30 Days to a Better Man, Day 20: perform service

Two-thirds done!

Another caveat: you don't actually have go to out and perform the service on this day (unless, of course, the opportunity presents itself). But you should take time to at least schedule some volunteer work.

A soup kitchen in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.

I selected Itaewon Global Village Center. They have several different volunteer activities that they do. You can pass out food to the elderly or infirm, or do the same for the poor little waifs at an orphanage, among other things. I'm curious about helping the poor while I'm here, as poverty is a taboo subject in Korea (thanks to Confucianism). The homeless and destitute are generally swept under the rug. But for the amputees panhandling in the subway station or the wild-haired bums scrounging through garbage, a foreigner might believe that there aren't any poor people in this country. And I've been wanting to volunteer at a Korean orphanage ever since I saw this.

So! I sent IGVC an application form today. I'll let you know when I get a reply from them. This is the moment when taking on a challenge like this really starts to pay off. I've always been lax with volunteering. I didn't do it enough, and I'm fairly certain it knocked me out of the running for several jobs. It left a black stain on my conscience, too. I haven't volunteered since the last balloon launch with NKP. (I'm actually in that video, by the way, at 14:10; the guy with aviator shades and the fedora, obviously.)

Be that as it may, it's high time I did something to help the South Koreans. This country's been good to me. I need to pay them back.

Stay loose for Day 21.

from me to all the world

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

--- W.H. Auden

...and a Happy New Year. 

territoriality: a discussion

It's high time I did some more sententious vaunting. This here's one of my rare opinion posts. Let's begin with a definition:

territoriality

ter·ri·to·ri·al·i·ty [ter-i-tawr-ee-al-i-tee, -tohr-]

noun

1. territorial quality, condition, or status.

2. the behavior of an animal in defining and defending its territory.

3. attachment to or protection of a territory or domain.

And let's follow that up with a basic truth: the concept of territoriality applies to human interaction as well. We build fences around our houses, put up NO TRESPASSING signs, and feel more at home in our native towns, counties, states, provinces, and (naturally) territories than anywhere else.

It's that specific aspect of territoriality I want to discuss, actually.

Traveling and living in foreign countries is a growing experience. It's a baptism by fire, a crash course in open-mindedness, cultural exposure, language barriers, communication disasters, culinary misadventures and homesickness. You feel it the moment you step off the plane. Everything's new, and it's scary. People are talking in tongues you can't understand. The signs are unreadable. Often the people themselves look completely alien to you, and it's a lead-pipe cinch that they'll think and act in different ways. This makes travelers apprehensive and twitchy and throws us all off our chumps. Eventually, with successive jaunts and expeditions, we get used to the otherness and can relax and enjoy our trips with relative ease.

But one fear never goes away.

In addition to the surface nervousness that traveling engenders within us, there is also something more primordial: a creeping, furtive sort of nervousness, an ever-present low-key fear. It's not just the unfamiliarity of our surroundings. It's the simple fact that we're off our home range. We're on someone else's turf, so to speak. We're in a foreign land, with different laws, mindsets, philosophies, mores, and etiquette. We're in someone else's backyard, and they know it like the back of their hand, and we don't. We, the interlopers, won't be torn limb from limb if discovered by the natives, as happens to wild animals who stray too far from their territory. But the inchoate threat of such still lingers in the reptilian parts of the human brain, and we feel that fear whenever a foreign shore heaves into sight on the  distant horizon.

Even after living in South Korea for something like three nonconsecutive years, I still get the willies on occasion. If I could speak the language better, I wouldn't have 'em so often. But even if I was a whiz at Hangul, that primordial fear would still be there. I'm in Asia, where the rules of the game are elementally different from what I know. The sun still rises and sets, and the tides go in and out, but those are the only similarities. The Koreans have their own ideas about commerce, social relations, gratitude, etiquette, politeness, interpersonal nuance, humor, entertainment, morality, fine dining, hard work and whatnot. Furthermore, the Korean civilization is thousands of years old, far outstripping my own country's paltry history. The enormity of those ages weighs upon my shoulders like a millstone at times.

I feel the opposite effect whenever I return home to the States. I exhale literally and metaphorically. Everything makes sense again, imperfect as it may be. The signs are legible. People's slang terms are comforting. That sense of oneness with my surroundings comes flooding back to me. I feel ready to turn and do battle with whatever extraterritorial threats hounded me home. Your turn, you bastards. You're on my block now.

And you know what? I think that's a good thing.

Culture shock, homesickness, and otherness are shoots which spring from the same seed: territoriality. The feelings of attachment or protectiveness we harbor for the land of our birth. It exerts a powerful, formative influence upon us, and rightly so. The stark reality of it is impossible to deny, deeply biological as it is. Americans have their territory, Koreans have theirs. I'm intruding, plain and simple. Never mind that the immigration office stamps my passport and lets me live and work here for a year at a time. I'm an alien freak. I have the children's stares to prove it.

Of course, there are other, darker shoots of that same territorial seed. Things like bigotry, prejudice, and racism are also tendrils of territoriality. But there are positive effects as well: patriotism and nationalism, for example.

Many will disagree with me on this. Some of you may be shaking your heads right now. In your minds, the argument is coalescing: "Some of the most horrendous atrocities have been committed in the names of patriotism and nationalism!"

They have, no doubt. But I still say that devotion to, fondness for and belief in one's country and culture are healthy things for an upstanding, free-minded individual to have. I think that notion of otherness isn't a stumbling block, but rather a step stool. It's a platform with a telescope, a hill to climb, steep and rocky perhaps but a great place to pause and peruse the sunlit uplands beyond.

I believe (especially as an American) that we're sort of shamed into forsaking our nationalities when we're out on the road. We're encouraged to forget who we are and where we came from, and be totally open-minded as we view other countries, cultures and customs. Viewing anything through the lens of the culture we were born into is frowned upon. Bigotry, it's called. Prejudice. Willful ignorance.

I disagree.

I think you have to judge the entire world from the perspective of your own tiny slice of it, because you'd have to be a robot to do otherwise. Only a mindless automaton is capable of ignoring its own heritage and upbringing and judge something with perfect objectivity. As G.K. Chesterton warned, "Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out." Stay judgmental. Be biased. Cultivate prejudice. You need a basis, a foundation upon which to judge what you see, and your background is well-suited to it. As long as you're a righteous human being (and I already know that you are), then you won't fall into the bottomless pits of prejudice or racism or ethnocentrism. You'll be fine. Rock on. You need that cultural context of yours to form sound opinions of what you see and hear abroad.

D'you see what I'm saying, here?

I'm starting to think I'm the last person on the planet who feels that way. The paradigm is shifting. The world shrinks, technology advances, airplanes and boats and cars and trains move faster and with less energy, and the information superhighway reaches ever deeper into our lives. As the lines between cultures and continents begin to blur, the zeitgeist has changed. In talks with many of my more liberal friends, they have expressed nothing but disdain for the concepts of patriotism and nationalism. They shake their heads and say things like, "Murrica! F*** yeah!" in satirical tones. Some of the more extreme among them have expressed outright approval for a sort of "world culture," in which national boundaries are swept aside, the myriad cultures of the globes are integrated and amalgamated, and a sort of homogeneous global culture ensues, freeing humanity forever from the damnable vices of bigotry and racism.

