How Bob Vila and Feng Shui Affectively Stole Our Mojo
Part of the appeal of undertaking so-called “real man’s work” is that I can allow myself to feign that belligerent voice that I believe lies deep in the primortial soul of all men, we hunters and gatherers. The voice sounds something like this: “Unless Feng Shui is some sort of black-belted ass-kicker from the Orient, single handedly capable of rearranging the features of my face, he can take his home decorating concepts and do you know what with them.”
However, the tone in which I choose to write this entry is of the mojo-less schmuck of a man I’ve become, sensitive to the needs of not only my better half, but, of the Home Improvement Establishment on the whole, a cabal that has hobbled all the pure intent and ingenuity that tinkering types like me used to have before the likes of Bob Vila got on TV to tell us we were doing it all wrong.
My home improvement project at the moment is to do something with the veritable cord of thick wood planks stacked six high in front of our humble bungalow by Sagami Bay, Japan. And do something with it quick. I’ve learned that living in this land of limited space and time, every home project embarked upon—diminutive to dwarfing—married men, like myself, are behooved to abide by the rules of a unique time paradigm I define as the thin red line between bliss and divorce. Or should my wife grammatically model the maxim, it might look something like this: “get it done ASAP, or else."
I digress.
A pile of wood obstructing the flow of chi, goods, and services in and out of an otherwise yin and yangly balanced home is certainly not seen as an eyesore fit for the set of Sanford & Son, rather an inspiration for wannabe-carpenter husbands the world over. But for those of our race, on the black paisley side of the Taijitu coin—the feminine “yin” side, as it is—such sites are the bane of the wives of us yangs, unable to grasp the metaphysical potential of what looks to them nothing more than an unsightly pile of stinky wood. While women see a stack of sea-soaked wood, stain, and tools near their doorway as the antithesis of Feng Shui, most men would see it as a painter might: a fresh canvas and palette: that yang-shaped tray loaded with assorted colors. Equipped with these materials, a man has the potential to paint the next Mona Lisa or, in my case, create the Eighth New Wonder of the World, if I may be so humble.
Let’s face it, were it not for the great painters of the world, the walls of the Louvre would be decorated by Martha Stewart, and not by the likes of Rembrandt and DiVinchi. And speaking of the Louvre—as great a place as it is—it ain’t gonna win any Feng Shui awards. In fact, for years, the glass and steel pyramid plopped incongruently in front of the stately stature of the famed museum was seen as an eyesore to many in the “Establishment”. To my eye, however, the Louve Pyramid is pure genius, breaking the rigid geometrical rules of centuries-old architectural conformity.
Feng Shui aside, I see the merit in getting my home projects done in a timely manner, for no nobler reason than to stay a married man. Nevertheless, some projects simply can’t be rushed for any reason. Just ask the generations of artisans assigned to the perpetual building of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, the Roman Catholic basilica that has been under constant construction since 1882.
I will often resort to such absurd, theology-based trivia to create appeals for extensions of grace periods for home projects undertaken, but almost always overshoot, either temporally or budgetarily. “Honey,” I will plead with my wife, ”for the love of God, Jesus was a carpenter,” or “Sweetie, do you think Noah bought his ark at Costco?” absentmindedly forgetting her Buddhist roots for a time-biding, albeit futile and brief reprieve. Notwithstanding, for the project at hand, I cited that the beloved 11-headed Hase-Kannon Buddha in our town of Kamakura was intricately and painstakenly carved from one massive camphor tree only to be thrown into the sea, allowing the forces of nature determine the deity’s final resting place.
Invariably, songs and dances such as these buy me less than a millisecond of spare time to ride the aforementioned paradigm, as I agonizingly watch the Bliss/Divorce needle dip deeper and deeper into the D end of the gauge with every metered tap of my wife’s right foot. There’s little time nor space to stall; the benevolence of Buddhism is an illusion; Mrs. Kubo has not the fortitude to wait for my pile of planks to be divinely reincarnated into a glorious deck extension by some miraculous act of god or deity, much less some false prophet like me. It’s either I build the goddamn deck as promised, and with my own mortal blood, sweat and tears, or start writing my personal Internet ad. An ultimatum I can work with OK, but not before I finish writing this journal entry.
