*Written August 2nd, 2023, from my parent’s home in Indiana.*

Today has been a lazy day, and I have spent the day as such. Just lazing about. Some days you just really don’t feel like grinding. You have no desire to check off the boxes on your to-do list, and you really can’t be bothered to take any of the steps you know you’re supposed to be taking towards achieving your goals and dreams.

That has been today, for me. But, (I’m telling myself this at least), what’s great about life is that you can do nothing at all and actually still make progress.

I think that’s a great thing about life. That some magic happens when you’re just sitting around doing nothing. And today, that’s been happening. I’m just existing, and letting the magic of the universe do its thing.

My dog does this every day. She’s just existing. She’s really good at that. And I’m sure this is one of the major reasons why we love animals so much. They help pull us out of our super-mega-fantasy brain world that teleports all across time and space and conjures up all kinds of wacky and wild and anxiety-inducing scenarios, and into reality. Into the present, you know. The here and now.

Me and my gal, we’ve been swimming. Every day, we swim. We’re lucky enough to be able to do that these days, being on a small lake in the summer, and we’re taking full advantage of it. It’s a blessing, a blessed thing. We both agree. Every day around noon, she starts to pester me. She comes right over to me, plops her fat butt down on top of me, starts pushing on me with her nose, and tries to eat my hands. Alternatively, she will just stand next to me, and stare. You know exactly what she wants, and you know she knows you know exactly what she wants. It’s swim time. She’s waited patiently all morning, for you to do your morning business, she’s been patient, and waited long enough. And now, it’s swim time. These days, it’s the only thing on her mind. It’s everything she’s living for. You can see it in her eyes, and by the way her face lights up when you say the word, the word that she has oh so keen an ear for, the S word. You have to be careful, very careful when you say it around her. I noticed she was going crazy around me when I would be walking around without a shirt on, and I realized it was because she thought we were going swimming. She knew I was always shirtless. So today, after my morning work, of some emailing, some phone calling, and some generation of AI cats drinking milk from saucers in the style of Pablo Picasso, and I sat down to play a little guitar, Daisy decided it was swim time, and came right over and sat her butt down on top of me. Into the water we went!

(Oh, did you say you wanted to see those Picasso cats?)

Tell me, are they not genius? DiffusionBee took 20 seconds to make each one. The exact prompt “orange kitten drinking milk from a bowl, by Pablo Picasso”. These are the cream of the crop. I cranked out hundreds, at least fifty. It’s addicting, making these things. You never know what’s going to come out, and when you land on a really juicy prompt like this one, you just don’t want to stop. (Yesterday I spent seven hours churning out AI images.)

Daisy likes to splash and snap at the water with her massive maw. She is very otter-like in the water. Or a giant water rat. My dad has taken to calling her “the famous swimming dog.” She is renowned throughout the neighborhood. A couple weeks ago I let her loose, which is an incredible joy to see, that first sprint off the pier, the leap, and the plunge into the water. There is a perfect freedom in it, a total, raw, unbridled joy. It is one of the most beautiful things in the universe, and I hope that everyone can find something that they love as much in their lives as Daisy loves swimming. I let her loose and it was so joyous that I had to applaud, and cheer, from the main floor deck balcony, and as I did so, two neighbors across the lake joined me in celebration. We were celebrating joy, and there to bear witness to the presence of great joy in the world. After she exhausts herself swimming around with me and splashing her heart out, she will patrol the shores, going both ways, out to the neighbors, striding through the filthy muck-silt and the shallow water, climbing on the small rocks that line the shore, prowling for fish and other creatures. Our lake was carved out of a bog, and would probably immediately revert back to a bog if not maintained by people. I think it’s not that old and only fifty years ago or so was a bog. We have a spring right out from our pier, and the water is ice cold, shooting up out of that spring. Daisy will then spend most of her time, after all her patrolling, on the pier, looking down into the water, at the fish. We have a sizeable pontoon boat, and in the gap between the boat and the deck, she sticks her head and looks for fish. I stuck my head down there with her the other day and looked too, and it was just like being in an aquarium, standing at the aquarium glass, the fish would swim right by, with no sunlight reflecting off the water, so you could get a really clear view. She tried to chomp some of them. I think the fish must like it too, playing with her. Sometimes she will get too excited and fall into the gap. She swims around to the front of the pier and climbs up the ladder like a regular human. The more exhausted she is the harder it is for her to lug her big butt up out of the water. She has a really massive butt.

She likes to play a game where she will try to jump directly on top of you when you dive into the water. It’s dangerous if she succeeds because she has razor sharp talons and will marr your baby soft skin with them when she lands on you. She’s smart though, and is hard to fake out. So you can try and fake her out, try and wait her out, or just go for the dive and hope that you get far enough away that you’ll be safe. I’ve left my legs trailing on some of the dives and have been severely maimed as a result. That game is more fun for her than us.

I did an exhaustive aquative workout yesterday, so I didn’t swim too much today. Mostly I sat in a shaded spot not far from the water, in the shade of some large tree-bush with large bell-shaped white flowers. We have these giant trees, called cottonwoods, with leaves that rustle beautifully in the wind. A very soft and soothing rustling. They piss a lot of homeowners off because they spew crap throughout the year, thousands and thousands of airborn fluffy white seeds, pod seeds, like a string of green beans, sticky, incredible sticky seeds, coated with a powerful superglue sap.. and worse, they shed their limbs too easily, and have to be pruned all the time. I know this because I recently commented on them to my dad, about how much I loved the cottonwoods, and his response was, “If I had the money I’d cut them all down.” And I was aghast, and then he gave me his reasoning, and told me the money he spent pruning them, and I thought, well that’s fair. They go through multiple phases of releasing their seed into the world, first via extremely sticky pods that will adhere to anything, especially bare feet, and then fuzzy dandelion-esque whiteness, that when it really gets going makes it look like snow in summer. Not the best for homeowners I suppose, but their leaves make such beautiful rustling sounds, and the birds love them. The birds really love them. We’ve had orioles, nuthatches, red-winged blackbirds, hawks, woodpeckers, and recently even a kingfisher in them. And of course, we’ve had Jimmy Squirrel. He has made the cottonwood right outside of our living room window his estate, in fact. But anyways, I sat in the shade, in the grass, and kind of just zoned out. I wasn’t intentionally meditating, but I wasn’t thinking too hard about anything either. Zoned out is really the right word. Zoned out, and let time pass, and listen to the rustle of the cottonwoods, and watch Daisy play in the water. While I did this, I watched the little microbugs crawl all over me. This was only like two hours ago, by the way. I’m sitting outside now as I type this because I felt like doing something. They were some of the tiniest bugs you’ll ever see. Two of them were extremely tiny Hymenoptera, which are the bees, wasps and ants, and I’m not sure what it was, and I don’t think it would have been a fly because it had wings that folded over onto themselves, but I’m not sure. These little bugs were about a millimeter long. If they squished together, probably two-hundred of them could fit onto my pinky nail, and I don’t have a big pinky nail. They were probably the smallest bug that visited me, but the other ones weren’t much bigger. I had a nymph mayfly on me, only slightly larger, and a very vivid, fresh green color. That one was really tangled up in my belly button hair, and I thought it was going to fall into my bellybutton, where it might never get out. I didn’t exactly want that to happen, but I was ready to see it. There was a small beetle on me, one of the long ones with the big butts. I don’t remember what they’re called. Buprestids, maybe. Then, of course there were ants, which tickle too much, and I threw them all off. There was a little, tiny, tiny-teensy green spider, running up my thigh. I only even noticed this spider because I was wondering why I had this giant blue vein running up the middle of my thigh, and I then I saw this little spider. It was so small and light that my nerves simply couldn’t register it. That was adorable. It had a body that was light green like celery, with a little yellow circle around its dark-green cephalothorax. (You know, that’s what spiders have. A cephalothorax.) Body and head is fused. That would look horrible with humans. And that reminds me, as I sat there and played with a stick, I thought, me picking a stick up off the ground is kind of like me picking somebody’s severed arm up off the ground. Kind of morbid, if you think about it. I liked having these microbugs climb all over me. I felt like a giant, a giant tree. We really are giants, comparatively. Even a baby human is absolutely massive compared to a small jumping spider. I don’t think those little microbugs knew any different, that they were crawling on a tree, on the earth, or on a big ol’ human, and that was nice. I liked that. They accepted me for the lump of matter that I really am, and made me feel like I was really a part of the fabric of life. That’s why I like spending time in nature. You don’t often get that feeling sitting around on your computer, or driving your car. But it’s a very important one.

Also while I was sitting there, I heard a strange, furious fluttering sound, and looked up to see a large hummingbird right over my head. It was getting some drinks from the big white bellflowers. I watched it there about a foot from my head, and it even rested on the branches. That’s a real treat, to see a hummingbird just chilling out. My grandma noticed one the other day, I’d bet the same one, from our window in the kitchen, seated in a tiny curve in a skinny branch, like it was sitting in a little swing. Like a little doll in a dollhouse. They are the most fragile and adorable looking creatures ever. A tiny, beating, fluttering emerald and cream jewel. It must live around here. It’s a good place to live, for a hummingbird.

Well, I’m finished writing. That was nice. Two swallowtails have just started dancing, right in front of me. Two gorgeous, yellow butterflies.

I have become a meme.

At least, I hope I have become a meme.

We can start there. Last week, Ozu High School won the prefectural soccer championship. Pretty easily. The game was four to zero. We all sat in the auditorium and watched it together, during the school day, as it was live streamed on YouTube. I told you that Ozu is good at soccer, and that their soccer team is like a small army. I now know that, if the students are to be trusted, which they are not, although when it comes to soccer they’re probably a reliable source of information, that the Ozu soccer team has over 170 members. 170. There are something like eight hundred kids at the school. So about one in five students at Ozu are on the soccer team. And that sounds about right. Some of these kids wake up at 4 am to make the trip to Ozu and be there on time for morning practice, which starts at 5:30, and don’t get home until 8 or 9. I have to respect their dedication, even if I think it is totally insane. I couldn’t do it. These kids work at least 10x harder than me. It is really like being in the army. I’ve never been in the army, I have no idea what’s it really like. I imagine it is to some degree what an Ozu soccer player experiences. But anyways, last week, I was in the school gym, as I often am, working out with the boys, which is a lot of fun, because they think that I am the strongest human that they’ve ever seen. At least they treat me like that. I am stronger than almost all of them, but it’s just because they’re tiny twinks. Compared to them, I am truly a muscle-bound freak. I was in the gym, and I asked them about the soccer tournament, because I knew that that last weekend all school sports had had their tournaments. This is a difference between Japan and the US, where almost all of the sports have their tournaments at the same time. Baseball, I think, may be an exception. So I knew that the soccer guys had played last weekend, and I asked, and they told me that they had a game tomorrow, during the day, and I could watch it on YouTube Live, on a channel called Green Card. I’ll put the link here so you guys can check it out. The next night, after work at Shoyo, I went home, gorged on my nightly soba, and then grabbed my laptop, sat on those steps in front of Nagata sensei’s apartment, hooked up to that sweet, sweet WiFi, and searched up Ozu’s semi-final game. That game was the semi-final, I forgot to say. This was the second time I had ever watched Ozu soccer. They’re a good team. They won that game, 4 to 1, one of the goals being an outside of the box upper-90 shot. Sexy stuff. I was impressed, and I thought, hey, I’ll leave a little comment. I don’t often comment on YouTube videos. I’ve actually maybe never commented on a YouTube video. By the time I get to any YouTube video, there are already about a thousand witty comments or memes, and there’s no need for me to add my far less witty comment to the noise. But on this video, the comment section was just a barren patch of white, and so I thought they deserved something. I just really had an urge to comment, then. So after thinking for about one and a half seconds, keeping it short and sweet, I wrote, 大津強いね！Ozu tsuyoi ne! Ozu is strong! I then closed the laptop, thought nothing of it, and returned to my apartment.

The next day, I wasn’t going to have class, but Atsuko sensei asked me if I would join her. When we walked into class together, I was deep in thought, I’m sure over something incredibly trivial, and paying little attention to anything. By the time I had reached the podium, to set some textbooks down, I realized that I had heard something, something that was meant for me to hear, when I walked in, and that was, 大津強いね！Several students had said this, when I walked in, at a volume slightly above conversational level – not shouting it at me, but loud enough for me to hear. And it took my brain a few seconds to realize, that’s what I had commented last night. Waking up from my trance, and saw seven or eight boys in their seats, looking directly at me, and I said, “大津強いね！” My comment made an impression on them. My YouTube profile is linked to my gmail, and so my YouTube username is my actual name, paired with a clear and unmistakeable picture of me, so it’s obvious that I was the commenter.

I thought that was a funny reaction, but it still didn’t sink in, the scope and reach of my comment, until later the next day. That day, Ozu was playing in the prefectural championship, and we all gathered in the gym to watch it on an enormous screen. In a normal year, we would have all gone to watch the game live, at the stadium, but this was not a normal year. Some of the teachers, the young bucks, had been designated cheerleaders, and were decked out in some electric blue Ozu swag, and I went over to them and said, “Hey, nice shirts.” They said, “Want one?” And so I walked with Dragonball Z sensei (he’s got spiky porcupine hair) to go get one, and as we were walking, he stopped and turned to me, and said, “YouTube.. Nice comment.” And now I thought – ok, spiky sensei knows about it, 1-5 knows about it.. how many people have seen this comment? So after the game, I sat down at my desk, pulled up the video, and saw that that video had 15,000 views (which blew my mind, I had no idea so many people were interested in high school soccer), and my comment had 7 likes, which is by far the most likes I’ve ever had on a YouTube comment, and my comment was still the only comment on this video. So any student, parent, teacher, whoever these 15,000 people are, whoever watched that video, would have seen their school ALT commenting, 大津強いね！And at 15,000, that could be the whole school. At least all of the soccer players would know about it. And the soccer players, especially, but the high school boys in general, really enjoy a good catchphrase. A good meme. They had already memed me with it that day when I walked into class. For my part, I’ve tried to help cement it as one. After the championship game, I pulled up the recording on YouTube, and again commented, 大津強いね! I think it stands a good chance of being adopted.

