on the airplane...

As I type this into my computer I am on the plane to Tokyo. The past five weeks I have been touring the continental United States. I saw many people that I love. I met strangers and saw old friends. I visited Bellingham, Clifton (Colorado, near Grand Junction), Berkeley, Palo Alto, Vancouver, New York, East Hampton, Ukiah, but not in that order. Oh yes, and Eugene. How could I forget? I even stopped in Grants Pass for a taco.

Now I am embarking on something that feels more than a little random. To teach English in Japan was never my imagined future, well until recently it was not. But it was never my idealized imagined future. I fell into it for various reasons. And this is in spite of the long application process—I really do feel that I simply fell into this. So let it be a fruitful act of providence.

And here I go, the classic way as well: 500 miles per hour 37,000 feet in the air above Alaska (I guess…).

Anyhow. I could write a lot about the U.S. and its various vagaries. NYC would have felt even more bizarre than Las Vegas if it were not for the power of its hype. I seemed to be constantly aware that I was in NYC because of its fame and cultural dominance. It was a dominating place. I do not see how it cannot take a hefty chunk out of one’s individual freedom of/production of reality because it seems to impose so much of its own. I sometimes felt weaker, dumber, less interesting while in the city, and yet I fit in fine and did not feel badly judged by anyone there. But then again this is the way I envision all major cities except Prague where I did not feel dominated; I felt like a proper outsider/observer/wanderer. Perhaps if I was alone in NYC I could feel that way, but something tells me that it is one of the hardest cities in the world for that kind of existence (and maybe that is some sort of compliment to the city). I am primarily a country boy (but that does not mean I won’t be enticed to live in the city someday—especially Vancouver (which is a whole other kind of city anyway)).

And then comes Japan, the destination of my JFK-Narita 14+ hour voyage.