Throughout my life, I’ve been plagued by persistent memories of surreal snippets of film and TV–a door breathing at the top of a flight of stairs; a bouncing red ball George C. Scott can’t get rid of; a man with a glass hand who discovers he must spend over a thousand years alone. They are sort of the visual equivalent of an earworm. For some of the snippets I could remember the source; for others I couldn’t.

All of them can most likely be attributed to my habit of staying up too late.

I’ve heard that it’s normal for teenagers to suffer from “Lost Boys” syndrome: up all night, sleep all day, and it’s true my oldest has begun to develop that quirk, but I’ve retained that well into my late 40’s. During long vacations, I slowly invert my sense of time and find myself staying up later and later.

When I did that as a teenager, not long after we got cable, I discovered a USA Network program called Night Flight that came on long after my mother had gone to bed. Night Flight specialized in showing odd things that no other program would show. Being a good Christian lad and member of the First Baptist Church in Hayden, Colorado, I wasn’t supposed to watch MTV–because it showed such degenerate, racy fare as The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star”. Bow Wow Wow’s version of “I Want Candy” and Tony Basil’s “Mickey.” Night Flight, though, was running the uncensored version of Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film” and running special features on videos too racy for MTV.

(Note: NO, I wasn’t, technically, supposed to watch Night Flight either, and NO, I didn’t have any discipline when no one of authority was around.)

(Note to Young People Under a Certain Age: MTV used to actually play music.)

I remember Peter Ivers spouting crap at the beginning of “New Wave Theater” and interviews with punk bands and young comedians. It also showed cartoons, Japanese action shows, short films and cult movies. For many years I remembered snippets of a cartoon where giants kept small humans as pets. Thanks to the internet, a couple years ago I searched around and figured out I must have seen Fantastic Planet one night. I also remember seeing Kentucky Fried Movie there and something that I think was The Clash’s Rude Boy.

Night Flight wasn’t watched, so much as experienced. Add in a half-asleep teenager with a brain of questionable status, and you get something epic.

Oddly, I didn’t watch it much after we left Colorado. I don’t know if that was for the best or not.

I just finished two fingers of the first bourbon I ever drank: Jim Beam. I remember drinking it for the first time when I was 10 or so. I didn’t drink very much and I didn’t drink it on purpose. I grabbed the wrong glass and thought it was iced tea. Luckily, there wasn’t much left in the glass which meant my entire head didn’t burst into flames, only my throat.

I also remember my parents giving us very watered down white wine for Christmas or Thanksgiving. The amount was barely enough to make the bottom of the glass wet.

All this has me thinking about one of the quirks of life that amazes me to this day: the way our tastes change over time.

As I became a teenager, I would try an alcoholic beverage that was called “beer”, more specifically Coors Light, and that pretty much meant that I wouldn’t be a huge fan of beer until a trip to England when I was at university. Mind you, I would drink beer, but it was mostly an alcohol delivery system, not something to be savored.

Dark beer eventually gave way to screwdrivers (orange juice and vodka) which gave way to Bloody Mary’s which, for reasons I still don’t understand, gave way to straight vodka, scotch and bourbon. (I’m guessing lack of money was involved and remembering that Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar liked straight vodka because it didn’t taste like anything which probably got me to try it.) I’m still not a fan of mixed drinks, especially sweet ones. I’ve slowly developed a taste for wine, despite unfortunate adventures with kosher wine and things called Mad Dog and Night Train.

Now, here in Japan, I’ve rediscovered beer and become an amateur sake snob.

I had a similar journey with tea. When I was a kid I remember putting enough sugar in a glass of iced tea to have a centimeter of undissolved sugar at the bottom of the glass. I remember gagging the few times I drank unsugared tea (that’s “unsweet tea” to those of you from the U.S. South). Now, though, and I don’t know why, tea is the only thing I can’t drink sweet. When I was in Albania I used to horrify the Albanians, for many reasons actually, but especially for drinking hot tea without sugar.

Finally, there’s coffee–blood of life. The first coffee I ever tasted was a gruesome concoction of non-dairy creamer and artificial sugar. When I started drinking it at university, I ordered elaborate coffee drinks such as the double espresso, double double chocolate, double mint-mocha at the Espresso Royale which were basically desserts served with the coffee inside to save on cup cleaning costs. A lack of money got me back into tea and got me to try something they called “Americano” which the coffee shop claimed was a regular cup of Joe. Then I saw them make it and realized it was just a shot of espresso diluted with hot water. After that I put aside that “Tea, Earl Gray, Hot” bullshit and all that water ruined nonsense and started drinking “pure” coffee.

