Hideaki: A Tale of Manliness
Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2012 4:14 am
Just a short lil Hideaki thingamajig I whipped up. Our favorite trap is sadly underrepresented on this site. Anyway, excuse the weirdness, I'm pretty tired.
Comments are greatly appreciated as always.
Biology
Volcanology
Campology: Part One
Campology: Part Two
Campology: Part Three
Parapsychology
Golfology: Part One
Golfology: Part Two
The Gang Steals Cable: Part One
The Gang Steals Cable: Part Two
Dateology: Part One
Dateology: Part Two
Anthropology
Mother Nature truly is a harsh mistress.
It’s been a month. An entire four weeks, two days, and sixteen hours, to be exact. I should know, I counted. Meticulously.
Yet, here I am, repeating the same scenario as last week, the week before, and the week before before.
Not a single hair on my body. Not one.
My father’s been able to grow the most majestic of beards. It’s like a great spirit wolf descended from the moon and chiseled him in its likeness. The thought brings a tear to my eye.
Me? Barely even stubble. I think back to last month, when I actually hugged my father because I thought I finally grew a hair on my chest. Turned out it was a cat hair. We don’t even have a cat.
“HIDEAKI! BREAKFAST IS READY!”
We do have a howler monkey, though...
More specifically, a bear-monkey-gorilla hybrid. A true wonder of science.
I trudge my way down the stairwell, and already my father has finished off three omelets. He’s left one for me. How sweet.
“Don’t you know what time it is, son?” he grunts.
Too tired to deal with his inquiries, I just shrug and wolf down my pitiful excuse of an egg and ham omelet, washing it down with pulpy orange juice.
“It’s almost noon. You know what time I woke up this morning to treat myself to this delicious, protein-rich breakfast? Seven! On the dot! Your underdeveloped teenage mind, however, wasn’t strong enough to wake up until almost noon! Absolutely disgusting.”
He rambles on with various anecdotes of his life, including when he had to haul a calf fifteen miles through the snow at four in the morning when he was ten. I stopped listening after that.
“Where are you going today?”
Uh-Oh.
“What makes you think I’m going anywhere today?”
He takes a mighty gulp from the plant pot he calls a coffee mug.
“I overheard you on the phone. You’re going to see those deviant lowlifes you call friends, right?”
“Dad, they’re not lowlifes. Hell, they make better grades than I do.”
“First of all, don’t say hell. Second of all, they’re lowlifes! Hanging out at that idiotic mall all day and playing those damn ‘vidya games’ or whatever you call them. Hah! Back in my day, we had a name for kids like that! Track rashes! We called them that because they’d get rashes from being dragged around the track!”
“Absolutely fascinating, dad.”
“Hey, it helped build our upper body strength! They were doing a great service to the school!”
Not eager to hear the rest of my fathers grand tales, I hurriedly take my dishes to the kitchen and gather my things up.
I can see my father eye me as I prepare to leave.
“Take a shower when you come back.”
“Dad, why do you hate my friends so much?”
“Hate them? HATE THEM? If I could go back in time and punch their parents in their respective sexual organs to stop them from procreating, I WOULD! You have fun though.”
I roll my eyes and exit.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Another wolf whistle courtesy of the high school kids in the cheap Toyota. It’s a daily event, really. Even after I yelled at them a couple weeks ago, they just called me “so tsun-tsun” and drove off.
God I hate walks. It’s like the government made this neighborhood a fancy refugee zone for every self-important asshole in Japan.
And their favorite pastime is bothering me on my walk.
The unbearably hot afternoon does nothing to alleviate my fouling mood. My t-shirt and jeans have become a boiler room prison for my body. My father insists on buying absolutely everything for the house, including my clothes. Every time he comes back with something for me to wear, it feels like steel wool with cactus spines. And everytime I tell him this, he ignores me.
I can’t tell whether he’s doing this on purpose to “toughen me up,” or if he just has a bad taste in fashion. Then again, judging by what he wears around the house, I should probably be thankful.
I’ll be turning fifteen in a few months. I hope my dad doesn’t forget this time. I remember when he found out I saw a PG-12 movie and nearly blew a gasket; he ran around the house, called his psychiatrist, complained about his son “turning into a delinquent,” the whole nine yards. I was thirteen. The general consensus can be summed up thusly: my dad could use some work. Some retooling, if you will.
The same two guys are outside the convenience store as usual. One of them has hair bigger than a small car, the other looks like he stole his little sister's’ jeans. I call them “The Convenience Store Posse.”
I’m not good with names.
