May 6, 2007: I've started a Flickr page. Check it out; there you'll find many photos I haven't uploaded to Sweetwater. Flickr is a fave on the web right now b/c it has allowed me to come into contact with amazingly talented people and their work.

January 26, 2006: Ah, how quickly time passes . . . the year 2006 is the 10th year that SWEETWATER has been on the WWW. I'd like to thank everyone who has supported this web site over the years. I never thought this site would have lasted this long, and I never dreamed SWEETWATER would be seen by this many people from so many countries across the globe.

November 19, 2005: Another piece of news that's making me feel old: Ted Koppel is leaving ABC Television's Nightline soon. I watched Ted on the program during the Iranian hostage crisis -- this was way back during the Carter Administration. I continued tuning in to Nightline to watch Ted interview whoever was in the spotlight -- my fave is the time Ted had Donny Osmond and Frank Zappa on his show at the same time back when the PMRC was making its pitch to put warning labels on record sleeves.

August 17, 2005: Just recently Peter Jennings, the news anchor for the American ABC television network, died of lung cancer. While it's always a shock when somebody dies, Peter's death hit close to home because I remember watching him back in the 70's. I was a schoolboy back then, and for me Peter was one of those larger-than-life figures who was always there, and it is saddening to think that as I (or should I say we?) get older, even those who seemed immortal will eventually pass away.

June 25, 2005: Van. Van, as in Van Morrison. These days I've been listening to the big, fat guy from Belfast on my iPod. My, he sure has a lion of a voice. I always thought Bono was great singer, but listen to something like "Madame George" right after, say, the live version of "A Sort of Homecoming" and the dude from Dublin suddenly seems tiny. I hear President Bush has "Brown Eyed Girl" on his iPod. I am not a fan of the guy from Texas; but, if I ever have the chance to meet him, me and the big W will have something to rave about.

June 12, 2005: I was very surprised to learn that one of the "old blue songs f/ the 20's" mentioned below -- Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night" -- was placed aboard the two Voyager spacecraft that are now speeding away from the Solar System. "Dark Was the Night" is one beautiful song, and the person at NASA who picked it (along with works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Chuck Berry) had very good taste in music. While it is quite unlikely that a lifeform will ever find the spacecraft, I love the idea that there is a possibility that the scratchy recording by the old master may even outlast life on this planet.

May 22, 2005: Ah, the iPod. Everyone has one, even here in Sonyland. They're affordable, compact, very hip, reliable, and sound very, very good. I bought one too, the cheaper version of the Shuffle. After a couple of months of allowing the thing to provide the soundtrack to my life, I'm starting to find that certain sounds work better than others on the Shuffle. Furinstance, I was surprised to find that old blues songs f/ the 20's offer much punch, even when I am listening to them in the roar of the Sonyland subways. And certain instruments -- unexpected ones, like Arto Lindsay's untuned 12-string guitar, the normally overbearing bass drum on Metallica songs, and the cowbell on "Don't Fear the Reaper" (I didn't even know the song had a cowbell until I started listening to the thing ten times a day) -- seem to gain life on the Pod. As does Big Country. It's 2005 and I am listening to "Wonderland" repeatedly.

May 18, 2005: I can't believe it: it's been twenty-five years since the big eruption of Mt. St. Helens. I lived in Seattle then, which was far enough from the volcano so that nobody there was able to see/hear/feel the eruption (I remember the day as being either cloudy or rainy, which is like the default weather setting for Seattle). I first heard of it from a news bulletin on TV (I think I was watching one of those crummy kid's shows they had on Sunday mornings). Eventually we would learn that something big & terrible had occured some hours' drive south; in the end half of the mountain would be gone, entire forests flattened, the sky darkened with volcanic ash, and admist it all, more than fifty people would perish. At Dearborn Park Elementary School the next morning the air was abuzz with talk about mudslides, volcanic ash, Spirit Lake, the fate of one Harry Truman, deaths, escape stories of aunts & uncles who got out just in time -- and of course, there was a lot of talk about Camp Cispus, the camp near the angry mountain that was the scheduled destination for us sixth-graders going on our end-of-grade school trip. (We ended up going to a different camp a couple of hours' drive north of Seattle.)

But what gets me is the length of time since the eruption -- I mean, it was a quarter of a century ago. I left Seattle for Japan not long afterwards and haven't returned since. I have no idea what Seattle and Dearborn Park Elementary School and Beacon Hill and Magnolia and Discovery Park and all the other places I knew are like now, and I have little knowledge of what became of the kids I grew up with (and of the adults who looked over us). Though I am no longer the little sixth-grader surprised by the thin film of volcanic ash that had accumulated on the hood of my father's wine-red Delta 88, I am connected to the past by something that is both invisible and resiliant.

