Squatters' Rights

Years ago I used to joke with some friends about winning the lottery and escaping to a remote tropical island. Wheels up, we would say.

Yes, wheels up, jetting off to a place free of the constraints of home, to a place distant and deserted save for a few mosquitoes and a smattering of flesh eating humans. Hmm. Kinda like deep dark suburbia in August, just without the white picket fences and indoor plumbing. Frankly, I can give up the fences any time. No matter how many coats of paint you pile on, no matter how high you build them, they can't really keep the bad guys out. They are as useless as your average moat, which, as my daughter pointed out during our visit to a medieval castle in Japan, could hardly have been much of a deterrent to enemy armies on horseback. After all, horses can swim. Which, I suppose, is why the castle contractors installed holes in the castle walls as Plan B, so that the doomed residents could toss rocks and boiling water on the intruders. Intruders clad in armor from head to toe. Whatever those folks paid for that place, my guess is they paid too much.

The indoor plumbing though, that's a tough thing to give up. The closest I've come lately to peeing in an outhouse was squatting over a porcelain version of a chamber pot in a Japanese public restroom. Other than being the only real exercise I had for ten days, there was nothing good about it. Unless you remove your pants and underwear, you run the risk of peeing on them instead of in the pot, unless your quads are strong enough to get you to a solid right angle. And Japanese style bathrooms go hand in hand with Japanese style customs, which include taking your own shoes off at the door and being left to don public slippers as you enter the public restroom, slippers that have not only been on thousands of feet but have also been in direct striking range of zillions of pee drops. I suppose it beats peeing on your own shoes, but there's something to be said about knowing it's your very own pee.

Let's do the math. Except for the infuriating absence of wifi and the occasional primitive bathroom, Japan is a civilized country, filled with modern conveniences. Though by no means deserted, it is remote, certainly distant enough to offer the kind of protection from malevolent intruders that no picket fence or moat ever could. But, like any remote tropical island, it has more than its share of mosquitoes (I have the welts to prove it) and I would guess it has its share of flesh eating humans who thrive on the misfortune of their neighbors. Anonymity might help in the short run, but stay there long enough and you're bound to make it to someones dessert menu.

As enticing as the remote island seems, and as tempted as I was to stay in Japan indefinitely and escape the realities of my own life, there is a big part of me that always needs to come home. And so, when the wheels of Flight 450 went up, I was strapped in and bracing myself for the inevitable wheels down in my own neck of the woods. Where not everybody has my best interests at heart, but some people do. The ones who are important.

At the end of the day, the familiar creature comforts of home are bound to trump the discomforts of any place far away. So, I suppose I'll just keep my wheels steady and firmly planted on a bathroom floor free of pee splatter, and if anyone tries to bother me as I give my aching quads a rest and sit on a civilized porcelain oval, I'll just turn the other cheek.