It’s almost in slow motion, the models walking out with impassive dead faces looking pretty glum. It’s so teenage melancholy. They’re worried about something; are they walking into the Principal’s office to be punished? Are they about to lose their virginity? Most models look glum, but these are particularly so. It’s as if they are self-aware mannequins, realizing that their only purpose is to display clothes that some rich person is going to buy.
Holy Mother of God, these are models on a murderous prowl and they’re icy calm about it - and they’ve got sharp, gleaming things around their necks.

The clothes they’re wearing might even be made by these animated mannequins. They are all exaggerated shapes, dressing gown fabrics and headbands that are so home video VHS aerobic instructor that it’s almost endearing. This is chic by being anti-chic. Nothing here looks in the least bit showy, fabulous, sexy. It doesn’t look like fashion. The colours comprise those that adorn grandmother hats and matronly skirts; browns that cling to the tattered suitcases of tired men. I hated those colours the first time I saw them and I still do. They evoke memories that just aren’t chic. These memories are warm and fuzzy - very homely. What they really make me want is some pumpkin soup and homemade bread.

There’s no dream in this collection. It’s not something you want to dream about. It’s a dream within reality, within a dark room where there is no inspiration; a harsh reality from a walk in a park where a rich boy is being beaten by a thug with a family to feed and all the trees are burning down. It’s cold, concrete reality. This collection is about proles - think 1984 - infesting the establishment and changing the way the establishment dresses. One can imagine the lords and ladies of the city arriving in their carriages of steel and Italian leather to a function held by one of these proles: Marc Jacobs.
He doesn’t so much dazzle them as infect their collective minds with subversive takes on their own aristocratic uniforms. Here comes the white coat, over sized. Here’s a dress with a toothpaste top. Here’s a dress that’s grey, uniform grey. Not “Perl grey” or any other glamorous colour that may inhabit the wardrobes of these lovely ladies and gents. It is the grey of smoke vomiting factories. The real genius of this ruse is that it’s a fusion of two polar opposites: the proletariat and the bourgeois.

This feeling of adolescent tragedy lingers throughout the show - perhaps it’s the headbands. It’s in the sullen faces of the models. It rings out in the Sonic Youth playing too loudly. “Revolutionary” teenagers changing the world from the inside. Teenagers like (forty-five year old) Marc Jacobs. Maybe Jacobs is trying to change fashion from the inside. Change what, though? It’s still expensive as hell so if you want to make a rebellious statement in Mr. Jacobs’s latest. . .

An orgiastic vortex of twenty-four hour violence, unneccessary drug use and blood-drenched psychosis centering on one boy, a girl with a penis, a suit jacket haunted by the ghost of memphis blues, a robbery at a pharmacy, a den of sunshine addicted lunatic theives, gravel roads to nowhere, burned out shells of abandoned factories, labyrinths, menthol cigarettes, a woman who has unintentionally switched bodies, a talking cat and a single guitar case that may or may not contain a high yield nuclear device.

None of these events, people or objects are related beyond a tenuous connection, but they will be brought together against their will.

Who will survive, and what will be left of them?

I am chewing on a pen when he walks up to me and smiles and he’s got the most beautiful olive eyes I’ve ever seen. A bit too tall for my tastes, but he’s got that whole walking-up-to-a-girl thing down just perfectly. You know the walk I’m talking about? Well, maybe you don’t, maybe you’ve never seen it, but forget about it. It’s not important. The important thing is that he looks strange – out of place, out of time – like he probably shouldn’t be in this juice bar on the corner of 13th and Magnolia. He looks like someone out of a dinosaur’s wet dream. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what was so strange about him; it wasn’t something you could really pin down. Clothes that were a few seasons behind the curve, or maybe ahead of the curve, these things are cyclical anyway. His eyes remind me of a violent upheaval; a nightmare shut up into the twin coin-lockers set into his face.

“Can I help you?” I ask him.

“Yeah, can you make me an orange smoothie?”

“Sure,” I can hear myself thinking, even thought it comes out of my mouth as a sort of unintelligible half-mumble.

I turn around and start looking for the ingredients. God, if there’s one thing you’ll let me do perfectly, just this time, let me make a perfect orange smoothie. I open the bone colored cabinets under the counter and get two oranges. I get milk from the fridge and ice from the freezer compartment and dump the milk and the ice into this blindingly neon-green blender by the sink. My hands grab an orange and go to juice it and the orange does the strangest thing – it slips right through my fingers and falls apart into eight perfect slices. These little slices shatter into sixteen when they slide out of my hand and hit the countertop. The pieces tumble to the floor, shattering again into perfect halves as they strike the tile floor.

Speechless, I go to juice the other, too shocked to clean up the first shattered orange. This orange suffers the same strange fate. Eight slices fall through my fingers to the counter. I try to catch them as they fall, flailing my arms like a coked-up valley girl, but I’m not able to hold on. Some melt in my hands like icy flakes in a late spring flurry; others fall right through my fingers, slipping out of my grasp like wet soap. I grab more oranges from under the cabinet. These oranges fare no better than their fellow citrus. All of them split and slide one after another right through my grasping hands, eventually shattering into pieces too small to make out. I get the impression that they are separating all the way down to the individual atoms that made up the oranges, splitting down to the lonely quarks and perhaps farther than that. Elementary particles are nature’s wallflowers.

The gorgeous man behind the counter seems. . .

Where do you want this?

I’m not sure where any of this goes:

Glaciers on opposite poles have been holding a tenuous argument for millenia; a representative of the North Pole faced — well, any direction, really — and whispered a terrible lie; it would take a hundred years to reach the south pole, and what happens then, no one born nearly thirty years before yesterday has half of a right to imagine. The sky over Los Angeles was the color of recycled newsprint, late one night, and formless rumors kicked up inexplicable action and sound. A cat yearning for something unshapeable, a vintage record player playing a dead jazz lady’s not-best work on a rooftop far away, police sirens looking for something by making themselves heard; me sitting on a sofa listening to the sound of the needle of the cosmos in the record groove of the earth, everything distant reduced to a near-mute wailing treble squeal. In several weeks’ time, back in Tokyo, I’d arrive at the somewhat-adult, existentially horrifying decision of how, precisely, I’m supposed to throw away my garbage can. Seriously, what do I put it in? Back on that night, with a window open, a diet root beer, wildfire smoke clouding the Hollywood sign, the full moon beating like a human heart, the minute ticks of the earth’s second hand came within audible range. The shotgun holed up next door, contemplating suicide and unable to bend his barrel to fit his will, instead took it upon himself to begin reading the phone book, in as soft a voice as he could manage. The sky shook subtly with the passing of the months-long words of glaciers.

Days later I’d be stopped at a shoulder on US Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, confronted by the inverse of existence, at two in the morning, maybe mere miles from Santa Cruz, with less than a tenth of a tank of gas. We turned off the headlights; after a few minutes, the stars were all over the place. The ocean roaring two thousand feet below, barely a guardrail on the road, no electric lights, no passing cars. I recalled something I felt like I’d overheard, though really it was being presented to me as a paying customer at a planetarium that shared the top floor of a shopping-building with an aquarium that looked from the outside like all the glass within was green: out by Ayer’s Rock, down in Australia, late at night, they’ll escort people out by candlelight and serve them a full-course meal; at one point during dessert, they blow out all the candles, leaving the people alone with the stars and feelings, resembling memories, of everyone else around them. The narrator, back then, had recommended this to me, if I were ever in Australia, and the suggestion — as I wrote earlier — felt cheap, and immediately impressed all the experience of having worked as a busperson in said wild outdoor restaurant for three decades before giving in to. . .

I am not, by natural preference, a Politics Junkie.

My good father is an addict, though, of a very different color. I used to watch him go google-eyed (this was before Google’s failed challenge of the Microsoft eyeball patent) between CNN and MSNBC and (later) Fox News, shouting at regular intervals at a prime-time pastiche of puffy politicos and pontificating pundits. Again and again, Whitewater or Iraq or Osama or Lewinsky or The Giant Wall To Eliminate Mexico, his mustachioed point was pretty much always the same thing:

This thing that was happening! He could not BELIEVE this! This thing!

The things the man is unable to believe are, I think, a great source of fun and energy for him. As the kid, though, I found it all kinds of depressing. I mean, it was basically the same Talk Stew 24/7 . . . the context kind of changed, I guess, but for me it was all just a re-type of a nearly identical format. That whole Journalism thing - - I couldn’t really see why anyone would need to actually take out student loans for that sort of thing. You just needed to read The Onion or The Lampoon or The Daily Omniscient Laughtacular or whatever, and have less of a sense of shame about spotting inconsistencies in the figures and events of the day. (That’s called bias.)

