The Man From Boston

Well. There are many things I want to say. So many, many things. My perpetual problem plagues me once again, has been plaguing me. I have so much material for writing, so much content that I am completely overwhelmed, and feel unable to write any of it. I have old material, that I am revising, I have material that I am working on, have worked hard on, New York writing, and I have a little novel idea that I already have made progress on as well. I have the entire book in my head, and just have to actually write it, but that’s the part that takes the time, and the time, as we all know, is precious, and limited. It is the reason why everything I ever want to write about has not been written. And here we are, I want to write yet again, but with so much to say, and never enough time to say any of it. The thing to do in this case, I know, is just write anything, and whatever comes out, that’s it, and at least something was written. At least some of the story was told, and some of the story is much, much better than none of the story. So here I will tell you, on this fine morning in March, some of the story of what’s going on here now, in East Nashville, a true paradise on Earth for many of the East Nashvillians, although I guess just because it’s America, there are still people here who are not living their best lives. But for me, in general, I can’t believe the absolute paradise I have just teleported into, from the horrible Hell and Misery that I was previously a part of. To be able to step outside, into grass, into trees, and the singing of birds, into my very own yard, to sit at a nice picnic table and play my guitar, to hear the clicking, high-pitched grinding of squirrels devouring big nuts, to open the blinds on the window of my room in the morning, sunlight streaming in, and to see directly in front of me a handsome squirrel going bananas on a big, tough nut, my God it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen from a window, and it is my window, and my yard, from my room. (Well, it’s rented, but hey. It’s mine right now.) A room that I have decorated with my things, my books, my guitars, my Squishmallows. I guess I am particularly happy today, but I am happy every day that I’m here, that the sun is shining, and I can look out into my lovely yard, and hear the birds chirping, and see the squirrels frollicking. We have mostly clover in our yard as well, which now has hundreds of incredibly dainty, small flowers, that still attract all of the pollinators, tiny bees and flies, and they hover all over the clover field, which to them is I’m sure a magnificent forest, a huge bounty of food. They are grazing, in a way, just like cattle, scouring the field for the sweetest, tastiest nectar, sucking away at the sugary goodness.

I don’t have much energy because I woke up early this morning, and went to bed late (I thought about saying “bedded late”, I have been reading the ancient tomes), but I am not upset. I would gladly wake up every day in this way, and sacrifice sleep for it, because what woke me up was an incredible thing, that I have never seen as of yet that I have been here, for one month now, and that was, Nick Harding in the kitchen, making breakfast, at 7:50 am. Still, it is surreal to me, that we are in fact both awake at this very moment, going about our business, now 10 of the clock. I felt like I was dreaming. I heard his movement, and I walked out into the living room, and he immediately looked up at me, like he had been caught being a naughty boy, and whispered, “Sorry!” And I said, in my underwear, still half-asleep, “It’s alright.” I thought it was Josh, because although Nick had been hinting that this was coming, and had been trying for a few days, and had told me of his new plan last night, to not stay out all night, and come back early, and take a powerful sedative, to wake up early and restart his sleep schedule, I knew this was coming, but to see it in reality is another thing. Someone says, “It’s coming, it’s coming,” and it finally comes, and you’re still shocked, even though you knew it was coming. Nicholas Harding, the entire time that I have known him now, has been staying out, later, and later, and later, a creature of the night, and sleeping in, later, and later, and later, waking up with an hour of sunlight left in the day, and watching it disperse through a crack in his bedroom window. He has been as nocturnal as the Count himself, and the only way you would have ever seen him in the “morning” was to wake up early enough to catch him before he retired for the day. I would spend all day, many, many hours of the day, living my life, before Nick Harding had risen from his tomb, to begin his night. So to see him, standing there, in the kitchen, cooking bacon and eggs, in his hat, sweatshirt, sweatpants, morning sun streaming in through the windows, birds chirping, and his cat, Brady, out in the living room with him, also shocked and clearly very pleased with this new development, at 7:50 in the morning, was understandably, totally surreal. It took me many minutes to process that this was happening, that it was in fact reality, and that I was not dreaming. I kept repeating that I couldn’t believe this was happening, and Nick said, “You think you’re still dreaming, don’t you?” We had a great morning chat, in which he told me his new plans for life, taking the week to get his sleep schedule in order before he goes back to work, getting back into morning gym workouts, and, of course, very soon he was telling me “I’ve made a decision. (A famous Nick Hardingism.) I’m back on the dating apps.” To which I replied, “You got off of them?” (It felt like he had been on just as many dates as ever, which was, nearly every night. But now that I think about it, he had been having a lot of boys’ time.) He said, “Yeah I was trying it out, trying to date more organically, but…” (This phase of organic dating can’t have lasted for more than a week.) In short, he’s looking for real love now, which I would say is a great and noble thing to be searching for. I went back to my room then, Nick to his, to watch The Patriot with Brady, I think because just yesterday we had been talking about, if we had to fight in any war, any kind of military conflict, what we would have wanted to fight in, and Nick was for certain, the American Revolution, which I thought was a very good choice. We talked more about it this morning, when I went into his room, to behold the most incredible scene, that I still could not believe I was seeing, that was Nick, cozy on his bed, watching a movie, with his window curtains actually open, with his room not dark and cave-like, and not lit by the harsh overhead light, but by in fact, true, real natural sunlight, and with a candle burning, with photos of his family now on the windowsill, and with Brady at his feet, in a state of perfect contentment, he looked like he was purring his soul out just being alive in that moment, I still couldn’t believe that this was really happening. And he had so effortlessly switched, like he had been doing this every morning of his life. And he did comment, “I’m good at switching.” We rekindled our war discussion, as he was watching The Patriot and I could hear the sounds of battle, and I said, “You wish you were there?” And he laughed, and said, “Dude… I’ve been thinking more about it.” And his answer was still Revolutionary War, OR, to be in the Roman Legion, infantry style, because then if you die, you die with your boys. He said the worst thing would be to die alone. I mostly agree with that, except I would not want to die in an absolute maelstrom of chaos, which would unfortunately be very likely. I would rather have a picturesque death, in battle, and with some time to say my last words to one of my comrades who had really gotten to know me, and who would promise me that they would kill the bastards who did this to me, and win the fight, and carry on, and stay alive, and tell everybody that I loved them, and all of that stuff that you say when you’re meeting your untimely end in war. I would not want to just be blown up by a mortar as I stormed the beach, too loud to hear anything from the bombs and the gunfire, with my guts out.. wow, umm, anyways.. where were we. Well, basically, that’s it. My answer was still in medieval times, and if I was a common man, I would want to be an archer, but of course if I could choose it I would be a knight. To which Nick replied, “Oh of course, if I can pick I’m going to be George Washington.” And I said, “As in you would want to be George Washington himself, or you as in Nick Harding substitute for him?” And he said, he, Nick Harding, which I said, that is an incredible amount of responsibility, and do you think you can do the job? And he laughed and said, “F*** no.” And the whole time, the fact that we were having this conversation here in the morning, still, that the sun was out, not to set anytime soon, that it was in fact the beginning of the day, for me and him, I still could not believe.

Other things I could write about include having a moustache, having already been infected by Southern culture, where people do in fact have moustaches, and now hardly without meaning to, I now have one too, and I have also been infected with Squishmallow disease, as have I have learned, all three of us masculine men in this household, via women in our lives, and how I am beloved at my local Kroger Starbucks because I only order black coffee, (“This guy’s a legend!” one of the baristas recently commented to his manager.) When I first ordered it, he told me he loved me. He said, after understanding that I just wanted a small black coffee, “Man, I love you.” I guess that nobody orders just a black coffee at Starbucks. Or at least, not at this particular Kroger Starbucks. It is a kind of crazy thing to do, I guess, like not having a smartphone, which is also continuing to win me much renown. Both of my roommates have commented that they have talked about me having a flip-phone, Nick to his therapist, and Josh to his friends. Also, I will just say I have full permission to write anything and everything about Nick, who told me, when I asked if I could write about him, “Yeah, you can write about me. You can use my social security number for all I care.”

Some of the other things Nick has said to me:

*In all seriousness* “I think about them all the time.” (Them being first editions of books.)

“Whoever it is, whatever I did, I’m sorry.” (Him telling me about getting a random call from someone who knew him from high school and would not reveal their identity, and started accusing and shaming him. He said he knew that all they wanted was, what’s the word, to be heard. (I can hear a flute playing in the background right now, some martial tune from The Patriot. I feel like this is something like having your kid home from college.)

When I went to talk to him about kitty litter. I said, “I need to talk to you.”

“About what? Is it gay?”

“A little gay.”

“Ok, carry on. Pro-ceed.”

This is at midnight, Nick only returning home for a brief respite. And something about the way he said it, especially, “Pro-ceed” putting his little twist on the pro like that, just killed me.

I was there to high-five Nick the moment he had received his award from Tinder for being in the “top 20% of profiles”. He said, looking up from his phone, “Guess who’s in the top 20% in Tinder profiles??” We high-fived. Then he said they shouldn’t be telling him that because his ego would go through the roof. I can’t remember his exact words, the way how he described how his ego would soar, but they were good.

I was showing Nick the second mattress that I had bought, in the midst of my failed mattress adventures, raging about how it was a piece-of-garbage sponge cake, and he had come in and was sitting on it, and I showed him, that I could easily bend it at a 90 degree angle, I showed him this and said, “This is not right. Look, I can easily bend it at a 90 degree angle. That’s not right.” And he stopped mid-sentence (extremely rare), having then fully processed what I had said, and laughed and looked at me and said, “What a f***ing test though.”

I mentioned again about writing about him, and he said his step-dad was a writer, and he had written about Nick before, and that he (his step-dad) had said to Nick’s mom, “I only married you for Nick.”

I could keep going. This is effortless for me. It is just as effortless for Nick, to say all of these incredible things. Nick told me about killing beavers, killing beavers for his step-dad that were destroying their special pond on their hundreds of acres of property in Vermont, and how his step-dad had paid him for each beaver he slayed, $100 a beaver, and he got $350 dollars, because he killed four beavers, but the fourth he shot in the water, and it sank and he couldn’t get the body. This story was a short segway in a conversation about a woman who was a hunter, who told Nick that she could dress a deer in 10 minutes, that Nick was currently seeing. On some of our very first nights together in the house, Nick was fretting over sending a message that he felt was too romantic to this woman who he was I think not supposed to be falling in love with, as that was not what she wanted, but he didn’t want to lose her at all.. Something like that. He was telling me about this, and he said, he knew women very well, growing up with two sisters and watching Sex and The City with them. “Everything I learned about women I learned from Sex and The City. There’s four types of women….” And, to this hunter girl he was seeing, he had said something about, “I’ll have to be careful about riding alone with you in a pickup truck on the country roads.” Or something, because I guess that’s a thing they say, or a song, about falling in love with a blonde girl while driving in a truck on country roads, basically what I just said (I don’t listen to country music, I don’t know about this stuff.) And he thought that was too much, and he was in great despair, putting his head in his hands, groaning, saying, “She’s not gonna’ text me back. 100%, she’s not gonna’ text me back tonight. If ever get a text back it’s not going to be until after this weekend.” And she did text him back that night, in only an hour, which was extremely relieving for him, so relieving that he texted me and said, “She texted me back. We’re good.” (Because of course I was also so invested in this) and said that she was in the shower or something. In the meantime, as he fretted and tortured himself, he commented on the chess set that is the only piece of decoration or homeliness in our still-barren living room, on the standing counter of the kitchen sink, and he said he had always wanted to learn chess, to which I replied, “You are a 31 year old man and you do not know how to play chess?” Excuse the stereotyping, but I mean, come on now. And he went to prep school??? (Well. So no he didn’t. It was revealed later that this enigmatic and fantastical man was full of lies, and a general ne’er-do-well. That may be something of a spoiler, but.. it fits, doesn’t it.) So I taught him, easing him into this, because I knew it would be a lot for him, in this moment, a lot for him to handle, and after starting with the pawn, and then moving on to the rook, then the knight, finally the bishop, he says, “Ok, hold on. Let me run this back.” And then he took a deep breath, and said, “God, I have to think. I haven’t thought in so long.” And he was being completely genuine. This man was, and generally is, but particularly so at this time in his life, in those first few days that I had known him, operating on pure, primal instinct, animal energy, running off adrenaline, testosterone, caffiene, nicotine, and mango-flavored White Claws, of which he downed one in the middle of our game of chess. He stopped and said, “Hold on, I need to do something.” Getting a large 16, 20-ounce White Claw out of the fridge, and saying again, “I have to do this.” And I knew. I knew what was about to happen here, but still I had to confirm it, and I looked him dead in the eyes and said, “What are you about to do?” And he laughed, and he said, “That’s a great response.” He said, “I’m going to chug this.” He said he could chug it “really fast.” His best time being seven seconds or something. I said, “Let’s time it.” He pulled out his phone, and he said, laughing, “What?? I’ve had my timer on this whole time??” And the timer on his phone had been running for nearly 10 days. It was approaching exactly 240 hours, it was on 238 hours and 40 minutes. And I said, “Dude, screenshot that, that is insane. In an hour you’ll have it at exactly ten day-“

“It’s gone.”

“What?”

“I deleted it on accident.”

He then handed me the timer, and crushed the White Claw, in 7.8 seconds. We then resumed our chess match, for the eleventh time that we had put it on pause, because during this match we had stopped many times, for him to review the mistakes he had made in messaging this woman, for him to put his phone on silent to help him get away from it, then deciding that was not sufficient, and turning it off, putting it in his room, then going back to get it, turning it back on because he “needed to know if his friends texted him” but he put the woman on silent (apparently you can do this?). He was also constantly vaping, huffing and spewing vapor throughout. After him crushing the White Claw, we had now “played” for about thirty minutes, what felt like an eternity (actual game time being only about 3 minutes), I just had to end it. Actually, the universe conspired to end things at a proper and natural time there, because somehow the most amazing and effortless checkmate showed itself to me, and I figured, even though we had actually only played about 8 turns in this chessmatch, that was enough for now, and so I took it.

I think I was even talking about this because of the phones, and displaying his primal instinct, but Nick has a terrible addiction to his phone, which he “just realized” recently. A few days after our legendary chess match (there have been no more of those, by the way) I was up to go to the bathroom in the wee hours of the night, or morning, around 4 am, and the bathroom is right next to Nick’s room, and he keeps the door open for Brady to get in and out, and I heard what sounded like two shows, two audio streams happening at once, and the next day we were talking, and I asked him about that, saying “Were you watching two shows at once?” And he said, “Oh, 100%.”

I must confess that I could write for many more hours on Nick, and our relationship. He is an incredible goldmine of writing material. The man is a living, breathing, treasure trove of content. Truly for a writer of the type such that I am, I could not have found a better roommate, and I still can’t believe my good luck in how this has panned out. (And even wilder than I could have ever imagined, in these glory days, the downfall that was coming. For Nick Harding turned out to be lying about just about everything in his life, and was stealing, and forging, and was with high probability what was formerly called a sociopath, and now termed anti-social personality disorder, which seems shocking, and it was incredibly shocking to discover at the time. I would say it was even somewhat frightening, as I felt that I had become intimate with him, and thought I knew him well. But so is the art of sociopath, the confidence man, the fraudster. And perhaps some part of me wanted to believe all of his fantastical tales, his recounts of wild adventures and his deep well of fabricated knowledge, as it was so entertaining for me. I didn’t care so much that it was true or not, I just wanted to keep hearing it. He probably knew that about me, too.) From the very beginning this Nashville business has been fated to be, it seems, blessed or at least destined to be. I don’t know how long this chapter will last, this magical new bromance I have found myself in (only a few days ago Nick walked in on Josh and I and said, “Boys, I have some bad news. I might be moving out.” Which was absolutely shocking and also completely crazy, because he had not paid rent in a few days, and the landlord, his friend, was pissed, and then of course in several hours he had made the payment, “a friend giving him some money” (now in the future, we know that that could mean anything at all), even though he has much money himself, as he has, he told me this, “gold and silver bars” in a Nashville bank, that he brought with him, as well as expensive watches, in the bank, that are investments. And he just came back from a trip to Boston with ten of the most beautiful suits I have seen. He took them all of his bag, one by one, sometimes with matching pants, and showed them all off to me, telling me about each one, the style, etc., which was incredible fun for both of us. So how this man comes into my room and says, “I might be moving out.” because he couldn’t pay his share of the far-less-than-New-York-rent rent, completely baffling. Every day with this man is a new adventure, and other days have started off with, me answering the door, bright and early at 7 am, to a group of no less than 11 firefighters, and just a few days ago, waking up to having no water in the house. I will have to write more of our adventures together here soon.

(From the future.) You know… Knowing what I know now, this paragraph and writing seems to be so full of red flags. And yet, at the time, it didn’t seem that way. He was so artful in his reasons and excuses and explanations, and I also am (well really, was, because I don’t think I will ever be taken in by someone so easily again) trusting and honest myself, and so I really didn’t suspect anything for a long time, and believed him when he told me any of his never-ending explanations and excuses for the strange things that happened with him. There is more to this story, and I should tell it, so that you can hear the full arc. That’s where it really gets good.

Osaka (F*** League of Legends)

The only stain from my Osaka days was my League binge. Please never forget, everybody, fuck League of Legends. Fuck Overwatch, fuck competitive gaming, fuck video games. Fuck Fortnite. Fuck all of that shit. Fuck vice. Read books, lift weights, play guitar, write a novel. But, there is no doubt, fuck competitive gaming. I can’t just say fuck video games because some games are really cool and rewarding to play. Samorost 3, Pikmin, Zelda, etc. But the modern competitive video game that cares only about stealing your time and attention and money, only about getting as much as they possibly can from you, fuck them. Fuck them so hard. Don’t ever think that they are not trying to fuck you over. They are.