I say that the students really enjoy a good catchphrase, for this reason. The way that they first sounded off the 大津強いね！ in class, in unison and at a level just loud enough to catch my ear, took me back to a time early in my ALT career, a time where my days were filled with the words, “Hey guys.” Or, if the students were really in the mood for it, “Hey guys, we have a gift for you.”

Any foreign man, woman, or child working in the Japanese English education system will be familiar with this phrase. I now know that it is nationwide. In the beginning, this “hey guys” meant nothing to me. In my first classes, I noticed that at the start of class, and sometimes throughout class, when there was individual work or group time, I would hear this, and I could tell the students wanted me to hear this, this “Hey guys.” And at first I thought, maybe they were imitating me, because I did typically refer to the class as a whole as “guys” and when I want to get the attention of the whole class, I would sometimes say, “hey guys”, although I have since switched to “hey kiddos” being more gender neutral, more fun, and less likely to induce a “hey guys” in response. At first I thought it was because of this, but I don’t say hey guys all that often, and the students were saying it in every class, and in the hallways, whenever they ran into me, and it was just too frequent for them to be imitating me, I knew it had to come from something. I just didn’t know what. They would say it, and I knew they were looking from some reaction from me, but I don’t really internet, and so their meme fell short, and eventually, when they saw that Steven sensei doesn’t get the joke, they stopped using it. But sometime soon after I met Parker, which was now many months into being in Japan, he brought this up. He said to me, one day, “Do your students ever say, ‘Hey guys?'” And I said, “All the time.” And he said, “Do you know where that’s from?” And I said, “No.” And he said, “It’s from PornHub.” (Disclaimer: Parker is not a PornHub user.) And that was the day I found out that I was teaching a small army of PornHub fans. Apparently, at the beginning of videos, there is an ad, and the ad starts off with a woman, saying, “Hey guys, we have a gift for you.” That phrase has now since become a litmus test for seeing whether your ALT watches PornHub or not, although now that the meme has spread across the country, many ALTs know about it without having seen the ad. It’s a quick and effective way to try and elicit some kind of reaction from an ALT, and a cheap and easy way to get your lads to giggle. I’m sure it’s thrilling for them, to be sitting them, ALT walking into class, and thinking, “Ok, time to hit him with the ‘hey guys’, let’s see what he does!” I should not have been surprised that all this time my high school guys had been reciting the lines of a PornHub advertisement to me, but given how widespread it was, I didn’t think it’d be something that sinister. It really felt like every damn guy in the school had said it to me at one point or another. I thought it was just a line from a popular video game, like Fortnite or something. But, I still wasn’t too surprised. When it came to crass, I learned quickly with them. I could give a few examples of what I mean by that, involving trees, and hand gestures, and words that I would be ashamed to write here, but to keep this family friendly, I’ll hold off.

You may be thinking, Steven, are you trying to keep your blog family friendly? We’re already talking about PornHub. And I’m not really trying to keep it family friendly, but PornHub is something that will probably come up in your family. Everyone in your family, if they have any access to the internet, and any slight curiosity, must know about it. It’s 2021. PornHub is here and with us. And here’s the thing about PornHub, which is really what I think about when I think about all of my high schoolers being PornHub fiends, is that PornHub ranks quite highly on the list of companies that propagate pain and suffering. PornHub actually profits off of it. Pain and suffering is worked into the PornHub business model, along with straight up illegal activity. PornHub ruins lives. People have committed suicide because of PornHub. PornHub is a horrible company. PornHub is everything that is wrong with capitalism. If you’re interested, read Nickolas Kristoff’s New York Times PornHub pieces. While you could debate about whether free and easy access to porn is a good thing or not, there is no debate to be had over PornHub being one of the worst companies on this planet. So, of course, I’m not happy that all of my students are quoting PornHub advertisements, but I do get it. PornHub being the destroyer of lives that it is, the “Hey guys” thing, it’s funny. They are funny guys. And, they are high school guys. With phones. They’re still maturing young bucks, and they can’t be expected to know (although I would expect them to care) about the evils of PornHub. I did dabble with the idea of letting them know, choosing PornHub as the focus for my next edition of the school newspaper, The Ozu Times, and I even had a great title worked out for it. “Hey Guys, We Have A Problem.” In the small font below the main title: It’s PornHub. I thought that was clever. But I don’t think it was the move. That may have been quite an awkward paper for the homeroom teachers to hand out. It wouldn’t have survived the chain of approval anyway. All of my papers have to go through a rigorous approval process, passing up that long chain of command, from my supervisor, to the head of the English department, and the several head honchos of the school, all the way up to the principal. That would have been a fun conversation to have. Still, someone’s got to educate these kids, and if we ever talk about it again, I’ll let them know what I think. “PornHub, bad company. Very bad company. Black company.” Even those dinguses can understand that.

So that’s why I’d love it if 大津強いね！ could become a new catchphrase. It would be a much more wholesome one. It doesn’t have the edge, of the “hey guys”, or the nationwide recognition, or the appeal of being in English, so I don’t imagine it would last, but it’d be nice if it did, if I had inspired a quip to replace the dreaded “hey guys” with.

I now have a little collection of one offs I’d like to share with you. In lieu of any greater story.

I have taken to walking a certain route through my neighborhood. There is a park not too far from my apartment complex, called Shouwaen. It’s named after the Shouwa era (昭和), which was, I believe, three eras ago. This era is the Reiwa (令和) era, the last was Heisei (平成), and then before that, Shouwa. Do you know about this? In Japan, depending on the establishment you’re working with, you may write the date as being, for example, the day I write this particular section of this particular blog post, 10日6月2021年, or, 10日6月令和3年. When I submit paperwork, the year is typically written as the year in the era, and not the, what is it called, the A.D. year. The first year in any era is the 元年 (gannen), basically meaning ‘beginning year’, which I am proud to say I was here for Reiwa’s. That was a fun year, because I got to write 元年 on everything. If I leave on the last year of Reiwa, then it would be a convenient way to convey to both the Japanese and anyone who is familiar with the Japanese eras, how long I had lived in Japan for, if they ever ask me, as I could just respond, “令和”. The park is called 昭和園, Shouwaen, and it’s a nice park. It sits up on a hill, and from the top of the hill, when there are breaks in the trees, you can look out over your dominion, that is Ozu valley, and see all the way to the farthest ranges to the south, which I was admiring the other day, and wondering just how many tens or hundreds of kilometers away they were. They’re so far off that if they didn’t have just a jagged ridgeline, you might think they were clouds. Just a soft blue hardly distinguishable from the sky itself. There’s just something special about mountains. I remember talking to a guy, in Tokyo, and we had a special affinity, both being readers, and wearing the exact same pair of glasses, his name was Patrick, and we were talking about what drew us to Japan, and I mentioned the mountains, and he said that he thought he couldn’t or wouldn’t want to live somewhere where there weren’t any mountains. I’m inclined to agree. And when it comes to mountains, Ozu has a particular appeal. There is just something awe inspiring about living in the shadow of the largest active volcano in Japan. And that reminds me of another conversation that I had recently. On my last day, if I had one final day left to live, I think I’d invite everyone I knew, or didn’t know, anybody at all who wanted to come to someone’s final day party, to an incredible display of debauchery on top of Mt. Aso. Inside of the cauldera, it’s quite flat, and spacious, grassy fields ringed with rock. And inside the cauldera, over in the back, on the north side, is the opening. There must be a scientific word for that. The mouth of the volcano. I would host an enormous party, with a stage, live bands, horse riding, fireworks, copious amounts of alcohol, amateur sumo wrestling, whatever, and then, at the end of the day, I’d give a speech, throw on some leather, hop on a motorcycle, and with music blaring, and fireworks blasting, and to the cheering of all, drive off a ramp into firey doom of Mt. Aso. It is the most thrilling way to die I can think of within 50 kilometers of me. But, in sharing this idea, this is how I learned that in the mouths of all volcanoes are not open pools of bubbling lava. I guess I thought that they were. Apparently a crust forms over the top. You may think that I’m stupid for not knowing that, but I didn’t. I imagined that they were all boiling, frothing basins of red hot lava, and I’m more than a little disappointed that they’re not. I think the distance from the edge of the mouth the crust is so far, though, that I’d still die from the impact, when I jumped off into it. So, it doesn’t totally ruin my plan, but I did imagine more of a burning, melting sensation, in my final moments, then just a sudden splat. For me, it’s more appealing to disintegrate, and leave no trace behind, then to be splattered everywhere. しょうがないね. But it would be thrilling nonetheless.

Going off of the volcanoes not all being pits of flame thing, I had another similar revelation this past week, and one that might be easily used to accuse me of being an idiot. Do you know where your stomach is? I’ve asked several people this question, recently, as I’ve been wondering if this is more or less common knowledge, and I’m the only one who didn’t know, or if there are people like me, who just thought they knew where it was, and were living a lie. Everyone that I’ve asked has known. That doesn’t necessarily mean that most people know. I could just be surrounded by some very smart people. I think what’s more likely is that somehow I’ve made it this far in life without managing to see any of the infinity of diagrams displaying the arrangement of the internal organs in the body, or if I had, I’m sure I had, I had entirely forgotten them, and come up with my own diagram, existing only in my head, and not in reality. The other day I saw one of these diagrams, and had to look at several, because I did not trust that single diagram, as it was so entirely different from my mental one, but they all seemed to show the same thing, that your stomach is about in the middle of your torso. That single fact has blown my mind every day for the past week. It still does. Your stomach is approximately between your belly button and nipples, and situated somewhat to the left. If you had asked me where the stomach was, before my awakening, I would have pointed to my belly button. I thought it was right about there. Because that’s where the sounds come from. The tummy-grumblings. Also, I thought that the lungs were maybe 3x larger than they actually are. I thought that I had just an incredible set of lungs. What really blew my mind, looking at one of those diagrams, was how massive your intenstines are. I really had no idea. I don’t even like thinking about how massive the intenstines are. And the fact that my stomach is nearly in my chest. Don’t even get me started on the kidneys. I should not bring up the fact that I was a biology major, now. But, in my defense, I never took anatomy, and have never been all that interested in anatomy. I did take a zoology course, and cut open a number of poor, formaldehyde-soaked dead things, for science, and I didn’t really enjoy any of that.

So that’s a one-off. You could maybe say that was a two-off. Let’s keep going.

Here, these are all related. I can give you several recent of examples of amusing miscommunications. We can go in order of recency, reverse chronological order, if you like. The most recent of these happened just last week. I spent most of the Ozu High School’s championship soccer game in conversation with Uramoto sensei, who I have brought up before. He is one of the two vice-principals at Ozu. This is a confusing thing. There are two 教頭先生 (kyoutou sensei) at Ozu. I have had many a conversation about what the roles of the three individuals that sit in a row in front of the main cluster of teachers desks, where the normies sit, are, and here they are. There is a 教頭先生 (kyoutou sensei)、a 副校長先生 (fukukouchou sensei), and then another guy (or girl). Isn’t this sad, that I still don’t know, all three roles, and I’m sure I’ve been told many times now. That third role is the head of the teaching staff, but I don’t have the official name of the title. Anyway, the difficulty is in how to say kyoutou sensei in English. Fukukouchou sensei is obviously vice principal. That was obvious, wasn’t it? Well, now, wait a minute. I was going to say that we also call the kyoutou sensei vice principal, and that’s the confusing thing, but now I’m looking at those kanji, in 教頭, 教 being teach, and 頭 being head, and, well.. That certainly seems to be head teacher, doesn’t it.

I don’t want to write about that anymore. Let’s move on.

This is my blog. I don’t have to do that to myself.

I was having a nice conversation with Uramoto sensei. He is an incredibly nice man. I wrote before, I’m sure, that he was one of my favorites at Ozu. This man works about eighty hours a week. Seventy to eighty hours a week. They cut down on cleaning time at Ozu, and now only clean twice a week. But, there’s still trash to be collected in the teacher’s room. So who collects the trash? Yes yes, our man Uramoto. He shows up at around 7, and leaves at nine or ten, each night, and he commutes at least an hour every day. That’s not the only reason he’s working so late. That’s just an example, one of the many. I actually have no idea what he does, but he is always doing something. The BBC recently posted an article about overwork, overwork being the working of 55 hours or more a week, being a greater cause of death than malaria. More people die from overwork than malaria. I didn’t mention this report to Uramoto sensei, when he’s telling me all of this, because I don’t want to stress him out anymore, because I’m sure that would be stressful, to be stressed from working too much, and to then be stressed about your stress, because it’s killing you. But, I’m worried about that man. If anyone dies from overwork, and I don’t want anyone to, of course, but if anyone does, I’d really rather it not be Uramoto sensei. I would like him to enjoy a nice, relaxing, fulfilling retirement, with fingerpainting, long walks on the beach, and bottomless mimosas. I spent most of that game, not watching the game, but rather talking to Uramoto sensei, who was entertaining me with stories of his family trip to see the giant hanging fish (we had both been there on the same day, it turns out) and of eighty-hour work weeks. It came around that I started asking him about 熊本弁 (Kumamoto ben), which I like to ask the older teachers about, because they know some good ben. Ben being dialect. In Japan, there are strong regional dialects, and although they are weakening with the younger generations, I think you can still tell where someone is from based on how they speak, in the vocabulary and grammar that they use, and perhaps in the intonation as well. There is a great video on this, that I watched the other day, of a guy speaking in all 47 prefectures’ dialects, with the standard Japanese (which is, Tokyo Japanese?) captioned below, and I couldn’t understand any of it, including the Kumamoto ben. So, that partially inspired me to ask Uramoto sensei. This is one reason why it is nearly impossible to understand older people here. Another reason, applying specifically to the men, is that they move their mouths so little, and have such deep voices, and speak so quickly, that to the inexperienced ear, their language is not Japanese, but some kind of ancient, tonal grunting. I don’t want to call them cavemen. It’s not that bad. But it might help you understand what I mean. Over time, their speech has just gradually devolved into being the most effecient, with the least amount of effort, required. The higher your rank, in the Japanese world, the shorter your sentences can be, and once you’ve reached the top, you hardly have to speak at all. At least, you’ll never have to form a complete sentence again. I’m getting at the Kumamoto ben, because I asked Uramoto sensei, if he could teach me any, and he did. That day, as it has been recently, was a scorcher, and Uramoto sensei taught me the proper Kumamotoan way to say, “It’s hot.” And there are two ways. One, is a general change that you can make to any adjective, by just dropping the i at the end, and adding a ka, and drawing it out. So, if I say, atsui, which is, it’s hot, I would say, atsuka—–. Or, for samui, it’s cold, samuka—-. Then, there is the real Kumamoto version, which may be an entirely new word, and not an alteration of existing ones, which is, nu-ka—. Only real Kumamotoans know this. He told me. The real ben speakers. After the game was over, (Ozu won 4-0, I think I missed every goal), equipped with my new ben, I mosied back to the classroom, and came over to my desk, and saw Kusuyama sensei in her seat next to mine. As I pulled back my seat, to sit in it, I said to Kusuyama sensei, who is from Kumamoto, I should add, “Phew! Yu-ka—ne—-!” She turns to me, “Yu-ka—?” She was suprised to hear my Kumamoto ben, I was sure. I repeated, “Kyou wa (today), yu-ka—-ne!” She’s not surprised. She’s confused. She’s repeating to herself, “Yuka? Yuka?” And now I’m confused, and give an uncertain, “Yu-ka?” I’m now wondering if either Uramoto sensei taught me something so esoteric that even the average real Kumamotoan doesn’t know it, or I’ve got something wrong, when Kusuyama sensei’s eyes light up, and she says, “Oh, Nu-ka-ne!” And I reply, “Yes, yes! Nu-ka!” And she starts laughing. She says, “Ah, nu-kane. Kumamoto ben, hai, hai. I thought you were trying to say your butt hurt from sitting in the gym. Yuka means floor, ne.” And then I realized that I had just come over to her, and been saying, “Floor! Today, floor!”