May 17, 2005: Yes, it's old news now, but it was one of those things. Hunter S. Thompson, one of my favorite writers, died. And that SOB, he died by blowing his own head off. I do not like it when people blow their heads off, for whatever reason. Sure, his work in the past few decades tended to be forgettable (save a few winners like the one about the hot Ducati and the "Sausage Creature"), but so what? In a world growing scarier and duller, there is a need for guys who with their very presence represented concepts like craziness, wildness and above all, freedom -- and after wading through the huge volume of eulogies that have been written, I'm getting the sickening feeling that he was the last of a special breed. While I do not forgive folks who shoot guns at themselves (you reading this somewhere, Kurt?), I am going to miss the fucker.

One last note: Hemingway, Brautigan, and now Thompson. This has got to stop.

January 4, 2005: I spent the end of the year/start or the near year hopping around Osaka and Kyoto. I was born in the region, and it's always a joy going back. This time I went drinking in a crowded bar/eatery in Kyobashi (no seats) and visited the bustling Korean market of Tsuruhashi as well as the amazing stone garden of Ryo-anji.

December 5, 2004: I hurt my back a few days back. It ain't fun; tasks like standing up, sneezing, and picking up socks became torture. If you hurt your back, about all you can do is to take a few days and lie in bed and not move at all. One guy who hurt his back and couldn't do this was one Bob Geldof, who hurt his back right before Live Aid. Look at photos from that great day in 1985 and you'll see him standing at odd angles wearing a muffled expression of pain.

October 9, 2004: I bought a new laptop, and the thing came with a word processor program. It isn't a great word processor, but I've been using it to write down some of the little stories I come up with before making my collages. Here are some of the stories:

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The fever went down and the coughing never stopped. I coughed all the time and the doctor couldn't do a thing about it. I could barely speak, eat, drink, much less work -- all I did was cough violently and consistently. Coughing, or whatever it was that was making me cough, took over my life.

One day I started coughing especially hard at the subway station. A few minutes later I started chocking and began to vomit. I knew a lot of people waiting for the train were staring at me but I didn't have the luxury to care; I got on my hands and knees and threw up my stomach's contents to clear the industrial-strength fuzz I felt in my throat. I puked what must have been a bowlful of half-digested food.

Then the creature dropped out of my mouth and landed in a pool of tan-colored vomit. It was a mothball-like thing the size of a pill that had ten legs. It was covered with what looked like aquamarine astroturf. I picked it up and felt a heartbeat. It had five eyes -- two in a clump on the left and three in a clump on the right. And it had a tiny mouth with pink lips that seemed to form a mocking smile. I immediately burned the thing with a lighter.

Though the coughing stopped I started gurgling Listerine by the liter.

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When the fever got worse I hired a boy to keep me stocked with a certain brand of cough syrup. I sat on the couch and chugged the stuff all day, all night. I spent weeks sitting in a cocoon heated by the mild opiate that gave the syrup meaning. I quickly stopped caring about my health, about my job, about the girl who was threatening to leave me, about my friends who by then all seemed to have bigger paychecks and nicer homes, about the ache in my back, about all the bills I hadn't paid, etc., etc. All I cared about was the soft warmth that surrounded me. One day I found on the web a photo of a glowing poppy flower and spent hours trying to caress its petals.

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The door of the padded room I live in has been open for a long time because the people who used to keep it locked went away and never came back.
I can leave whenever I want. But I don't, mainly because I have nowhere to go. In fact, the years I've spent in this hospital have made me forget things like my old address, the color of my mother's eyes, the school I went to, and whatever it was that brought me here in the first place.
I do remember being in New York, and I have clear memories of watching and hearing the planes fly into those buildings. And, I also know that my legs are now far too ruined to carry me back there.
So I live on the mushrooms and moss that grow on my room's paddings. When I am thirsty I lick the dew on the pipes and window.
I try to spend my days not thinking about anything. And I try not to notice the lady who lives in the room next door. Every once in a while she stands in the doorway holding her sagging breasts in her shaking hands.

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Intelligent life does exist out there. Or so I'm told. It was one of those things involving a friend of a friend who's into Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who. He gave me a photocopy of a "report" that was written by somebody who was supposed to be from the Centauri system. The friend of a friend jabbered for a long time when he brought me the thing to my house and I tried to concentrate as much as I could on my cigarettes so I wouldn't have to listen to whatever it was he was saying. It wasn't until a week had passed when I decided to read the thing. The Centauri system guy was like this prince back home who landed his ball-shaped spaceship on a lawn somewhere in Tokyo. The problem was, nobody noticed him or his space ship; I guess that made the guy angry enough to cut short his visit. "Fuck Terra," he wrote. "I loved your flowers, but all you Terrans should burn in hell." Right.

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When the hounds of hell ran past me I sat down, lit a cigarette and waited for the carnage. Soon limbs, ears, hair, bones, intestines and blood began landing around me. This went on for an entire night; I quickly ran out of cigarettes and wondered how I'd get more. When the hounds returned, they hardly gave me a glance.

