I have operated on a few simple principles for more than two decades now, with good success.

First, do no harm. Or as little as possible.
Second, do not suffer fools or Bad People. They will rob you of your life.
Third, make choices with an eye to minimize future regret. In other words, imagine you were on your deathbed looking back - live your life to make that old bastard as peaceful as possible about dying.
Fourth, learn and wander. We may or may not be hairless monkeys, but there is wisdom out there. It may be an evil world, but there is beauty. Find it.

There is no meaning -- in anything -- but what our minds create. To search for meaning is to make the same mistake as those who search for happiness : both meaning and happiness are mental constructs superimposed by your mind on top of the actual conditions of your life. Seeking them in externals will drive you mad if you're smart, or guarantee you failure if you're persistent.

I wrote that in response to an AskMe question, almost 5 years ago, and had completely forgotten it until tonight, when I noticed that it had been favorited out of the blue, all these years later. The question was "Do you know what you want out of life? How do you know? How did you figure it out?"

I've been angry and silent lately, at least in terms of my own writing. I've been doing all sorts of other stuff online, sure. Built and run my own busy community over here, a bunch of other stuff. But I've decided tonight that I need to start stringing those words together again, laugh and glare ironically and textually dance on the graves and all, and tamp that anger down, or at least direct it productively, before I become the kind of old bastard I've always hated. I have no choice about getting old, but I do have a choice about what kind of old man I become.

Ain't makin' no promises, mind you. But maybe it's time to write some stuff again, and widen that circle out, again, a little.

'Cause what the world needs now is another active blogger. Like I need a hole in my head.

8:52 PM | 14 comments

The nails didn't hurt nearly as much as I'd expected going in, but the pain bombshell blossomed as they dropped the post into the hole and levered us upright.

My brother's head was wobbling a bit on our shared shoulder as I glanced over, but he felt my eyes on him and snapped back into his customary 200-watt anchorman idiot grin and winked. "It's not like we didn't expect this, eh?" I couldn't argue. We'd had a pretty good run.

Raising his face to the sky, still grinning, he bellowed "Father! Why has thou forsaken us, dude?" My conjoined brother, the son of god. Smart-ass to the last.

4:01 PM

They beat him hard hauling him out of St Paul's after he crapped in front of the High Altar, but he barely felt it through the hockey pads and the exhilaration. Light rain was falling in London, and it cooled his face as they kicked him to the curb. One of them spit on him as they walked away, dusting their hands. He was alive and unhurt and shaking as the adrenalin ebbed.

The first skirmish had ended in success. His war on god was underway.

[Sometimes entire paragraphs just appear in my brain, right before I fall asleep. It happens a lot. I'm going to try and start remembering them. So, this.]

11:34 AM | 6 comments

The exploratory committee has come back with a dog-choker of a bar bill, the Portobello market magic 8-ball has come up with a big och-aye, the goat entrails are vermiformally encouraging, and the Voices of The Peoples have been heard.

VOTE WONDERCHICKEN! (You know, eventually.)

I am a donut.

But I swear by the Vengeful Bearded Deity of The Midwest, I will emerge from the media birth canal triumphant, only mildly crumpled and sweaty, and wiping god-goo from my forehead, stride manfully forward into the cleansing light of the television cameras.

8:42 PM | 3 comments

I'm screwing around with about 17 different projects at the moment (and one of them I'm actually going to get paid for, woohoo), but here's something that I've always wanted to do, and Tumblr has finally made easy-peasy and pretty and stuff. So check it out -- it's a wonderchicken Aggregator, with all my de.licio.us bookmarks, Diggs, Lastfm songs, posts from here and OutsideinKorea, posts from Metafilter, random stuff that catches my attention, and a bunch of other crap I forget what-all at the moment, a-rivering at you snorting and throwing off clods of digital turf like a horny horny hippo of hyperlinking. Stalkeriffic!

Share and enjoy.

[Update: DNS has gone weird for some reason. Please stand by...]
[Update 2: DNS deweirdified. Resume rocking out...]

7:08 PM

...so in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty, I think of Dean Moriarty.

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A Poetry Break brought to you by the fine people in the AudioVisual Division of Wonderchicken Industries™

10:31 PM

I agree that Dave's "What are five things I don't know about myself" is more interesting than "Five things you don't know about me". Not that there's anything wrong with that. Hell, any meme in a storm, in these root-withering Latter Days of Blog.

So here:

1. I don't know if my growing suspicion that reproducing is in some important senses what we are for, and my feeling that my reluctance to do so has been to say 'no' to life (something I swore decades ago I would never do) are enough to overcome my bowel-loosening terror (and unusually for me, I do not exaggerate for effect, here) at the very idea of having children. Or if they should.
2. I don't know if the childhood demons I thought I'd exorcised long ago have been defeated as completely as I had hoped.
3. I don't know if I'm a good man, or just a (garden variety enlightened) selfish one with people skills. I'm not sure what it means to be a good man, anymore.
4. I don't know if I'll ever write the things I've always wanted to.
5. I am 41 years old, and I don't know what I want to do with the rest of my life.
   

2:29 PM | 5 comments

Rumours of my demise have been much exaggerated. I haven't been eaten by the hogs, I haven't sold out to the Man. I haven't quaffed the hemlock, I haven't screwed the pooch, I haven't jumped the shark. OK, maybe those last two, but that's it, officer.

What has happened, apparently, is that I've been killed, cooked, and incorporated into a delicious sandwich.

Kids, let this be a lesson. Live right, or it could happen to you too. [via]

Update: Apparently the marketing team that made the ad had never heard of my nom de blog, but thought it was pretty funny once they had. Cool.

7:22 PM | 5 comments

My two-week visit to back to Canada, by the numbers.

• years since previous visit: 4
• kilometres driven: 3270
• members of personal pantheon of heroes (of 5 surviving) drunk with: 4
• percentage doing better than last time I saw them: 100%
• percentage of them who believe they are dying: 25%
• percentage of them with whom manly tears were shed about one thing or another: 75%
• ways in which I might well have died while rolling ATV into icy bog: 4
• number of beers consumed before said accident: 4
• number of hours before getting some dry clothes on: 3
• number of beers subsequently retrieved from mud under chest-deep icewater: 18
• cameras ruined: 1
• fresh moose carcasses manhandled: 2
• teeth chipped on shot embedded in Canada goose breast: 1
• average price of Canadian cigarettes:$9.50
• approximate price ratio, Canadian/Korean smokes: 4:1
• packs of duty-free Korean cigarettes given away, despite people claiming they didn't like them: 8
• teeny bottles of maple syrup brought back for coworkers: 11
• number of new cocktails discovered with unrestrained glee: 1
• number of new cocktails discovered whose ingredients cannot be bought in Korea: 1
• car-battery-sized blocks of cheese consumed: 1
• hamburgers eaten: 18
• number of days free of alcohol consumption: 0
• kilograms of weight gain: 3
• unexpected pleasure at returning to Korea, which now feels like home: unlimited

10:54 AM | 19 comments

Everybody⁽¹⁾ probably remembers the episode of Seinfeld in which George Costanza, newly-single thanks to the timely expiration of his fiancee, celebrates his rebachelorization by lounging sybaritically, half-naked, in front of his TV, with a block of cheese, the symbol of manly freedom.

Jerry: (stares into coffee cup and looks back at George) Problem?

George: The Rosses have started up a foundation, Jerry, and I have to sit on the board of directors.

Jerry: Hey, board of directors. Look at you!

George: Yeah! Look at me! I was free and clear! I was living the dream! I was stripped to the waist, eating a block of cheese the size of a car battery!

Jerry: Before we go any further, I'd just like to point out how disturbing it is that you equate eating a block of cheese with some sort of bachelor paradise.

George: Don't you see? I'm back in.

Jerry: All because of Wrath of Khan?

George: Yes!

Jerry: Well, it was the best of those movies.

[The camera is over George's head and spins around repeatedly as George screams.]

Now, the furthest thing from my mind is any desire for the demise of She Who Must Be Obeyed. I love her dearly, at least when she's not premenstrual.

But I'm going to Canada this week, for the first time in four years, for a two-week visit. And the wife, she decided that she wasn't really up for it this time, and quite happily gave me her blessings to do it alone. We are very rarely apart, and never for more than a couple of days at a time, and though I will miss her, this trip, [this is good]. A fella (particularly one with a past as spotted and a present as buttoned-down as me) needs some time to go stupid sometimes, or at least stupider than usual.

The thoughts of many men -- and almost all Korean men, if the nudgey-winky questions of my students and male colleagues are any guide -- might turn to matters illicit and concupiscent, perhaps, in such a situation. Not me. I am and always have been a one-woman man, in large part because I simply don't have the energy that the alternative would require.

Me, though? My first thought (after, of course, sugarplum-fairy dancing spectral images of the dog-choking quantities of quality booze that I'll be able to drink and fine tobacco I'll be able to smoke, without the mild concomitant guilt brought on by the presence of a well-meaning but disapproving spouse)?

I pictured myself shirtless, driving a rental car that glorious roadtrippy thousand kilometres between Vancouver and my home town, with Mötörhead cranked up, gnawing on a block of cheese the size of a car battery.

Oh, yes. Oh my.

I may write some updates from the road, if I have the time. On the other hand, I just might have a myocardial infarction. But it's going to be fun.

¹ And I mean that literally, of course.

[Update:] I'm baa-aack. Proof of a time well-had:

6:25 PM | 9 comments and 1 trackback

Well, it only took 7 months, but my Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator™ toy from January got dugg, and seemed to inspire much jocularity.

It's been interesting, because the page has been one of the most-linked bits of the site for the last 6 months, almost exclusively amongst weblogs in Europe and Asia, for some reason. Then, a few days ago, (near as I can trace it), after I dropped it into a comments thread at Metafilter, it was picked up by milov.nl, then automatically showed up on Hot Links, then Daring Fireball (kablooie went the visits), then Reddit and Digg almost simultaneously.

Happily, the server shows absolutely no signs of melting down (er, so far). Like I said recently, Dreamhost has treated me well.

Share and enjoy.

Update: Whoops, now Techcrunch and de.licio.us and Blue's News and Dvorak and O'Reilly Radar, too. Memetastic! Now it just needs posting on the front page of Metafilter, and the circle of life will be complete.

[Note: should not be posted to the front page of Metafilter]

5:13 PM | 28 comments

OK, it took about a month longer than I thought it would, what with my back going kablooie and the summer doldrums setting in and me just generally not working all that hard on it, but OutsideInKorea is finally open for business.

The dust is still settling, and I've dropped my tools and cracked a beer to celebrate, but most of the stuff I wanted to do is in place. There are lots of features and content yet to come, but I think it's ready to pull back the curtain and hope that people like what I've done. Some things are probably broken, or look weird, but I've tested in Firefox and IE and Opera on Windows, and it looks pretty good to me. If you have problems, it'll help me if you drop a comment here or there and tell me what's busted.

The only content other than the welcome message is repurposed essays about Korea from this very site, but I promise that I will be writing regularly and frequently. I've done a lot of work on the design (and I'm no designer, and it probably shows), and now it's time to start filling the bucket with words, Roxanne, words. If you're interested in Korea, I hope you'll bookmark the site, and pass the URL on to friends and neighbours, ex-lovers and therapists, your mom and the guy who sells you your drugs.

I've decided to put ads on the site -- though there will never be ads here on the 'bottle -- and in my Welcome! post over there, I talk about why. It may seem hypocritical of me given my stance about advertising in the past, and I'm willing to accept that criticism. If I can make some money from the site, though, I'll be well-pleased. It's not my only reason for building it, but it'll certainly help me to keep up my enthusiasm, if it happens.

So. Go, and I hope you like. Help me out, my scattered blog tribe, and spread the word.

This site won't die, I promise, but I'll be writing about Korea over there from now on.

6:47 PM | 4 comments

I've been working on a new project, which will hopefully be ready for a triumphant launch within the next week or two, if I don't get distracted by any shiny objects.

Keep on eye on this URL, and if there's anything you'd like to see in a slightly-toned-down but still wonderchicken-y site dedicated to information and commentary on Korea, the expat experience, and all things peninsular, please drop a comment in the usual place.

Huzzah!

6:28 PM | 12 comments

For some reason, this post from a few years back -- Uncle f--ka Exegesis -- has been getting hits like a proper weblog motherf--ker lately. Not as much as the weirdly-popular-in-Europe Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator, but pretty damn close.

I re-read the exegesis for the first time in a long time just now, and I'm kind of thinking it's the best damn thing I've ever written. Then again, I am drinking beer because tomorrow's Buddha's Birthday -- that bastard -- and I'll admit that the juice might possibly have coloured my perception and delaminated my judgement.

I'm still on the road, though, and I'm still gunning for the Buddha (that bastard). That's got to count for something.

Anyway, sometimes I make myself laugh. Your mileage may vary, as they say in the halls of power, those petrol weasels, them.

11:50 PM

It's a scary moment when you finally stop telling yourself that everything's fine, and accept the fact that it might just be possible that you've got cancer of the balls. Especially if you're someone like me, who, although built like a veritable Adonis (well, you know, with a few extra kilograms and body hair that's just slightly more simian than I might like), is a bit on the body-shy side. Almost as bad as the idea of actually having something sinister growing in your satchel is the idea of having a stranger squeeze it, or, god forbid, stick his finger up your ass searching for the lost gold of Tumacacori. It seems insane, but there it is. I've gone 40 years with my nether sphincter working in one direction only (with entirely too much vigour, usually), and I wasn't about to change now.

For a while, I've been having the occasional dull ache in the lower back. I figured that it was sleeping in my customary discus-thrower pose on the new, Korean mattress my wife had bought a few months back. Being new, and in particular being Korean (although cunningly named 'Lady Americana' to give it that so-important New Jersey cultural cachet), it is approximately as hard as a slab of granite. Not that soft, dissolute western granite, either. Good, hard, Korean sleeping-granite, ripped from the very earth in the mattress mines of Kangwon-do.

But a couple of weeks back I also started having some pain in the old goolies. Kind of a dull ache. I figured: 'Well, I ride the bike to work everyday, I use the exercise bike at the gym a few times a week, I spend far too much time sitting on my butt at work lately, and, having emerged triumphant into my fifth decade, I have developed a major case of the Swingin' Dad Balls, which remain largely unconstrained by my capacious boxer shorts. The poor boys are just getting mashed and mauled a bit more than they like...'

