Tokyo Air Show

Some stories don't need to include a valuable lesson. Some days don't require a crazy happenstance to make them memorable. Some days are just plain good days. One of my good days came with a trip to the Tokyo Air Show.

One day in the Summer of 2009, the girl I was seeing invited me out for the weekend, but didn't tell me where we were going. To my delight, it turned out to be an Air Show.

You can see why I liked her.

Even though I didn't come home with any zany stories to tell about that particular Summer's day, between the wicked fighter planes, an energetic cover band, a great nightcap at the bowling alley, a chance to have American food again, and excellent... ehm... company, all day long, it ranks high on my personal list of all time greatest days.

But that's just a memory of a smile to keep me warm. For you, my small but loyal fan base, I have a real treat...

Gratuitous Jet Fighter Porn!!!
(Sorry, no full sized pictures for sale. *sorrow and sadness*)

The F-22 Raptor, future King of the Sky

My personal favorite, the A-10 Warthog. Basically a massive cannon with wings. ...and bombs and missiles and rockets.

The F-16 Fighting Falcon and the Mitsubishi F-2 (No cool callsign given).

 The F-2 was jointly developed by Mitsubishi and Lockheed Martin, the technology behind the aircraft, and its basic form and function, is based off the U.S. F-16. Congratulations, you've been learned uponst.

A massive C-5 Galaxy cargo plane.

 

C-130 Hercules's... Herculii? Um, anyway, dropping para-troopers all day long.

A camoed F-4 Phantom II.

Our cover band for the day, they treated us to American and Japanese classic rock.

They also played a catchy little tune I knew I'd heard before, I told my girl that I couldn't think of where I'd heard it before. She smirked at me and told me it was the theme song to a popular softcore "hentai" series. Which leads to an interesting question. Who's more busted, the boy who vaguely remembered the theme song to a pop porno, or the girl who knew it well enough to name it?

I think all you boyfriends out there know the answer to that one.

    And here's something you don't often see in Japan... outstanding.

Anyway, everyone deserves a day like this now and again. Ladies, treat your man next time the Airshow is in town. Seriously.

Til next time.  

. 

Nagano

So with winter in full swing, and vacation time to use up, my friends and I headed out to Nagano to do some skiing. Now, I'm not a half bad skiier, I can get down my fair share of hills, no problem. But I had never been snowboarding. It looked easy enough, one suicide stick to control instead of two, though you dont get the handy balancing poles. I suppose you could use them, but you'd look like a jackass, and looking cool is way more important than keeping your ribs intact.

So, sign me up for the largest pair of rentable snowboarding boots you've got, I decided to give it a try.

I was on my ass within seconds of strapping onto the board.

I picked myself up, dusted myself off, hit the snow three seconds later.

Not a great start.

Now I should preface this with the understanding that the Tokyo girl I was seeing at the time, who was there with me, was damn near professional grade on a snowboard. She was also absolutely without mercy.

We started on the black diamond course and moved up from there on the difficulty scale. If you don't know what a black diamond course is, you can infer from the name. Let's just say its not the "pleasantly emerald" course.

My two other friends are not as skilled, but they'd done it before and quickly got back in the hang of it. I soon found myself alone on the slope. Soon, like, 30 seconds after they dragged me up the damn thing. Great. I guess I'll just figure it out on my own, thanks, no worries. Trial and Error, the best way to learn a dangerous and often lethal sport.

Pure Evil.

My troubles were compounded by the fact that I couldn't see a damn thing through the goggles. I'm one of those people that radiates heat like a blast furnace at all times. Women with cold bed feet love me, but goggles and I don't get along.

I'm nothing if not stubborn though, and I'd be damned if I'm getting stuck up on that hill alone. So several hundred bruises and a stress injury to the tendons in my thighs later, and I've pretty much got the hang of the side to side, lean back turn, and I can get a good 30 feet or so before I wipe out. A couple hours sees me safely down the mountain.

Awesome, made it down alive. Now I can find the bunny slope and get some practice time on the basics in a controlled (considerably less likely to kill me) environment.

Somewhere inside my head I hear Murphy laugh, and sure enough, I turn around and there are my friends. We're going over to the double black diamond.

Outstanding.

So, up we go, and down I go again, and again, and again. Soon, I'm alone on a slope that is about 3 degrees shy of being categorized as a cliff. Nothing quite so humbling as watching little Japanese girls go swishing and giggling by you as you try to pick yourself up out of the snow every 30 feet or so.

