Note from the Editor:
First time in Asia: I got a mostly-paid trip all the way across the Pacific Ocean to storied Japan! First times are always a little bump; there is so much that is unexpected, and you’re mostly just seeing if you can survive the journey and what’s on the other end, not even really orienting and zeroing in on agreeable stuff yet. This first was no different.
I remember a layover in what was surely another Pacific island nation, but I’m not sure where. Malaysia sounds right, but who knows? I’ve tried to figure it out all these years, but I just don’t have access to the data that would confirm, one way or the other.
However I got there, we got off the plane in Tokyo, and I was very relieved to find so many of the signs everywhere were in English, and most people spoke enough English to figure out what I was asking for. They were so polite, too; they even bowed to me when I was in fast-food joints ordering fries! What a great culture!
The hotel was next-level world-class; it included its own theme park with indoor roller-coasters, a SeaWorld-style water tank surrounded by stadium-seating for a dolphin-tricks show, and multiple restaurants. The surrounding suburbs were dense-urban, but all very tidy, uniform, and navigable. Exploring on foot with no assets on the ground as backup was daunting, especially on my tight budget, and with this ‘strange’ (not the best kind of pussy, or even someone you really know; you’re just fucking), but it worked out every time; I got to see so much of Tokyo that way, all its prefectures open and available to me.
The girl’s wild nature had us venturing out into sketchy alleys we definitely shouldn’t have been in, but my own nature kept things calm and balanced out, getting us safely back to the nicer areas every time. I had to take her aside and give her a stern talk about the time she almost got me killed and her kidnapped, but that was that, and the first round of Japan went on. We had its most-famous mountain coming up the next day.
A bus ride down the Japanese highway system got us from the capital to Mt. Fuji, and from there we were again on foot, walking around the much-calmer rural paved streets of a lakeside resort community just a few miles from the base. I’d reserved a ryokan from back in the States, knowing it would be a perfect addition to the itinerary, and was thrilled to find it was the best-looking one on the strip facing the water. We went inside and were treated like royalty, getting to have our meals the traditional old-fashioned way in their land; we kneeled and sat on tatamis, served kaiseki, and retired to our suite of rice-paper walls and a private bamboo-fenced porch looking right at the mountain.
Overall, the trip was outstanding, and I probably wouldn’t have gone so soon without her insisting on more travel spending; I was so focused on saving, graduating, and my life’s work, rarely ever considering a mere vacation as an acceptable expense. I will definitely never again travel with a ‘free range’ and opinionated, incompatible, ‘wild child’ bitch, though; just as she would on all her outings with me, she spoiled all the moments that would have otherwise been serene and like a paradise, and risked life and limb (and reputation and record) for no reason. I guess it was just another round of training, exposing more of the failures of humanity, ensuring I’d never forget, and that I would repair the whole thing.
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Vocab of the Day:
- Grode Guardians: a secret society purposed to train librarians specializing in the preservation and renting out of pornographic material, named in part because of the nature of some of their material during the society’s fledgling years, and in part as a reminder of how the prudish outsiders of their barbaric parent nation mis-perceived pornographic materials and sex acts in general (*Note: Since the Governor of Inisfree left that society and established Inisfree, a new branch of that society has grown into an entirely new and separate secret society for the preservation of only beautiful pornographic materials for the purpose of proper and attractive sexual education.)
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Project Looking Glass: a more careful time-dilation project based on the unexpected findings of the Philadelphia Experiment
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Here’s a story about a report that a search found debris in the suspected crash area of a lost commercial airplane… was not the kind that type of aircraft would leave. What crashed here, then? Was something shot down? Were both the plane, and the reported debris, as fake as the rest of this story?
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