Fist Bumping Giants

Beautiful manly camaraderie on display.

Speaking Of Knives

A few days ago I suddenly felt an itch in my left forefinger.  I absently scratched it, then realized there was a small cut, looking as if it had been made by a knife or razor.

I had no idea of how it came to be, though.  Actually, this sort of thing happens to me fairly often;  I may be a physical coward who tries to avoid taking risks unnecessarily, but it so happens I'm also a klutz, and I'm always bumping into things and knocking things over, so minor casual damage is not unexpected.  Here is a photo of a somewhat more serious-looking cut in the very same place(weird!), from a few years ago;  it looks rather gruesome, and you would be forgiven for thinking I would remember an incident like that -- but no, I have no memory at all of that cut, either.

Kind of odd, in light of the fact that I still well remember the incident from my fifth or sixth year, when someone spilled hot porridge over my foot, tried to wipe it off, and peeled the scalded skin off my foot!  I ended up being carried off to the nearby hospital for treatment.

 

Knife

I won't come out and say it's my favorite knife, because I don't want my other knives to feel jealous -- blades have spirits -- so I'll just say it's my EDC (everyday carry) knife.  It's not fancy or anything, certainly not expensive;  I just really like the sleek streamlined blade and the curvy-not curvy handle.

Once, while I was on a subway train, the woman sitting next to me started to open a package but was struggling a bit with a stubborn knot.  I clicked open the knife and wordlessly offered it to her;  good thing I remembered to hand it to her handle first;  she and her companion were clearly a little shocked at first, judging by their reaction.  I guess it really was startling;  I should have offered her the use of my EDC scissors instead.

I have to mention my third EDC item:  this magnifying glass, which I've had since fourth grade.

I wouldn't want it feeling left out and jealous.

Pregnant Cloud

Carrying a precious babe in her "belly"

Another "Snap To Grid"

And this time, it's literal.

Joy To The World

I'm not Christian, but still...

 

Ginkgo Nuts In Myeongdong

I checked out the tourist-friendly shopping district the other day

not to shop, but to patronize a street food vendor I remembered from the past who sold roast ginkgo nuts.

I don't know about the mobile vendors that sell various small toys and tchotchkes and such

but the food vendors all start arriving at around 3:30 PM to start setting up (maybe it's to do with district bylaws or some such), and by 4 PM they are ready to receive customers.

I bought a small bag of hot, freshly roasted ginkgo nuts, and they were as good as I remembered, with a texture resembling firm gelatin and an "aristocratically restrained" (I don't know how else to put it), slightly bitter taste.

I once read in an old tome that these nuts are actually mildly poisonous and one really should not eat more than ten at a time;  but look at the contents of this bag -- there are dozens of them.

Presumably it's one bag, one customer.  Surely one is not expected to share them with three or four friends.

The Sun Going Nova

That won't happen for a very long time (hopefully), but the SF fan in me can't help but imagine how that might look to ground-dwellers on Earth.

"Snap To Grid"

One more example of spontaneous order.

When you've got OCD you tend to notice these things.

Day In Night / Night In Day II

 

Acrobatic Moon

In A Different Timeline, Maybe

Many years ago, not long after graduate school, I once went out with this girl -- let's call her Lisa -- whom I got to know through a show I had at the Simard & Halm Gallery on Melrose Avenue (it's long gone now).

She was the daughter of a well-to-do German lady who was supposedly of noble(!) heritage (they still have those in Europe, at least nominally).  The mother had asked the curators for an interview with the artist, probably expecting the artist to be a mature man of Christian/European extraction, based on the subject matter and style of some of the paintings in the show, and the fact that my last name, Suhr, looks German.  So if that were the case, mother and daughter must have been surprised to see a young Asian guy show up, but maybe they were all the more intrigued by the unexpectedness of it, and anyway they were super nice to me;  and as things worked out, the daughter was about my age and single, so we ended up going out.

We started out with a movie date.  And although I can't recall what our original selection was at the time, for some reason we ended up going to see "Eddie Murphy Delirious" instead, a performance documentary of Eddie's stage routines.  Well, if you know anything about Eddie Murphy's standup, you know it's gonna be full of all sorts of expletives casually thrown about, and forbidden lines crossed and recrossed, all in good humor.  Good luck^^

The movie had been released quite recently, but it had quickly developed something of a reputation for its riotous full-bore-ahead, anything-for-comedy style;  so poor elegant Lisa, you can fairly well imagine her shock...  To be sure, I myself hadn't expected anything quite so wild either, but still, I wasn't offended at all and anyway it was all very funny.  But afterward when we came out, all Lisa said was "That was not a movie" -- presumably meaning that she'd found it vulgar and offensive, not at all like the classy films she was used to, and she was not at all entertained by it.  I was maybe a tiny bit annoyed by her reaction to what I'd found simply hilarious, but anyway that certainly didn't keep me from "parking" on the way back to her house.  We talked a while, then we started "necking" (do people even still use that term any more? it was old-fashioned even back then) in the car -- until we were interrupted by a policeman who thought we were suspicious (this was in a ritzy area of L.A.).

