“Jiko shokai” in Japanese means “self introduction” Happy new year to you. Yes, you. So it’s 2012 and it seems like a good time to tell you that I often like to force myself into new habits. People tell me I’ve changed beyond all recognition. If that’s true I must have done it in incremental adjustments.

Did you know that halfway through their lifespan, rats stop looking for new sources of food and stick with what they know? It’s self-preservation.

I know the default stance of the Twitter generation is to say “you should not let arbitrary things like the date affect your decision to change, you should be doing every day.” I think this is, like so many commonly held beliefs, patently wrong. Important dates, rituals and collective behaviour are not simply conceptual events. They are real to us as atoms. They affect us.

Did you know that four placebo pills a day have a more positive affect on your health than two do? Did you know that an injection of sugar water makes you demonstrably more well than sugar pills do, even though neither contain medicine? Did you know that you are far more likely to be interested in someone who you believe is interested in you? For humans, our reality is what we believe it to be. By the way, rat-boy, the older you get the more vital is becomes to force yourself out of those well-worn tracks.

Try refusing to go to the same cafe twice this year. Try filling your iPhone with music and audiobooks you’ve never heard before. Russian techno followed by a Shakespeare comedy has a way of keeping you on your toes.

My name’s Andy. I’m the guy who is always camwhoring on this page. I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself earlier, but up until now this page has been alternately about photos and writing. As of 2012 it’s going to change focus again. I’m going to merge my photoblog, photography portfolio and writing pages into this one page. This is largely because I’m going to be spending more time seeing the world and less time at a desk, so I wanted one easy-to-maintain page for all of my work. I’ve been looking for a theme for a long time, something that would tie together my photography, my writing, my videography, my music, my designs, my illustrations and my musings. I couldn’t find one, so I just called it andyheather.com

This is going to be a place for stories and images that document my adventures.

Thoughts from a plane

When I started writing this I was flying to Hong Kong from Kansai Airport in Osaka, Japan. At the time I knew I was going to transfer there to Sydney. In Sydney I was going to star in a commercial for a well-known camera manufacturer. I was going to shoot three commercials for three different cameras with lines. This is the kind of gig actors dream about. But I’m not an actor. Let’s back up a bit, I should qualify that. I have acted all my life. I did so on TV and in movies, as an extra, when I was a kid, and I still do so in Japan. However, I am also a photographer, a translator, a lecturer, a writer, a songwriter, a musician, a vocalist, a designer, a director, an illustrator and an editor. I believe that if I was either “a photographer” or “an actor” I would not have got this gig.

So I say, make your resolutions in the full knowledge you may not stick to them. Your reach should exceed your grasp. You should be over-stretching yourself. Try forcing yourself to eat new foods for a couple of months and avoid old favourites.Case-sensitive and JournaledI used to write a blog called Memoirs of a Gaijin. It attracted a lot of attention in certain circles and was imitated a little, before being largely forgotten. It was a warts and all confession of the time leading up to my move to Japan and the years that followed. It became an invaluable record of my time here. It was partly fictional, but all memories are.

In the end it made my life more public than was tenable, so the blog had to go. The original memoirs were closed down back in the day because I decided it wasn’t right to make public a life you are sharing with a significant other. It’s all well and good to be a child of the 21st century and over share everything you’re doing at all times, but it’s not cricket to make that decision on behalf of the people around you.Try throwing out all your old clothes and replacing your wardrobe.