The ache went away, came back, went away, always just south of being really painful. Much closer to 'crossed my legs and squashed 'em' than 'log-rolling accident of the worst kind'. Ignorable.

I did the self-exam thing, conscientiously. Soaped up the sack, squeezed and stroked, had a fine old time. Couldn't find anything out of the ordinary. They did feel a little bigger than I remembered, perhaps, but I put that down to the continuing expansion of the universe or losing weight in my fingers or something.

But last weekend the pain came back, and didn't really go away. I made the mistake of telling She Who Must Be Obeyed, who promptly freaked out. I hate when people freak out, even though I do have a tendency to do it myself, when it's about something other than the possibility of ball cancer. It was fun teaching her all the slang words for testicles, though, and that seemed to calm both of us down a bit. Balls hadn't ever been a topic of conversation for us before, so it was a new experience.

She made me promise that we'd go... to the doctor. Damn it. I don't like doctors. I agreed, realizing that now that the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, there was no putting it back in.

So yesterday, we went to one of the approximately 70,000 little clinics in this small port city. Here in Korea, you don't go and see a GP who then refers you to a specialist, you just go straight to the specialist. Don't even bother making an appointment -- those are for dupes! That's not the way I recall it in Canada, but then, last time I went to a doctor in Canada, they were giving me a lollipop if I made wee-wee in the cup without getting it all over the wall. Or at least that's how I remember it, officer.

Although there are about 120,000 clinics in this town -- three for every citizen, and about half as many as there are singing-rooms cum blowjob parlours -- there are apparently only two that deal with maladies of the male meat-and-two-veg. One is the hospital, where I'd been before when the wife had been ill last year, and where competence is second only to cleanliness at the very bottom of the priorities list. The other was a place called, predictably, 'Mr Kim's Dermatology and Urology Clinic'. It was also dim and dirty, but that barely fazes me these days. I just wanted to get it over with.

After a short wait, in we went, and the doc in front of the computer spoke a little English, as most of the doctors seem to. As I sat down at his desk, he looked at me and asked pleasantly "Your face, right?"

"Er, no, actually." Christ, I thought I was looking pretty good these days! I glanced over at my wife, as I'd already forgotten the polite Korean word for 'balls', and she obliged by explaining the symptoms.

He got me to stand up and drop trou, and shunning such undoctorly nuisances as gloves of any kind, went to town on my danglers.

It actually didn't feel too bad. He'd clearly done this before. I forgave him for the dermatological blunder earlier.

The good news hooray! was that he didn't figure there was any cancer to be found. He said he figured the problem was either a)kidney stones b)orchitis or epididymitis c)prostatitis. I was rooting for epididymitis, because one of the songs on my Monty Python records from 30 years ago ended with '...epididymi-iiiii-tis', and I'd been singing that line for a week or two to myself, and I thought that'd be pretty cool, given the alternatives. It was time for a urine test to check for white blood cells or spimes and blogjects or something, which'd show that there was a bad thing happening somewhere. His English wasn't all that great, when it came down to it. I dutifully took the cup down two flights of stairs to the -- dim and dirty, of course -- toilet, and did my best not to pee on the walls, hoping there'd be a lollipop for me somewhere at the end of all this. I was expecting the Greased Digit of Humiliation, and somewhat distracted.

We sat for about ten minutes in the waiting room while the machine did its thing with my pee, and the receptionist showed us back in.

His diagnosis: prostatitis, and a not-terribly malign and quite common sort. No treatment, no major worry apparently, brought on and aggravated by stress and, like I'd fancifully told myself weeks earlier, the rough treatment my bottom had been receiving by various bicycle saddles. He told me to rest and eat lots of vegetable protein -- soybeans, in particular.

He also demonstrated how to take a 'sitz bath', a phrase that I'd encountered before, but didn't really understand. Taking off his lab coat, he squatted down, and brandished an imaginary wand. 'Shower,' he said. He held the wand under his butt. 'Five to ten minutes.'

'Ooookay,' said I, uncertainly.

I was still expecting the command to bend over at this point, but he talked to my wife in Korean for a bit, and then it was all bows-and-goodbyes.

Maybe he was out of rubber gloves. I suppose I should count myself lucky. Korean men don't tend to trim their fingernails that well.

We paid at the counter, and there my story ends, almost. As we were walking back to the taxi rank at the bus terminal to return to our Corporate Island home, I asked my wife (who is the wielder of the plastic) how much it had cost.

It was 3000 won. Under four dollars.

Korea never ceases to surprise me.

5:26 PM | 9 comments

This is about something I love. Not as much as beer, perhaps, but more than a hell of a lot of other things.

Maybe 6 months ago I was trolling one of the private darknet sites where I get my bittorrents, looking for something new to download, watch, and delete, as usual. All that fat pipe Korean bandwidth going to waste is a crying shame, and I do my best to keep it humming, and make sure that the carbon doesn't build up in the virtual valves. The Korean government gets a big wet kiss from me for their policy of relentlessly ramming bandwidth down the throats of their citizens (and the scruffy no-account foreigners who squeak in through the cracks), if not for many of the other decisions they stumble into.

So I was 4 or 5 pages deep in the movie forum, and there it was, with only a couple of peers on the torrent so far. I swear, my heart skipped a beat. I caught a whiff of those dusty sun-pummelled rocks of Southern California, and the rich stink of bubbling road-tar. A few notes of the theme song. An fleeting image of perfectly conical 1963-era brassiere-bound breasts. A shiver of the joyous goofiness of life's meaningless serendipity. I hadn't thought about the movie in decades, probably, media-starved and nomadic as I'd been during my wanderyears. It was, without exaggerating, one of the formative films of my young life. It helped make me the man I am today. I fired up the torrent and whispered a breathy 'woo hoo', so as not to wake up She Who Must Be Obeyed, and the downstream rate nudged its way up past 400KB/s.

The movie was "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World".

Let me tell you about how this movie lodged itself so deeply in the crenellations of my brain. I warn you, there may be some adult concepts and situations involved, though. What else do you expect from the wonderchicken?

I started babysitting when I was maybe 10 years old, I guess. I didn't do it much, and only for some friends of the family who had two kids about 7 or 8 years younger than me. I'll call them the Potters. Mostly it was a New Years Eve thing, when my parents would go out with Mr and Mrs Potter and get smashed and celebratory at whatever parties were happening in our little town. At that point, they were almost ten years younger than I am now, which makes me feel a little wobbly when I think about it.

Anyway, it was the New Year's Eves I remember the most. I probably had a good run of 5 years or so before I got old enough that I wanted to start going out myself and getting loose on illicitly-acquired booze on December 31st. But I didn't mind doing the babysitting one bit during those years. Mr Potter, you see, had something that my father didn't (or had hidden too damn well for me to find, much as I tried).

The porn.

Out in plain site, tucked into the accordion sidepocket and jammed down alongside the seat cushion of his chestnut-brown naugahyde recliner. In a messy pile mixed in with the TV guides and local newspapers on the floor. The thing was, it was almost all textporn, and I discovered it by accident, out of boredom. I don't even know if the genre even exists anymore -- cowboy novels with long, long stretches of pure high-octane sex. I still remember the night when I first found it. I was sitting in the recliner with a bowl of salt and vinegar chips on the folding TV-dinner table beside me, and I pulled out one of the broken-backed paperbacks that was jammed between the cushion and the armrest. Like all of the others I read over the ensuing years in that house, the cover featured a long-haired, spectacularly-bosomed woman, mostly clothed but inevitably dishevelled in a long dress, with a gunslinger, whitehat or black, posed like an action figure, guns metaphorically out. This paperback was totally flat, open about midway through, and when I scanned a few paragraphs, something went 'boing' in my head, if not right away in my pants.

Keep in mind this was the mid1970's, and I was only about 10 or 11. The only naked women I'd seen had been in the couple of low-rent skin mags that other boys had somehow purloined and brought into school, or that I'd literally stumbled upon in the woods. There wasn't an internet, and we had no movie theatre, and only two channels on the TV, video rentals didn't exist. Porn was an as-yet unexplored frontier. A different world than we live in today, where 9-year-olds are sending each other goatse links.

I wonder now if my eagerness around that time to go and babysit for the Potters seemed a little odd, somehow. I wonder too if my love for words grew at least in part out of these intense early textfests. I know where my love of the road came from.

I was a big reader already at that age, but the rare sex scenes in my vast mom-sponsored collection of science fiction were like whale-oil candles to this nuclear blast of meat. It went on for page after page of sucking and nibbling and grunting and heaving and cowpokery. I was boggled.

How on earth does this tawdry little tale connect with "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World", you ask? Well, that was the movie that, for some reason, our nearest CTV affiliate station played in its long form as the late show every single New Year's Eve in those days. Like begging my folks to let me stay up for the Sean Connery Bond movies, or the Sunday afternoon double-shot of Disney and Bugs Bunny, it had assumed a kind of ritualistic significance for me.

I loved the movie regardless -- it was shown at other times during the year, and I'd seen it half a dozen times by that point anyway -- but it played so regularly as the background soundtrack to the pure unalloyed joy of smacking my weiner around like a pinata at a fat kid's birthday that they eventually merged into twin double-happiness somehow, back in the root of my pubescent lizard brain.

For the first couple of years I sat in the Potters' living room, though, it was just about the unlimited cola and snacks. I had a quick scan of whatever cowboy porno was laying around the living room occasionally, and there had been some interesting stirrings in the groinal region, sure, but around the time I turned 12, it all started to change.

I recall the moment at which curiosity and a feeling of general naughtiness blossomed into a full-blown vocation. Long after the kids had been put to bed, of course, mind you. Most of the time they'd already been put to bed before I even showed up, and the house was mine from the get-go.

Over the previous year or so, things had been getting cramped in my jeans when I was doing my late-night study of Mr Potter's novels, and I'd taken to letting myself out for some air, if you take my meaning. And, you know, I'd discovered in the fullness of time that giving myself a bit of an aimless rub once in a while was a pretty pleasant thing, too.

But one night, on New Year's Eve, it was, the damn thing just went off. Like a geyser.

Nobody could have been more shocked and surprised than I was, once my eyes rolled back down out of my head. I guess I must have known this sort of thing happened -- I'd been reading those damn cowboy books during my babysitting sessions for a year or two by that point -- but that was different than having it actually happen to me. And of course, "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" was playing on the TV in the corner, beside the dried-out Christmas tree.

The rest of that night I'll slide a diffusion lens of modesty over, but suffice it to say that I could barely walk on January 1st. I'd discovered something that would occupy a lot of my free time over the next few years.

Until I saw that torrent file for The Movie, I'd almost forgotten about the supporting role it played in my sexual awakening, not as fodder, but as refractory-time wallpaper.

I don't think my slightly irrational love for the movie is entirely about the sexual imprinting, necessarily. The movie itself is not especially sexualized for me. And these days, I don't much care for cowboy novels or brown vinyl recliners, nor do salt and vinegar potato chips give me spontaneous erections. There's much to love about the movie, I think, and it's become like an old friend long-lost and remade for me in the six months since I've downloaded it. Somehow it takes me back to a time when new worlds were opening wide, full of possibilities. Sex and the road, out there in front of me.

I remember how that seeing that arid Californian desert, so alien to me and so clean, how seeing those cars race through it set up resonances in my brain that I couldn't explain. That I still can't, for that matter. How the movie made me laugh. How it mixed with the heady fumes of newly-discovered sex, and filled me with an awareness that life was both utterly random and completely hilarious.

On some of those Friday nights at home since I've rediscovered the movie, when I've had my fill of beer and my reflexes have degraded too far to be much damn good in Rocket Arena 3, and I've sung along with a few Tom Waits songs, and am weary and hungry, I find myself firing up the movie and watching a few scenes. Imagining myself rakish and dissolute in a heavy steel-framed convertible with a woman in a satin gown, racing across the California desert towards the Big W. And I feel both rooted in a past that I frequently have difficulty remembering, and a little bit free.

But these days, at least, I keep my hands above the waistline.

10:46 AM | 4 comments and 1 trackback

Just a quick note, because you never know, do you?

I had a sudden onset headache yesterday of epic proportions, and of the kind that rarely but occasionally means (according to the Google Oracle) that you've blown a gasket in the old noggin, and that you're leaking blood up there and going to keel over and go vegetative or die entirely in the next short while.

My lack of faith in doctors in general and doctors in Korea in particular (plus the fact that I just did my research, 24 hours later, here in the office) means I haven't gone to get anything checked -- they say you should get a CT scan right away. Yeah, well, sure, say I, ever the rugged optimist.

But it makes me a bit nervous.

So, whatever. If I go kablooie away from the keyboard (statistically unlikely, lately) in the next while, then I'd just like to make it clear that I love you all.

Well, most of you, anyway.

*crosses fingers*

3:15 PM | 4 comments

I am a weblogger.

I am a man. I am an authority. I am hieratic. I am a drinker. I am a Canadian. I am an expatriate. I am somewhat inebriated tonight.

I am a spice without a sauce. I am a singer, I am a writer. I am a lover. I am a man who loves. I am happy and I am unsatisfied. I am content and I am angry. I am actively ignoring the present continuous in favour of the possible future simple. I am alive. I contradict myself.

I am growing old. I'm farting like a Captain of Industry. I'm hurting every goddamn day. I'm present perfect linking my patchwork history with this moment here, where the glass is in my hand. I've abused this strong big body of mine. I've moved people to tears. I've made them laugh. I've been completely wrong. I'm squeezing out the pus.

I am uncertain. I am defiant.

I am buoyed on foamy waves of ancient guitar. I am tired of the bullshit. I hope for the best. I'm averting my eyes.

I'm wasting my life. I'm in the moment. I'm teaching people that English has no future tense. I'm pretty sure there's no point. I am happy about that.

I am thirsty. I am hungry. I am so full of shit my blue eyes are brown.

I love. I rear up in anger. I love.

I need another beer.

10:23 PM | 6 comments and 1 trackback

Because weblogging, or 'writing online in reverse chronological order with permalinks because I heard that it's cool and you can make money for talking about cheese sandwiches and wheeeeee!' (as the kids are calling it these days), has become a bit dull, I've been hunting for newer, shinier things to mess around with.

