Today’s soundtrack: that September, in the rain
Today at 8:02pm: Sitting around a table with eight good friends


My friend Seiji is crashing my place for a month. I slept on his grandmother’s floor in Tokyo a lot. I used to be a big floor-sleeper.

Fridays and Saturdays we’d to go to these hip hop clubs in Shibuya. Or house clubs in Ebisu, lounge spots in Aoyama, pubs in Shinjuku. Pumping bass and thousand-yen cocktails, girls with skirts shorter than your span of attention.

Both of us lived an hour away in Saitama-ken so afterwards we’d cab it over to his grandmother’s place in Setagaya. Four in the morning but she didn’t care and in the mornings she’d make us breakfast.

I met so many people and I was a different sort of person back then. It’s weird seeing Seiji because it brings me back to that time period. I was this lost kid living on the outskirts of a foreign city, spending money that wasn’t money, just multicolored paper.

I had a Mac 520c, a bicycle I’d ride to work and a cell phone you couldn’t get in the ‘States. I had a career on the back burner, an ex-girlfriend in Hong Kong who hated my fucking guts and too much on my mind.

Sundays we’d get brunch at this café called Aux Bacchanales in Harajuku. There was a café across the street called Des Artistes or something, I can’t remember the fucking name but it was all red inside. One night we were hanging out there and started talking to these two supercute girls, Girl A and Girl B.

I was into Girl A but somehow ended up on a date a week later with Girl B. Nothing ever came of it. My Japanese sucked and her English was nonexistent. I can’t remember where we went to dinner and that bothers me.

Now I’m back in New York and nothing is the same.

Traffic swirls around me, buildings rise and fall. Girls say yes and no, phone numbers change, planes take off and come back again. The dollars run through my fingers and I can’t find the time.