Sobriety

It was back in September, and the Korean doctor was running the ultrasound wand back and forth across my lubed-up abdomen, shaking his head and looking stern. “Patty Ribber” he repeated, three or four times, pointing at the monitor, on which I saw nothing but the usual indecipherable patterns of amorphous grey blobs. I nodded like I knew what he was saying, which is my usual strategy. After nearly 15 years since I came to Korea, I’m still not that great at parsing things out when I’m in an unfamiliar situation.

The doc sat back down behind his desk while his disconcertingly attractive nurse wiped the lube off my stomach, and started talking at my wife, in the arrogant tones that Korean doctors favour. I was catching one word in three, as usual, but when she grabbed a piece of paper from a stack on the shelf beside her and handed it to me at his behest, and I saw the picture, “patty ribber” suddenly resolved in my brain to “fatty liver” and my blood ran cold.

“He says ‘no drinking for six months’,” my wife told me, unable to entirely hide the fact she thought that was a pretty fine idea.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” said I, and she gripped my arm and led me out of the room with the requisite bows of apology for my grumpy tone. I’m sure he was used to it. There was a big stack of those info sheets, and they were the only ones there. I think he may have been a crypto-temperance advocate, and every guy who wandered into his office got the same orders. Maybe.

It’s 3 months later now, and I’m half-way through my enforced period of teetotalling. This is the point at which people offer faux-hearty congratulations and that’s greats, and we all briefly bow our heads contemplating the ravages of the demon alcohol. Well, to hell with that.

I miss beer something fierce.

But that is not to say that I have experienced any withdrawal symptoms, physical or psychological, at all. I’m one of the lucky ones, thank goodness, who can turn the switch on and off at will, it appears. But I do miss it; I miss the fuzzy warm welter of mild confusion that came later after the initial rush of energy and mental acuity. The Joe Strummer Mystery-Train extended pees. I miss the inhibition of judgment and I miss getting outside my head once a week; I miss blowing the carbon out of the mental valves. But stopping has been the easiest thing in the world. I just stopped.

When I was much younger, my best and longest friend and drinking companion Barry and I used to worry about being, or becoming, alcoholics. The dread word. We drank a hell of a lot, 20 or 25 years back, we did, and we loved it, but many was the night we spent, drinking our rye, on a beach or bench somewhere, wondering to ourselves what being an alcoholic really meant, and whether we were in danger.

Turns out not.

After his health started to go a bit sideways a few years back, or maybe just because he was done with it, Barry started tailing off with the booze a bit, without difficulty. Until 3 months ago, I kept to a regular schedule for a good ten years or more, as I am a man of habit, and drank my beer each and every Friday night, until I was done, and had had enough. One time out of 8 or ten, I wouldn’t feel the thirst, or my wife and I were arguing and because I hate to drink when I’m not feeling happy, I’d give it a miss, or finish before my customary measure and call it an early night.

But stopping? Well, after 30 years of being hard at it, the first 15 of which it was hammer-and-tongs like I had something to prove: no problem whatsoever. Do I feel a little more mental acuity, more energy? Well, maybe: I’ve certainly been on a creative tear lately, relaunching old websites and creating new. I’ve lost 6 or 7 kilograms and feel pretty good. My lovely and overprotective wife is pleased. I suppose the point of the endeavour — to allow my overburdened greaseball of a liver time to regenerate — is a good and noble one.

But I said this, I recall, four years ago, over at Metafilter

It is interesting (and not without justification, certainly, given the problems that alcohol abuse causes) how the default response to the drink seems in recent decades to have swung from an appreciation of the wild, mystic revelry of bacchanalia to a primly moralizing disapproval. I think of it as a very American sort of attitude — in opposition to the more European or NE Asian attitudes toward booze — and find it fascinating.

A lot of it seems to come from the generation(s) — from kids up to some people in, say, their early 30′s, who often seem to think of alcohol as their parents’ or grandparents’ drug of choice, and therefore kind of lame — who have grown up in some senses Postbooze, in the decades during which the central cultural focus in attitude seems to have shifted from the celebratory and sacramental aspects of (alcohol) intoxication to the damage and the carnage, to the idea that a one who drinks is an alcoholic, that to be an alcoholic is to have a disease, and that those who drink without destroying their lives are condescended towards and granted the qualifier ‘functioning’, but are still ‘diseased’.

I don’t mean to judge either way — there is much to be said for the power of intoxicants, and alcohol may be the oldest one humans have used. There is also much to be said about the destruction that excessive alcohol use has wrought, and continues to wreak on individuals and families and societies.

Neither extreme tells the whole story. Each individual is different, and the balance between the exalted and the debased, between the bacchanalian reveler and the destructive and damaged addict is always fluid.

For my part, I’ve had more friends whose lives have been ripped to shit by cocaine (for example) than ones whose lives have been ruined by booze (though I’ve seen both), and I’ve some had friends who have bounced back from both.

and my attitude hasn’t changed. I know, believe, and understand that alcohol can and does destroy some people — many people.

But I am eternally thankful, given how much I love what alcohol does to my brain when I drink it, that I am not one of those people, and that putting it down for a while or for forever, though not something I’m enthusiastic to do, is not something I find difficult.

This site was named, all those years ago, as a vague gesture. Empty bottle because all of the contents have been drunk or empty bottle because there were none to begin with? Empty bottle as a wish for the future or a lament for the past? As a celebration or a warning?

Hell, I don’t know, myself. All of the above, I guess. I just hope the liver bounces back, because come April 2011, I’m looking forward to my first beer with great anticipation.

In The Belly Of The Beast

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.