Journal: 04 / 2005

HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN!!

First of all, about that last post — I got too much email about it, mostly from people who think I was talking about them. One guy I actually did talk about, a guy I’m surprised and honored to find actually reads this page, posted on the thread. I write here to tell you that I am surprised and saddened that so many people thought that post was about them. I mean, shit — was it not specific enough? Stop being so self-important.

ANYWAY! There is a rock show on Tuesday night! The rock show is in Shibuya, at a dive called “Cyclone.” The admission is 1800 yen, and that includes a free drink. Five bands will play. Two of them, I know for a fact, are pretty good. One of them is godly. If you’re in Tokyo, you’re welcome to attend. Please come! We’re meeting at the statue of the dog Hachiko at Shibuya Station Hachiko Crossing at 5:50 in the PM. If you’re a hater and want to stand in the distance and envy the bulge in my jeans, you can do that, too! Shades of the internet, bask in joy that you know exactly where I will be, and when! Take photos! Rest assured that I neither know nor care who you are, nor what you look like! Understand that I find this even sillier than you do

However, should you want to be led to a rock show that will scare the living (and dead) bejesus out of you, I can do that, too. Just come up and introduce yourself. I’ll be the guy who looks like me. With shorter hair.

Now, more on the show. The show is going to be fucking nuts. The band we’re talking about is called Salsa Gum Tape, fronted by Tetsuya Kajiwara, who used to drum for Japan’s most famous punk-rock band ever, The Blue Hearts. The Blue Hearts rocked from Okayama to Tokyo from 1984 to 1994, and during that decade each of the four members became millionaires off such hit songs as “Linda Linda” and “Train Train.” Their final years saw them collapsing in on themselves in a blaze of literary-informed, mildly-pissed-off riff-rock, and some people like that better than the punk. The Blue Hearts died in 1994 following a sold-out show at the Budokan in which the first several rows of the audience were filled with mysterious members of a religious cult. At what would become the end of the show, drummer Tetsuya Kajiwara stood up and implored the audience to leave behind everything they own, to throw away their lives and their identities, following the example he was about to set, so that they could know their souls better.

He then walked off stage and disappeared for ten years.

Now he’s back.

I followed the underground Japanese rock and roll scene for ten years following Kajiwara’s disappearance, and it was only after he resurfaced that the whole thing started to resemble one of those mangas about Japanese rock. A few weeks ago at a club called Red Zone in Otsuka, a little town outside Ikebukuro, I met Kajiwara prior to his show and talked to him a bit. After my friend’s band, The Sanyons, opened the show — they blew it big-time, and no one remembered their names at the end of the evening, I’d think — Kajiwara for the first time in a decade played a live show. It opened with a seven-minute drum solo. I tell you, I’ve known and seen people who hit drums before, and sometimes I hit drums myself. I’ve never seen someone do it like this, though. I’ve always believed that a person who takes it upon himself to beat things with sticks for a living has to be kind of odd; in Kajiwara’s case, this is all too tragically true. When I talked to Kajiwara about his performance after the show, he told me that, ten years ago, he was in a bad place, and didn’t feel like rock and roll music was his destiny. Three years ago, he attempted to kill himself by wrist-slashing and failed. He showed me his wrists. It looked like a failure. He was institutionalized and, in his own words, “Came to want to do enjoyable things again.” Blest with the small fortune of a couple hundred million yen his career with The Blue Hearts had earned him, he bought a new, gorgeous drum set, and took to practicing the drums for eleven hours a day, seven days a week. He did this for three years before the show back in March.

He played that drum solo for seven minutes, his face not changing. He had this unmoving expression of mild discomfort, like he was just slightly too hot, and every time he crushed a cymbal, his eyes squinted in half a wince. It was hurting him, somewhere, to be up there and playing the drums. He was giving the drums something back as well. When his hickory sticks struck the wooden rim on his snare, sparks flew. I’d never seen sparks coming off drums before, not even in an action film about rock and roll. Yet, there it was, and it was really happening. Over the course of the evening, Kajiwara must have broken a dozen sticks. It was insane. I shook his hand after the show, and the fleshy parts that weren’t done up in boxing tape were hardened like goat leather. “I like myself more now than I did before the show,” he said. “I think it was good to do this.” That was when he told me about the next show, in Shibuya, on this Tuesday night. “It’s a little club. Still, I think it’s best to ease into it this way.”

What is Kajiwara’s new goal? What is his plan? He merely said “I want to do a rock and roll band again.” Does he want it to be famous? “It doesn’t matter.”

I’ve not yet said anything of his band. This is probably because I don’t know how to describe them other than to say that they freaked me the fuck out. Kajiwara drums with the pained expression while two forty-something Japanese men play Fender Jazzmasters, some other old dude plays bass, a kid in his twenties — a big, round, merry-monk-looking guy with a bald head and a goatee, who I came across in the street in Shimo-Kitazawa a week later, and he greeted me with a huge, white-teethed grin and a wink, all while wearing foot-high Japanese wood-block sandals — singing vocals, and, well . . . sixteen costumed retards in miscellaneous percussion. I don’t use the term “retard” lightly — I mean, these people were very retarded. Yet they were well-behaved. Some of the retards were less retarded, and female, and though they ranged from teenagers to women in their late forties, they sang like a chorus of grade-school children. The fact that one of the retarded boys was, at the beginning of the show, dressed up as the Green Power Ranger, and stripped one garment at a time to reveal he was really dressed like a pirate, eye-patch and all, was . . . well, it was something. They handed out a survey after the show, and I filled it out, so we’ll see if they don’t take it into consideration.

What’s very important to note is that before the show, during Kajiwara’s little solo drum session, The Blue Hearts’ singer (and now front-man of Japan’s best classic rock band, The High-Lows) Hiroto Kohmoto came out on stage and beat the shit out of a harmonica for twenty minutes. It was a surprise to some people that Kohmoto was there. It wasn’t a surprise to me, because I spotted Blue Hearts (and High-Lows) guitarist Mashima Masatoshi and bassist Junnosuke Kawaguchi standing against the wall with the rest of the members of The High-Lows halfway through The Sanyons’ act. Hiroto will be attending the show on Tuesday, it looks like. He even sang a song with Salsa Gum Tape last time, so chances are he’ll do that again. They seem to aim to be a traveling freakshow of a band; I think they’ll be able to go far. The vocalist has surprising range (he used to sing for an enka-punk band called Wanpaku) and a slightly menacing presence; the guitarists, ex-cult members, the both of them, are meticulous, precise, and imbued with just the right amount of crazy. The drummer, as has been said elsewhere, is a demigod. Together, they play very fierce rock and roll music; I’m not even sure there’s a one- or two-word name for the genre it occupies. Just suffice it to say, for now, that it freaked me the hell out, my eyes have been opened, and I want to get as many people in on the action as possible. We will meet in Shibuya, and I will take you to this show, and then afterwards we’re going to go out to eat. So — if you know my cellphone email, email me to let me know if you’re coming — this means you, FFD — and if you don’t, email me at my Gmail to ask for my cellphone email. You can’t miss this. Really.

I’m going to make some udon now.

Well, this has certainly been a long time coming








That, my friends, is a picture of Drew Cosner thumping around the house in Ukimafunado playing some blues on the guitar. This was the last night I was in Japan, it was probably too bad that we never really got around to playing Risk or Monopoly. This was also the night that I found out they sold Soju (korean rice liquor) in 2 liter plastic bottles. Pay close attention to this picture, because it quickly becomes very relevant to the content of this post.

GO!

GO!

GO!

GO!!!!!!!!!!!

“Well, that sucked.”

Dear Friend X,

I write out of desire to kindly inform you that the girl you are fucking is kind of a whore.

As a man who, as a boy, desired to one day be a lawyer, as many good little children do, I assure you I do not use words like “whore” lightly. Let us explore the legal definition of a “whore” before presenting the evidence. We all recall the age-old yardstick, do we not?

A whore fucks every guy at the party.
A bitch fucks every guy at the party except you.

A prostitute, technically very different from a whore, is a girl who gets paid to fuck. A hooker is a prostitute you might find lurking outside a dime-store or an automated teller machine. I don’t dare call the girl you’re fucking a prostitute, because as far as I know, you aren’t paying her every night. If you are paying her every night, well, regard the rest of this letter, or else read it for enjoyment.

Now. If a “whore” is, as a rule, a girl who fucks every guy at the party, am I insinuating that your girl fucks every guy at every party? Don’t be ridiculous. There are exceptions to every rule. A girl can be a “whore” without fucking every guy at the party just as surely as orange juice can be “fresh-squeezed” when the oranges used to make it were actually pressed. Exceptions to every rule. The only rule with no exceptions is the rule that states “there are exceptions to every rule.” Except for sometimes, when it has exceptions.

Your girl doesn’t fuck every guy at the party because, theoretically, the “party” is kind of a vague term here. I personally haven’t been to a party, per se, in six months. I’ve known your girl on very limited speaking terms for just short of four. She, you, and I live in a world called “Japan,” where, as guidebooks warn tourists, walls are paper-thin and girls live with their parents, so having sex with them at home is out of the question. They come to your place, or you meet and run off to an hourly hotel. This system works. It’s a booming piece of an economy. Nobody really complains.

If you’re wondering what brought this on, let me refresh your memory. No doubt you’ve just awoken in a gutter in Roppongi stinking of vodka and stumbled into a smoky internet cafe to check your god damned eBay auctions, and you’ve probably gotten bored and stumbled over here, and the first line grabbed your attention so hard you just knew it was about you, and you’re right, this is about you, and even though you’re sharp enough to know I’m writing about you here, you don’t remember why. Well, here’s why: you called me, on the telephone last night while I was in the middle of important business, to lecture me for a half an hour on the state of your fucking relationship (the previous gerund here is no mere emphasizer) with this girl, which has been thrown into turmoil because I talked to her for a half an hour several nights prior. “It’s taken me until just like three hours ago to get this all under control,” you moaned. Before we continue, let me say fuck you: “Fuck you.” Far be it for me to throw around sweeping statements (heh), though hell, if something like your girl talking to a guy who’s not you about that guy’s girl, who’s not her, is enough to make the two of you impossibly angry at each other, maybe you should kill either yourselves or each other, because evolution has clearly fucked up somewhere. I understand that you were trying to sleep when she was talking to me. She was on her way out to smoke a cigarette on the veranda. I took this to mean you’d already just fucked, because damned if movies haven’t always shown smoking to be something men or tough women (usually whores) do after having sex. I didn’t know what else was going on in your room. I was busy entertaining your guest in your living room the whole time when she came out in her pajamas and asked me how things were going with the girl I was seeing lately. So prodded, and being in the middle of writing an email to that girl at that exact moment, I gladly elaborated. Halfway through our conversation, you came out and told me you were going to bed; you then disappeared. Minutes later, I was still talking to this girl, and I told her she should go talk to you or something, and she said, “He’s probably asleep.” Then she kept asking me questions. Far be it for me to not answer a girl’s questions, especially when that girl is asking me about girls. I’ve been thinking a lot about a specific girl lately, so of course it was understandably interesting to talk about this girl with another girl, especially in Japanese, because speaking that language is as fun for me as playing a videogame or reading a manga or some shit (LOL).

This apparently infuriated you in a way you explained to me on the phone, shedding light on a despicably, unforgivably moronic facet of your personality which, quite frankly, makes me want to never see you again. I will return to this subject in the second part of this letter. For now, we will dwell on the conversation and the girl. First of all, the girl: your first indicator that your girl is a whore should come when you acquire the girl during a drunken party, knowing full well that she knows full well that you know full well she’s still engaged in a long-term relationship with a guy she knew in high school. Your second sign that your girl is a whore should be when she’s still with that guy three months after she’s already started up a fucking account with you.

My own character comes into question here, and I lay it out on the line. I myself, I suppose, am a whore. The exception to the rule in my case is that I’m a guy who would, if possible, fuck every girl at the party. We can tool around with semantics and say “okay not every girl — just a nice majority of them.” Scholars as early as eighth-century Daoists have bottled and marketed this phenomenon that dictates why certain men will have sex with nearly any woman. I can put it into Japanese-comic-book terms, and say it’s kind of mostly like sparring, building up one’s personal power-level statistics, and evolving as a character in a real-time fantasy world. In martial-arts terms, it helps me gain a better understanding of my surroundings. I lament rather humanistically that I have to put these things into such words, siphoned through such points of view. The first cavemen to desire to kill mammoths with clubs and eat their hairy flesh did so without putting any of it into words; a caveman longed to grope a cavewoman’s flesh without the word “boob” popping into his head even once, because he had no words for the thing he wanted to touch while touching something else. He merely wanted, longed for, waited for, struck out at, and did. It was when the first caveman enunciated some syllable in greeting directed toward another caveman he wasn’t really a big fan of that humans began to evolve into a non-animal animal. We’ve written and passed things down ever since, collectively longing that we never forget what the people who come before us remembered through making mistakes.

