filaments

invisible rice paddy freeway
but
fragmented yet structurally sound
and
dew drenched

chocolate kinolau

i fill distractions.
i distract things.

i drink women.
i eat
the fuck that plagues me at all times and in all places.
box of distractions.

keyboard book there.
empty bottle and Sartre.
i am empty and i am brown,
big broad shoulders
wasting days disenchanted elders.

i reckon i oughtta
get on a flight and fly.

empty glass of pine mountain,
drinking and drinking, waiting
–take me away.

i’m thirsty. i’ll pour another
as the rain
wafts
the window

and my pig nose
digs so deep i can cry.

korean construction crew

korean construction crew

metal on metal on concrete on metal
the shards and the stabs of the slats
across the alley thru my window they throw

every early morning come seven sunday past saturday
the grinding and the binding, the gutting and gouging.
they break what they’re building, piling and pounding.

in straw hats and smoke plumes, with low hips and
late nights, they bang and slam into the sunset,
dawn till dusk, seven till seven — spraying tinpanic Sevin.

“Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions.”

“Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions.”

Michael Pollan

mash-up

korean pots and pans music in the next classroom over + death cab for cutie eurythmics cover = interesting mash-up.

gustatory awareness

mints from the garden, slowly chewing around a canker sore and imagining myself in Oregon.

school lunch: hot peppers in almost every stainless compartment, except the meat side dish. what is that i detect? is it spam? no, not spam. it’s got a strangely latch-key aroma… ah, yes. ham. ham from a Pizza Hut pizza.

korea: a dirty, not so pretty version of Japan

Korea is a dirty, not so pretty version of Japan. I keep realizing this, time and again.
The first time was when I was 18. I was a depressive sort of lay about at that point. I went to a lot of museums (well, three) since I figured that’s what academics and writers did (I wanted to be an academic but got a 2.7 GPA in high school).
I was in the Honolulu Academy of Arts when I stumbled on a bunch of Korean paraphernalia. Pottery, hanbok, tapestry, etc. It all struck me as… crude. I know, I know. I was being a cultural relativist. I hadn’t gone to college yet, so I couldn’t help myself. But still, they looked so crude. Especially compared to the elegance of Etruscan pottery or the erudite refinement of the t-shirt and jean shorts I was wearing.
The next time I realized how unpretty and dirty Korea is when compared to Japan was the flight over here. It was a trans-Pacific nine-hour nonstop from Honolulu to Seoul. About 8 hours into it, I looked out and saw the most beautiful delicate and verdant country I ever saw out of a plane window (and I’ve seen a lot of them). I thought to myself: “Wow. I’m lucky. I get to live there!” But then I looked up at the progress map on the big screen and, oh, fiddlesticks, we were passing over Japan. Sigh.
Then the revelations just kept on coming.

Wait. Why am I working so hard?

.

Q.E.D.

flying donkey force

i didn’t know donkeys could fly. i suppose they can. He-haw.

and this is some sick shit right here.

korean word of the now: 우울하다

Justin teacher: How are you today?
Student(s): I am fine/so-so/happy/not so good. How are you?
Justin teacher: Oh, a little bit depressed.
Student(s): puzzled look on their face(s).

This is the quandary I find myself in. But now I can just say Oh, I’m so 우울하다.

(the unmentioned) ambiguous poetry

come ten it will hit
full bore. but till then
it will pour

like light ginseng honey
through trees to meet

pollinators alighting
a domestic abuse
energy sluice,
and spider webs fighting.

autistic anal rentiveness

one of my students — i think he’s slightly autistic — just pointed to his butt.
“what?” i asked.
he pointed again.
“What?” i asked.
he walked away and farted. stinky.
“dude, go to the bathroom.”
he shook his head, smiling.
“jib,” he said. the korean word for house.
He wants to wait until he goes home to shit.

wow. glad to know i wasn’t just a strange little kid all on my own in my anal retentiveness.

why am i here?

i ask myself every time i have to teach a class. i stand there, either not teaching at all (because the korean teachers do it better without me) or fake teaching. and the reasons run through my head like the months through my life.

1) when i first got here, i didn’t know how easy it was to leave nor how fucked it would be to stay. i didn’t know i could find a hagwon job in twenty minutes nor that all the things i disliked about this place would — far from getting better — get worse. i thought i had a good deal until i met other english teachers and found out my deal was raw.

2) when i first got here, my principal said something heartfelt to me. one of the teachers translated it to me as that he loved me. i was touched and decided to stay just because of that deep human emotion. but then i came to realize he said he had “jung” for me. that’s a deeply racist concept which, far from making me want to stay, makes me want to get the fuck out of here. yeah, he was just operating inside the constraints of his racist culture. and saying he has “jung” for me is the few ways he can express emotion towards me, a foreigner. but still. racists.

