Wooohooo! 100!!

left: Mike and Patti's little man, Kaden. He really has nothing to do with this post. I'm exploiting his image here to draw people into the blog. I'm fishing for readers. When people hit that "Next Blog" button on the navigation bar at the top of a blog, if they see this cute slobbery face staring back at them, they're bound to stop and investigate. Actually, no, now that I think about it, he has a good reason to be included here: he has his own email account now! He's a member of cyberspace! And he can't even control his own shits yet!! He typed me a one-paragraph-long email yesterday. He's the smartest baby I know, for sure. Congrats Kaden!

That's right folks, I've done it!

This is my 100th post on Savedscribbles, a true cause for celebration. I've managed to do what only 1,343,951,843 other people have managed to do, and let me tell you something: it feels damn good.

The excitement that a 100th post generates inside one's gut is unparalleled. It feels like I reached the summit of Everest without the aid of oxygen, like I completed an unsupported paddle board trip around all of Hawaii's main islands, like I created the first human clone under the cover of secrecy and raised it until it could speak and thank me for creating it.

This day will go down in the history books one day. Yes, mark my words. One day, when society drastically lowers its standards for what constitutes as "history," June 1st, 2007 will be regarded as The Day Savedscribbles Turned Magnificent.

People all over the world will celebrate by scribbling on their faces with permanent markers, and they will recite my previous posts aloud during every waking moment of their lives until the marker wears off of their faces. There will be fasting from sunrise to sunset. Flogging on bare backsides. Donations of money and first-born children. Huge, ornate buildings of solid gold and marble will be constructed and shaped like pens and notebooks. Evil Headscribblers will guide the vulnerable masses of Smallscribblers in the proper ways to scribble and make monetary donations to Headscribblers. Medical virginity examinations will be administered for any woman who, on her wedding night, claims to have never scribbled with a man before.

OK, enough nonsense. Onto the meat...or tofu, rather, of this post.

Every Wednesday, I drive 20 kms to my visit school, Tateshina High School. The school sits up in the mountains outside of Ueda and is surrounded by rice fields and old, traditional Japanese houses. Apple orchards blanket the hillsides and most people I see along the road in the morning wear muddied boots and garden gloves. As I start the drive, I pass a strip of car dealerships on the main road that cuts through Ueda. This past Wednesday (and every other day I have ever driven to Tateshina in the morning), at each dealership, this is what I saw:

Car salesmen, with shirts so white and starched they looked like blocks of soap, bending down to pluck weeds peeking up through cracks in the sidewalk outside their dealerships, dealership receptionists picking up trash that had blown up against the curb of the street, salesmen sweeping the sidewalk in short, jabbing, firm strokes. All wore new cloud-white gloves.

This past Wed., I’m not joking, I saw two car salesmen waist-deep in one of the water drainage ditches that runs alongside their dealership. They were using long metal tongs to pick up some sort of green sludge from the bottom of the ditch and putting it in plastic bags. Why? I don't know. To send off to the lab for testing? To eat as a seaweed substitute? One can't be sure.

I’m fascinated by this.

I wonder,

Is this some throwback to times when religion more strongly influenced Japanese people?

Has Buddhist belief in order and simplicity inspired the cleanliness that the dealerships maintain?

Can car salesmen be devout Buddhists?

I don’t know, but either way, I always get a laugh out of seeing this every Wednesday because I imagine what American car salesmen would say if their bosses ever tried to get them to shed their suit jackets to go pick up bubblegum and pull weeds from the sidewalk. I imagine a big ol' "FUCK NO!" would be their unanimous response.

I'd like to think the cleaning that the car salesmen (and I do mean men, I've never seen a woman behind a salesperson's desk in any of the dealerships) is a type of repentance. These people sell new cars to customers who could very easily buy used cars. They help populate the earth with metal and plastic that will undoubtedly turn to junk in 30 or 40 years. Also, the product they sell farts pollution and fucks up the world for the very kids that play in the Kid's Zone! of the dealership while their parents sign lease papers. They're some of the most prolific slayers of our environmental future. Some real bastards. They deserve to pick up soda cans and candy wrappers from the road each morning.

I’m going to miss Japan when I leave in July. It's a cool country. I dig it. If you speak English here, life is good. You get to walk down weeded sidewalks that are free of trash at the expense of the sweat and toil of white-gloved-car salesmen who are willing to pull sludge from ditches to keep their country purrrty.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot---I want to dedicate this post to my four or five fans. Without your silence and lack of comments or emails about the content on this site, I'd never be able to write with such reckless abandon, such brutal honesty. So thank you!

When a man screams in cyberspace and no one is there to hear it, does he even make a sound? I don't know, but I just got an email this past week from a nice gal named Rinda (who is also a JET in Japan) and she told me that she's been reading this blog for about a year. I was shocked---I thought I was the only one who has been reading this thing for that long!

So, cheers to Rinda and my other secret readers. It helps knowing--or not knowing--you're out there.

A