Phooey to that, I say.

I don't know about you, but the whole notion of a "world culture," gives me the heebie-jeebies. You should take pride in your homeland. You should have some prejudice in its favor. You should be leery of the way other people do things. You should believe your country's the best in the world simply because you were born in it, as George Bernard Shaw once so scathingly wrote.

"Why?" I hear you ask. "Aren't you being an arrogant, ethnocentric pig? Won't people hate you for thinking that way? Aren't you being close-minded? Shouldn't you travel with an open mind?"

To which my answers are: No, yes, no, and yes.

Being territorial—feeling uncomfortable in another country and safe and secure in your own, cleaving to an intrinsic, instinctive, subconscious kind of nationalism—isn't arrogance. It's only natural to believe that your country's the best. You did grow up in it, after all. But it's not just natural—it's evolutionary. This is your territory. It's your home, and it's a part of you, from the tip of your hairs to the marrow of your bones. You were fed on it, suckled by it,  knocked about by it in your youth. You've breathed it, swam in it, tasted it and slept in it your whole life. It knows you and you know it, and you have each other's backs. You should love it to death. Stepping out of your territory is frightening, strange and potentially life-threatening. That makes the challenge—and rewards—all the greater.

People will hate you for feeling that way. They'll call you a racist pig, a jingoistic idiot, an ignorant, short-sighted, narrow-minded fool. Don't listen to 'em. You know in your heart that you're not a racist. You know people are people, no matter where they're from. You know the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, and you don't attribute either of those things to a human individual just 'cause they're from a particular place. And as long as you know it, no one can touch you or make you feel like you're a bad person.

You're not being close-minded. You're open to new experiences. In fact, that is the whole point of traveling: to get out of your comfort zone. To leave your territory, those familiar shores and welcoming skyline, and venture into the unknown. There's the rub. Be territorial. Love your homeland, be wary or even leery of other people's, but don't let that stop you from going. Go there and find out how it really is. Then you can decide whether or not your preconceptions were accurate. What you're doing, if you're doing it right, is giving other people's cultures and societies the respect they deserve without fawning over them, worshiping them, or paying them lip service for political correctness's sake. By the Great Green Arkleseizure, folks, you're allowed to have an opinion. Just make sure it's founded on your own experience and a thorough knowledge of circumstance, not sweeping generalizations or assumptions. Just look at Paul Theroux. That's precisely how he writes his travel books. He's judgmental as hell. He'll lampoon anybody, be they an individual or a government, foreign or American. The point is to go and see, and then judge harshly...based on what you know is right.

That, my dears, is how you travel with an open mind. You have a context to work with: your culture. Hold that culture close to yourself, cherish it, be proud of it, but keep your heart and mind open. Let the ambient weirdness trickle in. You'll learn some startling things. Some of them will be as stupid or wrong or yucky as you always suspected. Many of them, however, won't be as bad as you thought—and more than a few will be the exact opposite. You'll see sights you never dreamed existed, taste the milk of human kindness, add more capital to the bank of experience than you ever thought possible. But don't forget where you started. Don't lord it over anybody, don't put anyone else down, but for Pete's sake, don't be afraid to flaunt it. You are who you are. Be proud. Don't skulk about. Tell people. Everyone's just as curious about you as you are about them, or ought to be. They're all nationalists at heart, too. They may dislike you just because of the color of your passport. But you can forgive them for that, 'cause deep down you're judging the hell out of their clothes, their dirty fingernails and their country's cockeyed ways, and you can laugh inside at the crazy two-way nature of the universe. 

But how would this priceless sensation, this ability to learn about others, to understand how things are done on the far side of the world, down in the dust or up in the snow, on top of the mountains and in the deepest valleys and over the silvery lakes—how would it be possible if we had one world culture? Where would your identity come from? What would you take pride in? How would you build that base, that context, from which to travel and peer into other people's lives? How could you judge their shortcomings—and their wonders? What use would travel be if everyone else thought and slept and breathed and loved the same way that you do? 

It wouldn't, and that's the truth. It wouldn't be any use at all.  

I don't want a world that's all the same. I don't want a world where I never feel ill at ease or out of place. I want a world full of mystery and weirdness and otherness to explore. And I want a patch of dirt that I can come back to and feel at home in, unconditionally—but with a host of foreign friends and experiences rattling around in my head, heart and soul. I think it's grand that we're all different from each other, and that we have a little fear and perhaps aversion to one another (and our respective nations). Just because we travel and learn about the world doesn't mean we should lose faith in who we are and where we came from, or our belief in our own greatness. I think that sort of national pride fosters healthy competition, self-confidence, cultural self-esteem, and most importantly, our curiosity about each other. It makes the sun brighter, the water clearer, the air fresher and our friendships warmer. 

But maybe that's just me.

Patriotic enough for ya?

why I quit Facebook (and should quit the Internet, period)

Civilization is what makes you sick.

— Paul Gauguin

It's been three weeks to the day since I went dark. "Dark" is something of a misnomer; I haven't quit the Internet entirely. Facebook accounted for, at best, 10-15% of my total time surfing the web. It's fair to say, however, that it was the main reason for my being on the web in the first place, if you know what I mean.

Some of my friends have only just discovered that I'm gone. I've received text messages and e-mails asking me what's up and when I might be coming back. I have no definite answer to give, because honestly, I'm not sure myself.

The answer is "When I'm ready."

But why did I quit in the first place? I've been wrestling with this question for nigh on a week. As of this morning, I was still at a loss.

Then, this afternoon, I went down to the Han River to read. I took a folding chair, my new Stanwell pipe, a plentiful supply of tobacco and matches, a bottle of Jim Beam and a copy of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The air was crisp. The sun was sinking behind feathery clouds. The trees were dripping with reds and yellows. The river was iron-grey and lay at rest like a freshly-tempered sword. I unfolded the chair, lit up my pipe, filled a glass with bourbon, opened the book, and read the final four chapters in one go.

Upon finishing, I felt that I'd reached new levels of clarity in my search for answers.

Civilization.

That's the problem.

Civilization.

I've been staring the matter in the face this whole time and never recognized it. The problem of civilization is a central theme in Brave New World, just as it is in my own novel series (the third installment of which I'm writing for NaNoWriMo).

What do I mean by "the problem of civilization"? Bread and circuses. Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller of Western Europe (and the closest thing to a villain that Brave New World has) explains it thus: you can't have a civilization full of intelligent, independent people, or it will dissolve into chaos. There'll be differences of opinion, boredom, ennui, insanity, or outright war. Hence the system of control which is so thoroughly explained in the beginning of the novel: the intelligence, physical beauty, and usefulness (or lack thereof) of any particular human being is determined at the embryonic stage, and a series of clinical processes are enacted to ensure that the resultant human being is molded and shaped to be a cog in the machinery of civilization. Menial tasks are performed by big, dumb, ugly people who've been chemically and genetically altered in their test tubes and then conditioned in childhood to accept their lot and perform their tasks with joy. Administrative duties are performed by handsomer, prettier, smarter, and wiser human beings, whose development and conditioning were likewise controlled from the get-go. To counter any malaise or dissatisfaction, humans are encouraged to imbibe soma, an ecstasy-inducing drug; have as many dalliances as they like, with no strings attached; watch "feelies," tactile versions of movies; and play ridiculous sports like Obstacle Golf. With their minds mired in pointless pursuits and carnal pleasures, and their days filled with the drudgery they've been preconditioned to enjoy, human beings have no need to ever worry about things like war or civil strife. Anyone who shows "subversive" or "devious" preferences for solitude, monogamy, or sobriety is sent to an island, severed from the main population to preserve the public's general state of contentment. Only in remote places such as Western America, on the so-called "Savage Reservations" (vast tracts of land surrounded by electrified fences) is humanity's inherent barbarity allowed to continue: religion, viviparous birth, marriage, love, and natural aging.

