yes! yes! yes!

I’m a bookish boy. A voracious collector of lit, I purchase every book I read. And only after I finish the book, with its dog-eared pages and highlighted passages, do I set it gently upon my bookshelf. I dream starry-eyed of the day when my home will be wall-to-wall, floor to ceiling books, all books I’ve read and manhandled. Every pulpy page smudged with my oily fingerprints. And when the curtain falls on my time on earth, and my ashes are scattered at various points across the globe, I will burden my children and grandchildren with my collection, and they’ll wander from room to room wondering what to do with all these goddamn books.

There are a handful of writers who seem to speak directly to me. Whose books I clutch to my chest and cry yes! yes! yes! kicking my legs in the air and squealing like a teenage girl reading Tiger Beat. There’s Ray Bradbury and Joseph Heller. Jack Kerouac and Haruki Murakami. Steinbeck, Eggers and Vonnegut.

There’s Spalding Gray.

I had tickets to see Spalding Gray deliver one of his monologues. I had tickets twice, actually. The first time he was stuck in the Denver airport, grounded in a blizzard, and the show was postponed. Sherry and I went to dinner instead and drowned our sorrows in liquor, and Sherry got sick off margaritas and appletinis. The second time I had tickets, the show was canceled due to complications from injuries Spalding sustained in an earlier car accident. Then he killed himself. And since then there’s been a hole in my heart that will never be patched.

But last night, I took one step toward closure when I saw Garrison Keillor perform his one-man show. I’m probably too young to be such an avid fan of Garrison Keillor. The average age of attendees last night was 65, but Brandon has many personalities, and the shriveled old man inside of him – the same one who likes his coffee black and his bourbon straight – loves Garrison Keillor. I was introduced to Keillor many years ago through a quote in our local paper: “God never intended for me to work hard,” he mused. “I see that now. My true calling is to live unencumbered and follow the fleeting impulses of my heart and take a nap around 2 p.m.” And I’ve been hooked ever since.

In the book section of my myspace page several years ago, I described Garrison Keillor as the Mel Torme of literature. His prose are so fluid and velvety. His ramblings akin to the strangely melodic skeep-beep-de-bop of an unruly scatman. He shuffled onstage last night in a black suit and a pair of red Sauconys, and for an hour and a half he flopped his maniacal hair around, habitually brushing his frayed mane from his forehead. Eyeglasses perched atop his head, he revealed deep secrets of his youth. He told us of the first time he clumsily made love. He thought it went in straight forward, at a 90 degree angle, like a key into a lock. His words poured forth from his aged jowls like melted butter. It was funny and sad and glorious.

At one point I ran to the lobby to borrow a pen. He had inspired me to write, right then and there, and I scribbled in the dark on the back of a flier for David Sedaris, applauding and yelling yes! yes! yes! as I scribbled. I scribbled the words to my next blog. The blog you just read.

Mata ne

Hakone is a mountainous region of Japan known for its abundance of hot springs. Among the many hot springs is a family-friendly, themed onsen park called Yunessun. It’s one of my favorite places in the world. They have traditional Japanese onsen, where you confidently soak naked with members of your own sex, but they also have a bathing suit zone where boys and girls can romp around together, mingling in harmony and equality. It's in this area where the “themed” part of the park comes in. You see, it’s not all boring hot bubbling tub after tub. The onsen have themes. There’s a chocolate one, for instance. A coffee one, you actually soak in brewed coffee. A green tea one. There’s even a sake onsen, and you can sip actual sake from a spout! The place is simply amazing.

Overlooking the rolling hills of Hakone on a recent chilly afternoon, steam rising from our shoulders, our feet submerged in 104 degree red wine, Sherry turned to me and her eyes said let’s do this more often. And to that my eyes replied let’s do this always, life’s too short. And her eyes said life isn’t short, Brandon. It’s the longest thing any of us knows. The most beautiful too, and as long we keep doing things like this we’ll never lose sight of that. And my eyes said to hers you’re right.

That was a nice day. And our visit back to Japan was back-to-back nice days. Except that day when Sherry and I were both zombies breaking out in cold sweats and visiting the restroom to vomit after a long night out. That was a bad day. (Again, our humblest apologies, Masumi. Thank you for tolerating and babying us. You're a pal and a confidant.)

When Sherry and I left Japan and moved back to the States a little over two years ago, I began crafting a blog entry to tie up our time abroad. It was a list of all the things I had fallen in love with and would miss savagely, brutally, painfully. The entry quickly got out of hand, though, and I could never bring myself to stop listing things. So I just stopped writing. And the list sat on my laptop for the next couple years, in the Blog folder, an unfinished document titled Goodbye.