*Depressed at the cubicle. There will only be two more days of this.*

The other day, I threw my mouse in the trash. I’m thinking about that right now, because I’m somewhat hoping that my roommates haven’t taken out the trash, in which case I can dig to the bottom of that full can, get my mouse back, and play League of Legends tonight. That’s what I’m thinking about this morning, now, at 11:37am, from my cubicle. (And you know what? I fucking did it. I pulled my mouse out of the bottom of that jam packed can, covered in celery juice and coffee grounds, and I wiped it off, and I played six horrible games of League of Legends. Filled with idiots, filled with trolls, with people being angry, people being mean, people being sad. I played until 2 in the morning, spent 4 more hours on the computer after a full day of being on the computer, and then went to bed watching someone else play more League. The League formula is so powerful that it made me pull my trash mouse out of the trash. That’s addiction. That’s an addict relapsing. Fuck you League. I will never play you again. You suck asshole, and you people who run League, you fucking suck too. You never get any more of my precious time again. I will never say the words again, like He Who Must Not Be Named. The Game That Must Not Be Named. That is what you are, now. You have achieved Harry Potter supervillian status. The Game That Must Not Be Named. The most hated enemy. And I will never play any game like you. I will never touch a multiplayer competitive game for as long as I live. I don’t want to. I have no interest in it. And I will not. 1/24/2024. Remember this day. The final day, the last day I was a slave. The last day I allowed myself to be taken advantage of. When you play these games, you are not the player. You are being played. (Oh, that’s so good.) January 24th, 2024.

I’m sitting here, and after having gone through a period of just straight up depression, probably from a lack of sunlight and any social interaction or physical movement, basically there has been no joy yet in my day, except when Mr. Shimoyama had a few words with me, and a moment on the train where the train lurched forward and I slipped in water and did a little ballerina pirouet, spinning exactly 360 degrees in one second and somehow perfectly catching myself on the railing, to which I made a witty comment and not a single person of the many people around me on this packed train had any response to at all, and I now have some energy, having had some coffee, and am waking up. I am waking up, and I am waking up in my cubicle, which is something of a desert of the senses, you could say, and am now once again retreating into the oasis of my mind for my mental water and dates, that are entertainment and stimulation.

I don’t really have a pressing task right now, I already managed one. And the problem with these computer tasks that require no creativity is that they are not going to provide you any kind of juice, or gas, to get you going, and inspire you. Conversely, they require energy and motivation. But right now, I’m out of that. The tank is empty, you can say. And so, I daydream.

I was thinking about my time in Osaka, actually. I was thinking about the time I spent at Tully’s Coffee, at Tennouji Park. When I think about Osaka, the two months that I spent there, living in Toyo Hotel (which was really more of a hostel), I think about a lot of things. At the time, I did not appreciate how transformative of a period of time that was, but the more that I go back to those memories, I see how precious they are. Like Thailand, they cost me so little, and are worth so much. I didn’t really know what I was doing in Osaka. Actually, that’s not true. I had just been in Hokkaido, trying to force myself into a life that wasn’t working for me, and after forcing, and scheming, and carrying out plans that just weren’t working, I gave up on the game, and relinquished myself of that vision. I left, and I decided that I would now simply give myself up to the river of life, for some time, without planning, as that only seemed to get me into trouble, and cause me trouble, and I did that, and ended up in Osaka. I went to Osaka because I wanted to be somewhere else in Japan, and I wanted to try a big city, and my Japanese friends told me I would like Osaka more than Tokyo. They said it was more of my style, and when I did a little Googlin’, and found a Tokyo vs. Osaka post, and saw that Tokyo had in its corner, “History, food, art, entertainment, anime culture, sports, etc. etc. etc.” (basically, everything ever) and then on the Osaka side, only one thing, “Comedy”, I knew Osaka was for me. I have so many stories from these two months in Osaka, so many good stories. I was a completely free man living in hostel with international travelers, mostly young people but there was a mix of everybody, longer term students living there (Mao and “Miss Tiger”, Yuko Woo, Chinese girls), a teacher, half New Zealander half Canadian, who had been there for four years who was exactly a modern day hippie hobbit (short, hairy, always barefoot, and with long dreads)(and just to give you an idea of the level of swag that this man was at, he wore the Okarina from The Legend of Zelda, Okarina of Time around his neck, 24/7).. and there was.. god what was his name, KEN, it was Ken, Ken was a real character man. I don’t even know what the hell Ken’s story was. I can’t remember where he was from, I think he was from Arizona, and what the hell he was doing at Toyo, I have no idea. When I first met Ken, I have to say (sorry Ken) I thought he was cracked. He was always asking questions and I almost felt like he was a little nosy. But very quickly Ken grew on me, and I saw that he was just goofy and easygoing, and always in a good mood. You know, with people being so complicated and moody and difficult, anyone who is always in a good mood is a winner in my book. That’s a person that is so welcome in my life. I need it, because I’m fucking moody sometimes. I’m not one of those people, and that’s alright. The happy people, the people who are always having a good time, who keep things in perspective, and are not overly preoccupied with all of the many great horrors and injustices of the world, who are always grounded in the here and now, who are up for talking about anything, who keep it light, they are winners in my book, and they are very valuable to me. Ken was one of those people, and so was the other guy, and they were buddies.. Noah. I have to remember these names. Noah, my god man, what a character. I also thought he was just a total goober (I’m sorry Noah). I mean, you have to be a little crazy to commute anywhere six hours a day, which is what he was doing in Australia, to his college. He said that was normal, but man, that can’t be normal. There’s just no way that’s normal. That’s pretty fucking insane. He would drive three hours every morning, and three hours back at night. You would think he was making that up right, but I swear Noah wasn’t a liar. He wasn’t even an exaggerator. He just actually did stuff like that. He had big square glasses. We both showed up at Toyo at about the same time, and he was looking to become an English teacher, and he got a job while I was there, and was working out of the hotel. I remember his first interview, he told me that he was interviewed by a anime cat, and he couldn’t take it seriously. I thought that was hilarious. I could never have taken it seriously either. I mean, if someone decides to have an interview with you, and they use an animated cat to do it, you don’t take that seriously, because that’s not serious. That’s a dumbass company right there.

“Miss Tiger” Yuko Woo was one of my favorites. We had a special bond. She was hot for me. She was like my old Chinese wife, in a way. We just acted like an old married couple. We had really great banter. She would just give it to me straight, and you know I love a woman who gives it to me straight. She once asked me, “Why you wear glasses? You look like nerd.” And took them off of me. “That’s better.” That was Yuko Woo. Her Zodiac animal was the tiger, and she was talking about it one day, I can’t remember why, I think because we had a Chinese New Year’s party together, and that year it was the Year of the Mouse, and she said she was a tiger, so I started calling her Miss Tiger, and it was really very fitting for her, and then she asked what I was, and I told her boar, because that’s what I am, and then she started calling me “Mister Pig.” And I told her many times, I am not a pig, I am not born in the year of the pig, that’s a different Zodiac animal, no, I am a boar, a mighty boar, with tusks, roaming the wilds and goring things, and she would say, “Ok Mister Pig.” Yuko was into partying every night, or on most nights at least, and I was always disappointing her, because I almost never went out, and at least not with the big group, or whoever she was going out with that night. I did still go out, because it was the first time I had ever lived in a place with a real nightlife, and I experimented with that, and I gotta say in the end, it’s mostly just not for me. I’m just not the type, I guess, because most of the times that I went out, I didn’t really feel like it was ever really a success, or something that was good for me, even with all of the meeting people and the seeing things, but I did get stories, and those are always worth something. I did go out with Woo a few times, and every time I did, she would just get drunk and dance, and she would do a little wavy dancing, kind of just standing still and waving back and forth, like kelp in the ocean, just vibing out.

I’ll save my going out stories for later, I guess. I haven’t talked about Mao yet, who is the last of the main characters of Toyo, the main residents, who were there for the entire of my two months. You see, I learned from the hippie hobbit Matt, that you could actually live at Toyo, you could become a resident, and they would move you up to the top floor, the resident’s floor, and you had elevated status, and paid a monthly rate that was even cheaper, and the hotel was already so cheap. This hotel was so popular because it was so cheap, it was notorious for being cheap, because, I learned after I was there, from the hippie hobbit Matt, that we were living in the worst ghetto in Japan, called Nishinari. It was a famous place, and Japanese people knew the name, and when I asked some of my Japanese friends about it, they were like, “Eeee? Nishinari no?? Nande?” (“What? You’re in Nishnari? Why?”) And it’s funny, and I think about this a lot now, because I lived in the worst ghetto in Japan, and it is incomparable to New York City. The worst ghetto in Japan is by comparison the most blessed and greatest paradise on earth compared to New York City. That’s no exaggeration. I saw only one homeless man in Nishinari, and he was doing great. He had a fort of boxes, he had a nice spot on the curb, warm clothes. He wasn’t begging, he wasn’t bothering anybody. I passed by that man almost every day, on my walk to Tully’s, and Tully’s is the reason why I’m even writing about this at all this morning. Tully’s Coffee at Tennouji Park is the best place in Osaka, or if you want to include the whole park, Tennouji Park is the best place in Osaka.

I was thinking about Tully’s Coffee because this morning, I put a Tully’s coffee cup into our office Keurig machine. I fantasize about some of the best moments when I’m in shitty places, like a cubicle, and the New York City subway. So you can understand why I fantasize about Thailand and Japan almost every day that I’m here in New York. And when I think about my time in Osaka, and all of the things that I did, and everywhere that I went, the purest, most joyful memory I have, which is almost a physical sensation that I can feel when I conjure up the memories, is me walking around Tennouji Park, in the clear, blue winter sky, with all of the smiling, happy Osakans, and hanging out at that Tully’s Coffee. It was only a short walk from the Hotel, and I went there almost every day, in the mornings, for most of the two months of my Osaka stay. There was one period of time where I fell into the void that is League of Legends, where I completely forsook the outside world, and fully assumed the identity of Kindred, Lamb and Wolf, the hunter, and it was not worth it, and fuck League of Legends, but that’s what I did. And I knew I had given up on the physical world when I stopped making my Tully’s pilgrimage, because that was a very important part of my life then. It was a routine that brought me great joy. It was a sacred place for me, a place for me to be. And what was so special about Tully’s, and Tennouji Park? Nothing, really. That’s the magic of it. It was just an ordinary place, an ordinary park, with happy people, some futsal courts, some park events, a michi-no-eki with the local produce, a zoo nearby, a nice Italian restaurant, super popular place, and Tully’s. The nicest coffee shop in the world. This Tully’s was big, and the walls were all glass, so you could see outside. You could watch all of the people in the park walk by, smiling, living their lives. The coffee shop was always packed, probably 30 or 40 people could all be in there sitting at once. There was a table with plastic dividers, for covid, that could seat up to 8 people, and that’s where the computer people, the people that were there to do business, would mostly hang out. Next to that, there were six armchairs, with small square tables in between, for sitting across from a friend or with a group, and chatting. There were then all along the back and on the other side, small tables with two chairs across from each other, lining the store. And in the very back corner there was a low table with two couches on opposite sides. There were three ways in or out. The front main entrance, and then one entrance to the left side. The one on the right, nobody came in that way, but you could leave through it. The park itself was like a giant rectangle, with a large grass area in the center. Man, there was even a roller rink and a small dog park. I mean, when I really think about it, that park had everything you could want. It had just about everything for everybody. And surrounding the park was the greater Nishinari area, that had all of the shops, huge malls, the shoutengai (the covered, long outdoor malls, with rows and rows of shops), the zoo, Shinsekai to the west, and the tower, in the middle of Shinsekai that was like a small Tokyo tower, a giant Don Quijote, a huge, multistoried onsen facility.. Man. I miss that like crazy. It was this sprawling, exciting microcosm. To the north of the park there was a stately art museum that was unfortunately closed while I was there, and a Japanese garden, a big one. So, you could take your pick, where you wanted to go, what you wanted to do. There were so many places to play, just in that little few square miles of Osaka. And then we were right on the train line, the subway, and not far from Toyo and the park, you could ride the faster rails, that could take you the farther places, like Kyoto and Kobe and Nara. Those trains ran on the dime, they ran on the money, they never failed me once, and I rode them often. They never failed once. God, I hate to rag on New York City, I really do. It just makes me depressed. But, this city is just so fucked compared to Osaka. So fucked compared to Japan. I just can’t help but think about it.

I didn’t tell you what I paid to live at Toyo, either. It was 30,000 yen a month. Do you know much that is in dollars? I’ll tell you. It’s like $220. That’s how much I paid, in a month, to live there at Toyo.

I would go to Tully’s Coffee almost every day. If the weather was particularly bad I might not, but I would still try. The best memories I have of Osaka are of walking past all of those happy people in the park, seeing the soccer players, and the couples, and the parents, the kids, the groups of young guys and girls, living their lives, and then going into that Tully’s, paying my 300 yen for a coffee, and taking a seat amongst the Tullians. I was a regular for sure, and the staff knew me. I am charming, you know, and make small talk, and generally like to have positive interactions with people, so it wasn’t long before we were chatting, and they were regular friends to me. There were four staff members that I would regularly interact with, but my two besties were the manager, who was almost always there, a woman in her 30’s or early 40’s, and Kento, a young guy who lived in California for a year and had amazing English. We would always have a laugh together, over anything at all. He always had something fun to say to me. I remember he said to me once, that I was confusing the other staff girls, because I would sometimes speak in English, and sometimes in Japanese, and they didn’t know which was which. It’s common to speak in both languages when you’re both familiar with them, but for a low-level speaker of one of the two languages, the switching is quite confusing. The other two members were younger girls, who I never could get much out of, but they knew me, and they knew what I wanted, which was always a medium black coffee, until I realized that the medium was just too much for me, and I switched it to small, which was I remember a momentous decision, that I’m sure was talked about by all of them, when Kento said, “Medium?” And I said, “Make it small this time.” I’m laughing so hard writing this. It’s actually true though, that’s how it went. And he was like, “Oh!” I would always ask what kind of coffee they had today, and they would just start telling me, so I didn’t have to ask. It’s the little things, you know. I felt like I had really reached a certain status, it was like a badge of honor, when the manager came over to me one day, when I was sitting in the back, and she told me that one of the seats at the 8 unit table where the Tullians went to do their work sat, she told me one of those seats was available now. She knew that I always liked to sit there. She noticed that, you know. She knew my habits, she knew me. That was sweet. It’s really the little things.

They ran a perfect ship. It was always clean, people were always taken care of. That Tully’s was so popular for a reason. And they always played jazz, good jazz, like jazz trios, jazz quartets. That’s my favorite kind of jazz. I remember they were once going through a jazz Harry Potter CD, for maybe a week or two, they were playing Harry Potter jazz. I loved it. I mean, jazz, coffee, nice, happy people. Not hard to see why Tully’s Coffee was my favorite place to go. It doesn’t take much. And you could find anybody in Tully’s. There were often other foreigners. There were Japanese moms, girlfriends, couples, students, families, businesspeople, old friends, kids. Everybody was there, hanging out, living life, having a good time. Always good conversation and smiles. One of the young worker girls, she didn’t have much English, and was a little on the shy side, and I remember once walking in, and walking up to the counter, and there was a foreign family there trying to explain to her their complicated order with all these bells and whistles, and I could see the girl was having a tough time with them, and I thought, This is my moment. Leave it to me. And I stepped in and saved the day. The mom said, “Thank you so much, we’re from Hong Kong, I thought Japanese people would speak more English!” And I translated their complicated order with the bells and whistles, like no ketchup on the wiener, that kind of thing, and everybody was happy, and the shy girl was grateful, and I felt like I had performed a great service. It’s nice when you get to use your language skills to actually help people. It’s a very satisfying thing.

The only sad thing about Tennouji Park, and the Tully’s – the only problem with it, was that it wasn’t my culture, and it wasn’t my people. The Japanese never intentionally made me feel that way, but the language barrier did. And, I never felt this way when I was in Ozu, or in Kumamoto at all, because it was rare that I was ever surrounded by masses of people. I was usually in smaller groups, where I would be, you know, 5% of the population at the least, but I also had a role, like in the classroom, I was a part of it, being a teacher. I think that was actually the biggest difference, because while I was in Kumamoto, I had a role, and I had an identity, and that gave me a reason to be in Japan. There was something I was doing that tied me to Japan, and made me a part of it. But once that was gone, I felt that there was nothing now that really bonded me to Japan, and I didn’t have a place in it anymore. And I started to feel that when I would hang out in the park, and at Shinsekai, and at the mall, and on the giant circular crosswalk in the sky on the intersection between the park and malls and giant buildings, and I would be surrounded by Japanese people, hundreds of Japanese people, and then there would be me. Just me. And I would feel it, then, that I was different. It was like, wow, this is a lot of Japanese people. In fact, every one of them is Japanese. And, I’m not Japanese. I’m different from them. Sometimes that’s a fine feeling, and it comes with a lot of perks. Most of the time, really. It’s fun to be exotic. It’s just that, eventually, you don’t want to feel that. Or, you don’t want to feel that way all the time. You want to be exotic, of course, but you also want to just be normal. That sounds like something that celebrities could really relate to. You just don’t always want to stand out. Sometimes, you just want to be like everybody else. And when I wasn’t thinking about how I wasn’t Japanese, which was actually 99% of the time, the language barrier would often remind me, because even with the level of Japanese that I had, which was that I could have a conversation with anybody, I wasn’t nearly fluent. I would still make mistakes, I wouldn’t understand what they would say, I would have to ask them to repeat themselves, all of those things that just get in the way of normal communication, clunk things up, and remind you that you’re different. Those little, passing interactions, are very important for relationships. The fleeting interactions. You may have just a small moment to make an impression, to say what you have to say, to show some personality. Being unable to do that, it’s hard. Having something you want to say, but not being able to say it, right there on the spot, or trying and failing, it’s just hard. I had just been back to the US for the first time in years that fall as well, and I remembered, or really, I learned for the first time, that feeling of just being so easily enmeshed in a culture, of existing so easily in it, being able to understand everyone and everything, knowing what they’re going to say before saying it, being able to handle every interaction nearly effortlessly, was just so.. refreshing. So easy. Like being a fish in water again. That was really the only problem with Tennouji Park, with Tully’s Coffee. By extension, that was the only problem with my Japanese life, then. Otherwise, it was just about perfect.

Man, I really miss Japan.

