The Halloween that Wasn't

Well, despite the fact that the Japanese most definitely do not celebrate Halloween, I'd be damned if I wasn't going to hook it up for the kiddies over here.

I figured my greatest Halloween victory would occur at the Elementary School. They're usually the ones who have the least structure, meaning I have the most freedom of what particular Englishism I want to impart to the littleuns. I envisioned an all-day Halloweenfest, with the kiddies showing up in whatever costumes they could smack together. I didn't expect much since, as I already mentioned, the Japanese don't celebrate Halloween. And apparently my coordinator at the elementary thought the same for the same reason. She told me that there was no way we could have a Halloween extravaganza on the Friday before Halloween because A) all the students would be far too busy diligently preparing for their school festival on Sunday November 1st and B) there was no way any of them would have any costumes to wear to school.

I tried to negotiate a visit to all of the grades, rather than just the grade 5 and 6 visits I had scheduled for the day. I figured It'd be a pretty easy negotiation that would go something like this:

Me - "I want to teach every period of the day next friday, taking over each of the grades for a period and giving each of their homeroom teachers a break."

My Coordinator - "You want to work your ass off and you're not making any more work for any of the teachers? Sold. Go for it. Job's a good one."

Unfortunately, I'd clearly underestimated the importance of this ruddy festival, and the best I got out of her between bouts of teeth sucking (a patented Japanese form of "well...I don't know...") was something along the lines of an "I'll ask the other teachers, but they're all pretty busy...and the grade 5s and 6s have an established curriculum, so we can't deviate from it for something like a Halloween lesson."

So I went to my other schools from Monday to Thursday, expecting little form the Elementary on Friday. I wore my cowboy outfit to the High School on Monday as a bit of a dry run since my JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) at the High School is chill and is amenable to the bouts of English mayhem I try to create. The students at the High School are this wonderfully chill brand of kids. I mean, their English ain't so hot since their school isn't all that academic, but I swear the worst these kids could ever throw at me would be a half-hearted sneer. They seemed to rather enjoy my outfit.

For the Junior High School on Thursday, I dressed up like a matrix reject. Very shortly after I started at the Jr. High back in August, some of my third year students had told me that, if I slicked my hair back and wore my sunglasses, I would look like this character named Albert Wesker from the the Resident Evil/Biohazard series of survival horror games. Well, I say they told me that, but when you factor in their broken English and my rudimentary Nihongo, it was more like they were communicating by smoke signals, and I was responding in semaphore, but somewhere in the middle I got "Hair. All back. Uesuka!" from them. I googled the guy, and when I saw his picture I thought "well. That's easy."

Some black clothes and some bicycle gloves later, I had all the students who had played Biohazard thinking I was a cool dude, and all the rest of them thought I was some freak who liked the Terminator movies an awful lot. (In Japan, if you're a white male wearing sunglasses, and you're a bit brawnier than the standard Japanese build, everyone tells you that you look like Arnold Schwarzenegger) Either one was fine by me.

Then I headed to the Elementary this morning, expecting little of the day but planning for the worst. I figured that since I had offered to teach all the grades about Halloween I should at least be ready to do so if my coordinator had managed to swing it. Plus, I'd had previous experience with her telling me something might change, only to inform me that it had, infact changed ten to fifteen minutes before I needed to have a completely new lesson ready for a completely different class.

And today was no different. I rolled in this morning, and she informed me that I would be visiting all six grades today. Surprisingly, all of the homeroom teachers had happily agreed to let me take over each of their classes for a period, saving them the lesson planning and teaching time.

Imagine that.

So I was able to bring a bit of Halloween to all of the classes today, doing things like drawing paper pumpkins, teaching them to Trick or Treat, and showing them pictures of all my mad costumes over the years, and all the mad costumes my friends had donned. The following picture of Alex was a real hit with the kids. I don't think you can say you've lived properly until you've seen a first grader imitate that rocker face.

I also told a ghost story to the older grades. Despite having to tell it through a translator, the kids were genuinely freaked out, so I don't think it lost any of its creepiness. What's more, I got them going and they told some ghost stories of their own.

But, what made the whole day was the one particular class where, without any prompting from me, the teacher had helped the students to build makeshift costumes. When I showed up to their class, they were sitting orderly in their seats, and every last one of them was wearing a costume.

Shit, man.

