This'll Just Take a Minute

Hearing the story sucked all the air in the world into a volcano, and I started suffocating. I know I should calm down and not be so dramatic. Osamu has been waking up at 5 a.m. pretty regularly recently, and I've been crashing out on the living room floor with all the windows open because I'm in love with this season; rainy and humid all day, cool and humid all night, with sunsets that turn deep purple and sunrises at 4:15 a.m. Kenzo and Osamu are catching on to my ways. First, Osamu comes downstairs and wakes me up, asking if there's kindergarten today, to which I often have to check and make sure. Then Kenzo comes downstairs and hops on me like a Dr. Seuss character, instantly rendering my phone alarm obsolete. I don't have a business mind, and I especially don't have a Japanese company business mind. This is something my Japanese company boss, who is very skilled at businessy business, likes to remind me about sometimes. In business terms. However, he's try...

Eri changed around the downstairs a little bit in addition to the interior decorating streak she's been on recently. We bought our dining table at a furniture outlet event at Tsurumi Ryokuchi Park in Osaka when we used to live right across the street. Six years ago.  I went through a phase where I would casually browse for new dining tables whenever we were at a furniture store, but I don't anymore. This table means to much now. Eri's been taking care of the boys' Japanese passports. Getting them to take a nice picture takes patience. And bribes. It seems to have worked out. Kenzo and Osamu have to carry two passports when they travel internationally. Kenzo even has to sign his own name on his Japanese passport application. I got some serious sleep last night. About twice as much my average these days. The bad news is it was because I crashed out from exhaustion. I tucked the boys in before nine p.m. and then I went and lay down on our bed and I set my alarm for 20 minu...

Eri and I were checking out one of Kenzo's school notebooks tonight. This page has so much going on, and I love all of it. It made me realize something that I can easily forget - he's a person. He has a life separate from mine, lives each day having experiences that I will never know about, and has thoughts and ideas that I can't nor should get in the way of. "Thank you for doing everything," she said. Eri walked with me this morning as I went around the neighborhood and delivered planter box maintenance information and schedules to various folks.  We stopped at the first house and I rang the doorbell and handed the old lady the three-page information sheet I had made and copied and we exchanged greetings and then I realized this is going to take forever if I ring every single person’s doorbell and chit-chat with them. I’ve got 20+ more of these to hand out.  So we started just sticking them in people's mailboxes and made better time. Most folks aren’t home an...

I forgot to post this video before. It's when Kenzo had his first peanut butter and banana sandwich back on June 10th.  I'm gonna try again with real peanut butter. It totally makes a difference. I decided to go for a late stroll after dozing off at my desk chair once again. It was almost midnight, and as I stepped outside, I couldn't help but notice that the college student residing in the adjacent apartment building had his window wide open. Again. He was watching TV or playing video games at a pretty high volume and engaged in a boisterous conversation with a friend, the sound reverberating across several houses in every direction.  Fortunately, Eri was completely exhausted, fast asleep with the windows shut. Nonetheless, I had reached my limit. Just yesterday, I took the initiative to discuss the issue with the local beat cops at the police box, and Eri even reached out to the apartment owner to explain the ongoing disturbance. But I had reached my breaking point. It w...

I hopped over the fence to the little apartment building next door.  About half of the twelve units are vacant now. The university campus moved downtown and all of the college students who were living around here have mostly cleared out.  Some haven't. There’s one nice old lady who lives in the unit right next to our house on the first floor and she loves the boys and even added Eri as a Facebook friend. She gave us handmade masks when the pandemic started and she's as friendly as could be. She works at an old folks home and even when she's super tired after her shift she stops to talk with Kenzo and Osamu about whatever they happen to be doing outside, whether it's splashing water or messing around with lizards. Right above her, however, on the second floor and right across from our bedroom window, there’s a leftover college student who has gotten a bit noisier over the past six months.  Now that it's officially rainy season/summer the weather is warming up and eve...

"PUT that coffee DOWN ." Osamu had no idea he was doing a perfect impersonation of Alec Baldwin in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross . He wanted me to play soccer with him. In the house. He told me put my coffee down, in very clear terms for a four-year-old. I found a place to safely set down my freshly brewed hot coffee and kicked his little soccer ball around with him for a few minutes. He kicks it super hard, but it's fine. It's a little deflated and it's the size of a tennis ball. Technically he could knock something over and cause mayhem, but that's the price of fun. I saw  Glengarry Glen Ross  when it came out. I was a senior in high school. It was 1992. No one wanted to go with me so I went by myself. It made an impression on me. The dialogue was like a coarse symphony. I found a copy of the play at the bookstore. My drama teacher saw it and didn't say anything, but I could tell she was not approving of my choice in playwrights. It was around that time ...

