Mediocrity Triumphs!

When I was a little boy, I went to the Boston Museum of Science and saw some baby chickens being born in an incubator.  Man, those were some hot chicks.

Q)  Why did the lumberjack clear-cut the forest?

A)  It was getting too big for its birches.

Q)  What did the logger who suffered from terrible hay fever say?

A)  “I can’t see the forest for the sneeze.”

I’m proud to announce that I’ve been given a job at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, better known as Gitmo, the notorious Home of American Torture, as their Chief Distributor of Bad Puns.

Speaking of Gitmo, have you seen Mos Def’s video in which he tries to see what being force-fed liquid food is like?  He can’t stand it for more than a second, as the procedure is too painful to endure.  How nice that those prisoners who find their lives at the “camp” utterly intolerable are not even allowed the satisfaction of a dignified death through a hunger strike as they’re kept unwillingly alive in such a sinister manner.  Bon appetit, putative terrorists.

Yesterday I participated in a contest of sorts at my wife’s church.  We sang a song entitled “This Is My Father’s World.”  (My real father once shared the philosophical observation that no one really owns anything and we’re mainly just a Planet of Renters.)  I had practiced the song religiously, drilling the Korean lyrics into my head while sitting on the toilet for a grand total of five minutes.  Since I think it’s silly to believe in God, especially considering how many horrible things happen in the world while you wait (that’s meant as a reference to an overused TV commercial catch-phrase, not a criticism of the reader, who’s apt to be a better citizen than I’ll ever be), I didn’t feel  particularly compelled to memorize the sucker.

Jina had also told me ahead of time that we’d be surrounded by several other singers at the time, so I figured I could fake my way through it.

And that’s exactly what I did.

Because Jina is holier than thou, whoever thou might be, we’d already been stuck in the church and portions of its vast compound since ten in the morning, and the “talent show” didn’t commence till two p.m.  What a waste of a semi-beautiful day.  I was also restless because I wanted to be doing something more productive–or at least fun–with my time instead of farting around with a bunch of benighted if well-behaved lunatics.  

While Jim Morrison may have said that “All the children are insane,” (thanks for that authoritative diagnosis, Dr. Morrison, who cleverly and cutely arrived at the self-fellating anagram for himself “Mr. Mojo Risin'”), I’m delighted to announce that most of the kids I “teach” in Sunday school are still pure and wise enough not to go in for all that God and Jesus bullshit.

As the irrepressibly uptight twerp who conducts the class blurts his instructions to them through his microphone, performing all kinds of ignominious contortions for them to imitate while indoctrinating them in the ostensible ways of the Lord, I make faces at some of those children whose attention he fails to hold, while the rest of the kids who ignore him daydream about magnificent television cartoons they’ve watched.

Whenever the rest of the congregation–junior or senior–lower their heads in groveling prayer, I look around to see if anyone else is bowing out of the ludicrous ritual; that way I’d know I might have an ally.  

But no–hence, I have to keep up appearances, which is a big part of Korean culture–perhaps the main part, if not the only part, at least as far as I can tell, or as near, as an old housemate of mine from Vermont used to say.

Anyway, it’s Monday morning here and I’ve got to get up and get ready for work in a few minutes, so I’ll cut to the chase:  despite the formidable competition of the descendants of Orpheus and the sirens, people born with music notes flowing through their veins, Jina and my team managed to come in second place.  All I did was intone the words in a nondescript way, hiding my voice in a thicket made up of the voices of my fellow singers, peering at the lyrics with quasi-literate comprehension through my handy symbiotic reading glasses (you have to wear them at the same time as your regular glasses–they fit comfortably right inside them).  First place went to a group of crooning teenage girls who had us beat hands-down on the adorability factor.  

Despite the advice I always give to my public speaking students, I never made eye contact with the audience once–maybe because if I had I would have burst out laughing at being involved in such a fraudulent farce.

Although we were not privileged to win one of the coveted electric fans distributed during the raffle afterwards, Jina received a prize of one hundred thousand won (about a hundred US bucks) after I’d already high-tailed it out of there.

