Twenty Miles

Let me tell you how my husband and I willfully nearly killed ourselves.  “Oh boy,” you are likely musing to yourself.  “Did you guys hike Mount Fuji?!  Journey to a remote shrine?!  Ski down challenging runs in the mountains?!”

No.  None of those things.  We… walked.

In today’s edition of Dumb Shit We Do, we were trying to figure out how to get ourselves into some Tokyo trouble this weekend, as per usual.  Jan jokingly said, “I think our Pasmo (transit pass) cards are low, we could save money and just walk to Tokyo.”  Huh.  Well, a couple beers and an hour on Google Maps later, we decided we would walk from our front door in Sagamihara all the way to Shibuya in Tokyo which is about 33 kilometers (20 miles), because we really like adding trophies to our Things That Sounded Good At The Time wall.

While we usually sleep in on Saturday until at least noon like obese raccoons who like karaoke too much, we woke up at 8am.  We strapped on our walkin’ shoes and headed out on our journey, full of piss and vinegar.  I had my pedometer app going on my phone so we could track our progress.  Below you will find a Captain’s Log of events.  This is not hyperbole or exaggeration – these things actually happened.

Mile 1.5:  I am getting a sunburn from the blazing glow of my superior fitness level, because my feet don’t hurt.  Jan tries to air out his armpits and accidentally flings his tablet to the ground.  The tablet survives.

Miles 3:  The conversation flips between how cool we are for doing this, and how doing this makes us so cool.  We are prancing through the streets of Machida like a gazelle that just took a shit, except with one of those Snapchat filters that makes us look like Bambi and puts flowers in our hair.

Mile 5:  We are bobbing and weaving through random neighborhoods along the train line.  My right hip is starting to hurt but I say nothing because I am not a loser and my hip is fake news.  I would later find out that Jan’s ankle was in dire straits but he is also not a loser so said nothing.  We happened upon a Family Mart and decided we had earned ourselves an egg salad sandwich and a couple of road beers.

Mile 6:  My trust in Jan’s navigation skills are eroding as quickly as the ligaments in my ball-and-socket joint.  This mistrust is confirmed when we accidentally start wandering through a college campus.  Apparently drinking an Asahi is not acceptable on college campuses.  We are stopped by a security guard who says stuff in Japanese to which I respond, “wakarimasen” which means “I don’t understand” and also “please don’t take my beer.”  Our beers are confiscated along with our dignity.  

Mile 6.5:  We had to walk uphill.  “This is so easy, I’m not even sore!”  “Me neither!  Yee-haw!”  is how the conversation goes, as we contort our faces like Stepford wives and bury the agony into the depths of our bitter souls.

Mile 8:  I almost got hit by a truck because “GOD THESE TRUCKERS DRIVE LIKE FUCKING MANIACS HERE” and Jan responded with “Look at that stupid little kid in that stupid thing on his stupid mom’s bike.”  We are happy people, and my hip is not crumbling and Jan’s ankle is not in the throes of peril.

 

Mile 10.5:  We decide to take a break and get some food.  We stop in at a place that advertises having an English menu, which is super because then I don’t end up accidentally ordering a single soft-boiled egg and a side of scallions.  They do not have beer which is very unfortunate.  We order on a machine which spits out tickets and we sit down.  Like a dozen people who got there after us get their food, and we start to wonder if perhaps we do not understand how this works.  We stay because it feels too good to sit.  We finally discover that we accidentally ordered takeout, so we eat our meals out of Styrofoam containers at the bar like goddamn savages.  There are three dressings and I don’t know what any of them are.  Little kids are staring at us.  I use the bathroom before we leave, and the seat isn’t heated which is an unreasonably heartbreaking discovery.  My hip feels FINE!  It feels GREAT!  YAY LET’S KEEP WALKING I want to die.

Mile 12:  I’m not sure if it was some shift in the lunar cycle or something, but everyone and everything we walk and/or limp past is horrible.  I mean, we’re reasonable people so we refrain from punching faces and looting but man.  Hey lady on the blue bicycle with a right hip that doesn’t feel like it has a handful of acid-soaked rocks in it, why are you so goddamn smug.  Why are your boots so cute.  I hate you.  I would later come to find out that at this point, Jan’s ankle had committed seppuku and was dead.

