Trash Quest Pt. 2

Note: This post is 683 words, excluding this note. It’s not 500 but it’s the best I could do. It started at 1000. I refuse to cut any more!!!!!!!

After writing up my morning post about my trash quest, I opened up my bag of collected trash and plastics. It was time to see what I had. I haven’t thrown anything away, except for a broken, metal door hinge. I regret throwing it away.

I examined my trash, and found a few things. There was paper of various kinds, mostly paper from mail. That’s recycleable. Easy. It’s not compostable because it contains small amounts of plastic film that act as a window, to see the sender’s address.

I had a poster from Gibson Garage that was not laminated, and so recycleable as paper.

Then, there was plastic. Strange hard items, rigid plastic like trays and containers, and then a lot of plastic film/bags. The plastic film I found could be recycled at a few grocery stores near me. The Publix was the closest, so I took my bag of plastic and set off to investigate.

Now, I was successful. They did accept plastic bags and plastic wrap at a recycling bin at Publix. That was most of my plastic. Great. But then…

When you see it, when your eyes are opened, to the scale and scope of the problem, you cannot unsee it. It’s like being in The Matrix.

I walked into the Publix. I wanted to see what I could buy, without acquiring any plastic.

The answer was, nothing.

Nothing at all.

I was supposed to be in a place for buying food. I was in a grocery store.

Yet, all I saw was plastic.

A sea of single-use plastics: shrink wrap, bags, rigid containers, stickers—everything encased in plastic.

This is the problem, people.

Now, that was bad. That was horrifying, even. But what was worse?

On my walk back home, I picked up 9 plastic bottles.

I picked up other pieces of trash as well. Wrappers, food containers. With each piece of plastic litter, my rage was rising. And then?

The literal icing on the cake, was an actual cake.

I saw it up ahead in the road. Two plastic bags, fluttering in the street.

I approached. One bag had half of a cake in it, in a rigid plastic container. The other bag had a bundle of bananas.

Hundreds of ants were swarming the cake. I decided to dump it, let the ants feast. I took the bananas with me to put in my compost hole.

I took the stickers off the bananas. They’re plastic, and won’t degrade. The cake I was disgusted with, and I threw that plastic away. I should have gone farther and cleaned it, and added the rigid plastic container to my collection. I threw the bananas in my compost hole.

This pissed me off. I was getting angry. I found two cans and two bottles on the last minute of my walk.

Now I was really fired up. I wasn’t done. I knew that our trash can itself would be full of recycleable and compostable trash. Why? Because of our roommate.

The dude chugs Dr. Pepper like his life depends on it. Like it’s his Holy Elixir of Everlasting Life. And he throws all of those cans in the trash.

I talked to him about it. I’m not angry with him is because he’s absent-minded. He doesn’t realize what he’s doing.

The biggest reason why we should not allow these permanent items out in the world, in the size and scope that they are: Even if they can be meticulously recycled, there will be people who don’t do that, or things that go wrong. And they will end up in the environment.

I pulled four Dr. Pepper cans out of the trash. Then, there was mailing waste. That could be recycled. Paper towel waste, and two chunks of bell peppers: compostable.

Parker and I haven’t been using paper towels for months. We just use rags instead. But the other roommate bought some recently.

This is the trash quest I am on. The size and scope of the problem is huge, y’all. But we have to do it. We have to solve this.

This Is A Criminal Post

I’ve just sat down on the couch at the coffee shop.

It’s extremely hot out. And humid. Yesterday it was so humid that it was hurting my head. I was sitting outside, at this very same coffee shop, working from a small metal table, and generally enjoying being outside. Except for the fact that it was so humid that my head felt like it was swelling.

I wasn’t even overheating. It has to be really hot for me to overheat, and I have to be thirsty too. But it can get so hot that I feel like I’m wilting. That was happening to me at the Alamo. I was just wilting. I couldn’t keep going. I couldn’t be in the sun.

Yesterday it wasn’t that bad with the heat. But the humidity PLUS the heat, it was doing me in. I couldn’t concentrate. My head felt like it was swelling.

When you are really overheating and sweltering, walking into a cool, air conditioned room is like a dream. It’s a wonderful thing. That’s how I felt just now getting off the phone and going inside of the coffee shop. I was ready to come in here.

Now feeling great, drinking a green iced tea and sitting on the couch. What a wonderful life.

I am trying to do shorter, more consistent posts. It’s an experiment. And it’s just what you’re supposed to do, when you have a blog. I also don’t want to overwhelm everyone all the time, including myself, with “mega-posts”. That’s what I have been calling my beastly writings that take twenty or thirty minutes to read, that are thousands of words long. And you know what’s funny?

