We’re back, we’re back. I’m sorry. It’s been awhile, I know that.
How are you guys? Doing good? I’m doing good, thanks.
We’re back, we’re back. I’m sorry. It’s been a while, I know that.
How are you guys? Doing good? I’m doing good, thanks.
When I write, recently, it feels like I’m talking to myself. And only crazy people do that. Crazy people and the Japanese. They’ve even got a specific word for it – 独り言。Hitorigoto. It means self-talk, and my tantosha does it all the time. It took me a while to get used to all this self-talk. I think it’s something us Americans aren’t used to, at least I wasn’t used to it, people sitting next to you talking to themselves out loud, as loud as they might if they were trying to talk to you – which is what I thought they were doing. But they weren’t talking to you, they were talking to themselves. Japanese people aren’t crazy, at least not all of them. They just do this sometimes. They don’t do it all the time, either. They don’t do it on the train, for instance. They would be thought of as a bit of a nut, I think, if they did that. At least I would think they were a bit nutty. But people don’t talk on the train, not often, not even to themselves. They talk a little bit, but mostly, they’re quiet. It does depend on the train, and where you’re going. If you’re squadded up with a crew of ごきげん high-spirited sightseers, you’ll have a better time striking up a conversation, then if you’re on the late night, coming back from a soul-crushing day of work train. I don’t ride that one much. I bike to my job. I’m not an expert on this topic. I haven’t tried to strike up too many conversations during public transport. I did try to ask two ladies, separately, on a bus, if I had missed my stop, and both of them ignored me. One had headphones in, and the other was older, and I’ll say that she could have been somewhat deaf. I don’t know for certain that she intentionally ignored me. Headphone girl definitely did. She was sitting behind me, though, directly behind me on the bus, and when I turned around to ask, my face was already pretty close to hers, much closer than I expected, and with the headphones in and all, she had no idea what I said, and then add the fact that I’m not Japanese, and we’re on a bus, and I can’t blame her for getting all deer-in-the-headlights on me. Actually, she looked like she was about to have a heart attack right there on the spot. Her eyes almost popped out of her head. I thought about asking the question again, but I saw the headphones, and it was already so awkward, with our faces being so close and all, that I just turned back around. I did miss my stop. I rode that bus all the way to the depot. I asked the bus driver if we ever stopped at my stop, and he said, “What? What stop? I don’t know what you’re talking about, crazy guy. Please pay the money and get off the bus.” Turns out I had the name of the stop wrong. Those damn kanji. You would think I would remember the name of the stop now, having gone through that. I don’t. I would probably still get it wrong, if I rode that bus again. I’m like that. It takes me a while with names. Somehow words with meaning, words that I can use to explain things, or describe things, they stick fine. It’s just that names are so abstract to me. They don’t seem to fit anywhere into my mental schema. They may as well be a series of random numbers. If you introduced me to a person and told me their name was 16840A, I might have an equal chance of remembering it, as if you told me their name was Tom Pantaloon. Alright, that’s a lie. If you introduced me to a guy named Tom Pantaloon, I’d never forget his name. This is what happens when I talk to myself and no one is responding on the other end. I’ll just ramble.
I ramble a lot, on these posts. I know. Of course I don’t want to give you a bunch of ramblings. I want to give you something better than that, with a plot, with an arc, with a payoff. We love the payoff. But, I don’t know. Maybe you like the rambling. Still, we need some kind of payoff, in writing, in stories. Is there any great work that consists entirely, solely of a series of ramblings? Moby Dick is kind of like that, but he has an overarching theme for the ramblings, and a major payoff in the end. You can diverge all you want, as long as you have something to come back to. And we do have that here, because there is one thing that I absolutely want to tell you in this post, and we better start with that first, because we only have so much time, and the other things I want to tell you, if we start with them, we’ll never, ever get to what I absolutely want to tell you, in this post.
The funny thing is this: an extraordinary occurrence during a quite eventful game with an intensely interesting person named Austin, and involving dogs. I know it’s vague, but I can’t give you much more than that. Not without spoiling it for you. And first, we have to start with Austin, the hero, who is to be the main character of this comedy.
Austin is from Kansas.. probably. We can say for sure that he has at the very least spent some time in Kansas. He’s been there. I know for sure that he has also spent some time in Oklahoma, and most likely in Arkansas as well. Which he calls, Ar-kansas, by the way. Did you know that there are people calling Arkansas Ar-kansas? I didn’t know anybody called it that, but he does, and he told me that’s what people from Arkansas call Arkansas.. which is interesting, because if you say it that way, the way that it wants to be said, because you know, Kansas is Kansas, and if you put an ar in front of it, why the hell would we suddenly change the end of the word to aw, but that’s what we do.. if you say it the Ar-kansas way, people will look at you funny, or tell you you’re wrong. Except for the people who are from there, of course. They won’t look at you weird at all, because that’s how they say it. So everyone else has it wrong, except for the people who live there. And it’s not like they’ve chosen to make it fancier or anything. The way they say it is the way that it reads. It’s the natural way. So how the hell did the whole rest of the world pervert the name? I don’t know. I guess the same thing happened with Louisville. I guess people from Louisville actually say Louis-ville, and everybody else says Louey-ville, and if you go there and call it Louey-ville, they’re miffed. Or at least they know, you are not a true Louisvillian. Austin is from this region of the United States, “the part of the United States that nobody really talks about.” (His words.) And I had to laugh at that. It’s kind of true, isn’t it. You don’t hear a lot about Oklahoma and Arkansas. I don’t know, if you’re a sports fan maybe you do. They’ve got some good sports teams, probably. Basketball and football. I guess it’s not necessarily a bad thing if nobody talks about your area, because it might just mean that everything isn’t going to crap there, or at least it’s going to crap faster in other places, but.. I don’t think that area is doing too hot. Not according to Austin.
Anyways, Austin is from Kansas. Austin is a burly brother. His dad is even burlier. His dad is at least 6’4″, bald, and enormous. I’m sure there are many other nice descriptors I could use to describe him physically but I’m just going off of what I’ve got, here. (I realize that describing someone as “bald and enormous” is not the most flattering description, okay. What do you want me to do?) Austin showed me a picture of his dad wearing an eyepatch, as he’d ruptured his eye, and naturally it was quite bloody, and of course, he looked exactly like a pirate. He showed me another picture, no eyepatch, and in that one his dad looked like a perfect cross between a Viking and Santa. If Santa were a Viking, he would be Austin’s dad. Austin has the strapping muscularity but missed out on the height genes. Ah, the genetic lottery, so fickle! For his giant Viking dad, somehow Austin ended up shorter than me, who is a respectable 5’11” and ¾, as the nurses insist on saying (Why take that away from me? Why can’t I be 6’?). Not bad for an American, but nothing to write home about. In the great genetic lottery he did win big Viking bones, and balding. He’s hairy everywhere else except for his head. A bit like a werewolf permanently stuck in mid-transformation. The Japanese kids love to pet him, like he’s a big, furry teddy bear, or Bigfoot. (Japanese children just like to touch people. That’s kind of their thing, and they especially like touching foreign teachers, like they’re some kind of strange, newly-discovered creature, because that’s actually what you are to a Japanese 6 year old.)