Slightly-good sir, I am here to say that I come before you, and I am here to teach you something, and that something is that your girl is a whore. Sexual affairs with women have been the catalyst for many great wars we won’t name for fear of accusations of not listing enough details, names of warriors, or scenes of battle. I have read all of these stories and considered them vaguely for nearly two decades, and this has engorged me with no desire to, ever, start a fight with another man over a woman. I used to have a girlfriend who told me she’d fuck Russel Crowe or Harrison Ford (during his Indiana Jones years) if offered the chance; she said, sneering, that, if offered the chance, she’d give up everything she had, her whole relationship with me, which was like destiny in how we’d built it up between the two of us, if Indiana Jones told her he wanted her for his own. I didn’t even have the historical bravery or courage to pick a fight with her. If I’m not going to fight a man over a woman, I’m most certainly not going to fight a woman over a man. Other people’s mistakes have taught me most of what I know. It’s a little invigorating and a little irritating.

As a whore myself, I know how whores work. I like girls and will have sex with them if the opportunity presents itself. There are more men who think this way than women. Let’s get serious here — I’ve read women’s magazines that go on dispelling “urban myths” about how “the whole thing about men wanting sex more than women — no way sister!!” Yes, I’m very certain that’s all well and true. I’m not denying women the right to want sex, because every one I ever have sex with seems to want it a whole lot, even from me. It’s a momentary state of mind and genitalia, is what it is. No, no, what I’m saying is that men do want sex more. This is because we don’t get pregnant. It’s a hormonal fail-safe. This is, I repeat one last time, not to say that girls who want and crave and need lots of sex are rare, unique, freaky, weird, or even bizarre. They’re just . . . there. Only there are fewer of them than there are men. Arguing with me on this is like suggesting to me that there is a perfectly equal number of men and women on this earth, a perfect fifty-fifty split. I’d reply by telling you, well, yeah, and half of all numbers in the universe have two as a prime factor. Does this, however, make it a more recurring factor than three? Of course not, for the sea of numbers is infinite.

Let’s put mathematics aside for the moment; what we’re really driving at is semantics. What makes me a lovable, gigolo of a whore is the semantic blanket I use to cover myself. That is to say, I find it easy and enjoyable to have sex with any girl who will have me, because I never call one my “girlfriend.” I used to call a girl my girlfriend, and then one day I stopped, because she stopped first. This does not, otherwise, make her a whore, though that’s what I called her while we were still going out. We thought it was funny. At the moment, it was. Now, it’s not really funny anymore. Memories of its being funny are like the files in the Recycle Bin on your Windows PC desktop; they used to be real. Only there’s no “restore” command in real life.

Your girl has/had a guy she calls/called a boyfriend, while fucking you. She said she liked you, probably, and this is wonderful, and I figure it makes a man feel about three-quarters as well as it makes a woman feel. I tell girls I like them all the time; it’s usually true, and it’s usually right before touching their breasts or neck for the first time. It’s not much of a lie, really. I find myself quite optimistic when I have an erection. I’m willing to accept the beauty in even a girl who smokes too much, or drinks too much, or eats too much, as long as she isn’t entirely revolting. I’ll go so far as to tell a girl I like her for two weeks; if I don’t get action out of her by then, I pack up the tackle box like a good fisherman and go buy a marked-down croquette at the supermarket. Catch a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime; give him a coupon for a free hamburger and he’ll develop a taste for McDonalds. Et cetera.

The truth is, my friend, that in this paper-thin-walled game we call life in Tokyo, “The party” consists of you, her, and the one she calls boyfriend. Is that clear? I am revolted by many things in this world — it’s what keeps me going — and I’m most revolted by the memory of the time I revolted my best ex-girlfriend by finding another girl and announcing to her, in mid-vacation, that I didn’t want to be her boyfriend anymore. I had yet to fuck the one I chose over her. I did eventually. The world was yet a big place full of things I’d never done. The first girl loved me deeply, the second one shallowly, with deepening passion. To the first girl, I was as good as a whore. I grew up thinking I’d be a film director, a lawyer, a famous novelist, a robot engineer, or any of many other things, only to grow up and be hyphenatedly called a “mother-fucker” by a beautiful, big-breasted Korean girl in a three-star hotel in Venice, where they had linoleum-tile flooring even in the bedroom. I got a terrible, chilling feeling then, one that vanished with passing weeks and came back, two years later, when it was all over. In Japanese poetic terms we call that ?????????. “Sullied sadness.” The beginning had been flawed. It had been all fucked up from the start. How far could I go with this girl? How much had I really expected to respect her, knowing full well that she had, as far as the only three important people on this earth were concerned, taken me from someone else? A thief of love! That’s what Shakespeare would call her. Yet even as such she was adorable, and I adored her until I’d drunk down everything she had that was new, and I was left with tarnished sad memories of the way the one I’d promised myself to had made the one who’d promised herself to me think about the self I promise to myself. It was a dirty mess. Yet there you have it. I ran away from that girl, all around the world, saying I was keeping my promise. I kept the promise until the end; the running away, in the first place, had assured that the situation was going to end someday. It’s a real shame. Lots of things are.

Your girl has, for four months, constantly, relentlessly complimented me about everything. It’s damn maddening. It’s damned tactless. It’s damned repetitive. She tells me, oh, your hair looks good like that, oh, I like that shirt, oh, you have good fashion sense, oh, you have such interesting jobs, oh wow, your Japanese pronunciation is so perfect, oh you could be on television, oh someday you’re going to be so rich, I just know it!! She was telling me the other night, during The Conversation That Would Not End, that I’d have to take her out for yakiniku when I received my first salary for my manga-translating job. I told her I didn’t eat meat and she just laughed. How Japanese is that, to immediately suggest going out for an expensive meal just because you’ve earned your first salary at a new job? What strange traditions this people breed over here. Another Japanese tradition is complimenting people even when there’s no reason to. With regards to this Japanese tradition of complimenting a guy just because he’s sitting on the sofa under a blanket writing an email, I say there are two types of Japanese people, those who speak these constant compliments and those who don’t bother. This says nothing of the reasoning of those who do speak these compliments. They might be doing it to be polite, or they might be doing it because they seek to gain something. Know, sir, that every word in this human concept called language is positioned to a purpose; we don’t speak in vain, even when we’re lying or writing fiction. People fulfill themselves or others through words; speaking the words “Yeah I’d like some noodles” to a waiter, for example, results in noodles being set down on the table in front of you. What purpose does telling me my new haircut looks great serve, in the context of human hunger? You and I came to the conclusion during your screaming at me on the phone that your girl kept talking to me, kept asking me questions while I sat there on the sofa, because she wanted to be polite, she didn’t want to interrupt my speaking. You say this is what she told you when you screamed at her for her talking to me, she said she wanted to be “polite”. Yeah, well, fuck that, you fucking retarded asshole. There’s some guy on this one internet forum about videogames, I don’t even remember who he is, other than that he’s an asshole, and his signature quote says something like “there is no means of manipulating men so effectively as through women,” and it’s attributed to some guy I’ve never heard of. Yeah, real smart quote there; I think of people who feel the need to attribute fluffy little bitch sentiments like that to people that regular(-ish) guys like me have never heard of, and in my mind I draw a picture worth zero words, of this confused kind of hate. It’s like a racism, is what it is. This girl told you she was being polite to me by letting me talk; the truth of the matter is I was saying bizarre things. The truth of the matter is that I have some problems lately, and that I’m rethinking a lot of events in my past and my future is at stake. I’ve got something I’m going to do, and I relish the opportunities to bring it up to strangers, like people in the supermarket who catch me speaking Japanese and compliment me, and then ask me what I’m doing here and if I have a girlfriend or what. Your girl is on an informal enough level with me to pull me away from a couple in the supermarket — they were telling me about a rock practice studio in Toda-Koen, really close to my guitarist’s house in Ukimafunado, like, walking distance, and only like eight hundred yen an hour for two people, and this girl of yours is like “Leave these poor people alone!” She then looked at them and said “Don’t be alarmed by him, he likes talking to people.” If she could say such a thing about me, in front of me to people she doesn’t even fucking know, why couldn’t she say that to me? She kept asking questions, kept suggesting I take her to yakiniku, heard my story of my fateful final English lesson, suggested she’d pay me for an English lesson, kept suggesting it when I said I was through with teaching English, and, well — what kind of politeness is that? If that’s the politeness that they teach kids in middle schools here, then I think I understand what’s wrong with the Japanese economy. If this kind of pointless and crippling “courtesy” is “correct,” then, well, I guess that’s about as understandable as the legality of signs outside a 600-yen-an-hour internet cafe that say “100 yen an hour.” This is Japan, right?

Now let’s make this all about me.

I used to know a guy, a Russian guy and a right moose-like motherfucker, who once emailed me because I mentioned him very discreetly in an article on insertcredit.com. He informed me that I had a man named “Tim Rogers” on my website writing “slanderous” things about him and his vegan girlfriend. He told me wasn’t suggesting I fire Tim Rogers — just that I, maybe, talk to him about his tactics and the way he thinks and behaves with people. I replied to him with what I think was one of the best emails I’ve ever written. In the end, I told him Know full well that I do not care what you are. I make the same bold request of you before I say what I’m about to say. This moose-man, it should be told straight off, was one I met through a girl I met at a videogame store in Indianapols. His girlfriend was mousy and quirky and funny, and liked talking about her various illnesses, so we bonded. She was not, otherwise, my type. Not at all. When I needed a ride down to Bloomington one weekened and she offered to take me, she and her boyfriend got into a huge fight, one which ended with the boyfriend taking me aside, putting his hand on my shoulder, and saying, “It’s not that I’m afraid you would try anything — it’s that I’m afraid she would.” (This man would later take to chatting with my ex-girlfriend about how horrible a person I am and how she should consider forgetting about me, yet not hesitate to contact him for a “cup of coffee” if she was ever in his town or he was ever in his; she sent me transcripts and we laughed, and it was a real tragedy, in the end, because he had a bit of a right to say a lot of things he said, I mean, why didn’t he, he was a man.) I disappointed him by scoffing, which probably sounded rather ugly. I told him, “Man, she ain’t exactly my type.” He regarded me with hate and spite forever, until he died, an aged man of a hundred and seven. He broke up with the girl about three weeks after I told him the truth about my feelings for her; she was fucking three of her ex-boyfriends, is what it was. Vegans know how to pork.

I feel the same way about your girl. Man, she ain’t quite my type. As a man-whore, I tell you up-front that yeah, I’d fuck her if I didn’t know her name. I’d be sure to ask her once the docking procedure was appropriately completed and I was stroking her hair back behind her ears and kissing her cheekbones or whatever. (I actually don’t even remember if your girl has cheekbones, to tell you the truth.) What this little bit of non-fantasy should indicate to you is that your girl does not, in any way, repulse me with regard to her aesthetic projection. It doesn’t mean I like her, or much less care about what she is. Yes, she is “kind of a whore,” like I said, and you can believe me when I say that because I don’t care about what she is. Remember that! Remember that until the day you die, you stupid motherfucker!

Now let’s make this all about me.

My friend and guitarist Drew Cosner won’t take so much as a sip of Coca-Cola from a can that someone else has sipped from. I find this kind of silly, because you can’t see the germs, really, and they’re probably not even there to begin with. Though I guess I certainly wouldn’t drink a Coke after someone just slobbered all over it, or maybe it they cut their tongue on the rim and there was blood all over it or some shit, I certainly don’t mind taking a deep, knee-buckling sip of Coke after a guy says “I can’t finish this” and hands me a half a can. “I CAN FEEL IT IN MY BALLS!” I like to scream. It’s quite a rush.

However, I have a strict, no-nonsense rule about so much as shaking hands with a girl if I know she’s shaken hands with a guy I know, or even a guy whose face I’ve seen. To have sex with a girl who has had sex with a friend of mine first would paralyze my spinal cord for life. This is not because I respect the guy too much; it’s because I, myself, am that kind of man. As a progressor, as a mover-forward in the human experience, I care deeply about what I am, even if it means not caring in the slightest what other people are. This is not a bad way to live; it is merely the best way to live, and I can prove it because I am not yet dead.