However, things have changed since then. Life has moved on and I realise that I want to start documenting again, not because i have a story I think is worth telling - I can’t tell yet, I don’t know the ending - but more because I need this. I obsessively document the world around me. No, the reason is that if I’m not writing out my life as it happens I’m simply not thinking as lucidly about my priorities. Writing as I go as good a way as any I’ve found to get it right. When I narrativise everything I do into some Homer-esque odyssey, I’m far more likely to make more interesting choices at the next juncture. I like whimsy. I like adventure. I like raconteurism. I like Oscar Wilde. I like Lord Byron. I like people made their lives their greatest works of art. I know it’s not for everyone. I know that some people think it shows a lack of modesty and propriety. I know they killed Wilde for making his (and, by extension, England’s) private life public. But it makes me smile and life’s too short not to do things that make you smile. I once met a Japanese woman who was angry at her husband not for having an affair, but for failing to keep it quiet. When news of his dalliance got out she was forced, for appearance’s sake, to divorce him, move out, get her name removed from his family register and have it replaced on her father’s. It was all a terrible inconvenience, she said. How about you go to a different gym and try only the machines you’ve never used before? When I stop fictionalizing what I’m doing I start just coasting and not really making the most of life. I’m not sure when this started but I think it began during my teenage obsession with Jack Kerouac. Brutal honesty, burning effervescence as a lifestyle, one’s life as one’s novel, and minimal liberties with the truth were credos to live by, simply because On The Road changed me, affected me and sculpted me to my very core. I was so sure I wanted to be a writer in the same vein that I couldn’t imagine not documenting every last gory detail of my Japanese experience as I went. I’ve changed over the years and I no longer have the same romantic view of the world that Kerouac instilled in me. I no longer believe that the unedited truth is the only way. As I sit here on an aeroplane heading to Hong Kong with my single-serving peanuts and Japanese beer, I am aware that my lifestyle shares little in common with the beatifically austere existence Kerouac opted for at his creative peak. I am a flag-waving member of a generation that bemuses its seniors with increasingly rapidity. When I first started blogging and podcasting both practices were far more lo-fi and underground than they are today. Nowadays I put my life in the cloud, the gaze of my Twitter followers replaces that of God - who, to be honest, I always suspected was not very attentive in the first place. I literally scoff at people who do things on paper in the meat world that should clearly be done digitally and backed up. Delete your blog, delete your plugins, delete your bookmarks. Make new ones. When I see people reading and writing on pulped trees I tut and shake my head like a homo sapiens casting haughty looks of mixed pity and contempt upon Neanderthals who have yet to discover the joys of fire and are still using their own faeces for warmth. I have become, in short, a lot of things I once hated. I unashamedly enjoy mainstream culture now, whereas once I virulently despised it. There is no more tedious snob I know than the British humanities student. Now I am a digital snob, but not a cultural one. I now desire fame and recognition in a way that used to horrify me in youth. I see a great deal of value in being readable and entertaining, whereas I used to find only the intellectual and impenetrable art palatable. Delete all your favourite songs and find new ones.

I finished writing this in January, after I came back from shooting a commercial in Australia, then playing a gig with my band at a club on new year’s eve. Drunks girls in the front row explored my torso as if it had the secret of life written in brail on my body, while I sang my heart out into a mic. None of that seemed in the slightest bit odd to me. On the contrary, it felt good to be doing what I felt I was born to do and getting instant feedback for it. It felt right.

I have had countless experiences like that this year. Experiences that I am aware few people who have ever lived on the planet will have been able to enjoy. I am aware every day that I am one of the luckiest 0.0001% of humans who has ever lived. My generation has it better than the kings and queens of any generation past, yet we have the temerity to whinge about our first world pains on an INSTANTANEOUS WORLDWIDE MESSAGING SERVICE. We are truly hilarious little apes. Life may never be this good again. In short, I am starting afresh in a new online skin, as a new online man. As someone who is a bit more like the real me. You may not remember me from my last guise, but that’s fine, because really, neither do I. Let’s begin afresh shall we? Pleasure to meet you. My name’s Andy. I am a polymath, renaissance man, something of a creative genius and I believe the things I make, the art I create, the photographs I take, the words I write, the songs I sing, the performances I give and the way I live will be influential to millions. These are not easy things to say. I don’t like saying them. People are not supposed to write sentences like that. It’s immodest. I don’t say them to shock you or to whip up a comment frenzy. I write things like that because I like it when people say memorable things with a wry smile, so you can’t tell if they mean them. Kill off your old heroes and find new ones.

If that sentence repelled you it might be a good idea to leave this page now and forget it ever existed. There will be a lot of mythologisation, self-delusion and optimism here and it will likely make your blood boil. Before long your trembling, Tory finger will be hovering over that "comment" button. You will redden and sputter mouthfuls of tea and crumpet on your computer screen like an angry Daily Mail reader shaking with rage over another thoroughly-researched article about foreigners being the cause of the worldwide economic crisis, the disappearance of bees and gay. This is clearly not for you. The splash Some days you find yourself in a trade show, drawing illustrations of Japanese children while their parents stand looking over your shoulder, urging you to make the picture cuter. Always cuter. At times like these you tend to float out of your body for a second, look down on yourself and ask, “How did my life-choices deposit me here?” For whatever reason, sometimes for good and often for ill, I tend to make a splash. I don’t try to. It just seems to happen. I have given up trying not to make said splash. My life has been a constant struggle to try and drive that splash in a positive direction. It certainly does not always work that way. Not even most of the time. But sometimes the splash I make leads to positive things. Often its a massive impediment.

