Today's daily double is... SUMO!

osaka. the tickets were waiting at the front desk exactly like the very patient man on the phone promised me three weeks and one ocean ago, and today we watched giants collide.

i don't know how to explain sumo to you if you haven't sat in that room. four minutes of ceremony for four seconds of violence. the squatting, the stomping, the salt thrown up into the light, the false starts and resets, and then BANG, three hundred pounds meets three hundred pounds with a crack like a screen door in a hurricane, and one of em is out of the ring and everyone applauds. the ritual IS the sport. the collision is almost incidental.

somewhere in the middle al leaned over and said "it's st. patrick's day at home." so it is. pour out a lil green beer for us, we're drinking asahi in a sumo hall and i wouldn't trade it.