Menace, back from his ear cleansing, was more than a touch concerned as the hostess started rummaging through his (my) bag; it contained his pipe and a quantity of dope, which he used to carry on his person wherever he went (until he got busted by the airport staff in Lima at the end of 2008!) Fortunately she didn't find the goodies, and she took an interest in my (his) Maru chan badge instead, which I went on to describe as kawaii! ("cute") If only the customs officials in Peru had been so negligent, Menace would not be in jail right now. And I would not be feeling quite so guilty, about the disappearance of this man. But that is another story.

Coffee, vegemite on toast, and then the plan of the day: basically chilling out at the local pool, drinking beer and chu-hai and hitting on local women. It was a pool we had rocked in the magic summer of 2007, at what I now recognise was the peak of my Scorpio Upwave (I should add Maniac is a Scorpion native, and it was no coincidence that he appeared in my life, just at the time I needed to learn some Scorpionic lessons.) For a time, he was a good teacher. That time has passed, surprisingly fast, to be honest. Maniac is a typical Scorpio though and like many Scorpions he just gets a little too intense sometimes (a lot too intense, all of the time). To be fair, I always have wild adventures whenever I am with him -- a night out to karaoke turned into two weeks in jail, for example. What happened at the pool that hot sunny drunk Wednesday afternoon was, obvious both at the time and also in retrospect, the kind of wierd coincidence and colorful encounter which only happens when I am with Maniac. But the pompous way he was acting at times drew me to distraction -- and I guess I have to blame him for the nasty fall I sustained riding home from the pools, which left me with sprained wrists and a month of pain which intruded into my Family Ties adventures right up the coast of Vietnam. I often have a serious accident when I run with this dog!

So, here's what happened at the pool. We managed to smuggle our cargo of silver beers, chu-hai's and vodka blends in through the gate, along with a hefty bag full of grated ice. We found a place to chill. There are a whole lot more people here today than when we were here last year, but then again, that was a weekday. Today was a holiday, and the pool was heaving. We cracked open a few of those aforementioned drinks. Next to us was a toddler's pool, and on the other side of that, I noticed a white geezer with a Japanese bikini babe, and two young boys in tot. At first glance I thought he was another white guy with a Japanese girlfriend/wife, although his girlfriend/wife seemed a little hotter than those who usually date white guys in Japan. As I looked at the guy, I got the feeling that he kinda looked a little familiar, like I had seen before -- on the set of some saigen drama I did for Lazarus back in 2003 or something. Then I thought: No, wait -- isn't that the guy I have been seeing on TV for years -- isn't that �Z�C�� �J�~���@(Sein Kamiyu), the most famous gaijin media star in Japan? The way that the Japanese mothers and fathers in the pools were looking at him, I knew that they could recognise him too. Yes, that was him, and to compound the strangeness of the event, him and his wife seemed to be heading right over to where Maniac and me were sitting, right to our very spot. When they arrived, his wife asked me if it was cool for them to sit on the bench behind us, upon which we had stored some of our stuff. At close range, I could see she was pregnant (it turns out she was expecting a daughter to be born in November.) Naturally, I granted them access -- you can't go denying a pregnant woman a seat, especially if she is wearing a bikini.

Strange stuff always happens when I hang out with Maniac. We did time together, and he even got me into a porn flick. We must have chatted with Sein Kamiyu for two hours or so, on and off (between toilet stops and missions to the canteen to buy plastic cups of beer.) The cicadas hummed in their trees, and misty specks of clouds curled in the skies, soon to be forgotten. Little kids slid down the long tube of the waterslide, which gushed them feet or head first into the churning main pool. Sein Kamiyu had many interesting things to say, about the state of the entertainment industry in Japan. Not all of it was pretty.

If you think the clinical trials could be the thing for you while you are in Japan, send me an email and I will try to recommend you to the relevant authorities. I am hoping to start my first trial in late 2006, God Willing, and I am going to use much of the proceeds to try to make a movie in Iceland in early 2007!

In other news: I was feeling depressed about breaking up with my girlfriend, and wishing that I could get back with her, when I found a way to beat depression -- and that is, to take Royal Jelly! I have been taking it every second day or so recently and I have already begun to feel better about the whole situation. Maybe Royal Jelly isn't the only factor in my recovery, but it is a big part of the strategy I have cobbled together, to get over the break-up as quickly as possible. I found another thing which works well, is rearranging the furniture in the house -- I did that last night, and within a few minutes I noticed there was a different feeling in the air. So go figure.