Yes, I have the Conqueror Gene. I like to crunch on new snow. As a vegetarian, as a man who has never smoked a cigarette and never tasted alcohol, I have principles that live and breathe in dark, violent places. I will never kiss a girl who has hugged a friend; I will never fuck a girl who has shaken a friend’s hand. If my friends end up shaking the hand of a girl I’ve fucked, by the way, I don’t mind at all. It adds texture, so long as I was there first. My personal sexual conduct rulebook-writing machine is laid out like a sequence of funnels and cafeteria trays. It’s very childish of me, though, for the most part, historically and future-historically, guys never have and never will have trouble with me moving in on their girlfriends. Guaranteed. I am as incapable of having sex with a friend’s girlfriend as I am of going to Shinjuku 2-Chome and prostituting myself at a gay bar. Much as the Japanese promise me I can make hundreds of thousands of yen in a few hours, and tempting as that sounds, I just can’t do it. I’m not wired that way. Suggesting that to me as a career path is like like asking me to unfasten a bolt with a Philips-head screwdriver. This is a trait of mine that I consider very tragic and very human all at once; at times I quite like it and at others I find it quite inconsequential to anything. You needn’t worry about it; you needn’t care about what I am.

This letter winds down starting now.

You, good sir, need to grow up a lot more than you might have. Do you remember that day, years ago, when, having noodles after a movie, we were talking about that project that failed? You told me, “There was shit going on behind the scenes that you could never imagine, that you’ll never have to know about.” I told you I could very well imagine anything that could have possibly gone wrong. You told me I couldn’t have. I shook my head and said that your very way of thinking had you imprisoned; to deny another man the imagination he wields with careful regard to everything he’s come to see and experience is to deny one’s self any potential for maturation. I said something like this, and you nodded, flicked your eyes up and to the right, took a breath in your nose, looked back at me, and said, maybe I was right. Whether you know it or not, you started to grow up a little bit since then. You were a kid with dreams, some of which had been crushed and others of which you constantly held beneath your Converses, ready in case something went wrong. Your dreams have changed while mine have remained the same. Yours gradually have come to resemble mine, and I’d consider that a shame, from one man to another, if I didn’t have so much going on on my own side. All that I can offer you, in light of this argument that roused you to use a Japanese cellular phone for half an hour and roused me to relative apathy, is to tell you that, in the years since our above conversation, you have grown up. Yet the goal you held then is about twice as far from you now as you’ve progressed since then. Also, I’m typing this on your computer, and the document you have on the desktop is aptly named.

THIS IS WHERE I REVEAL THE MAGIC TRICK, WHERE I FLIP OVER YOUR CARD, THE TWO OF HEARTS, AND YOU’RE LIKE “WHAT THE FUCK”

There are lies in this writing. The above paragraph is rife with them. Only you, the one to whom this is addressed, will understand all of them. You will understand where all the lies came from, and you will be able to stand at one end of them, grip them on the skinny side, and see what they’re pointing at and where they lead to. Try it one at a time. I’ll help you out — the computer I used to type this is actually not yours. It wasn’t the computer where you have a Beat-poetry-filled document on the desktop with a filename “shit,” either. It was another computer. Yet I’ve seen that document! And I’ve used that computer!

THIS IS WHERE I TELL YOU TO “WAX ON, WAX OFF” AND YOU DO THE MOTIONS WHILE I PUNCH AT YOU IN A FLURRY AND YOU’RE TOTALLY DODGING BULLETS

I met a girl at a kung-fu dojo three weeks ago, or so the story goes. We had a few good sparring sessions. She is an avid collector of videogames starring samurais and/or Chinese warlords. She is studying jeet kune do because she likes Bruce Lee and she needs to lose the weight she gained over the holiday season. She told me, rather up-frontly, that she’s finished with me. I told you about her, told her that I was finished with her, and you said I should send her your way. This revolted me because — you know my thing above, about me not fucking girls my friends have touched? It goes the other way — I don’t want my friends fucking girls I have fucked. At the same time, how could you ask such a thing, only to presume to behave in such a manner on the phone no more than four days later? You are a spotty and inconsistent man, and this is otherwise not a horrible thing, nor is it anything I care about none too much. The first time it occurred to me to erase your name and face from my memory banks was one night in January when you were wasted and talking to some big-haired reggae woman on the street, freaking the fuck out of her. She looked at me with this hateful look in her face, like I was supposed to explain what was going on. You were asking her about her iPod. I took my iPod out of my pocket and said, “I have one, too.” Then I turned around, not able to bear the sight. I didn’t want to be involved. You lashed out and grabbed my shoulder, and spun me around, and told me “WHAT THE FUCK MAN WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU HAVE TO TALK TO HER LIKE THAT?” When she had appropriately run away, you were still screaming. “I WAS JUST SPINNING SOME GAME, MAN!!” You fucking made me fucking sick. I was hoping you tried to hit me, because I would have punched you so hard and so fast you would spin around on one foot like an about-to-explode monster on “Might Morphin’ Power Rangers.” I seriously wanted the opportunity to open up, and I wouldn’t have regretted it. If you can’t see what is wrong with what you did that evening, and if you would still seek to defend yourself, then, in light of recent events, you are no longer worthy of an entry in my mental addressbook. Maybe you’ll grow up at some point and realize how fucking toolish of you that was, and exactly what you did that was so objectively, damn-near-legally wrong. Maybe you’ll pretend deep down that you’ve already learned, and more power to you. Lying to yourself — or even telling the truth — is a healthy agent of change, sometimes. Whichever course of action you choose, I’m sure you won’t end up murdered by a woman for at least a long time.

?????????, man. That’s what this is about. It’s about things that are tainted from the start; thinking processes that, like computer viruses, swell and grow until they’re entirely in charge of a situation in the worst kind of way. You need to meditate on your ability to pass what I call “human judgment.” All people possess it. It’s a fun activity to practice. You can do it while lying in bed at night.

You said to me the other night, “You tried to give her your phone number?” Did I? No, I did not. Maybe she told you I did? It is true that I gave her my cell phone email address; however, I gave it to her back in January, when she told me she would introduce me to her sister, the one who works for the big game company. As far as I know, she’s had it in her phone’s addressbook ever since. The last time I was over at your place, before, you know, the time you got angry like that, when she was really drunk and so were you, about an hour after you took me into your room and rasped, “I don’t know what to do with this girl — when she’s drunk she talks to everybody except me”, she invited me to go out and play darts with her and her sister on Saturday night. I told her, yeah, sure. I had every intention of just ignoring her email because fuck if I want to go play darts on a Saturday night when I can go out on a date or something. Though, to be polite, I told her, if you’re going, email me or something. You know my email address. It’s such an easy address to remember. I had really been looking forward to meeting her sister three months ago, though by that day the desire had left me, because it never happened. No bites on the line today. I’m going to go to the grocery store. I didn’t know her sister had a boyfriend, anyway, and she didn’t tell me until a while after she first told me she’d introduce us. That’s what me and your girl were talking about during our outrageous conversation, if you must know. Japanese girls who just want a free white-man ride once or twice. I was telling her that the girl I like at the moment has followed me around for four months, doing nothing irritating, until just recently starting to hold my hand, and I think that’s a great way for things to develop. I think she means to stick around for a while. It’s nice that things slotted into place this way.

That girl tells me she has something she wants to talk to me about. She says she wants to sit somewhere outside yet devoid of people, and tell me a story. I guess it’s going to happen on Saturday night. She’s already told me that when she was thirteen she was arrested and put in a juvenile detention facility for half a year. She says when she got out everyone hated her. Her parents wouldn’t look at her. At school, everyone knew who she was and what she’d done. I don’t know what she did. I suppose she means to tell me. I’m rather alarmed that I’m considering the weight of the situation this heavily before it even comes to pass. How did I grow up . . . this way? I’m not sure. I know by the way this girl kisses that I’m not the first man to ever kiss her. Yet there’s an easiness, and a sadness all together. Kissing her standing up on a crowded train feels like holding a big, bright, wrapped-up package on Christmas morning; I don’t know what’s inside, and it could be a severed head for all I know, though for the meantime, the simple act of holding a package fills me with a warmth that challenges me to believe that human beings can be beautiful for more than just a few dimly-lit, incense-stinking hours at a time.

On the phone, you told me to think more seriously about how I’m going to “behave toward girls” you “date in the future.” That’s amazing. I’d rather think — correctly, fuck you very much — that I do no wrong in my behaviors, as dictated and shackled by the principles I have laid out above, and that it is you who needs to think more seriously about the girls you are dating in the now. You seem very much to be a man who cares about what other people are, so this is why I have officially informed you that the girl you are fucking is kind of a whore. I figure you will care about her status. My ex-girlfriend loved it when people called her by her first name behind her back. The third-personing of one you have sexually experienced brings that person into a new light. Around a table, one guy says, in your presence, “Did you see the girl _________’s dating? She’s fuckin’ hot,” and you like this sort of thing. So I’m telling you she’s kind of a whore. Be proud that someone is bothering to talk about her in third person, and be like a good Western businessman (who holds onto “as much of the money for as long as possible,” let’s remember) and enjoy her while she lasts. You’ve already apparently set a timer on her. Congratulations, you’re a goal-oriented man.



You must understand that different people speak different truths to different opponents. Going with the “words as tools” motif, we can consider the people we talk to for various reasons to be our “opponents” in life. A woman in bed with a man is the most believable kind of human being. A man will tell her anything and believe anything she says. There are far-reaching, goddess-invoking reasons for this. I won’t get into them. A man talking about a woman as she exists in bed is a mysterious, puzzling thing. You care enough about her to tell me about sexual quirks of hers that bother you; why do you give me this information? You tell me not to talk about you on the internet, as, well, most people — including my whole band and the . . . people I live with — tell me not to do. So I don’t. Or, when I do, I lie violently. However, far beyond the truths and the untruths that lurk in words, there are truths and untruths in actions and existences. I am trying — real, real hard — these past few months to open a door to an honest existence. I have done things wrong, most of them through ignorance, and I’ve paid for things. There was someone who loved me, who I lost because I loved someone else, who I lost because I couldn’t not love someone else, who is gone because she refused to grow up and her parents hate me, and blame me for everything. What I have now is a girl who might have done something horrible, a girl who mortified everyone surrounding her yet behaves like a perfect princess on warm Saturday nights now that she’s grown up. She frightened her surroundings because — and this is the central point of this piece — she exercised her human possibility to be wicked. ?????????????????????????????????? The man who quits smoking is more respectable in our literate, book-learned society than the man who has never smoked a cigarette. We love patient quitters more than we love impatient children of habits to never try anything new. A person has to earn trust as they earn love and as they earn patience. This is me telling you something you might already know, that you reserve the right to disbelieve a woman or a man who has ever existed dishonestly. Words spoken in the dark from a man to a woman or vice-versa; she tells you about the one on whom she is cheating; the very fact that she does this locks out all possibility that she can be telling him about you. Which is a bolder lie? Not telling a man you’ve been with for years that you’re cheating on him, even though he never asks, or saying “Yeah, my boyfriend works until midnight,” when really he only works until eleven o’clock, and “midnight” just makes you sound like more of an “oh you poor thing honey“? I know this question well; a married woman will, in bed, talk about her husband, I have learned, after the dust has settled. Whatever she says about his wicked ways or his boring job sounds like the gospel. Yet I can rest assured that knowledge of my existence will never find its way into his head. To part from her is my choice; should she tell him about me after I am gone and dead to her, I will not know. She always turns down the wedding picture on the mantle whenever I come over. Once I picked it up. I looked at the guy. It was a good photo, wonderful lighting, both members of the couple caught unawares and smiling naturally. I haven’t been back to see her since then. Maybe I will some day. I don’t know his name and I’ve never shaken his hand, after all.

In the end, you may be fuming and furious about my posting this on the internet. Pay no mind to your pride; people won’t know who you are. A mass-murderer buying corn flakes, for the first six years or so of his career, probably feels leery that the cashier is onto his scheme. Then he realizes that people, as people, generally don’t suspect each and every fellow man of wickedness. Much as it fills me with apathy to admit, you are not a wicked man. You are merely a fucking asshole who needs to grow up. You will find yourself far more tolerable to deal with, and you probably won’t end up getting cold-cocked by a stranger should you ever visit a port city where strangers cold-cock other strangers just for being so strange. I mean for this writing to occupy a position more like a greeting card than like a piece of literature. I don’t dare want to make literature, ever. Greeting cards are better. Though the cartoon guy on the front of the birthday card has big bushy red hair and a long nose and a load of balloons tied to his arm and you don’t, you must understand that that man is not supposed to be you so much as he is supposed to represent you. There are many ways for you to respond to a birthday card, and far fewer ways should that card contain a five- or ten-dollar bill. The ancient Daoists say the best of thirty-six ways to avoid a fight is to run away. Times have changed for those of us who walk paths in the present. As something of an amateur Daoist, I’m going to let you in on the secret that, in almost all cases regarding words, only one method of response is correct: that way is to truly understand, and to say, “I understand,” and to not pursue the matter further. To do less than this is to risk all integrity. To do more than this is to lose all integrity. As integrity is all you have, I encourage moderation. Go ahead and leave an anonymous comment on the thread here, saying “I understand.” Hell, anyone who understands — go ahead and do it. Let’s make this a group exercise. This shit here all applies to anyone reading this, not just one person.

