"No! You can WIN!"
Back in High School, I had a Japanese friend named Yasayuki Fukuto. Since we didn't have anything else besides white people in Salem (except for a few Mexicans in the fields), Yas, as we lovingly called him, formed my early impression of the Japanese, and the Asian people as a whole.
True or not, this is what I learned:
They (the Japanese and/or Asians) carry English to Japanese, Japanese to English dictionaries wherever they go.
They talk like Beavis or Butthead (due to hours upon hours of MTV watching).
They are insomniacs.
They gamble.
They gamble like maniacs.
"Oh, man," Yas said as he fed another twenty into the slot machine, "I keep LOSING!"
But he said "LOSING" like he was "WINNING". And he kept feeding the bills into the slot machine like it was nothing -- like it was a paper shredder.
I came back for Christmas break during my freshman year in college. Yas had sold his car to pay off gambling debts. Last I heard, he was picking up pachinko balls up from the sidewalk in Shibuya.
All this...
and the memory of time he prayed while running up Kuebler Boulevard,
"Oh Buddha, Buddha, you can help me SLEEP!"
...comes into my head at 3 AM after losing four online Literati games in a row.
Back in High School, I had a Japanese friend named Yasayuki Fukuto. Since we didn't have anything else besides white people in Salem (except for a few Mexicans in the fields), Yas, as we lovingly called him, formed my early impression of the Japanese, and the Asian people as a whole.
True or not, this is what I learned:
They (the Japanese and/or Asians) carry English to Japanese, Japanese to English dictionaries wherever they go.
They talk like Beavis or Butthead (due to hours upon hours of MTV watching).
They are insomniacs.
They gamble.
They gamble like maniacs.
"Oh, man," Yas said as he fed another twenty into the slot machine, "I keep LOSING!"
But he said "LOSING" like he was "WINNING". And he kept feeding the bills into the slot machine like it was nothing -- like it was a paper shredder.
I came back for Christmas break during my freshman year in college. Yas had sold his car to pay off gambling debts. Last I heard, he was picking up pachinko balls up from the sidewalk in Shibuya.
All this...
and the memory of time he prayed while running up Kuebler Boulevard,
"Oh Buddha, Buddha, you can help me SLEEP!"
...comes into my head at 3 AM after losing four online Literati games in a row.
posted by c. @ 2:46 AM
2 Comments:
At 9:53 PM,
Dern said…
"Oh....man....I don't know why I couldn't sleep. I stayed up all night drinking Coke.....I don't know why I couldn't sleep"
Yas.
At 2:37 AM,
c. said…
"...and I see these shapes -- YEAH! You see them too? Oh -- No. You don't? Well, I like, see these shapes and stuff. They, like, come at me whenever I close my eyes. It's scary. Like big squares and rectangles and stuff. Oh man, you're so LUCKY you don't see shapes. No. YOU don't understand. I see these shapes like EVERY night. So, I just stay up and drink Coke, and watch MTV, and stuff."
-- Yas
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