You
enter the world imagining you can do anything, because your mind knows you can do anything, because your mind is aligned with the universe.
Then reality piles up around you and you realize you can’t do anything because you’re
so helpless and small and inexperienced.
I don't know how you deal with that. I hope it's still working, whatever it is.
If you’re like me, someone eventually makes you go somewhere before and
after school, and that place will have a super connector that will open you up
to a world beyond your wildest dreams.
Not only will the world be at your fingertips, but you will actually control
this world with your fingertips. No
longer small and helpless, you walk through the Himalaya Mountains, run through
the Amazon Jungle, traverse the Sahara Desert, swim in the deepest depths of
the Pacific Ocean and find the gold star atop the pyramids. If you pay attention to the clues on how to
solve the puzzles as you play, fight hard and persist toward your goal, there just might be a princess
waiting to meet you. And if you’re
really lucky, she’ll join you for your next adventure and conquer the world in
her own way. If you’re a woman, I’m
sorry that there weren’t more games where you got to fight and win a
prince. There should be. Then again, if you’re reading this, you’re
likely past the video game stage, and you’ll be happy to know that it's much more fun to do this in real life. I'm still working on it, walking around the world, solving its puzzles, fighting against my own self, persisting towards something that I hope is the best, but until then, I try to enjoy the rest between each fight test, with increasing finesse and authentic zest.
I grew
up in suburban America, on Long Island, a place that used to be beautiful with
wetlands, marshes and meadows, and was slowly transformed into one long strip
mall. I shouldn’t speak as though that’s
my own nostalgia, as it had been transformed by the time I entered the world,
and it was my father and grandfather who reminisced about the good old days of
wide open spaces where you could still have an adventure in your backyard. Although shy in public, I was very
rambunctious when left to my own devices playing in the backyard. I had endless energy and enthusiasm when I
played with my imagination. I
loved running and dreaming. My mother thought
I had an imaginary friend named “Lenny” because I kept running back and forth
and yelling stories and beginning every sentence with, “And then he.. And then
he… And then he…”, but she thought I was saying, “And Lenny did this, and Lenny
did that.” When I was old enough to go
to school, my mom had to go to work as a social worker and drop my sister and
me at the babysitter’s house. They only
lived a few blocks away, but her kids owned Japan’s greatest treasure: a
Nintendo Entertainment System.
I was
five years old the first time I played Nintendo. Since we were guests we always had to wait
our turn to play Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt and Duck Tales. I loved all of them, and had a strange
connection with Duck Hunt because my dad’s passion is duck hunting, and Duck
Tales because his passion is carving and painting duck decoys. I have never shared either passion with him,
but back then it seemed like I did somehow.
Either way, Super Mario Bros. was the best adventure ever. And Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3 were even better.
Everything
you need to know about life is in Super Mario Brothers. All you have to do to find your love is to
hop over the bad guys, and if they won’t leave you alone, jump on their head
and they’ll get the idea. Everything you
see has a question mark on it, and the only way to find out if there’s treasure
inside is to use your head. And of
course, who can forget the power-up mushrooms?
They’re rare and cloaked in mystery, but if you use your head and eat the
mushroom, you’ll not only feel bigger with greater confidence and stamina, but
you might even get a powerful 1-up for your life. And if you’re really lucky, you’ll find an
invincibility star, and no one in their right mind will mess with you after
that. I don’t remember the music on
Super Mario Brothers for Nintendo, but my parents eventually caved in and
bought me a Game Boy for my sixth birthday, so I spent most of my youth playing
the black-and-white version of Super Mario Land. On the plus side, the invincibility song was
the “Can-Can” dance.
My
other favorite game, for both Game Boy and Nintendo, was the Teenage Mutant
Ninja Turtles. They were a cartoon
creation based on the ancient art of Ninja from Japan, although besides that
there wasn’t really anything Japanese about them. They were enormous mutant turtles who lived in
the sewers with a master rat because society wouldn’t accept them for who they
were. But they saved the day anyway, and
seemed to have an awesome time while doing it.
Most of my young vocabulary came from that show, words like “awesome”, “dude”
and “gnarly”. They also loved pizza. Better yet, they were named after four of the
greatest artists in the history of the world: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello
and Raphael. I didn't appreciate that then, but I do now. They each had cool Japanese
weapons, such as a sword, nun-chucks, a staff and sais. They beat the evil Shredder, the leader of
the Foot Clan, time and again. I definitely spent a lot of age six beating the Ninja Turtles game on a two inch screen.
When I
moved upstate to the country with my family, I didn’t have any friends the
first few weeks of summer and then school.
