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By Root 713 0

specific demands or instructions on what I was actually supposed to do as I sat there, but that very fact demanded that I had to make the practice valuable for myself. Now, I’ve always been a guy who had to be doing something at all times. I don’t like vegging out the way lots of people do. I’d gotten into art and music mainly because I felt I had to produce something in order to justify any activity I found enjoyable. I don’t like to waste time. Ever. Zazen gave me a way do nothing while still doing something that seemed somehow constructive.

Another thing I appreciated about Zen Buddhism was that it was resolutely anti-sexist. The other religions I’d encountered, including the Hare Krishnas as representatives of “Eastern spirituality,” were very much boys’ clubs. Since high school most of my closest friends had been female. My friend Emily once called me a “womanly man.” I’m still not sure how to take that. And with my long hair and rather slender physique (I prefer that description to “wimpy”), by college I’d had more experience than most guys of being propositioned by hard-up horny-toads in Trans Ams. Buddha was emphatic that women were just as capable as men of reaching enlightenment.

I made the practice of zazen part of my daily routine from that day on. But I certainly wasn’t ready to commit to the life of a Zen monk, whatever I imagined that might be, because, after all, I was a rising star in the indie music scene! In 1987 I made another record, and the next year I actually put together a real band and played live a few times. Our third album, Disturb the Air, was produced by Glenn Rehse of the band Plasticland. That one sounded like a real record. The vocals were mostly on-key, and I even did multiple takes of certain tracks to try to get things right—because by this time Midnight Records was paying the studio bills. Glenn played Mellotron, the keyboard made famous by The Beatles and The Moody Blues for its ability to imitate a full orchestra (albeit a spooky, slightly out-of-tune full orchestra) and mixed the results with slabs of cavernous reverb making our little garage band sound positively huge. Our record sales, unfortunately, failed to live up to the hugeness of our sound.

AS I WAS DOING all that zazen and was struggling to make Dimentia 13 happen, another strange idea was brewing in my brain. Ever since I was a little kid, there was something compelling for me about Japanese monster movies. I couldn’t tell you for certain what it was. But in the 1970s movies like Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Gammera the Invincible, War of the Gargantuas, and Frankenstein Conquers the World (in which a fifty-foot-tall Frankenstein monster terrorizes Tokyo then dukes it out with a big-ass dinosaur) were staples of UHF television. In Cleveland most of these films were hosted by The Ghoul, Channel 61’s hepcat horror host with a fake goatee and groovy green wig who came on during the commercial segments of his Saturday latenight show to talk trash about the movies and blow up model kits with M80 firecrackers. I was mesmerized by every one of those stupid rubber dino-fests.

* Not nearly as good.

But even better than Godzilla & Co. was a Japanese science fiction TV series called Ultraman, which came on every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 4:30 in the afternoon on channel 43. (Tuesday and Thursday they showed another Japanese sci-fi program called Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot.*) Unlike most kids’ shows, Ultraman was not a cartoon. It was a live-action show with special effects like the original Star Trek. The hero was a silver-and-red guy with big yellow bug-eyes on a sinister, immobile, and totally alien metallic face that predated the Greys from the X-Files by thirty years. But what really set Ultraman apart from American superheros was that he was 150 feet tall. And he didn’t battle boring bank robbers and criminal masterminds either. Not our Ultraman. No way. He personally slugged it out with gigantic Godzilla-style monsters.

Why Ultraman affected me so deeply I can’t really say. But I do know that I