Me, Lost in Osaka

Here I am ... lost in Osaka. This is a street so well-lit that were I remotely epileptic, I would be rolling around on the ground, frothing, and coming close to biting off my tongue. Thankfully I'm not epileptic, but rather simply mesmerized by blinking lights and gigantic robotic crabs they mount on the walls of crab shacks that line this road.

Happy Independance Day, Bill Pullman!

It occurred to me in the shower that it's July 4th. I love this holiday because it involves getting drunk and playing with fire and explosives. Oh, and remembering sacrifices made on my behalf and thinking about how lucky we are, blah blah blah.

I kinda wish I could be in the US for the 4th of July, but, alas, 'tis not to be. Instead, I think I'll lecture my students about Independance Day and how important it is that we celebrate the US-led victory over the aliens who mysteriously sought to annihilate our species.

In other news, I completed viewing the ridiculous fourth season of "24". This is a monumental achievement in TV watching, and I'm sure you're all proud of me. For season five, I'm going to do "24" in 24: 24 episodes of "24" in a 24-hour period. Furthermore, I'll write 24 consecutive hourly blog entries complete with pictures and postings depicting my reactions to the events as I witness them unfold. As if watching me watching TV wasn't exciting enough, I'm going to perform this feat under the pressure of a brutal "24" themed drinking game. To borrow a phrase from the immortal RyBo, I'm gonna get hammered.

The tentative date of this history-making endeavor? Probably in two weekends, after regular classes have ended. Stay tuned for more details, including the rules for the drinking game. If you download (legally, of course) season five of "24", you're welcome to play along with me--IN REAL TIME!

Until then, here's a CG rendition of Baron Munchausen. I'm also going to try to publish video of me getting lost in Osaka a couple nights ago. I can't figure out how to do that in this post, but it should be ... well ... above this post. Enjoy! (hopefully...)

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. "

Why I like guns.

I had the opportunity to slowly walk by a Japanese police officer yesterday and surreptitiously gaze at his sidearm. This was strangely a little disappointing. It's not that the pistol was too weak for my taste (although it was just a dinky .38), but rather that it was tethered to the officer's belt by a thin rubber-coated cable, not unlike the kind one might use to lock up a bicycle. When I saw this, I frowned, likely made a funny face, and walked away grumpily.

It wasn't until later that I started to wonder why I became annoyed. It was then that I realized, yet again, as I had realized for millionth time, that I'm strongly attracted to and fascinated by guns. There's no discernable reason for this outside of the fact that guns are metallic and menacing, dark yet shiny, and capable of making cool noises. Unless they're "silenced", and then they make really fucking cool noises!

(Note: I've never actually heard a silenced gun being discharged; I'm basing my judgement on the positive sonic properties of silenced handguns strictly on films, Carlito's Way being the most influential among them, not because it was a great movie but rather because the silenced pistols it featured sounded much cooler than in any other film I've seen.)

Although my family ran in apocalyptic social circles where guns were stockpiled in the event of one-world government takeover, the only weapon we had when I was growing up was an antique .22 rifle that my dad kept hidden in the attic. The bolt for the rifle as well as a box of ammunition was safely kept separate from the gun in a dusty shoebox in my dad's closet. That I knew this and still vividly remember the details are testament to the long-lasting nature of my fascination.

When I got into college, it occurred to me many times that I could purchase a firearm of my own should I strongly desire to do so. And I did desire to do so, many times, but held back because I rarely had enough money to get a decent pistol, and when I did have the money there were other, more important things that I felt more compelled to purchase--like video games.

As a result, I never really indulged my desire to play with guns. But when I would see a police officer standing close to me, my eyes would automatically stray to his sidearm. The holstered gun always seemed to silently snarl at me from its leather pocket, like a badass doberman chained to the fence of a junkyard. I always wondered if the cop ever truly "got used" to having an instrument of death strapped to his waist, or if the weight of the gun was a constant source of confidence ready to be tapped if the man was feeling scared, weak, or self-conscious. Regardless, I would always envy the officer, but my jealousy was tempered by the notion that, with some deft fingerwork and balls of steel, I could slide the gun from its holster and obtain the power for myself. That thought alone, that silly fantasy, always made me feel good, like I was tapping the confidence power of the weapon through my sheer proximity.

And perhaps that's why I didn't like how the Japanese police officer's gun was connected to his belt. Citizens are not allowed to bear arms in this country, and, as a result, most of the guns that are here would be difficult to disentangle from a cop. That might be a relief to some people, but not to me. But perhaps this is ultimately a good thing, as, if I had a gun, I would likely walk around everywhere with it tucked away, secretly smiling in the knowlege that I could easily scare, wound, or even kill if I felt so compelled.

Sigh. I miss America.

And I miss my friend, Errol. We rarely discussed guns, but occasionally, while we would be driving around Fort Collins, he would extend index and middle finger to simulate an uzi barrel, and then spray imaginary bullets out the car window. He'd do this by making sound effects with his mouth and holding the imaginary gun in a horizontal "gangsta" fashion. Whenever he'd do this, I'd know we were on the same page with regard to the second amendment. This picture's for Errol.