I’m back from Michigan — got in late last night, and was very pleased to find the internet was still working. Yes I know it sounds stupid, but most of August went by in a blur due to me having no net access, and coming back from a different time zone and a 24+ hour transit I was really in need of some kind of temporal anchor to keep my mind from floating away completely.

Fortunately coming to Japan from the US doesn’t result in jet lag as much as it gives you a time boost. So thanks to my confused circadian rhythms I woke up at 5:30 am, bright and early, ready to work. (Keep in mind that unlike Michigan, where the sun rises around 7 am this time of year, in Japan it’s already as bright as mid-day by 5:30.) I was able to finish up some work that had been lagging begind — two event posters and some translations — by 9 am and suddenly found myself with a bit of time to write a blog post. This is only my second post this month and my traffic is starting to take a serious dive due to my silence — which is pretty close to suicide for an artist who lives primarily on web-based sales.

Because of the move, I’ve really been lagging behind of life drawing recently. So I was determined to do some sketching in Michigan. One interesting thing about Japan is that beverages often carry little presents on them, like the prizes in the bottom of the cereal box in the US; recently I picked up a great pocket-sized sketchbook from a 6-pack of beer (actually I bought it for the sketchbook more than for the beer — I don’t like that brand). It was the perfect size to carry with me, and it felt great to be outdoors in that wonderfully cool, fresh lake breeze sketching in the afternoons. We had a sailboat and a pontoon boat, and the water was warm for swimming. The air was cool and the sun was warm, and it had been so long since I’ve been in the wide open US that I forgot how great it can be to just have a wide open space to play around in.

Since it was sort of a family reunion, relaxation and socializing got in the way of sketching (not complaining here), but I was still able to get a few pages done. The sketchbook has a soft cover so it was quite difficult to do any sketches on the boat — or rather, I did some sketches on the boat, but they turned out a little wonky. Here are a few pages of quick 5-10 minute sketches:

My wife writing a goodbye email at Itami Airport

The pain! It should be illegal for airlines to do this on such long flights!

Oh yes, I have to stop here and complain for just a moment. A couple years ago I mentioned how a Japan-US flight on Northwest was the most uncomfortable flight of my life. While that still holds true and I have forsworn ever flying Northwest again, this time around United pulled the same trick!! It wasn’t as bad as Northwest only because the flight (from Narita to Chicago) was shorter than the Northwest flight (from Kansai to Detroit). I wish I could make this clear to the airline; it is practically cruel and unusual punishment to have a trans-Pacific flight (really, any flight over 4 hours) without TV screens. Narita to Chicago was an 11 hour flight, and the only “entertainment” was for me to crane my neck up and to the left at such a sharp angle that I probably would have snapped something if I tried watching the barely-visible projection screen. And the movie selections were awful, but at least if I had a personal TV screen I could have flipped channels instead of having only 1 option.

And the real crime — as awful as that in-flight “entertainment” was — was that, like on Northwest, the seats have been shortened to the point where a human can longer fit. I’m not talking about some morbidly obese person trying to squeeze into the narrow airline seat — that has been discussed at length elsewhere — I’m talking about legroom. Now I’m no giant. I’m a fairly average 6 feet tall, non-lanky guy. I can put up with the painfully narrow seats and aisles that you have to sideways-shuffle through (all the while having to rub your butt and crotch against the faces of the poor fools who chose the aisle seats), but there should be a certain number of inches mandated for legroom. This time and on the previously mentioned Northwest flight, my legs actually did not fit in the space provided! That is to say, my knees were jammed up and my feet were hovering for the entire flight, giving me terrible leg cramps and bruises on my knees. If the lack of TV screens was cruel and unusual punishment, then this was downright torture. They suggest you rotate your feet and try to avoid, you know, deadly blood clots in your legs, but they mockingly don’t even give you the space to do that, so the whole flight I was paranoid I would suddenly drop dead from some embolism.

There needs to be space for a human being to be able to stand fully upright in between the seats. It doesn’t need to be much, just enough to stand up. In this seats, the edge of the seat in front of me was actually past being even with the edge of my seat; the head of the passenger in front of me was closer to me than my own feet.

I get that fuel is really expensive and airlines are struggling, but there has to be a limit to this downsizing. I’m at the point where I’ve come to despise air travel, and I almost never want to fly again in my life. My legs are still quite sore today. Anyway, if you’re reading this, I would strongly advise you to avoid both United and Northwest on anything but the shortest flights.

The view of our backyard, the dock, the lake, and the pontoon boat

The view of the house from the pontoon

The pontoon was great fun, but it had a maximum occupancy of 10 while there were 14 of us. As Coldwater Lake is really shallow and we were running so low in the water we ended up bottoming out on more than one occasion. Even more exciting, twice we experienced the pontoon effect — a sort of spontaneous sinking, although we luckily didn’t completely capsize. The first time it took us by surprise as all of a sudden the front of the boat dipped straight down into the lake without warning and a huge wall of water washed over the front of the boat. The second time it happened I felt like we were angling further and further forward, but I ended up not saying anything (truth be told I kind of wanted to see it happen again), and sure enough after a few more seconds we dipped, a lot deeper this time, and nearly drove straight down to the bottom before my uncle put it in full reverse and pulled us out. Great fun!

My wife on the boat; This is one of the really wonky sketches, as we were boating around Coldwater Lake as I sketched it

My dad reading on the boat

Is there room for one more complaint about flying here? Because on our return flight, we went down to the gate for our flight and noticed that about 75% of the chairs had been roped off and were being sold to customers. I don’t remember the price, but considering they offer to give you an extra 2 inches of legroom (still too short in my opinion) for about $100, it must have been at least $60 — just for the “luxury” of sitting in a chair! Since they ask you to come to the airport 2 hours in advance I can’t help but think that charging you to use a chair should count as some kind of extortion.

A guy using his laptop in O'Hare

A pilot on his lunch break

Those last two sketches were done in the airport — and for anyone who likes drawing and wants opportunities to draw people, I can’t recommend the airport enough. It’s the perfect place for sketching people. There are thousands of people around, and you’re almost guaranteed that they will be around for at least an hour while they wait for their flight. And as there’s not much to do, most of them will be reading, or sleeping, or otherwise sitting still, giving you a solid 10-15 minutes to do a sketch without any interruptions.

Just be careful about being too obvious — the very big fellow on the laptop ended up spotting me and giving me a glare that he wasn’t too happy at being drawn; and later on while I was doing the sideways-shuffle in the plane’s aisle (trying not to brush my crotch or my butt against the faces of the fools who actually chose aisle seats) I stopped in line for the bathroom right in front of his seat! I had to stare at the ceiling and pray for no turbulence lest I ended up giving him a big faceful of groin and signing my own death warrant right there.