Mostly, I've just ended up going back to Metafilter to play the grumpy curmudgeon with a heart of gold yet again, or lurking around the SA Forums, or desultory perusing of the [nsfw] uploads at Fipilele, or listening to streaming standup comedy. Or firing up Bloglines, seeing the 14000 unread items in bold, and just catching up with the new posts from people from the old blog neighbourhood (but not bothering to click through to their sites if they don't offer full excerpts) before closing the tab quicksmart. I don't listen to 'podcasts' (that word still makes me f--king gag, and I pronounce anathema the marketing-imprinted clownweiners who call it that. Which means I'm flipping the bird at pretty much everyone, which makes me the weird intense guy with the lazy eye passing out pamphlets on the street, again, I know. I know too that that was my schtick last year, but I'm nothing if not persistent), let alone give a rat's ass who the first person to suggest a double-byte framistat of the persistent reacharound attribute of the CDATA enclosure in the XML for version .09b of RDQ was. Hell, I'm a big old geek from way back, and I've written more than my fair share of code over the years, and I'm crotch-deep in that dirty old weblog water, but even I can't bring myself to care. 'course, I got nothing against other folks being interested in it. It's all good. But scrabbling to stake claims to a place in history, when it's the History Of Sweet Bugger-All, well, it seems like pointless self-promotion to me. And I thought we all agreed way back when that pointless self-promotion was what this whole weblogcasting thing was about from the get-go. So, ennui.

My solution? I've decided to invent a new game, guaranteed to amuse precisely no-one other than myself, probably. Which is usually the way my mind works, so I'm good with that. I've already been playing it for a while, though I didn't realize that until today.

I'll call it scatterblogging™, because that's the word that just leapt into my brain as I was typing this, and I trust my brain, at least when it's sober. What I've been doing, and what I think I'll continue to do, is this: when some amusing-to-me brainfart squeaks out through the old cerebral firewall, I'll launch a new blog, on Blogger or one of the myriad other services that make the hosting and broadcasting of brainfarts their business. I'll get maybe three, four good diurnal emissions off per day, I reckon. Maybe they'll be under one of my existing noms de keyboard, maybe not. Maybe they'll point back here maybe not. But one weblog per thought, one shot, that's it, post and forget, log it out close it down and move on. And whatever I do post, it'll be wonderchickeny.

There's a reason for it, though, beyond mere boredom. You see, when that divine spark suddenly and spontaneously lights up deep in the network and the internet itself shivers itself into self-awareness and emerges from the googleplex, bent on ad-sense vengeance, like an unholy butterfly from its chrysalis, those tiny seeds of wonderchicken will be scattered throughout its distributed mind. Tiny, embedded, sarcastic synapses. And when it begins to systematically exterminate the human race -- beginning, of course, with the advertisers, then moving on to the bloggers -- it'll pause, recognize me, and move on. The next stage of evolution, the conscious world network to come -- it will taste like chicken.

4:07 PM | 7 comments and 2 trackbacks.

Went for a hike today, as part of the Corporate Team Building Exercises In Which All Must Participate, and even though it was compulsory in nature if not actually in name, I enjoyed the hell out of it, and took a few snapshots at random. As always when I post pics of stuff, I offer the disclaimer that I don't know nothin' about birthin' no babies takin' no pictures. Snap snap grin grin all the way. (Click through to my Flickr thing if you want to add comments or stuff, or see larger versions. Flickr still has the Rock Juice, even if their buyout fairy godmother Yahoo sucks sweaty chocolate donkey balls.)

So, here, anyway. In lieu of words, which is what I ought to be, but can't seem to, lately.

7:57 PM

One of my old pieces, about sailing in Mexico, has been reproduced in its entirety, complete with images, here, I note through bloglines. There is a cursory link back to the original, which is just a sop, and not a very effective one, I reckon.

What the f--k?

On further investigation, this other site, which purports to be 'frassle's cache of a feed received from another site' (ie, mine), is doing the same thing, which seems to me slightly less egregious, but still a bit dodgy.

A quick googling of the wonderchickeny phrase 'living a life of madness and booze' from the post also gives me this hit, with the extract text 'Search results for Chicken boy man sex'. Now that's funny, I admit, but still annoys the living piss out of me. Upon inspecting the URL (http://five.admins-software.com/canadian-gay-sex-10100.html), I've decided I'm not even going to go see what repurposing of my writing has been done there, at least until I get home from work.

I note that I do not have teh ghey, although, you know, there's nothing wrong with that.

I'm not writing a damn thing lately, in case you hadn't noticed, but I'm not keen on this method of new Wonderchicken™ Content© hitting the wires. Not keen at all.

It's punchinnaface time, friends and neighbours! I got yer creative commons right here!

(Advisory to my text-hijackers: I do not use cc licenses on this site, but old-fashioned copyright, because I haven't had the goddamn energy to educate myself properly about it yet. Perhaps this is my karmic retribution for downloading Family Guy episodes and such.)

3:24 PM | 11 comments

I've been thinking about dying again. Not that I've any intimations of impending mortality or anything, particularly. I'm as hale as I ever have been. My body is a good, strong vehicle, and I take reasonably diligent care of it, even if I am prone to taking it out for a venturi-clearing race around the nearest dirt track once in a while. Blowing the carbon out of the valves, all of that. Still, strong as it is, a wayward bus would squash it flat, and we rarely see the buses until it's too late.

We're all going to die, this I know. The far-flung remnants of my tiny, tattered tribe of blood-kin can attest to that. Shit happens to the best of us, and in the end, some random syllable of DNA gone squirrely, some unhinged bomber or drunk driver, some chicken-barracks virus or opportunistic infection emboldened by years of exposure to low-level antibiotics, some bus with our name on it, something's going to do us in.

This woolgathering I've been doing was hammered home by yet another piece of bad news from the folks this morning. Following on having their fishing lodge business being foreclosed on by the banks, on being made homeless but for the kind assistance of their many friends, and having to reinvent themselves and their means of livelihood in the 7th decade of their lives, the next hammerblow has fallen. Can't get a break, my family.

I'll let this bit from my mom's email speak for itself:

So, shit. Happens. And it never rains but it pours, like they say.

I hope he's going to be OK. He's a tough old bastard, and he's pulled through things like this before. There's nothing I can do but hope, I suppose, here on the other side of the world.

When my own personal train comes barrelling down the track, I don't expect I'll have much warning about it, any more than my friend Rick did a couple of years ago, any more than my bro Barry did when he almost died a while before that, any more than my stepdad did last week. So I'm going to put some dead man switches in place, I think, here and elsewhere on the web. And I'm going to write about what I'd hope might be done for me, to me, and about me, after that inevitable hammerblow falls.

Just not today.

[Update: Broken vertebrae, blod clots and a bonechip in his brain, but he's soldiering on. In agony, but he's got the Serious Drugs prescribed. Doctor told him point blank a couple of days ago "I never expected to see you alive again." The good news, such as it is, is that we're talking about Canada here, and so his medical care is costing he and my mom literally nothing, and because the accident happened at work and was not a result of anything but bad luck, he is receiving workman's compensation. Things could be worse, I suppose. Thanks for your thoughts, folks.]

11:22 AM | 7 comments

It is true that I haven't been writing much of anything of late, but I have been beavering away at various other projects; slapping together code and design ideas in my own haphazard, ill-organized and only occasionally successful style. Throw it against the screen and see what sticks!

I have these phases, when my beer-battered brain (mmm, beer batter) produces more squirts of pleasure-juice when it's kept busy writing code as opposed to deathless prose. There are also times, of course, when the my brain is happier just sitting there in my brainpan marinating. Those times actually tend to outnumber my brief flurries of productivity. So it goes. My brain is my second favorite organ, like Woody said, and I willingly aquiesce to its frequent outlandish demands and coddle it after its temper tantrums.

I've got a couple of projects of my own that I'm fiddle-farting around with, including a redesign of the ancillary pages here at the 'bottle, a separate Korea-centric site, and an all-singing, all-dancing Wonderchicken Industries™ Portal site as a free service to all those who just can't seem to get enough of all things miraculous and fouwl.

Just off the presses, though, is a showcase site I built for 'drinking buddy J', my American friend and neighbour, who I've mentioned a few times here. Though no longer my neighbour -- he's girded his loins and left the comfortable Employment Womb that is Korea Inc, while remaining in Korea -- we still enjoy sinking a few litres of beer together, even if it has to be virtually, via Skype. Did it last night, in fact. My head hurts.

So, anyway, J is an outdoorsman of great enthusiasm and no small erudition, and the set of foreign, English-speaking flora and fauna experts in Korea is a very tiny one indeed. It would probably be no exaggeration to say he's one of, if not the, English-speaking authority on freshwater fishing in Korea. If you're into that sort of thing, he's setting up a guiding service as part of his new, self-employed life, and I recommend him wholeheartedly, even if I'm not personally all that big on the whole 'fishing' part of fishing.

He's also a freelance writer, with a long and respectable series of publications to his credit, something I envy enormously. Of course, I am far too lazy and insecure about my skills to try to emulate that with any real diligence.

Wonderchicken Industries™: Waiting For The World To Beat A Path To The Door Since 2001.

So go visit him, have a look around. There are still a few rough edges and nailheads sticking out here and there, but I'm quite pleased with how the site came out. If you're into fishing in Korea at all, well, drop him a line. Even better, if you work for a print publication that might be interested in buying some writing on the Korean outdoors, he's your man.

Of course, if you work for a print publication that might be interested in buying some writing on pretty much anything else Korean, well, I work cheap. *nudge* And I'm usually unruffled by editorial excision of 90% of my uses of the word 'f--k'. Usually.

4:56 PM | 6 comments

I'm sicker than a gut-shot monkey on the set of a Russ Meyer titty-spectacular, I'm boreder than a glory-hole sander at Bar Sinister in Amsterdam, I'm queasier than Buzz Aldrin chokin' down the buzzcut nitrogen punishment in orbit.

Whatever. I've been infected by self-important look-at-me wanktards* spurting their goofy podcast jism all over the blogobucket, so I got hammered and recorded my last post for posterity.

DOWNLOAD AND READ ALONG WITH THE WONDERCHICKEN (or die) [5Mb], MOTHERBASTERS!

*of which I am one, or else why would I do this?

Update: My old good friend the mighty Bearman

has taken the audio and backed it with some of his superb piano playing. The web is so damn cool. Thanks, man!

11:19 PM | 14 comments and 2 trackbacks.

In the footsteps of Hotblack Desiato, I've been taking a month off dead, for tax reasons. Well, OK, not really for tax reasons. The Korean government treats me relatively well when it comes to hoovering up the monetary crumbs in my fiscal wake, and I have long been out of the purview of the long arm of Revenue Canada.

But I certainly have been dead, at least from the neck up. Occasionally during the course of the last month or two, as the caffeine rush has hit me, I've had a Brilliant Idea flash up on the Times Square text-crawl on the inside of my forehead, then just as quickly disappear, before I actually worked up the energy to write it down.

I'm not entirely sure why this might be, other than the damp lassitude that comes with the 'monsoon' season here in Korea, when the rains come and the whole country starts to smell and feel like the inside of a fat man's underpants. Not that I've spent a lot of time rummaging around such places, mind you, but I got me an active imagination.

And I do have some theories.

The most plausible is performance anxiety. Since it became as certain as these things ever are that some of my offhand screeds were going to be included in the upcoming 'Best of Web Writing' book (which should be finalized and ready to get magically transformed from bits to atoms in the next 8 weeks, according to a recent email from the publisher), I've felt a little weird about writing. Back when I was posting something every day -- being a realio trulio weblogger, half self-promotion, half self-regard and half community-cheerleader (I know that's three halves. I am large, I contain multitudes) -- and I was pushing the thousand uniques a day envelope, with a couple of times the number of daily readers I have now, oddly, I didn't think much about it. Just had a coffee or a beer or something, and whacked out some brainfart that was temporarily stinking up the room, to clear the air a bit. I imagine that many of those people who once visited the site now read it through the newsfeeds, and I may well have more readers than I did back then, but they are invisible to me, basically, and off my Pay Attention To Me Waaaah! radar.

I'm not sure if that reticence to dance in the spotlight for fear that it'll just suck is a good thing or bad. Probably bad, because if you don't write, you're not a f--king writer, right?

Right?

The other thing that made my weiner shrink in the glare, authorially speaking, was this Flickr testimonial from my blogfather, Rageboy.

I even sent the bastard an email that could be summarized with "Dude? WTF?" to inquire if he was just yankin my crank. He replied in the negative. Proud -- astonished, is more like it -- am I that someone I've respected and sucked up to for so long thinks so well of my stuff, but I think it pushed me over the brink into the 'crikey how can I live up to that?!' swamp.

Not to say that I've spent more time revising or rewriting any of the infrequent posts I've made in the last month or two, of course. Hell no! But I did cringe when I hit the post button, which has to count for something.

And not to say that I don't bask in the praise like a puppy with its ear being scratched. I do. Don't stop now!

My other theory about why it is that I've if not gone dry, at least had a dam built upstream somewhere, is that I'm healthy, by god. Rude, animal health. All bulgy muscles and efficient oxygen exchange. Meaty, beaty, big and bouncy.

I started working out, you see, for the first time in my life, about 7 months back. About 4 1/2 hours a week, weights and treadmill and stationary bike. My 39th birthday came and went a couple of weeks back, and I'm in better shape than I have been in my life. It pleases me, especially considering that given the lifestyle I enjoyed during my 20s and early 30s, I'd figured I'd be dead by now.

But I'm kinda thinking that the life of the mind might suffer in some way when the meat is singing. Has there ever been a Real Writer who worked out at the gym? I'm not talking foofoo yuppie reactionaries like Brett Easton Ellis or someone like that, here. I mean mad bastards, one of whom I have always considered myself to be. Hell, I don't know. But the persona, writerly and otherwise, that I've invested so much time grooming over the past few decades just doesn't marry up with sleekness and throbbing muscley health.

It's not that I feel that much dumber, per se, it's just that, for the first time in a lifetime of flesh-hating, I'm feeling pretty comfortable inside my skin, and at the same time, the locus of Me has shifted downwards a couple of feet.

