Sunny Breaks

I went down the east coast to a little town called Ulchin. In size and removedness it is to eeetchon as eeetchon is to seoul. They eat anything and everything that comes out of the sea. Little kids were yelling and waving at me continually. I wonder if there’s any furriners teaching there. People were generally nice, the local bus drivers in particular were above average. A lot of times I ended up just leaving the money on the counter of places and leaving because no one was around.
I was looking for this motel that’s in the LP guide. I went in to a bookshop and showed the woman the name of the joint. She then started talking at length to her kid and then motions for me to follow the kid. It’s pretty amazing the level of trust in strangers - sending your six y.o off like that. It was a few blocks, I walked behind and when she got to certain places that, I guess, she knew she’d start swing her arms like marching.

I ended up having to ask some high school kids because we got lost.

Of course, the thing Ulchin is known for is da nukes. So I went and check their shit out this morning. A good rule of thumb is: the more money spent on PR the darker the activities the company is engaged in. The information centre at KHNP (korea hydro n’ nuclear power co.) was fantabulous!
I was able to tag onto the back of a tour group consisting of folks from ‘headquarters’ who were reconoitering for a new propaganda website they was gonna make. I couldn’t unnerstand the tour guide, but they gave me some nice brochures.

Indeed, why do is they?

There was all kinds of animated displays and flashing lights and whizz-bangedry. One of the guys in the group spoke a little english, we chatted a little and he asks if I want to go into the power plant with them.
I’m not one of these people whose ‘jaw drops open’ or to the floor. I don’t even like using the expression. But ususally when someone offers me something nice, I smile. I couldn’t smile at this guy because my jaw was doing shit. I couldn’t believe they were just going to let me walk in there.
And as it turned out, they didn’t. Some other tour guide later, says I needed to have advance-registered. Fair enough really because I could’ve been anybody, especially without having shaven in a couple of days. I was kind of surprised I was allowed to leave my very full looking backpack unattended by the reception desk.

If I am not unmistaken dat iss a piece of uncooked bacon dat ish shaken on modern olive.

And by that I mean I’m taking a couple of days off and going to the beach. Seeya.

In minbor news, I finally finished changing over all the old entries to one CMS (content management system) so now, as the more astute will note, there is more than a thousand entries here. I think I went back through all that old stuff once before and thought it wasn’t so bad but this time it made me wonder what the heck I was thinking.

But now I’m thinking of changing to werdpress because those cretins at the nucleus support forum won’t help me fix the damned rss feed here. I don’t know what’s wrong with it.

I met up/went out with another woman last night. An architect would you blieve? Alright. Would you believe a postal-worker holding a T-square? heheh. j/k The first one. Actually on Fri arvo I saw the Charles Bronson with a toupee teacher talking into his shoe-locker, and the first thing I thought was ‘Larabie!’.
Anyway, she seems really nice. Really tall, like, a cm or two shorter n’ me and with height-enabling footwear appeared taller n’ me, which was fun - I felt like gomez adams, minus the suit. But give it time, I’m sure that she’ll turn out to be crazy or, more likely, she won’t like me for some reason.
I tellya after that last one I honest to god wanted to to an exit-interview to find out what the hell was going on in her head, or what she had a problem with about me. I’m thinking of writing up a questionnaire with some mulitple choice questions and some of those sliding scale things. “YS’s personal hygeine was of an acceptable standard for me” 1 indicates ’strongly disagree’ 3 indicates ‘mildly disagree’ 7 indicates ’strongly agree’ and so on.

The other week I went and saw the star wars film again just in case I was wrong. I was not. I was intending to go long about why, mainly for my own benefit because it’s hard to accept how someone could make such a series of mistakes. But ultimately I can’t deny that people do indeed make mistakes.

I was the only one in the cinema.

This created the dilemma of where do I sit? I felt obliged to sit right up the front, but it terned out to be too close. I felt obliged to sit in all the seats. I had an important conversation to finish so I talked loudly through the opening sequence then stood up stiffly, turned around and told myself to shoosh the eff up.

But better was seeing Batman Begins tonight. It was neato! There wasn’t any product placement, all of the characters were flesh n blood humans and the batmobile was really cool. One of the baddies, dr.Crane - a psch doc. - had a really evil look and I haven’t seen him before in anything.

