Two Non-Japanese Stories Written In Japan

Presented here are two tales I wrote in response to a 12-page letter I had received in the mail from my taxi-driver friend, Doug, back in Toronto.It really has nothing to do with Japan - just that they were written there. I think the stories (short, too) are highly amusing, and I hope you don't mind me sharing it with you here today. Both stories were written by Andrew Joseph (me) back on May 27, 1991. To see what else happened that day, you can read my blog entry HERE.
Meanwhile, enjoy the stories.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

by andrew joseph 

Have you ever visited the stars? Have you ever truly been out there on the perimeter where brave men fear to tread? Gods, but I envy you. I suppose I've been there, too, but not in this form. Nor the one before it. I feel like I was one of the original sentinels of the spaceways. An easy rider on the cosmic wave. Y'see...I know things. I know how it all began. 

A long time ago when the world was young, Earth was visited by 'aliens'. They wereobviously more intelligent than the creatures that inhabited the sphere, forthey were like Gods to them. Let us make man in our own image. So they took themonkeys and did genetic alterations to them to side-step several time-consumingeons.That the monkeys would eventually grow to be like the visitors without their aid is not likely... for they were happy in their ignorance of higher evolutionary animals. Still, the visitors gave the simians a kick to allow for faster evolutionary growth. Missing link?Ha! There is no missing link - save perhaps for the alien physicians. 

So, how did life evolve on Earth? Well, I'm told that the ancients of those visitors came to this orb when it was but a watery bauble. Landing their spaceship to make repairs after it was struck from a chunk of the almost-planet between Mars and Jupiter (the so-called asteroid belt), some of the astronauts decided to lookaround. The air was breathable for them - much heavier in ozone content thanwhen it was the most plentiful element in what constituted our atmosphere. Thefirst breathe they expelled after removing their helmets was the beginning oflife. As humans would eventually have, these visitors had plant cells inside oftheir bodies. Flora and other bacteria would grow. 

But what of the carbon units? 

Well, kilometres from their ship, a scout party had a corlan break (lunch). After eating, Nature called and they had to take a dump. Themess that would eventually evolve from their lunch would become animal life forming: mollusks, fish reptiles, amphibians and finally mammals who would growto be monkeys who would later be genetically altered to skip a form toeventually become Australopithecine (I couldn't spell it to save theuniverse... ah, but that's another story.) and eventually the Neanderthals andthe Cro-magnons. 

These two sapient-like individuals would shape our destiny. There must have been twoexperiments! The Neanderthals lost. Thanks perhaps to a lightning storm settingfire to a teak tree in a neighbourhood the Cro-magnons happened to control thatweek. The rest was history, as the strong rule by fire... much like today,where he who possesses fire from Prometheus' Pit by splitting an atom (worldsscream asunder) often controls our destiny. I am the god of hell-fire. 

And that was the origin of Man. 

We are an endangered feces. 

AND - here's that second story I wrote back to Doug.

ANOTHER STORY 

by andrew joseph 

Once upon an eon, I was a dog-face in an intergalactic exploration unit. Our mission was to try and convert as many of the indigenous lifeforms we found to our way of thinking or to show them the error of their ways by sending them on their way to meet our creator.

You can imagine my surprise when I died a few years later and found out that our creator was not the being we thought, but rather a strange metallic square with the ubiquitous (I can't remember the meaning, but I was told it was the word to use) name of Eyebem-Rom-Forebit. One of the lesser pixels who had arrived scant google-eons prior to my demise told me the 'entity' was rumoured to have comefrom the future. "The future what?" I asked, but to no avail. He knew not the answer. Nor did any of the transmogrified specks of silicon.

Deciding to make it my new after-life's goal to find out, I simply asked the entity. It said (or thought or wrote) I had to best him at a game first.

"What type of game?" I asked.

"A spelling bee," it answered.

God has a sense of humour.

To find out where the entity was from, I was told I had to beat THE god in a contest. If I lost, I would be responsible for the extermination of my universe. God was into some really wicked stakes.That's what you get when you dare to challenge a deity, I suppose. It would notbe that difficult as all the words would be from my planet.

The Creator graciously allowed me to go first. My first word tohim was to spell nothing. After a billion years, IT finally deduced itwasn't a trick question and spelt the word correctly. My chore was to spell"Australopithecine".

"What's that?"

"It's an evolutionary by-product of your planet."

"Oh? So why haven't I heard of it?"

"Because it hasn't come into being yet, and it won't be known as that for five million years after."

Well, I had to admit it had me there. I was impaled on a future word. I had lost. The worst part is that the word is non-existent on what was once my own planet. But since GOD knows we accidently started life on a shit-hole called Earthduring an exploration mission (God considered Earth a summer home), theUniverse is dead.

It's not my fault really - chili con carne just upsets my stomach.

Hope you enjoyed the stories folks. In some sort of weird way, I like to think the origin of life in our planet did start the way I suggest in the first story... and it's also the way our planet will end in the second story - not with a bang, but a whimpering spelling mistake.

