May 20th, 2007
Hitting my stride
So, last Thursday things were shaky and panic was raining over the citizens of Rustopia like so much psychological shock and awe from above. However, there were a few key moments between Friday night and now, and oddly enough I’ve been making all the right choices in the Design Festa 25 Choose Your Own Adventure book. More consultations, more positive feedback, more analysis of the weak points in my assembly, more emphatic emotional support. Yes, yes, YES.
Yesterday I made a trip to my second Oita Prefecture Kakujo High School reunion, hopefully I can write about that this week. Following the event, NamiT and I had a nice, settling talk at Cafe Crie’ and afterwards I got my affairs in order along with the next batch of prints for HCL while going over the syndicate plotline episodes from Cowboy Bebop for the thousandth time.
Went to bed right at one, woke up with the sun right in my eyes at five-thirty, rolled back and forth among blankets dreaming of buttercup-sweet love, and was on the road getting supplementary shots for the show by seven. Yes, seven.
Three hours, relaxed bicycling, instinctual turns at every intersection, and made my way down to old towne Honmachi, north through Nakano-shimbashi saying hello to Tomato Club, under the Chuo line at Nakano, meandering to Ochiai, and eventually stumbled across the back gate to the same park (哲学堂公園) I enjoyed another wonderfulSunnyDay last July. Then along the Myoushouji river (little cousin to the great Kanda), under Yamate dori, coasting past the eastside of Toyama Park near Waseda (which I hadn’t visited since 2004!), into Okubo only find my meat bun Chinese grocer still closed at 9:30, down through the hangover peak of Kabuki-cho, and had the wonderful timing to see all of the pachinko addicts lined up outside of the slot parlors before opening to drop off two rolls of blue-skied, cherub-kissed Centuria. Write the first draft of my opening poem while eating a five dollar hamburg steak meal at Saizeriya, then pick up a FIFTY DOLLAR binder at Yodobashi for my 8×10 back catalog, grab the proofs from Kitamura, and then home to sort them all out with the rest of my stock to decide on enlargements. Now I have QR codes to phone-friendly versions of my shots, now I have flame-retardant cloth to appease the Fire Marshal.
Now I just have to work out a first run of 20 minutes of environment music, write the first drafts for the poems for each of my featured shots, print a QR code test sheet at Kinko’s, pick up the enlargements at Kitamura, find a couple of pocket displays for my mailable wares, and write a set of friendly reminders that I am doing a show next weekend so I can drop them in the post first thing in the morning.
Not bad for sixteen hours, huh? 
