Short post, long overdue, sincere apologies, blah blah.

In all seriousness, allow me to extend a belated birthday wish to my now-married pal, Ryan. Congratulations once again, buddy! The big 2-7. I'm sorry I couldn't be there to pop out of your gigantic hollow birthday cake ... hopefully next year!

In other news, I promise to give a substantive update in the next few days, but not now. When Zac visited, I put a lot of important work-related stuff on the back-burner. Now that he's gone, I've been trying to get it back on the front-burner, but it has to share room with all the new front-burner stuff which cannot be placed on the back-burner, and so everything's piling up into quite a combustable situation. In keeping with the stovetop/kitchen allegory, imagine my silly-looking chef's hat catching fire, causing me to rush panicked from the kitchen in order to dunk my head in a toliet.

Yep, it's been a rough couple weeks.

But there's only two more real weeks of class, then two weeks of exams, followed by two months of vacation. Yay!

But now I must depart. I need to prepare a speech for a Japanese class I'm taking. My Japanese teacher is a Buddhist monk (no foolin!), so I don't want to disappoint or I can expect a brutal and ritualistic punsihment involving bamboo canings and coconuts falling on my exposed chest from great heights--ala Kickboxer, if memory serves correct. Until next time (which I hope will be a short time) friends, please accept yet another tentacled/octupus themed picture which practically shrieks THRILLS, CHILLS, & ADVENTURE GALORE!

(repurposed without permission ... heh heh heh.)

Van Damme On the Dance floor

Speaking of "Kickboxer", this priceless footage--the cornerstone of Errol's dancefloor prowess--is now posted for the benefit of all six Crepuscular Ray readers. I found this on Bill Simmons' ordinarily sports-related column on the Youtube hall-of-fame. Enjoy!

Gone, but not (too) forgetful.

Short post, long overdue, sincere apologies, blah blah.

In all seriousness, allow me to extend a belated birthday wish to my now-married pal, Ryan. Congratulations once again, buddy! The big 2-7. I'm sorry I couldn't be there to pop out of your gigantic hollow birthday cake ... hopefully next year!

In other news, I promise to give a substantive update in the next few days, but not now. When Zac visited, I put a lot of important work-related stuff on the back-burner. Now that he's gone, I've been trying to get it back on the front-burner, but it has to share room with all the new front-burner stuff which cannot be placed on the back-burner, and so everything's piling up into quite a combustable situation. In keeping with the stovetop/kitchen allegory, imagine my silly-looking chef's hat catching fire, causing me to rush panicked from the kitchen in order to dunk my head in a toliet.

Yep, it's been a rough couple weeks.

But there's only two more real weeks of class, then two weeks of exams, followed by two months of vacation. Yay!

But now I must depart. I need to prepare a speech for a Japanese class I'm taking. My Japanese teacher is a Buddhist monk (no foolin!), so I don't want to disappoint or I can expect a brutal and ritualistic punsihment involving bamboo canings and coconuts falling on my exposed chest from great heights--ala Kickboxer, if memory serves correct. Until next time (which I hope will be a short time) friends, please accept yet another tentacled/octupus themed picture which practically shrieks THRILLS, CHILLS, & ADVENTURE GALORE!

(repurposed without permission ... heh heh heh.)

...lucha de gigantes...

Hello All:

Still not much new to report. My friend left a couple nights ago, so it's me flying solo once more. But that's OK. After spending months largely alone, my tolerance of others has declined sharply while my own arrogance has swelled, and, as a result, I feel an odd porcupinal comfort, like I'm safely nestled among erectile quills interspersed with coarse hair. Not that ole Zac was intolerable by any means--he was a wonderful and welcome guest--but it was obvious even to my clueless self that I have turned into one helluva cranky bastard. Really! I wonder if any of my closest friends would recognize me based on my current behavior. Who's this brash and abrasive dick? you would likely ask, And what did he do with the sweet Crepuscular Ray who used to tickle our souls through his innate gentleness and soft mannerisms?

