Tokyo, Japan #2


A story is made of appendages. Let me tell you about our arms. They are flapping their way to Tokyo.


As you can see, Sogee is in constant fashionista status. Here we are going through the gate and she's got the perfect little outfit - black boots and all.

I am donning my usual black tee and jeans. I would like to wear other clothes, but I just can't seem to get off the habit. I expect someone from a reality show to stop me soon. It's already happened in Brooklyn. Some kids yelled at Sogee and I last year asking what she was doing with me. I was going to tell them that it took money, patience, and other skills. They beat me to it though.

"Does he have money? A big dick?" one boy screamed out the car window. "Please tell me! I want to know. How does this happen?"

Sogee laughed at the situation. I took it as an insult on my fashion and body image. I told her to stand up for me next time. She said she would. It didn't really matter though. I did the same thing when I was 16, so what are you going to do?

Anyway, back to Tokyo...


We spent most of our time trying to figure out the subway system of Japan. That was fairly difficult. There are multiple lines. Some maps list only a particular line, so you have to make sure you have a complete map. We had to learn this the hard way. It took me about four maps and two days of getting off at wrong stops to figure it out. Here is Sogee taking a break from her usual pose with maps. I had to sort of look for other photos to take, since we spent most of our time in the belly of Tokyo's subways our first day.


One thing I could tell about Tokyo right away was its cleanliness. The streets were not covered with gum or trash like in Seoul or New York. In fact, I couldn't find any trash cans in the subway or on the streets my whole trip. I figure that is to make people carry their trash with them, until they find a proper receptacle, and therefore, cut down on littering. That a pretty ingenious idea if you ask me. I might try it out in my house. "Trash? Oh, sure. We don't have any. You better rock that empty bag of chips with you."

Our hotel was in Gotanda. It was about seven stops from Tokyo Station. I dug the room. It was just like my space apartment in Seoul. Everything was compact and ready for micro-living. Check out the entire kitchen and laundry appliances behind Sogee's excitement.


Let's take a closer look at Sogee's excitement. Apparently, she was really gung-ho about the snacks at the local 7-11 and grocery stores of Japan.


I tried something that I thought was mul mandoo - a Korean dim sum (think boiled egg roll). I was wrong though. This was some kind of raw meat wrapped in dough. I was not a fan. Can you tell?


Sogee was tired from all the travel and our early rise in the morning, so I decided to walk the streets of Tokyo by myself. I didn't know how safe it was to walk in the middle of the night, but I figured I'd risk it. Besides, I wasn't too worried. I can look menacing when I want to. At least I thought. I walked only a couple blocks before I was accosted by four different sex walkers. Each offered a variation on this dialogue: "Massage? Sexy massage?"

The first couple prostitutes were women. Then I must have hit the male streets, where the inquiries were a bit more polite.

"May I service you, sir?" a young man with a lopsided mohawk asked.

"No, thank you," I responded in kind.

He bowed and left. I kept on my adventure. It wasn't long before I found some tire advertisements at the gas stations that caught my attention. It was my friend, Leonardo, selling tires. I was surprised at first. Tires? Well, they pay well in Japan from what I've heard, or at least from what Sogee has told me.

"You can get a million or five million dollars for a couple days of work."

"Really?"

"Yeah, Brad Pitt does commercials here all the time."\

"I'd like to see those."

"Just look on YouTube."

"Okay."




Leonardo loves tires and Suzuki.


It started raining during my walk. I did manage to catch this pic of a Denny's and 7-11 in Tokyo. It made me feel like I was in Little Tokyo or a side street in New York. Tokyo definitely didn't feel like a foreign city. I walked back to the hotel and got a ticket stub from a vending machine out in the lobby to watch a film on the computer monitor on the desk in our room. Sogee was asleep. I watched the whole film. I looked at the city from our balcony. I thought about what we would the next day. I didn't have a clue. I tried out the bidet and warming toilet seat. I went to bed.

More to come...

Death of a Gang Starr


Guru passes away after a year long battle with Cancer.

Sky Cake



Patton Oswalt explains the dawn of religion.

I, Godzilla!


I run rampant across Tokyo. It is 9:45 a.m.. We must check out of the hotel at 10:00 a.m.. I will now discuss the trip in three minutes or less. That is all the time I have. Okay. Go. We have done a lot of things. Mostly, we ate strange things and got lost a lot. We came here without even bringing a map. I suppose it's what one would call a backpacking adventure. Sogee says she doesn't like these types of vacations. "Next time we go to Bali," she says. "I don't like this kind of trip."

