Eulogy for Rob

March 23, 2002 / / No Comments

It’s just not possible to trace the fractal-chain of cause-and-effect back to a single Prime Mover moment in your life, usually. Trace the branches back, navigate around the random events, the decisions made or just taken, and hope to find any kind of actual reason for the way you are today, the way you think, and you’ll drive yourself f–king mad with might-have-beens.
Decades ago, Rob Beitel introduced me to a few of the chemicals I’ve enjoyed in my long and bumpy history of self-medication, ones of which, along with all the rest, I no longer partake. I haven’t seen him in nearly two decades. He was found dead recently, in the snow, within sight of his home in Northern BC, half a world away from here, a couple hours away from the town we grew up in. I talked about it a bit on my buddyblog with the Bearman, who knew Rob as well, way back when. Mirrored here because I’m drunker than hell, and sentimental, and having a little one-man wake for Rob tonight.

Rob Beitel’s dead.
It’s odd that that should deflate me the way it does. I barely knew the guy, to be honest. He got me mind-crogglingly stoned a few times, provided me with a few stories I could regale people with, and have, at bars in far flung corners of the planet, I think he f–ked an ex-girlfriend of mine before she actually became an ex, he was a shaggy, bearded, small-town Lizard King with mirror shades and a fast motorcycle.
I wonder if he ever realized what an influence he had on my life. In a small town populated with a vast array of losers and wanna-be’s, he was damn near the Real Thing. Meaning, of course, that he wasn’t anything like the Real Thing, but when I was young and unschooled in the ways of the world, he seemed near enough to me, damn it. Dissociated, vague, cool.
I remember an evening when I was still a teenager, the Bearman and I at Rob’s girlfriend’s apartment (she of the Trans-Am, which may or may not have had a large, glam-rock flame appliqué on the hood, but that’s the way I remember it), smoking. More than ever before, and probably more than ever since. It may have been the first time I took more than a toke or two. There was rye whiskey, of course, which was all Bearman and I would drink when we were teenagers, and there was an insanely large, complicated, twisty glass bong. There were hash brownies. We smoked and drank and smoked and nibbled. We sang songs. After what may have been minutes or hours, I had gotten to the point where, when I moved my head, my eyes would track to follow a second or two later. This I found uproariously funny, and Rob seemed to take some pride in this cherry-breaking drug-induced first. I don’t know if Zeppelin IV was playing, but it should have been. The next thing I remember was staggering around, alone and drooling, on the road to the elementary school, which had inexplicably developed a 45 degree list. I think I slept in a ditch for a while. Good thing it was summer, I guess.
Another time, again the Bearman, Rob and I. A cold night in the city of Prince George, at Rob’s aunt’s house I believe. One of those nights where you’re not quite sure where the hell you are, but glad at least to be inside. There was fungal psilocybin, a lot of it. Rob and I sitting up all night, while Bearman tried in vain to sleep, cackling joyfully, tripping. My jaws were sore, and tears streaming from my eyes, and it was one of the most purely enjoyable chemical experiences in my life.
Yet another time, Barry and I driving that Trans-Am for some reason, Rob following us on the bike. (In hindsight, I suspect there was probably a kilo or two in the trunk, and plausable deniability was the order of the day. What the hell did we know?) He pulled a wheelie somewhere just outside Fort Saint James, and as we approached Vanderhoof, nearly 50 kilometres later, he was still up on one wheel. We shook our heads in dude-respect, took a drink, and mumbled ‘crazy bastard’ to one another in admiration.
He was a f–king legend in my mind, at least, was Rob Beitel. I haven’t seen him in half a lifetime, and now I never will. Drugs took him, it would seem, which was probably what was expected. Sad and pitiful to die in the snow, freezing slowly, it might be said, but at least in character, and maybe that’s what Rob would’ve wanted. Burn out, don’t fade away.
Rock on, you crazy motherf–ker, wherever the hell you are. Rock on.


Comments? comments.

Red Sky All Day

March 22, 2002 / / No Comments
“Experts warned that the dust storms carry harmful chemicals, such as sulfate, as well as compounds containing cadmium, aluminum, lead, nickel, copper and arsenic. To protect themselves from the sandy winds, people are advised to stay indoors and keep windows closed, especially the elderly and children. While outdoors, they should carry umbrellas, and after returning home, they must wash themselves and gargle, because the particles in the wind could trigger irritations in the eyes, skin and respiratory organs.”

