Dan Ryan earned BA in Journalism from Lehigh University in 1987, but has only gotten serious about publishing creative work in the last year. In the past, he has at various times been a private investigator, a market research journalist, and a public school teacher. In 2011 he served as an editor for the Japan disaster-relief book project 2:46: Aftershocks. Also in 2011 he wrote news and short features for Giant Robot Magazine. In addition, he wrote “photo-poetry-journalism” and music pieces for Scholars & Rogues, which published “Tokyo in the Underbrush.” Dan’s short story “Kamiya Bar” was published in August, 2011 in Kizuna: Fiction for Japan, a charity fiction anthology to raise money for Japan 3/11 earthquake and tsunami relief. And lastly, but nowhere near leastly, in 2011 Jack Move Magazine published “Kamiya Bar”, “Tokyo in the Underbrush”, and the short story “Henry’s Jug Of The Last”.

In 2012, Dan has partnered with a fine gentleman named Our Man in Abiko to form Abiko Free Press, a new electronic book publishing company which will focus on various facets of modern Japan through non-fiction and journalism, and creative fiction and photography. And for the entire month of April, Dan will head to Tokyo on a private grant to work on a book-length follow-up to “Tokyo in the Underbrush.”

Dan has had an abiding love of Japan since living in Tokyo for two years in the late ‘80s. He currently lives in Brisbane, California with his amazing wife and two very idiosyncratic cats.

The other night I looked at his house and thought it would make an interesting image for a short story I had in mind.

So I walked over and asked him if I could take a time exposure image of his house to illustrate a vampire story I had brewing in my head. He didn’t blink an eye, and said “Sure”.

So I went back across the street, and set up my camera for the long 15-second shot.

And it was just dumb luck that someone drove past in their Prius as the camera lens drank up the light from the darkness.

And that’s about all there is to it.

P.S. The short story is still in the works. I’m trying to figure out a flattering way to make an elderly family member into a newly-made vampire character in the narrative. Tricky issue.

“Patience,” the Priest said, “You are Death, but Buddha will provide.”

But it’s home, and it’s raining and it’s beautiful, and I wish I had a waterproof sleeping bag so that I could sleep out for the night.

….on my front porch.

There’s nothing deeper here than that

except

a lesson I may have learned while I was out past my porch running some errands for my in-laws.

My mother-in-law

needed me to dispose of a stiff, dead opossum she had found in her yard.

My father-in-law

needed me to buy him some Duracell 312 hearing aid batteries and three packs of True menthol 100 cigarettes.

So, the opossum ended up in a bag which I tossed into a dumpster behind our local grocery market here in Brisbane,

and I

ended up in a run-down CVS pharmacy just off the El Camino Real in South San Francisco, California.

Cigarettes and hearing aid batteries for the elderly are always in such places. It is the joy of these places.

And they have El Jimador tequila, which I have never tried.

But I have smelled it because of the weaving-drunk man who was behind me, even though I didn’t ask.

We were both in line, and I had

my cigarettes and batteries.

He had his fifth of El Jimador tequila, and a copy of Maxim magazine

(which I found pleasing because it had a picture of a lovely woman with enormous tits on the cover.)

And this guy looked rough, and he was Latino, and that didn’t matter

because he looked my age

and it was Friday night

and the only thing he could weave about to plan and do was to buy El Jimador tequila and Maxim magazine

and go off wherever he had to go in the rain.

My birthday is upon me.

I’ll be 48.

And I don’t pray but I did make a sort of vow to myself that,

for the rest of my life,

I will never be the kind of man who swerves into a run-down CVS pharmacy in South San Francisco, California on a Friday night

to buy

a bottle of cheap tequila and a big-titty-girl magazine

and then shuffle off into the rain and the night.

And the State Department rejected it, the bastards. They didn’t like my photo. Said the dimensions or background were wrong. I have the memo. No biggie. I’ll just pay closer attention to the required photo specs, have my wife take another picture of me, and re-send the application in a couple of days.

I’ve got 2 1/2 months until I need the document anyway. Maybe I should get a haircut first.

But this upcoming Tokyo trip is a huge deal for me, a potential life-changer. So for a few minutes this morning I felt impatient and considered trying to re-shoot my passport photo myself.

And while I thought about how to take the passport self portrait, I looked in my bathroom mirror to see how presentable I was.

Then I remembered it was Martin Luther King Day.

So as I looked over my face, noted my features and how they have aged in nearly 48 years, I asked myself a pretty serious question: Does the color of my face matter any more now than it did when I was four years old and this great man was still alive, still fighting for all of our rights and, more importantly, for our dignity?

“Yes,” was the brutally honest answer I gave myself, as my eyes welled up with tears.

And they were tears for this great man, tears for myself, and tears for the state of things that makes the color of my skin perhaps more important to some people now than it was when that coward shot my hero down in Memphis on an April evening in 1968.

That just seems to be how the world works. We are, at best, incidental.

I’m good with that.

Twigs of Genius.

…the warm, burning slumber of home.

they’ll park down the street from your house.

At these times of the year, you won’t let me hide from the evil I know the night normally harbors in the darkness.

So, I guess those sons of bitches will see me coming.

But on the bright side, I suppose, it will make it easier for me to see and kill every last goddamn vampire in Brisbane. I should be able to kill them all by the end of the month, or at least banish them back to San Francisco.

Yeah, always look on the bright side.

Or under it.