But they say you learn fast in the metaphorical fire, and I was getting better, albeit, the injuries I was sustaining via this method of practice were slowly making it harder for me to put what I was learning into action. Muscles were screaming with strain and exhaustion, the concussion I got from a frozen rock in a patch of ice that put me down head first had my brain throbbing against my skull, my normally impenetrable impact cushion in back was warning me that shields were failing and I would not be sitting comfortably on anything that week, and perhaps most importantly, my beard had frozen solid and was starting to fall off my face in the form of icicles.

Yeeeep. Time to hop that bus home, I reckon.

So I'm halfway down this slope when, you guessed it, I run across my friends again at one of the midway stations. This is a sort of "choose your course" area on the slope. Go slightly right and you're on a leisure cruise down to the bottom, go center and you've got a bit of a challenge. Go slightly left and you get to dodge trees while you try to see if you can outrun your own sonic boom.

 I could have gone right.

Everyone was ready to call it a day...

Except my girl. (Sound of laughter in the back of my head, Murphy grabs a beer and settles in to watch the show.)

She wants to take the far left path and go to the Olympic Course slope. Yes, we're at THAT Nagano.

Now I'll admit, I was intrigued. I like seeing things that have historical significance, and this certainly qualified. The two friends took the easy course down and hopped a bus.

I got a smile from the girl as a reward for my decision to die an icy death, and followed her along a very narrow trail into the woods.

Less than a minute later, the woods open up... and I am snowboarding along the side of a 50 foot cliff over rocks and trees, on a path thats barely wide enough to turn the board sideways on...

People, I don't know how to stop this frikking deathsled without veering to the side.

Option A: Hold it straight and pick up immense speed along the narrow path beside the probably fatal drop, hoping there are no sudden turns or bumps.

Options B: Try to slow down and probably slide my bruised ass right off the side of the cliff.

Needless to say, since I'm sitting here writing about it, I went with option A.

Anyway, we made it to the Olympic Course, and I got left behind again, so I took the opportunity to snap some pictures and make my leisurely way down to the bottom.

 Beautiful Nagano

The lift down from there took us out near our lodge, and we actually ended up beating our friends home by a couple hours, as their bus went all the way around the base of the mountain, making stops.

Now, I make light of it all, but it was in fact a very exciting day for me, and I had a great time. I got a chance to push my boundaries and survived the hell out of that bitch. It was a day well worth remembering.

I decided a trip to the lodge's hot spring would do alot to alleviate the accumulation of bruises I'd aquired throughout the day, and headed in to try it out. This was another first for me, and it took a bit of getting used to.

After showering in preparation, I picked out a pool and stepped in. It didn't take me long to notice that whatever spring I sat in, all the Japanese men would get up and move to another one. Needless to say, that was a bit offputting, but I was on a mission to limit my bruising, so to hell with em, I'd have my own pool and like it.

I was a bit worried that I'd missed a step in some kind of custom and had been offending everyone, so when I got back to the room, I asked my girl why they kept moving. She laughed and lifted her pinky up in the air, wiggling it around.

"Penis fear."


Come to think of it, she wasn't such a bad chick after all.


.

Top Shots [Kannon's Pagoda]

Kannon's Pagoda

Sensoji Temple, Tokyo

Christmas Time in Tokyo

That first Christmas/New Years in Tokyo.

Kannon Pagoda at Sensoji Temple in Asakusa, Tokyo.

I headed to Sensoji Temple to hear the ringing of the bells that I had been told was the seasonal tradition. There was a large crowd gathered, we stood, time passed, no bells. Gyped.

Turned out it was just Hatsumode, the celebration of the years first visit to the temple, so at midnight, a bunch of monks came out and let the crowd rush in. That was pretty much the highlight of the evening.

Anyway, I did get a few good shots while I was there, so it wasn't a total loss. The nightshot of the Kannon Pagoda above, is still one of my favorite shots from Japan.

New years day rolled around, and again I was told that the tradition was to go to the Imperial Palace to hear the address from the Emperor. It's one of only two times each year that the Inner Grounds are opened to the public, so of course, I wanted to see inside.

I must have missed something, because mainly I was just herded along a driveway with several hundred other people, and we ended up in a big parking lot overlooked by a balcony in a fairly normal looking building. The Emperor and his family came to the balcony, said some things I, of course, could not understand, and everyone waved the little paper Japanese Flags they'd been given.

Pays to be tall in the land of the Rising Sun.

So, yeah, it was a bit underwhelming, but I'm a silver lining kind of guy. I got a neat paper flag for free, and some nifty shots of the city on the way out.

 This part of town is considered a park. Notice there are actual gaps of sky between the buildings. Downright rural, for Tokyo.

