Living Idea
October 27, 2003
On Saturday around 5:30pm as I was walking downstairs to put a load of clothes into the washing machine, I noticed it was a lot redder than it normally is in the foyer. At first I thought it was new lighting, in that maybe the landlord found some red lightbulbs on sale but that wasn’t it. The frosted glass doors were closed. They aren’t normally closed. Through these glass doors, I noticed it was very red outside. I thought something was wrong! I opened the door and went outside to see that the whole sky was red! It was very ominous and beautiful at the same time. Of course it was nothing mysterious about it. The setting sun light was being reflected all over the place by the many streaks of clouds that filled the sky. The result was truly one of the most startling and captivating sights I’ve ever seen.
I quickly ran upstairs and brought out my god awful digital camera and snapped 10 pictures. They came out pretty well aside from the mandatory blurring that my camera loves to do. I’d like to share two which I’ve put in The Dump. It’s exactly the way the camera captured it except I reduced it to 800×600 to make the file a little smaller. Check it out! Pic 1. Pic 2.
The most interesting thing for me though was that awhile back I wrote a very rough script to a story called, “The Red Town”. It was about a guy who believed the city was becoming red. Everything from the street lights, to sidewalks, to birds, to even people were all becoming more and more red. It all happened after his loved one died. I was going to illustrate it as well with pictures of this city and a character drawn right on top of the picture to show just how he didn’t fit into the red town. Basically, it would have left you thinking, was the town really becoming red or was he just becoming crazy after the loss of his true love. I stopped working on that story because I don’t have the artistic talent to finish it. The writing’s mostly there so perhaps one day it can be finished.
So anyway when I stepped out of the glass door to see this red sky the very first thing that popped into my mind was that I had become the character in the story. Maybe somehow, my loved one had died and that all this time this whole year in Osaka was nothing but an illusion. Another reason I ran up back to my apartment was just to make sure this little panic attack wasn’t real. Luckily, Eri was still sound asleep.
