I was never one to go spouting my petty New Year's Resolutions to everybody within earshot, but listing them here would keep you from being caught unawares later on. And calling them "resolutions" would seem to invite them to be unequivocally broken in short order. So here you go, my plans for 2012 (to be immediately rendered null and void if the Aztecs decide to let the world end):
Number One: Ascend to my rightful place as a writer (i.e., have more confidence, dammit).
I'm through with the crippling lack of confidence and dithering indecision which plague me whenever I try to gauge markets, write relevant stories and articles, look up potential publishers, and submit works. Hunter S. Thompson never bothered with any of that crap. He just went out, did what he had to do to get a story, looked around and submitted it somewhere. That's what I'm going to do from this moment forward. I'm looking up markets for creative nonfiction as we speak. Who says I need only do travel articles and short sci-fi stories? I'm sure I've got lots to say on other subjects...and can tease it out of my brain without the aid of chemicals. So, to that end, I intend to become a more prolific writer this year...and a more assiduous salesman.
P.S. This may or may not include publishing that damn novel. We'll see how it goes. I don't know how easy it is to publish a novel from a foreign country, and I don't have Ernest Hemingway here to tell me. Maybe that magic Internet thingy will come to the rescue! TA-DA!!
Number Two: Go back to Korea (i.e., drink a lot of soju, meet crazy foreigners, do the cool stuff I didn't get to do before, pig out on bulgogi, and all that rot).
Well, shoot. That's taken care of. Helen the Eminent Recruiter tells me that my paperwork is where it needs to be and my E-2 visa is expected any day now. My room is still in rampant disarray, but order is precipitating out of the chaos. My desk is cleaned out, my closet has been divested of all garments which shall not be accompanying me on my Asian odyssey, and that big pile of stuff in the armchair is looking less like a war correspondent's personal effects and more like a roving journalist's kit bag. I should be ready to go in—criminy, twenty-eight days!
Number Three: Give Hulk Hogan a wedgie (i.e., sneak up behind him on the set of his reality TV show and yank his Fruit-of-the-Looms up over his cute little head).
Just checking to see if you're still awake.
Number Four: Live for others...a little bit (i.e., get involved in some charity work).
The only things I've ever donated to others are a few hours at an old folks' home in East Tennessee (which nearly scarred me for life; cue the old lady in the wheelchair screaming for her dead husband) and a few fistfuls of change for the Salvation Army. I aim to change that this year, and put some real charitable man-hours under my belt. Some of my foreign friends in K-Land have gotten involved with organizations which donate food and clothing to North Koreans in need, which interests me something fierce. I never did a flipping thing to help the poor NoKos the last time I was there, and the thought wracks me with guilt to this very day. Once I get back to the States I intend to put my time in planting trees and passing out soup at homeless shelters, too, but that's a story for 2014.
There's more to my list, but these snippets are all I can think of for now. I need to read more books this year (and write a few, too). I recently rediscovered reading for pleasure, and since then a whole host of worthy volumes has passed under my eyes. I'm way behind on reviewing 'em, too...especially since I decided to review only one book at a time on this here blog. I'm five chapters into Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and am enjoying the living daylights out of it. But more about that later.
Cheerio, people. Send me some heroic resolve...
If he had one, I'm on it. And probably Karl Marx's and Friedrich Nietzsche's, too. Why? I have way too much crap. Way too much.If Thoreau, Marx and Nietzsche were teleported into my bedroom at this very instant, and perused the absolute disarray to which it has been reduced, with piles of junk and trinkets and baubles occupying every flat surface, and umpteen bazillion hats and coats and shoes in the closet (yes, I'm a clothes-horse), and papers and notes and photographs and picture frames lying everywhere, and no less than seven cardboard boxes of books shoved into my brother's room for safekeeping, they'd be appalled. Thoreau would holler at me to simplify, Marx would fulminate about my materialism, and Nietzsche would aim a few mocking jibes at my sentimental and pointless memorabilia. I wouldn't blame them. I've been doing likewise.
