Category: Chillin’

This new Beasties album sounds really great playing softly in the background right now – the beats are funky and I can’t hear the lyrics. As far as I’m concerned that’s the best of both worlds. A dog that doesn’t shit, so to speak.

Well, maybe the time difference can count for something. Happy Father’s Day, dad, and thank you for not selling us all to gypsies continued support throughout the years. You are a good father and I only hope I can do as well (the time is coming pretty soon I think).

Yesterday being “big trash” day, when one can dispose of the unnecessities that clutter life, liberty, and the, um, American way with impunity – you know, old furniture, broken appliances, the big stack of bathroom reading material that’s been piling up for eighteen months – I made a major life decision and threw away all of my frying pans. Five, to be exact. They were all used extensively over the years and starting to sport bald spots in the Teflon coating or rust spots at the handle joint, so I threw them out. People who know my packrat ways will not be surprised to hear that I found it extremely difficult. It was like parting with old friends, or shooting Old Yeller at the end of the book. Tragic, unforseen, yet in retrospect, inevitable. For that is the sad-but-true way of the world – all good dogs die too soon.
These were, after all, the tools that enabled me to provide fine fare for myself and those I care about for several years. Some of these pans had followed me around since college, you see. One funny thing is that more than anything I couldn’t bear to stand the thought of someone else finding them in the trash and for some digusting reason deciding to take them home and use them. I guess I’m just extremely possessive in that sense – I would have melted them down into stainless steel ingots if I’d had the equipment. As it was, I did the next best thing by cooking garlic-heavy dishes in each one, methodically creating smelly carbon buildup on the frying surfaces, and then throwing them out without washing. Jesus, tossing that shopping bag full of frying pans on the garbage pile felt like drowning a sackful of kittens in the river.
Now that I have used both cat and dog analogies, perhaps we can move on.
My house hasn’t been panless for many a year and as the designated Fryer of Meats, today I could think of nothing except what kind of pans I would buy after work finished. I mean, I know I can be a weird, lonely introvert at times, but I’m pretty sure this was a new low. But hey, I figure that life is short and if getting older entails being excited over the choice of new cookingware, then true feelings I must express. I was really happy to go shopping for new pans.
For the past hour I was browsing the kitchen section of Jusco, feeling the heft of each and every frying pan they had for sale. I compared stainless steel to cast iron to titanium, and coated to non-coated to dimpled, ridged, and scalloped. I evaluated the top contenders mentally on a point scale, and almost ended up with a mixed set of the winners. Then, craving unification, I almost broke down and shelled out 150 bones for a set of T-Fal pans because they have some nice shapes in the right sizes. In the end, I bought a cheapie pan and am doing the nerdiest thing imaginable. I’m doing research on the net before investing in a matching set. And yet, it makes me immensely happy. It somehow provides me with purpose in life.
I am turning 30 this year. This whole aging thing is getting pretty scary. By the time I’m forty I’ll probably be collecting spoons and driving a white Toyota. So if you love me like I love you, you will shoot me sometime before then.

To my Air France stewardess friend, who is coming over tomorrow:
Nothing says friend like a bottle of Chateau Margaux. May I suggest the 1961? But why am I telling you this? I’ll stick to what I, as an American, know best. Crackers and cheese whiz are totally on me.

Well, it looks like Typhoon #2 (Japanese don’t follow the western convention for typhoon naming – on one hand, I suppose it’s kinda nice not having to admit that your cities got “battered by Alice” or “ravaged by Gertrude”) – is coming straight for my island tonight. Last time a typhoon came by I had to drive over the bridge between here and Kobe, and it was like the movie Twister in that I just had to crack my window to see just how strong the wind was blowing. In an instant, every loose toll receipt, shopping bag, hamburger wrapper, etc., whipped out the window as if we were at 30,000 feet and if I’d had the foresight to attach GPS trackers to everything, I probably could have mapped out the eye of the storm (I guess that makes my Silvia “Dorothy” in this analogy but I won’t go there.).
The weather today is what I like to call, “fungus-inducing.” Basically, this is the kind of humidity that causes jungle foot, crotch rot, and the downfall of western civilization. You actually feel dryer in the shower on days like this. I might as well spend the night in there since big storms usually destroy my satellite reception and the last one screwed with my FTTH connection as well.
It totally cracked me up when my Aussie pal told me what a brolly is. And a sultana (as in, “Sultana Bran”). Thanks to William Gibson, I know what a standover is. Damn, I really need to visit Australia sometime soon. After I buy a D70, I think.