It’s weird to say this, and it’s weird that I feel this way, but I do. I have very few regrets in life. I actually might only have one, and it’s this. They say you only regret the things you didn’t do, and so far for me in this life, that holds true. I wish I would have told my Tully’s friends that I was leaving Osaka. I didn’t tell them goodbye, I didn’t tell them I was leaving Osaka. And when I think about it, it feels like I just disappeared into the night, vanished without an explanation. Time passed, they wondered where I was, if I would ever come back, and then eventually, stopped thinking about me. I wish I would have taken the time to tell them goodbye, and thanks for everything. Thanks for running a great store, thanks for the friendly conversation, thanks for caring about me, thanks for giving me a place to go, a place to be.

When I think about Osaka, it’s those moments at Tully’s and in Tennouji Park that come back to me, but there was another place where great memories were made, and that was in the Toyo common room, where I made so many friends, encountered so many characters, had so many great conversations. I really did make so many friends. Genesis, the German med-student that failed her med school exam and was taking a haitus, Jean, the French beatmaker who quit his engineering job and was looking for a new lease on life, Ben, the Scot, the sustainability expert, Thal and Roy, the Israeli guys who had finished their mandatory military service and were now doing the customary world travel, all of the main crew of Toyo, Mao, the Tiger, Noah, Ken, and Derek, the photographer from Illinois.. there was a crazy Pakistani man, a guy from Florida, who, when we were talking about crazy Florida people, told me a story about a guy who taught his parrot how to say, “I consent” so that he could have sex with it, and when I said that there was simply no possible way this way true, no matter how crazy Floridians are, (because let’s be real, it is anatomically impossible to have sex with a parrot), and he Googled it and said that ok, it was a fake story, but he believed it because that’s how crazy the Floridians are.. Man, so many characters.

There are many stories here. There was a mystery man. In the lobby, in the common room on the first floor, where we all hung out, there was a guitar. It was a piece of garbage. It was mostly broken, but it had strings. You could make some sounds, but you didn’t play that guitar. It was mostly for the comfort of guitar players, to have a guitar around, and to look at, even if it didn’t work. But one day, after I became a resident, and they moved me up to the 5th floor (and I remember asking if I could just stay in my 2nd floor room so that I didn’t have to “move all of my stuff” (insert crying laughing emoji)(because I had like two suitcases) I started checking out the upstairs, and found a nice roof, and a secret lounge that no one was using. Inside of this secret lounge, there was a guitar, that was nice and actually functional, and I adopted it. I never saw anyone in the lounge, after hanging out in there for some days, and I figured that this was just a left-behind guitar, and started keeping it in my room, and somehow, Aya chan, one of the Toyo staff, a wonderful gal, knew that I had the guitar. A few weeks later, she asked me if I had the guitar, and if I could leave it in the lounge, because the owner had been looking for it, and I said, “The owner???” She said he used to live there and still comes around sometimes to play in that room, and he was glad that someone was using the guitar, but still wanted to play it too. So I left it in the lounge, and wondered about this mysterious man. Not long after that, when I went up to the lounge to play, as I walked up the steps to that 6th floor, I heard something. I heard music, string music, but it wasn’t guitar. It was something else, something like a sitar, some Middle Eastern sound. I walked up to the door and listened, and what I could hear was absolutely blowing my mind. Whoever was playing whatever in that room was a complete genius of the instrument, and I knew that must be the mystery man. I stood there in awe, listening to this master, getting a private concert, and waited. I didn’t want to disrupt him, obviously, but I needed to know who he was, and so when he finally stopped playing, I opened the door, and there he was. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, the mystery man, a Japanese man with long hair, playing his mystery instrument, made out of a gourd, with 20+ strings. (Google tells me it’s a kora, 21 strings.) I said, “Sugoi.” (Wow.) And then we became best friends. I apologized for taking his guitar, asked him about his instrument, he played some crazy stuff for me, told me all about the kora, asked me to play some guitar for him (which I was so embarrased about and have never felt more humbled) but he was encouraging and said I had a lot of feeling behind my playing. I felt like I was meeting a rare character, a magical being, like a unicorn, or Tom Bombadil from The Lord of Rings, something mysterious and ephemeral. I saw him outside of that room, once. He was a young man, but he had some problems with his legs, and walked with a cane. We met several more times, and played together, and talked about music, in that secret room, in a private space, outside of time, away from the noise and chaos of the world.

The ability to get away from the rest of the world, to have such a private, personal, untouchable space, both in that lounge, and in my room, was a truly amazing thing. And I had complete freedom at this time, with no one to answer to but myself. My time was entirely my own. Another rare, and powerful thing. But that’s a very precious thing, and you have to be careful with it. In the throes of winter, in this Toyo Hotel, I did for some time disappear into the void of League of Legends. It’s almost no different than if I had been sucked into an opium den. I disappeared from the lobby, I disappeared from the world, and I entered that magical, fictional world of the Rift. I hadn’t played in years, prior to this, I had nothing to do with the game. I was an addict. And I went back in. I had to relearn the game, a lot had changed. I had always been a jungler, a king of the jungle, killing monsters, surprising opponents, dictating the flow of the game, supporting the strongest members of my team, shutting down the enemy movements, controlling vision, territory, and objectives, and I gravitated to that role again, choosing as my character a new character, Kindred, Lamb and Wolf, a deadly archer with a spiritual wolf companion. I had to relearn the game, learn the new characters, learn this new character, her ins and outs, as she was a totally new concept, being a ranged hypercarry, but in the jungle – with no way to immobilize the enemy, easily killed, but a killer herself. Highly mobile, with an incentive to invade the enemy jungle, with the ability to mark targets for death, and hunt them down, growing stronger with each kill – she could fight early, she could fight well, if you knew how to handle her, and what fights to pick, but she couldn’t fight everybody. That didn’t come until later, when she had grown in power, and was completely unstoppable. She was conceptually entirely new, with a steep learning curve, and with massive potential for payoff, which made her fascinating to me, and that’s what I did. Day in and day out, for a week, for ten days, I hardly left my room, and mastered this killing machine. I will never forget one of the last games I played. Of course, I knew this was a problem, that I was playing League, that I was again disappearing into this void, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care at all. I was in. And in that last game, the final fight is burned into my mind. I had now mastered Kindred, I had perfected the killing machine, I played the entire game flawlessly, with no missteps, and in the end my total dominance from start to finish was complete, as I single-handedly cut down every member of the enemy team and ended the game, while my own team watched on. I decided that the game was over, and so it was. It was a flawless victory, my mastery was complete. After that, what do you do? Where do you go? Was I going to keep playing, to climb the endless ladder, rise to the top of the ranks, spending more precious time that I don’t have? I already didn’t have time for this. No. It was enough.

It was rare that I ever had anywhere specific I actually wanted to go, as I was mostly just hanging out, going to Tully’s, and enjoying the company of the other Toyo people. They gave me plenty of things to do, they all had their own itineraries, they were full of ideas, and I could join them if I wanted, or just let them go out and do the excursions, and get the report when they came back. It’s fun talking to other backpackers this way, because everyone goes out, and they do their things, and then you all come back to the hostel and talk about it, sharing stories, sharing ideas, inspiring each other. Sometimes, you find someone you really like, someone has an idea that you want to get in on, and you do it together. You can always find someone to go out to eat with you, if you want it, either in the common room, or going out somewhere. You are like a little family, for the time you’re together. I was happy to go along with others, and for that time I was something of a tour guide, because I was one of the few in the hotel who was actually a Japan resident, and spoke Japanese, and knew about all of the things that they were learning about for the first time, and so I could introduce them to new things, show them some of the more interesting aspects of the culture, and I became a little bit of a local expert, and could take them to places that tourists might not get into. Most casual tourists, probably very few came to Nishinari in Osaka at all, and so you got a different and more adventurous crowd, more world travelers, more experienced travelers, and people who wanted to experience deeper elements of Japanese culture. Well, on one excursion, that was wholly my project, I convinced some of the other Toyoans, that was photographer Derek, French beatmaker Jean, and the Scot, Ben (his name is not Ben but what the hell was his name), to join me on an expedition to the Tower of The Sun. I had been enamored with it since I discovered it in a pack of famous-Osaka-things cards that I got in a vending machine. I still have those cards, and what an incredible purchase. That pack had all of the Osaka gems, all of the local treasures, everything to do, everything to eat. In a pack of cards. And when I flipped through them and saw The Tower of The Sun, I had the feeling that I had seen it before, somewhere in Toyo, and I started walking around and checking the walls, which were all covered in art made by the guests and staff, until I found it. There on the wall in the main lobby was an image of the Tower of The Sun. And so I looked this thing up, and I knew I needed to go there. It was kind of far though, about thirty minutes or an hour away, and I didn’t want to go alone. I pitched this trip in the lobby, and Jean, Matthew, and Derek signed up for it, and so we planned to meet the next morning, not too early, just something like 9:30, and all go together. And at this time in my life, I had no phone, and one of the biggest inconveniences about not having a phone, and you wouldn’t expect this, is that you actually don’t have an alarm clock anymore. I usually wake up early, and so I was sure it wouldn’t be any problem, but for some reason that morning I slept in. I woke up at 9:45 or 10:00. The day of the big expedition! Shit!! I called my friends on the Line app, no response. I rushed down into the lobby, but I didn’t see them. I wavered on what to do, and decided that they must have just left without me, hoping to see me there. So, I grabbed my camera, and I made the trip myself. The Tower of the Sun is an enormous art installation from the 1970’s world art expo, that was held in Osaka. The outside is basically an enormous, 100-150 foot tall concrete and metal cone, with two arms, and with a giant hybrid sun/moon face, with a quirky sun face painted on the front, and a quirky moon face painted on the back of the main tower. It’s like an enormous, modern, Japanese totem pole, in reverence to the sun and the moon. (Then you get inside, and it’s totally not what you would expect, and I knew you could go inside, but had no idea what was in there). It’s amazing. And it’s part of a huge, many-square-miles-large park. I took the train there, walked to it, and looked all over – but my friends were nowhere to be found. I went inside and picked up the four tickets that I had pre-ordered, and wondered what to do. Could they have gone ahead? Were they already inside? Did they give up on the trip? Did I somehow get ahead of them? Should I wait? And these are the fun kinds of questions you have when you don’t have a phone. These are the fun little riddles you have to solve. Because obviously if I had a phone, I would know. They would have told me. But I didn’t, just like the olden days, and I had to wonder what happened. This best part of the story wouldn’t have existed if I had a phone, so when people ask me what it’s like to not have a phone, remember this story. I asked the girls working at the Tower’s reception if there were already three young male foreign men in the Tower, and they said no. I didn’t know what to do, and I waited around for some time, probably fifteen minutes, and walked around the park. I think I had a time set on my tickets, that I was supposed to use them within a certain timeframe, from 11am-12pm, so there was some time pressure. After waiting, and explaining my situation to the nice girls working the reception desk, I decided that I wasn’t going to be finding my friends, and I should just give the rest of my tickets away. I went back outside, and saw a couple with two young boys entering, and offered them my tickets, but they already had some. Same with another guy walking in. I walked up the entrance ramp, and went out into the park. Nearby, there were three young girls, high school aged. I tried them. As soon as I started talking to them, they were shy as hell, giggling and alert, as this is a very rare occurance, having a wild gaikokujin start speaking Japanese to you, and I offered them the tickets. They were very apologetic, and thought carefully about it, but they had somewhere they needed to be, and wouldn’t take them either. So after that, I just said, well, I tried, and I went back into the tower. I updated the reception girls, and told them after all that I couldn’t find anyone to give the tickets to, and was just gonna’ have to go in alone, and they were sad to hear it, but shouganai! It can’t be helped. And then, not a minute after I had gone in, and was looking over the initial design sketches for the construction of this magnificent tower, one of the reception girls came running over to me, saying excitedly, “Sumimasen! Sumimasen! Tomodachi ga kimashita!!” (“Hey, your friends are here!!”) And I ran out, and there they were! And I said, “What the heck!” And they were like, “We were in the lobby the whole time!” I couldn’t believe it. Somehow I had just missed them. And so we went in together, and had a great time. And it turned out, externally the Tower was all about the sun and moon, but inside, it was The Tower of Life, and the thing was filled with giant sculptures of paleolithic creatures, protozoans, early man, dinosaurs, jellyfish, spiraling up to modernity, from the ancient times. The entire interior glowed red, and there were spiny things everywhere, and there was a whole section at the beginning that was just crazy tribal masks. Then, afterwards we went to a nearby mall, and gorged on amazing udon. God, I love udon. And while we were loading up our udon with all of the goodies, Jean was standing next to me at the counter, pouring the fried crunchy crispies into his bowl, and this whole time we had been speaking English, and then he says something to me, and I was like, “Bro, was that French?” Because I couldn’t understand him at all, and he was like, “Was it? Oh, sorry, my brain is so tired.” He was so tired that he had just defaulted back to French.

To be continued??????

A Nice Bit Of Diary Writing From Starbucks

*This is some old writing I was just rereading, I wrote on the day of December 15th, 2025.*

Context: I’m sitting at the Starbucks I work at (now worked at) 4pm on a Monday.

It’s time.

To do some writing.

I planned to type but this wifi is terrible. This Starbucks wifi. That is, my Starbucks wifi.

I’m sitting here at my Starbucks writing and hanging out. I’ve already been here and done my duty, and I’m back because I got home, threw my feet up on the bed, got comfy, and discovered that I had brought the magic building keys home with me. My first time doing this. And it’s funny because when I had been given the key, I looked at it and intentionally said, “I have to give this back.” And still that didn’t work. It was fated.

There are Japanese people sitting next to me speaking Japanese. That’s kind of rare.. The wacky guy has shown up again, this time telling KB all about his identity being stolen. He went through the line and is now going back to ask for his receipt. What a pain. I’m looking down so that he doesn’t notice me. I really don’t want him to talk to me. Not looking for new friends right now, no thank you.

He probably won’t recognize me because I’m in civilian garb. I’m not taking chances.

Katarina just coughed. That deep, double cough she’s had for three weeks now. Andrew was here ranting and raving about it last weekend, as we were all trapped behind the bar together. Now this weekend, he’s out sick. “He thinks he has covid.” Look at that. I probably already had it. Rachel has it now. Stacy has something now, again, because she already had something about a month ago that made her so sick she had to leave work early. That tells you it was something serious. She is a tank. Not much can stop her.

As you can probably imagine, Starbucks is a fountain of content. A deluge. I have probably 50 notes from the first weeks when I had started and everything was particularly new and exciting. But even now, 4 months in, as the novelty has faded, the developments don’t cease. Nothing is static, here. Always new faces, new characters, new situations. I was told today that my promotion date was now going to be after Christmas. I had already heard this yesterday from Queen, and now heard it from the big boss today. This is the fourth time –

Cori just scared me. I smelled her. Then I looked up and she was sitting right across from me.

Money just asked me, “What are you writing about?”

Apparently I’m colorblind because my hat is “green” and my pants are “grey”. I thought my hat was brown and my pants were blue. Money said, “Yeah if you were trying to color coordinate today it ain’t working.” I totally thought I was color coordinating.

It’s like being told you’re seeing ghosts. You can’t trust your eyes anymore.

Cori said I have a mental illness. I can’t remember why she felt the need to say that, maybe about the color blindness. I said, “But what is it? Many people have said that but no one can diagnose me.”

That’s right, she said it because I was writing. Money asked me why I was writing. Cori said, “He has a mental illness.”

Oh no. Crazy guy is talking to the customers and making them uncomfortable.

I’m uncomfortable.

He’s still talking to them.

Just plunged the toilet.

Cori tried to give me $20. Not necessary. Took me 30 seconds to plunge. 30 seconds to plunge. Like 30 Seconds To Mars.

My pen is dying!!!!

Went and grabbed a new one. (The color of the ink has now changed from blue to black, as proof.)

My phone. Left in the car? Definitely left in the car. Called sis.

Nice time talking with Money. She showed me photos of her family. I was wondering why she wanted to do that. I tried to show her a photo of somebody on my flip phone, and then discovered the no phone. Just like the old days.

It’s a gloomy winter day. We are approaching the longest day of the year. Then it’s only uphill.

Witches and Warlocks

February 18th, 2025

I can do some brain dumping for you. Let’s see what comes out.

This is for your entertainment. So it better be entertaining.

Jaz told me today that her family is full of witches and warlocks. Her exact words were, “My family is full of witches and warlocks.” That was absolutely an incredible thing and I immediately had to go and write it down. Jaz has Jamacian ancestry, or perhaps Haitian, I must confirm this, but Carribbean at least, we can say, and so she was not joking. She said, “I’m not joking.” She knows about voodoo, and she said she used to practice, and knows about the techniques, for hexing and cursing and etc.. That she comes from a line of practitioners. And she told me a story of putting a dead trout in her roommate’s air vents, to get her worthless roommate to understand what it was like to have a stinky house, because she would never take out the trash or do the dishes. She served her roommate up with a problem so unbearable that she would be forced to actually deal with it. If I had been consulting with Jaz this whole time, or if Jaz had lived in 805B, I don’t think Wisdom would have lasted two months. Jaz knows about being petty. But the main thing, that was so incredible, was that she said this statement, after mentioning some things about voodoo, in full seriousness, in the year 2025, and that was what was so incredible. To say, “My family is full of witches and warlocks.” In seriousness, and mean it, and I know that you mean it, and are serious about it. What an incredible thing to say.

I’ll tell you about the mug. I just went and took a sip out of it, and was reminded about my mug, and I need to tell you this because I need to give you some good things, to compensate for you reading my rant.

