Sunday, August 14, 2016

Hell Is a Mosburger

At the bus stop, after saying goodbye to Tai-chan

Yes, Misery is a place. I've done this trip drunk, but that never helped—I lost too many laptops.

One saving grace is the Wifi at Kansai airport—ever since I can remember, going back to even 2005 or so, they always had free, fast and easy-to-log-on Wifi—bearing in mind that back then, 864K Jpegs were actually quite large.

But here I am, in Miseryville.

It would be better except for this persistent abdominal pain—very worrying. It's unnatural. I just can't figure it out, but it's not going away. Right below the sternum, mostly, but sometimes radiating out to the right, right where the upper lobe of the liver would be—or the pancreas, I'm guessing. Oh, and the esophagus. Oh, and the stomach. Fuck!

Well, can't say as how I'm maltreating it, except for the CRAP I AM FORCED TO CONSUME.

In Japan, there is NO SUCH THING as healthy food—unless you're heavily into Japanese food, and that's expensive. If you're forced to eat on the run all the time, in restaurants or from convenience stores, you are royally FUCKED. There is no such thing as whole wheat here, no such thing as a plain croissant. Everything is soaked, spiked, painted, dusted, glazed, SLABBED with sugar. I mean, how can you actually INSERT A CUBE OF BUTTER INTO A PASTRY so it explodes bizarrely into your mouth? Yet they have done that very thing; I am a living witness.

It's just sick—so I'm sick. I'm sick of trying to decipher their katakana—the phonetic way they convert foreign words, so "croissant" becomes "ku-a-sa-n." And it becomes "su-ii-to" (sweet). Then there is the ubiquitous "ku-ri-i-mu ku-a-sa-n" (cream croissant) and hundreds of variations. Whole wheat, unsugared is not one of them.

So fuck knows what this is doing to my biome—if it is indeed my biome.

Last night I was dragged, unhappily to a quite upscale "sushi boat" restaurant, except the fare is not $1 a piece, it's $4 a piece. You are charged by the colour and pattern of the plates you get your food on, and then they count the plates.

I had two maguro sushis and one stick of ebi tempura (shrimp tempura) but the bill for all five of us—three children and two adults—came to around $105. Tai-chan did most of the devouring. I counted 12 plates in front of him . . .

Regrettably, not anticipating this  authentic Nipponese feast, I didn't bring my camera gear, so it is left to your imagination . . . middle-aged men wearing white chefs' hats slicing, patting, assembling dozens of glistening sea creatures, some alive just seconds before, and putting them atop clumps of sticky white flecks of bright white endosperm-wrapped rice, middle-aged women in asceptic white frocks orchestrating the mayhem in a cacophony of fishy, raucous Japaneseness.

It's quite insane.



So as I sit here glumly at a fast food counter at Kansai Intl., my flight a yawning four hours away, some James Taylor Swift songs shrieking on the loudspeakers around me,  I beg you to whisper a sliver of happiness to my quavering, wavering trillions, as they anxiously await the next ugly surprise that is going to plummet down amongst them.


I have to move now—I've been practically squatting here for two hours, charging my Devices. they're going to kick me out pretty soon.

See youse in Vancouver.

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