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      "body": "<center>Pooping in Japan is a continuing essay series. To start from the first post, click here: https://steemit.com/travel/@jeunebug/pooping-in-japan </center>\n\n![8B4B76A4-AB0E-4402-A77C-F7C7E5A7A2A4.jpeg](https://steemitimages.com/DQma7iQb88zsZXXULupmraAub6CbEbR3n1tjh8WVQbvFZRe/8B4B76A4-AB0E-4402-A77C-F7C7E5A7A2A4.jpeg)\n<br>\n\n<center>January</center>\n<br>\n\n\nWhat’s the mandatory minimum on a farewell tour? \n\nIf you use the KISS precedent, it’s a two-year hiatus between dropping a “final” album and reuniting for a worldwide goodbye. And after said goodbye? Their status remains up for debate, with each new tour simply provoking new questions: “Are they starting up again?” “Are they retiring again?” “Do those motherfuckers even know themselves?”\n\nOr, in the words of The Beatles, a rock n’ roll band that knew how to definitively bow out of the game, “You say goodbye, and I say hello.”\n\nPoint is, the current status of KISS is a murky gray area, and by living there, they can inconsistently produce work of questionable value without widespread retribution, because they are “post-career”. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.\n\nHave I produced enough <i>Pooping in Japan</i> to similarly “retire”? Has enough time elapsed between the last edition and now to qualify this as an exciting reunion, as opposed to a needlessly-delayed release of a continuing work?\n\nThese are legitimate questions in this current world, where progress is always speeding up exponentially. What was the 24-hour news cycle is now the 24-minute Twitter cyclone. The planned obsolescence of electronics has worsened, from VCRs that ran for a solid decade before they started shredding tapes into confetti, to iPhones that are programmed to deliberately fuck themselves up after about two years. And music? There seems to be no required quantity of work to justify a greatest hits release. Justin Bieber alone has released five compilations. He’s only released four studio albums.\n\nNow before I settle back on my self-assured throne of internet snark, let me add that really, the last bit isn’t all that new of a phenomenon. Vanilla Ice also released a greatest hits album, as did Lou Bega (is it just “Mambo No. 5” fourteen times in a row?) Even the Rolling Fucking Stones put out “Big Hits” in 1966. They’d only been around four years at that point, and weren’t much more than some snot-nosed, bowl-cut kids ripping off Chuck Berry tunes. Keith Richards didn’t even require a necromancer to attend band practice yet. <i>Greatest hits?</i> Half of their material wasn’t even theirs! \n\nLet’s cut to the chase: I think there’s a healthy precedent for me bowing out of this series a little early, and when someone with as inconsistent a work ethic as mine sees that precedent, they’re likely to seize it. So on this farewell tour, let’s stomp that pedal to the metal and go out with engines roaring and tires screeching.\n\nAnd by that, I mean let’s get those hands planted at 10 and 2 and keep it at a steady crawl just below the posted speed limit. \n\nBecause this time, we start with a driving test. \n\nMen in their thirties can find themselves surprised with a sudden onset of decline. That’s certainly been the case with me; the problems I always assumed would start much later in life have shown up to the party unfashionably early. Rising out of bed each morning sets off a cacophony of cracking bones and rip-roaring farts so loud, my neighbors would be forgiven for thinking I’d renovated my apartment floors with wall-to-wall bubble-wrapped whoopie cushions. Segue into a sad scene in front of the bathroom mirror, where I review my thinning hairline like King Leonidas overlooking his last surviving Spartans holding the line at Thermopylae (referencing “300” is a conservative estimate of how many I have left). And if I was so bold as to drink the night before? Well, hope my schedule’s clear, because what used to be a few hours of hungover recovery is now a multi-day event.\n\nBy the time my coffee is brewing, I can be solidly in the throes of a full-blown pre-mid-life crisis.\n\nI wasn’t blessed with a mathematical mind, but I think there’s a formula for inverse correlation in here somewhere. Life expectancy is on the rise (well, given a macro view of trends, at least; the U.S., meanwhile, has seen it drop for the past two years (<i>thanks,</i> opioids!), meaning what qualifies as middle age should also be edging up. At the same time, our culture is growing increasingly youth-centric, thus bringing that marker back down. The line between social relevancy and that quaint farm upstate where those past their prime are sent to live is thus in flux, and worrisome types like myself may find themselves feeling lost and wondering whether, when watching certain classic films, they’re supposed to identify more with <i>Harold</i> or <i>Maude</i>. \n\nFaced with this new reality, some of us desperately start seeking out ways to recapture our yesterdays. There are the tried-and-true clichés: buying a sports car, starting a rock band, hitting the gym, and having an affair (or for those with less skill and a tighter budget, driving the Volvo over to Guitar Center to flirt with/creep on the employees, and then masturbating in the shower at Planet Fitness).  There’s the ever-versatile spectrum of substance abuse, from alcohol on down to rock bottom (<i>thanks,</i> opioids!). And, of course, a free market ready to step in and and mine our nostalgia into purchasable and binge-watchable commodities, giving us all the Stranger Things and other things our lovely, empty little souls could want (<i>thanks,</i> capitalism!)\n\nAnd after reviewing all these options, what I’m here to tell you is this: ain’t nothing gonna make you feel like a young sixteen-year-old full of ignorance and vigor once again like nervously sitting in a department of motor vehicles lobby for six hours while awaiting your turn to take a driving test. \n\nMany ex-pats get to forego this experience, because they live in an urban center with enough awesome public transportation and awful traffic to render a driver’s license utterly useless. But, by continuing my lifelong trend of living in nowheres close to somewheres (bumfuck Fredericksburg just north of Richmond, VA; bumfuck Antioch just southeast of Nashville, TN; bumfuck Loudi southwest of Changsha (hometown of communist heartthrob Mao Zedong and capital of Hunan, the province that at least six of your local Chinese take-out restaurants named themselves after); and now, bumfuck Naka in bumfuck Ibaraki (a.k.a. Kanto region’s “Most Unappealing” area, voted 47th out of 47 prefectures <i>three years in an row!</i>) just north of Tokyo), I find myself in a different situation than they. The nine schools I’m currently traveling between run the gamut of urban to rural, with the majority tucked away in mountains accessible only by way of long, narrow gravel roads criss-crossing paddy fields (in other words, waaaay off the bus route).\n\nSo I kinda need a car.\n\nFor those who are planning on living and driving in Japan for less than one year, a Japanese driver’s license is unnecessary. A trip to your local AAA and a $25 fee are all it takes to get set up with an international driver’s permit, which is the only requirement for getting behind the wheel here. Yes, it really is that easy. <i>Just think!</i> You could snag a permit and be on a plane tomorrow, and find yourself fast and furiously drifting all over Tokyo the day after! (and probably in jail the day after that)\n\nFor those like me who are staying longer, that permit is valid for only one year, and can’t be renewed. Leaving only one option: apply for a Japanese driver’s license.\n\nI moved here in July, meaning it’s not something I technically need to worry about for another few months. But the Japanese Auto Federation is notorious for failing applicants numerous times, due to a notoriously strict examination that both ensures widespread safe driving practices from those who’ve passed, and a full enrollment for JAF-affiliated driving schools ready to collect tuition from those who’ve failed. My bosses, who’ve been running their business for over thirty years, say teachers average about three attempts before passing. Best to start attempting it early.\n\nBut like a driver attempting to chart a course forward, the first step is to find my location on the map. And I can’t know where I am without accounting for where I’ve been.\n\n(That map metaphor brought to you by pre-smartphone GPS millennials; <i>pre-smartphone GPS millennials, because “Back in MY day… we used to waste more time!”</i>)\n\nSo let’s briefly retrace the course of the previous six months and what it’s like to drive here, from fumbling with my dashboard for the first time, to sitting on a bench awaiting the instructor to accompany me out around the examination course. Might as well; like I said, I have over six hours to kill, and have already assembled a number of quick observations about the driving experience thus far, which I’ll now relate:\n\n1.\tThe first few trips are primarily a series of erratic over-corrections of potentially lethal blunders, due to everything being flipped from its normal location. These actions are often punctuated with “oh, fuck, right”s. “Oh, fuck, right- that’s the lever for my wipers, not the turn signal!” “Oh, fuck, right- everyone is honking at me because slow traffic uses the LEFT lane here!” “Oh, fuck, right- I’m driving down the wrong side of the road again, LOL, and that truck is heading OH, FUCK, RIGHT AT ME-” And while desperately trying to reorient myself in this strange mirror world, I’m all the while  half-expecting the Enterprise to touch down at the intersection ahead, and for the goateed Spock to leap out, phaser in hand, and proclaim: “One more mistake like that, and it’s the Tantalus Field for you!” \n(That Star Trek reference brought to you by… my sad, sad, existence)\n\n2.\tThe gas prices seem really reasonable... until you remember they use the metric system, and that's the price per liter. OH FUCK, THAT TRIP TO THE GROCERY STORE JUST COST ME NINE DOLLARS\n\n3.\tThe erratic shaking I've associated with driving around a busted automobile for the past ten years is no longer related to mechanical troubles. My car is fine. That's an earthquake.\n\n4.\tGoogle Maps doesn't perform at the same high level of quality in Japan as it does in the U.S. I've stopped using the app and now appeal directly to the soul of David Bowie/Jareth the Goblin King, as he's much better suited to deal with this labyrinth of knotted routes and redundantly-numbered roads. \"Okay, so you're saying I follow 31 down to the light, then take a left at 31, and continue on 31 until it intersects 31? Uhh... yeah, got it?\"\n\n5.\t75% of the roads here are about the width of your friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart's typical parking space. They're still meant to convey traffic in both directions. I refer to these quaint little lanes as Thunderdomes. \"Two cars enter... one car leaves. The other is probably in the ditch.\"\n\n6.\tPrevious issue is mitigated slightly by the design of most Japanese cars. They're about the size of the Little Tikes Cozy Coupe. In general, products here are smaller. The American small is the Japanese large. The American large is a Princess Bride quote: \"Inconceivable!\" This applies to most things: beverages, clothing, egos.\n\n7.