Another recent and entertaining miscommunication. I was walking my walk through the neighborhood, returning, when, as I turned the corner at an intersection, I ran into two of my students (or, they seemed to act like my students. At least they seemed to know me, although I couldn’t tell that I’d ever seen their faces.) They said hi, and told me they we’re going to the grocery store. And I said, you know, that’s great, and have fun. And I specifically said the words, “Have fun!” And our conversation was going along smoothly, until I uttered these words. At that, the lead boy, on his bike, stumbled. He looked at me uncertainly. “iPhone?” He replied. I tried again. “Have fun!” He said. “iPhone.” I repeated once again. “Have fun!” He said to me, reaching for his pocket, “持っています.” Motteimasu. (I’ve got one.) He then turns to his friend behind him for help. His friend is just as confused. “Headphones?” He ventures. They look to me again. And I can’t just keep repeating “Have fun!” at them, as much as I’d like to, as I’ve already carried it on long enough, and if they haven’t gotten it now, the chances are extremely low that they will get it, and so I said, “楽しんでください!” Tanoshinde kudasai. Have a nice time. And they said, “Ah! Thank you!” As I was walking back to my apartment, I practiced saying “have fun” and “iPhone” with Japanese pronunciation, and they are similar. I get why they thought that. But, wouldn’t it be hilarious if I was really just standing there, at the end of our conversation, and repeating, “iPhone! iPhone!” That’s as ridiculous as me sitting down next to Kusuyama sensei and going, “Floor! Floor!” iPhone is just a standard American goodbye. We are that proud of them. It’s a way to remind each other of our innovative and enterprising spirit.

Here’s another recent one. These happen often, weekly at least. This was a few weeks ago. I was in the office kitchen. Just two days ago I asked 森田先生 (Morita sensei, Forest Field) what you call this room, because I’d been wondering about it. She didn’t know either. I keep thinking there is a specific name for this kind of room. Is it a staff room? Is it a break room? Is it just a kitchen? Kitchen doesn’t quite feel right. It’s weird to me to say that you have a kitchen in the middle of your office. And no one really cooks there anyways. The most cooking that happens is heating up water for instant ramen. That’s all. So calling it a kitchen is really a stretch, although you could cook there if you wanted to. They have the equipment for it. I should really cook a nice meal in there on one of my lunch breaks. I do get fifty minutes. That’s more than enough time to cook something nice up. I think I would just be in everyone’s way if I did that. I would get an incredible amount of attention, as every teacher who popped in there to get their lunch, or drink, or make coffee, or microwave something, would see me sauteeing some onions in a pan, and ask me, as they shove me aside to open up the fridge door, or squeeze behind me to get at the microwave, what, are you actually cooking something? I could bring an apron and a chef’s hat. They would all get a big kick out of that. This is starting to sound like a really great idea. A few weeks ago, I guess we’re going with kitchen, in this office kitchen, I was in it, and I ran into Yokogawa sensei (Sideways River, 横川) (it’s a small kitchen, it’s unavoidable that we run into each other) (anyone who enters the kitchen with you must be at the minimum greeted, no matter how unwilling the two parties. It’s just the standard etiquette of such a small room. On few occasions I have said nothing and it’s quite awkward. When two and only two humans find themselves together in such close proximity, you really have to make the choice to speak or not, because there’s no way that either of you could pretend at that point that you didn’t notice each other, or were thinking about something else. It’s not a great room for misanthropes, or the socially inept.) I struck up a conversation with Yokogawa sensei, and at one point, unprompted, she said to me, “Today, chili.” Now, this is harder to convey, because I have to type that word, with one kind of spelling, and then you’ll know what she was saying, based on the spelling, but there are two words that she could have been saying, right. Chili, and chilly. Seeing as we were in the kitchen, and I had just finished asking another sensei what they had brought for lunch, and she was herself standing in front of me with lunch in hand, I thought she must be talking about her lunch, and I was shook, because I’ve never heard any Japanese person mention chili up to this point, and I had really almost entirely forgotten about chili, and so the fact that Yokogawa sensei was having chili for lunch, not only that she had made chili, but brought it in for lunch, which was so outside of the standard range of answers when you ask a Japanese high school teacher what they brought for lunch was, that it I shook me, and I said, “What, really? Chili? You made chili? I didn’t know that anyone in Japan ate chili!” And she says, “No, no. Today, it’s cold. The weather is chilly.”

I have more. Here’s the last one, of the recents. I was talking with Ryoka, my Japanese friend in Malaysia, known as “Malaysia girl” to many, about whatever we talk about, and for some reason I mentioned Jeff Bezos. I think I was quizzing her on famous Americans. She may have said that she didn’t know that many. I threw Jeff Bezos out there, and she said, “べーぞ？(Behzo?) Yeah, I know べーぞ。べーぞ pizza, ne!” She thought I was saying basil. And then I thought about two things, which is, one, a Jeff Bezos pizza, and two, a Jeff Bezos, except his name is instead Jeff Basil. What would be on a Jeff Bezos pizza? What set of ingredients suggest world domination? Or maybe each pizza just has a nice full headshot of Jeff Basil posted on the underside of the box lid. It could just be Jeff’s favorite kind of pizza. These are all good suggestions. I should ask her about Elon Musk.

In this same conversation, Ryoka told me a story. This is the story of the baby’s ぐー。(Gu.) I told her that that’s the sound that babies make, in English. The sound of an English speaking baby. Goo goo gaa gaa. The sound of a Japanese speaking baby: ngyaa ngyaa. んぎゃーんぎゃー. I would now like to hear baby sounds in all languages. The story of the baby’s ぐー is this. And you have to write it with that little ー. If you don’t, it’s quite confusing for the Japanese. They won’t know what you’re talking about.ぐー means rock, and it also means fist, and is used in rock paper scissors (グーとパ、別れましょう！) I think that’s what they say, although I’m now wondering why they say that, because they’re saying, rock and paper, let’s pick one, and why would you ever pick rock in such a situation, unless you are a true rock man, or you would like to lose. I’ll have to ask about this. (Here’s the answer: This is used for dividing teams. And that makes sense, because 別れる means divide up, and there are only two options. 説明 (setsume, explanation) courtesy of Mr. Parker Junior.) But, anyways, グー is fist. Babies are born with closed hands, I guess, with closed fists, and in each fist, they are holding something. In one hand, they hold the name of the person who will be the most important to them in their lives. The name of the person who will have the greatest influence on their life. The person you marry, for example. Or Shia LeBouf, if you’ve been particularly struck by his “Just Do It!” video. In the other hand, they hold the name of the Pokémon that will lead them to become the next greatest Pokémon master. Ash, or, Satoshi (Japanese name) for example, was obviously holding the name Pikachu. I’m just kidding about this. In the other hand, they hold their dream. Their future dream. Their greatest achievement. So it could actually be the name of the Pokémon that will guide them to absolute victory. I think that’s right, that they hold their dream. I was tickled by the idea of all Japanese people being born with the name of a spirit Pokémon in their hands that I may have forgotten how the legend really goes. This is a Japanese legend (is this kind of thing a legend?), and I thought it was interesting. People spend their lives then trying to catch what they let go of when they were first born. Just a few days ago, while I was on the phone, I caught a mosquito one-handed, and I was so startled that I may have just caught a mosquito one-handed, pretty nonchalantly, like you might reach out to pick your watch up off your desk, that the first thing I did, before even giving my hand a squeeze or anything, was just open my hand back up, to confirm that I really had caught it, and as I watched it fly up and out of my hand, upon opening, I knew that not only had I just caught a mosquito one-handed, but I had also just let it go. And this was in my apartment, where I am now sleeping in a tent, on some nights, to protect myself, although it has recently gotten so hot, that inside of that tent I am being cooked alive, and now have to make the difficult choice, every night, of either falling asleep in an uncomfortable pool of sweat, or while slapping myself in the face and head every five, ten, fifteen minutes, until finally becoming so fatigued that mosquitoes are allowed to drink even the blood of my face freely. I think they are learning, though, that if they just fly down to my feet, my legs, even my arms, they can have a free meal, and avoid all potential danger. This is a long story, the story between the mosquitoes and I. But why I say this is because, if I do end up catching my dream, however I end up catching it, I hope I don’t do what I did with the mosquito, and find myself so startled that I caught it, that I open up hand to see if I did, and end up letting it go. Maybe it’s better that I didn’t kill that mosquito.

The above is a recording of Malaysia Girl imitating a Japanese baby. I thought you’d like to have the audio. Actually, you kind of need it. I really have no idea how you read ngyaa ngyaa to yourself. I read it the way I hear the baby voice, but I already know what the sound is, and now you do too. You can compare this to the sound you thought the baby was making, when you read that ngyaa ngyaa. Were you close? This is the sound of a Japanese baby. I’m really proud of including this audio file, by the way. This is a major milestone in this blog’s history. A groundbreaking post.

You know what, here is the American version. This is me. It’s not fair that my American readers get the Japanese baby, and my Japanese don’t get the American. This is the sound of the American baby. The first audio files uploaded to this blog are twenty year olds making baby sounds. That’s the kind of blog we’re running here, I guess.

We’re doing good, here. I think I’ve told you a lot of good things. We’ve made some baby sounds. There are only two more things I think I’d like to tell you before we wrap this post up.

I am changing the name of my blog. $30 is the price that I have to pay for being an uncreative and unoriginal monkey. I came up with the name for this blog, ManInJapan, using about the same amount of time and energy it takes to sneeze, and am being punished for it. I can’t stand searching ManInJapan and seeing tens, hundreds, of other ManInJapan accounts, and being reminded that I am one of them, one of this horde of incredibly uncreative and unoriginal men, who realized that yes they are a man, and that the words man and Japan sound nice together, and they are in fact a man in Japan, and so man in Japan is obviously a great name, except for the fact that basically any man in Japan can put this together, and then only the ones who are not totally uncreative or unoriginal realize that everyone else will use this too, and then opt for something better, that takes a little more than a single second to come up with. ManInJapan was the first name I really thought of, and while it does have a great ring to it, I see my options as being only this: either I continue to exist among this horde of ManInJapan accounts, and achieve ultimate dominance, establishing myself as THE true ManInJapan, or I simply change my name, to something that is just slightly more specific to me, and distinguishes me in some way from the ManInJapan army. The second option is just easier, and I also can’t really stand being ManInJapan anymore, and so I’m going to change the name to hakuchoumusuko. 白鳥息子. This is, 白鳥, being swan, hakuchou, white bird, and musuko, 息子, being son. This is my last name. We can argue about how much more creative this is or isn’t. I think it’s still more creative than ManInJapan. It’s also personal. And, this is one of the most reliable jokes in my self-introduction lesson, which has now become a half standup comedy routine, as something about it just really gets the Japanese, me converting my name to Japanese, the way that I convert theirs to English. I’m lucky enough to be one of the very few who can do this with their last names. Yet more evidence that my relationship with Japan is a fated one. I say it like this, in class. “And my last name is Swanson.” And some of them will say, Swanson. And I’ll say, “Do you know what a swan is?” At higher levels, hakuchou is said immediately. At lower levels, it might take a few tries. At the lowest levels, only silence, and then if someone gets it, they are immediately recognized by the class as being the new representative English guru. Then I say, “How about son?” And at the higher levels, musuko is usually said. At the lower levels, taiyou is said first, which is sun, and then my Japanese sensei sidekick will say, no, not that one. At the lowest levels, again, silence, and if anyone does know it, English guru. Then, once they know what we’re talking about, the punchline. “So, my name is Steven Hakuchoumusuko.” And cue big laughs. The first time I ever told this joke, it was entirely spontaneous, as these all are, it popped out after probably the twenty or thirtieth self-intro lesson, and it got big laughs, and even a compliment by one of the senseis after the lesson. “I liked your hakuchou musuko joke.” And I thought, “Was that a joke?” So I knew that was a keeper. I think the evolution of my self-intro lesson parallels the evolution of an organism, or really, the evolution of anything at all. Evolution doesn’t change. The process of evolution. Evolution itself is obviously quite dynamic. I try it over and over, making small alterations, spontaneous mutations, and if they are effective (get laughs) they stay, and if they aren’t, they don’t, and over time, my lesson is improved. Actually, my first self-intro lesson was just a pathetic mess, compared to what we have today, but it took, what, some 70+ runs to get the point where it will reliably entertain the average high school aged Kumamotoan. I’ve heard that some standup comedians have a no phone policy when they perform at weekly clubs, when they’re trying out new material, because they’re taking risks, and they don’t know if something will bomb or not, and they don’t want it getting out and bombing on the world stage, the internet. What we see in their final performances, their tours, their TV specials, are the products of a long period of tempering. My self-intro lesson has gone through the same process. I’m glad there are no recordings of my first run throughs.

