I ran into another one of those odd but amusing Korea things as I shambled off to the doctor today to have him insert his video camera into my ears (revealing the most unnervingly unpleasant innerspace vistas I’ve seen in a long time, I must admit. I half-expected to see tiny demons, smoking cigars and lounging on the mounds of reddish-brown crud, poking the souls of the damned in the ass with pitchforks.
Aside to the aside : I tend to patronize practitioners of the medical profession as little as possible, as I’m just a little eccentric that way, and so new technogadgets like the teeny tiny video just blow me away. When did this stuff get invented? I’m kinda keen to make up some maladies just to see what other shiny med-gear surprises might be in store for me! And the patient management software he had, even though it was in Korean, of course, was really freakin cool as well.)
So, anyway, I’m walking down the street and the bass-heavy thumpathump of booty-shaking disco rumbles down the pavement at me. I step aside, matador-like, but it gets all up in my face, and I steel myself to the inevitable.
Although it’s like 33 degrees (that’s about fahrenheit 451 for you Americans out there) and the humidity is pushing 98 percent (i.e. if I hork a loogie, to, like, blend in with the crowd, it would kind of float there in front of me, ghostly as well as ghastly, and then slowly dissolve into a sticky mist), there are two rent-a-dancers outside the new shop in the recently-completed concrete block on the corner.
The new shop is a clothing store for infants called, Koreanically-enough given their dutiful but regrettable obsession with the fruits of fornication rather than the act itself, Baby Boss.
Still, undeterred by the surrealism of the whole proposition, the young ladies (who are quite stunningly lovely under all that furrowed-by-rivulets-of-sweat makeup) are shaking their booties frenetically, halting only to implore passersby to come in, buy something, anything for chrissakes, just please pretend to be interested, or he’ll beat us again!
Well, I exaggerate a titch, perhaps, for comedic effect, but there was indeed a guy who looked very much the part of The Procurer, red-faced and corpulent, leaning against a mini-van parked across the street, alternately scowling and leering. I suspect if he were not Korean, he’d be called Rocco. Hell, maybe he was called Rocco. I didn’t stop to ask.
Nor did I stop to browse the baby clothes. I hope the girls don’t pay for my inattention later.
I talked about this phenomenon here, too, if you’re interested.
Category:
Korea-related