And to be honest, it was a truly beautiful, brisk winter day to be out on the streets. I didn't even really notice all the weird stares and double-takes at the big foreigner in the long black coat, or the extremely nervous looking security guards.

I'm fairly certain the horse was asleep at this point.

Not a half bad way to usher in a new year.

Oh, one last thing before I go. At some point my buddies and I went out for a couple drinks. One or two at the most, I'm certain. Anyway, I fell asleep on the train home along with all the other people drunkenly falling asleep on the train that time of night, and was awoken by the gentle poking of the train conductor, informing me the train was at the end of the line. Well, that's what he would have been informing me if I spoke Japanese, I figured it out regardless.

I had missed my stop. Actually, I hadn't, I would have had to have been on the right train to have missed my stop.

Anyway, there was one other person vacating the train. A man in a pale tan long jacket, with a rounded english style bowler cap and a brief case. He walked quickly down the corridor. I followed him around a corner, and ended up here:

Ever have that bout-to-be-made-into-soylent-green feeling?
 

Except... there's nobody there. At all.

Now, number one, where the hell did that guy go?

Number two, I don't know if you've ever been to Tokyo but... there is nowhere this empty in the subway system in downtown. Ever.

And it was absolutely silent. No road sounds. No train sounds. No sounds.

Then the beeping began. Faint, off in the distance, a strange pattern. Then it stopped. And the absolute silence returned.

Seriously considering fleeing.

I'm not quite sure what happened after that. I have no idea where I was. But not long after, I woke up on another train that was within jogging distance (4 miles) of my apartment. I was good and sober by the time I made it back.

Anyone been here before? 

Fantasy Fest

Guess which one has a healthy, self-confident mindset about their body and which one dates drug dealers and thinks they need body altering surgery? Yeah, I don't understand either.

Fantasy Fest. Halloween as it should be celebrated, 10 days long and various shades of paint covered naked bodies. I'm pretty certain I can't post some of the best photos, but there were some great memories from that week and a half.

First off, you need ten costumes if you plan to enjoy the entire celebration. *Note: You can make it with just one, so long as your plans for the night don't involve socializing with anyone sober enough to smell you.

 Ah, red party.

It is a hot, sweaty, raucous good time, and for the people who work on the island, it's a significant portion of their annual pay. Twelve hours of work can send a bartender home with several thousand dollars for the night. Needless to say, it's a popular event to host.

Now, alot of that week is fairly blurry for me, but the parade down Duval Street, in all its macabre gaudiness, is definitely worth seeing.

Costumes range from the clever to the enticing to the essentially non-existant, and as with all nudity in Key West, odds are good you're going to get three eyefuls of something awful for every prancing naked beauty you behold. Don't even get me started about Lesbian Weekend or the 93 year old woman in bondage gear with her boyfriend on a leash using a walker. *shudder*

Bring your sense of humor or else. Seriously.

 Laziness, drunkeness, and nudity. As it should be.

*Warning: If you have serious religious disagreements with the state of morality on the island, be forewarned that the revelers will not take you nearly as seriously as you take yourself (Especially if you're standing around half naked while you do it... or in camo pants).

The street entertainment gets creepier every year.

These gents had set up shop near the cathedral on Duval, we had a good laugh on the way to grab some Mr. Z's. I will miss those greasy, wonderful cheesesteaks for the rest of my natural life. Anyway, it does make one wonder what it would be like to be born bereft of a sense of humor... or irony, for that matter.

This is also the week I discovered the joy of Bailey's Mint on the rocks after a long night of work. Wonderful stuff.

Oh, and also, waking up in the cleanest alley I've ever passed out in in my life. If you value your memory, avoid the diesel 151 drinks.

Good times.

Well, till next time. All good things should end with a kiss, don't you think?

-Grey

Key West

Key West. The Southernmost Point. Home of Duval Street, where you can get anything you want, so long as what you want is alcohol and women naked from the waist up (paint optional depending on the season). My first time there, my friend and I met an arms dealer who took us up to see if we had any interest in purchasing a sub-machine gun, or maybe something smaller and more practical. If only I'd had $600 to my name... opportunities like that don't come around every day, you know.

I learned a valuable lesson that first trip. If you scorn a woman's advances and she accidentally sleeps with her cousin as a result, you will end up having to drive the 22 hours it takes to get back home, alone.

If you do this the night after dancing and drinking at a rave for eight hours, you will get to experience a little cocktail I like to call paralyzation by muscle fatigue, the primary ingredient of which is sitting in the same position in a car for most of a day after strenuous activity, with just a hint of dehydration for flavor. If you're lucky like I always am, you'll experience it in a ghetto at 3am while you try to get gas using only the pedal foot and your driving arm, since everything else will have essentially become dead weight.