And I’d also tell you to quit drinking so much, though you wouldn’t listen to that, and I am, as always, not a man who believes in miracles, anyway. Besides, you don’t seem so bad about it anymore. Hell. You know, that reminds me of something I meant to fit in here while I was writing it. It slipped my mind — your little “It sucks to be around sober people when you’re drunk” speech? Fuck you, asshole. Sometimes it sucks to be around drunk people when you’re sober. Yeah, you can argue that “OOOOOOOH, well, I don’t choose to have these sober people here!!” Well fuck you again — I don’t choose to make you drunk. That, and I don’t complain. You call yourself a Sunday-school graduate, and you don’t even have a basic grasp of Christ’s “Yeah, be nice to people 101″ seminar. So fuck you and your one-dimensional principles once again. And while I’m airing out my laundry (both real laundry and figurative laundry, today), this one’s to my main man Kevin (I actually know four Kevins in Tokyo, so, well): get a grip on your situation. And if I’m not the one in your house, warn me next time before you start drinking, maybe write up a contract permitting me to punch you in the face if needs be, because you become an absolute Parkinson’s-syndrome-ish useless mess when you have four beers in you.



A wonderful spring day in Shitamachi, and it’s actually heating up. It feels like summer in this tatami mat room. I have to step out to the immigration office soon; lord knows what they want. They sent me a letter that says no more than “please come here.” Last time they told me they needed some documents. This time, no mention of documents. Just a “please come here.” It could be good or it could be prison. I’m loading up my iPod and listening to the television talking about Golden Week, the big string of holidays coming up next week. Everyone has off work every day next week, so Tokyo makes all prices three times higher, so everyone stays at home with stored-up food. It reminds me of the woman I used to know who said it was best to wait in front of only the most-crowded line at a train station, trusting her fellow passengers to be informed about which cars would be the least full. Never, for example, would you wait at the car right by the stairs, because there’s no way you’d get a seat. This was the Tozai Line, from Funabashi out to Mitaka, far east to far west. “The stairs are in different places at every station,” I told her. “It’s not like the stairs are always in the same place and people are always getting in the train right when they reach the top of those stairs.” I had a good point — according to a large poster-diagram, there it was — the locations of the stairs at all the other stations. “Even if people are jumping right in when they get up the stairs, then, well, every car is going to be full! Why not just go to one of these cars that are lined up with no stairs at no train stations?” This wasn’t good enough for her. The fix was out, she’d read it on the internet — car five, near the stairs at one in four stations on the line, was the least crowded. A near-dead-empty train whipped by, this was at about noon on a Sunday. Car five was empty. We went in and sat down amid a crowd of other passengers who were also mysteriously waiting by car five. She was very satisfied with herself. “See! I was right!” I didn’t speak further. She was satisfied with herself; good for her. I ended up not seeing her ever again, starting not too much later after that. I think back on her self-satisfaction with fondness. She was otherwise not irritating, and kind enough. Besides, what kind of a sad animal have humans become, that we consider “self-satisfied” an insult? I can think of little more that would qualify a person for happiness. That’s a damn sincere notion, I mean it. I mean every gorgeous syllable of it, I really do.

Rest assured, good citizens, that a feature about Japan is coming soon. Rest equally (maybe a little bit less) assured that Tim’s feature on the Most Gorgeous Situation in Korea is coming soon. It’s going to combine all your favorite parts of the Metal Gear Solid series, Frankenstein, and REAL PIZZA AND DONUTS. That’s right, none of that strange Saizeriya pizza with the gobs of melted mozzerella unevenly distributed throughout the pizza.

It looks like circumstances beyond my control will lead me to leave Korea, almost for good, this coming September. I’ll be in Chicago, so if any of you out there live in Chicago, maybe… I don’t know, you could take me out for a deep dish pizza, or whatever it is you people eat out there? I hear the whole college thing might set me back a couple bucks, you know.

Here’s a little something to hold you over until all the great new features hit:

This is what happens when Poker gets boring.

This is technically a failure, but I think it’s a valuable learning experience nonetheless.

THE INEVITABLE AND CLIMACTIC CONCLUSION! Whenever money comes, and money comes sometimes, I buy myself a new razor. It ends up that I’m not able to buy a razor more than three or two times a year, because that’s when the money comes, three or two times a year. For all the time spent between owning a razor and that next shipment of money, I’m shaving myself with a dulling blade. Cartridges for these razors with blades that can be replaced are so expensive, a good 1,200 yen for a pack of three or four. The three-blade razors come in packages of four cartridges; two-blade razors come in packages of six; the new four-blade Shick Quattro catridges come in packs of three. So, yeah, twelve blades in one box. I once bought a box of replacement four Gilette Mach 3 Turbo replacement razor cartridges for eight dollars at a Ralph’s in Los Angeles before going to Denny’s, eating a big fat stack of four slices of French toast with strawberries, paying six dollars for the pleasure, and then going to the airport to take a twelve-hour flight to Tokyo. They inspected my suitcase at the check-in counter, found the box of razor cartridges, and confiscated them. Sons of bitches.

So I ended up growing hateful of the Gilette Mach 3. I’d be damned if I was going to buy a new pack of cartridges for 1,200 yen so soon after wasting eight dollars on a pack of cartridges just eighteen hours ago, yet there I was, at a Matsumoto Kiyoshi drug store in Ikebukuro, in Tokyo, another world, and one far rainier and with many more kids singing folk songs in front of metal shutters, thinking I’d better get something to put in my knicked-up razor. I ended up not doing that. That blade accepted blood and rust for two months, and then I found some money, and found myself an Ippondo pharmacy in Otsuka, one stop yet so far away from Ikebukuro, and I had a choice there. Basically, it went like this. I first felt the need to shave when I was twenty years old. Twenty years old! I am what my ex-Japanese teacher called baby-faced, and trust me, she would know a baby-face when she saw one and touched one. She called me “Subesubekun” and rubbed my face. Of course she didn’t do this in front of the other students. She was a nice lady with an odd taste in skirts and a damned good taste in young men. Subesube is a Japanese sound word, by the way, one that spells out the sound made when you rub a hand against smooth, hairless skin. It’s a hell of a twister to translate when you’re translating manga. Believe you me. Tamio Okuda has some great song lyrics about a “The country where I first behld such long, subesube [in this case, feminine] legs beneath a bathrobe.” It’s a song about America. They must have nice razors in that country, the listeners think.

Twenty years old, and I bought a crinkly bag of razors. Just — at the grocery store, a big fat bag of yellow Bic Razors, the single-blade ones. Big crinkly bag for a dollar and nineteen cents. The glow of the flourescent lights reflecting off the bag — so crinkly you’d think it was made of a new kind of space-age newspaper — seems to stay there even after you’ve got the thing sitting in the passenger’s seat of your car on a rainy night in October driving back home. I swiped my roommate’s shaving cream, lathered up my face, and went about relieving the itch that had been bugging me for a week. I’d almost thought to tell someone about it, and then I saw my friendd Big Joe, with his stubbly-as-hell face, and I thought, hey, maybe that’s what’s itching me, too. It turned out to be right. In relieving myself of the itch, I ended up cutting the bloody hell out of my face. I had half a roll of red toilet paper stuck to my lips when I was done. It was a gorgeous situation. I went back into my room, where my roommate was still watching my television in his underpants, in my chair, with my remote control touching his teeth. He had a posture like that statue what’s called “The Thinker,” though he wasn’t fooling nobody — he wasn’t thinking about shit.

I’ve been a meticulous shaver ever since.

I’m not about to hide anything, and tell you, hey, I’m not a facial-hairless dweeb, I just shave very carefully! Because that’s not true, entirely. I am not gifted in the ways of facial hair. It just doesn’t work for me. It’s because of this that I sometimes get my ethics questioned. Nick Can told me the other day that I’m not the best judge of a razor because I don’t grow enough facial hair, and I told him to sit the fuck down and understand that it is because I have so little facial hair that I hate it and wish to see it obliterated every morning. On the days I cannot shave, when the opportunity doth not arise, I scratch all over myself like a gorilla or like Toshiro Mifune in “Seven Samurai,” and I’m generally full of loathing for everything. It feels dirty, like having wet socks on a hot or cold day, or, better yet, like having one perfectly dry sock and one sock completely inundated with cheap beer on a pleasant day in mid-autumn. And wearing shoes. And driving a car.

I’m not a masochist, yet the experience kind of thrilled me, to see my own blood being drawn painlessly from the skin of my face. I used just one of the razors in that fat bag of razors until I realized they made ones with two blades and a little pad that was supposed to protect your face. I wasn’t so sure about how much better this would be, though mathematics classes had prepared me to think it would be twice as good. I bought a little package of these razors and used them. I took to shaving very carefully. It all worked out. I was in America and just shy of twenty-three years old when I found out that Gilette, whose corporate slogan is “The best a man can get,” was now offering a razor with three blades, one that would change the way the world shaves, and I really liked that idea. Before I got that Mach 3, the three-blade razor of fantasies, I’d had something of a hobby for cutting my fingernails. Well, that dried up and was gone. I began to enjoy a good shave. I’d get it out of my system once, maybe twice a day. I want that face smooth as a grown woman’s boob, I’d think — I’m beyond thinking it should be like a baby’s behind, I mean that’s just not healthy. Some people suggested electric razors to me, and these people were always such unclean sorts. Electric razors are the hygenic equivalent of the guy who works a night shift at a grocery store, just pulling all the day-old loaves of bread to the front of the shelf: it’s just hiding. It’s pretending. It’s making yourself, your business, the things you represent — more tolerable. Still waters. My little brother uses an electric razor, I think. What a buffoon! He has lots of little blips of acne, too. I couldn’t stand to be ten feet of him when he fires that razor up. I can imagine the sound of the acne hitting the whirring razor, like golf balls in a lawnmower. Holy shit that gives me the shivers.

Once, when I lived with a Japanese comic artist, I was using a straight razor every day. I had a female friend named Mami, one who worked at a hairstylist dojo. She managed to hook me up with a slick little razor with a bamboo handle. This was back when I had money, and had a promise, which was eventually broken, as half of promises on this earth are, that said I’d have a hell of a lot more money very soon. The razor put me back fifty dollars. It was in my suitcase, the suitcase I tried to check, on my way back to America months later. They took it from me and threw it away. They must have thought I looked like the sort of guy to wake up when all the flight attendants were sleeping, sneak into the belly of the plane, and find my suitcase, just so I could retrieve the razor from sub-zero-degree temperatures and, I don’t know, go to the bathroom and shave. That was a real shame. I loved that razor. See — just two months before Mami got it for me, she’d waxed my face. Yes, waxed as in the way some girls wax their legs, or their unmentionables. It was amazing. Not a sprout for a month and a half. When the hair started coming back, I had that razor, and was able to restore perfection every day.

Well, back in America, I had the Mach 3. I ended up hating it when my cartridges got confiscated, along with my nail clippers, from my suitcase on my way back to Japan. I shaved for two months with a rusting, bloody blade, and when my money finally came, I faced a choice. I could either buy a package of four Gilette Mach 3 Turbo triple-blade razor cartridges for 1,200 yen, or a new Shick Quattro, with four blades, and no extra cartridges, for 980 yen. I thought it over, and I ended up a victim of razor mathematics: one blade is clearly, infinitely better than none (by “better” I mean it actually shaves the hair and gets the job done); two blades is better than one (when it comes to the disposable types); three blades had proven better and closer a shave than two — why should four not continue this pattern? I bought the Shick.