So now I’m steering the ramshackle Life Express towards Thirtiesville (Population: Previously Unnecessary Zeal for Hair Removal/Preservation); apparently we are in the midst of some kind of election, here. And wouldn’t you know it . . . I think the horrifying civics-minded parasite paddling around my father’s spinal fluid has somehow, in some way, gotten to me.

Oh, I vote. I vote and I have voted, but in terms of actual gee-gosh civics rushes I’d have to say that helping send this one Baby Shaker to prison for life was a far cleaner and longer-lasting high. But now I’m starting to get breathless at the little things. WILL the Puerto Rican delegates become instrumental to selecting a candidate they can never elect? DOES futuristic space candidate Barack Obama have the momentum to carry a demographically-challenged Rhode Island? HAS McCain’s face been subtly re-textured and stylized throughout the course of the campaign? I’m starting to believe that it has. I want to believe that it has.

You should not DO this for days at a time, as I foolishly have. I’m starting to think big and hazy and conspiratorial: just how did Hillary get that mysterious cough, anyway? Am I really supposed to believe that Bill Clinton was able to smooth his way through an impeachment and a record-breaking number of presidential pardons, and then - - OOPS, SORRY HONEY - - accidentally blow off his wife’s leg (metaphorically) by disenfranchising a legion of committed black voters with a sudden case of late-onset foot-in-mouth?. . .

I’m pretty sure it should go without saying, but, you never know so: don’t eat natto. It’s horrible and disgusting. This comes from someone who really likes korean tripe soup and sea urchin sushi.

The world’s full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!
Though twisty roads packed tight with choads
May stymie you, you can
Demure! Avoid their macabre gaze!
As gray as Dorian!
The world’s full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

The world’s full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!
Fortuna’s foal find purchase whole
Upon Earth’s azure span!
The blessed few then sure to view
God’s Holy Caravan!
The world’s full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

The world’s full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!
Delight in Worry?  Foolscap jury!
Non-Prescription Flan!
To wit: the Embers cattle-called
Entreaty the Sudan;
The world’s full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

The world’s full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!
Malarkey’s barking pale moon parking
Innocence D’urban!
The atmospherics fear to hear the
Cousins of Dianne!
The world’s full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

The world’s full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!
Debase yourself upon the shelf
You purchased in Spokane!
And nevermore’s a whore’s encore:
A frozen-jawed Cheyenne!
The world’s full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

The world’s full of Beauty, Sir, and I am but a Man!

The world’s full of Beauty, Sir . . .

. . . and I am but a Man!

Clicking the hidden link on the staff page of the DolphinSafePlasticRings site (click the fourth green pixel from the top) will let you hear amxxx.mp3. Portions of the audio are corrupted (perhaps due to their interception and subsequent re-broadcasting by The Nefarious Collective), but a rough transcript (Thanks Kevin!) follows:

WOMAN: They’ve found me. I don’t ***** if they traced the pathways from Caldecott, or whether ****** Relfon Corporation again, but I don’t ****** time to discover a cure for the virus. Or a virus for the cure. ********** going to sign off ******* Oh no!

Caldecott is also referred to in the surveillance footage shown on the Adabraxian Pharmaceuticals page (use name WHYGAR and password POSSIBLEPAST to download the files from the Remote Login page - - this information was obtained by the first 50 people to purchase the Ovyerrun Chronicles game collection via a heat-sensitive sticker on the back of the game box). On the third oil drum from the left in the warehouse footage (check at the 1:14 mark) you can see that the delivery sheet on the drum has been signed by one J. Caldecott (though this may be difficult to see at some resolutions - - check the HD version of the file). There’s a further reference to James Caldecott in the interrogation transcript available in the HTML code of the Smithtrone Security Services site - - apparently he was working on the original Tridium Cluster at the time of the initial impact (January 2057 in the Blue Timeline, February 2031 in the Green Timeline). As for the Relfon Corporation, little can be concretely confirmed at this point, though there is a reference to both “the corporation” and “the virus” in the fourth track of the limited-edition version of the game’s soundtrack (only available from select Spielplan stores during the August 2006 German release). Of course, all of this is moot if we’re following the Red Timeline version of events: in that version of reality, the EMF pulse of the impact eradicated the functionality of 1) the electronics used to record The Disturbance and 2) the transmission tower from which The Disturbance originally originated from; if we accept this as the most realistic version of events, it’s unlikely that any of the Collectives (Nefarious, Seven Keys, or 001-Group) would have been able to piecemeal together the final version of the formula used after the final Convergence, and you have the re-splitting of the timelines predicted on the corrupted version of the About or Community page of DoctorChurch (the original page loads as an uncorrupted JPEG of a woman sitting with a seashell; use your TAB key to highlight and click on all of the hidden links on the page to view the un-cleaned version of the page (this option isn’t available in the White Timeline after the execution of the PurityAtAllCost campaign)).

I’ve got the feeling that we’ve got a few more twists coming up, though -. . .

I haven’t masturbated in over two years. I suppose I could have said “masturbated to completion”, though as I am a man, masturbation isn’t really masturbation if it’s not “to completion”. If you’ve ever seen a rated-R motion picture made after, say, 1999, whose main character is a writer or another person whose occupation is creating static pieces of “art”, you might have the impression that masturbation is necessary to getting anything finished. This is both correct and maybe not correct; either way, in the last two years I have found myself almost cripplingly realistic; as a child, I never believed in neither Santa Claus nor the Easter Bunny, and as an adult I dare not apologize for having never tried to pretend I did; as a post-adult I find myself dissatisfied with my own powers of imagination. I’m not having trouble getting laid, I keep telling myself: it’s just that I don’t feel like dealing with the people aspect. I don’t want to have to share my bed, my room, my corner of the city, et cetera. I’ve had interrupted sleep for more than two months; first by a man who snored like God must snore, second by someone who hung a wet towel over my (kind of cheap) wooden living room door, which now makes a horrible squealing sound whenever it’s closed, third by a good friend who actually did nothing to irritate me, and fourth by someone who doesn’t bother me, really, it’s just that by now, when I’ve not had a string of days alone in over two months, I kind of need everyone to go. Today I was working on something that requires excessive concentration — I couldn’t have gotten rich any other way — and the very fact that my mind was wandering from the subject of dollar signs is evidence that I wasn’t concentrating enough, so behold, pornography. Years ago it would have been only slightly untrue to say that typically it’s impossible to find pornography starring “the kinds of girls I find attractive”; now, languages have blossomed in new ways, and my loves are reduced to single keywords. There she is, someone I’ve never met. Like a gosling, I find myself attracted to a specific three-point-two seconds of doggy-style penetration; I find her tooth-line incredible and her little hiccuping-sob-like squeal of pleasure arousing on a philosophical level. Playing the guitar has developed in me amazing enough muscle memory to click the mouse with my left hand while doing something else with the right, so I replay those three-point-two seconds long enough to realize why pornographers spam one camera angle for so long at a time. Repetition rots the mind, truly; after hearing that delightful squeal more than a dozen times, after mapping out its exact shape with the insides of our ears, it becomes like the nickname our mothers called us. It becomes something we respond to with indifference. Imagine having sex with a girl (or a man, if you must) who. . .

I’ll call this “the sinking ship dilemma”.

Basically, you’re in this ship, right? It’s not a particularly attractive ship, but it has this sort of rusty charm that makes you like it despite its flaws. You feel really, truly at home on this ship and the way it rocks back and forth in the saltwater at night helps you go to sleep. One day, you decide to take this ship for a trip to the Arctic Circle even though your sailor buddies are warning you not to and you’re not even sure why you’re doing it yourself. You end up doing it anyway - maybe out of curiosity, maybe out of spite - and everyone sort of chuckles uneasily but they all bid you a safe journey into the wild unknown. You smile, light a cigarette and chug off in that rusty boat for the North.

So, let’s say that you’re chugging through the Arctic Sea and it’s so cold your words are freezing and falling to the ground, clinking when they hit the deck. “But hey,” you think to yourself, “This isn’t so bad. I can swing this sort of life for a while.”

