Where The Streets Have No Name

That night, we find ourselves at a hostel nestled between two mountains. Without an address, we'd gotten here only by plugging geographic coordinates into the navigation system on our rental car. The thought of travelling to a single point reducible to numbers without knowing where you're really going to end up has never lost its magic. There are no street lamps, no road signs and no markings. When we find the place, it is by spotting a yellow flag. Entering the hostel, we lay out our bed sheets, and, needy for dinner, we walk back out into the cold, then the car. There is a faint glow over the lower sides of the mountain to the right. We drive in its direction, and arrive at a point when the glow morphs into a ray, and then looking down from the edge are rows upon rows of city lights. A labyrinth of life stirs and its ordinariness stirs further. It looks like an hour's drive away, and yet it's the closest we've been to civilisation thus far. In the dark, our trusty Toyota Fielder works its way down, and with the heaters blasting, the alpines hide shadows - of monsters, of men, Of Monsters and Men on CD playing in the background. As the wind whispers warnings through the valley, there we are, like wide-eyed neanderthals coming out of a cave, with only the light to follow.


--
"Still building, then burning down love"

Chrimbo Fever, and Trent

As you may find out yourself if and when I post more of these, stuff I write about sport is rarely about the games. So much of sport is contained in the stands and in culture and context that you will never be able to do justice to the significance of a sporting moment with a play-by-play elucidation of the event.

And so much of why I've always looked forward to Christmas is because of sport.

From a young age, I've long associated this time of the year with sport. For football, fixtures in the Premier League come thick and fast in mid-late December, leading up to the New Year. The action mostly culminates in the Boxing Day fixtures (which I absolutely love) and the New Year's Day games. It means that - thanks to the difference in time zones - my Boxing Day often lasts 8 hours longer. Following basketball slightly later on, the Christmas Day tip-offs became an actual thing in my family, living miles away from home then but finding warmth in huddling together before a television screen; the 2008 classic between the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics was everything we needed (besides the turkey we eventually burnt).

The excitement is so feverish, the need to watch men kick and throw balls around so pressing it's as if all the sporting action could emancipate psyches and souls hardened by a year of tedious afternoons and numbing nights. On The Anfield Wrap, this award-winning podcast/blog managed by Liverpool supporters from the city itself, there's talk of Christmas in most pieces. This one - which I'd recommend to even those who don't watch football, since it's hardly about the match and all about the people - had me hooked. It ends movingly and rather poetically:

"Stand Reds. Stand tall. The bells are ringing out for us. Happy Christmas, Mike. Happy Christmas all."

There's this idea of sport as a mass of ruffians, men high on testosterone with their chests out and voices loud. That piece shows that, but it also shows men at their most sensitive, softest versions of themselves. It's from watching sport that I've seen men reduced to tears on hearing a song belted out, and it's from playing sport that I've seen teenage boys acting tough and all suddenly breaking down and banking on every little ounce of courage left in them. The piece handles it beautifully; one reader even compared it to Yeats.

"I like to think that in my darkest, most cowardly hour that night at Highbury that the boy/man to my left side, the first lad to link me, my Gabriel, was Michael. That we stumbled and rose together in that Red front. And that maybe in some way he kept me safe."

My friend Caleb and I have this inside joke that he's "Ben" (Benjamin Woodburn) and I'm "Trent" (Trent Alexander-Arnold). We are both Reds, and both the real life Ben and Trent have been at Liverpool since they were 6, and now, as 18 and 19 year-olds, they've enjoyed a great year with the first team thanks to opportunities that the manager has showered on youth. They also happen to be really good mates, and there's this instance in November 2016 after Woodburn scores his first ever senior goal for Liverpool when Alexander-Arnold comes up to him after the final whistle, puts his arm around him and altogether seems more excited than his friend about that immense personal breakthrough moment.

I'm writing this now also because Alexander-Arnold just scored his first Premier League goal for the club he's grown up playing for on Boxing Day a few days ago. It felt special when that ball was smashed in, not so much because I might have internalised being "Trent" a bit, but more so because there's always this indescribable feeling every time a local boy who's actually born and bred in Liverpool scores in front of The Kop (which is the section of the crowd at Anfield, Liverpool's home ground, where the most fanatical fans sit - or, for the most part, stand).

I'm relieved that we've known each other for four-five years but started this joke only six months ago or else I'd really have completely internalised being "Trent" by now...

After Woodburn's goal last year someone pieced together the graphic below, showing how the local boys always seem to celebrate the same, distinct way - regardless of what year they're playing in; maybe it's a tap on the crest over the heart, or maybe with a fist bump at the end, but always, always, running to the corner flag completely hysterical with arms outstretched and looking to the stands as if it means that something more to them, more than to any other player on the pitch. Because it does, I think, if you score for your city and your people.