Part II: With Typhoon as Medium, Feng Shui Speaks to Me
The aftermath of a recent typhoon was my muse, the storm having pounded the coast all night, left behind incalculable sums of detritus, strewn up and down Kamakura beaches like a tickertape parade for unsung heroes far and wide: Beachcombers and Scavengers of the World, a group of which I’m a proud member.
Three days ago while on a post-storm reconnaissance mission, I spied what appeared to be a wall or deck previously attached to one of the many temporary beach huts that dot Japan’s summer coastline. “Umi no ie” (lit. beach houses) provide services for the beach-going hoards, ranging from hot showers and coin lockers to food and drink. Come September One these summer shanties disappear like hermit crabs, as workers dismantle and haul away the deconstructed structures. For many, this annual undertaking marks the sad end of summer, but a swell new start for some, as fodder fit for beachcombers and fathers alike comes up for grabs, some of it quite irresistible.
Should a typhoon coincide with these end-of-summer mop-ups, lots of “home improvement opportunities” are left in her wake. In my particular experience, rather than see long sturdy planks of premium wood go to waste, or go through the age-long process of becoming true driftwood, I felt the primal urge to scavenge. And scavenge I did, ecstatically, extension-of-deck blueprints unfolding between the folds of my mind.
The planks had festooned themselves over a concrete runnel leading to the sea, looking much like one of many whimsical driftwooden sculptures hippie artists of the 70s used to build on the wetlands of Emeryville, an area off the Eastshore Freeway leading to the cantilever section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
30-some-odd years on, on the very opposite side of the Pacific Ocean, the “new hippie” author of this journal contemplates the logistics involved in transporting what looks like a 5.5-meter long, unfolded Japanese fan from the concrete runnel to his abode some one-half mile away. The section was in the hundreds of pounds, thus requiring some disassembly. So, with cordless drill, and handsaw in hand, I set off to salvage, in part, the remains of summer. Wife and kids came along to offer their support, and, I’m sure, to secretly enjoy the spectacle.
When I jumped atop the huge fan I soon sensed it was perched firmly atop only one side of the concrete runnel, resulting in a unwilling bending sensation not unlike standing on the end of a disused, sun-beaten diving board ready to snap any moment. From this somewhat unnervingly precarious position, I attempted to unscrew the planks from the weather-beaten joists only to find that most of the screws had been set too deep and too tight to remove smoothly. I tried various torque settings in an effort to reverse the screws without further striping the Phillips heads. Given their low-tensile strength—a mark of shoddy construction—the screw heads melted like butter, leaving them burrowed deep inside the planks and joists like a tick might leave its head in one’s skin after its body has been scratched away. Unexpectedly faced with having to craft Plan B, I determined I had to saw free the planked section from the cumbersome plank-free frame that constituted the main assembly, which, once free, would resemble a makeshift raft, that—in theory—would float freely to sea, but not before taking a 2-meter plunge into the murky runnel water below. After a fair amount of strategic cutting, the section finally cracked free, and, much to my 4-year-old son’s delight, splashed dramatically into the rivulet below.
Pops, too, now knee deep where the salty swell meets the dirty freshwater stream, finds a slimy, algae-covered rope, which he uses to fashion to the end of the raft, so as to guide it down the runnel and to the restless, seething, post-typhoon sea. Pleased to see his theory turn living practice, yet knowing things are going maybe a bit too smooth, perhaps sensing that kind of ominous calm before the storm (as seen depicted in countless natural disaster movies), Pop’s instincts tell him the toughest leg lay just ahead.
With all this sawing and tugging going on, I had attracted a fair amount of attention from fellow beachcombers and passersby: four young boys toting makeshift fishing poles, three high-heeled, college-aged girls from the city, and, of course, my family. I felt like Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway, wrestling an unwieldy and unseaworthy craft. Thank goodness the responsible parent beat out the romantic parent self, in that, had the Tom Hanks/Sawyer in me placed my son atop the raft, we would now be a family of three. “Kai!!!” (cf. “Wilson!!!”)
