Running Away From Pittsburgh

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Due to Pittsburgh’s inability to contain any sort of fun, enjoyment or people that are fun or enjoying, I needed to leave for a short break. I also needed to escape my crushing workload. I also needed to fucking get out of this city for just a weekend for the better good of society.

My index finger reflexively twitched whenever I saw yet another white, backwards trucker hat donning male. But alas, I am not holding a 9 milli Glock with the safety shaved off and the parts illegally machined after-market to make it fully automatic. Instead, I usually find a horrendously useless cellphone or a laptop in my hand that does nothing when I pull my index finger except having said white person smirk because they know I hide in my bedroom whacking off to computer parts at night and “Hey Brody! Here’s the proof, he’s fingering his electronics!”

So in this scenario, I just swallow and smile and the fucking tension and anger accumulate every ten seconds as I run into yet another douche. There are douches everywhere, and I get fucking angry as fuck everywhere, but the problem is that Pittsburgh has no release.

Unlike every other Computer Scientist I know, I hate video games so I can’t vicariously live through a digital soldier indiscriminately mowing down Nazis while screaming “pwned!” into a call-center headset or stealing cars and screaming “Nigga, whatttt?!” in the safety of my suburban, sound-proof room. Obviously, the other forms of release are not even available…I do get insanely drunk, but due to my workload, instead of the usual 3-4 days a week I’m accustomed to, it’s been once a month. And though sex would be easy to have, I don’t want to choke on third base from a Cambells can sized clit that these walrus-sized Pitt bitches probably have.

In all seriousness though, the reason for going to Montreal was unfinished business. Throughout the entire Chiaki episode of Japan Part Tre, there was a large side story being played out with Miss KO. Or, perhaps Miss KO was the main story with Chiaki taking the role of side story. In either case, I'll tell that side of my summer sometime later. Well why didn’t I tell it while it was happening?

Because I am fucking American. My stories need to be linear, with a beginning, middle and end. Check any one of my stories and they follow the exact same formula. Guy meets girl and guy convinces himself he’s in love. Guy goes after girl and enjoys moderate success. Girl ultimately rejects guy and guy falls into deep depression until the next girl comes along. And then throw in untold amounts of unnecessary cursing, off-color jokes and from time to time employ some literary device, but make sure the audience catches it by keeping the camera focused in on it for a solid 2 minutes. And just like Hollywood, there is no real sex—just a bunch of random singles and doubles to keep the audience entertained—and every story has one loose end in case a crappy sequel needs to be pumped out.

As such, I can only tell one story at a time and only in my prescribed manner. I don’t have the subtly to weave multiple tales into one. And most importantly, I don’t have the literary prowess to deal with something that doesn’t fit my standard formula. When I tried telling the “guy meets girl” portion of Miss KO, she didn’t fit any of the molds and the entry that came out sounded nothing like a Gen K----- blog entry and I was fucking confused and scared. So I focused my writing on a bad sequel in Japan, whilst in my real life, Miss KO was flitting around.

And thus, I found myself in a situation in Pittsburgh where I needed to meet her again, to confirm that the spark we had in May, that amazing week of raw emotion, that week of love...whether it was true or not.

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The only moment I had any semblance of free time was the weekend of October 29-November 1. And that meant I had two projects due that weekend. In order to free up my schedule, I had to do a three-day binge fest of studying and work.

By “studying and work” I don’t mean a 3:2:1 ratio of Bookface, Youtube and actual work. I mean work in the sense of typing until you have carpal tunnel in your wrists and blisters on your finger pads. I mean work in the sense that your contacts have fused to your corneas and you can’t even see correctly because the bags underneath your eyes have covered your range of sight. This is graduate school studying. Oh and by three days of studying, I don’t mean an-all nighter, then sleep during the day, then repeat twice more. I mean over 72 hours parked in the same spot in the library studying. Jews in World War II think they got it bad but at least they got to shower in Auschwitz.

At 4am on Thursday (the 29th), after three no bullshit straight days of studying, I hurriedly packed my bags in the library and trotted the 2 miles to my house. Did I want to trot? Obviously not, I was fucking shaking from sleep deprivation and caffeine but my flight left in three hours and a trot was the fastest form of running my tired body could produce.

I finally reached home and then steadying my right hand with my left, got the key into the keyhole and entered my house. I quickly stripped and for five amazing minutes I showered…

…then I skidded out, dried, threw a stack from my “clean” pile into my suitcase, hopped on it to close it, threw on some clothes, dashed out the door, managed to catch the 4:30am airport shuttle, forced myself to stand up in the empty bus to keep myself from passing out, raced through the ticket gate, x-rayed my luggage and made my flight with 20 minutes to spare.

I sat down, buckled my seat belt, made sure my tray was upright, and though my body was screaming to pass out, I groaned and pulled out my textbook and laptop to finish my assignment…

“Excuse me sir, no electronics until we’ve taken off.”

At that second, I had a splitting headache and my brain wasn’t functioning correctly and I could barely see, and I was ready to scream at this bitch but I wanted to get this plane up in the air, so I gritted my teeth, incremented my “anger in Pittsburgh meter” and put my laptop away.

“Thank you sir.”

I spent the next agonizing twenty minutes of “in case of an emergency…”, the short drive to the strip and then the lift off constantly pinching my arm to keep myself awake but I could barely feel the pain so I started squeezing my balls, leading the woman next to me to scoot herself halfway off her aisle seat in abject fear.

I tried reassuring her by explaining the situation but I could barely understand my high-pitched squeak so I stopped and just stared out the window constantly squeezing my balls until the little seat belt light pinged off and I grabbed my laptop and started working…

An hour later I was shaken awake, “Sir, we’re landing now, please put your electronics away.”

Splitting headache, and in my reflection in the window, I could make out a keyboard imprint across my forehead…and I had gotten no work done, so I groaned and threw my laptop in my bag, spent the next 20 minutes waiting for the fucking Air Force reject pilot to find the gate at Philadelphia’s shitty airport, park and then wait for 40 fucking people in front of me to grab their luggage from the overhead compartments and slowly shuffle down the aisle and get fed a big, shit-eating grin by the actress reject stewardesses (“Thank you for flying American!”) before I could finally race to my connecting flight, and make it with another 20 minutes to spare and repeat the whole fucking process, to find myself in the white-washed shithole that is Burlington, Vermont.

Why Burlington fucking Vermont? Because I have no money and a direct flight to Montreal is $500, while a flight to Burlington (100 miles from Montreal), is under $200 for the sole reason that Burlington is in America, so I flew from Pittsburgh International to Philadelphia International to Burlington International to find a local bus to Burlington’s two-bit greyhound station to wait an hour and a half to take a 3 hour bus ride to Montreal, all while attempting to finish up my assignments by squeezing my balls but falling asleep on my keyboard, so when I ended up in Montreal’s shitty fucking bus terminal in the midst of a snowstorm that was instantly marked grey by the belching clouds of diesel from the outdated buses, I was fucking ready to shout out my dying wishes in my newly acquired tenor voice then slam my head through my LCD screen but all was forgotten when Miss KO greeted me at the station and hugged me.

My body literally sank into hers in exhaustion and after a beat, she whispered.

“Tadaima.” (Welcome back)

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Photos

Miss KO and Me
The First/Last Recorded Meeting...back in May