When Halloween means as much to you as it does to me, and it seems you have to fight tooth and nail to convince some of your friends/coworkers that there's a unique joy in throwing on a costume, to show up in a classroom in a country that doesn't celebrate Halloween and to find every last one of your students wearing a costume that they made from scratch specifically for your 45-minute visit...

James Donald Jones captured it best when he said "well. That just makes me feel about ten feet tall."

The Three R's

This one is for environmentally-/waste-minded friends like Amy and Lindsay. Before I ever made it here, they were warning me that Japan is notorious for the large number of garbage incinerators that they have in use. When you look at the place and see how remarkably uncommon flat, useful land is in this archipelago nation perched on the shoulders of volcanoes, and you think about how any flat, useful land there is was probably first settled several hundred (if not a thousand) years ago, it’s clear why these people can’t rely on landfills to dispose of their waste, as we do in land-rich North America.

Still you’d hope that, with all the people here, and all the futuristic technology for making various parts of their lives more efficient, the Japanese may have developed some kind of space-aged composting technology to capitalize on the vast amounts of organic waste they do create.

And when I first arrived here, the outlook seemed like a good one. I had been warned about the very anal-retentive approach the Japanese take to sorting their garbage, and that was completely on the mark. There were three different, colour-coded garbage bags to be used when sorting your garbage, and recycling was divided between different bins for cans, plastics, glass, and coloured glass.

Certainly a nation that was so scrupulous with sorting their trash would be just as scrupulous about disposing of it. Maybe Lindsay and Amy were wrong; maybe the Japanese had turned over a new leaf and mothballed all of those big black incinertators. As I tried to make sense of the document detailing how the garbage system worked (which, thankfully, had more pictures on it than words), I was happy to see that the very eco-looking green bag was the one that we were supposed to put all the biodegradables like paper, food waste, and tea bags into. Surely this thing was heading straight for the local composting depot.

Then I received a presentation from the town official in charge of waste management. He didn’t speak much English, but he used the little English he did have to burst my bubble about an eco-friendly Japan. He pointed to the green bag and all the lovely compostables in it and uttered one syllable:

“Fire.”

He pointed to the orange bag, where we were supposed to deposit all of the plastic and foil wrap (there’s so much of this crap on Japanese food that I’m pretty sure their packaged food would ride out a nuclear holocaust just fine. They put bunches of bananas in plastic bags. They saranwrap nets of oranges. They shrinkwrap tomatoes to Styrofoam forms.) and said:

“No fire.”

He pointed to the yellow bag, which we were supposed to use for broken glass, dead appliances, used batteries, and any other household detritus too substantial for the other two bags. He raised his arms in a shrug, gave me his surprised face, and said

“Uhh-Ooh!”

I assumed he meant “broken” by that.

And just like that, my dreams of an eco-Japan went up in smoke. All those lovely compostables were also the most burnable items of Japanese refuse. Not only that, but as I’ve asked around about what they do with the plastic and foil/orange-bag items, the kind of veiled, non-answers I’ve gotten have lead me to wonder if they’re not hucking these on the bonfire as well—just in some other, more specialized incinerators.

I’m a little disappointed that they don’t have a separate garbage bag for silica packages. It seems that every packaged food item I pick up from the kombini not only has several dozen yards of plastic wrap in successive layers to hermetically seal it off from the outside world, but it also has a silica package in it, sporting some awesome Engrish brand name like “Everflesh” or “Infinisoftu.” I’ve honestly bought the most insignificant of donuts from the kombini and had the thing sitting on its own plastic tray, with a silica package beneath it, and a layer of plastic wrap around it. When I take it to the cash, they’ll put it in the world’s only individual-donut plastic bag, and they'll try to hand me some disposable hashi to eat it with. If I succeed in waving all that off, they’ll still slap a plastic sticker on the plastic packaging of my individual donut incase someone mistakenly tries to bust me for shoplifting in the four feet between the cash and the door.

And once you get all of that annoying plastic packaging out of the kombini, and you head off to your eventual destination, merrily eating your donut along the way, you face another harsh reality of the Japanese waste management system:

Waste management is your problem.

