Light Randomness

I was sitting on a heated rug, spread out under a low, deep blood-red wood table at a temple in Migata when an evening at Cafe Netherworld I'd had six, seven or eight years ago crept into my consciousness. What was that about?

I had been gathered with the five older Ojikan women I do a craft with. We've been getting together every Tuesday night for the last year and a half to assemble these kits. We make dolls. They're called kami ningyou in Japanese and are most traditionally made for the Doll's Festival (O-hina matsuri) held in March. Here's a photo of what I'm talking about:

And this was my contribution to the display at the town's bank this year:

anyway, it was during one of these nights that I started thinking about Cafe Netherworld. ( http://anubis.ntw.net/netherworld.com/ ) In all of my life I think I'd been to the bar/coffee shop/pool hall maybe three times, but for some strange reason, I started thinking about one of those nights as I was spacing out in an onslaught of unintelligible Ojikan-flavored Japanese.

Then, I started thinking about how I was sitting in such a small, secluded corner of the world, among these women whom I couldn't really understand, but whom I felt and cared deeply for, and how that at that exact moment there were people clutching pool cues and drinking flavored coffee or hip cocktails in a dingy corner of a place linking intself to an underground heaven or some such thing. I then felt a little special to have been in both of those places at one time or another and felt special for probably being the only one in the world to ever be able to claim such a thing.

And, there are so many other corners and nooks of the great expanse of life playground that we get to make similar comparisons, and isn't that just amazing?