The Japanese aren’t hairy. Austin must rank in the top 5 hairest men in Kumamoto, and he’s really not even that hairy.) The parts of him that are hairy are really hairy, and the parts of him that aren’t, are completely hairless. There is a stark divide between hair and no-hair zones on Austin’s body, such as at the upper, upper forearm, also known as right below the elbow. Similar to how on a mountain, there are certain plants and trees that grow, thrive all the way up until a certain elevation, a certain cutoff, and then boom, no more. They just can’t survive past that point. And you see the same phenomenon in the ocean’s intertidal zone, with more sensitive creatures, such as the mussels. The higher they move up the shore, the more time they’ll spend out of water, and at a certain point, they simply can’t handle all the desiccation, and so you have a clear boundary between where a mussel can live, and where it can’t live. Any young, free-swimming mussel child who decides to settle on the other side of that line.. God bless that mussel child. Yes, this stark, natural boundary also exists on Austin’s forearm, and also on his thigh. Nothing can grow past that point. And I know all of this, not by studying him like some kind of specimen, of course not. He just told me about it. He just tells me about these kinds of things. It’s a conversation topic, you know. When he showed me this peculiar physical phenomenon of his, I was very interested, and asked if he’d ever been burned, on his arms and legs, or if he had gone through a phase of wearing shirts that were way too tight, and he told me that he did used to wear some tight shirts. So he might have done it to himself.
Austin has accepted his extremely premature balding as he does with most misfortunes in his life, the true, noble way – with humor and grace. He jokes about it quite frequently. Really, I think that’s your best option when it comes to balding, at least until the hair science technologies perfect the art of hair growing. What else can you do? You cry about it, or you can own it, and Austin’s owning it. You have to respect that. He came over yesterday to my place, with the original intention of getting trimmed up, by me, which I was very excited about, because I’ve never cut anyone’s hair, and I told several senseis that day, “Hi, I’m going to cut my friend’s hair tonight!!” It was big news. I was paying him back for a cut he gave me a few months ago, and he gave me his trimmer, a powerful brick of a buzzer that blows my wimpy rechargeable one right out of the water, that really buzzes when you use it. It’s a buzz you can feel. That’s how you know it’s good, when it’s got that buzz. Like a hive of bees. He gave it to me, and he wanted to get his hair trimmed up, and so we set it up, his trimming appointment with barber Steve. I invited the Brit over, Lewis, to participate in the post-trim debauchery that I will soon be mentioning (as it relates to Austin’s dogs.) But for our trimming, when Austin showed up, I said, enthusiastically, “Sit down, and let’s get to trimmin’!” And he said, “Eh, I think I’m ok.” He had been thinning, he said, and so had been worried about his hair looking too thin. I said, show me, and he showed me his hair, the front, right above the forehead, the hairline, and it did look pretty thin to me. So, I didn’t get to cut his hair.
There is much, much more I can tell you about Austin. He’s kind of been my partner in crime ‘round these parts, being the only other young American in my small town of Ozu. I have to tell you a little bit more, because I need to be certain that you can understand that Austin is truly a funny guy. I have to impress that on you or this whole story will be a total flop. So let me continue.
Austin is Irish. That’s not supposed to be funny, that’s just to help you understand him. Irish, and maybe Austrian. For awhile, he thought he was German, but apparently, his dad recently said to him, “Actually, son, I think we’re Austrian.” So there ya go. We are all a bunch of mutts. You don’t need to know his whole life history. Oh god, I’m rambling!
Austin drives slow. As in, he drives really slow. In Japan. And that’s very significant, because people in Japan drive slow. Unless you’re the highway, where you can drive as fast you like, people be driving slow, and especially in the Inaka (the countryside). Those little Ojichans and Obachans are cruising around at 20 kph in their dainty K-cars and trucks. (Like 15 miles per hour, for real). So, you don’t want to be getting passed in the countryside. Basically, it shouldn’t ever happen to you, especially not if you are in good health and in your 20’s, and not in some way physically incapacitated or otherwise have reason to exercise extreme caution. I’ve never been passed in the countryside, and I don’t drive fast. Not by choice, but by limitation, as my little Suzuki Wagon R really doesn’t let me. It’s possible, but it takes too much commitment for me to get up to any speed that could really be considered speeding, and by the time I ever get up to such a speed, I have to stop again. So, yes, Austin is driving so slowly that he gets passed in the countryside by Ojichans and Obachans, which is quite unusual and outrageous. And why does he drive so slowly? Something about not wanting to end up in Japanese prison, I think. He had a few reasons, all of them related to his suspicion of the Japanese police force and their treatment of foreigners, if I remember right. Even if they were all really out to get him, and planned to pull him over on the smallest possible infraction, still his chances of ever getting into trouble were very, very low, because I think there are only three police officers in the state of Kumamoto, and they’re all busy with bike thieves and assisting the elderly. (Oh Japan! What a lovely country!)
I’m not the only one who’s noticed Austin’s snail driving. When we took a trip to Ogawa to see a bunch of giant hanging fish flags (Austin, Parker and I), I was first riding with Parker, and we were caravanning, and Austin was behind us, and Parker was like, “Wow. Austin drives pretty slow, huh!” We almost lost him many times on that drive. When we got to Ogawa, after getting out of the cars, one of the first things Austin said was, “Man, that was a great drive! I really got to get some good chanting in.” And I thought, “Oh, so this is why you’re so slow!” Because of the chanting. And it makes a lot of sense. He’s in that car, where most people are screaming at drivers in front of them, jockeying for position, racing around, Austin is in the car having a great time, growing the grey matter in his brain, and meditating. Austin is a practitioner of the Sokkagakkai sect of Nichiren Buddhism, thus, the chanting. One of the things they do in Sokkagakkai is chant the Lotus Sutra. There are a few sutras in Buddhism, and you pick the ones you like, and chant them to the Buddhas of your choosing, and they will grant you favor, such as money, or purity of spirit, or sexy waifus. (Ok, I don’t know about the last part, and I’m not making jokes about Buddhism for Buddhism’s sake. Anyways I think the Buddhists can handle it. They are pretty chill as far as religious practitioners go.) They are into the proselytizing though, unfortunately (Sokkagakkai is at least. I don’t think that’s common for most Buddhists but I ain’t no expert on this topic.) The Sokkagakkais are somewhat aggressive about it, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, and actually I was personally on the receiving end of some proselytization (I just love that word.) by a Sokkagakkai member. I was in Kamitoori, in Kumamoto City, with Lewis the Brit, trying to the cross the mega-crosswalk that connects the northern and southern shoutengai, the shopping districts. I had a nice conversation with this fine older lady, during which she asked me if Obama was also in the deep state, along with Donald Trump, (“Obama san mo, deepu suteitu desuka?”) And I told her that I’m sorry but it’s very hard to tell who’s deep state and who’s not, kind of like the Illuminati. Very hard to confirm it. And so I couldn’t say. She did have noble intentions with her attempt to convert me to Sokkagakkai, I remember, because apparently we had brought the coronavirus upon ourselves as a kind of retribution for all of our sins, and we could pray them away. Something like that, which I thought was good to know, and I wish her the best of luck. Hey, whatever it takes! When it comes to Sokkagakkai members, I only have two examples to speak of – Austin, and the Kamitoori deep state lady, so I don’t know a lot more about them, and I don’t need to write anymore, I think I’ve already written enough, and I’m supposed to be writing about Austin. But anyways, that’s why he chants. And he has a little metal bowl, a gohonzon, that he chimes in prayer, a soothing thing. I did go to a Sokkagakai meeting with Austin once, to check it out, and they were a great group of people, I have to say, and he’s a very chill guy, so there is something going on there, with the bowl ringing, and the chanting.