Mile 13:  I point out a military helicopter above us.  Jan responds, “I hope it falls out of the sky and lands on top of me.”

Mile 14:  Nothing matters anymore and everything I thought to be true is a lie.  I can’t feel my feet and my husband is walking like a geriatric mule.  We decide to pop into a minute mart to get some ibuprofen, only to be reminded that alphabets here choose art over simplicity and we have no idea if these pills will make our pain go away or make us shit our pants.  We buy whiskey instead.

Mile 16:  I can smell the color blue and drugs don’t even exist here so that is weird.  

Mile 16.5:  Jan remembers that I am married to him so legally have to deal with him in sickness and in health, and informs me that he doesn’t even think he can make it to the nearest train station because his ankle is so dead.  I am disappointed because I am totally ready to walk 5 more miles HAHAHAHA nevermind I fell in love with him all over again because he made it okay for me to want to rip my entire leg off and cauterize the stump with a Bic lighter rather than walk any more.

Mile 18:  We are steps from the train station.  We are in a random neighborhood where tourists would never be.  We walk (I’m using that term loosely at this point) past a guy who says exactly what I think but do not say every time I see a Westerner here – “Hey, white people!  Where are you from??”  Come to find out he is an Italian tattoo artist staying with hosts in Tokyo who are from Oregon.  He was energetic and kind and when I showed him my pedometer app that showed how many miles we had walked he was very surprised and impressed.  Validation from a random stranger who spoke the Englishes made me feel as if our journey had not quite been in vain.  We bid him adieu and hobbled like pirates to the station.

Mile 18.5:  We arrive at our home station.  We consider stealing a scooter from the Pizza LA delivery fleet but instead decide to buy a pizza with hot dogs in the crust, and Jan accidentally punches me in the face while trying to tell the cashier that we’ll be waiting outside around the corner.  It was the least of my injuries, and retaliating at this point would be like setting fire to a swatted fly.  He could barely stand upright and his foot was visibly swollen through his shoes.  I am floating in and out of consciousness fantasizing about my couch.

Mile 19.1:  We arrive at home.  I pour a pint glass of wine, eat some weird shrimp mayonnaise pizza because this is my life now, and we watched Braveheart which I had never seen before.  Which was great, because there is no better way to wrap up a day of misery than watching a guy have his wife murdered and then be castrated.  Real upper, that movie.

Today:  I am eating cheese and drinking highballs because I built up a well-deserved calorie deficit yesterday, tomorrow is a federal holiday, and I intend to exploit that properly. 

Captain’s log, signing off.

Art Versus Words

I am very verbose.  I talk way too much, I use 20 words when 5 would do just fine.  In my writing, I could probably cut a few paragraphs out of every post or email.  Pretty much the only negative marks on my report cards from school were “talks too much, distracts other students, is super annoying.”  In true blabbermouth form, I just took five sentences to tell you that I talk too much.  I’ll take another to apologize.  Now it’s six.  Shit.  Sorry, closing in on a dozen now.  I really don’t know when to quit.

Anyways, I’ve been thinking a lot about my dearly departed Grandma Ruthie lately.  In true blabbermouth form, let me tell you a bit about her.  She was married to my Grandpa Bob for over 60 years.  They raised 7 children together.  She earned Masters degrees while raising those 7 children.  She owned a bookstore.  She was a school librarian.  They traveled the world together, amassing a stunning collection of antiques and unique art and she didn’t give one hot shit if her 20 grandchildren flew threw her house full of priceless treasures like drunk howler monkeys.  She was a woman of passion, and a woman of few words, and when it came to art – she didn’t know when to quit.

When she and my Grandpa passed last year, I acquired a few things that were special to me from their expansive collection.  I was telling my coworker about her art and what I had gotten, and he said, “Wow, how much are you going to sell them for?”  I was a bit taken aback.  It hadn’t really occurred to me that they had monetary value.

