Sea-Cucumbers

Sea-Cucumbers

I have always found sea-cucumbers to be strange. If you have ever been snorkeling, you may or may not have noticed these elongated vegetables on the sea floor. I suppose I shouldn’t call them vegetables though, because they are slightly more ‘cognizant’ than garden-variety greenery. Instead I have dubbed them ocean-turds, because honestly, they do look the great defecation of a marine mammoth. They are also well-shaped, perfectly cylindrical turds at that! I am rambling again. Forgive me.

In eighth grade, my parents and I took a trip to Japan. My dad is a baseball scout, and instead of flying over solo to give the Kyoto Carps the once-over, he decided to make the scout into a family vacation. I was skeptical. I don’t like seafood, and here we are, going to a country that eats raw fish and that names its baseball teams after blunt-nosed marine life.

The city itself seemed a bouleversement of day and night. Humanity’s great invention, the lightbulb, mocked with overwhelming voltage, density, and quantity nature’s celestial fireballs. Bulbs, the imitators, the pupils of fusion, now ridiculed night with flashes from across the spectrum. As we drove into Tokyo, I couldn’t believe that its citizens were able to sleep at night, what with such lambent pollution. But I was eager to walk the streets, to run into the shops that beckoned to me with signs for Sony and with gadgetry that inhabited the display windows.

The hotel room had paper walls! As an American used to a room’s noiseless seclusion, I liked the idea that here, rooms were not meant to be space with a relentless fixation on privacy. I promptly made my mark. Restless after the long plane flight, I was bouncing off the walls when I literally poked an extremity through one. You can image my surprise at discovering such fragility. I am in the holy land of ninjas and samurai, and I have just punched my way through a wall. Awesome! I felt like ‘the kid’ from “Karate Kid.” All that was missing was the exotic, ruminative twang and non-western modality of Asian music.

Of course, my ninjas-and-gadgets glorification of the place was, alas, not meant to be. My fun and games had to be extinguished; a foot had to be put down and that foot was Japan’s ooey-gooey cuisine. My dad was interested in one of the Carp’s players, and as was customary, the team’s owner felt a strong sense of duty to take us out for a traditional Japanese dinner, so that the two of them could discuss arrangements for the trade.