Well, soon after that first date I had an opportunity to attend a "lecture and simultaneous magic show" given by this psychiatrist in his Bel-Air home;  it seems he was a well-known personality in the local L.A. chapter of Mensa.  Imagine my surprise when I saw Lisa and her mom there -- turned out, Lisa was a Mensan (as was I).  Long story short, I was already having second thoughts about Lisa, and I had gone to the meeting with this other girl from my job who I thought I might have better luck with (not to mention more in common with).  Her name was Melanie.., or maybe it was Melody...  Anyway, so I sat us to the front of Lisa and mom, and all throughout the psychiatrist/magician's presentation made a show of being real close with Mel.  And it worked.  Lisa dropped me forthwith, and I was free.  

At the time I felt pretty proud of myself, thinking I'd gotten away with something really cool, having manipulated Lisa into "voluntarily" doing something I wanted her to do, even as she thought it was what she wanted to do -- you might even say it was a bit like a plot device from some convoluted K-drama romcom (and this long before anyone had ever heard of K-dramas);  but that was then, and now I'm feeling pretty s̶h̶i̶t̶t̶y̶ guilty about it.  It reminds me of the proud Monkey King, Son O-gong (Ch. Sun Wukong), the central character from the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, who flew on a cloud to the edge of the world and back, and thought he'd won a bet with the Buddha, only to realize he'd only been spinning around in the palm of the Buddha's hand.

But still, I can't help it -- now and then I catch myself imagining the seismic shift the course my life might have undergone, if I'd managed to successfully court Lisa and married into German nobility!

To be honest, I'd very probably be long since divorced, due to "irreconcilable personal differences".  It's just obvious.  But would I then have been able to keep whatever aristocratic title I might have acquired from the marriage?  Probably not.

EDIT:  O.K., I'd forgotten about this other incident wherein I was also an underhanded egotistic scheming rat jerk.  But at least that time, nobody got hurt.

Winter Rain

Happy hippo catching the rain in his maw

Paper airplane that hit a tree and crashed

A sidewalk comet that looks like a cyclopean ghost

Pedestrians caught short

And just as the weather forecast predicted, later in the afternoon the rain turned into sleet.

A Few More Waking Dreams

Then Appeared In The Evening Sky

a great flaming sword (minus the angel).

Errant Wiener

If the above title made you think of Guillaume Apollinaire's The Amorous Exploits of a Young Rakehell, you're forgiven^

 

Related posts:  errant

Contrast

Crawling through the back lanes and alleyways of Seoul in search of shots, I sometimes come across rare scenes.  The stark contrast between the despairing girl and the happy smiling model in the sign is indeed striking, even cruelly so.

She reminded me of this other girl I photograhed last year.

And no, I didn't ask that girl what was the matter, either.

Beauty

 

Day In Night / Night In Day

An impactful shot of the lowering sun.

Or the rising full moon.  I've forgotten which.

Mermaid Dream

Early this morning I had a dream about a mermaid who longed to tread land under her feet and experience the world of humans.  So she managed somehow (the details are forgotten, if indeed there were any) to acquire the means to transform her tail to legs (painlessly), went ashore, met a man she loved, and settled down.

It was all on borrowed time, however, as there was a time limit on the magic that turned the mermaid's tail to legs.  The date of her forced return to the sea was known to the man from the start -- she had not hidden anything from him -- and when the day came he threw a grand farewell party for her by the edge of the sea.  Everyone had too much to drink and fell into a stupor;  the mermaid-woman was the only one who remained alert, and at the appointed time she walked into the sea.  And here is the part I remember most vividly, as if I had been watching a movie instead of sleeping:  she waded in until she was waist-deep in the water, then she suddenly fell back, indicating that her legs had turned back into a tail;  she took one last poignant look at the sleeping man, then turned and swam away into her original home.

That "ending" was so cinematic that after I woke I actually wondered if I hadn't been remembering a movie rather than dreaming.  I remember her long wavy black hair, her round face, her serious expression, and the bitttersweet mood of the ending scene.  I actually did an online search to see if indeed there had been a movie with such a plot (despite the fact that I could not recall seeing such a movie) but came up empty.

All in all, the dream seems to have been an amalgam of the Hans Christian Andersen tale of "The Little Mermaid" and another, obscure but exceptionally haunting mermaid story I once read as a child in a collection of Korean short stories.  That book was either lost or left behind when I moved to the US, but even though I could only vaguely recall part of the actual plot I never forgot the impact the story had on me -- at one time, many years later, I went looking for it in bookstores in L.A.'s Koreatown, but I never was able to find it again.

I also could not find an image online that illustrated something similar to that last scene, but then I found this shot I'd taken earlier this year, of a bicycle that aspired to fly like a bird, and thought it was a good visual analog of the mermaid's longing to walk on land.

Another Mirror In An Absurd Place

Untitled V

Just happened to notice this guy hiding in the shadows, looking scared of his downstairs neighbor.

A Rather Ominous-Seeming Staircase