Fascinating book. You should read it. Mightily depressing, though.

Why? Because it's coming true. I look around now and I see the same thing that John the Savage sees when he leaves his Reservation and comes to London: thanks to drugs like the Internet, amusing diversions like video games and smartphones, and Facebook—that saccharine filter of friendship and raw experience—we have a civilization more blinded to the ebb and flow of reality than ever before. I see people more concerned with emoticons, abbreviations, Bubble Crush, Angry Birds, KakaoTalk, YouTube, Twitter, news feeds, discussion forums, and torrent downloads than they are with a lavender autumn sky.

That's the way I saw myself heading. And I didn't like it.

When I originally quit Facebook, I told myself I was doing it because my right hand was moving of its own accord—creeping, crawling toward that Facebook tab, clicking on the bookmark unbidden. I also felt that my brain's natural tendency towards autodidactism had been superseded by a base craving for input: information of any stamp, no matter how sordid or simplistic. I perceived that I was logging onto Facebook every morning for two vile reasons, and those reasons alone:

(1) to peer at the winnowed grains of my friends' (and coworkers', and distant acquaintances', and too-distant relatives') lives and assess them subjectively; and

(2) to make myself angry. I'd foolishly become involved with ("liked") a slew of conservative political Facebook groups, and my news feed teemed with their inflammatory rhetoric on a daily basis.

I was fed up. I felt like Facebook wasn't much good for communicating with or keeping track of loved ones anymore; now it was just a place for my friends to post insufferable political views, hackneyed jokes, fatuous memes, mushy musings on pets or spouses or babies, and pictures of cats. I felt like I wasn't really contributing anything to Facebook anymore; I realized that I was reposting quotations and news stories basically in order to annoy my liberal friends. I had degraded. I was no longer an intellectual, upstanding member of the online community. I was little more than a troll. Enough was enough. When I woke up and saw that Facebook was making me miserable, that my hand would relentlessly click on the link and prevent me from accomplishing anything worthwhile, and that I was spending nearly six hours of my day—all of my free time—just staring at screens, it became clear that I was a full-blown Facebook addict. 

I didn't feel like I was really living.

You'll notice that "living" is one of the tags I use for posts. You'll find it in the tag cloud over on the right side of this blog's webpage. (Even using the term "tag cloud" makes me want to puke.) I did that intentionally. I want to highlight the posts that are actually about Life, life with a capital L, not life through a fiber-optic cable. I want to keep track of how much living I'm doing. I want to feel like the two hundred hours Steam so thoughtfully tells me I've spent playing RAGE have been counterbalanced by at least a thousand hours of pure-D experience. 

Facebook wasn't letting me do that, and I knew it. I've known it from the beginning. I mentioned something in my original post about wanting to accomplish more during the hiatus, such as touring Gyeonggi-do, riding trains, visiting Hwaseong Fortress, exploring Ganghwa Island and so forth.

I don't know why I got so wrapped up in Facebook and the Internet at large. I can't explain why it's so easy for the human brain to fall prey to instant communication, electronic entertainment, and easy access to moving and static images. But that's what happened to me. Maybe it's a byproduct of civilization. We're social animals, and we've been conditioned to be even more social by our millennia-long habit of living in cities. We want to feel connected. Perhaps it also has something to do with the way our brains our wired. After an eternity of playing with things like marbles and Jacob's ladders, video games and streaming video are a quantum leap forward. (Whatever the reason, the effects are insidious.)

I just want to feel alive. I believe that civilization, and with it technology and all its insidious tendrils, is sapping the genuineness and joie de vivre from the existential equation. I was on Facebook for the sake of keeping my brain entertained during its downtime, like a kid with a Game Boy in a waiting room. And I wasn't even using my time on Facebook in a constructive way (as far as it's possible to use one's time on Facebook in a constructive way, anyway): I was just trolling. If it wasn't Facebook, it was something else: editing pages on TV Tropes, looking up trivia on the Internet Movie Database, watching Grand Theft Auto V videos on YouTube, researching firearms on Wikipedia, even browsing news sites with the same ulcerating anger with which I once patrolled my Facebook feed. Technology, man. The Internet. It's eating my life. I'm 13,000 words into my NaNoWriMo project, and I can ill afford to be wasting time wholesale—now or ever. 

So I quit Facebook. And I might just quit the Internet, too, at least until November's over. We'll have to see. Something's gotta give. Civilization's making me sick, especially now that I've finished Brave New World. I read about soma, and feelies, and sex-hormone chewing gum, and Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy and Assistant Predestinators and bottles and television and I thought, Man.

No way. Not for me.

As the Savage defiantly tells Mustapha Mond, "I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want goodness. I want sin."

Living, in other words. Not virtual reality.

If you agree with me, then get off my blog and go eat an apple in the autumn air. You'll thank me later.

thoughts on Korea itself

After living in a place for 18 months (soon to be three nonconsecutive years), you get to know it pretty well.

I'm not an authority, but I like to think I've observed the idiosyncrasies of Korean culture with a journalist's eye, and gleaned some insight therefrom.

Sometimes I feel like I'm not properly documenting those insights, though. I mean, I've posted plenty about the quirks of living in Korea. I've never actually stepped back and written a comprehensive treatise on the fundamental differences between Korea and the western world, however. After all, it's not easy to describe a country where vegetable gardens are squeezed into the meager margins between buildings and roads; where the two most beloved national heroes are remembered for inventing the Korean alphabet and whooping hell out of the Japanese Navy, respectively; where howling ambulances stop for red lights and city buses blow them; where pop songs are written and performed for the launch of new mobile phones (and frequently top the charts); where hordes of tiny schoolchildren in matching uniforms are herded about on field trips, attached at the waist by a running line; where trash bags are piled under trees on the sidewalk rather than in dumpsters or trash cans; where a tiny reading lamp costs fifty dollars; where a shop can increase its curb appeal by painting a pidgin English phrase on its front window; where the people sprinkle sugar on ham sandwiches and corn dogs; where neon swastikas are hung everywhere (being, as they originally were, Buddhist good-luck symbols); where the most popular pizza toppings are sweet potatoes and corn; where soccer and baseball are religions, not mere sports; where cans of Spam are given as luxury gift items, like flowers or wine bottles or fine chocolates; where things like limes and turkey are unheard-of exotics; and where one may find bread-flavored soda pop, aloe vera juice, canned guava, squid jerky, and red ginseng candies on any supermarket shelf.

Korea can be a weird place.