Yesterday, when I was thinking about how long a post could/should be, for regular posting, Chat GPT told me to shoot for 500 words in a post. That I could even set a cap, and just stop myself from writing at 500 words. So I thought, let me look at the post I just typed up, which I felt like was still too short. I had actually just finished adding more to that post, the post I had just posted yesterday, about my writing update. That was 1900 words, and Chat GPT said that a “mega-post” was 1000-2000 words. And I still thought that was a short post! Not long enough!

Chat GPT and I have a different definition of “mega-post”. But the point was that, I can get away with writing posts that are much shorter. That are so short that they feel criminal. It really does feel that way.

For example, already I can sense that we are almost at 500 words. Right now, here is the word count: 453 words. That means I only have 47 left! And look at how short this is!

It’s criminally short. This is a criminal post.

Now 478 words.

And this took me all of 5 minutes to write.

But I guess you will read the entire post.

Writing Update

What’s up y’all.

I want to write a post here to let you all know what’s up with me and writing. I know I haven’t posted anything on here in a while. I haven’t been up to date at all. It hasn’t really been that kind of a period for me. I have done a lot of writing, but not much has made it to the blog.

It has been an interesting and developmental phase for me. I spent a lot of time, going through cycles, when I was not holding down a job, doing a lot of editing work, and then when working, almost no editing, but still a lot of creative writing. And now I’m in a place where I have multiple ideas or drafts, works that need to be finished, and I really want to finish them, and I have finished the second major revision of my Japan memoir, which I want to call Kumamoto Days. It’s a reference to Orwell’s Burmese Days and I like the sound of it and I think it captures everything that the memoir is about.

I have compiled all or most of all of the Japan writings that I did here on this blog, and have put them together into a single work, and have been meticulously editing and improving them to try and have something publishable. Dr. Joseph Chaney had the great idea to do this, and it has really improved me as a writer, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about how books are written, and the editing process, and what it takes to actually make something as good as it can be. That has been a big deal and has taken now quite a long time. I’ve been doing the editing for almost two years now, which is crazy. I did not imagine at all that it would take so long, but I kept finding ways to improve it, so I have had to keep editing. But I think we are nearly at the end of the road with that. I will start reaching out to agents and trying to get it published. But in the meantime, I can put up a downloadable PDF of the whole thing, and you can have it in digital form. I just want to review it one more time and get a bit more feedback, before I do that. So I just want to let you know now that that’s coming.

This is my plan. I have other works incoming. I want to focus on one thing at a time. But finally, after a long period of editing and working on this dang thing, I’m nearing at least the next stage of the project, which is the publishing part, and it seems like I can’t have any idea how that will take, because it’s not up to me, unless I self-publish it. All I really want is to have it in a physical form and look over and see it sitting on my bookshelf. That’s all I want at this point. And for you guys to have that too.

New Life in East Nashville // 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.

General December Writing – Philosophy Thoughts, Starbucks, Invasive Species, Personality

It’s December 16th or 17th, 2024. This pen has dried up and is too scratchy.

Did I fix it?

Whatever. There we go.

I have not been doing much writing these days, no writing for sharing. All writing just for me, because I am writing nearly every day. But I haven’t written a piece in months, and I am inspired to write one now, with so many topics and themes and developments I’ve been stewing on, and I just picked up Hamilton, by Ron Chernow, last night, and for some reason that’s inspiring me. Maybe because Hamilton was a prolific writer and reading his writings about his life makes me want to write about mine. It’s generally a good thing to do, and I have mostly not ever regretted taking the time to really go for it and write about anything. So here we are again.

In a way, it’s like writing a letter to a friend, but that friend is myself, but also whoever wants to read this, because for some reason I like to share this kind of thing. Well, that’s what blogging is. A lot of people do this.

Here’s the status report.

Starting small… I’m 146 pounds. Lean and wiry with almost no body fat at all. I eat light but healthy, and have taken to running because weight lifting is boring and I am.. can’t be bothered to try and arrange tennis matches. But for awhile I was having a good time playing tennis with Nicholas Harding of Vermont, who was a sociopath (what they now call antisocial personality disorder) and generally crazy, delusional, a thief and grandiose narcissist and liar, so we had to kick him out. I wrote a bit about the new roommate…….

I’ve arranged my furniture so that my desk is over again facing the window, where I’m sitting now. My bed is next to me, the couch fitting perfectly into a space by the door, opposite from the window. This is possibly my final arrangment. It’s a fun thing to do in the winter. I don’t usually care so much about how my room looks, but when you spend enough time in here, and you get bored, you start having ideas. Having my desk back at the window where I can sit here and look out at my small yard and contemplate the meaning of things is definitely the way to go. The only major lifestyle change I’ve had to make as a result of this new arrangement is that my record player is now on the floor. Of course at first I thought this wouldn’t work, but you quickly get used to things, and actually it makes sense. Right now it’s one of my most precious possessions, so it being front and center in my room is actually exactly where it belongs. And I can lay on the floor, or sit on the bed, or sit lotus style, and listen with the headphones. The cable reaches long enough that I can do all of those.