Well, see, then you hit this big bastard of an iceberg. I mean it’s really fucking huge, right? Cuts this big gash all along the side of the boat while you were posing on deck looking cool in your Captain Gordon raincoat and you hear “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” playing. Problem is, the big bastard of an iceberg destroyed your radio equipment so you can’t SOS any boats that may be nearby. So, we’re left with a choice:

Do you hold on to the last second, abandon ship, jump into the icy waters of the Artic Sea, shoot some flares and hope to God that there’s a boat nearby that sees you before you freeze to death? Or, do you accept the consequences of your rash and ill-advised journey and sink down into the depths with this rusty but lovable hulk of a ship that really never did you any wrong?

The waters are cold, but the inside of the ship is warm for now; at least it will be until it sinks under the waves. Oh, and if you stay aboard you’ll drown which is quicker and probably more pleasant than dying of hypothermia, desperately trying to stay afloat until your strength wears out and you sink like a stone. Though, is that glimmering of hope - of possible rescue by another warm boat that might be rusty and lovable too - enough to deny fate for? Is that worth betraying the boat that stuck by you until the end - a victim of your decisions - for a few more fleeting moments of life? Do you think you’ll regret not going down with the ship, like a good captain would? Or, should you rage against your misfortune and forge. . .

Early 19th-century fettuccine magnate Adrian ‘Hats’ Hatsworthcelli once opined that “Speed and Leisure exist in that most dynamic of tensions; each pulls wincing at the other, and the band inevitably snaps.” Food for thought, I suppose - - but like so many people of his day, Hats did not live nestled in the Utopian clockwork of modern Japan. Nor did he ever ride Tokyo’s newest glimmering electromagnetic wunderkind: the 特別USAGI急行列車. If one rightly judges one’s self-worth by the experiences one accrues in life, I am far better than that man.

Outside the USAGI’s peculiarly convex plasticine windows, traditional Tokyo bonsai gardens blur past at a breathtaking 4000kph . . . doubtlessly impressive to the uninitiated, but a far cry from the train’s top speed of 32500. There’s no sound from the frictionless rails - - then again, how could there be, floating as we are a full seventeen meters above them. There’s a slight hiss, of course, pumped into the individual reclining seats that conform directly to the contours of every grateful passenger, but it’s nothing more than an auditory illusion designed to eliminate the unsettling sensation of Unmoored Frictionless Travel (UFT) in those unaccustomed to it . . . and it’s due to be phased out within the next seventeen days. Tokyoites, it must be said, are an adaptive lot.

The same can’t be said, sadly, for Jennifer Tetherbrackt, a self-described cosplay fan and street performer from Denver, CO. She’s wedged herself into the aisle next to me, her chalky, ham-like frame unable to find purchase in one of the USAGI’s chairs. The robotic onigiri vendors swerve nimbly to avoid her. She tries to engage me in lopsided conversation between great gulps of Pocari Sweat, but I realize just how greatly my verbal English has decayed during my long absence from the States. I give her a small origami crane and a wan smile, turning my attention back to CHIEMI.

CHIEMI is my constant companion for this journey - - the form I’ve chosen for her is that of a flaxen-haired Harajuku cosplayer, complete with black ginseng/clove cigarillo. But I’m no pederast: CHIEMI is nothing more than an adaptive-intelligence traveling companion calculated deep within the bowels of the USAGI’S centralized server farm in Hokkaido, beamed instantaneously to one of the JSDF’s orbiting satellite banks, and then down again to my speeding train car. She’s being beamed directly onto the back of my optic nerve via a tracking system in the ceiling (originally developed for use in LASIK). We’re playing Turtle Punch (rough translation), one of the games offered in CHIEMI’s entertainment pack, and the only one that doesn’t require signing up for direct withdrawl from my bank account (I’m no technophobe, but my hanko is currently being reworked to incorporate my new Japanese surname). She’s beginning to look pouty; she does this when you refuse to cough up any additional service fees. I kind of enjoy it.. . .

Wayne Kang is coming to Japan.

you have been warned.

You may or may not be pleased to know that the Wikipedia article on tipping does not cite any references or sources, and has been flagged appropriately

Second of all, I’ve been waking up a lot lately. You never really notice how much you’re waking up until you wake up at seven different times on seven different calendar days in a row. There’s almost no right to this rhythm. I might go to bed at midnight and wake up at four in the morning, and then I might go to bed at four in the morning that day and wake up at ten AM — and then go to bed at six PM and wake up at three AM. Or stay up that night until nine PM and wake up at three PM the next day. I don’t quite believe that desire to sleep stores up, for one thing. I’d wager that sleep is more of an opportunity than anything else. After all, if I stay awake for four days, that doesn’t mean I’ll then sleep for thirty-two straight hours. More notable is that I’m sleeping more deeply, and I’m seeing terrific dreams; my habitual urination has finally started to merely become part of my dreams. I tell you, there’s hardly anything worse than being heavy with tiredness, one navigational click away from the center of the forest of the night, and vaguely jealous of that pen-knife-like feeling in the groin that tells you you’re going to have to get up and turn on an electric light, and squint for sometimes upward of a minute if you ever want to see the dark side of your imagination again.

It’s been roughly five months since I earned my freedom and slipped into this erratically sleeping existence I occupy. Somewhere in the middle of a recent night, when a friend was sleeping on my sofa and snoring more loudly than a wig factory on fire and all its workers on strike and doubly angry, it hit me that this is probably how I’ll be when I die. It was a fascinating realization — here I was, locked up in a cage with iron bars in the square of that South-American village called My Own Life, with a hot slab of sleep dripping and bloody on a stick inches from as far as my hands reached, and for over a week, as well, and I was entertaining the fatalistic revelation that this way I feel is probably how I’m going to feel when I die, and that there’s nothing morbid about that, really. I see self-entertaining gentlemen all the time, on my increasingly infrequent trips to the hundred-yen store (hypothesis: I might be a human being capable of purchasing enough hundred-yen housewares to last him indefinitely, and eventually I might cease to remember things I’ve forgotten). I see men in their late fifties or even sixties, who seem like they don’t mind not getting up and walking to the train station every morning. . .

Here at LPN, we care about few things more than 1) rocking hard and 2) the soft caress of a woman’s hand. You take care of those things, and they take care of you, okay? That’s how life works, and it’s a pretty fair system, all said.

The rock pretty much minds itself. Ladies, though - - well, evolution’s been mighty cruel to that Pack O’ Angels, and it saddles them with menstruation once a month. It’s not funny. Sometimes it makes a woman so she don’t even want to have her hand softly caressed. Believe it!

So the shark-toothed labcoats here at LPN Beverage have come up with a tonic that is both mysterious and relaxing As All Hell. I mean, it’s not a cure. And you sure as hell don’t want to claim that the special gal in your life needs curing - - especially when she’s going through a Phase. But if you make it and she drinks it, it might just swing her bones back a notch or two toward normalcy. And the drink’ll be there, and you’ll be there, and maybe she’ll put two and two together and notice just how nice she feels when she’s rocking there, all nice and close to you.

That’s not half-bad, if that happens.

This tonic is called . . .

The Easygoing Woman.

INGREDIENTS:

Six bags of chamomile tea
Four limes
Some sugar
Vanilla extract -OR- 6 ounces of vanilla vodka
Some water
Some ice

1) Make the tea. Chamomile tea is a natural muscle relaxant, and it helps a lot with cramps. Unfortunately, people tend to brew it weak and nasty, because it tastes like musty balls. You want to brew this stuff strong and thick. Use maybe a cup or two of water. Throw the tea bags around in the kettle or cauldron or whatever and boil the demons out of them. You should end up with some nasty brownish liquid that smells not so great.

2) Put the nasty, dark chamomile into an iced tea pitcher.

3) Juice the limes. Juice them well. Strain the bits out and put the juice into the pitcher. Limes are high in potassium, something women need more of during That Time. And hey, maybe leave a few slices of lime to float around in the pitcher. That’s got class.

4) Fill the pitcher with water nearly to the top.

5) Here you’ve got to make a choice: vanilla extract or vanilla vodka? Alcohol will relax her muscles, but fuck with her ability to process water, possibly bloating her unduly. Also, you don’t want to say a sentence like so maybe you shouldn’t drink booze huh you seem to be retaining a lot of water unless you are a doctor, because sometimes people take good common-sense statements like that as personal attacks. Tricky. Dicey. I’d say go for the extract if she seems in the. . .

This is the fifth in a series, in which I take as much relaxation as a machine can manage to give me, and sip a bit at a bottle of water. It was actually pretty nice. Don’t know if I’m going to buy the T-shirt, but . . . yeah, actually pretty nice.

Love - - at least, the way I work the angles - - has got some explaining to do.

