What the?

Do not panic. Do not adjust your set. Do not freak out, or set yourself on fire. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, coat your genitals in gold paint and dance suggestively for the old men in the park. Do not, and I mean it this time, do not stick a fork in your eye, or in anyone else’s eye for that matter.

The default templates should not scare you. Don’t let them put you off. Vicksburg is a very nice… er, city, or whatever it is, I’m quite sure. I’m just decrufting. It’s been a long time without a decruft, and I’ve accumulated quite a lot of it. It’s gotten into all the nooks and crannies. There are drifts of off-white cruft built up in the corners. I’m knee-deep in the stuff. It’s got to go.
It may take a while.

Partly Cloudy, Chance of Refrain

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.

Scatterblogging

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.

Language Drainage

It’s a common thing for people (and by ‘people’, I mean expat English teachers; many would justifiably disagree with my choice of collective noun, there, I admit) who’ve served a long sentence in the grammar mines of Korea to complain that they feel as if their ability to express themselves in English has drained slowly away. They’re in a bar somewhere and suddenly find themselves totally unable to describe clearly how much they hate whatever bug it was that crawled up their ass that day. And it’s not the booze that’s split mind and mouth, damn it! No, it’s the daily grind of feeling compelled to speak in monosyllables, to shoehorn their thoughts into non-complex sentences. It’s grown into habit. It’s become instinct for them to avoid using the present perfect or the passive, or even, depending on the age and language ability of most of their students, to begin to avoid using auxiliary verbs altogether when speaking to the Koreans with whom they spend so much of their time. It’s begun to feel like communication is more effective for them and everyone else if the difference between “Where you go yesterday?”, “Where you go now?” and “Where you go tomorrow?” gets restricted to that single, terminal time word.

Of course, that’s dumb, but trained language teachers tend to be like honourable politicians amongst the unwashed hordes of the hogwan†istas. Which is to say, pretty damn thin on the ground, and automatically under suspicion merely because of their rarity.
† cut-throat, private language institutes.
Anyway, they get used to that deliberate act of pulling their arms back into the communication train before it enters the tunnel. They start to feel tongue-tied when digging any deeper than the equivalent of ‘See Jin-Ok run! Run Jin-Ok! Run!‘ They shelve their Great Canamerican Novel and start to limit their self-expression to ‘HAHAHHA yuo suck!’ on message boards or ‘HAHAHAA pwned joo newb!’ in Counterstrike or Q4. Or even ‘That’s a transparent strawman argument, and I know that this is an ad hominem attack, but yuo you suck!’ and ‘On preview: HAHAHHAAA 5-dolla newb!’ on Metafilter.
Me, I’ve noticed two things that have emerged from paying attention to what I say and speaking as clearly and correctly as I can, almost all the time.
The first is that my writing is getting, if anything, more parenthetical and rococco. That’s probably not a good thing, but much as I love writers who are spare and sinewy and rippling with Harlequin-romance-cover muscle, wanky pyrotechnics and goofy juxtapositions have always played a too-large role in the stuff I’ve written. It’d take too damn much effort to change that now. You know, unless somebody paid me to do it.
I write the way I talk when I’m drunk, I think, even though I never write while drunk. I admit I am always trying, what with the Strunk & White tattoos I had done in invisible ink on my forehead back in high school, to eliminate unnecessary words. The problem there being that I have so much difficulty deciding which ones are unnecessary (and I’m pretty sure, unlike many of those teachers I mention above, that it’s not the auxiliary verbs) that I just don’t bother editing myself at all.
Also, I’m lazy.
The second thing that’s emerged is that when I speak, naturally and extemporaneously, I never use idiom or slang. I rarely use contractions, and my Canadian accent (I think) has all but disappeared. I am the (literal) model of clear, expressive use of standard English. My students are elated that they understand me easily, and inevitably depressed when they can’t understand a damn thing that American engineer who’s visiting this week is saying. I’ve always spoken quickly, and though I still do, now I merely give you a mild case of windburn rather than lift your scalp right off when I’m excited about something. These are good things, I think.
I’m trying like hell (well, maybe just like heck, to be honest) to find a shiny, happy medium between these two poles. Me talk pretty already, but me hope me write pretty someday, too.

