I am back dating a bunch of content that were really emails to Sarah while on my trip to Japan. This is the first. Before anyone goes to Japan I highly recommend reading Dave Barry Does Japan. It was the only tour book that you could need. Actually the one with all the pictures of the insides of buildings was pretty cool too.

EMAIL TO SARAH:

Sarah,

I had a customer service experience trying to get the Internet working in my room. The DSL modem was free but you needed to ask for it. So a nice Japanese girl came upstairs to bring it while my dad was in the bathroom. He came out in his underwear which she didn't seem to freak out for and then my dad went looking for his shorts.

She then finished installing the modem (she was wearing a neat and proper hotel uniform) and then let me know that when the light stopped blinking that it was working but if there was a problem to call 4. So the light never stops blinking on the modem and after I futz with my computer for 15 minutes I called back down to the service desk to ask for some help. A minute later the girl returns with a new modem. She obviously didn't speak much english and she had a new modem and someone technical on a cell phone to talk to. She turned it on and off and stared at the modem after having talked to her cell phone connection person. She stared at it for about 5 minutes waiting for the light to stop blinking and I could see sweat slowly forming on her brow. She then called back her technical person and switched the modem to another second modem that she had brought. On hooking-up the second modem within 15 seconds the light stopped blinking and I had my internet connection. She apologized profusely (4-5 times) as she was leaving. I imagined that she would likely have to be killed by the internet connection department and the chief of the internet connection department would be taking his own life in a few hours.

As you can tell... I have arrived in Tokyo.

I hope all is well.

Tasukete! (Help!)
Michi ni mayomashita (I'm lost)

Dewa Mata. (See you later)

- Dan

Life is good here in Sedona. It is just awesome to look at the big red rock formations here. I am just an hour from Flagstaff.... I got onto a chrome horse which was a silly little picture but I have lots of images of red rocks and playing golf with the big red rocks in the background. In summer it is pretty cheap to stay in sedona... Our hotel is awesome and was 100 bucks a night for the group. We overlook a rock formation that looks like snoopy lying down.
Getting psyched for the canyon trip!!!!!

Too soppy sappy not enough riggidy rappity. It's not so bad with a rat-tat-tat or a pa-bloinga bloinga blue. I and Gabriel will be competing tomorrow night for fussiest hiker along with the crew. The key to any successful sporting event is DAY-GLO FEMALE BEER VENDORS WITH KEGS ON THEIR BACKS AND TAPS IN THEIR HANDS.

They come in at least 5 flavors including every major highlighter color each matched with a Japanese beer. Some of which have important signs on them like (unreadable japanese character), 100%. What the fuck is 100%... the only thing a beer can have 100% of it beer and that's why I'm drinking it stupid!

The Giants game was awe inspiring. Plenty of cheering and lots of hand puppets shaped like a Nomuri Giant. A nomuri giant is an orange cartoon character much like Hello Kitty or Astro Boy or the green and blue mascots for the Winter Olympics in Kyoto that wander about on Subway maps. We all need to have our kitchen gods and in Boston ours is called Wally who for all intents and purposes escaped a few years ago from the Kyoto winter olympics just to provide solace to a team that was turning a green wall into a place to drink beer and watch a sporting event.
Go figure, eh. We got a little tired after wandering so much. Our trip across the country the last few days would look like a game of pick-up sticks and a poorly played game at that.
It is good to hear that you staved off the bullet wound of wine. It should teach you to never play White Russian Roulette with a loaded glass or a drunken friend.

The sound on the Kinkanshen, the bullet train, faster than superman, supported with a green platypus mascot inspired by the funny swan like, beak like neck... The sound on that train when it pulls into the station is the music from the movie Lost in Translation. It is absolutely true.
Nothing like a bento box full of fish, pickled items, and a sweet plum to make standing room only feel like living in a Palace.

Tokey. Tokey. An American player who would have an afro like a 70's microphone bats 3rd for the Giants. They call his secret tune with passion previously reseverved for calling the name of the emporer while dive bombing an American air craft carrier in the mid-atlantic in 1943. BONZAI. Tokey swings and the ball flies to the outfield deep. It's a home run. At home plate he is greeted with the customary home run bouquet of flowers by one of the six orange mascots, one of the two female ones. The crowd goes wild in the bleachers waving their orange bandanas and singing the home run cheer and the cheer for Tokey. Tokey.

