Inebriated Times At Hoboken High

So Hoboken, well what can you say about Hoboken?  It’s a funny place.  I’d always heard of Hoboken, one of the many ‘burbs of the late, great New York City, but the thought of it actually being a place, with people, stores and bars; well that just eluded me.  A few years ago, a very good friend from college moved there and so began my sporadic, yet always fulfilling, relationship with the little big city across the Hudson River.  Now, I don’t know much about the place, I mean as an autonomous space where people live and work, where they buy groceries, the DMV, the location of a post office, all that civic stuff.  But I do know how they play!

Ah, the good times at the cool names: the Yard, Hobson’s, Texas Arizona, Lou and Jays (my personal nickname for the place).  All bars, all cheap (compared to the inflated chaos that has overtaken all the drinking spots in the city) and all with their own sort of characters, flies, locals and dirty deeds behind the bar, in the bathrooms, down in the basement and naturally, after they close and lock the doors.  Instances of entertainment involving the “juice” like these are nothing new to me, really.  After all, I did spend my most insightful years of life learning how to hold down the sauce in Chapel Hill, NC (somewhat of a notorious drinking college town), so I’ve been there, done that.

Only, Hoboken’s style is one that I always gaze upon in admiration.  Doing things I know I shouldn’t do has become my mission in this life and of course that damn place didn’t help me at all.  With that said, I should recall the 2007 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, Round 4 (I think), where my fabled Tar Heels took on the Georgetown Hoyas, marking the 25th year anniversary of the 1982 NCAA National Championship game played between the two.  That single match, probably the most notable in contemporary college basketball history, vaulted my Tar Heels to the front of the line as one of the teams you let it ride on and put a stink in the taste of Georgetown that, well, they'd wanted to get rid ever since!

Hangin’ out at Hobson’s, on a Sunday afternoon, watching the game with my Carolina buddy and a new found friend, we watched as those damn Hoyas let us lead the whole game and smacked us down in the last five minutes like cheap whores trying to short change a pimp!  Now, part of me knew I should have just swallowed my pride and accepted the L, got my mess together, crossed the street and took that damn PATH train home, but this was Hoboken!  That night we was drankin’!  I don’t mean like getting a strong buzz and having a few laughs at the expense of some innocent bystander who’d just spilled his drink on his way over-priced Armani button-down.  I mean, I probably would have attempted to drink a light bulb if I came in a transferable liquid form (alcoholics, lushes, winos and all sorts of hard drinkers know what I’m talking about).

At one point in the evening, after what was to be our first round of bar hopping, I weighed the depth of my inebriation and any and all possibilities of making it to work the next day.  The scales broke!  Those two girls and I literally drank a hole in the liquor supply of northern New Jersey for the next week.  Common place for a young man in his prime on a Sunday night, says anyone who has ever frequented or even lived in the birthplace of Frank Sinatra and baseball.

But, I digress.  What is it about Hoboken that I am hopelessly in love with?  It could be that this quaint, semi-suburban town of commuters and locals has the highest number of bars, and/or establishments committed to the disbursement of alcoholic beverages, in one square mile, than any other place in the US?  Could it be that everyone I know who lives here is over 25 years old and has learned how to get their shit together after doing shots of Jack Daniels and snorting elicit substances off some putrid, dirty bar until 3 am, to somehow eke out a full day’s work or at least phone in at a decent hour to inform “the man” that they were sick? Perhaps it’s the abundance of “recreational materials” that keep people busy in the wee hours of the night that, in the manner of the fabled mafioso said to have lived in this bastion of “Jersey-style” decadence, make you an offer you can’t refuse?  Yes, no and maybe?

Of all these main attractions for big kids, ages 21 and up, the most profound was the drama that swelled and ebbed like a tidal wave, on a nightly occurrence in this town, that kept me paying the extra $3.00 train fare to get the hell away from the passé art scene of Soho, over-hyped, over-priced and tired ass clubs in Chelsea and the desperately fading underground music scene of the Village to flock to the “Land of Midwestern Yuppies” and the premature attendants of AA meetings.  The drama that went down was monumental!

The ridiculousness of Ridgemont High was way too under-aged and the controversies at “Melrose Place” were marked up, over-priced nothings involving silly jackasses way too into themselves. Hoboken is where things you could only experience in real life (or maybe would watch in some Art House flick full of heroin addicts that takes place in the East Village during the late ’80s) go down.  For fear of exposing players in the many games of sex, drugs and of course Rock ‘n Roll inherent of underground life in Hoboken, I leave the explicit details of my memories and stories up to your imagination (and if you yourself happen to remember some rather 'vulnerable' occurrences that I might know of that went down there, don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone).

To assist you in setting up an itinerary for your own personal, mental tour of Hobo city, I ask you to imagine these “scenarios” (in no necessary or cognitive order): doing something naughty in a bathroom stall with a broken door and about an inch of piss on the floor while trying to pee yourself and attempting to fold a suspicious looking dollar bill to safely hide away in your pocket, jacket or purse, because someone is banging on the door, screaming “I gotta fuckin’ pee!”; sitting at a bar, drinking a pint of Sierra Nevada, watching over-aged frat boys do tequila shots by snorting the salt, taking the shot, then mashing the lime into theirs eyes, then looking at you like you got a problem because you have the look of “Damn, I’m fucked up, but not that fucked up” in your eyes;  waking up on a friend’s couch on a Monday morning and realizing that phone call you made to your boss was just a dream and running to the bathroom to drop to your knees and puke a gastric cocktail candy apple red in color, fearing it blood but then realizing that you’d eaten about 4 slimy and rotten chili peppers at some restaurant bar after eating an undercooked burger, while drinking the biggest damn mug of beer you’d ever seen, all the while wondering what time you should say goodbye and catch the train to go home and sleep it off; walking into a bar, already having drank too much and a guy coming by in a flash and punching some other, totally random guy in the fucking face for absolutely no reason, knocking him unconscious and showering blood all over the floor, then being swarmed by 4 very attractive women (all claiming to be EMT) to help mop up the blood gushing out of the poor saps head, all the while you staring and continuing to sip your beer before considering, “Hey, you want to get out of this mess and go to Louise & Jerry’s before last call?”