In a month I’m going to do a summer camp in Ulsan on the south-east coast. It doesn’t even rate a mention in the L.P. guide - all the more reason to check it out. The largest shipyard in the world; a company town - hyundai. The whaling talks are being held there at the moment. Some petrochemical plants too.. O how I have the thick black smell of the refinery.

Some time ago, maybe a year and a half I was on a bit of a jag of building this site into a full blown aggrandisation of the self, the self being my self. It was fun for a while but then I must’ve forgot because I only just remembered it again today.

Kind of touching but also way strange was this situation this morning where this student came up and gave me this little head — my head. It’s fantastic. It reminds me of how bald I am. As with similar things before, I can’t even remember talking to this girl. It’s always the quiet ones that come up with the surprises. They’re all completely transfixed with blue eyes. Big noses too. I’m often told I have a big nose, but without any negative slant to it.

I was talking to a friend, a canadian woman, candles about the issue of obsession with outward appearance here. There’s mirrors everywhere, (like even up the hill at the mineral spring there’s a mirror hanging on a nail) and people are always checking themselves in them. So I sez to Candles, I sez, but don’t you think that it’s just that folks are more up front about it here, and that we tend to hide it, do it in private, in the west? But she says no, and I suppose I’m starting to agree - it is worse here, and I’m sure more so from the women’s position.

I’m off to find a small baby grand piano to put my shrunken head on.

I discovered there’s 10 or 12 music video clips on my phone. Most of them are horrendous. I kept one because it was shot in Melbourne/victoria. Featuring typical everyday occurences souches:

driving around albert park lake in an old Ford

Korean music videos are by and large, ballads and feature 1 effeminate guy, 1 even more effeminate girl, guns and shooting, being chased by gangstas, bad suits, people (the guy) getting killed, a complete halt to the music with grief-stricken squeal by girl to emphasise dramatic shooting dead bit, and lastly - everyone alive again at the end.

hanging out the door of a W-class tram while havin’ a pash

Two things I wish were in the phone are a stop watch and some thing so I could make up tacky synthesizer tunes on the keypad.

pulling a t-stop skid on the Great Ocean Road

Phone batteries last a lot longer here than in aust. and the value in dollars per minutes for a prepaid is much better, adding more voice to the theory that telstra are pirates.

Is what it says is “Bee-Tuh” and I think it’s fab. I really like that typeface. I might use it for here somehow. i sit and look at the front of the beater box often of an evening because i don’t have the brain power to do much else and I don’t have a telly. I kind of wish I had a telly. I see it sometimes when I’m at eateries and there’s baseball on at the moment. I’m pretty sure it’s yankee b-ball, but I’ve never heard of a “d” bears team. Detroit? I don’t know.

My concrete box doesn’t get below 24°cel at night but I’m so tired from missing the afternoon naps that I sleep anyway.

My ma got me an electric coffee grinder for my birthday and it rocks. They grind your coffee in-store here but it comes out too coarse, wasting the precious caffiene particles and their grinders are filthy.

It’s another think that gets me wondering about the take up in australia — how did it happen? Did the Italians open coffee shops knowing that their fellow contryfolk would patronise them, and then oneday some english-bread stumbled in, got adventurous, had a coffee and said “hey wow, I think I’ll go do filing for seven hours nonstop!” Did a few people get invited to an italian household and were introduced to the real thing?

I also wonder what it’d be like for whoever of those first explorers to different lands and learning/exchanging language with no one around with prior knowledge to help bridge the gap.

It’s been like after rounding the cape two weeks ago, the gigantic wooden ship sits atop a deathly flat sea. Unbearable heat every day. There’s air con in the officers cabin but not in the hull where the hundreds and hundreds of press-ganged crew work the oars all day long. Taking my shifts down there, making sure the drum-beater keeps constant, is getting difficult.
There’s still a fair amount of them who believe we actually have a destination, and are moving toward it, but the more worldly of them, with their waistcoats hanging slack and open, their powdered wigs much the worse for wear, realise the pointlessness and have begun to let show a look in their eyes of mutiny and murderousness.

sdolen.

