entry nº 6 // 20161024

i was quite honored to see the weirdest thing i’ve ever seen in my life a few weeks ago, which was a white burlap sack full of strings of illuminated, wildly blinking lights sitting up against a wall in an empty lot. thought about it for a while afterward and i decided it just has to be the weirdest thing out there. i saw it a couple more times before it finally disappeared as construction began on that empty lot. good thing i’ve got a couple of .jpgs and a .mov to prove it happened. 

here’s maybe a couple things you don’t know about me: 

•i go running sometimes. why not? just strap on my sauconys (which i bought, sneakerless early this summer, thinking they would be cool shoes to wear around and stuff. but i experienced a moment of extreme clarity sometime in mid-august: these sauconys are dumb, and make me look like a dork. so i designated them “running shoes” and got some regular old black vans instead like a normal person – which, by the way, the shoe store didn’t have the size i wanted, so they offered to simply deliver them to my house? i was like, “how much” and the store clerk was like “it’s free.” big wow moment, there. however, i had quite a bit of difficulty filling in my address on the iPad store order app, because it’s all backwards compared to how i’m used to writing it, and i don’t know all the kanji anyway, plus i don’t have a phone number here so the woman had to go in the back and ask and ended up just putting the store phone number. very embarrassing and i was sweaty afterwards. also, when the time window i had chosen for shoe delivery came up, a few days later, i expected to be waiting around like a sucker as if it were some sort of comcast service appointment or whatever, but the dude showed up exactly four minutes into the window. incredible.) and my trusty black umbros and head out for a run. it’s great! sometimes i go east from our place toward shimoyamato. you run along the sidewalk which is directly next to the water, and depending on the tide + weather that day, in certain spots little bursts of sea spray will pop out and get you if you’re not careful. it’s awesome. then you duck into this magical seaside pine forest and run along the paths there till you bust out on this rock jetty/embankment by some super old fortification-wall-ruins that I haven’t really stopped to take a close look at because what’s the point i won’t have a prayer of being able to read or understand what the informational sign says anyway? maybe next year when my japanese is better? anyway i usually stop there and sit on the rocks and space out and look at stuff for a bit before heading back, at which point i choose to run along the rocks and pretend i’m a trail runner and it’s great because you get hyper focused (because of course you don’t want to misjudge the traction afforded by one of the rocks and slip out and suffer a hideous compound leg fracture in a distant country where you don’t have a cell phone and your travel insurance card is basically illegible because the printer was more or less out of ink when you printed it out, ahem, haven’t quite gotten around to taking care of that chore yet. hi mom!).

•i often skateboard to get around our neighborhood. shoko does too. i fixed up her skateboard that she got when she was 19 – new bushings and bearings – and then shoko’s got a cool little natural-wood, handmade penny board that she zips around on. i try to do some ollies sometimes but i’m pretty bad at it. however, i miraculously landed a pop shove-it yesterday. wow. it was cool. nobody saw it, because i was on this little deserted stretch of smooth pavement/bike lane behind the train tracks where i didn’t have to fear people witnessing my poor skating ability. also, shortly afterward i realized i had my shirt on inside-out. super fun to skate around though. i wish i had tight ollie control so i could bust over curbs and stuff and be unstoppable in my transportation-centric skateboard lifestyle. maybe one day. it’s all just practice, you know. just a thirty-two year old man trying to learn how to ollie. it’s fine.

speaking of which, i had simply one of the most delightful experiences around my neighborhood a few weeks ago as i was skating down the street. there was some construction going on (ditches, shovels, road cones, etc., you know how it is) and policemen were stationed at the various road crossings to direct people, traffic, and so on. there’s this one particularly jovial-looking, chubby, ruddy-cheeked officer who i’ve seen on a few occasions; this time, as i skated down the street, i saw him there enthusiastically waving me through. as i passed him, he said (in english), “ah, sorry, i’m sorry!”, just positively beaming and nodding as he flagged me by. like, as in, apologizing that the road was being worked on and that i was being inconvenienced in my travels. “it’s okay!” i replied, smiling. just all smiles in this story, huh? i feel like if that situation happened in boston, i could reasonably have expected to hear the officer call me a f*g under his breath or something like that. big world out there! 

w/ love,

kevin