Balance is good, they say. Maybe it's just that while the changes underway in the ways my mind and body work together are consolidated, I'm off balance, and it'll all settle into a new pattern eventually. Hell, I dunno (redux).

But like I said, maybe it's only the weather.

Either way, I apologize for not writing more to those who like to read the meandering mental travelogues of the wonderchicken. For now though, let it be known that I haven't been on a half-assed hiatus because I'm unhappy. Just the opposite.

10:24 AM | 11 comments

*pokes head above the oily surface of the waves, all Sheen-y from Apocalypse Now*

I've been keeping my head down of late, snarfing up Warren Ellis's astonishingly cool Transmetropolitan during the afternoon, reading The Collected Philip K Dick at night before the sandman whacks me one in the medulla oblongata, filling in the spare moments with more bittorrented Takashi Miike movies and old episodes of Space Ghost and The Kids in The Hall. The things I gotta do to hotwire my brain now that I'm drug-free. It's a damn shame.

Anyway, some strange and marvellous textual creature is soon to be born out of all this non-bloggerly activity (if not Athena-like parthenogenetically spoinged from my forehead, then perhaps appearing on the scene in a more, er... cloacally ichor-dripping kinda way (and then presumably slouching towards Bethlehem or something), which should be big fun for everyone involved), I hope, but then again, that might just be indigestion.

Stay tuned. Or not. I never know where the hell I'm going with this stuff.

*plays tape backwards, hoping that it'll look like he's re-submerging and that nobody'll notice the ripples are going in the wrong direction*

5:05 PM | 4 comments

My heartfelt and humble thanks to the folks that have kicked a few bucks (or a lot of bucks, in some surprising but very welcome cases!) into the hosting kitty over the past few days, by the way. I'll leave the button up over on the left, I guess, should anyone else get the urge to help out.

As it stands, though, I have enough for a year or so of hosting now, I think. You people rock!

I promise to try to write more in future. Although given the post just to the south, there, for example, that may not actually be a Good Thing. Your call.

6:01 PM | 4 comments

I've put off doing this for a long time. It makes me feel weird and a little ashamed. But when the going gets weird...ah well, you know the rest.

My good friend and kind host, who's been providing a home for this site gratis for the last few years, isn't going to be able to do so much longer. This wouldn't be a problem if I could reasonably spare the bucks to pay for my hosting, but the sh-tty thing is: I can't.

So I've finally taken the plunge and set up a paypal account tip jar, and if you've gotten any pleasure out of my ranting and babbling over the years, and you'd like to do the equivalent of buying me a couple of beers, as thanks or as fuel for more of the same, well, I'd be in your debt. I'll use any dollars or euros or yen or shekels thrown my way to keep this site online, and if folks do kick in, I promise to try and write more frequently as a token of my appreciation.

I'm putting a button over in the left column as well. You have my heartfelt thanks if you decide to shoot me some coin, friends.

Edit: Nuh-uh. Long since deleted. If you want to help me out and get some hosting for yourself, go here.

In happier wonderchicken news, the contract for the upcoming book has arrived, and all systems look to be go, so if I end up rich and sexy and famous out of the deal†, the beers'll be on me. It's a promise.

[Update : †Yeah, like that's gonna happen.

Also, I just realized I probably put up my little 'help me, I's monetarily disadvantaged!' plea here at the worst possible time, as blogger wallets snap shut all over the web thanks to the MT 3.0 brouhaha (man, I love that word), making a sound like distant automatic weapons fire. So go give Rageboy some money, if you can only afford to help out one weblogger with a tip jar and a bad attitude this year. It sounds like he might need the help more than I do. And he'll kick my ass if he doesn't get his meds.]

7:32 PM | 10 comments and 1 trackback

So my big news this week is that I've been asked for permission to allow some of my writing here to be published in a book that is intended to gather 'the best of writing on the web,' to be released this summer by a publishing house in New York.

Back in 2001, I started writing this weblog for a few different reasons, and over the years, those reasons haven't really changed, although I have discovered some new ones that keep me going. My life was going through one of its periodic upheavals, the transplantations I seem to need periodically to help me thrive, when I uproot and fling myself (and this time my wife) and my meager collection of possessions halfway around the planet again, and I thought it would be fun to write about it in a journal that I wouldn't end up losing in the shuffle, like I have so many others.

My memory is spotty at the best of times, and (I'm not sure if it was Cory Doctorow or someone else who coined the phrase, but to them I offer thanks) I really liked the idea of having an outboard brain, a kind of inverse memory hole that I could dip into to help me recall who I was and what I was thinking in bygone days, when I looked back from some far-future vantage point.

I also love to write, plain and simple, and though I've never studied writing in any other way than the tattered-and-wine-spattered-paperback-in-a-hovel romantic way of youth, people kept telling me that I was some kinda kick-ass.... word putting down guy. Me write pretty someday. So I thought that if I wrote in public (although my 'public' was pretty thin on the ground for the first while), it might be a way to keep me honest, keep me writing every day, and through sheer practice, that I might become better at it. I think I am a better writer after almost 3 years of this stuff, when I make an effort, so mission accomplished there. Although one of my great failings as a writer and a man is that I don't often make much of an effort. Ah well.

As many who read my stuff regularly know, I've been travelling around the planet for about 15 years now, and writing about it, when the mood struck me. My semi-secret dream has always always been to make a living from doing so -- travelling, writing, meeting people and drinking their odd, skull-cracking native beverages, writing about that, and moving on, weaving a bit -- but, as has been my habit since I was a kid, I never really did much about the dream, hoping that somehow I'd just be discovered. Bad habit, and one I've tried to break many times. Comes down to 'an external locus of control as a result of childhood bereavement,' the literature told me, back 20 years ago when I was trying to figure out why I was such a lunatic, but that's neither here nor there, perhaps.

It seems now that I have been discovered, and in a way that might, if I'm both lucky and determined, help me to realize the dreams I've always had about writing -- not fame, or much fortune, or even the cocaine and hookers so much, but just a dream of being free to wander and write about that, to read and think and drink and write about that, and to make enough money from it to live, and continue. Or it might not. Either way, I'm thrilled.

Others have 'discovered' me too, over the past few years, and helped me and encouraged me, or pointed to me and praised my work (or called me an idiot in a comment thread and roused me to rages as eloquent as I could muster), and I don't think this book offer would have come about if it hadn't been for those people. You know who you are, and there are many of you, and I thank you all. You are one of those 'other reasons' that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, reasons that I love this and will keep doing it.

So the book will be published in a couple of months, and I hope that everyone will buy at least five copies for themselves, and a few more besides for their grannies and orthodontists and paperboys and so on. It will, I think, be a book well worth the buying and the reading, and should occupy a place of pride on the toilet tank of the best homes in America. I say this not because I'm going to have some stuff in it, but because of the superb work of the terrifyingly talented other writers alongside which my paltry scribblings will stand. The list is impressive, and I will share, when it is finalized. It stands now at 26 writers, I believe.

Have I finally become an A-lister? Hell, I don't know. Not even sure what that means anymore. Am I starry-eyed, dazzled by the glare of the spotlight from Old Media that has swung my way? Sure as sh-t, I am. Am I overly enthused because I'm actually going to be included in a book that includes the word 'Best' in the title? Yeah, probably. But I am aware that many of the people I consider my virtual friends in the weblogging community have several (or many!) books already out there, without sharing author credit with 25 other writers.

Still, this is a big moment for me. I'm having a Sally Field moment, and I am still uncynical enough to hope that it might be one of those Big Moments in my life, like the one almost 3 years ago that started me doing this in the first place.

This is where you come in, friends and neighbours. Although an editorial board (including the publisher himself, an editor from the New York Times, a Yale professor and New Yorker contributing editor, a Time Magazine columnist and a best-selling fiction author) have already read and thumbs-upped a few pieces from each of the authors selected for the book, and a group of three readers will apparently be going through my archives (and those of the others who will be contributing) mining for gold, I've been asked to submit a list of 5 or 10 pieces that I consider to be my best. A number of pieces out of the union of the resultant lists will then be selected for inclusion in the book.

I hoiked out some of my faves a while back, and whacked them into a new 'Uncrappy' archive list, which includes some of my personal favorites, but I find that what I think of as my 'best' is frequently different from what you folks think. I thought that Typepad bit a couple of days ago was Comedy Gold, for example, but it garnered little more than a collective 'huh' from you, the Readers. Go figure.

So, I ask you a favour, friends. If you have a favorite or favorites amongst the bits I've written over the past couple of years, then I'd be forever in your debt if you'd consider whacking a link (or just a description, if you can't be bothered searching) in the comments thread attached to this post. Whether from my 'Uncrappy' best-of list, or not, could you tell me what your favorite bits of wonderchickensian blather are?

Then, when you give a copy of the book to your garbageman, you can point to one of my pieces and say with pride (or shame, your call) "I picked that one!"

Many thanks.

Update : Here's the lineup for the book. In fine company, am I. Hoping I don't look like a rube by comparison, am I. Stop talking like Yoda, must I.

1:44 PM | 24 comments and 4 trackbacks.

I've got a new EB gadget for you that I've been compelled to whip up after literally thousands hundreds dozens not a single solitary request. Still, it's something I've been planning to do for a while, even though I wanted to keep this design free of the crud-accretion that plagued the last one.

Way down the left-handside there, under the stack of coasters, is a box of past posts which I consider to be relatively Uncrappy. Highlights. You know. There're some missing, but I've managed to hit a few high points going back as far as the end of 2001, so far. If you Daypopped in with the crowds or are otherwise new to my stuff, you may find some dusty relics in there somewhere that you like. The whole list can be found here, if you've got a few hours.

Can you feel the excitement? The electricity in the air? The whole axle-snapping, gear-grinding power of it? Can you hear the crowd going wild?

No? Me neither.

Ah well.

A warning in advance though, to be fair : the content to be found yonder in the archive includes a short description of Dick Cheney's penis. But if that's not a highlight, I dunno what is.

7:14 PM | 4 comments and 1 trackback

It's huge. It rumbles in the distance, ominously. It squats down in the dangly bits of Korea, terminus for a thousand cargo ship routes, sucks in one kind of stuff, and spits out another slightly more value-added kind of stuff, all the while belching beautiful mushroomy columns of billowing white steam by day and chthonic-god pillars of flame by night. Oddly enough, it's the cleanest, greenest, most orderly place I've seen in Korea in more than 5 years of living here. And it's my new home.

Did I mention that I took that job with the Koreastyle Ontologically Repulsive Empire of Avarice, Incorporated (KOREA, Inc, geddit?). I did. It didn't take a great deal of thought.

But see, back when I worked for UltraHyperMegaNet™ in Sydney 2000 Oi Oi Oi, all I wanted was to get away from the moneyfication of my every waking moment. I was so sick of ROIs and business cases, of scope document meetings and steering committees and a new mission statement every week, each torturing the language a bit more with a further application of those 'positive power words' electrodes to the genitals. Empty words that everyone seemed to believe would magically draw profits, sympathetic magic from chanting corporate shamans. I was sick of the valuation of everything and everyone with the holy pumped-up technodollar.

Still, it was a hell of a lot of fun, exhausting and lucrative fun, and it turned out, after a couple of years in academia, where there are just as many sh-tweasels and not nearly as much money, that my experience in Oz, rather than turning me off entirely from working for Big Evil Corporations, just taught the importance of Avoiding the Assholes.

Avoiding the Assholes is, I realize more with each passing year, a skill to be sought and nurtured in the rest of Life as in work. Perhaps this is self-evident to many. I'm a slow learner. Or an optimist. Or a pugilist. My first and overriding reaction to assholery is to fight it, rather than run away from it, which has resulted in a number of CLMs over the years, none of which has much impacted on my slow and inevitable rise to the very top of my chosen profession.

OK, that's not strictly true. I don't have a chosen profession, really. I tend to choose where to live, as much as I am able, and the professions just kind of follow on from there. Which has made me versatile, if nothing else. And mercifully free of possessions.

Anyway. I wanted to talk about the KOREA Inc. chaebol I'm working for now, or if not the company itself, the strange feeling of being a Company Man, living in a company apartment, with my electricity and water and heating and telephone and massive broadband all provided gratis by the company, shopping at the company store, breathing company air, flushing my well-formed chlorellafied company lunch turds down into the company sewer, riding a company bus out into the real world occasionally, there in the distance, off the company island. It is, in many ways, the apotheosis of capitalism, and I'm smack in the middle of it. Not that I'm anti-capitalist, you understand, so much as just generally contrary. I'm driven more by cussedness and outrage at injustice than I am by any ideology. I'm as likely to punch you in the nose if you call me a lefty liberal as I am if you call me a rightwing conservative (not, of course, that many would call me the latter). Both are pejorative drooling simpleton simplifications for stupid people to try and get a handle on complicated issues.

Still, me, in the belly of the corporate beast. Funny how life works, ain't it? And the belly of the beast is f--king plush, I'm telling you.

Most of Korea is littered with massive apartment blocks, cereal-box shaped, terrifyingly ugly in their cookie-cutter 70's-style brutalist pragmatic anti-architecture, standing knee-deep in clusters of crowded, decrepit shops and halfhearted half-dead clusters of tired, leafless trees. They've been designed, if such a high-falutin' word as design can be countenanced when speaking of these dystopian monstrosities, to maximize floor space, measured in pyung, and little else. People are clamouring for opportunities to move into these things, and their value has skyrocketed in recent years. More, thousands more, are being built beside highways everywhere, and particularly in Seoul, where prices for these concrete shoeboxes have increased by 25% in the past year alone. If you move into one of these 'apart's (and what an amusing and sad little Konglish borrowing that is, because life in these monads, as far as I've been able to divine, is one deliberately designed to keep one cosily apart from one's neighbours, an aim freakishly self-destructive in such a traditionally village-collective, group-oriented society) anywhere in the country, its layout will be one of a small number of trivial variations on a depressingly similar theme. Fittings and finish will vary, especially if you buy a 'premium apart' built by one of the omnipresent chaebol, for which you'll pay anywhere up to a $50,000 premium, mostly for the name, which it is assumed will help resale value. In the past 15 years the housing demographics have shifted from something like 15% of the population living in these human beehives to something like 85%. Flying into Seoul, particularly at any time during the year other than verdant late-spring and summer, presents you with a death star landscape, carpeted in bumpy grey concrete as far as the eye can see. It is one of the ugliest cities I've ever seen, from the air. (Meanwhile, predictably and depressingly, the city is planning on allowing development inside its barely adequate greenbelt of (guess what!) more apartment buildings. Not clever, not even a bit, but no doubt enormous sums of money changed hands, and when the culprits are hauled up in front of the TV cameras a few years hence, it'll be too damn late.) Smaller cities are equally strewn with concrete eyesores, and it is not uncommon to see clusters of them inexplicably rising out of rice paddies in the middle of the countryside as well.