The idea of me changing to a degree which I can no longer be trusted or even known by my old compadres is a gnawing fear. I feel myself changing daily in ways I can't really understand. Of course, this is normal. We all change to some degree regardless of our environment, but as long as we watch each other change and change ourselves in accordance to the same trajectory-altering events life hurls at our shared lives, others' individual personality changes are understood and accepted. But here, in Japan, I feel like I'm changing in ways I can't explain, and in ways people who aren't here can't understand. Likewise, I realize that my friends are also changing in ways I can't understand seeing as how I'm no longer around. Hell, half my friends got married in the last 30 days. Talk about change. When we meet again, will it be like we're friends? Or more like awkward strangers?

I got great buddies, so I'm betting on the former. Thankfully.

Anyhoo, here's a picture of a solitary samurai in deep and thoughtful meditation. It's meant to mirror the pensiveness of this post while giving a nod to my geographic and cultural location. Perhaps a professional art critic would comment on possible onanism symbology in the graphic and subsequently declare it scandalously suggestive of the way I'm spending my alone time, but I assure you this is not the case.


PS--My friend Zach's awesome blog now has moving pictures in addition to a song of the day, a killer feature he added a few months back. I lack the blogging prowess to embed music in my blog, so instead I think I'll just write the defining lyric of a well-known song, and let my readers' minds do the rest. Here's the first one:

YOU'RE THE BEST ... AROUND!!! NOTHING'S EVER GONNA KEEP YOU DOWN!!!

Bad Blog-writer, Baaaaad!

Hello Everyone! Please forgive the unforgivable lack of steady updates. It's not that I've been busy these past two weeks, but rather that I haven't done anything blogworthy. I'm not sure how many people want to read about my thoughts on television, but that's about all I've been tempted to write about (my TV comsumption has seriously spiked since coming to Japan).

I'm thinking about using one of my monday "research days" to do a blog-project I would call "24-in-24." Here's what I would do: (1) obtain an entire 24-episode season of the Fox TV show "24"; (2) watch all 24 episodes in one day, beginning the hour I wake up and continuing until I'm finished with the season; (3) regularly update my blog every hour to keep all my excited "fans" (i.e. the six or so friends who read this blog) updated on my thrillingly inert living-room adventures. These hourly updates will be possible as each episode of "24" is only 41 minutes long due to a lack of commercial breaks. Maybe I'll even set up a web-camera so people can indulge their sick voyeuristic tendencies by watching me stare at a screen in my sexy, slackjawed fashion. This would be a mighty one-man sit-day, reminiscient of the one's we used to have in Matt's basement.

Anyway, if you think you'd enjoy that, let me know.

This week, my friend Zac is in town and currently sleeping on my living room floor. This is not anchorman-Zach (with the unnecessary but nevertheless standard letter 'h' in his name), but rather fellow-van-driver-Zac who is an old coworker, good friend, and excellent travelling companion. I picked him up yesterday, and he'll be here all week, so I'm quite psyched as not only do I get to hang out with a friend, but also get to converse in standard English. Since picking him up, however, I've learned my English-speaking ability has drastically declined due to either continued disuse or exclusive use in slow, low-verbosity ESL-teacher talk. When next I see you, dear reader, perhaps you'll remark on how authentically retard-like I've become in my speech patterns. Anyway, yeah: Zac's here for a week, then it's off to Kathmandu for him, and then to Australia, and then back home. This winter, he'll be going to Argentina, and then Antarctica. With the travelling he's done earlier this year, that will make seven continents in one year. I think that's pretty cool, but frighteningly expensive.

Well, I must be going, but let me dig through my folder of delightful pictures. Ah yes, here we go: a stylized CG picture of the Satanic cowboy from Tombstone (wasn't his name "Curly Joe"?). I'm posting this because the third and sadly-final season of Deadwood starts soon in the United States (and shortly thereafter on a computer screen near me). Perhaps after indulging heavily in Deadwood's colorful dialogue, I'll start peppering this blog with spicy lexical items such as "dirt-worshipper", "square head", or the always enjoyable "cocksucker". To kick things off, here's a memorable quote from Deadwood's delightful and sweet Al Swearengen: "Pain or damage don't end the world. Or despair or fucking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man... and give some back. "