I went on to meet a friend for Mexican food and beers, and he soundly defeated me at chess.

I hope to win at the game some day before I die, but if I held my breath I would have become a chess piece myself a long time ago, ready to nestle endlessly in my box all by myself, everlastingly out of the game, sequestered in a boneyard of old discarded chessmen and -women of all shapes and sizes, hidden under the tessellated arena of the boring board.

Response to Stew

Hi, folks.  Sorry I haven’t been pressing words lately.  I’ve been very bizzy.  And hot!

Without further ado, here’s a guest post from my friend and fellow blogger over at sweettenorbull, who has an axe to grind about something i wrote a little while ago (“Why I Don’t Want to Have Children”).  Apparently, he does.  (I’ll give you time to heave a prodigious sigh of disbelief.)  But seriously, I think he’ll make a great father, especially with such airtight reasons to reproduce.  

In Defence of Fatherhood

 

Stew, I read with interest and enjoyment your argument against having children at the beginning of the month, but felt that the counterarguments deserved an airing too. There are many good reasons to bring children into the world – and I’m not talking about benefits to society, or to the environment or even to your spouse, but benefits to you, yourself and you!

 

1. Nobody else will listen to you. Sad but true. Much to my surprise, I can talk to my wife about subjects that she considered deathly boring when we first started going out, notably bird-watching (she can tell a buzzard from a kite and knows a dipper, a wagtail or a dunnock when she sees one, impressively); but there are still subjects she runs from like the plague – anything sporty, for example, or the heroes of early Northumbrian history, or the travails of Irish saints. I have the same trouble with friends: sadly, none are particularly interested in my opinions on the redefinition of county boundaries (I want the old pre 1974 boundaries back, since you ask); and no one I know can stand to talk about poetry for more than say 10 minutes, which is why I blog about it instead.

Things are different with kids. For them, your stories have the quality of epic myth, even if they’re just about a misadventure on the way to the takeaway. I boasted for years to school friends just because my Dad had had an altercation with the guy out of ACDC once, when they were both trying to park outside a curry house. To whom else but a son or daughter would that be even remotely boast-worthy? Moreover, your opinions have the authority of Old Testament pronouncements, and will be your kid’s own default opinions until he’s in his early teens – or even longer if he’s dull-witted.

2. Somebody to visit you and take care of you when you’re old. If nobody is listening to me now, I can’t imagine who would want to when I’m old, decrepit and befuddled. But my kids, I would hope, might – if only out of guilt or a sense of duty (or, to put the world-weary cynicism aside for a moment, love). Otherwise, it’s you and the minimum wage care assistant with a hangover, texting her boyfriend as she bathes you in tepid water, and the other geezers in the old folks’ home who will put the snooker on the TV and turn the volume up to full while you’re trying to read the latest Douglas Copeland.

There are other ways to ensure a comfortable old age, of course. The first is to make yourself absolutely filthy rich [insert canned laughter here]. The second is to marry a younger wife (I see you took that route yourself, Stew, you old dog! No wonder she tires you out etc. etc.). However, see reason 3.

3. You can do what you want and your wife still (probably) won’t leave you. Until you have children, your wife can leave you for any old reason – you don’t earn enough money, you drink too much, you smell of cabbage, and so on. She’ll get half of your savings, and probably the house, and probably most other things. In these computerised times, you no longer have to worry about dividing the CDs, but on the other hand, she may spitefully post pictures of your testicles all over the internet. Also, you’ll be lonely, and, unless, you’re one of these handy in the kitchen types, you probably won’t eat like you used to.

Once you have kids, however, unless she’s a heartless witch, she’s just not going to leave you, not unless you do something really bad. The threshold for her walking out suddenly gets a lot higher. You can quit your job, take up a dissolute lifestyle, coming home late and drunk every night and vomit on the newly vacuumed carpet and still she’ll stand by you for the sake of the children. No stress! I’m not suggesting fathers ought to be doing any of these things, of course, I’m just saying: it’s an advantage, no?