The intervening time between this and my last post has been spent desperately trying to whip my small room into some semblance of order, to cram the trappings of my life into manageable containers. I've lugged some cardboard boxes out of the shed, taped them together, and have been steadily stowing away all the detritus of my quarter-century's existence. I cannot believe I let this go so long, nor the sheer volume of material I'm dealing with. There are so many things which I should have let go long ago: old pictures, greeting cards, outdated documents, rough drafts of stories too puerile to preserve...the list goes on and on.
But I'm making progress. My nightstand has been cleared of CD cases, notebooks and electronics; my filing cabinet has been purged; only the dust remains under my bed. I still have, however, the daunting task of clearing the larger gewgaws out of my desk drawers, and packing up the clothes in my closet. This'll take some doing. And I must exercise caution and restraint as well. The well-worn seat of my armchair, now a repository for the equipment and essentials I will bring with me to South Korea, is near to overflowing.
Where did I pick up all this crap, anyway?!
I look around the room (a roadrunner just ran by the window, making me think of Jerry's desert musings). I see a beaten canteen hanging from the chair, along with the plastic bag full of taco sauce pouches I promised Smithy I'd take to Korea with me. Suspended from the other side is the plastic bag with all my medicines and first-aid equipment in it, and a shoulder holster with a ripped seam. Lying on top of the desk is a boggling assortment of trinkets: a Lego seaplane, several sets of headphones, cables and power cords to who-knows-what, a packing tape dispenser, an old Walkman, my new laptop speaker, a photograph from our trip to the Aquarium of the Pacific, a coffee mug with my name on it, library books, a jar of Korean wishing stars painstakingly handmade by my lovely girlfriend, and a desk lamp that has my prized Stetson fedora and the tassel from my university mortarboard hanging from it.
To my left, on the top shelf of my closet, I can see an untidy jumble of hats, a mosquito net in a drawstring bag, and the glow-in-the-dark hockey mask I wore at the Halloween party and scared the bejesus out of John and Matt with.
On the small TV tray in front of the bed there's a picture frame showcasing my great uncle's uniform patches and insignia from the cavalry regiment he served with in Vietnam; a pair of orange hat brushes; my brand-new HD webcam, still in its package; a tin of Icebreakers Sours; a lottery ticket; my checkbook; and the DVDs for Spider-man 2 and 3, awaiting transferal to some less discerning owner.
In and around the armchair are haphazardly piled a couple of laptop briefcases, several decks of cards, a small heap of books (concerning alcoholic beverages and card games, mostly), passport pictures, address books, important papers, artifacts from my travels, and my precious journals.
The dresser is by far the worst offender, a fountain of materialistic indiscretion. Quite apart from the raiment overflowing from its drawers, its summit is crowned with flotsam. Shammies and chemicals for cleaning spectacles and LCD screens; a small vanity filled with loose buttons, batteries, ticket stubs and foreign coins; a pinochle deck; more books (Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild and John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me); a ledger where I keep track of my spare change; rolls of quarters and nickels and dimes; a flashlight; a disassembled music-box, given to me by one of my Korean students; a nifty black pouch containing my five USB drives, and thereby my entire writing career; several pairs of glasses and sunglasses snug in their cases; a can of lighter fluid; a toy Model T and several metal-and-plastic warbirds; and a whiskey-tasting certificate from the Old Jameson Distillery in Dublin, Ireland.
On the hooks behind the door are two mostly-pristine flight suits in desert tan, American flags gaily gleaming from their shoulders; my old blue TacAir baseball cap; two pairs of bathrobes; and a dusty ocarina from who-can-tell-where.
The walls are mostly bare; I've taken my Korean flag down, and all the pages torn from various warbird calendars; but the framed jigsaw puzzles and the Indiana Jones theatrical posters remain.
I've gotten rid of us much as I possibly could. I'm no hoarder, but it's difficult to lightly pass up the virtues of the pack rat. It seems like every bauble, every half-faded line on a wrinkled sheet of paper, every dog-eared book and creased photograph holds some happy memory within it.
I'll stop there. You know what comes next: a load of maudlin reminiscence. I'll spare you.
Suffice to say, this is a more monumental task than I anticipated (but isn't it always?). I'm slogging through it. I anticipate having my room entirely packed up, my existence encapsulated, by the middle of the month. All of it will go into storage while your humble author and a few select garments and trinkets and novels will sally forth unto East Asia. More about that later.
And by the way, Happy New Year.
