Hammock Review:

Nagoya, Japan

It was the hammock before the Covid.

But I didn’t know it at the time.

At the time, it was more like relaxing towards the hammock.

In other words, relaxing in different ways that built up to the hammock., like a great explorer ascends the mountain to the summit, a great story or sexual encounter swells to the climax, or a Johann Stamitz symphony intensifies to a crescendo.

It started off with a few drinks the night before the hammock.

One drink was at the Kids Bar.

Perhaps the idea of the Kids Bar is to drink enough alcohol that you reduce your intellectual capacity to that of yourself as a little kid, where there is no room for life’s worries accumulated during the hammock-deficient years of adulthood. And so, even though the brain is less developed, imagination has the freedom to run wild, like when you rest your head on a hammock: the ultimate spaghetti strainer filtering out worry through strategically-woven interstices; with worry’s extradition freeing up room in your mind for more imagination, imagination can truly be productive.

Or maybe the Kids Bar’s motive is to increase your intellectual power to your little-kid levels when you could imagine anything. Just like a child’s sponge-like mind is superior at language acquisition, it could also be superior at “crazy”-thought acquisition (imagination) that adults require performance-enhancing drugs like alcohol and hammocks to achieve. But rather than comparing little kid’s minds to simple sea creatures like sponges, maybe we should be comparing them to engineering marvels like hammocks. For a hammock has the magic to create room where there once was not: hammock-less travelers are limited in lodging capacity by two-dimensional floorspace, but when hammocks become involved, the world (with the same amount of square footage) becomes three-dimensional as the hammock can hang in the air, allowing more to lodge in a room and be safely sheltered. Likewise, the child’s expansive hammock-like mind can shelter more imagination. The adult’s imaginatively-stunted mind, remaining obsessed with floorspace, simply has less real estate (citation: stagnant housing market).

So maybe when you rest your head in a hammock, whose design is very ergonomically supportive of imagination and wonder, you increase your imaginative capacity to little-kid levels, not completely dissimilar to if someone handed you a bunch of money to better your financial situation so it could match that of a trust fund kid. Just like a start-up company needs financial backing to succeed (less it end up using more non-monetary metrics to measure success, like Sweet Livin’ Productions does), the adult imagination often requires the backing of a hammock to see success.

But the Kids Bar may have been playing a different angle altogether. After taking a quick, informal demographical age survey of the Kids Bar clientele, I realized its strategy may have been to speed up the process of guiding one from the golden child to the golden years, from the kid of youth to the kid of caducity, from juvenile whimsy to aged wisdom, from decidedly young to decidedly old, which are not so different as neither are ever really that physically, mentally, or spiritually far away from a hammock.

It is us, your standard-issue middle-aged adults, that are so problematic and desperately deficient of the nutrients hammocks provide.

So I had a whiskey and imagined/visualized/pre-paved a hammock situation before hopping over to a few other non-Kids Bars.

It was relaxing.

Then I slept.

Also relaxing.

The next day, well-rested, I sought more rest.

So, using the modern dragnet of the internet, I caught myself an onsen relatively nearby: one transfer on public transport plus a little walking.

I am not sure if this was officially an onsen in terms of compliance with the 1948 Hot Spring Law, because it was almost entirely indoors (part was actually outdoors, but it was not a natural spring). But it had onsen in its name and if it was not officially an onsen, it at least could be called a relaxation center because it was generously furnished with a variety of ways to relax.

I would love, in some life, to become an onsen expert like I am of hammocks, but a person can only really have one such highly-practiced specialization per lifetime.

I used some of the relaxation methods offered in the center as appetizers before proceeding to the onsen itself, which was like a buffet of hot tubs–-each offering different temperatures, different jet powers, and different ambiances (some were inside, others outside). It was wonderful. A satisfying and satiating meal of relaxation.

Time for dessert.

The hammock.

Not a light read by any means that one would normally associate with reading in a hammock, but it was the book I was reading on this trip; The Underground Railroad is very good and would become a staple of my literature classes.

And that is how you relax.

La siesta indeed.

A view from the hammock.

“Of height there is no fear, when the hammock is near.” — Ancient Anonymous Hammock Proverb

And so it was with the healthy meal of relaxation and its every succulent dessert: the hammock.

Later, in history, there was Covid. But for now, there was only hammocks and there is a lot of power in the now (Citation: The Power of Now). And in that now, I am uncertain if I had increased my imaginative power to that of a kid or if I had increased my imaginative power to that of a senior citizen; but we will conclude this Hammock Review with complete satisfaction without having come to a conclusion in that regard as our hearts are warm with the charity of providing such debate and analysis to Advanced Placement English classes and academic journals desperately lacking proper hammock content.

“Covid cannot survive on a hammock.” — Ancient Anonymous Hypothetical Hammock Proverb Mixed with Selective Science

“Humans cannot live on bread alone, but also need every [hammock],.” — Matthew 4:4