A Hairy Encounter

My day started at home on monster island (Awajishima). Woke up at nine. Picked up my new cellphone at the nearby AU shop with Nam (will write review later – it’s a Sony/Ericsson A1402S, an upgrade from my trusty old Hitachi). Went to the high-speed boat terminal down the street and caught the hydrofoil to KIX. Met up with none other than deep thinking shitblogger extraordinaire, Kevin Kim, on a day trip from Big Hominid’s Hairy Chasms in the “sea of Korean tourists lugging many tape-patched boxes around” scenario alluded to in my previous post (link).
Hopped on the very Nemo-esque Nankai rapi:t train to downtown Osaka. Feeling hungry, we homed in on a forgettably-named okonomiyaki shop across from Namba Parks and I dutifully snapped the obligatory nerd blogger photos with new phone.
From the heavens, a seed crystal fell into my bowl. As structure took instant form from the nether edges of velvety nothingness, I watched the world exist apart from myself and stole a glimpse of the Path. This is how I achieved x-ray vision.
In my heightened state and unfettered by the bonds of sanity, I instantly realized that Kevin is indeed an alien construct like I suspected all along. However, also as predicted, we got along very well since my girlfriend and I as well as the entirety of the Asian continent (and for that matter any lines of text appearing on your screen) are merely figments of my blog’s imagination. There was way too much ice in our cokes.
Walked up the shotengai (covered arcade) to nanpabashi (pick-up bridge), where they have drained the stinky canal quite a bit and apparently plan to beautify the river… It just warms my heart to see my taxes spent in this purely symbolic effort, I mean, remind me again, how do you turn mercury into gold? But I won’t go into that today. A bald, scary-looking man dressed in shorts/white t-shirt approaches us after hearing us talking in English, and turning to me, loudly asks, What do you think takoyaki? I find myself strangely unable to answer, but I smile and the guy half-grins back in such a way that raises the hair on the back of my neck. Something is not right in there, behind his eyes, which would usually put me on guard. But today I am dwelling on a different plane and feel a strange need to help this guy in some way. So I have a brief conversation with madness and in a short time have confirmed that there is no answer to his riddle, it is a genetically modified logic bomb. Yet I must give some sort of answer. I stall by talking about the hot weather, then throw a loop back at him by teaching him the phrase, How about some hot takoyaki?, which seems to please him immensely. After practicing his pronunciation on me a couple times, he wanders off into the crowd chanting this new incantation over and over and over again. The crowd parts to let him through, this man with a new mission in life. (Note: If homeboy ends up stabbing someone important while yelling about hot takoyaki tomorrow, I’m really very sorry.)
We had dessert in Kirin Plaza at the far end of the bridge, on the 4th floor. Nice place. They have a brewery on the first floor, so I had a pint of their ale – yum. We saw an art exhibition on the 6th floor, which started out interesting but kinda fizzled out for me at the end. Too many neon fish-headed creatures. Plus, I hate galleries that ban photography outright. Many of the paintings were labeled as digital proofs, so I found the photo ban a bit ironic. But it was cool inside and hot on the street, and too many neon fish-headed creatures is, by definition, preceded by just enough neon fish-headed creatures, so I had my moment of equilibrium – which is definitely redeemable for an Hour or Two of Thornless Respite come Armageddon.
Nam took off for a dinner meeting with friends, and I walked with Kev back to Nankai Namba station. We parted ways there and I presume he is now locked in a room at the Korean customs office for trying to smuggle Japanese centipedes into the country so he could make them publicly surrender and admit that his centipede really kicks ass…
DVD Bonus: The toilets on a Nankai rapi:t train look like this.
UPDATE: If Kevin’s always going to let the Japanese version of history stand, I hereby declare the official spelling of his name everafter as “Cevin”. Also, I predict he may appeal (in vain) with minor technicalities (i.e., “it’s just a bug”), when he hears his pet centipede is now officially classified as a Japanese territory.