3) i had a crush on the 3rd grade teacher. i thought we could fuck or something. turns out she was being a disingenuous cunt.

4) when i first got here, i ate a lot of chocolate. like, the first three days i was stuck in a hotel room with nothing but chocolate bars and korea cable pron. the whole country was shut down for Chuseok and i just sat in my room, watching porn and eating chocolate. then after i ran out of American chocolate, i started to discover the Korean kind. in plastic bottles and at least 52 percent cacao. that fucked with my reasoning ability.
half the time i was wildly optimistic. i’d down a bottle of chocolate and think: “I can handle anything!!!” the rest of the time, i’d be depressed and irritable and nothing seemed manageable. i’d be lurching from one chocolate bar to the next.

but over all, i’m a timid and lazy person. i don’t know if this was bred into me or if society (civilization) has damaged me to this extent. whatever the case, i have stayed here these 9.5 months just because i couldn’t imagine myself leaving.

primitivism

i mention to people that i’m into John Zerzan at the moment. they have a fit. that is, if they’re intellectual types who went to college and read books there. if they didn’t, they ask me what he writes about and I tell them. They think about it for a moment and sort of go: “Why would you want to read about that? I like civilization.”

Here’s why:

Because all the social justice bullshit, as much as I admire and agree with it, is just bullshit. Bullshit running around in self-perpetuating circles. Like feminism. Yeah, it’s great. I agree that women ought not to be subject to the demands of males and i agree that males ought not to have more power than females simply because of their existence. But you know, the machinations that feminists go through to put right the patriarchy’s wrongs are just… absurd.

Then there’s affirmative action.

I won’t go into it. I’m lazy and I have to prepare for 3rd grade. But suffice it to say, all the things the social justice types do to make civilization right are like a fool dancing on his roof, shattering his roofing tiles; then when it begins to rain, hurriedly going up and fixing them and praising himself for a job well done. Then being surprised when rain starts streaming into his bedroom from the twenty holes he punched in the roof while he was fixing the roof. (Thanks to Matsunobu Fukuoka)

But then someone said to me that we couldn’t possibly live without civilization. That she couldn’t possibly imagine a world without cars and machines and agriculture. And I said that two hundred years ago, no one could imagine a world without the Patriarchy and that no one would even think to question the necessity of its existence. But guess what?

awkward

i’m an awkward guy. i move like a cross between monute bol and some flaming homosexual Army medic. i dress in this way that no one including me (excluding for one of my friends in Philadephia who used to run a thrift shop) really understands. my sense of humor is… well… yeah. and, frankly, i don’t know what to do with myself at parties. i either embarass myself, shun the women who want to fuck me (because all the awkwardness in the world doesn’t negate the good genes my parents gave me), or embarass everyone in my attempt to fuck some bitches, yo.

so it was no surpise that tonight, i had a nice embarassingly awkward showing.

a friend had reached that solar day cycle at which she could be called one year older. same for two other friends. she was having a party at some kind of all one can devour meat and alcohol festival.

honestly, i didn’t want to go. meat and alcohol weren’t on the to do list for this week. but getting out of my little village and back to a sembelence of the life i led before coming here was.

so i thought, “i’ll go to this damn thing,” and set off. of course, i live two hours from the appointed meeting place. and of course i find it terribly lame to go into Seoul just to eat and drink with people i don’t really know just because the foreigners around here are… well… i rather not say.

anyway, the point is: the awkwardness.

so i was at the table, eating meat and drinking poison. i thought. man, i should make some conversation. i ought to make some convesation with these people. i need to talk to these people.

but, wouldn’t you know. that sort of thinking results in anxious conversation. it results in muy talking to fast and me thinking: “am i not saying the right thing?” yadda yadda yadda, the people i’m talking to think: “why is this guy stuttering and nervours?”

so i stop talking, and damn it, wouldn’t you know, everyone is sort of like: “why isn’t think bald kid talking?”

anyway, paranoia aside, I was sitting at the table, eating my pork and beef, and said to one of the guys: “so which part of the UK are you from?” thinking that would be a safe converation topic. I mean, every Briton loves to talk about their hometown. How is old Durft street these days, anyway? But, turns out the guy was Irish. Bloody Irish. Meaning, of course, he wasn’t from the UK. But Ireland — a colonized land populated with some people who are rather sore at the UK.

“Really?…” I said and shut the fuck up. He and his British friend talked amongst themselves. I sat there and ate more pork. Or maybe chicken. I don’t know. It’s all meat to me, a former vegan.

A few minutes later, I thought: “I ought to show that I care about this guy’s culture. I should mention something Irish.”

So I did.

“Do you ever watch ‘Father Ted’?”

