In his essay Terry Pratchett: An Appreciation, Neil Gaiman wrote the following about his fellow fantasy author: “Terry is that rarity, the kind of author who likes writing, not having written, or Being a Writer, but the actual sitting there and making things up in front of a screen.” Aside from my vast admiration of both men involved with that statement, the words themselves have been indelibly imprinted on the part of my mind that aspires to some sort of artistic ethos; the words are a manifesto of sorts, on that rare occasion my ambition and work ethic finally manage to follow through on a rendezvous.
To like writing. Not having written.
In short, this is my long-winded disclaimer. As much as you can take any writer at their word (I’m inclined to believe you can’t), believe the following: this is the prosaic equivalent of masturbation. It’s me having fun by myself, for myself, and if you’re able to see it, I guess that means I opened the blinds because the potential for others to see what I’m doing gives me a sick little thrill. I say all this because the four people who actually read my China essays and managed some level of interest requested a sequel, and I definitively turned them all down. Come on, you don’t actually want another round of pontification from that egocentric little shit you used to read back in 2013! You only think you do, like you only think you want whatever clusterfuck of cheese and ground cow anus Taco Bell is peddling as their latest bastardization of food. Then you actually consume these things. And while a few rounds of diarrhea later your body has relatively cleared itself of that muy loco meal choice, my words have this insidious tendency to linger on- until enough hard drinking or head trauma has successfully knocked the requisite number of brain cells out of existence. To which you undoubtedly reply: “You’re totally right, and how I’ve forgotten that lesson is anyone’s guess. Who’s up for drunk rugby?”
I also definitively turned them all down in order to not raise expectations I would have certainly crushed. I didn’t move to Japan with the intention of writing anything. It wasn’t about finding some circumstances to use as bait as I went fishing for attention. It was about buying a lot of manga on the cheap.
Only kidding.
Only sorta.
All that prelude to say that, within three weeks, it all changed. Slowly but surely, certain occurrences and observations began to coalesce into definitive narrative events, with commentary not far behind. Slowly but surely, the iPad, which had as of late become just another vehicle for streaming episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, began calling out a different and far more alluring siren song:
Write, went its susurrous, late-night song. Wriiiiiiite.
I turned with narrowed eyes and furrowed brow, and after the slightest moment of hesitation, nodded. It was decided. There was nothing more to do than submit to the muse.
Don’t forget the punsss and poooop jokesss, the iPad added.
Did I mention my muse is thirteen?
And as I sat down this evening, and penned these words, it all came flooding back. The late nights at the laptop typing, in that shitty little apartment in Hunan, as cigarettes smoldered in the ashtrays, cockroaches scuttled along the baseboards, and a cacophonous river of honking and bleating traffic threaded its way through the neon streets below. There are plenty of moments during that time of my life that I never put to the page. Some lacked general significance. Some I simply decided to keep for myself.
But while all those moments, great and small, shared and not, all shaped me, the stories I wrote down are the stories that stand out with the greatest clarity. Perhaps this is just the tail wagging the dog; the meaningful moments are those that made the narrative cut. But I think the converse is just as true; in the process of figuring out how to talk about those moments, I figured out what they actually meant. The lived moment emanates meaning, but writing the moment imbues it with more.
And so I sit, revising my earlier manifesto.
To like writing.
And to also like having written.
Because while I like the act itself, I also like having something to return to. A chronicle that captures the event along with a piece of myself. Never mind that in practice, looking at these things after the fact usually does little more than make me grimace and shake my head in embarrassment.
And so I stand, ready to search for the meaning in another day here in Japan, and remembering the other reason I’ve been called back to the page to make sense of these experiences:
I actually fucking hate traveling.
I just like having traveled.
There are levels of sweat.
There’s level one: the little beads of perspiration that twinkle across the foreheads of all us humans as our planet rounds another titled loop on the ecliptic and turns towards that relentlessly blazing sun, like some scoliotic adolescent awkwardly jogging another lap of the mile and turning towards that one gym teacher we all had: you know the one. Relentlessly uncomfortable stare, thinly veiled contempt for all the lesser male specimens (see: me), and the same guiding principle when it came to both haircuts and shorts: reeeeaaal high and tight. I refer to level one as Basic Sweat, as it’s both the extent to which most normal people sweat on a given summer’s day, and also what I imagine occurs between the toes of someone who wears a pair of Ugg boots out of season.
There’s level two: The Pits. Like a trumpeter’s spit valve during marching band district finals, this is the liquid overflow that occurs when things really get going. This is the dark, damp patches of moisture that spread around all those trenches and valleys below epidermal sea level: the arm pits, the chest cleavage, the small of the back, and in varying degrees of intensity between the bellybutton and taint. It’s the level of sweat usually observed in fit people who are out for a mid-day run, or Al Pacino when he robs a bank.
