I am trying to get my sea legs back with this whole web-page thing. It's been a while. I did my best to keep it current while I was in Japan, but the fact is, to me, weblogs are all about being stuck at work. I don't really understand people who blog from places other than work. What is the motivation? If you weren't chained to a keyboard, only able to half-concentrate among the piercing hum of a hundred office machines, why wouldn't you just go outside and play, or read a book? For all of the goofy talk about digital content revolution, it has always seemed to me that weblogs are just the new media scheme for caged birds to sing. Or talk shit, as the case may be.

Poo-too-weet. There will be new photo galleries added over the next few weeks and they will be tremendously exciting, each bringing vivid illumination to some fascinating corner of the world. Below, you can already find a link to one such visual journey, in which monkeys run wild over a sleepy Japanese suburb and the police are helpless to stop them. There is a story that goes along with that gallery, and now seems like a good time to tell it. The suburb in question is in the northern part of Kyoto, near the mountains. My friends Tianni and Travis lived there. One warm summer night, not long before I left, they had me over to their place for dinner, and we had a grand time. Travis told me that one of his co-workers had talked to someone who claimed to have seen monkeys running through the streets in that area once, a long time ago. The monkeys had come down from the mountains for whatever reason, and then the police had chased them away. We talked about how great it would be if that were true. Monkeys in a city, I thought. Holy shit. When it was time to catch the last train, I walked back to the subway by myself, calling out "monkeys!" along the way in that way that I do when I'm walking around and looking for something I don't really expect to find. (Friends of mine will know the tone of voice.) Then I boarded the train and went home. Tianni had the next day off, so I didn't see her until Tuesday. When she came into work, she pressed her digital camera into my hands without a word. The photo gallery below records what had happened the next morning.

Honestly, if you are not standing on your feet and cheering by the last photograph, I do not know you.

I went to the Mark Twain House on Saturday. Let me tell you, Mark Twain had a fucking awesome house. His wallpaper was 84% better than the best wallpaper I had ever seen before. They had the house all decked out for Christmas, which was nice. The tour guide said they hoped to have the kitchen restored by May, so maybe I'll go back and check out the kitchen.