It looked so out of place, a lump of snow out of the blue, by a busy sidewalk with not a hint of snow anywhere else around. Hardworking "environment beautification technicians" (aka street cleaners) had cleared all the snow off the sidewalk, but had left this one snowball alone. Kind of poignant, that.
A cleaning crew with a sense of poetry. Or perhaps irony.
Looking at this image, I feel like I should improvise a short poem in the old sijo style, just like the gentlemen scholars of old Korea; that, or perhaps a zen-succinct haiku. Too bad I don't understand the first thing about poetry...
I also thought about "The Moon Taking Aim" as a title, but decided against it, because it might oblige the Moon to be perceived as taking sides in the petty mundane conflicts that only concern us manusha.
My Facebook memory threw this out at me today. Taken in panorama mode, the photo itself isn't dated, but the FB post is dated February 1, 2020, so it must have been taken not long before I left L.A. for Korea, and shows a highly unusual cloud formation stretching tornado- or maybe dragon-like from horizon to horizon. I̶t̶'s̶ a̶l̶m̶o̶s̶t̶ a̶s̶ i̶f̶ i̶t̶'s̶ s̶h̶o̶w̶i̶n̶g̶ m̶y̶ l̶i̶n̶k̶ b̶e̶t̶w̶e̶e̶n̶ t̶w̶o̶ c̶o̶u̶n̶t̶r̶i̶e̶s̶ o̶n̶ o̶p̶p̶o̶s̶i̶t̶e̶ s̶i̶d̶e̶s̶ o̶f̶ t̶h̶e̶ w̶o̶r̶l̶d̶.
(Expanding the image is highly recommended)
He is always with me no matter where I go.
He is invisible to the naked eye.
But he still casts a shadow.
Today I went out and shot (photographed, not hunted^) pigeons in the plaza. Not on the ground, but in the air as they flew in to land on their customary roost on the roof of the metro entrance, with the waxing moon providing the backdrop. I had to be patient and be prepared to brave the freezing winds because the rascally pigeons kept blithely ignoring my telepathic commands^, but anyway after a fair while and many wasted shots, I had a handful of images I considered presentable. Here are the best five of the bunch:
And as a humorous also-ran, here's one I'm calling "Pigeon carrying the Moon piggyback":
I started to watch this video with giant contrabass saxophones on YouTube, and found myself spontaneously saying "Fill that with water, and you could drown a kid in it", just like that.
This time it was in an alley across from the leasing office of a fish market in Euljiro, Seoul. Not just any fish market, but specifically a market for dried fish only. Proudly self-described as the largest such market in all of Korea.
Yesterday morning I had an interesting experience -- two quick dreamlets back to back, separated by a short waking period, starring the same character.
First, I dreamt that my friend William came and started to tell me about the grindingly difficult qualifying exam his students had to sit (he's a professor of astrophysics at UCLA). To show the awesome amount of work they had to put in, he held up his hand with the thumb and forefinger parted a couple of inches, to show how "thick" the exam was (I guess in my dreams Ph.D students still take pencil-and-paper tests).
Then I woke up, made a brief trip to the bathroom and came back to bed. I soon fell asleep and dreamt again, and this time I was standing by the long edge of a narrow table or counter when William came in, wearing what looked like a white sailor's cap, sat down on the other side, and silently fixed me with an intense gaze. I was perplexed and uneasy at first, thought maybe he was trying to weird me out for a joke, but then realized he was drawing me. I cooperated by keeping the same quarter-profile facing him even as I moved along the edge of the table.
This double appearance of a character in two consecutive dreams reminded me of the time when I nearly woke out of a frustrating dream but through an act of will was able to #go_back_into_the_dream to resolve the situation, and in the process "doubled" myself.
As for William himself, he was an original member of the little group I once organized in the L.A. chapter of Mensa for the purpose of meeting once a month to dine and watch Korean movies together at my downtown flat. I dignified it with the important-sounding title of "The Korean Cinema Lovers Society" (but only for personal reference^). It was quite a diverse group at first, the membership including, other than Prof. Newman, an IT tech and his librarian wife, an Asian "tiger mom" and her young daughter, an ancient Jewish couple who I thought were married at first, but no, it turned out they were living in sin^ (they still send me holiday cards every year💖), and even a porn producer (it takes brains to produce good porn^; come to think, my therapy group also included a porn producer, but he made gay porn -- before dying of AIDS). As time went on the Society went the way of many such informal groups -- it gradually petered out, became smaller and smaller, and on several occasions William was the only one to show up^, but we kept it up for quite a while before life matters intervened.
apparently. I once took one of those online personality tests, mostly for a lark, and this is the response I got back:
O.K., not to worry -- it's probably just a gag. They probably respond with this to everybody who is self-absorbed enough to send away for a personality analysis...^^
But I have to say, at the same time I was just a tad weirded out, because it reminded me of this exchange I once had with an actual diagnosed sociopath, in which I was very positive on her emotional "condition", praising it highly and actually wishing I could be more like her.
Stairs for persons with very uneven legs, perhaps? But then, the design leaves out half the population of those who suffer from severe cases of Leg Length Discrepancy. On top of that, the very same persons who found climbing these steps easy would find it extremely unnerving to descend, and vice versa.
I remember back when I was a child every now and then my father would set out early in the morning with his air rifle to go bird shooting in the hills and return in the late afternoon with tiny birds hanging from his belt. It was up to mom and the housekeeper to pluck them, pick out the birdshot and roast them whole, heads and all, for dinner.
I thought they were gross and refused to touch them back then, but now, I think maybe I can. After all, they are supposed to be very tasty! Recently I actually suggested a lunch trip to this restaurant in Jongno -- one of the very few remaining establishments in Seoul that still serve roasted whole sparrows -- to a friend, and he turned down the offer, as he thought they were gross. And since I'd rather not go just by myself, the fate of the plan is currently in an uncertain place. But really, if France's former President Mitterand could bend the rules just for himself out of the whole entire La République, to dine on illegal ortolans (tiny birds that are just like sparrows, but classier for some reason) for the last feast of his life, I think I can chow down on a plate of these birds, Korea's everyman-version of the hoity-toity French buntings.
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They say that when dining on ortolans it's tradition to cover one's head with a napkin, to trap the delicious smell of the meat. But I know the real reason -- it's to hide one's greed for the dish from God's sight. Wonder if M. Mitterand covered his head?
As if mere headlessness weren't scary enough, he was posing dramatically behind those "beheading" cables.
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Makes me think of old TV fantasy/SF programs like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.
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makes me tired. As I've said before, "Step out the front door in Seoul, and you're either standing on a hillside or looking at one". It is known that 70 percent of the Korean peninsula consists of mountainous terrain, but sometimes it also feels like 70 percent of the city of Seoul is mountains as well.
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Select related posts: "Feets, Don't Fail Me Now"
To turn it into a proper "silhouette", I inverted the black and white
Reminded me of this stuffed cat I picked up on one of my prior trips to Seoul