Yesterday I bought three records. I walked on over to The Groove, to see what I could see. I had a feeling that they would have Nevermind. The last time I was there I scored In Utero. Well, guess what? They had it but it was overpriced, and I didn’t really want to listen to it anyways, yesterday. I wanted stuff that was not Nirvana.

Eh. This part is feeling too diary-esque for me. If I write all of that kind of stuff, I’ll run out of steam before we get anything good.

Since time and energy are limited, what are the best topics, for you and I, that I could write about?

Well, I have now volunteered twice removing invasive plant species from the local park. Our last session was attended by a crew of enthusiastic veterans, and so we did damage. The two main plants we removed were Bush honeysuckle and Chinese privet. And I’ll tell you about this.

The first time I volunteered to do this removal, my main focus was Chinese privet, and that’s what I learned to recognize. I came home and saw it everywhere in our yard, and then pulled 10 or 15 plants. This time around, I solidified my ID skills of privet, and can now ID Bush Honeysuckle, and as with privet, when I came home, I immediately spotted it in the yard. On my run yesterday, I saw it everywhere. Bush Honeysuckle is even worse – just as bad as privet. And it is everywhere. Both of them can get quite big. As big as small trees, 8 feet tall or taller. They’re large and proliferate rapidly, and at Shelby you could clearly see the effect that Bush Honeysuckle was having on the forest. By being a solid plant on the ground, vines are able to grow across the tops of the honeysuckle plants, and they fan out, and with the vines on top, suddenly where there is supposed to be clear, open forest, there is an impenetrable mass of vines and bushes and these small trees. Choking the forest. Not at all what it’s supposed to be.

So we tore it out, and it was hard work. Using handsaws, weed wrenches, and mattocks, which was the best and an incredible time. The mattock is like a pickaxe that you can use for mining an embedded plant out of the ground. You can pick in and get under the roots, and then pry the whole root ball out. There was one Bush Honeysuckle that Eve and I double-teamed, with me picking away the dirt surrounding the thick roots that were holding the plant down, and then Eve taking the loppers and severing them, one by one, until we could finally get the thing out of the ground. It was an enormous root ball, and we took a photo together, holding it like it was a prize fish we had just caught.

The ground was soft and wet because it had rained last night, so the conditions were perfect. You could pull most of the privets out of the ground, just rip them right out, with no tools, and I was running around ripping them up like I was playing whack-a-mole. I was really in hog heaven. It’s not often that you get to do demolition, to chop, hack, and destroy, which is at least for me, totally very fun, and then it was also a fun winter outdoors activity. It’s harder to find fun stuff to do outside in winter.

Running around the neighborhood, I now see privet and honeysuckle everywhere. Our crew leader CD Paddock had once said, “Once you see it, you’ll see it everywhere.” And it’s so true. What has been seen cannot be unseen. I think it is a clear and obvious metaphor or example of how knowledge opens our eyes and our minds to new things. These plants have been all around me, but I never noticed them or thought much about them. And now, suddenly, my brain is aware of them, and trained to spot them, and I see them everywhere, and think, you. You do not belong here.

Language is another example. Looking at the sake bottle on my desk, I see written on the front, むら。And I know now, of course that’s mura. But once upon a time I did not know.

I’ll take a break.

I’ve taken a break. I think that the writing bug has been scratched. That’s how it goes. But there is much much more to be written about. For what purpose? A good question. Well, does everything have to have a purpose? And, does everything have to have a purpose that you can understand? Many things are happening with purposes that you do not know about. Including your own actions.

That sounds like some Buddhism stuff right there. Pickles is currently barking like a savage maniac. What the hell has gotten him so triggered? Or her. Patrick must not be home or he would have yelled by now.

The Buddhism thoughts… I will say that I have had some Buddhist type thoughts in my head recently, and in my conversations with Rachel recently, I seem to have hit on some Buddhist ~~principals~~ principles. I can’t believe I just spelled that wrong.

In no particular order.. One thought I’ve been having recently is that, probably inspired by my reading The Republic, everyone has to come to knowledge for themselves, and only they themselves can unlock it. Even if it has already been discovered a thousand times before. You see this on Reddit, I saw just last night, people say things like, “Now that I’ve quit YouTube I find that I’m having more time for thoughts.” Or, now that I’ve stopped watching/reading the news I feel more peaceful. Or that connecting with nature makes you feel more at peace. This knowledge, about anything, in this case about mindfulness practice, is already out there. These thoughts have been thought many times before, and people, some people are already very aware. But there was a time when they learned that. Everyone must learn everything themselves.

Some things are instinct, and inborn, knowledge. But understanding on a higher level, grasping with the intellect, must be done on one’s own.

This is actually a serious statement because it means that you can’t just give someone knowledge, like you can give them $5. You can’t just give anybody knowledge. Not knowledge that they will really feel and thoroughly understand.