I’m glad I didn’t actually pay money to see that stupid star wars movie. A buddy had a pirate dvd. It had numbers running across the top which partly obscured things. Nevertheless, this didn’t stop me from concluding that it was what we in Brectian circles of cinematic device-ology call, “fucken shit”.
I have two possible thoeries: i. George Lucas died after making the original three movies and some 12yo kid made the more recent three. ii. George Lucas didn’t create the first three.
Lending weight to the former theory - the kid got fed up by the time the last one had to be made, and so just cut and pasted everything from the others — dialogue, scene structure, you name it. There was nothing new in it.

As I write this, it was 31 years ago that I made the transition from liquid-breather to air. I went out for dinner with some of the ladies last night but today I think I’ll just clean the grouting in the shower.
Certainly the last six of this 12 months have been interesting but it’s never enough. I’m always wanting more. I could beg and beg for you to let me tap your front teeth with a fingernail but as soon as I got that then I want to stick my hand down your throat.

Here is a list of stuff I would’ve liked to get but didn’t:
- this laptop.
- dvds of twin peaks
- subscription to Nexus
- amon tobin’s splinter cell soundtrack, plus probably a bunch of other stuff from Ninjatune.

The dilemma always is that if I mention someone on here in a less than Disneyfied light (read: honest) then I’m reluctant to mention the URL to them, but if I don’t then there’s gaps in this moulded old version of subject reality. That is to say the blind date went kind of okay - but I just don’t get women. I think it is that I get to this age and I have to admit that to myself. Astrology is so popular because people don’t get eachother. Factor in cultural differences on top of this and I might as well have just landed on what ever the hell name of the planet is in The Left Hand of Darkness.
She’s pretty good looking and if she is completely crazy then it wasn’t immediately obvious. Really into touching, like almost from the get-go, but also hardcore christian - this much: getting up at 5:40/6am to pray, going to churchy twice a week, and also telling me that her “company” (apparently congregations divide into these so they’re more manoeuvrable and able to respond quickly) rocked up to the front of the President’s house on Monday (public hol) to pray for him and sing hymns.
That’d give me the heeby-jeebies if I was Prez.
Especially if I was corrupt.
Which he almost certainly is.

But boy she sings like a canary. And that’s no meatphor - during the evening in toto of several minutes broken into about eight episodes where she was making chirping noises.
Okay, I’m making that last sentence up. But seriously the only people who can’t sing in this country are spazzies and foriegners.

So, anyway yesterday evening I was walking thru town with a loaf of WHITEBREAD under my arm, coming back from the supamarket when I just happen to bump into her. She smiles and I stand there like an iditio (as usual) while she finishes off parkin her car. She was wearing the pendant thing I gave her (good sign) but when she gets out she says she’s busy and, just like that, keeps on going, saying she’ll call me. All I was after was a stupid trivial how’s your day? 15second convo — and no matter how busy I was I’d still do that. I dunno. And no call.

How is it that I can go from being unemployed to having a full time job and yet I’m still not busy?
Although I maintain that I haven’t been bored in 8 years, but I’ve been having border feelings this year compared to last.

The gumment seems to have stopped my out-going emails because not even my mum will reply to me, let alone the fucking credit card company.

“And he’s saying to me that, ‘You know how you have memories?’

And I’m saying like, ‘What do you mean, memories?’

He’s saying, ‘You know how you remember your father, your mother, your sister, the birthday parties?’

I think he’s giving me an example and I’m saying yes.

And he goes, ‘Someday people who are like you will not have those memories either. They’ll be like me.’ Like him meaning.

And I’m saying, ‘What do you mean by that?’

He’s saying, ‘Don’t you understand that?’

I said no, or rather, I don’t say no, I just shake my head. And then again he tells me to listen.

He says, ‘There will be only one purpose for you. You won’t have memories like you do now.’

I’m asking him like, ‘You mean me?’ He goes, ‘No, the people who will come after you.’

I don’t know what he means by that.

He’s asking me, ‘Are you understanding?’

I’m shaking my head like I don’t. I’m asking him, ‘They’re not going to take me away, are they?’

And he’s saying, ‘They don’t need to take you away. They will come.’

I don’t know what he means by this. Again I ask him what are they doing.

He looks down and he looks up at me again and he lifts his arm up. He is saying something like, ‘Do you see this?’

And I say, ‘What, your arm?’

He goes, ‘Never mind.’

I said, ‘No, tell me. Tell me. What are the aliens doing?’