Seoul is enshrouded, enfolded, entombed, in a choking cloud of dust from the growing deserts of Northern China, the Hoang-sa, the Yellow Sand. This, to put it bluntly, sucks major ass. As if the clouds of reeking industrial effluent weren’t enough, now we’re left squinting through veils of yellowish dust to boot. Elementary and middle schools are closed, parents are being warned to keep their children in the house, old people are being advised not to breathe for a few days. My nose, as I sit here, is streaming, as it has been all day, my eyes red, throat afire. If the swirling clouds weren’t so irritating to my mucous membranes, I might enjoy them, in the same shivery, mock-fearful way that I enjoyed fog banks as a child, staring into them, alive to the potential mystery and the sheer strange wonder of it all.
But I’m old, and cranky, and I just want it to go away. Now. But at least my students were amused when I stopped at 15 minute intervals in most of my classes today, shook a mock-tragic, operatic Shatnerian fist at the sky, and roundly cursed China for even existing.
They just said on MBC news that’s it’s going to be worse tomorrow. Thrillsville, daddy-o.
THIS IS THE FUTURE

Ah Korea…

March 20, 2002 / / No Comments
Ah Korea. Even though the constant parade of Really Weird sh-t™ continues apace, I find that I’m so inured to it that any response rarely reaches the level in my mind of being consciously noticed. My mental DJ, enjoying his perpetual party up there in the locked-off booth at the top of my skull, is usually busy playing a Mojo Nixon song, or some half-remembered one hit wonder from the 80’s, drowning out the hacksaw sniff-backhaul-and-hork of the Throat Oyster Launchers, like some nauseating avian mating cry call-and-response, that surrounds me as I walk the dirty streets to the University and back.
I really need an mp3 player.
One thing that did stick with me yesterday was a new advertising campaign on the subway. Korea, you see, is owned, lock-stock-and-two-horking-barrels, by the chaebols (similar in some ways to the Japanese keiretsu). Samsung, LG, Daewoo, Hyundai and perhaps a score of others own everything. I live in an LG apartment building. Our TV is a Samsung. LG makes the blank CD’s on my desk, here, and the soap that my wife is currently using in the shower, as well as the grocery store where we buy our food. Subsidiaries are responsible for the production and distribution of that food. Daewoo made the elevators in my building, and the steel comes from Hyundai steelworks. The huge new apartment beehive going up next door is a Daewoo buidling, and is being built by Daewoo Construction, with Hyundai machinery, mostly. All the cars and buses on the streets are Korean-made, of course, by one of the chaebol. Electronics are sold in LG shops, or Samsung shops, depending on who made them. Pretty much everything you touch or see during your day was either grown, processed, created, built, shipped, imported, sold or in some other way touched by one or more of the chaebol. Each chaebol also has an array of banking interests, and a staggering array of credit cards on offer to the public. When I say that they own this country, I actually mean that literally. It could be forgiven to think that they own the people, as well, but this might be arguable. There are pockets of dissent.
So, me, on the subway. A shiny new plastic proto-banner-ad above my head is touting the Samsung Christian Card. Big black letters emblazoned across a golden Visa card, bigger even than the Samsung logo, saying “CHRISTIAN“. In the soft-focus panorama, the card lies beside a wooden crucifix, atop an open Bible. The tableau is somehow as erotically charged as the close-up food-porn fried chicken ad beside it.
Now, even though I do groove on their funky metaphors of death and rebirth and all that, I’m not especially Xian. Still, that ad struck me as deeply f–ked up. Like hardcore porn performed by people in full clown make-up, complete with big red noses and fright wigs. Like the voice of Henry Kissinger coming out of my wife’s mouth : “Richart, Richart, you’re drahnk agayn.” Like a Friday evening without any delicious beverages at all. Just plain wrong.
Somehow brings to mind one of my responses back in University to the ‘Jesus saves!’ grafitti that was everywhere around Vancouver at the time : ‘Buddha spends!’


Jesus Saves! comments.

Famous last words

March 19, 2002 / / No Comments

Famous last words : In the spirit of refusing to get involved (as I have nothing to add) in all the gonads and strife floating around lately (eek! floating gonads!), and striving for a laugh or two, I present to you the dying words of two great poets :

Walt Whitman : “Hold me up; I want to sh-t.”
Dylan Thomas : “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskeys. I think that’s the record.”

