Greetings From God Knows When

You know you're gone when you know where you are but you don't know when you are. This is what happens every time I trek to the far east. It seems like I go to sleep on the east coast of the good old US of A, and wake up a while later somewhere far far away. Or maybe it's like I never quite went to sleep in the first place, and thus never really woke up.

This is what happened to me today_ or maybe it was yesterday. Or damn, for all I know it happened tomorrow. I can never really keep track of these things and I find it harder and harder to keep track of what time frame I am currently existing in. But I always know I've arrived when I walk down any random street and I notice people trying their best not to stare. They're never very good at hiding their burning curiosity, and I can almost always tell when I'm being watched, even when I'm actually not. But you do it enough times and you get used to it. Maybe you even start to like it, or at the very least learn to get a kick out of it. But it doesn't seem to matter how many times you make a trip like this, you can never seem to establish what day you arrive. And hell, with a fourteen hour time difference, who, other than a person of great discipline (which I am most certainly not) would be able to keep up with something as minor as the current date?

But that's just it. In the grand scheme of things, all things in Japan seem to eventually balance themselves out, including me. As jet lagged as I am right now, I sit here in my tiny single-room dorm in Ota, Japan, trying to muster up all the lucidity I have left to create the first of what will be a large collection of posts, informing anybody who's cool enough to listen about all of my incredible adventures through the land of the rising sun. For the next four months, this tiny little box, in its tiny little corner of its not-so-tiny city of Tokyo will be my home. And i've made two discoveries: 1) Having just come back from Seoul this summer, I'm beginning to think that I have more in common with this part of the world than my own, and 2) Asia's dope! So gimme your time and I'll give you stories worth a million yen.

And after all the traveling, and all the heavy suitcases filled with things I may find that I don't need as much as I thought, and all of the confusing strangers giving me wrong directions that inadvertently take me to all the right places, it's just me: little old me, in Japan again; half in and half forever out saying KONICHIWA! and enjoy the blog