In the time it took me to free the planked section to when the stream met the sea, the tide swelled to waist level and the brine became a different animal altogether, something in the order of leviathan. The maiden voyage was smooth going down the runnel, but once beyond the breakwater, a wave from nowhere pounced on me like a liger (yes, a liger) would a mouse, mauling the raft in a capsizing seizure of sea foam. Granted, it was a swell that would have thrilled a surfer, but one that scared the pee out of me, as my imagination allowed me to virtually experience the near reality of my 500-pound, wave propelled, waterlogged behemoth taking my teeth out in one surging blow to the mouth.
Allowing the cold wave to slap some much-needed sense into me, I quickly got my sea legs and bearings straightened. Castaway Pops was back on course, en route to Sakanoshita, his end of the beach, one-half-mile due north.
With a fair amount of tugging to and fro, I finally beached her at the large concrete landing between the dank fishing nets folded in stacks tall as me, midst the alive and lifeless alike. I was, at this stage, among the half-dead.
Night fell quicker than curtains on a bad play, but not before splashing the dusk pastoral, with clouds arranged in gradations: orange to pink to pale gray.
Like personal lifeguards, wife and kids had walked the boardwalk to Sakanoshita, watching me, and our deck-to-be, every step of the way. And there, now, above the landing, three smiling faces greeting me with cheer.
Breathless, blistered, salty and wet, I beckon them down, algae-slimed rope still in the other hand. My son now standing atop raft, triumphantly, like Karate Kid practicing “the crane,” pointing to the evening sky that has turned the heavens into a halved blood orange, squeezing out the last of its acerbic light.
We stand there under the whiskey-sour sky, beholding the sunset, as I let the scene seep deep into my mind like paints taking foothold to canvas, drying. Long after the laughter and the setting of the sun, the moment stays framed, hanging there as it does, in the Louvre of my mind.
First there is a deck, then there is no deck, then there is! My mind, heart and mojo now realigned, and true to Feng Shui form, whoever the hell he is.
Kamakura
September 14, 2007
However, the tone in which I choose to write this entry is of the mojo-less schmuck of a man I’ve become, sensitive to the needs of not only my better half, but, of the Home Improvement Establishment on the whole, a cabal that has hobbled all the pure intent and ingenuity that tinkering types like me used to have before the likes of Bob Vila got on TV to tell us we were doing it all wrong.
My home improvement project at the moment is to do something with the veritable cord of thick wood planks stacked six high in front of our humble bungalow by Sagami Bay, Japan. And do something with it quick. I’ve learned that living in this land of limited space and time, every home project embarked upon—diminutive to dwarfing—married men, like myself, are behooved to abide by the rules of a unique time paradigm I define as the thin red line between bliss and divorce. Or should my wife grammatically model the maxim, it might look something like this: “get it done ASAP, or else."
I digress.
A pile of wood obstructing the flow of chi, goods, and services in and out of an otherwise yin and yangly balanced home is certainly not seen as an eyesore fit for the set of Sanford & Son, rather an inspiration for wannabe-carpenter husbands the world over. But for those of our race, on the black paisley side of the Taijitu coin—the feminine “yin” side, as it is—such sites are the bane of the wives of us yangs, unable to grasp the metaphysical potential of what looks to them nothing more than an unsightly pile of stinky wood. While women see a stack of sea-soaked wood, stain, and tools near their doorway as the antithesis of Feng Shui, most men would see it as a painter might: a fresh canvas and palette: that yang-shaped tray loaded with assorted colors. Equipped with these materials, a man has the potential to paint the next Mona Lisa or, in my case, create the Eighth New Wonder of the World, if I may be so humble.