See, Death’s after Love, three feet off her heels; he’s riding flat-out like all the saints and the ghost of Moses was three feet behind him . . . and he’s hungry. Hungry, hot-chained and reckless, on a bike half Harley and half Hell Itself, tires hovering half an inch above the ground.

And you might think that would be enough, to catch a little thing like Love all there alone by her lonesome, but get this: she’s on God’s own moped, that girl, and she’s pushing that holy chunk of tin on high-octane rainbows and unicorn farts, and it’s always just fast enough to hold the distance there.

Barely.

And so it goes down on down the road, as fast and steady as you please, through the sun and the bugs and the dust and the rain, the ever-loving grind of single-minded obsession and single-minded indifference. And then . . . hell, when they finally meet - - when Love finally digs her spiked pink heels into the dust, and jackknifes that damn moped right there in the middle of the road, and there’s that final conflagration of dust and grease and she looks Death full in the face and screams What. Do. You. Want . . .

Well.

That’s something Death hasn’t quite been prepared for.

I mean, he’s looked at the situation from all possible angles at that point, and it’s frankly kind of baffling, to a guy like him. He thought he’d readied himself for any eventuality - - everything from a cup of coffee to a quick rape behind a disused toolshed - - but now, actually face-to-face with her, there in the road . . . he finds himself very much the Dog That Caught The Car.

She flips back her visor. She’s a pretty thing, ‘course, better than Death could have imagined in his loneliest nights, and she’s got a little heart tattooed on her right cheek, right below the eye. He coughs a mess of grime into his fist.

“Uh . . . ”

“Yeah?”

Death wiggles his toes around in one of his boots.

“Was . . . well, was kind of wondrin’ if you’d like to maybe . . . ah, hell Clarence, you are fucking this up . . . I was . . . well, wondrin’ if you maybe could see clear to finding your way to a cup of coffee or somethin’. With me. I . . . uh, know a pretty good toolshed near hereabouts . . . ”

Love looks at him and blinks, just once - - long lashes and a perfectly balanced sense of the very most cosmopolitan corners of the modern cosmetics industry. She makes herself a damn unfriendly face.

“God! No!”

And then she’s off again - - fast, blinding fast, and at the same time taking it just a bit easier, because she. . .

Hi, gang! Been super busy. Things are kind of up in the air right now, and maybe a little weird and also strange, but I think I am kind of trying to sort of deal with all of that here, now. Expect things, if you would. Expectantly.

Jobless in a technical sense for two weeks, pledged to begin spending time instead of wasting it, four to six days removed from something of a guitar epiphany [regarding scales], hoping to stop cracking my knuckles already and start finishing that science-fiction murder-mystery novel set during the male masturbation marathon in the 2244 Winter Olympics in Tokyo (chief reason for procrastination: My Lord, This Story is Dense) or else start recording a couple of these polished as hell pop-rock masterpieces (I’m like the Kinks sucking of Dinosaur Jr while Jesus and Mary Chain watch with Slurpees in hand over here) for the purpose of showing my drummer (chief reason for procrastination: Garageband is kind of an annoying program for not letting me layer tracks exactly as I want to), I’d instead fallen feet-first into a shallow era wherein I found it quite easier than anything to sleep for more than fourteen hours a day; yes, that’s more than half a day; I’d suggested to a goatee-wearing reflection of myself in a dream I don’t exactly remember (I had a couple of good ones of those) on a night that felt like the other night though was probably more than a week ago that I could make a killing on broadway if Salon.com were gracious enough to deem sleeping “the new singing and dancing”; following a moment-like twenty-two hour sleep session during which I think I filled out an IOU marked “one apology” to a girl who had come over with hopes of maybe putting her hand on my leg as I sat next to her on the sofa (reason for her failure: I couldn’t get out of the bed), I arrived at a revelation the way a train arrives at a station, the way a merry-go-round arrives at a revolution: that it was high time to start opening curtains, to let the sun shine in, to let the wind of the world blow once again into this kimchee-stinking (though otherwise impeccably clean) modern-day caveman haunt; and when I did this, it was good; I had woken up prior to noon six days in a row, and prior to ten AM for three days; I had proven that the prejudice that flits on the surface of a Japanese person-face when I say “I don’t have a job right now” (that prejudice that amazingly doesn’t go away when I say I have enough money to buy a condo with my fucking credit card (three reasons I haven’t bought the condo yet: Location, location, location)) is wholly unfounded and kind of sad: sitting around on a sofa that might as well be stuffed with dollar bills isn’t a bad or even dishonest lifestyle, especially when there are movies to watch; and I’m getting sidetracked and I know that, so to recap: recently sleepy, now wide-awake, after dinner, doing a little translation work, ready to go to bed of my own accord, I check my email on this here blazing-fast top-of-the-line highest-of-the-high-tech Macbook. . .

Super Roots 9
An album by Boredoms
A review by Joe Flynn


I must confess; I am a bit of a Boredoms fan. A cursory glance at my profile on a certain social networking site might reveal that I consider the Japanese punk/psychedelic/rock/funk/studio manipulation collective to be personal heroes. I find joy in their approach to music, that being “Whatever feels right, and damn everyone else.” It’s an approach that’s lead to a lot of chaotic, abrasive, ADD-inducing, dada rock music, as well as a bit of sun-worshipping krautrock and tribal drumming. When I heard about Super Roots 9, I was ecstatic.

Read more.

When we last left me, I was standing on a bridge, windswept, in a coat that made me look something like something Dr. Who would regenerate into, with a red carnation in a plastic bag in my pocket, listening to the shaking of concrete and the wailing of metal on a windy day; a war had been fought, those past few days, within handheld electronics devices, and maybe I hadn’t been the only one fighting. For all I knew, the coal-tar-shitting, deadbeat-faced, tongue-clicking old man sitting next to me on a rush hour train might have been a Lieutenant Colonel of the heart when it came to defending his reputation to a dime-store whore.

I’m not going to badmouth anyone, really; I’m not going to goodmouth anyone, either, while we’re at it. Let’s just keep rolling forward, normalmouthing everything.

I’d been locked out of my apartment, and not with good reason, by a man so drunk and so tired that he took my courteous offer of an old, unused television set to mean he was allowed to lock me out of my apartment. I wasn’t mad; I just went kind of delirious in those thirteen hours I was stuck out on the street. Watching the wind cast plastic bags high above the earth as concrete creaked and groaned and I wondered about the mystery of the wind when the sky was so blue put me in a groove-like state of mind wherein I could probably forgive anybody, and let’s say that’s what I ended up doing in the end. I’d spent the night before in the company of Popfairies, and I’d hardly been able to notice the waves of change sweeping within me. Maybe I didn’t change, after all. Either way, a week later someone said let there be rock, and there was rock, and a week after that, I was running up a hill in Roppongi, of all places, the place foreign people are deemed to hang out, running with the idea in mind that there existed a street that, when crossed, makes one not in Roppongi anymore. I suppose there are streets like this for every occasion. We crossed that street, we were in Nishi-Azabu, and I loosened up a little bit, and realized I was in the company of more white people than I could count on one hand. We were seeing about penetrating the Popfairies’ nest, this time for another all-night club event during which an official NME up-and-coming band called Damn Arms was to play a short set. They’d come all the way from Australia; I guess they were playing a show in Nagoya, or Nagano, or one of those Nagtowns, on a night that wasn’t that night. There was a bit of a David-Lynch-cover-band vibe draped over the evening; many persons in the audience had the ambiguous personality of a champagne bubble that got stuck halfway up the glass and forgot where it was. The guys in our party didn’t look. . .

Angela Aki (whom you may remember sang the Final Fantasy XII theme song, “Kiss Me Goodbye” and who, to this day along with Hirai Ken, claims to be Japanese which I refuse believe [although she is half, not that it makes a difference]) did a cover of a Blue Hearts song during one of her tours if you are into that sort of thing.

The latest dramatic masterpiece by tim rogers, directed by tim rogers, starring tim rogers, with exquisite cinematography by tim rogers. It’s “the blood can’t run from me — not anymore”, a short film about one deep-throated, unreasonably jaded and bafflingly young detective’s addiction to the most potent drug to ever be banned from the pharmacy: the past. Watch, from the edge of whatever seat you can find, as he spirals toward lost love, regret, revenge, and danger.

“Timeless. Absolutely. Fucking. Timeless. Don’t miss this one.” Raved the Christian Science Monitor.



