MARCELLUS NEALY

I met the man you see in the photograph in Okinawa. He was busking on the street. I don't exactly remember how I began talking to him but somehow we became friends . His name is Kaya. He runs a restaurant now in Yokohama called Smokin Fish. He took the name from a painting that our mutual friend Ponzi created for him. It's Italian food a la Kaya. the price is very reasonable, and the taste is very good. If you go to the shop, you'll see a brief poem that I wrote to Kaya whi

America! I don't know why, but while I was looking at this photograph, which I took in New York City, I suddenly remembered the slim Jim story, At Dave's supermarket, where I worked in high school, the owner and patriarch decided he would break his son, Steve, into the business. Steve was quite famous at the supermarket for making rash decisions. Things that seemed normal to him did not make sense to anybody else. He was very obsessed with making money and saving money b

Tonight I saw full Halo around the moon. It was as if I were looking up from the bottom of a wine glass. It’s called a 22-degree Halo. The ring apparently has a radius of 22 degrees around the moon. Usually Halos around the moon or the sun signify the coming of a storm. What's even more interesting is that ice crystals forming in the clouds above are what create this effect. It seems that depending on where you are standing the appearance of the Halo changes. It was amazi

People often ask me about how I ended up in Japan. My first exposure to Japanese culture was through a Buddhist organization called the Soka Gakkai. When I was in junior high school, my mom came home one day and asked us , “what if I told you I was going to become a Buddhist?” the four of us looked at each other and had no idea what it meant. Our mom was the type of person who liked to explore ideas and cultures. In many ways, she was on a spiritual journey in search of trut

Today's post is dedicated to all the parents out there who are doing their best the handle their high energy children. Lord knows is not easy. Many of us have forgotten how we were when we were children. Our lives are busy with all the activities related to surviving. If you're a single parent then I applaud you even more. The amount of power it takes to juggle work and raise children is unbelievable. I am one of four children that my mom raised all by herself. Four children

Today's post will be brief. I'm writing it while taking a break from doing some other work that's due soon. The flower in the picture was taken when I went to Glasgow to attend my friends’ wedding. I talked about booze yesterday, so I won't even go into the heroic amounts we drank that night. Instead, will talk about how amazing it was to be there. I know that my description of the people and the events are once slice of a moment out of millions upon millions of moments in th

This picture reminds me of crazier days in Tokyo. For a few years, I was one of the regular photographers for a rock band named Tits Tats and Whiskers. Those are some of the most wonderful years of my life. It's hard to believe that everyone has settled down now. It wasn't so long ago when alcohol-fueled madness was our norm. There were never drugs, not with this group. Alcohol was all the drugs we needed. I never quite understood how booze could be legal, but all the forms o

I went to my friend Masa's place after work. I told him I wanted to go home early but wine and rum had other plans for us. So, here I am. It's morning now. I fell asleep while writing this. This will make the third time I missed my daily assignment. Have you ever had a supernatural experience? When I was a child of about six or seven years old, I was lying in bed waiting to fall asleep. As a child, I suffered from a chronic case of sleep paralysis. It always happened when

There was a book going around a few years ago called The Secret. The basic premise was that if you believed in something and knew in your heart of hearts that it was true, then that thing would happen. The idea coincides with this notion in physics that our thoughts create reality. There was an alien named Bashar that channeled itself through a man named Darryl Anka. Apparently, the alien can travel almost instantaneously anywhere in space and time but has never set foot on e

I'm so sleepy right now I will just leave you with this image. Perhaps when I visit dreamland I will find this exquisite creature and say hello to him for you. Maybe you'll find him yourself on your own journey to dreamland.