From left to right: Ian Rush, Robbie Fowler, Steven Gerrard, and Benjamin Woodburn.

I did look out for Alexander-Arnold's celebration on Boxing Day. Uncanny, huh?

In an age when sport deals in ridiculous wads of cash and borders are blurred, few clubs in the Premier League have this - this thing that we're fortunate to see and hold, witnessing a young lad come through the ranks at the Academy and finally play on the big stage for us. I know Liverpool fans might sound a bit self-righteous when we talk about this but it's this club that's all about roots and history.

And we like it that way.

Stuff We're Made Of

In a planetarium near Mt. Aso, nightfall


What Are We

but a spectacular series of births and deaths,
a monument to psyche psyched-out,
the nightmare of the nothing from nowhere;
no one lived
to tell the story.


What We Are:

Fleeing fleas flying
Skies catching the light
Grimacing pangs
Cliff-hanging ends
Beginnings that promise
Journeys taken
Laps and leaps.


Magisterial might of light, you do not
go out. Celestial, incomprehensible,
with fate up in the air,

you

find your place in the sky.

December the 24th: Living Eve

My family is spending our last two nights in Japan in a city, having lost ourselves to the vastness of Kyushu's volcanoes, mountains and rural towns over the past week and a half. It takes some reminding, but there are actual street lamps now, actual inner city train systems and actual youngsters with glasses too big for their faces, iPhone 8s in one hand and overpriced coffee in the other.

There is something to be said about Christmas in cities across the world, something about it all being the same, even when there are thousands of ways to say "Merry Christmas". Malls try to outdo one another with their trees but none shall be grander than the big ass one in the city centre. Shops slash prices. Supermarkets play those more than likeable Yuletide tunes. People wish one another, back and forth. There's a familiar feeling in the air, a collective and albeit unspoken recognition that the year is fast drawing to a close and maybe this - like all endings supposedly ought to - calls for celebration.

In larger countries, humans get in touch with their inner animal and also begin The Great Migration. On the streets of this city we are in, people lug luggage across streets and into cross-country trains, buses, and ferries which will see them into the countryside. To have come to the city for  work is to leave a lifestyle and a community. To then go home to people who keep your name tucked under their tongues is to learn that there is probably nothing quite like it.

Tonight is our final night here, and we are at an izakaya - one of those cramped little restaurants serving skewered foods. This one appears to be a family business; the greying man working the grill is flanked by a lady, and two servers bear a striking resemblance to the both of them. For the first time since we've been in this city, there aren't any other tourists eating here. In fact, the street that this izakaya is on was not particularly quiet, but occupied by only locals. The table beside us seats a family of six - grandparents retired, parents rosy, kids rambunctious. It is a Japanese custom for families to have fried chicken on Christmas Eve, and, sure enough, they share a plate of crisp, blistering Hakata chicken. Above the squeals of mischief and sizzles on the grill, a radio station playing Japanese pop triumphs over the speakers and a guy at the table for two behind me pipes along; he seems to know the lyrics to every single song that station puts out. "Eve" has its origins in the Hebrew word for "life." This is very much a snapshot, but still, life is in flux.

Around here there isn't a Shibuya-type insanity. Around here there are few Singaporeans. Crows perch on branches above Shinto shrines and go helter skelter when visitors enter, but then there is a silence as they suddenly pause to take stock. There is an honesty here. This is not Tokyo. Neither is it Kyoto, nor is it Osaka. This is the capital of a lesser known cousin, along this proud strip of rising sun. This is Fukuoka. Between the giggling of a girl on her grandpa's lap, the charred pieces of meat, the gleeful 'clink' of glasses and my own father's bad jokes, I already know - this is Christmas Eve.

Peel Street

We walk ten thousand paces

of life; in the claustrophobia,

we all come face to face.

Faces, walls, façades:

face of a wall, another brick

in the wall, another shop

in a mall, and the

peace, and the

pieces

- they come together.

But all the paint, and all the

scaffolding that wore;

all the words that people left

for the photographs, home or away

- there must be, there must be 

a way, some

way.

Where once "we go again" rang true,

but now you can't put a finger

on where you're going to;

not again, never a gain,

all ways, always

loss.

Update: It's a drought

It's nearing a week since I changed up the site and laid out all these grand plans, but nothing's actually coming to fruition. That's even when I've tried working on five different ideas. 

I think the problem is:

a) The ideas for these pieces came to me when I wasn't sitting in front of my laptop so I had to jot down some basic notations on my phone/try to keep it in my head, but going back to them at night found that the inspiration was absent

b) My past week has been more packed and exhausting than I previously imagined

c) I've become lazy

d) Any idea I have at the moment is sort of being overshadowed by this overpowering feeling I'm having about where stuff (life) is headed. Which means nothing else gets dissected, concretised, or developed.

Terribly sorry...

It's a proper drought.