The week that followed was comparatively uneventful. The girl this time is seemingly without a penchant for drama, which is something I’d have killed (Yuki?) for last year but my unfading anxiety of tranquility and belonging and my love of the hardship and struggle has made a virtual Atari 2600 of my brain and set my heart back and forth like an oscilloscopic pong ball. I made an abrupt call to Yuu on Friday (June 13th) and worked an invitation to her family dinner down in the Yokohama suburbs. Yamato station has to be the Cabaret club capital of Kantou. I [View Full Entry]

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I woke up on Inokashira park on Sunday June 8th at 6:10am. It was raining and my phone was ringing. Some of you might know this place as the spot where Eikichi Onizuka (22 years old, single) was always puking after being carried out of an Izakaya by Ryuji Danma and Azusa Fuyutsuki and then going on to give a rousing speeches about youth and the future. There was nothing inspiring about the last five hours I spent in this park. I wandered around Kichijouji station for over an hour looking for a capsule hotel and failing that anywhere dark and [View Full Entry]

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Monday, June 2nd. I was in a foul enough mood this week that I had found myself able to write satire again. I skipped Basketball on account of generally sh*tty weather, and a gererall sh*tty outlook on life and I found myself in a basement bar down by Hino station, trying to figure it all out while another old-drunk-hag bar mistress asking me questions about the weather in Canada. There was one other lone Hino-city barfly and chubby part-timer who had just come from her other job at the cake-store, and a barmaid who was deadlygorgeous but for a daringly conspicuous [View Full Entry]

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Let’s face it, writing is difficult, you have to think of sentences all the time, and make sure they’re intelligible and grammatically sound. Even with the lax standards of today’s internet audience, proper penmanship always seems to beyond some unattainable margin-lines that fade forever and forever as we move through cyberspace. An even worse problem is originality. Goodness gracious it just seems like in this day and age, everybody’s been everywhere and done everything. How's a self-labeled, slightly-rough-around-the-edges individualist supposed to garner attenti [View Full Entry]

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Sunday I woke up on the nambu line two stops before the station I had got on. It was 8:16am, and I had boarded this train at about 6:30am…meaning my near-lifeless, booze-stinking corpse had been riding the train back and forth between Tachikawa and Kawasaki for nearly two hours. The severe pain of being seized me. I cringed and stretched spastically and then retreated to fetal helplessness. Clawing at my jeans for the Ibuprofens I’d stashed there the day before. In my right hand I was still clutching the bottle of Pocari Sweat and I tore open the screwcap violently and [View Full Entry]

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I’ve doubled my efforts to bring this stylistic train-wreck of a travel journal up to date, but I’m still almost three weeks behind. It’s becoming a bit of a “2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics” style fiasco: A sprawling poorly organized series of events, shamelessly exploiting the aesthetics of indigenous culture and the rhetoric of the common human spirit, and costing way too much money while not advancing anywhere close to schedule. Also, You might’ve noticed that some batting stats have gone missing from the last entry. My Ace found out I was publishin [View Full Entry]

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I met Soon-Mi on Saturday May 24th at Hitotsu-bashi Gakuen station and we walked back to her house to drop off her bike. It was Rainy and cold, but it had been warm and overcast when I had gotten on the train earlier that morning. She phoned Minami who was supposed to be going to dinner with us but was now apparently on the verge of death from a sudden inexplicable illness. It looked to be just the two of us that evening. I got rained-out while we were drying off in her place and then soaked again the minute we [View Full Entry]

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Karatani Kojin wrote that sometime before the start of the last century, Japan turned to the west and its churches and conversions to Christianity peaked. It was not because they offered a representation of the modern, nor any long awaited solutions to multitudinous spiritual problems of the age. Nor was it even the possibilities of eternal salvation that piqued the interest of the adolescents of the Meiji generation. It was in fact, he wrote, for the possibility of that profoundly involving romance, in which one might lose one’s self entirely. A sensibility only achievable (or so go [View Full Entry]

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I spent the remaining eight weeks of school focusing on my papers and my play, exchanging two emails daily with Soon-Mi, eventually investing in a webcam and losing sleep to stay up late or wake up early only for the sake of a pleasant chat. Slowly but surely I started to slide downward on that slippery slope towards boring-“relationship”-person. …But that’s what I wanted wasn’t it? I started writing again- -not travel journals, but I unearthed my long dormant novel from its lair deep in edit-hell. I told Soon-Mi it was because of her, but really it wa [View Full Entry]

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I did dream about her. Fancy that. Sometimes you get what you want after all. Better yet, I woke up because Minami peeled the duvet off my face and when I rolled over to swat at this enemy hostile towards my sleep, I hit instead, a firm female thigh, which wasn’t hers. It was Soon-Mi’s and it was wrapped up in these bright blue leggings and all the sleep in me just vanished. I sprung up, careful not to expose the other morning-sprung member of me and applauded her choice of garment. She told me I had to get moving, we [View Full Entry]

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