As for Jim Beam, it’s smoother and sweeter than I remember. Of course, I haven’t had any since I was 10.

Over the past couple years, I’ve managed to lose almost three notches on my belt or just over two inches on my waist. (For the metrically minded, I’ve lost around 6 cm). I don’t weigh myself, so I don’t know how much actual weight has been lost.

This has been accomplished with very little conscious effort on my part. I’ve reduced my bread and pasta intake, increased the push-ups and squat kicks in the morning, and decreased snacking except for nuts and some beef jerky and the occasional Reese’s Peanut Butter cup binge right before Valentine’s Day when they are available in Japan. (I can quit any time I want; I just like having them in the country.)

The main source of my weight loss, though, has been a simple formula: Regular Meal Size + Growing Eight Year Old + Growing Teenager = Reduced Portions for Daddy (and fewer leftovers).

In the past, because we have a small kitchen and, by US standards a small refrigerator, and therefore don’t have much room to store leftovers and because Japan has no mechanical version of them, I was the house garbage disposal. Imagine the snaggle-toothed pig under the sink in the Flintsones’ house and that’s pretty much what I was.

Now, however, that is what our daughters are for. The youngest likes to eat and the oldest, especially if she likes the food, can put away shocking amounts. They’ve also got long arms, allowing them to reach food without third-party intervention, even when the plates are closer to my end of the table. Just like THAT, the last piece of chicken is gone. I look away for a second because they say Jennifer Lawrence is standing behind me and the last shuumai disappears mysteriously (as does Jennifer Lawrence as she can apparently only be seen by females, or something like that, or I’m just slow).

We try to keep a mix of both healthy and tasty snacks, and Japanese sweets are less, well, sweet than those from the USA. Cinnabon cinnamon rolls were too big and sweet for Japanese taste and now there’s only one store left in all of Japan. Krispy Kreme has done well–the original store had two-hour waits–but most Japanese only get one at a time along with a cup of coffee. Bags of potato chips are not much larger than most free samples handed out in grocery stores. (Oh, and I’m now competing for the chips, too. Remind me again, why was it necessary for our girls to eat solid food?)

It’s also been fun to see which snacks each girl likes. The youngest loves red licorice; the oldest can’t stand it. The oldest likes Reese’s Peanut Butter cups; the youngest doesn’t (although they seem to be growing on her). Unfortunately, that means I have to fight for all those, too.

Luckily, there are still places I can reach that they can’t. That will change soon though; the oldest is almost as tall as her mother.

Time to invest in a safe.

It occurred to me this morning that I left out part of the story in yesterday’s post. Because it was karate practice night, the theme was, by default, supposed to be sports related. Then, as I got writing, I got hung up on the kissing and forgot to mention the sports–or more specifically the sports injury. (This, perhaps, reveals a lot more about me than I care to know.)

Therefore, since today I’ve hit a major lull in the ideas for daily posts, I’ll revisit yesterday’s post a bit, and add a couple odd details.

As I said yesterday, when I was in As Is, I was performing several parts. Because it was a low-budget graduate student production, we were expected to provide our own costumes. I seem to remember telling the costume designer something to the effect that I didn’t have anything that was really gay looking. (Shut up, all of you, right now. Just shut up. Stop snorting.) The costume designer said “No, just bring some of your cool clothes from your closet”. I said something to the effect that she’d probably better come look at my closet herself.

She managed to find a few usable things, but I suspect she’s still recovering from the horrors she found there.

Now, as for the sports, playing several parts also meant I often had quick costume changes. If you’ve only ever been in the audience for a play, one of the truly remarkable things you never see is the highly coordinated, very carefully timed machine involved in a costume change. In one case I had a monologue where I was a scientist who’d been rejected by his peers after they discovered he had AIDS and then I had two minutes to get back stage, get into a new costume and be back on stage as a new character who was, as one critic described him, a “minty” AIDS hotline worker who actually got to deliver the line “You go, girlfriend” with every cliche stereotype the director told me to muster.

The problem is, the Purple Masque Theater is a thrust style stage built in part of an old football stadium. Because of where I was standing, to do the change, I had to run outside, run across the grass, run in through the front of the theater, run down the hall whilst undoing my belt and get backstage where a team of costumers would be waiting to simultaneously strip and dress me, redo my hair and then shove me back on stage.

The early stages of all that went well. I got outside and got across the grass, but as I made the turn into the entrance to start the run down the hall way, my left foot slipped and I landed on my left knee cap with an impressive smack that tore my trousers and bloodied up my knee. I then hobbled down the hallway to the impatient and angry costume team who told me I was late as they stripped me and dressed me and shoved me on stage. I then got to hobble around through a couple more costume changes.

