Jun 6th, 2006, 09:12 AM
In Our Dirty Neighborhood
You shouldn't aspire to much, because our dirty neighborhood is enough.
In our dirty neighborhood there are cigarette butts on the uneven sidewalks cemented by careless workers, there are bags of rotting vegetables leaning on streelights and carts where poor men sell bread filled with sweets that look like fish; here there are kids that play soccer until 11 PM, and obnoxious workers that drink until 2 or 3.
In our neighborhood when you look two blocks down in either direction there are four sets of double barber polls where you pay the equivalent of $60 for an erotic massage finished with a helping hand, mouth, or cunt.
Kids walk by in school uniforms, old women wear their oversized flower-pattern pants and bonnets and old men wear suit-like attire and hats too fancy to fit.
On saturdays and sundays there are some puddles of vomit, some broken glass; if you come out at the right time there might be a fight or a man beating his stubborn wife.
It is hard to live just outside this neighborhood -- I am separated by a wall and some guards that enforce arbitrary rules.
I cannot imagine growing up within the Anarchy of a broken-down building in Uijeongbu.
If the standards I had to uphold, if what I inherited from my parents was a crumbling apartment and a legacy of working class I would be King of this neighborhood.
There is no freedom like this dirty neighborhood: if I were a Native to this crumbling village within a modernizing city, I would buy my groceries from those whithering hands of the ancients, I'd drink soju until my liver exploded for a buck a bottle on her sidewalks; I'd go to her pool halls and go to her Noraebangs and sing the classics, I would live under dimming lights of the streets dropping cigarette butts wherever I please.
I'd fight, I'd fuck, I'd drink, I'd smoke, I'd work a simple job 8 hours a day and not ask questions. I'd watch time pass. I'd make kids. I'd watch my kids. I'd watch their kids. I'd sell vegetables with my withered hands, and smoke some more cigarettes and scatter their butts, drink more bottles of soju and scatter their glass.
I'd live a dream -- a dream I did not have to work for.
I'd have an adventure -- an adventure I would not have to travel far for.
When I was bored I'd listen to music or take the subway to the other side of the city, I'd scatter butts in someone else's dirty neighborhood and listen to someone else's simple music. But I'd always come back.
I do not want to go to a college -- I want to spend my tuition on cigarettes, alcohol, and whores; and I want to spend a few bucks a day to tell you about it from a PC room.
I want to be one of the lost boys -- because it is so easy, so relaxing, and you can live with it forever.
I do not need any motivation. I need to be left alone.
Aspirations are for those who are not satisfied with women, alcohol, music, film, books, and cigarettes. I am completely satisfied.
I have enough good times in dirty neighborhoods to never bother wanting to live in a rich neighborhood.
You always find the Buddhist temples (which are nothing more than run-down buildings) in the dirty neighborhoods, with little signs that say 'PHILOSOPHY' on the side, or perhaps 'THOUGHT.' It's not because poor people need religion, it is because religious people do not need money.
Money means nothing when the finest pleasures in life can be bought off of a meagre allowance.
Fuck every time I ever thought of being anything more than a gardener or a gas station attendant or a cook or a waiter or a taxi driver.
To be anything else would be a waste of effort and overlooking the entire meaning of our existence.
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