The updates and blog posts have been few and far between of late.  Of course, if you’ve been paying any attention whatsoever you already know this.  Life has a funny way of coming back around on you.  One minute you’re convinced that you have enough to say or write to put into words every day and the next you’re sitting around pounding your head into the wall trying to squeeze out a word turd through your prolapsed mental asshole.

It’s not like I haven’t had things to do.  Come the end of the month (June 2017, for you people reading this in the future), I’ll be starring in a play in Shinjuku for a couple of nights (a bit role that probably won’t pay much but that’s per usual here in Japanese showbiz, the land of long hours and no money).

Aside from the many practices and rehearsals and all the other stuff that being in a stage play entails, my manzai conbi has started getting a little traction in the world of no name wakate comedians.  Of late, we’ve been getting five or six gigs booked a month, which doesn’t sound like much but compared to where we started (the mandatory three pay-to-play midday gigs per month) is a hell of a whole lot.  Plus, me being me (i.e. a dumb American dude in an industry that is 99.999% Japanese), I get the occasional solo work whether it be TV appearances (nothing big of late, just background or extra work) or talk live appearance.  It’s not much but it’s forward momentum and, two years into the process, that’s pretty much all I can ask for.

So why haven’t I been writing more blog posts or interacting on social media or whatever lately?  To tell you the truth, I don’t really have a good answer for you.  It’s not that I’ve been busy (believe me, I have a lot of free time on my hands).  I’ve been writing- a heck of a lot.  Sometime over the past couple of months, I got the stupid idea in my head that I’d try writing fiction again and a hundred or so thousand words, several aborted “Novels seem easy to write so let’s try that” novels, and no blog posts later, here I am with nothing in hand to show for my effort, which I guess is the entire creative process in a nutshell so yay me, I guess.  Hopefully, I’ll gather the courage to finish something or other sooner or later but until then my “To-Finish” pile is eternally piled sky high.

While we’re on the subject of to-be-released works, upon a chance meeting with some of the staff involved during a visit to head office, I found out that the completed-an-entire-year-ago What’s Manzai?!!! 2 is apparently nearing release.  I have no clue as to the precise date of this but I assume it’ll be soonish.  (It’s a minor miracle they told me as much as they did.)  While reaction to the first one was mixed at best, all I can say is that I hope you’ll give part two a chance.

I promise I’ll try to post stuff here more in the second half of the year.