\tSometimes, while stopped at a light, you might peek into the cars in neighboring lanes, and would be forgiven for thinking you’d suddenly been transported to Humboldt County. It seems like every third car has a pot leaf air freshener dangling from the rear view. But is that young salaryman in the suit behind you really getting blazed after work? Is that elderly couple in the right lane regularly ripping crucial gravity bong rips before heading off to the pond to feed the ducks?\nAnswer: absolutely not. Marijuana is super stigmatized here, and getting caught with possession can land you a five-year stint in the slammer. I asked my boss what’s up, and he said simply that people think it’s a cool shape, and many of them probably don’t even know what it actually is. For a society that generally places great emphasis on the beauty of the natural world, in particular fauna, and is generally unaccustomed to drug use, this actually makes sense. \nBut to reappropriate one of Shakespeare’s famous lines: “Would a weed by any other name smell as highly of THC?”\n\n8.\tThe tolls are comparable to your typical mortgage payment. OH FUCK, THAT TRIP TO THE GROCERY STORE ACTUALLY COST TWENTY DOLLARS\n\nAnd alongside all of these experiences was my constant driving companion: the wholly bewildering assortment of programming riding the airwaves on 83.2 FM. We became acquainted way back in July, as I sat sweating in the parking lot one afternoon after school, scanning the radio for something new and interesting to play on my drive home. Instead, what I came upon were the flutterings of Vivaldi’s “Summer” (it was a sweltering July day, so… a little on the nose, 83.2). Now I know that, for whatever reason, talking classical music usually gets someone immediately pegged as fucking pretentious, but if anyone deserves to be name-dropped, it’s Vivaldi. A brilliant composer who, like so many others, sadly descended into poverty in his final years. It’s reported that, at the end, he even had to sell off his own manuscripts; he was just too baroque.\n\nBA-DUM-CHISSSS\n\nThat selection earned 83.2 a fast-track to preset selection 1, but immediately got me thinking: this is certainly no time to be listening to something familiar. In fact, this is the single most important opportunity for expanding my own listening experiences, if ever there was one. Because, along with the flipping of turn signal levers and street lane orientations, one other important thing has also ended up on the opposite side of what I’m familiar with: the radio.\n\nQuick recap, for those not well-versed in pseudo-science: early neurologists like Broca and Wernicke pioneered research into the localization of different functions within the brain. Pinpointing these functions to one hemisphere vs. another turned out to be a pretty neat method for later theorists to prove the old aphorism true, and reduce all our infinite ways of thinking into “two types of people in this world”: left brain (logical and analytical) or right brain (creative and intuitive). \n\nMy high school art teacher was particularly dogmatic about this, and refused to allow any forms of verbal communication in her classroom once we started on a project; those were LEFT BRAIN activities, and had NO place in her right brain sanctuary of pure, unfettered artistry. \n\nMaintaining the purity of her right-brain classroom also involved her constantly playing her stereo,  blasting right-brainfood like jazz, classical, and the occasional twenty-minute prog-rock mindfuck from Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (whose occasional use of lyrics, you might think, violated her moratorium on verbal communication- until you realize that lines like “See the gypsy queen in a glaze of Vaseline!” aren’t communicating anything particularly logical).\n\nWhile continued research has shown this oversimplification for what it is, the left brain/right brain categorization fits in nicely with Myers-Briggs, Hogwarts Houses, and all the other quizzes and categories we turn to in the hopes of making some sense out of the clusterfuck of insanity going on in all our minds.\n\nSo let’s roll with it. \n\nIf our dominant traits are linked to a particular hemisphere, and our dominant hand is cross-wired to the opposing side of our brain, then my right-handed actions have been forever dictated by my logical, analytical left brain. Well, <i>shit!</i> That’s the hand that scrolls along the iPod click wheel (I’m dating myself here (to a recent past that already feels incredibly distant)), slides the the vinyl album out of the sleeve, and, yes, operates the knobs on the car stereo! And all this time- run by <i>left</i> brain? Dude, this isn’t your area of expertise! If <i>anyone</i> should be stepping in to regulate operations related to music, it should be ol’ righty. \n\nHave I been limited all this time? Is <i>this</i> why I just “didn’t get” that seven-piece experimental band from Brooklyn who mic’ed a blender through nine Electro-Harmonix pedals and played a drum set composed of nothing but crash cymbals? Fucking <i>left</i> brain in the way! \n\nBut oh, sweet relief! Because now that I’m driving on the right side of the car, my left hand is running operations over at the radio. Well okay, right brain, let’s see what you got!\n\n…talk radio, eh? Huh. Didn’t see that one coming.\n\nOkay, 83.2 it is.\n\nThe next few times I tuned in were like the first: leaving school in late afternoon to be treated to an orchestrally-arranged ride home. But then, on Friday night about a week later, I was surprised to start my car and be bombarded with the rapid power chords of Green Day. Those chords continued for the entirety of the drive, because 83.2 was playing the album <i>Dookie</i> in full. \n\nIt was the first inkling that 83.2 was much more than the classical station it had originally seemed to be. Over the next few weeks, I found myself setting aside my various podcasts in favor of experiencing what 83.2 transformed into at different times of day. Afternoons consistently yielded classical, while evenings generally offered a wide assortment of rock- maybe Green Day, maybe Van Halen. Around the lunch hour, you might find some of the very worst hip-hop the genre has to offer (tinny snare beats ripped from a 1993 Casio overlaid with the typical cliches of clubbin’, ho’s, and gettin’ paid; <i>thanks,</i> capitalism!), while an hour or so after that might showcase some “new” sound, often especially tricky to categorize;  one showcase featured a German industrial mess so brash, it was as if Phil Spector decided that the best way to achieve his “wall of sound” was to fill a fleet of industrial washing machines with brass bolts and set ‘em to spin. Overtop droned a vocalist who sounded kind of like how Robert Smith might sound if a wish gone awry Freaky Friday-ed him into the body of the lead singer of Smashmouth.\n\nAt this point, someone leans over your shoulder and asks, “Hey! What are you reading?”\n\n“Oh, just Brandon’s latest blog entry.”\n\n“Ahh. What’s the subject this month?”\n\n“He’s writing music reviews.”\n\n“For what band?”\n\n“I don’t know. And… actually, he doesn’t, either.”\n\n“…how is this a good use of your time?”\n\nThe morning shows are pretty great, especially one deejay who plays hit pop songs in both their English and Japanese versions, back-to-back. This can be interesting, and also a huge mistake, as in the case of The Carpenters. \n\nThe reason so many of us humans would agree that dogs are our best friends is because we share such  close emotional connections. Those connections are forged through sharing some core traits: namely, poor impulse control. Unlike the cat, we cannot just leave dogs at home with a few days’ worth of food and go out of town; they’ll overeat until they vomit and then starve for the remainder.\n\nBut before you counter that you’re not subject to the same whims as this <i>inferior</i> species, please take a moment to consider what you did to your own body the last time you visited an all-you-can-eat buffet.\n\nLike the dog, we have this habit of consistently overestimating our own appetites. Fast food restaurants concoct hamburger combos with enough meat patties to reenact the first murder from <i>Se7en</i>; as sort of an additional <i>fuck you,</i> the blu-ray release of Suicide Squad actually contains bonus footage; and on my last visit to a sex shop, I realized just how many penises one woman can be expected to contend with.\n\nYes, I was at a sex shop. I had to buy some Christmas presents. \n\nThe Carpenters fit in well with this idea because, while I always remember myself liking some of their material and thinking I can get down with them, in practice I rarely make it through an entire song with that outlook maintained. Karen sure had a beautiful voice, but some of those lyrics are so saccharine they give me cavities; in fact, I believe the song <i>Sing</i> is currently tied up in wrongful death litigation, because every time that children-sung chorus hits, a certain proportion of diabetics start flatlining.\n\nIn other words, a potential appetite for The Carpenters will be more than sated by a single listen. A change to Japanese lyrics or not, that second play-through is gonna be rough.\n\nCue the segue (on 83.2, that segue is the first four measures of Cake’s <i>Short Skirt/Long Jacket</i>, which is an awesome choice in that it works so well as a segue, and a terrible choice in that pretty much no matter what follows, you’re disappointed and just want to continue listening to Cake) and we’ll transition from the back-to-back jams on into my personal favorite late morning show, weekdays from 10-11. The deejay is a real character who gets super pumped about the tracks he plays, generally talking about each one for two to three minutes afterwards, and even throwing in a few beatbox recreations of his favorite parts (his oral rendition of a Dream Theater drum track was… an experience). He also has some quirky little traditions, like playing AC/DC’s <i>Back in Black</i> every Thursday morning at 10:48 for the month of December.\n\nIt was on my second Back in Black Thursday that it all became clear. All these random bits of programming… of COURSE 83.2 makes no sense. \n\n83.2 is the western station. And a western station by definition makes no sense… at least, not to the westerner. Now anyone, of course, could listen to The Carpenters, and then a little AC/DC, and describe some difference in their sound. But as westerners, are we more susceptible to noticing the differences among the familiar? Do those of different cultural backgrounds listen and hear, instead, more of what those two pieces of music share?\n\nWe are definitely predisposed to categorizing by similarity ourselves, in particular with one of Japan’s more famous exports: anime. \n\nDo a quick survey on the street, and I guarantee that the majority of people, if they’re even able to describe it at all, will define anime as a genre. “Anime? Oh, right, those Japanese cartoons, where they all have big eyes and spiky hair and are always shooting energy beams and kissing cat girls and shit.” And sure, those shows are out there, but what about all animes about cooking competitions? The crime procedurals? The ghost stories, the space operas, the slow unfolding dramas of a woman giving up her career in the city to find peace in rural farming? How absurd does it look to the initiated that the rest of us lump them all together under one umbrella, based solely on some perceived aesthetic similarities? \n\nAbout as absurd as following up Karen Carpenter’s <i>sha-la-la-las</i> with the screech of Brian Johnson.