We left at dawn with all the Japanese kids, all of us sweating, them in their tight racing-striped tees and platform boots and hair dyed blonde, hair dyed blue. There was a locker room where we all had checked our bags and it really looked like a gym locker room and for a moment I fantasized I was one of them in a Tokyo school. I liked to stand among them, their titters and glances dancing around me.

Roger and I went into a train station and a British couple approached us to chat. They'd been out celebrating his birthday – happy birthday, we said. He'd had "quite a few beers, mate, quite a few tequilas." Turns out they were there teaching English; they lived in a tiny apartment somewhere and had this strange ex-pat life. They were ordinary working-class British, down to earth and fast-talking. We asked them what it was like and the guy riffed about Japan and the Japanese. He was funny and I liked him. He said it was right strange living here, mate. The Japanese do not feel shame the way we do, he noted. For example, they are not the least bit disinclined to stare straight into your eyes for a long while simply because you're white. It happens to him all the time, he said. He'll be on a train and he'll sense something a bit off and look up to find the commuter across the aisle staring intently at him and, rather than looking away in embarrassment upon being caught, unflinchingly continuing to stare, every bit as intently. And also the customs, you have to be careful. It's quite taboo to eat while standing up. Very taboo. Don't eat a piece of pizza or something standing on the platform of a train or walking down the street. And don't blow your nose in public. You may just as well be wiping your arse.

What do you eat?

Lots of noodles mate. You get used to noodles. You have to get used to noodles if you want to live in Japan. Food is bloody expensive but noodles are fucking cheap, mate. And a bit of seafood now and then yeah? But the shop is very strange here too. The way prices are for things. For example you can go into a shop and find a mini-stereo, speakers, CD player, radio, the whole lot, for 3,500 yen. And then you go to the fruit section of the store right? And you pick up a package of red apples, three polished red apples packed in clear wrap on a green styrofoam tray and you look at the price and it's… 3,500 yen.

The girl was quieter but funny too and I liked them both. She had brown hair tied back severely in a ponytail and bright red lipstick and lots of mascara and a sexy sort of form-fitting leather jacket. Roger said are you a Jordy then? She smiled and said yeah, she's from Newcastle, can you tell? And Roger said yeah, you got a Jordy accent.

I took a great picture of the two of them on the train, her head on his shoulders, and then they got off forever and there I was with Roger on our way back out through the suburbs, gray and dewy this time, schoolgirls staring with their white socks up. We got off in a little town near the airport and took a walk, and he wanted to go see a monastery or some fucking thing and I just wanted an excuse to leave him so that's where we parted, him walking down the road, me hailing a cab back to the hotel. I took a shower, numb and nauseous, and took the bus to the airport and flew back around the world.

There was a huge crowd in a U-shaped space around the bar, everyone dancing in place, like everything else in this city. A DJ was spinning up-to-date hip-hop. I waded from one side of the room to the other, watching people, stopping to dance awhile, hoping to really feel lost. It was mostly young Japanese but there were Westerners here and there. There was a magnificent sight all along the bar: ten or so beautiful young Japanese women all dancing in a row, their hips and arms in counterpoint. I approached and faced one and danced before her for a while, aware of myself as a sort of worshiper or supplicant. She occasionally graced me with her gaze and smile. Eventually it was just too much and I had to move away, and I danced before another one, and another.

When I saw Roger again he had gotten a hold of two glow sticks and was dancing ostentatiously raver-style, his gaze intent, wildly waving his arms in the space he'd created around him. I wandered away again, hoping to perhaps never see him again.

The music was hot and I was drunk, a mass of dancing youth around me. Everything vertical, up up up! Time raced for the sunrise. A particular bar dancer caught my eye because she was wearing a t-shirt that said something. I could tell from afar that it was English and I knew that if a beautiful Japanese woman dancing on a bar was wearing a t-shirt in English, then what it said had to be remarkable. I made my way closer to have a look. I felt hot and short of breath in anticipation. Finally I could see it. She was dancing, knees pumping up and down, arms swaying. The t-shirt was white, with a rainbow on it. Above the arc of the rainbow it said this: COMMUNICATION. And below the arc, on three lines: GOOD JOYFUL HAPPINESS.

I wanted to cry it was so beautiful. Then I danced in front of her like a fool.

