One of Jessy’s students, let’s call him Timbo, apparently told her yesterday that “[he] hates black cops” which was more than just casually alarming because he is a generally polite space-cadetty young boy of the tender age of seven. His friend, in contrast, disagreed, being all like “no, black cops is awesome.” Doing her civic and professional duty, Jessy side-barred the boy’s mother when she came to pick him up. Today your little boy said he hates black cops, she says. Black cops, the mom says. Timbo ya goof ball, she tells him, that game isn’t called black cops, it’s Black Ops. Oh right, Timbo says, rendering a series of potential considerations in Jessy’s tender first-year teacher mind: is it good that his mother is at least aware of the video games he is playing and corrects him on their pronunciations, or is it bad that Timbo is playing Call of Duty: Black Ops, in which you assume the role of men who stab/shoot/slice enemies amid a virtual hailstorm of words including but not limited to fuck? Perhaps it is a little bit of both, perhaps it is a little bit of both.
AMERICA, OK
– Bought an iced tea at the 7-11 yesterday, it was available in Gulp, Big Gulp, Double Gulp, and Super Big Gulp sizes despite the fact that if anyone tried to “gulp” any of these massive drinks their entire esophageal passages would explode immediately, also the iced tea tasted kind of dirty, like I mean it tasted as though there was dirt in it
– I got some pad Thai at a restaurant in a little strip mall over by the Interstate for lunch yesterday and ate it in my car, it was probably the second best that I have had in my life, meaning that the pad Thai ranks for me are as following: #1: dinky store under an old apartment building in the middle of Iowa, #2: random little strip mall store in yuppy eastern suburb of Dallas, Texas, #3: Thailand
– Speaking of food I gave Jessy a meal at a sushi place around here called “Hypnotic Sushi” cause they had like some kind of gift card deal and it looked fun but now that I think about it I sort of wonder if I really want to be hypnotized by raw fish
COMIN’ TO SAVE THE DAY
My pal James, who used to assist me in nuclearly obliterating all competition in a variety of trivia contests, is currently posting offensively excellent pictures of his sweet hostel views on Facebook, the following of which I have reproduced here without his permission.
I kinda decided somewhere along the line during my life in Japan, when a good view could literally be mount Fucking Fuji out my window, that you have enough good views and after a while they are all the same, like the fifth or sixth temple you’ve gone to, or another shrine after you’ve already been surrounded by vibrant little things at Ikuta on New Year. The views that are more interesting are essentially the bad ones, the bad views. I like a bad view every now and then, what’s more entertaining than this room that’s all dressed up to look real nice and you even have a low wattage bulb in the desk lamp next to your hotel bed and then you open up the curtain and it’s a literal brick wall? I have fond memories of a story that my step brother used to regale me with of the time that he and some of his classmates took a trip to New York City as part of the chorus class and they checked into some hotel there or whatever and he said that the most notable thing about it was that instead of some kind of painting or framed art on the wall or something there was a poster advertising the movie Heat, the Pacino/DeNiro thing, and it was actually glued to the wall, covered over with like some kind of glue plaster like that shit you’d buy at the stationary shop so you could paint over puzzles with it to preserve them as framed art or whatever? it was painted over with that shit on the wall so nobody could steal it I guess, so nobody could steal the poster for the movie Heat. I wonder if anyone actually tried to steal it, I guess my stepbrother at least examined the situation, cased the joint, the joint being the poster for the movie Heat.
What I mean to say is I like a bad view. My favorite place to take a piss, or at least one of the most frequent places I would go, was in the side part of the Sannomiya Hankyu station, and I’d go there because it was maybe the only train station restroom that I knew of where I could get to it without having to actually use a ticket to get through the gates? I’d pull a gaijin smash and beep through with my prepaid fare card, go take a piss, then come back through the gates and be all like “I mistake, I mistake” and they’d cancel the fare out so I could go back to the bar or karaoke or whatever immorality I was participating in. Anyway the urinal that I’d always use had this little flip-open window right in front of it, and when I looked out of it it would pull me away from my reality in this sort of different way than I was expecting, because it reminded me that I was actually high up, which is a thing you tend to ignore or forget in Japan. Often times, quite without you realizing it, you are either three stories underground or four or five above it, having gone up a few steps to a station, an escalator or two, something to a platform, a walkway connected to another building, who knows where the fuck you are. I’d stand there with myself in my hand lettin’ er rip and peer out that window and it looked like inside a television or something, a few old slimy black pipes connected to walls that were parts of buildings I had no spatial awareness of, a big old crevasse below it, little bits of old rainwater dripping down onto something or other, and the vague voices of people that probably didn’t realize that their words carried up to this place, wherever this place was, whatever this place did. For a minute there each time I didn’t stop to say “hey look at the view out there, where I am not,” but “hey, look at what that view has done to me, here, where I am, look at how it has made me notice where I am,” and I always found it more memorable than that nice pastoral, that picture on the wall out my window.
NM DY 