oyl in tokyo

The pigeons of Roppongi Crossing, looking for a scrap, cluster near the night ladies of Roppongi Crossing scurrying to find the remains of the night.

Cell phones as alarm clocks in the smoking chamber of McDonald’s. Closed eyes, red faces and gold chains. Memories on snooze about the night before.

Old women, on hands and knees, scrubbing filth and stories from the grit of the sidewalk. Heads on pavement. Bodies in doorways. All waiting for the old woman to wash them away like ghosts before the light.

Buy an orange juice.

Buy some fireworks.

Straight lines on club shirts. Collars displayed, across rigid cross walks, a collision of bodies and heavy footed yellow taxis looking to scoop the final yen payouts of the evaporating night.

Have a sip of orange juice. None of this involves you.

Read the morning tweets from your mobile device and take pause to read the broken English of the graphic T’s that pass.

Yellow cabs. Black cabs. And some green ones.

Have a croissant.

Have a hologram.

Apes with men bodies, squeezing dignity from girls in wispy dresses.

Dump trucks, grabbing muscly foreigners to take them away. But they don’t go. But keep clinging to fake tan women who throw purses and not compliments.

The man with white gloves, a driver of mafia.

Fake eyelashes, real gold medallions. Dance class and soccer practice.

Everything at once.

Street scenes, cast in full shadow, before the gaze of the newly rising sun. The land of tipsy, falling bodies and a million suns. All for sale. Available in any color you’d like.

A drowsy woman in a blue dress stops to insult the pigeons of the Crossing. Old women scurry to avoid porcupine haired young gangsters.

Beware of the blue dump truck. It takes bags, bottles and clingy women who have thrown their purses. Full jump suits, under the watchful eye of Tokyo Tower. The great Eye sees all. 

And it sees it all, every night. The Golden Arches nod. They are lovin’ it.

You always notice the backpack first.

And the constant strapping it tighter.

Then there is the guidebook bulging from the back pocket. Maybe even double barreled back pocket guide books if we’re talking a real tool here.

T-shirt that says Tokyo in the least imaginative way ever. Might as well say Maine, or Fargo, or Des Moines.

Voice situationally unadjusted, three notches too loud.

Organizing a family, in a constant state of flux. Too itinerary bound to enjoy or notice a beautiful day. Must hop from postcard view to postcard view before the day is done. No time for serendipitious meanderings.

“We must visit a bookstore” he mandates.

They find one, probably to rent some Hollywood blockbuster on DVD they’ve already seen, but will use to come up for air in the culture shock they find themselves maladjusted to.

The shirt is tucked in. Of course. And getting more tucked in.

The backpack is getting tightened. He reaches into the fanny pack for cash.

There is a fanny pack, did I mention that? Oh yeah, a fanny pack.

The kid looked flummoxed. This is National Lampoon’s Tokyo Vacation. These are the real world Griswolds. The mom is loving the escape and looks completely divorced from her husband’s plight. The kid is awkward and most likely unaware he is on the other side of the world. A handheld gaming device keeps him in his comfort zone.

It will be good for him later the mom says.

The dad rustles for subway maps. He digs so violently in his pack that his shirt comes untucked a little bit. He retucks and then continues to look for maps. He finds it and unfolds it to its extent. It’s a damn near to scale depiction of the metro lines. There are smaller, cooler looking maps that he constantly forwent in favor of this beauty.

His arms spread fully, assuming full on standard tourist posture. You mean people out there still do this? So baffled by their surroundings that they unknowingly stumble into this stereotype?

Only a man like this doesn’t stumble to this fate. It’s a life pursuit. Being THE tourist is this man’s art.

I mean, the fanny pack? Come on. Could you try any harder than actually donning a fanny pack?

What’s he gonna do next? Pull out a pair of rollerblades and skate off to Tokyo Tower?

You know he owns spandex shorts, blue blockers and probably owns one of those ultimate weed wackers they only show on TV really late at night. The ones that can mow down an entire forest in 15 minutes.

That weed wacker.

Maybe he’s got it folded up in his back pack ready to clear the path through the ‘urban jungle’ he has heard so much about.

Happy trails, traveller.

Doing what’s different isn’t arrived at by mass consensus. No amount of empirical testing can prove being different yields unprecedented ROI. Nor can the same study prove a different approach leads to certain death. What is guaranteed by daring to be that different thing, is that it is the most basic step in the game of being memorable.

Isn’t that what we all want? To be interesting enough for others to remember and appreciate? Well, maybe some of us dream of blissful anonymity in some creekside log cabin of our own devices, but if you are in the business of business, or somehow involved in a society where goods and services carry monetary considerations that can pave the way to an easier means of living, you might want to be somewhat memorable.

If you are a giant corporation fighting for airtime, screentime and maybe even have ambitions of finding a little section in peoples’ hearts, then you probably really, really want to be memorable. You don’t get there by seeing what the other guy did and saying, “That, but in a different color,’ or “That, but with a different (cooler, more relevant, etc) celebrity.”

You get memorable by ignoring the rules, being a human and doing your damndest to walk a different way than that other guy you are fixating on.

You ignore the rules, but you don’t act clueless. Having some razor sharp people around who can dissect business problems and navigate the cultural context is very helpful.

Doing the illogical or being different doesn’t mean you’ve been granted free license to ‘do whatever.’ It means, figure out the playing field, and then do what you think you’re not supposed to on that specific field. Know what’s played out. Know what is a first reaction. Analyze. Dig. Come up with 50 solutions. Sleep on it. See which ones you like 24 hours later. Come up with plenty of options and then hand select the three most different ones. Hold onto one as your favorite.

