Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Japan Journifications, Ear/Eye Hustles & Such

Random Random’s in Japan: All Sense Hustle

Fire hydrants are underground, I get all spiritual woo-woo every New Year, afro’s are popular in Japanese pop culture, I can pierce any part of my body without seeing a piercer and my facial small fuzzy hair is unattractive. And none of this is connected and all of it fits together perfectly.
When the New Year rolls in I always ask myself to look for signs. The thing is sometimes I can’t tell the difference between a sign and a random-random. Somebodies random-random is somebodies coveted sign. For instance, one person walks down the street and gets pooped on by a bird, her reaction, Are your friggin kidding me? Ewww. Another person walks down the street and gets pooped on, her reaction, Something wonderful is about to enter my life! Yippee!
I know it’s not that simple and the lines we draw around what we deem sacred and what we deem sick and what we deem random-random and what we deem sign sometimes seem to cross and uncross daily. And do you remember those connect the dot puzzles when you were younger? When you started out with 1-8 the dots made total sense and you felt like you were on the right path but by the time you got to 22, you wondered if you messed up somewhere and cheated and saw the complete picture in the back of the workbook. And this is my grand checkitout revelation: life is a series of random-randoms AND coveted signs.
Japanese fire hydrants are underground; how they work underground I have no clue. What this means? There are no dogs pissing on fire hydrants, there are no children secretly opening them on sweltering days, teen agers aren’t using them as seats while they swig on Red Bull and wait for school busses. But they exist. It’s an unseen safety net. An underground fire hydrant says you don’t need to see the safety but it’s there.
The woo-woo in me wonders if this is an omen? A sign for my internal make-it-happen-ness that says, you don’t need to see how all the good stuff is coming and/or it has already arrived. Underground fire hydrants mean we don’t have to show you anything for you to know we exist. Underground fire hydrants say faith. Or—someone’s reading this thinking, underground fire hydrants are just a way to simply store an object used to put a fire out. We live in a world where random-randoms and signs peacefully coexist. Whether we see them sitting together or not.

Below, a couple of random-randoms in Japan.














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