So, the World Cup is upon us, and tonight, my old homeland of Australia take on my new homeland of Japan. It is just a game, to be sure. Although I am surprised to find myself getting interested in this World Cup much more than I did in the past. Even when the World Cup was held in Japan in 2002, I wasn't that interested in it. But now I am. So later tongiht I am going out to visit my Australian buddy Chris Mae in Kichijoji, and we are going to watch the game there.

For many ppl in the world, I guess this is a dreaded Monday morning for you? I am so lucky that now I don't work on Mondays or Wednesdays, and I want to get more days free in the future. I am moving over to the freelance style life. So today I was free all day, and I find for me it is so good for my mental and emotional well being, just to wander around with no fixed plan, thinking about stuff, discovering things, and so on. I went for a walk for about three hours, I first headed over to Asakusa with all of its temples and tea shops, and then chose a direction at random and walked that way, and kept going, for miles and miles. This city seems to get bigger the longer you are here -- it is endless! (I guess London is the same though.) I am always finding new stuff here. By the way I am getting back into the journalistic field as well -- I started working as a restaurant reivewer at a magazine, and I have also been doing extra jobs for TV and movies. Not only is it easy money, but it is fun as well, and gives me the chance to meet interesting people. The Australian guy I am visiting today is not only an old friend (we go back 12 years) but he is also an agent in the Tokyo modelling/acting industry. So he gets me plenty of jobs!

While I was on my trip today, here are two of the photos I took:

After the karaoke gig we cruised the streets of Kichijoji in what looked like a miniature black Hummer from the House of Mercedes Benz, firing little rockets into the night. We eventually wound up at Nishi Ogikubo, which is actually a kind of cool place -- real old school and authentic. If you want a taste of old Japan not far from Shinjuku, you ought to check out Nishi Ogikubo. We went to this Okinawan bar which was complete with old peeling wallpaper and tables which leaked their own sap, a soundtrack which got lost in the 1980s, and a pesky little cat which delighted in pouncing on hapless diners. The food wasn't bad either, and followed an Okinawan theme: on the menu was one of my favorite dishes, kakunin (boiled Okinawan pork). The next day I passed my second hurdle in the process of obtaining my latest media job, which is a singing job at ++++. I will be telling you about this job soon enough because it is one of the best jobs for newcomers to Japan, and it has a strong media/performance arts potential. So if you want to get leads and develop contacts in the Japanese media and performing arts, ++++ is a good place to start. I am hoping to be working there by the end of the summer.

In the evening I went down to Shimbashi where I snapped these pictures, of the skyscrapers caught in a rare dose of late afternoon sun:

Earlier this week, I played the role of an extra in a Japanese World War Two movie, which was filmed in the beautiful Ibaraki Prefecture north of Tokyo. Me and my crew played the roles of American soldiers during the Occupation in 1946, and according to the script, we were supposedly stationed on the southern island of Kyushu. In the story we stumble upon a vintage kamikaze plane left out in the fields, and in our anti-Japanese hate, we burn the plane down! Yes, that is right, this was another role in which foreigners are cast as devils, insensitive to the hurts they inflict on pure-hearted Japanese folk. But what the hell, it was a great day out in the sun, the birds were singing, the sun was shining, and it was a beautiful day. I earnt 12,000 Yen (about US$120) for my efforts. I got to see a part of Japan I had never seen before (maybe I will be back there one day.) When the shooting was over and I was back in Tokyo, I headed out to Kichijoji, to team up with old Aussie bud Garnet. We decided to head in to Shibuya, to take photos of all the girls on the street, and all the cool shops.

Today's movie extra job was organised by a modelling company called Group Echo, an Osaka based outfit. If you would like to do some acting or modelling when you are in Japan, Group Echo might be able to help you out. You can email them on grpecho-osaka@mist.ocn.ne.jp, or call production manager Hikaru Furukawa on this number: 03/5282 5321. Group Echo have branches in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka.