On the way back from our Ogawa excursion, to see the bunch of colored fish dangling from the sky, Austin made several comments regarding the fact that he was being tailed, such as, “Man, this guy is right on my ass!” And, “Jeez buddy, you’re in a hurry!” “I’m not going to go any faster!” And I thought “Hmm, that’s interesting!” because even with my tame Suzuki Wagon R, I never had much of a problem with people tailgating me. And yet, here it was happening to Austin, really just about everyone was tailing him! “I’m just doing the speed limit, buddy!” He said to one tailer. And then he informed me, (I didn’t ask), he said, “I’m just happy doing the speed limit!” Later on the drive, when we were on the highway passing through the tunnel between Aso and Ozu, a new and glorious tunnel (the old one having been destroyed in 2016 by an earthquake), a kilometer or five long, (which is a few miles, for you Imperial system scoundrels), and Austin again has someone right on his ass, and he makes similar comments, and I check again in the rearview mirror, to see a now familiar sight, of someone right on the back of Austin’s bumper. Austin seems a little unsure, now, and he says to me, “It’s 60, right?” And of course I didn’t know, because really there are no speed limits in the Inaka, and no speed limits in a tunnel. You just drive however fast you want to go, or you drive as fast as everyone else is driving. But as we’re going through the tunnel, with another driver yet again right on our butt, we pass a speed limit sign, and it says 80 kpm. And Austin says, “Huh. I guess it’s 80!” And then we go a little bit faster, and the guy behind us definitely did not let up. We pass through the tunnel, through Ozu, and we’re on a street near my place, when yet again Austin finds himself with another car aggressively close behind, and something finally clicks in him. He turned to me and said, “Am I a slow driver?” And I said, “Well, Austin.. You do drive a bit slow!”
Austin being a slow driver makes a lot of sense, because he is completely imperturbable. His feathers cannot be ruffled. I don’t think it’s ever been done, I don’t think it ever will be done. I’ve never seen so much as a single feather out of place.
For too long, Austin was seriously struggling to say the word “Fukuoka” properly. He can say it, at least, he could, but he wouldn’t. Fukuoka is a prefecture to the north of Kumamoto. Austin calls it Fukioka. That is, the correct pronunciation is, or at least the totally-not-incorrect pronunciation is, foo-koo-oh-ka. And Austin says foo-ki-oh-ka. Nobody knows how or why he started doing this. Early into our relationship, he dropped the Fukioka on me, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. “I think this man means Fukuoka,” methinks. But I wasn’t sure. And so I said, “You mean Fukuoka?” And he said, “Hai. Fukioka.” Yes, Fukioka. And so I told him, as non-condescendingly as I could, because I know people are sensitive about that stuff, their pronunciation and whatnot, some people are, I am, that what I was hearing was not Fukuoka, but Fukioka. And he seemed to get it. And then the next time we were together, he once again called it “Fukioka”, and so we had a similar conversation. But that time, I didn’t leave our conversation with a strong feeling that Austin wouldn’t say Fukioka again. Actually, I had almost no confidence at all. Just something in the way he said, “Oh, ok.” while I talked him through it. It doesn’t give you a lot of confidence.
I told Mr. Parker Junior about this, the Fukioka business, before we all went to Oguni to see the fish flags, and it was several hours before it came out. It finally did, as we were walking down that narrow street back to the parking lot, an onsen parking lot that was not for festival parking, as we were soon to find out, being chastised by a furious onsen employee, that Austin dropped a Fukioka. I was walking behind the two of them, Austin and Parker, and the Fukioka popped out, and I thought, “I’ll just let them hash this out.” And so I listened. And Parker says, exactly what I said, what anyone says who’s trying to help someone say the word they want to say when they say a different word, “You mean Fukuoka?” And this time, Austin says, if I can remember right, “Fukioka?” There’s a little bit of doubt, there. And Parker says, “It’s Fu-ku-oka. You’re saying, fu-ki-oka.” And Austin says, ok.
I talked to Parker about this later. I was a little bit delighted that Parker got to hear it. The Fukioka. I asked Parker if he thought that Austin knew what was up now. Now that two people had commented on it. I don’t know how he’s made it this far in Japan and the Japanese haven’t fixed it for him. I think they just know what he’s trying to say, and that’s good enough for them. If they went around correcting all of our atrocious Japanese mistakes, nothing would ever actually be communicated. Only corrected. But still, the Fukioka was pretty bad. I still wasn’t sure that anything had changed, but it had now been pointed out by two people, right, so Austin must have known that it wasn’t just me being a stickler for pronunciation or anything. By this point, I had told Emily about this, and I wanted her to hear it. The Fukioka. But I wasn’t sure if she’d be able to. Austin may have it down, by now. I’m getting a little out of order chronologically here, but at our hangout, Lewis and Austin and I’s, I’m deeply focused on something (I’ll come to that later, I’m out of order here), but not so focused that I can’t hear Austin’s Fukioka, when he unleashes it on Lewis. I was at that moment as alert as any dog is when it hears its name and it knows its been a bad boy. Or girl. Lewis’s response. “What?” It was golden. Lewis actually didn’t even know what Austin had said. Austin recognizes this, now. “Fukioka? What, am I saying it wrong?” Internally, I’m dying. But, I’ll let them hash it out. Lewis, comprehending now. “Ahh, ah, Fukuoka. It’s fu-ku-oka.” Austin says, “And what am I saying?” Lewis. “You’re saying fu-ki-oka.” And it is now, it seems, really dawning on Austin, that he might be saying this word wrong, as every time he says it, at least among the company of Westerners, the immediate reaction to his Fukioka is, every time, “Huh?” “What?”