Hollywood, tim rogers is available for any young detective roles you have lying around, if you are sure to catch him on a day of terribly influential influenza and / or film him from a terrible angle when he hasn’t shaved and is very sleepy, possibly from his own shower while he’s thinking about taking out the garbage.

A new short film production by tim rogers. Directed by tim rogers and starring tim rogers.

“The Layover” is a thrilling tale that’s sure to please all ages. If it doesn’t please you, please become a few years older, or younger, and try again.

PR COPY FOLLOWS

Hot on the heels of his epic journalism masterpiece the insertcredit.com fukubukuro 2006: GAME OF THE YEAR EDITION, tim rogers springs back onto the internet with a new haircut, a new shirt (the previous one was stolen off his clothesline by presumably a homeless man; says rogers, of the incident, “If I see the guy in the street, I’ll just say to him, hey, come over my place and I’ll give you another shirt; now, though, it might be impossible, what because it’s too cold and them homeless are all wearing layers, and if I were wearing layers that shirt, my favorite one, that’s the one I’d put on the bottom” (the new shirt is an Edwin Jeans super-light double-gauze pseudo-flannel, in spring colors of orange and leaf green (Harajuku Edwin HQ shop, 3,900 yen))), and the same old digital camera to record yet another breathtaking example of why he is (debatably) the most prolific and enrapturing artist of our time.




Thank you for watching.

Things I heard today in the static between radio stations on the drive to work:

“Change.”

“Change is a long and difficult road, but-”

“I know that when I think that something is going to tempt me, that I will be tempted by i-”

“We are terrible.”

“We are sinners.”

“Sin-”

“Relationships, personal-”

“The very crux of the issue!” Ian cried, banging his dining tray with an intensity that jostled the dingy plasticine booth. He held the dripping Gordita aloft and peered at it through a taut rictus of rehearsed disdain. “A penny’s worth of Baja for an extra fifteen’s worth of charges. The bean-tweezers at Head Central must have stiffened rather sharply on the Tuesday they wagered this insipid little coup.”

“Language, dear,” blushed Sarah. Though their record of Mass attendance vouchsafed their place among the fashionably pious — and kept them well free of the glare of the piously fashionable — she was certainly the more devout of the two.

Ian beamed, well into his element. “True language, my love! And if Truth be not God’s, then God be not True, and we all grab tail and spiral down together. Nay; this is the ticket,” he said, shaking the greasy thing like a wounded fig. “You look at a sauce-dollop like this, in times like these, and you quickly extrapolate all the dismal scuttlings of the mechanisms whirring together in unison. The faintest wisps of Nothing dressed up as Added Value. Nothing, hah! Hire a broad-shouldered man to carry a sign hawking Half-Off Nothing on Thursdays Only; you’d have every fool in the country in a smiling queue within the hour.” He shuffled his side order of nachos toward Sarah, and she ate one, dry.

Cordery coughed and picked lightly at a vinyl window decal. “You’d have your Gorditas be free then? Perched on silver trays along the backs of little Mick children, shuffling their way to your manor door?”

“Hardly! Let them use the servants’ entrance like the rest of them — Oh, only in jest, love!” breathed Ian, noting the cold shock on Sarah’s face. He waggled a finger. “Always the slippery slope with our man Cordery! Always the coin-flipping absolute of This or That, affairs carried out to their hideously boring logical conclusions. He well deserves the occasional barb. But to answer, No: I would not lash the backs of Irish youngsters to sate my appetite for cilantro and soured cream.”

“So if not Caste and Class, then what? What have you against the Machine?” Cordery tasted his Slice and made a face. “You’re a part of it yourself. You’re as valuable, as expendable . . . ”

“But not as reliable. Don’t you see? The Machine needs its quantities and qualities meted out just so; by the inch and to the jot. The Devil’s in the deviance, good Cordery. I’ve every respect for the flow of currency and the great persistent turning of the wheels — but only when they demand it of me. When Labor takes to strumpeting around all cat-in-heat, I shudder; when Business takes to bounding at her. . .

Last night my friend, film director Jason LaRay Keener, sat me down in his electrically heated room and showed me a game he enjoyed. It’d been a nostalgic sort of night: we’d watched my old senior video — my one and only completed film — and several of Jason’s early works. Natalie, the star of his upcoming film Natalie Natasha brought some of her old photo albums which contained a lot of old pictures of me and the people we used to know. It was sort of weird seeing myself with hair down past my shoulder blades, but I think my decision to cut it was the right one. I think it freaked out Keener, since he apparently recognized me from before I cut my hair, and he hadn’t made the connection that the guy with the long hair and me were the same person. I don’t know. The other night I tried to convince him I was his great-grandson from the future and had time traveled into the past to warn him of a disaster. Also, I was high.

Anyway, this game! It’s quite nice, a little difficult but nicely programmed for a flash game. It’s a parody of the Rocky series done as a Final Fight style beat-em-up, with you playing as Ivan Drago. Try it out, and don’t give up, at least until you get the dinosaur. You’ll see what I mean.

Ivan Drago - Justice Enforcer

On a side note, Castlevania: Curse of Darkness blows.

Get ready folks, it’s the Sengoku Super-Review Extravaganza! With reviews by Autumn Campbell, Chris Pinner, Matthew Collier, and Alex Savage, commentary by Jack Hanna and Richard Attenborough. Presented in Technicolor, look inside specially marked packages for details:



:At some point, Thriller and the Gay Cowboy gain the ability to transform into anything from a ninja who only moves by cartwheels to a dog. They may also gain the ability to shoot fireballs, or wield a sword, or make blue dudes fly forth from their palms like so many projectiles. There really seems to be no logic to when these abilities are gained, though they roughly correspond to the collection of floating orbs of various colors. There is never any guide as to what these colors do, and the ones that give you swords can give you anything from two swords to a very phallic single blade.

The cloud cover, a dizzying height below, was like a cereal bowl — or else a white rice bowl — full of pearls. Like God had set the condensation of the world out on a cutting board and went crazy on it, and somehow each little piece ended up a sphere. It must have been the cruel air of the world that made things round: it pulled on anything suspended until even brainless molecules didn’t know which way was up, down, left, or right. They say, for example, that you empty a carton of orange juice in space and it takes a fraction of a second to become a quivering, hovering ball. Hell of a dimensional identity crisis to wish on something that should be enjoying a peaceful life in some rich kid’s science textbook.

Texan Jumpley, codename “Icarus”, though no one who had ever called him that in an emergency (the only time it counted) was still alive, thought about the clouds: they’d told him in grammar school that just one mass of clouds weighed more than all the elephants that had ever existed on the planet. Ain’t that a trip.

“Icarus, this is Daedalus. Come in, Icarus.”

Texan sighed. “Yeah, I copy.”

“Quite a sight, ain’t she, Icarus?”

“I guess so, Stumpy.”

“Heh. I suppose there’s no need for call signs, what with the war with the Moetrons having ended back when your pop was still alive. What can I say, hm? I’m a grizzled old man — I was a grizzled old man back when your pop was still in love with your mom, and I’ll be a grizzled old man when you have your first son, Icarus. I can’t get the formality out of my blood, and you’re just gonna hafta deal with it.”

Texan felt himself chuckle in the face of the extreme g-forces. “Whatever you say, Stumpy.”

“Anyway! I reckon you haven’t been in the cockpit ever since your discharge from the squadron back after your heroic solo mission during the closing stages of the war. You saved our butts, kid. Hell, you saved the whole human race. Too bad that’s not enough to change the fact that you broke a law to do it.”

“Yeah, yeah, I hear you, Stumpy.”

“I hear you gettin’ impatient over there. I ’spose you’re eager to get back into the action. I ’spose you probably don’t even need me up here at all. Regulations, kid. I got a clipboard full of checkboxes, so we’d better get started.

“First I want you to try doing a barrel roll. These new crafts have some pretty touchy response, so be careful — a barrel roll is activated by quickly and gingerly tweaking the flight stick twice in the same lateral (left or right) direction.”

For a moment, the scales of the universe were turned. It looked again as it had during the ascent. For a moment, the clouds stood above Texan Jumpley, and the blue was beneath. His excellent peripheral vision — he had been the top of his academy class. . .

So it seems I missed both Christmas and New Years, and I spent New Years Eve on my sofa with a dude, playing a videogame. I did, however, have an excellent experience on New Years day, one what I won’t bother mentioning here because the last time I mentioned an excellent experience of mine I got a thousand angry emails, one of which told me to “Stop embarrassing all of the white people in Japan”, another of which told me, “Face the facts: you don’t speak Japanese and you never will. I’ve been in this country for ten years and I still can’t make heads or tails of the language.” (Actual quotes.) To talk about what transpired this past week would stop the hearts of the more wannabeish of my readers, and would invite lynch mobs in the rest.