4. You can do fun childish stuff without appearing suspect. My wife gets this ‘Fun things to do in Northumberland this weekend’ feed to her Facebook, and invariably the most fun looking activities are ones you can do with your kids: Badger-spotting evenings at Gibside, star-gazing at Kielder Observatory, archery afternoons at Alnwick, that sort of thing. Of course, there’s nothing to stop childless couples and single people doing these things, except: a) you’re quite likely to spend most of your time being annoyed by other people’s children, and b) the default attitude towards childless adults in Britain since about 1996 has been paranoid suspicion: either you’re a parent, or you’re a paedo (unless you have a CRB check handy). Are you really here just to watch the badgers, wonder paranoid, tabloid-reading mothers. I’m exaggerating, but not by much.

5. You can pass all your failed dreams and disappointed hopes on to them. So, you never managed to write that epoch-defining novel, or get into Oxford or Harvard, or make that ground-breaking scientific discovery, or get a job, or whatever your greatest ambitions were when you were young. The older you get, the less likely that is to happen, too. But with kids, you needn’t despair – you can simply project all your great hopes and ambitions on to them. Have them reading Latin in playschool, or playing tennis from dusk till dawn, or learning piano, horse-riding and oil painting after school, to spread your bets. And you can relax – because it’s much easier to tell someone else to do something great than to do it yourself. And if they fail too, never mind – by then you should be wise enough to have realised the vanity of such dreams; if not, you can always hold out for talented grandchildren.

I wonder if I’ve convinced you at all, Stew? – I think I’ve convinced myself at least. You’ll be invited to the christening, naturally – there’ll be booze. But if you’re really dead set against having kids, all I can proffer is that time honoured advice given to reluctant men with broody wives: have you thought about buying her a dog?

If I weren’t marooned in a dysfunctional marriage in a state of perpetual arrested development, I’d have to say–you’ve sold me!

Why I Don’t Want to Have Children

Apologies for the delay in the story started earlier this week.  I promise I’ll get around to it again over the weekend.  I’m too bloody knackered and pressed for time to pick it up right now, however.  Sorry, and thanks.

Initially I thought of entitling this entry “Why I”ve Decided Not to Have Children,” but then opted for the more direct, punchier alternative.  

First of all, before I say anything else, as a disclaimer, let me point out that children are absolutely wonderful, and delicious when sauteed in butter and garlic.  Even yummier than the spicy rabbits’ heads now all the rage in China (no joke–just ask the New York Times).

My wife wants to have children.  Whenever I let her have her way, it’s game over for Mr. Stew.  No can do.  She wants to have kids?  More power to her.  Maybe she can persuade Simon Cowell to knock her up.  I should warn her that his man boobs aren’t as advanced as mine, and I know deep down they’re the main–if not the only–reason she married me.  Can’t say as I blame her.

Having children matures you?  So does death.  People who decide to have kids always say they wouldn’t trade their decision for the world.  Come to think of it, neither would I:  the world’s a piece of shit.  I’ve already sacrificed enough freedom by getting married.  For all I know, Kurt Cobain’s last words to his wife Courtney Love might have been “Thanks in advance for pulling the trigger.”  (Not that I think he wanted to die; the poor guy was probably murdered–not that I was there, or that you should take my word for anything.)

Children demand love and attention.  You know what?  So does just about everyone else you meet.  Luckily, there’s no law of either civilization or nature that says you have to engage in conversation with every stranger you meet, and most people in public these days move around like self-sufficient robots.  But sill, we human beings are emotionally needy creatures who hunger for companionship.  At least I know I am and do, inveterate curmudgeonliness notwithstanding.

The human race is doomed.  I’ll speak for myself in saying this.  But if you’ll allow the solipsism of one guy mistaking himself for seven billion people, as far as I’m concerned, when I go, everyone else goes to.  I don’t mean to suggest that I’m planning to blow up the world with a secret one-trillion megaton bomb built into the ballpoint pen in my shirt pocket, but I do mean that since I was born, enough things have been getting worse enough to almost convince me that our kind has no future to speak of beyond an increase in hardship, suffering, struggle, and all that hoopla.  The idea of compounding the problem by bringing more of us into the world seems futile at best, a naive, optimistic fool’s errand.

