(Photo: Willy came back home...)

Day 142: Saturday, July 30, 2011

Something is happening…

Last week there was an art book fair in Tokyo and while I was hanging out, a couple of Japanese people came up to me at different times and asked me if I was who I was, which had never happened before here (or anywhere else actually). I found out that they had seen My Little Dead Dick, which is still relatively unknown in Japan.

A few nights later, while I was at a bookstore waiting for a friend, two girls approached me as well - they were college students- and they asked the same thing. I don’t know if it was because of the heat or if it was because they were two college girls, but I started sweating a lot.

The following day while I was hanging out with my ex, she mentioned that one of her friends, who she had introduced me to at the book fair, went home that day and checked my website. After seeing it, he got so inspired that he went out and bought a camera. That was nice to hear, but I assumed she was exaggerating until yesterday at a friend’s art opening, that guy was there; he came up to me, took out his new camera, said the exact same thing as what my ex had said, and on top of that, he wanted to show me his photos someday that he had taken of his girlfriend...

After I had gotten back home, I checked my email and got a letter from my new English student. Actually she contacted me through Talking Barnacles, and asked me if I could teach her, and since she seemed nice and I needed the money, we met last weekend and to my surprise and luck- probably the first time in my 7 years of teaching English- she was stunningly beautiful. Anyways for some reason it turned out that she wanted me to give her life advice more than teach her English since she had been feeling lost lately, so for homework, I told her to do a diary to see what was floating around in her head… The email I got from her tonight was her very own 7-day diary. Before I went to sleep, I read it and by the end was touched that she would share something that personal with me as well as for the fact that she had actually followed my advice and made something quite beautiful with it.

And then finally it happened... At 3:57 a.m., the whole house began to violently shake. I ran out of my room in a panic and was greeted in the hallway by Yuki and Ian. We stood there in our underwear and waited for everything around us to settle back down.

(... but then left again.)