Don't forget Kyoto where the pigeons eat little japanese girls for breakfast in the courtyard outside and the others queue up to worship in their standard uniforms of a white hat and a blue jumpsuit. One wild one scampers in and out of a wall in the museum just big enough for a seven year old as her little brother who has not yet mastered the run let alone the walk tries to follow behind her.

It's the Tokyo-dome, the big egg, an indoor stadium where the temperature control mechanisms don't work. Achiusu, Achuisu, pulling at your shirt on your chest to show how hot it is and your sweat. The young female fans spraying themselves with deodorant as they sweat and bounce and play with their orange puppets. One girl wants to practice her english on me. She lets me know that she took and english conversation class six years ago. Her english is better than my Japanese. When she sees me in the crowd on the way out she lets us know she is glad the Giants won because she was praying for it and she was glad we could see it. I give her my card and she studies it in typical Japanese business form and thanks me then disappears into the crowd.
I myself feel a pang of regret at having rooted for the Giants over the swallows. After all - what adult male would want the Swallows to lose anything. Swallows are a part of our heritage, they maintain the high groud. They provide great pleasure. They give great head.

Don't try to buy clothing in Japan if you are a normal sized western male. They stock the shelves with small and extra-small clothing designed for the daintiest male elves on the planet. Trying to fit into them is like trying to put a golden toe sock over your head.

There is fantastic bread here. Someone decided to copy the French for their boulangeries like they copied the VCR and the modern engine. It is fresh out of the oven, pastry fine, like the croissants on St. Maarten on the french side of the island at 9 AM. They are hot and some are filled with chocolate. I had to get a second one just to make sure I made the most of the find. The waitresses at the boulangerie are dressed like young french maids crossed with Hello Kittty dolls all perfectly matched in their uniforms. You can't touch the food. Instead you can take your own thongs with you and move the pastries onto your tray. They will wrap them carefully even if you decide to eat them in the store.

Don't try to find a garbage can anywhere in public in Japan. They don't exist. You need to go into a restaurant like Wendy's or McDonalds or a french boulangerie or a sushi shop where you have a baffling self serve green tea hot water dispense in front of you as the sushi rotates past at $1.20 per pair of nigiri. If you survive the sushi then you have a stomach of steel but it tastes fine as it goes down.

Life here is so interesting. I think I missed most of what we were supposed to see in Kyoto. Plenty of kimonos but none of them opened. I should have taken some thongs to a japanese girl masquerading as a french pastry girl. Ohhh la la mon cherie.

I will see you soon. ... CENSORED BLACK MARKER... maybe that can never happen because it could open some deep paradox like some of the things that happened in Back to the Future like having the betting tables for future sporting events or breaking-up your parents such that you could never have been born in the first place. The universe has a way of holding it all together no matter what worm hole we sneak our protuberances into.

Catch you in a flash. Keep it real and neat.

Too smootchie or kootchie for you. Maybe a little too much hootchie. I couldn't exactly say no to a beer girl in DAY GLOW!

Astro boy. Over and out.

Last night we went out with the boys and tried to have a dangerous time in Kyoto. It wasn't so risquee given that all we did was drink. About 300,000 of the two million people in Kyoto were wearing their best Kimonos last night because of the festival. Pretty awesome sight actually. We ended up going out to a bar and then to the "C-Club" which we never figured out quite what it was because all that happened is that we sat at a table and local women sat next to us and chatted with us. But we don't speak Japanese and they didn't speak english. One of them taught me to count to ten which I promptly forgot.

Today is the festival so I need to run and watch it and then ride the bullet back to Tokyo to catch the baseball game.

The new Tom Robbins book is awesome. It is entirely topical to my life. It starts with an allegory of some Japanese mythical creatures and includes a guy in Bangkok who buys a guitar and plays Leonard Cohen music reminiscent of Robert's experience in Bangkok. Dickey also meets an Elvis impersonator who sings Blue Christmas - reminiscent of Robert and my Elvistmas adventure. It hit more relevant passages that relate to exploits that have happened in my life in the past year but I can't recall them at the moment. I'm in a parralell universe to Tom Robbins or the guy is following me around. There is a great passage about how Dickie decides to drop out of dream school - which basically is about how it sucks to be in school when you are dreaming because you always forgot to study for a test, need more requirements to graduate, etc. Dickie in one dream finally drops out of that school in his dreams so he can live a more free life.

