Today’s soundtrack: good times around the corner
Today at 10:02pm: Cooking. (out of cash)


I’m up and I’m down. After a three-week hiatus The Corporation finally started using me again. Past few weeks have been a blur. Had to pull a couple all-nighters to put the Japanese bag project to bed. Also the Germans ain’t paid me yet. Where’s my money you lousy krauts. I’ll take it in Marks if I have to, just cut my cheddar.

So Seiji scored an extra ticket to the Knicks-Rockets game last night. I was all psyched to go and see Yao Ming. Then I remembered today is Lam’s birthday and I didn’t get him nothing yet so I gave the ticket to him. Lam would appreciate it more anyway; he’s a hardcore basketball fan whereas I have never paid attention to more than seven consecutive minutes of basketball in my life. I heard that Yao guy is good though.

My upcoming Cornell gig fell through, but at the end of the month I’m off for Madison, Wisconsin. I’m actually excited to go because I’ll get to see a new state. Tell you the truth I’m not even sure exactly where Wisconsin is but I know it’s up north and I think it’s shaped like a mitten.

I’m so sleep-deprived nothing is making sense. I’m scared fuckless of subterreanean bioterror attacks so the other day I walked to work. It’s about sixty fucking blocks each way and it takes an hour. I was tired but cyanide-free from avoiding the subway. I don’t want to die underground, it’s bad enough you’re going to bury me there.

Every day since then I’ve taken the subway just halfway (along the unlikely-to-be-attacked route) then walked the rest of the way. It’s my bad luck that I’m off one of the most populous subways with the busiest station stops.

From all the extra walking the shoes are putting weird bruises on my feet. It’s good exercise, no? Al Qaeda is indirectly helping me get in shape. And hapkido takes up the slack. It’s too bad you can’t destroy anthrax spores with roundhouse kicks.

Tony scored a copy of “Infernal Affairs” so I’m having a little screening at my place tomorrow night. Gonna have to borrow the neighbor’s Big TV. (I have little tv.)

Holy shit, I saw “Hero” today and it’s fucking goooood. I almost cried and shit, like a little bitch. I don’t know why the Jet wastes his time with DMX when he could be making that good Zhang Yimou shit. This one is hot and has somehow made me even more in love with Maggie Cheung. This is a fucking movie movie. It took me away and all that. On weeks like these, the Kingdom of Qin is so much better than downtown Manhattan.

unfree

Today’s soundtrack: it’s just a shot away, it’s just a shot away
Today at 9:02pm: Bypassing party at X-girl (the shit was packed)


On the Playstation I drive a Lamborghini to the recording studio and slay drug lords. In real life I drive a Volkswagen to LaGuardia to pick my father up. He’s been coming in and out of town a lot lately.

Tonight he came out of the American Airlines terminal at 10pm on the dot. He’s more impatient than I am so I hardly stopped the car to let him in; he threw his bag in the back, clambered into the seat and I hit the gas.

We hit the Grand Central (Parkway), I was supposed to ferry him upstate. But he needs a lift back to the airport on Wednesday afternoon, and I have to work.

“It’s okay, I can just take the train to Grand Central (Station), then take the shuttle to LaGuardia.”

“That’s no good, dad,” I said. “I want you guys to stay out of Grand Central. On the news they keep talking about the terrorists.” So on-the-fly I decided to give him my car for the week.

The new plan is as follows: We pull over and I take the subway back to Manhattan and he drives himself upstate. On Wednesday he drives the car back to Manhattan, drops it off at my garage downtown and hops a cab to LaGuardia, problem solved.

We pulled back off the Grand Central and detoured into Flushing. In front of a 7-train station I put the hazards on while he told me how he and my mother are worried about my little brother. I told him not to worry but he wasn’t having it.

I got out of the car and he got into the driver’s seat. I told him where the gascap release and the seat adjustments are. Asked him if he was okay with driving a stick. He laughed, and I remembered that he was whipping a stickshift Karmann-Ghia through NYC traffic before I was born.

Then he pulled off, and I headed into the station. The sight of my father driving my miniscule little hatchback was kind of weird.

Still, it’s not the first Volkswagen he’s ever driven; like I said he used to have a Karmann-Ghia. That was back in 1969 and he was younger then than I am now. Weird. I picture the young him and the current me driving our VWs along the Grand Central, oblivious to the passage of time and traffic. Back then he was worried about eating; Me, I’m worried about eating Anthrax.

On the 7-train I settled into my seat and started fishing around in my bag for my MD player. I was psyched to spend the hour train ride listening to music--I just burned some new Cody ChestnuTT shit and goddamn is it hot.

Unfortunately I forgot to bring headphones. I brought the MD player but no goddamn headphones. I was glad Seiji wasn’t here to see this--“Now who’s tech-retarded?” he’d say, holding the MD player close to his ear to see if he could hear the music.

