El regreso del Sr. Blanco

Crap. Why is your head always filled with ideas until the moment you`re confronted with a blank sheet of paper or text field? So many things to say and no idea where to start or how to put them in order ...

I "came home" to Tokyo (that still feels weird) on Friday, after the 10-day Spain trip made awesome by Jared, Marta and the strangers of Barcelona. People had been telling me I woudn`t want to come back here, and I believed them, and it turned out to be true. Maybe it`s just the allure of the beach, or the laid-back people, or the abundance of delicious shawarma, or .. yeah, pretty much everything about the place. In the end I came back because I have a job here that is (usually) pretty sweet.

"Coming back for work" seems like a weird thing to say as well, considering what I do, but literally I had to come back last Friday so I could go do this job in Fukuoka over the weekend, which combined my usual Fukuoka jobs of 1) appearance at the Yahoo! Dome and 2) TV show with the handicapped artist kids. You know how they did this? Instead of getting breaks I`d just bounce back and forth from one thing to the other. So I`d go outside and get mobbed by people with boring lives for an hour, then come inside and try to understand what the hell the handicapped kids were saying to me in front of TV cameras for an hour. And so on, all day. Meanwhile, Dante just filmed a new commercial, bringing his count up to like 10 or something and leaving me with my measly 3 which I don`t think are even shown on TV anymore. The thing that didn`t make sense to me, though, was that his most recent commercial was for the new thing called the White Family Plan. What the hell, shouldn`t that be mine?? Annoying .. his agency gets him new commercials and mine just keeps sending me to the same events over and over again.

Wait, that`s not annoying ... this is. You remember Blues Jet, the crazy guy who lived upstairs from me, gave me all his furniture and an old musty bed, asks me to lend him money every time he talks to me, got kicked out of the apartment and moved into a church up the street (with the minister`s permission), and one day plans to kill himself so he can go to hell and fight with Satan? I`m back at my place for like 15 minutes before he comes knocking at my door again on Friday (he can see when I`m home because I have the lights on, and he still knows the keycode to get into the building) ... this time instead of asking for money, he tells me that the minister kicked him out of the church, threw all his luggage out into the street and called the cops on him. I`ve met the minister; he`s like the nicest guy in the world. Blues Jet ... not so much. But he looks distraught, and he goes "I have no place to stay. I don`t know what to do." I`m not about to invite him to crash at my place, but I am considering letting him in to sit down and think about it for a few minutes, until he goes, "I didn`t even do anything bad ... I should kill that fucker." I told him there was nothing I could do and shut the door in his face. Time to move ...

I didn`t mean to go off for so long on the Blues Jet thing, but I was thinking about him the other night and what role he plays in my life, like, what is the reason for the presence of this character, and I think I got it: the guy is 40, still dresses like a punk-rocker in his 20s, has no job, no money, no place to live ... oh yeah! That`s me in 14 years or so if I don`t start to grow up a bit. That`s another catch to living here doing odd jobs (as most foreigners do) for an extended period of time ... you have no future. I just realized the other day that since quitting the last job and moving to Tokyo, I`ve been here for almost 8 months. Even that`s a pretty long time to spend doing nothing! Time to "level up" at "useful skills." And I guess by that I mean go to Ikebukuro and eat sushi with Warao.

Sushi: short-term cure for the existential blues!