After this, I can’t say that I still had any confidence at all that he wouldn’t say Fukioka again. I was thinking that perhaps, the muscle memory was just too strong. The word Fukioka had now imbedded itself in his linguistic library and was never going to come out. I had told Emily about this, because it was funny. Emily already knew Austin. I had actually been messaging her about it for some weeks before. I gave her updates. I told her about how he had unleashed it on Lewis. And I was excited to tell her about that. But I thought, now, the chances were much higher than they’d ever been, that the next time that Austin wanted to say Fukuoka, he would say Fukuoka. Austin came over to cut my hair, this past week. I wasn’t looking for it, the Fukioka, and we went that whole hangout without it – until, as he stood in my doorway, with his foot halfway out of the apartment, he told me a story, about places called Soappaas, or something like that, I know the first word in the name was soap, places where you can pay people to take baths with you, but you’ve gotta be careful, because the yazuka have been running a racket, and stealing people’s shit, while they’re taking their bath. Which I thought, that’s pretty sad, isn’t it, to not be able to find anyone to take a bath with you, so you end up paying someone to do it, and the whole time they’re lathering you down, you’re being robbed by sleazy yakuza scumbags. And of course, all this paying to people bathe and theive you, this is happening in the heartland of the yakuza, Fukioka. He said that to me, then, in such passing, as a gracious parting gift – and then vanished into the night. And at hearing that Fukioka, I was not in total disbelief. I was actually quite happy, because I thought that the chances were now very good that Emily would get to hear it, and then everyone who I’d introduced Austin to would have gotten to hear his Fukioka, and we could all have a good laugh over it. Austin, Parker, Emily and I all gathered at my place again this week, and as we sat around my small round table, the gaikokujin of the round table, Emily asked Austin if he had gotten to get any travelling in before corona struck, and he said, yeah. And I sensed it, that this was my opportunity. I said, “Where have you been?” And he said, “Oh, mostly, in Kumamoto.” And I said, “But you’ve been to other prefectures, right?” And he said, “No. Oh! I’ve been Oita.” And now I’m thinking, dammit Austin, just say it, just say Fukioka, I know you want to! “What prefectures do you want to go to?” Specifically asking him to name prefectures. I know I’m smooth. He says, “I’d like to go to Hokkaido.” We’re close. I say, “In Kyushu.” (Fukuoka is in Kyushu. I’m trying to get him to say Fukuoka. I’m helping to narrow down the possible answers he can give.) And I’m thinking, here we go. You must say it now. I know you want to go to Fukioka. You talk about it all the time. Just say it Austin. Say the Fukioka. And he responds, “Well, I’d like to go Nagasaki.” And then he looks me right in the eyes, and says, “And that one that I keep getting the name wrong.” And I said, “Dammit Austin!” Whether he was too smart and saw the trap I’d laid out for him, or whether he was now really done with saying Fukioka, I couldn’t tell. And half of me was pissed, because I really wanted Emily to hear it – but I think more than being pissed, I was proud, and I had to get up and go give him a hug. My boy was growing up, like a baby that finally says someone’s name right after having only said the baby-fied version up to that point. I don’t have any specific examples of that because I haven’t raised a baby and I can’t remember what it was like being a baby, but I have thought about what it would be like to have my full consciousness, all of the consciousness and awareness that I have now, inserted into my baby self, and I think that would be pretty interesting. I wonder how long I could play it off that I had the mind of a simple baby and not that of a twenty-five year old. What would give me away? Maybe I’d get caught changing my own diaper. I’d be wiping myself off with one of those baby wipes, and mom, or the babysitter, someone would walk in, and I’d have a wipe up my butt, and we’d make eye contact, and they would just know – this baby knows what’s going on. Maybe I’d put my tiny baby finger over my lips. Don’t tell anyone. But I don’t think I could put up with the helplessness for long. The only time I’ve ever seen Boss Baby was at the Tamanagas, when I was making some dessert thing with the kids, and Boss Baby was on the TV. I guess there’s a TV show, and they love it. Riku was describing all of the characters to me. “Tina, this baby, she’s really out of control. And Kevin, this baby, he’s really smart.” I wonder how Boss Baby does it. I think I’d pull the baby card sometimes, to get out of sticky situations, or to get out of doing things that I didn’t want to do. I wonder if I would get totally sick of baby food. Or if I wouldn’t be able to help but make a total mess every time I tried to eat anything, because I have such a weak and undeveloped baby mouth, and no teeth. That must be hard, man, being a baby. No wonder they cry all the time. Babies have it tough.
I could probably describe things to the world about being a baby, and what it is like to be a baby, that babies never could, because they’re too stupid. It could be revolutionary for baby science.
I can give Austin a hard time about the Fukioka thing. I know he doesn’t care. He’s imperturbable. Austin told me about his co-workers badmouthing him, right in front of him at work. They think he doesn’t understand Japanese, I guess. Apparently he understood enough to know that they were talking smack. And of course, he was smiling, laughing while he tells me all this. “Isn’t that shitty? Ha-ha!”
Austin is addicted to Tik Tok. I once rang him up, and he answered the phone, laughing. Literally, the first thing that I heard was laughter. Have you ever had someone answer the phone like that? You just have to wonder if they’re insane. He’s not insane, I don’t think. He was just in the middle of watching a Tik Tok. I think he’s usually watching a Tik Tok when I contact him. He responds to my messages almost instantaneously. I think there’s a good chance that he’s watching a Tik Tok right now.
Austin’s Tinder bio includes the quote, “Shoot your shot.” by John Wilkes Booth. I know I’m just throwing out random facts about this man for you now. These are all very entertaining to me. For my Japanese friends, John Wilkes Booth is the guy that shot Abraham Lincoln. And he probably didn’t say that. Austin said to me, “I doubt anyone knows who that is in Japan. But it’s funny!” He started off this conversation with me by saying, “So I matched with a woman who is way out of my league.” She was an incredibly busty woman. “I guess she liked my bio!” Naturally, she was a robot, and was inviting him to talk with her on Late Meet. An app. He’s been invited to a good four or five different apps by Tinder robots. He does well with them.
I think you must now have to some degree a small sense of who Austin is. I hope you do, anyway. He’s a fun guy. And now, we’ve really got to get moving. That Fukioka business is actually a good lead in for the main event, here. You’ll see what I mean by the end, I think. The main event being the funny thing that I really wanted to tell you. And I do hope it’s funny for you, or you might never come back here. At least, you won’t be able to trust me on what is and isn’t funny. I’d like to say that you can trust me, and I’d like to keep that trust, and so I’ll do my best here.
