entry nº 47 // 20190407

[part 1 of 2]

lately everyone around here’s always like, kevin, blogging sucks, why don’t you try TEXTING instead?! and i’m just, i mean, i just don’t get it, you know? i guess everybody’s different no matter where you go. it’s just one of those things. 

anyway, couple days ago me n’ manabe-kun borrowed neighbor gen-san’s red canoe and rowed our little pants off until we got to NOKO ISLAND, across the bay there, which i have looked at out our apartment balcony every single day and night since moving here. it’s not like i’ve never been there before, though – you can catch the ferry from over at meinohama ferry port, and in fact shortly after moving here to fukuoka back in 2016, shoko + i + shoko’s friend went to noko island for isla de salsa, a latin music festival that happens there every year. or maybe it doesn’t happen there anymore? but, well, i mean it happened there that year. and it was fun. i did a backflip off the floating dock, which, well, if that happened at least once a summer i wouldn’t be upset. we went there another time, too, “there” being noko island, not isla de salsa, to see the cosmos flowers up at island seaside park or whatever it’s called? and had a magical nighttime walk back down the island roads toward the ferry port since we’d missed the last bus down from the park. which i may or may not have blogged about sometime way back, but which i can’t confirm from my present position in this particular textedit document. 

so, yeah. rowing to noko island? takes about 40 minutes on the way there, 50 or so on the way back. got an early-ish start: 7:30, though we probably sat around chit-chatting w/ gen-san and a couple other neighbors who were up for their morning walks, our little neighborhood friend group there, having crystallized last summer, i guess, and now providing a constant source of human companionship, warmth, and neighborhood goodness, and also some stress w/ regards to myself in particular, in terms of certain more radical factions of my thoughts, when it comes to hanging out w/ that group, being like kevin why can’t you understand them 100% perfectly why can’t you keep up with the conversation why are you being shy and/or quiet ew they’re gonna think you’re WEIRD or something better study harder starting tomorrow! et c. but those factions are, you know, i mean i do my best to ignore them. fringe elements, at best. but that’s neither here nor there, right? we’re out there sippin’ coffee that fujimoto-san brought, snacking on bread someone else brought from HIPPO BAKERY next door (whose praises i probably haven’t sung enough around here), and in general just enjoying the gentle morning sunshine and each other’s company and, well, we probably didn’t end up actually pushing off from shore until an hour later or so.

but, the totally most hair-raising part of it all? when, about three quarters of the way across the bay, i look to my right and see, well, a pretty big boat coming in hot, really kind of like straight at us, and hmm, it sure seems like it’s not really changing its course or anything, but i mean it must see us, right? and, hey, manabe-kun, uhh… and so on. we kind of basically looked at each other like, “welp, i mean, uh?” i might’ve waved an oar up in the air in a surely-futile attempt increase visibility. either way, the boat veered around us and sped by, impassive, leaving us bobbin’ around there like a coupla chumps in its sizable wake, which in that moment read like some kind of boat world equivalent of a “fuck you.” turns out it was the ORO ISLAND FERRY, which, armed with that information, you better believe we looked up that ferry schedule online before deciding when to head back home.

and after that? landfall. noko island. first order of business (in manabe-kun’s words): off to the capital city.