I bought a mug from the store, a cute lime-green mug, in the classic coffee mug shape, with an interesting series of purple and pinkish-brown lines across the middle of the mug, and also in the middle of the handle. When I rang it up, it was listed in our system as the “gradient mug”, to which I told Juanito, and who said, being a smart boy that he is, “What! That’s no gradient! You call that a gradient?” I actually think, from my web dev days, that it is a gradient, and that Juanito is just plain wrong, but I’m not going to do any Googling to confirm this. I’m just going to assume that I’m right, and that it has something of a gradient on it. This mug caught my eye from the moment I saw it, I was immediately charmed by it, and it is an unusual item to be in our merchandise roster. We have many more interesting items, things way more exotic, but something about this simple yet unique mug stood out to me. In the color scheme and the gradient. My brain did not really attach words to use to describe the mug, or why I should like it, as it goes with things that strike you in a visual way, you just like them because you like how they look, but when I was considering buying it, because it was now 50% off, having survived about a month and still, sat there on the shelf, I admiring it from behind the counter every once in a while, I was considering buying it now, only $8.65, and I of course first consulted with every single other employee, my trusted advisors, to gauge their reactions and also because I was curious what they thought about this strange mug, and I asked them to rate it out of 100, to which Juanito replied, something sarcastic, I can’t remember exactly, he said something that was not out of 100, and then someone gave it a 40, I think that was Jessica, and then I think it was Katerina, who said it was ugly, but kind of cute, and that I needed to buy it, and that’s when I knew I needed to buy it, and she was right. Katerina has phenomenal judgment and especially because, when she described the mug as being cute and ugly, I felt that she had a similar understanding of what was special about this mug, she saw it in the same way that I did, and I also felt that it was like that, cute, but ugly. Because the colors, as someone said, green and purple, they didn’t really go together well in this way, they could not have been the most obvious choice, and yet somehow, it worked. It was actually working. It was wonky enough to be interesting, and ugly, and yet cute. So, I bought it then, immediately ringing it up, and then drinking coffee out of it, and that was about the first thing that happened that morning. I spent the first thirty minutes of that day in such a jubilant mood, and having purchased the mug, and so happy to be working again with a team who was in good spirits, that I had to ride that out for as long as possible, as it was also very necessary for my mental health and spirit (this was now four days ago, I would say), and I just walked around with my mug, after the successful purchase, and enjoyed my coffee, and chatted with everyone and made many jokes and said stupid things. I went over to Queen sometime later, after having done some work, and was holding my mug again, so charmed and happy to have this wonderful new mug, that I had now been able to buy, and had already said to her soon after I had bought it, that even if somehow my mug disappeared or I broke it, and I was only able to use it for this single day, it had already brought me so much needed joy and excitement that it was worth the purchase, and then about an hour later or so, I was again sipping coffee from this mug, and she was sitting down at one of the cafe tables taking her break, and I walked over just to talk to her, and was talking, and she said, “Enjoying your new mug?” And I was absolutely enjoying it, should could obviously tell, and then I realized that me holding the mug then, in that moment, and sipping on my coffee, and wearing the Starbucks apron, I felt so absolutely relaxed, like I was in my living room, or a hotel, in my slippers and a robe, which my apron was giving me the feeling of having like a lounge robe on, and I realized that I had felt exactly that way, which I told her. And we had a good laugh about that. Somehow, through this assortment of cues, the new mug, just the act of holding a mug of coffee, and my feeling, and then the apron was truly somehow making me feel that I was in a robe, or some pajamas, made me feel that I was just chillin’ in my living room, enjoying a cup of coffee and reading the paper. It was a great feeling, and Queen asked me if I was going to keep the mug here at the store, and I joked that if I did, and it made me feel this way every day, Stacy Hamilton was going to hate it to the maximum. And, remembering how comfortable Charlie would look, holding his cappucino that he had made first thing after showing up and clocking in, and how much she hated that, and how Charlie lasted only two weeks (RIP Charlie), I decided that I should just take the mug home. And the advantage there is that, I have a little piece of my store at home, a small link to my Starbucks world, that I can enjoy and reflect on.

I think this is a good story too because it makes me feel the positive side to acquiring an item. I feel that we know that we make purchases that we shouldn’t make, but here is an example of a purchase that does good. You really can buy material things and they can bring you happiness, and function as well, because I haven’t really had a good coffee mug, that I loved. I bought a pig mug from Goodwill for $1, that is a large mug in the shape of a pig, that is cute and special, but I realized the problem with it as soon as I first tried to enjoy a cup of coffee out of it, which is that there is no easy way to drink from it, because the shape is weird, and so that completely ruins your drinking experience.

That’s the mug story.

My friend Mister Ethan Beller of Atlanta, Georgia recently called me and praised my outstanding guitar riff that he had seen me play on Instagram. He had recently seen this video I had posted, of me playing Creeping Death, and was very impressed, and said “100 out of 10 guitar riff, Steven san.” I said, I know, and then I realized that he thought that that was my riff, and I said, do you think that’s my riff, and he was like, yes, and I had to laugh so hard, because he definitely thought that that was all my work, not even one riff but the three main parts of the whole song, and he had no idea that that incredible guitar music was from one of the greatest metal and Metallica songs of all time, that is Metallica’s Creeping Death. But I thought it was also amazing because it goes to show that good music is good music, and he wasn’t swayed by thinking it was special just because it was Metallica or because other people said it was an amazing song. He thought it was mine, and he recognized it as being incredible. And he said, “I guess I should listen to some Metallica.” And I was like, yes, you absolutely should. I’m thinking about this because I’m sitting down to practice this legendary, masterful work on the guitar once again. It is 214 beats per minute, and James Hetfield plays with only downstrokes, which means that the song is played at 214 bpm and only with downstroking, which if you don’t know about BPMs and downstroking, let me tell you that it is not very easy to do. At least, not until you can do it. Then you can do it easily. I was struggling with 160 bpm, then it was easy, then 170 bpm, and now that’s a cakewalk, and now 180 bpm, which is doable. And that’s how it goes. But how long until 214 bpm? Let’s see what I can do tonight.

180 is possible with mostly no mistakes. 185 is not possible, doable with many mistakes and some collapses. So there ya go.

Today a cute girl came into the store, her name was Katie. Katie had mobile ordered, and we knew she was coming to get a Penguin Cookie, which is a sugar cookie with a cute penguin face on it, that we had in the winter, and we didn’t have them any more, and we were going to have to break the news to her. So, I was standing out in the lobby area, not having anything particularly to do, but needed to get farther and farther away from Andrew, in this moment desiring freedom, now needing to get so far away that I have to leave from behind the counter, because even that is too close, and Katie walked in to get her goodies, amongst which is the Penguin Cookie, and as she stepped up to the counter, I approached her and told her that we had good news and bad news, yada yada. At this same time, Andrew approaches, because he cannot ever let anyone do anything by themselves, and must intrude on all affairs, particularly me, and my affairs, because as Jessica would say, he’s in love with me, and so Katie is now somewhat flanked, and Katie is looking at both of us, but mostly looking at me, as I am the lead and initiated this interaction. So, Katie asked if we had cake pops, and went with the birthday cake pop. And when we had gone over to the register, which, I don’t know why we even did, because she didn’t have to make any transaction, and I said, “You like the Penguin Cookie, huh?” And she said she did, and that she had been getting them since high school, and she figured we wouldn’t have it, but she saw that it wasn’t marked out on the app, so she thought she would try and go for it. Andrew of course had followed us over to the register and was now standing very close. The Penguin Cookie was nostalgic for Katie, and I thought that was cute, and also shocking that Starbucks has had the Penguin Cookie for that long, and then she got her birthday cake pop and left, and I was standing there at the register, thinking about how Katie had loved her Penguin Cookie, this little Christmas cookie that she had some attachment to, and then I thought, why could she order the Penguin Cookie? She shouldn’t have been able to order it anymore through the app, because it was seasonal, and it has been phased out, and we don’t have it anymore. So, I went into our POS system, into the seasonal items, and found the Penguin Cookie button, and saw that it was not marked out as being unavailable, and I went to mark it out, and it was then marked unavailable. So at least, if Katie ever looks, or if anyone else looks, they will not have to be disappointed. I then tried to mark out the other seasonal items that were not listed as unavailable, but the system told me I couldn’t do that, because they were unavailable already. These are the small technical glitches that happen in the POS system, of which there are many. But I was able to mark that Penguin Cookie out. I felt that I had done something useful then. For Katie and the Penguin Cookie lovers.

They say that one of the best ways to make friends with people is to see them regularly. Any time you regularly see someone, you will have a higher likelihood of becoming their friend. People who live in apartment complexes make friends with people on their floors, etc. Well, that’s definitely 100% true. I have so many friends now through my job at this Cummins Station Starbucks, only because I see these people every day (most of my coworkers) or every other day, or every week (the regulars). And in almost every case our friendship and closeness and familiarity that we now have, where we know things about each other and have some idea of what is going on in each other’s lives, is only because we’ve seen each other repeatedly. It’s not because we have had any kind of special connection, although there are always going to be people that other people bond with. Everyone has their special friends. It’s interesting to see what baristas, what members of our team have befriended what regulars, and what customers, and who has positive interactions with who, and in what way, and what they bond over. One person I think about in particular right now is a woman named Katharine, who has a small dog, Lambo. Katharine is a regular and is in the store usually at least once a week, and I see her walking all over downtown Nashville with her extremely cute Pomeranian fluffball. This dog is one of the cutest dogs in existence, and is an extremely special dog. Katharine knows this and you know that this dog is living like royalty, or better. It is obvious. You could almost say that Lambo owns Katharine, actually. It really feels that way. Lambo is the king. Well, I remember that Katherine and I had a funny interaction from the very beginning, that we were sharing laughs, I can’t remember exactly what was said, but I remember that from the beginning, that she was funny. And that was about six months ago, when we first opened. Well, here we are all this time later, and when I come in on my off days, if Katherine comes in she’ll sit by me, and we’ll talk about life, or if we’re slow, I’ll chat with her over the counter while she sits there with her incredible dog, and talk about guitars, or her pilates class, or Starbucks, or the weather. And every time we talk, or every other time we talk, we learn something new about each other. But, the friendship, a friendship like this, is not based on anything but pure social joy. There is nothing transactional about it, it is just pure friendship. Nobody wants anything but to have a laugh and a good conversation. That’s very wholesome.

I have a similar relationship with many of the people from the Gibson Garage. I learn about them, learn a little more each week, acquire a new fact, and add it to the list of facts and stories I’ve learned about them. Just yesterday, Whitney came in, and I knew that she had been wanting to buy a new guitar, we had been talking about this for a few weeks now, and she was excited to tell me that she had bought her new guitar, her first Gibson, and it was a light-blue Gibson Les Paul, and of course she had to show me a picture, and I was like, oh my god that’s a beautiful guitar, outstanding.

This is the joy of working in a coffee shop like this. You can get so many stories and learn so many things about people, and the happenings of the world. For example, about world happenings, two days a lady came in, asking when we had opened, because she came here every year with her husband, because he goes to a yearly conference here in Nashville, and she hadn’t seen us here before. I told her that we had opened in August, and I asked her what the conference was (we get many conference attendees because we are right downtown by the Music City Center, I think that’s what it’s called, that hosts large conferences, with like, 30,000 people, and they all stay at the hotels right in the area) and she said it was a healthcare conference, and she told me that security was really tight this year, because of, you know, the shooting, she looked at me, and I said yes I did know about it, and she said that she knew people in the conference and she was usually allowed to enter and talk to people and mingle and hang out, but that this year they weren’t letting guests in, and they had metal detectors and etc. So she had to find other things to do. And I thought that was a good example of hearing about world affairs and the happenings of the world, and we could say as well an example of how the news is real, and that there are really events happening, and changes resulting from them, and here was an example of someone impacted by an event that had happened recently, that we all knew about. Because Luigi Mangionne killed Brian Thompson, this healthcare guy’s wife couldn’t go to her husband’s conference anymore. That’s what I mean.

You can learn a lot about someone, more than you ever wanted to know about some people, when you have even 15 minutes of free time to talk to them. They can open up, and they can tell you their entire life story, or you can read about them on Wikipedia, if they’re famous, or something like that, you can read about them in the news, or whatever. But when you meet someone over the register, over the counter at the coffee shop, you don’t have a lot of time. You have only thirty seconds, even. If there’s no one in line, or you particularly want to talk, you can manage to have more of a conversation. You could talk for even 3 or 5 minutes. But eventually, something is going to happen, someone is going to walk in, someone is going to ask me a question, or their order is going to be ready and they will be called, and feel the need to go get it, and you will be pulled apart. And then, if you see them again, if they come back, you can talk again, and then if they keep coming back and are a regular, then you can do this, over and over, and then each time, or every few times, you learn something new, in your conversation, they reveal something, and you accumulate facts and knowledge about this person, and you get to know them a little bit better. And in this way, over the course of weeks and months, the person is slowly revealed, and continues to be revealed, and you learn more and more about who they are. But still, it happens slowly, it can be just a trickle of information, and you never see them in their element, really, you only know them from the coffee shop, only know what they’re like and how they act within the confines of the coffee shop, and don’t know anything about their entire life outside of the shop. You only know about it from what they tell you. And similarly, they only know me as being the Starbucks employee. They don’t know about my entire life outside of it, they don’t know what I look like outside of the uniform, they haven’t been there for any moment of my life away from the Starbucks store. They only know me in this role.

Some little information that I learned today about Jared – he is a salaried employee. Jared works for the Gibson Garage as a Sales Pro, and is a younger guy, probably about my age, from Florida, also been in Nashville for a year, and is extremely good at guitar, has played for like 17 years. See, I know about this guy. I have now had many of these small interactions with him, learning something each time. And today, we had another one, and I learned a new thing, that Jared is a salaried employee. That’s a small fact, a small single fact, but I didn’t know that about him, and now I know.

One of the most recent times I was in the Gibson Garage, Jared showed me the fancy, expensive, real Gibson Explorers, and let me rock out. I was really impressed with and loving the Lizy Hale Explorerbird, that just felt and played amazing, and sounded incredible. So heavy. He had asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted to play, and I had been playing the Epiphone Explorers, and liked those, and had been too shy/not bothering to ask anyone to unlock the expensive ones for me, and let me try those out. So he took me over there and let me crack in to ’em. And now that I’m thinking about this, I actually have this story somewhat wrong, because this is what happened. HENRY was the one to ask me what I wanted to play, and took me over to the Gibson Explorers and let me crack in, and he showed me an incredible thing when he took the guitar down for me, which was this: that all the expensive guitars have a “lock” on them, that prevents you from taking them off of the rack without help from a Gibson Garage employee, but he showed me a trick, which is that the lock is actually kind of useless, and only requires you to twist the twisty-part with your fingers, to get it to unlock, and the special key that they have for the lock is basically just for show. But, this whole time that lock had prevented me from taking anything down, because you know, as like most people probably do, you see that something is locked, and you think, well, it must be locked, and I can’t get through a lock, so I’m not even going to try. But this lock was extremely easily foiled, if you just tried. With two fingers, you can defy these locks. I thought that was amazing, and Henry was very happy to show me that. Henry and I are cool, I should say, and I’m sure he’s not just going around and showing everyone how to foil these little guitar locks.

Seeing how easily these locks could be defied, but how effective they actually were at stopping me, just because they were there, made me think about something that I had heard before, that I don’t know if is true or not, but I had heard this once, that elephants kept in captivity were, when young, bound with chains, so they couldn’t actually escape when they tried, but then when they grew up, the elephants would be tied with rope instead, which they could actually escape if they tried, but when they had tried to escape the chains they found that they couldn’t, and so they stopped trying to escape at all. I felt like the same thing had happened with me and these locks. And if I was an elephant, and another elephant came along and showed me how easy it was to break my rope, I would have been just as shocked.

Starbucks The Novel

It is 6 pm, I am home for the night, still wearing my work attire. A perk of the job being that my work attire is comfortable enough that I don’t feel that I immediately have to change out of it when I get home. My feet are a little hot and moist, however. That’s from the Dr. Martins. And from standing all day. As you can see, I’m not going to hold anything back here.

The day started off interestingly enough, right out of the gate. I walked into the back to find a massive mountain of trash. I immediately proceeded to make the mountain even more massive, by going around and collecting all full trash bags and adding them to the pile. The single roller trash can that we keep for trash in the back was hardly visible anymore, the mountain was so large. It was completely engulfed.

I was immediately told by CJB (Jessica), that Stacy Hamilton desired that I would go to the Margaritaville Starbucks and see if I could procure two bags of cold brew coffee beans. “At the least, one bag.” I did not particularly want to do that, in this moment. I was feeling more thoughtful and not yet in a very active, ready to deal with Starbucks business kind of way. I had woken up early this morning and had gone to the store, cracking open my laptop and writing about CJB and reading about “State Capture.” So being immediately asked to go drive to another store, I was not thrilled about. However, it is fun to get out into the world, and I had just been on a run to the Margaritaville Starbucks, and it wasn’t far, and I was going to return some warming bags while I was there, that we had just borrowed. First, I wanted to handle the trash, and then I figured I would be ready to go.

My caffeine for the day, I decided, first of all just to have caffeine, because in the last two weeks I’ve been cold turkey and then using very sparingly, as it has been increasing my anxiety levels, which is not good during stressful times, but today I felt that I wouldn’t have much stress, and would benefit from the energy/mood boost. I had what I’ve been getting recently, a grande blonde Americano. I sipped that as I did my trash business, and then set off to find a dumpster.

We have to cross the entire building to go get a trash dumpster, then bring it back all the way across the building, load it with our Starbucks trash, and then bring it all the way back down, to the loading docks and dumpsters, and throw it all in the giant dumpsters. It’s a process, and recently we’ve been walking all the way down there to get the dumpsters, and not finding any, because the janitorial team has them all squirreled away somewhere. So I wasn’t sure if I was even going to get one today. They like to say that our building is as wide as the Empire State Building. Making a big deal out of how far the walk is. I never thought it was that bad. But it’s annoying to walk all the way down to get a dumpster, or the flat cart, which is the real struggle and source of frustration, because there is only one single flat cart for the entire building, and it’s almost always in use. I have to tell you a story now about this, even though it will be kind of long and a good chunk of writing. Stacy Hamilton once sent me to fetch the flat cart, which we had at that time learned that it was usually not to be found, and I had a feeling again that I would strike out, having walked all that way for nothing, and I said so to Stacy, and she said it would be there, and go get it. So, away I went, going all the way down, and spying no flat cart, and finding it nowhere laying around or in use on the way back. I reported this to Stacy Hamilton, who was immediately enraged. She forgot all about me, and said, as she started marching down the hall, “Motherf*****s. I told them to leave the f***ing flat cart…” She was out for blood. I’ve seen her angry before but never this angry. I didn’t really know what to do, but I felt that I was a part of this quest, and could get in trouble if I wasn’t there for her. Of course, the risk is also that if I’m around when she’s blowing up, I could get yelled at. I have gotten good at reading Stacy, so I opted to go with her and see if I could be of use. And I wanted to know what was going to happen. We walked down the central hall on the main floor to the halfway point, where the main entrance is, a security desk, and the freight elevator, that I learned today is exactly 73 years old. (I will tell about this soon.) Clark was manning the security desk, a laid back cool older black guy, who I thought for the first three months that we were open was named Hank, I was 100% sure of it, and I would always call him Hank and he never said anything about it, but one day he came in and Stacy was at the register, and he had paid and she said, “Thanks Clark!” And I said, after he walked away, “Isn’t his name Hank?” And she said no. And I said, “Are you sure?” She was 1000% sure. But I really thought his name was Hank, I could have sworn it, and so the next time I went down to the security desk, as I pass by it every time I go on a trash run, which is not as often these days, because I am a mighty shift supervisor, and that’s grunt work, but I said, “I have a question for you. Is your name Hank or Clark?” He said Clark. I said, “I thought your name was Hank.” He said, “Nope. Where’d you get Hank from?” And I told him I called him Hank this whole time and he said he never noticed. That’s how laid back this guy is.

