Oh.My.God.

Worst commute EVAR.

So I get up on the early side today, rather pleased that I'm in line to make the early train which is ever so slightly less crowded and affords me the room necessary to read my book in peace (currently reading Battle Royale (with cheese) in Japanese btw - 2x the gore of the movie!!). I get to the station with a good 2 minutes to spare and gaze up to the time ticker and see... nothing! Absolutely not a damn thing.

All the times were blanked out, and in their place was a message at the bottom - some jerkoff decided his life sucked, and he needed to end it while making millions of people's lives a little bit worse in the process, so he jumped in front of a train. I know it's sad that a suicide can be reduced in the minds of so many as a nuisance and delay to their daily lives, but when you don't know the guy and it doesn't happen right in front of you, that's reality. After the shit I went through this morning, I feel like going down to the morgue to stab dude in the face with a fork... I'd kill him if he wasn't already dead, and if you read on you'll know exactly why.

So anyway, I get up to the platform and it looks like what I imagine it'd be like if Lenny DiCaprio and Justin Timberlake base-jumped into an all girls high school campus. Wall-to-wall people as far as the eye can see. No express trains, just normal trains and delays as far as I could imagine. A guy actually came up to me and said he was taking pictures to send people back home. We got on the train and had a nice little chat... er, as nice as chats can be in such circumstances.

This was, for the record, THE busiest train I have ever been on, EVER. I'm talking like this was worse than the time that I pushed all the way up to the front of the moshpit at a Foo Fighters performance at the end of the HFStival a couple years ago... nothing but a sea of people everywhere you look breathing all your air and leaving you with naught but the fiery anger swelling in your bellows to keep you going. There were so many people that the guys on the platform who are normally there to help push people onto the train and make sure luggage doesn't get stuck in the doors were actually telling people to wait for the next train. Inside the train, not only was movement not possible, but there were actually people pushed to the point that they were sitting on the people sitting on the benches with another person hunched over their backs. It was the first time I've ever heard a Japanese person yell out in the train for someone to get off because it was too much to take and the person next to him was about to pass out from the pressure!

This went on for 2 frickin' hours... over twice as long as I'm normally on the train. I would've seriously considered just going back home if I didn't know that it'd take just as long and be just as painful to get back. It's really no wonder that at the end of the day on the way home I noticed that on the exact same line there was yet another jumper that afternoon - probably depressed from the shitty day he had thanks to people like the morning guy. I hear that this is the heavy season for suicides in this country whose citizens kill themselves more than just about all other civilized countries. And that is why I want to impale a corpse's skull with an icepick right now.

But hey, I'll get over it. On the bright side of things, I got my camera fixed under warranty the other day, so I'll be able to take some pictures again soon! Gotta get on that... I hear there's lots of Christmas lights displays that I'd just love to check out before coming home in a couple weeks. Ok, off to bed to do it all over again tomorrow.