I can but hope, in my terminal moments, as I lie (-in a feather bed, on pure white linen, surrounded by my loved ones / drunk and drooling, unnoticed on a barroom floor, in a puddle of my own urine-) that I can come up with a legacy for the world as touching, as illuminating, as perfectly revealing of the deeper nature of our existence on this planet.
[via this amusing Metafilter thread]

Your famous last words? comments.

Spiking The GooglePunch

March 17, 2002 / / No Comments

Jeff at Visible Darkness led me through to this piece about the Dark Side of Blogging. (Insert “Use the blog, Luke!” and related unfunniness here) Questions about how marvellous and whiz-bang this new medium really is, and indeed how “stupid and repellent, sometimes crypto-genocidal” some warblogs can be, for example. Pushing back against utopian paeans to the organic growth of communities that even I, surly wonderchicken, have been guilty of propagating :

But when I suggested that there was something inherently suspicious about online “community,” I had in mind a radical thought experiment that forces its way across this divide. Something like: suppose we took warblogs, or even stormfront.org and its satellites, as the model of a weblog “community.” Should the kinder and gentler blogrings find that thought sobering? Don’t dismiss the comparison too quickly, not if you want a real assessment of the medium in all its potentialities.
Community vs. “strength”: Maybe I meant that there should there be more consideration of how to seek individual autonomy through community. That task might be different both from the mindset that one sees in the attack blogs and from the communal sociology of the more benign “clusters” and dialogic blogrings.
Or maybe I could put it differently this way: it’s not so much that I disagree with the celebration of the positive, even the wondrous qualities of weblogs. It’s just that I suspect they’re living on borrowed time.

So it's a cliche. Sue me.My only addition at this point is to tangentially woolgather : is it only a matter of time until Hollywood starts regularly hiring hundreds of blogtemps to fire up new weblogs, post furiously and praise to the skies the latest piece of crap opus by Jerry Bruckheimer or some other purveyor of soul-destroying cinematic garbage, interlink to themselves and a few ‘a-listers’, start offering large cash incentives to Kottke and Rageboy and other high-traffic blognodes to link back to the rent-a-bloggers, and watch the Google rank for their new Product soar? Or record companies to promote their wares? Or governments? Are recent, highly-successful experiments in spiking the GooglePunch like the recent one by Matt Haughey the tip of the iceberg? How soon before big business catches on, before the Office of Strategic Mind Control realizes the subtle power (if they haven’t already) of the interconnectedness of blogs and begins working blogspace like the infopimps they strive to be? Before this ‘place’, too, becomes branded and corporatized? (Forget the stone-knives-and-bearskins, bandwidth-wasting crudity of banner ads – savvy marketers will work the medium, pimp the actual hyperlinks, and tickle Google till it quivers, moans, and page-ranks, gratefully. Linkwhoring could become a serious business. Perhaps we could form a mafia, a Blogga Nostra, and skim a little of that corporate cream off the top, broker linkage deals, extort flame-protection money.)
Of course it may become moot, if Google fine-tunes their page ranking system for blogs. For now, though, please hold my hand. I’m a little scared.
(Edit : I see that Doc talked about this, recently, grumpily, kinda. Whoops.)

This blog entry has been brought to you by the new film from Tom Green : “Somebody Kill Me Now”. In theatres next week! comments.