Hell, you can really do your homework and go for the extra credit by analyzing those choices, and figure out what makes them so wrong. Then turn that around and figure out what makes them 100% right and bulletproof for the identical reasons.

Billy Shakespeare once said, “Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” So use your damn thinking and show us why your different thing is good. Why it’s different will be apparent to everyone. It will be laughed off. Met with “We could never do that,” or the all time roadblock cliche of a comment, “what were you smoking?!”

Comments like those mean you are really close to the right, wrong idea.

Time to dig in deeper and find a way to explain why it is a perfect solution to the problem that nestles perfectly with the larger unfolding of society and the ongoing cultural narrative in general.

Being different is an ongoing dare to yourself and others that will never feel perfectly comfortable, because the means of being different will constantly change and feel a little or a lot wrong every time.

That wrong feeling is called your gut. It’s your greatest asset. Follow it. Defend it. Get it out there.

(This all made perfect sense tonight in one of those frenzied Jerry Maguire keyboard rattling epiphanies. We’ll see how I feel about all this in the morning….)

I look at managing my time of creative projects like coaching a basketball team. I have five players out there on the floor, but I make sure I get the ball to whoever has the hot hand.

There are blocks and dead ends that come up when you are so obsessed and focused on one project, that you get paralyzed, think in circles and any hope of progress gets washed away.

That’s when I like to have another project to throw myself into fully. These days, work offers plenty of alternatives to get absorbed in. And I always have a roster of personal projects to get done.

The computer is nice, because right now I have this blog in one window, a couple of TV scripts up in Word, an illustration I’m working on in Photoshop. When I hit the wall on one, I can jump tracks and keep my steam up with another one. A creative body in motion tends to stay in motion or something like that.

This entry is getting really teenage diary-ish, so I’m sure I am only seconds away from jumping back to another project. This got my thought moving a bit, but is turning into some sort of public display of streaming consciousness. I don’t have many rules for this blog, but that was one thing I wanted to avoid.

Sometimes when I work on projects, I like to lay them out in stacks on the floor or on a table. I put the very freshest thing on top, with a pile of where it came from and how it got there behind it. Sometimes it helps to rifle through the process of discovery to help spark forward movement.

I like to ask really critical questions of my projects. Even if they are just personal projects. I find that when you force yourself to analyze five things at once you jump to conclusions and make connections that often lead to new directions.

This is probably the worst, most rambling entry I’ve made.

Maybe that is because other projects are looming large and I don’t feel a need to put a laser like focus on a blog entry right now. I look at this more as a morning warm-up. I didn’t want to tackle any of the other projects cold, so I came here, to this blog.

To stretch, to spew and try to spark my thinking to another level.

I’m sorry you had to watch/read.

I promise next time I will give more attention to you. I feel like I just used you. But I am reassured that because of the scattered nature of the past few ‘paragraphs’ that roughly only 5% of my daily visitors have made it to this point.

I just wrote a few tagline options for another project.

This is turning into a live-blogging of my morning now.

Please look away.

This is the worst of me, without editing, without a filter. Just saying some stuff and typing it. I’m actually whispering these words as I type. It’s getting creepy.

Maybe it is better to just do one thing at a time. I just went to get a drink and I was talking to myself. That’s a bad sign. I’ll probably delete this post in a couple of days.

Apologies in the meantime.

Time to switch projects.

I’ve never really tried it to be honest.

I like to keep myself busy in as many projects, teams and adventures as possible. But I reckon it is probably pretty important to devote a portion of time every now and then to doing absolutely nothing.

To sitting in a fairly comfortable chair (not too comfortable though that it becomes an activity in its own right) and to stare at nothing in particular. Perhaps a blank wall. But not a wall with that popcorning texture, or much of a texture at all so that you start seeing shapes and are drawn back to reality and to-do lists and logos and cartoon characters…

But once you are in that perfect, blank environment, oh the things you must think of. You are probably drawn to make comparisons between atypical ideas, put a couple of wrongs together and come up with something new. You probably get the biggest, big picture view of the world, and can sort out the many complex steps in succession that would lead to global harmony and eternal sustainability.

If only we had more time to sit and do nothing to come up with these amazing revelations. Can it be a part of every work day? I’m sure some of the thoughts would help revolutionize whatever business or industry you find yourself in. Surely the intellectual map to progress and promotion and corporate domination are available to those able to commit to doing nothing.

If you want to do something, it seems you should start by doing nothing, not by doing something else. That is always how it goes for me. I will be doing one thing, and then I will clear jump tracks to the next thing, without any kind of full stop. Things get messy that way. You don’t see trains operate that way. If they need to transfer cars, they totally stop and then slowly make the transition to the next line.

Why, if I could do nothing, I imagine I could really accomplish things. What has not doing nothing done for me? It has filled 27 notebooks with to do lists, impartial sketches, lame puns and impractical product inventions.

I think the key to activity is inactivity.

This sounds kind of like meditation. But I think what I have in mind is slightly different. I’m not on a quest to clear my mind of the concerns of the world and replace them with surreal tranquil settings with the constant sound of a babbling brook. I’d like to replace my regular thoughts with super-charged, revolutionary thoughts. I don’t think those hang out with soothing tones and glowing orbs of pure energy.

Maybe one of these days I will test out my way of doing nothing and let you know how it goes.

But not today, I have too much to do, to do nothing today.