Monday, June 28, 2010

A Few Things I Have Noticed In Seoul:

1) I have seen little to no stray animals. I don't know why this may be. And don't pipe and say it's because they are getting consumed by people. They use certain farmed breeds for this use in specialty restaurants.

2) I have seen very few stray humans (houseless folks). I have not seen more than one or two at a time, unlike other places I have lived or have been for periods of time in the US: SF, PHX, DC, Salt Lake, New Orleans, Tucson, Sacramento, KCK, etc. The previously mentioned places, I have found, have small to large groups of homeless people who often seem to be under the influence of a variety of illicit and licit substances. A qualification to the previous sentence is that the people on the street may seem to be under the influence, but may really have variety of mental illness due to a lack of affordable mental health in the US.

3) The subway trains and stations are amazingly clean (including the bathrooms). I am impressed by the lack of grafitti, trash, and smell of urine.

4) Most of the public places I have been so far (various malls, the subway, alley merchants, etc.) have had a shockingly low amount of police presence, if any. I do see police near military installation gates and during protests (there are many protests by my work). But, here's the thing, this city of 13-14 million people has super-low crime. I have heard form Koreans that you can walk down the street at anytime of night, anywhere in the city, and be unaccosted. This atmosphere is very foreign to me, save Germany and some of the rural places I have lived.

5) The food is fucking awesome and super healthy. I have seen very few fat Koreans, which is suprising, as I have seen some of them pound food like it is going out of style.

Blast from the Past: Musings of a Man in His Later Twenties...

They can actually prompt him to speak. He always feels berated, but he will certainly open up like morning glory blooms in the dawn’s early light. The information he divulges is broken and strained in as much as he can twist the truth into what he believes. Nothing is vast, and the fact that he knows this makes him believe in nothing, as it exists in its entirety. Where the road ends, misery begins. This is the situation, as it stands, just beyond being halfheartedly crippled. He nods his head and shakes with the sickness of a broken man from a broken home. He is broken from the oh so lovely opiates that keep him going strong in his convictions to disagree with these inquisitors from the Devil’s system of imperfection. Given all the possible outcomes of the night, death seems like a very comforting alternative.

All of these tumbling hours, and ours is just a shifting path of irregularities and random acts of conspiring forces that seethe in alleyways trying to obliterate his sanity. “What is this all about?” He creeps, and as the drone of voices rage on overhead he dreams of everything good and wholesome in this life; burritos on Haight, warm, clean sheets, kind bud, and the pale, prickly-pear goose flesh that blankets the lush labia as he licks life’s holy eye. That will be enough of this rambling on in such a venereal fashion.

The seriousness of the present predicament is lost in the faded consciousness of the Asian flu sickness that makes him shiver with a sort of moaning anti-delight. He feels like Oswald when Jack Ruby stuck a gun in his guts; however, a knife to the hilt would more apt; a straight classic. But, opinions never counted in the American gray matter of separating black from white, rich from poor, good from evil, right from wrong, tastes great from less filling, for better or for worse, so help me God. It’s all the same fucking thing! Delirium is settling down for a permanent stay in the confines of his thick skull.

How would Uncle Bill handle this situation? Well, he would probably call Ronnie Milsap, Ray Charles, Little Stevie Wonder, and the rest of the Blind Boy Scout Battalion to croon lullabies of redemption into his sweltering ears. “Hell, Zimmerman never wrote any shit this crazy, never strayed so far from the path”; I think to myself crankily and quite conceitedly. Everything occurring since his breaking point, even with the flow of time, has not made any more sense than it did on the Western Plain.

The eyes open, dry and red and irritated by the fumes of the peeling paint. His eyes roll wildly, dart furtively, then open wide with an expression seeming to exclaim, “My God! (My Dog!). What a blindingly brilliant world that waits for me to…to…run away and hide from…me.” What is that creature squirming in my throat? Did I swallow my pride? It tastes a bit like bilious, Hollywood homicide. His mouth is parched. His dreams are decayed. His wants are trivial. He runs to look in the mirror. “That’s not zombie road kill in my throat, that’s my tongue.” It’s all purple swollen and abused like Linda Lovelace escapades into celluloid insanity. Saliva! Where are you? Where did you go? Tears.

The night before is a torturous, blank memory. The course of the day remains to be seen. The sun scene seems to be polluted with ideas of nothingness, and where my liver used to be, now resides an I.O.U. Well shit, I don’t want to pay up…I’m destitute…I’m zero balance on Karma…you can even ask my friends. The guy wasting away 6 doors down is a junkie, but not me.

I rode all the way from heaven in a Uterine Carriage, some 23 or so odd years ago. I fell from heaven as if a broken angel. The fall has been long and hard, the road full of potholes and broken promises. I have been told by various, nefarious women of the night that I am an angel, that my personality exudes the necessary generosity that makes men of mice and saints of sinners. No way. No how. Not this kid, not this gullible, Goat-head wannabe. This walking stranger headed for nowhere, that eerily empty place where the sunshine fix awaits.