So it turns out that my girlfriend brought back more for me from Thailand than met the eye. I inherited this Bangkok bug that is just laying me to waste. For starters, a 24/7 splitting headache that can only be fought off with the Big Green Pills (Nyquil). Sore throat. Sporadic coughing and lung-boogers. General shit-like feeling and soreness of joints. Compounded by the crappy weather today – rainy, hot, and humid – and the screwy air conditioning in our office which means I suck down cold humid air instead of hot humid air. As you can imagine, the overall effect this bug has puts me in a foul mood, which is kinda irritating since I’m normally such a rosy-tempered motherfucker.
So I was killing hordes and hordes of Koreans and Chinese playing Counter-Strike last night (154 kills – 28 deaths!), when this guy “[hxr]Chiang” starts accusing me of cheating and initiates a kick-vote against me. I didn’t get kicked. But I stopped playing for a while to take the Big Green Pills and found I was out of soda water (tap water in Sumoto has started to taste moldy; it will return to normal in the fall again). So I popped the pills with a beer, some designer pilsner I bought on our trip to Gifu last year that cost 800 yen per 500 ml bottle (which seemed like a good deal at the time since I was wasted on hot sake and paying for 10,000 yen Matsuzaka steaks – but that’s another story).
When I joined the server again, Primeiro Comando (run by nikkei-Brasilians up near Yokosuka), the Terrorist and Counter-terrrorist teams were split by country, which is a pretty common occurrence these days. Basically, Americans and Japanese players typically play the CT role and all other nationalities gang up on us, planting bombs, killing hostages, and trying to smoke our yankee asses in the quickest ways possible. As I said, this is all just the usual shit playing CS in Japan. I never take the bait when these fools bait me in the in-line chat saying shit about how fun it is to see Americans and Israilies beheaded by ragheads and how if it were them, they’d have shit down their necks and stump-fucked them, etc. etc. etc. (it really is a wonderful game, you should try it sometime)
Well, as it happens, the Big Green Pill and Mr. Pilsner decided to put me in an altered state of sorts, and while William Hurt never appeared and I didn’t climb into my furo, close the lid, and declare it an isolation chamber in which I could de-evolutionize, I did manage to knife in the head the previously mentioned [hxr]Chiang even though he was spraying at me wildly with an AK, win the round, and then type in the chat before the next round, so everyone could see, “0wnz0red.”
Oh my. I’m afraid I singlehandedly started WWIII online because the racial epithets, cheating accusations, and high school level political commentary got quite thick, and ended with somebody crashing the server with a DDOS attack. I just signed out for the night and zonked out, dreaming of the valley of Big Green Pills. I only woke up because mosquitoes were biting the hell out of my ass, literally, and I had fallen asleep with the sliding glass door open, not knowing about the mini-typhoon which blew rain onto my tatami and reminded me of monsoon season on faraway exotic beaches.

The other day I wrote a fairly long reply in the comments after derailing my own train of thought and forgetting whatever it was I originally intended on saying. It was in response to something my mom wrote in the comments about cleanliness being next to godliness. Since a couple friends and I have since hijacked that comment thread for a debauchery support group meeting this weekend, I figured it was only fair to bring that long comment out and let it stand on its own out here in the light:
Cleanliness: Diligence in keeping clean
Godliness: Piety by virtue of being a godly person
I can say with some confidence that these are fairly inaccurate descriptors for me. Need proof?
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
AN EXAMPLE OF WHY I AM NOT CLEAN OR GODLY
– BY C. BUDDHA
I’ve forgotten to dry the same load of laundry for two straight days now; I go home after work and upon tossing my sweaty clothes in the washing machine, I see that there is still a damp load in there from the night before. Not knowing the proper course of action, I simply start the washer again.
I can hear the merry sounds of rinse, spin, and drain cycles in the background as I make dinner or watch the news on tv, but by the time the machine is finished, I have invariably forgotten about it again. Not just for a few minutes, though. Not even for a few hours. No, I generally remember that I have to hang the clothes to dry right before I step out the door the next morning – by which time I am in a rush to get to work and will stop for nothing. So I curse and go to work and think about the ball of damp clothes fermenting in my washer at home periodically throughout the day. And I go home and the cycle starts anew…
This is not a big deal as of yet this time. My girlfriend has been gone for only two days, so we are not into a scary duration or anything – YET. Last time, she was gone for 19 days and I finally remembered to dry the laundry on the 18th day. I know what you’re thinking, I only remembered because I ran out of clothes, right? Wrong. You forget that I am a man. A normal man. And as such, if there are no clean clothes, I will recycle dirty ones for multiple uses without washing and never think twice about it.
The truth of the matter is, I only remembered on the 18th day because she called and specifically asked if the house was clean, the plants watered, the laundry done, etc., etc., etc.
Now, any man in his right mind would answer “yes”
in this situation:
– A cleanly man could truthfully say “yes” (but probably wouldn’t be asked in the first place.
– A godly man would have said “yes”, but later may have whispered “help me lord, I need a miracle.”
– I lied quite bluntly by saying “yes”, and in a total frenzy, attempted three weeks of laundry, dishes, and cleaning in one night.
She wasn’t fooled for a second. I guess it must have been pretty obvious with closetfuls of clothes hanging out to dry. This time, I know better. I am prepared. I will answer, “no.”
THE END