Luckily, my parents had finally consented to letting me buy my own Super
Nintendo Entertainment System with all of the birthday and Christmas money I
had saved from relatives. They were very
reluctant to do so because they thought it ruined my imagination and would lead
to me spending more time on my butt in front of a television and less time
running around outside. Since I’d become
obsessed with sports there was no way to stop me from running around outside,
and video games actually served as a perfect balancing act for recreation when
I was too physically tired from the outdoors.
My mom even had to concede that it was better than most TV because at
least I was interacting with the images and completely involved in everything
that happened, participating in the world instead of merely observing and
absorbing it.
That’s
how I got countless hours of training exploring the world of the newest form of
human imagination. By then Super Mario
had upgraded to Super Mario World (where he rode a dinosaur named Yoshi) and
Super Mario All-Stars, which consisted of all three major Super Mario Bros.
games from the original Nintendo on one cartridge. More importantly, Donkey Kong Country
entered my life. Donkey Kong Country was the most
cutting edge game ever created at the time. The graphics were more visually stunning and three-dimensional than anything
before it, and most importantly, it was really fun and fluid. You simply ran and bounced and rolled and
hopped across the board, (1161) collecting bananas in search of your misplaced
horde. I remember thinking back then
that there must have been something special about Japan if they could figure
out how to design all of these cutting edge games before anyone else. The end credits had plenty of Western names,
but all of those funky Japanese names that scrolled by made it evident that
they were the true masters of the art form. That and they were clearly the ones designing the weird yet irresistibly catchy theme music.
It wasn’t
until 8th grade that I had an actual real life encounter with Japan,
and that, like most of my international experience, was brought to me by my
sister. She had started a habit of
befriending most of the exchange students at our school because she’d spent so
much time meeting people from around the world in hospitals and developing an
insatiable hunger for knowing more about the world, and not just the world where
she had to live, but the entire world with all of its beautiful differences and
contradictions. I went to Japan
because my sister showed me it was worth being interested in beyond video games.
When I
was thirteen Emily befriended Toshiko from Tokyo. She stayed with a nice family in town. They liked camping a lot, but Toshi was a city girl, so she found herself
hanging out at our house with Emily so many weekends that she was practically
another member of the family. She was a
senior and I was only in middle school, but she praised me to no end because I
worked hard in school, did well at sports and didn’t get into trouble. Whenever my older sister was mean to me or
criticized me--as it’s every older sibling’s duty to do to make the younger
sibling tough--Toshi would jump to my defense and tell Emily to leave me alone and be nice to me. Except for the
time I played basketball in the driveway with my boots on because it was muddy. Toshi liked fashion, and she approached me as
soon as I came inside and said, “Ben, you are perfect, but why do you wear
BOOTS when you play basketball? You
shouldn’t do that!” I just really
loved playing basketball, and it was too muddy to use my basketball sneakers.
A year
later Toshi came back to stay with us for most of the summer, and she brought
her best friend Kadumi with her. Thus, the
summer before I entered high school, I had these two Japanese girls living in
my house, mostly hanging out with my sister, mostly praising how perfect I was
because I was the shorter non-threatening younger brother. Then again, they were also very
confused by my strange sense of humor and hard rock musical preferences.
One night they made Japanese desserts for us, and I was so picky that I
wouldn’t try anything. Actually, that’s not
surprising at all, since I didn’t try most American food either, but still, I
regret that looking back. Apparently
Emily didn’t even try it, which was strange for her.
They
loved staying with us so much that they came back the next summer too, right
before we got our own exchange student, Linda.
That's also the summer that they asked me if they could touch my butt. I have a very photographic memory of the incident. We had all returned home from some kind of event, and out of nowhere Toshi asked me, "Ben... can we touch your butt?" I was hopelessly awkward around girls then anyway, let alone women who were five years older, and I wasn't sure how to answer. They explained it by saying they played a game with their friends in Japan where they squeezed each others butts to see how firm they were, and they wanted to find out about me. So I said yes. I stood confused and nervous in the driveway while they each grabbed a handful and began ecstatically exchanging exclamations in Japanese. "Oh Ben, you have a very nice butt! Thank you! That was the game. Good bye. You should be happy though. Your butt is very nice."
After that I remember being interviewed by Toshi and Kadumi their last night at our
house. We were having a barbecue
outside, and they wanted to know if I would ever marry a woman who was older
than I was. I shrugged my shoulders and
said “sure”. They whispered
in Japanese. Then they asked if I would
ever marry a woman who was from a foreign country. I said, “Why not?” More whispers. They thanked me for my time and excused
me. Supposedly Kadumi considered me good marriage material if I turned out like my dad. I looked at that as both a good and a bad thing, since I was only 14, and I was just starting to develop a certain competitiveness with him and desire to become my own person. It was a nice sentiment, and Kadumi met her soul mate a month later and has been happily with him ever
since. They got married last year. He's great and calls her Thomas the Tank Engine because of her wide-eyed "wow" look at the world. I think it's because she's always tugging people up hills and saying "I know you can" and then letting them go when she knows they can handle it.