I got caught without Internet access with the night at the Ryokan. It was the top Ryokan in Makone which we are connected to through my father's contact who is married to a woman whose father is on the board of directors of the Riokan and also is involved in both oil shipping and pharmaceuticals. He apparently is the second largest tax payer in all of Japan. So the Ryokan was rather interesting. It included many of the Dave Barry things. We had our own personal maid who followed us around everywhere. We also had some misadventures in Tokyo involving meeting people at "The Starbucks" at Shiboya given that there were at least three of them. Today we watched Sumo wrestling in Nagoya and are now in Kyoto. We travelled twice on bullet trains to get here. At the Sumo tournament I made the mistake of stepping into our "box seats" with my shoes on. The box seats were basically a box where there were 4 mats on the floor each the size of one human butt. Luckily there were no other butts in the box since my father and I barely fit into the 4 person box. The Japanese people seemed to have no problem sitting in an orderly fashion on their matts. We did entertain a large number of them as the usher went unsuccessfully to pull my shoe off from outside the box. My father also got some lessons that he didn't really want from our maid on how to use chopsticks.

I'll have lots to tell and show you with so many pictures.

I hope you get some sleep but it sounds like you are going to be partying very hard for the next few days. I'm sad to be missing the big party in Gloucester but we can have the party in Marshfield pretty soon!

Some folks just love to eat chipmunks. Good to hear that Bunny finally caught one. I told you about the time that Ray caught a squirrel and wanted to show it around in the park in Newton Center to the little children from the Mason Rice school. And that the squirrel was not really dead but just knocked out so he would let it go and it would run a bit and then he would pick it up again. I love traumatizing children.

So you have been lax about your training routine. Good to relax. I prefer relax. In Boston relax not enough time.

Today I had some business meeting stuff. Last night I went out to dinner with my father and the many folks from this bio-tech conference to the hotel where they filmed Lost in Translation. The bar was the same as the one in the restaurant but they never quite gave you the impression of where the restaurant was. I had some tasty steak tartare but everyone warned me that I could get BSE (Mad Cow) as a joke. We didn't have enough time on the way out to film me at the bar saying things like "To the left and with intensity" but what can you do.

Today I was marvelling that Japan is what I would imagine an alien race would look like. Some Japanese people actually look like aliens and their writing style is completely incomprehensible. It is fun to pretend that I am a lone explorer interacting with aliens and representing our business interests from home. It is good to know what it would feel like to live in a world full of aliens. They aren't that different although they do insist on dressing any girl under the age of 17 in a Britney Spears catholic schoolgirl outfit. Among the fun things at the buniness meeting today were the many people who clearly couldn't understand much English who decided that when I was speaking it would be a good time to take in some REM sleep. I guess I can't blame them. I would nap if some alien came into my office and was blathering for an hour and a half about PRM software.

I did manage to go back to the fish auctions and this time we actually saw the tuna auction. We also had some great Sushi for breakfast at 6:30 AM. We tuned in to a little of the All Star Game on Japanese TV. It was pretty funny because regardless of what was happening in the game they would show what the Japanese players were doing. So it would be like - Ortiz has hit a home run while the images would be of (Ichiro drinking gatorade looking bored, Matsui squinting to look at the homerun from the dugout). Next they would say... something like "Let's look at all of Hideki Matsui's homeruns in the past year!" and would then proceed to show him batting 17 times hitting home runs. I also spent a long time at the pool today. I went twice. It is about 5,000 degrees Celsius here. Or at least whatever scale measures the temperature should measure it in Celcius.

Kilimnik is in Disney World so I am not sure who will greet me in California when I arrive. Maybe I will bum a place to stay from Joe Adler if he is in town. I could bug Yuval and Molly too but that derned baby is using my room! Jeremy is going to this audition this weekend... cross yo' fingers and toes.

Good thing I am hooked-up. We woke-up at 4:30 AM this morning and went to the fish market. I have attached a couple of choice photos of the fish market. There was one place after the fish market where there were about 400 people lined up to purchase tickets of some sorts and other people were photographing them. I tried to ask someone in my japanese if they could let me know what they were doing. Here was the extent of the conversation.

ME: Sumi Masen - (Excuse me), Eigo ga wakali mas-ka? (Do you understand english)
Japanese business person: Uggh... (Incomprehensible japanese speech)
(Turns to Japanese business person #2) (Speaking to each other in incomprehensible japanese speech)
(Turns to me)
"Lotte."
ME: Domo Areygateau sil vous plait!
Japanese business person: Uggh

Well ... I tried. I think it was the lottery because there was a picture of a cat, like the one from japanese restaurants. Anyways... gotta go. The pool is quite nice and it is hot out.