It is difficult and requires work. Possibly even certain mental capabilities that are beyond some people. But everyone is capable of learning.

I think what I really think is interesting about this fact is that it means that… Jesus that’s a long load of nothing. It means that even if someone were to attain true, perfect knowledge, if you could have such a thing, there is no guarantee that anyone else could ever have it again. No one else might ever be able to reach it, even with it all laid out and explained by the one who had achieved it.

Everyone is making a journey in their lives, of learning, of discovering, every person must do this, and it can’t be inserted or implanted in anyone else. Every person, every new human is a chance for a renewal of thought and a fresh outlook. That is the positive side of it. And then the negative side, if we can label it as such, would be that everyone has to suffer into the same knowledge, the “perfect, true” knowledge, over and over and over.

Let’s go for a walk.

I walked over to Walgreens and picked up a 9V battery to use with the pedal that my Dad gave me. The price tag wasn’t quite right, and I thought it would be $10.99, and it turned out to be….

Diary writing.

I reflected on mindfulness and Buddhist-type thinking on my small adventure just now.

I want to write more.. but I’m tired.

The sun is setting. I’m not ready. Well, bring on the night. Let’s get to creepin’.

Some creepin’ has been done.

Since I’ve been here, soon on arriving at 805B N 12th Street here in this duplex owned by Sir Michael Shields, I discovered the joy of candles. I never really knew about candles. That I myself could buy, light, and enjoy candles in my own home. I just didn’t know about that. I had never done it myself. I only write this because I have recently been enjoying candles to the fullest amount, now that it’s winter again.

I enjoy candles, records, books, and writing, and have a flip phone. I made one major step in moving away from the digital world, further distancing myself, when I decided to stop streaming music, and just go in on records. And I have found like I do whenever I have done these experiments that I am pleased with the results.

You know what’s really crazy? I think if people from the past could come here now and see Smosh sitting on the couch watching Tik Toks, see Taloya at the ovens with her phone out, all these people so disconnected and in phone world, they would be shocked. I know that people used to think that books were doing what phones do now, that people would be buried in books. There are always parallels. But think about this – how within a generation, something like 15 years, there is now a prevalent and normal, completely normal and commonplace behavior of being out in the world and holding a screen to your face and watching TV. Or being home and holding a screen to your face and watching TV. Or being 3 years old and holding a screen…. you get it. I guess I’ve really opted out. What’s also interesting about this is how things, how decisions feel to you at the time of you doing them. Going without a phone felt like a momentous decision, but only for me in the past, when I hadn’t done it. Living with a flip phone, with no smartphone, felt crazy and revolutionary. And now? I don’t think twice about it. I had all of these thoughts and revelations about it all, and now when people ask me I just say, “I like the flip phone better, basically.” Which is the truth. And that’s about it for me.

I’ve moved on. But I see those still enmeshed in phone life, smartphone life. Smartphones being very much a core part of their lives.

I am surprisingly popular. I am not writing this to stoke my own ego. I swear. You can never be sure that I’m telling the truth. I can’t even know. Of course I like being popular, but it’s not like Arianna Grande’s character in Wicked, who craves it. I don’t care either way. It just turns out that I am. And I’m writing about this because I am reminded about it almost every day. Like today, once again. Jessica commented once again that “Everybody likes Steven.” To which Stacy Hamilton quipped, “Not everybody.” And I said, “Who doesn’t like Steven? Let me find out.” Stacy said, “I’m just playing around!” Jessica says, “What are you gonna do? Give them that?” (This is some slang Jessica uses that means, you give them that, as in they say, Do you need that? And then hit them.) I said, “I’m gonna’ whoop on that heinie.” And that had her laughing. Not hard to make Jessica laugh. Just have to say something ridiculous like that. Chris K. said he misses me when I’m not there. He’s said it many times. Emily has said the same thing, that “I bring her joy.” Even Stacy has said, “He’s alright sometimes.” That’s a big deal. And I heard Jessica say today that Stacy has actually spoken the words, “I wish Steven were here.” When I’ve not been there, which, if true, is an absolutely incredible fact. I have had two work wives, Leah (my first wife), and now KB. The remarriage was instantaneous, more for KB’s sake than mine. Sorry Leah, but if you come back you will be my wife again instantly.

Leah may have been pushed out by Stacy. Having her hours reduced until it’s not worth it for her to stick around. That has been happening. Stacy does some scheming, I think. She has some presumptions and perceptions about the team that I don’t think are totally accurate. But she also has preferences, and one of her preferences is to minimize the fun and shennanigans. This is where I have been running into trouble, and recently much more frequently, because I have been recommended by my fellow maties to be an honorary shift supervisor. I wonder if Stacy groaned as she realized that I was the one to be picked. But Stacy has one great shortcoming, I would say, that she is too easily frazzled, and is too tightly wound. The stress is terrible for her. And just last week she said that she felt her heart beating in her chest. I was legitimately concerned for her life. She could straight up have a heart attack at Starbucks. She’s 62, overweight, a frequent imbiber of alcohol, and stressed out to the max. Me writing this is kind of showing me how possible this really is. I am often concerned for her health.