Now that we’re on jokes, we can tie this last thing in perfectly. Parker recently told a good joke, when we were out planting rice a few weekends ago, as we do. Well, as he does. Once in awhile. You don’t have to plant rice all that frequently. Just a few times a year. We were planting some rice, and having some nice conversations, with our new friends, Tomomi san, and Tsuki san, and Osajima san, and Parker, at one point, asked Tomomi san, “What’s your favorite soda?” Tomomi san is quite a bubbly person. Really, she’s just a like a soda. It seems that her natural response to any interaction is laughter. When we first rendezvoused, in a Family Mart parking lot, made our introductions and had a short conversation, and were heading off to go to the scene of the action, I remember that Tomomi san was laughing, still laughing, as she opened her car door and sat down in the driver’s seat. She was still so tickled. It also struck me that she seemed to think her thoughts out loud, and I say all this just to give you a sense of why and how she responded to Parker’s question, “What’s your favorite soda?” with a lengthy, vocal, internal debate over whether she liked soda at all, and what constitutes as soda, and out of those, what she did like, which all culminated with her saying, “In America, I had a strawberry drink. I think it was strawberry.” And Parker says, “Fanta?” And she says no. “Strawberry..” They’re standing, and here, I’m kneeling, taking a rest, staring down into the deep chocolate mud of the rice paddy, listening, and I also thought it must be Fanta, and so if it’s not Fanta, well, it could be Cherry Coke, which has a similar fruity taste, right, and it’s a good one, at one point was one of my favorite sodas, and so I say, “Cherry Coke?” And she says, “So so so!” (Yes yes, that one!) This all took at least thirty seconds, and some several back and forth exchange, and you can tell throughout all of it, that Parker really just wanted Tomomi san to say a soda, any soda. He says to her, again, now that we’ve found our answer, “So what’s your favorite soda?” And Tomomi san says, “Cherry Coke.” And Parker says, “Souda.” そうだ。Do you get it? Is any joke funny if you have to explain it? Not really. That might be why this joke is failing so hard on the student circuit. But I’ll explain it. It is more apparent to Japanese speakers, or it should be. そうだ (souda) can mean, “Is that so?” Or “That’s so.” depending on your intonation. So, you know, you ask what their favorite soda is, or favorite anything is, just ask any question, and souda is a common and acceptable response. Except in this situation, you know, it’s also soda, and that’s what we’re talking about, so you’re responding with the same word.. yeah, you get it now, you must. Is that funny? I think that it’s funny. I like it a lot. I’ve liked it so much, that I taken it into the classroom. Every class I have, we start off by just saying hi. I try to warm them up a bit, give them a little pre-lesson entertainment, if I can, just check the pulse of the class, give them a little energy if they need it. It’s a good time to try and make them laugh. If you can secure a laugh right at the beginning, that’s big. I had found major success with a joke, recently, this joke, “What is Michael Jackson’s favorite color?” Everybody knows Michael Jackson. I give them a few seconds, to float their random guesses, and potential explanations, before hitting them with the punchline, “Ao!” Said like Michael Jackson in a Michael Jackson song. You can imagine it, right. This is funny because that sound, ao, あお、is blue, in Japanese. It’s a good joke. It kills. And this has been hard for me to nail, this Michael Jackson Ao! sound. Sometimes the sound that comes out of me is just so strange. And sometimes my voice cracks. It’s also hard for me to get the volume right. I don’t want to scream it at the kids, but you need a certain amount of vocal energy to make a sound like that. Following up that joke, this past week, I’ve been trying the soda joke. Already, this joke has a problem, in that most students don’t know what soda is. So, they look at each other, saying, “Soda? Soda?” Someone might know. They will come to a general understanding, and my sensei sidekick or I will explain, and already the joke is losing steam, and answers will start to trickle out, but it’s all uncoordinated, and the students may not be listening at all, now, when I start trying to reply, “Souda.” to them. It’s impossible for me to tell whether they understand the joke or not, as well, when I reply, “Souda.” because they almost never laugh. When it has all gone off perfectly, and I’ve asked the question, and a student has understood, and has given me an appropriate answer, and at an appropriate volume, that the class is aware of what’s happening, and I can then reply, “souda.” even when all conditions are met, this joke has failed. It brings at most, feeble chuckles, or some grins. Nothing at all like the success I was having with the Michael Jackson joke. It’s not the reception I was expecting. On the second day of my telling of this joke, of me running it through the circuit, I was at Ozu, and it was my third class of the day. I said, to the class, again, “Can I ask you guys a question?” They say, yes. Some students don’t know what that question in itself means. Usually they do. I only need one student’s permission to go ahead with it. I say, “What’s your favorite soda?” This class, again, needs to know what soda is. Some students start talking to each other about it. Some students are looking at me in complete silence. Some students are thinking. Very few students mumble answers. No one speaks confidently enough for me to reply to so that the class will catch the joke. I ask one student in the back, then, after this initial confusion phase has passed, and we are all on the same page, that I’m asking them about soda, and what their favorite soda is, and they’ve had time to think of an answer, I ask one guy in the back, my man Nakamura kun, who I know can give me a straight answer, I ask him, “What’s your favorite soda?” He says, “No soda.” He’s a soccer player. I think, dammit Nakamura kun. I’ve wasted enough time at this point, it’s probably already been five minutes, and I’m supposed to be doing some kind of lesson, with a plan and purpose and everything. I turn to the front, looking down at the girls right in front of me. I recognize a girl (don’t flame me, I don’t know her name, I’m sorry, but we’re good friends, I swear) who I’m good friends with, have had many a conversation with, told many a joke to, pulled many a weed with, during cleaning time, and who is not a shy girl, thinking she is another surefire, and I ask her, “What’s your favorite soda?” And suddenly, this girl freezes up. You would think she just stepped out on the stage of Japan’s Got Talent and was asked to perform something. She’s looking straight down, embarrassed. She will not be giving me the name of any soda. I cross the room. I’m desperate now. Soccer player in the front, he’s an outspoken guy, he will give me an answer. I ask, for the sixth or seventh time now, “What’s your favorite soda?” He thinks for a second. “Mmm, water.” God dammit. I almost threw my hands up in the air. I think I did, actually. I look at a guy in the center of the room now. Someone has to answer this question. We’ve come too far to let it go. He is another soccer player. We’ve worked out together in the gym. We’re bros. He has to answer this question. I look at him, with a look that says, “Just say a soda, kid. Please. Just say the name of any soda.” And he says, “Ramune.” And that is the name of a soda. And finally, I get to do it. We can do the joke. And I say, just to confirm it with everyone, that his answer was an acceptable one, that it was a soda, “Your favorite soda is ramune?” And he says, “Yes.” And I say, “Souda.” This is the big moment. How hard did the joke fail? I look around. There are a few snickers. Some realization of the joke. One or two smiles. Most students seemed to have resigned themselves to the antics and are waiting to be told when it’s time for the real lesson. Ramune boy lets out a small laugh. Compared with previous classes, this class loved it. I let out a massive sigh. I’m just glad to have gotten it out, at this point, and we could move on. But, I had to let them know, I thought they deserved a little more of an explanation, about what I had just put them through. I said, you know guys, I’ve told this joke three times today. And in the first two classes, not a single person laughed. And of course, that made them laugh. A surefire way to get a class to laugh at your joke is to tell them about how other classes didn’t laugh at the joke. I will do this often when I have a joke that fails. In this way, even if your joke is an utter dud, you are still guaranteed to get a laugh. In failure, it succeeds. They could tell I was frustrated with the failings of this joke, and one student offered his reasoning for it, saying, sympathetically, “難しい.” Muzukashii. It’s a difficult joke.

I told this joke again, completing the circuit, this Friday, at Shoyo, with Kaneto sensei’s first year class. Kaneto sensei is a new teacher I work with. He’s a fun guy. Likes soccer, and drinking beer. He’s a graduate student at Kumamoto University. We get along well. I told the joke to the first years, was met with again, what could be described as a lukewarm reception at best, and Kaneto sensei, in wrapping this up, says to the class, “American joke.” And this is a funny thing. When I tell a joke, and the joke fails, my Japanese friends will often respond with, “Ah, American joke, ne.” What I think this is, even if the joke isn’t American, as in this joke, the favorite soda joke, because you know, this is not an American joke at all, this is totally a Japanese joke, because no American who doesn’t speak Japanese would get the joke, I think it is their way of trying to make the joke teller feel better. If I can conjecture to capture what they mean to express by saying this, “American joke,” they’re trying to say, “This joke is not funny to me, or us, Japanese. But we’re not saying it’s not funny. It probably does great with the American crowd. Just not with us.” I appreciate that, even though none of the jokes I tell them are really American jokes, and in truth they’re just bad jokes. But they’re giving me an out. Yet another example of how the Japanese are a very courteous people.

Blog post end. That’s it for this collection of one offs. It’s 27 degrees Celcius here, 蒸し暑い (mushiatsui) as hell, (humid), and I can’t sit here and sweat any longer. When I sit, my legs get so incredibly sweaty. This is the season where I spend every day at work wishing I could wear shorts at work. I tried to tell them once, that I’d like to wear shorts, (the head honchos) but I accidentally used the word for pants (I was a different Japanese speaker then) and they must have come away from that thinking, well, Steven really enjoys wearing pants, and it’s interesting that he’s asking us about wearing pants, because he is wearing pants at this very moment. He is just an interesting guy.

Final quote. I don’t know where it came from. I think it was from Emerson’s Essays. I also don’t know who Zoraster is, but he’s got a cool name. But I like it. And in these times, we could all use an extra dose of perseverance, I think.

“‘To the persevering mortal,’ said Zoraster, ‘the blessed Immortals are swift.'”

Jya mata ne! じゃまたね！

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！

Hey there kiddos.

I know, you’re not kids. I just like saying that and I can’t use howdy ho buckaroos every time, or I’ll wear it out. I wanted to write that sentence as, “lest I wear it out,” but I thought that would just be too old fashioned to be appropriate here. No one says lest anymore, but our man Herman Melville does, and I’m sure I wanted to write it that way because I’ve been reading the ol’ Moby Dick, and actually just finished it today. That was my work today, finally finishing that whale of a book, and this is my other work – writing this story for you! Because today is the final day of my little spring break, the sixth of the six days of nenkyuu (work leave) I took, when hard pressed to, as before this I had 26 days to take, and come July, 14 of them will go up in smoke (and be replaced with more) if I don’t use them. Like Mr. Parker Junior, I’m stingy with my days, and I’ve been hoarding them, because I don’t know what to do with them, and it’s easier to just go in to work and spend a day dinking around, busying myself with distracting the other teachers, and pestering them with Japanese questions, and giving them packets of wasabi; but this was spring break, and there are only so many days I can get by doing nothing, and so I took my nenkyuu, and forced myself to come up with some plans. I’m glad I did, as I end it having committed several acts of genius, and coming away from it with some quality writing material, and so I am able to sit down here at my desk on this beautiful Tuesday in Ozu town, on this sunny afternoon, when I would ordinarily be eyeing the clock, and wondering why I stick around for the last five minutes of the day, as my leaving time is officially 4:05, but does anyone know that but me? I wonder. I know I’m rambling a bit here, but, you see I’ve got the time, and the confidence, because I’ve already written this post out, more or less. I did it last night, the old fashioned way again, pencil and paper (I prefer pen but after three successive trips to Trial where I forgot to buy ink, I’ve run out, and am rediscovering the magic of the pencil). I hope you’ve had some acts of genius, or at least some inklings of genius, in days since the last post. My genius told me to take a solo trip to Kurume, a city to the north, which was the first time I’ve solo traveled, and went more or less how I thought it would – I made some friends, I spent too much money, I got sunburned, and saw things that I’ve seen many times before. The best part of it was the wild Japanese, and that is really what I wanted to get out of it; that and a ride on the shinkansen (the bullet train). The best parts of that trip were the parts where I was going from A to B, missing train stops, reading tickets and signs, asking people for directions, and throughout all of it using my Japanese, seeing how it holds up, seeing how much I can understand, and what more I have to learn, and what I can take away. I would compare that feeling to that of an athlete who has been training in the gym, versus performance, and on that trip I was able to perform, and I enjoyed that. Although I am living in Japan, I can still form a little English bubble around me, sometimes a not-so-little English bubble, forming around me whether I’d like it to or not, and getting out there alone, with no help, with no one to rely on, and no one to work it out for you but yourself, is a way to break that bubble. So I enjoyed the breaking of that bubble. I would just like to do it for cheaper next time.. did someone say hitchhiking?

My other act of genius on this break was to buy a guitar. I have been a piano player, but I haven’t felt like playing the piano. I have felt like playing the guitar. The electric guitar, specifically. I didn’t fight this genius, I didn’t overthink this genius, I just thought, let’s get a guitar then, and see what happens. I almost settled for an acoustic, as it was cheaper; but electric is what I wanted, and electric is what I got, and man am I glad I did. When I sit down with that baby, I feel like a wizard who just got his first wand.

I do have another update for you.. I’m wondering whether to include it now or later, and I think I’ll do it later, actually. At the rate I’m going now, this will turn into another beast of a post, it may already be a beast, and is getting beastlier by the key press.. I think we’ve enjoyed the appetizers enough; let’s move on to the main dish!