It’s Monday. My girlfriend went back to Thailand yesterday to do research for her doctorate. She will come back in a month or so, so the “hundred years” I used in the title are just my props to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who wrote the only book I have ever attempted to read in Spanish. (Huge digression alert!) I can only speak enough cholo to bum a cigarette from Mexican kids smoking in the school bathroom, but I kept the English version of the book next to me for reference. It worked, in a way, but forever convinced me that mandatory foreign language classes in public high schools are good for mainly one thing: Emphasizing the gap between kids who can use their own native language well and those who can’t. Which is not to say that mandatory foreign language education is a bad thing. It is just disappointing that there is so little to be gained regarding practical usage at the mandatory levels; around my home in southern California, at least, you can practice more Spanish comprehension by ordering at certain drive-thru windows than you can at school, ese.
I ate two fried eggs and canned chili from the pan this morning because I was too lazy to go shopping last night and I figured it was a sterling way to kick off a month of celibacy: Table manners have been shed for the next month, and, knowing that I won’t get reprimanded from my better half, the world is now officially my blast radius. I should have written a warning on my name tag today, something along the lines of Danger: Toxic Fumes (w/New Spicy Jalapenos).

I am a packrat. I am also a slob by nature, although sometimes I put on a good show of being organized when it counts. I spent the weekend cleaning out my small room upstairs and thinking, “Damn, I’m a packrat.” During my long years as an amateur geek/professional gadget junkie, I have accumulated enough electronic parts and contraptions to completely fill a six-tatami room. I’m talking boxes haphazardly stacked to the ceiling. This is a room you do not want to be in during an earthquake, which isn’t really a joke since this island was the epicenter of the largest quake in Japan in recent history. A hundred pounds of shielded cables crashing down on your leg would be a lousy way to wake up, methinks. Anyway, regarding this room – basically, I have been promising my girlfriend that I would clean it up and organize my CDs for the past three years. I think I decided to clean it up this weekend just to show her that my word is good. Also, I there was a steady list of “lost” things that I strongly suspected were hiding in that room somewhere – company health insurance card, backup software for my cellphone, ADSL line filters I promised to give to my manager, etceteraetceteraandsoforth.
So. I didn’t finish. Mainly because I started out by trying to organize my CDs. That was a mistake. Let me be clear – when I did my half year of duty in Canada five years ago, I took two weeks and organized all of my CDs into binders. I did this by lining up every CD I had (about 600) and entering them into a spreadsheet (Lileks would have been been proud at the hours of effort I spent on creating the perfect system), then breaking them down into genres and putting them in color-coded Case Logic CD notebooks (the BIG ones). I then placed all of the empty cases into boxes and stored them at my office on Gastown (where they remain to this day for all I know). This was a major accomplishment in my life and every time I DJed after that, I thanked God for giving me the foresight to organize those discs (of course, He decided to relieve me of foreskin so I guess I deserved something in return).
My problem as is related to this post is all of the CDs I have since acquired. Many, many. Between DJing and my lifelong quest for decent tunage (needle in a haystack warehouse if you know what I mean), the amount of CDs I bought in the past five years have been a boon to the music industry. Don’t get me wrong, I was on the empeethree bandwagon before most of you knew that your computer could make more sounds than “beep”, but I like CDs like most audiophiles claim to like records (Yes, I have records too but gimme a fuckin’ break. I drive a sports coupe and have a hard enough time carrying my digital gear around.). I like jacket art, CD-quality sound, and the warm fuzzy feeling I get by filling the pockets of old white CEOs and black street thugs alike.
Well, I forgot where I was going with this post, but I suppose that’s the point.
Oh yeah.
In the grand scheme of my 2nd Grand CD Organization (2004), I am exactly 1/3 finished. Which means my bedroom, where my girlfriend and I usually sleep (Sa-priize!), is filled with boxes and boxes and bags and bags of Compact Disks, CD-Rs, DVDs, floppies (many varieties including “TRON” disk size), Iomega media (both Zip and Jaz. Or was that Jiz and Zap? Ziz and Jap? Wuteva.), and several proprietary media types from various failed loser companies that tricked me into buying their shit and then went tits up. I mean, it’s a fucking joke. Don’t forget, this is just CDs and other assorted media – the small room I’m trying to clean out is probably only 1/10 finished. And now our bedroom is also unusable, almost unenterable. I just called Nam during lunch and without even a hello, she started cursing me out. She was upstairs despairing about where to start cleaning up because she doesn’t want to sleep on the couch again. I forgot what I called for, so I got an earful about what I will be doing when I get home tonight instead. Oh, and I got hung up on. Girls, man. Peh!
I gotta take some pics of the destruction I’ve caused so far. It’s hard to believe it will ever look clean in either of the two rooms. Then again, it’s gotta get better than it is now, or I’ll just burn the whole damn place down after the neighbors next door move to their new house next month. One of the scientists at Peenemunde (where they built rockets during the great war) was reported to have said somthing along the lines of “every fifty years all the factories should be burned down” in order to stimulate technological progress. Exactly what the hell that has to do with burning down my apartment, I don’t know. I just work here, fella.