There was a point

March 16, 2002 / / No Comments

There was a point, not long after I finished university, and spent 10 months or so holding forth nightly, Ouzo-and-water in hand, for the entertainment of the patrons on the porch of Stavros’ Irish Bar in Mykonos, Greece (where I spent some time writing software for a small hotel and making sure that the owner’s VIP gun-running buddies and their mistresses had clean sheets and plentiful champagne) that I stopped thinking that I actually had anything to say. Or that there was any point actually saying it to anyone. Well, not exactly that, perhaps – I made a deliberate decision to Stop Thinking So Goddamn Much. I think it had something to do with the fact that the other straight guys (of whom there weren’t really that many on Mykonos during the Season) were by and large not the Thinking Type, and it seemed to me that they were perenially achieving much more demonstrably significant levels of romantic success with the Swedish stewardesses, French public servants, and other maddeningly delightful examples of European femininity that constantly littered the beaches and bars, confident of their hetero groovethings amidst the heaving seas of Mykonian man-on-man action.
Ka-chunk – spurious causal connection made : reduce cerebration, increase fornication. But with my regularly scheduled rocket-fuel rants on the porch of Stavros’ place on the nature of life, the universe, or why the hell the Man in The Moon scared the sh-t out of me so badly, and my almost complete lack of wonderchicken-booty shaking disco action, the young ladies I tended to attract, if any, were more of the cerebral variety, who, without putting too fine a point on it, tended to be less carnally-inclined. Or English, which was worse. At least that’s how it seemed to me, sad, mad, alcohol-soaked bastard that I was. My tendency after a certain point in the evening to stagger over to the bar and do stately (if somewhat legless) sirtaki dances with portly, 50 year old Stavros put even them off. Stavros always had one or two young women under his arm, a fact looked upon with an amazing lack of remonstration by Effi, his long-suffering wife. Didn’t do me any damn good, regardless.
Left : After. Right : Before.What was I talking about? Oh yeah : there was a whole nexus of things that made me turn from the life of the mind (“I will show you the Life of The Mind!”) to a life lived in the moment. Not that I stopped reading, or thinking, or even talking massive quantities of sh-t to my friends while drinking beside bodies of water and trying to figure it all out, during my twenties and early thirties. But I did consciously do a trade-in of introspection, bookishness, and analysis for random danger, booze and swashbuckling, and spent the balance received on plane tickets to wherever it might be, eyes closed, that my index finger landed on a world map. And I’ll tell you, my friends, I had one hell of a ride.
All of this, in sub-Mike Golby-long-story-long fashion, is meant to leave a minotaur-fearing trail of crumbs to the point of this post : I don’t feel as if I have much to say today. Or for the last week, really.
‘Cause sometimes the habits of a decade and more well up, lapping gently around my brainpan, and I find myself saying to myself, as of old, “f–k it. Crack a beer, sing a song. Let the accountants fritter away their lives on the details.”
But blogging has been good for me, I suppose, and though I find myself logging into Blogger, ready to say : “Well, I’m tapped out. Go read Jonathon or Mike or Tom or Shelley (except she’s also tapped out at the moment) or any of the other fine and fascinating folks in the neighbourhood,” well, here I am, a long-ass post later, and I’ve ended end up talking about Swedish Stewardesses (oh dear lord, the Swedish stewardesses), and had an enjoyable time doing so.
That, from where I’m sitting, is a Good Thing. I hope you agree, gentle reader, but if not, well, the hell with ya.
(Oh, and the ‘Me Tarzan, You Jane’ stuff? Didn’t work worth a damn. You just can’t fake being good-lookin’ and dumb as a post. Live and learn.)

Well, I was young, OK? comments.

A conversation over dinner

March 13, 2002 / / No Comments

A conversation over dinner with a few of my Korean colleagues a couple of nights ago. In and of itself a little odd, that, conversing over dinner. Koreans tend to get the business of nourishment fully completed before chewing the fat, but a couple of these folks were Korean-Americans, and a couple others well-versed in the oddball ways of us hairy barbarians, and cut the requisite slack, as it was a ‘western’ meal : massive slabs of pizza and long styrofoam trays of gleaming, oily chicken thighs.
Predictably, it was about America, and the outrage upon outrage that the American government is perceived to be heaping on Korea and the rest of the world. The talk turned to the latest : North Korea as one of countries on the List, one of the countries where contingency plans to use nuclear weapons – in case of ‘surprising military developments’ – were being discussed.
A sense of outrage is building in this country. One of my colleagues said “They are talking about using nukes against North Korea, if necessary. I have family there. My father came from Pyongyang during the war.” Another nodded and said “Mine too. I have family in North Korea, a lot of family.” Heads nodded around the table. Almost everyone at the table, it seemed, had some relatives north of the border, close or distant, most of whom they’d never met. “We’re an occupied country,” said one of the men at the table, a Korean-American in his forties, “we have been for 50 years!”
I had to agree with him. It’s quite clear that the presence of US Forces may have staved off another invasion by the North, but the fact remains that South Korea has been a puppet for all these years, willing or otherwise, and the pumped-up, football field cheerleading that Pretzelboy and his cronies are spewing is doing nothing to ease the anger, the fear, and the rage that is bubbling to the surface. Quite the opposite, in fact. Anti-US sentiment is crystallizing everywhere – and this in a country that is ostensibly a ‘staunch ally’ of America. Set aside f–king Olympic medals, we have ‘axis of evil’ rhetoric, threats of nuclear strikes on family members, unilateral, illegal steel tariffs, Jay Leno making lame jokes about dog-eating, and Nogun-f–king-Ri, to name a few things that have pissed people off in the last month alone. Even my new freshman students, uncomfortable and standoffish in the early days of this semester, have warmed to me visibly when they found out that I’m not American.
America is making itself many, many enemies around the world recently. Far more, far more widespread, and far angrier, perhaps, than the scattered few that took down the Twin Towers in New York. Shrub and his cohort are stoking the fires of resentment and hatred all around the planet, and it’s the ordinary goddamn American on the street, in New York or in Paris, in Washington or Manila, that will lose their lives as a result, when next the next bomb goes off, the next airplane crashes into a building.
It astonishes and saddens me daily, with each new outrage delivered deadpan by the Resident and his handlers, that the American people are allowing their government – a leadership not even clearly mandated by an election – destroy what good is left there, and throttle what goodwill still remains in pockets amongst the peoples of the nations of the world. Dark days, my friends. Dark days.