I’m tired but want to keep going. I was just lying in bed and my brain was firing away at a much faster clip than I can possibly keep up with in writing. I will continue with me being popular, an interesting point, and I bring it up because this whole Starbucks venture has been an interesting environment for me, a foil to learn about myself, which is always interesting to do, but also is a hot topic because I am a hot topic. You can tell I’m tired now because I’m writing all this and saying very little. I’m trying to say that being thrown into this new environment and mix of interesting personalities and learning how to work together and all that has shown me some things about myself, or clarified them or made them more obvious to me.

I write this as you know I am interested in human psychology and personality, and have enjoyed taking personality tests and etc., even when you know it’s all BS, because it’s fun.

People are notoriously bad at self-perception. So to have external comments made about your person and personality can be very useful, assuming that they are correct. For example, if you’re playing dumb, or acting a part for some reason, people will draw false conclusions about you, obviously. And all of these people, my coworkers, new friends and comrades, never knew me before. So they’re seeing me and taking me in with fresh eyes, as I am now.

You are lucky to be able to live this life. You have many luxuries. Sake. A guitar. Coffee. Blankets (kind of essential actually.) Books. Many luxuries. A camera. A laptop. Nice clothes. Pens and paper. A room with a view. No disease or illness. Records. Very lucky you are.

Thoughts From The Cubicle: Honking, Homicidal Urges, Jewish Man Parts the Vehicular Sea

*Bored at my cubicle. Writing from 1700 Broadway, Manhattan. 1/11/24, 3-something pm.*

I’m going a little crazy here. I need a wheel. Like a hamster wheel. I need that thing. I would be running on it right now. I would be running so fast. Then, I would get tired, and I would go over to my water tower drinker thing, and drink some water, and then hop back on the wheel, and run again. What could be more fun than a treadmill? A giant, circular treadmill. I’m so into that. Someone design that right now. Cubicle hamster wheels. For humans. I’m so in. Give me 10% of the profits for the idea. For just one year. You can keep the rest. I don’t need a lot to live on. Just enough. Just enough from my human hamster wheel invention. And people will say, what did you do for your monies? And I’ll say, I proposed the idea of the human hamster wheel, the now world-wide office phenomenon. And they’ll say, that’s great. That was a great idea. Thank you for your great contribution to society.

(I’ve had a lot of coffee.)

I would settle for a treadmill. A standing treadmill desk. I proposed that many times to my senseis in the teacher staff room, when I was teaching in Kumamoto. I once piled up books and actually did stand at my desk, and of course it was awkward and attracted a lot of attention. I was the only teacher standing at their desk in a room of 40, 50 people. And those desks are not cubicles. There are no barriers. You are side-by-side. So there I was, lording over everyone, with my laptop quite precariously placed on a tower of books, typing away. That experiment didn’t last long, I have to say. Too risky, too distracting. I was always doing something to attract attention in that office, not that I was trying to. It just so happened that often I would do things like build a standing desk tower out of books or eat large raw carrots at my desk (like “Bugs Bunny”). It just happened that way. But I enjoyed that brief stint with my standing desk. It would have been even better if I was walking at the same time. Even better, if I was running, on a giant circular wheel. The human hamster wheel.

I have to write comedic material. I have to exercise my imagination. It is very important for my soul and spirit. If I am a very sick man, comedy is the only thing that can save me. I have to laugh. Otherwise, it is great suffering. That must be why New York is famous for comedy. It makes a lot of sense. You have to have some laughs or you’ll lose it. (Your sanity, that is. If you ever had it.) You just can’t take it otherwise.

Last night on my walk to the local grocery store Shoprite, I witnessed another insanity inducing spectacle, as I do on every walk. This absurd spectacle was a thick Jewish man, in full black navy suit, nice shoes, little round hat (kippah), talking on the phone, a man of business, a man who clearly has some sense. This man was across from me at THE most dangerous intersection on my walk to Shoprite, which is fraught with dangerous intersections, because every intersection in NYC is dangerous – but this intersection in particular is dangerous because it’s underneath a train, with pillars that can obscure view of pedestrains, and with many pedestrians, with small lanes separated from big lanes by pillars, and with 5 streets going into it, with one of them coming in diagonally, so the cars have to fork left or right.. There’s a lot happening at this crazy intersection, a lot of ways for it to all go wrong. Ladies and gentlemen, I could spend hours, hours upon hours upon hours reguiling to you the amazing and extraordinary things I have seen these New York city drivers do. There’s almost nothing they won’t do. No action too outrageous, nothing too disgraceful, and nobody to stop them. First, it is horrifying. Then, it is astounding. It is fascinating. But mostly, it is horrifying.