Anyways, Clark was manning the security desk, which was perfect for this little shennanigans, and Stacy came up to the desk and asked him if he had seen anyone with the flat cart pass by. He says no, but he says he can try to find it on the cameras. So Stacy and I moved to the side of the desk, and this was the first time I got to get a good look at what Clark was cooking with, with his security cameras. He had about 16 or 20 screens of action in the building, all the halls on all 5 floors, and whatever else, and we were all looking, and he said, “There it is.” And pointed. “They’re taking it to the loading dock.” Stacy is still very pissed, and immediately moved to go take an elevator down to the basement, where the loading dock is. Now, I decided here that I did not really want to stand in a confined space with a furious Stacy Hamilton, and I wouldn’t be of much use here anyway, because it only took one person to pull the flat cart, and she might have chastised me for hanging around being useless, so I decided to let her handle it from here. I also didn’t want to be there when she found the poor unlucky construction worker who had carried off the flat cart. It was a man, we could see from the cameras, one of the many construction workers in the building. Clark said, “Man, she’s mad.” I told him what was going on, and then we watched, saw her get off the elevator, and start walking down the hall towards this construction worker pulling the cart. The hall is long enough that there are multiple cameras that cover it, so first they were shown on separate screens, but we could see they were getting closer, and both Clark and I were watching intently, knowing that they were soon to meet. It was like watching two trains about to collide. I could only imagine what was about to happen to this poor construction worker, and they were on the same screen, and she was walking right up to him, and then something incredible happened. She walked right past this man, and the flat cart. She didn’t even so much as turn her head. I couldn’t believe it, and I said, “What???” Clark says, “She walked right past him!” I said, “Did she not see him??” I couldn’t understand that, but I knew that if Stacy Hamilton came back without a flat cart and I was anywhere near her, especially if I was discovered to have just been at the security desk watching her on the camera this entire time, I was going to be flayed alive, and so I said to Clark, “I have to get out of here now.” And ran back to the Starbucks. Stacy Hamilton returned some time later with the flat cart, having calmed down a bit, but still having residual anger, and she said, smiling her scary smile that means she’s pissed, “The construction guys had it.” I don’t know if she really did just walk past it that first time, that would be insane, if her rage somehow made her literally blind. But thank god she found it in the end.

These days, we’ve completely given up looking for it. And anyways, that was a very long tangent to tell you… What, exactly… That I was going down to take out the trash, fetching a dumpster, and there were, to my great satisfaction, all of the four Cummins Station dumpsters, lying there for my choosing. Having such an enormous mountain of trash and cardboard to dispose of, I picked the largest dumpster, which is like a small whale, that I knew could do the job in one go. As I brought it back, I had made it to the freight elevator, which is the second hurdle in our Starbucks trash runs. The freight elevator often has some issue that you must resolve in order to use it successfully. It is an old elevator, that requires you to manually open and close the large gate that you pass through, and is called by a buzzer. Sometimes on Sundays the elevator is not even turned on, so you can buzz and buzz and buzz and it will never come. Sometimes the buzzer button doesn’t buzz, and you just stand around trying again every 30 seconds until something happens. And sometimes it buzzes and doesn’t come, which means either someone is using it for a long time, or someone hasn’t properly shut the gate, which means the elevator won’t budge, and you have to physically track it down, and close the gate yourself, and then escort it to where you want it to be. Today, once again, I was buzzing and nothing was happening. However, I could hear some strange clunking sounds, and some buzzing that was being done by someone else that was on another floor, so something was clearly going on. I was still not very interested in handling Starbucks business at this moment, so I stood there buzzing even though I knew it wouldn’t be any good, just because I didn’t want to do what I knew I had to do. In the end I accepted my fate, and I went up a floor, stepped out to the security desk, manned again by Clark, and discovered that the elevator was undergoing maintenance, and so was definitely not going anywhere. I thought it would have been nice to have put a sign up on the other floors, but actually the people who needed it probably already knew… Idk. But I was then very interested to see this man tinkering with an extremely old freight elevator. He was standing on top of the elevator box, so you see the gears and cables and whatever, and he was shining his flashlight around and inspecting things. I told him I was sorry for all of my buzzing. He said it was alright. I asked him if he worked on many elevators like this one, and he said, “I don’t work on any elevators like this one.” Because it is so old. Clark got involved in the conversation, coming over and checking things out, and was asking about how old it was, and the mechanic guy said, “Let’s find out.” And shined his flashlight over to some labels with info about the elevator, and you could barely make it out but the imprint of the date seemed to end in 52. So the elevator is 73 years old. They kept chatting and laughing as good ol’ boys will do, and I left them to continue on my trash quest. I was so uninterested in doing Starbucks business and so annoyed at having been once again stymied by the freight elevator that I just left the dumpster by the elevator entrance in the basement. I didn’t even bother to put it back. I figured I would be back down there soon, and that was a correct assumption, because Jessica told me to take Elevator B, and that you could fit an entire dumpster on there, and I said, “Are you sure it will fit?” And she said, “Yeah, Andrew says he does that shit all the time.” So that’s what I did. I went back down, got the dumpster, brought it to Elevator B, took it to the 2nd floor, brought it to Starbucks, loaded it with an entire mountain of trash, Jessica commenting that I should’ve just brought the dumpster into the back of the store to save myself all of the trips between my mountain of trash and the dumpster sitting outside of the store (this is of course impossible), and then having loaded it all up, brought it back to Elevator B, took it down to the basement, and then to the loading docks, and out to the giant dumpsters in the back.

I actually like doing trash runs because you get some precious alone time, and you get to go for a walk, and most importantly, you get to stand on a ledge and hurl trash bags into a dumpster, which is definitely always a good time. And you get a breath of fresh air, while you’re out there. So I’ve never minded doing a trash run.

After returning from my quest, successfully, it was about time for me to go to Margaritaville. I had to do it, and I looked for ways to stall but met with none. So, I drank most of the rest of my americano, and off I went. I did ask Jessica if she would take my car and go there. I think I just said, “Wanna do something for me?” And she said, “Take your keys and drive your car to Margaritaville?” But then I said, “Can you do it?” Or something like, “Are you allowed to?” Because I didn’t think she could even drive, and I still am not sure what the answer is. Actually, I learned from several stories and anecdotes and facts that she proceeded to tell me, that she can drive but doesn’t have a license. So, I was the one going to Margaritaville. I grabbed some of the warming bags to return to them, and off I went.

… TO BE CONTINUED

The Margaritaville Starbucks is only a few minutes away, a hop skip and a jump. I walk in and as I am wearing my Starbucks hat am immediately recognisable as a fellow agent of the Siren, and find that the team is there waiting for me, all four of them at attention, with nothing to do. They must have just been shooting the poop, as they say, and the leader immediately greeted me, and we handled the business, I scoring one bag of cold brew coffee beans, not two because they were running low as well. The interesting thing that happened here was that, while the gal was in the back hunting for a bag of cold brew, I noticed that one of the crew was wearing a Nirvana shirt, that I had never seen before. I could see the iconic font of the word Nirvana, in between the loops of his apron, and when he turned around that confirmed it, because I saw the In Utero angel. I thought, because this was a special shirt, not the casual Nirvana shirt that everyone wears with the smiley face, that you just know most of the people wearing couldn’t tell you more than 3 Nirvana songs, at least I suspect so, but because this guy had a rare shirt on, he must be an actual fan, just like me, who has a rare Nirvana shirt. So I said to him, “So you must be a real Nirvana fan?” And he looked at me, laughed, and said, “No. I just like the shirt.” The girl then walked back out with a bag of cold brew, and I thanked them and left, but honestly, I was pissed. More like, I was having a.. What do you call this exactly, where something activates you, and you go on a rant? Because now I was feeling that way, thinking, Even this guy, this cool looking dude with a rare Nirvana shirt, even he doesn’t really like Nirvana! Even he isn’t a real fan! So, who is?? How can I find them?? I was so confident that he would be something else. That he would be, like me, a real fan. But no. He just liked the shirt. (It was a really cool shirt.)

So then, believe it or not, on my short trip back to Cummins Station, with this in my mind, what do I spy but another Nirvana shirt? Two guys at the 8th S and Demonbreun intersection, looking to be in their 30’s, and the one guy is wearing a blue crewneck, with the In Utero angel, that said “Live in ’93.” I think it was ’93. I looked at that guy, and I thought, This guy, is he a real Nirvana fan? He’s wearing a rare crewneck. I’ve never seen it. It says live, did he get it at a live show? But no way because he wouldn’t have been old enough. And then I had a very strong urge to roll down my window and shout, “Hey! Are you a real Nirvana fan??” I was so close to doing it. I was very close. But even if he shouted back, “Yeah!!” We couldn’t have really known. I did meditate then on the power and influence of a rock band like Nirvana. The scale of the reach that these bands have, that all this time later people are wearing their clothes, here in Nashville, that it’s so ubiquitous, and they don’t even know about the band.

I told this to Stacy Hamilton upon my return. I tell her many things that I know she is not that interested in hearing. I just have to get it out. I don’t even need a response. She understands. She will generally reply with something very short and generic, but spot on, and then direct me towards the next order of business.

I have picked up the Hamilton biography again recently, and I came away from it feeling strongly that Stacy Hamilton is like George Washington, the leader, and I am Alexander Hamilton, the aide de camp, running various missions and errands, and handling business on her behalf, and making reports. I think about this often and do enjoy being this kind of an aide.

After this Margaritaville expedition, nothing particularly extraordinary happened for some time. Taloya did ask me for some advice regarding some loan of hers that had been passed to a collection agency. I was having a hard time nailing down exactly what seemed to be going on because it seemed like she didn’t even know, but basically it seemed that she had had a student loan that she didn’t know about, and it was like 8 years old, and had been passed to a collection agency who was now gearing up to collect from her. So I said she needed to contact them and find out what was going on. You may be thinking, sounds fishy, but from what information I could gather it didn’t seem to be a scam. She immediately set to work handling this business from her smartphone, as I would see her in the back filling out various forms and typing away, as I passed by her to do my Starbucks business.

Jessica did secure for me a particularly special gift card, that was in the shape of a rabbit. I have been collecting gift cards, and have asked the team for their help, and it has now become a fun activity for everyone, to score used gift cards and bring them to Steven, which everyone is happy to do, and I am happy to receive. It has become like a little game, and is definitely just better than throwing them all away. This is happening because I had the idea to collect them and make an artwork, because they are nice and it seems so wasteful to just throw them away. My plan is to make a collage. Cut them up and rearrange them. Jessica had scored for me a rabbit gift card, that I knew was very rare, and I checked the date, and it was from 2020. It was an oldie, in mint condition. Juanito scored one for me later in the day, with an illustration of a penguin sledding down a mountain with a basket of fish on the front of his sled. Another great card.

When I had first started this collection, I had about 9 cards at this point, and somehow every card I had gotten was unique and with art, as in not a generic basic white gift card, and I had just spread my collection out on the counter to peruse it. I was at the register, when two pretty girls walked up, beautiful brunette women, I must say, and they made their orders, and when the one girl went to pay, she pulled out a gift card, that caught my eye immediately, because it was a deep purple with an orange striped design, and I could tell it was awesome, and I immediately thought, I really hope I get this one. Well, she scanned it, and I saw that it had more on it than what she would have to pay, so I wasn’t going to get it. They paid, and then started to walk off, and then the girl turns back around… No, actually what happened was that the girl said, “How much do I have left on the card?” And I said, you know, $3.58, and she said, “Is that enough to get one of the cake pops?” And I said, of course, and so she got one, which then brought her card balance to $0.12, and I could then see she was thinking about what to do with this gift card, as I’m praying that it comes to me, and she says, “Umm, should I just, give it to you and you can give it to the next person who orders? Like, pay it forward?” And I said, confessing, “Actually, I was really hoping that I could get your card. I’ve kind of been collecting them..” And I patted my apron pocket to show them, but they weren’t there, and I remembered I had spread them out on the counter, so I gestured to them, where they could see my entire collection beautifully arranged, and they beheld it in all its glory and were clearly quite impressed, and I said, “When you pulled that card out, I saw it and immediately thought, I need that card, so I would love to have it.” And they laughed, they loved that, and she said, “Okay, it’s for you then!!” And she gave me the card, and I was extremely overjoyed, having ended up getting this special purple orange “You’re Awesome.” card, and from these beautiful brunette ladies. And as I stood there thrilled with my success, Jessica, after making their drinks, came over to me to report gleefully, that they were saying, “He’s so cute!” And immediately we were both making the same joke, that were they saying that I was cute like how I would want them to think I was cute, or were they saying I was cute like how a puppy was cute, or an autistic kid. Jessica was dying over that. It has been a running joke by Jessica that I must have some kind of mental illness, something must be wrong with me, because of all the unusual habits and life choices and all of the crazy things I say. We’ve taken some tests together, of which of course I aced all of them, in the good way, because I know all the right answers. So something could still be wrong with me, we just don’t know what it is. And whenever Jessica says now that something’s wrong with me, I say, “Yes, but what? What is it?” No suitable answer has been given.

I thought that there were some interesting guest interactions, but today, not much. The next thing that I can think of was that I had a particularly great joke. Juanito had made a nutella chocolate cake, that after several attempts by multiple people made to give me an opportunity to try the cake, I still wasn’t able to get a bite, and I told him that he would just have to make me another one, to which he replied, “No! I’m not making you another one. Not just for you. It’s too much money. And nutella day is over.” To which I replied, “There’s a nutella day?” And he said yes, and it’s over. And here I said, the great joke, and I said, “You know, you keep saying nutella by the way, but it’s actually nut-ella.” And I said this, and I heard Heather lose it, from all the way across the counter, and that’s how I knew it was good. Heather doesn’t have much of a whimsical sense of humor really, but the absurdity of someone saying “nut-ella”, just the sound of it, that immediately got her. And Juan said, “What! No it isn’t!” And I just kept finding ways to repeat it. “Nut-ella! Of course it’s nut-ella! Why are you saying nutella! It’s not nutella, it’s nut-ella! Like Cinderella! Nut-ella!” That was too much for Juanito.

Juan is a smart, witty, mild-mannered 20 year old string bean. He can take it and he can dish it out, but mostly he just takes it. It’s just so easy to mess with him. And he is always cracked out on espresso shots. There is a running joke that is really a running truth, that he is addicted to caffeine and really should stop chugging so many espresso shots. Then he gets flustered immediately, and has small crises, hundreds of small caffeine-fueled crises a shift, that I can’t help but to exacerbate, by saying things like, “Are you stressed? It’s okay Juan. Just take a deep breath. Just don’t panic. Everything will be fine.” I say this over his shoulder as he makes a Venti Iced Coffee, light ice, 2 pumps sugar free vanilla, Strawberry Cold Foam, which all definitely stresses him out.

Ah, I just remembered. Juan really likes to go tell people at close that we are closing. For some reason he enjoys doing that. I don’t particularly, so I’m happy to sic him on them, so that I don’t have to. But today, we had a young lovebird couple who were going hard on each other. I didn’t see it, because I didn’t want to see it, and I’m not watching, but Juanito was disturbed by this, and couldn’t look away, and said they were “French kissing” and Heather was implying that we should say something, but I didn’t care and figured they would stop soon, and it wasn’t bothering me anyways, but after Heather told me that maybe we should get them to stop, I had the brilliant idea to go over to Juan and say, “Hey Juan, if you see them getting real friendly again, why don’t you go over there and say something?” Knowing that he usually likes to do that kind of thing. But this time he immediately protested, crying, “No!! You do it!! Why should I do it!! You’re the shift supervisor!!” That brought me great delight.

Luckily they did stop soon after this, Juan saying they’ve “cooled down” which was great because I really didn’t want to go over there and say something, although it would have been funny. “Hey kids, can you like, stop putting your tongues in each other’s mouths at our Starbucks? That would be really great. Thank you.”

The only other thing I really have to write about here, and my hand is starting to hurt, is Lexi. Lexi is a beautiful blonde headturner that works in the building and frequents our store. She is tall, absolutely gorgeous, and fair, like a Swedish princess. Like some kind of princess. I recently learned that her last name has something of an r that you roll in it, so maybe she’s Eastern European, her name almost sounded Russian.. you know what, she could actually be a Russian princess. But her and I have had many interactions now, and of course I flirt with her, such as when I commented on her nice brooch, and she said that she was really into pins lately, and so as she was sitting there drinking her little evening doppio espresso, I brought her one of the extra Christmas pins we had, that says, “Cheers To You!” and I said, “A gift for you.” And give it to her, and she said, “It’s so cute!” I have learned many small things about Lexi from our interactions, such as that she is a musician with fans, because she had a gift card that “a fan” had given her, and that she plays piano, because I asked her what she wanted Santa to bring her for Christmas this year, and she said she didn’t really need anything (great) but that she wanted piano lessons (incredible).. But she really impressed me when she was once perusing the wares, our incredible array of Starbucks merchandise that seems to rotate every week, she was taking a look over it all and when she came over to the register I said, “I see you were perusing the wares.” And she replied, “Yes, but you know, I don’t think I’ll buy anything, I’m trying to be less into consumerism.” And when she said that, she really had my attention, from that moment on, because we then had a conversation about being anti-consumerist, and embracing minimalism, and then she wasn’t just beautiful or musical, but intelligent. And she does wear glasses sometimes showing a more.. a nerdier side. Lexi is a catch and a special girl for sure, and I say headturner – she literally turns heads, mine included. She often wears cowboy boots, that make some noise when she walks and plus with her striking figure.. I was at the register once, and Lexi walked in, and there were exactly 3 men in our Starbucks, in the lobby, seated separately, and I saw all 3 of them look up, in unison, to check her out. It was incredible. Since that moment, I’ve thought of her as being literally, a head turner.

