Mar. 15

The girlfriend made a brilliant discovery a few nights back: Bob Dylan's coming to Osaka! I only started listening to Bob Dylan 2 years ago but quickly took in all his songs then albums and some radio interviews. He's brilliant and elusive and it seems unreal that he would still be touring, this from a songwriter who made his mark with songs about racial injustice and gallavanting in the '70s.

We got tickets but it wasn't without a small trial. I'm not used to being up early on Saturday. I say that it's because I work until 11pm on Friday but the truth is that I stay up until 3 when I get home and wake up 30 minutes before my shift regularly starts. It's my only early day so I don't feel too bad but the weekday habits don't help when something important needs doing first.

I was supposed to get up at 9 but slept through 2 alarms till 10 and then hustled out the door in yesterday's suit.

Not looking up information is fine if you have time to putz around but I only had an hour before my shift and knew only that the place I was looking for was in the basement level of a mall in Umeda and that there were "posters everywhere". Inside the mall it was warm and there were plenty of people milling around, waiting until the shutters ran up at 11, but none of the crowd or lineup I'd expected to mark out the ticketbooth.

And, there were two basements. The elevator wouldn't go to B1 so I went down to B2 and looked around the only place open, a Pachinko parlour, for some stairs. I finally saw a half-escalator going up and took it to a little platform between the ground floor and bottom basement. Behind a glass-pane I saw the promised posters and a few cashiers talking to themselves because there was not a single customer in there with them. But the glass wasn't a door, it was just glass. There were no signs pointing out somewhere else and it seemed like a joke that I could be seperated so simply from where I needed to be.

I thought about knocking on the glass and doing a few gestures for "lost" but then what? They'd probably say something in Japanese and then I'd sign that I didn't understand and then they'd get a complicated look on their faces and maybe point to somewhere I'd already looked but then I'd already looked there. I'd spent 20 minutes mapping out the building and had been outside twice, the building equivalent to a dead-end. What if they just bowed in their most sorry way and went back behind the counter to talk about what a hassle I was? Then they'd see me buzz back by the window a few more times still looking for an entrance and pity-laugh because the way in was so obvious.

"How can you be in a country and not understand 'Go outside and left'?" they'd say.

But, I did find the little door outside. The unprobable door leading into a dank stairwell with a tired security guard out front. The kind of back entrance that seems like a secret but then just seems half-finished once you find what you're looking for.

Apparently, Bob Dylan is awesome in Japan too and the front-row seats I was gunning for were sold out. Everything else was available but there wasn't one sitting ticket left. Ironic that there had been a line-up of people, people standing in 10 degree(F) weather for hours, who just wanted to sitdown.