I sighed a Charlie Brown sigh and stole surreptitious glances at the other passengers to see if anyone was worth watching. It was your typical panoply of New York immigrants, most of them from provinces you’d have trouble finding on a map. Across from me were two cujine girls, yapping on a cell phone and all dolled-up for their big night out in Manhattan.

At Junction Boulevard the train doors opened, and I saw National Guardsmen walking around the platform with AR-15s slung over their shoulder. Goddamn. The assault rifles here look much bigger than they do in “Vice City.”

Today’s soundtrack: big money for families having more than one
Today at 10:02am: on the phone with tech support


Last night I lost at Lotto.

It was up to $125 mil.

Which after taxes is 50-something million. That’s a lot of cheddar.

Last night I get in the door around 9:30pm. Seiji’s back from his first day at the job, apparently taking the edge off with a glass of whiskey. This is his first real job, he works for the NBA. Looks like we’ll be going to the Knicks-Rockets game, I’m psyched to see Yao.

Shady comes home soon afterwards, so now there’s three us. Each with our own Lotto ticket.

At 11pm sharp me and Seiji got our eyes glued to channel 5, watching the thing, you know, the friggin’ ping pong balls with the numbers. Both of us lost.

Shady shuffles out of his room a minute later. “You guys win?” he mumbles.

“Yeah, I won,” I say. “A hunnert and twenty-five mil. That’s why I’m still sitting here in our shithole living room, calm and in no rush to get anyplace.”

I awakened at 4:30am this morning because my biology is not cooperating with me. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I put clothes on and had some pineapple in the kitchen. Eventually I gravitated over to the laptop and started working.

Mike’s back from Japan, I just saw him and Yuka. They’re going on an afternoon date up to the museums. I might have dinner with them down at their place (down the hall) if I can make it out of Hapkido in time.

Speaking of Hapkido, the other day I was there and this thing happened. Again. There’s this one white guy there, can’t remember his name, but every time I train with/stand near Rosa he makes a comment. He’ll say something weird like “The Bobsey Twins!” or “I see the two of you are together again...” and I’m just like Whatever, White.

I think because Rosa and I are both short Koreans whose first names begin with “R” it sets gears in motion in his head. In a parallel universe I interrupt his next comment by double-drop-kicking him through a shoji screen. I’m big on parallel universes.

Did I ever tell you about Roberto? He’s the bouncer guy who last year hit me in the neck during training and I eventually had to go to the hospital. Well he was at the dojang the other night and I worked out with him, he’s one of the best guys at the school. He said good things about this one kick I’ve got so I was pretty psyched.

It means a lot to me coming from Roberto, ‘cause he’s an excellent fighter. The guy is crazy ripped too, you should see him. He’s like an inverted triangle of Latino destruction. We weren’t grappling this time so I didn’t get hit in the neck, although he did almost break my femur. In a parallel universe he kicked my femur out of a window.

The UPS man just brought me a package. It’s a copy of a magazine I wrote an article for almost a year ago; my article was delayed until recently, and they’re finally sending me a copy.

I opened the package and turned to the “Contributors” page to see if they fucked my name up or anything. They didn’t, and there’s even a little dorky thumbnail photo of me, but they completely fucked my bio up. This is the second time with this magazine. I should go down to their offices and kick some femurs.

Today’s soundtrack: the fitness institute is for the general motor man
Today at 2:02am: Dodging a clumsy drunk on St. Mark’s


It’s 5:20am, I should be asleep. What else is new.

Seiji’s crashing here now. He’s a funny kid, one of those rare cats who makes me laugh until well after the joke is over.

Fuck, Wendy’s gonna be over here in four hours with a camera crew and I’m sure to be bleary-eyed. Not to mention incoherent. Said she needs to shoot me “interacting” with people. I hope by “interacting” she means “choking” because I’m not much fun in the mornings. I really hope she wants to make a documentary about me strangling her sound guy.

We’re plotting a surprise b-day party for Mike the Photographer, he’s turning 30 and right about to blow the fuck up. After he landed the Maybelline gig he jetted off for Tokyo, and it looks like he might be getting Estee Lauder Japan. Fucking A, man.

All of us are psyched for Mike. See all of us know what it’s like to be flat-on-your-ass broke--goddamn we’ve been broke--but out of all of us, Mike was the brokest. I mean this motherfucker used to go to bars with a flask. Holy shit we were poor.

Wait a sec...I still am poor.

Do I curse too much? Dunno why I’ve become conscious of my pottymouth lately. Am I becoming sensitized? Perhaps I need to recalibrate. Mothershitassfuckbitch. There we go.