\n\nBut hey, it can’t be helped- this is just how we’re programmed. I’ll defer to the theorist John Dewey here: “Foreign languages that we do not understand always seem jibberings, babblings, in which it is impossible to fix a definite, clear-cut, individualized group of sounds. The countryman in the crowded street, the landlubber at sea, the ignoramus in sport at a contest between experts in a complicated game, are further instances. Put an inexperienced man in a factory, and at first the work seems to him a meaningless medley. All strangers of another race proverbially look alike to the visiting stranger. Only gross differences of size or color are perceived by an outsider in a flock of sheep, each of which is perfectly individualized to the shepherd.” We do not recognize subtleties in the unfamiliar. It’s why, when writing in English, my Japanese students have such a hard time differentiating between lowercase i’s and j’s… and why there’s a good chance that the Chinese character tattooed on your lower back is wrong.\n\nIt’s also why grocery shopping can often be a pain in the ass. Already I’m trying to sort through thousands of products in a language I can barely utilize, and now I have to decide on which of 28 varieties of tofu I want, based on some incomprehensible aspect of their form?\n\nYou know, sometimes a guy really just wants a good ol’ fashioned western duality: a world in black and white, with morality in good and evil, and tofu in soft or firm. While this thinking may be fairly reductionist when applied to much of human experience, it seems to pair well with our consumer habits. Look up Columbia University’s jam study to see some evidence that supports the idea that more choices = more anxiety = lessened confidence in choosing any one option. A duality, or even a handful of easily distinguishable options, is often preferable to a laundry list of possibilities. It’s why “which Beatle are you?” is a solid first date question, while “which member of Slipknot are you?” is not.\n\nFor multiple reasons.\n\nThe additional challenge we face when engaging in another culture is that our brains did not evolve to leave things unknown. There are certainly those among us who actively meditate and pursue a perception freed from the restraints of mind; they have cleansed the doors of perception William Blake wrote about, and perceive with less discrimination. For the rest of us, the “jibberings” and “babblings” will stay as such for a time; but stick around that unfamiliar culture long enough, and the brain will start trying to sort. And without the benefit of the tabula rasa child’s mind that engages with new stimuli and builds internal structures to match, we adults are stuck with old, fault machinery suited for a different task. When we start sorting new experiences with that shitty old machinery, we get shit wrong. In terms of language, we hear sounds that do not exist in English, like the Japanese versions of “r” and “f”, do our best approximation based on where’d they’d fit in our own alphabet, and hear them as such. We carry this knowledge home, we tell stories and write records, all built on a mistake in perception. This gets done enough, and eventually you help misinform an entire society into incorrectly referring to the country “Nihon” as “Japan.”\n\nThat, or you go through the process of committing to learning a new system. \n\nThat process is multifaceted. The tasks can range from the great undertakings of language study, to the subtle imitations of mannerisms. It’s learning how low to bow to your bosses, where to leave your shoes when entering the bathroom, and, as is the case today, getting a driver’s license.\n\nSpeaking of which…\n\nYes, all this time I’ve been rambling, and we’re still sitting on that hard bench in the department lobby, waiting to take the driving test. You can look back and think of everything that’s transpired as one overwhelming series of tangents, or remark at the ingenuity of my containing all that within one overarching framing device.\n\nYour call.\n\nEventually, my name gets called, and I look up to see examiner. Imagine an anthropomorphism of the very concept of bureaucracy: a sort of middle-aged android with the gait of a retired military officer, dressed in a suit that’s the textile equivalent of white noise. He scans me from within an impenetrable fortress of tightly-held documents and thick, obscuring eyeglasses, and accepts my greeting with all the warmth of a man having a catheter removed.\n\nThe long walk down the green fluorescent hallway is one haunted by the phantoms of the driving test training guide, and its admissions of “a high rate of failure,” “notoriously difficult,” and the mandate that I “check under the car, get in, lock the door, adjust the seat, put on the seatbelt, and adjust the mirrors IN THAT ORDER” if I have any hope of passing. \n\nSo when I sit down to the actual written test, I’m thrown for a loop.\n\n…10 questions? And… yes, three of them are just about U-turns.\n\nNo tricky Japanese-specific situations? No curveball questions about unfamiliar signs? Just a handful of brain busters like, “True or false: If an unattended child is walking along the shoulder of the road, you should slow your speed as you approach.”\n\nI pored over the questions three times, with each scan seeking to uncover the hidden <i>“gotcha!”</i> element that would fail me. But nope. No tricks here. Just a super fucking easy test.\n\nI passed handily, and after marking my grade, my android rose and escorted me out the back of the building and onto the driving course. \n\nYou ever see that M. Night Shyamalan film <i>The Village?</i> About the small society of people continuing on in an anachronistic existence in the forest, completely isolated from the outside world?\n\nThe course is kind of like that: a loop of roads with all the workings of the real thing, but completely contained within itself and separated from the real world (in this case, by a chain link fence). There are merge lanes and yield signs. There are intersections, with stops signs and traffic lights. There’s a goddamn <i>bridge</i>. The course is built and arranged to present test takers with all the challenges of the outside world, so there are also obstacles: work zone cones to avoid. Crosswalks to yield to. Like Shyamalan films, plenty of twists to navigate. Also like Shyamalan films, plenty of signs warning you that a twist is coming. \n\nTo add to the feel of authenticity, they also send four or five people, all testing for a variety of license types, around the course at the same time. So while stopping at the red light at a fake intersection could feel like a joke, it actually turns out to be just as important as the real deal- because that woman coming around the bend on a motorcycle, and the dude attempting to navigate that flatbed truck through a 32-point turn up ahead, could just as easily hit you as not.\n\nNow on the other side of the exam experience, I can both dispel and exacerbate the fears associated with this test. Yes, they are very strict. Yes, there are some tricky maneuvers. That said, it is a closed course, and every single one of those maneuvers is pre-planned. So if you just memorize the order and method in which you have to execute each task, it turns out to be nearly as easy as the written test. Take a cue from the examiner and morph into android mode. “I. am. a. perfect. driving. robot. and. stop. at. all. marked. signs. for. a. full. \n\nthree.\n\nseconds.\n\nAaaand. now. check. all. blind. spots.\n\ntwice.\n\nAnd. proceed.”\n\nLong story short, I left the department with a freshly-printed license shining in my hot little hand, and rode off into the sunset.\n\nWhich brings this outro back around to the intro: this might be it as far as blogs go. Aside from driving observations, I haven’t had much to write about these past few months. And I can’t write if nothing happens to me. I’m a blogger, not a French existentialist playwright.\n\n<center>—</center>\n\nBrandon: (sits at kitchen table) The oranges grow soft. Yet here, one has fallen from the bowl, and rests alone. Its peel is taut. \n\nBrandon: (peels and eats orange) Ah, such bitterness! The flesh is tough, the taste acrid and biting. This is what it means to be alive. I’m reminded of my father. I recall him smiling only once.\n\n<center>—</center>\n\nIt may just be that winter affords fewer experiences for dudes like me, who tend to hole up with a stack of books all winter. Asian winters find me particularly immobile, as the thin uninsulated apartment walls and lack of any central heating tend to have the inside feeling a lot like the outside. \n\nThankfully we’re on the other side of it now, a milestone celebrated here as “Setsubun,” the last day of winter. This holiday is usually around February 3rd, and is centered around the idea of expelling the negative energies of the previous year, and welcoming in the good fortune of the year ahead.\n\nOf course, this is Japan, and nothing is left to simply exist as intangible; the metaphor must be made manifest. In this case, it means the male teachers dress as <i>oni</i>: hulking, masked demons with giant horns and teeth who brandish giant clubs as they stalk the school hallways. When they arrive at a particular classroom, it’s the students’ job to fight the oni off by pelting them with roasted soybeans, until these monstrous representations of misfortune relent and run off, thus leaving open the pathways of impending fortune.\n\nIn reality: \n\nTwo grown men burst into a room of thirty screaming four-year-olds, most of whom were already hysterically crying at the very idea that a demon was about to arrive. The barrage of beans comes fast and heavy from the braver kids, but even they quickly retreat as the creatures step farther into the classroom. Soon, they’re all cowering in terror and fighting over the corners of the room, hoping to escape this nightmare. \n\nOne of the grown men, yours truly, figures this is too much for the kids, and hangs back, looking to the Japanese teachers for guidance on how to proceed.\n\nMeanwhile, said teachers are having a grand old time.\n\nThe gym teacher, the other male in this tale, sprints towards Nonoha, a meek little cherub of a girl. She darts behind her teacher, but this oni isn’t relenting. He <i>grabs her by the fucking legs</i>, and unleashes a monstrous roar: “NOW I’M GOING TO EAT YOU!” As he pulls, this girl starts shrieking bloody murder, clinging to her teacher’s skirt and looking at her in desperation.\n\nThe response? “Tee hee hee!” * snaps picture *\n\nThis is certainly a conservative culture in many ways, but I’ll tell you what- when it comes to Setsubun, they go fucking <i>hard</i>.\n\nAnd perhaps that metaphor is itself a metaphor for my own series. These eleven pages of content have been my little box of beans that I’ve been casting at all the lingering observations of last year. And now that they’re gone, perhaps there’s nothing left for me to say. \n\nThen again, maybe my brief foray as an oni is a sign that, after a wintery respite, life is about to get interesting again, and I’ll be back with another batch of nonsense before you know it.\n\nI return once again to that idea of the KISS precedent. You never know when those motherfuckers are gonna come back onstage.",
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      "permlink": "an-age-of-iconoclasm",
      "title": "An Age of Iconoclasm",