Public garbage cans are so rare in this place as to be mythical. You can only really find garbage cans outside kombinis, and even then not all kombinis have them. While Mark, Lindsay, and I are out and about, we’ll always keep an eye out for a garbage. When one of us spots one, it is that person’s duty to announce it to the rest of the crew so everyone can empty their pockets of all the plastic wrap and silica packages they’ve accumulated. Hell, with the amenities provided by all of the kombinis, it tends to be easier to find a clean public toilet than it is to find a trash can. It’s another one of the little paradoxes of Japanese society: they create more waste than anywhere else on the planet, but they don’t make it easy get rid of it.

Back in September at my town’s big festival, when they’d ringed a town shrine with food vending (and plastic dispensing) stalls, I approached aforementioned Town Waste Guy and asked him where the garbage bins were. He laughed and engrished “you take it to MY house.” Despite the possible comedic misinterpretation waiting in that sentence, I understood that what he meant was “Your” house, in the same way that the Japanese will call your personal chopsticks “MY hashi.” The town had set up this little waste generation station, but they’d be damned if they were going to help me dispose of the ridiculously hot fishdog-on-a-stick that my sneaky JR High students had bought me as a joke.

Then again, though the Japanese may not yet have “Reduce” down pat, they are certainly rocking “Reuse.” The Japanese have put second-hand shops to work like I’ve never seen before. Recycle Shops, from "2nd Street" to the hilariously named "Hard-Off," are everywhere, and since the Japanese like having new, shiny stuff, you will often be able to find their almost-new, just-less-than-shiny stuff for a bargain at these stores. I’ve caught some stores making a real buck off it—like the 2nd Street clothing shop in Sapporo that marks second-hand stuff up to retro-chique prices—but, for the most part, these stores seem to be on the level and they offer used goods at a considerably higher quality level than you’d find at Goodwill.

The Sisters Co would think they’d died and gone to heaven.

Soft What Now?

Today I was introduced to the Japanese sport of "soft volleyball." Its a wonderful little athletic aberation like Park Golf (something not quite golf and not quite croquet), and apparently it is very popular in Hokkaido. I was told it was a favourite sport of obachans and ojisans (grandmas and grandpas), so, of course I laughed the game off as I had previously tried to do with ultimate frisbee and badminton (both of which have since kicked my ass).

But I should have thought back to our Rishiri climb on the Two Points tour; I should have remembered that on that hike we only saw 'bachans and ojisans. The old fogeys of Japan have previously shown themselves to be made of sterner stuff than the soft little nannas and pop-pops back in North America. And, of course, it was no different in soft volleyball.

In terms of rules, soft volleyball is almost identical to 'hard' volleyball. However, you play with four on a side, and the ball you're playing with has more in common with those big, red dodgeballs of old than it does with a traditional volleyball.

Also, there is absolutely nothing soft about that ball when you get cracked in the face with it, as me and my Junior High JTE discovered today (though she has a good deal more to lose in the face category than I do). For a sport that's played with a glorified dodgeball, the players are surprisingly ruthless, and me and my Sensei weren't the last to get cracked in the face.

It was all fully worth it, though, as we were rewarded with CURRY for losing all our games. The first place teams won beer and nihoshyu (sake), while the second place teams won a box of ramen noodles and garbage bags. I have never seen someone throw such a substantial freak-out over garbage bags. You'd have thought they were stuffed with 1-man bills or something. They even displayed the garbage bags prominently when taking their victory picture!

I guess it should be noted that you pay for your waste collection when you buy garbage bags over here, and for the prices they charge, the bags might as well be stuffed with 1-man bills. But more on that in my next posting which will deal with the very exciting topic of WASTE DISPOSAL! (I can sense you salivating already, Thede)

However, I've got some Junior High students who have to rock an English Speech contest tommorrow, and I have to get up at the ungodly hour of 5am to escort them to it, so time for sleep.

P.S.: HAPPY BIRTHDAY EMILY!!!

Doors and Walls

Japanese houses are mazes of sliding walls.

There is something about the architectural aesthetic that appeals to me: sliding doors instead of hinged ones. No wasted space. The door slides in front of another or into a pocket in the wall. This style of construction was made popular in the south of the country, where (as William Ferguson touched on in Hitching Rides with Buddha) the oppressive summer heat necessitates the ability to lay one’s house fully open so that what little wind there is can blow right through. Despite the cooler summers making such features unnecessary in Hokkaido, these architectural hallmarks have nonetheless persisted in the north of Japan. With all the sliding doors in the apartments and houses here, you never really have to commit to having a wall or a door in a given place.