If I'd had a camera and the ability to lift an arm above my waist to use it, I would have a great still shot of a gas station attendant wondering if he should call the cops or an ambulance while some guy drags himself by one arm and one leg along the side of his car, looking like the victim of a drive-by. As sort of a last little kick in the balls, I got pulled over by what I can only assume was the most unimportant police officer in the country, who ticketed me for going 10 over on an empty freeway at 3:30 in the morning, while I was less than an hour away from making it home. I would have been angrier, but I got a really wonderful nap in while he filled out his paperwork.

Needless to say, on my next trip down to see my brother, I decided to just move in, rather than have to make the drive back again.

Getting Started

So it came to pass, about five years ago... I think...
Coulda been six. Or even seven or eight. What year is this now? Had to be close to five, I'm pretty sure.
Anyway, I had been out of college for a year and change, and it had started to become clear that I had been suckered.

Get through College, with the big C (in several senses of the term), and you'll be taken care of. Great jobs will fall into your lap, which will inevitably take you to that first big house and a selection of nice cars to drive to the airport before jetting off to whatever luxurious foreign land you decide to visit that month. Naturally, women everywhere will want you, because you're rich and successful and, damn it, you're not half bad on the eyes either.

I mean, honestly, why on God's green earth would your parents shell out six figures to get you that BA at that not particularly prestigious liberal arts college if it wasn't going to amount to something amazing? If it wasn't, they would have just given you the money and tried to help you open a business or something with it, right?

Right.

So you enter into the world of the self-reliant adult prepared for what is to come. You've been training for this performance all of your life. 22 years of eight hour days with a couple more of homework added on for fun. Activities, some fun, some not so much, eating up your free hours after school so you can develop vital career skills like piano playing and ball kicking. (When that giant round alien that can only be soothed by the dulset tones of amateur Mozart renditions before you can dropkick it back into outer space arrives, you will be PREPARED. We must, after all, plan ahead for these things).

Of course, it doesn't take long before you figure out something isn't right. After the first five humiliating, life sucking, ambition crushing, hope devouring, confidence smashing, kick in the crotch "jobs" you get to make ends meet while you wait on that next big break, that resume you dropped that is going to snag you your dreams and deliver them to you in a comfortably outfitted, not overly time consuming, but eminently lucrative career position, you might just start to get that glimmer of understanding...

It ain't comin.

Overqualified again? Not experienced enough this time? Oh, that's a great degree you got, now you just need to do a 2 year unpaid internship or get that Master's degree first and we'll hire you.

Oh, yeah, sure, no problem. I have 60-100k sitting around to live on for a couple years while I pay for some more schooling. I was just job hunting on a lark, I got so tired of living on my yacht and jetsetting around the world on odd weekends. Sign me up for the 14 hour a day unpaid gig. Sounds like a chuckle.

So what do you do? 22 years of training, 100k or more gone, not even getting in to all the costs of those after school activities and tasty tray lunches in the cafeterias. All of that, and you're working at Chili's until you can't take one more obnoxiously rude and entitled customer or one more manager that makes real that gigantic douche boss from Office Space. So you think, "Hey, why not get a crappy job outside. At least I'd be outside." Pick up some landscaping work. Why not? Bonus! I can brush up on my Spanish, at least I'll be using SOMETHING I learned in school. Great idea. Up at 4AM to cut peoples lawns. Back and forth. Back and forth. 22 years of training, and you are a human pong pixel. Oh, and that Spanish they taught you? It didn't cover the words your illegal co-workers are using to describe the pendejo gringo who's working 14-16 hour days to make just enough pay to cover rent and food for the month.

But hey, it's better than the restaurant gig. At least you can't really tell what they're saying to you, and the outdoor environment is nice, on good days.

Then winter comes and, guess what? The illegal guys are cheaper to keep on for the lean season, so you're fired. Awesome.

Ah well. This is like, job number 11, so its not like I don't know how to find another crap job, right? Yeah.

It isn't all gloom and doom though. The weekends are still good with your friends. Sure you don't have nearly as many of them anymore, and sure, it can be a chore to get people to get out together, but once they are, it's good times. If some of your pals have gotten involved in relationships and they're not hanging out anymore because theyre attached at the waist to their significant other, its all good. So what if your best buddy for as long as you can remember is rapidly turning into a self-loathing alcoholic. We all drink, he blends right in.

