The other day, I was talking to some friends as we walked along a small river running through Okayama City, when I stopped up short to watch a small cormorant swimming by, not two meters away. I rarely get to see them up close like that, since the local ones are so skittish, and I wanted to enjoy the moment. One friend said something like, “Oh, right, I saw you post bird pictures on Instagram. You’re a man of many interests.” Something about the comment resonated, and it rolled around in my brain as they went on talking about things I know nothing about.

I am a man of many, many interests. Almost infinite, in fact, to the point that “interests” seems to be an inadequate word for what I have. I am unable to be into just one thing, to the extent that people who label themselves by their interests seem to walk in a world alien to me. I read, constantly and meanderingly, but I wouldn’t label myself “a reader.” I play video games regularly and occasionally endlessly, but lord forfend I ever self-apply the epithet “gamer.” I only hesitantly included the label “writer” on my various profiles once I started earning a bit of money from putting words out into the world, though it’s something I’ve been doing regularly for years and years and…

What I am is not bound up in what I do, not for enjoyment or for money. It makes me uncomfortable when people try to box me in, even when I have seemed to encourage it. Many many people know me as “a sake guy” because I made websites and social media accounts and wrote a book about sake, but it’s only one thing I’m interested in. I’m not, in my own head, “a sake guy” because at any given moment, or on any given day, I give more mental space to taking pictures of rocks or singing songs about a bird I saw or helping my son figure out if Link could beat Bowser (OF COURSE HE COULD).

In the past, I have thought of myself as some kind of failure because I am not any one thing. Everyone seems to arrange their identities around a solid core, so being as nebulous and aimless as I am felt like a weakness of character. I think, if there is a thing at my core, it is curiosity. I want to know. If something catches my eye, I chase it down. I explore and dig and investigate until I feel satisfied and then the next thing catches my eye and I’m off again. But I never stick with any one thing long enough that it becomes some kind of defining element. I cannot sum myself up with a word. I will never be any great expert. Which, I think, for some people is a waste of time. What’s the point of doing anything if you don’t stick with it to the end? Isn’t it just a waste of time? Don’t we have to be some*thing*?

But then I think about Kurt Vonnegut writing about envelopes. It’s a story you might have seen on Facebook, or YouTube, or any number of the various online spaces the man himself would have hated. It was once mentioned by CBS, even, but it seems originally to have come from his collection of essays titled A Man Without a Country.

It is a story about a simple trip to buy an envelop, which takes him out into the world where he sees things and meets people and hears languages he cannot understand and that is what life is about. He sums it up, saying “Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

And that is how I think about who I am and what I do. For me, the point is to get out there. The point is touching and hearing and learning. I did not write a book about sake to sell sake. I wrote a book about sake so I could go meet people who do things I could never imagine possible, and those people are so fascinating to me. Now, I did that, and this time I get to do something else. And meet more people, hear more stories, and fart around some more because that’s what I seem to be here to do.