Door to door in just over 24 hours: not that bad for going to the exact opposite side of the planet. (Suck on that, Magellan.) Our shuttered and darkened 747 chased the sun all the way across the pacific, finally letting it escape over the horizon when my Minnesota watch told me it was past midnight. This wasn't an overnight flight and it was barely approaching dusk in Tokyo so nobody really needed to sleep, and the whole purpose of darkening the plane was just to let people squint through the static of our ancient projection TV at the least appealing line-up of movies I've ever seen on a plane... is it bad when one movie doesn't even have a description in the in-flight magazine, like Delta knows the passengers would just panic and flee down the big yellow slide if they knew what entertainment hell awaited them?
I did try to pack reading material with some weight to it, but as always the more ambitious titles in my reading list served as inspiration to read something a bit more skimmable: I let Tristan Egolf's Faulkneresque first novel Lord of the Barnyard and Yasmin Reza's God of Carnage script sink to the bottom of my bag so I could for Rick Castle's Naked Heat... yes, I read a book by a fictional TV author and still felt intellectually superior for not giggling along to Little Fockers with the rest of the plebians in my cattle car. And I just recently discovered reading books fictional authors is not an entirely new thing for me, having read Kilgore Trout's Venus on the Half Shell back in high school without being able to place the author as a creation of the mind of Kurt Vonnegut. (Bizarrely it appears Trout's one published novel was actually written by Philip Jose Farmer and not by Vonnegut. There's got to be a story there somewhere.)
I feel like I did accomplish one more bit of business and didn't let a whole day go to waste by scrambling to find the single, solitary sushi place in Narita airport (I know like 4 downtown Minneapolis: catch up, Japan) Figuring I had no time to waste on translation and pointing I mumbled out the Japanese names of fish I could remember only to have the spritely Japanese girl at the takeaway window ask me in perfect English if I wanted my octopus boiled or fresh. Fresh is generally a good word when you're talking fish, so I went with that only belatedly realizing the way I usually get tako in the states was cold but obviously precooked... fortunately the mouthful I swallowed down before running onto my plane was delicious; I'm sorry I doubted you slimy airport cuisine, Japan. Now I've got to convince somebody in Minnesota to serve it to me that way.
I did earn my nickname of AMG (Angriest Man at the Guthrie) by getting wound up over the smallest grievances, so naturally I assumed riding for 24 hours in 40 year old airplanes with tiny rock-hard little Asian-friendly seats featuring the original upholstery from 1972 would have kicked my ass. Surprisingly it wasn't so bad; my least favorite thing about flying is turbulence, and our pilots kept warning us about storms and turbulence and preparing for difficult descents... but approaching Narita I started grumbling to myself , “Alright, let's start our descent already and get it over with,” only to feel the wheels gently hit the ground a second later. I really couldn't ask for it to go any easier, unless I got one of those weird pod seats they had for first class on the 777 I took from Narita. Seriously, they're these retro-modern bathtub like enclosures all set at a 45-degree angle to the aisles, straight out of 60's sci-fi... even the first class passengers all looked vaguely embarrassed to be sitting in them.
With only a couple hours of sleep crossing an ocean of restless discomfort I had to wonder why I was so mellow, and sort of almost enjoying the myriad little challenges of alternately racing through airports and trying keeping my butt from going to sleep, and somewhere over the South China Sea it finally hit me. Everything I care about is on the other side of thousands of miles of rock and molten nickel-iron, looking at different stars. The job, the theater, the people I love and the women I can't figure out (often one and the same) are two days away. All I've got are a whole new world to explore and a couple friends who for some reason always let me into their home. Everybody else can worry about themselves for a while, I'll be lost in Chinatown.
And lost is the right word: I know I'm not the best traveler in the world, for instance it didn't occur to me until I was trying to fill out immigration forms that I had no idea of the address where I was staying. This of course was not at all awkward entering a country where customs has the death penalty... I don't do drugs much less smuggle them over international borders, but every once in a while I do take this potion that makes me black out and turn into a completely different person, free of moral responsibility and social accountability, and to my shame it appears Mr. Hyde did slip something intolerable to Singapore's clean society into my luggage and made me smuggle it into the country. And man, when I step on this chewing gum and sell it on the Singapore Mafia's turf, there's going to be hell to pay (the S.M. are the baddest motherfuckers who always still remember to say please and thank you). So wish me luck.
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