The below photo of me and Craig Anderson was taken by Noa Deane (I think) at around one in the morning in a karaoke bar in Fujisawa, Japan.

I’m holding a glass of beer that was the replacement for the glass that Austyn ripped in half right out of my hands. Craig is wearing a wig that would be set on fire moments later. It was a fun night. I left before everyone’s pants came off. I stumbled out of the place and took the smokey elevator down to the ground floor and had no idea where I was, or where the hotel was, or what it was called, but I had a feeling that I’d figure it out. Before I left, someone sang a song that brought me back to a decade earlier, when I was just graduating high school and life was somehow more difficult and more free than ever before.

The freedom comes with not being legally bound to a wooden public school desk with graffiti carved into it by some cunt who sat frustrated in it twenty years earlier. The difficulty of not knowing what to do with it, and having little to no money to waste figuring it out.

I wandered around the neighborhood thinking about where I was at that time and how strange it was to be a kid and also an adult who is meant to pay taxes and answer the call of my national duty should the draft be reinstated. I was afraid of sex so girlfriends were out of the question. I hated school so that was also out. I remember little from that time, but the feelings are strong. I recall feeling enormously the weight of the rest of my life on my shoulders and being filled with so much feeling and having nowhere to put it, so I’d get in my step mom’s green and purple 1997 Toyota RAV4 and drive around my neighborhood for hours listening to songs that exacerbated those frustrated feelings. I’d drive and listen and sing and drink cans of cold coffee and would wake up the neighborhood blasting Blonde Redhead and thinking, ‘I have good taste, you’re welcome’. I was a real shit, then.

I thought about that time and those feelings the whole walk back to the hotel, which I eventually found in the exact opposite direction of where I had originally headed. Now I associate that night in Japan’s muggy air alone in the silence with those nights in Honolulu driving through the muggy air alone in the noise.