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LABYRINTH (1986) dir. Jim Henson

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When the cat photobombs your long exposure shot

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Vignette at the Hotel

He didn't look like Sakurai, but there were definitely similarities.

He was tall and handsome with gorgeous black hair to his shoulders. His gentle and polite demeanor made him easy to talk to, and his charming smile made crow's feet to frame his dark eyes.

He had a denser build and a tenor voice, and you wouldn't mistake him for Sakurai, but I couldn't help but think of our beloved Acchan while speaking to this guest, this stranger, at the hotel where I work.

It was the morning of his check-out date, and he asked if his bags could be brought down from his room while he went out for a while. We don't normally offer such a service, but with it being low season, I had the time, so I obliged.

Entering a guest room before cleaning is always its own adventure. Guests leave such unique marks of themselves: which bed they chose, how they used the unoccupied bed, the way things are rearranged, the trash and how much of it actually made its way to the bin, whether the used towels were rehung or left on the floor, how much and which amenities were used, the temperature, the humidity, the scent.

It's always different.

I entered his room and stopped dead in my step. It was warm and exceptionally humid. So much so, the walls were weeping.

Housekeeping staff talk. I read a rumor once about what it's like for a hotel to have Atsushi Sakurai for a guest. He requests two humidifiers and turns the temperature up. When housekeeping comes to clean, the very walls are dripping with condensation.

Having spent a few stints as a singer myself, I understand the reasoning. The best way to moisturize your throat—and if you sing, you should be moisturizing it constantly—is by drinking water. The second best is directly applied water vapor. Steam is great for this, and relatively accessible, as you can spend a few minutes breathing the evaporating vapor off a cup of just-boiled water. But a high-humid environment is vocal heaven.

I had often fantasized about hosting Buck-Tick at our hotel. As best I could, I would behave and stay calm, of course. But I'd certainly and happily install extra humidifiers without being asked. I would imagine coming to check on the rooms after their check-outs. Would I find wet walls in Sakurai's like I had heard there would be?

Of course, with Sakurai's passing last year, that silly little fantasy faded.

Yet here I stood. Our usually chilly and relatively dry guestroom made fit for tropical amphibians. I could see the water dripping down the windows and metal frames, and the wallpaper along the rest of the room damp to the touch. For a moment, that fantasy was manifest, and the echo of Acchan was here, across time and space, delivered unintentionally and unknowingly by a completely different human being, who happened to share of a few of his best-known traits.

I wondered if he was also a singer.

I opened a window to air out the room before cleaning and brought his luggage down, holding back a few tears. When he returned, I said nothing of the room, of course. He left as politely and kindly as he spent his time, unaware of the new memory he'd blessed me with.

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scanned by Aniterake 

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I don't know what course the world needed to take for you to connect my favorite, impossible-to-find Sanrio character to Acchan, but I am grateful it did. 🖤

lol

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Have you ever had one of those ruminating fever dreams? Not simply a fever dream of strange sights and vivid colors, not simply an anxiety dream of a repeating danger you wish to escape, but the kind of dream that comes after you've worked yourself into a frenzy trying to solve a great mystery, wrap your head about a new philosophy, or drown yourself in a language incomprehensibly alien to your own with no relief.

One needn't be genuinely sick. The brain generates its own heat, cycling through the problem at hand rummaging memories for any hint of clarity or direction. There's an unshakable feeling that the answer is so very close, that just one little piece is missing and, when found, will reveal the whole. If you just look a little more, think a little deeper. It's almost there. It has to be. The answer, the unifying principle, the meaning of it all. It absolutely exists, just over the next hill.

Were you to see yourself presently in the waking world, how silly it would all seem. What a strange sort of dementia the mind takes on in dreams! You might consider how the feeling of progress can be decoupled from actual progress, and how someone who struggles may not realize how much they're actually improving, or how, with all our pockets and planners and paperwork we've developed a feeling of productivity without making any progress at all.

But here in the dream, all such analyses are moot. There is only the desperation. And, while in terror-riddled anxiety dreams, one might welcome the relief of wakefulness, here in the rumination, where the drive to find the Truth overrules all, leaving the dream is resisted. How could you? How can you let yourself be pulled away now, when it's just around the next corner...

...if you could just math your way out of the laws of physics, life and death would be made right again, the world would make sense again. You're so close to it... if you could just—

And that's what 神経質な階段 feels like to me.

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I never used the word “bestie” before, but know that if I say it with you, I’m totally acknowledging you as a fellow 獣たち

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all of Atsushi's cat pictures from an old version of the B-T site which i have to thank sexual-xxxxx for because they found it! Best viewed on the site itself.

Bonus:

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遊星通信

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冥王星で死ね

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神経質な階段