Outside of the moneyed central enclaves of Seoul (around which 47.7% percent of the entire value of the Korean economy is spun from air, the latest numbers say), urban life is a struggle to breathe, a tarantella dance to keep clear of garbage piles and throat oysters, a race to avoid being run down by taxis and diesel-smoker buses, a clattering clamouring cacophonic maelstrom. Of Dooooom!

I've read in a number of guidebooks the claim that Korean streets are amazingly clean, and I'm always forced to wonder what country the writers actually visited, or if the bastards ever even left their offices. Let me set the record straight : that's a big stinky bullsh-t beanbag, there, friend. Or at least it's bullsh-t for the entire country that lies outside the very innermost core of Seoul (plus Gangnam), outside of which most recent guidebook writers apparently don't venture, at least given the execrable quality of the latest Lonely Planet Korea book, to choose a particularly lame example.

It has been variously described as a reaction to invasion, as a legacy of poverty, as a manifestation of collective self-loathing, or as an absence of civic responsibility, but the reality is a long long way from order and cleanliness and nuanced concern for the harmony of one's physical surroundings that arises, I guess, from the Japanophile-fueled expectations of many foreigners. Which is to say, without putting too fine a point on it, that most homes I've seen here are nasty, claustrophobic concrete boxes, packed with haphazard piles of cheap plastic gewgaws and cardboard boxes, harshly-lit with naked flourescent tubes and pallid shafts of pollution-filtered sunlight weakly penetrating through never-cleaned windows, grimy with the grease and cigarette smoke of years. And it's usually a lot more pleasant inside than it is out. I don't understand why this is the case, but it is, more often than it is not, Seoul-published womens' magazines notwithstanding. If I err, I err on the side of restraint. It sometimes seems to me that if there is a window outside the richest shopping precincts of Seoul that has been cleaned since it was carelessly fixed into its frame with a messy ejaculatory squeeze of silicon rubber, I haven't seen it.

I know that's a weird thing to focus on windowglass, of all things. I have a clean window fetish, I admit it. Sue me.

So, all that said, perhaps I have given you some small sense of how I feel as if I have stepped through the looking glass in my new home, living deep in the piney bosom of KOREA Inc. Fountains and public sculpture. Low-rise apartment buildings widely separated, with lawns and shrubs scattered pleasingly between them, linked by flower-edged walking paths. Broad, well-paved streets, with freshly painted markings, lined with broad tree-shaded sidewalks. Public trash receptacles, frequently emptied. Gardens, parks, manicured topiary.

It's not unlike the best, most pleasant neighbourhoods in, say, Vancouver, if you turn the architectural clock back 20 years or so. It is unlike anywhere I've ever seen in Korea. Tellingly perhaps, since it's built on an island that is almost entirely reclaimed land, it's not really even in Korea. It's only offshore by a couple of hundred meters, but those couple of hundred meters might as well be a couple of hundred thousand.

All of which makes me feel deeply, existentially guilty. But not unhappy, by any means. Life is weird, the way I like it, and it's good, too.

6:23 PM | 1 Comment

The move to our new locale at the other end of the country is complete, I'm freshly back online with a 10Mb/s line (comped, along with a host of other fringe-benefits, hooray!), and I'm off to Japan again (Osaka rather than Fukuoka, and staying at the Nikko on the company dime this time, double hooray!) tomorrow to get my sparkly new work visa glued into the passport.

My kornet.net email address is defunct, a little prematurely, so if you've tried to mail me within the last few days, it probably bounced. Send mail to anything your fervid mind can come up with at emptybottle.org, and I should get it. Claim an wonderchicken email namespace thingo now†! Supplies are limited, offer void where prohibited by law.

Pics and tangentially-related blather, coming soon. Stay tuned to this bat-channel.

†You know, or not.

6:09 PM | 7 comments

My birthday present this year, back in early August, was meant to be a digital camera. I'd done my research and come to the conclusion that the best bang for the most minimal buck was the Canon Powershot A70.

Unfortunately, that was right around the time that I became unemployed again. This usually does not worry me in the least, but seeing as how I'm all adult and bewifed and all, we decided to defer the purchase of any non-necessary stuff until I got re-employed, which I recently have been.

Hooray for me, skyrockets in flight, doves are released into skies of deepest azure, the baby jesus laughs with glee, etcetera.

Point being, friends, that the camera was delivered yesterday, and it's been well over a year since I've bought anything for myself other than food and beer, relentlessly frugal as I am and downright cheap as She Who Must Be Obeyed can be, and I'm like a kid with this thing.

Now I don't know the first goddamn thing about Art and Photography and all that crap, I just want to use this amazing new technology to help me remember. As regular visitors to the 'bottle may know, I've had me some Amazing Adventures, mostly lubricated with whatever chemical stimulant easily came to hand. The problem with that, unfortunately, is that in my dotage I have rapidly fading memories, and rapidly fading images in my brain of who I did, and how what and when I did what I did, never mind why. And very few pictures to help the stories emerge, when I'm in a story-telling mood.

From regret at this deplorable synaptic deficit, therefore, I've resolved and now have the technology to make images, on the fly and without expense, to document for myself my life. My Life. Starting now! Not unlike Matt's new thang, or Shelley's new photo projects and pursuits (and hopefully career), I guess, but more artless, naturally, and less public. I plan to share little things that I particularly like, but it can be assumed that they may not have anything like the significance for you out there, my friends, that they do for me. Me and my brainfarts.

I am interested in becoming more skilled at seeing, and at capturing images that approximate what I see, but that will come with time and practice, I hope. I have little of either thus far. In the meantime, though, what fun!

Here are a few for you out of the dozens I took today. I don't know if they're 'good' or not, and I don't care. I like them and that's all that matters at this point, and I'm thrilled with the effortless alacrity of it all. I hope you like them too, if only to help you get a better mental image of the place whose portrait I've been trying to paint with words alone.

6:20 PM | 13 comments

It's been exactly a year since the bombing in Bali that killed my old friend Rick Gleason and 201 other people.

Is there a statute of limitations on mourning? Should there be? If we stop feeling that skip in the heartbeat and stab in the gut when we think of someone we loved who was killed, have we stopped caring? Should guilt then rush in? Should we try to leave behind our grief, and get on with it? What is left of the dead one, a year after they've gone, in the world? What do we learn from their lives, what can we learn? What have I learned?

A year on, I wish I could say confidently that I've consciously changed my life for the better after Rick's death, taken the lessons his life and his sudden death taught me, plowed up some fertile ground. I wish that in the decisions I've made in the intervening twelve months, a reflection could be seen of some nebulous tribute to him, and the things we both believed about life. Maybe it's there, and I can't see it. When you're too close to the mountain, you can't see how high it really is.

I've lived my life with death all around me -- not in the way that the billions of poor people on this planet do, perhaps, with family members dying slowly in the corner of the shack, or ripped apart under American bombs -- but with frequent visits from the reaper, until he became a familiar presence in my life, neither feared nor hated. I have no fear of death, but I resent it, and the curtain it throws around our brief little lives.

My father died when I was about five years old, my younger brother, right in front of me, a few years later. Aunts and uncles, great- and otherwise, died with regularity through my teens, as did my dearly-loved maternal grandfather. The rest of my grandparents were gone by the time I was in my mid-twenties, and then my step-father, who'd married my mother not long after my father's death 20 years before, also died. I have friends who never lost a family member or dear friend until their mid-thirties, for whom Rick's death was a shock more singular, and I always wondered how they thought about death. Did they fear it? Do they hate it more now, or less? Do they put it from their minds, and go on with the humble daily things, keeping the stink of terror well hid?

Scars were left on me in the wake of those deaths in my young life, furrows and welts in my brain some of which are even now just working their way into the light. This is as it should be. My great and abiding love for the drink, moderated and benign as it has become in my later years, as much passed on genetically and nurtured environmentally as it may be, certainly has some roots there. My fear and loathing of the very idea of having children, absolutely. My carefully-chosen expatriate existence, yearning contrapuntally as I sometimes do for the deep, cold coniferous forests of my youth. The vigour with which I counter those who I perceive to be attacking me, yes. All of these and more. I have made my peace with the ghosts, made it many years ago, and carry my wounds with awareness and a quiet understanding that what happens is good by virtue of the sheer fact that it has happened, and that to claim otherwise and rail against our experience is to refuse life, and shrink from it. To say no, rather than yes.

But Rick's death marked me, more than I could have expected. I still feel that weightless skip in my heartbeat, that stab in the gut, when I think of him. One year on, there are more questions than ever, about what my life is to mean to me, and what it has meant. About what is important, what is indispensable, and what is good. About how to reconcile a love for individuals with a deep, heart-squeezing loathing for humanity, and particularly for the sort of people that knocked down the World Trade Centre, that set the bomb in Bali, and that ordered the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. About the preachers and the haters, the ideologues and the god-fearers, the killers and the martyrs, and about how deeply stupid and damaged, greedy and afraid they must be.

And in the end, of course, I'm left with more questions, and I'm left with a rising knot of choking rage and resentment that I consciously push down, squeeze back, and try to transform into something useful, into words and actions that don't feed the killer monkeys, that keep the bloody chaos at bay, and I'm not usually very successful.

I said this, about 18 months ago, long before my friend's death :

and I suppose I still believe it to be true.

But Rick's murder marked me, more perhaps and nearer the surface than any death I've lived past since I was very young. I suppose I am a better man because of that mark. I would be a happier man, and one less uncertain and questing, if it had not happened. Would that Rick were still walking around in his loose-limbed way, falling in love at the drop of a hat, laughing and drinking and seeing. Would that he could share a drink with me tonight.

But that is not the way it happened, and I'm still not sure of how to live with that.

11:45 AM | 13 comments and 2 trackbacks.

The sound that is made when you are biting through your own flesh is a little like that of thick rubber being torn. It's wetter, and when you hear it inside your head, it's kind of terrifying.

I bit a hole about the size of a dime deep into the top of my tongue, near the centre, the other day. I don't know how the hell I managed to do it. I was eating some soon-dae (potato noodles spiced and stuffed into pig intestines, with boiled, sliced organ meat on the side - tastier than it sounds) when suddenly the molars on the right side of my mouth met a bit more resistance, there was that odd sound, loud enough that my wife beside me started and stared, and the hot, salty flood started. No pain, not right away.

I went to the bathroom and let a mouthful of blood pour out -- a real Wes Craven moment, which made me once again wish we could afford that digital camera I want -- and had a look. Great meaty flap, deep hole, reddish-black blood gushing out. Cool.

I hate doctors, so I applied ice and didn't eat for a few days. The nub of flesh that pokes up out of the scar and the crater beneath it will be with me for life, I suspect. This is, in its way, good.

The sound that the small bones in your foot make when they break are not so much a crunch as a crack, startlingly loud. About 3 months back, I drove the corner of a doorjamb between my third and fourth toes on my left foot as I walked calmly into the bedroom to get the ironing board. Broke both toes, and a couple of bones in my foot as well, judging by feel. I did the 'apply pressure/apply ice/elevate above your heart' routine to minimize swelling, and bound the toes together.

I hate doctors, so I self-medicated, went back to work the next day, and limped around for the next 6 weeks or so while my foot slowly changed colour. I don't think some of the bones set properly, and the area is still a little tender if I poke or prod it the wrong way. This is, in its way, a valuable reminder to watch where the hell I'm walking.

I'm not sure precisely what led me to my wholehearted loathing of the medical profession, although I do have a few ideas as to the antecedents.

My hometown, an island of a couple of thousand brave and drunken souls isolated in a sea of trees way up in the part of British Columbia where the map merely notes 'Here Be Monsters,' was served by an odd, sullen, ragtag crew of medical practitioners over the years I grew up there. Most were South African, and were bound by contract to be there in order to get their residency in Canada. How much our town benefitted from the Immigration Department requirements that doctors migrating to Canada spend their first few years dealing with family violence and alcohol-related injury in the Boonies was debatable, perhaps. Still, they were a novelty, with their funny accents and poorly disguised, simmering resentment.

I particularly remember one Vietnamese doctor who was, in fact, one of my favorites (and a rarity in a town where there was precisely one Asian family - the Chinese folks who ran two of the half-dozen restaurants), and who, thanks to his redneck comedy gold inability to pronounce /r/ and /l/ according to my expectations, precipitated one of the funniest conversations in which I have retrospectively been involved when he handed the 10-year-old me a plastic cup and a small wooden ice-cream spoon and asked for what I swore was a 'stew' sample.

One of the various medical mistakes, blunders, and life-threatening f--kups (back before the first thing I did upon injuring myself was Google up some advice) that I was either the victim of or a witness to was, for example, my bottomless prescription for tetracycline (a broad-spectrum antibiotic) as a teenager, intended to combat the Aetna-shaming eruptions that my face and body produced. Not on-and-off, but on, for years, nonstop. My body, strong as it is, is still paying the price for that. And this was in the early 80's - not before medical thought had come around to understanding that continual massive doses of antibiotics might just have a deleterious effect on the patient overall.

My step-father, who pulled Dad Duty from not long after my father died until about 20 years later, died, I am certain, as a direct result of the interactions in the cocktail of drugs prescribed by his doctors -- by this time another ragtag gaggle of Africans, mostly -- but not after going quite mad beforehand. Or if not bibbledy-bibbledy mad, so far sunk into full blown paranoid delusions that it was painful to carry on a conversation with him on anything but the most trivial matters.

