Westerners don’t get it but it’s been an accepted medical practice in India for centuries. Madonna even used it.

But basically, what you do is:

Rub your own pee onto your skin. Piss into your cupped hands, blast all infected parts with it. It will cure virtually every affliction. It’s cured eczema like yours. It cured my cataracts.

No seriously: I went to the mainstream doc here in Sapporo and he told me my condition was incurable. But then, each night the next fortnight, I started saving em bladder dregs. Setting em aside. To douse my eyelids with.

And now. You won’t even believe—

I had yet to respond.

The thing with the ole man was, if I never hit him up, we’d never talk.

Had it always been like this.

There maybe had been a time when we did.

Musta been that six-month stretch, in 2011, so seven years ago, during my junior year back at school, after he dropped out of the priest training program in England, before he got a job teaching English in Hokkaido—where he lived now and ‘will till he dies,’ he’d said recently—when posted up jobless in a rental his lil bro, my uncle, owned but hadn’t rented out yet.

Maybe then. Maybe we spoke with some consistency then.

Although maybe not since that was around the time ex bae became main.

When ex bae and I became each other’s fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters too.

When the extreme codependency enabling shutting out / ignoring our respective families began.

I told him where I was at.

That I’d been roided for a second stint, but was now on this immunosuppressant.

Could feel the unease in the silence after I finished speaking, before he even spoke.

“That doesn’t seem good,” he said.

“It’s not about good or bad rn, bro. Pretty out of options here…

“If you could only see…

“If you happened to be around…”

“Well did you try what I told you to?”

“Dude—”

“I know you’re not used to hearing stuff like this, bc you’ve been raised in the Western system—”

“Bro—”

“But tellin ya, son. My cataracts—”

“BITCH don’t call me son I ain’t your son.”

“Well you are. Technically.”

“Relationships aren’t relationships de facto. They only are if you make em. Like plants; you gotta water em. Maybe if you had the balls to ever talk to your own dad, you’d—”

“Whether you like it or not, you chose me. Your soul did. Chose me, as a parent. So—”

“You’re still telling yourself that? To justify your fuckshit? That’s weak, bro.”

“Whatever you say—”

“That doesn’t even make sense. What about abortions?”

“Well yeah. Abortions. Abortions are wrong. Unnatural.”

“So, what. You have an abortion. Then…what?”

“Well your soul is gonna have to pay for that. At some point. The soul of the child—”

“Dude, you fuckin serious?”