A Little Protection

It turns out that life is difficult.

No surprise there—at least to those

who are living—but

what might surprise most folks

is the extent to which we can really

protect ourselves and

provide for the unintentional &

how necessary this skill actually is.

 

The key, as it turns out, is not located in excess

but in having a very clear conception of what you

actually need to survive.  The turnaround is the

fact that it’s not in having too much, it’s in having

just enough: too much is a burden.

 

Be sure you have food,

or you’re going to starve.

Be sure you have shelter,

or you’re bound to feel the

wrath of the natural mother.

Be sure you have clothes,

or you are going to freeze.

 

These things will ensure you’re survival.

How you go about them is your business.

What you want to eat,

what you want to live,

what kind of clothes

you wish to wear…

these are your business.

 

My food is simple but nourishing.

My home is modest but enclosed.

My clothes are not expensive but warm.

 

Once you have the things you need, that really ought to be enough.

Then, it’s easy:

all you have to do is take care of them,

and that’s where it gets slightly more complicated,

but realistically, maintenance

is a small price to pay for the certain security of certain survival.

Just

a little protection is all it takes sometimes.

Eli’s Top Fifty

(At the request of a loved one, and in no real particular order :-)

1. Quiet contemplation (priceless)
2. Wailing away into the night on the guitar (guitar $150, years of practice: 4)
3. Making soup (variable)
4. Letting the fingers flash across the keyboard (macbook: $1500, time)
5. Porch conversations that last well into the night (time and a companion)
6. Writing letters using pen and paper to those you love far away (pen: 1.00—or more—paper: cheap to expensive)
7. Throwing the disc in Prospect Park with loved ones (disc: 12.00)
8. Free reggae festivals in New York’s Central Park (Free)
9. Watching Mary Poppins in my underwear and drinking a martini at 9am (gin: 20.00, olives: 3.00, Mary Poppins: free as a gift)
10. Making tortillas from scratch (flour, water, pan)
11. A nighttime run around Ochang Public Park (shoes, sweats, living in Ochang, South Korea)
12. Clipping your fingernails AND filing them for better guitar action (fingernail clippers and file: 6.00)
13. A perfectly prepared martini (gin, olives, ice, cocktail shaker, cocktail glass)
14. A perfectly prepared Manhatta (whisky, maraschino cherries, ice, cocktail shaker, cocktail glass)
15. Catfishing (rod, reel, stink bate, weights, time)
16. Discovering anything (a sense of danger)
17. Ulysses (19.95 for the Gabler Edition)
18. The Annotated Ulysses (29.95)
19. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (book: 13.95, movie: 19.95)
20. Literary criticism (gray matter restructuring)
21. The “Weight” of a philosophy tome (Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”:  18.00, five pounds… roughly)
22. The burden of existence (hmmmm)
23. Long hair (time)
24. Writing simultaneously in five different notebooks (variable from 3.00-18.00)
25. May All Beings Be Happy (12000 SKWon)
26. Experiencing something for myself (fear)
27. “Actions reveal subconscious desires” (the ability to see in superficialities)
28. Wagner’s Ring Cycle (75.00)
29. Receiving baked goods in the mail in Korea from various parts of the world (friendship)
30. Maintaining three blogs (time and thoughts)
31. Consciousness (who’s to say)
32. Consciousness (of) consciousness (lots)
33. Shisha, food and beer in a Moroccan place in Seoul with a Moroccan, and Irish, and another American (45000)
34. The blank look on the faces of Korean middle schoolers when we play hangman and the words are: Phenomenological ontology (priceless)
35. Simply Calphalon 3qt. Saute Pan (85.00)
36. Simply Calphalon omelet pan (45.00)
37. A good 8” Chef’s knife (30.00 and up)
38. Wandering (the fear of being lost)
39. Exhaustion (work)
40. Spooning (companion)
41. Driving down backroads a little bit lost (car: 1500, untamed roads)
42. The shape of the female hip (what price could be placed on a curve like that)
43. Nalgene bottles (8-12.00)
44. A good walking stick (found, as in, the former branch of a tree)
45. Wool socks (Merino, from New Zealand: 12.00/pr)
46. The Keyser Quick change capo (14.95)
47. The ease of reading and difficulty of understanding of Hangul (time and practice)
48. The Nichomachean Ethics (12.00)
49. Skype (free download)
50. The internet (Thanks Al Gore… I know you didn’t invent it, but thanks for the help)

Anybody want an iPhone?

It turns out that hunks of machinery,

however fancy, and fine and shiny

are nothing but machines

and show themselves to be

when they stop working just as you need them.

 

Wandering Mindspace

It is quite cold in Korea these days,

and I feel the coldness in my bones—

or maybe I feel the coldness in me.

 

I am sinking, somehow, faster than I can possibly swim,

and nothing and no one is anywhere near to

pull my head up above the waves.

 

That’s the thing about swimming though:

you have to be able to sink before you even consider jumping in.

 

The cold is a worry in so far as cold water is not conducive to

conducting a proper swimming session,

or, at the very least, the session won’t be lasting all that long

and is largely based on how much you

are capable of enduring.

 

The cold is always an endurance trial,

with day after day of icy arctic blasts attempting

to sway you into a more indoorsy type

of environment—away from the unreasonably

inhuman environment of the out-of-doors.

 

“Conduct thineself accordingly!” the brainmeat screams out.

“You know what you are getting yourself into!

Do not run yourself into the ground chasing down something

you have never been about to define yourself.”

So, on a fool’s journey we are going.  Acceptance comes first.

 

Traveling through the moors of endless bracken

with a backpack full of nothing and nothing as

the goal.

 

No-mind.  Is it the same as the unthinking?

Satirizing no mind might find us eating our

young, swiftyly, and laughing at ourselves

when faced with facts of indubitably imminent

failure.

 

Yes, perhaps that’s the way to go.

Forge on ahead.

Go where you’re not meant to go.

Persist in pain.

Do the things you weren’t meant to.

Endure it all.

Be whatever you want to do, man.

 

Such clearly dangerous thoughts streaming through the mind’s eye,

and yet it feels so delicious as it pours onto the page.

Is it real?  Am I real?  Who’s to say?  And who’s to really care if

I am one or the other or all or none? 

Cannot we for one second remind ourselves that there is nothing

and nobody to stop us.

 

We are we are the youth of the nation.

Stupid pop songs resurfacing suddenly.

That’s the danger of the cold, I guess.