Now, if I were smart, and if you’ve been reading this blog regularly you know how doubtful that notion is, I would have gone to the campus clinic to have my knee checked out. I, of course, did not. I don’t know if it’s psychological or If I gave my kneecap a good chip or hairline fracture, but it still hurts on occasion to this day (especially now that I’m writing about it).

The funny part is, because of the way we got our costumes, it was my trousers I ruined doing all that not the costume department’s.

For reasons I don’t remember, although I suspect a woman or some kind of art credit was involved, I signed up to take acting classes when I was at university. One of my teachers was Charlotte MacFarland and what I remember most about her class was that she was great at bringing out what few talents some of us had and that the final exam consisted of going to a party where we could eat and drink at our pleasure.

When you’re a student, this seems like the greatest idea for a final exam ever and it would have been, except that we had to go in character, as the character we’d performed in our final monologue, and we had to stay in character for at least an hour (maybe two, I don’t remember). Again that could be great, except in my case I chose to do the “To be or not to be speech” from Hamlet which meant I had to go to the party as Hamlet.

Let me assure you, Hamlet is not the guy you want to be at a party–you have to wear black, be depressed, run from ghosts, talk to skulls, call women whores and try to kill people named Claudius (actually, now that I think about it, that’s pretty much what I’m like at parties anyway).

Other acting classes were also invited and, at the party, I apparently impressed a graduate student instructor/director who was casting a play and he invited me to audition. Auditioning for a play is a strange process involving cold reading characters and interacting with strangers and every now and then some of you are sent home and others stay, hoping not to be sent home at the last minute. To cut to the chase, I was cast in multiple roles.

The play was As Is which is one of the first plays to deal with the AIDS crisis and it’s effect on the LGBT community. I therefore had the unusual experience of impressing my mom by telling her I’d been cast in a play and then freaking her out by coming out to her, so to speak, that I was playing a number of homosexual men and that a kiss was involved. (See, I told you there were kissed cowboys.) Actually, I might not have mentioned the kiss. I may have left that as a surprise.

To her credit, my mom attended the play and stayed for the entire performance, although I’ve heard from friends in the audience, the kissing scene didn’t go over very well. It wasn’t easy, at first, on my part either, but once you get in character, and don’t have a choice, it gets easier. The director was also keen on acting exercises designed to build trust among the cast. Oddly, we all trusted each other enough to smooch on stage, but a lot of us didn’t like each other outside of the theater.

After that, I acted in several small plays at the Purple Masque Theater and played Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which means I was the only un-funny character in the entire play. I also did some back stage stuff, including being Light Board Operator for one play. (Note to any future Lighting Designers in the audience: Don’t Change the LIghting Cues At Dress Rehearsal One Night Before The Play Opens!)

Acting was always fun, but it was never a passion. I walked away from it as easily as I walked toward it. I did save a few techniques and voice excercises here and there that I use in my higher level English classes. I also learned to project my voice pretty well, which helps a lot with junior high school classes.

I didn’t kiss any more cowboys though–although there was that drunk Japanese guy at a beach party once, but that’s another story that also involved a little red-haired girl.

A couple weeks ago forces from two different countries and two different walks of life combined to steal away what little productivity I have left. A YouTuber/soulless ginger from the Southern USA and a soulless Canadian bureaucrat, by colossal coincidence (Coincidence? I think not!) nearly simultaneously introduced me to the online game World of Tanks. It’s basically a slow-moving first-person shooter involving tanks. The best part is I can speak with the soulless Canadian bureaucrat over the internet while we play. (I realized after we first played that it was the first time I’d spoken to him directly in 15 years. Welcome to the modern world of modern friendship. This makes sense when you keep in mind I’m also friends with New Zealand knife maker I’ve never spoken to at all.)

All this has me thinking about computer games because the first computer game I remember playing too much was Combat on our Atari Video Computer System we got a couple hundred years ago (plus or minus a few years) when we lived in Hayden, Colorado. The most amazing thing about the Atari 2600 was that my mom also liked playing, although her favorite game was backgammon, and that we still managed to play outside a lot, even in winter.

The first thing I remember learning from that game system was that computer games cheat. My mom still has a picture of the tv screen after the backgammon game gave itself double nines on six sided dice. We also learned, when mom got the famously buggy ET: The Extra-Terrestrial game. (By the way, if, by any chance, she still has it, I encourage her to sell it.)