Now, as may or may not know Raoul Duke and the great Dr. Gonzo went off on their little excursion into the neon nothingness of Vegas searching for that Dream, American and proud. What they found there had completely tainted the glory of the story all together, but somehow the general idea of my situation isn’t the same. I feign Rap and Roll like a frat boy, jock talking the king of swing. I eat paper wrapped, salted crap for dinner. I scrub my nether regions; Carlin fashion. I dine on moist animal flesh. I was raised transfixed by the fix and the glimmering sheen of the Tee-Vee screen. I learned to fuck missionary style just like a good God! fearing citizen, so is it such a wonder why a life that should be so full of bliss and so mightily meaningful feel so wasted, so broken, so hollow like busted, bar slut, brain chambers? Will I ride the snake to the lake with that brown tooth, dangling cigarette droop, writhing in the wrinkles of sin, buttered and basted, by back-seat thrill rides and drunken jokes with forgotten punch lines?

Yessir.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

And today's all-original, aweful joke of the day is:

What did James Bond say to the Madame when he got to the brothel?

"I'd like a fresh lady, shaven, not furred."

Thursday, June 24, 2010

'Sweet Burn' or 'Ode to Mr. Jerry Tomato (slightly bruised)'

Girl come! Come into the darkness…Draw the curtains on my calm Korean morning as the dew beads on my upper lip, too. We’ll steal ourselves from the shining, oven light of the sun. I see the sweat stand out on your soft skin as I fall from high heaven, naked and wailing, only knowing you’ll leave here and I’ll be holding my dead-beating heart in my outstretched hands. The contempt brews just beneath the surface slurry. Your gaze eats my mind as it sputters in the shallows, trolling for an excuse; fishing for the reasons. Why do we pretend to defend the sanctimony of our empty promises, the olden, golden, glory-gone, leaves gathering out in the garden? Our version of the fall of…

Man, I despise that man-thing, that bumbling beast; the interloper who hobbled in from the flatlands in the East with a smiling sneer and the glossy veneer of a snake semen salesman seeking a rosy rube to spill syrupy, kind words into a leaking vessel. Tears strewn throughout the home from one cherubic, naïve, the mother of us all. The tales she tells, true fiction, ever seeking, solace and redemption in the aisles and alleyways of her heart. Or so I see…

Slowly and sleepily, Stuttgart dreams call, peevishly, pandering, and pensive, the salesman pounces, panda-like, reeking of fermented, phony bamboo, on his prey. With the prospects of no gal, no beautiful babes, and no home, the mouse in this man is left tattered and torn from the ever-brewing, bawling battles. A white flag covers his shame. Pencil on paper soothes my pride. Rock crushes scissors. It’s a losing game. A bitter bet…better yet for all of me to all of thee that I have nothing else left to write; even less to say.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

The Infancy of My Intimacy

Fallow fields. Vision concealed by the facts of matter scattered at the periphery. When I see what I see I want to be far from here. I wallow in the wake of forces that lie beyond the shoal and greave for the lack of soul at the center of all of the activity.

Will it come to pass that I will not be able to outlast the fears that hold me back? I scrimp and save Karma like the bits beetles roll into balls of dung and the flush it all down the sewer pipe, 23 skidoo; rinse, repeat. Then the monsters and mental mistresses come to me in fleeting visions. They reconnoiter in shadows of the void that lie between the spirit and waking worlds. They come blasting out into the fields of vision stretched thin and wispy upon the back of my eyelids. They come and delicately pound the timpani drums residing comfortably in my ears. Those bashful beasts bring unto me words, images, songs, and sounds of realities far removed from my own. I would be grateful if I could bring these states into my waking world and for me to be walking through the gardens shocked wide-eyed and beautifully ecstatic with golden glowing purple flowers woven beneath my feet like walking stones on the path to oneness. Draw another deep breath. Sigh.

My one true hope is that Mystery finds me naked and feral in my own mindscapes, sucking on the teat of post-modernity. I wish to be torn from the teat and thrown into the beautiful chaos of the cosmic. Cosmopolitan, I search about for meaning, for solace in the arms of the gentle ones, for table scraps from the bleeding hearts. I come up empty, pockets pulled out, a look of quizzical embarrassment shrouding my face in comic fuckery (did I just press Winehouse word coinage into your palm like a paper seal filled with dope?).

The drive for downing libations with half-witted remembrance of the ghosties of Saturday night that came before to wallow in the sallow lights of personal oblivion, only strokes the yearning urges for meaning. Where is it? I cannot seem to find it in the carnal ramblings of breathing, walking, corner skulking, early mid-life crises or the voracious sexual appetites of the young Gods who drive chrome rimmed chariots into the noxiously neon night. Where the fuck is it? I can’t seem to be able to just copy and paste it into existenz. It is not appearing to me as a matter of convenience. It does not seem to be readily apparent. WTF?

