As blogged previously, I am going to post some of my personal history, Basically, how I ended up here in Japan. I'll be posting in chronological order for the most part, so those of you that are waiting for the Japanese school girl stories will just have to wait a bit longer. Sorry!

First, a bit of background...

I'm originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana.

The city is really not very well known outside of the midwest area, but does have several "distinctions" not mentioned on Wikipedia.
Sometime in the early 2000s if I remember correctly, there was a bit of census information going around the city that was talked about in the schools and in local government quite a bit.
Apparently Fort Wayne has a pretty split personality.
I don't know if it still applies, but at the time, Fort Wayne had the most churches per capita than any other city in the midwest. At the same time, they also held the honor of having the 2nd highest amount of stripclubs per capita than anywhere else in the entire US!

A couple more less well-known tidbits.

Fort Wayne was highlighted in the series Supernatural in episode 5 as the source of the Bloody Mary legend.

Perhaps even more blood chilling, Fort Wayne is the home of CAG The Mana Knight.

Scary stuff.

Now, let's jump in the old wayback machine!

I was born in Fort Wayne in January of 1977. I could be the father of half of you reading this!

I lived and worked in Fort Wayne all my life and had never spent more than 2 weeks outside the city until moving to Japan in 2005.

We'll skip a lot of the boring stuff (aside from all that crap I already spewed) and go to 1996!

In 1996, I was one year out of highschool and I had the best job of my life!

I worked in a small mom and pop video store. One of only two stores in the city at the time that were not owned by a chain of some type.

It was fantastic!

My job was easy, I could watch anything I wanted while working (typically Mortal Kombat on an endless loop - See blog title ) and, being only 19 years old at the time, was happy that we got all the free movies we wanted to take home at the end of the night including the "back room selection".

Unfortunately , in November of 1996, it all came crashing down.

The owner said that we were getting less and less business due to the Video Stop that opened just down the street. He had decided that he wanted to get out while he still could, so he was going to be closing down the store and selling all the movies.

We closed the store for rentals only one week later. For the next 3 weeks, we took inventory of the store, put everything back in it's original box and reorganized the store in full alphabetical order. In December, we reopened the store and began selling off the stock. The adult movies (about 3000 of them) were 100% cleaned out in only 3 days. By Christmas Eve (our last day of work) we had only a couple hundred movies left in the store. The owner came in, thanked us and gave us each a Christmas card with $200 in it. Not so bad. He also said we could take whatever we wanted that was leftover. I ended up with about 40 movies as well, so that was cool.

Then, it was time for the job hunting to begin!

Of course, New Year's is not the best time to be looking for a job, so it took a few months to be able to get in somewhere...

NEXT BLOG: 1997-2005 The Best Buy Years!