Austin and Lewis both came over, I think last weekend, that doesn’t matter at all, but I think it was last weekend. I’ve taken to calling Lewis Lew recently. He hasn’t made any comment on it, surprisingly. I feel like most people would comment on that kind of thing, their being given a new nickname and all. It’s a personal thing, a nickname, so you would most probably feel some type of way about it. Lew doesn’t seem to be feeling any type of way about it. Or if he does, it’s secret to me, which is pretty typical, because that man is a walking, talking secret. He is enigmatic. I’ve talked too much about Austin to give you an equivalently thorough description of Lewis, not in the same post. If I were a better writer I could probably characterize these characters in much fewer words. If I wanted to. I don’t really want to. But I will say about Lewis, Lewis has a special way of speaking, and talking about things, that is particular to Lewis, that cloaks him in mystery and intrigue, and it is all unintentional. I thought, early on, that it was intentional, because it seems that it’s just too obvious to not be, but I’ve called Lewis on several such things, when he’s speaking in this way, and his response is always, “Oh god you’re right.” Or something along those lines. It will go something like this. Lewis will say to me, out of the blue, and this happens quite often, something along of the lines of, “I’ve done something terrible.” Or “Something terrible has happened.” Or “I’ve just had the worst experience of my life.” Something quite vague, like that. And then you’ll say something like, “Oh, boy. What happened?” And he’ll say something like this. “Oh, I can’t even say it. Not now. It’s too bad.” Or, “You know, I don’t really want to talk about it, to be honest. I don’t think I’m ready.” And you’ll say something like, “Oh, boy. Must have been bad!” And he’ll say, “Oh, it’s so terrible. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done. I can’t believe I’ve done it.” And you’ll say, if you care to continue this line of conversation (by now I know how it goes, so I don’t typically) “Is there anything I can do? Are you going to survive?” Something like that. Because you’re now wondering, why he’s telling you about something he’s done, without being able to actually tell you what he’s done. Maybe he needs some emotional support. Maybe he just needs to confess that he’s done a terrible thing, just to have someone else know that he’s done a terrible thing. It’s like a confession, a mini-one, confessing that you did a bad thing, but not going so far as to reveal the nature of the bad thing. It’s too horrible. I get that. But he’ll say, “Yeah. I’ll be alright.” And then you’ll now think, alright, he’s done a bad thing, he doesn’t need my help, this line of conversation is over. Let’s move on. And you’ll move on, or at least, you’ll think you’ll move on, but it won’t be for long, because it’s coming back. At some point soon, it will come to him, realizing that he’s done a bad thing, and he’ll say something like this. “But dude. That thing I did. If I told you, you would not believe it. I can’t believe I’d done it. It was so bad. It wrecked me, dude. I don’t even know what to do about it.” And you’ll think, ok, we’re coming back to this again, I guess he really does want to talk about it. And you’ll say, “Right, you keep talking about this thing, what was it though? What did you do?” And this time, he’ll hesitate, and he’ll say something like, “Ahhhh. Man… I want to tell you, I do. I just don’t think I can. It’s not the right time.” And here there will be an additional level of intrigue added, where he’ll say something like, “I have to see what will happen. It might just work itself out.” Or, “It might just be better if I don’t tell you, to be honest. Not now.” Again, something vague, like that. It’s all very vague. And all of these little details make their impression on you, of course, and your desire to know what he’s done that could be this bad, and the more you talk about it, the more your curiosity naturally grows. You will make conjectures. They may or may not lead you to any reasonable hypothesis as to what it could be. “Is it about that girl?” “Ah.. well, it could be. In a way, yes.” “Is it about that other girl?” “No. Or, not really. I don’t think so.” It’s usually about a girl, but you can’t be sure. When he answers in such ways, you can’t be sure about anything. And the best part of all of this, is that the odds are ten to one that in the end, you will never know about it. You will never find out what the bad thing was. It will come around, if you want it to, sometime down the road, and you’ll say, “Hey, that bad thing. What was it?” And all he’ll have to say about it is, “What thing? Oh, that? Oh, that wasn’t so bad. I worked it out, in the end. It’s alright now.” And that’s it. You’ll never know. I had to get used to that, the never knowing, and it took awhile. The thing is, he doesn’t do this on purpose. It sounds crazy, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t mean to make everything so mysterious, so curiosity-arousing, so dramatic, but he does. He can’t help it. And it’s good fun, this mystery. It’s good to keep some secrets, I think. Just for the sake of intrigue. People like that stuff. It can be infuriating, yes. But some infuriation every now and then can be a good thing too. Even rage is better than nothing.
Lewis is in the process of uploading his consciousness to the internet. He was, since the last time we spoke about this, 59% machine. I’m sure it’s much higher now, and increasing by the day – especially since corona kicked in. He lives in a techno-cave, and is quite happy with it. I think about how we are so opposite in that regard, in our living situations. I live in a spacious, well-lit, second story apartment, windows open, with plants, and colorful things on the walls, and no internet. Lewis, by comparison, lives in a dungeon, or a small grotto, a place where the number of times it has been graced by sunlight can be counted on one hand, where no living thing grows, where interior decoration is minimal, and where consciousnesses are uploaded to the internet. I suppose when I write that, it must sound a little depressing. It’s not that bad. He could benefit from having a plant or two. I knew more about the city that Lewis lives in after a month of being in Japan, when he had been there for a year. I can’t get him to do anything outside with me. Hardly anything. That’s not surprising, given the whole, sunlight never gracing his apartment thing. He will look at flowers, and walk around parks, and that is the extent of his interaction with nature. If your invite contains the mention of sports, mountains, or bugs (to be fair, bug hunting is not as popular of an activity, for adults. Kids know what’s up.), you will be receiving a hard no. He did go to the beach with me once. Lewis doesn’t read books. I gave him a copy of The Lord of The Rings. I had a spare. This man wears the damn ring around his neck, and I couldn’t get him to the read the book. I get it, if you’re not a reader, it’s an intimidating thing, that book. But it’s like wearing a rosary around your neck, calling yourself a God lover, going to church, watching Passion of the Christ, and having never even cracked open the Bible. At least in that simile, there was a walking, talking person that spawned it all. The book was based off of real life events, if you choose to believe such. In Lord of The Rings, however, it all comes entirely from the book. None of this stuff happened in real life. The book is the source. But Lewis won’t read it. I gave Lewis 50000円 and told him to keep it if I didn’t weigh 80 kilograms (175 pounds, you’re welcome) by July 4th. This was last year. I think we settled on July 4th. Or maybe it was by the end of the year. I think we made the pact in January. Times and dates mean nothing to me, almost nothing. On most days I don’t know what day it is. You might say that’s a luxury. I don’t know the date, that is. Of course I know the day. I’m not an idiot. I can keep track of the days. There’s only seven, and they loop, and certain things happen on certain days. But, when I made that pact with Lewis, it does seem that I have no idea. Anyways, I threw in a bonus clause, into that pact, that if I made it to 85 kilograms, Lewis would have to read The Lord of The Rings. I made it to 82. I got my money back, but he didn’t have to read the book. I do wish I would have tried harder. I think he’d still be reading it, honestly. But at 82, I had put on too much fat anyways, as I was eating a loaf of white bread for lunch every day, because “I was bulking.” That was a good time.
I could tell you more about Lewis. I don’t know how much you need to hear. Austin is really the main character here. Anything more about Lewis is just some additional sprinklings of goma seeds, I think, on what is now already shaping up to be a perfectly good bowl of goma, tofu, peas, and brown rice. I eat that almost every day, these days. It’s good stuff. With a little olive oil drizzled in. Here’s the last thing I’ll say about Lewis: he is never on time. If you say, let’s meet at 5:30, Lewis will say alright, that’s fine. He will then send you a message at 5:35, when you’re expecting that, hey I’m here! message, letting you know he is now leaving his apartment. Very rarely, he will be significantly early, but he’s usually just late. I was going to say he’s unpredictable that way, but I think he actually is to some degree predictable, in that you can be sure he will never be on time. He may come early, he will mostly likely come late, and occasionally, he won’t come at all – but you can put your money on it, if he does come, he will not be on time. I’ve never asked him about this, actually. Different people have different conceptions on what it means to start an event at 5:30. It may be that for Lewis, that means something like, at 5:30 I’ll be ready, and anytime after that is a good time. He might take it that way, I don’t know. I should ask him about it. I know I don’t think about it that way. If you tell me 5:30, I’m gunning for 5:30, and if I’m anything maybe fifteen minutes or more later than that, I’ll probably apologize, or explain why. But not everyone’s like that. When inviting Lewis to anything, I’ve found some success in the strategy of shifting the time of the invite back. It usually works. If want to meet him at say, 6 or 6:30, then I’ll say, hey, how about we meet at 5? And I now recognize that this is just haggling, isn’t it. I haggle with Lewis over our meeting time.