There’s level three: Saturation. Think the collective gym socks of all the obese people ever exploited by the Fox network’s Extreme Weight Loss and Lifestyle Overhaul With Fanatical Fitness Coach programming line. This is the touch, the feel, of cotton at capacity; sweat that can be wrung out of clothing into puddles; the level reserved for only the most zealous athletes, or those mythical gamers who, by whatever black magic they employed, reached the final level of Battletoads.
And then there’s me, fifty-five minutes into an English play class for four-year-olds, hopping around in a desperate attempt to maintain their attention, as the stagnant, humid air hangs uncirculated in the classroom like a wet blanket on an Amazonian clothesline (the Amazonian clothesline of reality, referencing the rainforested region’s notorious humidity, as opposed to the Amazonian clothesline of mythology, referencing an assortment of single-breasted brassieres left out to air dry). I’m talking sweat actively pouring down every part of my body that’s vertically aligned, and pooling in every part that’s not. I’m talking pages of workbooks turning translucent as they make contact with my soggy fingers. I’m talking speech gone slurred as my philtrum becomes a veritable waterfall of perspiration and, faced with this onslaught, my lips lose all ability to enunciate.
I’m talking James Brown and a coked-out Chris Farley competitively eating five-alarm chili during hot yoga, as Richard Simmons goads them on from the judges’ dais, fucking sweat.
How did I get here? What series of events transpired to bring this man 6,000 miles away and 14 hours into the future, so that he could sweat all over The Future, a.k.a. Our Children, as he literally mists the classroom with every round of Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes?
This is where some of you may stop, scratch your head, and in that vague fuzz of déjà vu, ask: haven’t I read this before?
To which I say: That’s pretty likely, because I’ve certainly written it before.
Yes, it was somewhere between Al Pacino and Richard Simmons where I realized that I began my Pooping in China essays by complaining about the heat. This trend will most likely continue for as long as I choose to structure stories around teaching terms, as teaching terms start in late summer, late summer is fucking hot, and despite having lived my entire life in The South, I have yet to acclimate to fucking hot.
But to answer that question of how I got here, I think the credit for that and a whole lot more goes to one very important person who made a huge impact on my life:
This is where I’m supposed to talk about my mom or Jesus or some shit, to which I say- HA! You seem to be forgetting I’m a MILLENNIAL! You know, the generation that eschews familial and religious ties in favor of marketed commodities? The kids who sell themselves their own nostalgia at mark-up?
No, no, no! Not my mom, not my father, not Our Father, Who Art in Heaven- I’m talking about Ash Ketchum.
I wish this weren’t the case. I wish I could say this journey is the culmination of any number of more poetic and genuine experiences, and that I’ve journeyed to this Land of the Rising Sun to fulfill some innate wanderlust tied to my innermost being. But if I consider writing to be some means to discover the deepest truths, which I do, then I need to be honest. And if I’m going to be honest, that means I need to tell you that I’m here because of fucking Pokémon.
It’s not the easiest fact to face. See, when applying for a work visa, Japan requires a document called the Certificate of Eligibility. In addition to demanding rigorous descriptions of any possible tattoos (tattoos are NOT cool with the government here; they seem to associate body art with Yakuza gangster culture (to which I say: great, another culture caught up in nativist anger over those dang foreigners comin’ in here and takin’ all the dang Yakuza jerbs!)), the Japanese government requires work visa applicants to submit a one-page statement of intent. The statement should answer basic questions: why do you wish to work in Japan, what will you contribute to Japanese society, where do you see yourself in five years (er… Japan?). I suppose it helps to weed out all those radical, subversive types; you know, the ones who can’t manage to conceal their disruptive intentions for a full five paragraphs. Still, less blatant than my own country’s typical line of questioning on customs entry forms: “Have you ever been involved in, supported or encouraged terrorist activities in any country?” * throws hands up * Aw, alright, ya got me! Dang it, wasn’t prepared for that one!
So, of course, I lied.
Not about Japanese government subversion, of course. Fuck, my country is currently run by Donald Trump; concerned citizenry is a 24-hour job! Particularly busy during those key late-night Tweeting hours. So, sorry Shinzo Abe, but ain’t nobody got time for you.
No, I Iied about the source of my infatuation with Japan. And it certainly is an infatuation. For years I’ve been greatly interested in their culture, be it historical, religious, culinary, artistic, technological, or, in particular, the convergences between them (though I draw the line at alien tentacle porn (actually, my line is far back from tentacle porn and a plethora of other Japanese fantasies, as this is also the country where grown men can pay a mere 3,000 yen to lie next to girls in schoolgirl outfits (or pay more to do more, for those with full wallets and empty consciences (these simply aren’t the sorts of subjects you bring up in a letter to the government (especially since this number of interlocking parentheses would make them question whether I’ve even attained proficiency in my own language))))).