I teach children for a living.  Too much of something you like is never a good thing, and in my role as a teacher of Korean elementary students, I’ve learned that some kids will do everything in their power to drain you of your last drop of energy.  I’m not sure they even do it on purpose; maybe it’s that demand for love and attention referred to above, only expressing itself in perverse and hyperbolic ways.

It costs too much money.  The only reason most of us work is to make enough money to survive, and I’m no exception (even though at those times I’m unemployed, I feel like that much more of a loser.  So it’s slavery or isolation–take your pick).  When it comes to finances, my wife is a bungling Nazi worthy of the Hogan’s Heroes cast, and I know that if we had a kid, she would “have to” give that much more to the church in order to ensure our progeny’s continued well-being from now to eternity.

I’m too old, and would probably make a lousy father anyway.  I’m pushing fifty and my wife is over forty.  The likelihood of giving birth to a child with Down’s Syndrome or autism is that much greater, and if we did I don’t know if I would have the stamina needed to both empathize with the child and pursue what’s left of my dream to write.  May I please borrow Mr. Kurt Cobain’s shotgun?

None of this is to imply that those who would like to have children shouldn’t–do whatever the hell you want.  It’s your life, for Christ’s sake, and I’m not going to live it for you.  Or that people who’ve already opted to have kids are for any reason the poorer for it.  I’m grateful to my parents for my accidental creation, and I hope I wasn’t too much of a nuisance to prod into adulthood.

As for my wife, she could still talk me into it, as shocking and horrible as that sounds.  But I think she’d be better off adopting with some other Christian yahoo instead of wasting the rest of her life with me.

Amen to the max, brothers and sisters.

On Trying to Manage Anger and Children

To those of you who live in the U. S. and whichever other countries celebrate it, Happy Mother’s Day.  Or is it Mothers’ Day?  Probably the latter.  Here in Korea things are done a little differently.  Today is declared Parents’ Day, even though this country’s divorce rate rivals that of my own, which may be why some prophetic soul had the good sense to separate the sentiment into two distinct holidays from the get-go.  I’ve heard that American pro-lifers are campaigning for a holiday for unborn children.  Good luck with that.

Last Sunday was Childrens’ Day, and what a day it was.  Anyone familiar with this blog might occasionally get the impression that I abominate children, which I can assure you is false.  But please understand that I’m also a pathological liar.  Your mission is to discern the lies from the truth. (In other words, am I lying when I say that I actually love children–and I don’t mean in a Michael Jacksonian, Father John Geoghanesque, or Jeffrey Dahmerian way–God rest what remains of their fetid souls–or when I describe these elaborate situations in which certain devilish, devious, or your garden variety delinquent Korean children disguised as angels in their little cherubic integuments, conspire to drive me around the bend?)

My wife Jina, who has both more patience and more firmness with children than I do, sometimes accuses me of not seeming to care about them (which is different from wanting to dismember them limb from limb and feast on their entrails like Cronus or John Wayne Gacy’s distant cannibal cousin Harold).  Most of the kids we team-teach are lots of fun to have in class.  They get along well with one another and appear eager enough to learn English as long as we go out of our way to keep it from becoming too dull.  Jina’s also better at this than I am, since I’m more in my element teaching adults, and can’t speak Korean worth shit.

Anyway, yesterday while we were managing a group of kindergarteners in the back room of the library owned by her church, there was one new boy who I could tell was trouble from the get-go.  Jina had been guiding them in the construction of little paper houses when I arrived, and I just had a bad feeling about this kid.

On the agenda was a book called Down by the Station, and the song that goes with it, along with some laminated cut-outs of various vehicles Jina had downloaded from the Internet.  These she stuck to a felt sheet she’d attached with velcro to a white board.  As we were in the process of reading the words from the story for the children to repeat, this little monster, whom I’ll dub Damian, proceeded to knock the cut-outs off the white board.

