Samuri rabbits always know just where they are!
Ratan chairs—Coffee—First blog, most recent blog—First visit to NYC—An uber-hip hotel—Sojourn in SoHo—Making out with Liv Tyler in a bar—A newspaper headline, and a photo—Grand Liquors abound—Blogging about it—Encounter with Anderson Cooper—A samurai rabbit—Further coffee—A blog post about it
I am sitting in a ratan chair like the ones we had in the dining hall at high school. I’m sitting in the place where I sat when I first posted on this blog. Some passerby girl’s perfume just put me in mind of that worn by a girl I dated in high school, when she was in high school. Every second goatee I see seems to belong to some other girlfriend’s boyfriend, a grand aggregation of experimental facial hair. I had a muffin and a small coffee for-here (today). I can’t remember what I had (that first day). I sat here, or here-adjacent (that first day). Outside, a lady sports a shirt that reads, “HAPPINESS IS A TALL STIFF ONE,” with a martini glass standing in for that “t” in “stiff.” Tally it up, boys and girls. This is the mindness of place.
When I was 15 or 16, I went to New York City for the first time. My father took me and we stayed in a hotel with cradles for dead roses drilled into the facade, low, low-to-the-ground seating in the lobby, different- and strong-colored ambient lights (purple and green among them) in the elevators—colors which my father complained caught fire in his grey/white hair, a strict black-and-white color scheme mixed with a prevalence of see-me design (over use-me design), and a general Germanic (?) and uber-hip NYC vibe that appealed to the me that was visiting the city for the first time, but useless to my father. I think we spent the remainder of the trip, after a first night in the hotel, on the futon at his friend/collaborator’s SoHo studio on Greene Street. I went to a wrap party for an independent film and drank Heinekens and apparently somebody made out with Liv Tyler at a bar down the block. This was the only time I have stayed in SoHo, New York City, but it doesn’t put me much in mind of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Online, there’s this article about turning the TL—a place I heard described in much disgusting, hilarious, third-season-of-The-Wire sad detail by Saddleshoos and 1/2 of Terry Timely last night to Anderson Cooper, who is triumphantly relocating to the Bay Area and had requested the skinny—into a new SoHo of SF. There’s a picture of Grand Liquors there. I asked Alice a week ago as we walked by that store, how many stores in the world do you think are named that? How many in SoHo, NYC, for example? Maybe enough for a mindness of place?
When I was tinier than that, my father—or perhaps one of his Japanese friends—gave me a copy of the first installment in Stan Sakai’s excellent Usagi Yojimbo—Samurai Rabbit series. As a youth, I somewhat shamefully never kicked my way out of the field of least interest in comics. I got into my sister’s Calvin and Hobbes a bit, and once bought a copy of Spawn #1 (this was the collector in me, planning to cash in with a big sale years later), but the stories of the rabbit ronin wandering warlord-era japan, doing good, and some hilarious depictions of lizards and small dinosaur-looking creatures inadvertantly dying during battle scenes with other rabbits, a mercenary rhino, etc, touched me like no comic had before. I’m proud to say that I will now stop blogging, refill my coffee @ 50 cents, and commence reading book seven of Usagi Yojimbo, recently purchased at a Piedmont Ave. gamestore and made a gift to me by Alice, the cover of which is shown above.
