Yeah sorry I’ve been busy.

Went to the local bar, sometimes a metal bar, sometimes the metaller of the local punk bars, to me a pinball bar, and tonight it was Poikkeus’s “welcome to America” party bar.

About 3/11ths of my college classes were “learning to use Japanese” and I have ever only used it five times since, four of which were to talk to or listen to people at bars when at least one party is totally wasted.

The first was in LA on the roof of The Standard (the downtown one) when a girl I knew as a package with the DJs I knew back then was coked up and talking to two Japanese hairstylists in town for a fashion conference, I wandered into the cluster and it was “hey [kontextmaschine], do you know Japanese” as a throwaway and I braced myself and said “…yes”. She was inviting them back to party and they were politely playing along and my contribution involved forgetting how to count room numbers in the crazy Japanese counting suffix system.

The second was taking the JLPT in LA, this was back before the N-level revisions and I thiiink it was the 3 level. The course I’d been through was the scaled-down version of an immersion course that was oriented to the DLPT instead. I absolutely bombed the vocabulary and listening comprehension sections, I could feel it happening, literally the worst test I’ve ever taken. And then we got to the grammar bit and it was an absolute breeze, there was no question I ever had to think twice about (after 6//6///¾//¾ credits I knew all the structure in the Japanese language, the idea being if I was ever airdropped in Japan I’d just pick the words up). After the test was scored and normed I passed by the skin of my teeth. Got a formal certificate, and then a few months later an e-mail saying that the information of anyone who took the test might have been stolen by hackers.

My proctor was a girl from the college anime club, the one that was the one to fansub Utena, back in the genlock days. We traded looks enough to confirm and then pointedly ignored each other.

The third was at M Bar, in Los Angeles. This is not the “M Bar” on Vine that Google tells me about, M Bar was a Japanese expat piano bar semi-attached to the Knights Inn on Temple Street just northwest of downtown. M Bar was also an after-hours bar, it would keep going after the (LA? California?) closing time of 2am. Of the after-hours bars around Echo Park, it was my favorite. Alvarado House (which was the backyard of an actual house, on Alvarado just south of Sunset) would have music and girls with fox tails who would respond to your “oh, isn’t that just yiffy” with an embrace and “how long have you been in the fandom!?” and freak you out because at that point in your life you’re great at passing judgement but terrible at relating to people in the moment; M Bar would have competently mixed drinks and a dude playing piano in front of a weird vine-themed stained glass wall display.

I’d gone there a few times before I ended up staying at the Knights Inn because my place was being fumigated, and went out and came back drunk and had lost the card to open the parking lot gate so put it on the street and walked into the bar to ask if anyone could call the hotel (this was before cell phones had the internet to look numbers up). And I asked once and the (expat) bartenders and regulars couldn’t understand, and twice, and thrice, and then it was like okay, tonari no hoteru no denwabango, wakarimasu ka? And minna wa “heee” te, and tried to talk to me across a language barrier and bilateral drunkenness but I did get the number.

The fourth time was in Portland at C Bar, I just picked up on the “[letter] Bar” continuity and it’s kinda funny. The (Japanese) owner and (gaijin) husband of the iffy sushi place next door were in the pinball room playing, getting drunk, and talking shit on people, and I followed along.

{oh! somewhere between 1 and 2, maybe even before 1, I translated h-doujins, because of course I did. This was maybe in the early days of e-hentai, before even ex-hentai, maybe even before when your only source was mangakan.net/main.html; alternatingly 3 or 5 doujins each day and sometimes they’d be loli or guro or plain ugly and you were just fucked. This was back when “sexual menace” still meant tentacles and not NTR; there was less begging boys to nakadashi and more begging them not to, there’s maybe an insight there? Anyway I did some of the Sakura Taisen “Mai Hime” ones.}

Tonight I used it to interpose between the charismatic Poikkeus lead (as a social unit, I dunno as a band) and a doorman I’m friendly with to communicate the fact “one of your friends is passed out on the patio, they need to leave”.