I said that I am at the end of my spring break. The beginning was last week, Tuesday. Only Monday was I required to show up to work, and that was to say goodbye to all of the teachers that were moving on. Goodbyes are interesting, aren’t they? The way you feel about the goodbye says a great deal about how your relationship was with that person. It’s strange saying goodbye to someone, who had such an influence on your life, and knowing that you may never see them again. And that is the way of the world. Every day a new life is lived, every day a new stage is set. Characters enter, and they exit, and they may return, and they may not. This play is being written by the day. And on Tuesday, the day after this exiting of some of the up-until-this-point main characters (and you know many of them – Sakamoto sensei (kind older English conversation teacher with erratic class greetings, Hiroyuki the cat sensei, Goto sensei (you know her, right?), Matsuzaki sensei (gave me dekopons), Shota sensei (I think you know him too.. genki math teacher at Shoyo)..) the cast of characters was made up of familiar ones, ones that I hadn’t seen in a long while, and they were the Higashi clan, and their accompanying friends.

I don’t know exactly what I’ve written about the Higashis, but I know I’ve at least mentioned them. This is already shaping up to be long, and with the Higashis, and our history, it could come out to be any of several varying degrees of long, from a bit long, to extremely long, to just too damn long, and I think I’ll have to exercise some creative control here, and not allow that to happen. I want to tell you everything, of course, but we just don’t have the time – I’m not writing a novel, after all; I’m just writing a blog, and one that I’m trying to post weekly on, at that (we’ll see how long that commitment will stand for, I’m already two days past my Sunday deadline, one day later than last week). So, I really just need to give you enough that you can work with, for the time being, to make this story come alive just enough for you, that you can appreciate it. So, without writing a novel, who are the Higashis?

I’m already paragraphing.. that’s a bad sign. We’ll stick to it, though. We can do it. The Higashis are a family that I have befriended in Kikuchi. That’s description level one. If we upgrade, I can say that I met them when I first came to Ozu, as they hosted me at their home for the first four nights after my arrival. It was originally supposed to be two, but then came my first typhoon, and, knowing that I am an Indiana boy, who has yet to be indoctrinated in the ways of the natural disaster, Maki, the momma san, kindly said to me, “Why don’t you stay longer?” and so my stay was extended. It is a custom for some schools to have their ALTs stay with a host family when they first come to Japan, and I was a beneficiary of such a custom. I was lucky. Some ALTs don’t have this experience, and possibly worse, some ALTs have this experience, like my predecessor did, and they end up spending a night or two with a family in the midst of domestic turmoil, and living in squalor, and being generally ignored by the family, and coming away from it with the experience of seeing their first husband sleeping on the couch, and sighting their first cockroach in Japan. I came away from it with lifelong friends, with a new Japanese pseudo-family, who took me under their wing, and introduced to me countless sights and trips and cultural experiences that I’m sure I would never have had otherwise, and so I am extremely indebted to them, and recognize that I got, just like with my schools, and my supervisors, incredibly lucky with being connected to them. And for the time being, I think that can be enough on the origin of the Higashis, and why they are important part of the act of this play, of my time here in Japan.

I can remember that I mentioned Eichi, the father, because I know that I told you that his name, converted to English, is English #1, and it’s funny, because in the Higashi family, at least, Eichi is not English #1, or 2, or 3.. he might be competing with Haru, the seven year old, for fourth place. He is behind Maki, the momma san, who is probably #1, but is in a close race with the oldest daughter, Misaki, who is now a second year university student, who is an incredible artist, but also an incredible English speaker, and for her age I would say her level far surpasses that of her peers. Out of the Higashi children, Misaki holds a special place in my heart, because she was the only one I could have any real conversation with, when I first got here, because I couldn’t understand the kids (the real kids, Haruma and Ryouma) at all, and Suzuka, the second oldest daughter, was too shy to use her English with me. So, Misaki was my best friend, and on the various adventures I had with the Higashi family, in those early days, when all around me was essentially gibberish, Misaki was there for me, and I would wait patiently in my confusion, for Misaki’s words of clarity, of solace, of English. Maki san also speaks fluent English, but Maki san could not at all times be in attendance to me, and when she was off telling Haru to stop climbing on something he shouldn’t be climbing on, or making plans with English #1 on the smartwatch, or was in some other way preoccupied, Misaki was my go-to. When I first met the Higashis, and started teaching at Ozu High, Misaki was a third-year (the final year) there, and that’s how the connection was made, but Misaki has since moved on to university, and so unfortunately enough, she was no longer around at our hangouts, and I had to get a little more familiar with the younger Higashis, especially Suzuka. Haru, the youngest, had bonded to me pretty quickly, as much as it is possible to bond when you can exchange no to very little information verbally, but Ryouma was a bit more inaccessible, and Suzuka had just been shielded from being my best friend, as Misaki had mostly kept me at bay before, but now that she was gone, someone had to be my new best friend, and being the oldest, now a high school student, we could have conversations about more than just Splatoon and Beyblades, and so she was it. All of the children are gifted artists, which I learned, during one long car trip back from Amakusa, that probably in large part came from Maki’s father, who was an incredible painter. Misaki is now studying art at a college in Oita, the prefecture east of Kumamoto, where I go to visit Mr. Parker Junior, and has created several large paintings that are now hanging up in the Higashi home that to me look like they could be in any art museum (and at one time they were, as the art students at Ozu had an exhibition at the art museum in Kumamoto city, where I went with Maki san to see Misaki’s and the other student’s works, and that was when I learned that Ozu High school has some amazingly talented artists – my favorite work was a giant pink paper mache frog riding a moped (a real moped) overgrown with grasses and flowers).. And.. Oh boy, I’m writing a novel here aren’t I. I think I just have to move on from this, or we will never actually get to the story. Although, if I do this now, I’ll never really have to do it again.. But this part is important, and at least, I wanted to convey to you that Misaki holds a special place in my heart, and so I was very pleasantly surprised, when after not seeing her for many months, when I hopped into the car that Tuesday at noon, to head out to the south of Kumamoto, to go “camping” with the Higashi clan, I was pleasantly surprised when I looked across the table in the back of the car, to the girl sitting next to Suzuka, to ask who the new friend was, when I realized that it was Misaki, and I said, “Oh! It’s Misaki!!”

I put camping in quotes, because while it was said that we were going camping, and I was invited to go camping, and we had been talking about camping, what in actuality we were doing was not really camping, but glamping. At least, I should make the distinction, because when you think about camping, you probably don’t think about staying in a comfortable house, with a bath, and a stove, and lights, and air conditioning and heaters and futons and all that good stuff, which is what we did, but rather about staking out tents, and unravelling sleeping bags, and lighting a campfire, which is what we did not do. We have done the camping of that variety, but this time around, not only did we do the glamping, but we did it in style – we stayed at a traditional Japanese home, complete with the (let me flex some new vocabulary on you here) いろり (irori)、a cement fireplace sunken into the center of the living room, かまど (kamado)、a traditional iron stove-like thing for cooking rice, with two iron bowls for rice sitting above small chambers that are filled with wood and lit, and a 五右衛門風呂 (goemonburo, this is pronounced go-eh-mon-bu-ro), an iron, circular tub, that is filled with water, and then heated from below, by again filling a small chamber, this one outside of the house, situated under the tub, with wood and lighting it. It was wide, it was spacious, it was comfortable, it was beautiful; and that is why I call it glamping, although I know you could have all those things on a nice sunny day out in the field as well. We went a few hours down south, staying at a place up in the mountains, looking out over the flatter plains and rolling hills of the Aso-Kuju national park, and looking to the north, when the sky was clear.. I was going to say you could probably see for fifty to a hundred miles, I don’t really know – but from the point where we stayed the Kuju mountain range did not look all that far off, although it must have been at least an hour’s drive away. I don’t know how accurate any of these numbers or estimates are. You could see far. It was beautiful. And in between the mountain range, and the top of our small mountain, the land between was filled with hills, and pines, it felt like we were raised up on a small island in the midst of a forest sea, and it was all quite enchanting to look out over.

I’ve gotten to the description of our campsite, and the place where we stayed, and yet I haven’t even made it past the getting into the car, and being pleasantly surprised to see Misaki. I’m getting things a bit out of order here, I know. I got into that car then, that enormous car the Higashis have, to go glamping, although I should say that I got into that living room, because the back of that car is essentially a living room. That car consists of a driver’s seat, a passenger’s seat, and then a living room – complete with two sofas facing each other across a large table, and with a bench underneath, and a chair on the side. And riding in that mobile living room, with English #1 manning the helm, was myself, Misaki, Suzuka, Suzuka’s friend Hikari, who I have gone on several adventures with before, and almost never stops laughing, Ryouma (I didn’t mention much about Ryouma, aka Dragon Horse, he’s maybe nine or ten, is a bit shy, can eat more onigiri than me, likes volleyball and Minecraft) Haruma (aka Spring Horse, I usually just call him Haru, he is bolder than Dragon Horse, is only still when he’s sleeping, and likes to use English – we have had speed reading competitions, in English and Japanese, and he will often surprise me with.. surprise English), and finally, a 6th grader (looks like he could be in middle school) who is the son of a co-worker of Maki’s that I have spent many a barbecue and karaoke with, and who’s name I am ashamed to say that I still don’t know, as I missed my chance at the beginning of the outing to own up to the fact that I had forgotten his name, if I ever knew it, and spent the rest of the time waiting for a chance to pick it up, and never did. We have to give him a name, and I’m going to create one for him, for the purposes of this story, and it will be Mr. Glasses, as he was the only other guy wearing glasses, and he wore them well. And then, everyone in the car has been named, and I am now sitting smack dab in the middle of all of them, at the start of this adventure with the Higashis, on this noon on a Tuesday.

I am now wondering how I introduce what is to be the main drama of this scene, of these scenes, in this act, of this play. I think I just have to come out and say what it was, and let the story progress from there. There is a reason why I chose to write about this particular trip, and while I love the Higashis, and this is a good chance to introduce you to them, and I love Japanese culture, and this is a good chance to study up on that as well, neither of these things are the real reason why I chose to write this story. These are good things, but they are not what lifted this excursion up, they are not what elevated it to the status of being blog-worthy, not on their own. To make it to this page, it takes something extra, something unplanned, something unpredictable, to give the story the spice it needs to reach the stage of being worth sharing, of worth writing about. And what that something extra was, that thing that brought this out of the realm of the ordinary, and into the realm of the shareworthy, was that for the entirety of the approximately thirty-six hour window that I spent with the Higashis, on this glamping trip to southern Kumamoto, I was consistently releasing a steady stream of the deadliest, most insidious, air-defiling, lung-corrupting, soul-corroding, sickness-inducing, vitality-sapping flatulence that I have ever had in my life. I have been alive for a quarter of a century, and I have never had any kind of flatulence, that reached such a level of potency, nor for such an extended period of time, as I did over the course of these two days; and who was it to receive the brunt, who was it to bear the brunt of such an unfortunate and cursed bombardment of Hellish stinkings, but none other than the blessed Higashi family. Our entire time spent together, there was, from the first fart, not a moment, hardly a moment, where I was not stinking, where I was not defiling all air around me, the inverse of a walking air freshener, and there was almost nothing I could do about it. My mistake was this: in the day before, Monday, I had eaten an entire bag, 250 grams, (dried weight), of black beans. Before that, I had only ever eaten at most half a bag. Black beans are cheap, black beans are high in protein, black beans are delicious. I have recently been incorporating them into my diet, and that day I cooked up a whole bag, and mainly out of convenience, I ate them all over the course of the day. Eating even up to half a bag, I hadn’t noticed any serious changes in my gastrointestinal state, and so there was not any indication, there was no clue, no sign, no omen, of what was to come, and I thought nothing of this eating an entire bag, over 1000 calories of black beans, in the day before my glamping trip with the Higashis. I have now learned, the hard way, what such an act will do to me, and what it will do to those around me, because I spent the next two days, from the first fart, until the minute I finally reached home once more, thinking about how horrific the gas emanating from my bowels was, how powerless I was to stop it, and how sorry I was to everyone for dousing them with it. It was just their luck, that they happened to think, “It’s been awhile since we last saw Steven, let’s invite him to spend two days with us, with most of it confined to a small car, sitting around iroris, or otherwise crowded together in some way!” at the same time in my life that I happened to think, “I’ll eat a whole bag of black beans today!” It was nothing but fate, nothing but the moving of two great celestial bodies through the universe, on their predetermined courses, unalterable, and headed for jarring and dramatic collision.

The first fart happened early. I had probably only been in the car for a few minutes at that point, probably some time after I had recognized Misaki, and settled into my seat. I had let out a few that morning, but I hadn’t yet realized the implication of what it meant, did not yet foresee what the future had in store for me, for us, until several farts into that car ride. Trapped in that car, seated shoulder to shoulder, with the windows up, and not even a draft of wind, there was nowhere for my farts to go, but up into that stagnant air, and into my own nostrils. I could smell them before, that morning, even in my apartment, when there was room for them to disperse, where I was moving about; but in the car, I was made to bask in them, to bathe in them, and then I knew how bad they were. I was at first not so concerned, but as the farting continued, at regular, and increasing, intervals, so I continued to become gradually more concerned. We sat around the table, in the back of that cavernous car – the kids were jostling about, Haru grabbing my iPhone, asking for my password, swiping across the screens, hunting for the app store, searching desperately for games, while I repeatedly tell him, sorry kid, there’s nothing; Do you like the news? – I ask the high schoolers how their final exams went, if they got good grades in English; they both say yes, Hikari says that Suzuka is lying, a tiff ensues – I ask Misaki about college, she tells me interesting stories about working at Seven and I (the Japanese name for Seven Eleven, the Japanese are inclusive with their marketing) – we’re singing along to pop songs, anime songs, Crazy Frog songs (a play by DJ Haru), we’re drawing pictures, playing shiritori (word game) – and throughout all of it, throughout all of this, permeating the air, hovering over all activity, is a silent, sickening, undulating stink, rising in intensity in the seconds following expulsion, receding in the minutes, but always and ever present, and lingering. I am all too aware of this, and like the air, it fills my thoughts. I knew that being in the car, in such a confined space, and with the smells being of such potency, if I could smell these farts, then someone, at least one member of this crew, must be smelling them too. I was constantly consoling myself with the thought that, just maybe, no one else was noticing. It was possible, after all – I couldn’t know that they were smelling it, at least they didn’t reveal it to me. For after each puff of death gas, I would scan the room, subtly looking into the faces of each member of the car, looking for any sign, any hint, seeing if I could discern any trace of discomfort, any whiff, or reaction to such a whiff, of the stench. But, in that hour car ride to the giant stone bridge, 通潤橋 (tsuujyunkyou) I perceived no distress, and no indication that anything had been wrong at all, and certainly not that I had been the culprit of it, except for one slight movement made by Suzuka. At one point, in the middle of a peak wave of stinking, Suzuka ever so slightly appeared to be disturbed, and proceeded to check the three bags in the car, one bag with food in it, and two with trash. I noticed this – but of course, I reasoned that while there was a chance that she was searching for a source, for a cause of that hideous odor in the air, there was also a chance that she was just searching for something in one of those bags, a snack, or something she misplaced, and having nothing else to use as evidence for reasoning one way or the other, I couldn’t draw any definite conclusion. And so, upon arriving at the campground, after two or more hours of being a human stink bomb, I had escaped detection.

