Yokohama Yuri

And here I am again, though it seems the headaches subsided sometime before dinner. Tooled around for a couple of hours on the departure ticket with no real leads or bites. I think the wig trumped up watchmen a bit much, didn't think it was that good, prolly wont give it another viewing for a couple of years. Mr. Baseball is on TV, watching that a reminding myself I have to get the next season of Magnum PI on DVD. Four and a half hours until sunup, trying to figure out if I can fatigue my mind by then. Also trying to figure out who to root for in the NFL playoffs, guess I am gonna have to go with the Saints, at least New Orleans has good food. Another day without hitting fifty degrees on the mercury, and here I am, becoming a night owl again, somehow trying to determine the cause. I will give it this, though, it is blissfully quiet. I do miss the days of nonverbal communication with somepeople. Its kinda fun when you can interpret a gesture or a glance appropriately. That is the one true thing about humans, they can never really hide anything. They can decieve themselves that it is something else, but even that takes preparation. I have never hid my loathing for loud people, and I do love my silence, but the cold just seems to accentuate the loneliness. The bizarre thing is I am even more constantly surrounded by people, but their attitudes and actions have either distanced them from me, or caused myself to create some distance from them. In some cases, both have occurred. It is as if people have been getting closer, and I have begun using a scale with smaller measurements. A world full of familiarity has become twisted and strange to me. Though I cannot tell whether it is me going mad, or the world.

Grime exists everywhere in this world. The constant shedding of the human skin creates a neverending supply of particules to contribute to this phenomenon. Couple this with the seeming omnipresence of water and the continuing cycle of life and death, and the sad truth becomes painstakingly clear: everyrthing is dirty, it just depends on  the degree. Some people try to maintain an environment as spotless as can be, in an everlasting fight against the entropic tendancy of nature. Others just make do with cleaning enough so they can  function and not be made ill by their environs. Some, however, completely surrender to the inevitable march of filth and become awash in it. This bar seemed to be owned and frequented by those of the latter classification.

In Japan, one tended to view all establishments by a stereotypical model that was found every three blocks in Tokyo; clean, open to technology, and polite. Here, in Okinama, it seems that the personnel from the nearby military installations had brought a bit of the Ol' Wild West in with them, and some of the locals had embraced it, distancing themselves from the Tokyo urbanites. At one point, a swarm of flies has mounted an all-out offensive to take the bar as a resupply zone and forward operating center to take the entire island. However, as it happened with the charge of the light brigade, they had met with the heavy artillery of reality. Most of the victims lay strewn about the ground, black specks of futility, wallowing in the stench of failure, fermaldehyde laced beers, and marlboros. Some of them had been inundated with enough poison throughout their lifespans that they actually made it to the bar, where the encountered an even denser cloud of smoke and deeper pools of alcohol. The only things that could survive here were humans and fear. The venue was so ill-lit that it would seem suitable for a spelunking convention.

Yuri opened the door, instead of the accustomed stench of grain vodka, the muted corn mash of bourbon whiskey sifted through the door. Ten years in the Russian army, Chechnya and Georgia (South Ossetia, you say) in particular, had made him a monster, killing anything that unsettled his verve, emptying his soul so the torments had nothing to tug upon, and deafening his ears so the screams fell short. Fifteen more in the FSB (though he still preferred the ring of KGB) had made him part of the devil's legion, knowing who to bribe, who to kill, and who to ignore in milliseconds. This bar was one of a million like it that Yuri had seen in his lifetime, and he knew exactly what could be found here, waylaid arms of the US government. Most people would think to find prostitutes, drug dealers, and Yakuza in a place like this, but those were the pawns, knights, and castles of vice, and this was a den of death. It reminded him of an ex-legionnaire's bar in Marseille, but he doubted the couscous was as good here, and he'd be damned if he was gonna eat anything raw off of that bar. The steel-grey eyes scanned the room, a reflection of the Siberian winter, spreading the spirit of the tundra and the gulag throughout the space like a virus in a host. Then the hawk found its prey in a side booth, just on the fringe of the light, flirting with the tenebrous shadows of melancholy. A thin, lanky figure, who seemed to belong more to an early twentieth century opium den than a twenty first century dive bar. Clean shaven, with a face so drawn and morose, it took ten seconds to figure out of he was dead or not, and sunken eyes that warned you not to trust them. In this world, those were the people you needed, people who knew trust was a lost commodity, so the had the speak in truths so stark, the reality cut your skin.

Dunno where i'm gonna go with this one

Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus

Dave

I was at : 4244 NW 76 Terrace, Gainesville, FL 32606,