Ghosts of bloggins past

What's the term for that sense of dread that washes over you when an old, forgotten piece of your digital past comes back, 2-ish years older and reeking of liniment, yet not a single second wiser? I'm sure the term exists, and if I had some sassy young hipster in my life to Grimes up my Musk, I'd probably know it, so maybe not knowing is a better place to be found wallowing in. Regardless, this beast before you came knocking on my ones and zeroes tonight, so I felt compelled to whip out the knife and carve a notch into it, like those marks you put on the kitchen wall to demonstrate how much you've grown, only in this case I don't particularly feel like I've grown much at all.

2-ish years back, I was still mostly basking in the newly forged freedom from my less than glamorous exit from the IT career I'd never wanted and yet somehow fumbled through for almost 13 fucking years. I still had a chunk of already squandered 401k moneys melting through my bank account like a candy bar on a hot midsummer car seat (the lesser-received prequel to "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"), and I had such big plans. Going to Japan, I was, taking a deep and immersive language course and basking in the humid misery of the Japanese summer in full swing.

Well, that kinda happened and kinda didn't happen, and there's a story to be told, but for tonight I'll leave it at an innuendo of a story and maybe when I return 2-ish years from now, I'll be able to tell it without immediately contorting into a shame configuration and drifting off into an all-encompassing fog of ennui for some unknown sum of time afterward.

Time may tell, and a smarter me would never tell, which is why I'm sure I will tell, because I am nothing if not a product of time, both wasted and otherwise.

It's been a while since I've strung some words together, and like everything else I do, it aches more than it should and it's probably awkwardly uncomfortable to gaze upon. For tonight, I think I'll be brief and let slumber inform me as to if this was a wise route to take or if I'd been better off letting sleeping blogs lie. Perhaps I'll be back with an update sooner, as opposed to another 2-ish years later. Tune in later and find out (or at least get the disappointment out of your way early enough to make lunch plans elsewhere...)

WAR.

Animated Airplanes Over...

Another airport. 2016 has been a year of airports in a run of airport years that I'll probably not be able to match for a few more years.

Wait, did that even make sense?

Today, my destination is another brand-new stamp for my passport - Seoul, South Korea. I'll be in Seoul until Tuesday morning, then I'm off to Osaka, Japan. I'll be in Osaka until Thursday, and then I'll be hopping the Shinkansen up to Tokyo. 

Then shit gets real.

I'll be in Tokyo for the entirety of July, attending Coto Language Academy, taking their "Crash Course in Survival Japanese", which has very little to do with zombies, or TEOTWAWKI, but will definitely cover ordering food in a bar and grocery shopping as well as being able to describe to an EMT exactly how and why my arm is broken (should it ever break while I am in Japan). 

They call it "baby steps". But the thing is, babies eventually learn to walk, and before long those babies are making new babies and electing presidents, sometimes even in that order.

This is another check-mark off the long running list of things 18 year old me thought I'd have taken care of long ago. Perhaps, in an alternate universe, there's a version of me that got his shit together at a younger age and is doing incredible things because he didn't think things like going to college or applying himself in his formative years ran contrary to his notion of what constituted "punk rock values".

Yeah, I bet that guy is a dick.

Oh well. That ship has long been broken on some bleak Madagascar coast, the metal which made its' hull turned into machetes and TV aerials, if there's any justice in this universe. 46 year old me is the reality, and my reality is about to get challenged. If I succeed, I will emerge from my gross cocoon as some sort of quasi-preschooler in terms of Japanese language comprehension. But hey, preschoolers learn shit, and that's what I am trying to accomplish, right?

That's the long of it.

The short of it is that I'm off for another 5 weeks of Asian bliss, and I have decided that this particular place will be as good a repository as any for some sort of long-form journal, soul-baring, word-barfing place to put things that are longer than the normal TL:DR Facebook caliber of posting. I'll still be putting photos and short entries up on the old standby, but this gives people a chance to just flat out IGNORE these sort of posts and has the added value of letting anyone foolish enough to care what I'm thinking about a chance to look further under the hood and see that there is indeed a heart still beating, in its' own gross and overstimulated fashion.

So yes, I encourage anyone dumb enough to care to follow along and enjoy the ride, I'll do my best to bring you along for this voyage, bumps and all. Likewise, if you got to this page by accident and have read this far, hoping for some sort of insight, I probably owe you an apology, but you're not gonna get it. Click on or read on, those are your choices.

For those who decide to join me on this trip, buckle in, it's bound to get rough, but I assure you the destination is worth the journey. Or is it vice-versa? I always fuck these metaphors up. ((sigh)).

No photos, but imagine an airport and you've pretty much nailed it.

...On Beginnings

Just setting this space up, I haven't put in a couch or a lamp yet to make it a usable home. That will happen on Friday, the 24th.

For now, consider this a "Hello Neighbor" - I'll be back with a bottle and some snacks in a few days :)

(and now a catte photo)