      "body": "<center>\n![FC9AF4F6-A95E-42FF-AC67-058DD3A285E4.jpeg](https://steemitimages.com/DQme9Lr8rkmbea7HkjGUn3bgxfQP5fJUH5izXw3T9AK7kdw/FC9AF4F6-A95E-42FF-AC67-058DD3A285E4.jpeg)\n</center>\n\n<center>I met a traveller from an antique land\nWho said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone\nStand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,\nHalf sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,\nAnd wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,\nTell that its sculptor well those passions read\nWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,\nThe hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.\nAnd on the pedestal these words appear:\n‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:\nLook on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'\nNothing beside remains. Round the decay\nOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,\nThe lone and level sands stretch far away.”\n-Percy Bysshe Shelley, <i>Ozymandias</i></center>\n\n<br>\n\nWe need a new mythology.\n\nFor every new insight our History enlightens, we find another aspect obscured, a shadow cast across all the wisdom that failed to survive us. We guess at the meaning of icon-etched artefact, of spit and charcoal spread along the cave walls. But flesh withers and dies, papyrus crumbles to dust, and what remains of the Great Library of Alexandria? A half-remembered tale of the fire that reduced all its knowledge to ash.\n\nWe crane our necks, lungs strained with bated breath, <i>listening</i>. For the cry of Prometheus in the hiss of the flames; for the footfalls of Gilgamesh, forever seeking immortality, as he haunts the floodplain of our ancestry like a mirage. \n\nFor the Old Gods. For the voices that echoed through so many epochs, only to die away. For the hope that we might better understand those that remain.\n\nIn religion we’ll find some of the greatest lies and most profound truths codified. And as we listen, the most constant reverberation is a blurring of the two, a mirror image of an actuality:\n\nThat the gods make us in their image.\n\nBut those who continue to seek, who continue to listen, will discover the deeper truth:\n\nWe make them in ours.\n\nIt is no accident that the gods of the desert were harsh, and vengeful. That lands besieged by drought and famine found themselves beholden to gods demanding sacrifices to appease their every callous whim, while people in the lands of plenty developed a pantheism that imbued every stream and meadow and rock with the sacred. Dig through the layers of the Torah, and you’ll find the fragments of a god remade across the ages. The early Hebrews called him Yahweh, a close, personal god who walked alongside his creations in the garden. A century later, they called him Elohim. And as they migrated, and suffered through exile, the faith changed: from the monolatry of one local god among many, to the monotheism that would see him remade as God, the One, the Only, a distant and omnipotent creator of the universe who might compete with the great gods of Babylon.\n\nAs they remade their god, so they remade themselves- from a people of flesh, destined to die and sink into Sheol, to dualistic vessels housing a Platonic soul capable of transcending the corporeal into an afterlife newly ornamented by Hellenism. \n\nFor the slaves in America, backs broken and split by whip, God was merciful. Not the petty, vengeful deity demanding the genocide of Ammonites and Moabites, but the benevolent force that brought the Israelites out of Egypt, that delivered the covenant of love in Christ. But the slave masters had the same religion, and when God spoke to them, he spoke through Leviticus, through the laws that delineated a system of human enslavement. That same Christ, who flipped the tables of the moneychangers, can be found every Sunday morning in soup kitchens feeding the casualties of capitalism, and in the prosperity gospels of televangelists begging but a few dollars more to fund their private jets.\n\nThere are plenty of explanations proffered for how the god of the Hebrews endured the ages. The believers will claim it as proof of the divine at work; the skeptics will cling to historical happenstance.\n\nThrough the lens of natural selection, it appears another example of how the fittest have always survived: they adapt. They morph and change, a sort of Rorschach ink blot that allows continual reinterpretation for each generation seeking divine justification for their self-worship. \n\nHuman history is a history of continual change, and the gods we’ve created in our image must remain in our image. They must change with us. And those that cannot be remade are consigned to history, to dine in the halls of Valhalla, alongside Ra and the Jade Emperor, tracking Apollo’s celestial arc and admiring Aphrodite’s beauty from afar.\n\nThose changes have carried us here, to this moment, where we gaze wide-eyed at the immensity of our collective nuclear arsenals, lament the vastness of our collective ineptitude, and wonder whether we’ll survive ourselves.\n\nMillennia from now, the next great galactic Caesar may sweep through our solar system, on his way to pacify the denizens of some far-flung corner of his empire. Perhaps, as he passes the charred embers of a dead celestial body, drifting third from the star, he’ll slow his retinue, and turn to address his attendant.\n\n“What of that dead world?”\n\nIn an echo of the Alexandrian library, the attendant will shake his head and reply, “It was once called Earth. Now, nothing remains. A shame; I heard there was great knowledge there.”\n\nAnd if they are to approach the dead planet, and the ring of debris caught in its slow, silent orbit, they may find a final few surviving relics, and among them the records that tell of our own age.\n\nWithout the hindsight of the historian, I cannot say what we’ll be remembered for. But if I stop once again to <i>listen</i>, for those Old Gods, I’ll find them more distant than ever, drowned out by the cacophony of New Zealotry. Perhaps that’s how the historians would define this age.\n\nFor while we’ve always made our gods in our image, never before have we so feverishly worked to remake the world in the image of our gods.\n\nCan we still call the hand of the free market invisible, when worn like an armband on every devoted capitalist’s sleeve? When entire sections of society must mobilize and intervene to keep it solvent? The very idea was that our own individual interests would serve to regulate this system of capital. But instead of accepting that system’s failure and seeking reform, so many adherents contort their own minds, hammering away at the edges of our world in a desperate attempt to break it down into their chosen compartment. There need be no conspiracy of elites to engineer an oligarchy; when enough of us believe in the God of the Market, we’ll hold our own wages down, we’ll erode our own tax base, we’ll allow our own public goods privatized to serve the few over the many, because those are the sacrifices our god requires. We’ll decide to incentivize our financial system speculating its way into catastrophe by bailing it out afterwards,  falling behind our representatives with the devotion of Isaac following Abraham to his own sacrifice. We’ll allow talking heads to perpetuate their talking points until their narratives are so familiar that their propaganda becomes cliché. “Burdensome regulations on small business…” and say no more! If my wages failed to appease, I’ll lay my health insurance upon the altar. Poison my drinking water, dismantle my watchdog groups, defund my schools until they fail so completely that there’s no choice left but to sell them off to a board of private donors. In Market We Trust. \n\nWhat of the God of War? The Greeks called him Ares; in certain circles, we may know him as Boeing or Lockheed Martin, though his power transcends as something greater: Public Opinion, growing continually, exponentially, with every flight of F-16s over the football stadium, every blockbuster film chronicling the heroism and moral rectitude of military might. Even the torturer may be reformed in the public eye, when recast as the will of freedom and democracy at work.\n\nOne can easily point to this god’s failings. Our instigated coups and outright invasions that destabilize other societies for generations, leaving the vulnerable to suffer through the monsters who rise to fill the power vacuum. “Should we open our doors to these tired, these poor, these huddled masses yearning to breathe free?” some ask. “Madness!” The god cries in response. “There are wolves among the sheep at the door. Bolt it tight.” \n\n“But what of the role we’ve played in this villainy?”\n\nAnd with that the questioner makes the fatal error, unintentionally stepping into the line of fire of a people well-conditioned to police those weak in the faith:\n\n“I find it inappropriate and, frankly, disrespectful to criticize our revered military leadership, our brave men and women in uniform.” “It sounds to me like you just hate America and don’t appreciate the sacrifices of our troops.” “Love it or leave it!”\n\nWe need not contend with the <i>audacity</i> of those who question our militarism, not when their criticisms can be obfuscated by blind deference to The Troops, that demigod suffused with all the pride and grief our people can muster. It is a time of war, and in times of war the avenues of our Shining City on the Hill must reverberate with every voice. Our radios and televisions forever tuned in, we nod and sing the refrain, believing we’ve filtered the truth sufficiently to find the Truth. All the while, the God of War watches, pleased by the devotion of these acolytes, these proxies for party propaganda. In a world at war, the voices never stop; and in a war on emotions, on tactics, on Terror, the war never ends. \n\nSome gods rule us best when they have a devil to destroy.\n\nOne would think that, among these forces, the one stalking the rows of church pews, the halls of elementary schools, the cubicles of workplaces and the streets of every city, indiscriminately ripping apart the bodies of anyone it finds there, would be a devil.\n\nBut not in this land. In this land, it is a god. For this is the Land of the Gun.\n\nThe Land of the Gun is well-suited for this religion. It is a land steeped in the ego of individual exceptionalism, where the collective good is so easily shouted down with the cries of “Liberty!” Its creation myths are a fertile soil, where the armed revolution against tyranny, the armed taming of the frontier, and the armed maintenance of a vast, hegemonic empire sow their respective values in each successive generation. What we reap is an internal arms race, where the only thing that stops the bad guy with the knife is the good guy with the handgun, where the only thing that stops the bad gun with the handgun is the good guy with the assault rifle, and where following the philosophy’s own precepts to their logical ends finds me locked into a system of mutually-assured destruction with my neighbors, our respective arsenals ensuring that no one instigates conflict. \n\nI eagerly await the lifting of burdensome regulations on the enriched uranium-show loophole to allow for my constitutionally-guaranteed personal security.\n\nThe Gun is the ultimate inkblot, evading argument by forever morphing. “Why are we manufacturing these deadly weapons in the first place?” we ask. The ink shows us an image of a sportsman, and responds, “They are not weapons, they are TOOLS. Do you want to outlaw hammers?” \n\n“Well should we better regulate the distribution of these <i>tools</i>, to make sure they only end up in the hands of trained… er… <i>tradespeople</i>?”