Sometimes I Miss Being a Dope Fiend

At least when I walked around with a head full of acid, I had a ready-made explanation when I encountered things that were utterly baffling, strange, surreal, and unbelievable.

Sometimes I miss those days, because now, when I experience things that seem unreal, but I know arereal, having to cope with them without the plausible deniability of it being just a hallucination is almost too weird to handle.

Almost...

I'm not sure, but there is a chance I will spend my Christmas having dinner with a retired AV star and her manager in Osaka for research purposes.

Read that again.

Let it marinatefor a second.

Cool? Maybe.

Weird? Utterly.

Tragic? Just a pinch.

I am certain that should this happen, by next summer it will have become one of my better stories. And I am admittedly kind of tickled at the prospect.

Even if I don't get tickled at dinner.

But what am I supposed to tell my mother???

"Sorry I couldn't come to Florida, because I had to fly to Japan and interview a former porn star. But I bought her dinner... 'tis the season and all that... and I took pictures, like I know you wanted me to..."

A long time ago, I realized I wasn't like other kids.

It was probably around the time my mother called meabnormal .

To a great extent I accepted that maybe my life was never going to be about cheerleaders, bowling leagues and having my own chair in the living room that no one dared sit in except the dog.

And it hasn't been.

Usually by choice.

That's not the hard part. Just like it's not hard listening to my parents tell people I have an interesting life nowbecause I was always weird then. I can't say they're wrong on either of those counts.

I have no problem with the weirdness I bring on myself. I can't whine (too much) about a sense of isolation in Hong Kong if I'm the one who moved me to a place where there is a language barrier of great proportion andI refuse to engage in even remotely social activity.

Unless my arm is being twisted by Shan Chen in a school uniform.

Did I say that or just thinkit???

But my point is that  I do all those things to me.

What I struggle with, on occasion, are the times when life gets twisted on me without my active consent or participation.

Please believe me, I didn't set out to have what is, even for me, a dangerously iconoclastic Christmas. I just ended up within the realm of possibility for it to happen. I of course take responsibility for it in broad terms; it's not like these people asked mefor the interview. I was going to Japan anyway, so I figured, why not see if this works?

From the looks of it, it just might.

The only thing worse than trying to do somethingjust because you know you can try is having your effortsucceed .

Besides, I also confess to certainly getting a nice leering kick out of the horrifically bent nature of the enterprise. If you can't have Christmas at home with the family, just go tearing off in the other direction as far and as fast as you can.

And I think some people in my sphere of influence will benefit from asking me what I did over Christmas and hearing my answer. It may terrify, offend, or puzzle them, and I say good. They need it, or maybe just I do.

Then again, I can also easily concede that spending 12 days on my own in a foreign country just to look at guitars in Ochanomizu and interview someone over dinner who used to make a living doing things that not even I find sexy is kind of , well, pathetic. Either from a 'creepy AV fanboy' perspective, or from the 'alone at Christmas' angle.

I mean, let's be honest, I willask her to take a picture with me, if for no other reason than who would ever believe me otherwise? And I also admit that I hope it happens on Christmas just so that I am not utterly f@#$ing alone all day.

There's a joke there about f@#$ingtogether , but I'll just let that go...

But let me not kid anyone; if I stay in Hong Kong, I'll be by myself too. By choice. Because it's just the way I am.

When I look back and write about my life, there will be a perhaps larger number of somewhat unique events compared to someone who lived a more normal life. Like the guy with the chair.

He probably never ran into someone he knows from Hong Kong in Taipei. And he definitely didn't do it in the company of two women who don't speak English that he brought to Taiwan simply because he knew it would be a goof of enormous proportions, especially considering how crap his Cantonese was. And he won't have one of those women verbally sh*t all over Taiwan in a taxi stuffed with these two women,and two female Taiwanese friends of his, and himself, and the Taiwanese taxi driver. He won't be involved in what nearly became a nationalistically motivated physical confrontation involving six people inside of 20 cubic feet. He won't get to watch that evening unfold, or see the insulting companion devolve into drunken, slobbery apologies to Taiwan and everyone in it, saying that now she sees how nice it is, while remaining sober the whole night. He won't get to see her do this four times. He probably wouldn't end up sleeping by himself all weekend either.

But all that's just hypothetical. I mean, do you think something like that could actually happen?

My memoirs will be published post-mortem for legal reasons.