A very attractive…GIRLFRIEND I have. An attractive friend of the female persuasion is staying over as well. My girlfriend is reading as I write this over my shoulder. Fucking please, somebody help! Well, I guess I asked for it. Many beers. Fuck me. I’m a fucking idiot for even mentioning this shit.

When I first moved out here to Awajishima, I was as prepared for the lifestyle changes as one can be moving from the inner city slum that is Nishinari (the area of Osaka famous for its troubled history,especially the riots that occurred there in 1990) to a city with a total population of 40,000 (and like the rest of Japan, shrinking). An early indicator of the trouble I would face here was the list of ten real estate agents my new company provided me. Upon calling every agent on the list, six were no longer in business, two told me there were no rooms to rent, and only the last…

Between the damage done by the typhoon last week and a freak wave of work that slammed over my desk quite unexpectedly, I just haven’t felt like writing lately. It’s kinda depressing driving around because the traffic is really bad – the drive to work usually takes less than 15 minutes, but now it takes up to an hour. Last week I mentioned that a couple bridges had broken, but it turns out that several more suffered structural damage that wasn’t seen at first and have since been closed to traffic. Road conditions have been appalling – the thick layers of river silt on the asphalt dried out the first…

It was a glorious sunset over the mountains and we walked the endless rows of fruitstands and tourist giftshops in search of seafood. As we neared the plaza concentrated with seafood stands, a young man approached and invited us over to one of his tables. Other stall owners caught movement out of the corners of their eyes as they performed various tasks – wiping down tables, setting out plates – and also came over to beg our patronage. “Cheapcheap!” “You want snapperfish?” “You want crab?” “Good seafood! Best!!” We were the very first customers of the night in the whole plaza, and we were being greeted accordingly; we quickly became…

Ouch. This person obviously chose the wrong career – I’m thinking Corrections Officer would have been more appropriate. My second year in Japan, I got in a fairly serious accident while riding to work on my motor scooter. A small car ran a stop sign right in front of me. I crashed into its side and flew over the hood into a drained rice field, gasping for breath as the wind had been knocked out of me. I passed out and woke up during the ambulance ride to Tenri Hospital. All in all, I felt relatively uninjured. They looked me over in the ER, checked especially for head trauma, and…

From the Guardian: In a secret Paris cavern, the real underground cinema In my third year of university here, my pal T came back from a two year journey all over the world, most recently Paris, with a crazy gypsy girlfriend in tow. She had red hair and crooked teeth, and although I never caught her doing it, I swear she had a little bag of bones she would occasionally toss into the ashes with which to determine the alignment of Jupiter or tomorrow’s chance of rain, or some such crap. Actually, she was pretty cool to hang out with because she made T act like a man sometimes, which…