All Signs Point to Insanity
I awoke to an impossible combination of a bus full of nuns, a helicopter full of orphans, and an all you can eat buffet of endangered species at Woodstock, crashing through my window, crawling into my ear and tap dancing on my brain…at least that’s what the ringing phone sounded like. When that high pitched ringing sound we desperately wanted to avoid burst into the room, it was somewhere around 12:30, and our check out was scheduled for 11 AM. I would like to say that we had prepared the night before, packed our things, organized ourselves, etc…but we’re lousy tourists, and damn good alcoholics. It’s in these awkward moments went your freshly jolted body is springing around the room piling clothes into your bag and smell testing for a single moderately clean shirt that the thought of paying extra for the room creeps into your mind. You brush your teeth like they’re covered with spiders, throw water on your face, get dressed so fast that you barely avoid zippering your testicles and rush down to the concierge to tell them the phone was broken.
What we forgot was that we weren’t in New York, or California, we were in Japan, the land of I’m sorry. When we walked downstairs with our big puppy dog eyes, they had the polished brass cojόnes to tell us they were sorry for waking us, but that it’s past check out. They couldn’t even dignify our irresponsibility with a glib remark, or feigned anger because they hate their job. Sometimes these people can really get on your nerves.
Well, I had a solid 6 hour coma after the debauchery of my birthday, and now it was time to go ahead with the simple task of navigating around the island of Kyushu toward our hotel without an atlas, an ability to read road signs, any idea where we currently were in the grand scheme of things, hung-over more than a little, and on anti-biotics, which I popped before we left the hotel. We trekked to the airport parking lot, found the car, opened the doors, and waited outside with the doors open for a solid 15 minutes so the car could reach a temperature around hot enough to cook chicken in the oven. The current temperature inside of my Suzuki Alto hovered somewhere around the center of the &*$*ing Sun.
We got on the expressway (6$) and drove, maybe in the right direction, for about ten minutes. Then the expressway split 5 ways; Route 1, Route 2, Route 3, Route 4, and Route I hate Japan. None of the signs were particularly helpful as we couldn’t read them. I asked El Charro which one, and he gave me a look like he’d been drinking all night, I would have asked El Angel Solo, but she was a woman, and we weren’t in a kitchen. I took Route 3 and we leapt through the lanes, driving like angry people who want to get somewhere but know they not going the right way. We gave up, got off the expressway, turned around, and got back on the expressway the other way (6 $). We came to the same mouth of asphalt tributaries and chose Route 1. Why not? El Charro came out of his stupor enough to start looking at the old maperoos. One page computer printouts of random parts of the city, and the island of Kysuhu, it would be what an atlas looked like if designed by 140 monkeys with ADD, and ADHD, and Alzheimer’s, and AIDS too, just for the hell of it. El Charro decided we were going the wrong way again, so we got off, and got back on (6 $). We took Route 4, it lead us past a giant tower, and a domed baseball stadium, home of the Fukuoka Hawks, because El Charro’s Asahi animal spirit guide swore to him the night before we needed to pass these two structures to get where we were going. So far the ride had taken 1 hour. We were within 5 miles of where we had started.
I said to El Charro, “I swear to God if we drive past this dome again, I am going to invent a time machine so I don’t have to wait to murder your first born.”
This was not a pleasant hangover.
We stayed on the toll road for a while, if we were going in the right direction we would have to come to what El Charro’s students called, the most confusing off ramp of all time, afterwards it was supposedly smooth sailing to Beppu on the expressway. We were cruising a solid 130 Km an hour (The maximum reading on the Suzuki Alto dashboard is 140) and we saw the toll gate. We paid the toll (3 $) and proceeded down the impending stretch of…single lane country road. The speed limit was 50 km/hr (30 mph) and there was no traffic. All rational signs pointed to the fact that I would have to invent a time machine, but El Charro’s was sprightly and optimistic. In possibly the best line of the trip so far, possibly dwarfing his confession that he had gone on a week’s vacation with absolutely no money on him because he left it in a drawer in his apartment, El Charro’s turned to me and with a note of sincerity blurted, “Well, it feels like we’re going East, I mean it looks like we’re going East.”