Jessica was talking about Lexi to me recently. Jessica has been looking for a girlfriend for me, and has had Lexi in mind. There has been something that has made me hold on making any move on her, something that I was getting, that seemed to me like she’s just been keeping a little distance, and not becoming too friendly with me, if you know what I mean. Well, Jessica discovered a week ago, that Lexi is married, and I think it must have just happened, because I swear I never saw a ring on that finger. Jessica came up to me and said, after I had been with Lexi at the register, “That girl is cute. Really cute. Is she taken?” And she spied the ring on her finger. Taloya also said that I needed to “get on that.” Her exact words, “Steven you gotta’ get on that.” But, she’s married.

I wasn’t suprised to find that out. I had a feeling she was taken. With a girl like that, chances are very high, when every guy in the world is falling over her. So today, she came in with her husband, and I wasn’t at the register, and I didn’t get a good look at him, and I didn’t make his drink, but I checked him out a bit, and he was a pretty classic, masculine-looking man. Short hair, muscular, beard, tall, wearing a flannel and boots. But you know, I have never been a jealous guy. They sat together and had their drinks, I couldn’t hear anything they were saying, but they seemed happy, and I was happy for her. I was happy for them both. I’m always like seeing a happy couple.

Lexi and I still managed to have a cute little interaction though. I was at the espresso machine nearest the customer pickup area, the drink handoff area, and Lexi came over and said, “Hey, do you think I could maybe get some cream, if that’s possible?” She is really very dainty and sweet, for someone who is that much of a bombshell. I said, “For you, you got it.” And she said, “You might need to pour a little of that out. To make room for the cream.” And there was already room, so I said, “Oh, you like a lotta’ cream!” And she laughed, and I poured some out, and then brought the cream over, and she was still holding the cup, and I said, “You hold the cup and I’ll pour the cream. Just tell me when.” And I started pouring, and she said, “When!” In a very small and cute voice. And she said thank you, and I had just put the cream away, when I was thinking, I wonder if she knows that we are now having customers pour cream themselves, that we have a container sitting out? And if she does, that the container is empty? You can see how with this incredible deductive reasoning skill I have risen up to being a mighty shift supervisor. And I looked up and over to the container, over at the trash station by the front door, and saw Lexi holding the container and kind of looking my way, and she said to me, smiling, “I didn’t know that you guys were doing this now!” And I smiled and said, “I was just wondering if you did!” And she said, “Now I know!” And she set it down, and looked at it for a second, and there was a little bit of a pause, like she didn’t quite know what else to do, and then she looked back over at me, smiled, and said “Well, have a good one!” And walked out.

I think that what made this special, if not conveyed in the writing, is that in that little aftermoment, both of us were thinking about that cream container. And we came back to each other over it. She was feeling a little silly I think, and I was thinking about her and if she had known about the cream container, and then she had discovered it, and she wanted to tell me about it. It was definitely, very cute, and made me feel good inside.

Also great that for this moment, her husband had already left the Starbucks, and was nowhere to be seen.

Do we have something like a Jim, Pam and Roy scenario going on here? Only time will tell. Writing this, that’s definitely what comes to my mind.

… TO BE CONTINUED

Today I bonded with Katerina over Russian literature. This has been a major source of bonding for us in recent weeks. It started with me bringing in a book of short stories by Anton Chekhov. I was getting so bored at closing that I was losing my mind. So it wasn’t before long that I brought a book in, and I had the perfect book for the job. My cousin had gotten me a book of Anton Chekhov short stories, as we both like Russian literature, and I was having a hard time handling such fast paced, condensed stories, some of them being only three pages long, and the book is full of these, and I had just read Don Quixote, which is over 1000 pages long. But I thought, this light reading is perfect for downtime at Starbucks, when you have 5 or 10 minutes to do something with, and that’s after I’ve exhausted the nearly endless list of tasks to take on, because when you really get into it, there’s almost always something you can find to do. Stocking, cleaning, tidying, arranging, checking up on things, fixing some small problem that’s been neglected, hunting for small problems that haven’t been noticed… But sometimes you just don’t feel like doing all of this extra stuff anyway. So that’s where my Anton Chekhov was going to come in handy. Well, lucky for me, on our team we have a real blood and bone Russian, 24 year old Katerina from Kazan, which I can remember because Kazan means “volcano” in Japanese. And Katerina is pretty much liked by everybody because she is of a very rare type among the Starbucks crew: quiet, hardworking, smart, and causing no drama. That is a very rare type, that has made her respected and beloved. Katerina is quiet, but as it goes with many quiet people, it’s not because she doesn’t have anything to say, and I have had many good conversations with Katerina. She has a good sense of humor. You just have to give her space and time to respond, and ask her questions. She also has to work around the language barrier, and I know exactly how hard that can be, and I think that’s why I can have more of a connection with her. Well, that’s one source and an early source of bonding between us, because I understand what it’s like to integrate into another country and culture. It’s hard. So I try and have tried to make her feel welcome and comfortable. To try and remove that distance and that feeling of otherness that can happen when you aren’t seamlessly a part of the culture, and struggle to understand the people around you because you don’t know the slang, don’t get the references, can’t understand the dialects. Even on our small Starbucks team, you have a seriously diverse range of slang and accents being used, some regional, some racial, some generational. Southern, Black Southern, Midwestern, Gen Z, Millenial, and Boomer are all present, and they all have their own set of pronunciations, vocabulary, colloquialisms, etc. And then you mash all of this up, and that’s the kind of talk you’ll hear behind the counter at our Cummins Station Starbucks. I know that Katerina is just lost a lot of the time, which is hard. Excluded by default. But anyways, Katerina does have a good grasp of English, but still that bar for fluency is so high. She has only been in the US a few years, here on political asylum, I actually just learned. Her and her husband. So, I brought in the book of Chekhov, somehow not even thinking to talk to Katerina about it, and she asked me what I was reading, and I told her, “Russian literature.” and she said, “Who?” And I didn’t know that Anton Chekhov was famous, or a big deal, but Katerina told me that he was, and I said, “You know him?” And she said, “Of course I know him.” And she said that they read Chekhov in school, and I asked her if pretty much everybody in Russia knew about Chekhov, and she said yes. So I learned about Chekhov from a real Russian, which I think is awesome, and she kept telling me I needed to read Kashtanka, which was a story that they would read in school, and it was in the book. Well, she kept asking me, and I kept disappointing her, and I had then fallen out of reading the Chekhov because the stories just contained so much drama and arguing for me, and they weren’t really holding my interest, even though they were good, and I didn’t want to just skip all the way to Kashtanka, which is in the middle of the book. But last night, I had nothing to do, and read some Huckleberry Finn, and then I wanted something else, and I thought, you know what, let me read Kashtanka. And I read it, and it was actually genius, and exactly what I needed to read right then, in that moment. Actually I thought it was so brilliant and so evocative, my mind able to capture the story so entirely and conjure up the images with such clarity, like I was watching a movie, that I nearly had chills at the end. And that night I knew that, the first thing I was going to talk about with anybody tomorrow was that I was going to tell Katerina what she wanted to hear, that I had finally read Kashtanka, and that it was genius. And I told her, and Katerina asked me what I thought the moral was, which is a great question. I said I didn’t think that there was a moral, but Katerina, in her wisdom, replied, “There is a moral in every story.” And she said she needed to reread it, and then she would tell me what she thought the moral was.

… TO BE CONTINUED

Today I did not expect to do any work for my special Cummins Station Starbucks. Yesterday I had gone in, and had ended up doing a very small amount of work, taking some boxes down to our storage room, which took me about 5 minutes of easy labor, and for which Stacy Hamilton rewarded my very light efforts with a command to go on over to Wild Wasabi and buy myself some sushi. I almost protested at this, because I felt it was so unnecessary and that she should know that I would have done this small task out of the goodness of my heart and out of my love for the store, but I knew that she already knows that, and that she probably just wanted to buy me sushi, and so I was not going to refuse. So, I took her $20 bill, after carrying this light load of boxes, and for the first time went and bought something for myself at Wild Wasabi. Wild Wasabi is mostly a Japanese restaurant, with sushi being their core offering, and it’s at the other end of our long sideways Empire State Building building. It’s right next to the Gibson Garage, which is my special, magical place, like Santa’s Workshop, full of shiny and expensive toys that you can’t have until Christmas, or in my case, until I’m not poor anymore… And usually when I head down to this part of the building, it is to go to this magic Santa’s Workshop. So now I was excited to have some business with Wild Wasabi, and I actually thought, as I was leaving the restaurant, how incredibly lucky it is that I actually work in a building that contains establishments related to some very core loves of mine, which are guitars and Japan. And then, I get to work at a coffee shop, and a nice one, and live out my coffee shop dream. That is pretty incredible, so thought I, walking out of the Wild Wasabi. But not much happened inside, as there was nobody really in there, and I didn’t want to spend too much of Stacy’s money, and I am really a vegetarian, so I just got 8 measly veggie rolls. I say measly to no offence of Wild Wasabi’s, I just say that because they’re veggie rolls. Who’s thrilled about a veggie roll? Nobody’s thrilled about a veggie roll. But they were fine, and importantly, I had quite a ceremonious meal. I made sure to say my 頂きます, with my hands together in prayer, and give a small bow, before snapping my chopsticks, perfectly, which I rarely do, and must be good luck, and I made sure to eat all of the wasabi, and all of the ginger, and every single grain of rice, leaving absolutely nothing behind, as all of my Japanese girlfriends would have wanted. And, when leaving, I made eye contact with one of the sushi chefs, who smiled at me and nodded, and I said, smiling back, “ごち”そうさまでした！” Which I was sure he would be surprised and thrilled to hear, but he seemed confused, and held his smile, and nodded again, before looking away. So, I don’t think he was Japanese, which surprised me because I thought he actually did look Japanese. There must be someone on the staff who is Japanese, but maybe not. I know the owner isn’t, the owner being Karen, who is an extremely friendly and amiable lady. She was not at Wild Wasabi on this day, and I haven’t seen her in awhile, but when we were first opening the store, she took a great interest in our activities and came by nearly every day to see what we were doing and to chat with us.

The entire reason why I was at my Starbucks on this day, and was about to carry these boxes and receive a wonderful sushi reward, was because on this day I was enjoying my life and visiting the cafe as a regular civilian. This is something that has baffled some members of the team, as to why anyone would ever want to go in to their place of employment on their days off, but as I said to Jaz just that day, as I was again asked why I was there (this is now the 23rd time that I’ve been in the store as a regular civilian), when she said why would you come to work on your off day, that I didn’t see it that way. I have explained to them, tried to explain, that the whole reason why I wanted to work in a bustling, bright coffee shop was because I liked being in them, and so it is no surprise that I would be going to one on my day off, because that’s what I do, and I might as well go to mine, because I know everybody, and like being there. And there are perks, such as that I can basically always score free food and drink, and on that Wild Wasabi day, I even scored sushi. Going in and hanging out at the Starbucks on my off days has presented me with many opportunities, as is the case of being in the right place at the right time, and also, the whole thing about third spaces, just hanging out somewhere in public, where you can have no pressure and spontaneous interactions with people in your community, or the people of the world. Unfailingly, every time I go in to the store to hang out, someone ends up talking to me, usually my coworkers, who find ways to get away from the counter and come chat with me or discuss the day’s drama, as every single day contains at least one notable event of major drama, but I also have had many conversations with customers. And this is exactly why I like being in coffee shops. You can eavesdrop, and listen these people’s conversations, maybe they’re on the phone with a colleague, maybe they’re with a friend, maybe having a job interview, seeing an old friend, tourists, bachelorette girls, or discussing serious business, and you catch the tone of the their voices, the general content, the relationship of the speakers, and their mood, and you realize that all people everywhere are kind of the same.

As the register king, the POS king (point of sale) which is the position that I gravitated to and excelled in (if I may be so humble as to say) and loved, because I have a nearly endless stream of quips and banter, and because I can also actually listen well and hit the right buttons on the machine, which is actually an enormous responsibility, because getting even one single thing wrong can be the death of a $10 drink, a twelve-step process, or simply neglecting one word, can result in your barista working hard to make this beast of a drink to perfection, and then handing it over to the customer, who says, the dreaded and infamous, “Umm, this was supposed to be iced…!” Or perhaps they take a sip, and they say, “Was this made with oatmilk? It tastes like regular milk.” To which you reply, “No, was it supposed to be? It wasn’t on the ticket. I’m so sorry about that, I’ll remake that for you, right after I go over to the register and throttle Titania, who has now gotten 7 out of the last 9 drink tickets wrong, and now there are 25 people standing here waiting for their drinks, and by the way, who’s on warming, and why, how is it possible that we have no brewed coffee right now, at all? How could this be possible? So literally no one has brewed it?” This is how it goes.

My point being here that pushing buttons at the register is a very important part of the Starbucks factory line, and I knew that, but then I learned one day that Stacy also knew that, and that’s why Stacy always put me on POS, because I would push the right buttons. Prior to me fully realizing that I had a special gift of being a good register button pusher, charm and conversational skill aside, I would often give up the position or trade it with other team members, because they wanted to have a go at it, and because after about 3 straight hours of being at the register and having 200 small conversations in a row, I would get tired of it. If I actually got tired, and needed a break, such as to be relieved of my frontline position after 3 or 4 hours of intense rush action, that’s a different story, and I could get relief, but if I was just bored or indifferent, then sometimes I would give up my spot to Charlie, who would be itching to say to every customer who walked up to the counter, when he would ask them how they were today, and then if they would make the mistake of asking him how he was today, he would reply, almost always, without fail, “It’s a great day to have a great day!” Now, Charlie was extremely corny, and he also had a habit of shouting out every 15 or 20 minutes everyone slaving away at their battlestations, “You’re doing great, everybody!” And it was amazing, the team’s varying reactions to this strange, corny, positive encouragement. We were not used to being treated this way, and to hearing such words. Christopher Bodily, Granddaddy Snow, back in the days when he had graced us with his presence as the Assistant General Manager, before he left us for bigger and better things, I think had the best response, that he could use every time, and that was always nice, that was, “Not as good as you, Charlie!” Jessica meanwhile immediately hated that, and immediately hated him. Stacy Hamilton would generally just say nothing, probably not even registering these useless words, and some other members would laugh, and sometimes, when he would announce it after a particularly turbulent time, a tense time, where Stacy was pissed, and everyone was battered and bruised, and then Charlie would announce, his timing now being somewhat awkward, but he could never help himself, God bless him, “You’re doing great everyone!” And if Chris was around, he would be the only one to reply, “Not as good as you, Charlie..” Forcing it out, and saving it from falling completely dead, on silent, disgrunted ears.

Depending on my mood, I would either like to hear his corny, stock words of encouragement, and I would reply, or I would like them, but would have nothing to say, or I would think that they were corny, and then sometimes, I would think that they were corny, and that I desperately wanted to then be sarcastic, which would get laughs, and so after some time, because I didn’t want Charlie to think I was a meanie butt, and needed him to know that I was just a jokester and fond of ribbing and roasting, and that I did actually appreciate his words of encouragement, but I just needed to ease some of the corniness tension, I would then say after his words, to some friendly coworker who was deserving of or seemed to want to receive some good ol’ ribbing, “Except you, _____.” Which was often Jessica. And that would get a response out of them, and kill the corniness, wipe the corniness from everybody’s minds, a bit.

Although he was corny, and had a habit of hugging everyone on the team, including the people who he should never have been hugging, because you know there are 100% people who do not like to be hugged, and if you hug them they will hate you, he would hug those people, and they would hate him. I’m mainly talking about Jessica here, who if you really knew, you would understand immediately that Charlie hugging Jessica was an enormous transgression and should never have been done. But Charlie was just like a puppy. Very genuine, very direct, smiling, and friendly. I liked that about him, and I did like him, but unfortunately, this personality type, as lovely as it is, has no place on Stacy Hamilton’s ship, because Charlie lasted for about two weeks before he got the axe, which is an extremely short period of time. Stacy Hamilton could not stand his corny joy, his boundless, caffiene-fueled, positive energy. He was also always walking around with a cappuccino, and Stacy noticed that, that he would come in, and the first thing he would do was make himself a cuppuccino, and then 7 more throughout his shift, and when she said that to me, my mind was filled with memories, all of the visual images of all of the times that I had seen him strutting around with a cappuccino in his hand, sometimes, I swear, if my brain is not lying to me, even two cappuccinos, one in both hands. He may have lasted three weeks, but he did not survive long, and I was somewhat sad to see him go. We actually did benefit from his blind positive energy, his persistent motivation, even if we all thought it was varying degrees of stupid. Charlie did not know what to make of me, in the beginning, a masculine man that I am, and presenting a very tough, cool exterior, with quick wit and sarcasm. He tread lightly with me, before warming up to me, and then hugging me, which then was the sign that we were officially friends. I think that took about three days.

I write about Charlie now, and I do miss him. And since he’s been gone, ever since Charlie made his short impact on the team, I will occasionally find myself filled an urge, as I walk out from the back and see the whole team before me, mulling around, having done great work, or not, having nothing to do at all, I have the urge to say those magic words, “You’re doing great everybody!” Because even in corniness, even in irony, they work. When I have actually said the words, and I have confessed that I have these urges, when I have said those words, those who remember Charlie, they understand.