\n\nThe inkblot blurs into the indistinct image of an accidental anarchist. “Criminals don’t follow laws and will get them anyway. What’s the point?” (In other words: why have laws at all? They apparently have no impact on human behavior.)\n\n“But you have to admit that your <i>tools</i> are a serious threat to the public good.” The inkblot blurs into a series of tragedies: of a knife attack at a Chinese train station, of a van running down pedestrians in Barcelona, of the British woman who killed her mother-in-law with a rolling pin. It sets its arms at akimbo, and defiantly counters, “GOT you, libtard. Look at these. See? Argument destroyed. <i>Anything</i> can be a murder weapon. If only someone had a gun for self-defense, maybe these tragedies could have been avoided!”\n\nIt takes a second to find entry into the disparate, looping threads of argument, unsure whether to begin with, “Isn’t this cherry-picking statistically unlikely anecdotes from across the world, as opposed to addressing the obvious bloodbath that is so neatly contained within our borders?” or with furrowed brow, ask, “Self defense… so, then, you DO admit that the gun is a weapon, not a tool?”\n\nBut the blot has already turned back to the range and started firing at targets. It looks back over its shoulder and hollers to hear itself through its earmuffs. “SORRY-” bang bang bang “-I CAN‘T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND-“ bang bang bang “-OF MY FREEDOM-“\n\nBelievers in the Gun don’t often have to contend with these counterpoints. They find their own devils, phantoms forever lurking in the prejudices of those ready to heap every injustice at the feet of The Other. The disillusioned youth, the right-wing radical, the foot soldier of Islamic fundamentalism, the encroachment of secular values and the issue of mental health. These ideologies are disparate, yet responsible for the same social plague. Never mind that they are variables in a despicable experiment where the only constant is the Gun. We do not question the Gun.\n\nGods of Market, War, and Gun. If these are our gods, it is no surprise that the righteous murder each other with such regularity; that the latest bombing campaign had our commander-in-chief looking “very presidential”; that the 43 million in poverty are easily rebranded as unfortunate side-effects of an otherwise perfect economic system. But hey, speaking of tax cuts- did you hear about some of those Wal-Mart bonuses they’re handing out? One-thousand buckeroos, holy <i>cow</i>, now <i>that’s</i> what I call a whole lotta <i>mazuma</i>!\n\nAnd so the crowd churns into a frenzy of gratitude as Commodus slings a few loaves of bread out into the Coliseum stands, while Gracchus looks on and remarks: “He knows what Rome is. Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they'll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they'll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the Senate, it's the sand of the Colosseum. He'll bring them death...and they will love him for it.”\n\nWe need a new mythology.\n\nThe greatest mistake we can make is to think our course is set. While much of humanity’s wisdom may have been lost through the ages, enough has endured to make for a worthy historical guide. If we look to ourselves, we learn, time and again, how dramatically we can change course.\n\nThe land of the Vikings who raped and murdered their way across land and sea is now a society with one of the highest and most progressive standards of living on Earth. Japan, once an entire nation mobilized into the service of imperial aggression, is now well known for the emphasis they place on conscientious public behavior and the greater social good (and… perhaps sex robots). That latter transformation happened in living memory, and while it came in the wake of unimaginable tragedy, it is not a requirement that a society nearly destroy itself before seeking reform. \n\nIt is not a requirement, because we are in the midst of a transformation ourselves, and we are not yet destroyed.\n\nTo think again of those later historians is to remember that while this may all end up as an age of New Zealotry, it may just as easily end another way: \n\nAn age of iconoclasm.\n\nThe symbols we’ve surrounded ourselves with are collapsing around us. Coal miners and Berkeley students are newfound brothers and sisters in arms, awakening to the knowledge that they are pawns, manipulated into position in a game in which they’ve lost their stake. Mass media narratives will supply us with the worst representatives from either side, will inundate us with the idea that all those liberal California snowflakes are actually fascists, ready to shout down every conservative commentator, punch every Nazi, and continue on until free speech is made irrelevant, due to everyone thinking like them; that every blue-collar worker in Appalachia is a Bible-thumping white supremacist, who wants every immigrant out and every border closed for good. There, on the surface, the people stay divided, forever at war over the dividing line of what’s politically correct, or who’s to blame for what slight. But coursing beneath, within the people, is a new force, and it binds more wholly than the old. They have simply to cast off their gods and see one another for what they share.\n\nConfederate generals are crashing down from their pedestals, as the public majority asserts their well-deserved authority. “These are your gods, the gods of your fathers and grandfathers, but they are not mine, they are not <i>ours</i>. They do not represent who we are now, and they do not help guide us to where we want to go. They no longer belong.”\n\nBlack Lives Matter is laying bare a system of gods who have engineered oppression for generations. Gods that held the whip and hid beneath the white hood are gods who wear the badge and don the black robe. If mass incarceration and unarmed people shot to death in the streets are what happens when Lady Justice is blind, it’s about time someone tore that blindfold off and showed her what’s been happening on her watch.\n\n#MeToo is chasing down the monsters, the rapists and abusers of power, and giving them no quarter. It is opening up every corner of society to its own failings, hypocrisies, complicity in bolstering such a long reign of injustice. \n\nWe are losing our religions, our gods, and in response, so many lament: “Where does it stop? How long until they come for me? Until they outlaw hugs as sexual harassment, until they smash the Jefferson Memorial and rip Lincoln down from his throne?”\n\nWell, that depends. Where do these symbols and myths cease to serve us? To constrain instead of guide us? At what point do we fall into that recurring trap of attempting to mold a world to fit the religion, instead of constructing a religion that suits the world?\n\nIf we have one true opportunity in this moment, it’s the opportunity to decide, as a species, that we are infinitely capable and intelligent. That we only fail ourselves when we anchor ourselves to burdensome regulations of our thought. That nothing should be beyond the bounds of debate, accepted as a given simply because it’s always been that way. Nothing’s always been any way. As the Dire Straits sang, “once there was a river, now there’s a stone.” The canyon was once an ocean. The nation, a tribe. The god, an idea.\n\nIn the midst of these upheavals, we have a clear choice: to continue on as is, or make a break from tradition. To continue with our zealotry, or commit to this iconoclasm. \n\nThere’s always a new god waiting to be born out of the blood of a deicide. We could trade one zealotry for another, and replace Robert E. Lee’s statue with yet another icon. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo could outlast their own movement to become self-serving ends in themselves, forever lobbying the halls of Congress alongside the pharmaceutical reps and union leaders and other captains of industry. The movements could cease to move; and we know from experience that, as soon as they stop, they ossify into yet another power structure; they stagnate into a swamp. \n\nListen to the story of the small band of plucky colonists who cast off the shackles of a tyrannical British monarchy; hear it echo through the years. In its refrain, we find similar battles unfolding- in towns torn apart by drone strikes and streaked with the dead children we’ve classified as collateral damage, in export processing zones where contractor loopholes allow the legal enslavement of workers- though, this time, the revolt is against the shackles of American imperialism. \n\nIt is our duty to forever reexamine who we are, what we stand for, and what we’re becoming. When we don’t, we punch protestors in the name of free speech; we torture prisoners in service of the rule of law; we invade and murder in the spirit of liberation. \n\nNot fulfilling this duty is our greatest danger as a people. Lately, the gods seem like the hydra, ready to replace each severed head with two more. Capitalism has failed us, so let us tear down the church of Capital, and from its rubble construct the Holy Church of Marx, with an adjacent monument to our patron St. Sanders, and we all shall feel the Bern, Amen. Donald Trump has allowed the swamp to proliferate, and dredged even worse monsters from its depths. He must be taken down, so let us stand and link arms with war criminals, and herald our saviors the FBI, the CIA, and George W. Bush. The enemies of my enemies are my friends! And Bush wasn’t so bad anyway, right? Mostly just a sweet old man who likes to paint.\n\nWhat failing memories we seem to have.\n\nThere are always new gods, new zealotries, ready to received the disillusioned into their open arms. As Rage Against the Machine and its lyricist Zack de la Rocha once brilliantly noted, “Hungry people don’t stay hungry for long.” \n\nWe can succumb to inertia and head for the stage to play out the tragedy once more. Or, we can climb atop the shoulders of these felled giants, to see a little farther: to a new paradigm.\n\nA new mythology, built not on the power of icons or systems, but on the more fundamental pillars of our humanity: reason and compassion.\n\nOur course is not set. We are not destined to serve the Old Gods, or the New; we can cast them off altogether, and enter a new age. An age where we no longer twist our brains into doublethink to cover for the failings and inconsistencies of our systems and leaders. Where every idea is supported only so long as it offers the best solution to a specific situation, is abandoned when it falters, and is never prescribed as a cure-all for problems beyond its scope.\n\nWhere the statues are torn down from the pedestals, and the pedestals are left bare.\n\nAn age of iconoclasm. \n<br>\n<br>\n<br>\n\n*Note: Ideas are a lot like ivy. If you find a strand and start to pull, you unearth an infinitely complex system of intertwining roots, and can quickly lose track of where you started. While I couldn’t even begin to do a full accounting of all the giants on whose shoulders I attempt to stand, I’d be remiss if I didn’t credit a few major influences on my thoughts here: the philosophy of Ken Vallario and his ideas about systems and gods; the model agnosticism of Robert Anton Wilson; Susan Sontag’s masterful essays; the journalism of Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill, and loads of other great reporters at The Intercept; and Dr. Cornel West, yet another great thinker in a long line of civil rights leaders like Dr. King and Malcolm X, who never stopped speaking truth to power. I cite them not to inflate my own work or ego, but to simply encourage you to seek them out, and to keep thinking.",
