Wow, it’s been a fast few months. In Tokyo, my fiancée and I continued her visa process (and mine) and we breathed a sigh of relief when I got hired as content producer & PR guy for Bushiroad. The team at STARDOM — the world’s top women’s wrestling promotion — was familiar with me from running Monthly Puroresu, which I divested from back in February.

I am now free to stay in Japan longer than three months!

Helping project manage English subtitles and run social media strategy for Bushiroad still left me with adequate time to keep chucking out half-decent words & sentences as a copywriter for Millbrook Media, helping drive player growth for their clients’ online gaming communities.

In between all that work on my laptop, I still found enough time to enjoy the American Southwest. I love the Southwest, and am always creatively inspired when visiting towns like Austin, Santa Fe, Boulder, Flagstaff and of course Los Angeles. There’s a special creative energy that runs through the region, and after a not insignificant amount of time exploring Japanese music and culture earlier this year, I enjoyed coming home & watching Western classics featuring John Wayne, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman.

I watched The Searchers a couple of times; its anti-hero (played by Wayne) and the push/pull of his values against a changing world around him reflects a lot of the struggle I see with men in modern America. It’s one of the most beautifully shot films in VistaVision, and inspired me to take a train ride on the Royal Gorge after I left Texas for Colorado.

In Colorado, I hiked more than a few trails, and rounding the corner toward 40 I could really feel the extra effort to keep apace and make it up and down those trails. The view is always worth it at the top, though. With Pike’s Peak was always on the horizon,  I enjoyed more than my fair share of enchiladas and craft beer before heading back to LA.

On that note, I was surprised after returning to LA for the first time in 6 months, to see many more small businesses had closed. And prices of food & drink still hadn’t stopped increasing… the same $7 pint of Pale Ale in Colorado was $11-13 in LA, and downtown Santa Monica is playing host to more empty storefronts. The once-proud Third Street Promenade was a shell of itself, and For Lease signs littered the offices around where I used to work.

Ocean Park was, however, as beautiful as ever and I enjoyed some fresh green smoothies and wistful walks in that familiar coastal breeze — it’s a sort of timeless narcotic to walk, bike along the palm trees even as the socioeconomics are continuing to produce a K-shaped recovery now four years out of the Covid-19 pandemic. The vibe shift from 2018, when I first moved to Santa Monica, to today is always sort of masked by the nature of coastal life in SoCal.

To that last point, I exchanged many emails with my friend and former professor at Texas State University Dr. Bob Price.

As I trekked the boardwalks of an area once-known as Silicon Beach – an area that’s seen of nearly all office life abandoned – we talked a lot about how communities like Santa Monica are changing in the face of surveillance capitalism; its convergence with AI and the modern attention economy.

This conversation produced pages of notes and reading which I’m still working through, but I hope to have enough material for a series of essays I can shop around starting this Winter.

Until then, I am winding down my current contract with Millbrook Media. Don’t know if it will be renewed so I am #OpenToWork!

If you’ve made it this far don’t hesitate to email me. Let’s connect, and maybe collaborate…. The Work is never finished.