Wooden Toy Skateboards: I’m an errand boy, in search of a mockingbird

If you are like me--and you might be (whether you know it or not; whether I know you or not)--then you’re looking forward to the one sublime moment where you feel like you’ve been shot in the head with a diamond bullet* as you realize that human beings are just fine, thank you very much, and don’t really need you. I imagine in that that moment I’ll feel a hand on my shoulder and it will be Buddha, or perhaps ¡SOLUSTRON!. I’ll look at her, she’ll look at me and give a single nod, maybe a little wink; that will be that. My work here, whatever the hell it was, will be done and I’ll become one with whatever we fade into when we fade out of here. 

For the purposes of this post let’s call this moment “mockingbird.” 

This morning I was watching NHK World, as per my custom, and I brushed up against the mockingbird. There was a story about a Japanese guy in Yokohama who designs and builds temples in addition to... custom, handmade skateboard decks (i.e. the wooden part you stand on). 

This guy was a skater, gave it up for a while while he was getting his temple designing and building business established, and when he returned to skating he was surprised by how uniform the decks had become. So he made his own deck, and then a friend asked him to make one, then another friend, then a stranger, and slowly his temple business evolved into a temple/skate deck business that employs a small team of temple building, deck creating, skateboarders. 

The company is called Wooden Toy and here’s an example of their work:

Does this move you to tears? Does it? DOES IT, godamnit?!?!

I wish I could give you a surefire link to the video so you could surefire watch it for yourself but, thanks to NHK’s bizarrely anachronistic website, I can’t. There’s a video about Wooden Toy on vimeo, which is beautiful but not in English. I can’t tell if Wooden Toy has a website (and if they do I imagine it’d only be in Japanese) but this blog features their work.

To summarize: there’s a guy in Yokohama who started a temple building business that transmogrified into a custom skate deck/temple building shop that’s run by a team of temple building skateboarders. This man, his business, the team of skater/craftsmen and I live in the same world. Had you told me this a couple days ago I a) wouldn’t have believed you and, after you proved it, b) been certain this would be end of Sawyer Blur, as this me is known here. Certainly Buddha or ¡SOLUSTRON! would gently squeeze my shoulder and give me a nod and wink after that. But she didn’t.

So I’m still here. Waiting for the diamond bullet. It’s here somewhere but--and I hate to tell this but it’s true: I won’t get the chance to tell you when it finds me.

*An ode to Francis Ford Coppola, who has provided more than his fair share of near miss mockingbirds.