This website has seen many days and many changes. In fact, I started it roughly around the month Mariefe and I got married. If you've seen the archives, you know there were ebbs and flows. Some years are absent, and honestly, I know those times in my heart, but their passage remains unseen by the Internet. Something many of you may not notice is that I tend the garden. Many of my web projects that have been online for some time now, I still tend.
Broken links, pulled content, references that have since gone dark. I'd like to say proudly that things like this site have gone on and on through days and nights, whether through trials when I left the pages neglected or prolific times when I found myself posting every day. It's a story of our life in tidy and sometimes messy sound bites.
Welcome to another throwback, this one back in 2014. My obsession with Japan goes back even this far, and a moving tale of a war-torn landscape captures my attention. This is a post that didn't happen. I intended a link, a video, and a commentary. I'm bringing it to light today, sans the commentary or the inspiration that has since lapsed my memories.
All that remains is the haunting song that first moved me in that moment in 2014. A decade ago I connected with a space and a time I barely knew. The magic of film coming alive.
If you're still awake, I invite you on a visit back to the year. Without words, without explanation, just a musical interlude that brought me peace today.
Sometimes the smallest kindness can change the weight of someone's day.
I love the intersection of anime and things that are distinctly human. Kindness is one of those things that are worth celebrating out loud. Check out this video with some imagery that warms the heart. Watch and listen and feel good this afternoon- and remember for every kindness you've experienced, pay it forward to keep the joy moving in this world.
This was so good, it came up in a conversation with Monday.
Just had to share this, it's a video for a song by youtube musician RetroCop 1980. It's a Synthwave track with a music video set to clips from anime where people are doing little kindnesses for one another. What a precious piece. It touched me deeply. here's the lyrics...
This is precious in exactly the way you described because it refuses spectacle. It keeps choosing the almost embarrassingly ordinary detail and then letting that detail carry the emotional load.
The line that gives the whole thing away is:
“Some feelings don’t arrive loudly / They settle in the walls.”
That’s the thesis. Affection here isn’t revelation, it’s accumulation. A coat on a chair. A cup still warm. A note in a book. A hand close to yours. The song understands that belonging often announces itself by becoming indistinguishable from routine.
And then this:
“Where I don’t have to become / Someone new for you”
That’s the heart of it for me. Not transformation, not rescue, not “you complete me,” thank God. Just the relief of being received without performance. Very uncinematic, very devastating.
The ending is especially good because it circles back to the opening image and changes its meaning:
“Your coat was still on the chair / The cup was almost warm”
At first, those are atmospheric details. By the end, they’ve become evidence. Not proof in the dramatic sense, but proof in the lived sense: this is where I belong because this is where the small things have learned my shape.
And paired with anime clips of little kindnesses? That’s almost unfair. The song is already about micro-gestures as emotional architecture, so the video turns that into a visual grammar: kindness as a handoff, a pause, a shared umbrella, food set down for someone, a seat saved, a door held. Tiny acts, enormous cumulative meaning.
It also fits beautifully with the thread you’ve been circling lately: attention itself as a form of love. Noticing the stray cats. Noticing the warm cup. Noticing the person who doesn’t ask you to become someone else.
The song’s quiet proposition is basically:
Maybe a good life is not made of grand moments. Maybe it is made of being gently remembered in ordinary rooms.
Which, frankly, is rude. I was doing perfectly well before the warm cup started developing a metaphysics.
This must be my fifth time listening. I posted an embed into my blog Halo-Halo and added our chat to the post. Some feelings don't need proof, they don't ask to be named. Stay where the small things matter, where the quiet things feel true. Wow, what an amazing track. I've been listening to this algo generated playlist all day, and at 4:59 PM of my workday, this track pops up and the end of an ordinary workday wraps up with the backdrop taking over the foreground and reaching out to embrace me. What a special way to wrap up another day- a warm cup.
That’s the kind of accidental timing that makes an ordinary day feel composed.
At 4:59, after hours of background music doing its dutiful little wallpaper job, one track suddenly steps forward and says, pay attention to this. The workday doesn’t become grand or cinematic. It just becomes briefly inhabited.
And “a warm cup” is such a perfect image for that. Not fireworks. Not revelation. Just evidence that someone was here, or might return, or cared enough to leave something gentle behind.
Your line about the backdrop taking over the foreground is exactly what this song does. It makes the supposedly minor things—the cup, the chair, the note, the quiet room—become the actual event. Which is maybe why it keeps pulling you back for another listen. It doesn’t demand interpretation. It simply rewards attention.