They will honk at the drop of a hat. They will honk not at the drop of a hat. They will honk at you for parking. They will honk at you for turning. They will honk at you for stopping at a stop sign, they will honk at you one single millisecond after the light turns green and you haven’t slammed on the gas, they will honk if they can’t go anywhere for any reason, say, an EMT car that has stopped for a medical emergency and is loading someone in a stretcher onto the ambulance (saw this two nights ago), and they will honk as a form of personal expression. A beautiful, poetic expression, of anger, of joy, of love, of life. On a normal Thursday, last week, over a 24 hour period, I estimated that there were between 200-300 honks happening in the streets around my apartment on Avenue H, south Flatbush, Brooklyn. Between 200-300 honks. With that, you are also guaranteed at least one car alarm a day, and no less than 10 total minutes combined of sirens. I hear every one of these honks, every one of these sirens, and every car alarm. Peppered throughout, there are also random explosions that sound like gunshots or fireworks, but they aren’t – they’re just people’s motors, you know, exploding. That’s fine though, because that makes those people feel special and powerful and cool, and what, am I just going to say someone is an asshole because they make little explosion gunshot noises every day so that they can feel powerful cool and special? No, no. I wouldn’t deny them that, and I wouldn’t deny anyone their little teddy bear that they need to snuggle up with at night to keep the loneliness at bay.

The average length of a honk varies, depending on their purpose, just like with bird calls. Mainly, length of honk corrolates with rage/exasperation level of the driver, and can be used as a guage of the strength of the offense of the offender. (My hypothesis, at least.) Between 0.5-2 seconds is the average, but is not uncommon to hear a honk that is over 5 seconds long. If you get that far with it, that means the offender is really messing up, and/or the honker is really angry. Now, a 5 second honk may not sound that long, guys n’ gals, but let me tell you – it is, and if you don’t think it is, and even if you do, I want you to count to 5 for me right now. Count the Mississippi way, count properly. 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, 4 Mississippi, 5 Mississippi. Ok. Now read that again, and play a honk sound in your mind. Imagine that someone is honking that entire time. Time is a relative thing. When you hear someone honk for 5 seconds, you realize that 5 seconds is a very long time. In honk time, 5 seconds is long. I hear 5 second honks often, probably every other day. And I can truthfully tell you that I’ve heard honks of up to 15 seconds. When it’s that long, anything over 5 seconds, you can only help to marvel at it. How angry can they be? How long will they go for? When will they call it? What a honk, what a fucking honk! There is something marvelous about it.

Now, why do these Brooklyn drivers do this? It’s a good question. If they’re here driving in Brooklyn, chances are that they live here in Brooklyn. They must know that there are potentially hundreds of people around who will hear their honk. They are certainly aware of the great detriment to everyone that is rampant, unchecked noise pollution. They undoubtedly have read all of the many scientific articles that have been written about the effects of noise pollution on human health, on child development, on mental health, on stress and anxiety levels, blood pressure, and such. I am positive that they are well acquainted with the facts. And knowing all of this, still, they honk. This is really an incredible thing. What could explain it?

I will tell you, my hypothesis. After careful consideration, and much contemplation, I can say that with high probability… They’re angry. Yes, they are in fact angry. They don’t always have to be, they may just be annoyed, they may even be trying to be helpful, but I would say in most cases, these honks are laden with rage. That is part of it, yes, but there is something else yet, that plays a bigger part. More than rage, I suspect, is that fundamentally, these people are unintelligent. Yes, unfortunately they may just be dumb, downright stupid, plain and simple. It may be general unintelligence, or it may be anger-induced stupidity, as anger does shut down your prefrontal cortex, and prevents you from having any logical, reasoning thought – however, whether they are all the time stupid, or just stupid while the horn is on, at the time of them honking that horn, they are in most cases, dumb. It is a sobering fact, yes, because it means that of course, many of these people that I share this community with, my brothers and sisters of America, don’t have much going on for them in the brain department, but it’s important to know, because then you can understand them somewhat better, and you see that honking isn’t entirely their fault. Like a baby that craps in its own diaper, it just doesn’t know any better. It can’t understand. And the anger, the anger is understandable. There is quite a lot of anger here. Really I have never witnessed so much horrible screaming, shouting, swearing, and fighting in my life. Crushing poverty, abysmal living conditions, and rampant mental illness may have something to do with it, but surprisingly there haven’t been any studies done to link these together, and so we just can’t say for sure. My roommate played for me a recording he took of a couple fighting at his last apartment complex, also in Flatbush, only a few streets over from where I was living. It sounded like they were right outside the door, but he said they were in their room, one floor up. I have never heard such horrible screaming and fighting in my life. And, what would you know, the man murdered someone the next month! Now you know, if that man gets behind the wheel, he’s honking that horn. He’s honking that horn all day and all night.

