entry nº 22a // 20180804

fuck me did i not already start writing this one? 

got a JAPAN RAIL PASS back in january and went up to kyoto to meet up with pro photographer and friend HEATHER MCGRATH. she made me sign a brief contract swearing i would write her name in all caps if i mentioned her at all in any writing about the trip? i dunno, something about her personal brand or whatever. anyway, HEATHER was an ideal travel buddy, and holy shit kyoto was just off the wall. just so many breathtaking things to see, all right next to each other. 

here’re some of the things that happened, more or less maybe in order i think but also possibly not?:

•first of all, shinkansen. oh my god. i was like, giddy with excitement the first time i actually saw one of these pull into the station. it just simply looks like a spaceship, which means that you basically get to ride on a real life spaceship. it was awesome. of course the schedules are super-precise, and the train ride itself was totally smooth. i ordered a small hot black coffee from the refreshment cart woman during one of the legs of my trip. it wasn’t particularly tasty. there’s something about kind-of-shitty train coffee no matter where you are, i guess? it’s just good. you drink it and you sit on the train and you stare out the window and it’s good. what else is good on the train? writing in your journal. listening to good music on your headphones and staring out the window forever. drinking that train coffee. 

once, a couple years ago when i was on the amtrak back in the states, i went to the cafe car to buy a whiskey from the guy working there. [it was an evening train, okay?, before you get all judgey]. we bantered a bit and the guy was nice and whatever and when he went to pull out the nip from the box under the counter, he saw that there were only two left. he was like “only two left, here, want the second one, too?” in a kind of wink-ey, hey-buddy-i’ll-cut-you-a-deal way. me, always knowing a bargain when i see one, and extremely well-versed in the wheelings and dealings of human males, of course jumped on it. the guy served me up my plastic ice cup and two jack daniel’s nips on a tray, and then just simply rang me up for both whiskeys? which was like, $20 because it’s the goddamn amtrak. i sucked it up, paid for the things, and then went back to my seat and, although a bit poorer for it, put my headphones back on and served up my whiskeys on the rocks. 

•you think to yourself, “big far-away trip on the train to a different part of the country, yikes, what’s it going to be like?” from a train-window perspective, i have to say, it looked pretty much the same. houses? yep. villages, towns, or cities? yes. fields, mountains, ocean from to time? all the same stuff, out there. i guess when it comes down to it, it’s not that huge of a country. 

to be continued