But all my love of sushi, Shinto, samurai and Studio Ghibli can be traced back to one clear entry point: Gotta catch ‘em all! You can put it mildly as an illustrative example of the influence a country’s soft power can have in this age of globalization, or heavily as another casualty of lifelong consumerist addiction linked to one very potent gateway drug (Charmander, in my case). Whatever way you slice it, Pokémon was my introduction to Japanese culture.
That said, it didn’t remain the focal point. The interest quickly unfurled, leading me down the shonen anime rabbit hole and zipping along like Goku’s nimbus past the repulsive swelling flesh of Tetsuo (of both Akira and The Iron Man fame), into the greater realm of cyberpunk, with a very painful sojourn alongside the needle-wielding sadists of Miike’s films before comfortably settling into an academic lens focused on history and culture (not to say movies weren’t involved in that last bit; I mean, what’s Japanese historical study without Kurosawa?). My thoughts became less of monster catching and more of this wholly foreign and entrancing society, built on honor, and intention, and vast historical tradition. I started seeking out more than what was first presented to me; perhaps this is what is meant by that line in the theme song, “You teach me and I’ll teach you”?
So that’s the truth, and while the truth may set you free, it doesn’t always guarantee a job (“Application Question #37. Rate your agreement with the following statement by selecting a number from 1 to 10, with 1 representing ‘totally disagree’ and 10 representing ‘totally agree’: ‘The customer is always right.’” “Uhh… FUCK the customer. And fuck your numbers too. Negative four.”) I write that shit in a letter to the government, and I can already imagine the response from the bureau chief: “Oh, HERE we go, another Pokémaster.” At which point he retrieves a comically large stamp, slams it down upon my application with gusto, and slowly peels it away to reveal the following red block letters: DENIED.
In truth, I think I wrote a series of variations on “I’ll be an upstanding member of the community and am super dedicated to my career,” but at this point, it really is a bit of a blur (this lapse in memory brought to you by wine!; wine!, for when you’re too pretentious for beer, but too poor for dirty martinis).
That infatuation with Japan has stayed with me. It outlived the fandom that activated it, the puberty that eclipsed it, the girlfriends that dissuaded it. Hell, it outlived the family dog (rest in peace, Morgan). I carried it into college, and mustered it to apply for a study abroad scholarship (DENIED, for other reasons; though I did get APPROVED for China. Hey, a step in the right direction, right?), and set it on the backburner while I went on a very different and unplanned journey from Shanghai to Hunan, through their educational systems and on to the charter schools of Nashville, Tennessee. But, like an oil-filled pan left on that backburner, or an untreated case of herpes, the passion was given to sudden and intense flare-ups. The latest one got out of hand, and I was faced with a very clear set of choices: follow the example of numerous arsonists before me and give in to the call of the flame, or continue eking out a comfortable but ultimately unfulfilling existence on the living room couch as the kitchen burned down behind me.
I chose. And a half-dozen trips to Goodwill later, I packed my remaining belongings (comic books and toys, mostly) into a set of plastic tubs, stacked them in storage, left my car to my mom, and hopped a plane that took me so far west, I found the East.
And so I’m here. Naka City, Ibaraki, Japan. Once again, teaching and sweating and noticing and appreciating and complaining about all the cultural idiosyncrasies, both familiar to and different from my own realm of experience. Stick around; you might learn something (the veracity of what you learn not guaranteed (FAKE NEWS); no money back), you might laugh, you might cry… you might stare emotionlessly at the screen for twelve minutes, glance at your wristwatch, and remark, “Hmm. Well, that’s twelve minutes of my life I’ll never get back. Thankfully, Brandon authored me this anachronistic but admittedly precise accessory so that I could keep track of time, and thus bill him for what I’ve lost when I eventually die and reach Father Time at his analog Ferris wheel in the Grand Carnival of the Afterlife.” (I have a unique conception of heaven). At the very least, my labyrinthine run-on sentences will test both your patience and problem solving, which are both good mental muscles to keep in shape.
“Hmm,” you add on. “That penultimate paragraph seemed rather conclusive. But how can he end this month’s memoir without mentioning poop? It’s in the damned title of the thing!” To which I respond: Patience you must have, my young padawan. Like the bowel movements wrought by a cheese-based diet (yo, my Wisconsin readers, make some noise), good things come to those who wait.
P.S. I don’t actually “fucking hate traveling.” Sometimes, when the sweat has dripped and dried into so many layers that you’re basically coated in a layer of fetid gossamer, and has pooled in your buttcrack so deeply that the Louisiana State Park Service has designated it a protected bayou… well, in these moments, one is given to emotionally brash exclamations.
P.P.S. Sometimes, later on whilst editing in a calmer state of mind, you leave that statement in, because while it may not be totally true, it’s still funny.
P.P.P.S. I told you there was no truth guarantee.