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Linked by Warren Ellis, it’s the touching true story of a man who bought a monkey just so he could fight it.

Okay, here we go. Fixed comments, can use the damn system again, looks like. I hope. All old comments are gone, but what the hey.

So, to start things off, a dream I had recently:
I wake up on the Joban line train, right as they’re announcing Sanuki station, my stop. It’s early morning, and I’m sleepy as hell, so I know that I must have been out in Tokyo clubbing or something. I stumble out into the early morning, into a sea of headphoned salarymen. The sun is still low in the sky, making me squint, giving me a slight headache. I’m not limber enough to bound up the stairs with any grace, so I’m plodding along, my feet heavy. I get up to the turnstiles, and they seem much further away than they usually do. It’s like a dolly-zoom shot from a Hitchcock movie. I reach for my wallet, take it out, and I can’t find my rail pass. I’m standing in the thick of things, and people are whizzing by on either side of me. The crowd thins, and I’m there, alone, and I can’t get out of the station and back home. And then I wake up.

My first thoughts were, goddamnit subconscious, you’re not even TRYING to be subtle anymore.

So, I’m doing 2.5 weeks of travel by myself across Asia before heading back to the States. Already hit up Korea (South and technically North), in Thailand right now, and going to Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos before it’s all said and done with. How’s it been? Let me tell you!

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So I’ve been a complete wreck for something like 2 months now and haven’t posted at all. Mea culpa. Here’s the lowdown.

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This had me in stitches.

Dear world:

So, the Virginia Tech shootings. They’re bad. We know.

However, this does not give you license to complain about society’s this-or-that. You may not pretend that the cause of the shootings can be traced to some perceived iniquity for which you’ve been saving up your soapboxes.

Society, especially American society, is like a giant hundred-headed cat.

• First off, it’s not a monolithic, single-minded entity, so claiming it does anything on purpose is, shall we say, a bit much.
• Second, most of us can only see two or three of its heads from where we stand, so it’s not like we have some insider scoop to share with the world.
• Third, it’s a fairytale construction. It doesn’t exist in any meaningful sense.

Blaming some abstract concept when things go wrong is ignorant at best, irresponsible at worst, and childish somewhere in between. Honestly, it’s not much better than saying the devil made you do it. Just sounds a little better in present company.
So don’t do it.

That is all.

Rainbows and lollipop kisses,

-Jason

Usually when I dream, I at least have the suspicion that it’s a dream… I just had a nightmare that was unrelentingly vivid, and even now that I’m awake, I’m still shaking.

In the dream, I get a car, and I’m driving around Tokyo. It’s a rainy day, and I’ve been walking around Disneyland. Daryle and Amy are in a car behind me. I’m at a stoplight, and the lane I’m in becomes a parking lane on the next block, so I speed up as soon as the light turns green, merging lanes so that I can get ahead of the car next to me.

Except my foot’s all slippery from the rain and I can’t get to the brakes.

When I run over the cars at the next light, I remember being a bit surprised that I didn’t outright crash into them, but instead went over them. Maybe my car’s lighter than I thought. Maybe no harm is done. I start my fight or flight response… maybe if I speed up, they won’t catch me and everything will be normal.

But I pull over to the side of the road. Good thing, too, because one of the cars there was an unmarked cop car, and it’s pulling in right by me.

As it pulls in, I notice it has a gaijin in the back in cuffs, and he’s mouthing something to me urgently. I can’t tell what it is.

They get two half-Japanese, half-gaijin cops to drill me, the classic bad-cop, good-cop routine. One starts talking about how I was drunk and ran over a kid, which I of course object to — I didn’t have a drop to drink, and there was no kid.

Except there was a kid. Somewhere between 5 and 8. And he’s dead.

Suddenly, nothing I say will matter. There won’t be a trial. There won’t be a waiting period. My visa’s going to be cancelled and I’m going to be sent back, without so much as saying goodbye. And I’m going to have to live with being a murderer for the rest of my life.

What I remember after that is the horrific crying, the non-stop, body-shaking wailing that I collapsed into on the way out of the station. I’d explained my situation, how I just hadn’t driven in awhile, and my foot slipped, and how sorry I was, and it’d fallen on deaf ears. Well, of course they’re deaf ears. I’m a murderer.

I get back home, and for some reason, Shawn is the only one meeting me there — Daryle and Amy are nowhere to be seen. As the cops are walking me along, Shawn is protesting, saying that “You don’t know this guy, he’s got this awesome website he’s helping us make, and who’s gonna take that over?!” and I just fucking lose it and yell and yell and yell at him to shut up, just shut his mouth and go the fuck away.

When I get in my apartment, I fall apart, crumple up in a corner and just cry.

No saying goodbye to Japan.

No saying goodbye to my kids. Who knows what they’ll do for a teacher. Who knows what they’ll say.
No goodbyes to the JETs. Everything I’d been planning to do for them, up in smoke. No plane ticket back. No nothing.

No Golden Week in Okinawa. No saying goodbye to Kana, no explanation to her.

And when I come back, what then? Could I ever live with myself again? I’m a murderer. What could I possibly do that would fix that?

I cried for what seems like hours… then I woke up. It’s the crying I remember and the crying that’s staying with me, even as I finish typing this up. Terrible, gutteral moans, crying until there weren’t any tears.. convulsing like I was dry heaving, until my sides physically hurt. Then doing it some more.

At least I have no classes to teach today.

Still have to find time to post about this past weekend, which was chock-full of cherry blossoms, high school friends, and dancing Elvises, but in the meantime, I figure I should update some of you on my plans for the future.

Since continuing here in Japan would be quite difficult (and because, being a foreigner, it’s a conseqeuence-less fantasy land, which really bugs me), I’m not renewing my contract after August. My (extremely rough) plans are:

• Wander around Asia for a month or two until I have to go back to the states.
• Visit folks in Kentucky for a bit.
• Go back to California, either LA or San Francisco, and do CG for a bit. I’m open to staying for more than a couple months, but if nothing spectacular happens, I’m planning to go to…
• Europe for a couple months, to visit folks I know from all over.
• Maybe settle in Europe for a bit
• Graduate school for art, perhaps. Or writing. Something creative.
• ???
• Profit

Not really thought out, but that’s basically what I’m looking at.