I’ve never really been materialistic except for that one time when I was 20 and I spent an entire paycheck on a Coach wallet (I still use that wallet every single day more than ten years later, for the record), but now I live in a huge consumer culture.  Most every train station is also a mall twice as big as the mall I grew up going to.  There are shopping centers multiple stories high everywhere you turn.  Their electronic stores are like 10 Best Buys and 8 Targets and a couple Dollar Trees had a torrid polyamorous orgy that resulted in a giant litter full of everything from pencils to puzzles to $8000 televisions to blenders to robots to anime figurines. 

Initially eschewing that madness, this weekend we decided to check out a self-described hipster neighborhood of Tokyo called Shimokitazawa.  It felt a bit like our home of Portland – tons of espresso bars and vintage shops, low-key but quietly bustling at the same time.  We saw so many quirky things that my Grandma would have loved.  I couldn’t quite justify the price so I passed them all by, but I couldn’t help but mentally place them somewhere in what was the ever-shrinking artistic canvas of their home.  We walked past tons of awesome, bright street artwork and graffiti.  It was so cool and weird.  It was so Grandma.

From Shimokitazawa, we decided to hoof it a few miles to Shinjuku, which made up for all of the quaintness and slow-pace of our original destination by… well, being Shinjuku.  A major economic powerhouse also including some well-known red-light areas, it is exactly where I would take anyone who comes to visit us who wants to “see Tokyo”.  It reminds me, on a more aggressive scale, of my Grandma’s house.  So full of so much crazy weird stuff that you can’t focus on anything in particular.  It all just becomes a mass of stimulation.  And, much like my Grandma’s house, you can run through it like a drunk howler monkey.  It’s quite fun and I highly recommend it. 

After meeting up with friends for some drinks and then heading back home, I went through the few hundred pictures I took.  I noticed a strange dichotomy between Shimokitzawa and Shinjuku – the former was quieter, subtler, definitely more low-key.  The latter was in-your-face, unapologetic, and pretty much futuristic in its overall vibe.  What could possibly tie these two together, other than both happening to be in Tokyo?

For most people, probably nothing.  Their differences are stark.  But to me, I thought about how my Grandma had filled her house.  There were neon signs and antique dolls and naked ladies with crocheted pubic hair and beautiful glass ornaments hanging from the rafters and cast-iron motorcycles and pretty much anything else you could imagine.  Some pieces were glitzy and immediately caught your eye – the giant “DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS” neon sign above the dining room table being a clear winner – and some were tucked away in the corners, and you wouldn’t know they were even there unless you were a drunk howler monkey who had careened through the house for your entire life like someone I know (hint: it’s me).

I mentioned before that I am a blabbermouth, which if you have made it this far you begrudgingly know.  I also mentioned my Grandma was a woman of few words.  She was the matriarch of a family of 7 men and 2 women, herself included.  These men, bless their souls, are my dad, uncles, and grandfather and they love to hear themselves talk about as much as I do (it’s genetic, I blame all of them for the length of this and any future posts).  Politics, history, a game of Risk – countless nights their house was filled not only with crazy amounts of cool art and bottomless Oregon wine but a storm of conversation, sometimes heated.  Grandma wouldn’t often chime in, but when she did – goddamn, she shut up all of those uppity sons of hers (sorry, uncles).  She chose her words wisely.  For how much she filled her walls with any and every damn thing, when she made herself heard with her voice – she was not as verbose as her art collection might suggest… but just as powerful.

I remember one time, a few cousins and myself were playing hide and seek.  I’m especially close with a couple cousins, and we had kind of teamed up to win.  Grandma stopped us while we were flying through the kitchen and said, sternly, “You are not mean girls.  Don’t act like mean girls.  Be fair.”  I will never forget that because it put a chill up my spine that still hits me sometimes on those nights that I can’t fall asleep and like to torture myself with everything I’ve ever done wrong from spending too much on that stupid wallet to getting on that motorcycle that one time.

Grandma Ruthie was loud, but not with her voice.  She was quiet, but not with her art.  All things said, she was HEARD.  In one way or another, she was heard. 

I wish so much that I could share this journey with her, but I hope that wherever she is in the universe her energy gets pinged by my energy and she gets a little jolt of what she instilled in me all those years ago.  I hope she also knows that her insane, human-sized cat-bat hybrid statue with a feathered tutu got shipped to Japan and continues to terrify my cat to this very day.  And it doesn’t even have to say a word.

Dichotomy is a beautiful thing.