Despite how flexible a set up this would seem to be, there is still an undeniable finality to a sliding door/wall. A hinged door, even when locked, is always an exit or an entrance. You can bolt it with as many latches and chains as you like, but as long as the knob and the doorframe still exists, it is still a door. Were you to lock a prisoner in that room, the hinged door would live on as a small area of hope in the prisoner’s mind. Even if the knob never turns and that door never opens again, it will always represent that possibility.

When a wall slides shut, it can give the illusion of a room without escape. The madness of it is multiplied when the handle for the door is small or hidden. Someone unversed in this design could likely die in an unlocked room like this: pounding on the walls, but never thinking to try sliding one of the walls out of the way.

All this came on at my high school when I first noticed the large, almost blast-door-like sliding walls that exist at the threshold to each of the three floors. Those doors could be slid shut, and where there once was a whole floor, there would only be a wall. These hold particular significance in my high school as I know this is the last year it will accept a new class. Next year the ichi-nensei (grade 10) will transition to ni-nensei (grade 11), and the ichi-nensei will cease to exist. The school, which already has so many derelict classrooms, will have even fewer students. I can picture it starting to shut up on itself, sealing off wings and class rooms that have sat idle for so long as to collect thick layers of dust. I dread when they close up the third floor—the third floor that I only just discovered. It houses a computer lab and a library, but its most alluring feature is the stunning view it provides of the Furubira valley below the school’s hillside setting.

Strangely, this image of the various wings of the school closing up is far more final and moving than the idea that there won’t be a new ichi-nensei class next year. Perhaps it is because I can already see the eventual outcome demonstrated in the now-closed kindergarten, which is adjacent to the elementary school I visit. Where once there were colourful little rooms filled with colourful little furniture and atomically-powered little children, now there is only a steel wall with one of those maddeningly knobless Japanese doors at the centre of it.

The door is a punctuation mark at the end of the life of the kindergarten: an undeniable, unmovable period.

Another Elementary Afternoon

There’s a cacophony loose in the elementary school today. The students are practicing for their school festival at the end of the month, which means that the separate grades are banging away on separate instruments, sequestered in separate classrooms, all over the building. And at certain points in the school’s hallways, different parts of the cacophony will harmonize, and the haphazard symphonies that emerge are endearing and a bit haunting as they echo away down the long corridors of this place.

_______

A third grader passed close to me and caught a whiff of cologne or deoderant or detergent from my shirt. She pressed her face into my shirt and held it there for a minute—for a second, I almost thought I could feel her breathing—before pulling away in a swoon, exclaiming iinoi! As if it were a call, that got the rest of her class to surround me, each of them planting their own faces in the fabric of my shirt and holding there, immobile for a moment, before withdrawing with iinois of agreement. I stood there, frozen, not knowing what to do and not wanting to interrupt them.

_______

A fifth grader burst into a giggling fit as she tried to get out the words “red sweater” in the middle of a game we were playing. There was no doubt that she could do it as she regularly trips over herself to bombard me with her most recent Englishisms at nervous, breakneck speed. But all she could squeeze out when she tried was giggles, and her giggles got me giggling, and it didn’t help the situation any to have a member of the opposite team blurting out “PANTS!” “GREEN!” emphatically, over and over, despite the fact that his card depicted “green shorts.”

INFLU

Monday October 5, 2009.

Plague masks out, kids.

What was a humorous one-liner last week appears to have fully descended on the schools of Furubira this week. I realized it when I walked into the teacher’s office of the elementary school on Monday, and I had the normally laughy-jokey Kyoto Sensei (vice principal) pretty much forcefully apply one of those sick masks to my face before I could breathe too much of the air unprotected.

INFLU, as the Japanese call it, had finally gotten its pestilent little claws on the schools in my town.

This wasn’t the first I had heard of it as the teachers had been throwing the word around for about a month now, but I had written the whole thing off as media-boosted heebie-jeebies, akin to what was going on in Canada before I left around the whole Swine Flu threat. However, when I rolled in on Monday and was informed that my awesome third grade class had all been quarantined at home, and the teachers (every last one of them with a plague mask on) were planning to close the rest of the elementary for a week at the end of the day, it was clear how seriously the town was taking this whole thing.