Holy lord did it suck. It was the worst shave I’ve ever had. I can’t even tell when the hair is coming off. The thing doesn’t make any damn sense. Looking at it fills you with a puzzle. Why are there four blades on this fucking thing? It looks so ridiculous. You know when youf irst saw the commercial for the McDonald’s Triple Quarter-Pounder in America? Even if you’re a fat fucker, you probably saw that and gagged. “How the hell . . .?” you probably said. You probably weren’t able to finish that sentence. You were no doubt flabbergasted. Yet this did not change one crucial fact, the fact that you probably had eaten at least two dozen Double Quarter-Pounders before that. A single Quarter Pounder is, in and of itself, a grotesque (and I suppose tasty, if you’re a carnivore) hunk of sweaty cow-flesh. A double is twice that. Yet the very promotional image of a Triple Quarter-Pounder With Cheese is the beef patty that broke the camel’s back. It just looks like too damned much. That’s what the Shick Quattro looks like. In performance, it’s a lot like the kid who, through tears and gritted teeth, screams, “SO ARE YOU!!” when the generic playground bully tells him he’s a “stupidhead.” You can almost hear it singing to your jawbone while you shave in the morning, while the world outside your postcard-sized screen window hums awake and men with umbrellas greet their yakuza bosses ready for another day in the sex trade. It sings, “Yeah, I’ve got four blades! Four blades, yeah, sure I do! You can count them, if you take the time! One, two, three, four! Yeah! Life’s great!” Otherwise, I don’t know what the hell went wrong in the design phase. Is it the angle of the blades, or what? I had a small dread when I bought the thing, and I spoke that dread to a woman. that’s a great thing to do, speak your dread to a woman; just be careful if she starts speaking her dread back, because by my experience a woman’s dread, unlike a man’s dread, is actually something that frightens a man. I told her, anyway, “How much longer are they going to continue this penis-measuring contest? Is Gilette going to turn out the Mach 5, and then Shick’s going to whip out the ‘Sick Shick Six,’ and then Gilette is going to retaliate with the ‘Mach Seven, Jet to Heaven’? Are we going to end up with twelve-blade razors? How will I manipulate around the little crease under my nose without cutting my top lip up?” She shrugged and said, “My razor only has two blades.” I scoffed. “Like you need a razor!!” I said. “I shave my legs,” she told me, and I told her oh, I didn’t know that. I didn’t really have any reason to, though I guess it makes sense in the end.

Close to five months, I used that damned razor. Close to five months, I earned not a goddamned penny. I’ll admit — my period owning the Shick Quattro was the first time in my life, and hopefully the last, that I ever used another man’s razor. When at a girl’s house, in the shower, I . . . ran her girl-razor over my face, just a good once-over. I needed something else. I found a bag of these “BESTY” disposable razors, a Japanese brand that doesn’t suck too bad. Sometimes they left patches. Sometimes, the patches were given two weeks and they exploded into bristles. I’d sit on the train fondling my own face, feeling where I went wrong. Four years of shaving these features, navigating a blade around these curves, and I can’t yet do it in the dark, noiselessly. I must hone my technique, I’d think. And then I’d snap out of my trance. There is no need to hone the technique! There is no need to earn a technique in such things in the first place! It is a sin, and certainly no fault of my own, that I live to live hungry for so much in the first place, and it is a crime worthy of punishment that one of the things I hunger for more than sex or shoes or cough syrup is a god damned close shave! (The shoes, by the way, are getting ridiculous — there’s a hole clean through to the sole in my right Vans Off The Wall, shoes I love yet will not buy anymore because I’ve essentially grown up to play the part of a classic rambling man, and as such I need shoes that last me on my travels. I’m going to get some noble Etnies next, I think, if I ever get back to America and within reach of size-twelve shoes. The hole in the shoe, right now, if you must know, is positioned such that I can step on wet concrete as a man sprays the sidewalk in front of a flower-shop on a clear, sapphire-skied spring day, and feel a jolt like licking a battery as my sock is instantly inundated up to the ankle. It’s a miserable failure of a way to walk.)

Well, money came, and I bought a new razor. The razor I bought was the Gillete Mach 3 Power, which in Japanese is called the Gillete Mach 3 Mach Syn Mach Power, which is too many Machs, and far too high a speed at which to shave. According to a diagram on the package — complete with a smiling and bald image of David “The Motherfucker” Beckham — there’s a way to fit an AA battery in there. Hell if I know what it is. Anyway, there’s this button I can press on it, and it starts to vibrate like a cellular phone. While playing the Game of Life in Japanese with Drew, Kevin, and a girl, I kept the just-bought and flaming hot-green razor in its holder on the kotatsu table, and at odd moments kept pressing the power button, making it vibrate, and making everyone think their phones were ringing somewhere. I put it on the tatami and hit the power button here, while my friend was making udon, and that caused quite chaos. This friend hates it every time I mention “Where’s my phone?” “I didn’t steal it! I don’t touch your phone!!” Such guilt! I turned the razor on, my friend is standing in the middle of the living room, arms-akimbo, turning around, kind of watching TV. “YOUR PHONE IS RINGING.” I’m sitting here in front of the computer. “No it’s not,” I say calmly, “it’s just my new vibrating razor, under that T-shirt over there by the lamp.” In ten seconds, I’m getting a fist shaken at me in a very cartoonish way.

The razor is much fun for pranks that don’t make any sense. How does it hold up, however, as a razor? That’s what this piece is all about. In a word, the razor is gorgeous. If you would have told me when I was nine years old that I, this little boy who thinks he’s going to some day be a builder of robot parts, a famous novelist, a doctor and a movie director, would one day sixteen years from now buy a vibrating razor and it would change my life, I would have seriously punched you in the scrotum. That’s kids for you — even the geniuses don’t like authority. You come across boy-geniuses who do like authority sometimes, though they’re usually sons of bitches, or else bastards.

The razor is gorgeous. It vibrates using supersonic waves. I used to know a woman who had a doctor-prescribed plastic acne-obliterating vibrating rod that supposedly utilized supersonic waves, though hell if you could even feel that thing vibrating. She told me, “It’s vibrating so fast you can’t tell it’s vibrating at all.” That woman used that thing every night before bed, and then applied some astringent. The inside of her mouth tasted like an empty rubber balloon. I’d like to think that was because of the supersonic waves.

I’m not sure if the Gilette Mach 3 Power’s waves are more or less supersonic than that woman’s acne-crunching machine. I don’t know, even, if what the commercial says is true — that the razor vibrates gently, sending tiny ripples through the skin (if you keep the rubber safety guard, which, yes, is vibrating, too, pressed against your face right); the hairs ride those waves, being trimmed down at three impact points by each one of the razor blades. This is too complicated to grasp. Let me tell you, though — lather up with some shaving cream and use this razor, and you might just end up bleeding all over yourself. I am addicted to it. I have used it once a day, and girls keep touching my face.

In the end, the most comforting thing about the Mach 3 Power is that, hopefully, it’ll make it so we never see the twelve-blade razor. Though I reckon we’ll be seeing a vibrating four-blade razor coming around the bend. This is an important development — vibration is the new multiplication.

Meanwhile, in the field of beverage, there is something bigger brewing. Razor mathematics will no doubt live on, if the season’s Japanese lemon-soda market is any indication. CC Lemon, a beverage produced by Suntory, who has their head office in Odaiba, where I was today covering a story, has been around since 1989. It is a lemon-flavored soda with a taste slightly tarter and a color much more yellow than Sprite. CC Lemon is quite tart, in fact — almost like the liquid equivalent of one of those chewable vitamin-C pills, yet a little lighter. See, the thing is, it contains vitamin C. Something like ten times the vitamin-C you’d possibly need to live a healthy day. The Japanese believe that vitamin C is good for preventing sickness. They believe that much, much, much vitamin C is enough to stamp out a cold before it can begin, and sometimes even rational human beings can’t help getting caught up in an office-lady-like hype — you take a sip of this soda, it’s refreshing if a little mediciney, and though it’s a cold beverage on an icy, charcoal-gray morning, you feel hopeful, like nothing bad is going to happen to you. CC Lemon is a wonderful product for fans of meaningless quantification as well — on the label, right there, it says, in English as well as Japanese, “70 Lemons’ Worth of Vitamin C.” Doesn’t it make you feel good, to know just how much you’re getting? This drink has been the people’s choice of vitamin-rich beverages for preventing colds, for a decade and a half. And just two weeks ago, Kirin released Kirin Lemon. Right there, on the label, it says “77 Lemons’ Worth of Vitamin C.” The god-damned gall evident in this is nerve-wracking. For this wants-to-live-an-honest-simple-life me to know that businessmen exist who will pump out and pump up ideas like this — it’s like a cockroach in my living room. I can’t fall asleep knowing that cockroach is there, and I can’t kill it because I don’t know where, exactly it is.

Then again, that’s Japanese business, ain’t it? I’ve talked about Toyota and Edwin before. Now let’s talk a little more about Tokyo Tower — built in the image of the Eiffel Tower, only a lot bigger. And now they’re building a bigger one. Don’t you people see? Sure, there’s a certain satisfaction of megalomania, a certain love people have of making something the largest or most vitamin-packed of its kind; still, though, history is painting you people the color of assholes. I tell people sometimes, when they’ve bought me enough Coca-Colas, that Elvis Presley was the last man history can ever paint to look like a hero; John Lennon and Paul McCartney certainly aren’t heroes, much as I admire them — they admired Elvis too much. Kids heard The Beatles and were inspired to start a band. Kids heard Elvis and were inspired to be Elvis. This is why the man has so many impersonators even today, and even comedy movies about his impersonators, and even dry, inane, un-wisecracking doped-down action flicks about his impersonators, even. John and Paul had balls to take music and do it how thye wanted. yet they did not have the heroism of Elvis. To be a hero, I believe, takes two things — virtuosity and fate. Elvis was a virtuous man of great talent, great looks, and great personality. He was fatefully being sought by a record executive who wanted a white man who could sing like a black man. He was found because, though the record executive did not know his name, someone else somewhere else apparently did. This is a modern-day case of “fate.” Good on it. Elvis was the first and the last man to be as much of an icon as, well, Elvis. All will be compared to him, even should one objectively more talented than him rise up and stun the world, making all the young girls fall in love again; women will want him, men will want to be him — he still won’t be a hero. No one will be; my lord, I watched a Japanese-subtitled DVD of “Old School,” starring that asshole Will Ferrel, my buddy Luke Wilson, and your and my friend Vince Vaughn just last night, struggling to explain the American cultural significances of each tired college-town set-piece. Are we even trying to make heroes out of anyone, anymore?

I have an issue of Wired here guest-edited by James Cameron. It’s about “discovery.” “Exploration.” How much more of the world, really, is left to uncover? Cameron’s team of guest writers tackles the question. The answers don’t stick to any part of my brain. All that feels important is the moment I’m in right now, stomach full of chocolate cake from a little adventure this afternoon, face already growing stubble and in need of another shave. I’m thinking about a girl I know; though I’ve known a lot of girls (both this way and that way) before, I like this one differently. Something inside the way I think about this girl is different from everything inside every way I’ve thought about every other girl. Maybe it’s real, and maybe it’s not. There are so many things within one man’s mind that are not real; it is more than worth finding out what is. I have two weeks planned out, during which I will see her three times, and I’m planning what I’m going to look like, walk like, and talk like each time. There was a time when I was singing in a hardcore punk-rock band up in Saitama, and back then I’d have spit in your face and called you a queer for presuming to ham up some kind of superficial act just because you like someone. I liked girls, back then, who agreed with this sort of thing, and who either smoked cigarettes while talking about philosophy in bed or talked about philosophy and the dangers of smoking, also while in bed. Your basic renegades/vegan-liberals split, is what it was. This girl now is very different. I’ve told people that she reminds me of the mute woman in Woody Allen’s film “Sweet and Lowdown,” the one who the protagonist picks up early on, and she just starts following him. The protagonist, played by Sean Penn, is Emmet Ray, the “World’s second-greatest jazz guitarist.” He is a weirdo. He sometimes meets girls at the ends of his performances, girls who think he’s probably a pretty cool guy to be able to play the guitar like he can, and he invites them to go to the dump and shoot some rats, in those exact words. They always think he’s joking, and then end up horrified and bored. Well, this one girl, the mute one, she has a good time shooting rats at the dump. He eventually breaks up with her for a magazine reporter played by Uma Thurman, and the movie ends when he realizes he “made a mistake.” It’s not a bad deal. Yeah, this girl, though, she’s a lot like that girl in that movie. She goes with me to Tower Records, and while I listen to music at the listening station, she listens to music, too. Usually the same music, with the other pair of headphones. Likewise, I go to her hair salon and sit there reading magazines while she gets her hair done by this gay guy she’s known since high school, or else I take her to the New Balance shop in Harajuku and explain what “overpronation” is because she’s thinking of starting to run every morning. These kinds of little developments feel nice. Holding hands outside on a warm day in early spring, knowing that I first held hands with her on what was an ambiguously cold day in late winter, knowing that I’ve known her for two seasons, at least, plus a little more or a little less, depending on how you think about it . . . I like it. It’s not the heroic fate I thought would sweep into my life and turn me into some sort of god-figure back when I was mute and in high school. I’m not breaking any new ground for anyone else to read about hundreds of years from now and say, yeah, this guy rocked. Still. It’s not so bad.

