About a Brog
(L~R: Matt, Erica, Colleen)
You know, in Chinese astrology, dog and dragon are a terrible match. Colleen is a dragon and I’m a dog, and I think we’re perfect. Hot take: maybe it isn’t the best idea to base what you know about a person on astrology.
Anyway, maybe you didn’t know I was born in the Year of the Dog? Truth be told, there’re probably a few things you don’t know about me. This being the first brog of the year (in what I will now call Year of Brog II), I thought I’d introduce myself a bit.
I was born in Middletown, CT because my dad was a visiting artist while concurrently earning his master’s degree in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan. I grew up in Seattle, Washington, and on Bainbridge Island, just a short 40 minute boat ride from downtown Seattle.
My first trip to Japan was in 1975 and we traveled from Seattle to Yokohama by boat. The plan had been to emigrate and in those days, you could book passage on a container ship and get a cabin and a container.
I wonder if they still give these out…
I remember only a little about the crossing. Like playing with a little car with a friction motor, letting it roll down the passageway outside our cabin while the boat pitched to and fro. The car would roll slowly all the way down to the end of the hall and then slowly make its way back. The waves must’ve been enormous!
We lived in Kamakura, Kanagawa-ken with my grandmother before making our way back to Seattle some time later.
I had a terrible time with school my whole life. I struggled in every subject and didn’t feel like I fit in until after my freshman year of high school. I went to five different high schools in the end, and never graduated. However, I’m still friends with most of the people I met in the 10th grade at The Northwest School of the Arts, Humanites, and Environment.
I moved back to Japan in 1988 in what would have been the year I graduated and came back to the states in 1992. We lived in Higashikurume, technically in Tokyo, but basically Saitama. My train line was the Seibu Ikebukuro Line.
Karuizawa, 1988 (that’s me on the left)
I never attended college, although I taught shakuhachi at Keio University in Tokyo.
I’m ordained in the Universal Life Church, which I did from the back seat of a car while on tour in California. It was done in order to marry two dear friends, although I haven’t performed another since. Not that I wouldn’t do it again, but I will say it was a lot harder than just being in a wedding band.
bonafide!
I won a Juno Award in 1997 for Best Roots & Traditional Album of the Year with a group called The Paperboys. (The story of this band is long and unpleasant.)
I roast coffee, and I really enjoy doing it. However, I’m way too insecure to sell the coffee I roast—I tried that once and the stress almost killed me. Since then, I have been known to roast beans for friends because they’re less likely to be upset if it’s undrinkable. I get beans from a company called Burman Coffee Traders. I mostly stick to South American beans, but I’m excited to try this new batch I just got from Viet Nam.
Kaldi drum roaster. Roasts about 225g of green coffee at a time.
During the pandemic, I became hopelessly nostalgic. I found myself only wanting to listen to the music I listened to as a youth — titles and artists from between about 1930 to 1991. I also started collecting action figures again.
Right around the time I moved to Japan, I developed panic attacks. I got them under control by 1991 or so, but they came back with a vengeance—worse than they’d ever been before—while I was living in Maine. For the most part, they would manifest when I had to fly, despite having no real fear of flying; eventually it got to the point where they could come on any time I left the house. When they started happening while I was on stage, it was apparent I needed to take action. I got on SSRIs to try to bring them under control which worked, but not without some wretched side effects. Just last year I went through the painful process of weaning myself off them. As part of that process, I underwent three weeks of ketamine infusions. Can recommend.
I wear hearing aids now. There’s a good chance that if I smiled and nodded when you asked me a question (or ignored you outright) between the years of 2016 and 2023 it’s because I actually didn’t hear you. I hate having to wear them but it’s awfully nice to be able to hear conversations without having to say I’m sorry? or come again? six thousand times.
I’m sure that’s already more than you ever needed. I’ll try to get back to more regularly scheduled programming next week. In the meantime, as always, fire away with any questions and I’ll do my best to answer them.
More anon,
Hanz