And yet it's not so different from back home. The skyscrapers look the same. The apartment buildings are a bit different than what we're used to, but they all conform to the same cookie-cutter design. People drive on the right side of the road. The stoplights and roadsigns are recognizable. One may easily find a McDonald's, Costco, Burger King, Chevrolet, Dunkin' Donuts, 7-11, Hyatt, Starbucks, Hilton, or Pizza Hut on any street corner. (There's even Taco Bell, Subway and Quizno's in places.) English is written everywhere, and spoken almost as much, particularly in the urban areas. There are toilets, running water, electricity, and so much free Wi-Fi that it makes one's head spin. Everybody, down to the last twelve-year-old child, knows who Maroon 5 is, and David Beckham, and Tom Cruise.

There are times when I can readily believe I'm living in a foreign country. Other days, it hardly seems apparent at all. Those are the days when that phrase I learned in college ("global village") hit me hard. The world truly is becoming one. That may be a good thing for international relations and cross-cultural understanding, but we may learn (too late) that it also erodes cultural boundaries. I'm sure no Korean from the 15th century would even recognize his home country these days. And for me, your humble correspondent, it hardly seems worthwhile to write florid travel articles and in-depth treatises about a place that's so highly Westernized.

I need to get out of here. Like Paul Gauguin, I feel the need to escape from "everything that is artificial and conventional." After I finish up my two years here, I'm going off the grid. I'm going someplace that's so drastically different from the U.S.A. that I won't know which way is up. The toilets will flush in the opposite direction—if indeed there are any flush toilets. I won't be able to read the alphabet; almost no part of the native tongue will owe its roots to English. The buildings and shopfronts will be strange, eldritch, alien, of unrecognizable architectural roots and filled with unknown purpose. People's clothes will be radically different, the local customs' functions almost unguessable. The food will be delicious but totally foreign. Western fast food chains and designer stores will not exist. Cars will be few and far between, and those dented and dusty. The roads will be narrow and hardly paved. Civilization will be younger, narrower, more old-fashioned, less quick, less harried, less pretentious.

I've survived life in urbanized East Asia. Now it's time for a breath of fresh air.  

no therapists in cyberspace

I should like to take this opportunity to announce that my blog has just passed the 100,000-view mark. Over a thousand poor suckers welcome visitors have clicked on my blog or one of its embedded links, and been ushered into my world (even though most of them only stayed for one second or less).

Having made this announcement, I want to say a few words about insecurity. Close your browser now or forever hold your peace.

Is it just me, or is every other blogger on the Internet a lonely, maudlin mess?

And by "every other" I mean fifty percent. One out of two. Half of the total (and considerably high) number.

Whereas people once sought out their friends, family members or therapists to bare their souls and get encouragement and reaffirmation, people are using this Internet thingy to do it. I've lost count of how many pessimists, downers, wet blankets, naysayers, doubters, foul-weather forecasters and sticks-in-the-mud I've run into online. I've read their blogs. I've assayed their oeuvre. It's uniformly dismal drivel. It may be well-written and literary drivel, even borderline poetic—but drivel it remains.

I'm afraid I have very little patience for other people's problems. I was never intended to be a therapist. I'm more inclined to put a pie in somebody's face to cheer them up than to bring them a cup of hot tea and give them an ear. Perhaps I'm narrow-minded. Perhaps I lack patience. Perhaps I'm just a selfish bastard.

Either way, I find myself turned off by these blogs—even those penned by close friends. I turn away in disgust, hitting the red "X" and closing my mind to their plights.

I suspect it has more to do with the way I was raised. My family's intensely private. You don't air your dirty laundry in public. You don't fish for sympathy. You internalize suffering and grief until time and experience grant you the clairvoyance and perspective to recover and move on.

(See what I did there? That was four instances of the word "and" in one sentence.)

Perhaps because my family is so private, I interpret others' emotional openness—in cyberspace and elsewhere—to be a form of indiscretion. At best, I consider this a minor annoyance at best. At worst—when bloggers bare their souls, wax poetic, talk about things like despair and love and hope and other abstract nouns—when the pathos becomes overwhelming, in other words—it strikes me as an egregious affront to my sensibilities. I promptly hit the "back" button.

Whatever the root cause, I'd like to make one thing clear: I've gained perspective. I don't think any less of people to pour out their sufferings in the blogsphere. (Not anymore, anyway.) This has gone on too long to be gauche any longer. It's mainstream. It's cool to unleash the travails of your mortal existence onto a consoling (and anonymous) audience.

It just weirds me out, that's all.

Same thing goes for Facebook updates.

foundation, inspiration

Cover art from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Hence the title.

Basically, the situation is this. Rather than sit around and watch video game walk-throughs on YouTube all day (damn you, Shadow of the Colossus), I decided to update this here blog. Since I have no worthwhile news to relate (well, I do, but that will come later), I'll bring you up to speed on some novel-ish things. This originates from my recent decision to whip my novel into working order and publish it for the Kindle™ before the year is out.

First, however, I'm making some changes to my manuscript. There's a major overhaul underway. (Yes, I paired those two words intentionally.) I'm incorporating elements of my second, third, fourth and fifth novels into the first one, to add more characters and spice up the plot. In addition to this, there are several minor changes I'm making, some of which have only occurred to me in the last few days.

I'd like to sit down with you and dissect every little change I'm making, and elicit an editorial, literary and thought-provoking critique from you. But that's not going to work. For starters, I'm paranoid about revealing any details about my baby on this Internet thingy. Some scurvy rotter might come along and steal my idea, and I'd have to commit suicide (after decorating my apartment with the miscreant's entrails). Second, you'd be bored to tears. This is a rather nonsensical, esoteric novel I'm working on: social commentary wrapped in epic adventure-filled action-packed speculative fiction, with a few metaphysical touches thrown in for good measure. It's kind of like a hot dog buried under layers of onion, tomatoes, sweet relish, cheese, chili, and all the other crap that Cthulhu knows should never be put on a hot dog.

Eldritch analogies aside, however, you wouldn't like hearing about what exactly I'm writing. It'd spoil the surprise, anyway. You can read it for yourselves when I publish this beast. What I'd like to talk to you about today, because it has special bearing on my writing (and rewriting), are the foundations for this work.

To put it bluntly, I'm mad as hell. And I'm not going to take it anymore.

I'm about to get political/pseudo-philosophical, so all of you intolerant or opinionated types (or just those who don't want their impressions of me ruined) should get the heck out of Dodge, right now.

The world is sick.

It's backed itself into a corner, run itself up a blind alley. And now it's got nothing to do, nowhere to go, and it's eating itself.

Like Cyrus says in The Warriors: "Now look what we have here before us." Look at the world today. Overpopulation. Cramped, smoky, grimy cities, soaked in sin and desperation. World trade, economies, businesses, the very definition of success—all built upon cramming people into stuffy cubicles in monstrous floodlit buildings, where they slave their lives away for peanuts, pushing papers and dozing through meetings.

It's a horrendous job, and somebody—a million somebodies—has to do it. I'm aware of that. I'm not castigating the white-collar worker. All of them, men and women alike, have my respect. They've built something amazing. Human civilization as we know it depends upon them.

No, my beef is with human civilization itself.