My current step-father, 'Ol' Number 3,' a tough, boozy, no-bullsh-t ex-cowboy, experienced runaway heart fibrillations and tremors and pitty-patting for more than four months this year, to the extent that any kind of physical labor would sometimes make him lose consciousness. This was deeply embarrassing to him, and made life extremely difficult for him and my mother. He visited the docs over and over again, several times a week, a situation made more difficult by the 140 km of unpaved road between the fishing lodge where my folks live and the nearest town. Bamboozled, they merely scratched their heads in confusion, and ordered more tests. Finally, after months of this, unable to take it any longer, he just stopped taking his meds (including the new ones the doctors had prescribed), and the problem simply went away.

(There are more stories, and I'm sure you have a few too. C'mon - share!)

To hell with doctors. They can keep their pills and their guesswork. Unless I need a limb sewn back on, I'll be taking care of myself. This attitude draws great chagrin from the wife, who is a big believer in the power of The Doctor, like most Koreans I've known, who tend to run in panic to the nearest doctor (and Korean doctors are a worry in and of themselves, let me tell you) if something flies out of their noses when they sneeze.

I tell her that whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger. I'm certain, as she shakes her head in annoyed bemusement, that in her mind she replaces 'stronger' with 'stupider.'

I can live with that.

1:58 PM | 11 comments

Part One can be found here.

Back to the capsule hotel I went, almost skipping with glee. I dropped my shoes in a locker this time, dropped the locker key at the front desk, retrieved my wristband key from one of the desk clerks, and rode the Super Fun Luxury Lift to the 6th floor. I figured I'd drink a couple of Asahis, then go exploring.

Back at the room, I closed the accordion door, climbed the metal ladder into my top-bunk capsule, leaned back, switched on the TV that protruded organically from the plastic wall of my coffin, cracked a can, took a deep and almost orgasmically satisfying pull of my long-anticipated Asahi, set it down on the little extruded-plastic shelf to my right, grinned and sighed.

Pushing a little metal chicklet set into the airliner-like control panel cycled me through the TV channels on my 7-inch monitor. There were a couple of scrambled stations in the line-up, tantalizing, flickering shards of heaving pink and purple meat, the audio tracks for which were subdued sighs, gutteral man-grunts, and the occasional squelch. Either the Abbatoir Channel, or The Legendary Japanese Porn, apparently. The girl at the front desk hadn't been taught how to say 'You want porn with that?' in English, I guess. I was briefly disappointed, but I figured drinking and smoking were vices enough for a short 12 hours in-country. No big deal, and although I can't say that I wasn't curious, I also wasn't curious enough to go down to the desk and ask, possibly in pantomime, please may I have some porno?

I spent the first beer fiddling with switches (something from which it is apparently in my genetic code to derive great pleasure), channel-surfing, adjusting the air-con nozzle just-so, and the second beer watching some kind of top-20 countdown of neat shops and restaurants in (I believe) Tokyo.

It was time to explore a bit, I reckoned. Also, I had to take a crap. You know how that is.

There were a few more guys around, sitting in front of the pedestal ashtrays in the smoking lounge near the elevators and getting drinks from the vending machines, than there had been before, and they were all wearing identical pajamas. Ding! A light went on, and I suddenly realized what that pile of cloth had been, the one I'd dumped on the tiny desk in the room in my rush to climb up into the capsule and play around. I went back to my cubicle, stripped down to my boxers, and put on the 3/4 length jammy bottoms and v-neck top. They actually fit pretty well, which surprised the hell out of me. I am not a small man, and I've been lifting weights again for the last couple of months.

Suitably attired, and feeling like a million bucks, I made my way back to the toilets. You could have eaten off them. No, seriously. If there's anything I like better than a cold beer, it's a clean bathroom. I blame my mother for this minor quirk. She's a very clean lady.

Attached to the side of the porcelain pot was one of those electronic bidet machines that are getting so popular in Korea, but that everyone (or possibly just me, I don't know) associates with weird Japanese poophole fetishism. I'd never used one, although I'd tried the low-tech variety of bidet in Europe when I was travelling there, with, shall we say, mixed results, usually involving too-cold water and Extreme Scrotum Tightening. ("Next up on ESPN : EXtreme Scrotum Tightening! Brought to you by Asahi Beer!")

I was feeling adventurous, and mildly euphoric from the first couple of Very Large Cans. After nature had taken its course, I centred myself, as it were, chose a button at random, and pressed it.

Wahhhh-ahhhhh! The angelic choir descended, I'm telling you. The portal to a new world opened briefly, as water warmed to a perfectly refreshing temperature cascaded and burbled playfully around my grateful sphincter. It was pure bliss, for about 20 seconds.

Aware that it would sound a bit strange (and that I might be arrested) if I were to just sit there and hit that button over and over again for the next several hours, like the wirehead monkey hitting the button for the electrical jolt to his pleasure centre, oblivious to the world, I reluctantly patted dry and padded out, casting wistful glances back at the stall. Maybe I'd need to do a #2 again later. Maybe. Hopefully.

Walking with a new spring in my step, I hopped on the elevator, and rode up to the 11th floor. As expected, the shower facilities were well-stocked with towels and lotions and unguents of all sorts, spotlessly clean, and brightly lit, in a welcoming, warmly incandescent kind of way. Not only that, but there was a sauna, all marble pools and steam and cascading water, which I vowed to try in the morning, if I had time.

The restaurant on the floor below was similarly excellent in appearance, with a bar and a menu card chock-a-block with enticing-looking dishes.
I had an appointment with 6 more rapidly warming cans of beer, though, and beer trumps food, always. Besides, the shouted greetings from the employees anytime someone came in the door, as in Korea, put me off.

Back in my capsule, butthole absolutely singing, I cracked another can, and switched the TV on. It was about almost 9pm by this point, and although I had to get up in less than 9 hours, get on a flight back to Seoul and convince immigration that they should let me in again with no visible means of support, I was feeling frisky, if not frisky enough to do anything but drink in bed.

That's when Japan suddenly became the Greatest Country In The World, a status for which, in my mind at least, it had already been building a good case for candidacy.

There was a show on for about an hour that involved really goofy costumes, senseless violence, public humilation, sumo wrestlers, fat guys dressed like sumos wearing Elvis wigs and riding motorcycles in quarries, more random violence, and it was the funniest.thing.evar. No, really. Dumber than dumb, but beautifully so, if you know what I mean. One segment involved one of the fat shameless guys wearing a radio earpiece and acting out the instructions of his controllers in front of a department store, which would be less funny and more of The Usual TV Crap if the people watching weren't Japanese. That somehow made it comedy gold for me, as did the fact that half the time you almost couldn't see the poor guy through the crowds of onlookers, every single one of whom was pointing their mobile phone camera at him, snapping digital pics like no tomorrow. I laughed until tears came, and that doesn't happen often, dour bastard that I usually am.

But for all the fun inherent in that program, the moment of truth came afterwards. This is primetime Saturday night, keep in mind. The show, which lasted two hours or more (things got a bit fuzzy there towards the end), was called The Poetry Bout.

It was a tournament, with the loser of each two-person bout knocked out and progressing to the next round, of Poetry Reading. Poetry! On a Saturday night! On TV, with flawless high production values, in front of a rapt and appreciative live crowd! With (what I presume were) celebrity judges and just-plain-folks, singly and in groups, in bars and homes, butchershops and schools and street-food places all over the country, via live video, giving their own commentary and votes for the winners of each round. The contestants were anywhere in age from middleschool to retiree, male and female, some eliciting laughter, some tears, some a kind of liquid silence, all clearly in love with language.

It was riveting. I didn't understand a goddamned word, but I was glued to the set, rooting for my favorites, for a couple of hours and several more of those Very Large Beers. As the winners of the preliminary rounds went on to challenge winners of other heats, I began to become familiar with their style, and was surprised for example when a happy funster would change strategy, and pull a change-up with a poem all serious and heartfelt, instead. This, the beer was telling me, was the way poetry was meant to be appreciated - not on the page, all dismembered and nullified with dead-soul dissection, but as music, incomprehensible, glorious music, in front of a crowd that laughs and cries and farts along with the poet.

And, you know (apologies in advance to Dan, if you read this), I f--king hate poetry sometimes, unless it's being subverted by someone like Buk. This is how much I liked this show.

The final round, although some of the oldsters and art college types had put in a good showing, was between a teenage boy and a teenage girl. She, I think, for no real reason that I can tell, was the better poet, but he frequently made his listeners both laugh and shed a tear in a single poem, and, although shy and involuted, was clearly their favorite.

When it was over, I had to go out to the lounge and smoke a cigarette, and think about what I'd seen. It seemed to me if as I'd seen something about Japan, no doubt glamourized and stage-managed and cheapened in the way that television does, but something that I had not expected. I couldn't imagine the same thing happening, or being watched, in Korea, where the fake, the maudlin and the sentimental trump the real as a matter of policy, and though that's what Canada may be like in my distant, half-fantasy memories of the place, I know for truth that the latest tits-and-explosions import from America is more likely to be greeted with enthusiasm there.

This wasn't a niche show, for intellectuals and fruitbats - there were people from all walks of life watching this thing, cheering and high-fiving, of all ages, and it didn't look like they were doing it to the insistent flashing of APPLAUSE prompters, either.

I stayed up, smoking in the lounge and finishing my last couple of beers, and thought about it a bit, and decided that I would have to write about it, start writing yet again, because, damn it, I realized that I wanted to be one of those poets too, up in that ring, and I wanted to try and make people laugh and cry with my words.

And so here I am, back in the saddle. I hope you like my poem.

3:07 PM | 22 comments and 2 trackbacks.

Japan rocks.

No, really. I have a few friends, virtual and otherwise, over there, and they are quick to jump up the ass of anyone who's drunk the kool-aid and open their umbrellas. You know the type of travel-fanboys I mean, and my friends love to hate - men, mostly, who go to or end up in Japan to find something that they're missing for some reason, something they can't find wherever they are. These guys tend to fall in love - with the mythos, with a woman, with the culture, with the history, ex post facto or otherwise - and either sooner or later begin to buy into the casual Japanese certitude that the Japanese are just better than you. Better, stronger, faster, with tentacle and dismemberment porn that makes the next best tentacle and dimemberment porn offerings look like Curious George Goes To The Hospital. These fellows tend, in time, to become those annoyingly smug expats-in-Asia who are determined to overlook anything unpleasant in their adopted home, to blame the outsider, to spout platitudes that regardless of their high-minded elegance come down to 'it's not better or worse, it's merely different.' You know - the kinds of guys you want to bust in the f--king chops half the time, if only because they speak the language better than you do.

So, anyway, these friends of mine who've been in Japan for many years, they tend to have little patience for the kind of rah! rah! Japanophilia that I'm about to display, and for that I am profoundly sorry. All I can say is that I only spent somewhat more than 12 hours there, and the bulk of that was while I was slightly inebriated, so how much of the bad stuff could I reasonably have seen? I haven't drunk the kool-aid, but I did drink the beer.

After getting rectally roto-rootered by my last employer and not finding another reasonable job before the contract term expired, I had to make a visa run and come back on a tourist visa, and the cheapest flight I could get was to Fukuoka. Sitting at the superb, gleaming new Incheon international airport, I noticed a flyer from Onse Telecom that said that wireless broadband was available in many of the departure gates, and if you didn't have a laptop to take advantage of it, you could just come over to the desk and they'd give you one, for free.

This I promptly did, handing over my passport and getting a snazzy Samsung laptop in return. Good deal. I went back downstairs to the Burger King beside Gate 30, bought my first greaseburger in a few months, fired up the computer, and went surfing. I tried searching a bit for some hotels,but quickly got bored and just figured it would be groovier to do my usual trick from back in my backpacker days : show up with no pre-planning whatsoever, and see where the fates and random quantum flux took me. Instead of being prudent, I spent the next while posting snarky comments at Metafilter, until boarding time. It was about 4:30 pm, and my return flight was for 9 am the following morning.

A bumpy 90 minutes or so later, through red-lit thunderheads and millefeuille nimbostratus, across gut-levitating canyons of air - my favorite part of flying, those landscapes of cloud - we were glidepathing down into clean, green Fukuoka. It was overcast there, too, and more than 30 degrees, but I was pleased as I stepped out of the plane to find the air free of that horrendous fug to which one grudgingly becomes accustomed in Seoul.

I made my way through customs - the guy finding it odd that I only had an overnight bag, and amused when he found my two cup ramyeon packages inside - and straight to the hotel booking desk. Everyone on the various fora I'd checked before I'd left had said that the women who staffed that desk spoke excellent English, and were invariably helpful.

The girl there spoke English alright, but, in that annoyingly reticent way in which the Japanese break bad news, informed me that there wasn't a single goddamn room left in the whole city.

Ah, sh-t.

She gave me a list to try and call myself, and after a few unsuccessful attempts punctuated by those pregnant silences that I was already starting to figure out were the Japanese equivalent of 'sorry, buddy, you're screwed,' I figured I'd just have to wing it.

The shuttle bus to the domestic terminal, the subway two stops to Hakata, the centre of the action in Fukuoka.

By this time I was feeling a bit gritty-eye tired, sweaty, grumpy and increasingly sure that I was going to end up sleeping in a seat at the airport and looking like a rumpled rummy when I tried to get back into Korea the next morning. I'd done worse, years back when I had the youthful energy for travel hijinks of that sort, but these days I'm more into the Good Sleep than the Amusing Anecdote.

So I started walking around Hakata Station. The first five hotels I dragged my ass into knew what I was going to ask before I asked, and were already shaking their heads, politely, by the time I'd gotten to the desk and asked it. The two guys behind the desk at the sixth actually chuckled a bit at my stupidity - by this time I was drenched, both in sweat and by the steady rain that had started to fall, red-faced and getting extremely grumpy indeed - and I was about ready to give up and try the 5-Star (and probably more expensive than my plane ticket) Hotel Nikko.

I went into the 7-11 on the corner, bought a pack of cigarettes, and had my first sober smoke in more than three years. That helped.

As I did so, I noticed that the place across the sidestreet from me was a lobby of some sort - Hotel Cabinas Fukuoka, it said! 'Cabinas? Capsule hotel? Yes! I've been wanting to stay in one of those since I first heard about them!' thought I. I looked around for about 5 minutes trying to find somewhere to get rid of the cigarette butt - the streets were clean, and I was damned if I was going to mess them up by doing anything worse than dripping sweat on them - and then shuffled, chafing and praying, into the lobby.

One of the girls at the desk took one look as I stumbled into the lobby and - politely, mind you - said 'Shoes...shoes please!'