I haggled Lewis into meeting early on a Saturday, to join Austin and I in a day of debauchery. I think I told him 11 or 12, initially, and so he said, “I’ll be there at 2.” Which then turned into, “Now 3:30.” I think he showed up at around 4. And what we were all there to do, was to play a game called Magic The Gathering. And now we’ve reached the part of the story where I tell you about the debauchery, that is Magic The Gathering. Do you know about this game? I hope you don’t. Magic The Gathering is a terrible game. I wish that I could say that I have nothing to do with it and have never had anything to do with it, but I can’t. I have. And what’s worse, I love it. It’s a very fun game, for me. It’s a card game, and it’s nerdy. Full of dragons, and wizards, and merfolk, and Swords of 1000 Truths. I’ll just throw some card names at you, and I think you’ll have a perfect understanding of what we’re dealing with here. Territorial Scythecat. Grotag Bug-Catcher. Deadly Alliance. Akiri, Fearless Voyager. Shepherd of Heroes. You get it. Fantasy. But it’s good fun, if that’s what you’re into. It’s just that it might steal your soul. I hadn’t played this game since I’d been in Japan, but Japan is into it, somewhat, and they release the cards in Japanese, and somehow, that just makes them look a bit more, or a lot more, badass. I debated for a long time, whether I should drop 8000円 on a box of them, so much that I even summoned Emily’s counsel, as on one hand, I thought it would be fun to learn some new fantasy related words, that could also be useful to me in my daily life, words like exile, destroy, graveyard, merciless, eternal (actually both coming from the name of a single card, Merciless Eternal), angel, plague, demonic, etc., but on the other, I was concerned that I would be trading my soul for it. Whenever my senseis come to my desk to say what’s up, they’ll usually see that I’m studying, and would look over my notebook, and in the older days, before they realized that when it came to Japanese, I wanted to know everything, they would see these words, like exile, and merciless, and rejuvenate, and they would always ask me, “But Steven, when will you ever use these words?” I have an expansive imagination, senseis. I find ways. And if I don’t use any fun words like those, then I’ll spend my whole life as a Japanese speaker with a sad and boring vocabulary, and I don’t want to spend my whole life as a Japanese speaker with a sad and boring vocabulary. I want my Japanese to have some spice to it.
So, this Saturday, we’re playing this cursed game, Magic. I’m pronouncing that, cur-sid. The old fashioned way. Austin has played it only once or twice or three times before. He knew the rules, more or less, but when it came to strategy, and winning, he was entirely clueless. I found this out when he started going through the cards to make his deck, and was attracted to cards that any veteran Magic player never be attracted to, unless under very specific circumstances, or they were going for an experimental strategy, or they were just trolling. A beginner Magic player is kind of like a child. They are attracted to cards on whim, and fancy, just because they like the way they look, the name, the art, or something else that is aesthetically pleasing, but practically has almost no impact on the game. Although the name can, in some cases. Beginning Magic players are innocent enough to still hold aesthetics in some regard. Veteran players have seen too much for this. I enjoy the aesthetics of a card, but I enjoy battlefield dominance more, and I will choose accordingly. Austin had his first taste of what happens when you choose entirely on aesthetics.
The deck that you play with in Magic reflects your personality. Lewis’s decks are intricate. You won’t know what’s going on with them until the machine is fully assembled. That is, there are machinations. His decks are finely detailed, with many moving parts, an apparatus that when complete becomes a whirling death machine. His turns take time. There are a great number of steps that are required to build the machine, and much trickery. He often tricks himself. His decks could be considered, “big-brained”, which really just means that they’re extremely annoying to play against. Also, if I can offer a critique of Lewis’s Magic game here (I don’t know why I am, because, like I said, Lewis doesn’t read, and he’ll never read this), he’s not bad at building the death machine, but he’s pretty bad at protecting it. Blow up one cog, and the machine falls apart. And it’s never too difficult to blow up one of Lewis’s cogs.
My decks are not so complicated. By comparison, they are relatively “small-brained.” If Lewis’s decks are death by machination, my decks are death by being bludgeoned to death by the club of a rampaging troll, or by being gored in the stomach by a massive horned ram-demon. I occasionally choose to overwhelm with a legion of many, but either way, for me, creatures are the engine. Simple, but effective. The trickery is minimal, and the machinations are few. I also have a knack for identifying and being attracted to the strongest cards in the game, and that helps. I beat Lewis every four out of five games, or so.
Austin’s decks are collections of cards that strike his fancy. A card goes into the deck, not for any strategical reason (none that you can see, at least), but simply because it has a certain appeal. It has charmed him in some way. Unfortunately for Austin, at least for his chances of victory, he seemed to be attracted to almost entirely useless cards. The first card that really got him was a card called Meteorite, and that’s exactly what it was. It was just a meteorite. I think that’s exactly why Austin liked it, but it didn’t do all that much, unless you had a certain kind of deck, which Austin didn’t have. He saw this card, and said like he said with all such cards that struck his fancy, “Now, look at this card! That’s a good one!” And he would show me, and I would take about half a second to pass judgement, that this was an inferior card, and would not help Austin win the game. I said, “Yeah, if you have blah blah blah, it’s not bad.” and Austin didn’t have blah blah blah. But he thought it could work anyway. And that was something I noticed about Austin, when it came to Magic, is that for not really having any clue what was going on, he had very strong opinions about his cards. And I did like that. He threw a useless Myr (some kind of brown, crescent headed robot thing) into his deck because “I saw a Myr deck once. It was really strong.” He was also attracted to a card called Trusted Packmate, or something like that, that was again, not very useful to him at all unless he was going for a certain strategy, that he was certainly not going for, but his response was, again, “You know, I think it can work.” So, after letting the lad assemble his own deck of fancy, of meteorites and Myrs and trusted packmates, and goring it with horns, and crushing it under the weight of infinite machinations, Austin asked me to help him make a deck. And now, finally, the funny part is coming. I promise.