It’s funny--Seiji’s lived in Philadelphia, Tokyo and London, but this is his first time living in New York and it’s actually got him in awe. It’s some funny shit seeing this cosmopolitan bastard get all bent out of shape because crackheads stepped to him at Port Authority. I’ve dropped my girlfriend off at Port Authority and she can handle it.

The town has gotten to Seiji in other ways as well; he’s already coming home soused and rambling on about kooky get-rich-quick schemes he cooked up on the subway. I’ll write it off and say it’s the whiskey talking.

Right now he and my roommate are conked out while I sit here typing this with headphones on, listening to Elvis Costello singing “Opportunity.” Good track. This is a good song to walk through Port Authority ignoring crackheads to.

Going somewhere.
Where are you going?

Today’s soundtrack: I'm so happy.
‘Cause today, I found my friends.
They're in my head.

Today at 6:14pm: Appearing to be a reasonable facsimile of a bored hipster while flipping through Surface at the Virgin Megastore on Union Square while waiting for Cia.


After a couple hours at the dojang I got so hungry I was shaking. I showered, changed, hit the street and broke out the cell. Not many people have the number of their local diner memorized but I do.

“Hey Mohammed, it’s Rain,” I said. “I’m gonna need a Mexican omelette and a bacon cheeseburger deluxe.”

“You come pick up?”

“I come pick up.”

Five minutes later I had the food in my shaking hands. Fifteen minutes later I had most of it in my stomach and the rest of it on my face. Two abused, silver takeout containers staring at me like a shocked pair of eyes.

I eat like a barbarian when no one’s watching. If you and I end up having a meal together and I’m using my fork or chopsticks, know that I’m doing it for your benefit. I keep hoping you’ll go to the bathroom so I can bury my face in the plate and chew, chew, chew.

Saw Shanghai Knights tonight. It’s as good as or better than the original, technically speaking--Owen Wilson is funny as fuck and JC’s fight scenes are more inventive--but still somewhat disappointing. Because Jackie, man, he just can’t do it anymore. It breaks my heart.

Jackie Chan is a physical genius. You see the shit he did in “Project A” or any of the “Police Story” flicks and you’re like, Holy Fucking Shit. This is a man who gave his life to making fight sequences that bury anything else out there. But simple biology and chronology have taken over and now JC’s stuck in the abused body of a guy pushing 60.

JC originally tried to make it in the ‘States back in the early 80s. A combination of shitty scripts and poor production did him in so he went back to Hong Kong. Unless Tarentino rereleases Jackie’s older shit, American theatergoing audiences will never get to see the man in his prime. And that’s a damn shame.

Recently people with access to HK gossip channels are telling me Jackie’s quite the philanderer. They say he cheats on his wife on the regular and recently knocked up some twentysomething chick. Hey man don’t tell me that stuff, I don’t want to know. Don’t bring me down. I hate the way pictures get faded and dirty with age.

The Corporation has yet to call me back in, so I’m going on almost two weeks of no work. Gonna be fucking scary when that cash gap hits my bill cycle in a couple months. Nothing worse than knowing there’s canned fish in your dietary future.

At least there’s some interesting (if non-paying) stuff to fill my time. Wendy called me up tonight, she wants to shoot/interview me on Monday for some documentary. Subject’s kinda vague, she said it’s gonna be on “character.”

She wants to shoot in either the AsianAvenue offices or my apartment, she hasn’t made up her mind yet. My vote is for my apartment; if we shoot it here I won’t have to put Outside Pants on.

Today’s soundtrack: shinjite iru there will be...
Today at 9:02pm: Pounding the pavement in search of dinner.


I don’t know what I’d do without music. A large percentage of my day is spent with headphones on, my ears are used to being covered by the little foam pads. Things don’t make sense but you put the headphones on and everything makes sense. I need that layer of insulation.

Sometimes I wish headphones came in a full-helmet form. You’d look over at me reading my magazines at the kitchen table and in place of my head would be this big mirrored sphere.

Scratch that. It would be a big mirrored sphere with a little hole in the front and a cigarette sticking out of it.

Today my Pops called me from out-of-state. He asked me to run a simple errand for him and I kind of fucked it up. He must think his kid is such a retard. I can practically see him hanging up the phone and wondering if my mother slept with the mailman. Anyways I went to Hapkido afterwards because there’s no time or space to feel like a retard there.

Actually that’s not totally true. Today I was training with this one girl who’s a fashion model. I’m not talking about that import-car crap, I’m talking like she’s in Vogue Magazine and shit, the big time.

So we were doing these exercises where you take turns choking each other. When it was my turn to break out I accidentally tapped her nose with my fist. It wasn’t a hard shot, just a tap and she hardly noticed, but I realized if I’d gone an inch further we would have had a big fucking problem.