We drove on for about a half hour, and then turned around, following a few other lost vacationers the wrong way down a one-way street for a while, which wound to the point where we were all going the wrong way over a one way bridge, and finally ended up in a town. We were lost, hung-over and hungry. We stopped at a supermarket and had an obligatory pee/sandwich break…in that order…kind of. We drove straight for another half hour afterwards and in some horribly bitter turn of cosmic spite spied the highway in the distance. The same set of tolls we had passed to enter this god forsaken, “East-looking” wasteland. I checked for cops, then I checked for traffic, and then made an illegal U-Turn, through some cones, 50 meters from the entrance/exit of a toll-booth, on anti-biotics. Picture yourself driving towards the George Washington Bridge, deciding you didn’t want to go over it, and turning around in front of the toll-booths, then picture yourselves being the only white people in a 5 mile radius, driving a car with your boss’ phone number on the back of it. We kept driving.
Soon afterward we stopped at some kind of market to ask for directions. A gentleman with his wife and kid was kind enough to help us out. I forgot to mention that for the duration of the driving on this trip, we are listening to our IPOD’s on my nifty little battery powered IPOD speakers in the car, Jumping Jack Flash was playing at the time when I decided to really murder El Charro’s first born. Beppu was due East of where we started, in the two hours we’d been driving, the bulk of it was spent going…drum roll…Southwest. SOUTHMOTHER%&*!INGWEST!!!! The guy did manage to map out our route perfectly for us though, we recognized all the streets because we’d already turned around on them at least once and we now had a damn good idea of the way we should go. We thanked him vigorously for his much needed counsel, and I politely asked him if he had any uranium for my flux capacitor. El Charro winced a little.
We made another U-Turn. We headed back toward the toll booth we went through once, made an illegal U-Turn in front of, and then went back through them again. When we passed the Dome again I gave El Charro the best shit-eating grin I could manage, and then I changed the music. I needed angry driving music, because I was an angry driver. I put on the album Ignition, by The Offspring. The opening lines of the song session appealed to me at this moment, the thought of LAPD police brutality resonated within me, and the thought of burning down a few buildings leapt over my heartstrings.
Steve: “Ok, for the next 40 minutes, while my angry music is playing, nobody look at me, nobody talk to me, nobody breathe near me, if you open your mouth once before this album is done, I’m just going to head straight for a gas tanker”
With the exception of the music at full volume, the car was dead silent.
When the music had finished we were approaching the off ramp our students had told us was the hardest part. After what we’d been through already this morning though, I didn’t think it could be that tough. We approached a sign that quoted distances of a few dozen destinations, and we recognized one as the correct one, things were going ok. Then we approached THE SIGN.
This sign was about twenty feet long and ten feet high. The roads were in 6 different colors. The best way to describe would necessitate inventing a few extra dimensions, but I’ll try to explain it in two. Picture, if you will, 4 pretzels. Now interlock them. Melt them into each other. Stretch them out. Wrap them into a perfect trapezoid. Color them different colors. Now write Japanese characters in all the empty spaces.
El Charro: (Pointing to the sign) There’s our exit!
Steve: Umm…
El Charro: The little white one on the left
The little white one on the left looked like it was a smudge of white-out on the corner of the sign. It was like a tiny alien popping out of the chest of a real exit.
Steve: That’s our exit?!
El Charro: Yeah dude I’m 100% sure, that’s the exit we have to take.
We took the exit. Nothing happened, we were driving down a highway in a string of already similar looking wrong highways. We gave it a chance though. Ten minutes later, we saw a sign that stated the distance to Beppu, our destination. El Charro and I screamed our heads off, I was honking the horn like crazy, turning on the windshield wipers, flipping my blinders on, and if crashing the car would have been apt celebration, I would have gladly done that too. I looked behind me, and El Angel Solo was asleep. She slept through the entire sign adventure. The most complicated sign in the history of travel, worse than the silk road, the trail of tears, the Oregon Trail, and Magellan’s circumnavigating the globe put together, and she slept through it.
We ambled at a moderate pace (burying the speedometer) for a couple of hours, with a brief stop for doughnuts and sun glasses at a rest station. Then as we approached Beppu proper, there was some odd happenings on the highway. We started seeing police cars with their lights on, driving down the highway…very slowly. I, as a driver, was confronted with a spectacle I’d never seen before, and I had no idea how to handle it. There were a half dozen police cars going in both directions on the highway, driving at very low speeds. The lights were flashing, a lot of people were lined up behind them, and some people were blatantly speeding past them.
I decided to play it safe in this situation, we probably could have blasted past them, maybe we would have gotten pulled over, maybe not. Despite the fact that most people in Japan treat us like Gods, not because we deserve it, but because we’re white, the police are a whole different ball game. There’s not actually any crime in Japan, so the police find it increasingly difficult to exercise their power trip. Nothing, and I mean nothing, gets them off like arresting or pulling over a Gaijin. We’re like black felons with no license driving past and smoking a crack pipe in plain view. Essentially we are a drive-by orgasm for a bored and power hungry cop.
