I have been back from Tokyo, Japan, for almost a month. The first few days were tough adjusting my mentality to the misery beat that isn’t just a trope but seemingly a sense of being ingrained in everyone and the environment. My first real hardship was standing in the line at Starbucks waiting for my coffee. I was greeted with less than enthusiasm, and I could almost feel them pour their self-loathing and misery into my cup of coffee.
I was left with the conversation that I had with my friends our last night in Tokyo about joining my Cult, C.U.L.T., or Cultural Understanding Learning and Teaching, with the main focus of happiness. The only gimmick was that we all had to get up at 4:30 in the morning and project our dreams and the dreams of others East towards the rising sun. After all, that is where the sun crested at the beginning of our new day. My idea was that group thought was better than single thought. The other idea is that people will tell you to surround yourself with positive people. In other words, having out with four millionaires, you will become the fourth. Even this simple idea seemed to be asking too much of people, while others just laughed it off and scoffed at it.
I know the power of projection of thought and belief in an idea, so much so that it took me to L.A. for North America’s largest anime convention. After having postponed my trip and adventures due to financial worries and other problems, I remember one day sitting at work wondering if I could still make it, remembering that I still had the ticket. I would need to work an extra week, which would put my work rotation out so that I could make the event. I got out of the truck, got on my hands and knees, pointed at the sun with my hands, and, like a satellite, I projected my message to the universe. Within minutes of getting back into the car, I received a phone call from the area coordinator asking if I wanted to be one of the guys that goes to East Texas for a week for a set. After saying yes, I immediately went to work to book a ticket and a hotel. I made it to my first Anime convention in L.A. in 2018.
Before even changing where I could go to the anime convention, I doubled down on life and bought a ticket to Japan, thinking that was the answer. I had no idea how I was going to pay for the trip, considering I had to just cancel a the Anime convention. None the less I bought the ticket and I was taking the ride.
After a couple of tough days at work, I sat down and wrote myself a letter laying it all out there. The letter went on to say things like I deserved better. That I was being taken advantage of. I deserved more than I was getting and valued myself even if others didn’t. Then, after a day of being ridiculed and having to deal with some extreme conditions, I went home and ran my mouth on social media about how done I was with everything. My friend then came to me and said that her husband’s company was hiring. I didn’t know what it was or what he did, but I was in. I had an interview on Monday and was hired on the spot. I quit my job that day; it was the first time I walked out on a job. In the hiring process, I said I had a planned trip, which they had no problem accommodating.
In 2019, I doubled down on life again and went to Japan and two major cities; in one, I found incredible magic with a fantastic woman who became a great friend, and one where the sun rose twice. If Tokyo, Kyoto, and Hiroshima weren’t enough, I visited my friend in Istanbul to walk a day in her life.
2020 was a great year again, and I planned to go to Japan for the third time. This time, I want to meet up with my friend and see the cherry blossoms. But that did not happen. The world was thrown into a tailspin, leaving a trail of misery and misfortune for the next three years. I lost my job and was thrown into a state of what I would do—but these times held something else for me. Formative years where, despite the adversity, I overcame the adversity and hostile work environment of a job that went from great to horrible to return to Japan in 2023, graduate with my BA degree in accounting, and start a new Job doing what I went to school for with plans to return to Japan in 2024.
I go to Japan for many reasons, but I go there because I can clear my head and think about things I wouldn’t usually think about. When your head is freed space, you can walk down the street and ponder different philosophies—a Plato of your mind. This time, I could focus on manifesting reality and escape the negative of the space that surrounded me, which caused me to slip into depression, so much so that I began to question my artistic path and my other passions, let alone myself.
“Spaces are made by humanity, but humanity is made by its spaces too, a feedback loop, a cycle made virtuous or vicious based on the choices we make together. Ghost in the Shell wants to show us that the dynamics of ourselves and our spaces are one and the same.” Nerd Writer
When I look into the critical analysis of the spaces that I inhabit and their reality, I think of how they have influenced people and the dynamics that shape individuals and spaces. If you have ever studied Joe Dispenza, you know from his teaching that you have to be greater than your outside environment because to be able to manifest your reality, your personality creates your personal reality, and if you allow the reality around you to create your personality by causing you to experience negative moods, funks, anxiety, and depression then those elements are manifested into your world-like energy attracts like energy.
This is why it is so easy to meet people and share great experiences when I travel to Japan. The people that are there are there for the same reason, experiencing the same euphoric sense of being. The people who encounter me and similar individuals are overwhelmed by our happiness. After taking that critical look at reality, I realized that a change was needed to make my dreams a reality. This wasn’t the first time I looked at my town and my spaces objectively.