Comments? comments.

"Worldwide interstimulating inscription"

March 11, 2002 / / No Comments

“Worldwide interstimulating inscription” : Who will be the executor of your e-state, the beneficiaries of your last blog and testament? If I kark it tomorrow (which is never outside the realm of possibility), of my few and meagre works in this life, these bits and bytes right here might well remain the longest. Maybe I should install that Dead Man’s Switch after all, and rig up a script to make the bastard launch a Terminal Comments Thread, where my dearly beloved could hold a virtual wake, trash the place and pelt me with rocks and garbage one last time.
That’s a little morbid, perhaps, but it is interesting to think that thanks to things like archive.org and the mighty GoogleBeast, our children and theirs and so on in serried ranks into the future will be able to experience the textual voices of their long-dead ancestors, us, and read about the minutiae of their lives, their thoughts, and the truth about which f–king member of Radiohead they apparently resembled thanks to yet another online quiz. I wish I were able to read the journals kept by my grandparents, or my father, when they were young (and alive), and learn what made them tick. They might be disappointingly puerile, but on the other hand, they might not.
It’s a mind-buggering world we’re building. There are big bobbing icebergs of implication to all this technology floating around out here, and I for one am still bashing my head against them on a regular basis.
Ouch! f–ktacular. Just did it again.

Eulogize! comments.

Hookers!

March 8, 2002 / / 1 Comment

Having a look at the referrers log, I found that someone had Googled here scant minutes earlier on the faery wings of the search string ‘where+are+the+brothels+in+pusan‘. I find this amusing as hell. The answer, my horny, pathetic friend, is
a) near Camp Hialeah (the US Army loves its hookers and drugs),
b) ‘Texas Street’, a nasty little area with equally nasty Russian ladies catering to the appetites of the Russian sailors, and
c) a place called ‘Green Street’,
the latter two of which are odd in a city without street names, but any taxi driver will know that of which you speak.
I’ve never been, myself, but I make it a point to know these kinds of things.
You’re welcome.

It’s all part of the service here at the Empty Bottle… comments.

Myth and Metaphor

March 8, 2002 / / No Comments

There is no way I could say it better. Joseph Campbell, from Thou Art That : Transforming Religious Metaphor :

