The Instant Rice Show

by request from my sister, here is the epic tale of cloudy cloud calculator. it’s not a work of fiction and not exaggerated in any way. everything in this entry is the truth to the best of my memory.

in the spring of 2003, a friend of a friend of a friend in a town not terribly far from where i live went to a used record store to browse for some new tunes. he found a copy of one of the clash’s albums and bought it. he got into his car, opened the case, and inside was a light blue CD with no labeling on it whatsoever. he threw it in the cd player and it was clearly not the clash. he kept listening out of curiosity. he got in an accident on the way home, but wasn’t hurt. he told a few friends about the weird cd he got by mistake at the record store and made some copies for people. the first guy to get a copy listened to it at home, and within the hour, he broke his arm. copies were given to two friends of mine. one fell down the stairs the afternoon he received it. the other friend put it in his computer. in the middle of playing, his computer shut off. the motherboard was completely fried, but before the system went down, his media player connected with the CDDB to reveal the album they had found:

cloudy cloud calculator by takako minekawa.

this was during my senior year. i had visited my friends one weekend and they told me about this horrible cd while we were driving around. it wasn’t like these were horrible dreadful stories, but this was an album that seemed to carry a lot of bad luck. we made a lot of jokes about it, and something they had noticed was that the bad things stopped happening when you made a copy for someone. it’s like the lite-flavored audio equivalent to the ring. i told them to keep it away from me because although i didn’t think this cd was actually cursed, i didn’t feel like taking the risk.

three weeks later, i was digging in my bag for something at school and i saw it. a CD-R labeled with blue marker. “cloudy cloud calculator.” regardless of the fact that i was in class, i called up one of the friends who told me about the cd. the one who was in the back seat of my car where my bag was when i was hearing about the audio atrocity.

“you fucker. i fucking hate you.”
“hahahahaha, you found my present! good luck, skippy!”

since it was already too late, i figured i’d throw it in my computer in class and listen to what was so weird about it. it was some of the weirdest music i’d ever heard (it’s japanese, i know, i shouldn’t be surprised) and it was weird to the point where i had classmates come over and listen to it. three of them asked me to make them copies that afternoon. i got home safely and figured i had broken the curse since it had been several hours since i listened to the cursed japanese noisefest. copies were made, distributed to classmates, and i went on like normal. more requests were made by other classmates until pretty much every other person in my program had their own copy.

one of them fell off a stack of pressure treated lumber and got filled with splinters. his entire torso was covered in swollen red marks. another classmate’s girlfriend broke up with him out of nowhere (this may not be related to the CCC curse). the guy i sit next to in math fell asleep at the wheel and wrapped his car around a telephone pole. he got away with a sprained wrist and a bruised forehead. of all these misfortunes, nothing bad had happened to me.

fast forward to about 2 years ago (fast forward to the past. sounds like a back to the future tv series). i was telling this same story to some other friends of mine one evening while i was driving around. one of them, kurt, said he was interested in hearing the cd sometime. i kept it in my car, just in case i had to make a copy and i don’t know what would happen if i ever got rid of it. we threw it in my cd player and drove around, laughing at the ridiculous sounds and having a good time just enjoying the evening. at some point we had to go back to kurt’s house and wait for his dad to get home before we could leave again. we sat around and smoked cigarettes and kept the cd going. kurt’s dad got back and we were finally ready to leave. that’s when it happened.

i was backing my car out of the driveway like i had done so many hundreds of times before (i used to drive kurt to school) and BAM! glass everywhere, huge dent in the back of my car. kurt’s dad parked his car in the same spot there had always been a car every time i picked kurt up to go anywhere, but this time, i backed right into it. there wasn’t any serious damage, but all the same, that’s how cloudy cloud calculator gets you. nothing deadly, but just enough to let you know it’s there. all the copies i made for my classmates kept me safe. it was listening to it again after the years passed that put it back on me. i made a copy for kurt and he made a copy for his ex-girlfriend. since then, neither of us have listened to it. i still have my copy in my car, so i know exactly where it is, just in case.