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      "title": "Pooping in Japan: October",
      "body": "<center>Pooping in Japan is a continuing essay series. To start from the first post, click here: https://steemit.com/travel/@jeunebug/pooping-in-japan </center>\n\n![IMG_0074.JPG](https://steemitimages.com/DQmT9J9WAEpu5AFskr6Nr5ruFMmXtrxqo6eg82Sspn2wvRk/IMG_0074.JPG)\n\n<br>\n<center><b>October</b></center>\n<br>\n\nOkay, okay, <i>okay.</i> I <i>hear</i> ya. I’ll wake up!\n\nAt this point, you’re maybe scratching your head and asking, <i>to whom am I speaking?</i>\n\nCan’t say I know his name, but it’s that son of a bitch who’s been working on the railroad all the live long day. You know the guy; one of Dinah’s friends.\n\nLet me explain.\n\nIn Japan, public service announcements take the public bit very seriously. Vehicles frequently cruise through town, blasting various announcements from loudspeakers propped up on the roof. And every few city blocks, mounted high atop a pole, there’s another stationary set, ready to broadcast whatever message the government deems necessary to relay.\n\nSometimes, it’s to warn us of the impending landfall of a typhoon. Sometimes, it’s to warn us that North Korea is sending yet another missile our way.\n\nAnd sometimes- er, no, I’m sorry. I misspoke there.\n\nAnd <i> every fucking morning at 8 a.m.,</i> it’s to play bright, jangling chimes to the melody of <i>I’ve Been Working on the Railroad</i>, to lull any stragglers out of their warm cocoon of sleep and into the day. And that’s about where you caught me on that little intro back there.\n\nThis is one of those things that some people will assume I made up, until they ruminate on it for a moment and realize it’s way too random and strange to be a fabrication- not unlike the street sweepers that used to brush down my street in Hunan, blaring a jangling, MIDI-esque rendition of Celine Dion’s <i>My Heart Will Go On</i> (also too weird to not be true).\n\nAs I wrote that first bit about the unnamed narrator of the song, I found my curiosity piqued; is there an actual known author for that obnoxious ditty? Or, like so much American folk music, does a trace of its origins simply dead end in some mysterious community tucked away in the Appalachian foothills?\n\nThat lead me to the <i>I’ve Been Working on the Railroad</i> Wikipedia page, where I discovered the following section:\n\n<b>Popularity in Japan</b>\n\n“An adaptation of this song is a very familiar nursery rhyme in Japan, with the same melody and roughly the same subject matter, but with a different title and different lyrics. It is known as \"Senro wa tsuzuku yo doko made mo (線路は続くよどこまでも)\", meaning ‘The railroad continues forever’.”\n\nWell, if that last bit ain’t just the perfect metaphor for starting your workday.\n\nIt’s actually a relief to have some validation on this, as previously, the melody caused me an unsettling sensation of dissociation; how am I experiencing something that so obviously doesn’t belong in this culture? There’s a term for this: <i>anatopism</i>, something out of its proper place (related to <i>anachronism</i>, for something out of its proper time). It’s like that feeling you get as a kid, when you see one of your teachers out in public for the first time. Or that feeling I get as an adult, whenever I see Donald Trump in the White House.\n\nIn addition to playing this song every morning (read: <i>every</i> morning, including weekends), they also broadcast little jingles at noon and 5 p.m., apparently to communicate that it’s time to eat lunch and time to leave work, respectively. Though since the Japanese are well known for marathon work days that often last well beyond 7 p.m., that last jingle is really more salt in the wound than anything else.\n\nBrandon ver. 29 would have reprimanded me for any complaining. “You’re whining about being woken up at <i>8 a.m.</i>!? Do you realize I still have to wake up by 4:45?”\n\nOh, past Brandon. All I can say is: it gets better. And I say that to all past Brandons: the one waking up at 4:45, the one with the bowl cut getting bullied on the bus, the one discussing hidden GF summons in Final Fantasy VIII and trading anime VHS videos with his friends at the lunch table (he’s about to be bullied on the bus, arguably for good reason), the one painting his collection of Warhammer 40k miniatures-\n\nEr, Present Brandon? What are you doing there?\n\nI also say: It’s <i>October</i>! <i>(Editor’s note: well, it was when I wrote it)</i> We should <i>all</i> be sleeping in a little later. If you aren’t up every night, under the covers and reading Lovecraft into the wee hours, you’re missing the point!\n\nSpeaking of: I can’t write an October entry without spending some time discussing the quintessential October holiday.\n\nThat’s right. I’m talking about Sports Day.\n\nSports Day is basically what we Americans call Field Day, except for the fact that this is Asia. In Asia, every public event gets turned up to eleven. For those of you only familiar with the typical American assortment of sloppy relay races and a few popsicles at the end, allow me to enlighten you.\n\nThe Sports Day celebration of physical activity and athletic prowess is a meticulously scheduled, strictly regimented, and fairly formal affair, though with a few moments of levity thrown in. It is overseen by the school oversight board, all in business attire, and opens with three separate speeches: from the school director, the former school director, and the leader of the PTA. These speeches are followed by words of encouragement from the teachers, the rest of the parents, and yours truly, whom they goaded out on stage at the last second. I fumbled through a phrase I’d overheard earlier in the morning, and am pretty sure I wished the kids good luck in the competition- though considering the piss-poor state of my pronunciation, it’s also equally likely that  I exclaimed, “This is an occasion for stomach cancer!”\n \n\nBefore I continue, let me briefly describe this particular school- and I say particular, as I am currently employed as an extracurricular English specials teacher, and travel between nine different schools each week. This particular school is Wakakusa, and is a nursery/kindergarten, with students aged three through five.\n\nThree through five.\n\nI taught kindergarten in the U.S., and know from experience what students that young are doing in school by early October: they’re tottering around, cropdusting the classroom with their milk farts and crying over who’s sitting in whose color square on the carpet, before nodding off and pissing themselves while their teacher reads aloud “The Kissing Hand” for the sixth time.\n\nMeanwhile, in Japan…\n\nCue the kids.\n\nA snap and rattle of snares heralded the marching rows of three-year-olds, moving in lockstep, their hands planted on the kid in front of them. They snaked through the parents thronged around the field, and as they made their way into the middle, out came the four-year-olds, serving as the school color guard, all smiles and twirling flags. \n\nAnd then, the five-year-olds arrived, and the snares grew louder as the drum line marched in. At the same moment, four kids broke away from the pack, taking their positions at a line of amped keyboards behind the stage, and began playing a melody in unison. \n\nAll the kids, from three to five, were in the same blue and yellow military-style uniform. Except one. His name is Shin, though henceforth I’ll refer to him as the fuckin’ ADMIRAL, because that’s how they dressed him, and damned if he didn’t own that rank with every expert twirl of the baton.\n\nThe five -year olds marched around, threading their way through the other assembled kids, never failing to adhere to the sharp, angular path dictated by the white lines pre-painted across the field. \n\nThe snares cut off, the keyboards faded away, and the fuckin’ ADMIRAL took the stage, to give a short motivational speech to his peers. After a round of applause, Sports Day was officially under way!\n\nThe first event began with a surge of frantic techno exploding from the speakers, and set the tone for the day’s soundtrack. For the next four hours, it mainly oscillated between two types of music: the upbeat synthesizer instrumentals familiar to players of late 80’s/early 90’s arcade side-scroller beat-‘em-ups (particularly the third stage themes, when you’re desperately piloting a vehicle through the endless hazards of some sewer or tunnel or other enclosed space); or, the occasional vocal track, which I’m assuming were television show melodies, as they sounded like someone fed Alvin and the Chipmunks a bunch of meth amphetamines and forced them to sing in Japanese along to cartoon theme songs sped up 2x normal speed.\n\nAnd of course, in the midst of these oscillations, there was the occasional inexplicable outlier, like the main theme of the Harry Potter films playing during the grandparents’ relay race.\n\nYes, a grandparents relay! Because while the bulk of the tug-of-wars and hurdle races were competitions for the kids, Sports Day also included plenty of fun for the adults.\n\nThis was first made apparent to me when Touko Sensei, the Wakakusa principal, approached me at my seat in the faculty tent.\n\n“Do you want to run?” She asked, pumping her arms wildly at her sides in an imitation of the action. Despite having the best English of all my various employers, she’s seemingly the least confident in her abilities, and always accompanies her speech by animatedly gesturing.\n\n“Me? Oh… do the teachers run, too?”\n\n“Yes,” she nodded. “Come here please,” she said with a smile, and lead the way to a group of men laughing and stretching beside the starting line. I tried to make sense of it. It wasn’t a teacher race; the only other male teacher at Wakakusa is the gym teacher, and he was busy running the show. That meant it was a… dad race? So what the fuck was I doing there? Was Maury about to pop out from behind the podium and exclaim, “Yes, you ARE the father!”\n\n“Here,” Touko Sensei said, pointing at the line.\n\n“Okay, what do I do?”\n\n“Just wait please. They’ll explain.” And with that, she was gone. The other men lined up, three to my left, and the rest behind. Okay, so we’ve got four teams here, but... What was the goal? I surveyed the field, and saw a box of deflated balloons, a blue gymnastics mat, a table with cups and a pitcher of some carbonated liquid, another blue mat, and a succession of hula hoops laid flat.\n\nThank god they were giving instructions. Because I didn’t have a fucking clue.\n\nThat’s when the gym teacher stepped out into the center of the field, and began explaining the tasks. In Japanese.\n\nThat was no surprise, of course. I expected nothing else, as I am, after all, <i>in</i> Japan. But I guess I was hoping for a little more of the Touko Sensei-style gesturing to help me make sense of that random assortment. I looked behind me. Why was I in the front? If I could at least move to second in line and watch what goes down in the first group…\n\nBut it was too late. The runners beside me tensed, my heart leapt, and, just before he pulled the trigger on the starter gun, the gym teacher locked eyes with me, and smiled. And in that moment, I knew, deep down, that he knew exactly what position I was in. And he knew I knew that he knew, and for whatever reason, seemed thrilled about it.\n\nBANG!