I'm not pleased with how it turned out. I don't like that our society depends on things like corporations, Wi-Fi networks, stocks, bonds, markets, trades, mergers, industry, commercialism, business, economy, commodities, digital technology, and all those other intangible things built on numbers and figures and data. I resent that Western civilization revolves around forcing its youngsters to educate themselves in the purgatory of public school and the political chop-shop of college, so they can graduate with a pile of debt and a host of half-formed ideas and forgotten facts, and thence obtain a soul-crushing, unfulfilling job in the private sector and work until they die.

I like things...simpler. Freer.

(I realize, as I sit here and rail against the modern age, that I am typing on my laptop computer and sitting in my ninth-floor apartment with Owl City playing in the background and an electric fan preventing me from succumbing to the sticky Korean heat. I am the world's biggest hypocrite; I admit it. I don't give a pair of dingo's kidneys. I am spreading the word, my fauxslophic ideas, with the only viable weapon at hand. Indulge me.)

I'll be the first to tell you that I was born in the wrong century. I often find myself wishing that I could have taken part in the great explorations of the past five centuries. Ah, those were the days. There wasn't a single piece of plastic anywhere in the world. Everything was made from romantic materials like wood, metal, and canvas. The map hadn't been completely filled in yet. Anything—literally anything—could happen. Anything was possible. The sky was the limit. No, there were no limits. Even the sky was up for grabs.

I want to tag along with the famous explorers—Marco Polo, Francisco de Orellana, David Livingstone, Sir Francis Drake, Lewis and Clarke...even the doomed ones like Captain Cook, Burke and Wills, Mungo Park, Robert Falcon Scott, and Roald Amundsen. Heaven only knows what these guys really saw, and what they felt as they did. It seems like there's no room for expeditions like theirs anymore. Today's intrepid souls (Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Mark Jenkins, and others) know what's waiting for them at the end of the trail. I long for the days of romance and mystery.

I guess I don't really hate human civilization as we know it. I just said that out of spite. I don't even hate technology. Technology saves lives, eases burdens, facilitates communication, bridges gaps, expands minds. And it lets Adam Young make music. I dislike the mindset behind technology on occasion. Progress for progress's sake, and whatnot. And I wish e-readers wouldn't replace my trusty paperbacks. That's all.

But most of all, I wish the world wasn't so small. My most cherished dreams are those in which the world has become vast, unexplored, and dangerous once again, and it's up to me and a few other intrepid souls to plumb its mysteries.

So that's what my book's about. The decks have been cleared. Human civilization as we know it is kaputt. Earth's surface has been rearranged, altered unrecognizably. It's awash in eldritch abominations, mysterious monuments, savage beasts, colossal monsters, alien technology, sentient inhuman races, ferocious weather patterns, cosmic anomalies, laboratory experiments, fractured space-time, a hodgepodge of familiar cities and nations...and, of course, the terrified and scanty remnants of humanity. Into this mess are thrust my two protagonists, office drones from the Earth we know, refugees from the chaotic, hopeless, stifling present day. It's the end of the world as they know it, and they feel fine. They were actually sort of waiting for it to happen. So they jump at the call. Off they boldly go, throwing away their old lives and seeking their fortunes in this new and barbaric world. "Going for howling adventures over in the territory," as Mark Twain put it. Fighting, exploring, befriending, rescuing, and just generally being heroic and badass.

That's something I think every human being should have the chance to do.

But the world is sick, remember? First, we're poisoning the crystal waters of pure human existence with the drug of digital immersion, an ersatz life lived in the virtual world. (When was the last time you had a conversation where somebody didn't quote a movie, mention a video game, reference a website, or whip out a cell phone? I catch myself doing this distressingly often, and feel like running up to my apartment and hurling my computer and my smartphone out of the window.) But second, our worldview as a species seems to be shifting. This is particularly notable in the United States, but it manifested first in Europe and other notable civilized nations.

I'm speaking of the distressing trend of liberalism.

lib·er·al·ism [lib-er-uh-liz-uhm, lib-ruh-]

noun

1. the quality or state of being liberal, as in behavior or attitude.
2. a political or social philosophy advocating the freedom of the individual, parliamentary systems of government, nonviolent modification of political, social, or economic institutions to assure unrestricted development in all spheres of human endeavor, and governmental guarantees of individual rights and civil liberties.
3. (sometimes initial capital letter) the principles and practices of a liberal party in politics.
4. a movement in modern Protestantism that emphasizes freedom from tradition and authority, the adjustment of religious beliefs to scientific conceptions, and the development of spiritual capacities.

I've already talked your ear off about the state of human civilization, so I'll be brief. I disagree wholeheartedly with the liberal mindset. As innocuous as it sounds on paper, liberalism is a destructive cancer, a pernicious gangrene corrupting the world. I define myself (categorize myself, Smithy) as a conservative atheist. This means I have the advantage of looking at the world through the practical, no-nonsense lens of your garden-variety conservative, yet I don't have the obfuscating religious hangups that fundamentalist Christians do. I have a clearer view than most anybody.

I have observed, by monitoring the major news networks (most of them) and the general trend of American politics, that the liberals are taking over. Conservatism is passé. It's discredited as a system of thought. People (liberals) believe that conservatives are barbaric, violent, hidebound, intolerant, insensitive, cruel, racist, corrupt, money-grubbing Neanderthals. We're an unpopular lot right now, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

The popular consensus seems to be that we are moving toward a state of world peace. A utopia. Everybody gets along, the state oversees every aspect of the citizens' welfare (that's what they mean by "the government guarantees individual rights and civil liberties"), people pay sky-high taxes to support the bloated and all-powerful government, but don't mind because they're off their chumps on sex and drugs and other hallmarks of an indolent, cared-for lifestyle.

Hogwash, I say. That's not what humans were meant for. Humans strive. Humans overcome. Humans pioneer. Humans explore. Humans hunt. Humans kill.

[grunt, snort]

Sorry. As I was saying, humans don't fit the mold which the liberals seek to jam us into. We weren't mean for a utopia. We weren't mean for a civilized, caring society. I think pastoralism and minarchy are the ideal fit for humanity. Anything more threatens us with a total stagnation of the human condition, a decadent travesty of civilization, a sparkly balloon easily punctured by external or internal pressures. (If you think I'm wrong, ask Thomas Cole.)

I wondered why, as a boy, I loved watching movies and cartoons where governments and bureaucratic order had been overthrown, and the world had descended into lawless chaos. (Mad Max and Thundarr the Barbarian come to mind). There was no law to tell you what you could or couldn't do; you had to decide for yourself. You could be bad or good. I loved the idea, without really knowing why.

As I got older (and politically aware), I figured it out. We've got too much government right now. So much that it's stifling our very nature as living, breathing, entropic beings.

To be properly free, we need a minimum of government, a government which fulfills no further function than that of a night watchman. The government doesn't try to control the administration of things like health care and welfare and job creation and other social programs; those things aren't rights, they're privileges. They aren't guaranteed, they're earned. The people are on their own for those things. The government should merely ensure that the people's basic rights—speech, press, arms-bearing, assembly—are guaranteed. Then it can back the hell off.