And he’s saying all they’re interested in, that no matter what happens at all, is that they control.”

I <3 aliens and children somuch.

I saw a couple of chinooks for the first time the other day, hulking by. Those things are so strange - I don’t know how you’d operate a chopper with two rotors.

I got the lollies a few weeks back while at Everland. It took quite a bit of digging through that little plastic bin with the little plastic scoop. By the time I located all the right letters I think the staff were on the verge of calling security.

There’s a del.icio.us feed thing right down the bottom of the right hand column, mainly because I’m always finding/bookmarking things on one machine getting to the other one and not remembering what the search query was that got me there.

I realised the other night how much I’ve started to adapt to environment when I found myself cycling along the road and text-messaging the same time. Then even more local, climb-a-mountain (in the dark) while txting.
I found out from one of the girls at school that there’s a rumour circulating about me that I have or had a wife and kid back in australia — which is pretty rad. I’ve never been rumour-worthy before. Anyway, she set me up on a blind-date with her tutor, and since I’m always on the look out for comedic situations, I accepted. That’s tomorrow. I d’know Joe… why is always the pretty ones who go nuts, busjack, and drive it through the front windows of E-mart? Beats me, Bill. Beats me.

I was hiking up over the local hill the other afternoon and I came across this bear. Or at least I thought he was a bear. He was sitting on a rock wrestling with his foot. He noticed me standing there watching him.
“Grrr”, he said.

I was about to pull the camera out of my backpack.
“If you’re not going to run away then could you help me?”, he says.
“What’s wrong?”
“Damn zipper’s stuck”.
“You’re not really a bear are you?”
“No.”
“Did you run away from a circus?”
“No.”
“Do you work for a promotions company?”
“No.”
“I give up then.”

“I’m from the next world.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Wow…. y’know I’m no way near as curious as some people. I guess I’ll just find out when I get there, or so I’ve always thought. But since you’re here, and since I’ve thought of it right now instead of next week or something … what’s it like? The afterlife I mean.”

He stood up slowly and had a bit of a scratch of the back of his fake-fur covered neck with his fake-fur covered paw/hand. There was little black fuzzy-felt triangles at the end that must’ve been claws. He stretched, slightly bending this way, that way, and I could tell he was kind of chuffed about playing the expert.

“It’s a lot like here really.”
“Really!?”
“Yep. Well actually it’s not as good as here.”
“Oh pffft, get outta here!”
Yeah. Sure it’s cleaner but you walk around the streets and think ‘Where’s all the people?’ It’s cold most of the time and the lunch and dinner menus are limited, and by limited I mean limited. Mostly it’s pulse based, and that grain, what’s that grain … ?“
”I’m sure I don’t know.“
”No one gets much of a say in anything.“

I was looking into the small square of meshed netting below the protruding, patent leather bear nose. I was 8/10ths sure it was a normal human face in there, but then a couple of times I saw some pin-points of odd, gold glow.

”Listen can you take a look at this zip. I think something’s caught in it.“

The zip attaching the headpiece of the bear suit was well and truly stuffed and I said as much.

”Why are you wearing this now anyway?“
”We’re not supposed to leave. It’s against the rules. But man, now and then, I get this thing for raw fish and there’s this joint in the Downtown that does it just right. The only way to get out is to get disguised as an animal.“

Sometimes when I’m tasked with something I get carried away at wanting to succeed. I yanked at the zipper a few more times and muttered under my breath about how they should’ve used Velcro fasteners.

”I reckon I can get it off but the method might be a bit unconventional okay?“
”Please. I’m boiling in here.“

I grabbed ahold of his fake fur bear ears and yanked but the guy or whatever was almost as tall as me so I couldn’t get enough leverage. I got him to bow forward and I put a foot on his shoulder for purchase. For the sake of warning as to what was coming I called out, ”1, 2, 3, Heave!”

The stitching on the ears was not great by any means and it came clean away. The rest of the bear costume, and what was in it, went barrelling backward over the edge of an unfortunately close ledge. I scrabbled carefully to the edge, bear ears still clamped in my hands, and had a look over. It wasn’t that far down — 10 or 15 metres maybe but he landed on a pointy rock that’d snapped his spine backwards quite nastily.

So I guess he ended up going back to where he came from.
It wasn’t my fault, I swear.