Dad hates them more than he hates anyone else in our neighborhood, if that’s even possible. He practically chokes on his own saliva whenever he sees them, and I’ve had to stop him from yelling at them to pick up their pants on more than one occasion.
The afternoon heat has grown to unbearable levels, fogging my glasses up to an almost blinding level. Said convenience store looks quite inviting now.
A wondrous blast of air conditioned goodness greets me as I make my way in. It’s a pretty small crowd today.
The shop owner is a rather fat Vietnamese immigrant. The only language he knows is agitated stares. Alongside him is his horse-faced wife with the unusual name. I think it was “Sarah” or something. She seems to be in a perpetual state of smelling something awful.
Only a few teenagers are in the store today, checking out week-old magazines. I take it they’re the rookie members of the CSP.
As I search through the drink section for a soda, an uncomfortable feeling of being watched sets over me, and sure enough the two teenage magazine stragglers quickly turn their heads away as I look back.
I’m a little less freaked out than I ought to be. Years of being mistaken for a girl by everyone from fellow students to traffic cops has left me battle-hardened in the face of gender confusion. Living with Jigoro Hakamichi is just a lifelong lesson in survival instinct, after all.
Quickly paying for my orange soda, I make a hasty retreat back to the discomfort of the outside.
It’s still as hot as Satan’s taint out here (a fun phrase I learned from a show my sister’s drill-haired friend was watching last week), but at least I’m not being ogled. In hindsight, maybe I should have made my voice really deep and said something really intimidating to the guy. Like “Hey, yo,” or whatever rappers are saying these days. That would’ve been quite the sight.
Ah, the things you think up after all’s said and done. Those are the truly the greatest regrets in life. Well, that and waiting too long to see a movie in the theaters.
The neighborhoods haven’t changed much around here. Still the same old neutral tones, perfectly manicured lawns and hi-tech security systems as always. To say the people around here are paranoid would be something of an understatement. They’re one stray falling tree limb away from starting the bloodiest, most nicely organized turf war in history. The few forays they take outside the confines of their neo-modern-deco homes are accompanied by lightning-quick eye glances on and movements that would make a gymnast envious.
Just last week, a man let his dog take a crap on one of the lawns, only a few feet from the sidewalk. No one ever saw him walk through here again. They say he just found a different route, but that’s probably because they cleaned his blood away before anyone could see it.
Great, now I’m becoming paranoid. Must be a placebo effect. I once read on an internet forum about curtain closing techniques to thwart sniper fire. I guess I should start trying that out.
People are strange, to be sure. Strange and wonderful. Mostly strange.
A dull vibration of the phone provides a rather uncomfortable sensation on my bottom. The name that comes up when I check elicits a groan.
“Yes?” I answer with a less than enthusiastic tone.
“HNNNNNNGGGH, HIDEAKI, CALL THE AMBULANCE, OH GOD THE PAIN.”
“D-dad?!”
“BURY ME NOT ON THE LONE PRAIRIE SON, I CAN SEE THE LIGHT!”
I’m shaking like a shot-at rabbit. “D-dad, what’s wrong, are you having a heart attack?! Answer me! Ok, just keep your breathing steady and-”
“Thirty seconds!” he answers loudly. This, however, is his regular loud voice, and not his “on-the-brink-of-death” loud voice.
“What?” I ask, throat and head sore from the fiasco. His snideness practically carries through the line.
“Thirty seconds I was on the line! I could have died in the time you took blabbering away like some mentally-challenged guppy! Looks like I’m going to have to run more drills to keep your mind sharp!”
There’s a lot I want to say right now, but somewhere between my esophagus and the tip of my tongue it gets garbled into some alien blabbering.
“Still too exhausted to answer, eh? Not a problem! I’ll just keep calling until you finally metamorph into a true survival expert! Who knows, I may even put some strip spikes around the house! Better start wearing shoes! Or hell, maybe I’ll put them in the shoes! I’m just full of ideas today!”
I clamp my phone shut before any more irreversible damage can be done to my psyche. My dad’s like a walking case study on why paint thinner should be kept out of the reach of children.
I find myself watching the sky more and more as I continue down my route, fearful that he may drop an anvil down on my head. I wouldn’t put it past him.
I stop my train of thought. Am I really going to go through the rest of my life like this? A guinea pig to my dad’s masochistic need to make my life a study in burst synapses? The sad truth is, probably.
It’s time for change to be enacted. Nothing around here ever changes. Not the houses, not the people, not the Korean shopkeepers.