So, naturally, in my novel, all the world's governments and governing bodies—particularly the United States—vanish in an instant. The world is now leaderless, anarchic. And of course, a host of baddies rise up to fill the void and impose their will upon a helpless population. Enter our two heroes. They save the day, move on, do it again. Live life as they want. Oppose oppression. Exercise independence, common sense, human decency. Explore, strive, create, inspire. If those aren't true American values, then I'm more idealistic than I dared to admit.

And then...well, I don't want to spoil the plot-lines of future works, but I will say this much. My two heroes, after kicking around for a while and saving the day here and there, decide to found a country of their own in the midst of this bellowing wilderness. It's a free country, a good country, a large and powerful country. It's filled with hardworking souls who don't feel entitled to anything, who know that the government isn't there to support them or care for them, but simply to protect their rights. It's a country where moral goodness and common sense are valued above political correctness, affirmative action, reparations and the crippling overabundance of tolerance. And it's a country unafraid to defend itself or its allies from threats. Actions, not words. Guns, not sanctions. Confrontation, not appeasement. That's the American way. 

Long story short...I'm writing a novel which is essentially American in its character, in which I create the ideal world as I see it. One that makes sense to me. One that feels right. A world where our fates aren't decided before we're born; where we're not dependent on technology or successful careers or upward mobility; where we decide who and what we want to be, every minute of every day; and we have the freedom to follow whatever path we choose. And those who challenge our way of life, those who seek to dominate or terrorize us, are dealt with, swiftly and permanently, at the point a sword blade or a six-shooter.

I hope this makes you want to read it.

And now kindly listen to this, a paean to unexplored worlds. This technology is allowed:

the problem with technology - a philippic

I hope you've liquored yourself up properly before clicking your way over here. This here post is yet another vitriolic op-ed. If the word 'philippic' in the title wasn't enough to scare you off, heed this final warning, go back to your pay-per-view and microwave some lasagna.

I like to think of myself as a principled man. I'll grant you that some of my principles probably aren't all that productive, or even healthy. I go out of my way to step on those extra-crunchy leaves, I write people parking citations whenever they miss the bloody white lines, and I try never to pay for my own drinks.

Diseased as my principles are, however, I stick by them. To betray them is to betray the very essence of my being.

Well, the very essence of my being is feeling a bit betrayed right now.

I read somewhere once that the philosopher Plato despised the invention of paper, alphabets, and written language. If he'd had his way, nobody would ever so much as scribble "bagels and cream cheese" on a Post-It note and tack it to the fridge.

Why?

Writing degrades the memory, he said. If people could just write stuff down, nobody would ever have to remember anything, would they? They'd just let their bloody memories go to pot.

Plato practiced what he preached. He never touched paper. The man routinely memorized verbal treatises on rhetoric (thousands of words long). He remembered the trial of his mentor Socrates verbatim, and in so doing single-handedly set the principle of stenography back by a millennium.

(If Plato were alive today, I wonder what he'd think of things like datebooks, and gingko biloba, and all those memory puzzles on the supermarket racks. Apoplexy anyone?)

I'm kind of the same way. Technology bugs me. By nature of its omniscience and accessibility, technology, as a medium, degrades the quality and uniqueness of the works it so greedily subsumes and regurgitates.

Case in point...

MUSIC

People don't enjoy music anymore; they saturate themselves with it.

My grandfather had a tradition. One night every week he'd shut himself in his den, put a record on, and listen to it, beginning to end, without interruption. My cousins and I could hear him in there, whistling along with Mark Knopfler and Chet Atkins. I could almost picture him sitting in his armchair, replete with sweater, penny loafers and black socks, tapping a toe in time to the beat, his eyes closed in concentration like a marquis at the opera.

Nowadays, sitting on the subway, I find it difficult to find anyone under 30 who doesn't have a pair of earphones stuck to their head.

People listen to music everywhere: at work, at the gym, at home, in their cars, on airplanes, even when they go out on an introspective walk in the country.

I'd love to know how you're supposed to commune with nature when Rage Against the Machine is raping your eardrums.

(I don't exempt myself from these habits; read on and you will see how I, likewise, have become a member of the digital generation. Hell, you're reading this very post on the screen of a computer or a smartphone, right?)

I'm not saying people shouldn't enjoy music. I'm not even saying that there's a wrong way to do it. It just irks me that, thanks to technology, music has shifted from being an occasional, introspective, evocative, enlightening treat...and has become business as usual. Nothing special. Small potatoes. Et cetera, et cetera. 

People used to look forward to live concerts for months, hoarding tickets like fragments of the Covenant. What with live-streaming video and camera phones and fiber-optics and Wi-Fi, they can push a button and tune into to U2 (Live at the Rose Bowl) from anywhere on the planet.

Whereas folks used to have a collection of ten or so prized vinyl LP records (you may want to Google the terms "record," "LP," and "vinyl"), nowadays they'll have something like ten gigabytes of music. That's hundreds and sometimes thousands of songs, any one of them accessible in an instant. You don't need to put a needle into a groove anymore; just hit a button and spin the wheel.

You could almost argue that people have too much music. People (me included) find themselves slewing wildly through their music collections, skipping song after song until they find one they haven't heard 30,000 times over. Sometimes there's too much even to fit on a single device, and said music magnate must either retain multiple MP3 players or simply rotate their library out every six months or so. (I'm talking to you, Miss H.)

Think of the way it used to be, people. If you wanted music, you had to wait for a band of strolling players to waltz through your village—or make the music yourself. It's everywhere now, all at once, in your face and as loud as possible.

I'm not exempt. I (occasionally) have my ear-buds on when I go out on walks, and my headphones are almost always glued to my cranium when I'm working on my computer. (I'm a little obsessed with LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem," okay? Sue me.) But I can still appreciate the specialty of a particular group, artist, song, or album. I still buy most of my music on CDs, so, when the mood takes me, I can pop one into my stereo set, crank it up, and enjoy an entire evening listening to only one band. Crazy, huh?

When you mass-market anything and make it available at the push of a button, it loses its specialness, its rarity, its unique nature. It's not a treat anymore. It's more like...coffee. Or gasoline. Or Pop-Tarts. Just another consumable resource to help get you through your day.

Technology cheapens art. That's the crux of my argument.

LITERATURE

My biggest beef with the techno-revolution. It's screwing with my beloved books.

(Yes, this is a pathetic argument, meaning that it stems from an appeal to human emotion, rather than a logical argument appealing to rationality and common sense. Bite me.)

The Kindle^® is the bane of my existence. I know it's the wave of the future. I know e-book readers will replace printed works in a deplorably short time. I'll even acknowledge that they're a helluva lot more convenient for carrying around your reading material. But I don't like 'em. They can't replace a lovely, dog-eared, care-worn paperback with yellowing pages, coffee stains on the title page, a broken back from all those times you propped it up on its spine instead of using a bookmark, and which smells so deliciously of the wooden cases, gritty carpet, dusty counters, and sagging shelves of every used bookstore you've ever ventured into.