Somewhere looking up words in a dictionary,
Andrew Joseph 
PS: Did you notice that 'god' was only a 4-bit computer... but that even in 1991 I had used the term 'google'. You know the number 'google is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes, right? It is. 

One Day

Hi... Japan - It's A Wonderful Rife has had an amazing month of March so far - easily topping over 2200 page hits. Thank you. I'm sure a lot of it has to do with the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear radiation concerns - but I've found that more people are actually reading the funny stuff..
So... I'm going to do that again - with the odd bit of current news from Japan when it happens - or at least when I find out about it.
I'm going to take you back to a very exciting time in my life. Okay, it's one of the many, many exciting times in my life, and it begins on Monday, May 27, 1991... according to whatever calculations I made, this is my 312 journal entry of life in Japan. It's also my 352nd blog today. Yay! Happy birthday or whatever. It's not my birthday.

It's an office day. I am still in my first year here as an assistant English teacher (AET) on the JET (Japan Exchange & Teaching) Programme - teaching at seven junior high schools in the city of Ohtawara (Ohtawara-shi) in the Prefecture of Tochigi (Tochigi-ken).
At the OBOE (Ohtawara Board of Education who pay my salary), I talk to my boss Hanazaki-san (Mister Hanazaki) about me wanting to kill all of the spiders around my apartment. At first he is concerend because all spiders are special to the Japanese.
Apparently - according fact or myth - the Buddha will return reincarnated in the form of a spider. Not wanting to tick off a country by accidentally killing the Buddha, I come to my senses and tell Hanazaki-san that there is no way the Buddha would be reincarnated in the home of a non-believer like me. So, until the real Buddha does show up elsewhere, I'd like to kill all of the imposters, I mean false prophets, for the Japanese people (and myself).
Hanazaki-san is no idiot. He knows I'm a joker and he knows he (and Kanemaru-san) are responsible for my well-being here in Japan. He knows I'm playing him, but gladly accepts my argument for killing spiders. He asks a junior office worker to order some spider spray for me.
Then I tell him that I would like to buy a telescope. Back in Toronto, the city lights at night are too bright and you can only see maybe 20 stars up in the sky... but in Ohtawara-shi after 9PM when the city rolls up its sidewalks - well... there are millions and billions of stars in the sky. Despite getting excellent marks in Astronomy classes in university, and having read every book I could ever get my hands on about astronomy and space since I was six-years-old, I had never actually looked through a telescope.
For some reason, Hanazaki-san has a book handy that shows me differing types of telescopes and their prices. Cool, but weird that he happened to have that book! I know people know everything about me here - but this is ridiculous!
Okay... things are going well... so I tell them I would like a small air-conditioner in my apartment because my goldfish are sweating. Hanazaki-san smiles and says he understands. Nothing else is said.
Apparently, on the JET Programme, host offices responsible for the AET get a fairly large annual budget - I believe it's Y300,000 ($3,000) to spend ( at their discretion) on the AET to make him or her more comfortable.
Who knew?
I did, of course... which was why I was acting the greedy little bastard.
I began studying some Kanji (the Japanese alphabet that looks like symbols and is based on the Chinese pictograph system) ... there are 1,942 Kanji one needs to learn by the end of high school in order to be considered fluent. Anyhow, along with learning how to write the Kanji, I also memorize all of the definitions and words you can use them with when you combine multiple Kanji symbols. Truly humbling.
At home, I receive a letter from my taxi driver friend Doug back in Toronto, who has sent me a 12-page document - hand-written. I write him back describing my theory on the origin of man and life on Earth, and then I create a story about the origin of God and why our universe will die. I think it's funny, and I'll present it to you (both stories) over the next two days before I go back to exciting time.
Anyhow, after I pen my tale, I eat dinner (I didn't write down what it was, but chances are it was take-out... as I didn't have alot of groceries in my fridge as I was going away the next day.
After my meal I ride my bicycle over to my extra-curricular night school gig and teach by myself for 40 minutes to about 20 adults from the city who are interested in learning conversational English but probably enjoy just talking to me more.
I head home at 9PM and iron clothes until 12:30AM.

Somewhere putting an electric fan in my aquarium,
Andrew Joseph
Today's blog title is by Matisyahu: NOMOREWAR
PS: I need to buy new goldfish.

