All right, let�s get this over with.

I'm not trying to sound as though the second leg of the US trip was a chore. On the contrary, it was more fun than I've had in quite some time. But typing it up is a bit of work. Especially with all the other things that seem to take up far too much attention and energy. But I promised to put it here, and promises oughta be kept, even if it was only made to myself.

Especially if it was only made to myself.

Anyhow, Albuquerque is a good place to be, especially after a place like Tokyo. Most big cities can be criticized for ignoring human scale. Which is a reasonable complaint in a place where a million people have been crammed, usually vertically, into a space that would comfortably hold maybe a fourth of that number. If you want to keep Wall Street, Victoria Road or Ginza humming at full capacity, you have to load a maximum number of people into a building footprint. That means either going up or down, and not too many people can justify paying Wall Street, Victoria Road or Ginza rents for an office sunk down in the bowels of the earth. So people have to work in buildings that dwarf any sense of human interaction.

Take Roppongi Hills, for example. This stunning bit of futuristic architecture looks like Delta City from Robocop. But as cool as it must have looked on the architects' plans or as one of those foam-core models that usually winds up in a plastic box in the back corner of some office lobby, it completely exceeds any human sense of scale once you're within a half mile of it. It fills your field of vision vertically and spreads across four city blocks. And once you're actually in front of it, the place is surrounded by escalators, elevated walkways, parking access ramps and monolithic slabs of concrete stamped with the development's name. There are few obvious entrances, and the people surrounding the buildings seem to be move as if they were almost unaware of them. As if the disparities in size made the people unable to interact with the structures. They are out of human scale. And if you step back a bit, most of Tokyo is similarly out of scale. And spending too much time in places like that makes me feel not like a cosmopolitan city-dweller, but like I've been caught in a very large Habitrail� set.

But that's not the point I was originally intending to make. Tokyo is big, and the buildings are big, and I can't see enough of the horizon to feel comfortable. Albuquerque is nothing like that. Placed near the southern end of the Rocky Mountain Range, Albuquerque sits across a section of the Rio Grande valley, and has a central elevation of around 5,000 feet above sea level. But that doesn't mention that the town occupies two sides of a valley, and that the city limits on the west side of that valley are around 5,800 feet and in the Northeast fall at around 6,500 feet. That's a fairly steep slope, and it makes for some expansive views. You can see for miles. Literally from within the city you can look north, west or south and see peaks over 35 miles away. Your field of vision can cover 900 square miles. The land feels wide, spread out beneath an enormous dome of sky. And that's why I'm usually happy to go back there.

The previous paragraph was paid for in part by the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce and the Albuquerque Tourist Board. �Albuquerque: we're more than just a wrong turn!"

So I was happy to spend the post-Xmas-to-New-Year's-Hangover-day period there. My friends were fine, my family was feisty and, in general, aspects of all acquaintances could be alliterated alluringly.

Not really, but we had a very good time before preparing for our journey west.

January 2-3: Been through the desert on a horse with no name.
But we couldn't get out of the rain. The worst winter storms in a couple of years drenched the southwest the entire time we were there. Otherwise arid areas were covered by thunderstorms in the south and blankets of snow in the north. The otherwise beautiful drive from New Mexico to LA was continually cloudy and interrupted with frequent, lashing rainstorms. Dramatic, but they did limit the view a bit.

Wait, I thought Detroit was the motor city...
There are a ton of things that suck about Tokyo's mass transit system. Riding it at certain times sucks in profoundly life-altering ways. But it is a mass transit system that moves huge masses of people quickly, cheaply and fairly. LA just can't compare. So you have to drive everywhere all the time. Which meant I did a lot less drinking than I otherwise might have.

But it was strange having to actively raise my language filters again. In Japan I really can't just read things; it takes an active effort to decode what the (few) symbols (that I can understand) mean. So I have to leave my input filters open more, if that makes any sense. I understand far less of my surrounding information field, so I need to take in more data. But for me, in the US there's no effort required to understand the meaning of stuff I could see. That shit just leaked all over the place. So I found myself having to actively ignore signs, advertisements, radio DJs and television promos. That was a little tiresome.

But otherwise, it was good to be back. I needed to see some familiar and deeply missed places. The food restored my faith in good. and the people were, well, the same jackasses that I remembered so fondly.

Then it was back to Japan.
There. Will that cover it?

Feh. Next time: more pissing, moaning and run-on sentences that go all around a topic, using all sorts of unusual, or generally unnecessary, clauses deemed appropriate at the time to explain a point which most people probably would have understood if given half a chance to just get to the point of the original idea that was supposed to have been ever-so-apro