Austin asked me to help him make a deck. I was happy to do so. I already had an idea for another deck we could do with our cards, and I had just started getting the pieces for it together, when he hands me a stack of cards, and says, “And I’d really like to have these in it.” I flipped through them, and took the meteorite and Myr out right away, and saw that what we were left with, what he had really handed me, was a pile of dogs. Flaming dogs, St. Bernards, dogs with armor, dogs striking majestic poses, dogs running fast. A bunch of dogs. What happened was, there was a big, shiny dog, called Pack Leader, that was a pretty good card, that made your other dogs stronger, and invincible, which is great and all, and Austin saw that, and he really liked it, and so he thought, well, that’s good, let’s make a dog deck, and he went and found every dog he could, and that amounted to about nine or ten dogs. Unfortunately, this was not enough dogs to constitute a deck on their own, and also, really all of the dogs except for that one big, shiny dog, were almost useless. I took one look at his pile of dogs, and I told him that, and he wasn’t swayed. “I like the dogs. Let’s use the dogs.” And so, I set them to the side, and went to work, cooking something up entirely unrelated to dogs. And as I worked, I could see that something really nice was coming together, something with dual-wielding mohawk men, scrunchy, scheming goblins, and floating golden skymauls, but I saw that as I progressed in the course of putting this deck together, however much room there was for Austin’s dogs at the beginning, which was essentially, none, there was now increasingly less room for them. I would keep trying to take a dog out, slyly, saying, yeah, and I think this guy is gonna have to go.. but Austin would be right there to put the dog back. “Ooh, not that one. No, we have to keep that one.” And I would explain, quite rationally, how my card made sense, and fit into a greater strategy, and was in every way superior to Austin’s dog, and it hardly made any impact on him at all. “Austin, look at this card. This card can fly. This card is a rogue. This card has X, and Y, and you can use it with Z. It’s great. You need it in your deck. This card is just a dog. It doesn’t do anything, at all. It is only a dog.” And that meant almost nothing to him. “Yeah.. but with Pack Leader, it’s pretty good, right? And just look at that cute little pupper. Let’s keep it.” I did get him, by powers of persuasion, to drop a few of the most utterly ineffective dogs, but by the end of building this thing, we had too many cards overall, and by that I mean, we had too many dogs. I tried that, many times throughout the construction of this deck, trying to slip out a dog here or there, and replace them with something that made sense, and would be useful, and Austin just wouldn’t have it. I was building a deck for him, yes, but building a deck is an art, and I had a vision for my project, and wanted to execute it perfectly, and yet when I would take steps to bring it closer to the perfected form, I would run into the dog problem – adding this card would mean taking out a dog, and that wasn’t going to happen, because at a certain point, we had taken out enough dogs as it was, and the rest became non-negotiable. So, we reached a point where some kind of final deck had been completed, which was a cohesive deck that had a functional strategy, with some dogs thrown in. We had something like forty-eight or forty-nine cards, and we needed to get to forty. Basically, we had a perfect and complete deck, if we just didn’t use any dogs. But Austin wouldn’t have it. We laid out all our cards, and went through each one, and made the cuts. And how that went was, Austin would pick a card, and he would almost always gravitate to the best cards in the deck, and he would say, “You know, I think we can take this one out.” And I would say, no, Austin, that’s the best card in the deck. And he would go to another one, and say, “Is this one all that good?” And I would say, yes, that’s a core component. We’ve gotta have it. And then he would come to one, and he would say, “Well, we really don’t need this card, do we?” And I would explain how it was again, necessary. And certainly, would not be sacrificed for one of his feeble dogs. And for each card that Austin would choose, he would ask me, for the sixth or seventh time, then, “And what does this one do again?” Because we were playing with mostly Japanese cards, and Austin can’t read much Japanese, and so more than half of the cards in his deck, he couldn’t read them, and didn’t know what they did. When playing, he would come to cards, and think they did one thing, when it was the other card that did that thing, or he would try to remember what they did, and he would get this look on his face, of just a slight bit of confusion, and Lew or I would notice it, and say, “You got it?” And he would say with complete confidence, after an uncertain pause, “Oh yeah, I know what this card does.” And after a few times of him saying this, I learned that when Austin says, “I know what this card does,” he really means, “I certainly have no idea what this card does.” And I had explained the strategy of the deck to Austin about fifty times, in the course of building it. It wasn’t complicated. It was warriors. We wanted warriors. And we wanted equipment. We wanted to have warriors and to give them weapons. And that became another frequent point of contention – Austin, this card is a warrior. We want warriors. Your dog is not a warrior. And he would say, for the fiftieth time, “Why do we want warriors again?” Austin was almost entirely uninterested in my building of his deck. He just wanted to make sure that the dogs had a place in it. Austin and I worked through his deck, to bring it down closer to that ideal forty cards, and I have to say, it really hurt me. Each card that we cut, was a card that brought that deck closer to something beautiful, and in place of that card, taking it farther away, would be another dirty dog. It was hard for me, and some tense words were exchanged, swords crossed, both parties unwilling to back down, but ultimately, after pushing him as much as I did, I could see that Austin was serious about his dogs, and that compromise must be struck. It was Austin’s deck, and if he wanted to so defile it, I had to let him, and so I did. “If we have to take anything out..” And I pulled the cards, and the downgrade was complete. This process, of sorting through the cards, identifying a working strategy, assembling them into a functioning body, of trying to figure out how to cut as many dogs as possible, of arguing with Austin over each dog related decision, was an hour-long masterclass in the arts of strategic planning, persuasion, and compromise. And again, I had to respect his conviction. The man wanted his dogs, and have them he would. And so, at the end of this hour long struggle, to put together something that wasn’t as horrific as his first production, and with dogs, we were finished. We had something. Austin had his dogs, and his warriors, and it seemed to be not all that shabby, and we were ready to see how they performed. And now, here, finally, is the funny part.
Austin and I sat opposite each other across that small round table of mine. We set our decks on it. This was to be Austin’s first run with his new dog/warrior deck. It was exciting. After all that planning and persuading and arguing and compromising, the good part was here, and we were going to play the game. And we drew our cards, and we started the game. I played my turn, I passed it to Austin. And Austin, on his first turn, he’s got one. And I’m ready for it. I know what’s coming. You can tell by the look on his face, how tickled he is, to be playing it. It’s what he’s wanted all along, what he fought tooth and nail, against all reason, to have in his deck. He’s been waiting for this moment for the past hour. He’s breaking out into a full smile, he’s pulling the card out of his hand, he’s about to speak, and as he sets it down on that small round table, in the center of the table and in full view of all, he announces, “And now I’m gonna play this wolf!”
I’ll let that sink in. You might be confused to see that word. I was certainly confused to hear it. Wolf, did you say? There were wolves in that deck? You didn’t mention anything about that, Steven. You only talked about dogs. A lot. You probably wrote the word dog twenty times or more in those last few paragraphs. So why are we talking about wolves now? And yes, you’re right, and that’s a great question, isn’t it. I didn’t say anything about wolves, because there are no wolves in the deck. There is not a single wolf in the deck. No, not one wolf made its way into it. But plenty of dogs did. We spent an hour, an hour, making a deck, an hour, making a deck with dogs, in it, arguing over these useless dogs, talking about how we should take out this dog, and that dog, and how we couldn’t, because they were so cute, and Austin wanted, needed to have dogs in his deck, and in that last hour, if anyone had been counting, they would have heard the word dog said, between the two of us, at least fifteen thousand times, this dog, and that dog, and this dog, and they wouldn’t have heard the word wolf, a single time. They would not have heard the word wolf uttered even once. Not once. And yet, after an hour of dog talk, after an hour of squabbling over these dirty mutts, these Bolt Hounds and Selfless Saviors, after putting such incredible focus into constructing the ultimate hybrid dog and warrior deck, after all this, Austin’s first play of our first game, Austin has his dreams come true, his greatest wish granted, on the very first turn, he gets to play one of his god damn beloved super-cute pupper dogs, and what does he call it? He calls it a wolf. A wolf!
