Blood in the rearview mirror

Ok, ok ok. The last post was a cop-out, I'll admit it. I just pasted an old file that happened to be on my computer. I promise though new stuff is coming, and it's quite excellent. Before I break off an another massive, I need to take wednesday off to finish this story entry, I will leave you with a small anecdote about my drive to work today.

The day started at about 2 when I woke up on El Charro's couch, for reasons that will be explained in one or two entries, and walked down the Serene Path of Serenity, to the Mysterious Park of Mystery, eventually wandering back into my apartment. I quickly showered, got dressed, ate some left over patato salad, and got in my car to go to work.

When I leave my apartment for the spectacularly annoying main drag to the office, Route 2, I have to enter the flow of traffic in the wrong direction, which means everyday I have to bust a U-ey at the same spot. This spot is about 30 to 35 feet long, paralell to the highway, and maybe a little over a carlength wide. As I approach U-town, there is already one car waiting to make the turn, I pull up next to it. Immediately following me, an old man in a tiny car pulls up trying to turn in the opposite direction, blocking my view and the flow of traffic, then a woman in a huge mini-van pulls up next to the old guy looking to turn in the same direction. Then another huge van pulls up next to me going in the same direction I'm going in. What we have now is this little u-turn playground is a five vehicle mexican standoff, that ensured that absolutely nobody had a clear view of the two land highway they are trying to pull into. This is obviously the fault of women and old people, who upon seeing cars already waiting should have opted to wait another 30 god damn seconds, and turned around at the next traffic light. The day is not beginning well, after 3 to 5 minutes of sitting there, I went, it didn't seem like anyone was coming, the road felt clear.

Anyway, I got going, and simmered down a bit, then as the highway moves into one lane I look at the car behind me. Obviously it's a police car, it's a white sedan, with big red lights on the top, and the occupants look thirsty to nail some gaijin ass. Of course we're driving on the street that everyone speeds on, even grandma, and naturally as I slow down, the cop speeds up. The cop gets right on my ass, and as I look back I notice that there is a word, an English word, written on the hood; BLOODin big red capital shiny f*$k off letters. I am officially terrified. What the hell is this, what kind of police force writes blood is huge god damn letters on the hood of their car? Is it some kind of Enrish mistake, did they mean to write...ummm...brood, or blued, or brewed? What is the deal here, are they out for blood? Did an entire Koban (police station) have their minds poisoned by Chuck Bronson movies, we're they goth police on some kind of vampire trip? I have not been this LIT (lost in translation) in quite a while. The car is beating down on me, I'm imagining that I'm seeing fangs on the uniformed men in the car, and is that radiator grill tinted red? I can't be sure.

Finally, the road turns back into two lanes, and I get my ass over to the slow lane in a heartbeat. Which is as long as it took to read the English phrase on the back of the car as it sped away. Blood Transportation Vehicle was written neatly across the back panelling, along with a picture of a green hospital cross on a blue background.

Just one of those weird moments that stick with you for a while.

Jet-Lag in memory

This is kind of fun. I guess this would be my first travel story. I found it on my computer from the days in 2002, when I was planning on writing a travel book about my semester abroad. This is the story of leaving New York to go to London for a semester.

Jet-Lagged

I am not afraid to fly; in fact I always find it to be a giddy rush when a plane takes off. If you think about it, flying is nothing but riding a controlled explosion thousands of feet into the air, and then moving hundreds of miles an hour because you don’t have to compete with both gravity and friction. The whole fuselage of an airplane is built to shake and move because if it were completely rigid the forces acting on it would simply rip the plane to pieces. I always found the premise of a seatbelt on airplanes a little ridiculous, the plane is moving at a few hundred miles and hour, unless it crashes into a mountain made of marshmallows what good could a little piece of fabric possibly do? But I think what drew me to flying was the complete abandon you have to mentally embrace before boarding, you have to realize that if something happens to the plane at 30,000 feet there is absolutely nothing you the passenger can do about it. If lightning hits the engine, or a wing flops off, or the rudders stop responding, or a gremlin attacks, or the food is poisoned, or a disabled kid who needs an extra kidney and is tone deaf misses the high note in “loving you” and smashes his helmet through a window de-pressurizing the whole cabin, or any number of mechanical errors, all you can do is enjoy the most intense roller-coaster ever, just without the loop de loops. However, despite my attitudes about airplanes the flight to London would be by far the longest flight I had ever taken. But first I had to get out of the airport.