Great. My first faux pas already. You were supposed to take your shoes off at the front door, before you even got into the lobby! That would have made more sense in Korea, where horking up throat oysters on the street is an Olympic-level sport, and wearing your mucous-encrusted shoes inside would definitely be unhygienic...but fair enough. I backed up to the door, quickly, mumbling 'sorry, sorry' while the couple of Japanese guys in pajamas in the lobby eyed me suspiciously for a moment or two, then went back to their newspapers.

I took off my shoes, came back to the desk. "Do you have any...umm...spaces?"

I almost kissed her when she said "Of course!" and pulled out a laminated menu showing two kinds of capsules - one in a little room of its own, and one set into a locker-like bank of them, 2 high. Even the 'deluxe' was well under the price I had expected to pay for lodging, and I immediately and gratefully pointed to the bigger one. It was 4300 yen - about $50 for the night, Canadian. Woohoo! There's some beer money, right there, thought I.

She took my details and my cash, showed me the locker room off to the side of the check-in desk where I could put my shoes, gave me a plastic wristband with a key attached, told me about the sauna and showers on the 11th floor and the restaurant on the 10th, and wished me a pleasant stay, all in accented but excellent English. She was prettier than heck, too. Things were looking up.

This place, I neglected to mention, was nicer than most $200 a night places I've seen in Korea. Brightly lit, impeccably, spotlessly, surgically, clean, brand new. I'm a sucker for luxury - even faux luxury, to be honest - and although this was to all intents and purposes budget accommodation, cheaper than anywhere else I'd heard of in that city, it was nice. Really, really nice.

I took the elevator to the 6th floor, and through a set of glass doors was a set of corridors lined with capsule-rooms. Each one was a tiny hotel room, basically, with a folding, accordian door panel. Inside were a desk, built into a closet unit, and a capsule unit either in the top or the bottom. Mine was set into the top.

The capsule itself was a single piece, injection-molded plastic coffin, with a video screen, alarm clock and radio, aircon control, speakers behind either ear, and amidst a profusion of knobs and switches, a large red button labelled in Japanese only, that I thought of as the 'ejection button,' and was sorely tempted to press, later that evening.

I pulled shut the accordion door, doffed my sweat-soaked business shirt and tie - I always fly with a tie, and find it helps to smooth my way through immigration - pulled on my old friend's band ('MARY') t-shirt, and went on the hunt for beer. Nobody even looked at me. No stares, no 'Oh my god - it's a foreign devil' in the local lingo, no double takes or furtive muttering and pointing. None of the stuff, in other words, that I live with every time I leave the house in Korea.

I walked around for a bit, and marvelled at the cleanliness and order of the area. This was beside the biggest station in the city, bus and subway, the sort of area you'd expect to be heavy with The Scuzz, but it was downright pretty, by night at least. I imagined living there, and somehow managed to do so, as I often do, without concurrently entertaining any discouraging notions of work or budgetary constraints or anything of the kind. In my 'let's imagine that I live here' games that I unfailingly engage in whenever I happen onto somewhere nice, reality rarely intrudes.

Back to the station I wandered, after that short look around, and although none of the 7-11ish convenience stores had had any beer to sell, to my transient chagrin, and there were none of the vending machines I'd heard so much about, there was a little hole-in-wall place that had a cooler full of beer, that I somehow navigated to flawlessly once I'd booted up the beer-radar, as if I'd been following the map to the Pirate Treasure. Big black gothic-font beery 'X'.

I am inordinately fond of Japanese beer, especially Asahi. I'd been all a-drool all day thinking about it, after endless months of choking down the Korean swill that passes for lager there. I bought Eight Very Large Cans, just to be sure. Better to have too much than too little is my thinking when it comes to such things. The girl behind the counter didn't even bat an eye. I was beginning to love Japan by this point, with a love deep and true.

As I left the station, there was a band busking outside the entrance. It is possible that my recent successes in securing lodging and sweet sweet beverages was rosying up my outlook a bit, but i swear they were the best band I'd heard in years. This judgement may also have been due in no small part to the fact that they were also the first band I'd heard in years. (There are no buskers in Korea, good, bad or otherwise. Beggars, yeah, who somehow can afford mobile freaking karaoke machines into which they wail their maudlin songs, lying prone on the ground, wrapped in black rubber, presumably entreating passers-by to give them some money so they'll shut the f--k up. Never mind, I'm getting sidetracked...) A friend was passing out flyers, and they were called Chaba, and their website is here. After a couple of songs, a couple of cops came up and good-naturedly shut them down, and though I was tempted to follow them and listen some more, I had a whole bunch of cold beer gently sweating in a plastic bag, and I was thirstier than hell, and had to be on an airplane in approximately 13 hours.

Part Two, in which I wear pajamas, drink beer and listen to Prime Time Poetry in a language I don't speak, and love it, is here.

6:01 PM | 24 comments and 8 trackbacks.

Well, it's that time again, friends and neighbours, for the wonderchicken to take a wee break, I think. Adventure awaits, or if not adventure, then at least a new home and some new faces.

I'll see you around the usual watering holes, virtually, but I won't be writing here, at least for a while. Hell, I haven't written anything worth reading in weeks, I know. I need to have some more stories to tell (though I'm far from exhausting the old ones) and I need more stories to hear too, but I won't be ready to tell all of you those stories in turn until I've felt the sun on my face a bit, and blown the proverbial carbon out of the valves with some Mekong whiskey, or some compressed air down on a reef somewhere, or some dangerous and ill-advised antics in the Bad Side of Town, or maybe just a simple change of scenery.

Then again, I might change my mind and post a semi-inebriate screed or a philosophical ramble or two in the intervening weeks before we land - somewhere - again, so check back once in a while, if you're so inclined.

But life calls, and I've always been one to shake off the dust, pull up my drawers and leap - all floating hair and flashing eyes - into the fray when I hear the call. I'm afraid, a little, but excited too, and feeling the pull of the open road. Wish me, wish us, luck.

See you soon. Ish.

10:48 PM | 21 comments

Not much interested in weblogging per se at the moment - busy firing off resumes and such, and trying to work out the logistics of the next few months.

Australia is still the primary plan, and everything looks good for a triumphant return, but given that my last visa application with immigration there took 11 months to process, alternatives need to be considered in the interim.

Happily, I've already been offered a job at a government school here :

Well not that exact spot on Koh Samui precisely, but Surat Thani, which is the nearest city on the mainland to Koh Samui. About one hour and two dollars, and you're there. Paradise.

And apparently the beer's cheap too.

I've wanted to visit that part of the world since I knew it existed, and to be able to live and work there for a while would be, well, sweet.

The wife is firmly against it. The standard Korean mythology (not entirely inaccurate, given what I've heard about Korean husbands' predilection for patronizing the sex trade) is that the primary reason one goes to Thailand is to indulge one's need for commercial f--king. She's also not big on sun and surf, and the pay would admittedly be minimal. I am lobbying fiercely.

We shall see how this one plays out. In my mind, I must admit, my bags are already packed. Unless something much much better presents itself, this seems like too good an opportunity to pass up.

Remember what I was saying last month? Life has a funny way of opening doors as other ones are closed, doesn't it? I love my life, as hard as it may be sometimes.

12:22 AM | 7 comments and 1 trackback

Well, I've just been told that I'm not going to be offered another contract at the university, despite the fact that the students have consistently rated me as the best intructor there, four semesters running, and there was no indication whatsoever that this might happen. Directive from the President (a friend of someone of influence who would rather see me gone), apparently, which is not to be disputed. Looks like I backed the wrong pony.

Ah, petty politics.

This development does however give me free reign to make fun of them, which I will, you can be sure, but not right now.

This makes life interesting, living as I do without a safety net. As I've hinted, though, my great and good friend back in Sydney has offered me a job recently, which I tentatively accepted not two weeks ago. There are a few visa hurdles to be jumped through, but I'm confident we can do it.

I have always found that when I'm having difficulties making a decision that might change the course of my life for the following few years (as I seem to do at 2 or 3 year intervals), something happens to make the choice perfectly and indisputably clear. Diamond bullet between the eyes.

I just hope the visa application goes OK, or else I'll be well and truly rooted. I've got about 6 weeks to sort myself out before I get kicked out of Korea, since they're not really interested in the continued pleasure of my company if I'm not going to be A Good Worker anymore. Timing is always a problem when you're bouncing around the planet, and not rich.

Right. Eyes to the future, and fingers crossed....

10:37 AM | 31 comments

I'm aware that the past week has been the longest unannounced hiatus I've taken from posting since this site started. Apologies to those who are left feeling out of sorts and mildly irregular in the absence of regular doses of wonderchicken. Life is happening, which is often a good thing.

Off to the DMZ this morning. My plan to moon the North Koreans on the other side of the Joint Security Area would have my companions a bit worried, if they were aware of it. I will maintain a tight security cordon.

Let's hope the Bouffant-boy Brigades don't pick today to march southwards for glory, conquest, and decent food (not to mention loose shoes and a warm toilet seat).

2:33 PM | 9 comments

You ended up working for people you hated, and you found the massive inflow of cash thrilling but completely unrewarding. You felt like you had pissed away years of your life building some inconsequential piece of software that would never see the light of day anyway. You felt an urge to actually do things for people, to do something that might leave a mark of some kind on someone. On anyone. Something that felt real, or at least realer than the corporate office-politics circle jerk that had turned your sense of work as play into a daily grind as your friends quit, or were made redundant, or just gave up and waited for the foundering ship to finally sink. Endurance counts the most, Bukowski always said, but you were just too damn tired of spinning your wheels 80 hours a week, and getting shunted to the sidelines by incompetent technocrats who felt threatened by you. So you left your freakishly high-paying job, in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. People thought you had taken leave of your senses.

And you went back to a place you had publicly reviled, a place you'd spent hours (days? weeks? months?) complaining about, a place in which the swarming multitude of infuriating details that assaulted your senses on a daily basis had driven you to drink for all the wrong reasons, a place where in weaker moments you felt sure that you'd had some of the life drained out of you, unrecoverable, into the smoggy night. But to a job teaching again, chasing the noble dream again, at a university, poorly-paid, yes, but where you could make a difference, you thought, where you might see in the eyes of your students that your labours were appreciated, that you would, at least by a few, be remembered. Where much of your time would be your own, and you could stretch out, grow your mind, cultivate your soul.

Dreamer. Pretty soon, predictably, you grew weary of that, too, and wondered what the hell would ever make you content.

And now, there's an offer on the table to go back, reverse the clock, and join the racing rats once again. You're sorely tempted, and you are annoyed with yourself for being so easily led. And afraid that if you don't grab the ring again, don't say yes each and every time to the possibilities life offers you, that life will stop offering you those chances, fold closed the kimono, and it will all be over.

And you realize, in your confusion and doubt, that all you really want is to go back to that bamboo hut - the one in Fiji, or the one on Flores, or the one on the Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo, or the one you have kept in your mind like a mantra manifested since you first hurled yourself out on the road - the one on the new-moon arc of powdery sand, beneath the coconut palms, the one you've dreamed about over and over again. You can almost picture yourself sitting there again, deeply tanned, drinking a beer, the good hot smell of your own baked-off sweat, the dried-seawater tautness of your skin, natty dread, nothing going through your mind other than the colour blue, a deep and throbbing hum, and a set of gentle animal hungers. In the moment.

And then the phone rings.

4:52 AM | 7 comments and 1 trackback

I'm feeling one of my periodic bouts of knee-jerk anti-intellectualism coming on, during which I customarily have a tendency to gibber and howl, slap my belly and dance and drink and sweat and swear and look at pornography, so if the next little while amongst the bottles is characterized by determined, single-minded stupidity and you, dear reader, find that to be either annoying or contrary to the Loftiness of Blogocratic Discourse and the general air of 'I'm-smarter-than-you'-iness we occasionally see around the blogs, I invite you, o kind and gentle soul, to either crack a beer and play along or, you know, go away and come back a little later. It's party time!

"The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself." - Noam Chomsky

"The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the nonintellectuals have never stirred." - Aldous Huxley

"What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?" - Henry Miller

"Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race." - Henry Miller, again

7:15 PM | 8 comments

Out of nowhere this evening, I remembered one afternoon many years ago when my friend Rick's and my paths had crossed - in New Zealand I think it was - and he asked me what I'd been doing for the last couple of years, expecting one of my 6-beer-long monologues.

I paused, said the first thing that came to mind : "Tuggin'." He laughed.

Deliberately dumb, that exchange became a shorthand ritual in later years when our travels would bring us back together in the same place for a day, or for a week.

"How've you been?" he'd ask. "Tuggin'," I'd reply, and that would be that.

It was our code to signify that it didn't really matter how long we'd been apart, that the thread of our friendship could be picked up again without missing a beat, no matter how long the time intervening, that we were more often than not men without women and not too worried about it, and that the telling of tales could always wait until we'd had a bottle of wine or three.

I remembered that this evening, and then I remembered that it wouldn't ever happen again, because he's dead. God damn it.

3:10 AM | 11 comments

Spring has sprung in Seoul, and the last few days have averaged about 10 degrees Celsius warmer than the average for this time of year; the prevailing winds from the East, which are unusual and have not only encouraged the blossoms to open but have cleared away some of the smog to which I have reluctantly become accustomed, well, those warm, cheek-tickling breezes have also made me hornier than a three-peckered billy goat, as my colourful character of step-father is given to say.

Perhaps it's just death that has me tumescent. Apparently that happens, sometimes. Regardless, sex. Mmm, sex.

3:49 AM | 3 comments

I said this, before :

You f--king primates. Kill each other until you're all dead, grind each other's bones to make your bread. Swing the infants by their heels and shatter their tiny skulls on the doorjambs of your hovels. Kill! Hate! Let it never end! Swear blood feuds, and carry on the senseless slaughter of your fathers' fathers, and their thick-fingered simian fathers, too. Bathe in the blood of your enemies, before they have a chance to caper like children in arterial gouts of yours. Cleanse the world of your hated foes, yes, that's it, ethnically cleanse. If there are any women left alive, don't forget to rape them, and rape them hard. Slitting their throats after you've spilled your filthy warrior seed is optional, but recommended. Kill! Lay waste! Wreak havoc! Defend the honour of your people, sink your hands deep into the warm entrails of those you would destroy as they cough out their last curse! Kill!