Sure, the Kindle^® and its ilk may do wonders for literacy. Most e-books are only about $2-$3, I hear. And my Kindle^®-owning friends tell me that they can get most of the classics for free. That's all right by me. If a device brings the best literature in the world before the eyes of the proletariat, I'm all for it. Free books for the people, I say. But I dislike the idea of the e-book reader. The primal feeling and sensual joy of reading is no more. You can't smell the binding, feel the rough edges of the paper, read the author's signature on the inside cover. You can't hold the work in your hands and wonder how many other people before you have done the same thing. You can't ostentatiously flash the cover at passersby when you want the world to know that you're an intelligent and well-read human being for reading The Brothers Karamazov. Nor can you hold a Kindle^® up in front of your face when you're sitting on the train next to somebody you really don't want to talk to. And worst of all, at the end of the day, you can't walk into your private library, sit down in a comfortable chair, and cast your eye over the familiar spines of your favorite books crowding the mahogany shelves.

Oh yeah, and books don't need batteries.

That is all.
 
AVIATION

Technology is pervasive stuff, ain't it?

I feel the need to say a little something about airplanes. Aviation has customarily been on the forefront of the techno-tsunami. That's both good and bad, as it turns out.

I had the opportunity to fly a Cirrus SR20 recently.

What's a Cirrus SR20, you ask?

Cirrus Aircraft is a Duluth-based company which prides itself on its line of advanced, user-friendly, safety-focused aircraft. Right now that line consists of two airplanes, with a third in the works: the SR20, the SR22, and the SF50. The SR20 is the basic model; the SR22 is the same airframe with a better engine; and the SF50 "Vision" is a sleek-looking VLJ, or Very Light Jet, projected to hit the market in 2012.

The circumstances which allowed me to pilot a $750,000 airplane are not important. Suffice it to say, however, that though I found the SR20 pleasantly simple to fly, I did not approve of it. The thing is soaked, sopping, steeped in technology.

You remember how I said that Cirrus prides itself on designing safe, user-friendly aircraft?

Yeah, well, they do that by analyzing accident reports, determining what most commonly causes malfunctions, and then designing aircraft that even a knee-biting dumbass could fly.

To give you an example, Cirrus's experts decided that, no matter how safe or intelligent a pilot could be, he might still forget to put the landing gear down sometimes. So they made the SR20's landing gear fixed instead of retractable.

I don't like that. I don't like it when a company assumes I'm going to do something stupid. I don't like it when they try to think for me. I don't like it when they decide that I can't be trusted with retractable landing gear and give me fixed gear just to be on the safe side.

Tish and blather. Fiddlesticks, I say.

Cirrus airplanes have a boatload of built-in fail-safes and recovery devices which are ostensibly intended to help a pilot prevent and/or recover from a dangerous situation. The most notable of these is the SR20's built-in parachute. That's right. The airplane has its own parachute. It's controlled by a red handle on the ceiling of the cockpit, over the pilot's seat. Yank that handle and a solid-fuel rocket blasts out of the airplane's roof, just behind the rear window. Straps unfurl all along the airplane's sides, the canopy deploys, and the airplane floats gently to earth at 15 mph. The aforementioned landing gear is designed to collapse in just such a way as to cushion the impact and protect the fuselage (and its passengers) from damage.

That's not all. The Cirrus SR20 has a blue "LEVEL" button in the cockpit which, when pushed, automatically returns the plane to straight-and-level flight. Let's say you're flying in IFR conditions (when you can't see outside the airplane, and are using your instruments to fly), and you get spatially disoriented. Or let's say you were flying on a clear day and you had to dodge a bird. The plane starts to go out of whack. Push that blue button and the plane quiets down, straightens up, and levels out. Bang, there you are, flying along just as if nothing ever happened.

The SR20 has built-in sensors which know when the plane is about to stall. (Remember, a stall happens when the air is hitting the wing at too severe an angle to generate lift. The plane basically stops flying and begins to fall out of the sky. In the hands of an inexperienced pilot, a bad stall can lead to a spin, rapid descent, and a big smoky hole in the ground.) These sensors simultaneously alert the pilot of a stall and tell the plane to fix it. The plane levels itself back out and recovers from the stall automatically.

The Cirrus company was also the first aircraft manufacturer to put something called a "hypoxia awareness system" into their airplanes. This is a sensor that monitors the pilot's control of the airplane above 12,500 feet. Above that altitude, without supplemental oxygen, the human body won't be able to take in enough O₂ to sustain consciousness. I've experienced this effect myself. There's lightheadedness, headache, decreased awareness, euphoria...and the blackout comes pretty soon after. So, if a Cirrus pilot flies up that high, and his oxygen system malfunctions, and he faints, and he doesn't touch the airplane controls for two minutes...then a computerized voice will ask him very loudly "Are you awake? Are you aware?"

Receiving no answer (or control inputs) the computer is then programmed to automatically take the airplane down below 12,500 feet, all the time asking "Are you awake? Are you aware?" until it gets a response.

Seems cool, right?

No. It isn't.

Look back through those last few paragraphs and you'll notice something. I used the word "automatically" way too much.

My question is this: if you're such a raging dullard that you're up above 12,500 feet with no oxygen, or flinging the airplane all over the sky trying to dodge birds, or letting yourself get stalled out, then what business do you have flying an airplane in the first place?

Okay, sure, this technology saves lives. I read somewhere that the Cirrus parachute system has saved 121 people from almost certain death. The hypoxia awareness thing sounds like it could come in handy. But look, you should be able to do all this for yourself. This technology makes it too easy for you. A pilot could get spoiled, and his skills dulled, flying in a Cirrus. And when the real emergency comes along, when the electrical system fails and he loses all that technological whizbang, how is he going to know how to handle the situation?

Cirrus is barking up the wrong tree. If anything they should be trying to find out how to make people safer, not airplanes. Last I heard, the NTSB had concluded that eighty percent of all airplane crashes, accidents, and mishaps are caused by human error. There's no way to design human stupidity out of an airframe. Cirrus won't be able to accomplish that no matter how hard they try. But they're still trying. And what they're coming up with might ultimately cause more problems than it solves.

Do you see where I'm coming from? Technology is convenient, yes, but there are things far more preferable than convenience. Skill. Talent. Romance. Sensuousness. Appreciation. Peculiarity. All the qualities which make music a treat, books a joy, and airplanes a challenge are being ingested and diluted by the unstoppable march of technological progress. I find this deplorable.

Technology has its uses. Moreover, it is a paean to the scope of innovation and the indomitable human spirit.

But does it have to take my precious books away from me?

Couldn't some of us, withal, remain happy in the Stone Age?

And now, just to prove how inescapable the thing truly is, and how immersed I myself am in it, despite all appearances to the Neo-Luddite contrary, I leave you with a song. A song synthesized with electronic instruments, mixed with digital recording equipment, distributed via laser and fiber-optic cable and data port, brought to you by a video download from a website on the Internet, appearing to you on your computer or smartphone with its LCD screens and high-fidelity sound reproduction, and packaged for you by an online personal blogging tool.

...through which the author has chosen to disseminate his anti-technology rants.

Go figure.

Even the singers are wearing those damn ear-buds...

where've all the Irish gone?

TIME: late afternoon, June 15, 2010

PLACE: Dublin, Ireland (O'Connell Street and the River Liffey)

MAJOR PLAYERS: my Canuck friend Jeff and I

OCCASION: our side-trip from northeast England into Ireland

PROBLEM: where the hell are all the feckin' Irish?