When
they left they were extremely grateful for all of the time they had spent with
us, and made us all beautiful gifts.
They gave me a special stamp with my name’s Japanese symbol on it, and
better yet, Kadumi created signs with traditional Japanese calligraphy for each
of us, which isn’t as simple as jotting a note down in English. It takes years of practice. She asked me beforehand what I wanted mine to
say, and I was really into the band Nirvana back then, so that’s what she made
for me. I hung it on my wall and it
still hangs on my wall. I had some
Cobain lyrics underneath it, “I’m not like them, but I can pretend. The sun is gone, but I have a light. The day is done, but I’m having fun. I think I’m dumb. Maybe I’m just happy.” You know, how every teenager feels at some
point. I didn't actually understand the kanji characters and never really did, but I knew what it was supposed to mean, and more importantly, I knew it had been created for and given to me by people who had lived here even though they definitely weren't like us, and they had still found a way to enjoy this place, so I could too. And maybe there was a place to be out there for me where fitting in was a reality. Then again, I was fourteen, so I was being overly dramatic about feeling alone.
The best part was the note that Toshi and Kadumi left for me:
Dear Ben,
Your putt is sooooo sweet and so are you.
Tell us when you get a GF. Try more food.
Your sisters,
Toshiko and Kadumi
They must have meant "butt" because I hated golfing, and "GF" meant girlfriend.
The next time Toshi visited she came alone and could only stay with us for a few days. By then I was seventeen, driving the Quest and introducing her to my first girlfriend. I still needed to improve on the food front.
I didn’t give Japan much
more thought until sophomore year of college.
My friend Brian and I wanted to visit Risley Hall, the artsy dorm, for
the first time. He had a friend whose
friend was playing a show in this little café attached to the dorm, so we went
and checked it out. I’ll never forget
the first song they started playing, because I’d barely heard it in years. It was an indie rock version of Willy Wonka’s
“Pure Imagination”.
Come with me, and you’ll be
In a world of pure imagination
Take a look and you’ll see
Into your imagination
We’ll begin with a spin
Traveling in the world of my creation
What we’ll see will defy explanation
The
next song they played has been one of my holy hymns throughout my 20’s, and I was hearing it for the very first time that night. I remember being instantly drawn in by the
wacky guitar rhythm and insane opening lyrics:
Her name is Yoshimi
She’s a black belt in Karate
Working for the city
She has to discipline her body
Because she knows that it’s demanding
To defeat those evil machines
I know she can beat them…
I asked
Brian what they were singing and he said it was a Flaming Lips song. I knew the name. I’d worked the previous summer at a personal
injury law firm in Albany, a depressing job in a depressing city. It was my first full summer of work at a
white-collar job, and I did not like it at all, especially since it was
personal injury law and I was the-bottom-of-the-ladder errand boy. I couldn’t get over the fact that I had to
wear a dress shirt and khaki pants all summer, not to mention my first
experience with rush hour traffic and hour-long commutes to and from work. Somewhere in there I remember being in the conference room and opening up the
local paper to see an interview with The Flaming Lips about their upcoming show
at The Egg in Albany. Apparently they were
renowned for their insane cosmic circus live performances. I hadn’t
really heard of them until then:
Oh Yoshimi, they don’t believe me
But you won’t let those robots defeat me
She’s gotta be strong to fight them
So she’s taking lots of vitamins
I
immediately downloaded the song when we got back, and listened to it every day
for months. I finally dipped my toes
into the rest of their catalog with “Do You Realize??”, a far more moving and
profound message, but somehow not as catchy and meaningful to me at the time. It was a year before I got the entire album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, which
had been recorded in June of 2002 in upstate New York. My class graduated from high school in June
of 2002, and Bonnaroo started then too.
The
following semester I found myself sitting beneath a sign post looking out over
the ocean at Japan, dreaming of just how crazy it would actually be to live
there. Living in New Zealand had already
been a far out adjustment for me. I
couldn’t fathom just how hard it would be to live in a country with a different
language, alphabet, culture and cuisine.
NZ cuisine wasn’t anything to shout about, but you could always find
something familiar enough. But if I ever
went to Japan, I would have to eat Japanese food, and I didn’t think I could do
that. I don’t think I’d even had any
Japanese food at all at that point in my life.
Now this is nothing in comparison, but when I was younger my strangest
characteristic was eating dry cereal.
Every morning I ate Cheerios with no milk. I finally started adding milk in
college. At that rate of improvement, I
would be able to survive in Japan in another 434 years.
Even
so, that sign was clearly pointing to TOKYO...
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