A few minutes later, when one girl started to cry (personal issues, as the child psychiatrists would say), Damian, who sat next to her, started mocking her in an attempt to win friends with his pint-sized peers.  I told him to cut it out, and Jina echoed my request in a less assertive tone (usually she’s the assertive one, while I’m either reticent or indifferent, depending on my mood and energy level).

Finally, after Jina cued the C. D. so we could start jamming to the tune together, the relentless little cunt (meaning Damian, not Jina) hit the stop button on the player so we all had to start over from the beginning.  I lowered my voice and gave him an admonitory look, but then he did it again.

I was going to quote Bill Clinton, one of my least favorite living ex-presidents (not that I can confess to liking any of them, or his skinny-assed, empire-infatuated replacement), and say, “Three strikes and you are out.”

Luckily, Damian refrained from further shenanigans in that department, opting instead to throw a couple of compact disks on the floor.  I told Jina I refused to teach him again, and even offered to kill him to his face, not that he had any idea what I was talking about.  If I do see him again, I’ll have to remember to bring him a razor and some shaving cream so he can shave his precocious, incipient mustache.

Afterwards, at least the little shit had the decency to bring me a Vitamin C candy, presumably prompted to by his mother.  As Jina and I left before most of the kids did, I waved goodbye to him to be nice, contrite, forgiving, or polite, but he ignored me.  Since he could no longer be the center of attention, I’d evidently become irrelevant as a foil.  So much for trying to make amends with bad seeds.

The capper is that Jina wants to have a baby (and a car, and a house–as if we needed any of those things).  But the baby would, of course, have to be a fanatical, life-denying Christian like her.

That reminds me–it’s time to pop down to the local convenience store and pick up some more condoms.

Those of you who have children, I hope for your sake they’re not as menacing as Damian.  Remind me to bring my Omen knife set to impale him with next time.  

I’ll be doing his mother a favor.

(I’m just kidding, by the way, as usual.)

The Evolution of Evil

The funny thing about depression is that when you’re in its throes, you refuse to forgive people for the slightest things.  You allow no possibility for the positive, and negatively assess everyone you see, beginning with yourself.  Depression at its most pedestrian is a species of stupidity; believe me, i speak from experience.

You may be wondering about the ominous title I’ve chosen for this post.  You’re not the only one.  Wish I were here.  Well, since it’s Sunday and time for our Bible studies class, suffice it to say it may not be amiss to bring back the tradition of the slaying of the first-born, at least when it comes to the little boy who lives across the street from me.  Now that the spring has finally arrived, with toxic yellow dust wafting through the air (one of my students said you just get used to it; hey, I guess you can get used to cancer and lung disease too), people are spending more time outside, tearing themselves away from their computer terminals and TV screens to be alone with their smart phones.  

The satanic vermin I’m referring to is about two feet tall; I’m guessing he’s probably roughly two years old–one foot of growth per year, sort of like a dandelion.  Please bear in mind that I have nothing against children in general.  I can put up with a certain amount of ungovernable young noise, having been a major generator of it myself throughout my life (though now the noise has gotten old).  But this kid makes me contemplate homicide on a less than neighborly scale.  Unseemly as it may seem to record such thoughts so shortly after the Boston tragedy, along with all the less widely-reported atrocities that have happened either before or since, his undiluted wailing and crying makes me wish I had a bow and arrow to give him something more pressing to bellyache about.

His parents appear to be AWOL; perhaps they’re trying to suffocate themselves by forcing condoms over their heads in a desperate act of penance.  Yesterday, while hanging up my laundry, my nerves still freshly raw from having been chewed out by my wife Jina, who was blessedly absent at the time, preparing her high school English students for one of their innumerable sadistic exams, this little monster was in top form, bequeathing his formidable arsenal of sorrows to the world.  Maybe he’s the reincarnation of someone slain in the My Lai massacre, or at Wounded Knee, and is therefore a bottomless repository of unending grief.  Couldn’t tell you.