The car was the danger zone. The house was not so much. We were outside often, the doors were open, there were competing smells, the smells of the cooking rice, and curry, and pizza, and alcohol. But every so often, I would let out again another stinker so intense, that I would have to look around, and wonder, again, if this was the one that would finally draw a comment, if this was the one that would find me out, and I would quickly duck away in shame, and find a fresher spot to permeate with my poison. As the night progressed, and the frequency and stink of my farts refused to abate, with each one I felt an increasing urge to apologize to everyone, knowing that they had all now been thoroughly soaked in my flatulence, and had most likely been smelling it, and putting up with it, for a majority of this trip. I have a distinct memory of standing close to and across from Misaki, in mid-conversation, with Maki san, English #1, Mr. Glasses and his mom, and Hikari chan all in my immediate vicinity, and having the stench assault my nostrils yet again, and thinking, “This just isn’t right.” And it just wasn’t right. It was just wrong. I was thoroughly defiling everyone and everything around me, I had been all day, I was at that very moment, and could they smell it? As I stood there, eating my green pepper pizza, attempting to correctly say “I will slap him until he cries” (Misaki was quizzing me on the difference between the verbs 当たる、殴る、叩く – different ways to say slap, hit, beat, strike, etc.), surrounded by a chorus of chatter and giggling from the rest of the party, with that smell yet again wafting into my nostrils, I had to look her in the eyes and maintain composure, simultaneously wrestling with a series of thoughts such as: Does she not smell this too? And does she know it’s me? And should I say I’m sorry? And how do I go about doing that, exactly? It’s hard enough to make that confession in your native language – in one that you’re liable to be misinterpreted, that you’re liable to butcher, it’s even harder. And so, I said nothing, and we continued on that way, all night. Sitting around the table playing kanji karuta (kanji matching card game) with Haru and Mr. Glasses. Can they smell it? Lying wrapped in futons with Suzuka falling asleep next to me, Ryoma lounging at my feet. Can they smell it? Squatting at the fire with English #1 and his friend, talking about the perfect burn level for roasted marshmallows. Can they smell it? I felt like, this whole time, I was living a double life, like I was holding a dark secret, like I knew something that they didn’t, like I had a burden, a demon in my closet, and I desperately wanted not to be, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit it, and I couldn’t make it end, and so I had no choice but to keep the secret, keep playing the game, keep forging on, keep the torment alive.

That night, we made curry for dinner. Misaki really made the curry; I just ate it. And ate it I did. Way too much of it. This was a critical mistake. Under normal circumstances, curry can be a meal of some concern, in terms of the stink factor. For a man who is already gastrointestinally compromised, it can be a disaster. And disaster it was; I could not stop eating that delicious Golden Curry, even though I asked Misaki to stop me several times. That night, as we had started eating so late, I had made the call to break my fast (my fast was the source of much interest – I can’t say how many times I said, “十二時から二十時まで” (from 12 to 8, my fasting window), and I did learn how to say noon from this, 正午, shougo.) Apparently intermittent fasting is becoming trendy in Japan right now, and Maki san was doing it too. So fast I broke, curry I ate, and worse my gas became. I woke up the next morning to find that my gas, that was already so thoroughly putrid, that made you feel sick after a single sniff, did the impossible, and now had, on top of it all, an additional, wholly evil bite to it. When we piled back into the car, after folding up the futons, dusting off the tatamis, and taking a walk around the grounds, to see how the others glamped, and to admire the beautiful sakura; when we got back into that car, to begin the journey to Aso Farm Land, I knew then that it was only a matter of time. It was now all but impossible that I would be able to end this journey without being exposed, without my secret being uncovered. As I clambered up into the living room of that gargantuan vehicle, I aimed to take the seat in the middle, between the two sofas, and this was a strategic move – I thought that by positioning myself at near equal distance from all members of the car, there was less of a chance that the stink would be traced back to me. This seat also afforded me slightly more space, as I wasn’t immediately flanked by anyone, but had a slight gap between either sofa. As I stepped up to assume to my tactically chosen spot, English #1, in all his misguided courtesy, thought that that seat looked to be a little too small, and a little too uncomfortable for me, and so he offered to me Ryouma’s seat, and knowing that this would be doom for me, and for the rest of the car, but not wanting to ever reject his polite suggestions, I agonizingly obliged to trade seats with Ryouma; and this was doom. I was now positioned in the back left corner of the car, snuggled in next to Suzuka, and while this was a more comfortable seat, it was also the seat farthest positioned from the window, and in this tank, in this submarine of a car, that small window, in the upper right, right behind the head of the driver’s seat, that tiny porthole was the only source of solace, was the only source of deliverance, from the stagnant air that was so full of my festering. Haru was positioned right by this porthole, he was in full control of it, the life-link between the fresh, unsoiled Aso air, and the rank, defiled air of the car. Deep in the bowels of this submarine, as far as possible from this link to the outside air, where hardly a draft passed through, jammed up next to Suzuka, there was now not a single hope that I could survive this trip undiscovered, and so I took that seat that had been so generously gifted to me, and waited patiently for my end.

I say my end, but that is selfish. A farter does not often smell his own farts, and when he does, I think he is often, if ever, not able to comprehend the full strength of their foulness. What this experience must have been for the rest of the group, I could only surmise, up until that fateful moment. Pressed up against poor Suzuka, whose nose was but two feet from mine, she may as well have been farting those farts herself. I don’t know how long into that return trip it was, but after some time, after some preliminary stinking, there was a lull in activity, with the conversation between Hikari and Suzuka dying down, with Ryouma daydreaming, Haru gazing out of the window, Mr. Glasses half asleep; and in this lull, I released a gas, so sickening, so wretched, so cursed, so vile, so insidious, so pestilent, that the second it reached my nostril, I recognized that I smelled the end. This would be the one. I waited, and then I turned. Slowly, my eyes cast low, looking up just enough to be able to read Suzuka’s expression, and when I saw her begin to react, I turned fully towards her, and she towards me. With a distorted face, nose scrunched up, brow furrowed, she looked to me and said, in a voice mingled with soft desperation, burning curiosity, quite pleading, deep frustration, she said, “なに、におい？” “What is that smell?” I held her gaze for a moment – I could see the pain in her eyes. I looked down at my hands, now open, as you do when you are begging, pleading for forgiveness, and chose my words carefully. This was my time, this was where I came out with it, this was where I finally apologized, where I could begin to right the wrong, where I could somewhat atone for my sins, where I came as clean as I possibly could, while immediately bathing in such a festering, gaseous cloud. I looked up and saw the three kids, sitting across from me: Mr. Glasses, Haru, Ryoma, finding all three pairs of eyes now staring back intently into mine. Time seemed to have stopped; all was silent, everything revolving around the words I was about to speak. I looked back down at my hands, I sighed deeply, and summoning the courage, turned back to Suzuka, and said the only words I could. “僕です。本当にごめんなさい.” “It’s me. I’m so sorry.”

With these words, a spell was lifted. The oppressive stench oppressed no longer, for ignorance leads to fear, and now that the source of the horror had been discovered, there was no fear, there was no mystery, no confusion, but understanding, and words could be spoken, anger, frustration could be directed, action could be taken. That apology sparked an uproar. Suzuka’s immediate response was to hang her head, shut her eyes, and reply, as if I had just confirmed what she had been suspecting all along, “まじでーーー ” (Reallyyyyyyy). Hikari immediately burst out into wild laughter, and Mr. Glasses, recoiling in his seat, to now position himself as far away as possible from the source of all of this poison, with a pained grimace on his face, said, “くさい!” “It stinks!” By his tone of voice, I could see clearly that Ryoma had been suffering. “くさーい” he whined painfully. Haru barked at me, with passion, and a tinge of enjoyment, possibly finding the current situation, of a grown man’s embarrassingly confessing to a car full of kids about his stinky farts, amusing, “Steven くさいよ！” “Steven, kusaiyo! It stinks!” Mr. Glasses repeats, “くさい、本当にくさい。” “It stinks, it really stinks.” And all I could do was take it, each and all of their varying emotions, all of their outrage, all of their indignation, all of their derision, because they’d been putting up with it for so long, and it was their chance to strike back. I couldn’t fight it, I could only accept it. What could I do? Of course they were right; it was so, so stinky. I kept my eyes on the floor, thoroughly shamed, shaking my head back and forth. “ごめんなさい。本当に。僕は腐っている。” I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. I’m rotting” (I threw this out, using a word I had picked up from Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫), kusatteiru, rotting, decaying, festering.) Since the confession, Hikari hasn’t stopped laughing, the kids haven’t stopped calling me stinky, but Suzuka, being more mature, and perhaps feeling some responsibility for me, being a family friend, and having some small respect for me, given that I have somehow in my life managed to reach the status of Sensei, quickly recovers, and moves to relieve my embarrassment. She says, consolingly, “自己申告、ね。”Jikoshinkoku – a self-confession. As if she were saying to me, that was big of you, Steven. That must have taken a lot of courage. And I appreciated that. I had confessed, and like many who finally confess to their crimes, who bring their sins out into the light of day, to let the world judge them as it will, and to end their personal torment, on making that confession I felt as if a massive weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. We would suffer in silence no more. To confirm, as a final piece of evidence, as a final bearing that my flatulence had this whole time been as bad as I thought it had been, I ventured to ask English #1, sealed off at the captain’s helm, if he thought it was くさい (kusai) too. I knew that, given how polite he was, and how protected he was, sitting up at the front cordoned off from the rest of us stinking mongrels, if he responded in any way in the affirmative, then it was really as bad as I thought; and he did. Holding up his fingers, thumb and forefinger slightly pinched, he turned his head slightly to the left, leaned a bit back towards me, and replied, with a little hint of apology in his voice, ”ちょっと。”　A bit. And with that, I had had enough. I would not torment this family any longer. Haru moved to open the porthole wider; I picked him up, and sat him down in the back, and took my rightful seat by it. Once upon a time I would have thought that this would only serve to give my fumes an added velocity, as the wind carried them on its wings throughout the car, but I have since learned from watching those COVID particle dynamic videos that having a window down can only help to diffuse and remove dangerous molecules from the air, and so I felt confident that this was the best thing I could do to somewhat rectify this sad situation, to exercise some control over it all. I wish I could say that, after that pivotal, climatic confession, that was the end of this gassy affair – but it wasn’t. I continued to fart, continued to fart all the way to Aso Farm Land, continued to fart as I petted capybaras with Suzuka and Hikari, continued to fart as I raced Haru down the steel slides meant for six year olds, bruising every bone in my body in the process, continued to fart as I laid blissfully on a flat warm rock in a cozy steaming sauna with Ryouma.. I wish I could say that I stopped farting then. I didn’t, but at least they stopped tormenting me, and perhaps all of us. Psychologically, that is, for sensually they were still every bit as pestilent as they had been at the beginning. After Aso Farm Land, I rode back to my apartment in Ozu with Maki san and Misaki, my two favorites, enjoying some nice conversation, and chowing down on squid flavored chips, now mainly in that language so comfortable to me, and still farting; and after reaching my apartment, and saying goodbye, I found myself thinking two thoughts: how nice it was to see them again, and how fun of a time we had; and how free my bowels now were to breathe out the last of their befouled breaths in the peace of my home, without guilty conscience.

I wonder what words were shared by the Higashi family that evening. I wonder if my flatulence was mentioned. It could have been as much as a single comment – “Stevenのおならは本当にくさいね。” Steven’s farts are so stinky. It could have been a greater family discussion – what was wrong with Steven? What was that? He’s never done that before – that was terrible. Do you think he’ll do that again the next time we go glamping?

I hope they do invite me back. I think it was bad enough that the next time I see them, I owe them some token of gratitude, for their inviting me, but also for their enduring me. A candle might be a nice gift.

That is then, more or less, the end of this story. I spent a third of my spring break under the worst bout of gastrointestinal discomfort that I have ever been unfortunate enough to have, and the Higashis were unfortunate enough to suffer through it with me. And yet, that was in some part the highlight of my vacation. Life is a strange thing, isn’t it? I will say that, although it was fun, I do not plan to do this ever again. I know that my social status, and my financial as well, depends on it. I feel bad for the Higashis, but thank god it was them, a family who knows and loves me, and not my poor senseis, some who love me, and some who abide with me. I can’t imagine dropping bombs like that as I skirt about the classroom, making comments on this or that worksheet, or this or that skit, leaving confusing English advice, and a deathly scent, in my wake. I have a fairly good reputation at the schools, and I still don’t think it would last long in the face of gas like that. I would be sent home on sick leave soon, and if I kept it up, let go. No, that can’t happen again..