One thing I learned from our nine-day vacation is that I still don’t like saying goodbye to that country. So although I still won’t revisit that document with the intention of wrapping it up, I will borrow a line, hastily typed and meant for that other entry two years ago, and repurpose it here. “This isn’t sayonara, Japan. Just mata ne.”

Cause I ain’t done with you, girl. Not with your beautiful, dizzying language of conjugated adjectives and adverbs. Not with your unrivaled and strange obsession with all things adorable and cute. Not with your themed onsen. Not with any of it. Not by a long shot.

Mata ne. Hopefully sooner than later.

No Better

Dinner with old friends... ... leads to 4am karaoke with new. Had to be up at 9am, so thought it best to just not sleep at all. Rode my rental bike along the Kano River, parked, smoked a cigar on the bank at 7am and watched the sun rise on Mt. Fuji. Didn’t get that picture cause I was simply living the moment. It gets no better. The perfect morning.

Numazu

It’s been just over two years since Sherry and I left Japan and moved back to the States. And now we’re back, for a visit. We’re bypassing Tokyo, though, along with Kyoto, Osaka and all the other big name cities we Westerners have heard of. Although we did briefly see Nagoya our first night because we got on the wrong shinkansen and took a small two-hour, 150 mile detour. But once we got that all straightened out we headed directly to our old home, the city of Numazu – a modest, medium-sized city nestled at the base of Mt. Fuji and situated on the shore of the Suruga Bay. A city known for producing more dried horse mackerel than any other region in Japan.

It ain’t nothin’ fancy, but Numazu was our home for a year. And really the only other home Sherry and I have ever had outside of Austin. We love it, and though it’s been over two years, I have thought of Numazu every single day since we left on December 22^nd, 2008. I mean it. Every. Single. Day. And so, I expected that returning would be a bizarre, surreal, dreamlike experience. Like returning to your childhood elementary school and remembering the halls being wider and the urinals being taller. But the strangest thing about being back is that it’s not strange at all. It’s like we never left. It’s like the job I’ve held, and the apartment we moved into and every new friend we’ve made over the past two years in the States were simply a product of an overactive REM sleep brought on by a night of Suntory whisky overindulgence. It’s happened before.

Sigh.

Natsukashii, Numazu. I’m glad you’re you. It’s a good thing when old friends are just as charming and affable as you remember them.

After an inexcusable hiatus...

I'm putting brush back to canvas.

A birthday present...

for my perfect newborn nephew...

Bru.

Welcome to the world, sweet pea.

You're already the coolest guy I know.

Hang Son Doong, the infinite cave

I’ve never been to Vietnam, unless you consider the Hanoi airport to be part of the country, which I don’t and neither should you. But I’ve heard terrific and magical things of the country, and on balmy summer evenings I still close my eyes and pretend I’m strolling along the dusty and cicada screaming roads of Thailand or Cambodia. Yeah yeah, I know they’re all different countries, but if you’ve been to either or all, you know it’s a fair comparison. And though I’ve never been hotter and dirtier than I was in that part of the world, my heart still aches if I reminisce long enough.

And now, at a time when my feet couldn’t be any itchier for international travel and exploration, I happen across this article about the scarcely explored Hang Son Doong: A cave system near the Vietnam Laos border that, in places, is so large it could house an entire New York City block of 40-story buildings. Certain passages are so wide and high that they have their own clouds. Clouds. In a cave. And the cave has its own jungle. It’s the Disney Land of caves.

Sitting behind my desk, sipping from a can of spicy hot V8 juice, I shake my head in awe at this ragtag team of spelunkers. Lucky ducks. Why not me, I ask myself. And I’m forced to answer myself with a question of my own: Right, exactly, why not you? Why not you?

But that’s another day of internal exploration. My own cave, you could say, blah. But give the article a read and save the images as your desktop wallpaper. Not only is it a well-written article about an underground kingdom, it also taught me the word bivouacking.

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/01/largest-cave/jenkins-text

Damned Dirty Ape

There are no words for the sorrow I feel at having to say goodbye to two of the finest television programs I have ever known. On the other hand, I do have words for the profound relief of finally being released from the bondage of two terribly addictive television dramas. Good riddance, LOST and 24. Now I can finally do something productive with my life. Go join your buddies – The Wire, The Sopranos, OZ, The Shield and Reading Rainbow – and have a nice rowdy wrap party. Don’t let the door hit ya on the way out.

Television, take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape. I’m going to go paint a picture, write a play and learn a foreign language.

P.S. I didn't mean that. I miss you so much it hurts. And I have zero interest in writing plays.