On Packing Up On Moving On The Trip Up North
I wake from a dreamless sleep in a dark cold. It feels as if there is nothing around me, not even the ground on which I lie, though I take this for granted as I am not falling. Trembling, I push myself up and attempt to feel my way through the chill nothingness, though where [...]
Death in San Francisco
“East is East, and West is San Francisco.” — O.Henry The brilliant curmudgeon Norman Mailer called Chicago “a great American city” yet allowed that she is a lady. H.L. Mencken noted [...]
The Trip Overland Hacked via the Timthumb Vulnerability
On the road there is little time for anything other than catching glimpses out of the corner of your eye along the speeding road of the blurred trees and the slower moving mountains at the far-off horizon line. There isn’t an opportunity to jack in, hook up, dose out online. When you are working out [...]
Books To Sail To
From my Sealog: Over the next three days I drank as much of the steward’s horrible coffee—a diuretic—as I could possibly choke down. This, coupled with ransacking the library for what hard-boiled detective novels as well as any and all spy thrillers I could find, served to allay my hand from the ship’s well-stocked stores [...]
Beer from around the World
Beer is water, barley, hops and yeast. More or less this is the recipe for the most popular alcoholic drink-and third overall-the world has ever known. There are many variations on this recipe, which, much like the variations in people, give rise to the differing characteristics that make the world such a diverse and awe-inspiring [...]
In Beard We Trust
“There are two kinds of people in this world that go around beardless—boys and women—and I am neither one.” -Greek aphorism The idea to grow a beard is not such an arduous task-when you first have to shave at thirteen, can buy beer (and condoms to pass it off) with a week’s growth at sixteen, [...]
Movies to Travel to
Before I left Japan in April I downloaded maps and travel documentaries to help me along in The Trip overland to California. It was a busy time and with lot of other practical preparation to do, I had little mind to sit down and think out exactly what I should be searching for. It is [...]
Burning Myself in Effigy
…fire began to burn higher and the whisky took strong effect, the flames curling the images on my photographs into imperceptible blurs…
Beautiful Strangers
One of the best things about being unemployed (or as I like to refer to it: funemployed) and hitchhiking in Japan is meeting people. I found that since I moved to Tokyo I had lost the part of me which woke up everyday amazed that I was living in a foreign country, and the first [...]
Soba at Honke Owariya
Watching Spartacus on the late night movie got me thinking about what it would actually take to do as the Romans, and how it would probably be rather uncouth here in Kyoto. Which begs the question: what do they, the Kyoto-ans, actually do, that makes this relatively small ex-capital of Japan so special? Kyoto, whose [...]
The Trip™
You remember hearing the epic travel tales of The Odyssey, 1001 Nights, & On The Road, don’t you? Imagine undertaking all those voyages in 2010, without ever setting foot in an airplane and you have some idea of what Manny is undertaking.
But you live on an island…in Asia?!