As I got older, impact became a less and less desirable quality. Sometimes, I curled up and remained almost motionless trying to minimize it. But when the timing is right events fall into place as if I’d written them and reality takes a back seat. These are the moments I live for. I don’t know what that is. Mental illness perhaps. Megalomania. Delusions of grandeur. I don’t know. Perhaps some day you can tell me. I’m all ears. You could try avoiding the roads you know, until you get good and lost. Sometimes you find yourself acting in the Indiana Jones TV show, your favourite franchise ever, and think to yourself, “How did fate plant me here? I could die fulfilled right now, and I’m only 11 years old.”

Imagine you’re in a huge apartment, with a living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and balcony and you’re drinking beer on another man’s dime, looking at the Sydney landscape, trying to remember your lines because you’re about to go and shoot on top of the Harbour Bridge. When you get up there you’re speaking Japanese to a film crew and everyone’s eyes are on you. Some are wondering why you can speak Japanese. Some are wondering if you’re someone, or if you are, as they suspect, really no-one. Some are just using every muscle in their body to hate you, because its impossible not to look cocky when you’re got a film crew pointed at you. At times like these you stop what you’re doing, take a step back and take stock of your situation. There’s always the same question in your head. How the fuck did my life end up here? So why am I writing this, here, in this way? Well the answer is twofold. Firstly, traditional publishing doesn’t work for me. It’s too slow and dissatisfying. I need episodic blog publication followed by packaging, polishing and amplifying. It’s the only way that makes sense to me. Secondly, I’ve been living in fear for too long. Fear of being myself. Fear of sharing. Fear of losing the creative outlets, the friends, the family, my sense of home, my sense of myself, my life. And fear has taught me that life is too short not to do this. It feels right so I have to do it, because one day I’m going to die.

Death “Cos one of these days this’ll die. So will me and so will you.” A lot of people were deeply moved by Steve Jobs’ Stamford address after he died and were perhaps a little surprised by how much he focused on death as the great motivator. I had come to the same conclusion after reading about the samurai and had come across the Stamford address some years before his death. It changed my life and behaviour. I, like Jobs, felt that death could come at any moment and I decided to step it up a gear. Some days you find yourself in a town in Japan standing on stage with your band poised and ready behind you and a thousands pinpricks of light blinding you from in front and you can hear female voices screaming out your name. At times like these you have to step back and ask… of all the possible outcomes, how did my life wind up here? Looking at the big picture once in a while is a great trick. Imagine you’re a member of a vastly intelligent alien species looking down on the babbling hoard of simians running the earth towards the edge of a metaphorical cliff and ask yourself, “What on Flargon do they think they’re doing?” Culturally we’ve been raised to see death - along with the other biological functions like sex - as taboo and somehow negative. Sure death is scary, but there’s nothing in the world that puts your priorities in order like the lurching approach of the grim reaper. If I think I’m struggling with a tough decision, all I have to do is remember that I only have one shot at this game, and that my shot could end under the wheels of a bus tomorrow. Suddenly the decision seems easy. That’s my reason for doing just about anything nowadays. Because one day I’m gonna die. I think about the death of myself and my loved ones every day. It makes me value them and love my life. It makes me get my priorities in order. It makes me drop the hammer. It makes me rush. It makes me honest. It makes me loving. It makes me incredibly positive. I heartily recommend it. Warning: It might make you a handsy and over-sentimental drunk.

“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain” I did the Sydney commercial shoot with a carefree and fun-loving attitude. I enjoyed it as if it was my last. Whatever happened next, I knew that for one week I would be fed, watered, pampered and powdered. I intended to go Hollywood on my first job. Will Smith style. I went out of my way to ensure that everyone involved had the best shooting experience of their lives, because I wanted to make my one shot count. It was one of the most positive and memorable experiences in one of the best years of my short but colourful life. I won’t be writing every gory detail here. Sometimes there will be scarcely a word at all. But somehow I get the feeling it’ll all flow here eventually. A carefree smile and a playful attitude are great ways to approach a shoot. I recommend both. If it doesn’t lead to anything you can say you tried it once and loved it. If it does lead to something it’ll be yet another of the innumerable twists and turns that make it for a good story. You have to enjoy the hell out of a shoot while it lasts, because it has a tendency to burn like magnesium and fizzle out fast. Sorry, did I say "shoot"? I meant "life". So many unlikely scenarios and opportunities have presented themselves to me in the last five years, and the majority of them have gone undocumented. Briefly alluded to in a tweet, perhaps, but not really shared. You probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you about them. I’ve decided I don’t want to let any more slip by. Life, in the 21st century at least, is a stream.

THE END