The first time I did was when I moved back from Laramie. When I was in Laramie, I had a group of people I loved hanging out with at our favorite coffee shop early in the morning. We were a bunch of aspiring writers known as the coffee drips. We all worked together, and when we got together, we hung out, partied, philosophized, and often made the scene just like Thompson and Kerouac. In the mornings, we would get together and write and discuss writing over coffee. There was me, Donutz Geoff, and three others; aside from all that, we were all going to school for different things. We were an eclectic bunch of artists. After deciding to come back home, I sought to find that sort of magic here, but I found the Misery Beat.
I did my best to create a Warhol experience with elements of that Kerouac and Thompson Magic, but home was much gritter, and no wave or tide took out to sea the garbage that didn’t make or learn to surf the wave. The wave represents the excitement that comes in every year to Laramie in the form of new students. After each semester, the tide pulled out all those elements that hadn’t made it. For someone like me, I surfed the wave and rode out to meet the new wave as it rode into town.
Now, I have grander goals and aspirations. I want another year like 2019 and better. I want to celebrate my life and share it with people who are just as eager to share their life and their experiences. I have always believed that through art, we can create a bigger picture and take greater meaning and understanding of life and the world around us. This journey starts with getting back in touch with my dreams and sense of self and surrounding myself with people who also want to know and explore the world in its infinite awesomeness. The only problem in doing so is becoming limited in nature, limited in the ability to network and connect with people who want the same things and want to do the same thing. The other problem is that so many people have seemingly “Tuned in and Checked out” what I call the living dead. Those going nowhere do nothing but exist in the mindless thought already provided for them—the proverbial tropes of life.
I believe the American dream is one of those tropes that no longer exist, and for what purposes would it exist now? The owning a home, maybe a summer cabin or lakeside home, two cars, a mutual marriage 2, kids, a dog, a picket fence 2, cars, perhaps a boat or a camper, with an end goal of sending one, if not two kids to college and retire in your home. Maybe go on a handful of exotic vacations but more or less settle on a family road trip every year or every other year.
To me, life is a revolution. You have to hold specific ideas as values worth preserving, and you have to know why you're doing what you're doing. Otherwise, you have no course of action, and others have no context of who you are, where you're going, or what you're doing. Like a top that lays motionless on the plane of existence, at some point, you have to pick it up and set it in motion, to spin and go in a direction. Sometimes, if that top remains stagnant, you have to pick it up and set it in motion again, but never allow it to fall to rest.
I suppose maybe I am jaded, or perhaps I watched my parents and my parents' generation mass the sentimental “American Dream” only to have some die and have utter regret for how they lived and spent their time and money. In contrast, I watched the others cling to the dream or barely make a home for themselves. The current events and economic landscape, let alone the socioeconomics and culture, no longer support such ridiculous ideas. I think it’s strange that life and our time here are so uncertain, yet we seemingly make certainty in our lives as we live daily and in the construct we attempt to make in our lives.
When Major is asked to merge her consciousness with 22051, she states that after redefining her identity, she wants some guarantee that she will be herself after the merger, which he assures her that there isn’t one. 22051 explains that “your efforts to remain what you are limit you. All things change in a dynamic environment.” Ghost in the Shell. When Major's friend asks her if 22051 is still a part of Major replies at the end, “Here before you is neither the program called the Puppet Master nor the women that you called the Major
Standing there looking over the Mega metralopious Magor says to herself, “And where shall I go now? The net is vast and limitless.”
Stepping out and taking up that sand in line, the words of history echo with the reproach of remaining stagnant in the most amazing times of our lives. Lenin’s main argument in his book What is to be done was that the workers would not suddenly develop class consciousness due to economic circumstances or through various abstract actions. Lenin argues that there is a need to organize formal organizations to promote and publish ideas of the very revolution they intend to promote.
“We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighbouring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don't clutch at us and don't besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are "free" to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, What Is to Be Done?
When I shared my goals and ambitions for the future, Travel Back to Japan in October 2025, a Trip to Munich, Germany / Salzburg, Austria, and that I would like to remotely work in Japan so that I can make both of them happen, he responded with good luck with a negative undertone. I simply walked away from the conversation, and I knew this to be accurate as I walked away. Everything I had ever put my heart and soul into, I have watched manifest one way or another. Life is just too great to sit on the sidelines and let it play out without being a player, a contender, and a contributor. The end of 2024, I believe, holds greatness in ways I have you to know and understand, comprehend, or know, but it will pave the way for the future. A New Economic Policy that evolves my situation and circumstances and situation. It is an artistic movement that begins to carry me and my ambitions the distance, uniting artists and telling a story about life and humanity greater than anyone one individual could. I want to live like a revolution and have people around me who believe in the same ideas and notions and hold them as values worth preserving. To share in the world's magic with those alive and desire to know its magic. I want a home, an estate, a place I call my own. Something as grand as Karin Hall or other notable homes and lodges. A home in Japan and many other things are too many to list here. Ultimately, it makes me the grandest I can be because if anyone deserves it, I do, let alone someone to share it all with more extended than a cup of coffee.
Here I am readying once again for the greatest adventure, a new day a new begging and infinite opportunity.