Returning to Tekko is @CalebHyles ! With 1.5M YouTube subscribers and 800k+ Spotify listeners, Caleb brings his larger-than-life voice to anime like Made In Abyss and Kaiju No. 8, plus RWBY, video game soundtracks, and his acclaimed 2025 LP The Darkness Before the Dawn.
An American man held a door open for me at Target.
I was 30 feet away.
He waited. Silently. Like a soldier holding a position.
In Japan, if someone holds a door, you are right behind them and it would hit you in the face otherwise. It is not kindness. It is physics.
This man chose to wait. I was so far away I had to jog. I did a small run. The awkward run you do when someone holds a door and you are too far to walk but too close to ignore.
I said "Thank you" while breathing heavily, like I had just finished a marathon sponsored by Target.
Then it happened.
I held the door for someone else. A woman with a stroller. She smiled and said, "Thank you, sweetheart."
A stranger called me sweetheart.
In Japan, the last person who called me sweetheart was my mother. I was five. I had a fever.
Now I hold every door. I held a door last week for six people in a row. I couldn't leave. I was trapped by my own politeness. I stood there for two minutes like a doorman who works for free.
The sixth person said, "You're a gentleman."
I have been holding doors for three months now. My right arm is visibly stronger than my left.
My wife asked why.
I said, "America."
She did not ask further questions.
In Texas they told me to stop at Buc-ee's for gas.
I have been to shrines. I have stood in temples that took two hundred years to build.
I was not prepared for the gas station.
There were one hundred and twenty fuel pumps.
I counted them because I did not believe them.
A man beside me was filling a truck the size of my first apartment, and he was not filling it because it was empty.
He was filling it because he was here, and here is where a man fills things.
Inside was a hall so vast I lost the horizon.
A wall of jerky. A wall of fudge I did not know the country produced.
A brisket sandwich handed to me by a man in a beaver costume.
And I want to be clear, the beaver is not a mascot.
The beaver is a saint.
The people speak of him the way my grandmother spoke of the mountain behind her house.
And the bathrooms.
I had been warned about the bathrooms and I had dismissed the warning as the pride of a loud people.
I was wrong to dismiss it.
The bathrooms are famous across the whole state and they have earned it.
I have slept in worse hotels. I nearly bowed upon entering.
A janitor was polishing the floor with the devotion of a man tending a garden he loved, and when I thanked him he said "welcome in," which I have since learned is what Texas says instead of hello, and also instead of I am glad you exist.
I went in for gas. I was inside for ninety minutes.
I came out with fudge, a shirt printed with a joke I do not fully understand, forty dollars of jerky, and a feeling I can only describe as having been to church.
I did not need any of it.
I needed all of it.
I have walked through the great cathedrals of the old world. I lit no candle there.
I lit no candle at Buc-ee's either.
But I did fill the truck.
And I understand now that in Texas, this is the same thing.
@azukicchi1@MibshaD Sorry no - still plenty of women who would take advantage of a young girl - as a mom w a daughter - my husband knows to never let our young daughter into any bathroom unsupervised
To anyone struggling;
You're not alone.
It's never too late to start again.
Youre never too far gone.
You deserve love.
You deserve acceptance.
If you are "Far Away", it's time to draw near.
Saw the Backrooms for a third time. #backrooms
Here's the isolated portion of my original album promo back in 2021, which was entirely a "backrooms" homage