I forgot to mention a few things in that last post. First of all, right after we got to our hostel, I leaped out the door and ran down the road to an Internet café, where I stumped up a ridiculously large amount of euros to use a computer for two hours. I sent off my latest article to The Expeditioner, and then I went back, rendezvoused with Jeff, and met Harry, our Australian roomie.

We all clear now? My apologies. This is what happens when I blog without having my notes in front of me. I tend to complain a lot and not say anything edgy or worthwhile. All the poetry of the moment has been scribbled in the notebook.

Jeff hadn't been idle while I was out writing an article. He had explored the western regions of College Street, and ventured a little way east, into Temple Bar, the gleaming party district of southern Dublin. It's touted as the "cultural quarter," preserving the medieval street layout and cobbled streets. But it's also the drunken touristy bit as well. No matter. It was scenic, had a sort of charm about it rarely found in an urban area, and was awash with pretty girls, as I'd mentioned previously. And don't forget the red-haired street performers and amphibious trucks filled with screaming children in Viking hats.

And there was another thing I'd noticed about Dublin while I was out walking around by myself, and even more so when I hooked up with Jeff again and went exploring up O'Connell Street, north of the Liffey.

There were hardly any Irish people anywhere.

There very well may have been, but if they were, they were few, and quite silent. I saw almost nothing but foreigners. I certainly heard nothing else. As we walked up the broad avenue towards the enormous spire in the distance, Jeff and I were barraged with American accents, English accents, Australian accents...but hardly a whiff of Irish in the whole bunch.

We couldn't accept it. This was Dublin, for Pete's sake. The same city Joyce wrote about in a book called, unsurprisingly, Dubliners. It's the capital of the country. The largest city in Ireland. It should have been a friggin' nexus of Irish folk. (I wanted to see some Irish lasses, dammit.)

 

So I decided to try an experiment. Neither Jeff nor I understood what the hell the Spire of Dublin was supposed to be. It was just this shiny steel rod, standing up straight in the middle of O'Connell Street, north of the Liffey. Looked impressive, sure, but it was hardly the most imaginative monument we'd ever seen. (And before you say anything disparaging about the Washington Monument, at least that is an obelisk, and a damned tall one, too, countering anything the Egyptians ever put up.)


So we decided to ask somebody about it. A local, preferably. This would be a great way to assay the extent of the un-Irishness of Dublin. If the random person we picked turned out to be Irish, my faith would be restored. If not, I'd give up all pretense and guess that there were probably fewer Irish people in Dublin than there were foreigners...however good or bad that may be.

I picked the prettiest and most bored-looking girl I could find in a 50-foot radius from the base of the spire.

"Excuse me," I said, pointing up at it, and putting just a hint of Texas into my inflection, "my friend and I are both new around here. What the heck is that?"
"I don't know," she said, in an American accent.
"You don't know either?" I asked. "What's it called?"
"The Millennium Spire," she said. She wasn't offended by our questions. She had an amused sort of smile on her face, in fact. She was a curly blond wearing a flowery skirt, flip-flops, and Paris Hilton sunglasses. She wouldn't have looked out of place in Orange County.
"Where are you from?" I asked.
"Minnesota," she replied. "My family's here on vacation, I'm just waiting for them now."


Well, that was that. I guess there's some kind of reverse diaspora going on in Dublin. All the Irish left and all the foreigners moved in and took up the slack.

I had more pressing matters to attend to than demographics. Jeff indulgently followed me as we ducked down Henry Street and into a supermarket where I grabbed some postcards for the folks back home. Then we went back across the river and into Carroll's Irish Gifts. I was a man on a mission. One of my dear friends, the lovely Miss B (whom I was rather close to in college), had given me a special request. She had stated categorically that I was to buy her a souvenir whilst abroad in the British Isles, on pain of death.


Never one to incur Miss B's wrath, and wanting to surprise her with something beautiful and lovely and marvelous and reminiscent of our time together, I stepped into the shop and cast a discerning eye over the goods. After much deliberation, I selected a necklace, a teardrop-shaped bit of amethyst with spiral silver trim. (Purple is Miss B's favorite color.)

Then it was time for more selfish ends. I dithered a while over a T-shirt for myself. The selection ranged from the basic—IRISH REPUBLIC, EST. 1916—to the jocular—IRISH I WERE DRUNK—to the ribald—I SURVIVED A NIGHT IN DUBLIN, with images of a glass of beer, a couple humping in bed, and an aspirin pill.

I decided to sleep on the decision.

Jeff and I returned to the hostel (stopping off by the Ha'penny bridge on the way, which struck a chord with Jeff, because his ancestral name is something quite close to Ha'penny; so we had to get pictures) and had a lovely nap. We partook of some delicious pasta salad in the kitchen on the second floor, courtesy of the staff, and then went out to explore Temple Bar.

We passed the Christ Church Cathedral and the Four Courts...

...and located the Brazen Head, supposedly the "oldest pub in Ireland", established 1198. Here we sipped Guinness (and I learned how to pour it; the stuff's so foamy that you have to fill the glass three-quarters of the way and then let it sit for a bit before finishing) and watched Brazil beat hell out of North Korea.

And we laid plans for the morrow. We figured we'd take the walking tour just to familiarize ourselves with Dublin's layout and historical significance. Couldn't hurt, and it was free, too. We were on a budget, after all. We'd definitely want to hit either the Guinness brewery or the old Jameson distillery. Those were two Dublin tours we couldn't miss, and they both offered the chance of a free taste.

And suddenly Jeff and I realized the inherent stupidity of coming to Ireland to detoxify.

We slowly worked our way back east to the hostel, stopping in at any likely pub that caught our eyes. First there was Thomas Read for some Paulaner Hefeweizen (apparently it's a faux pas to order Kilkenny in Dublin; the barman stiffly informed me that he was fresh out); and then Doyle's, right next door to our resting-place. We had another pint of Guinness. We had become addicted to it. Guinness, surprisingly, actually tastes good in Ireland. Everywhere else it's been bitter, flat, and thoroughly unimpressive stuff. But in Ireland it was rich, foamy, dark, aromatic, full-bodied and smooth, far and away the best stout we'd ever had. We were astounded, flabbergasted, gobsmacked. We couldn't get enough of the stuff. One drink was like the most delicious meal and the most satisfying draft all wrapped up in one.

While we were sitting there in Doyle's (which was the most pub-like of all the pubs we'd visited...almost pitch-black, loaded to the brim with dark wood, and filled with all manner of working-class folks, their faces half-hidden in shadow) a sharply-dressed gentleman with a name tag that read "Martyn" walked up to our table and asked us if we wanted to read his poetry. I had a few beers in me (and, subsequently, a pervading sense of general equanimity), so I said I would. With names like "The Black Rose" his poems were charged with feeling and besotted with visual and sensual imagery, manifested in florid verse. I was a bit buzzed to tell Martyn that, though. Nonetheless, I read a few of his poems, nodded appreciatively, handed his book back, and told him thanks, but I was saving all my money for beer.

Don't miss the next chapter of our stalwart heroes' fearless journey through Dublin, dancing with the Australians, coming soon to a blog near you!