That previous experience, if you haven’t been tuning in, involved dating a Japanese swimsuit model and pseudo-porn star, a girl who was so respected for her beauty that, once every three months, she was invited to a soundproof booth to lick ice cream cones for wads of cash what because they would use the sounds to accompany the visions of girls sucking on penises (penises censored) in pornographic films — that is to say, the porn directors would gather the girls for the films by asking them cold on the street, and then they would hire professional models (respected and adored for physical and personal beauty) to eat ice cream because the sound of a gorgeous girl eating ice cream, so says the yakuza bible (or dictionary) is equal to much more money than the sound of a girl actually sucking a penis; what do I know, though — I find the sound of eating, personally, even when I’m alone, to be disgusting, anyway, no matter what’s being eaten — I’m killing myself lately with preztels, for example. They’re just so fucking crunchy. Hell of a day for run-on sentences! The sun goes down over Tokyo Highway 246 as I write this; the windows, what offer a view of the highway and the park and the illustrious banking district outside, become mirrors when the sun sleeps; the boss’s window runs parallel to his back, his computer monitor’s contents revealed for anyone standing in front of his desk, close enough to hear him bark (about nothing): dude’s looking at Yahoo! Auctions. Hell of a day for business! Hell of a day for changing the world! It’s cold outside and it’s not obnoxious, if you have a scarf and a zipper.

I guess I just broke up with this girl, my “girlfriend”, the swimsuit model girl. Good for me! I didn’t like her, anyway! After receiving no contact from her for more than a month, I’ve finally managed to incite a rollicking email session by not sending her email for seven days, and then sending one out of the blue that says “Is cheating as fun as ‘Sex and the City’ makes it. . .

“I used to think that it went to the center of the planet.”

“Really?”

She was only vaguely interested, lounging in the cloth bucket chair with her legs straight up — a horrible feline with a toy ray gun she kept pointing at the window and firing. She’d squeeze the trigger and it’d whirl up, making little sparks and squeals inside. This was all fitting, her being from another planet and all. She was painfully good at being cataclysmically vague.

“Like the Shaver Mystery?” she asked.

“Sort of.”

“I always associated myself with the Deros. I felt bad for them. They were abandoned in those ancient cities for thousands upon thousands of years. I imagine I’d go insane too. It wasn’t like the Shoggoths.”

“Yeah, well, you’re already insane.”

“What if I’m a Dero?”

“You probably are.”

She was grinning, but we both knew I couldn’t see it. I had gotten really good at knowing when she was grinning and she’d gotten really good at pissing me off.

“So, about this pipe to the underworld?”

“Yeah. I never saw the bottom of it. It was just so weird — this metal pipe in the middle of the woods, with nothing around it, completely out of context.”

This got her excited.

“There’s a name for those things! Err, I forget the name now, but they’re like the crystal skulls and the Baghdad Battery. Out-of-place and out-of-time objects.”

“Well, those things are advanced, you know? This was just a simple pipe.”

She put the ray gun down and went to the window. The sun was setting and the dust floated through the beams of light. Everything was orange and hot — my dearly departed uncle never put an air conditioner in here. The heat was preferable and agreeable regardless. I could just barely smell the sweat on her neck and this made me smile on the inside. She lit up a black cigarette and turned to me, her face backlit by the window but just barely visible from the glow on the cigarette. Her hair was messy. This also made me smile on the inside.

“Did you ever try dropping anything down it?”

“No, actually.”

“Why?”

“This sounds weird, but it felt cruel to do that to something. I had this notion that maybe that hole didn’t stop at the center of the planet, but that it kept going forever and ever. Whatever I dropped down that hole would never end up somewhere. The fact that it would never have a final destination creeped me the hell out.”

She smiled wide this time and all I could really see was her crazy fucking grin.

“So you’re afraid of perpetual existence?”

“I guess you could say that. Infinity creeps me out. Thinking about space, and how it never ends and just keeps going and gets colder and colder,. . .

Dear all,

I am very busy out here, saving the world.

I regret to inform you that the thousands of words I was thinking of force-feeding you today got lost in a dark place. What I do have, however, is a Macbook Pro and iMovie software. So I reckon I can start to make things like this. If you like things like this, that is.

This is a short film, called “SLOT TOKEN”, written and directed by tim rogers, starring tim rogers, guest-starring brendan lee, with music by koichi sugiyama and camera operation by one john overton.

It details, essentially, my new year’s resolution.

Yes.

I’m going to be a lot more cautious this year, I promise.



There’s an mp4 version here, and an iPod version here.

Goodnight.

They come early.

They come early in big, early droves; the whole early lot of them, from Japan and the World at Large. They converge and connect, and where you had a building and tables you have a single, pulsing, living thing . . . the Comic Market . . . Comiket.

Comiket is a full-on all-out half-million-strong conflagration of comic artists and fans . . . somewhere between a sales event and a massive convention. Ground zero certainly for Japan’s doujinshi market – a situation unique in all the world, rooted in Japan’s laissez-faire attitude towards fan-creations based on copyrighted works. A large number of original comics and homebrew games make an appearance as well. Cosplay happens. Photos are taken. It’s my first time.



I’m going early - - at 8:00, a bit before. I haven’t navigated the Yurikamome before; it’s a fully automated train line, with all of these truly spectacular views of the Bay and the morning docks. The track yawns out over the Rainbow Bridge in arching dramatic swoops; even at this hour I can rub my eyes and muster the ability to be a little impressed. I think about my gray and shadowy commute to Shinjuku every day. I have a very fleeting idea of moving.

Epic scenery or no I, am a professional . . . and I have my Journalism Smirk spread neatly above my chin. Somewhere in the middle of this thing will be the dark heart, the Lonely Center - - the discontent whirling away in the middle, frustrated and balling its fists, and I can poke it a couple times and damn it with a hollow grating laugh and then maybe have a few Nice Cold Beers. Journalism, writing! Ho!

I look around at the people in the car . . . mostly Comiketers, no question – they’ve got that kind of vibration to them. The guy with the Comiket backpack talking on his phone about Comiket, certainly. Certainly too the girls in a state of proto-cosplay; the Comiket website says you’re not really supposed to show up in costume (“PLEASE BE AWARE THAT COSPLAY AND MASQUERADING HAVE YET TO BE WIDELY ACCEPTED BY JAPANESE SOCIETY”), so they’ve just gotten as many of the preliminaries out of the way as possible, and they start to curl their lashes and I turn and look pointedly out onto the Bay.

When we get to the stop, I’m confused, because I am not a person for whom directions come easily, and someone sees me spinning there and tilts their head towards me. I point down and mouth CO-MI-KET . . .

. . . and she smiles and nods, once.



I quickly note that 8:00 is not strictly ‘early’ for Comiket . . . the Droves are already here and have been for hours, stamping their feet against the cold and cradling canned coffees tightly between their fists. I don’t immediately see. . .

I generally give things like New Year’s Resolutions a miss, because they’re one of those unnecessary traditions that magazines like Reader’s Digest encourage (10 TIPS ON KEEPING THEM INSIDE). This year, though, I’m actually thinking about going and giving them a stab, once I have them worked out. We’re pretty much the sum of our traditions, after all; you let too many of them slide for too long and you’re a mess of greasy hair and rotting teeth rubbing hopelessly against a gray blanket. Glory, jack — that’s no way for a man to live.

So, yeah, I’m going to do it. I already have a pad of acid-free paper and the vague desire . . . a borrowed stub of green crayon or something, and I’m all set.

I guess I started to think about this when I went to the Military Base and saw a mother . . . well, actually, let me back up. I saw what I think I thought was a mother at the time. Let’s call her a mother; she had children about that seemed to make demands of her. I’m just sort of unsure, because she looked very old and world-weary and put-upon, but I’m not a mother, and I imagine every time a child demands something from you another wrinkle splits its way into the corner of your eye and your breasts grow more pendulous by another half-centimeter and you start to wonder about maybe getting your Valium prescription refilled before the holidays creep up again . . .

Let’s say she’s a mother. We’re writing in the present tense, now, and we’re feeling the flashback hard and strong. We’re going through a little refrigerated drinks island in the beverage aisle, and we’re trying to fit as many Starbucks Doubleshots as we can into the crook of our elbow, because they don’t sell them anywhere else in Japan and we forgot to get a shopping basket.