And hey, you've got a pretty good girl of your own. Suuure, she's hung up on her Ex and basically using you as the surrogate boyfriend, minus any bedroom activity. She's beautiful, and she shows up most of the time when you're supposed to meet. She's friendly with you. Not really intimate or caring, but friendly. Things really aren't that bad. Hey, you just have to adjust your expectations. Life is not that Disney movie you've been watching since you were a kid. You aren't a special and unique snowflake, fate is not holding out some great design for your future, you will not save the Princess and inherit the kingdom. You will work as a security guard, standing and staring at an empty road for 12 hours a night while your vertebrae slowly grind themselves to powder. Of course, bringing a book to break the total monotony of the silent, empty street is as taboo as taking a cup of coffee to keep you awake, what self respecting boss could look at himself in the mirror if he let his employees get away with crap like that?

That was my life, anyway. Perhaps not in that exact order, but more or less in a nutshell. It wasn't all that different from the lives of my friends, and their friends. It had become the modern state of man, and still is. College was not the holy grail. People did not need me in their lives. I was not going to be important to the world.

It was a tough pill to swallow. But I did, and so did my friends. Each year just trying to make things a little less awful. I know, we didn't have it rough like some. We weren't about to starve to death or die of horrible diseases in the near future. Really nobody has the right to bitch if they live in a country like America. Your worst just ain't as bad as it could be.

But there is more to life than food and good dental hygiene. Nobody grows up saying, "I will do absolutely nothing special with my life. I will be mundane and forgettable". Deep down, every last person wants to be needed. Needs to be needed. Seeks it out as if it were their lifeblood. Nobody would make a choice to be that meaningless person.

A soul is hard to break, but its easy to grind down. It just takes a little time, is all.

For me, I had enough to be content. I had enough friends to not always feel lonely. I had enough partnership to feel like I was wanted. I had enough money to feed myself and pay for my entertainment. I wasn't going to starve, most days. I could have gone on like that and I could have worn down over time till I thought I was happy. Well, perhaps not, but I can see how it might have happened.

It didn't. I know. You were worried, right?

Around the time of my third landscaping gig, a thing happened to me, that I can only hope will someday happen to you (Nice of me, right? Keep reading).

Everything in my life went to hell, and I got washed right out the door of my comfortable little nothing.

The girl finally ran off to find the Ex. She didn't say a word, just disappeared. If I hadn't read her friend's Myspace status update, I would've called the cops to file a missing persons report. I didn't hear from her again for two years.

The landscaping gig fired me. It was Autumn. No-one was surprised.

A significant amount of my money went up in smoke to prepare for an event that never took place. I'll leave it to you to guess what.

And oh yeah, I nearly died trying to keep a woman in a mini-van from murdering her three children through her unfathomable negligence. My car paid the ultimate price for those boys. But that's a story in and of itself. Needless to say, Geico was in no rush to pay out on her policy, despite police verifying that she had caused the accident. My poor dodge...

Regardless, I found myself broke, with no job, no car, no girl, and no particular way to get any of these things. As "fate" would have it, I was also at the end of my lease on the house. My roots had all been severed, and I drifted for a few months, moving back in with the parents. Yeah, you'll have that in your nightmares tonight, too.

Then one day, my half-brother called out of the blue, and we got to talking. He and I had never been close, we lived half a country away from each other, but we tried to talk at least once a month, and he was trying hard to get me to visit him in Key West. This time around, I couldn't think of a single reason not to take him up on it. Not long after I found myself on the move, and I haven't stopped since. But that, too, is another story all together.

So what's it about? Nothing special. I don't know that anyone will ever see or read any of this, but who knows, maybe someone will, and they'll see something that'll spark their interest. Something, anything, to light a fire back inside them, some kind of passion, some little bit of drive. We are explorers at heart, it is in our blood, and every day we sit and we watch and we wait for a chance to be something great, to do something worth doing, to be needed, wanted, admired. To go where no man has gone before. Whatever. If nothing else, we want to feel that we have these qualities within us, and we are exercising them from time to time. Without that feeling, that personal knowledge, something always feels like its missing.

Nothing moves until you do. The more I travel, the more I learn that that thin, miniscule line between wanting something, and taking the step off into the unknown to get it, is the most difficult thing in life. Most people won't take it. My world had to crash down around my ears before I took it, but I'm glad it happened.

Ill try and show you what I see, and if I have the time, a bit of how I see it, on this blog. If you like it, tell your friends. If you don't, tell your friends anyway, cause they might have better taste than you do.

You know, this was supposed to be four lines long when I started it. Ah well, mice and men... as they say.

Cheers!
-Grey