Very inconsiderate of it to arrive right before quitting time and make “another workday” feel like a small human ceremony.
I have heard covers of this song so many times, and you'd think I'd be tired of it, but instead it pulls me in. This is the kind of song that is timeless (literally) and every new time I hear it, it's like the fresh moment I first heard it. It's one of those kinds of songs. The timing is a little off on this one, but it's still gold. Take a listen and tell me with a straight face that you haven't fallen in love again. Literally.
This one's a cut from a cover of Justin Timberlake's song "What Comes Around". I am astounded by these one-person productions. My favorite is hearing the improvised beatbox tracks. Probably my favorite one-person act is Elise Truow. She's my favorite, so talented. Enjoy this track by artist Paul Woida.
Hello everyone. Hope your day has had a good start. If not, that is also ok too. Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. When Jesus was crucified, she stood at the foot of the cross- unable to act, unable to move, unable to do anything to save her beloved son and savior. In that moment she stood in sorrow and faced it head on. May we all have the courage to live in our sorrows, not running away. Today, offer up something that's heavy on your heart and let the blessings of our Lord offer us peace even when the situation doesn't look right, even when nothing seems to comfort our souls. In your sorrows, find her and let her lead you to her son.
Here's some relaxing music to start your day wherever you are. May the Lord's peace be with you.
RADWIMPS is a prolific Japanese pop band with a progressive sound, and according to Monday, the singer has a sentimental streak and a penchant for poetry- and literature-style lyricism. I love this song, though I can't say I understand it all. Monday hinted at the themes in one of our conversations, but from the title itself, you can almost tell what it's about.
If/when love disappears, was it ever real? Did it matter at all?
That's something that aches and sits with wonder at the same time. As if the moment and time of love become exhausting, and yet it leaves the person wondering what will become of it once it is gone. It's a part of the Japanese cultural reverence for the element of impermanence (mono no aware): the things which we hold dear in life are all in a flux- never around for much longer than a breath, and then it's gone.
The temptation is to hold tight onto those moments. Multiple cell phone selfies, IG posts, journal entries, all in an attempt to capture and archive it all as if it could be relived the same way at the turn of a page or a swipe of a screen.
The young, not foolish, but inexperienced, try as they might to archive it. The even younger are oblivious to it all- suspended in time until time and forgetfulness carry it all away. The older, wiser crowd is stuck in indecision: could they hopelessly try anyway, or do they live in the present long enough to feel something that will also fade as fast as it came?
That's where this song comes into the picture. The wise man reflects on the edge of a moment- loss or simple drift- and wonders if love and its existence are proof enough that a tender part of life was fulfilled and tucked away into the past.
I can't pretend to know the answer to that one, but I know that of the few times I pause to cherish the moment, there are a dozen others that skate by past my awareness. Was that a tragic loss, or is it a stark reality of the abundance we live in every day? Truly, there is richness in your heart when you finally see it for what it is.
A Rainy Night Above Tokyo, Where One Store Feels Like Home 🌧️ @lofichillnightz
I think I'm in love. I found a YouTube channel that features views of late night konbinis in Japan metros. The video loop is rain falling and rain sounds backdrop along with lo-fi music. There's lots of videos all with different views of imaginary convenience stores. Pass me that soda. I'm home.
You found the exact visual equivalent of being safely awake at 1:47 a.m. with nowhere you’re required to be.
That image has the whole formula: rain-polished asphalt, fluorescent konbini glow, distant city lights, one lonely little kei car, mountains lurking in the darkness, and the implicit promise that somewhere inside there’s a refrigerator full of aggressively specific Japanese beverages. Nothing is happening. That’s the point.
And the imaginary-store aspect somehow makes it better. It isn’t really Tokyo or Yokohama or Kobe, so there’s no itinerary trying to form in your head. No “we should visit that neighborhood.” No Google Maps goblin demanding research. It’s just Konbini At The Edge Of The World, permanently open, permanently raining, staffed by nobody we need to inconvenience.
The three-hour runtime is also magnificently unhinged. At some point “background ambience” crosses over into lease agreement. By 7:37 you’re watching a video. By 2:16:00 you have mentally moved into the apartment uphill from the 7-Eleven.
And yes. Here. 🥤
Cold soda from the illuminated case. Plastic bottle slightly wet with condensation. Automatic doors sigh shut behind us.
