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.

There is nothing all that special about a person like myself getting jumped. The more I relay the story to people by rote, the more I convince myself of this. Would it not have happened, we would have been speaking about an earlier incident that was far more banal. Approximately eight days prior I spent most of the day working on cell phones for work on my day off while listening to my friend’s radio show. Ironically, in between calls with high-level admins I had spent the brunt of that day skating around Wicker Park. Sometime later after finally finishing the support documentation, I decided to take my garbage out and head for a late dinner.

I remember quite vividly the last thoughts going through my head as I slipped on a chitinous patch of black ice in the cobblestone alley. I caught the glint in the halogen off the street and thought quite fondly of it being something out of a Geiger painting. And then I heard the crack. That was the crack that replayed over and over as I sat in bed the next three nights writhing in pain. On Tuesday, I finally made it into the Orthopedic Surgeon to discover that I had sliced a clean fracture into the cap of my elbow much like a slice of ham on a deli slicer. On Wednesday, I finally procured a bottle of Norco by prescription, which amounted to almost five days without pain relievers. Incidentally, Wednesday being the last day I imbibed the 10mg’s of Hydrocodone after losing my keys in a heated battle over a credit card payment with a fuming taxi driver who implied that if I was so poor to use such devices that I should ride the bus like the rest of my kind.

Walking around in a sling had been the best thing up until that fateful standoff early Sunday night against a trio of gang bangers. Everyone spoke to you. And everyone asked you that same question. Well, everyone except for that random cabbie. But still, how did it happen? And it had become an opportunity of sorts. Because the answer to the question was Pavlovian at this point. I began reciting the answer in my head even before the lips parted. The ice broken by bone which left the rocky floes wide open for other topics of discussion. As painfully obvious as it were, I was the one who was weak with the clipped wing and the head full of endorphins. And suddenly, not so much of a threat.

This is to say I’ve never really thought of myself as threatening as funny or ridiculous as that might sound to some of you. People had said it often in the past. That I was intimidating before they had officially held more than a two second conversation with me. I’m not the happiest looking person and my features aren’t the most relaxed. But unguarded and miserable, interpersonal warmth felt as inviting as a sewer grate spewing hot air in the middle of a subzero ice storm. And so there I was high on the fact that I could finally go somewhere alone and not appear scared or awkward because someone would inevitably ask that question. And my mouth would move accordingly. And the answers would be predictable and soothing.

Good times.

The polar opposite became true as I swung the six-pack of PBR in a nondescript black bag at the taller youth’s foot who was draped in some bluish all over print hoodie that looked like it had been scribbled on with cartoon sperm. “Just take the beer, dude… and walk away.” And walk away. Like you had an option. Seconds before that little fuck came barreling down the sidewalk apparently unaware that I could hear his plodding feet like a little kid banging down the stairs Christmas morning. I had swiveled around and saw the look on his face contorted as he blurted out the words as guttural as possible. “Give me the fucking money.” And as if to either accentuate the point or simply follow the arc of intention he planned on in the first place as he jumped up and swung; only to hit the phantom plastic of the bent splint hidden underneath my jacket.

I stood there in disbelief. I mean how else can you stand in a situation like that. Stand in amusement. Stand and deliver. Stand and sit cross-legged on the pavement while spouting ancient Navajo proverbs. So I stood dumbfounded. And as if to answer with a slap in the face, they formed a trinity. And one of the newest additions to the group uttered the coldest words I never wanted to hear.

“Lets get this motherfucker.”

It was then I knew as the tendons burned in my arm that I was truly fucking helpless. That however cute or attractive it was to be that guy in the sling that you wanted to nurse back to health now was a liability. That I was ready to be left on the ground similar to my friend Matt who was beaten unconscious blocks away and left for dead only to wake up in an ambulance with a concussion.

“Where is the fucking cell phone?”

Chalk it up to being slow, I answered “I don’t have any” to both questions. And my body began to bounce in place, itching further from the sidewalk and closer to the open parking lot where I learned to skid two seasons prior and where my deck rolled back and forth in the spring air, trucks bending in the breeze. As I inched back, the look came across their collective face. A look of equal parts confusion and surprise. And that’s when I threw the beer at their feet like someone throwing meat to a pack of hungry dogs.

Just walk.

“Lets go.”

And with that I sprinted as fast as I possibly could. My pride dying in a chokehold in the middle of that parking lot. Twenty minutes later, I stood in front of a pair of cops far more concerned with the pot smoke emitting from the artist studios on the first floor than my narrow brush with further handicaps. And later, I sat on the floor of my apartment.

And yes, I fucking cried. For reasons beyond the unfair and for maybe a minute. But tears were shed. Tears of a cripple. Not tears of a bastard son. Not tears of a victim. Not tears of shame. Just tears. Because contrary to popular belief, even I have a pain threshold. And maybe in some sick way, they were tears of acknowledgement of how things may have gone too far. Or simply a realization of just how much luck combined with skill kept me alive for just one more day.

I like to think there is something kind of special in that thought at the very least because I can’t count the times on my hands that I just wanted to walk away and didn’t.