Can you believe that? I couldn’t believe it. It floored me. It was just like when Mr. Parker Junior ordered that parfait. It was about that good. It could have even been better – I think it was. I just couldn’t believe it. “Are you kidding me?” My go-to phrase in such situations. What else can I say? Was he kidding? But he wasn’t. I’m looking dead at Austin, jaw lowered, in complete disbelief. “You mean, this dog?” And he says, “Oh, right.” And he chuckles! This man, he hadn’t noticed a thing! If I didn’t say anything, it wouldn’t have mattered at all! How many times had we said that word, how much energy had we just spent arguing over that word, how much it had become entrenched in the identity of his deck, woven into the fabric, this word, and when he finally plays it, when it was finally time for the big unveiling, he gets it wrong! Calls it a wolf! Like nothing before mattered at all! It’s like, your whole life you’ve been dreaming about owning a Lamborghini, reading picture books about Lamborghinis as a kid, going to car shows to look at the Lamborghinis with your grandpa, discussing the latest Lamborghini models with your boys, scrimping and saving up enough money to finally purchase your own Lamborghini, and you go to the Lamborghini dealer, and you drive your new Lamborghini home, and the whole way home you’re feeling like a million bucks, and you finally get back, and you pull up, you park your brand new Lamborghini, and you step out to admire it sitting there, gleaming in the sun, the car of your dreams, parked right there in your very own driveway, and you put your hands on your hips, and you say to yourself with a wide, satisfied grin on your face, “Damn that’s a nice Ferrari.” It was just like that. Austin just called his Lamborghini a Ferrari. And that was entirely fascinating to me. How that happened, I just couldn’t imagine. I was just dumbfounded. And the best part was, he was all set to let this matter drop, and pass the turn to me, but there was no way I could just let something like that go. “Austin, tell me, did you really just say that? Did you really just call your dog a wolf?” His response: “Yeah, I guess I did! Ha-ha!”
I’ve learned more about Austin’s brain, and I have come to a better understanding of how that could have happened, in the time since that incident. For one thing, during the course of the game, and the games afterwards, Austin kept calling his warriors “knights.” I must have told him, like I said, about fifty times, his deck was full of warriors. Warriors. There are certain cards that interact with warriors in a certain way, and so the distinction is important. I’m not just being anal about nomenclature here. I mean, I am, and I was, but I had a good reason for it, other than it’s just insane to be calling your warriors knights, when they’re not knights. They’re warriors. He also would refer to his cards only ever with masculine pronouns. Austin’s deck was full of beautiful angelic warrior women, and badass armor-clad club-wielding warrior women, and every time he would play them, he would refer to them as “this guy” or “this dude” or “him”. And that just infuriated me. Lewis did the same thing, and I couldn’t understand it, and when they would do it, I would say, you mean “this woman”, or “this lady“, or “her”, and they would say, oh, yeah. And then the next time they would again refer to them as this guy. I just couldn’t understand it. But I talked to Austin, later, about this whole calling his dog a wolf thing, and calling the warriors knights, and he said, “I think my brain just works differently than most people’s.” And he then told me a story, about how he was writing an email at work, and he was saying out loud to his coworker, who was standing over his shoulder, engaged with him in writing this email, what he was going to be writing – but at a certain point, he stopped typing what he was saying, and started typing something else, different from what he was speaking. And I thought, that’s something that normal people would really struggle to do, and you’re doing it by accident. You do have a bit of a different brain, don’t you.
He also doesn’t like Scrabble. I asked him, “Do you want to play Scrabble?” He rejected that idea immediately. “Uhh… no.” And I said, “What? You don’t like Scrabble?” He said that “sitting around and staring at a bunch of letters” is not his idea of a good time. Which I thought was interesting, too, because for a lot of people, that is their idea of a good time. Look at how popular Words With Friends was. We also have the Fukioka thing to consider, as well. And recently, I was talking with Austin about local grocery stores, and he said that he frequently shopped at “DirectX.” Which sounded to me like the name of some low-rank shipping or cable company, and I was like, “You mean Direx?” And that’s what he meant, but he had been calling it DirectX this whole time. He also refers to Kumamoto City as just Kumamoto, which is, of course, as confusing as if you called Indianapolis, Indiana. I don’t know when he’s talking about the city, or the prefecture, and after every time he says that, I say, “You mean the city?” And he says, “Yeah.” But he still calls it Kumamoto.
So that’s really it, then. That was a lot of words for a story that I could have told in about one-hundredth as many, I know. I hope you thought it was funny. It was hilarious to me. It’s getting harder to find kicks these days, as well, in the long monotony of pandemic life. So that day of silliness was especially memorable. Austin brought a lot of silliness to that day of Magic, with his dogs, and his meteorites, and his dub. I didn’t talk about that, but there was a card that Austin insisted on keeping in his deck, a card that killed me more than any of the dogs, that was even more useless, called Dub, an image of a queen laying her sword over the shoulder of a kneeling knight, that was just a general buff, and that would turn your card into a knight. And he kept saying, in defence of the card, when I would say it was worthless, “But it turns your card into a knight!” And this may be how he got so stuck on the knights thing. I tried to take it out several times, and he would slip it back in, and several times, when shuffling the deck, my eye would catch this card, my instinct, that something was there that shouldn’t be, triggered, and I would say, “What’s this one?” And he would say, “Oh, it’s nothing.” And it was that damn dub. I think the peak of his joy that day, was when he ended up decking out his chosen, king of dogs, the pack leader, with that skymaul, and the dub, turning it into an actual flying dog knight, with several other buffs and things, so that it was truly an incredibly powerful dog. He couldn’t stop giggling. “It’s so strong!” And he didn’t even bat an eye when I took control of it and killed him with it. It was refreshing to play with him, actually, in the way that it is refreshing to do things with children – as they just know how to have fun, and are not so concerned with optimization, efficiency, domination, and such things, that adults so seem to be shackled with, and it took me back to the good old days, early in my Magic career, when I felt that way too. We could all use a bit more shenanigans in our lives, couldn’t we. I certainly could. For having a deck laden with useless dogs, dubs, and cards he couldn’t read, running mainly on fancy, and not battle-tempered strategy, Austin did pretty good for himself. Austin really brought the shenanigans that day.
So.. was it funny? Just tell me it was. Lie to me, if you have to. It took a lot for me to write all that. Days, you might be curious to know. At least four.
At the beginning of this post, I said that I didn’t feel that I was really in conversation with you guys. I don’t feel that way now, at the end of it. I think I just had to get warmed up to it, again. I have to have something to tell you that I think you want to hear, I think is what it is. If I think you don’t want to hear it, I’m not all that excited about telling you about it. I’m still learning about myself, and how I write these things, you know. For example, at one point I had the idea to try and bring some consistency into this thing, and write once a week. I told you about that, and I kind of knew it was doomed from the start. Anytime I try to schedule anything like that, it’s doomed. That was more of a fantasy than the characters in the Magic The Gathering world. Consistency and creativity with me, they just don’t go together. This is just not that type of blog, I have to say. If I could consistently schedule writeable material, then perhaps I could consistently schedule posts, but it just doesn’t work that way. This also just takes too much time, to do weekly. Not if I want to keep dropping bombs like this. But I would like to post again, sooner. I can’t believe it’s already been two months since the fart story, honestly.
Anyways, we really are finished now. It’s been long enough. I’ll leave you with a quote, like usual. I can do consistency, in some ways. And it’s just a good way to wrap these things up, I think. This is a Lil Uzi Vert quote. I heard it in a remix of a Lil Uzi Vert song, recently. He’s got some good lyrics, that guy.
“I’m the captain, so I’m never sayin’ pick me.”
Adios, muchachos! またね！
HAKUMUSU 