The Price Of Clean

Some time ago, my ceiling had an aneurysm, letting a rich spray of arterial roofwater into my apartment. Since then, I've been inspired to launch a number of cleaning assaults onto my already questionable carpet, in the hopes of reverting it from bad beige to good beige. My latest ploy to this end involved buying a mediocre steam cleaner, immediately losing the instruction manual, and improvising from there.

At first, the large tufts of pitch black hair that the cleaner kicked up delighted me. I didn't know where the hell they came from, but each one was proof that my house was getting incrementally better.

Then I heard the scratching coming from the attached water tank, and found out that I've got a damn ghost stuck in it. Not one of those mostly domesticated Midwest ghosts, either. I've got one of those Asian Longhairs that came over to America six years ago, before Customs learned to check shipments of imported Asian lumber for infestations. Without any unnatural predators to control them, the damn things are popping up everywhere.

I don't know to do about her, and I certainly don't know what she was doing in my carpet. The apartment's previous tenant has moved to Japan, and asking him over long distance if he happens to know why there's a dead girl in my room seems ill advised. Plus, the guidebooks agree that knowing a Longhair's secret past just pisses it off, anyway. What the guides don't agree on is a way to successfully get rid of a Longhair. I could just drop the water tank off at a landfill, but then I'd be out of a water tank, and constantly afraid that the ghost would go on an Incredible Journey back to my place.

The worst thing about the situation is her age. My apartment does have a contract that assures me that "Any spectral denizens within your apartment are all eighteen years of age or older, and do not represent any living or fictional characters." It would be a nice piece of CYA legalese, if it wasn't so obviously a pack of lies. The girl is...eight, perhaps. I'm willing to go so far as twelve. Either way, it looks bad, and I want her gone before my neighbors find out.

I'm probably going to have to get Narraptor to deal with the damn thing. Longhairs are pretty damn instant that they get the last word in, but after his extra-strength exorcism of this blog, I'm pretty sure he can handle her. But that means I'll have to commit to PAX, and watch people play Dance Dance Revolution for cash and prizes. There are worse fates, but none of them involve complete strangers telling me how great The Minibosses are.

Freelance Sign Editors Needed

Here's a weird thing I brought back from Japan. Bidding for the merchandising rights is well underway. You should know that the three tanks are brothers and the same one is always attacked by the cat.

As a result of my father-in-law climbing onto the roof of his house through a second story window during a rainstorm, I spent a lot of my trip in a hospital in Himeji. When not watching him attempt to lower his brain age, I visited the "Language Cure Room," where I learned doublethink and Fox Newspeak.

Himeji is famous for two things: Himeji Castle and yakuza. (A 16-year-old boy stabbed his mother in the throat in a local restaurant on Tuesday, but I am told this sort of thing happens all the time.) Whenever I return from Japan, people invariably ask me, "Narraptor, did you see any yakuza?" Indeed, I believe I did!

The alleged sighting took place a few hours away in the bar of the Osaka Ritz-Carlton. It's the type of place where grapefruit juice costs as much as a cocktail, and where the lounge singers amuse barflys by singing, "Welcome to the hotel...Ritz-Carlton!" After their opening performance, they announced that someone in the room was celebrating a special birthday. Someone just turned three!

Sitting next to the woman holding the birthday boy was a Japanese man wearing a white suit, impassively watching as everyone clapped along to the birthday song. Now I'm not saying that just because he took a kid to a cocktail lounge for its third birthday means he's a gangster, but at the very least he wanted us to think he was one.

I made a point of renting Miike's The Great Yokai War while in Japan, forgetting that it came out on DVD in America a few weeks ago. My wife translated all but the last 15 minutes for me, and other than the mysterious philosophies of the bad guy ("To destroy the evils of truth and love!") I think I understood everything. For those of you who don't know, Yokai is basically a Japanese Labyrinth or Mirrormask, but the monsters come from real folklore. And it's got a giant mechanical hellforge that allows the antagonist to merge kappa and tengu with discarded motorcycles and the like to create demon bikes and helicopter Terminators with chainsaw arms.

Will someone please watch it with the subtitles on and tell me what the ending meant, other than "I'm Takeshi Miike! Ha ha!"

Japan's Children Are Our Future Taiko Drum Masters

Hello from the future, where one misplaced letter renders our very language into katakana or some other form of Asiany hieroglyph. A mere 15 hours from now spacebars will be half their former size and bordered by character changing keys that are easily hit by stubby American fingers. It's what Morgan Spurlock warned us about.

The flight to Japan was dehydrating but otherwise uneventful. If you must be stuck in the middle seat on an airplane for 11 hours, a destination in Japan is probably your safest bet. I finished Errors and Omissions, and will have a word for the Onion AV Club when I return. I also skimmed through a small press horror novel which I won't mention by title. The publisher begged in the back pages for positive reviews on Amazon and Barnes and Noble's web site. I will do him a better courtesy and not dissuade anyone from reading this novel with homophobic homosexual sex, boring gratuitous violence (the worst kind), and scrotums filled with centipedes.

I should have just picked up the latter books in Naomi Novik's dragons meet Patrick O'Brien series. Despite having more semicolons in the first three pages than I have ever seen in my life, Her Majesty's Dragon is kind of fun.

When hiking through my wife's hometown today, we passed by her old elementary school. Rather than struggling with sea shanties on plastic recorders, these kids were outside wailing on Taiko drums. I felt robbed. And unless we restore music to our public school curriculums and invest in Guitar Hero, it's only a matter of time before we're all listening to Johnny Hell.

On another frightening note, I had been warned that there were big spiders and centipedes in my wife's hometown in the summer. I ran into one in her family's house last night that was bigger than my hand, and not in that daddy-long-legs way. The thing was horrifyingly proportionate. I guess when you grow up in an environment with spiders that big you can't afford to be afraid of them, but as far as I'm concerned that's like siding with the demons just because you're in Hell.