I was at the apartment one day, it was 10 o’clock sharp on a beautiful, crisp Monday morning, and for thirty solid minutes, there was an extraordinary, unparalleled and unprecedented honk-fiesta happening down in the street outside of my window. I had a wounded leg, or I would have gone down and witnessed up-close what was happening. I had to satisfy myself by watching from the window. I observed this spectacle from my sixth floor window perch, and upon looking out into the street, saw immediately what the problem was. Someone seemed to have either abandoned their car in the middle of the street, or was just sitting in it, parked sideways, completely plugging the street and preventing anyone from getting through. In some other places where there are rules on the road and people know about them, this may be a surprise, but here, that is nothing out of the ordinary. I wouldn’t bat an eye at that. I wouldn’t expect any of the other drivers to be stymied by such a conundrum either, but alas, several cars on either side had been caught in this trap, and were sitting there, throwing up their hands, and honking. Honking frequently, honking aggressively, honking exasperatedly, at this inanimate object that we aren’t even sure if had a human in it or not. I’ll assume there was a human in there, but they were clearly unresponsive. This sideways car was so exasperating, so styming for the drivers of south Flatbush, Brooklyn, that they spent an hour honking at it, honk, honk, honking away at the problem, chipping away at it one honk at a time. I don’t know how the situation was resolved in the end. I couldn’t stand there all day. But I’m sure that with certainty the car was moved only because of the great courage and vigilance of the Brooklyn honking army.

In defense of the drivers of Brooklyn, along with acknowledging their anger, and their low intelligence, I think they don’t actually know that there are any laws, rules, or regulations related to driving at all. Again, like babies crapping themselves, they’re just ignorant. They probably just bought a nice shiny car from the car store that they can’t afford, grabbed the keys, started it up, and drove it right off the lot onto Coney Island Boulevard, and are having a grand ol’ time parking on anything that is pavement, slamming the big button in middle of the wheel that makes a fun loud noise, stopping the car and turning around wherever they are the instant they realize they’ve made a wrong turn, and all of those other fun things you get to do when there are literally no rules on the road at all. But it’s not their fault. They simply don’t know any better, or can’t understand. And who’s going to tell them? Not the gov’ment. The gov’ment has bigger fish to fry. I don’t know what they are frying, exactly. But don’t worry folks, they’re frying something big, don’t you worry about it.

I have never had homicidal rage before. I can tell you that honestly. I am a mild mannered individual. I have never wanted to kill anybody. That is, I had never wanted to kill anybody before I moved to New York City. Oh boy, the fantasies I have now! What I would do to these honkers. What wouldn’t I do to these honkers! Rocket launcher, RPG, car bombs, grenades, AK47, just a straight up katana to the heart, death by shuriken. Climbing onto the hood of the car, smashing through the window, and stabbing them in the chest with a beautiful gleaming katana. I know, it sounds horrible. I don’t like writing this. (Ok, I do.) Drop a grenade from the window, watch it fall with glee, blow them all up. That’s one of my favorite fantasies. Stand in the street, wait a few seconds for the next honking offender, and just unload on them with your AK. I would really love to fire a predator missle at them, you know, from Call Of Duty. You get a 5 kill streak and you get to fire a missle from a Reaper drone, 5000 feet up, a missle guided by thermals, but in this case, it would be guided by sound, and go straight to the worst offender. I know, it’s bad. But you have no idea how much satisfaction it brings me to write this. Well, unless you live in Brooklyn, and then you do. You just don’t understand until you’ve been there. It’ll drive you insane.

It’s not that I want them to die. Well.. I do. But it’s not like I want to kill them. But.. dammit, I do want to kill them. Mostly, I want the honking to stop, immediately, and preferably, violently. To send a message. What I’m trying to say is that, I think, at a certain point you revoke your right to live. Do you know what I mean? Nobody by default deserves to die. They have to do something that is bad enough to warrant their death, like honk for 5 seconds straight, or engage in and perpetuate an infuriating and abominable honking culture. You honk for 5 seconds, 15 seconds, just honk too much, when you really, can’t be honking anymore, and.. ok, yeah, you can die now. You are now eligible for dying. Someone has basically every right to kill you. Honestly, it wouldn’t be unwarranted. What else can they do? If you push people far enough, they simply don’t have another choice. The gov’ment is frying other fish. They aren’t going to stop you. It’s up to me and my sonic predator missle. It’s vigilante justice. Most Brooklyners would have no problem with it, I can tell you that. My roommate told me a story of a lady in the neighborhood dropping her air conditioning unit onto the hood of a maniacal honker’s car from her window. Everybody cheered. Such a heartwarming story. Send that woman a box of grenades.