I didn't argue with her. We got lost almost everyday. I also wasn't much of a communicator in Japanese. Loren Goodman told me to just use "Mas" and "Das" after everything. That really didn't work. I know that most Japanese end with those verbs, but I needed a bit more of the language to be fluent and express my innermost feelings. That's what I usually like to do on vacations. I go up to strangers and tell them about my childhood or my first sexual experience.

The three minutes has ended. I will write more in a cyber cafe...

Writing Assignment #3: Near Death Experience


I am so quiet these days. I suppose I'm recovering from working so hard on this film. I don't know. I just don't feel like doing anything. That seems a good attitude to adapt a screenplay. I'll probably do that this week. Who knows? Maybe, I'll find some more inspiration this weekend. I head to Tokyo. I've never been there. I've always wanted to go. My life is consumed with Akira Kurosawa films. I watch at least one a day. I think they are moving paintings. I watch them over and over again. I also like watching Toshiro Mifune. He is an excellent actor. I like to see his extreme facial expressions. I might write about my experience in Japan. I might just sit around and do nothing. I definitely feel like I'm in a perpetual daze of 1991 all over again.

Each week a few writers in Seoul are getting together to write comics, stories, or poems on a particular theme. This week when we got together we discussed near death experiences. Below was my week's installment. For some reason, I was interested in the master villain. I may write some more on this, but considering that I haven't written anything and it's almost Wednesday, I doubt it. Usually, I know when something launches long because that's all I do for a couple weeks. Looks like the search continues for the next novel.

Next Week's Writing Assignment: Getting Jiggy

Latest Fiction:

I am not much of a hero. I wish I were. I wish I woke up in the morning with thoughts of “saving the world” or “kittens.” I wish I could look in the mirror and see something besides destruction, brimstone, and a pestilence so severe it peels the skin from human skulls to expose the hidden vanity and dishonesty that lies hidden beneath them. It would make life so much easier to see the “beauty of all things” or have a “poster of Gandhi” on my wall. Believe me. I might have had some semblance of a life that wouldn’t be consumed by how I could invoke a thirty year old curse passed onto me by a witch doctor in Haiti that would make my younger sister think she was a troll, or spend six months trying to hypnotize the students in Mercer County to commit mass suicide rather than studying for my SAT. I could have been a product of Pac-Man, Cheerios, Reaganomics, and the golden arches. Instead, I am hopelessly crippled by my deafening superiority to the insects around me. I sit by myself in the tall, overgrown grass by the bleachers at Roosevelt High and practice my Chinese. That’s the only thing that can soothe my criminal tendencies. Then I think about how I could conquer the world.

I have several methods to bring villainous thoughts into reality. In most cases, I free associate. I don’t mind map or filter a plan with the use of an outline. I just allow treachery to come freely without control. I see the Amoco on Route 6. I think “boom” or simply “get Max, the attendant, to check my oil, while I lift the latch that holds the hood of my car and let it fall on his fucking back and terminate his apparent uselessness to the world.” That’s one of the secrets to creating an effective and ruthless plan for destruction. It’s all about freedom. You can’t hope to melt off the fingers of everyone in your chemistry class by just rigging one Bunsen burner. You’ve got to have the creative freedom to max out the fuse box and pump acetone peroxide and silver nitride overnight into a U-tube, until the next morning, when a mild explosion sends seventeen useless bags of skin to Mercer Community Hospital.

Ruthlessness requires a singular mind that is not corrupted by frivolities that a hero might consider. I don’t sit around in the cafeteria and stare at the smoking hot babes and pretend to be shy because I’ve got some secret identity I’ve got to keep. No, fuck that. I watch how the lunch ladies get the contents for meatloaf from the yellow cabinets by the gas range. I make a note of the size of the bag. I take a few photos with a camera I’ve installed in the top button of my white Oxford. I navigate my way past the buffet line and ask “Miss Charlotte” – because that’s what she asks me to call her – what makes her tater tots so good, and like a dunce, she lifts the key ring from the nail sticking to the side of the fryer to open up the yellow cabinets to see “all them food stores” during her pathetic tour that takes all of about two minutes.

The New Jackie Chan



Loren passed AZO onto me. He's pretty impressive. I like it best when he jumps over the fountain.