nude highway driving

Just rolled in from D.C., and boy do my ribs hurt! No, but seriously folks — I love this town. I’ll be here all week … er, two months.

I can honestly after the past day that United licks American Airlines’ shiny metallic ass. Total class warfare potential on the plane. When I flew AA to Tokyo last year, we had a little monitor on every seat back, allowing us to choose between various channels (movie, prepackaged TV crap or the live map of where the plane is). On United, this option only exists for the first class. Us main cabin folk were relegated to one crappy-ass, misaligned projection screen at the front of the cabin with our entertainment chosen for us. (Please oh please show “Sinbad” again.) Couple this with the new federal regulation that you can’t whiz in the upper-classes’ bathrooms, and there could be plane riots in no time.

Fewer snacks on United, too. When they brought the beef & rice (final snack of the flight) I swear I heard people up front singing “Food, Glorious Food” from “Oliver.” The chicken and rice was decent, and so was the Chinese noodle soup, but that damn lemon cookie is about as welcome in my stomach right now as Richard Simmons at a monster truck rally.

Note:Even though I logically know I’m toast if my plane crashes from 39,000 feet up, for some reason I get way more paranoid when we hit turbulence while flying over arctic waters off the Alaskan coast than if we were over land. We had a bad spell that lasted about 15 minutes, prompting people in the cabin to start hootin’ & hollerin’ like they were at Six Flags.

I feel kinda worldly having gone from Hurricane, W.Va., to Tokyo within 48 hours. One day I’m scrapin’ possum off the highway for dinner and the next I’m at a cozy little joint near Nishi-Azabu, downing some Japanese-made pizza with prawn balls (no, I don’t know how they get their little legs apart). Barely made it through dinner — hell, I was hallucinating by the time we got to Rainbow Bridge. Traffic going into Tokyo from Narita was great until we hit the bridge, then it took us half an hour to cross the bridge. One bridge. Between the “Blade Runner” cityscape, the giant-ass neon Ferris wheel you see as you’re coming in and a complete absence of sleep on my part I had some amazing visions. During dinner I think I felt my soul leave my body. Do they ever slip blotter acid into those lemon cookies?

I melted into my bed by 10:30, set the alarm for 7, and left this world immediately … only to wake up wide-eyed at 5 a.m. Part of this is due to the trip and complete change of schedule (Tokyo is 14 hours ahead of D.C.), and part is due to the fact that, just before going to bed, I realized I forgot to take my credit card out of the ATM machine at the American hotel after getting my yen. Oh yes, Uncle Sid’s a bright one. This means I’ll be spending my morning praying that the machine sucked it back in as I try to get the bank to come open it.

Despite this really, really bad move to make at the beginning of the trip, I feel amazing as I type this at 7 a.m. I’m in a damn great mood. Why? Three words: Heated toilet seats. God, I love the Japanese.