Block, block, blocked. I write this column on urban dating. The last installment was due last Monday, and I’m sitting here at 2 in the morning staring at a not-even-close-to-finished, messy page of disjointed sentences. I suck and I can’t even suck on time.

The column used to be good and well-received but I haven’t had a hit in months. I crank out mediocre installment after mediocre installment and I watch it suck. The readers can tell too, which is great because what I really need in my life right now is self-doubt.

I wish I was one of those people who could just blame my problems on others. That must be great, just blame others and avoid all heat. Gotta try it someday. Specifically I’d like to blame all my problems on Secretary of Labor Elaine Chow, but I’m not really sure why.


ROOMMATE: The milk’s gone bad.

ME: That fucking Chow!


Ahhhhh.

So tomorrow I’ve got to run this errand (correctly) for my Pops, then I gotta go to Paragon over on Broadway and 17th to check out bags for the bag project. I should take some pictures on the way. Maybe I will see something cool. Either way, I will be wearing headphones.

Today’s soundtrack: you’re all I want, my fantasy
Today at 9:22pm: Ignoring weird guy staring at me on the N/R. I hate the N/R-trains.


Running out of music. I am cranking Def Leppard’s “Photograph” right now to remind myself of a world where Space Shuttles held together, the Twin Towers were the tallest thing around and telephones couldn’t give you cancer.

It’s fucking busy, dude. My column is overdue, I’m setting up this college gig for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, prepping for a hapkido test on the 21st, and taking a workshop on self-publishing. I decided this year I have to fucking publish something, either a travelogue or a collection of short stories or a book about sphincters.

Once upon a time I had a literary agent waiting for me to produce something, but I waited too long and now he’s out of the business. I let myself procrastinate and get sidetracked, letting life pull me this way or that. I have to quit fucking around now or I’m gonna be a looooooser.

I hope you want to read and are willing to pay ten bucks for a travelogue written by me. If you’re not that’s okay, you can always continue to read my free blog. Perhaps you’ll enjoy my adventures as I shift from Struggling Writer to Busboy to Freelance Busboy and finally to Busboy Serial Killer.

Michael Jackson singing “Billie Jean.” Remember when that motherfucker was still black? Those were the days.

The Corporation hasn’t called me in since last Monday, which is actually good because now I can focus on my own shit. The column is giving me major agita; I can’t get shit to flow. I need writer’s laxative.

I used to have writer’s diarrhea, that was the best. Shit just kept coming out, you never knew when. You’d think you were done and sit down to watch TV, then more words would come and you’d have to run back to the keyboard.

Sitting in the corner of the keyboard, the ESC key mocks me. ESCAPE. Reminding me that right now, somewhere in the sky is an aeroplane with an empty seat. An unbooked cabin in a cruise ship. An empty room in Havana, a bare Parisian sidestreet, an unkissed girl in Shanghai.

I have wanderlust mixed with A.D.D. There’s a cure, but the pill is unwieldy. It’s shaped like a Boeing 767 flying someplace I can’t properly pronounce, like Angkor Wat.

I’m staring at my keyboard here and just realized there are a bunch of keys mocking me. FN in the lower left, which clearly stands for “Fuck Noe.” Next to that is CTRL, obvious shorthand for Can’t Take Rain Logging. Well fuck you too Mr. Keyboard. I own you bitch, I push your buttons, I hold you down.

There’s another key on the lower right: END.

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.

Today’s soundtrack: internal combustion power
Today at 11:32pm: Showing Shady’s cousins from Hong Kong how to play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City


This week I visited my grandmother, the Columbia exploded and it was Chinese New Year’s.

My grandmother has many children but no one goes to visit her anymore. I was a freshman in high school when the Challenger exploded and I didn’t think I’d hear a similar newscast in my lifetime. For Chinese New Year’s I went to Ping’s Seafood with a grip of Asian friends. We had to stand on line behind a crowd of white people, we waited 50 minutes. I don’t think that’s right.

The chow was killer though. Eggtart’s a Hong Kongite so she knows what to order.

I asked my grandmother to tell me stories, anything and everything about The Old Days. Though nearly a century old, she’s still lucid and a lot of it is fascinating to me. Unlike the neatly-packaged, self-sufficient stories of television and film, a story from an old person has no clear-cut beginning, end or conveniently discernible morals.


There wasn’t much candy in Korea, we didn’t really have that. Maybe one type. But during the Japanese occupation I was a little girl and some Japanese merchants came. They opened up a candy store.

The family who ran the candy store, they had an old woman behind the counter. Her teeth were black, dark black, like ink. I always thought that was strange. She was kind of scary.

Later the family told me that in the area of Japan they were from, the old custom was that when a woman’s husband died and she didn’t want to remarry, she painted her teeth black. She loved her husband very much and after he died she painted her teeth black.