Let’s face it, were it not for the great painters of the world, the walls of the Louvre would be decorated by Martha Stewart, and not by the likes of Rembrandt and DiVinchi. And speaking of the Louvre—as great a place as it is—it ain’t gonna win any Feng Shui awards. In fact, for years, the glass and steel pyramid plopped incongruently in front of the stately stature of the famed museum was seen as an eyesore to many in the “Establishment”. To my eye, however, the Louve Pyramid is pure genius, breaking the rigid geometrical rules of centuries-old architectural conformity.
Feng Shui aside, I see the merit in getting my home projects done in a timely manner, for no nobler reason than to stay a married man. Nevertheless, some projects simply can’t be rushed for any reason. Just ask the generations of artisans assigned to the perpetual building of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, the Roman Catholic basilica that has been under constant construction since 1882.
I will often resort to such absurd, theology-based trivia to create appeals for extensions of grace periods for home projects undertaken, but almost always overshoot, either temporally or budgetarily. “Honey,” I will plead with my wife, ”for the love of God, Jesus was a carpenter,” or “Sweetie, do you think Noah bought his ark at Costco?” absentmindedly forgetting her Buddhist roots for a time-biding, albeit futile and brief reprieve. Notwithstanding, for the project at hand, I cited that the beloved 11-headed Hase-Kannon Buddha in our town of Kamakura was intricately and painstakenly carved from one massive camphor tree only to be thrown into the sea, allowing the forces of nature determine the deity’s final resting place.
Invariably, songs and dances such as these buy me less than a millisecond of spare time to ride the aforementioned paradigm, as I agonizingly watch the Bliss/Divorce needle dip deeper and deeper into the D end of the gauge with every metered tap of my wife’s right foot. There’s little time nor space to stall; the benevolence of Buddhism is an illusion; Mrs. Kubo has not the fortitude to wait for my pile of planks to be divinely reincarnated into a glorious deck extension by some miraculous act of god or deity, much less some false prophet like me. It’s either I build the goddamn deck as promised, and with my own mortal blood, sweat and tears, or start writing my personal Internet ad. An ultimatum I can work with OK, but not before I finish writing this journal entry.
Part II: With Typhoon as Medium, Feng Shui Speaks to Me
The aftermath of a recent typhoon was my muse, the storm having pounded the coast all night, left behind incalculable sums of detritus, strewn up and down Kamakura beaches like a tickertape parade for unsung heroes far and wide: Beachcombers and Scavengers of the World, a group of which I’m a proud member.
Three days ago while on a post-storm reconnaissance mission, I spied what appeared to be a wall or deck previously attached to one of the many temporary beach huts that dot Japan’s summer coastline. “Umi no ie” (lit. beach houses) provide services for the beach-going hoards, ranging from hot showers and coin lockers to food and drink. Come September One these summer shanties disappear like hermit crabs, as workers dismantle and haul away the deconstructed structures. For many, this annual undertaking marks the sad end of summer, but a swell new start for some, as fodder fit for beachcombers and fathers alike comes up for grabs, some of it quite irresistible.
Should a typhoon coincide with these end-of-summer mop-ups, lots of “home improvement opportunities” are left in her wake. In my particular experience, rather than see long sturdy planks of premium wood go to waste, or go through the age-long process of becoming true driftwood, I felt the primal urge to scavenge. And scavenge I did, ecstatically, extension-of-deck blueprints unfolding between the folds of my mind.
The planks had festooned themselves over a concrete runnel leading to the sea, looking much like one of many whimsical driftwooden sculptures hippie artists of the 70s used to build on the wetlands of Emeryville, an area off the Eastshore Freeway leading to the cantilever section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
30-some-odd years on, on the very opposite side of the Pacific Ocean, the “new hippie” author of this journal contemplates the logistics involved in transporting what looks like a 5.5-meter long, unfolded Japanese fan from the concrete runnel to his abode some one-half mile away. The section was in the hundreds of pounds, thus requiring some disassembly. So, with cordless drill, and handsaw in hand, I set off to salvage, in part, the remains of summer. Wife and kids came along to offer their support, and, I’m sure, to secretly enjoy the spectacle.
