Lesson learned.

Intentional or not, if you wear a red striped shirt with a fedora, people will think you're Freddy Krueger.

Otaku

Several nights ago Sherry and I lay in bed reading. We were all Mike and Carol Brady like: slippers on our respective sides of the bed, bathrobes hanging from the wall, baseball bat within reach should we hear a noise downstairs, I be sent to investigate only to find that the children have booby trapped the downstairs to thwart would-be robbers and instead have entangled an unsuspecting Alice in a web of tin cans. Deep breath. I looked over at Sherry and the book she was reading - slyly, almost imperceptibly I looked, because she gets nervous when I watch her read. She was reading Norwegian Wood, one of my favorite Haruki Murakami novels, and I just happened to be reading Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a collection of Murakami's short stories. There we were lying next to one another, engrossed in our own imaginary worlds penned by the same man's hand, and I was so excited that I wanted to clutch her by the cheeks, kiss her on her pensive pouty lips and exclaim soul mates, you and me, soul mates! So I did, and she grimaced and told me to leave her alone, she was reading. So then I wanted to tell all my friends on the facebooks and the twitters and the linked-ins how in sync my wife and I are, and what a miracle it was that we would both be reading the same Japanese author. But I didn't. Because I'm afraid I'm becoming that guy: An otaku.

At the risk of being labeled an otaku, though, I've decided to write this blog. It's simply too important not to.

SXSW just wrapped up in our city. It's pretty much my favorite week of the whole entire year. For a brief window before our unbearable Austin summers bake us to a golden brown, the weather is absolutely perfect. And SXSW transforms our already bad ass city into a living, breathing, pulsating, gyrating party animal. It's strange. It's overcrowded. It's noisy. It's bloody wonderful.

My favorite night of my favorite week of the whole entire year is Japan Nite. A collection of Japanese bands from all genres and walks of life are pooled onto a single bill, and for $15 at the door my socks are rocked right off my goddamn feet. I love it. It's bizarre, sparkly, sweaty, incomprehensible; Everything I want from my music. Creepy gaijin like myself can practice their garbled Japanese and become buddies with the bands (like here and there) and my bro-in-law can have his belly signed by an all girl Japanese punk band. All us creepy gaijin look at all the other creepy gaijin doing the exact same creepy gaijin things as ourselves, only to judge them and somehow believe we're the only non-creepy gaijin in the entire crowd. We make faces and apologize for the behavior of our countrymen, just like this creepy mofo in the background of this picture. But not all bands want to make friends. Hence the inspiration for this sad blog from 2009.

Aww, but anyway.

Sherry and I have been going to Japan Nite for several years now, and this year was no exception to total badassery. Although, not all bands were absolutely radical. One band was just two shy dudes on their computers, flooding the venue with laser beams and whatnot. It might've been cool - or frightening - if we were totally stoned. But we weren't, so it was neither cool nor frightening. Just meh. Another band was fronted by an American (creepy gaijin), and was underwhelming. It seemed to me that she wanted to be a rock star more than she actually was a rock star. Scratching her head like she had lice, clutching her tummy like she had indigestion. That sort of on-stage foolishness. And I missed the final two bands because the people I was with were hungry and wanted to eat Thai.

BUT!

An all-caps and resounding BUT! Two bands of the night blew the hair straight off my head. Straight. Off. My. God-fearing head, I say. Zukunasisters is a soulful group of four ladies with boundless energy. They make you happy you woke up this morning. Happy to be a part of the human race. Happy to have ears on both sides of your head. I was all grins and butterflies in the stomach at the end of their set.

Then on the other end of the spectrum was Hystoic Vein. Terrifying. Mesmerizing. Adorable in a sweetheart, don't-touch-that-baby-rattlesnake kinda way.


Lots of bands can sit on stage and perform good sets. But these two looked you in the eyes and said "For the next 45 minutes, you. Belong. To me. So, otaku or not, these two bands were extraordinary. They will make you dance and sing, and then they will melt your face off. 

 

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.