelings about Japan are so damn ambiguous at this point that I don't have any confidence about writing coherently about it. In many respects Japan is a shithole when I compare it to Canada. Yet there's no doubt in my mind that coming here was the best thing that could possibly have happened to me. My wife and daughter are daily reminders. After eight years I still don't know what to make of this place that has given me so much. And that's the essence of my problem--it would be unseemly to make fun of a place in which I've become, well, successful, but it would, at the same time, be remiss not to talk about all the fucked-up things I see here. My own ambiguous feelings are mirrored in how I'm perceived by the Japanese who know me. I'm neither an insider nor an outsider. I occupy some limbo-like region of social existence that I haven't quite come to terms with. It would probably help if I put more effort into my Japanese language studies, but there's a creeping fear: the more familiar I become with the language, the more obvious it becomes that the Japanese don't have anything to say--at least not anything I'm interested in. To be fair, that is an as yet unproven hypothesis...
Anyway, I haven't given up on this blog yet. Actually just writing this post has given me some ideas for a new approach. In the meantime, I've started a new blog about something I love: rock n' roll. It's called Rocklops, and you can find it here.