When I jumped atop the huge fan I soon sensed it was perched firmly atop only one side of the concrete runnel, resulting in a unwilling bending sensation not unlike standing on the end of a disused, sun-beaten diving board ready to snap any moment. From this somewhat unnervingly precarious position, I attempted to unscrew the planks from the weather-beaten joists only to find that most of the screws had been set too deep and too tight to remove smoothly. I tried various torque settings in an effort to reverse the screws without further striping the Phillips heads. Given their low-tensile strength—a mark of shoddy construction—the screw heads melted like butter, leaving them burrowed deep inside the planks and joists like a tick might leave its head in one’s skin after its body has been scratched away. Unexpectedly faced with having to craft Plan B, I determined I had to saw free the planked section from the cumbersome plank-free frame that constituted the main assembly, which, once free, would resemble a makeshift raft, that—in theory—would float freely to sea, but not before taking a 2-meter plunge into the murky runnel water below. After a fair amount of strategic cutting, the section finally cracked free, and, much to my 4-year-old son’s delight, splashed dramatically into the rivulet below.
Pops, too, now knee deep where the salty swell meets the dirty freshwater stream, finds a slimy, algae-covered rope, which he uses to fashion to the end of the raft, so as to guide it down the runnel and to the restless, seething, post-typhoon sea. Pleased to see his theory turn living practice, yet knowing things are going maybe a bit too smooth, perhaps sensing that kind of ominous calm before the storm (as seen depicted in countless natural disaster movies), Pop’s instincts tell him the toughest leg lay just ahead.
With all this sawing and tugging going on, I had attracted a fair amount of attention from fellow beachcombers and passersby: four young boys toting makeshift fishing poles, three high-heeled, college-aged girls from the city, and, of course, my family. I felt like Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway, wrestling an unwieldy and unseaworthy craft. Thank goodness the responsible parent beat out the romantic parent self, in that, had the Tom Hanks/Sawyer in me placed my son atop the raft, we would now be a family of three. “Kai!!!” (cf. “Wilson!!!”)
In the time it took me to free the planked section to when the stream met the sea, the tide swelled to waist level and the brine became a different animal altogether, something in the order of leviathan. The maiden voyage was smooth going down the runnel, but once beyond the breakwater, a wave from nowhere pounced on me like a liger (yes, a liger) would a mouse, mauling the raft in a capsizing seizure of sea foam. Granted, it was a swell that would have thrilled a surfer, but one that scared the pee out of me, as my imagination allowed me to virtually experience the near reality of my 500-pound, wave propelled, waterlogged behemoth taking my teeth out in one surging blow to the mouth.
Allowing the cold wave to slap some much-needed sense into me, I quickly got my sea legs and bearings straightened. Castaway Pops was back on course, en route to Sakanoshita, his end of the beach, one-half-mile due north.
With a fair amount of tugging to and fro, I finally beached her at the large concrete landing between the dank fishing nets folded in stacks tall as me, midst the alive and lifeless alike. I was, at this stage, among the half-dead.
Night fell quicker than curtains on a bad play, but not before splashing the dusk pastoral, with clouds arranged in gradations: orange to pink to pale gray.
Like personal lifeguards, wife and kids had walked the boardwalk to Sakanoshita, watching me, and our deck-to-be, every step of the way. And there, now, above the landing, three smiling faces greeting me with cheer.
Breathless, blistered, salty and wet, I beckon them down, algae-slimed rope still in the other hand. My son now standing atop raft, triumphantly, like Karate Kid practicing “the crane,” pointing to the evening sky that has turned the heavens into a halved blood orange, squeezing out the last of its acerbic light.
We stand there under the whiskey-sour sky, beholding the sunset, as I let the scene seep deep into my mind like paints taking foothold to canvas, drying. Long after the laughter and the setting of the sun, the moment stays framed, hanging there as it does, in the Louvre of my mind.
First there is a deck, then there is no deck, then there is! My mind, heart and mojo now realigned, and true to Feng Shui form, whoever the hell he is.
Kamakura
September 14, 2007