We followed slowly and arrived in Beppu proper, the only problem was our hotel wasn’t actually in Beppu but about 17 km outside of the city. We somehow made it without incident, parked at the hotel and heaved a massive collective sigh. Our 3 hour journey had taken roughly 7. But part two of Golden Week was about to begin…on anti-biotics.
What we forgot was that we weren’t in New York, or California, we were in Japan, the land of I’m sorry. When we walked downstairs with our big puppy dog eyes, they had the polished brass cojόnes to tell us they were sorry for waking us, but that it’s past check out. They couldn’t even dignify our irresponsibility with a glib remark, or feigned anger because they hate their job. Sometimes these people can really get on your nerves.
Well, I had a solid 6 hour coma after the debauchery of my birthday, and now it was time to go ahead with the simple task of navigating around the island of Kyushu toward our hotel without an atlas, an ability to read road signs, any idea where we currently were in the grand scheme of things, hung-over more than a little, and on anti-biotics, which I popped before we left the hotel. We trekked to the airport parking lot, found the car, opened the doors, and waited outside with the doors open for a solid 15 minutes so the car could reach a temperature around hot enough to cook chicken in the oven. The current temperature inside of my Suzuki Alto hovered somewhere around the center of the &*$*ing Sun.
We got on the expressway (6$) and drove, maybe in the right direction, for about ten minutes. Then the expressway split 5 ways; Route 1, Route 2, Route 3, Route 4, and Route I hate Japan. None of the signs were particularly helpful as we couldn’t read them. I asked El Charro which one, and he gave me a look like he’d been drinking all night, I would have asked El Angel Solo, but she was a woman, and we weren’t in a kitchen. I took Route 3 and we leapt through the lanes, driving like angry people who want to get somewhere but know they not going the right way. We gave up, got off the expressway, turned around, and got back on the expressway the other way (6 $). We came to the same mouth of asphalt tributaries and chose Route 1. Why not? El Charro came out of his stupor enough to start looking at the old maperoos. One page computer printouts of random parts of the city, and the island of Kysuhu, it would be what an atlas looked like if designed by 140 monkeys with ADD, and ADHD, and Alzheimer’s, and AIDS too, just for the hell of it. El Charro decided we were going the wrong way again, so we got off, and got back on (6 $). We took Route 4, it lead us past a giant tower, and a domed baseball stadium, home of the Fukuoka Hawks, because El Charro’s Asahi animal spirit guide swore to him the night before we needed to pass these two structures to get where we were going. So far the ride had taken 1 hour. We were within 5 miles of where we had started.
I said to El Charro, “I swear to God if we drive past this dome again, I am going to invent a time machine so I don’t have to wait to murder your first born.”
This was not a pleasant hangover.
We stayed on the toll road for a while, if we were going in the right direction we would have to come to what El Charro’s students called, the most confusing off ramp of all time, afterwards it was supposedly smooth sailing to Beppu on the expressway. We were cruising a solid 130 Km an hour (The maximum reading on the Suzuki Alto dashboard is 140) and we saw the toll gate. We paid the toll (3 $) and proceeded down the impending stretch of…single lane country road. The speed limit was 50 km/hr (30 mph) and there was no traffic. All rational signs pointed to the fact that I would have to invent a time machine, but El Charro’s was sprightly and optimistic. In possibly the best line of the trip so far, possibly dwarfing his confession that he had gone on a week’s vacation with absolutely no money on him because he left it in a drawer in his apartment, El Charro’s turned to me and with a note of sincerity blurted, “Well, it feels like we’re going East, I mean it looks like we’re going East.”
We drove on for about a half hour, and then turned around, following a few other lost vacationers the wrong way down a one-way street for a while, which wound to the point where we were all going the wrong way over a one way bridge, and finally ended up in a town. We were lost, hung-over and hungry. We stopped at a supermarket and had an obligatory pee/sandwich break…in that order…kind of. We drove straight for another half hour afterwards and in some horribly bitter turn of cosmic spite spied the highway in the distance. The same set of tolls we had passed to enter this god forsaken, “East-looking” wasteland. I checked for cops, then I checked for traffic, and then made an illegal U-Turn, through some cones, 50 meters from the entrance/exit of a toll-booth, on anti-biotics. Picture yourself driving towards the George Washington Bridge, deciding you didn’t want to go over it, and turning around in front of the toll-booths, then picture yourselves being the only white people in a 5 mile radius, driving a car with your boss’ phone number on the back of it. We kept driving.