I have a feeling it’ll be good to break the mold. I triumphantly take a swig from my orange soda and spit it out soon after.
It’s gotten warm.
Comments are greatly appreciated as always.
Biology
Volcanology
Campology: Part One
Campology: Part Two
Campology: Part Three
Parapsychology
Golfology: Part One
Golfology: Part Two
The Gang Steals Cable: Part One
The Gang Steals Cable: Part Two
Dateology: Part One
Dateology: Part Two
Anthropology
Mother Nature truly is a harsh mistress.
It’s been a month. An entire four weeks, two days, and sixteen hours, to be exact. I should know, I counted. Meticulously.
Yet, here I am, repeating the same scenario as last week, the week before, and the week before before.
Not a single hair on my body. Not one.
My father’s been able to grow the most majestic of beards. It’s like a great spirit wolf descended from the moon and chiseled him in its likeness. The thought brings a tear to my eye.
Me? Barely even stubble. I think back to last month, when I actually hugged my father because I thought I finally grew a hair on my chest. Turned out it was a cat hair. We don’t even have a cat.
“HIDEAKI! BREAKFAST IS READY!”
We do have a howler monkey, though...
More specifically, a bear-monkey-gorilla hybrid. A true wonder of science.
I trudge my way down the stairwell, and already my father has finished off three omelets. He’s left one for me. How sweet.
“Don’t you know what time it is, son?” he grunts.
Too tired to deal with his inquiries, I just shrug and wolf down my pitiful excuse of an egg and ham omelet, washing it down with pulpy orange juice.
“It’s almost noon. You know what time I woke up this morning to treat myself to this delicious, protein-rich breakfast? Seven! On the dot! Your underdeveloped teenage mind, however, wasn’t strong enough to wake up until almost noon! Absolutely disgusting.”
He rambles on with various anecdotes of his life, including when he had to haul a calf fifteen miles through the snow at four in the morning when he was ten. I stopped listening after that.
“Where are you going today?”
Uh-Oh.
“What makes you think I’m going anywhere today?”
He takes a mighty gulp from the plant pot he calls a coffee mug.
“I overheard you on the phone. You’re going to see those deviant lowlifes you call friends, right?”
“Dad, they’re not lowlifes. Hell, they make better grades than I do.”
“First of all, don’t say hell. Second of all, they’re lowlifes! Hanging out at that idiotic mall all day and playing those damn ‘vidya games’ or whatever you call them. Hah! Back in my day, we had a name for kids like that! Track rashes! We called them that because they’d get rashes from being dragged around the track!”
“Absolutely fascinating, dad.”
“Hey, it helped build our upper body strength! They were doing a great service to the school!”
Not eager to hear the rest of my fathers grand tales, I hurriedly take my dishes to the kitchen and gather my things up.
I can see my father eye me as I prepare to leave.
“Take a shower when you come back.”
“Dad, why do you hate my friends so much?”
“Hate them? HATE THEM? If I could go back in time and punch their parents in their respective sexual organs to stop them from procreating, I WOULD! You have fun though.”
I roll my eyes and exit.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Another wolf whistle courtesy of the high school kids in the cheap Toyota. It’s a daily event, really. Even after I yelled at them a couple weeks ago, they just called me “so tsun-tsun” and drove off.
God I hate walks. It’s like the government made this neighborhood a fancy refugee zone for every self-important asshole in Japan.
And their favorite pastime is bothering me on my walk.
The unbearably hot afternoon does nothing to alleviate my fouling mood. My t-shirt and jeans have become a boiler room prison for my body. My father insists on buying absolutely everything for the house, including my clothes. Every time he comes back with something for me to wear, it feels like steel wool with cactus spines. And everytime I tell him this, he ignores me.
I can’t tell whether he’s doing this on purpose to “toughen me up,” or if he just has a bad taste in fashion. Then again, judging by what he wears around the house, I should probably be thankful.
I’ll be turning fifteen in a few months. I hope my dad doesn’t forget this time. I remember when he found out I saw a PG-12 movie and nearly blew a gasket; he ran around the house, called his psychiatrist, complained about his son “turning into a delinquent,” the whole nine yards. I was thirteen. The general consensus can be summed up thusly: my dad could use some work. Some retooling, if you will.
The same two guys are outside the convenience store as usual. One of them has hair bigger than a small car, the other looks like he stole his little sister's’ jeans. I call them “The Convenience Store Posse.”
I’m not good with names.
Dad hates them more than he hates anyone else in our neighborhood, if that’s even possible. He practically chokes on his own saliva whenever he sees them, and I’ve had to stop him from yelling at them to pick up their pants on more than one occasion.