 


   

Please Mr. Postman

It might sound stupid and whinny, but even though I’m in a foreign country with new friends, a girlfriend, have my own apartment and am experiencing new things I’d never thought I’d have the opportunity to pursue, there still exists a feeling of lament. A feeling of homesickness.
While I’m no quitter, there were more than a few Assistant English Teachers (AETs) on the JET Programme who could not handle the life in Japan and chose to leave. One bugger, an American guy, who in my third year in Ohtawara decided to leave Japan so he purchased an airplane ticket, sold all of his apartment’s furnishings and left—without telling anyone… you know, like his board of education employers. To top it off, the furnishings didn’t even belong to him. Our apartments are rentals and come fully furnished with items the employer purchases on our behalf to make us more comfortable, and so save us quite a few Yen (Dollars/Pounds/Euros). What an ass, eh?
In Japan for about two months, the euphoria I felt at being here had begun to wane, because I constantly found my thoughts drifting back to my home in Toronto.
Phone calls to my family only seem to exacerbate the feeling. I missed my mother, father, brother, my three rottweillers, my cat, my friends, my comic books and my televisions shows – especially hockey which was just starting training camp for my beloved Maple Leafs.
It’s why watching the mailbox became a pastime of mine, one that lasted the entire three years there.
I don’t mind telling you that getting a letter from home was like water to a thirst-starved wanderer in the desert. Lifesaving.
My mother realized that and made an effort to send monthly shipments of a letter, food products – microwavable lasagna shells, and VCR (remember those) tapes of television shows my brother Ben would tape for me—it would always be a pot pourri of shows – maybe a hockey game, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Star Trek: TNG, comedy shows galore… always stuff I could share… and to Matthew’s credit, his folks did the same… we were looked after. But the feeling of abandonment or loneliness always seem to pervade my oft-time moody personae.
Along with standard news from my family, it was also uplifting to get a letter from a friend. When I left Toronto, everyone said they would write. Everyone being maybe 25 people. The reality is that about half of them wrote – once.
All of those writers except for two people – maintained a more constant letter-writing presence: my good friend Rob Jones who has been my friend since I was 14, and this cab driver named Doug McIntosh whom I had only met once a couple of weeks prior to leaving for Japan.
Rob first. I’m unsure if I was Rob’s only friend, but I was certainly his best. While he never sent over a package of videos, he more than made up for it with letter frequency. Over my three years there, Rob sent 69 letters. Remember… this is in the days before e-mail where one had to put pen to paper, find an envelope, buy a stamp and then post it. How Rob was able to send me so many entertaining letters without poisoning himself with envelope glue, I’ll never know. But he did it. And I’m here to tell him now just how much it meant to me.
Also – and here you have Rob to blame for this – but he’s the one that kind of got me started on this whole creative writing kick.
Sure I had been writing a primitive version of It’s A Wonderful Rife once a month for the Tochigi-ken AET newsletter, but it was the letters that got me thinking about writing professionally when I got back home.
For Rob’s upcoming birthday at the end of March, I thought I would write him a letter every weekday for the month as a cheap present. After three days of “How’s it going? I’m fine” crap, I decided to write a creative short story instead. For some reason, the creative juices were flowing, and I actually wrote three that day. And two or three or four the next, and every day until it was his birthday… I wrote close to 60 short stories that month. Lots of comedy, but other more series stuff too. Despite the grammatical and spelling errors, that stuff was/is dynamite and I’ve converted more than a few of them into comic book stories (www.strangefuncomics.com).
So… blame Rob for my writing. I do.
And there’s Doug who equaled Rob's output of 69 letters. A little background info is required here. I was 24-years-old to Doug’s 41 when we met in 1990. I was working for the Toronto Star as a reporter on a summer internship program. On a hot and humid July day, I was asked to go out and do ‘pick-ups’. That means I had to go out to the homes of people and pick-up photographs of a loved one who had just passed away. That job sucked. Its still bothers me to think about it.
I went down to the line of cabs parked in front of the Toronto Star, peered into the open passenger window and asked if he could take me around for the day, as I had several photos to get. A deep, clean voice that made me think of radio beckoned an assent.
I still have no idea why I did it, but I opened the front passenger door and sat beside him.
We made intros and shook hands… but who sits in the front seat of a taxi when there’s plenty of room at the back? Me, I suppose. 
We spend the day together making the pick-ups – I bought us lunch at a Harvey’s, and at the end of the day, he knew more about me than I knew about him. He said (and I quote), “Ya gotta write to me from Japan,” and gave me his business card.
A couple of weeks into Japan, I began writing letters to everyone on the computer at the OBOE. Even though I am loathe to admit it, I sent off a few form letters – changing only the addressee name. Doug’s was one of those. Hey, writing was hard back then.
A week later, I opened up my mailbox at my apartment – and lo and behold, there’s a letter from Doug. I wrote back – and surprise, surprise, so did he.
All I can tell you is that we became story-telling sounding boards for the other… but more importantly, we became friends. And now while I’m older than Doug was when we first met, we’ve only physically seen each other a few times, but the letters keep a-coming… each as interesting and heart-warming as the first.
It’s funny where friendship can occur. Sure still being friends with Rob is to be expected (It is, isn’t it?) And so, too making a friendship with Matthew? But how does a chance taxi ride turn into a 20-year-friendship? I have Japan to thank for all of that.
Letters kept me sane(ish). Who would have thought that writing would ever be so important to a writer?
Ending in a melodramatic note: Why is it that it takes so little time to write and send a letter, but to receive one, months seem to pass?

Somewhere starting a letter to Doug (I’ll see Rob when we go comic book shopping later!),
Andrew Joseph
Today's title is by The Marvelettes.