How dare you call me selfish if I say this is the best way for things to be. I don’t see you out discovering lost continents, or diving to the deepest trenches.



In Odaiba today, I saw a letter from a kindergarten girl to my friend. The girl belonged to my friend’s brother. His wife had given birth to her, you see, to put it into too many words. The letter was punchy, and in English:

Dear Tooru,

From Yui.

Yui is a very smart little girl. I say this devoid of the pride a parent has for his child, because Yui isn’t my child. I know she’s smart because I met her before and had a nice conversation, in English, about algebra. She goes to a special school. She’s just turned five years old.

I remember what John Lennon said about imagining all the people living in harmony, not hating each other, et cetera et cetera. I guess that’s pretty much the same thing Jesus was saying. I wonder why no one gets it? I trust Yui, with her no-nonsense approach to writing a friendly letter, will grow up to be quite the harmonious woman.

I wanted to take a picture of the letter. I opened my duffel bag and started digging around for my digital camera. I couldn’t find it. It’s contained in a sock, a sock I got in Korea. I still need to tell you about what happened in Korea, though I fear for my soul what will happen if I do. Oh, God help me — I wandered that country for a week, saw Hell with my own eyes, and did this all with rakish stubble. No razor. I don’t ever take one overseas, anymore. I couldn’t stand to lose another one.

I eventually found the sock. Only it wasn’t the one with my camera in it — it was the one with my iPod. My iPod was all tangled up in my long Sony headphone cord. Yet it was still plugged into the iPod! I let out a small screech, and tugged the headphones out. Half-cursing (cursing in Japanese, that is, where it never counts), I unplugged the headphones and wondered aloud, “How do headphone cords get all tangled up when, like, the headphones are totally . . . plugged into something?” Tooru was smoking a cigarette, watching a tugboat chug beneath a bridge far out in the harbor as trucks that looks like toys sped around on oversecting, intersecting highways on this dreary, humid-growing day. He spoke to me from the balcony, a man who doesn’t seem like he’s ever going to grow up, sometimes, yet sometimes seems like he’s always constantly changing into something else. He’s like a clown tumbling down a hill.

“You know, I read about that somewhere. Did you know that fifty percent of knots, these days, are perceived knots? I mean, knots that aren’t real. Just jumbles of cables or strings or hairs that you think are knotted and really, you know, aren’t.”

Far be it for me to not challenge the research integrity of my friends. “I’d like to know where you got the figures for that.”

“So would I,” he said. I got the itchy feeling that he was probably right.

An hour later, Yui would be home, with a red helium balloon in tow. She show it to me, and then tie it to my wrist. She sat next to me on the sofa while we watched Keanu Reeves in “The Devil’s Advocate,” versus Al Pacino. Pacino was demanding, in Japanese, that Keanu have sex with his sister, who was naked, lying on a table, and grinning devilishly. The Japanese title for the movie is “Diablos.” Tooru said to Yui, “Close your eyes, don’t watch this.” Yui put her hands over her eyes and said, in English, “Change the channel.” I translated for Tooru, and Yui giggled. We flipped on a cooking show. I’d kind of been wondering how the movie was going to end, though hey. So Yui looked me right in the eye, and said, “Hey, do you know how kangaroos die?” And I told her, “Yes.” I really did know. They taught us in zoology class in high school. Yui shook her head. “No, no. They die like this — they lose their teeth. Their molars.” She opened her mouth and touched the molars in the back of her head. “The molars are the first teeth to go. Then they can’t grind their food properly, and they starve to death.” “Yeah,” I tell her, “I knew that.” I pause for a second, wondering whether or not I should add “It’s a very lonely way to die,” both because Yui is a little girl and maybe she doesn’t know what it’s like to be lonely and because, well, maybe starvation isn’t so lonely. During my pause, Yui giggled. There she was, properly dressed in baggy GAP Kids jeans and a Minnie Mouse sweatshirt, shaking her permed head. “No you didn’t!”

oh, and the donation materials are up. if you want access, paypal at least a dollar and eight cents to tim @ insertcredit . com. OKAYSORRY



Just last week on this same weekday, and the weekday before it, I met American McGee, game designer extraordinaire. He made a game based on Alice in Wonderland, if you remember, and he’s currently working on one about The Wizard of Oz, I think, as well as one about Strawberry Shortcake. I personally am looking quite forward to the Strawberry Shortcake one, as I’m certain it’ll contain lots of explosions of jam that look so much cooler than blood.




left: my shoes. right: american mcgee’s shoes. middle: tokyo tower.



McGee was in Tokyo with his friend and colleague Ken Wong doing research on a new videogame. What the game is about, I won’t say. All I say is that of course it’s for Xbox, and of course it involves things exploding. I can hide only the grittiest details of the game’s plot; as you all know I live in Tokyo, you must understand that if American McGee came to Tokyo to wander around with me, chances are he’s making a game about Tokyo. So you have a game for Xbox that involves stuff in Tokyo exploding.



McGee had been to Tokyo only once before. During that time, he learned enough to come to be generally interested in the city. So he came back, this time at the height of a cherry-blossom-bloom and during six days of wickedly sinister weather flip-flopping. He wanted me to show him the kinds of places I stalk around and hide in Tokyo on bad days; he wanted me to give him the real experience of being a wandering, derelict, rock-and-roll bum in this, the world’s largest city. Or something like that. Mostly, I ended up milking a couple free dinners out of him, binging myself on okonomiyaki, racking up a monstrous karaoke tab, and generally acting like a complete asshole. It was great. I attended a lunch in Roppongi in which McGee and Wong talked to a couple squarish guys from a Japanese software publisher about things too boring and businesslike to be recounted here. The penne arabbiata was delicious. This was in Roppongi. On the way back out and around to the station, McGee spotted something down a hill and up on the horizon. How far out and away it was, we did not know. It was Tokyo Tower.




We ended up making the walk to Tokyo Tower. On the way there, we got sidetracked by a giant temple, one belonging to the Reiyuukai (”An Assembly of Friends of Ghosts”), a very creepy Japanese religious cult. The temple, positioned like two black pyramids standing base-to-base, was surrounded by a high cement wall complete with shards of glass studding the top. It was an impenetrable fortress of a cult temple. We got a better view of it from the top of Tokyo Tower.









Says American McGee to Ken Wong, looking at this, “It looks like a Star Destroyer. We could make it fly around, bombing Tokyo.” Ken Wong nods in agreement. I’m standing there, knowing I’ve never seen this temple before today, wondering if I’d have thought of making it fly around Tokyo, bombing things if I’d first seen it by myself. The answer is probably not.




McGee wanted to see sumo wrestlers. Any actual sumo fan would be able to tell you that the sumo season is over at the moment; McGee must not be a sumo fan. His trip was for purposes of work, things important to the future of the human race, like videogame research. I took him to see some sumos practice at Takasagobeya, where Asa Shouryuu, current champion of the sumo wrestlers, the one they, in all seriousness, call “Yokozuna,” practices daily. He wasn’t practicing when we went there. Still, there were sumos. Plenty of them. Big’uns, they were.







Not only did we get to see them push each other around, do their little sumo stance exercise, and cook lunch — we got to hear them talking about things like baseball. Baseball! The new season is just getting started. They had plenty of things to talk about together while two of their numbers practiced the ancient art of slapping another man in the boob. The about-baseball-talking was something of a revelation for me; it didn’t dawn on American and Ken, because they don’t understand Japanese. They were too busy taking photos and videos of scrolls, stuffed tanukis encased in glass, trophies, and fat-man-ass; I was sitting there remembering my closest ever brush with sumo. It had been years ago, in the dead of winter. A younger man dating an older woman, I had just finished having dinner at a fairly expensive place in Korakuen, near the Tokyo Dome, where the Yomiuri Giants play. This woman and I are walking down the manufactured outdoor hallway, talking about crepes or some other pastry, and these three sumos, dressed only in rice-paper-thin flowered robes on that freezing evening, are headed toward us. There was a sumo restaurant there. Almost as though sumo are a race unto themselves; they are, in fact, identified shortly after birth, like little Dalai Lamas, all of them, and whisked away to an academy where they’ll eat this certain kind of stone-pot-cooked concoction twice a day in addition to lifting heavy weights, rolling around in dirt, throwing and being thrown by other men fatter than even they themselves yet are. These sumos in this thin robes, hair done up perfectly, were walking three abrest, a good six people-widths of hallway obstruction. A collision was imminent. Aware of their body size, the three of them stepped apart, allowing the woman and I to pass between different sumo-gaps. Just before passing, the sumo in the middle — the three were eerily silent — looked me right in the eye and bowed his head. It was, as far as I am capable of remembering, the least condescending gesture of nobility another man ever showed me. I have been in his debt for several years. And now I go to a little gym and hear ten men who look just like him talking about baseball. Here I had built them up in my mind to be this larger-than-life, more-than-human beings. People disappoint you sometimes.



One of the sumos there, clearly a fresh-faced lad of less than eighteen, was far too skinny to be in the ring with the pendulum-chested master of the day. Each challenge he threw forth, each grunting clash of muscle-bone against muscle-bone, resulted in kicked-up dirt, swallowed down grunts, and disorganization of the younger wrestler’s hair. He needs to eat more, one of the other sumos laughed. They really do take eating that seriously. I’m sitting there on my knees on a pillow. My knees are killing me. I can’t do that tea-ceremony-sitting style. As a white man, I’ve been chucklingly exempted from it for the greater part of my life, anyway; whereas a Japanese kid would be scolded and told to get used to it, I get a knowing nod and a cheap smile. I go for Indian-style. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It doesn’t mean I’m weak. It just means I have little tolerance.



The strongest sumo then took on an exercise where he stood on the rim of the ring and all of the wrestlers — save the skinny one — came at him one at a time. He pounded them with his shoulder, pushing them all the way back to the other side of the ring. Then he rotated twenty-two degrees and was pushed, himself, to the other side of the ring by another waiting wrestler. He then turned twenty-two degrees and pushed the next wrestler. In this way, he worked through the whole room. The skinny man was crouching repeatedly in the corner, his hair flopped over his face. His back and his front were studded with chipped, itchy-looking dirt. I take it he wasn’t supposed to touch his hair with his body in that condition. It was his turn to do the pushing exercise now; before lunch, the sumos work out the strongest wrestler and then then weakest one — strongest, then weakest — just so they can see both how strong the strongest of the team is and how strong the weakest must become. The skinny guy got mauled at the pushing exercise. When it came to pushing his fellow sumos, he was only more than a little outmatched; the sumos were not to resist the pushing more than just a litte. The idea dawned on me while I watched this — the skinny sumo is not the only one being exercised here. Rather, the large sumos he’s pushing are being just as worked out. Bodies leaning forward, calves cocked like shotguns, they are adopting rigid postures appropriate for being pushed. When the exercise was over, the skinny sumo came up to the rim of the dirt pit and looked me right in the eye. I understood, then, that he truly was just two-thirds of my age. I felt kind of old. He said, “We’re done. Get out of here.” It was time for lunch.







Ten minutes later, I was taking American McGee to a grocery store in Asakusa; he’d had a sudden craving for cranberry juice, so I showed him where to get some. It dawned on me while watching American drink down that cranberry juice — I’d read, in the Yomiuri News, of all places, more than six months ago, that the Asahi beverage company was set to sell (I almost typed . . . “publish”) Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice in Japan. As a man with frequent urinary troubles related to an inguinal hernia, the doctor says I must drink a cup of cranberry juice a day. It’s my only “prescription.” I can’t do this, because the only cranberry juice available for sale in Japan is organic, tough, imported stuff that comes at a price of 800 yen a cup, which is way too much. I’d be in the poor house if I drank one a day; I’d pay more on cranberry juice than I do on rent, for god’s sake. Well, we found the Ozeki Supermarket in downtown Asakusa, where I’d remembered seeing Ocean Spray at a price of 150 yen for a six-ounce can. American McGee wanted to drink it just because he liked cranberry juice. He gladly bought me one, which I drank in three gulps. My bladder was healthier than usual for six hours afterward. It was great. You want a review of Japanese Ocean Spray Cranberry juice — let me tell you: it’s weak. It has none of the sting of its American counterpart. None of it at all. It tastes almost like Japanese pomegranate juice, which, even when fresh-squeezed or distilled, has a kind of paper-thin Kool-Aid-like aftershock. In cranberry juice, that Kool-Aid-like sticky feeling should be replaced with what we beverage experts like to call “emphasis.” Ocean Spray INTERNATIONAL EDITION, then, fails my cranberry juice litmus test. (This has been a half-revival of the Tim Rogers Beverage Report, brought to you by Ocean Spray.)




i think this is the best souvenir i’ve ever seen. really. only 900 yen!! youget a plastic tower, a paper-wrapped globe, AND a thermometer!!