And the reaction at my junior high school was no different on Tuesday. Fortunately, the first victims of the seemingly sympathetic superbug were three of my favourite {sic} students. It was also decided that the second year class would be closed and sent home for the week at the end of the day. The teachers at the Jr. high weren’t wearing masks yet, but they might as well have been as their speech was already infected and every second word out of their mouths was “infruenza.”

For me, the whole thing resulted in a kind of half-assed holiday as I still had to show up for work, but I had no students to teach.

For the town, though, it has had a broader impact than expected.

Another second or third year JET had once told me that my town was dying. There was some truth in the statement as my town once had roughly 14,000 inhabitants but has since shrunk to only some 3,800 people. The high school I visit will be closing in two years, and the public kindergarten has already closed. And having this other JET pronounce this death sentence got me down for a bit as I began to dread the idea of spending a year or more in a “dying” town.

Then I took an objective look at the situation and realized that the JET was wrong. There was still life in this place, and that life took the form of 3- to 5-foot munchkins that ran along its streets and through its parks. I saw that as long as Furubira had children, Furubira would be alive.

Strangely, this whole INFLU thing has served to prove my observation.

On my morning walk to the junior high school, I cross paths with the patchy stream of elementary school kids flowing in the opposite direction toward their school. Where we meet, they invariably greet me with a “HARRO NIKORASU!”, and I reciprocate with a “goodmorning!” or “hello!” in a tone that is probably a little loud for first thing in the morning. I also come across their crossing guard, the jack-of-all-trades Nakamura Sensei. He always greets me cheerfully, forces the children to greet me in English, and then he wishes me a good day. The best word to describe the whole exchange is “Genki.” (Japanese for “energetic,” but, as with most Things Japanese, it means a good deal more than that)

But on Tuesday morning, with the elementary closed for the rest of the week, there were no loud elementary students, and there was no genki Nakamura Crossing Guard Sensei. The walk to work was quiet, uneventful, and the furthest thing from lively.

It was the same case at Kendo on Tuesday night. On Tuesdays and Thursday nights, the kendo dojo at the sports centre is usually filled with the screams of the kendo kids. Climbing the stairs to the dojo, I can hear the kids before I can see them. The stairs resonate with their laughter and the explosive impacts of the balls they whip around in their indecipherable version of dodge ball. The game passes for a warm up activity as they wait for their kendo senseis to arrive. When I walk in, the kendo kids assign me to one of the two teams, and the other team gets to delight in firing balls at my head.

But that Tuesday night, I walked up the stairs to the dojo in complete silence. I entered the half-darkened, empty room, and there wasn’t another soul around. It appeared that the quarantine instated at the elementary school extended to all of the students’ extra curriculars as well. I warmed up on my own and even had the opportunity to attempt something like meditation in the quiet room before the senseis showed up. As it was just me there with the two teachers, we were able to get down to some pretty intense sword fighting action, but it wasn’t the same without a gaggle of 3^rd to 5^th graders running interference. The class was far more serious and far less alive.

So maybe I was right. Maybe it is the case that Furubira survives so long as it has children flowing like life through the arteries of its streets. And should the town ever lose those children, like it did last week, it would slowly start to fade to a cold, dead thing.

Torii Gates

As Will Ferguson touched on in his note on the Shinto religion, the Japanese mark the entrances to their holy sites with big, red, pi-looking things called Torii Gates. When one crosses the threshold of the gate, he knows that he’s stepping into the territory of a particular spirit or deity. Initially, I wondered if the sacredness might not be artificial when these bright red structures are slapped up in front of small shrines to worship river gods or spirits of the forest. I pictured them as somewhat overdramatic “DEITY APPROVED!” stamps, where the holiness of the site was derived from the Tori Gate alone, and without it there would be little of any great import to that particular place.

But in my recent trip out west to BC, I feel like I came upon some understanding of the Torii Gate. Ironic, that: coming to understand Torii Gates in Canada. Regardless, as I was rambling through the woods and up the sides of mountains, I would often chance upon things that looked remarkably like the Gates. It would be two trees of roughly the same size, growing more or less abreast with an arm span between them. The worn paths we were following would run between them, beneath boughs that swept together like a truss over our heads, and often I wondered if, perhaps, a coyote lay concealed in the brush to one side, and a cougar in the brush on the other: the north american ahh and nn.