A mythology may be understood as an organization of metaphorical figures connotative of states of mind that are not finally of this or that location or historical period, even though the figures themselves seem on their surface to suggest such a concrete localization. The metaphorical languages of both mythology and metaphysics are not denotative of actual worlds or gods, but rather connote levels and entities within the person touched by them. Metaphors only seem to describe the outer world of time and place. Their real universe is the spiritual realm of the inner life. The Kingdom of God is within you.
The problem, as we have noted many times, is that these metaphors, which concern that which cannot in any other way be told, are misread prosaically as referring to tangible facts and historical occurrences. The denotation—that is, the reference in time and space: a particular Virgin Birth, the End of the World—is taken as the message, and the connotation, the rich aura of the metaphor in which its spiritual significance may be detected, is ignored altogether. The result is that we are left with the particular “ethnic” inflection of the metaphor, the historical vesture, rather than the living spiritual core.
Inevitably, therefore, the popular understanding is focused on the rituals and legends of the local system, and the sense of the symbols is reduced to the concrete goals of a particular political system of socialization. When the language of metaphor is misunderstood and its surface structures become brittle, it evokes merely the current time-and-place-bound order of things and its spiritual signal, if transmitted at all, becomes ever fainter. It has puzzled me greatly that the emphasis in the professional exegesis of the entire Judeo-Christian-Islamic mythology has been on the denotative rather than on the connotative meaning of the metaphoric imagery that is its active language. The Virgin Birth, as I have mentioned, has been presented as an historical fact, fashioned into a concrete article of faith over which theologians have argued for hundreds of years, often with grave and disruptive consequences. Practically every mythology in the world has used this “elementary” or co-natural idea of a virgin birth to refer to a spiritual rather than an historical reality. The same, as I have suggested, is true of the metaphor of the Promised Land, which in its denotation plots nothing but a piece of earthly geography to be taken by force. Its connotation—that is, its real meaning—however, is of a spiritual place in the heart that can only be entered by contemplation.
There can be no real progress in understanding how myths function until we understand and allow metaphoric symbols to address, in their own unmodified way, the inner levels of our consciousness. The continuing confusion about the nature and function of metaphor is one of the major obstacles—often placed in our path by organized religions that focus shortsightedly on concrete times and places—to our capacity to experience mystery.


Comments? comments.

Buddhist tradition calls this samvega

March 8, 2002 / / No Comments

Buddhist tradition calls this samvega :

“the oppressive sense of shock, dismay, and alienation that come with realizing the futility and meaninglessness of life as it’s normally lived; a chastening sense of our own complacency and foolishness in having let ourselves live so blindly; and an anxious sense of urgency in trying to find a way out of the meaningless cycle. This is a cluster of feelings that we’ve all experienced at one time or another in the process of growing up, but I don’t know of a single English term that adequately covers all three. It would be useful to have such a term, and maybe that’s reason enough for simply adopting the word samvega into our language.”

[via a rather disappointing thread at Metafilter]

This is perfect

March 6, 2002 / / No Comments

This is perfect. According to the BBC News, South Korea wasted more food last year than the total amount of food available in North Korea. And it’s not by any means a surprise, to me at least. I’ve noted a few times to my waeguk-in coworkers at my university in the faculty cafeteria that the sheer quantity of uneaten food scraped off the socketed plastic buffet-trays is staggering. I’ve thought it was odd that we three Canadians tend to scrupulously clean our plates, despite the fact that we all grew up in more-or-less affluent, middle-class backgrounds.
Post-modern Ironic Self-Referential Rockin’ Musical Interlude (courtesy of Ben Folds)
Y’all don’t know what it’s like
Being male, middle-class and white
Repeat X 4
It gets me real pissed off, it makes me wanna say
Repeat X 3
f–k!
Conclusion of Musical Interlude.
Meanwhile, it seems as if most of the Korean teachers and staff habitually take much more than they can eat, and blithely scrape the uneaten excess into the hole in the dish-table. Elbow elbow, wrist wrist. With the famine in the North, and poverty only a generation or two in the past for many people, I thought it odd. Perhaps it can be explained by conspicuous-consumption boasting : “I’m rich enough to waste food – look!”. I don’t know.
(I’ve always wondered with a shudder if Korean restaurants recycle the leftovers from those dozen half-eaten side-dishes of which they are so proud, knowing deep in my heart that the answer is probably ‘yes’, once they’ve fished out the cigarette butts.)
What I do know is that Korea is nuts-deep deep into the terminal nightmare of consumer society – disposable, convenient, one-use-only, individually-wrapped, chrome-plated and dying of cancer choking on the factory smoke, lost in the middle of vast grey concrete plains littered with trash. Not enough room, too many people, too many cars, too much of everything except tranquillity and quiet contemplation, and the Faustian trade-offs that were made in the past few decades are coming back to bite them in the ass. Screaming for a bigger piece of the pie, possessed by a crippling obsession with the appearance of affluence, with appearance over substance in general. The sentimental tears shed over the televised temporary reunions of families separated by war for half a century dry up pretty goddamned fast when it comes to giving up your own hard-won wealth and comforts.
And this, at root, is why most Koreans dream of reunification deep in their hearts, but do not for a second want it to happen up in their minds, at least not anytime soon. The lessons of German reunification are not lost on people, and if there were a chance that the slowly recovering economy were to be derailed again, if there were the remotest possibility that I might suffer in the short term, says Mr Kim, well, no thanks. If it’s not said in so many words, not something that is even consciously thought, what it still amounts to is : Let ’em starve. [thanks Lia!]