Below lie some forbidden photos from the shoot in Ibaraki Prefecture, and some photos from my jaunt around Shibuya and Harajuku later in the day, with my buddy Garnet Mae:

It is funny how things can change fast, when luck is on your side. In the past month or so my life has been getting better on an almost daily basis, although there have been some big upsets as well. But I am beginning to think that my life is taking off and I am doing the things I want to do (like working as a restaurant reviewer for one of the magazines in Tokyo.) It is just the start of the good times and plenty of more good things are on the way.

As you know I am going to Iceland in a few weeks and I really want to have friends there, but I didn't know how to go about finding them. Well, this morning I got woken up by a phone call, it was Garnet just down the road from me, at Ueno Railway Station (see the photo attached.) He was on his way back to Australia from the Cannes Film Festival. I went up to meet him and we had a coffee, and he showed me all the photos of the stars he met at Cannes. Then he said that while he was at the festival he met some Icelandic people -- one of them a mineral water exporter (Iceland's meant to have the cleanest water in the world), another one of them a popular radio DJ in Reykjavik -- and apparently the Icelanders were really taken with Garnet. They became best of friends. They said to Garnet: "You should come to Iceland and make a movie in Iceland!" Then Garnet said: "Well, funny you should mention it, but my good friend Rob is going to Iceland next month -- can you look after him?" And they said: "Sure, tell him to give us a call when he arrives, we will show him around."

I know some people sometimes promise the world and then don't deliver on their promises, but I have got a good feeling about being able to meet with them. My angle when I do meet them is going to be that I am Garnet's assistant -- I am his script writer, and I am doing some research for a movie he wants to make in Iceland. So I am going to ask them to show me some places we could feature in the movie -- like bars, nightclubs, that sort of thing, and if they could introduce me to some of the local characters (celebrities, rock bands, etc.) You have got to remember that Iceland has a population of only 300,000 people, so it probably isn't that hard to get to know even the famous people there. Reykjavik the capital is smaller than Wollongong. It is a hell of a lot more interesting, though.

My plan is, a few times a year I will do a stint in a clinical trial in Japan, which is supposed to be something of a junket in itself (you get flown down to the southern island of Kyushu, spend a week or two in hospital, and then at the end get treated to an all-expenses paid couple of nights in a beachside hotel). Once the trial is done and I have got my money (which could be up to US$9000), I will bank a proportion of it for the future (say a third of so), and then head to one of my international home away from home's: Iceland, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Australia, Greenland, wherever. And once in my new location I will set to work developing media contacts and collecting materials for my web. It is the perfect life plan for me, and it will give me the chance to "live" in a lot more countries than just Japan. It will enable me to become an International Vagabond at last. But even if I go down the medical/clinical trial path, I am still going to have to spend at least half of every year in Japan. That is not so bad, because there are endless pleasures to be had in this land, and endless new vistas open before the jaded traveller no matter how many years he or she has lived here. Here are some photos I took today, in the Shinjuku skyscaper district of Tokyo:

The nature of my life is this: long periods of stability and stagnation, followed by rapid and amazing bursts of creativity and change and growth, taking me up to a whole new level of existence. Ever since the start of last month, I have been in one of these upward thrusts. For me these seem to happen every five years -- the last Upwave took place in 2001, when I was new to Japan and earning big money as an English teacher in the elementary school system. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then -- I have spent five whole years in Japan! I have spent more than five years in Japan! Since that heady time my life has stagnated a lot, although I still remember 2003 as the best year of my life -- mainly because I had a freelance lifestyle that year and a lot of free time, an escalating series of girlfriends, and I made a trip to Iceland in that year. 2004 and to a lesser extent 2005 were downer years compared to 2003, and I lost my freelancer lifestyle, even though I gained a permanent girlfriend, compared with the flaker girlfriends of the previous years. Come May 2006 and suddenly, unexpectedly, my so-called permanent girlfriend is gone, the freelancer lifestyle is back, and in fact I look set to take it to a totally cool and sublime level -- that of the International Vagabond. The International Vagabond is here, waiting to assume command of my life. According to my own astrological forecasts and understandings, I have entered the Scorpio Upwave. During the last Upwave which kicked in at the end of 2000, I left behind my old deadend job in Australia, and moved to Japan. It has been a heady and exciting time since then, and despite a lot of hardships I have established myself in this country, forever. I want to live here forever, and now I have the contacts and the means to achieve that goal. Living in Japan has always been exciting, a new experience every day, and I have done things that I would never have done back in Australia. But despite the novelty factor of being a stranger in a strange land, during the past two years I have started to feel like I am wasting my time, missing out on life, getting left behind by the pack. Little by little, my life in Japan has come to resemble my deadend life in Australia, with even less of a chance to escape. Astrologically (according to the Uncloned World creed of astrology at least!), 2004 and 2005 were the years of the Scorpio Downwave. According to my astrological theories, this was the time when the element of Scorpio was introduced to my life... but in a negative way. Or rather, shortcomings were revealed in my life which are to be resolved and transcended in the Scorpio Upwave, which will run from 2006 to 2009. It is only just the start of the Upwave, it is just the opening chapter. But I can already see what these three years will be about, and I have an inkling of the ways in which I will be transformed.