I was writing about Charlie because he was often one who would want to take over for me at the register, and told people, over and over, “It’s a great day to have a great day!” And I would generally let him do this, until one fateful day, when we were having an intense rush, and I was on one end of the counter, and Stacy Hamilton was all the way down at the other, with about 3 or 4 baristas in-between us, and I was checking over on her, standing down by the handoff area, making drinks and handing them off and handling customers, the maestro and the orchestrator, and we made eye contact, and she gave me an expression and a look that said, someone or everyone had f***ed up one too many times, that she was fed up, and things were not going well for her, and so I took some food from whoever was at the ovens, and brought it down to the handoff plane myself, and on the way I watched her take a drink from a customer, saying nothing, and immediately dumping it, and she caught me and said, in some desperation, “I’ve had to remake 15 drinks. 15 drinks already. If they get one more ticket wrong I’m going to kill somebody. This is why I put you on register. This is why I want you up there.” It was something to that effect, and that was the moment that I understood the method to her madness. Prior to this, I had thought that she simply wanted us to stay planted, which is the lingo we use for saying you have a battlestation and you stick to it, you don’t abandon it, you don’t leave it without being covered. I thought that that’s why Stacy didn’t like us moving around, but as long as everybody was planted somewhere, and all positions were covered, it didn’t matter where you were. But then I understood, I was assigned register and was expected to stay at register, because I was good at it, and that was important. So then, as a barista, I hardly ever left my spot, as the POS king.

I gravitated to POS, and it is still my home position. I have ranked up, and have now a larger set of duties and tasks that I must fulfill, and bounce around, all over, running on missions and quests and etc., but the register is still my home position. And if we were to say that our Cummins Station Starbucks were a ship, which I think about often, and Stacy is the captain, our Captain Ahab, the register is the steering wheel.

Everyone has their favorite spots behind the counter. Their favorite positions. Emily and Chris K. are the brewmasters. Emily in particular, the hot drink, the espresso machine, the latte art aficionado. Emily never gave up on her love of making latte art that no one cared about and no one would see. I encouraged this and supported it, and whenever she would make something particularly spectacular, I would say, “That’s amazing, Emily, you must show this to the customer!” And she would, and of course they would love that, even if you could tell that they didn’t really care, but you know, who isn’t going to be at least a little happy to see some latte art on their latte? Everybody is at least ever so slightly tickled by that. But Granddaddy Snow, for as much as I loved Emily’s latte art, Granddaddy Snow could not stand it, and would say, “If I have to look at Emily’s latte art one more time…” It was actually going to make him snap. And she never detected the sarcasm in his voice, when she would show him her art, and he would say, “Oh wow, looks like latte art!” And then immediately look at me and smile, that kind of smile that implies you are about ready to murder someone. So I would encourage Emily to show her wonderful latte art to either the customer, or Granddaddy Snow, when I felt that he could use some latte art in his life.

The big problem with Emily showing off her latte art and with her discussing anything in her life in general, or telling you about anything ever, is that it involved you looking at something on her phone, sometimes many things on her phone, an extensive, never-ending catalogue of personal photos and videos and social media content. Once you got sucked into that, there was no escaping. But, that’s actually not true. It’s more that after every 5 seconds of talking with Emily, you would then be forced to look at something on her phone, which for Granddaddy Snow was mostly latte art, and he couldn’t stand it, and I couldn’t either. So very quickly, very early on, Emily would talk to me, and say, “Hey Steven, I have to show you something, c’mere.” And I now, wary, would say, “Is it on your phone?” And she would say yes, and I would say no, I’m not looking, and sometimes she would convince me to look, pitching whatever it was that she had for me skillfully enough, catching my interest, but sometimes she would fail, or I simply refused to look at a phone screen in that moment, and I would say, “Just tell me about it. It’s okay. Just tell me in words.” And I remember, this happened many times, but there was one specific instance where she said, there was something I “needed to know”, that it was very important, and I refused to look at her phone, and that she had to just tell me, and she finally caved and told me, that there was a new flavor of Red Bull. I can’t even remember what flavor it was. It was not an extraordinary flavor. And after she told me that, I thought, okay, you literally could just tell me that in a sentence, and you’re trying to get me to watch a video, and so out of curiosity, to see what I could have been missing, I had her show me the video, which was a 26 second Instagram video of a girl holding the can and rotating it. For 26 seconds. Just a can in her hand. Basically, showing that it existed. And that video had 80,000 likes.

You can see why I stopped looking at Emily’s phone.

… TO BE CONTINUED

The Life Of A Rat

Scene – Student is sitting in college philosophy class. Professor is in a particularly tempestuous mood. Every other student is scrolling through Tik Tok on their phones.

*Professor is unaware of every student on phone. Professor has singled out Student not on phone.*

“Tell me son, is the life of a rat’s any difference from that of a human’s?”

*Student feels skin on his face concernedly.*

“Professor, my skin is so dry. Do you have any lotion? I forgot to put my African Shea Nut Butter on this morning.”

“Damn your skin! And no, sorry I don’t have any. Listen to me!”

*Professor slams hands down on table and looks directly at Student.*

“Answer me this – Is the life of a rat’s any different from that of a human’s?”

*The Student think this over.*

“Where does the rat live?”

“New York City.”

“And the human as well?”

“Yes.”

“I would say they are about equal, then.”

“And why is that?”

“Well, the rats don’t have to ride the train. I hear they have pretty good mental health care in their community as well.”

“If you believe this, then would you have any problem with trading places with a New York City rat? Assuming that you do live in New York City.”

*Student thinks this over.*

“Can I pick the rat?”

“No. Completely random.”

“Ok. No problem.”

“Interesting..”

*The Professor lifts hands up off of table and brings finger up to mouth in a contemplative gesture.*

“Ellie!”

*Professor attempts to get the attention of a female student in the back.*

“Ellie!!!”

*Ellie is lost in the Tok.*

*Student throws eraser at Ellie.*

“Wha- Oh my god.”

*Ellie is jolted back to reality. Professor slams hands back down on desk. Professor likes doing this.*

“What were you watching just now?”

*Professor is accusative.*

“Uhm.. I can’t remember.”

“Just try.”

*Ellie’s brain heats up.*

“There was.. an attractive man.. He had curly hair and was speaking fast.. Something about planting seeds..”

*Professor is encouraging.*

“Go on! What kind of seeds? Why were they being planted? Why, Ellie?”

*Ellie’s brain is really cooking now.*

“Seeds.. yes, yes they were lemon seeds! I remember now! I can do something with water and a paper towel and dirt! With just enough sunlight, I can grow minature lemon trees in my apartment window, and enjoy my own minature lemons!!”

*Ellie is excited.*

“Good Ellie, good!! Now, let me ask you one more question. Ellie. Ellie, stay with me girl!”

*Ellie is deep into another Tik Tok.*

*Student throws highlighter at Ellie’s face.*

“Wha- Oh my god.”

*Ellie is once again forced to return to this horrible plane of existence.*

“Ellie, I have one more question for you.”

“Ok.”

“Does the average rat in New York City have a better life than the average New Yorker?”

*Ellie sets her phone down. With a flourish, she tosses her hair back and stands up.*

“Professor, I have been waiting for someone to ask me this question for my entire life.”

*Ellie proceeds to expound upon the struggles of human existence, on the quest for individual freedom, of collective suffering, of easy access to pizza, on the differences between rats and humans.. Professor is completely engrossed. Student is furiously taking notes.*

“..moreover, in New York City both rats and humans are free to piss anywhere, on anyone, and at any time they so desire. If that is not true liberation, what is? And so, on the grounds aforementioned, I would argue that your question is fundamentally flawed, and can only be substituted by an altered and improved one – Is there any difference between the average New Yorker and the average New York rat at all?”

*Professor and Student are awestruck. They begin to applaud. Some other members of the class who have a particularly strong Pavlovian response unconsciously join in the applause.*

“Brilliant, Ellie! Brilliant!”

*Ellie bows and returns to her phone. A student in the front row, sensing a viral moment, recorded the entire speech and uploaded it at 4x speed paired with a Minecraft toilet-building compilation and a video of cats dancing to Odetari’s “GOOD LOYAL THOTS”. The video was an overnight success because Ellie was hot.*

“Class dismissed!”

*The Professor shuffles papers and walks out. Student picks up highlighter and eraser off of floor and follows him. One student has a crush on the professor and follows him out. All other students remain and continue scrolling.*

Slippers

Some writing from my Japan days.

This is a Frankenstein post.

It has been stitched together out of several sessions of writing and over the course of several days.

Last night I slept in a tent. In my own apartment. It’s right behind me. I will sleep there again tonight. I am doing this because I am at war. I have been at war now for some time, and the war I have won. I am at war with mosquitoes. They have my apartment. They will never have my blood.

I’ve sold my car. Last week or two weeks ago. Just in time for the rainy season. This morning I woke up at my usual time of around 5:30, to my usual serenading by Tamanaga san’s rooster. That rooster does his job well. Too well. He cock-a-doodle-doos for about two hours longer than he needs to. He just has nothing better to do. He’s crowing for his harem, perhaps. His diminishing harem. I was picking berries with the Tamanaga children and the eldest, Riku, told me about his recent experience beheading one of the chickens. His younger brother didn’t want to hear any of this story. He’s a tough kid; he described to me the chopping and the boiling and the spurting of blood and he might as well have been describing to me how ice cream was made. This rooster though, I noticed some months ago, whenever I would wake up in the middle of the night to take a squizz, I would open my bathroom door, and he would let out a wild cock-a-doodle-doo! (Which is kokkigokko in Japanese, by the way). Every single time, he would do this, and he still does. And I think, does this man not sleep? Is he really ready to flex all 24 hours of the day? He must have incredible hearing, to be able to hear that door. My window doesn’t fully close, it just kind of closes, as it’s covered with a series of slanted glass plates, that I can open or shut, but it’s not airtight. Still it’s quite far from him. I told Tamanaga san about this recently, and Tamanaga san said, “Oh, he thinks it’s another rooster.” The squeak of my bathroom door does not have, to me, even one-tenth of the vigor of that rooster’s kokkigokko; but he will tolerate not even a peep of challenge.

While I’m talking about my bathroom….

Let me ask you this – have you ever wanted to watch yourself pee? Have you ever had the desire to stare yourself down while you took a nice tinkle? At some point before me, a vain tenant, a well-meaning landlord, I don’t know who, but someone had this desire, and they affixed a small, square mirror, at eye level, above the toilet. Every time I go into the bathroom to pee, I have to make the choice to either look myself in the eyes when I let my stream loose, or look somewhere else. They put it right in front of my eyes, so it is more effort to look away, and it is also instinctive to want to make eye contact, and so if I go into that bathroom not wanting to stare myself down when I pee, and I don’t, I have to find somewhere else to look. It irritated me to the point that I finally tried to take it down, and I found that whoever put it up was so confident in their decision that this was a good idea, that they had it welded to the wall. The mirror stays. Do you think that’s ridiculous? Is it just me? I think that’s ridiculous. I don’t need to watch myself when I use the bathroom. I don’t need to watch myself at all. I think mirrors might be making us narcissists. Phone selfie cams most definitely are. I already think about myself enough. Don’t put a mirror in my bathroom. That’s like putting a mirror above your bed. I don’t need my first thought in the morning to be a reminder of how crusty I am.

I will tell you about selling my car. There is a reason why I brought up the car. I woke up this morning, to the crowing of Tamanaga’s rooster, at my usual time, 5:30, to grey skies. The skies are only ever grey now, and will be that way for a month or two. I like rain, so I don’t mind this time. Today was a day at my special needs school. That meant two hours of biking today – one in the morning, one in the afternoon. I leave at 7:20. Somewhere in between that window, the torrents begin. I sat on my couch, eyeing the downpour, and played with the idea of just calling in and saying, hey, uhh.. not today. This was the first time I’ve biked in such a rain, and it went as expected. Halfway through I was soaked. Not from the rain, but from my own sweat, as the amagappa (rainsuit) is so good at what it does, that no water enters, and no water leaves. I sat on the bench, in front of the changing station, the one that does not exist in American establishments, perhaps in no other country’s establishments than in Japan’s, the outdoor-shoes-for-indoor-shoes, or vice versa, changing station. Do you know about this? At the entrance of every Japanese household there is a space, called a genkan, where you change out of your outdoor shoes, and into your indoor shoes, which are typically a pair of slippers. You can walk around in socks, if it’s a house. That’s fine. When you get the bathroom, then, you change out of your indoor slippers, and into the bathroom slippers. In some bathrooms, such as bathrooms that are inside of a building where you can walk around in your outdoor shoes, there are slippers for your shoes. These are the best kind. You just slide your shoe right in. I think for this reason, ease of transition, the act of getting into and out of a shoe, is of great consideration to the Japanese. They choose their shoes with the fact that they will be performing this act daily in mind. I think they also just have some innate talent for getting into and out of shoes quickly – for anywhere we go, if I am with Japanese people, and we have to do the shoe to slipper swap (or just take the shoes off, which is common at restaurants that have elevated seating, where you all sit around a table lotus-style, criss-cross applesauce, I like this), if it comes to any shoe business, I am always the last one finished, as there will usually be some staggering around involved, perhaps a sitting or squatting down, to struggle through laces, to jerk a resistant shoe off, and by the time I stand back up again, I am alone. Only Austin, the Ozu yakuba Kansas boy, has got me beat. One time he took so long to put on his boots, that even I ran out of witty comments to make, and the restaurant hostess and I were both resigned to watching him struggle through his shoes in silence. I got a good kick out of seeing a thousand parents, at Ozu High’s graduation ceremony, dressed in their best suits and dresses, from head to ankle – because after the ankle were the slippers, and it seems that either no one has yet capitalized on the formal slipper market, or no one cares enough to want formal slippers, for the footwear for this occasion was an anything goes slipper bonanza, and it was all there. Linen beach slippers, fuzzy pink slippers, slippers of a more athletic bent. It was like Ozu’s graduation ceremony had a theme every year, like how we have 80’s themed or Halloween themed parties, and the theme for this year was slippers. And of course, they didn’t come there in the slippers, or else they couldn’t be wearing them in the auditorium, and so every person was supplied with a large plastic bag, that they carry their outdoor shoes in, while they were slippered up. I’m writing about the slippers because up until today, I have had to wear a pair at Kuroishibaru, my special needs school, and it was terrible. I only go this school twice a month, and so I had always made due with the guest slippers they gave me. The guest slippers are the lowest tier of slipper. You wouldn’t think this would be so, given the Japanese’s exacting standards of hospitality. It may just be that guest slippers in the Kumamoto school system are the lowest tier of slipper; but at the three schools that I’ve been to where I had to change into guest slippers, my experience has been the same with all three pairs – too dang small.

We’re pivoting again here.

Last night was a strange night for me.

I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. I’ve never been in the Twilight Zone, I haven’t even seen the show, but I imagine that what happens in the Twilight Zone is what was happening to me last night. There were just too many odd occurrences happening in such a short period of time that I couldn’t help but feel that I entered an alternate reality. The feeling was exacerbated by the fact that it was in the middle of night, where all sense of time vanishes, and I was only vaguely conscious. I was woken up by something. It could have been stomach pain, the buzz of a mosquito, a need to urinate. These things all did plague me in that Twilight Zone of last night.

I can’t say what it was, but I woke up last night, having not even a guess as to how long I’d been asleep. I was hot. It’s been hot here, and humid. The rainy season is here. I know this because it’s raining every day. And when you check the Apple weather app, and see rain forecasted seven days in a row, you get it. Rainy season is here. It will be raining almost every day for the next two months. It will also be incredibly humid. This is torture for some people – for me, it’s alright. I don’t mind a little sweat. Probably because I’m Swedish. I’m quite hairless. It is an annoyance, to be streaming sweat, to be moistening in your crevices, from the act of simply sitting – but some people have it much worse than I do. I’d take sweating over frostbite and dry skin any day. The real torture of this season is the mosquitoes. Evil, evil creatures. It probably started two weeks ago, that was the start of the real hell season, mosquito season. One night, as I slept peacefully, I was awakened by a high-pitched whining in my ear, like the whirring of an incredibly tiny, powerful drill. That was the beginning of mosquito season. I am now assailed by mosquitoes on most nights. Last night was one of those nights. I say mosquitoes, but I think it is always just one. That’s my feeling anyway, that just one of these hellions manages to sneak into my apartment every few nights, and engages in a dangerous game with me, trying to sneak that precious lifeblood out of me. The mosquitoes are winning. You can see that by the number of large red welts that mark my left forearm and right bicep. We are not prey for any other animal on this earth, not consistently, except for mosquitoes. They still devour us. I wonder how many hundreds, how many thousands of gallons of human blood are sucked up by mosquitoes daily. That would be a powerful statistic to use in any good destroy-all-mosquitoes campaign. They just released genetically modified mosquitoes in the US for the first time, this week, I read, in Florida. There are something like seventy-three species of mosquitoes and not all of them feed on humans, so we don’t need all of them to go extinct. Just the ones that stab and drink us like we’re big monkey juice boxes.