I was trapped between their world and another one freshly razed.

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I was walking across a square in front of Koma Stadium in the heart of Kabuki-cho that was filled -- as usual -- with drunks, drifters and groups of bored teenagers who would toy constantly with their cell phones. I was tired that day -- I'd drunk too much Four Roses the night before and my new tripod was straining my shoulder. I stretched out on the heated ground and folded my arms over my eyes and tried not to think about anything at all. Then, something cold, tiny and hard fell on my elbow. When I slid my arms above my head, I noticed it was starting to hail. And I noticed something else: high above the buildings was a tornado that was slowly descending towards Kabuki-cho. I sat up, lit a cigarette and wondered if anybody else saw it, though a quick glance across the square quickly told me nothing was distracting the square's citizens from their preoccupations. I thought about the rumor that "Dark Side of the Moon" was perfectly synchronized to "Wizard of Oz" and tried to think about possible parallels between Dorothy's Kansas and Kabuki-cho. Nada. I found myself with what must have been an evil-looking smile on my face when I realized that I was welcoming the tornado and that I was wishing that Kabuki-cho and all of its wretchedness would be blown far, far away. (Take it away, I remember thinking. I hate this; take it all away.) When I lit another cigarette and looked up at the sky, nothing was there, no tornado, not even clouds that could produce hail -- nothing. I took a deep drag and wondered if I had just missed out on something, that I had been left behind by something big and important and that I would not be allowed easy escape from my surroundings whether I liked it or not.

And as if to drive the point home, a tanned girl wearing a pink tank top threw up violently on my lap.

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I met Trotsky in a bar here. "I thought you were dead," I said. "Well, that's one way of putting it," he said. Trotsky said anybody who drifts from one country to another eventually finds his way to Tokyo. "I've been here ten years now," he said. "I thought I'd stay a few weeks, and find passage to Hong Kong or even Shanghai. Somehow that didn't happen. Y'see, I went into a bar -- and stayed. Tokyo has these incredible bars. You can drink all you want here, and people don't hassle you at all. I drink and drink and they keep poring you more. When I ran out of money, I got a job teaching Russian at a storefront language school during the day and went to bars at night. Then an interesting thing happened: after three months or so, I stopped caring about the Revolution -- and I was at peace with myself. All I care about is going to the bars after work. After a while I found out that there were others like me -- I keep meeting socialists from all over, filmmakers from Poland and Hungary, painters from Mexcio and sculptors from California. All of them are working in language schools during the day drinking in the bars at night. Tokyo is a place where entire revolutions and great bodies of art die."

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I used to frequent a bar that was located above a bad noodle shop. The place opened around 11 (PM, of course) and closed around 6. The place was dark and served mostly scotch or bourbon. The place was pretty cheap even though the bartender would pour Jack Daniel's from way back when. You always saw the same faces there, and everyone there kept themselves busy by drinking continuously. Every once in a while a regular would disappear for weeks at a time and return with dull stories of his or her stay at the hospital. My turn to do this came a month or two after I turned 35. By the time I returned to the bar the place was under different management; soon thereafter I started drinking absinthe at home.

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There's a type of cloud that's supposed to appear in the sky before a powerful earthquake hits. There are photographs of "earthquake clouds" taken over cities like Kobe before huge earthquakes destroyed them; however, these photographs have the same odor given off by photographs of UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti -- you get the idea. And yet I find myself looking up in the sky whenever a city somewhere is hit by a big quake, hoping -- praying -- I won't see something that would suggest Tokyo would be next.

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A woman friend and a bad painter told me this one over a bottle of tequilla: "There's this one nightmare I keep seeing over and over. I'm in my room, and a buch of commandos wearing masks and heavy boots come rushing in. They all point their guns at me and one of them looks at me and says, 'No, she isn't it.' They all leave without saying anything. Naturally this all scares me like anything and I scream and cry for hours. Then another group of commandos come rushing in and point their guns at me and leave after one of them decides that I wasn't who it was they were looking for. Then another bunch of commandos come in (and leaves). Then another. Then another. This continues for days, weeks. But when it stops I don't feel release and instead I get this sinking feeling that I don't matter at all -- and I wake up feeling like a zero."

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I saw a vampire once on the subway. It was really late, and everybody in the car was either drunk or half asleep. The vampire looked really pathetic in his stained Hawaiian shirt and ancient bowling shoes -- in fact, I would have considered him just another one of those sorry losers you always see on the subway had I not seen him plunge huge fangs into the neck of the heavily drunk girl sitting right next to him. I laughed out loud at the vampire's shocked expression when he discovered that the girl's blood was green. Though the vampire was too busy throwing up to have a look, I'm quite sure that beneath the girl's mousy hair were a pair of pointed ears.