Everything else in this American life comes so convenient. You just solve little bits of the maze and hit the treat bar with your little, clawed paws. ‘Take a pill, man, leave the driving to us’ seems to be motto for my day and age under the sun. Who the fuck is driving? I don’t know if I am to break into song about the whole mess of it like Pynchon scrawl because my program is all mixed up like DJ kicks and my situation’s been slaughtered by the sins of my bothers for so long now. I need to know my song before I start singing it from the misty mountain top. The foibles of faith tell me the peak is up there where I could be living majestic and eternal somewhere; post-life.

This tirade is tired and teasingly targets nothing, save my own inadequacies. And I, only troubled by the newer than new realization that somewhere along the way I lost the path. It must’ve happened early on in my time because I don’t exactly remember what it looked and felt like to be on the path. Notions of pre-recordings vanish into nothing as I stand on a pivot point of a huge invisible compass. I intuit that the 360° of potential paths are emanating out there into the void, but I am so fallibly human and cannot see. Dragged and drugged by the invisible hand of the marketplace across the shards, I wantonly reach out grope some comfortable bosom. Ringing loudly, voices come to me and say, “Monkeyshine Moodswing, self-deception was always your strong suit.” Just transmissions from the void. A vote of no confidence from my internal parliament; as it were. Oz ‘The Great and Terrible’ says, “no, sir.”

In classic fashion I’ve come to an impasse. The boiling over of the skull pot oozing like some sort of pre-mature ejaculation rattling the walls inside like a thousand paint cans full of coins riding the paint mixer, then nicht, like a light switched into the O-F-F position. Denouement leads to infernal suffering and the bubbles rising up from my muddy beer only serve to cast out the angels dancing on signals between my synapses. The 17-year-old within my skin constantly clamors and spouts vitriolic rants from the face of the pig, “Water melting, decayed and angry, collapse, collapse, collapse!” to ward off the potential good spirits drifting in from the desert. “Is this the only way to say a prayer?” Stare at me. See if I care…

We have just traveled 858 words (and counting) down, down deep into the rabbit hole.

How does it feel, to be horribly mind-blown?

How does it feel, to be like some monkey’s evil clone?

We’re no closer to the truth. We’re just slightly becoming aware that there possibly is/isn’t such a thing. Feeling it all out with this kid feels kind of good in a bad way like pressing an ingrown toe nail against the inside wall of your shoe, doesn’t it? Or is it horribly unsettling and leaves that dreadful feeling in your stomach like when we watch Mr. Orange writhe around in the back seat of a stolen Nova as he dies bleeding like a uterus from the bullet hole in his gut? Either way, just impatiently slack around for the next episode: “I Gotta Golden Pussy, Jones.”

Monday, June 21, 2010

Kalifornia Kreeping In

I peer around, sonically immersed in some blues ditty, at the sleeping sugar babes on the Seoul subway as they drift off to toil eagerly in the city towers. The almond-eyed scenes are so perfectly surreal to my wild Western eyes that I cannot help but feel like a subterranean homesick alien. The humidity in the lazily swirling air bothers me no more as Burning Spear drowns wailing into my ears with a song of sweet bliss that harkens my mind away from my perfect, little life I now happen to live; burrowing beneath the ground on shiny rails. Dead-heading into Dongdaemun with the breezy ocean, ice plant, moist eucalyptus air lapping at my soul, I catch myself coming under heavy with the suspicion that at this moment, life is good. Although, I do pine for Kalifornia so.

“My time coming, anyday, don't worry about me, no
It's gonna be just like they say, them voices tell me so
Seems so long I felt this way and time sure passin' slow
Still I know I lead the way, they tell me where I go.

Don't worry about me, no no no, don't worry about me, no
and I'm in no hurry, no no no, I know where to go.

California, a prophet on the burning shore
California, I'll be knocking on the golden door
Like an angel, standing in a shaft of light
Rising up to paradise, I know I'm gonna shine.”

Grateful Dead - ‘Estimated Prophet’

Saturday, June 19, 2010

New Band NAME:

Forrest came up with a phrase that would be a great band name: "6-year-olds with cell phones". Womp-womp.

"...mended broken wings" indeed.

I do miss the chance to see Calexico every so often, but I can bask in the music here in Korea. 

I see the crumbling foundations of the empire. Decadence...going under. The dust fills my trained eye, always hawking the bitterness of defeat; vanquished by the sword of entropy. I look at America through the sight glass of a broken telescope from the Asia continent. I love, but my love is thrown into my family and out into the cosmos, because it simply hurts too much to have nothing left to cherish in my homeland.

The words below remind me of this desolation. Like many other mindful Americans, I too look to the South and its beautiful tribes and peoples not thoroughly wrought by the 'free-market'.

The current scene: Learn it. Breathe it in. Exhale and 'press on with pride', like my dad, Lee Calvin, always exhorted during military mind exercises.

"Watched with a hawk's trained eye
Trees grow silent fruit
'neath a suffering sky
Those who have stayed, keep a flame
In memory of the fallen
And pass on the old rites despite the risk
But many more have left here
On mended broken wings
Turning to see your reaction
A tear drop fills your eye" - Calexico 'Woven Birds'

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

I knew the words were bullshit as they left my lips.