Disinfotainment

In a few short days, I will depart on a trip to Japan. It’s been a long time since I traveled overseas, but now one of my good friends is getting married in Tokyo, so this seems like a good enough excuse to travel.

Preparing for a trip is always troublesome. Some people like to travel light, I like to travel heavy, packing for every possible contingency. I always feel like I will forget something, and no doubt I will. There’s an old rule of thumb for travelers, “take half the clothes you’ll need, and twice as much money.” This works well in every place I’ve traveled except Japan. The premise is that you can always buy clothes in an emergency. But in Japan, it is impossible for me to buy clothing my size. Everything is too small. For example, every lodging in Japan provides a yukata (bathrobe) that is supposed to come down to your ankles, but they barely cover my knees. There’s an old Japanese idiom ashi ga deru (your feet stick out) that means something that’s more trouble than it’s worth. So a too-short yukata is an embarassment, everyone wags their finger at your feet sticking out. I went to some trouble to purchase an extra long yukata at a shop in San Francisco that carries sizes more suitable for tall Americans, but it is still at least 6 inches too short.

So due to my 6’2″ stature, I could never possibly buy clothes in Japan, I have to bring everything I might possibly want to wear under any circumstance. And it can be hard to predict those circumstances, since I have absolutely no plan whatsoever. The last time I was in Japan, my best item of clothing was a Versace T-shirt. I was surprised to discover that it was widely pirated in Japan, I saw quite a few people wearing shirts with the exact same design, except they all said “Vivace.” It was especially hilarious seeing the looks on the faces of people wearing the fake shirt when they saw my real one.

Shoes are especially troublesome, I usually carry a separate bag just for shoes, since they never fit in my suitcase. And my shoes are huge, size 13EEE. Fortunately, I can pack a lot of spare odds and ends in my shoe bag, since shoes are hollow.

And of course I have to bring my favorite gadgets. I’m going to bring my old beat up laptop, which is in absolutely terrible condition and locks up intermittently. I wouldn’t bring it at all, but I need somewhere to dump the pictures from my digital camera. I guess I’ll bring my CD player, I wish I had an iPod. There’s a lot of wasted time spent on the subways so some nice music is always vital.

But the most essential ingredient for travel is a good book to read. Last time I went to Japan, I brought “Roughing It” by Mark Twain. I decided that humor would be the best remedy for frustrating, tiresome travel delays, and this book was absolutely perfect. But the strangest thing happened as I read the book, each and every disaster that befell Twain in his travels seemed to happen to me in a similar way. I recall reading the part where Twain gets stuck for weeks in Nevada, just as I was stuck in the DFW airport for 3 days waiting for a standby seat.

This time I decided to pick up Twain’s “Innocents Abroad.” It’s one of his famous travelogues, I haven’t read it before so I have no idea what to expect. But surely this book will set the tone for my travels, just as the previous book did. I tend to get into a literary mode when I travel, I scribble in notebooks constantly, recording my impressions, and there’s no better inspiration than Twain’s travel episodes. And when traveling, you need to keep your sense of humor at the forefront, or you’ll go crazy.

I hope to be able to write a few blog entries during my trip, but it’s unlikely I’ll have adequate internet access. So if I don’t write anything in the next 2 weeks or so, I’ll surely be bursting with stories and photos when I get back.

Lately everyone is writing up their embarassing Courtney Love stories, and there sure seems to be an awful lot of them. Courtney is undergoing a full meltdown, which doesn’t surprise me one bit, since I personally witnessed the beginning of it all. And therein hangs a tale.

Back in 1987 at the height of my Los Angeles clubgoing days, a friend of mine, who I will merely call “J” so as to spare him embarassment, called me up with an invitation. He said we should get together tonight and go to dinner with Zander Schloss from The Circle Jerks, a good time would be had by all. Since I had a new car, I was driving (that’s usually how these invitations worked). So J and I set off for Lucy’s El Adobe to meet Zander. Lucy’s is a strange little place, it’s right across from Paramount Studios, and furnished with the typical trappings of any cheap Mexican restaurant, except that the walls are covered with photographs of Gov. Jerry Brown and Linda Ronstadt. Every time I saw the photos, I always thought of a remark by Phillip K. Dick, he said he wanted his epitaph to read “he discovered Linda Ronstadt, and signed her up.” I’m sure I’m the only person who ever thought this particular thought at Lucy’s.

J and I arrived at Lucy’s and met Zander, who had a woman in tow, a chubby bottle-blonde wearing a dumpy thrift-store dress, he introduced her as Courtney Love. The four of us were seated in a booth and I sat right across from Courtney. At the time, I had no idea who Courtney was (and neither did anyone else), but she was determined to let us know exactly how important she was. She blabbed endlessly about all the trivialities of the club scene, who was seen where and with who, which bored me to no end, since I’d been at all those clubs too, and gossip about club stars had no interest for me. Courtney delivered her nonstop commentary while shoveling massive quantities of chips and salsa into her mouth in a most unattractive manner. Just as I thought my level of annoyance could not rise any higher, Courtney announced she had “arrived” as a club star, she appeared in “La Dee Da,” the LA Weekly club scene column. I had heard this sort of claim to “fame” from other club star wannabees, so I decided to deliver a retort, “oh, did they mention you by name, or did they just mention the club you were at?” My remark was met with an icy stare, and Courtney just sat there and silently glared at me.