I want to keep eating black beans. They are too good to let go – nutritionally, that is. I can try other beans, if it really comes to it.. but I think at first, I’ll adopt a three-pronged approach, of eating less beans, looking for foods that will help me to better digest the beans, and then building up a tolerance to beans. Annie said that, after hearing this story, it takes time to adapt to changes in diet, like eating thousands of calories of beans in a day. I hope that’s true, but people often say that about spicy food, that you can build up a tolerance to it; but I’ve drowned my food in enough Tabasco, and yet my tongue still winces at the touch of it. We’ll see.

So I’ve written an entire story about farting! It only took fourteen posts (is this the fifteenth?) – not long, you might be thinking. I hope that I didn’t tarnish my relationship with the Higashis too much, and I don’t think I did. Maki san has already invited me to join her in a new adventure – harvesting bamboo shoots. That sounds like work I can do, flatulence or no, and may be a good story. I would like to write about them again, with more of a focus on them, and less on their reactions, to me, and my odors. They’re a great family, like I said, which I why I felt so much the worse for doing what I did to them. But, sometimes.. 仕方がないね。It can’t be helped.

I say I’m not in the business of writing novels and yet this turned out to be another novel length post. At least it felt like that when writing it. Do you still want a quote? Do I have anything even mildly related to the theme of this story? Let me see..

In honor of finishing Moby Dick, why don’t we take a quote from it?

“For, they say, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing out of this world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.”

Or, when cruising in a flatulating body.. get a good story out of it, at least.

Until next time.. Keep your bean count low, unless you want to have such a story of your own. Or, if you’ve got a bean tolerance.

Beans beans, the magical fruit. There really is truth to it…

じゃあね！

Update: About the picture. I don’t know what that plant is (is it a grass?) but I’ve been seeing it often and I like it. And actually, I just asked Red Star Sensei what it was. It’s kumazasa – kuma bamboo grass. So it is a grass! I was struggling to choose as my picture for this post, as I somehow came away with no postable pictures from my trip with the Higashis, between this kumazasa, and the train tickets of my trip to Kurume. I thought this was sexier – who doesn’t love a good grass?

Update from the future: Just to give you a preview of what is in this very long post: I am basically writing about my decision to stop using my car that I eventually did sell, and how I came to the decision. That’s basically it. If you’re looking for funny stories about farting and misspoken Japanese they’re not in this one. If you’re looking for quotes from transcendentalists and a dissertation on the advantages of bikes over cars, look no further.

Alright gang. We’re back.

I know, I know. It’s only been a week! Steven, you just wrote such a doozy, and now you’re coming right back around and giving us another other one, not a week later?

And to that I say, you bet your sweet bungus I am!

I’ve got things to tell you! And like I said, “A squid won’t cook itself,” well neither will a blog post write itself, and these things must be written, lest the moment pass, and they are forever gone. I believe, this is true with ideas, that with all ideas there is a certain window of action, that you have where you can seize an idea, and do something with it, make something out of it, or let it pass, and its moment will be gone. And perhaps you will have another chance at it, or perhaps not. This idea, the one I want to share with you now, is a fruit that has been maturing for some time, and I think it is now as ripe as it will ever be, and the time is as good as any to pluck it. So sit back, get comfortable, maybe grab a snack, some nice squid hearts, maybe a squid soufflé (I actually don’t know what a soufflé even is) and let me tell you about my little experiment in following my genius, and deciding to live life without a car.

The first thing I need to get at is the following your genius thing. I am not a genius, but I can follow it, and that is why I decided to stop driving my car for the month of March. Motorless March, I called it. I actually almost sold it, and even went to the length of calling up my dealer, taking it in to him, having him look it over, and then coming to his question, “Do you really want to sell this? Do you really really want to sell this?” and promising him that I’d really think it over, and after two of my close friends recommended that I try out a carless month first, and see how it goes, as a trial experiment, before fully plunging myself into the world of the no-car, only to find that it does not suit me all that much, and I am pained to go through the process of getting a new one, or to suffer with the ramifications of my poor and impulsive decision. But, while I did at their suggestion hold onto my car, prior to starting this experiment, I strongly suspected that I already knew what the outcome would be, and here we are, at the end of the month, and I can say that I was entirely correct in my suspicion. After an entire month without my car, I can say that not once, not a single time, did I think, “Man, I wish I could drive!” But what I did find myself thinking, time and time again, was the exact opposite, that I was glad that I didn’t have one. And so I will give you some examples, but you have already seen some, if you read my last post. On embarking on this experiment, somehow I had not even considered all of the merits of my decision to ditch the car and walk to school, but that came to me as I was writing that last post, and is even further support for the case of going without the car. So, I will give you some concrete examples, and what I’ve learned from this experiment, and the goals of this post then are two-fold – if this can be a lesson for you on following your genius, or a piece that challenges you to see your car in a new light, then I think I can say that this was a successful one!

First, on following your genius. I have mentioned genius a few times now, and what am I talking about? I am using genius in the way that our man Henry David Thoreau uses genius. I usually end my posts with quotes, but for this one, I need to give you a quote now, because this quote, primarily, along with some of Thoreau’s other compelling words on genius, was the catalyst, that brought me to cross that critical threshold between thought and action. So here is the quote:

“If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or even insanity, it may lead him; and yet that way, as he grows more resolute and faithful, his road lies. The faintest assured objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over the arguments and customs of mankind. No one ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be regretted, for there were a life in conformity to higher principles. If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, – that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”

It’s long, I know. Thoreau writes like this. Emerson does as well. Perhaps that’s why I am so enamored with them both. Thoreau is a man who catches star-dust, who does greet the day and night with joy, who felt bad for his jailers, when he was put into jail, for not paying taxes to the state of Massachusetts for something like seven years, because he did not support slavery, and Massachusetts was profiting off of and enabling the slave trade, at that time, and he felt that his jailers, after imprisoning him, thought that they had him confined – but he could not be confined, because in his heart he was free, much more than they, because while physically confined, spiritually he was as free as a bird. Actually, he thought they, and the state itself, were entirely pathetic, after that incident, as Thoreau was, taxes excepted, as good of or better than any citizen you could ask for, and was not in any way a threat to the state, and yet they imprisoned him. Thoreau lives by his genius, truly; that is one example, and another I could give is the whole fact that he moved out into the woods and lived there alone for two years, because he felt like he should, and he ended up writing the masterpiece, that this quote is from, that is Walden. I included the full length of this quote because I thought that, given that he includes them in the same passage, there must be a link between following genius, and catching star-dust, and when I think about this experiment, and even the outcomes of my walking to school, that there is a connection there.

So like I said, this quote is ultimately what got me to embark on this little carless experiment of mine. It is the reason why I pulled the trigger. About two or three months ago, I did something I had been meaning to do for a long time, and had never got around to, which was actually figured out exactly what my income and expenses were. Prior to this, I just knew that I was making more money than I was losing, and that was good enough for me. But I could only stand saying not being able to answer questions about my life financials so many times before I felt like it was necessary that I got the answers, and so I did, and I found that I was spending about 2万円 a month on car expenses, (about $200). I thought at that time, entirely jokingly, “Hey if I didn’t have a car, I’d save 2万円 a month!” And then this thought was followed by another, “But, of course, I need my car.” I can say now that not only did I not need my car, but in the same way that I was better off walking to school than driving, I am better off living without a car in all other aspects of my life, than having one.

In the days after I did that little, getting my affairs in order business, that thought of getting rid of the car kept coming back to me. I thought about all of the reasons why I needed my car – there weren’t many. I thought about all of the reasons I should give it up – there were many more. Why did I think I needed my car? Convenience, was one. Convenience on its own is hardly a good reason to do anything. Another, was freedom. Paradoxically enough, I found that I had more freedom without the car. That’s really it, in a nutshell. Why did I think I should give it up? This list is much longer. Obviously, for the environment. Also, for the savings. Those are good enough reasons, but there are other, more powerful, and less apparent reasons. I thought that, like walking to school, going without the car would put me outside of my comfort zone. After being here for as long as I have, as anyone inevitably finds themselves becoming after doing the same things for an extended period of time, I have gotten quite comfortable in many aspects of my life. I’m happy I can say that’s so, but if we take Emerson’s words, “People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them,” to heart, then it’s wise not to get too comfortable, and so I felt that this would be a good way to shake things up, raise the difficulty level on my life a bit, you could say. I will get into this when I talk about public transportation, of which, as a result of ditching the car, I now have many stories. The other of the more subtle reasons, I would say, was that I thought that getting rid of the car would force me to better prioritize my time. Having a car is a luxury, for me, and not a necessity. With it, I could visit my friends in the neighboring towns and cities on a whim, I could make trips to the grocery store, to the mall, to the 100円 store, when I felt like it, and I had many times come away from such trips thinking that they had not been all that necessary. Without a car, acting on impulse suddenly becomes much more difficult, in that sense. And so, the bar, or the activation threshold, for me embarking on any mission, quest, escapade, what have you, was now much higher, and I thought that, and I found that this was true, that it would force me to make better use of my time. And reflecting on it, I find that the same thing is true with my internet usage. I have no internet in my apartment. When I’m lucky, I can connect to my neighbor’s WiFi, but that WiFi is fickle, and will more often than not allow me to connect once a night, only to give me the results of my first search, and then dry up and return no more. When on that tenuous signal, I am aware that at any moment it could vanish forever, and that alone keeps me from attempting most internet activities, but often when I do try them, the internet will teasingly flicker on and off, and I will quickly lose patience with it, slam my laptop shut, and quit whatever I was doing. And this happens, the quitting, because whatever I was doing in the first place, was not all that important. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have tried to do it from my apartment in the first place, where the internet is so unreliable (I say the internet, it’s not even mine. I should say her internet, Nagata sensei’s.) When I really want to use the internet, I will either go visit Nagata sensei, or I will sit outside her apartment on the steps, where I can enjoy free-flowing, uninterrupted internet, and do my business. And I keep my business quick, because I’m most likely sweating, or shivering, with a sore rumpus, from sitting on a step of solid steel and concrete, and craning my neck down to look at the small, dimly lit screen on my lap, and so I am, because of all of these hindrances, efficient with my internet time. Unfortunately, as much as I would wish otherwise, I do have relatively low self-control, and if I had ample internet access I may not even be writing this right now, but would instead be watching English Premier League highlights on YouTube, or searching about how Rogain serves to promote hair growth (for a friend, of course), or something like that; something that I could be doing, but probably don’t need to be. By significantly raising the threshold for the ease of doing something, anything, you have to put in more effort to do it, and the decision to put effort into anything becomes more meaningful the more effort that is required. Thought, as well. Because now with my excursions, like with using the internet, the effort to action threshold has been raised, and I now have to spend a little more thought, and potentially a lot more energy, on whether I want to do something or not, and I think that this has been an incredibly effective way at delineating what in my life is worth my time, and what is not. I have turned down invites that I would have accepted if I had a car, because I didn’t. How interested was I, really, in going then? I have gone through the trouble of taking the time to learn how the busses work, and riding them, to get to the city to play soccer with some friends. That then, was clearly important to me. But not only has it forced me to weigh more considerately what is important to me, and what is not, but it has also forced me to plan out and be more efficient with my time. Before, I would go to the mega-superstore Trial. Trial is up on a hill and is out of the way for me. Because of the fact that it’s up on the hill, and I can’t even bike up that hill, in this entire month I’ve only gone to Trial once. Instead, I stop by Direx, as I pass there on the way back from Ozu High. I’d rather go to Trial, yes, and especially because Trial has my soba, and Direx doesn’t, and I’m actually pissed at Direx, because the last three times I’ve been there they haven’t had my soba, and I’m worried that they don’t even carry it anymore, and I’ve wanted to grab one of the store workers and say, “Hey, don’t you guys know that people like soba! You’re going to lose people’s business! Order more soba!” But even in my soba-rage, I can’t dump Direx, because it now just makes good sense for me to stop there. It is the most economical and efficient thing for me to do. Another point – I wanted to go to Kaldi, at the mall Hikari no mori. This is about a fifteen to twenty minute drive to the west. With a car, I would have gone. I wanted to get my natural peanut butter, which is way better than unnatural peanut butter (isn’t it weird to say that? But if what I get is natural, what else is the other kind but unnatural?) and my muesli (how do you pronounce this word?). Now it is an ordeal, and I had been mulling over when I would make the bike trip out there, when I was struck with the brilliant idea to ask Goto sensei, who I know lives in the Hikari no mori area, and frequents the mall, if she wouldn’t mind picking those things up for me the next time she goes, and I’d pay her back. And so, last weekend, after waiting a week, I got that sweet sweet Line message, “I’m at Kaldi!” And then I had my natural peanut butter and muesli, and I didn’t even have to go to the store. And when I say that paradoxically, I had more freedom as a result of my decision to ditch the car, this is partly why. While could be seen as now an increased reliance on others, I see it as a forced, economical restructuring of how I go about my business, and that restructuring has resulted in me coming away with more time, and less distraction. I can and will rope decision making fatigue into this, because why not – I’m even saving myself from having to make such decisions, about whether I should go to this or that store, to this or that event, to do this or that thing, as anything that I could, or would only do with a car, is immediately ruled out, and I consider it no more. You would think that because I don’t have a car, it takes me longer to get places, and so I would spend more time in transit, and would come out of this all with less time, but I have actually come out ahead, through virtue of the increased effort to action threshold (I keep calling it this and other things, I am not sure exactly what I should say here is, I keep thinking back to the concept of activation energy, in chemistry, which is the amount of energy that has to be supplied in order to make a reaction occur, and in this analogy, my action is the reaction, and the energy required to take the action consists of whatever might factor into the taking of the action, for example cost, time, benefits, etc.), and the fact that when I travel now, it is an experience, and so is never time wasted. That is another major point to be made about this, but I feel like I’ve mostly already made it in my last post, when talking about all of the beautiful things I get to do and see on my walk to Shoyo, that I don’t get from the drive. Whenever I go anywhere now, I go by either train, bus, bike, foot, or another’s car, and in any of those save the bike, I am not required to do anything but confirm every now and again that I’m still headed the right way, and then I can go back to fully engaging my senses in whatever capacity I like. In driving, you are a pilot, and while you can daydream, and sightsee, and enjoy the radio, or have a conversation, you can’t commit yourself to any of these things fully. On a bike, you do have to pilot, but that’s different than riding a car – that’s more sport than work. Riding a bike is exhilarating, especially in Ozu, where there is almost no level ground, where the roads are so narrow that you are almost crushed to the wall by passing cards, where the maze of cracked sidewalks and side-streets and street signs keeps you weaving, dodging, ducking, panting, coasting, endlessly engaged. And another perk about the bike is that you’re almost always in motion, and when you’re not, it’s simply a nice reprieve. Highways? You pass under them. Crosswalks? People stop for you. Traffic lights? Button you push, and turn green they will. (That’s a Yoda quote. It could be at least. I wonder if I thought to write that sentence that way because Yoda is green. The human brain is a mysterious thing..) When you finally do just have to sit it out at a light, you’re about ready for a break anyways. And the bike is the other reason why giving up the car brings more freedom. On the bike, you are truly free. You do still have to find a place to put your bike, that’s true – but bikes are much smaller than cars. I biked right into the heart of the city just yesterday, right into the heart of what they call the machi, the network of narrow streets, tiny stores, a densely crowded spot – I biked right up to the street that had the two stores I wanted to visit, and I leaned my bike up against a wall, and I stepped out onto the street, no worry about finding a place to park my cumbersome car, and at no expense. And on the way there, I passed car after car after car, stuck in waiting, mired in limbo, and I would fly right on by, with the sun in my face, with the wind rustling my shirt, with my heart pumping, and a medium grade sweat on my shins, because I wore thick sweatpants, and it was way hotter than I thought it’d be. As I passed them, I couldn’t help but think with smug satisfaction, “Suckers!!”