Now there’s a boy, maybe twelve, with dark hair and hollow eyes. They’re the eyes of someone regularly but poorly fed; a child who primarily eats Lunchables, but only the parts he likes, and snack foods that tout their color-changing properties. The child grabs a Snapple from the island and pumps it into the air. He’s got a voice like the buzzer at a basketball game.

CAN I HAVE THIS!? IT’S JUICE!!

It’s like a strong serve in a tennis match. I turn towards the mother.

PUT THAT BACK!! I DON’T GOT MONEY for JUICE!!

A more sharp-eyed veteran could have pointed out that that particular variety of Snapple is actually largely not-juice; sadly, a logical fallacy has been introduced. The child seizes on it.

HOW YOU GONNA BUY GROCERIES YOU AIN’T GOT NO MONEY!?

It’s a valid point.

PUT THAT BACK!! WE GOT JUICE AT HOME!!

Fails to address the issue at hand.

I SAID, HOW YOU GONNA BUY GROCERIES YOU AIN’T GOT NO MONEY!?

Still valid.

HOW I SPENDS MY MONEY’S. . .

INT. NIGHT: FUTURISTIC DINER

BARRY and XETRON walk into a diner. A perimeter sensor detects their subcutaneous investigator ID chips, and the scene suddenly changes: the diner splits and warps, instantaneously changing to an old-style greasy spoon.

BARRY: Wh . . . okay, what’s going on!?

XETRON: Heh. Just the old diner making you feel a little more at home. Machine at the door reads your occupation off your ID.

BARRY: Then . . . what do all the other customers see?

XETRON: I guess . . . I guess they see whatever they want to see.

BARRY: Sounds like The Matrix.

XETRON: The . . . matrix? What’s that?

BARRY: Heh. No one can tell you what The Matrix is.

XETRON: Don’t be all cryptic, jacker.

ROBOT WAITRESS: STATE ORDER NOW!

. . . Volume 1. In this outing, I read a portion of Truman Capote’s seminal In Cold Blood.

A very Merry Christmas to you and yours.

Somewhere she waits for me.

Her footsteps are crackles, then silence; calculating things of inch-along heel/toe softness. There’s a perfect arch to her ankles, and it sets the soles of her feet down with a stunning and unnatural pfft against the ground.

This girl is a walker.

I struggle to keep up, but she skips ahead; I try and halve my steps to match her gait, but she lags behind. I try and match her awkward teeter as she leans against the earth at some incalculable angle. I find her staring unbearable. I totter forward like a broken clown to hear her force a laugh.

Sometimes she whispers, and when I lean in to hear her she presses her lips together and pretends she didn’t say anything. Sometimes she says things that are difficult, and I can’t respond, because I don’t have the words and she knows I don’t have the words, and she does this thing that I don’t deserve where she squeezes my arm and I can feel her gloved hand through the lining of the secondhand autumn jacket I’m forcing into winter service.

We finally get things lined up for entire half-blocks at a time; her low heels matching my sad and loose sneakers step for step, and we both see possibilities and kiss in the awkward halo of an unsynchronized streetlight, its metal bulk holding on for dear life by one resolute and rust-free bolt.

Somewhere she’s there, and we both deserve each other, and the moon dips low in our bedtime windows and says something trite . . . and deeply, deeply appreciated.

Out of all the (recent) music I have bought this year, Clocks Are Like People stood out as the one which grew on me the most. I even put it ahead of Sunn O)))’s Black One and MoRT by Blut Aus Nord. Boy, those are amazing but this absolutely wonderful album by Circulus tops the both of them. And so closes a year where I put folk music ahead of avant garde black metal.

I downloaded an album the other day.



BAND NAME: Ass
ALBUM TITLE: Ass

I was expecting something amazing from these Ass men. However, their self-titled album disappoints on many levels.

Ass is boring folk music.

Why? Why, Ass? Why?

Man, I can’t really even think of what to write here, actually.

I went into work today — Shinjuku, near Kabukicho. And . . . well, it looks like they found a fucking human torso and a couple of damn arms in a plastic bag in the alley behind my school. I walk past the exact spot almost every day.

Cripes.

You can read more here.

I am the rather ginger bloke who was responsible for this monochromatic visual layout and the one to revere/revile (delete as applicable) based on your opinion. As my other journal/blog/den of thoughts is taken up with a collection of scribbles done using the drawing program Microsoft Paint and so is very un-journal-like this place here is where I shall store my various writings on subjects of equal variousness and variousity. I will also make it a habit of inventing new words and I encourage everyone else to do the same. Fun with words is important for your learning. So is italicising all the names of things.

I mentioned that I am a ginger. A ginger and the only child in my family which happens to be a one parent family. So that makes me a ginger and a bastard child, oh man that is just too good. And in school I hung out with other gingers, oh yes, this is just getting better and better. You’re probably thinking I was a skinny guy with bony girl arms and you would be right. This is becoming priceless, you couldn’t possibly ask for a better combination than that. You simply cannot dream up things like that in your mind and then put them on paper in the form of a story, they can only be observed in the real world and recorded as such. Oddly as a boy I was never teased. Maybe the thoughts of coming under attack from a young lad and his thin whip-like arms was enough deterrent to keep any would-be bullies at safe distance.

As of late I have taken to doing music using QBasic for composition and the internal speaker on my computer as output. It was something I was planning to do last year around this time since my acoustic black metal joke band did not get anything accomplished. I passed it off as being cult and elitist, breaking up before you even do an album. But plain laziness proved to be a successful means for putting it off. I have found that musicing using this method is a vastly exciting process which involves sitting in front of a blue screen looking like I shouldn’t be there, standing up to walk away for a few minutes before returning to repeat the process. Then playing other people’s music, not for inspiration, but for avoidance. You too can be a music-type person, let us all be music-type persons.

However I did manage to put something up on that screen yesterday, only seven lines of code which are looking at me with all the loneliness in the world expecting someone to expand the fifteen seconds of music they produce so it will have some friends to have BBQs or magical mystery tours with. This same screen was there for the rest of the day, looking at me with the same expression of loneliness and from the start of today I ran the software through DOSBox so it could continue to look. . .

Penny Arcade had a few words to say recently about an astroturfed viral marketing campaign. The main thrust seemed to be that you can’t really create a viral campaign out of whole cloth; it’s the kind of thing that has to grow organically through the Internet’s collective interest in something.

I don’t think that’s the case. The PSP-hyping debacle PA referred to wasn’t a failure of principle; it was the failure of a marketing company. The hard-tokin’ boys in the writing room merely failed to make a compelling enough object for the Internet to play with.

Compare and contrast to the Zlad! videos for JetLag, a series of travel guide parodies. These were every bit the creation that the Sony thing was, but they had a crucial difference: they were actually kind of funny. Not only that, but they had a bit of mystery to them — were they, you know . . . real?

They looked like they kinda could have been, at first glance. The Zlad! Elektronik Supersonik video in particular certainly isn’t that far off the mark; other early Italo artists certainly bent visual media in a similar way. If you go though the Zlad! song line-by-line, though, you get enough clues to help you figure the thing out. When you find out that it’s a joke, you feel a bit pleased with yourself — and if you thought it was funny, well, there’s a product available for you to buy.

The interesting bit is that the song lets you think that you’re in on the joke. Let’s take Elektronik Supersonik play-by-play:

Hey baby, wake up from your asleep.
We have arrived onto the future and the whole world is become . . .

Electronik, supersonik. Supersonik, electronik.

(Nothing too suspicious. 80’s eurosynth has a proud history of grammatical failure.)

Hey baby, ride with me away.
We doesn’t have much time.

(Starting to get a bit on the nose.)

My blue jeans is tight,
So on to my love rocket climb.

(First misstep/huge clue — one that’s mirrored in Limozeen’s Because, It’s Midnite. Tight trousers are a visual joke, not a verbal one. The phrase “love rocket” suggests a familiarity with the English language not reflected in the rest of the song.)

Inside tank of fuel is not fuel but love,
Above us, there is nothing above
But the stars above.
All systems gone, prepare for downcount!
5!
4!
3!
1!
Offblast!

(Far too on the nose.)

Fly away in my space rocket.
You no need put money in my pocket.
The door is closed I just lock it.
(Hah!) I put my spark plug in your socket (Hah! Ha ha hah!)

The sun in sky is bright like fire!
You and me gets higher and higher.
Heart of communication fire!
Only thing can stop us is flat tire.

(We’re getting into Weird Al territory here — this could certainly make the Dr. Demento Funny Five, but basically everyone knows it’s a put-on at this point.)