Wonderchicken Resurgent

You know when people say, “I turned 40 a little while back, and it got me thinking…”? and how you just want to smash ‘em one in the face?
Well, I turned 40 a little while back, and it’s been f–king with my mind.
I don’t think my only problem is the artificial midlife milestone hanging millstone around my neck, though. And I don’t suppose — much as I admit to being overfond of myself and much as I am wont to declaim while in my cups in a way that would lead you to think that my problems are unique in this world — that I’m alone in this.
I think your mind is probably twisting in the wind, too, dear reader, and there’s cool piss dripping from your boots, too, and that rope is creaking above you too in the coming dark. I hope not, but I guess so. It’s one of the few things we all share; we share the knowledge that we’ll die, and we all fabricate elaborate strategies to face it, that or we turn our faces away from it. We dangle on the gibbets we build out of the decisions we make, until the sun sets on us.
You know the drill: cowboy, steel horse I ride, all that shit.
I used to say to people, people who often regretted asking me whatever innocuous question it might have been that launched me into my rant about death and taxes and the ineluctability of extropy or whatever rocks that evening’s torrent had been bouncing over, I used to say that the biggest guiding principles by which I had lived my life thus far were two-fold. I’d say it just that way, too: “…they’re two-fold…” Maybe I’d throw in a ‘hellshitdamn’ or two for spice. People must have really hated me, sometimes.
Anyway, this hand was that in some geriatric future I’d rather regret something I had done than something I hadn’t, and that other hand was that I always wanted to have as many choices before me as possible, because once the game becomes a rail-shooter, it just isn’t much goddamn fun anymore. Knocking those two rocks together with my two strong hands struck off the sparks that lit the fire in my belly every morning, huzzah!
And both hands, of course, were just heaped with prettyword bullshit. The first was a way to justify living always like a 22-year-old on a tear, and the second was a way to justify the ‘external locus of self-control as a result of childhood bereavement’ I’d self-diagnosed myself with back in university, and sumo’d out of the ring only to watch the f–ker waddle back again, pulling up its diaper and grimacing intently.
I love those old declarations of mine, I do. They still sing to me, sirens luring me limbs akimbo onto the rocks of rye, cocaine, hookers and tropical isles. I deftly navigated those shoals when I was young and clear of eye, but I’m not so sure I’d make it through safe this time. No, I’ve tied myself to the mast, have I, and it’s the first mate who steers the ship these days. She’s immune, you see. And she mostly steadfastly ignores my shouted commands, my entreaties and panting demands to be set free when the siren songs call me again. In this way, she keeps me alive, and I know that my struggles against my bonds are carefully gauged to be almost but not quite violent enough to free myself from them.
And so it goes, as the cliffs seem to rise around us, as we sail onward, me bearded and wildeyed calling for mead and wenches, bound to the mast, her drawn and sympathetic to my madness, but unshaken.
The death of some my convenient lies about myself has not in itself been enough to f–k me up. Barely enough to write about, to be honest, much as I lie about the awe with which I regard my magnificence. There’s got to be more. But I guess I’ll figure that out later. For now, it’s good to be stringing words together again.
I hit post, now, dear lost readers in their thousands, not sure if this is resurrection or coda, but hoping a few diehard outliers of the wonderchicken army are still out there, and when their newsfeed ticks over from that limp and dusty (0) over to an erectile (1), that they’ll put the word out: ‘Wonderchicken returns, brethren and sistren! He returns! Dance dervish, and spill the blood of politicians in tribute and walleyed joy!’.
But having turned my back on the webs and the logs, on the adsense whores and their corporate pimps, having peed in the pool and pooped on the flag, having committed the unpardonable sin of dissing the digerati, I’m probably on the ignore list again.
Ah well.
Update : special reopening offer! Here’s a poultrycast™ of this post, in user-friendly shrinkwrapped mp3 format. One per customer; available for a limited time only. Act now!
Update again : same crap, newfangled shiny package!

Bitch, Bitch, Bitch

So I’m having one of those days. Must be the onset of the Hot and Wet season. Man I hate that.
A Few Random Things I Miss About Australia (or Canada, I guess), Because I Chose To Come Back To Korea For More Punishment

• beer other than fizzy, metallic lager
• cheese and deli meats of any description
• driving
• magazines
• books made of paper
• libraries
• bookstores
• bars and pubs
• good bread
• turkey
• international food – Thai, Turkish, Mexican, you name it, other than Korean and nasty yankee junkfood badly imitated or franchised
• having an oven
• promotions and professional recognition
• clean air and water
• TV and movies (that I don’t have to download illicitly)
• off-the-rack clothing and shoes that fit
• random jocular interactions with people at shops
• being invisible
• cocktails
• friends
• beaches
• ‘taking the piss’ and ‘going out on the piss’
• Nicorette Inhalers
• drug stores
• nice apartments
• community other than virtual
• Edit: jesus christ on a popsicle stick, I forgot limes. I miss limes like you would not freakin’ believe.

AusThings I Don’t Miss So Much

• exorbitant health insurance
• telemarketers
• rent and utility bills and ratbastard real estate agencies
• pauperizing income tax rates
• metred broadband
• Australian banks
• the utter lack of internet shopping

Could be worse. I could be a dog in outer space. [/obscure injoke]