JFK international airport, one of the busiest in the world by all measures, and if it isn’t at least it feeds into the busiest city in the world, New York. New York is the behemoth of the post cold war world. It is one of the bastions of the dominance of capitalism. If the goal of creating a respectable city was to block out the sun, eliminate nature, and make every single human being it it’s lair seem insignificant, then New York City gets the nod. To most Americans New York is a city that has both incredible new-age technological and architectural achievements, and a city imbedded with all the bloody, and glorious history of America from the rise of the thirteen colonies, to the fall of the invulnerability of the superpower. New York is not an aesthetic city, however, it is frightfully intimidating, as are most of those who work within its financial district. In the city that never sleeps I guess that after nightfall the financial district is the doped up nursing home where the occupants sit in bed and stare at fuzzy television screens. The entire area is comprised only of office buildings and restaurants. Brokers like their food like they like their money, well suffice to say they like each a lot. I remember the first day I strolled into my office expecting a professional work environment fostered by the nexus of information, art, and culture of the big city, and I remember leaving the office angry at the Yankees’ general manager for blowing key trades in the off-season. “So Bill what do you think of the human cloning issue, I think It has a lot of potential especially with stem-cell research,” I would say trying to elicit a conversation and exchange ideas on the subject. To which the response would be, “Derek Jeter is a fucking pussy.” Indeed, I don’t know how I didn’t see it before, at that it was time for a lunch break.

Moving back to my flight to London, it was a sunny August day and I had decided to play it cool when making my first impressions with the 30 people I was spending the semester with, so I donned a bright yellow shirt with the face of Spongebob Squarepants dominating the front, with brown shorts to complete the ensemble. This wasn’t really so much for the fashion statement I was making but out of the shear fear of missing my plane because I had gotten lost and everyone had forgotten about me. I assumed that out of the group of thirty people a bright yellow cartoon character could not be forgotten. Hey where’d the weird kid in the Spongebob shirt go? That was really the look I was going for. Everyone else did not seem to have my foresight, and dressed as normal human beings. I suppose the first impressions were slightly awkward but we had plenty of time to make up for it. We waited to check our bags for what seemed like a few hours when suddenly we heard from somewhere above, “All passengers on flight 412 to Paris please step to the front of the line.” Now that was the bottom line, we’re in America, and we aren’t going to let those no good Frenchmen get ahead of us. But, despite our indignation JFK did not show much sympathy to our situation. Once we finally got to the counter we were pretty much given seats as far away from each other as possible, and only my friend Ryan and I were seated together, saving us hours of awkward conversation with strangers.

The good byes were not particularly teary from what I can tell, it was simply a bunch of college kids traveling slightly further than Binghamton University. To the old world, the motherland, ancestral roots, and drunken adventures. I myself looked forward to all of these things, it was a great escape from the American perspective. Not the American perspective that Europe copies, the post 1987 American perspective. I judge that for whatever emotion they felt my parents began to drink more heavily while I was away. If I lost me to Europe I know I would drink a lot more, and come to think of it that’s exactly what I did.

And with that we were on the plane without too much fuss. Some people got randomly checked but since no stereotypical Islamic men were flying they were forced to go back to the previously subscribed method of harassing Blacks and Hispanics. The plane ride seemed to go on forever, and although a few people sank their worries into alcohol I was too excited to really drink, after all I thought it would be better to at least approach this phenomenal experience sober. On the plane ride there one of the passengers had some kind of medical emergency, but unfortunately nobody asked me if I was a doctor, and I imagined myself reaching into the overhead compartment and getting that brown bag that most people use to carry bowling balls but stereotypical movie doctor’s carry professionally, and then in a calming voice approach the victim with a stethoscope swinging vigorously in front of a bright yellow smiling cartoon character, “It’s ok ma’am, I’m a child prodigy.” But unfortunately all I could do was sit back and stair blankly at the television screen.