Soon afterward we stopped at some kind of market to ask for directions. A gentleman with his wife and kid was kind enough to help us out. I forgot to mention that for the duration of the driving on this trip, we are listening to our IPOD’s on my nifty little battery powered IPOD speakers in the car, Jumping Jack Flash was playing at the time when I decided to really murder El Charro’s first born. Beppu was due East of where we started, in the two hours we’d been driving, the bulk of it was spent going…drum roll…Southwest. SOUTHMOTHER%&*!INGWEST!!!! The guy did manage to map out our route perfectly for us though, we recognized all the streets because we’d already turned around on them at least once and we now had a damn good idea of the way we should go. We thanked him vigorously for his much needed counsel, and I politely asked him if he had any uranium for my flux capacitor. El Charro winced a little.
We made another U-Turn. We headed back toward the toll booth we went through once, made an illegal U-Turn in front of, and then went back through them again. When we passed the Dome again I gave El Charro the best shit-eating grin I could manage, and then I changed the music. I needed angry driving music, because I was an angry driver. I put on the album Ignition, by The Offspring. The opening lines of the song session appealed to me at this moment, the thought of LAPD police brutality resonated within me, and the thought of burning down a few buildings leapt over my heartstrings.
Steve: “Ok, for the next 40 minutes, while my angry music is playing, nobody look at me, nobody talk to me, nobody breathe near me, if you open your mouth once before this album is done, I’m just going to head straight for a gas tanker”
With the exception of the music at full volume, the car was dead silent.
When the music had finished we were approaching the off ramp our students had told us was the hardest part. After what we’d been through already this morning though, I didn’t think it could be that tough. We approached a sign that quoted distances of a few dozen destinations, and we recognized one as the correct one, things were going ok. Then we approached THE SIGN.
This sign was about twenty feet long and ten feet high. The roads were in 6 different colors. The best way to describe would necessitate inventing a few extra dimensions, but I’ll try to explain it in two. Picture, if you will, 4 pretzels. Now interlock them. Melt them into each other. Stretch them out. Wrap them into a perfect trapezoid. Color them different colors. Now write Japanese characters in all the empty spaces.
El Charro: (Pointing to the sign) There’s our exit!
Steve: Umm…
El Charro: The little white one on the left
The little white one on the left looked like it was a smudge of white-out on the corner of the sign. It was like a tiny alien popping out of the chest of a real exit.
Steve: That’s our exit?!
El Charro: Yeah dude I’m 100% sure, that’s the exit we have to take.
We took the exit. Nothing happened, we were driving down a highway in a string of already similar looking wrong highways. We gave it a chance though. Ten minutes later, we saw a sign that stated the distance to Beppu, our destination. El Charro and I screamed our heads off, I was honking the horn like crazy, turning on the windshield wipers, flipping my blinders on, and if crashing the car would have been apt celebration, I would have gladly done that too. I looked behind me, and El Angel Solo was asleep. She slept through the entire sign adventure. The most complicated sign in the history of travel, worse than the silk road, the trail of tears, the Oregon Trail, and Magellan’s circumnavigating the globe put together, and she slept through it.
We ambled at a moderate pace (burying the speedometer) for a couple of hours, with a brief stop for doughnuts and sun glasses at a rest station. Then as we approached Beppu proper, there was some odd happenings on the highway. We started seeing police cars with their lights on, driving down the highway…very slowly. I, as a driver, was confronted with a spectacle I’d never seen before, and I had no idea how to handle it. There were a half dozen police cars going in both directions on the highway, driving at very low speeds. The lights were flashing, a lot of people were lined up behind them, and some people were blatantly speeding past them.
I decided to play it safe in this situation, we probably could have blasted past them, maybe we would have gotten pulled over, maybe not. Despite the fact that most people in Japan treat us like Gods, not because we deserve it, but because we’re white, the police are a whole different ball game. There’s not actually any crime in Japan, so the police find it increasingly difficult to exercise their power trip. Nothing, and I mean nothing, gets them off like arresting or pulling over a Gaijin. We’re like black felons with no license driving past and smoking a crack pipe in plain view. Essentially we are a drive-by orgasm for a bored and power hungry cop.
We followed slowly and arrived in Beppu proper, the only problem was our hotel wasn’t actually in Beppu but about 17 km outside of the city. We somehow made it without incident, parked at the hotel and heaved a massive collective sigh. Our 3 hour journey had taken roughly 7. But part two of Golden Week was about to begin…on anti-biotics.
posted by Just1Wheat at
12:08 PM
