Dispatch № 53: A Reliable Bubble
The same elevator music as ever. The same door chime. The same fluorescent light making everything shadowless and tinged slightly green.
Dispatch № 52: Abandoned
They are often easy to identify, especially those drowning in vegetation. This is particularly true of those engulfed in the same infamous kudzu that is so reviled in the American South. Whole properties disappear under draped green carpets.
Dispatch № 51: Communal Waters
Third places are important, but some are disappearing, public baths among them. This is one aspect of Japan’s declining social capital.
Dispatch № 50: Ode to Fuzz
Because my cat is my most-requested topic
Dispatch № 49: Hushed
In relative terms, it’s a cacophony, and it seems so because it has otherwise been so tremendously quiet that minute sounds are magnified.
Dispatch № 48: Lineage
Long after the baby has grown into a man, he sits on a bench in a park in Japan, ten thousand kilometers and thirty-nine years from Lubbock.
Dispatch № 47: Still Smitten
I was single, but really didn’t want to be, and as we were leaving a while later, a thought bubbled up from my subconscious. Wouldn’t it be something if I wound up with her?
Dispatch № 46: Offerings
There was no way to know who had left them or why. No way to know if the offerings had been made for children who had been saved, or lost, or perhaps hoped for by would-be parents.
Dispatch № 45: Repeater
So why would I choose not only to board the train when I don’t really need to, but also remain in my seat for at least one full trip around the loop?
Dispatch № 44: Shuttered
The shutters came down, and the customers stopped coming, but life continued inside.