Scorpion.
I pulled out the suitcase on sunday, shook the sand from the underlayers, and laid my carefully folded yukata in its bag on the bottom. Then I stepped back and left it at that. The first thing I packed for my return from Japan is the most Japanese.

Today, I stuffed three bags full of paper waste from folders and notebooks. Essays, forms, paperwork, scribbles, study notes... all things I kept "just in case" are now destined for the incinerator. I even threw away some unwritten letters, looking back on the past that has become the past, considering keeping them for memories' sake, as an alcoholic might think about one last drink.

I wrapped the shells, stones and "found items" I've accumulated since coming here, and even some rocks that I took all the way from Glacier, MT last year that should be returned to their rightful home. These things are bagged and bubble-wrapped, laid next to the carefully picked-through scrapbook memories of tickets and souvenir stickers from places visited across Japan.

The books I cannot part with are in a bag ready to go to the post office on Wednesday. Today I closed my bank account and returned one commuter pass for the deposit. I bought five more photographs to commemorate the time I spent in kimono walking through Meiji shrine with Justin. I sorted through things that were my life this year.

At 9PM, I met the staff of the Kids' English School in Sasazuka for "dinner," if one can call a meal that late anything but sadistic. We had Korean food and the usual forced "all you can drink" until long past I wanted to go home. The beer I drank had me cycling between a giddy, happy laughing optimist and confessing all my worries about my Homecoming to the senior sensei at the school. And I wasn't even drunk.

I walked home from Sasazuka at midnight, forty minutes ago. It actually took just as long as the two-bus transfer route, if not shorter. A good part of the walk, the Blue Danube piped from my iPod through my headphones and ended perfectly as I walked through the front gate of my house.

There's a typhoon a-blowin', YARR. Or, rather, there WAS. Typhoon roku-ban (number six) just barely touched on Tokyo but enough to dump a few hours of rain today coupled with some severe winds. The humindity in this city must be close to ninety percent, and even though it isn't THAT hot, it's almost unbearable to move.

On the way home, I spotted something curious in a beverage machine... and a curious beverage machine at that. Normal Coca-Cola drinks were only 100 yen for starters, but I wouldn't have cared had I not noticed a drink I'd never seen before. Coca-Cola Scorpion. Looks like a Japanese Coke bottle but with a Scorpion on it. My guess is it contains deadly amounts of caffiene, especially as the pictures on the bottle depict a book, a car and an alarm clock. That's right, I bought it an I intend to drink it sometime in the next few days. I figure if the stress doesn't kill me, I might as well give it a try. Anyone heard of this Scorpion stuff? I'm bringing it to school for show-and-tell tomorrow, before I subject my poor heart to what may be its last refreshment. Bwa ha ha.

As for tonight, sleep, as T.S. Eliot says, 'till human voices wake me, and I drown.