We got out at Shinjuku Station and found a place to eat, a sushi restaurant on the second floor. Everything in Tokyo is up stories; it's a vertical city. Bars, shops, restaurants: 2F, 5F, 7F. What's on the ground floor? Banks.

We took our shoes off at the front door and sat cross-legged at a low table in the back. I had sake and Roger had tea and we ordered sushi that was no better than it is in New York. We talked about where we were from and then about girls and relationships and he said he was in love with some girl but he cheated on her or something and pissed her off and now he wants her back. Outside it began to rain.

There was nothing happening in the neighborhood so we took a cab to Roppongi. As I gazed through the beaded water on the windows I wondered, this place could be any city, it's like all the cities I know: What makes it Tokyo? I searched for something that would evoke magnificent, strange difference but found only pleasant residential streets lined with trees and shrubs and walls around parks, streetlights and crosswalks and cars and parking meters.

When we got to Roppongi the rain was pouring in thick, warm ropes. It was maybe the hardest rain I'd ever seen; a choking, blinding deluge that soaked all the fabric on my body. We walked up and down the main street and finally decided to go to the Gas Panic Bar, just down a side street. We spent a couple of hours in the second-floor bar, Club 99, a relatively subdued place with an American-looking bartender and lots of young Japanese. We sat at a small table, drying off and drinking beer and looking around. I took pictures in the red-lighted semi-darkness. And then we went to the bar on the third floor.

Lis and I drove into San Francisco from the airport on Thursday, with time to kill before picking up Mom and Viv in San Jose. It was beautiful and breezy. We headed north on 101 to the hill that said SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO THE INDUSTRIAL CITY. I was struck by all the Spanish names, San Mateo, San Bruno, San Francisco, and I thought of how good they sounded in American, in sunny California American, and I was happy that we had kept these Spanish words for towns, though it hardly occurs to us they are the names of saints.

With nowhere to go we headed directly to Haight-Ashbury.

Went to a bar to see my coworker DJ, with my other doomed coworkers, and we talked about what it was like to be on the way out and we talked about our dream jobs, not just our fantasy dream jobs but our realistic dream jobs, and we talked about seeing art in a museum and how the context is fucked up. Howie DJ'ed good and he played a great slow version of "Heart of Glass." 

We talked about outsider art and the creative process. Geoff has tried to write but he's sure he can't do it. "Yes you can," said Chris, "No," said Geoff, "Trust me. I write a paragraph and a half."

We told him we'd really like to read those paragraphs and a half.

Denis appeared to be high. "Life is beautiful," he blurted out at one point. We turned to him. "Don't you just think life is beautiful?" he asked. He described how important it was to him to escape the mundane.

Thump thump thump thump thump-bash thump thump-bash thump went the music.

Newton was a bit like Columbus. He made a big discovery, but he didn't know exactly what he had discovered – or how momentous his discovery really was.

When Newton discovered gravity, he discovered God. What is God – what could God possibly be – if not gravity? Without gravity, the entire universe would be completely empty and there would be no reality of any kind whatsoever. Think about it.

This view is consistent with other notions of God – or suspicions as to the nature of God, anyway. We are often tempted to assert that God is love. This sounds "right" in a sort of abstract, instinctive way – we like to imagine God as a ubiquitous, positive force. Well that's right. God is a ubiquitous, positive force. Literally. And it is love. Everything that binds or draws one thing to another, everything that staves off entropy, the single thing that has enabled matter to coalesce into worlds and higher and higher forms of life – it's simply gravity. And to the degree that we feel that God must be an agent in the life of the universe right down to the minutest elements in human affairs, well… that's true, too. Perhaps not in the way that we would like to think (God does not answer prayers, let's face it), but God – gravity!- is unquestionably the agent of everything that happens in the universe.

It's deceptively simple. We have overlooked it perhaps because it's too simple, and not satisfyingly romantic or spectacular to our overstimulated imaginations. Also, we have a foolish – tragic, sometimes – tendency to believe the greater the question, the more complex the answer. Often the opposite is the case. Good scientists and mathematicians really appreciate this paradox – when faced with a difficult problem, they know to look first for the simplest answer. And it's a law of troubleshooting, expressed in the owner's manual of practically any gadget: Not working? Make sure it's plugged in.

Looking for God? It's everywhere.