My homicidal urges always pass, and are replaced with pleading. “Please, stop honking, please. Please, stop, please, I’m begging you. No more honking, please.” I have also tried to mandate a no-honking time. These appeals and mandates are decreed from the window. “Hey, no..! No..! Bad! This is no honking time!” I have also shouted words of encouragement. “Yes, good!!!! Keep honking!!! It’s working!!! Woo!!!!” It’s cathartic for me. Just like honking, you may say. I know it, god dammit. I know. Once upon a time, after a particularly homicidal urge had passed, and I was still fantasizing about vigilante justice, the great idea of Anti-Honk Man entered my mind. Like Spiderman, fighting crime, Anti-Honk Man fights honking. He is the superhero that New York City desperately needs. He would be an enormous viral success. We could have Anti-Honk Woman, gender-neutral, whatever, it could be a dog, Anti-Honk Dog, whoever, whatever is willing to rise to the occasion. Anti-Honk Dog can be the sidekick, and has incredible powers of stopping all honking offenders from ever honking again, by tactfully placing car bombs in serious offenders’ cars, and leaving death notes that say “Death 2 Honkers!!!”, or, less homicidally, slashing tires, paintballing cars, etc. There are many ways that Anti-Honk Dog can carry out vigilante justice to the benefit of all Brooklynites. I had another great idea, (unfortunately, again homicidal) that I believe could immediately reduce honking in NYC by 99.9%, and potentially be a great and subtle form of eugenics, which would be that every car be outfitted with a bomb, that will explode upon the horn being held down for more than 2 seconds at once, and/or more than 3 honks a week. Everyone could have two warnings, like a three-strikes you’re out type deal, where the first time it would say, “Strike one: Your car could have exploded right now!” and then, “Strike two: Next time, you’re dead!” And then the third time, “Say goodbye, motherfucker.” Explosion. Oh my god, it would be great. Except it might kill me, an unoffending pedestrian, so we would need another creative solution. The driver’s chair is blasted with 1000000000 billion volts, instantly vaporizing the driver. Yes, that’s great. Maybe a little too painless for a Brooklyn honker, but yes, it would work.

My god this city has turned me into a sick and twisted individual. I have to get out of here.

I have to finish my story about the Jewish businessman crossing the intersection. I think you will really understand how amazing this is, now that you know about how horrible the honking is, and let me say again, I am a mild-mannered individual, NOT homidical. Brooklyn has made me so. I hear honking when I’m sleeping. I am honked awake, in the middle of the night, in the morning. Honking is my alarm clock. Honking tucks me in at night. Honking while I’m pissing, honking while I’m showering, honking while I’m eating, honking while I’m thinking, honking while I’m strolling about the neighborhood. 200-300 honks a day, remember that number people. 200+ jarring, sonic attacks daily.

Our Jewish businessman was crossing this 5 road dangerous intersection, while on the phone. This guy, as he casually chats, swaggers right up to the intersection. I’m watching him from the get go. He starts to walk out into the street. The cars are coming, full on, but so far he’s only walked on the side street, separated, still where cars could go, but not like it’s the main street, which most cars coming from the diagonal are now barreling through. As he comes to this larger street, he does not glance up, he only somewhat slows his stride, and I’m watching in awe, because it looks like, what this man is about to do, is he’s about to attempt to walk through full traffic, like it’s nobody’s fucking business. And you know what? That’s what he did. This man parted the Red Sea. He waited for a small break in the cars, and he walked out, raising his hand up, casually, keeping it low, like he was saying, “Hey bro, just a heads up, I’m crossing now. Thanks.” And he never dropped his conversation on the phone. This man just halted the world for himself, ground at least seven cars to a stop so that he could cross the intersection on a green light, and that’s a crazy thing. His audacity, his power. I envied him. I watched, jaw agape, watched him walk away, like it was nothing, like he hadn’t just pulled off the most impressive feat in Brooklyn that night. This event alone was amazing to witness, but there was something about it that made it even more so. The truly unbelievable thing was not watching a man simply waltz through a high traffic intersection so casually and confidently as this Jewish businessman did. No, the amazing thing was this. In this situation, of a man halting all traffic, thrusting himself out in front of cars moving through a green light, forcing an unpredictable stop from the drivers, putting his own safety at risk, with at least seven cars involved, witnessing, being inconvenienced – in such a situation where honking is actually, 100% justified, and reasonable, and useful.. There was not a single honk.

This event marked a paradigm shift for me. It’s a different set of rules, out here in New York City. It’s a different world.

On the way back from Shoprite, I was waiting for a truck to stop at and pass through a stop sign. Of course I never expect anyone to actually stop at a stop sign, and never to let me walk through a crosswalk. I understand, this is a different set of rules. But the guy in the truck, he didn’t go through. He had the window rolled down, and he was looking at me, and I looked up at him, and he said, with kindness, “Go ahead.” I was shocked. Like a loser kid who a girl has noticed on the playground, or a beaten-down dog that gets a pet. I could hardly believe it, it was like a dream. “Thanks,” I said. And I crossed, and he didn’t run me over.