On Saturday, Judy and I took a trip up to Omiya in Saitama to have dinner with some friends. We arrived early with a couple of hours to spare, so we decided, despite the freezing wind, to take a little stroll around and revisit some of our old haunts. Naturally, the place we headed first was our old apartment.

I’ve written previously about the many tribulations we experienced while living there, but it was still nice seeing the place again. The shitty “brick pattern” plastic siding concealing the original rotting-wood-and-damp-paper structure beneath, the mailbox where I received approximately five pieces of mail over the course of an entire year, the window through which a burglar came in and robbed me of all of my valuables, and so on. Oh, and my old bicycle, which has since become an extremely dusty trash bin.

Yes, that’s right: I abandoned my bicycle when we moved to Tokyo two years ago. I am a very bad person.

But please allow me to explain. There are basically three ways to get rid of an old bicycle in Japan: 1) arrange for it to be taken away and properly disposed of for a fee, 2) leave it outside of a train station or other busy area to either be stolen or taken away by the city, or 3) abandon it in a nondescript location to either be stolen or eventually become part of the landscape of urban decay. I hadn’t intended to do the latter; in fact, I had originally planned to take it with us when we moved, but there ended up not being enough room for it in the mover’s small truck, and so the two guys from my company who lived nearby and were helping us move (one of whom had actually given me the bicycle, third-hand), told me to just leave it behind. And so, with a lack of time and more favorable immediate options, I did.

And to this day, there it sits; a gradually deteriorating eyesore, its former road-weaving glory long forgotten as it gathers layer upon layer of dust while now acting as nothing more than a convenient receptacle for passers-by to deposit their garbage.

I wonder how long it’ll be before someone decides to have it hauled away. . . .