We’re watching Black Rain because I’m an idiot who grew up in the 80s and I’m nostalgic for a Japan that doesn’t exist now and never existed before with the diseased mind of a man who hates his present so pisses away his time constructing false pasts and this past is grainy, think Blade Runner, think the cover of Akira Terao’s album Reflections that font that smoke that jacket but you’re nostalgic for America now because you’re Japanese and you hate the patriarchy in Japan and I say there’s patriarchy everywhere, haven’t you heard? don’t you read the papers? But you just want to wear yoga pants in public and not work 70-hour weeks and not pencil in your eyebrows every morning because you admire how few shits American women give in comparison, their freedom and sloppiness, praying at the feet of an athleisure God and we’re in Hiroshima in an Airbnb with no view of Peace Memorial Park and I’m making you watch Black Rain because my mother had the hots for Andy Garcia before he gets his head cut off in that parking garage by the Yakuza and Japan was rising, rising, taking over the world, but I’ve never seen the movie through, seen a relationship through, seen through you, the veneer of you that is trying to please me but also sees me as escape from the Japanese Here to the American There but I placate you with American movies and sex and foot rubs and all the trappings of an attentive, modern boyfriend, dangling possibilities of a future, and in my clumsy Japanese I sing Terao’s hit “Ruby no Yubiwa” trying to imitate his talky coolness and earthy melancholy, and the song is about longing and maybe you hear that longing in my voice, my mother’s longing for Garcia pre-beheading, that thick lustrous head of black hair, and America’s longing for a past where we’re not the only country to ever nuke another and for the sustained delusion that we’re a benign empire bestride the world seeding aid and wisdom and democracies, Uncle Sam the generous sower, Millet redone on the walls of Goya’s Quinta del Sordo in a tempera of Texas oil and high-fructose corn syrup and the combined jism of Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg, and Terao sings about the other side of a frosted glass in a windswept town and you sing 問わず語りの心が切ないね and I sing I enjoy my loneliness and you sing 気にしないで行っていいよ and you want to be American and I want to be Japanese but all we have is each other and I stop singing because there goes Garcia’s head, a motorcycle decapitation, and I’ve never seen past this moment in the movie, past my own needs, my own bullshit, the way I’ve bullshitted myself, the way I was/am/will be bullshitting you, so I shush you and pull you into my lap and say watch the movie and you settle in and you don’t say anything but under your breath you’re humming as if there’s a little bird trapped in your neck trying to tear free.
-- Matisse wanted his paintings to be like cozy armchairs for weary workers to rest in. Jon Doughboy wants his stories to be like camping chairs in front of a dumpster fire. Huddle together to asphyxiate over some toxic s'mores @doughboywrites