An hour and a half later, and there I was at the top of Tokyo Tower. For so many years, ascending Tokyo Tower had been a possibility. I just hadn’t done it until that day. I was at the top of the tower, watching and listening to Ken and American excitedly discuss ideas for things they can do with various parts of Tokyo in their videogame. It I looked out at the wall of mist 95 kilometers in the distance where a plaque said Mt. Fuji should have been, and thought about the sumos again. My head was alive with the buzz of cranberry juice and chocolate. The sumos were probably still eating their noodles, rice cakes, and fish-balls. I thought, long and hard: It’s an exercise in both pushing and being pushed. Martial arts are full of so many little metaphors for life, though none so relevant to this writing as that one. Pushing and being pushed. How much clearer could it have been? I’ve spent my whole time as an “intellectual” learning how to push. I realize rather sadly that I’ve never practiced how to be pushed. (I mean, I know how to be thrown, for clarity’s sake; it’s all in the positioning of the shoulder, you see.) Being pushed, or even being pushed around, is something that generally happens. Forces of nature or guile come along and push you, altering your position from one place to another. Normally we let these things happen. A sumo is refined and humble, for he knows how to be pushed elegantly. Nobly.



If you asked me to make a videogame about Tokyo, I’d be crippled by my enthusiasm. I know too many things about this city, and I’ve been here too long. You wouldn’t have me saying “Let’s make a stage in Tokyo Tower, because Tokyo Tower is, like, the Eiffel Tower, only a lot bigger!” You’d have me setting action sequences in a street of ramen shops that I like even though I don’t eat ramen. You’d have me tell you Tokyo Tower was boring. We can put it in the background in one of the stages or something, though we certainly don’t want our hero going there.



As an aside, what the hell is Tokyo Tower, you might be asking? It’s a tower roughly in the dead center of the landmass called “Tokyo.” It is about 800 feet tall. I think. It’s pretty damn tall. It’s much taller than the Eifel Tower, which it looks just like. It was made in the Eiffel Tower’s image, you see. They’re planning to build another, very similar tower, down in Kanagawa over the next couple years. Who knows when they’ll get started, much less when they’ll finish. That’s Japanese ingenuity, at any rate. I have said over and over that the Japanese are revisionists, not inventors. I will not dare hint that this is part of their genetic makeup, as some Japanese writers have said. Rather, I’ll just rpeat that it is a cultural inferiority complex that they’ve had since a thousand years ago and they’ll probably have a thousand years from now.



I find things interesting that people in positions of power don’t find interesting at all. For example, I’ll never forget one of the first questions my good friend Nick Can asked when in my acquaintance for the first time — “Why is my girlfriend’s toilet plugged into a telephone jack?” I found this fascinating. A little digging revealed that the toilet needs to reference a weather service so it can adjust the temperature of its seat according to the outside temperature. There are a few reasons for this — for one, almost no Japanese homes have central heating. The bathroom is usually denied heater access, for two very human reasons: one being that you’re not in there so much, and the other being that you typically don’t enjoy the time you’re in there and/or consider that time to be a hassle. So it’s not worth it to heat the bathroom, just the toilet seat. Your rear end, in fact, is the only part of you that should be exposed to the elements when in the bathroom. So it’s the only part that gets heated.



If I sound like a stingy bastard in a lot of my writing, or even in person, it’s because I live in Japan, where everyone is a stingy bastard, where girls will scream at their live-in boyfriends for leaving a single switch on a power strip turned on for an hour when they’re not using the device that’s plugged into the corresponding jack. It’s confusing, bewildering, and strange: these people love a good budget cutback. Only they normally don’t talk about themselves using words like “stingy” or “bastard.” It’s just part of their nature.



Nick’s girlfriend’s toilet accesses the internet, learns of the outdoor temperature, and uses it to adjust the toilet seat temperature because installing a thermometer somewhere on the toilet would involve too many moving parts. That’s the factual answer. I don’t like that answer. Instead, we’ll use this one — With regards to technology in Japan, common sense takes a back seat to stuff that sounds ridiculous when talked about on the internet. That seems to be the only rule. Get this — there are these new things called QC codes. They’re like bar codes, in that they can be used on products which are sold in stores; unlike bar codes, which are merely graphical representations (in the form of bars of various thicknesses) of multi-digit numbers, a QC code is a dot-graph of encoded information — actual words, numbers, letters, and sometimes who sentences. Shibuya’s Mandarake, for all intents and purposes the largest comic store in the world, has recently switched to QC codes. They’re little, square, and different. However, this is causing a problem — a lot of Japanese cellular phones, most specifically Sony-Ericsson’s WIN series, come equipped with QC code readers. Bread companies have been using QC codes in promotional advertisements tied in with Sony-Ericsson, trusting customers to scan the codes where they find them in order to read parts of a hidden message that will yield them a fabulous prize should they work hard enough. Sometimes these QC codes are huge, six-foot-tall ordeals. Sometimes they’re the size of your pinky fingernail. They can all be scanned in the same way — using your phone’s screen like a camera viewfinder, keeping your body a proper distance from the code in question. There are programs and websites where you can make your own, printable codes. You can even make QC codes that exist only on a computer screen. Yes, you can scan the codes off a computer screen. You can attach them to emails, though I shudder to think what would happen if you attached one to an email you sent to a cellular phone. No phone has a camera that can photograph its own screen, though Japanese intuition can’t be that far off.



The codes on the volumes of manga at Mandarake contain no more information than the name of the manga, its volume number, its publication date, its number of pages, and a short summary. If you use your phone to scan them, the encoded information just sits there on your screen and you can giggle at it. I went to Mandarake with a girl a while back, and we tiptoed up and down the aisles, scanning QC codes with her phone and giggling like schoolgirls at the “secret information” we were “stealing.” Eventually, a girl dressed up in a maid outfit — staff uniform, you see — tapped my friend on the shoulder and said something along the lines of, “Please knock that off. Because of children like you, we have outlawed cellular phone use in here.”



So there you have it. Bic Camera, Japan’s biggest electronics chain, has also banned use of phones within their walls. I got my arm jerked around by the guy at the optometry clinic on the fifth floor of the Shinjuku Bic Camera while I was trying to write an email. “You can’t use phones in here anymore!” he scolded me. I told him I wasn’t taking a picture — I was just writing an email. He said that’s no good — “Phones do so much these days; we can’t be sure of what information you’re moving. We only ask humbly that you stop use of your phone in here.” This coming from a store that does great masses of daily business on cell-phone sales.



Bic Camera, usually on the seventh or sixth floor, sells Toto Washlet heated toilet-seats with robotic bidets. In a smart move, they equip their public restroom with these seats, and a clever advertisment that says if you like the seat, check it out on the sixth floor. Nothing draws in crowds like a good heated toilet seat. I know this from experience. If I need to use the bathroom and a Bic Camera is close by, I’ll go there.



There is a downside to equipping your public restroom with heated toilets, however. Ikebukuro Station East Exit has been home to the filthiest public toilet in Japan, with procelain holes in the ground that suffice for stalls, for two decades now. Just a month ago, a shiny, wood-paneled bathroom opened up near the Seibu Ikebukuro Shopping Park, just ten meters from the old, filthy toilet. The stalls are dreams come true; heated seats, remote-accessed flush buttons (none of this laser-activated nonsense), bidets, soap washes — even a modern-art-looking robo-coat-rack. How is this a downside? Well, enter the bathroom at just a little before noon on a weekday; notice that not a single urinal is in use. Notice that all five stalls are occupied. Wait. Wait. Wait some more. Twenty minutes pass, and no stall door opens. When you finally get a stall, you’ll want to take your time. Read some of that book you’ve been carrying. Queued-up wannabes usually walk away panting and angry. Those that wait are rewarded. At least until last week — I walked up to find the toilet stalls deserted. I opened a door, and looked at the toilet seat: there, in the pristine, matte-wood-walled stall, atop a chrome toilet sat a yellowing once-white plastic toilet seat that looked like it had been scratched up with a car key.



“Too many homeless people had been camping in there,” a security guard in the Ikebukuro Shopping Park told me in confidence last week, when I asked him about the peculiar development. “And we were getting a lot of complaints from a lot of customers about the long lines. The thing is — the Ikebukuro Station, they know their toilet is disgusting, so they put up a sign that says there’s a new toilet just ten meters that way. Everyone got hip to it, and — then they only started complaining about the stalls always being in use. Even though they weren’t customers at Ikebukuro Shopping Park!” I tell him that’s pretty wild. He agrees. So there you go. Further evidence of Japan’s fear of progress. This has a lot more to do with cellular phones and QC codes than it might seem; I implore you to use your imagination.


Maybe this is why I am not rich and famous and successful, because I ask people to use their imaginations about things people usually don’t use their imaginations for? You think that might be it? Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s not.



Something else interesting — Kevin pointed out to me that, in Kyoto, these days, they’re granting half-price bus and train fares to people who wear kimonos. I looked this up and it’s kind of true; apparently, they want to support the city’s traditional image. In a land where you might ride the train and the bus every day, this is quite an incentive to look the part of a local. I wonder, though — Japan Rail already offers half-price fares to children; a lot of my friends buy the child tickets and then dash through the ticket gates, just because they’re cheap. The thing is, whenever a child ticket is inserted, a chime rings in the little station attendant’s box. He then looks out, sees a child, and goes back to what he was doing. I guess the kimono system works the same way. There’s probably a different chime for the kimono ticket. I wonder if people are going to start buying kimono tickets just because they’re cheap? It used to be you could grin sheepishly and get away with being questioned by train employees about your child ticket by syaing you feel “young at heart.” Will a defense like “I’m wearing a kimono . . . in my heart” hold up? I doubt it. And how silly is this whole thing, either way?




my new EDWIN revolution denim euro-style straight tight jeans; from behind. yes, i have two slimes on my cell phone. i’m looking for a standard blue one.



I took American McGee and Ken Wong to a flower-viewing party in Ueno Park. A flower-viewing (hanami) is basically a Japanese excuse for every employee of a company to get drunk. Says a friend who works in a company, “It’s the only time of the year where you can punch your boss and get away with it.” Sure, Japanese people, as stereotyped, drink a lot in large crowds of fellow employees. Those drunken bouts, however, are business, not pleasure. A hanami is a break; a way for all employees to feel pleasure together. While drunk. Talking to American McGee in the company of cherry blossoms filled me with a feeling much like nothing. He’s a good guy and a rather normal guy. He doesn’t strike superhero poses just because he’s published a couple of videogames and been featured in Rolling Stone. I’m surprised by how little he knows of console videogames, though I guess I shouldn’t be. Me, him, Ken, and Drew Cosner had some interesting conversation over okonomiyaki that one night, and it seemed to me that I’d only feel ashamed if I brought up any of my hardcore overanalytical videogame talk during these conversations. There are people who like it; people who make games tend to not like it.







There’s a time and a place for knowledge or wisdom. Most of the time, I realize while reading these bestseller novels lately, people don’t want your knowledge or your wisdom. We, the people of the twenty-first century, have grown up much differently than Odysseus, King Arthur, Jesus Christ, and other heroes of legend. We do not earn our wisdom through suffering; we earn our wisdom because we are bored, in need of nourishing entertainment, and willing to seek wisdom.



I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I have been hard-wired from birth as a person who will not accept the wisdom of others. This makes me no better than anyone else; it makes me worse. I, and many others like me, simply am not free. Two years ago, one ice-bright day out of the middle of nowhere, my life was completely ruined by something I don’t think I’ll ever want to talk about. I have not been “picking up the pieces” all this time; I’ve been making new pieces. It’s a very slow process. I’ve been making new pieces, understanding that a child never listens to his father’s stories because his father always starts his stories with “When my dad told me this I didn’t believe him . . .” If nothing else, I’d like to think that I come from a generation that is far more grown-up than the generations of troublemakers that line up behind us. I come from a generation that dressed in flannel or GAP jeans, black and navy blue polo shirts, and khakis; we did this because we could see “the 1980s” on television. We could see the 1980s everywhere we looked; we set about making the 1990s something that no camera that wasn’t broken wouldn’t remember cleanly. No big hair, for the most part. No wacky eyeliner. We’re a squadron of people who keep it simple and sharp.



