I’ve received many thoughtful and pithy compliments about my blog entries over the months, and I cherish every one of them, but it would seem that while I may have a grassroots fan base that supports my writing, the institutions of “higher learning” do not; Every single one of the MFA programs I applied to rejected me, and all but one of the M.A. programs did as well. CU, my hometown school, saw it fit to put me on their waitlist indefinitely. Thanks guys. Suffice to say, going to school for writing is not what I will be doing next year. On a totally unrelated note, I now find the idea of “learning how to write” patently ridiculous. Except for at Florida University. Florida had the foresight to accept my ex-roommate Dan. Good luck with that, Dan. You bastard.

Now, as a means of coping with ten straight rejections trickling in every week over a two month period, I did what every red-blooded writer does: I destroyed my body. It’s a good thing that I got denied when I did, because rather than do what I would usually do when facing rejection, which is sit inside my cell of an apartment swilling Jack Daniels on the toilet, I was instead able to go out and celebrate my failure with a whole ton of Japanese people at the annual Hanami Festival for cherry-blossoms.

That’s right, ‘tis the season for the elusive and deadly cherry-blossom.

The Japanese go apeshit for these trees. If you ask them why, they’ll probably say it’s because the pink blossoms are so beautiful, or because their blooming signals the oncoming of spring, or because the short and beautiful lives of the blossoms are like the short and beautiful lives of the warrior-poet samurai of old and blahblahblah. These are all lies.

They Japanese love these blossoms because when they bloom, it means that everyone can go out and sit under them and get wasted during the middle of the day, every day, for two straight weeks. It’s the most ruckus season of the year. Anything goes. Often times fights break out between wasted groups of Japanese kids, and the alcohol loosens all the Japanese up so they can suck each others faces willy-nilly. It’s like a nationwide kegger, or it would be, if the Japanese had kegs and could drink more than two beers without falling on their faces. Mind you, I’m not much better. The days usually started something like this:


Look at how dapper we are! All smiles and cheer. Never mind that I am dying inside...On the outside I look fantastic! Soon enough however…

I’m slurring out a coffee order and listing heavily to the left and I've got wine dumped all down the front of my jacket and a blow up-bear doll around my neck. That poor, poor girl. You see? Don't you see? Just like that. That’s how this festival works. It’s like lightening.

One moment you are laughing and being jolly with a Japanese guy dressed up in an elmo suit…

And the next moment that very same Japanese man is passed out and rolled up in a tarp like some sort of Tickle-Me Sushi.

Once again, for those of you that might still not quite understand; Here we have Brad prancing around a piccolo player:

And moments later, here is Brad with a samurai top-knot hairpiece sitting down because he feels a little bit dizzy from prancing around a picollo player:

Remarkable. Truly.


For two weeks it was like this, every day the Japanese took the party to the streets and the parks, and every time they saw us foreigners they cheered and shoved hooch down our throats. We only joined in on the weekends, but that was plenty for me. Unfortunately, (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) the best days for drinking were Sundays, so all of us JET’s were just wrecks for work on Mondays. This Monday as I was walking to school assembly, Obata stopped me.

“Hey Brad, for class todaWHOAH! Did you go out drinking this weekend?”

“Why yes! How could you tell?

“Have some gum,” he said.

He gave me some of that Japanese super-gum he uses to cover up his habitual smoking habits and quietly chuckled at my pain.

“Hanami,” I said.

“Hanami,” he said, nodding.

Thank God those damn trees flower for only two weeks.