One last Tokyo Story...

So one morning Nick and I get up, and we're fairly hungover. I want noodles and broth - hunting for ramen. Nick eschews it for a simple apple.

I'm told that it's fairly uncommon in Japan to eat or drink at the same time as walking. It's just one of those cultural differences. I don't know if it's true or not, though I have to admit despite seeing vender machines everywhere (I call them vender now forever and always thanks to the sign in our hotel pointing to the vender machine), I rarely saw people walking with coffee in hand and so on.

So Nick gets this beautiful softball size apple. And we're walking down a drag in Shibuya and Nick is chomping away. There's this guy standing in the middle of the street, a recent graduate of the too cool for school school for the cool. It's more in his attitude and body language than anything. And he sees Nick, points and gets a shit eating grin on his face and says "GENKI GAIJIN!" This guy was so happy to see a blonde dude walking and eating an apple he was happier than Nick was eating the apple.

Every day I walked through Shibuya I'd see this guy standing in the middle of the street, trying to look cool. On the last day i thought, fuck it... So I walked up to him and made apologies and asked him if I could take his picture cause I was from New York and thought he was stylish. He got all shy. Then his Brazilian friend convinced him to do it, cause I was from New York.



Then they got all into it and wanted their homies to get in, too.



So that's the guy who was happy to see Nick eat an apple.

_

I spent a day in Seattle to visit my family, as I rarely see them any more. Or tried to. I was assaulted by the most hardcore jetlag I've ever suffered, so the first day in Seattle I slept and then was wide awake through the night in a hotel room. Odd way to decompress. No matter how nice a hotel room is there's something about the inabillity to open a window and that strange hiss of climate control that always reminds you that home is far away.

Here's my little sister Heather and her friend Mary, celebrating Mary's 28th birthday with dinosaur stick on tattoos. I got a Spinosaurus, which hasn't washed off yet two days later. Maybe it's permanent.



Heather once played in The Gossip way back when. These days she's in law school and doing installation art.

My older sister Arie just bought a house with her boyfriend. This really blows me away. One of us has become an actual homeowner. I'm very happy for her.

I took two showers in one night in the hotel, just running hot water over me and thinking. My body is a mess. I lost a ton of weight on the trip, and gained some strength from being in the ocean so much... But three and a half weeks of flying, eating nearly every meal in restaurants, has left me drained and my skin breaking out in zits like a teenager. I haven't slept for more than four hours in one go in weeks. There has to be a way to travel like this and not fuck your body up. It's probably got something to do with not flying United across the ocean.

But my mind is in really good shape. Energized, illuminated, having learned many things, and answered some big questions I've had lately with even bigger, better questions.