One thing about the car – the car keeps things out, but it also keeps you in. It insulates you, and that’s alright, when you need to be – but how often do we need to be? I’d rather be thrown out into the chaos of the world than snugly shielded from it. (Typed while sitting in a comfortable chair, at a comfortable desk, in a comfortable apartment, at a comfortable temperature, in some comfortable sweatpants..) But you get what I mean. I don’t want to be snug all the time; there’s not a lot to be learned in being snug – I want some action. When I made the decision to start biking, I knew I would have to be biking in the rain. This was something that would often come up when someone tried to suggest to me the folly of selling my car. “What about the rain?” They would say. Well, what about the rain? That would be a problem, if we weren’t living in the 21st century, and didn’t have such beautiful products as entirely waterproof synthetic body suits, but we do. This is what you see the students, the bikers, the motorbikers, wearing, in inclement weather, fully shielded from the elements of Earth like astronauts from the elements of space. I took a trip to Handsman, and got myself a similar suit, after trying on several, and deciding which country, of the pack of body-suit-producing, atrocity-committing countries all vying for my yen, I would give it to – and out of China, Myanmar, and Vietnam, I settled on Vietnam, as while they’re communist, I hadn’t yet heard about any recent atrocity committed by the Vietnamese. In this suit then, I am entirely impervious to whatever the wicked winds of Kumamoto want to blow my way, although large balls of hail would still take me out. When we talk about freedom, again, here is another example. As no one, under normal circumstances, naturally wants to be soaked by the rain, we tend to avoid it, and an umbrella helps with that, but you still have to deal with strong winds, if it is windy, and stepping in puddles, and finding a place for your umbrella, and making sure you don’t forget it, and if you do, making difficult decisions about how to get a new one, or waiting for a break in the rain, or biting the bullet and getting drenched in it. When you have a full body waterproof suit, none of this matters. You don your armor, and out you go, and there your worries end. In fact, what would before have been an annoyance, is now a joy, as it is incredibly joyful to walk about in the pouring rain, without a care in the world, to be completely impervious to it, to be able to laugh at it and revel freely in it. That is freedom, and it strikes me in similarity to that feeling I had on top of the mountain, standing there and looking the blizzard in the face, or in the onsen, finding warmth and moisture in the dry cold of winter – it’s a feeling of turning the tables on the elements, taking them head on, embracing them with open arms, defying them; and you can’t help but come away from such encounters with a little more life in you.

I talked about following genius. I had the thought then, coming back to me, that I should stop using my car. I did some pre-experimentation. I knew that the only real thing that could be a pain for me, without the car, was going to my special needs school, which is about a twenty minute drive from my apartment. Before going fully into the no car life, when I was yet still mulling it over, I had a free Sunday, and so I decided to make the trip then, and see how bearable it was, if it was something I could do twice a month, how long it would take, how sweaty I would get. On that trip, something happened, something that I took as a sign, that really affirmed that this was genius that should be followed to its ultimate ends. On the way to this school, I take a road west, for about fifteen minutes, then I turn south, pass through a neighborhood, go a bit down another street, and I reach the school. At that turn, from going west to south, at around that point, there is an enormous hill. This hill is striking in the same way that Mt. Fuji is striking – this hill is a mini-Fuji, because the land all around it is so flat, and clear. I have always wanted to climb this hill, and I look at it longingly whenever I make the trip. That day, as I came back from biking to the school, I thought, why don’t I climb it now? And climbed it was. I met an old man, who showed me the path to the top, I found a secret lake, I walked along ridges and up and down winding trials, leading me who knew where, but I had no place I particularly needed to be, and could lose myself entirely in the exploration. And when I got back, I thought about this. I had passed by that hill so many times in my car, and had always wanted to climb it, and never did; and I pass by it once on my bike, and it gets climbed. What more needs to be said? I think, for me at least, yet another fault of the car is it restricts spontaneity, rather than increases it. Having a car, you have to find a place to park it. You have to put gas in it and think about the gas in it. You have to get into it and step out of it. You have to turn it off and turn it on. You have to open and close the door. And while they sound like little things, I think all such little things, and especially cumulatively, form a barrier to spontaneity. On the bike, rather, you are encouraged to be spontaneous. You’re in motion, you can park almost anywhere, you can hop and off at a moments notice, nothing has to be turned on or off, you are the gas, you are not bound by streets, or even logic. That logic that keeps you bound to the fastest routes, to the most efficient paths planned out by Google Maps, does not apply on a bike, when you can turn down any road you like, on a whim, because it looks promising, where you can slide through back alleys with ease, change course without hesitation, stop at any moment to get your bearings, and readjust your course, or to go ahead and allow yourself to be lost. So, with Thoreau’s words, to follow my genius, and the climbing of the hill, to encourage me to keep following it, I decided that I would take that step, and go from thinking about giving up the car, to doing so.

I have yet to write about any of those moments where I was glad that I hadn’t biked, except with the climbing of the hill. I haven’t given you any specific examples. I haven’t told you about the impact that I’ve had on others, and I think this is always an interesting thing, when you try things like this, when you make these changes, that you will affect not only your own life, but consequently the lives of the people around you, without you intending to do so at all. I find this happening often as a result of being a pescatarian, and it was happening here, is happening here, too. Lewis, who replied, “Indoor human.” when asked if he was an indoor or outdoor human by my friend Kento sensei, told me two days ago that he biked to get groceries; Emily now wants to buy one, and was asking me this week where I bought my bike and how much it cost. But I want to touch once more on the genius bit, because I think you can see clearly that in this instance, for me it was entirely the right decision to follow it; but how did I know it was genius? I think the true skill does not lie so much in carrying out the genius, because once you begin to carry it out, the events and consequences of it will unfold naturally, as a matter of course. The hard part is discerning what is genius, in the first place, and then choosing to act. I can’t say that I have a real answer for knowing what is genius or what is not, what is a good idea, what is a proper intuition, an inspiration, that should be heeded; but somehow, I knew that this was so. That may just be the magic of genius, that it just comes to us, and if we give it the time, and the consideration, and the conviction, to carry it out, seeing not where it would lead us, and crushing it not in its infancy, giving it fuel, allowing it to light, instead of smothering it out of fear, uncertainty, comfort, laziness, or one of the many other such extinguishers, then it can have the power to take us to new heights, to expand and enrich our lives. All it may take is the simple asking of the question – what is your genius saying to you now? And that may be what gets you on, and if you don’t have an answer, then what will get you on the hunt.

I could say more about my dabbles in public transportation, about the fear in the eyes of the girl sitting behind me on the bus, when I turned around in my seat and started speaking to her, to try and ask her if I had missed my stop or not, and how I had in fact missed my stop, as I discovered as I got off of the bus at the end of the route, at the main transport hub in the city, about how I tried to get on a fancy express train and was politely told to get off, as I didn’t have a ticket, and hadn’t reserved a seat.. but I think I’ve more or less made my point, with one final addition. I mentioned that there were many situations in where I found myself glad that I hadn’t used a car, and none where I wish I had, and here’s one of them. I had been regularly playing soccer with some college students at a college in the city, (Kumamoto city, I realize I keep saying “the city”, and you might be thinking, what city, Steven? What city?) and the school year has ended, and they’ve all graduated. We had our last session, of soccer, sushi, then Fifa (they all wanted to play me, I think I played seven games of Fifa then, nonstop, more tiring than the actual soccer) and then a final going out to dinner. And if I had driven a car, we would have said our final goodbye there. But I hadn’t driven a car – that day, like the last time, I had come into the city by bus (unlike last time, successfully), and for this reason, they gave me a ride home that night. I ended up giving them a tour of my apartment, re-gifting almost all of the alcohol that I had stockpiled through various adventures onto them, talking about our futures, and otherwise having a real, proper, final goodbye. Not that it wouldn’t have been if we had ended things there, in that restaurant parking lot, after the dinner – but it would have been different. It just would have been a different ending, the car ending, and I thought about this too, in the passing days, about how that was yet another situation, that turned out for the better, through not having the car. This, then, would be an example of something that I could not see, when deliberating over whether I should or should not pursue this genius, and I think this is prime example of how, when following your genius, things will happen that you could not have predicted.

Well, I think we’re at the end here. This engine is out of steam! I hope that I’ve convinced you to follow your genius – I will keep following mine. You might be wondering, what will be the end of this car saga? I do still have the car. I think it would be at the dealer’s now if I hadn’t been told that I may be going to Aso to teach again, and if that happens, I then will be forced to own, and use it, out of necessity. But the lessons have been learned, and cannot be unlearned, and even if I go back to a life with a car, it will never be the same.

Update: I’m coming back to this after two days. I wanted the instant gratification, but I thought it’d be better for both of us if I gave it some time to sit and see if any more thoughts popped into my mind afterwards, to be added in. About the car, there isn’t much. I think another interesting point about it is that there was some resistance to this idea, some questioning of it, some “Why would make life harder for yourself?” “What if you regret it?” “Please don’t do it!” and I am glad I ran this idea by my friends because they 1. gave me the idea to do a trial run of the no car life, instead of outright selling it, and 2. they showed me that my idea was solid enough, as I was forced considered the merit of their concerns or arguments related to it, on top of my own, and after that, I still ended up following through. So, even if your genius is met with resistance, and perhaps it always will be, don’t let that stop it!

I want to add one more thing to this post, because in this post I’m trying to share a little insight I feel I’ve had recently, about the following your intuition to good ends, and here I have another small insight, or lesson, that I’ve learned, and don’t know where else I’ll put it, and so here it is. Do you know about the dongle? That little white piece of metal and plastic, that can connect two differing types of ports? My dongle was an AUX to whatever that small charging hole in the iPhone 6 or 7 is called. It’s about an inch long. Well, everyone knows that dongle is a piece of garbage. Such a thing really has no right to exist, but exist it does. It is an incredibly inferior product, by design, being so bendable, and thus vulnerable – but I think it is also probably just made with the lowest possible quality ingredients imaginable, so that it will break as soon as possible, and you will be forced to either waste your money on a new one, or finally out of frustration upgrade your headphones to ones that are not AUX, and match the new port. Until they switch the port on you again, and then you have to get yet another pair of headphones. Soon the port may be a thing of the past, with wireless charging and headphones, so that might not be a concern.. but that doesn’t matter to me at the moment, because I have a pair of headphones, I’ve had a pair of headphones for about 6 years now, and they are an incredible pair of headphones, and I don’t want to stop using them, and so I buy dongles, to connect them to my phone, and after buying the third dongle, I will never buy another dongle again. But the lesson is that, I should never have bought the second dongle, let alone the third, because I knew that they would break, and the problem would never really be solved this way. I complained about the weakness of dongles, as I searched for my third, a few weeks ago, about how stupid it all was, but yet I wanted it now, because I wanted to have my music, and I didn’t want to do the work to find any other way to solve this problem. After my second or third run with my new dongle, after making it about a hundred steps from my apartment, my headphones were filled with a hellish, grating, metallic screaming, the sounds a robot might make in its death throes, and I knew that it was done, and the fact that I was an idiot, confirmed. Putting band-aids over a deep wound will not help it close – at some point, you need stitches. Every time I bought a new dongle, I was just buying a band-aid, and not stitches. This was a poor temporary solution to a problem – it was never a permanent fix. And why bother with temporary solutions, if they will only cost you more time and energy in the long run? If you have a problem, and you have to choose between temporary and permanent solution, unless for the time being you have to choose the temporary, to get to the permanent, then never choose the temporary. That is the lesson I learned from this dongle business, and I’m thinking I might just tape it to my wall, next to my notice that I had gotten a package, that was being held for me by a local shipping company, that I procrastinated on, until one day I finally made the call, and was told, “Huh? That was a month ago. We sent that back.” I will always wonder what was in that package. That slip is a reminder to me, not to procrastinate, and especially not on the receiving of packages, and my dongle will be another reminder.

And now, we are officially finished! Will you ditch your car? Will you follow your genius? I don’t think I mentioned it, but the train line, that goes all the way from the west to the east end of Kyushu, is about a ten minute walk from my apartment, and the bus stop that goes into the city is about a two minute walk. That, with the bike, and having friends, made it significantly less daunting to go completely no car. But, even if you couldn’t go all in, any time you could trade your car in for the bike, or the walk, give it a try, and you might find that you benefit as much as I did.

So.. As they say in the Looney Toons, “That’s all folks!”

じゃあーまた！