Having never actually laid eyes on the perpetrator of noise pollution before, I finally saw him standing on the cluttered stairway beside the apartment building where he lives and converts his supercilious suffering into the stuff of nightmares for everyone in the vicinity.  He stood there like an Asian Charlie Brown, holding a cellphone, in profile.  At first I wasn’t even sure he was the source of all that voluminous caterwauling.  He was momentarily pensive, enjoying and, yes–sharing–a moment of silence.

Then, after pausing to refresh his budding lungs, he started carrying on again.

“Shikeuro!”  I shouted.  (That’s Korean for “noisy.”)  I wanted to add the rhetorical question, “Cheugeullae?”–which means, “Do you want to die?”–but I thought that might be going too far.  I’m not sure whether or not it would be perceived as an idle death threat by innocent bystanders, and didn’t want to make the ungentlemanly mistake of leaping from on high to dispatch the cherubic menace and vile village villain.

He looked up from his perch and saw me glaring at him from my window, and I told him in English to shut up.  Then I closed the window and was amazed that, after his prima donna’s rise in volume for having been the unwitting recipient of constructive criticism, he actually piped down for a change.  Maybe one of his parents finally murdered him or he was snuffed out in an uncharacteristically accurate drone strike.

Not that I have any right to be so optimistic.  When my wife got home after midnight and reprimanded me for not helping her out with her kindergarten class that morning, I appeared contrite to help things blow over quickly so I could go back to sleep.  She said, since I told her I have a proofreading job to do today, on the day of the Lord, I should think harder about the debt I know in God by beginning to believe in him.

I almost said, “I’ll believe in him if he kills me; then I’ll finally be free.”

But I thought better of it, not having the energy for yet another fight, or even any clean T-shirts handy to wave around as a make-shift white flag.  If Jesus did in fact die for my sins, I wish he’d have a huddle with his followers, give them a pep talk, and tell them to lighten the fuck up for a change.

If you have a dog, may he (or she) bless you.  (I may not believe in God, but I do believe in dogs.  At least we can all agree that they’re real.)

Hell Is From Children

I finally realized why the people raising the toddler who lives across the street let their little boy get away with murder all the time:  he’s being raised by his grandparents!

Now, while his biological parents are AWOL, the elderly substitutes who have to look after the child obviously don’t love him enough to give him any boundaries or limits on his hysterically infantile behavior.

In fact, they must really detest him, because they know that by the time he’s old enough for school, he’s going to get his ass kicked–hard, and repeatedly, by numerous well-aimed feet.

Alternatively, they might just let him get away with shrieking and carrying on like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, Damien in The Omen, Rosemary’s Toddler, or some such pint-sized drama queen because they’re hard of hearing.  Unfortunately, too many of the other people who live in the neighborhood are not–or at least not hard enough.

But the most plausible explanation for their non-interference with his opprobrious antisocial behavior is that as they know they’re close to death themselves, his insufferable displays can only make them yearn eagerly for the grave that waits for them with open arms and a price tag for their relatives to attend to.

I mean, who wants to be nostalgic for all the overrated charms and wonders of oh-so-fabulous life when you’re staring the Grim Reaper in the eye sockets and Jesus is close enough to hand you his business card as he rests his finger against the trigger of his snoozing Uzi?

Not me.  I want to be reminded of how shitty life can get so that inevitable death feels like a reward, instead of yet another punishment, not that anyone can rule out such a possibility in this capriciously sadistic universe.

And if there is an afterlife, God, the devil, or whoever’s in charge of this demented slaughterhouse (kudos to Peter Finch’s Howard Beale in the movie Network for that phrase) we all live and die in is never going to hear the end of it–at least not until he or she has the decency to finally kill me once and for all so I can get a good night’s sleep for a change.

(I apologize for the vehemently negative tone of the above entry.  I was in a less than ideal mood when I wrote the rough draft, due to sustained mortal combat with my wife, who deprived us both of Internet access for two weeks.  More on why she felt the need to do so later.)