My friend Keigo Nishida was wearing a suit last night. Black, pin-striped suit, white shirt, no tie. He doesn’t have a steady job; nonetheless, he wore the suit because he thought it looked good and he had gotten it very cheap. This coming from a guy who used to wear pink sweatpants just so he’d stand out on buses and trains. He’d bought a pair of 9000-yen headphones, Sony ones that our friend Wayne had also just bought, earlier that day at Bic Camera, and I let him use my iPod to test them out. He listened to Kama Boiler sing “Mimitabu,” and deemed the headphones and the song “damn good.” His girlfriend ate a Hamburg steak and I ate a really nice pasta. This was at a Skylark BLDY diner, who shockingly have the best Spring Menu of all Tokyo’s family restaurants. I’m going to write up a report on all of them, sooner or later. Just you wait!



I was making a big deal about the menu — Skylark Gusto’s Yamamori Potato Fry, removed from the Gusto menu with the spring changeover, now appears on the BLDY menu along with a gorgeous pizza selection and wonderful pasta. Nishida told me I hadn’t changed — except for my hair, which his girlfriend had just painstakingly cut — that I still cared too much about restaurant menu choices. I told him, I guess that’s me. I recalled the sumo again: An exercise in pushing and in being pushed.



I told Nishida, “I used to work at a restaurant like this, in America. During college. The manager guy, he seemed really apologetic about being the manager of a family restaurant, like I was judging him or something. Yet once he told me — this is a guy with a kid in college, a guy I could never imagine even drinking a beer or smoking a cigarette — he said, ‘in life, people don’t really, in the end, accomplish much. They’re born, they breathe, they eat, they drink, they discuss things with friends, they die.’ He went on to say that some people change the world for the better and some people change the world for the worst; some people live on in history positively, some people live on in infamy. Between those that change the world well and those who change it deviously, between those that live on as heroes and those who live on as villains, there is a rough balance. So in the end, changing the world is something people simply don’t do. ‘In a restaurant,’ he said, ‘you can eat, you can drink, you can breathe, and you can talk with friends. Birth and death typically don’t happen here, though I wouldn’t call it totally unexpected. So yeah, typically, four out of the six main human functions can be accomplished here. It’s not a bad ratio.’ He’d gone to college at that same university, studying hotel and restaurant management, and had decided to never leave. He was a good guy, I guess. I’ve thought of restaurants a little differently ever since.”



I’m not sure Nishida was listening. He had to wake up at six the next morning, for god-knows-what.



It makes me think I look at things too closely. It makes me think that . . . maybe the true meaning of Shakespeare’s adage “Brevity is the soul of wit” never really “took” on me. I write a lot of short magazine columns these days, and many of them are witty, though only ever by accident. This is not to deny the soul of the wit in something long; brevity is best mesaured in the elements of a piece, I think. We are a people, now, who would consider any kind of short wisdom-creation to be a throwback to something.



It’s like a job recommendation letter. Though you can provide evidence, pay stubs, and contracts froma previous job, it just doesn’t say as much as a letter from your boss, even if that letter is on company stationery and says no more than “Yeah, this guy worked here.” There is a distinct polarity between one’s own words and the words of others. In the same way, the difference between the words of the resident and the words of the traveler is staggering. American McGee, mentioning “Lost in Translation” more than ten times in two days, indirectly showed me the power of the words of the traveler; I could say his game will be merely a big jumble of stereotypes about Japan thrown together and lit on fire. That’d probably be accurate. Yet it’ll most likely be fun as hell, whenever it’s made.



And it’ll star me as the train announcer on the Yamanote Line. Maybe! Look for it on Xbox!!





i don’t understand why so many of my peers strive to be model thin. being flat, having no juicy ass and no curves is not a pretty sight. i don’t find kate moss thin hot at all. i don’t understand why so some people are soo jealous of my NO CURVES, NO NOTHING body! i hate it when they go ” i want to be as thin as you.” NO YOU DON’T. go ahead, have it. i definitely do not appreciate my NOTHING NESS. give me your curves, it’ll be fair trade! it’s so un-hot. women should have curves! i wish i were mexican! they have all the curves! auuugh. i’m a stick. a stick body is so not right. i don’t get why my peers insist on anorexia, bulimia, no fast food and fad diets just to look like NOTHING in the end. fat is good in the right freakin’ places. look at all the women that are regarded as GORGEOUS and SMOLDERING. they have great curvacious bodies: LINDSAY LOHAN, angelina jolie! i want to fill out gorgeous plunging dresses not have them drape over me! what’s the point of a model body if you can’t fill out the spaces of a dress/flaunt a great body in them right?

if there’s one woman i want to be as equally hot as, it’s vanessa ferlito who plays aiden burn on csi:ny. she’s got it all: a great body, fabulous hair, wonderful lips… damn girl! she’s even got incredibly attractive male co-stars. i want to look as GOOD as her and have a guy check me out as seen in this person’s icon. hell, i want the guy in the icon to check me out like dut period. i am not your typical girl when it comes to weight problems. i am not striving to lose weight but gain them in the right places. i don’t want to be stick thin, i want to have a proportional body where fat should be in the right places and not anywhere in it body. that’s the right kind of body! skinny is disgusting!! in the middle of skinny and fat is the way to go!! no extremes for me when it comes to body forms! if only i had more mexican blood! i swear, surgery seems so promising sometimes. heheh! X) i want ASSETS, something to flaunt. not NOTHING to show! i don’t undersand those girls who vomit to look like nothing! vomit is so gross pa, leaving such a yucky taste in your mouth! it’s soo not worth it! tssss. only permit vomit when you have had too much to drink. ;)

in summary: it just really pisses me off so many girls sacrifice so much good food/energy just to have NOTHING. it’s not worth it. if you were born with curves, manage them the right way. don’t let them go. you are truly blessed with them. my impossible dream: to look as good as vanessa ferlito, shock my old friends with the vanessa figure and have carmine giovinazzo check me out with such as pointed out in the icon link! X)
Hey kids! It’s me! I bet you thought that I was dead!

Unfortunately not, for some of you. Anyway, I am writing this post to inform you all that THE DONATION MATERIALS FOR THIS MONTH ARE UP. It is a hell of a lot of good material!! And none of it is about videogames (except for the small part that is)! If you paypaled me (yes, at tim @ insertcredit.com), then I put your email on a list and emailed that list the SECRET URL. If you paid money and didn’t get an email, — well, check your spam folder. It might have got filed in there, because I used a BCC. If it’s not in there, then email me directly and complain.

If you didn’t paypal me at all, and would still, kind of, like to see the stories, you can paypal me now, you know! I don’t mind!

I’m going to bed now, before I get beat up! Tomorrow, I’m going to actually, really, write a blog post! Without so many exclamation points!! And I’ll show you a picture of my new jeans, among a few other mysteries! It’ll be exciting!! Maybe!


this is what i look like with my old hair and my old jeans. fear the update, in the next post! LOLLERS!!!

we have two more videos. we need to make them smaller. really. they’re a lot better than this one, too! (maybe.)

project ffdog — brought to you by smirnoff vodka, super mario, and our friends at the n-sider.com.



Eric William Monaghan just won with the correct real answer. The only prize left is for the funniest wrong answer, which I’ll be posting when it comes in. Keep sending that shit in, people.

We already have a winner for the identification of that quote. Prize goes to Greg-kun (tell me if that’s not how you wish to be identified in this post). Looks like this shit is closing fast, so get your answers in QUICKLY! Also, for clarity’s sake, I’m looking for a picture-by-picture identification of whose glasses are being worn in each picture.

Yeah, that’s right. This is a CONTEST! Look at the four pictures posted below, and answer the questions that follow. It’s just a little bit like one of those old reading comprehension worksheets you may or may not have done in school.









So there you have it. Now, tell me, who is wearing whose glasses in which pictures? I doubt I even have the authority to make this deal to you guys, but the first person to email me the correct answer will win free access to this month’s donation material. Also, the person with the funniest (judged entirely by myself) wrong answer will also win free access to this month’s donation material.

NOW THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING YOU AND LOOKING FOR YOUR SUCCESS! NOW LET’S GO FOR IT!!!

Hell, I’ll tell you guys what. First person to tell me where that’s from also wins. Two is already a prime number, but I like three better.


it’s saturday night and you’ve been invited to a party where THE gossip will grow by three people. one of those people you fancy/lust over. damn. but your dad is weird and eeeeh who are those people who invited you? i don’t know them! i feel like such a loser. it’s a saturday night and i’m blogging. no offense but that party is where all the action is going to go down (literally and symbolically)! gossip galore! intrigue! what is she wearing this time, who’s making out with who, who’s grinding with who, chancing with a crush… hihihi. so high school i wanna see what madness ensues! oh well least my kindasortabest gal pal/my “bitch” are there to feed me details tomorrow. ;)

a lot has happened over the week, all of them basically making me reflect on my friendship with people in my batch as graduation draws closer. 5 more days baby! the first even was our pre-graduation party entitled Glamma! it was a very fun and sweet event with the parents performing odes to us and most of the batch singing our favorite baduy hits during elementary (LET’S GO N SYNC, BSB AND MOFFATS!)+ getting sexy on the dance floor. everyone was hot that night! me and my friend mika even terrorized the batch + parents with our alto voices singing mariah carey’s WITHOUT YOU. we were initially supposed to do like a virgin but my friends say they censored it! grrrr. tut tut. i guess it was good we didn’t attempt slave for you it was a totally fabulous night! i will definitely miss mad nights where i can glam up and go crazy with my batch 2005 bitches! :)
yeah me in pink and yes, they’re not real!
then, there was campout. like my brain, my emotions are slow. depressing things only properly sink in after i dwell on them. ignoring them i can be somewhat happy. during senior campout, we had this really sentimental activity involving candles. it really got me thinking about who exactly i’m not going to see as often next school year and how it would affect our friendship. there were sets of candles with different colored ribbons wrapped around them: pink for wishes, green for forgiveness and yellow for thank you. give any color candle to one person lighted, she blows and you say what you have to say. high school really shows you who your friends are. i am a friendly girl and i have friends from all walks of groups. i can’t stay tied down to one. but as i further think about who i’m chummy with, i realized so few of them i have a real and deep connection with. many of them, despite the years we’ve spent together i can imagine myself growing apart since there just isn’t chemistry, spark or a good mix. i get along better with people outside my barkada more often than the ones in my group/barkada. or maybe we’ll stay friends, stay in contact cause we’re high school barkada but i don’t think the frienship can escalate further. i can only name 3 people from my barkada (clique with less exclusivity) who i can really talk to and be free with. my other close friend, who’s practically my best friend but not quite i am closer with than the other 4 members of my barkada combined. and she’s not even part of my group of friends. then i really THOUGHT who can i imagine myself with 10 years from now, sitting in a restaurant, giggling about the old days, discussing boys more maturely and our careers? i could only count 3 girls. 3. i guess you can’t be friends with everyone… but it scares me that forces of nature will let me lose them. which i don’t want to happen. it can’t. i won’t let it. i told the first friend, lorraine, with a wish candle that i wish we’d never lose each other no matter how many times she says we might grow apart. i cried because she was my first real friend, she saved my life. then my gal pal mika, she… we only got close this year but despite the short time as opposed to others we have such a WONDERFUL friendship. she thanked me for everything. i told her the same thing as lor. then the most emotional where the tears really SLIPPED: margie. i love this girl so damn much. we’ve known each other since the fifth grade but we only got close this year. as in REAL close, as in i rose from a 2 to a 1.0002875478 in her friends rank. same with her. she’s second to my sis. and what really scared me was when she wrote this on her livejournal: …I still have Gela there. What scares me is the thought that even we would grow apart…. the growing apart part scares me like anything. i can’t stand being alone, i want these people by my side when i’m older. it scared me that she could think of that possibility, like it will be so easy for us to fall apart, to let go of the friendship. i don’t want that to happen. i can’t let it. it hurts that she could think that. yet it touches me. maybe it will make us work for the friendship to last. we’ve got great chemistry. we don’t have everything in common, in fact we clash perfectly yet we get along so well. we… damn. i see on tv people who have kept friends since they were in elementary. i hope that i can do the same with the people whom i’ve had good times with this year, since senior year proved a lot about what friendship is all about.

sorry for the emotional blog. it’s that time of the month and 5 days till grad. i’ve already confirmed my slot for college. it’s time to move on without letting go.