Whether it's meeting some hot chick who's gone to the same somewhat obscure rock concert as me 20+ years ago, or someone who can quote bits of a book at me that I happen to know, or even someone who knows someone I know.
For example... when I was six and my brother not yet born, my family adopted a second Cocker Spaniel dog named Tippy, after it was found that the family we got him from had a one-year-old allergic to dogs. At that time, we lived in a house in Etobicoke right across from the Islington subway train station - a few kilometers away from where I live now. Anyhow, years later when my brother was in Grade 7, he discovered that one of his good friends - well... his family used to own Tippy, who had passed away a couple of years earlier.
Or, how about my mother-in-law being very good friends with the mother of someone I knew back in high school.
Or how about the father of one of my son's friends just so happening to be a kid who used to follow myself and my buddy Rob around, hanging out at the local variety store watching us play Donkey Kong on a stand-up video arcade machine by using the old quarter on the string trick to rack up 99 credits... and making him wait for an hour before we would give him the remaining 80+ credits. He recognized me, which is cool considering we may have last seen each other some 33 years earlier. He said it was the voice.
Like I said... a weirdness magnet.
Now... since we are all here on this site, you obviously know I must have some sort of fetish for Japan to be writing about some place I haven't seen in a donkey's age. To be honest... it was always just a way to expose some of my comedic Wonderful Rife stories to the public, figuring I would 'publish' 88 stories and be done with the whole Japan thing. That's why I started.
But Japan never quite let its death grip on me, as I found it a cool way to stay in touch with my friend Matthew down in the U.S., who lived in the same town as me in Ohtawara-shi, Tochigi-ken, Japan. Really... it's why I continued.
Now... even though I sometimes think I want to stop writing about Japan, Japan still keeps slapping in the face like an old girlfriend telling me I can't dump her after she's been my whore for so long. I always had a thing for whores.
Now... I don't really mean to call Japan a whore in strictest sense of the definition, but I have slept over a lot.
Anyhow... for the past four weeks or so, I have been watching re-runs of the original Star Trek television series. I thought I was a fan, but it became obvious to me, that upon watching each episode, I had very little knowledge of what each episode was actually about.
And so, watching all of these old episodes in high-definition - episodes that have been digitally altered to give them a more modern feel for the external shots - it's like watching them all for the first time ever.
I watch these episodes on the Canadian television station Space, and record them on my PVR so that I don't have to skip off work to see them.
Watching an episode called The Naked Time (a totally misleading title, for my sexually depraved mind), whereby the crew went nuts and lost inhibition, I saw some graffiti on the wall. See the photo up above - it says quite boldly in English "Love Mankind", with Mr. Spock staring at it quite logically.
But what the hell is the Japanese subtitle doing under it? There has never been a subtitle before, and why Japanese? It could have been any one of hundreds of language sub-titles... so why Japanese?
Like I said... I'm a weirdness magnet.
Sometimes I think that maybe I see her (Japan) where Japan does not exist... and that I only think I am seeing all of these weird interconnections (I have the same weirdness surrounding the number '47')... and that despite shooting a photo of it, it only exists in my mind.
But... apparently, despite normal paranoia's - like who sent me that link to a LEGO story - I am pretty normal. And that's what scares me the most.
Cheers
Andrew Joseph
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