So yeah, crazy as it is I'm actually going to post again. When we were in Sapporo we headed off to the Sapporo Beer Factory, the name of which in Japanese is close enough to the word for Paradise as to lend itself to very convenient punning. It was pretty dang awesome and included a five-minute or so hologram-based fairy-tale story about an evil wizard who steals the king's delicious new batch of Sapporo beer and replaces it with his own foul brew; he also kidnaps the fairy of tasty beer and locks her inside a glass jar in his castle of bitter beer. Have no fear, however, as good eventually triumphs and hearty refreshing Sapporo is restored as the fairy escapes and returns everything to normal. It made me ashamed to be human, but at the same time it was the coolest thing I have ever seen. The tour eventually culminated with a free twenty-minute all-you-can-booze session, which beer-loving Owen and I found to be highly excellent. Sadly, the beer factory was not connected to an insane asylum and no crazy hijinks involving heavily adapted elements of Hamlet ensued from our quest for free beer.
Lately I haven't been up to much but school. Plans for Korea are all in place - as it turns out, going to Korea is actually cheaper than going to, say, Tokyo, Osaka, or just about anywhere else in Japan. I know shamefully little about Korean history and culture, so I'm sort of looking forward to being introduced to it in this fashion. I'll be pretty busy, though - go to Korea from the thirtieth until the sixth, move into my host family's place on the sixth in the afternoon after having ridden a ferry all night, then go to America from the thirteenth until the twenty-fourth. I don't think I've spent more than two weeks in the same place since January, but that fits my image as a hard-bitten traveler with a heart full of pain and a tormented soul just begging to be set free.
Read this awful book the other day, or at least the first fifty pages or so. I kept telling myself that it was going to get better, and instead it continued being inane and pointless, so I dropped it as quickly as I would a ton of bricks on which a mischievous scalliwag had written the entire works of John Steinbeck in human blood. It was written by this author who apparently thought it would be an awesome idea to write innumerable stories only a couple pages long each, only unlike other authors who have done the same thing interestingly like Ambrose Bierce or to a lesser degree Kawabata Yasunari, he decided to distinguish himself by making his stories completely bland, pointless and worthless in every concievable way. After about fifty pages of the book, the thought alone of picking it up to finish the remaining two hundred or so had me desperate for a handy blunt object with which could destroy space and time. Now I'm sort of at a loss as to what to read, but I could always start any of the twelve massive Akutagawa books I got. Hmm. Freedom terrifies me; why won't the government just tell me what to read? Or better yet, Oprah?
- Gyaa! I'm give up
Naka-ku, Hiroshima
730-0803
JAPAN