\n\nI barreled ahead with the others, then stopped short at the box of balloons,  watching what the men next to me did with them. Blowing them up, okay… kinda figured that… Yep, got it, so now I- no, they weren’t tying theirs off, they were… holding them to their butts? Okay, got mine behind me, then- POP! Ah, okay, supposed to sit on them- POP! And we were off again!\n\nAnd so the race unfolded; me, racing ahead with all the rest of my male peers and blundering into a series of bewildering ordeals, with no idea of how to deal with them other than to emulate the guys around me. It was less a relay race, and more a reenactment of puberty.\n\nI hula hooped, I chugged that strange carbonated concoction, I somersaulted across the blue mat, and, as I leapt across the finish line, solidly in last place, a member of the PTA congratulated me, and handed me a box of tissues.\n\nSolid award, though I personally think that when you ask a group of (primarily) fathers to perform certain physical activities, the consolation prize should be nothing short of a quick check-up with a chiropractor; my back hurt for three days after that goddamn somersault, because I turned 30 in August and I guess that’s the kind of shit that happens to me now.\n\nThe rest of the day was the typical series of activities combining the competitive and the ridiculous. Parents and children donned chicken hats and ran parent-child relays. The teachers emptied out a bin of at least two hundred balls, the student body split into two teams, and for three minutes the field erupted in frenetic fire as they all attempted to throw as many balls as possible into one of two color-coded baskets mounted atop a pole. There were piñatas, though not the fragile, papier-mâché  things I’m used to; instead, it was two giant metal bowls duct taped together to form a sphere. The kids once against unleashed indiscriminate fire, this time in the form of small bean bags, in an attempt to jostle the sphere enough so that the duct tape worked loose and released all the confetti inside. Now, a piñata is a lot like a game of Monopoly: it’s an activity usually suggested by a bored familiarity disguising itself as tradition, and it always takes way longer than you think it will; even when you manage to finish, it’s more out of necessity than fun.\n\nThat said, this piñata took particularly long; I clocked it at just over six minutes. That may not be a long time when everyone is just lounging around, watching one blindfolded kid tepidly swing a stick; when it’s 120 kids running and chucking bean bags as fast as possible, six minutes is a marathon. When the sphere finally broke, the applause was out of pure relief; a passerby catching a glimpse of those exhausted kids splayed out on the field would assume there was either a massive carbon monoxide leak on the school grounds, or the zombie virus had just broken out amongst nursery school kids.\n\nAnd of course, in between all of these events: LOTS of synchronized dancing. \n\nMy experience with pageants and school events in Asia is that they view synchronized dancing as a sort of entertainment sherbet; interspersed throughout the speeches and competitive time trails and occasional sketch comedy, the audience needs a little palate cleanser of spinning and waving children set to song.\n\nSometimes the synchronized dancing is just kids. Sometimes it’s kids with their teachers. Sometimes it’s kids with parents. Then with their grandparents. Then kids again. Then just teachers.\n\nSports Day does kinda drag on. That said, aside from the brief foray onto the obstacle course, I was in genuine comfort for most of the day. Touko Sensei caught me early on in the morning, soon after I had arrived. I was mingling about in the crowds of parents, making laborious (Japanese… still not there), simple conversation and high-fiving kids. But she insisted I follow her to the tent, and set me up with a seat just behind the besuited board of directors. And every time I stood to walk around, stretch, or leave the tent, she seemed to find me, gently press a bottled beverage into my hands, and insist I take a rest.\n\nThere wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and by noon all the direct sun had made the field damned hot. Parents fanned themselves and sweated on their blankets and canvas camping chairs.\n\nMeanwhile, I sat seated on my cool, shaded throne like the fucking King of Siam, flanked by bottles of green tea and lemon water, half expecting palace sycophants to gather around and start fanning me with palm fronds. A gaunt, lecherous character with a hunched walk and a black hooded robe would approach the throne, bearing news and intrigue.\n\n“Chamberlain, <i>chamberlain</i>!” I’d call, in a nasally, whinnying cadence, beckoning him closer with a limp-wristed wave. “How go the trials?”\n\nThis illustrates a greater trend that many foreigners experience in Asia: special treatment. People here take hosting duties very seriously, and on the numerous occasions I’ve been invited into people’s homes, I’ve been treated to lavish dinners, given various gifts, and generally forbidden from anything that would reduce my personal level of comfort. They’ll give me the comfiest slippers, the nicest seat in the living room. They’ll pull out <i>all</i> the snacks, and arrange them closest to me. And if I rise to, say, throw away a piece of trash or transport a dirty dish out of the dining room, there’s suddenly someone blocking my path with the Heisman stiff arm, shaking their head and insisting I relax.\n\nThese are very difficult situations to navigate. It’s an obsequious sort of hospitality that, as an American, I am not accustomed to. Additionally, it makes me uncomfortable because I’m generally not one to kowtow to anybody myself; and the older I get, the less willing I am to show deference to anything, be it human, god, or political institution (“Wait, with that last one, you meant human again, right? Because corporations are people.” -U.S. Supreme Court).  \n\nDon’t conflate deference with kindness. It’s a pretty muddy area where distinctions are hard, but for me, Americans are plenty hospitable and kind without running into that deferential territory, whereas here, the general style of hospitality seems excessively submissive. I feel like a piece of shit being waited on, as if I’m conceding the fact that, <i>yes, as a foreign dignitary, this is what I require.</i> My genes carry the weight of historical memory; I am that awful combination of the two most despicable groups to ever commandeer the planet: white and man. What, it ain’t enough that I’m running shit back home, with every institution orchestrating my special treatment? Ain’t enough I’ve got the tendrils of my empire slithering across every continent, spreading military bases like herpes and shooting missiles into children’s hospitals in Yemen? (Gotta keep that homeland safe!) Ain’t enough that I can travel most of the world with ease, because most cultures are required to learn <i>my</i> language?\n\nAll that, and now I’m gonna come here, sit in grandpa’s favorite armchair and eat all the grapes?\n\nSo every time I accept a kindness, it’s with both gratitude and self-criticism. I generally try to accept kindness while also communicating that it isn’t necessary and I don’t feel entitled to it, but with such insistent hospitality you run the risk of having to decline too strongly and thus come off as ungrateful. It’s a tough balance; to quote the great Johnny Cash: “I walk the line.”\n\nTo illustrate: some of my schools provide lunch, and on nice days, the teachers string up some tarps for a makeshift cover across the patios, and the kids eat outside. Not <i>Brandon Sensei</i>, though. They guide him into the office, and set down the lunch tray at a table directly across from a fan. And then they go back outside. Brandon Sensei tries to communicate that no, it’s okay, he’s fine sitting outside, but they say no, no, it’s too hot for you. And not knowing how to proceed, Brandon Sensei just smiles, nods, says thank you a few times, and stays sitting at the table. All during lunch, he can see the entire rest of the school outside, managing a meal in the sun just fine. And then the principal comes down the hall from some business upstairs, looks from Brandon Sensei, to the kids outside, to Brandon Sensei again, widens his eyes, and with a smile, says, “Too hot, huh?” And Brandon Sensei feels like the snowiest snowflake in the world.\n\nSo next time, when lunch is served, Brandon Sensei is resolved. He helps set up the tents and serve the food outside, and makes sure he snags his own tray before someone serves it to him. He finds a spot in the direct sun, and sits down to a very smiley lunch with the kids, with every facial expression and mannerism hoping to communicate how much he’s enjoying the lunch. And again, the principal finds his way outside from some other business, and on catching a glimpse of Brandon Sensei, gasps, and starts clapping. “Not too hot for you! You okay!” And he gets some of the kids to clap along; soon, Brandon Sensei, a grown-ass man, is being treated to a round of applause for having the fortitude to eat a bowl of noodles in the sun.\n\nAnd again, he feels like the snowiest fucking snowflake in the whole fucking world.\n\nLunch, though. Whoa.\n\nWhen I monitored school lunch in the U.S., it was basically thirty minutes of me watching the kids like a hawk, preventing would-be bag poppers and food throwers from turning the table into a Jackson Pollock painting. It was a cacophony of conflict: <i>she stuck her finger in my sandwich, they stole my Cheetos, he said my momma looks like</i> Rosa Parks! (actual quote) And I can recall my own time as a student, and the chaos of my own school’s lunchroom; wild animals hanging around a Serengeti watering hole tend to have more order.\n\nBut Japanese kids? Lunch with them is positively serene.\n\nFirst, there’s no bitching about food choices, like having to eat a chicken patty because there’s no pizza left; every kid gets the same serving of noodles, and soup, and pear, or whatever is being served that day. As a group, the kids arrange the wooden crates and floor mats that serve as their tables and chairs. As a group, they pass out all the food, carefully, and quietly. And as a group, they all wait patiently, no one touching their food, until the three students elected for duty that day assemble at the front and lead a short, sing-song “prayer” of sorts (still don’t know all its contents, but what I’ve gathered so far generally involves being thankful for having food to eat, and inviting one another to enjoy it).\n\nAnd after that, everyone begins eating, and the peaceful trend largely continues for the remainder. In fact, there’s really only one aspect to lunch that anyone might find remotely objectionable:\n\nMayonnaise. \n\nLots and lots of mayonnaise.\n\nI’m not one to object, because I like mayonnaise. For some reason though, it tends to get other people going; my sister writes a food blog (https://thepotatopantry.com) </siblingpromotion> and recently observed that, for whatever reason, a lot of us have strong opinions about mayonnaise. She’s absolutely right; I can recall a number of times that my own use of it has incited pure, unfiltered revulsion from fellow eaters.\n\nAnd I really don’t get the mayo hate. I can’t think of any other condiment that allows for such emotional expression. I would never, say, lean over someone’s shoulder and start dry heaving as they squirt mustard along their hot dog, or approach some poor steak eater and remark, “You’re putting A-1 on that? FUCK you.”