The focus of conversation shifted due to the sudden silence, which was a relief to everyone. Now Zander started expressing his upset at the release of Stanley Kubrick’s new movie “Full Metal Jacket.” Zander explained that he had auditioned for a major role in the movie but was rejected, and now that the movie was released, he was convinced that his performance would have been far better than the actor who got the part. He decided to prove his assertion by loudly performing his audition monologue straight from the FMJ script. This brought nervous glances from other frightened restaurant patrons, who heard an obviously crazy man yelling about killing gooks, and wondered if they should flee. I had no such doubts, I was determined to flee at the first possible opportunity.

After the meal wound down and several more beers were consumed, Xander and Courtney now admitted they were short of cash and the bill was higher than they planned, so could we cover their tab? J said he’d cover them, which meant that he had to borrow cash from me, since I was the only person in this foursome that had a real job. I knew J wouldn’t pay me back, but I figured that forking over a few bucks was the shortest path to the exit.

As we left Lucy’s, we stood outside in the damp, cool LA evening air, but Zander and Courtney weren’t quite ready to let us go. Courtney’s demeanor towards me changed and she turned on the charm, which repulsed me even more than anything she had done so far. She said that she was going out with Zander to score some heroin, but she didn’t have any cash left, so I should come along with her and if I bought, we could do some heroin together and party all night long. Even unto today, I have never heard such an unappealing proposition, and I have no inclination whatsoever to do needle drugs, so I pondered how to decline politely, or even whether politeness was desirable under the circumstances. I just said “no thanks, I don’t do that shit.” Zander and Courtney decided they had no further use for us, so they slinked off into the night, and J and I went back to my car. Once inside, J turned to me and asked, “what was that all about?”

Today I went to my local pharmacy, it took me a minute before I could park because a UPS truck was making a wide turn through the parking lot. And to my astonishment, he backed into a handicapped-only parking spot. I walked past the UPS driver as he exited his truck, and said, “Do you realize you’re parked in a handicapped parking spot?” His response was “OK” and he walked into the store carrying his package. I shot back, “what do you mean, ‘OK,’ you mean it’s OK for you to park here?” He ignored me and continued into the store to make his delivery.

Mr. UPS Driver, you are a professional and are well aware you are not permitted to park in that spot. I use this pharmacy often, and I know the FedEx and USPO drivers don’t park in the handicapped spot. These parking spots are for disabled people coming to the store for their medicine, they are not for the convenience of agile deliverymen. I suppose I wouldn’t be so outraged except this UPS guy illegally parked in front of a pharmacy a few blocks from the largest hospital in the state, surely this is one of the most vital handicapped parking spots in the city.

So I decided to take a little trip out to the UPS depot and register a complaint with their manager. I asked him if it was UPS policy to condone illegal parking in this manner. He said it was not, and if anyone got a ticket, they pay for it themselves, UPS wouldn’t pay it. I never heard of a deliveryman ever getting a ticket, and if I called the local cops on an illegally parked UPS truck, they couldn’t get there before it left. And I told the manager, that is what is so infuriating. These drivers think that since they’ll only be in the spot for a couple of minutes, they can get away with it. It never occurs to them that during those few minutes, someone might arrive who is legally entitled to that spot, and can’t use it. The manager told me he’d look up the route and find out who the offending driver was, and tell him not to do this anymore, and issue a reminder at the next morning’s drivers’ meeting. And the drivers will walk away from the meeting laughing at the manager’s directive.

Sometimes I get so outraged at people’s stupidity over handicapped access. I remember one incident at my local bank, coincidentally it is right next to this pharmacy. I was outside smoking a cigarette on a blazing hot summer day after doing my business inside the bank, watching some employees of an auto dealership parking a new car on the sidewalk for a promotion. They parked the car right in the middle of the wheelchair ramp, it was so convenient to drive the car up the ramp, it was a few feet from the bank’s main entrance where everyone would walk past it. Just as they stopped to admire their work and were about to leave, an old man exited the bank pushing his wife in a wheelchair, now they were trapped and could not exit down the ramp they had just used a few minutes ago. They were stuck in the hot summer sun as they begged the auto dealer to move the car so they could leave the bank. The auto dealer had difficulty repositioning the car, after a few minutes the elderly couple had to retreat back inside the bank due to the heat. Eventually the car was relocated so it was only partially blocking the ramp, and the couple edged their wheelchair around the car and down the ramp. I wonder what would have happened if the auto dealer had left before the handicapped woman, she might have been stuck there until they could come back to move the car.