Anyways, last night I was plagued with diarrhea. I’m sorry if you’re eating anything right now, like chili. This is the second night I’ve woken up with such extreme gastrointestinal discomfort. I know the source. I have a bean problem. The problem is that I eat too many beans. I think we’re going to have to go our separate ways. This is very sad for me, because that means I have to find another source of protein, and I don’t know if I can find something as cheap or convenient as black beans. I was cooking up half a kilogram in dry weight of those babies every Sunday, in what I called the “death pot”, would freeze them all, and secure a week’s worth of daily bean rations, to utilize in my quest to become a mukimuki man. That has been one of my recent genius, is picking up the adventure again, in the quest to become a mukimuki man. I’m working out at the Ozu school gym with the soccer players. They think that I am the strongest man alive. It’s incredible, going from my local gym in Indiana, being at the near bottom of the totem pole of muscular men, to being number one, the king, without having to have really done anything at all except fly across the world. It’s all relative. Surrounded by hulking American men, I am weak – surrounded by puny Japanese high school soccer players, I am Hulk. They’re not puny, I’m just kidding – especially in the leg department, many of those guys are stronger than me. But weightlifting culture is not big in Japan. It’s fledgling, I would say, although that implies that it will be growing, and I’m not sure if it will be any time soon. When they first started coming to the gym, they would see me lift my weights, and it would just blow their minds. They would huddle around me, and make exclamations, “Wow! Wow!” “Oh my god!” “Very, very strong!” and cheer me on. It’s been a great ego booster. Recently in class, they asked me if I’d be in the gym that day, and they were excited to tell me they would be too, and they asked me what my max bench press was. The time before, they had asked me if I could bench 50 kilograms, and I actually laughed, and they said, “5 times,” and I was like, they’re gonna like this. (For the Standard Measurement users, you know who you are, (Americans) one kilogram is 2.2 pounds). That’s about 125 pounds or so. Even for me that is laughable. I laid out on that bench and just started pounding them out. I may as well have been lifting a barbell with stuffed animals on the sides. And with each rep, they’re realizing my true power, realizing why I laughed at 50, and they told me at fifteen, “Ok, ok.” So in class, when they asked me what my max bench was, I said, “I don’t know, maybe 200.” You should have seen their faces. It blew their minds. And these kids really think I am so strong, that they believed it. That’s 200 kilograms, almost 450 pounds. Obviously that is impossible for me. But I’m truly flattered you guys think I can do it. Really, imagine that you go to the gym and struggle to pound out your six or seven pull ups. You’re probably following in the wake of some lean mean pullup machine who just cranked out fifty for a warmup. You step up, and you’re doing okay, until you get to the fourth, or the fifth, and now it hurts, and your form is falling apart. The sixth destroys you, and you fall to the floor with flaming arms. The imagine of the lean mean pullup machine is fresh in your mind. You do not feel strong. Now, go to my gym at Ozu high. Ask if you can do some pullups. You may have seen a group of young bucks standing around it, eyeing it cautiously, perhaps one of two of them with courage having just given it a go, struggling through a few, probably with terrible form, doing the fish-flopping thing, where you buck your legs to give you extra momentum to lift yourself up. You now step up to struggle through your measly six or seven reps. On only the first rep, you’ve caught the attention of anyone watching. On the second or third, they are now openly commenting on your pullup strength, turning more heads. Sugoi, sugoi. By the fifth, they’re all in, cheering you on, many oh my gods have been exclaimed, someone has probably started counting for you. On your final pullup, they are enthralled, they will beg for one more, and you will fight for it, and you will fall to the ground; and this time, you fall down as a hero, a champion, to the cheers and celebrations of onlookers, who are thrilled to have just born witness to such a remarkable feat of physical strength. This is what it is like to workout at this Ozu school gym. When I sit down at the lat pulldown machine, I move the peg from somewhere around 20 kilograms, to double that. The soccer players see this, and their eyes immediately widen. It’s really incredible.

It has been a great way to get closer to them. Some of these guys have excellent English, and some of them don’t even speak enough English to use the escape card, “I don’t speak English.” when I start talking to them. It’s bad enough that I have to try and gauge the level of the student before I approach them, because it might be that to whatever I say, they will have absolutely no response at all. But it’s easier to bond in the weight room. Sports have that power. Last fall I played in a little Japanese-Vietnamese-American (me representing America) international soccer scrum. Those Vietnamese guys spoke almost no English and close to zero Japanese, and we left good friends.

Typing “believe” makes me want to share something I spoke with a friend about yesterday. We were acknowledging the nightmare that is spelling in the English language. That is one aspect in which Japanese has English thoroughly beat. Japanese is consistent, and the only problem I have with Japanese spelling is whether there is a small つ　or an extra う。For the Japanese it’s obvious, but for non-native speakers, it’s not. English speakers learning Japanese have it much easier than Japanese learning English. They have to struggle to discern even between letters of the alphabet. It is nearly impossible for a large percentage of my students to tell whether I am telling them to write b or v. When you make a v sound, if you do it right now, you’ll notice that you do a little buzz with your bottom lip. It’s fun. Try it. The Japanese don’t have this, and so they can’t pronounce v, and if they can’t pronounce it, it’s very hard for them to hear it. The same is true for the th and l sounds, among others. So, that is already a hurdle, and then put the fact that English has all kinds of nonsensical and inconsistent spellings, that it is pretty torturous for the Japanese to learn to spell anything. I showed you before how many different ways they could incorrectly spell frog. (Like, a million different ways.) Blue and vegetable are two other ones that frequently devastate my students (and the greater Japanese community, for at many restaurants, where they have their menu written on a chalkboard, which is a popular thing to do, if they’ve written “vegetables”, 98% of the time it’s spelled wrong). I am sympathetic to all of this. I think English speakers all recognize that English is a bastard sometimes. Look at tomb and bomb – it took me less than five seconds to think of such an example. Another one – close. How did you pronounce that? Close can be pronounced two ways, two words with entirely separate meaning. Japanese is at least consistent. But anyways, my friend, while we were bonding over the horror that is English spelling, asked me if I had any problems with spelling, and I am proud to say that at this point in my life, I’ve worked out almost all of the kinks (one that was kinking me for a long time was restaurant, and when I spell this word I now actually pronounce it incorrectly in my head to confirm that I have it right, as in, I pronounce the staur as you would the saur in dinosaur) but there is one that still kinks me, and that is the dreaded ie vs. ei debauchery. What reminded me of all this just now was that I typed believe, and I actually typed it wrong the first time, perhaps because my core has now been shaken and I am now subconsciously evaluating every ie ei word that I use. I think you all probably know what I’m talking about – is it theif or thief? It’s thief, but I often want to spell it theif. That one is a fifty-fifty for me, but the worst, is receive. I have made the mistake of writing recieve and correcting it so many times that I fear it is now engrained in my muscle memory – for me, writing the word receive is an act of writing receive and then thinking, “Is that right? That doesn’t look right.” And then rewriting it correctly. And it’s a bastard because you have relieve and believe, achieve, sieve, basically everything receive, conceive.. I know, it’s “I before e, except after c.” I know. I just hate it. I’m just pissed about it. But I guess that does solve our thief problem. I before e except after c.

Here are all of the ways that I have seen blue misspelled by my students: bleu (common), bool (only once), belu (common), brue (surprisingly uncommon), blu (uncommon), bloo (uncommon), and blow (only once). And I think this illustrates exactly why English spelling is so evil. To an English speaker, three of these would be pronounced nearly identically with blue: bleu, blu, and bloo. They’ve never written it, but there’s another, blew. You could also write blueue, couldn’t you, if you queue is a word? Bastard language. To the average Japanese who does not attempt to model true English pronunciation when they speak, beru and brue are also correct spellings of blue, in that it models how they hear the word.

On the beans.. I am not sure if I’ve adapted. I am sure that I’ve had to eat less of them, and to tell you the truth, I don’t want to eat them at all. I’ve come to even be afraid of them. It is a certain fact that if I consume any amount of black beans, I will have stinky farts the next day. But I have a dream, a dream that I will be a muscular, mukimuki man, and if I have to make such sacrifices, I will. The protein is too high, for too good of a price, and the convenience is hard to beat. I can whip up half a kilogram in dry bean weight, what I have called the “death pot”, and freeze it all, and now have a week’s worth of daily bean rations. My main protein sources are, along with the beans, soba, tofu, soy milk, peanuts, and a small fish called いりこ (iriko). I think they’re sardines. I eat soba every day, and I often tell this to Japanese people, when they ask me what my favorite food is, or what I usually eat. Soba is a perfect food. It is a perfect noodle. It has outmuscled every other food because it is simple, it is healthy, it is easy to make, and it has an incredible base flavor and texture. Direx has all but lost my business because they don’t carry it. I stopped at Direx this last week on the way home from Ozu High, to pick up some soy milk, which is ten yen more expensive at Direx than Trial (Direx losing on all fronts), and I checked, with very low expectations, as to whether there was yet any soba on the shelf, and there was none, and I left disgusted. Goto sensei, my old tantosha, who I really miss, gave me an amazing 図鑑 (zukan) (kind of a picture encyclopedia), meant for elementary school students and detailing all of the most fundamental aspects of Japanese culture, and it was actually thrilling to me to find that there were two pages devoted to soba, and the making of soba. How soba was made was something that had been sitting in the back of my mind for a long time, like many things, that I’m curious about, and would really like to know about, but just not so much that I’ll sit down and look into it on my own. This came to me, finally, and in the form of a beautiful, detailed, meant-for-children picture book, perfectly matching the level of my interest with the level of the explanation. Because you know, there are so many degrees of knowing something, as I could say, “Yeah, I know how soba’s made!” But if you asked me to make it, obviously, I can’t, so do I really know how soba’s made? Don’t push me on it. What I can tell you, which is what the zukan told me, is that the secret of soba’s power, being full of magnesium, and fiber, and protein, mainly comes from the ground up fruit of the soba plant. They take the fruit, which looks like (based on the zukan illustration) some tough ass raisins, grind ’em up, take off the shell, mix them in with a paste made of flour and yamaimo, a kind of root vegetable, roll it out, and chop it up into noodles. And viola, you have Japan’s greatest noodle.

Sat Aug 5 // Sun Aug 6 // Mon Aug 7 – DiffusionBee and More Phantasmagorian Creatures

As I was typing this sentence (on Sunday), something caught my eye from the window. It was a small rabbit, or should I say large bunny, bounding across the lawn. I’m writing this time from the second floor bedroom, on a desk in front of a long rectangular window that allows me to look out over our humble kingdom. From this perch I can gaze out over the yard and – wow, there goes another bunny! That one was not bounding, that was a hurried scamper. A comical scamper. Boy those things can move quick, can’t they. I don’t think that was the same one, I would have noticed it come back across the yard. Same size though. Could be siblings. Could be twins. I guess they’re all kind of like twins, aren’t they, because they all come out at the same time. Twins, triplets, quadruplets. There’s a word for this – littermates. Yes, littermates.

This is extremely stream of consciousness. You’re right along for the ride with me here. I can see all of these things from this window, and more, because I can see the feeder from here. And the lake. I should say, the feeder complex. I have been here for the various stages of this aviation feeding station’s development, and would say that we can now officially call this a complex, the most recent addition being an oval-shaped mulch patch with African Lillies, for the hummingbirds. They like those African Lillies. Here’s a photo, courtesy of the internet, of what they look like.

In the last paragraph, I wrote, “oval-shaped”. When I wrote that sentence, I first wrote ovular, you know, like circular, or rectangular, but it immediately struck me as sus, and my intuition was correct. That word is already taken. For things related to ovules, of course. The English language is weird. The other day we were watching soccer and I said something like, “She’d just shotten the ball” and the parents stopped me and said, “Shotten??” Got, gotten, fine. Shot, shotten, no sir. Gotten is still alive in the common vernacular but doesn’t have to be used (I just got home, I’ve just gotten home), but it might go the same way as shotten, and die out someday. Because, I just did some Googling, it’s not that you can’t say shotten. It’s not incorrect, it’s just a dead word, listed by the dictionaries as obsolete. Once upon time it was used, if we can trust this nice graph from Collin’s Dictionary, some time in the 1700s, and who knows how much before then.

*source*: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/shotten

Anyways, back to the African Lillies.. Ours are yellow and orange. They’re dainty things. So now we’ve got some of those below our feeders, of which we have four hanging from two metal poles, that are four feet high or so, and one hanging from a cottonwood next to the mulch oval. From one pole, there are three smaller feeders: one with the sugar water for the hummingbirds, with little fake flowers for them to stick their tiny beaks into, a standard one, we’ll just call it that because I can’t really tell what’s going on with it from this angle, but it looks similar to the feeder hanging from the cottonwood, which has a little ledge in front of it that the birds and the undesirables (the squirrels and the chipmunks) perch on and pull seeds out through a slit in the bottom, and then there is a sack of smaller seeds, with a thin sieve-like mesh skin, that is favored more by birds with skinnier breaks. I’m thinking that the nuthatch might go for this one, and speak of the angel, the nuthatch has just landed. The hummingbird has just shown up as well. It’s a whirlwind out here. At this moment, I can see these birds: a female cardinal, four, then six sparrows, a hummingbird, a nuthatch, a few geese, far off, and some other kind of sparrow, or maybe a chickadee. These guys n’ gals are out here partying every day. Attached to the sack is a small bowl with jelly for the orioles. They were around earlier in the summer, with the red-winged blackbirds. They’ve both gone away now. Hanging from the other pole is a massive multi-storied megafeeder. This is monopolized by the sparrows. There is currently a sparrow at every feeding port, and they’re fighting to keep it that way. The nuthatch keeps trying to get in there. He flies back and forth, looking for an angle, a way in. He finds it, or forces it, gets a few seeds, and is chased off. He’s my favorite of these birds, I have to say. Something about the way he hops and skips, the way he swivels his head, and pulls seeds out of the feeder with his long, sharp beak. He trawls the sides of the cottonwoods, poking and prodding, snapping juicy morsels up out of the cracks, and possibly hiding seeds. I read that birds do that, wedge seeds into the cracks of trees. He’s got a very pretty blue, grey, white, black coloration. A lot of personality in that bird. He could be a she, I actually don’t know. Another hummingbird has just shown up as well. It’s now confirmed that there are two hummingbirds around.

A lot of action going on down there, man. You could watch it all day, especially if you were a cat. From here would be great, but from our downstairs window, a large, three-paned window with a fullscreen view of the feeders. That view is every cat’s dream. Cat heaven. And Daisy heaven is looking at fish. It doesn’t take much, with them. I was sitting out on the deck in the rain yesterday, right under the ledge of the house. I was only being sprinkled on. It was a soft rain, the temperature was cool, but a very comfortable, perfect cool, not chilly, and with low wind. It was just quiet, but not unsettlingly quiet, not dead silent, just quiet, with only the gentle white noise pitter-patter of the drops, on wood, water, and leaves. And with the fresh scent in the air, the fresh scent of earth, of wet wood, of rainwater. Daisy was out with me, laying beside me near the steps, staring off into the distance, out between the large trunks of the cottonwoods, at the geese in the yard. I sat there, watching her, watching the ripples of the water on the surface of the lake, watching the sky, watching the geese, and in that moment, so full of calm, my senses so pleasantly stimulated, a little thought popped into my head, that this was heaven. It was a fleeting thought, really. But it was a solid one. I wasn’t out there for too long before I felt restless, and I didn’t stay. For that short time, though, I guess I had a little taste of it. A brush with the divine. And you know, it really doesn’t take much. It doesn’t take much, to be happy. And it doesn’t have to cost a dime.

Now it’s Monday. Enough talk about the birds and the wind and crap like that. Let’s get down to business.

The text prompt for this image was “Creatures from a phantasmagorical universe, Pastel Art, Beautiful Lighting, Warm Color Palette.” And this image was built in 22 steps. Last post looked at the effect of step count on image generation, and now we’ll talk about the effect of prompt text and seed number. First, the seed number. Like an actual plant, the seed is the basis for the image. How exactly it works I don’t know, but I can tell you that if you use the same seed for an image, even if they come out wildly different in the end because of all of the other parameters, they must have started the same way. So, if you generate an image twice, keeping all parameters the same, including with the same seed, you will have nearly the same image in the end. If you keep all parameters the same and change only the seed, you will have an entirely different image in the end. The seed for that first image, our experiment image, was 54445. Below are images generated with seeds 54446 and 54447, and otherwise the exact same parameters.

This means that you could download DiffusionBee, set all of the parameters to exactly what I had them as for these images, and you would get nearly the same thing. You don’t get exactly the same thing, because the algorithm that generates these is as they say in the biz, nondeterministic. (Also.. how freakin cool are these pictures. I think I could have a promising career as a Phantasmagorian AI Art Programmer. Wouldn’t that be fun to tell people.) It would be interesting to know what exactly a seed is in the code, how that works. I’m trying to think of what it could be, like a set of numbers or parameters that are related to the growth of the image. I generated three more images with totally different text prompts off of the same seed, to see if that would reveal anything about the seed. 1. “Gorilla in a top hat, by Vincent van Gogh”, 2. “a bowl of cereal, colored pencil, children’s drawing”, and 3. “Barack Obama riding a skateboard, 8-bit”.

I can only really see one similarity between them. All of these images have multiples of the subject. I’ve wondered about that, because sometimes there are multiples, and sometimes not, and it doesn’t matter if you specify how many gorillas you want in the prompt text. That may be outside of the prompt’s control, and dependent only on the seed.

Now looking at the effect of prompt text. In the next image, I changed only one thing. In the prompt text, I changed “warm color palette” to “cool color palette”, and now you have an image that is in one way quite different, and yet similar. Take a gander.

Warm Color Palette vs. Cool Color Palette (slide the bar to compare images)

Many differences, and many similarities. You can see that the bones of the image are the same. That’s really where the seed is coming into play. The bones are the same, but the flavor, the details have changed. There is much more of a pronounced glow to the image, which I really love. The whole thing is glowing in mystical blue light. All of the flying fish are gone, and the firecat, the little glowing mushroom lamps, and the red sun in the upper right corner, gone as well. In the cool color palette, you have more detail in the background, less of a foreground (on the sides of the image), and now a really interesting scene at the bottom, with an incredible pink-purple boar creature, and a large, curly, pink monkey. There are new plants, and some yellow thing that my brain is interpreting as a butterfly. Would you expect such a different image just from asking the program to change the color scheme? I didn’t. I thought it would take the same image and just color it differently, but it’s much more than that. I had a lot of fun trying other color schemes and styles and seeing what popped out. Like the chocolates in a box of chocolates, you just don’t know what you’re going to get.

*Green (without the words “Color Palette”)*

They all have the same foundation, but the aesthetic is totally different. So how about changing something else, say, “Watercolor” instead of “Pastel Art”?

Amazing. So amazing. Look how the branches of the tree on the bottom right become the hair of the green rhino pokemon creature. The leg of the firecat becomes the leg of the dragon whatever. (I’m trying my best to describe these phantasm creatures to you. It’s hard, ok. I could make up names for them. The Wakkanok, the Schmerkelvitz.) The background just disappears and becomes stars, and the foreground is made of creatures, and colored gas. Now we really are out in the universe. I love it.

Warm Color Palette vs. Cold Color Palette

This one was “creatures in a phantasmagorian universe, Pastel Art, Cool Color Palette” but without “Beautiful Lighting”. That made a huge difference. I’ll take my beautiful lighting, please.

What if we change “universe” to “desert”?

Incredible.

Some of the best, here. On 10 steps, we could more creatures. I love the blurry, dreaminess of the watercolor.

Very cool. I’m really in love with these. You just never know what you’re going to get. So much to play with here, with DiffusionBee. This is a very simple program, no coding required, no importing models or anything. Also, they have AI video now, I’ve seen it. A full movie trailer, 30 seconds live action, apparently made with AI. Think of the implications. We could, potentially, the average person, easily generate hundreds of videos of penguins riding horses. Into battle, at the Kentucky derby, joyously through a meadow, along the beach. This is coming, this is the future. It’s exciting stuff.