\n\nBut you won’t face any negativity here in Japan. Japanese people love mayonnaise; a quick perusal of any grocery store’s deli and prepared foods section will offer a wide selection of various “salads” which are generally just one or two ingredients drenched in mayonnaise: sliced lotus root in mayonnaise, cucumbers in mayonnaise, noodles and shredded carrot in mayonnaise. \n\nYes, I’ve tried some of them. \n\nAnd yes, I liked them. \n\nSo sometimes the school lunches also feature a mayo-heavy dish; on that particular day when I bravely faced the sun for the first time, we were treated to what was essentially mayonnaise soup, with some tomatoes and a few other various veggies thrown it.\n\nHayato, the kid across from me, was literally slurping that shit out of the bowl.\n\nAgain, I’m all about mayo, but even <i>I</i> was like, “Whoa there, Hoss, easy on the ‘naise!”\n\nHmm.\n\nOkay, so I was trying to switch things up, as you can only interchange the words mayonnaise and mayo in a single entry so many times before both become repetitive. \n\nThat said, I don’t think <i>‘naise</i> is gonna happen.\n\nAnd now I’m about to discuss heaven, and you should take my thoughts with a grain of salt; no, in fact, take them with a pillar. Think Lot’s wife.\n\nYou remember, right? God turned her into salt because she had the <i>nerve</i> to look at the city of Sodom. But hey, it all worked out right? Because Lot got to be a free and easy single fella again, and get a lil’ wild from time to time- you know, like that time he got black-out drunk and fucked his own daughters?\n\n-Brought to you by the book that people still actually swear upon during court testimonies and presidential inaugurations\n\nIn short, take my thoughts on heaven as what they are: the opinions of someone with no experience or belief in the subject. It’s like interviewing Keith Richards about the benefits of moderate alcohol consumption, or asking Joel Schumacher to discuss what makes a great Batman film.\n\nHeaven must have tiers. Even if you limit membership as most believers like to do, and only, say, let the Christians in, one type of heaven still could not possibly satisfy all the various hopes people in that group are pinning on the afterlife. Some hip youth pastor who snowboards for Jesus probably won’t be as stoked on heaven if it turns out to be a dismal monastery with mandated silence, interspersed with periods of fasting and self-flagellation. Similarly, what is a 9th-century Benedictine Monk to do if that eleven-year-old girl who just tragically died in a car accident is right, and heaven is all Justin Bieber concerts and pizza party sleepovers?\n\nThat last joke most likely only serves to show how out of touch I am with the actual interests of this current generation of hypothetical eleven-year-old girls who tragically died in car accidents.\n\nOf course, there’s also always the possibility that all of them are wrong, and Belinda Carlisle was right all along: Heaven is a Place on Earth.\n\nEven if you imagine it as a monolithic skyrise or other massive complex divided into thematic wings, it’s hard to imagine a place that could group souls accordingly and still manage to keep them happy. The floor for musicians dead at 27 seems like a sensible arrangement when you think about Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison all hanging out, but makes less sense when you realize that illustrious group also includes Reba McEntire’s former keyboardist and a member of the Malaysian pop group SPIN.\n\nSimilarly, if there’s a section for those who died young due to reckless behavior, it’s hard to imagine where those dead of a mayonnaise-induced cardiac arrest belong. They have to try and fit in with a group largely composed of base jumpers and freedivers and James Dean.\n\nMaking their way along the refreshments table, they may try to start up a conversation with the grizzled, bearded guy ladling out a cup of punch. “Hey, so… What are you in for?”\n\nHe turns, and grunts, “Motorcycle accident. Hell’s Angels. You?”\n\n“Er… Hellman’s.”\n\nRight now, Japan has the highest proportion of centenarians in the world. But if these mayo trends continue…  well, just keep an eye on those statistics, is all I’m saying.\n\nWhich I’ll use to segue into my final topic for today: healthcare.\n\nNow, perhaps you Americans (I don’t think I’m wrong to assume you’re the bulk of my reader base) are uninterested in what healthcare looks like in other countries; after all, you’re surely living the high life now and enjoying that awesome, cheaper, better healthcare that Donald Trump promised during his campaign.\n\nThen again, you may overhear something on the media landscape about “single payer”; or, perhaps you’ll catch a glimpse of one of those statistics floating around, like the U.S.A. has the largest health expenditure per capita of any country in the world, but has the fifth-highest under-five mortality rate among OECD countries, and is ranked 37th by the WHO in terms of overall health system performance. In case any of these ideas make you stop and wonder about the veracity of that congressperson’s hollered claim that our system is the best in the world, I’m going to offer a brief anecdote.\n\nI currently live in a country with universal health care. I pay a low monthly premium based on my last year’s income, and when I visit a doctor, I cover 30% of the costs of any medical service I require; the government foots the bill for the other 70%. My prescription costs 1/6th what it did in America. And I’ve been to the doctor twice, and received some of the best care I’ve ever had in my life.\n\n<i>Bet there was a wait!</i> someone asserts.\n\nYes; the doctor saw me six minutes after my appointment time on my first visit, and fourteen minutes after my appointment time on my second visit. Not bad, especially considering some of the marathon sessions I’ve sat out in waiting rooms in the past. In an ideal world, I suppose the doctor always sees you right at the appointed time. If you ever visit that world, tell Plato I said what’s up.\n\n<i>Well, if it’s so fast, the quality has to be low.</i> \n\nThe WHO ranks Japan number one in the world in attainment of healthcare goals. In terms of overall system performance, it’s sitting pretty at twenty-seven spots higher than America. It has the sixth-lowest rate of under-five mortality among OECD countries, and, as I mentioned before, the largest proportion of centenarians of any country on earth. Sure, correlation is not causation, and other factors, like diet and overall lifestyle contribute to those stats. That said, the healthcare system seems to be serving them all just fine.\n\nFor my own personal visit, I found the doctor to be caring and thorough to an almost excessive degree. At one point during our initial consultation, he apologized profusely; he was not a registered spiritual counselor, and could not give me the emotional support that he believed necessary when receiving healthcare. Bowing in an apparent bid for understanding, he promised to give the best pure medical care, and refer me to a specialist who could help with my spiritual journey.\n\nI thanked him excessively, and said I appreciated his concern. It certainly threw me off; I’ve attended church services with pastors who were less concerned with the state of my soul than this medical doctor.\n\nIt was then time for the examination. He gestured for me to lie back on the table. All through this visit, he was communicating with me via a slow, stilted, but generally very clear English. I’d been lucky enough to find this awesome non-profit, Japan Healthcare Info (japanhealthinfo.com), that can help you find and set up an appointment with an English-speaking doctor anywhere in Japan, and if you pay for their travel and time, they’ll even send a translator to accompany you on your doctor visit to help you fill out paperwork. Through them, I found my guy, who had spent two years studying in Syracuse, New York.\n\nHe looked down at me, waiting patiently. And then, politely, but also as if I was missing an obvious instruction, he said, “Your penis, please.”\n\n“Oh. Uh, right.” So I pulled down my pants and let him go about investigating. He <i>hmmm</i>’ed to himself, walked away, retrieved something from his desk drawer, and came back bearing a ruler.\n\nAfter lining it up alongside my fella and muttering something to himself, he turned to me. “We use… centi<i>meters</i>. I… don’t know your size in… feet.”\n\nComplete honesty: I haven’t measured that part of myself since sometime back in the final, waning days of puberty. While I could <i>ball</i>park it (eh?), off the top of my head I couldn’t give a completely accurate measure of what’s happening down there.\n\nThat said, I’m still an easy conversion to feet: zero. Doc, if I had a penis that measured in feet, I'd either be a porn star or a murderer- or perhaps some overlap of the two, for those who are into those kinds of films. There is literally nothing else I could be doing.\n\n<i>Wait- quick, quality care, available to everyone, and at a relatively low personal cost? And they even throw in a free dick measurement? Sorry, Charlie, ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. That must be costing the government an arm and a leg.</i>\n\nSure- but not as much as it’s costing the U.S. government; Japan spends less than half as much as the U.S., and seems to be getting a lot more for it. Turns out helping keep people alive is a win for everybody. Who’d-a thunk, eh?\n\nAll of that to say: I get it. I have a fiery libertarian streak in me too, and I can see where the opponents are coming from with their talk of smaller government; when you look at our government’s track record, those people seem to come off as the more sensible types by affording it as little trust as possible. \n\nAnd a lot of them stick to those principles- even when giving in a little might mean net gains for everyone involved. It’s like that one teacher who has you sweating bullets and studying your ass off for three straight weeks leading up to a brain-crushing final exam. And then, as the test booklets are passed out, your teacher adds, “Also, I’ve decided to make this test open book.” A collective gasp. “With one stipulation: EVERYone has to use their book. Or else, no one can.”\n\nAfter the applause and cries of joy subside, everyone starts pulling out their textbooks. Except for your one friend, sitting across from you. He stares fixedly at his test booklet, but has not retrieved his textbook from his school bag. \n\n<i>“Pssst!”</i> You whisper. “Hey! It’s open book! Why aren’t you looking at yours? We all have an opportunity here to perform vastly better as a group, with no negative personal cost!”\n\nHe turns to face you. “Sorry,” he says, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “It goes against my principles.”\n\nAll I’m saying is, in the time it took you all to debate whether the individual mandate infringed on your personal liberty, thousands more Japanese centenarians attended thousands more grandchildren’s fifth birthday parties.\n\nI’m gonna leave it there this month. \n\nUntil next time~ <(^-^)>",
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      "body": "@@ -11,10 +11,10 @@\n o su\n-m\n b\n+m\n it %22\n",
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      "body": "I'd like to sumbit \"Uninvited\" for an honorable mention. It was another fantastic point-and-click adventure for the Mac from the mid-80's. The memory of the first time I got the attention of \"the mysterious lady\" still haunts me to this day...",
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