Cake? What the hell’s that? comments.

I'd just like to say

March 3, 2002 / / No Comments

I’d just like to say that even though I try to avoid being a ‘joiner’ and the whole deliberate-meme-propagation exercise tires me and (as those wacky kids are saying these days) chafes my scrote, I am entirely behind Rageboy‘s ‘f–knozzle‘ mission. The Register would rightly claim that RB is just doing some more self-promotion here, but even his blatant, throwaway self-promotion tends to be a hell of a lot of fun, so why not? At least he’s back in fine form.
I am all for crude and offensive neologisms. I myself have often blurted such double-take-inducing gems of negativity as ‘f–ktacular‘, ‘f–knuckle‘, ‘f–keriffic‘ and ‘f–ksicle‘ in my always-erudite spoken discourse (to which my erstwhile workmates at OmniHyperGlobalMegaNet.com will gladly attest), and I warmly encourage creative obscenity. If you lean towards the profane anyway, why not have some fun with it, huh?
Edit : Waaahahahahaha hee hoooooooooo *hic* heheh. It may be an old Regular Expression Cowboy geekjoke, but it’s a funny one, dammit.

Cry havoc and let slip the f–knozzles of war! comments.

At the local grocery store

March 2, 2002 / / No Comments

At the local grocery store today :

Lady Sense More

Vaginal Wipe Wet Towels

I think the big selling point for these things, though, is in the pretty blue Konglish at the bottom of the box :
Attractive Acacia Smelling
Note : This is not some sort of tangential whacked-out wonderchicken response to the recent genesis of the blogsisters, honest. I just thought it was silly, in a typically Korean way. Not unlike the breast-vibrator thing I talked about a while ago.

Ouch

March 2, 2002 / / No Comments

A Few Ways In Which I Have Hurt Myself Grievously
Number 1 : I am 5 years old, in the back yard with my friend CJ. We are smashing bricks onto the top of a low retaining wall, for some reason that I now forget, which is only reasonable, damn it! That was a helluva long time ago! I can’t be expected to remember every damn thing…Am I gonna have to kick yer….
Sorry. Lost track there. Anyway, CJ took a mighty swing with one of those rusty red bricks, and managed to bring it down squarely on the middle finger of my right hand, mashing it flat. I screamed like a petroleum-powered chrome-plated screaming machine, and he took the f–k off up the path, running home. I’d have done the same, if I were him. Once I realized that all that blood wasn’t a good thing, I pounded up the hill to the house after him, looking for mom or somef–kingbody to help me out with this newly-flat finger I’d acquired. CJ had gotten about fifteen feet ahead of me when he realized, I guess, that he still had the brick in his hand, so, still running, he flung it behind him. Hit me square on the forehead. I was a blood-streaked howling mess when my mom opened the screen door. That finger is still 50% wider than it’s twin on the other hand, streaked with scar tissue. I’m a little proud of it, actually.
Number 2 : I’m a couple of years older, and I’ve traded bikes with my friend David, and we’re about to zoom down the switchbacks to the public pool, which is in a deep hollow near the centre of our hilly town. The only problem is that I’ve never actually ridden a bicycle with hand brakes before, and am somewhat unclear on the concept. As I roar down the hill towards the first switchback, the back of which is a 100-foot dropoff, backpedalling madly to no avail, I take one of the sorts of off-the-cuff decisions which will end up characterizing most of the rest of my life : drop and slide, or sail off the edge into the abyss? I drop and slide through the gravel and broken glass, ripping most of the skin off the left side of my body, and embedding a few pebbles in the babyfat around my beltline. I stop sliding a few feet from the lip of the cliff, and David’s bike sails off into space. Still got one of those rocks buried in there. Not much in the way of scars, though, which still amazes me.
Stay tuned to this channel for more amusing tales of agonizing pain!
Or not. Your call.