(Hah! Hah! Ha ha hah!)

Hey love crusader, I want to be your space invader.
For you. . .

EXT. NIGHT: FUTURISTIC HIGH-RISE

BARRY and XETRON screech to a halt and clamber out of their hovercar. The high-rise is in flames.

XETRON: A fire in the safehouse! Now that witness will never be able to testify!

BARRY: Relax, X! Can’t we, you know . . . just call the fire department, or something? Have them put out the fire?

XETRON: I keep forgetting — you’ve been in cryo-stasis. Barry . . . there haven’t been any fire departments for over 300 years.

BARRY: What!? Then how’s this fire going to get put out?

XETRON: It won’t be! That’s just it — this fire is statistically impossible. We’re dealing with an arsonist here — I’d bet my diodes.

Inspired by the shower, Ryuuichi Sakamoto, and Yasunori Mitsuda’s “Another World” theme from Chrono Cross, I imagined a melody, emerged from the shower, and recorded my first attempt to play it. If my life were a story of four young people who set off on an adventure pointing toward revenge for a cataclysmic family- and village-wrecking event that they were probably too young to witness, this is the music that would play when they stepped away from the smoking ruins and the camera swirled up high up over the land, powdery clouds drifting everywhere, birds flying in random directions, inspiring us that despite whatever horrendous occasion, something, somewhere is free.

I’m being pretentious on purpose, yes.

To turn this into a pop song, one need only play it as is, and then immediately stomp a Big Muff and play it again with drums backing. Then, for the last verse, jangle a bit on that chord (like this: x999x9, x999x0, x9990x, 0999xx, et cetera — it’s precision jangling, lots of fingertip muting), and raise the vocals to a hoarse cry.

The name of the “song” is 『旅人の唄を』 “Songs of Travelers”. It has only one stanza of lyrics. “When the next morning comes / We will hear / Songs of travelers, songs of travelers, songs of travelers.” In Japanese. More “vocalizing” than singing.

I’ve been finger-picking for a week, and playing guitar for six and a half months. Whether I’m yet “any good” at the instrument isn’t for me to say, though if I know one thing, it’s that the great divide between the music in my head and the motility of my fingers is gradually growing smaller.

I need to obtain the proper hookups for my Macbook Pro so I can just record stuff like this straight into Garageband.

I have uploaded this video to this site because YouTube is just not working today.

View here.

Dedicated to Doug Jones’ baby daughter Megan, birthday November 14th.

Actually, this song goes out to all the girls born on November 14th, of whatever year.

And emegas as well, even though he’s not a girl and was not born on November 14th — because it was a discussion with him about Yasunori Mitsuda that had put Mitsuda on my mind these past couple weeks.

Actually, I was thinking that Mitsuda could definitely take over for Koichi Sugiyama if he ever gives up on the Dragon Quest franchise. It’d be a different direction for the soundtrack, of course, though I reckon Mitsuda’s vision would be appreciated there.

Well, Sugiyama announced today that “I plan to do Dragon Quest music until I die.” Excellent resolution in the old man. Also, I have about three hundred emails asking me what I think about Dragon Quest IX being a four-player action-RPG for the Nintendo DS. I have gone through a weird little whirlwind of opinion in the last few half-hours, and now I say, go ahead. Bring it the fuck on. I’ve always maintained that a four-player A-RPG on the DS could actually be really. . .

YOU ARE A GOOD WIFE. YOU ARE STILL WOMANLY AFTER BEARING ME FOUR HEALTHY GIRLS. ALTHOUGH THOSE GIRLS ARE TROOPERS IN THEIR OWN RIGHT, AND I DO LIKE THEM, BY NOW I SHOULD HAVE A SON.

BEAR ME A MAN.

MY GRANDFATHER WAS A MAN OF THE SOIL, AND HIS FATHER WAS A MAN OF THE SOIL. I AM A MAN OF THE SOIL, AND IT IS MY WISH THAT MY SON BE A MAN OF THE SOIL BUT THAT SEEMS UNLIKELY IF WE KEEP HAVING GIRLS.

BEAR ME A MAN! BEAR ME A MAN!

I LOOK AROUND, AND I SEE MANY FATHERS AND MANY SONS. IT SEEMS TO ME UNFAIR, BUT I DO NOT MOAN AND I DO NOT BITCH ABOUT WHAT IS NOT MY OWN. I WANT ONLY WHAT IS RIGHT FOR ME AND MY FAMILY, AND THAT IS TO BE ABLE TO LOOK AT MY FAMILY PHOTO AND SEE A SON WITH A GOOD STRONG BACK AND SHOULDERS THAT COULD BE USED TO CRUSH A QUARTERBACKS RIBCAGE. ALTHOUGH MY GIRLS ARE FINE SPECIMINS ALL, I DO NOT SEE ANY WAY THAT THEY COULD PLAY FOOTBALL OUTSIDE OF A FEMALE-ONLY LEAGUE CAPACITY.

A MAN!

YOU HEAR ME PRAYING AT NIGHTS. I KNOW THAT YOU DO. THE PRAYERS ARE LIKE THIS:

LORD, YOU KNOW THAT I AM NOT A QUITTER. AND THAT I AM A MAN OF MY WORD. AND SO I PROMISE YOU NOW THAT IF MY WIFE CAN BEAR ME A MAN AND ONE WHO IS STRONG AND NOT A QUITTER, I WILL QUIT THE DRINK THAT YOU AND MY DAUGHTERS AND WIFE HATE SO MUCH.

…BUT I SEE NOW THAT MAYBE YOU DO NOT HAVE MUCH OF RESOLVE AND STRENGTH OF YOUR CONVICTIONS. I HOPE YOU CAN PROVE ME WRONG. PLEASE FIND IT IN YOURSELF TO DO YOUR BEST, YOU KNOW IT IS ALL I ASK.

YOUR LOVING,
LAR

I had a brief exchange with self-made publishing magnate Brandon Sheffield in a dingy Akihabara live house; we were talking jobs and apartments and the like. I asked him if he’d ever considered, you know, moving to Tokyo for a bit. Checking the place out.

“Yeah,” he said, a flock of doves taking flight behind him. “Maybe. But I’m not teaching English. I just won’t do it. That’s something I will not do.”

I noted the conviction. I asked him what he would do.

“Game design,” he said. “Making the games.”

I told him that I did game design, too.

“Oh yeah?” There was a brief flash of interest.

I told him that I did game design in my pants.

I forget what happened next, but I think that was pretty much the end of the conversation.



Of course, we can’t all be Brandon Sheffield. I’ve had a number of questions about teaching English in Japan — well, more like Tokyo, actually; that seems to be where people would like to be parked if they had their druthers. Probably a lot of hilarious and sarcastic things could be written on the subject, but I’ll try to stay pretty much informative. Basically, just a little about how I got here, what I do, and what you might do to get talkin’ work in this direction of the world, if you’re so inclined. Please note that this is just the best advice I have to offer; reality might not line up exactly. Do remember to Google.

I got my first English gig through Acts of Gord, indirectly. I was coming toward the end of my college education, and was beginning to think that Computer Graphic Arts wasn’t the ideal fit that I once thought it was. While clicking around at Gord’s I noticed a post offering English teaching work in South Korea. The basics looked really good: decent salary, free apartment, free airfare to and from your country of origin, contract bonus, vacation. Although I ended up going with another job (via a tip from a college friend), it was a pretty good experience. The school did basically what they said they would, and it was a pretty good year. I signed with a different company for my second year in an effort to get into the Korean public school system. It was a nightmare; constant lies and illegalities; deportation worries. I decided that it was time for a change, and Japan looked like it.

My first year in Japan was done at a small, crumbling mom-and-pop conversation school in Utsunomiya (about 60km north of Tokyo). They did a limited number of classes in their asbestos-filled offices, but most of their work was shopped out to local schools and businesses. I got a lot of variety in that job — I taught at a nurse’s school, Honda, a couple of kindergartens, a junior college . . .

Tokyo was. . .

First off, I’d like to thank the talented ReroRero, aka Highway*, for the help with new site design. He’s quite a talented artist when it comes to MSPaint. If you do not think so, you must save our new logo, and then open it with MSPaint and increase the zoom to 800% to see what this man deals with. He’s apparently Australian, and that’s the country that gave birth to AC/DC, so that’s a pretty good country, as far as I’m concerned. He may or may not be designing T-shirts in the near future; go look at his art and begin throbbing for a T-shirt of similar design.

An