On the sparsely forested upper slopes of Blackcomb, I caught one natural gate that split light and dark at the edge of a stand of stunted trees. As we were passing back through it from the lakeside loop, I felt I should pay tribute in some way for the beauty we’d witnessed behind us.

Along the black, rocky shores of Ucluelet on Vancouver Island’s west coast, I came upon another natural gate that opened up on a seaside lookout. The grey, ocean-tossed view beyond of the Broken Group of islands and the area once known as the Graveyard of the Pacific inspired a reverence in me and lent a degree of proof to the idea that the trees with out-swept boughs we had just past through were meant to mark this place.

So perhaps I was wrong at my initial thought: that Torii Gates are divine salience artificially foisted upon the inane—a roadside attraction plopped down in an unimportant stretch of land to lend it import. Perhaps the idea and the design of the Torii Gates was once inspired by natural thresholds between the quotidian and the magnificent. And now, when these gates are built by man, they are just a frame, erected in front of a particularly special stretch of nature where someone was once inspired and they thought that you might be, too. The Gates are a “hey! Lookit that!” to pull us out of the hectic pace of our lives momentarily and cause us to take the time to really see something and catch the wonder in it.

Autumn's Here

“you can tell by the wind
by fresh cut wood
all stacked to dry
that autumn's here
and it makes you sad
about the crumby
summer we had…”

I think the fall is a season of nostalgia for me.

Fall is nostalgic like the afternoon is nostalgic. I remember when I was a kid and was most keenly afraid of the dark and most keenly susceptible to homesickness. I would always feel the pull of home most strongly in the late hours of the afternoon. The world around me would be gilded in the long, fat rays of the setting sun, and all I could think about was how I wasn’t heading home, how I wasn’t sitting down to dinner with my family. Looking back on it, I think homesickness is all about nostalgia. It is the remembrance of what is familiar, what is comfortable, and a longing for things to be like that now.

If you were to ram the four seasons into a day, autumn would be the late afternoon, and just as the afternoons would get to me when I was a kid, the autumn gets to me now.

That’s probably because the fall has always been a season loaded with gatherings and fond memories. From the time we were kids to the time we finished university, fall was our new beginning; the start of the school year when you saw all your old friends and got to make some new ones. Then, just one month after we’d started school, there’d be thanksgiving, which was always a time for family with my relatives. And, in recent years, we have made it a time for friends by creating FestivUS as a phony holiday excuse for all of us friends to get together when we all came home from our various Universities. And when you cram my birthday in there, between the start of the school year and the break at thanksgiving, it’s clear that autumn has always been loaded with friends and family for me.

And when autumn rolls around, random bits of nostalgia start swimming through my head:

There’s the kids from East B and Beechlawn and Lester and all the other places our Uni community squatted over the years—memories of our walks to and from the bars and pubs and Oktoberfests of Waterloo, shuffling through the fallen leaves. There’s a wet-yet-warm fall spent with Lindsay Frith on the edge of Mary Lake. There’s leaf fights with my maternal cousins, and there’s thanksgiving dinners with my paternal niece and nephews where they’d drink all the chocolate milk we had in the house. There’s the weddings; you guys and your bloody weddings injecting more memory into my autumns. And, like I’ve already mentioned, there’s FestivUS—how it was one more way our high school group stuck together through all of the drama and madness over the years.

It is for all these reasons that, as the days in Japan cool, the trees begin to turn, and the nights fill with the first whispers of woodsmoke, I am really feeling afflicted by a nostalgia for Canada for the first time. It seems to have kicked off with my birthday—a little bit of a bummer at the end of a road trip filled with fun when I finally realized that I wouldn’t be spending my birthday with all of you wonderful people back in Canada. And now Thanksgiving will be coming up, when you Torontonians will be feting FestivUS back home, my family will be feasting on turkey, and I will be the foreigner in Furubira. I mean, it looks like the international society here will be pulling out all he stops to make it a fun weekend, but I can’t help thinking that I am still going to feel more than a little separated from a great many important things back home.

Long story short, you can all rest assured that I miss you most in the fall.

Now here’s a little ditty from Hawksley Workman that might as well be the official anthem for my autumnal anxiety. What can I say, man; he definitely gets me.

“…i guess that autumn

gets you remembering

and the smallest things

just make you cry.”