Edit after a few more beers : It’s late Friday evening, which of course means there are an undisclosed number of Empty Bottles sitting around the WonderChicken at the moment : I just had a thought that it would be swell to wake up tomorrow to some similar tales of Really Painful Things from other friends in the virtual neighbourhood, if they were so inclined, just for fun. It’d be a break from Metablogging, at least…

I woke up this morning

March 1, 2002 / / No Comments

I woke up this morning from a dream of Flores, Indonesia. Bena, a small stone-age village, perched on the side of a volcano, that has stayed with me since the day I saw it, and has been the setting for many of my dreams.
Getting there was the usual trial of endurance that travel in some parts of the world can be. It had been about seven hours the previous day on one of the short buses that ply the narrow roads of Flores. One of the old Indonesia hands that we’d met in the days previous had told us to watch out for long bus trips in Flores – he’d said that the unhappy result of the winding ride through the incredibly rugged terrain, the road only having been in existence for a few years, and the fact that many of the locals were unaccustomed to long rides in motor vehicles was that on the longer trips, there was a tendency for a great deal of vomiting to occur.
‘Bah’, said I, ‘it can’t be that bad’.
About 3 hours into the trip, I’d managed to reach a detente of sorts with the chicken that had been pecking and pulling at my shoelaces. I’d noted to myself that chickens do not seem to be as clever as some other animals, in the sense that if you kick them, they forget about it rather quickly, and come back for more. Not that I have a long and noble history of animal-kicking experimentation : one just makes assumptions about being-kicked response systems. At some point, though, it had sunk into the chicken’s little birdy brain that my shoelaces were not edible, so I felt I had achieved a minor victory.
There was still the horrible, pathetic bleating of the live goat that was tied to the roof of the bus, unfortunately. This had been getting to me, until the bus driver popped in a cassette of the Rolling Stones’ Hot Rocks, which did drown out the poor bastard’s lamentation to a degree. In the fashion of all Flores bus drivers, the treble and volume on the cassette player had been turned all the way up, and what bass or midrange there might be had been silenced. After a few hours, I began to loathe that album. Ruby Tuesday still makes me break out in a sweat. But it was better, perhaps, than the goat-cries. Still, when the bus stopped for any length of time, the bleats of goaty anguish would start up again, and me and my vegetarian companion would glance at each other and make ‘yikes!’ sort of eyes.
Auditory assaults were soon to be the least of my worries. About halfway through the journey to Bajawa from Ende, a few more people managed to squeeze their way onto the bus and find places to stand or sit on the floor. Before getting aboard, two men, with the assistance of the driver and some of their friends, strapped a dead manta ray to the back of the bus, like a gigantic grey meaty parasol. The wingspan on this creature must have been close to three metres. Unfortunately, every time the bus stopped, a fragrance began to emanate from the corpse that managed to cut through the clove cigarette smoke like, well, like dead fish through pretty much anything. This olfactory extravaganza was actually preferable, though, to the next hundred or so kilometres. One of the manta-ray guys was standing in the narrow aisle beside where I was sitting, and once he’d made himself comfortable between sacks of rice and hunkered-down bodies, he more or less perched his right buttock on my left shoulder. There wasn’t much space to manoeuvre in this bus. Once he’d established to his satisfaction that I wasn’t really going to object to the crowding, he proceeded to fart in my left ear, non-stop, for the next two hours. Quietly, surreptitiously, but with a reek that overpowered even the dead manta ray. This, combined with the tinny shriek of Mick Jagger, the bleating of the dehydrated goat on the roof, the unique scent of the mantaray and the redoubled efforts of my chicken nemesis, was beginning to make me a little antsy.
Then the vomiting started…
That wise backpacker had been right. One of the young women in the seat ahead of us stuck her head out the window and regurgitated with a furious, gut-churning intensity. Her seatmate soon joined her, but, sitting as she was on the aisle seat, she didn’t have access to a window. Yes, I know. This began a chain-reaction which propagated, in a matter of minutes, to heaving and spewing up and down the length of the bus. Some of it even made it out the windows. The bus driver ignored the symphony of spew, the manta-guy kept farting on my shoulder, I chain-smoked to try and ignore the stench, and we carried on through the mountains.
We eventually did arrive in Bajawa, and I have rarely been as happy to get out of a motor vehicle.
Perhaps I’ll save the story of the stone-age village for later….

‘Hey, point that thing somewhere else!’ comments.