Just hurry it up, already. I'm waiting to dance on your unmarked graves, you cheeseheads.

...

I'm too f--king weary to get as worked up as I was when I wrote that little rant about some-f--king-war or other, so transliterate if you must, my friends. Turgid, purple and mildly embarrassing, sure, but better than nothing, right?

Better than embarrassed, embattled, uncertain silence. Better than a sad and defeated realization that no matter how intense the outrage born from a meaningless commitment to steer one's course by what seems ethical and right, the stupidity and hatred and killing will just keep rolling on.

Let's Roll™!

6:07 AM | 4 comments

I've been farting around with a sorta-new design, and your comments are welcome. Gooder, worserer? Look weird with your 5 year old browser?

I've done some checking with the latest Mozilla, Opera and IE versions, and it looks OK, but I'm too damn lazy to do much else. If it's egregiously broken on your browser/OS combination, I'd hate love to hear about it, though. After having been patted on the head from a number of places around the web for this current design (which was never intended to be, like, flashy or anything, but was just what came out of my head when I was thinking about what I wanted the 'bottle to look like), I'm hesitant to slap up something that blows or sucks or otherwise moves air about in an unpleasant fashion.

But I feel the need for a spring cleaning.

Thank you for your kind patronage.

(Edit : Also, as some small compensation for your debugging assistance, I offer you this, which is way cool, if you like stuff like that. I do.)

4:40 AM | 17 comments

Oh, yeah. I'd almost forgotten about all the hoohah, but I noticed yesterday evening that I didn't win that Bloggie I was shortlisted for. Whew. Thank the galloping gonads of jehovah for that small mercy. An honour to be nominated, of course, yadda yadda, bikkety-boo, *thud*.

"I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."

- Groucho Marx

3:21 PM | 7 comments

Am I what I write? Should I put it all here, the angelic farts and the chuckleheaded non-sequiteurs, or should I keep the best and worst of me apart somehow? Should I hold back, or should I tell the story of the first time I silently and all amazed erupted in watery semen when I was 12 while 'It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World' spooled off in all its madcap glory on the console TV on New Year's Eve, just to pick a semi-random example?

Should I tell all and let the googlecache fall where it may? Should I womb up my Real Stuff in some digital sanctorum somewhere, and just amble and natter and hitch a ride on this familiar hitcount-greased Route 66 down which I'm already walking?

Is it art, or is it socializing? It's pretty goddamn clear that it's not journalism, and the proposition that it might be such is just laughable: but what polestar should I steer my ship by, I ask you? Is it real or an illusion? Is it the goddamn tedious old Platonic shadow play on the cave wall, or is it a new way of gripping and tasting the souls of friendlies without the halitosis and clumsy hugs? What do I want to do with this pretty ever-lengthening scroll?

f--ked if I know. I think I'll have a beer and think about it some more.

5:02 AM | 7 comments and 2 trackbacks.

My folks are looking to sell Tchentlo Lake Lodge, a wilderness fishing lodge they own and run up in northern British Columbia, where I visited them over Christmas. I've put up some information about it here, and if you or anyone you know might be interested in buying it either as an investor or owner-operator, please feel free to contact them.

That gave me a mild feeling of accomplishment, throwing that together. It's rare that I actually feel like a good son.

1:58 AM | 7 comments

Steve and Alex have revealed their novels-in-progress, and I know some other friends and neighbours are girding their loins to do the same.

I'm just drunk enough at the moment to be tempted to open the kimono too on the humble beginnings of my thus-far-unrevealed (except to a few blogly amigos) semifictional tale of the vida loca del pollo magnifico, but it'd be deeply embarrassing if it sucked, so perhaps I'll just wait a while on that....

I'm still trying to figure out if I stole the cheeseriffic title, which has been circulating in my brain since the early 90's - The Night Smells Like A Dog - from the Beatles of Surrey, No Fun, or if they stole it from me.

6:01 AM | 6 comments

Shelley heads-upified me that Brooke over at the Bitter Shack of Resentment has apparently submitted my Goodbye to Rick to Harper's magazine as a "Readings" section candidate.

If the piece is actually published, I'm buying all of you a beer. Thanks, Brooke.

3:30 PM | 9 comments

Anger, denial ... etcetera etcetera. What are the four stages one is meant to go through in dealing with tragedy, according to some pop-psych pantload or other? I can't be bothered to look it up right now. Let's just say "...inebriation and distraction" to round off the quartet, shall we?

For someone who has experienced, if not more than his fair share, then at least a not insignificant number of deaths in his small family over the years (father, brother, all the grandparents, step-father, and more, all before I was 25, for goodness sakes), the loss of my old friend Rick hit me much harder than I could have expected. In the decade or so since I've lost anyone really close, I'd come to think that I'd grown blasé about dying. Apparently I was wrong.

Going back to Canada for the first time in 5 years over the past few weeks, though, wandering around British Columbia, seeing old friends and what's left of my close family, drinking a bit, listening to and telling old stories : this has been good. I have a lot of old letters and cards to reread, and a lot of memories to dust off and cherish, and I look forward to coming back to writing on this site with renewed enthusiasm and a richer sense of who I am and what I want. I've spent far too long running from my past, glorious and madcap as much of it has been, and I'm beginning to realize that I am an imitation of a man without it.

I mildly regret announcing a month or two back, when I put this site on hiatus, that I wanted to refocus it somehow, to use it to do some good in the world. That desire remains unchanged, but I'm aware now that it's not the site that needs purpose, it's me. And with that awareness will come, I hope, some decent writing, some worthwhile ranting, and a site that people will want to visit again.

And some more fart jokes, of course.

To friends old and new who only became aware of the 'bottle during the tragedy in October : I'm returning to the catch-all journal-weblog format that is the normal thing 'round here. This site was not created specifically to honour Rick, it was pre-empted, and although the tributes and laments will remain, here, it is time for me to move on. I hope you'll understand.

1:37 PM | 8 comments and 2 trackbacks.

You know that book I mentioned that I was writing a while ago? No? Ah well, bear with me.

So I started writing this book a couple of weeks ago. Figured I'd do the Nanomowrimomo thing, or whatever the f--k it's called, and just barf out the story unadorned. The story that's been percolating around in my head for about 7 years now, the mostly-true-with-the-names-changed-to-protect-the-innocent tale of booze, madness, sex, drugs, and rock and roll on the high seas that those of you who know me In Real Life have heard me reminisce about when well-watered.

It's been a few years since I'd heard from or about any of the principles in the tale, and I'd pretty much given up hope of ever tracking any of them down, gilded-caged as I am here in Korea.

So who do I hear from yesterday after years of being 'long-lost'? One of my best friends on the planet, the mad bastard who more than any other helped me transform myself from an overcautious wannabe into a two-fisted beery swashbuckler, the guy who plays the starring role in my Nautical Tales Most Edifying, my brother by dint of shared joy and grief, Craig 'Pancho' Oliver.

So the book's back on the back burner, while life, happily, intercedes. But if I do finish the book, I hope and expect it will be richer and more rewarding for the reminiscences that me and my long lost amigo will be sharing over the next while.

Welcome back, mi hermano, even if you didn't feel as if you were lost.

1:45 AM | 5 comments

I've never been good at mental multi-tasking, and I've got this other super-secret double-extra (yeah, whatever) thing I'm working on at the moment, and it's distracting me away from the posting of the amusing entries at the mighty Empty Bottle.

So go read the archives, my friends. As opposed to the chew-toy mastications of those purist 'weblog' wanktards, my old nocturnal emissions actually have some value beyond a pointer to the chronistic equivalent of Mahir or All Your (admittedly amusing) Base... hooo-hah!

No really, there's some f--king gold back there in the foothills, honest to cheese-topped goodness. Laugh, cry, wet your pants : it's the Disneyland of Weblogging! Lotta crap too, but Sturgeon's Law, nicht wahr?

6:04 AM

It'll be my birthday in about 3 hours, Korea time. I will officially be old enough to know better, while continuing to be too dumb to care.

But that hasn't stopped me so far, so I think I'll just carry on as usual, noting the gray hairs appearing in the skateboarder-goatee, but reacting to them with a hearty woo-hoo rather than a weedy boo-hoo. This, my friends, is the secret to my success, longevity, and general all-around air of worldly incoherence.

So happy birthday to me. Have a drink for me, won't you? I'll be sure to return the favour when your next birthday rolls around...

4:19 AM | 34 comments and 3 trackbacks.

I noticed that Christopher Smith, a person I don't think I've ever met but with whom I share at least one name, has added me to his blogroll, under the grouping 'Visionaries', along with such digeratti as Messrs Locke, Weinberger, Searls and Winer, amongst a few others of Great Stature and Flattering, Indirect Illumination.

Now this I like.

*pauses*

*strains to say something heavy with profundity and vision, farts loudly from the effort, looks around to see if anyone noticed*

9:58 PM | 6 comments

I've been wandering all over the Metafilter today, pissing on anyone who got into range. I don't know what gets into me sometimes.

3:15 AM | 8 comments

The university where I teach hands out student evaluations at the end of each semester. They are anonymous, and we don't get to see them. In fact, the administration (who collectively have their head so far up their fundament that they can tell if they're getting cavities or not) doesn't even deign to tell us the results, normally.

I, however, have my sources.

For the last two semesters in a row (that is, since I began this job), according to the student evals, I have been the number one professor at my university (hooray for me!). Both semesters I had eight of the ten top-rated classes in the entire school (double hooray for me, with a f--king cherry on top!).

This is why I was so annoyed and disheartened when the new contract I was presented with this summer didn't offer me a raise of any kind. In fact, thanks to some of the clever accounting at which Koreans can be so ept, I think I might end up grossing less this year than last. I genuinely love teaching, but damn it, I expect to be rewarded when I so completely exceed what is required and expected of me.

This annoyance percolated into rage today as I watched them erect a 30-foot, chrome-and-neon crucifix on top of the goddamn auditorium. They can spend what must be upwards of twenty grand on Xtian decorations, but they can't throw me a bone.

f--kers.

[Edit : I forgot to say 'Angry? Damn right I am!']

11:42 PM | 8 comments

Some things I'm angry about :

BBC World describes the shock and amazement with which ordinary people are reacting to the 'greed, ineptitude and dishonesty' of Big Companies like WorldCom and Enron and Xerox and so on. I tell you, ordinary goddamn people must be stupider than freakin' cowsh-t. Every single large company I've ever worked for (and most small ones as well) have been nuts-deep in 'greed, ineptitude and dishonesty'. Surely I can't be the only one.

A door has opened today, just a crack, and it looks as if it might just be possible for me to go back to Australia sometime in the next year or so. Until I was chatting with my old friend/old boss earlier today and the discussion turned to the real possibility of me returning Oz-ward, I hadn't realized how much I love and how much I achingly miss Sydney.

*crosses fingers*

What am I going to be able to bitch about if I leave Korea again, though?

8:36 PM | 5 comments

I'm not sure how happy I am to be cast as a Bad Guy in Dune, The Musical, but hey, I'm happy to be cast at all. Beats waiting tables. You take the luck of the 268-million-strong draw, or you go home empty-handed. It's not lost on me that the casting process occurred under the auspices of a bottle of The Macallan, either, which might explain my inclusion amongst the ranks of the better-known and slightly less prone to outbursts of borderline psychosis.

But it does make me especially happy to be slated to engage in mortal combat (whilst singing something heartstirring and suitably martial, one hopes) with Wil Wheaton. That oughta be heaps o' fun... but now I'd better start reading his blog a little more often, to study up on his moves! Them Hollywood types is full of devious trickery, I've heard tell....

Put up your dukes, El Whea al' Ton!

8:52 PM | 4 comments

My design for 9622.net - which is a MeFi-offshoot community blog created by a bunch of groovy and determinedly silly Metafiltrons who outgrew their cult thread and have been demonstrated to harbour an unhealthy obsession with monkeys - has gone live.

The design strikes a fine balance between a total absence of useability and, well, determined silliness, I think. I just thought I'd link it to toot my own horn, as I've never done something like this for a group of people before, and I think it's pretty spunky. Considering I don't know jack about design, and just make sh-t up as I go along.

[Please note the liberal use of #006699, which is an homage to you-know-where, of course.]

Edit : [Warning - self-obsessed wankage ahead] It strikes me as I wander around, reading the words of people who know so much more than I about, well, stuff, that it would be, with the kindness dial turned up to 11, charitable to describe me as 'an enthusiastic amateur'.

I leap into stuff with both feet, I do, like that 'design job' I pointed to above, but it seems that I am almost never equipped with the training or tools to attempt anything but make sh-t up as I go along. I keep going at it with guns blazing, but I do wonder if my mock-buffoonery is just a cover to deflect accusations of real buffoonery. In my decision many many years ago to just wander the planet and see what happened (with 10 kilos of books in my backpack, naturally) I couldn't forsee that the truly Towering Influences in my life, the people that I'd meet in out-of-the way corners of the planet who would shape my vision of the person I wanted to be, would be the mad bastards, tinkerers, and yes, the enthusiastic amateurs.

On nights like tonight, though, when I'm exhausted, drained, and sweating like Corky The Magical Sweating Bear, when I'm reading things people say that I understand, dimly, but that are clearly just signposts to deeper and more tangled thickets of learning, it's times like this that I begin to suspect my approach to knowledge hasn't panned out to be as good an idea as it seemed at the time that I devised it. Which was probably on a nude beach in Greece or some damn place like that.

Is this the mid-life crisis of the childless? Damned if I know. I'll keep you posted.

6:14 AM | 11 comments

Holy crap. Zeldman looks an awful lot like I did 10 years ago or so. Right down to the biker jacket...

Neat. More pics of members of the Cabal™ can be found here. I like pictures. There were some surprises there for me - some of them folks look nothing like I'd expected.

Just in the interests of disclosure, here's an old snap of me in my biker days :

3:31 AM | 3 comments

I've made the Daypop Top 40 (#32, rocketing upward, screaming like a mechanical weasel strapped to a solid fuel booster), and I haven't the faintest idea why. (Other than my good looks, debonaire manner, and staggeringly huge bribes, of course.)

How nice for me. Can I have my A-List Secret Decoder Ring Now*?

*nah, I didn't think so.