Here are the traits I have to overcome in this Scorpio Age of my life, according to the Esoteric Astrology of Alice Bailey and Djwhal Khul:

Category I
Sex - the relation of the pairs of opposites. These can be selfishly utilized or divinely blended.
Physical comfort - life conditions, selfishly appropriated.
Money - selfishly cornered (if I may use such a phrase).

Category II
Fear - which conditions activity today.
Hate - which is a factor in conditioning relationships.
Ambition - conditioning objectives.

Category III
Pride - which is intellectual satisfaction, making the mind the barrier to soul control.
Separativeness - which is the isolated attitude and which makes the mind the barrier to right group relations.
Cruelty - which is satisfaction with personality methods and which makes the mind the instrument of the sense of power.

When these faults are realized and are overcome, the result is twofold: the establishing of right relations with the soul and also with the environment. These two results are the goal of all tests in Scorpio.

The night was already developing a dreamy and mysterious feel, what with my determination to take my relationship with my girlfriend into some pretty amazing uncharted territory, a soft breeze coming in off the verandah, and behind that a whole soft tree full of leaves rustling against a purple spring sky. The ha$h was not strong (I was getting more of a buzz from the bottle of Royal Jelly I had drank earlier in the day), but I was feeling high on life and the potential of life. As if to put the icing on the cake, one of Chris's kids demanded we put on a video of one of my childhood favorite movies, The Goonies R Good Enough. This was the movie which, back in 1986 or something like that, gave me the inspiration to become an actor and a writer and all the rest. I used to feel that yearning so strong, when I was a 13-year-old in 1986. And now the dream has come true... is coming truer every day. And as the leaves rustled against the purple sky outside, and I thought about the magical realm of multisexual possibility which has opened up with my girlfriend, and the weak ha$h merged with the stronger and nobler Royal Jelly within my system, I began to feel triumphant. The Goonies R Good Enough starred Sean Astin who went on to become Sam in The Lord of the Rings. As Sean relates on his own website:

Chris is a master of manipulating the Tokyo media -- in association with the recent The Da Vinci Code boom, he played Jesus Christ in some biblical documentary on Japanese TV. He showed us the video and I kind of thought, he looked more Charles Manson, than Jesus Christ. Check out the photos below -- what do you think?

This job was a kind of hip-hop video/shoes commercial crossover, filmed in one of the first clubs I ever visited in Japan: Club Asia at Shibuya. Along with a crew of some ten foreigners and about 40 or 50 Japanese, my job was to basically dance in the background while three beautiful women -- a new hip-hop group being promoted in the video -- pranced around in the foreground. That's right, you read that right -- my job was to dance, their job was to prance! There was a lot of time between takes which gave me the chance to become acquainted with my fellow extras -- the good fellows I was alluding to before! -- and they were good, believe me! About half of the group were Russian chicks of the kind who often turn up to film shoots like this -- they are housewives of Japanese gents for the most part, looking to having a little fun and making a little mon during the daylight hours (when hub's away). Of the non-Russians?Cthere was one Canadian guy called Jeff who said he had set up a website to allow foreign models to meet Japanese women (interesting idea). Jeff encouraged me to keep on going with the development of my website until I push into the realms of profitability. He also said something which was to hang with me for the rest of the month: "It is possible to make all your dreams come true in Japan, but you have to get out there and make it happen." It made me feel like I have been missing out on life these past few years. Well, it is time I did some catching up!