One of those nights exhausted by the humidity, I found myself affixed to a counter stool playing street fighter on my phone. This is to say that playing street fighter on one’s cellular device is a bit like someone masturbating in an empty bed. If you don’t like that imagery, maybe you should take a long stare at the cemetery gates nearer towards the end of Eden. Grotesque imagery notwithstanding, people can sense your boredom with life, death, and taxes in those particular and peculiar moments. They can also read Korean purportedly. And with that set into play a shorter arc than a c list revival of your favorite mid seventies space opera. Its a two or three week gig into the danger zone involving one key player; the shadowy, anti-confucian presence known as the yakuza.

It was then and there I spoke at length about Korea with an ex-english teacher who spent the brunt of two years as a white man absorbing his experience in what my more racist friends would describe as the heart of ‘yellow fever.’ Mind you at this stage of my life I have a very different take on Korea and Hangul. I could care less about exploring the earth or escaping the realms of western civilization or even sowing my royal oats in some western fantasy attributed to such words as oriental, occidental, or ching or chang or chong.

You couldn’t count on a million clenched fists how many times someone has asked if the reason I’ve tried to learn an Asian language was to have sex with Asian girls. Its on par with how many times I’ve heard the sagely wisdom about getting over an ex-girlfiend by hate fucking an unsuspecting member of the opposite sex. Easy mode. Assisted Ultras. Miss Cleo. One Nine Hundred LL Cool J. There is an afterlife. Can you win the Lotto? What is matrix? Soylent Green is people.

But this is the proverbial world I live in nowadays. Its unsafe and caustic. Full of weak thoughts and weaker pickup lines. And dare I say its harder to navigate than a phonetically based font set hellbent on societal literacy.

I find peace in Hangul. There is a weird zen to the repetition. There are no grey areas. Sentence structures are rooted and pronunciations are sterile. That is to say beyond the swallowed consonants and the accents, of which ring in my ears in a sing song fashion from day to day in packed elevators. The first very memory of the initiative to learning Korean had little or nothing to do with girls, douche baggery or wanderlust. It had to do with sanity.

I can’t count how many times I woke up in the morning mumbling to myself. I’d sit in the shower hungover and rattle off random english phrases like uzi’s. Chalk it up to being a freestyle emcee. Mark it down on the calendar like a zombie outbreak. Its like I’m eating my own brains; slowly going mad in the fields of atrophy. Fuck me. What am I doing with my life? Ou est la plage? It became necessary to speak the same thing in a different tongue. A bit like working out. Masochistic yet progressive. An exercise in the futility of communication. Do you copy?

Delta-Fox-X-Ray. English motherfucker. Do you speak it?

Its always easy to segment yourself and marginalize. To be racist. To be classist. To pigeonhole yourself in your peer group and throw stones willingly. Its the surest way to assert your lack of comfort in chaos. Center yourself in the grid of the sprawl. Worship the cul-de-sac you come from. Where you played makeshift kickball in the summer sun for a month or two. The next six months where you sat holed up in your parents basement playing dungeons and dragons and checking for traps amongst trolls and gelatinous cubes.

Things miles away in the imperial standard are alien. Its as if the moon in the afternoon sky is akin the the paintings on the ceiling wall of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at either coast of the Americas. I remember one fateful afternoon that I got stuck there in that boat with the yo ho yo ho theme on constant loop. I stared up at the ceiling at the grates that led to the maintenance shaft. All the while I thought that I could crawl up there and right the wrongs. Maybe I could hack the fucking planet. After all that’s my generation’s mantra. Fuck this world up until it becomes my proverbial bitch (if there was a holy book that had a worthy proverb regarding said bitch.) Its like the moon in the sky blue in mid afternoon; impossible yet crucial; an affirmation and not a mirage or tease.

And so sitting in the center of the universe watching the radioactive decay in slow motion, I sigh. I tap away on the keyboard and rattle away random phrases into the void. I roll the old bones out every night or so in hopes to cross paths with heathens. To hear stories of tattooed miscreants talking with straight laced white men in Seoul bathhouses to be excused in the parlance of our times like “it ain’t no thang.”

And this is what I hear echoed in my fear of facing the reality of my own artistically manifested epidermic psychosis. I hear the stories of men in these very same bathhouses speaking in hushed but greeting tones of their livelihood. Of how they break faces, sell sex, horde drugs, and propogate crime. Of how they drink soju and sing karaoke. Of how they live life outside of the rules and how romantic that is in the face of the echoes of communism and confucianism.

And its there where I find myself on an average day sick of the average ways of western life staring at a black and white picture of a Korean born yet assimilated japanese gangster. He is sipping on a tumbler of presumably some asian analog of the finer spirits with crooked teeth and bald head. I read that from Japan he plays an active role in the kidnapping of the leader of Democratic Unification Party, who almost dies a Chicago style death of bricks to the feet and a couple or so leagues to the sea. Hours that seem only like moments earlier, I watch the films of Nagisa Oshima in a twilight zone fashion that daub the Yakuza in a surrealist fashion. I find myself delving deeper into his filmography to reveal the racism and politics inherent in japanese culture regarding the death penalty and the korean minority and it all subsequently blows my lily white devil mind into chunks.

The voice from the east has spoken. Korean yakuza godfather Hisayuki Machii born Chong Gwon Yong has entered and left the building. Those same personable motherfuckers infesting the bath houses filled with eager american speakers.

Its those very same nights I find myself at home with being an outsider on either side of the map. I feel like E.T. in the forest waiting for some fucked up ufo or rocket ship. After all, as the decades go by these methods of transit get more sleek and more architecturally sound and aware of gravity. You still have the cave people on the side groaning their esoteric grunts of disapproval.

But in the end, its all comes down to the voice whether from the east or the west. It all comes down to grunts, to phrases, to power over word. Language spoken automatically versus deliberate verbal command.

Anyone can ask for a sandwich. Anyone can ask for a cheeseburger. Anyone can button mash their way to a solid KO and walk away gloating. But not many can say they are gangster enough to manipulate whole governments with a bald head, makeshift teeth, korean born genetics in the face of discrimination, and a smile full of crooked teeth with a shot glass of poison.

I can’t say I or the rest of society could agree with you or your method and dare I say it would be the same vice versa. But we’re all here breathing the same air and spinning in the same yin and yang. And for that, I’m sure we’re both thankful to be alive countering each others frailties.

East meeting west.

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