I also remember a little cafe or shop across from the park in Hayden having, at one time or another, Space Race, Asteroids and Pac Man and burning a few quarters on those (about the equivalent of a dollar now).

My chance at fame and glory came in or around junior high when our school got Apple computers and they attempted to teach us programming. Some of my friends were programming surprisingly fun computer games yet, try as I might, I just couldn’t get interested in that. I liked playing games, not playing with code. To this day, I’m more interested in playing computer games than getting under the hood and trying to make them better or figuring out how to make my own. It’s one of the few activities I can truly surrender to. I could sit for hours with my Coleco Electronic Quarterback (hey, you had blockers and could pass. Awesome.) Decades later, I could play Civilization II for days on end without eating or sleeping and consider it time well spent.

Give me a book, though, and I’ll be analyzing it from the opening line and collecting ideas and tricks. Or I’ll be criticizing it and figuring out how to make it better or giving up halfway through because it’s not going anywhere. I’m basically the writer/narrator from John Barth’s story “Lost in the Funhouse” who can’t help but comment on the story as it goes along because he knows so much about the tricks the story is trying to pull. Sit next to me when we’re watching TV and you’ll soon consider moving to a new room where you can watch without the running color commentary and attempts to guess the next line.

I can surrender to movies–I’ve never walked out of a movie; I’ve been close, though, very close–but that critical eye is always watching.

Now it’s time to go fight with some tanks or stop the creepers from reaching my base. I haven’t decided yet.

Because baseball season has started here in Japan, and because that means there’s nothing on the news other than lengthy baseball reports and features, I’m in the mood to talk about sports. More specifically, I’m in the mood to talk about why I’m not a big fan of baseball.

I’ve said before that baseball is simply a group of people standing in a field watching two other people play catch while some jerk with a stick tries to interrupt them. I’ve then had baseball fans say that I don’t appreciate the subtlety and nuance of baseball. Fair enough, but this strikes me as damning with faint praise. It’s basically the same as having this conversation:

A–Dude, your sister’s ugly.
B–No, dude, her looks have subtlety and nuance.
A–Whatever, dude.

My disinterest in baseball can be directly blamed on Colorado. When I was growing up, Colorado had no professional baseball team. They did have the Triple-A minor league Denver Bears and the first sporting event I remember attending at a major stadium was one of their games. I remember having been there, and I remember my cousin three or four times removed catching either a home run or a foul ball and joke-complaining that he’d dropped his napkin whilst doing so, but I don’t remember anything else about the game.

Also, until I was 10 or 11, Hayden, Colorado didn’t have any form of little league baseball, preferring to produce rather impressive football teams (to my Europeans readers, that’s the form of football where people attempt to knock each other down, not the one where people flop around pretending they’ve been shot) As a result, baseball wasn’t imprinted in my bones from a young age. (I still can’t judge where a fly ball is going to land.) In fact, if I remember correctly, I played “organized” soccer in p.e. class, and remember some European pro from the old North American Soccer League visiting our school and giving us tips long before I remember playing organized baseball.

What Colorado did have was basketball and the Denver Nuggets–I remember getting to see them play after some Boy Scout event and watching the great Dan Issel do a backwards dunk. Oddly, although I played basketball in junior high and for a year in high school (“play” being a very strong word for what I did) I never became a fan of professional basketball and couldn’t care less about who wins the championship. (College basketball, though, that’s a different story.)

More importantly, Colorado had the Denver Broncos. Although I sucked at football even worse than I sucked at basketball and didn’t play it at all, Hayden had, at the time, at least as I recall, a football culture that dominated all other sports and I’ve always been a football fan. Having grown up with the Orange Crush, I became a Bronco’s fan, gladly accepting the embarrassment and sense of tragicomedy that often accompanies that choice. Even after we moved back to Kansas right before my junior year of high school, I remained a Bronco’s fan. This, of course, meant constantly defending that choice:

A–Dude, you’re in Kansas now. You have to cheer for the Kansas City Chiefs.
B–Why does living in Kansas mean I have to cheer for a team from Misery, er, Missouri?
A–Because, well, because they have KANSAS in their name and that’s all that’s on TV, dude.
B–Whatever, dude.

I admit to having a soft spot for the Chiefs (Chieves?) and like to see them do well, but when I finally got to see them play Denver live at Arrowhead Stadium, I was decked out in my Bronco Brother Crap in the midst of many rabid Chief’s fans, costing me the friendship of my travel companion, at least during the game and until we were a safe distance away from the stadium.

Unfortunately, football season is a long way off. Until then, I’ll find myself wishing the Boys of Summer, actually only played in the summer.