Eri had her business plan stolen. By her mom. The drama just got ratcheted up a few notches. I felt terrible for laughing, but it's so ridiculous that it's funny. Eri doesn't think so. Which makes it even more humorous and makes me even more guilty for laughing about it. Today was the big day where our neighborhood association planted summer flowers in the planter box along the main road. I made a video and shared it with our neighborhood chat group. The chairman of our neighborhood association was even sporting his favorite cap. There was also some major lizard play before soccer. And late afternoon play at the park and all over the neighborhood with friends. A light squall came through as I was walking through the Dounji graveyard. I took a video, but it doesn't do the moment justice. The smell and the humid air and the sound and the bugs are not capturable by any means other than the human nervous system. In a moment of inspiration, I invented "The Bad Boy Expre...

We’re not getting fooled again by that slippery lizard. This morning I helped Kenzo transfer his newly acquired, big ol' lizard from the main terrarium with all the sticks and leaves and stuff into his portable lizard box so he could take it to school. He grabbed the lizard. I held the lid. It was a solid plan. Osamu ended up having a pretty awesome Friday. Kenzo was off to Friends Club and papa was juggling work and neighborhood association duties. Osamu and mama headed over to the Izumi Chuo library and, of course, that has to include a stop at Nanakita Park. This guy was pretty proud of himself for being able to do the zipline on his own for the first time. I’m not sure if it’s the medicine that I take for my anxiety and my obsessive compulsive behavior, or whether it’s something that Eri is doing, or maybe it’s the weather, but I’m finding it a little bit easier recently to deal with a lot of little things that would normally make me freak out. I went into the kitchen this even...

I went in to check on Osamu's nap time and found that he sleeps with a gun. It wasn't loaded, though. It’s like a revolving door of reptiles at our house. Yesterday Kenzo came home from Friends Club feeling extremely proud of himself because he caught  another  lizard and this one is pretty big and also pretty surly. He’s definitely not happy about being in the possession of a six year old boy. He’s also a biter.  This morning Kenzo was getting all his things ready for school and the last thing on his daily preparation list is his lizard box. Now that he’s got one that he caught all by himself he was super excited to take him to school and show his friends. But of course he can’t resist the urge to open the box and take the lizards out and play with them before he takes off for school and then  bam!  That big new surly lizard made a break for it. He ran underneath one of the air conditioner units next to the house. Kenzo was reaching under trying to grab hi...

Bruno texted me this picture today. He's been going through old stuff apparently. This was the autumn of 2008 or 2009. Fourteen or fifteen years ago. Feels like a different lifetime.  I guess it was. Last night I got in late and crashed out in the tatami room, and this morning Kenzo wasted no time taking my spot in my cozy futon to do some catching up on his school reading. A couple of boys (not mine) said hello to me, so I said hello back. I guess it was just politeness, even though these two mealy mouthed kids were obviously at the intersection of Bored and Surprised. I should've just muttered a greeting and walked on. Especially when I'm dressed the way I was today, in slacks and a short-sleeved button-up dress shirt, like a Mormon missionary but older and darker and more cantankerous, I become a head-turner for a certain demographic, mostly nine-year-olds. Fortunately, I wasn't feeling too surly today, so I continued the conversation by asking them, "Are you gu...

I took the afternoon off and went to my therapist and my psychiatrist, but I think the best part was riding my motorcycle all over Sendai on this unbelievably beautiful afternoon. There's that curious quote I have even used myself in the past... “You never see a motorcycle parked outside a psychiatrist’s office.” — Geoff Smith Well, here's my motorcycle parked outside my psychiatrist’s office. The most therapeutic thing about this, I think, is that I can basically park anywhere I want downtown for free and traffic jams are a non-issue. Also, I love coincidences.  I don’t know if I believe in fate or coincidence. Or maybe neither are to be believed in, like when someone says, "I don't believe in using shampoo." Whether you believe in it or not, it's a thing that exists. The other day I was cleaning the house and listening to music and I had on some Amazon playlist called "Mellow 70s".  Yeah, I know. Please mock me. That song by the Carpenters, ...