He was quiet for a moment. I chewed some gristle. Pork or something meaty.

“I’m just not sure of what you’re getting at,” he said in that ‘if i were drinking a Guiness in Dublin I’d likely smash it over your fucking face,” kinda way.

I thought: “Damn it! He’s found me ought. He knows I am awkward and am only here to get social contact with foreigners and damn it he knows I’m faking this whole thing. Quick! Run!”

Instead, I said, covering my tracks: “Oh, I just watch it all day at work. I don’t work much and it’s on Joox. I watch it at work, ya see.”

I looked at him. And then realized. Holy shit, he looks exactly like Father Dougal. Motherfucker, he gets it a lot, doesn’t he. And it drives him mad. Because he’s a fairly smart guy and he must have been getting this shit the pat ten years. I know it’s kind of a drag when people say: “Oh, you look like Elvis” and he’s actually seen in a good light. But Father Dougal…

At this point, I decided to get out of there at the first available instant. Fortunately, a few minutes later and right after I asked one of them “hey, why are you in Korea?” three of the men decided to go out for a smoke.

 

Oh, yeah. and this little bit of fun. I got to the place we were meeting and sort of mumbled a bit. this was because i was sitting on the subway for two hours and handn’t talked to anyone. and i was sweating cause it was hot and exceedingly humid. and i was sort of flustered from the stairs and the whole living in a huge city thing. and i think i had a could or something.

all this in mind, it wasn’t strange when some guys said: “Well, have you been out drinking last night?”

i lied and said yes instead of finding a way to encapsulate all the above reasons — plus my exceedingly awkward nature — in a nice pithy quip.

“yeah,” I said. “lots of booze.”

Phew.

things that piss me off

when i plant beet seeds and someone steps on the garden bed. what kind of lazy mother fucker steps on a garden bed? it’s like six inches across.

ditto for carrot seeds.

when i am an idiot — social, fiscal or otherwise.

KBS.co.kr

i got a haircut

and i shaved.

Hyochon teachers

How hard is it to tell me, your co-worker, that you are leaving early?

Do you know how bad it feels to be left alone while everyone goes to their car, laughing? Do you? Do you know how isolated I am and how bad I feel, seeing everyone else drive off together while I sit, alone, waiting for 5 pm?

Obviously not.

Or else one of you would have made the monumental effort to say: “Go home.” Or even mangled something in your ugly fucking language.

To be quite honest, you people are the reason I am unhappy in this place in your school. I am isolated and unhappy. Yes, I don’t speak your language — your ugly, ugly language. And yes, I am not Korean. But how hard is it to come tell me: “Justin. You can go home early. We’re all leaving early.”

Pretty hard, I guess, when you can’t even remember that I exist.

Do you know what you all said to me when I got here in September?

“We’re your family. You are part of the Hyochon family.”

Ha! Does family leave family sitting alone in an empty school?

It’s clear that you don’t care about me. It’s clear that I’m just wasting time here. But you know what?

Despite your shitty country, in spite of your shitty school, in spite of your shitty treatment of me; I am staying here. I am staying here for one reason: money. I am staying so I can take your money. as much as I can. So far, I have taken many thousand dollars of your money. And I will take more. I will take more so I can walk away from this shitty little shit hole laughing at how much money I have taken from you.

I will leave in September 11,000 dollars richer and a year of my 9-5 life wasted. I have wasted a year of my life. This is my problem, but at least you could have told me: “Hey, you can leave early” when everyone else left early.

You people have made my time in your shitty little country that much worse.

Fuck all of you thoughtless people (Except for Ji-won. She’s nice.) But especially fuck the vice principal. What the fuck, dude. I can smell your goddamn cigarette smoke in the bathroom. I can smell it and I can hear your fucking newspaper rustling. In the goddamn bathroom.

milieu

word of the day: “개망초”

Come to Korea and you’ll see them everywhere. “개망초”  — the spindly, not-so pleasing weeds with little white flower on top. They’re gangly things –  two leaves dangling out for every five feet of fiberous stalk. They pop up everywhere. I’ve seen them everywhere but never had a name for them until this Sunday on the farm. I asked my host what it was and he told me: “망초 — not good!”

Later, his wife told me the back story of this weed. It’s the weed that will ruin your field, she said.
Literally, the name is “dog ruin plant” or, more grammatical, “The plant that will ruin your field.” The dog bit is just in there for gratuitous effect — in Korea, appending dog to anything make it extra nasty.

plums

tiny baby plums
red and rotten
three on the chinese
cutting board.

i stoop to pour buckets
and forget to shave.
i stoop to poop
and forget to make coffee.

it’s these days, running
one before another,
that i will have see as pointed –
but now i stumble

stooping through stubble,
stumbling through rubble
of my life.
.