It’s amazing what technology can do these days to keep humanity from reading. Seemingly endless tricks can be employed in almost any given situation to keep everybody from learning anything...ever. I’m not saying I don’t like to be distracted now and again from the more academic pursuits of life, but is it necessary to have 37 movie channels for a six-hour flight? During take-off and landing someone so much as sneezes wrong and a stewardess (flight attendant for those of us practicing political correctness, but if we were really politically correct they wouldn’t hire thin perky blondes and force them to wear mini-skirts while demonstrating how your god damned seat belt works) will fly toward your direction scolding you, but as soon as that baby hits cruising altitude 240 TV screens flick on immediately and Everybody Loves Raymond and Austin Powers and Jack Daniels all help to relieve the tension associated with flight.

I honestly couldn’t believe it when I overhead one of the stewardesses say the words, “we’re out of the chicken,” of course you are out of the chicken, because you idiots still offer people fish on these planes, in the decades since you started serving food on airplanes how many people have said, “oh the salmon that’s been freeze dried, vacuum packed, sucked of all flavor and nutrients, and covered with a sauce derived from curdled mayonnaise sounds delicious, I’ll have that.” Take a hint; offer beef and chicken.

Little did we know after that six-hour fiasco we had similar trials waiting for us on the island, customs and immigration. We were given three or four sheets of paper detailing the basics of our reason for travel; we were students of Binghamton University on a semester study abroad program from the month of September until mid-December. It was a pretty straight forward operation, I mean why would they ask us anything, the sheets of paper said Binghamton University right on them. I knew there would be a level of restraint needed here, that one so sardonically inclined, as me needs to employ when dealing with virtually any authority, and/or bureaucracy. So as a pasty white kid, wearing the clothes described earlier, I would have assumed that my presence in wondrous England would not be perceived as threatening. I was not here to praise the tenants of Islamic fundamentalism, I was here on an English program, that means I’m studying tyranny of the monarch, and colonial oppression, don’t these people know anything? They would ask us questions like:

“Oh, you’re a student?”

“Yes.”

How long are you studying for?

“About 3 and a half months.”

“What are you studying?”

“English.”

“What else?”

“Shakespeare, and umm there’s a class called the British experience, but I think that’s kind of a bullshit class where we just go to museums and visit parks and watch British television and stuff, but I doubt we’ll actually be in class learning anything about it, if you know what I mean, you know kind of how they consider lunch a class.”

Oh…Alright then, move along.”

Coincidentally we all made it through customs and acquired one of those airport push-carts which are required by the FAA and it’s international equivalents to have at least one wheel that can’t turn and brakes that don’t function, but after a few luggage casualties and a few well timed collisions with well-armed security officials we were met by the grandfather figure of our trip. A wizened Binghamton Professor who would be the voice of reason and experience to a gaggle of college students getting their feet wet in the currents of European culture.

As we packed out luggage onto the bus and started to get acquainted it finally dawned on me that I was actually in England. I had come to associate airports and that hassle of flying with America, and it took a while for the realization that I had landed somewhere else to settle in. The “flat” was some two hours away, and by the vague description of our living quarters all I could assume is that it would be no taller than one-floor. The bus ride progressed and as I looked out the right window of the bus to the other lanes of traffic I noticed that there were no drivers, in fact there were little girls sitting where the driver should be, and the car was passing us at near 70 miles an hour. What the hell was going on with this place? Yes, British people drive on the other side of the road, and yes they have the steering wheel on the other side of the car, but it doesn’t really hit you until your bus is passed by a speeding eight year old girl. At that point I knew, Jet Lag had set in, and I should prepare for a long ride.