The afternoon heat has grown to unbearable levels, fogging my glasses up to an almost blinding level. Said convenience store looks quite inviting now.
A wondrous blast of air conditioned goodness greets me as I make my way in. It’s a pretty small crowd today.
The shop owner is a rather fat Vietnamese immigrant. The only language he knows is agitated stares. Alongside him is his horse-faced wife with the unusual name. I think it was “Sarah” or something. She seems to be in a perpetual state of smelling something awful.
Only a few teenagers are in the store today, checking out week-old magazines. I take it they’re the rookie members of the CSP.
As I search through the drink section for a soda, an uncomfortable feeling of being watched sets over me, and sure enough the two teenage magazine stragglers quickly turn their heads away as I look back.
I’m a little less freaked out than I ought to be. Years of being mistaken for a girl by everyone from fellow students to traffic cops has left me battle-hardened in the face of gender confusion. Living with Jigoro Hakamichi is just a lifelong lesson in survival instinct, after all.
Quickly paying for my orange soda, I make a hasty retreat back to the discomfort of the outside.
It’s still as hot as Satan’s taint out here (a fun phrase I learned from a show my sister’s drill-haired friend was watching last week), but at least I’m not being ogled. In hindsight, maybe I should have made my voice really deep and said something really intimidating to the guy. Like “Hey, yo,” or whatever rappers are saying these days. That would’ve been quite the sight.
Ah, the things you think up after all’s said and done. Those are the truly the greatest regrets in life. Well, that and waiting too long to see a movie in the theaters.
The neighborhoods haven’t changed much around here. Still the same old neutral tones, perfectly manicured lawns and hi-tech security systems as always. To say the people around here are paranoid would be something of an understatement. They’re one stray falling tree limb away from starting the bloodiest, most nicely organized turf war in history. The few forays they take outside the confines of their neo-modern-deco homes are accompanied by lightning-quick eye glances on and movements that would make a gymnast envious.
Just last week, a man let his dog take a crap on one of the lawns, only a few feet from the sidewalk. No one ever saw him walk through here again. They say he just found a different route, but that’s probably because they cleaned his blood away before anyone could see it.
Great, now I’m becoming paranoid. Must be a placebo effect. I once read on an internet forum about curtain closing techniques to thwart sniper fire. I guess I should start trying that out.
People are strange, to be sure. Strange and wonderful. Mostly strange.
A dull vibration of the phone provides a rather uncomfortable sensation on my bottom. The name that comes up when I check elicits a groan.
“Yes?” I answer with a less than enthusiastic tone.
“HNNNNNNGGGH, HIDEAKI, CALL THE AMBULANCE, OH GOD THE PAIN.”
“D-dad?!”
“BURY ME NOT ON THE LONE PRAIRIE SON, I CAN SEE THE LIGHT!”
I’m shaking like a shot-at rabbit. “D-dad, what’s wrong, are you having a heart attack?! Answer me! Ok, just keep your breathing steady and-”
“Thirty seconds!” he answers loudly. This, however, is his regular loud voice, and not his “on-the-brink-of-death” loud voice.
“What?” I ask, throat and head sore from the fiasco. His snideness practically carries through the line.
“Thirty seconds I was on the line! I could have died in the time you took blabbering away like some mentally-challenged guppy! Looks like I’m going to have to run more drills to keep your mind sharp!”
There’s a lot I want to say right now, but somewhere between my esophagus and the tip of my tongue it gets garbled into some alien blabbering.
“Still too exhausted to answer, eh? Not a problem! I’ll just keep calling until you finally metamorph into a true survival expert! Who knows, I may even put some strip spikes around the house! Better start wearing shoes! Or hell, maybe I’ll put them in the shoes! I’m just full of ideas today!”
I clamp my phone shut before any more irreversible damage can be done to my psyche. My dad’s like a walking case study on why paint thinner should be kept out of the reach of children.
I find myself watching the sky more and more as I continue down my route, fearful that he may drop an anvil down on my head. I wouldn’t put it past him.
I stop my train of thought. Am I really going to go through the rest of my life like this? A guinea pig to my dad’s masochistic need to make my life a study in burst synapses? The sad truth is, probably.
It’s time for change to be enacted. Nothing around here ever changes. Not the houses, not the people, not the Korean shopkeepers.
I have a feeling it’ll be good to break the mold. I triumphantly take a swig from my orange soda and spit it out soon after.
It’s gotten warm.