Oh yeah, most important, in your little trip to Hoboken in your mind, remember that if you go outside to have a cigarette after last call (because the shitheads in New York City have convinced everyone that smoking indoors is a sin and so you can’t smoke in bars in New Jersey anymore either), you’ve just fucked up and it’s time to call it a night, because they are not going to let you back in and you can’t buy beer anywhere!  Of course, if you’re with someone from Hoboken in your dream, it’s okay; they’ve got lots a beer at their place for the late night and probably a little present to give you when you get home.

- Hoboken, New Jersey (Spring, 2007)

Whoa! It's Been Too Long!

Wow!  Guess it has been a while since November 2012.  No exact words to express just how much has happened since then!  Started graduated studies (again), slacked off and kinda forgot about it, did a manual labor job for a few months at Sears (of all places!), moved to China!  Brawled with educational administration idiots in China, left China for two months, came back to China and moved to a village where I'm now living happily ever after!  A lot really can happen in two years!  Luckily, I tend to recall random life events all out of chronological order, so won't affect what's to be told in the end all that much.

Guess biggest highlight during these past two years is that I have realized that I really can affect change and make anything possible! (the fact that I'm writing this today two years after some heavy medical woes in China can attest to that!)  Figure over this holiday (Western) season, I'll have lots of free time to catch up on all the highs and lows of the past 24 months, as well as recall some long lost moments of life's past, just to make it interesting.

It's been too long, but that's okay!  Writing about the past five years in the matter of about six months, with two year gaps in it all seems to be my forte... and no reason going and tryin' to be all progressive and rockin' the boat by changing things, right?

It's All English To Me

A few weeks after the St. Patty's Day incident... or what we might be ironically forced to now refer to as my own very recent and personal ‘March Madness’ (ask me about one the scars by my left eye!), things have been pretty chilled for me the past few weeks here in the ‘Land of Morning Madness’! NCAA basketball ended all of my early April activities and both of my universities’ basketball teams did okay, but didn’t quite finish number one (but you can’t always win! Yeah right!).  So I’ve had pretty much nothing to excite me or to look forward to lately. And as we all know, when I am lacking drama, I tend to go out and make some!

Any who, with the advent of the annual dust storms from China clogging my lungs and making heavy drinking almost a distant dream, I’ve been confined to either home or the gym (of all places), waiting for something interesting to come along. No dice.  But, I’ve been trying to make my work more exciting; yes teaching elementary school students the mystical and mind-numbing ways of the English language!

 

The Science pond freezes over, so we cut class and go play!

 I want to tell you a bit about my students. I know, it is still a shocker for many people to imagine someone of my rebellious nature to be in charge and the sole protector of thirty innocent souls, even if only for forty minutes each day, but I manage.

I teach at a pretty well-established elementary school (with a reputation spanning over 100 years), located at the original center of ancient Seoul, in Jongno-gu (district). This place is a typical elementary school, first to sixth grades, roughly averaging thirty students per class. I teach English as a foreign language, not Language Arts!  We do English, just like mostly everyone reading this did French, Spanish, Italian, German or Latin (even though it’s not even a ‘language’ anymore, in my opinion).  Whatever twisted language you chose to ‘study’ in order to meet graduation requirements and get the hell out of high school!  The constant study of how to make English grammar or rules of speech that tend to have more exceptions than constants make life very exciting for me, on occasion!

Hyoje Elementary School, Field Day 2005 (Awesome!)

Like I said, life has been pretty mundane recently and I tend to look to my students for enjoyment. A point to be made about them and the educational system here is that Sesame Street never fully grasped hold of Korean society, probably why a “Sesame Street Korea” goes unnoticed (if it ever existed to begin with!).   

There is no way you could put some of my ‘characters’ (aka… students) on TV and expect anything to go according to script!  Not that they are malfunctioned or faulty, they just don’t roll like that! I could see it, Big Bird introducing the letter ‘F’ and my students screaming in response, “Big Bird, (explicative) you!”  Then, our tall, bright friend becoming noticeably annoyed and confused, saying “Don’t say that!” and my little future CEOs of Samsung or Hyundai Corporations ripping off strings of ‘f-words’ or the notorious ‘s-word’ to shame old-school Della Reese and half the comedians on Def Comedy Jam!

Or, what do you do as a cast member of Sesame Street, when a snot-nosed first grader walks up to you and starts wailing in some language yet to be discovered by linguists and when you don’t respond (because you have no Earthly clue as to what the little hell raiser is spitting out his mouth), he goes in for an up close and personal embrace to tell you ‘face to face’ so you can hear him ‘that much better’ and understand the archaic moans and groans ejaculating from his mouth.  How could I ever forget my on very special case where a first grader who was schedule to attend ‘Tory English Time’ the next semester and probably had no idea this ‘not yellow’ guy walking around her school was, asked me every day if I were Korean.  

Leading morning exercises at the Jung-Bu District Winter English Camp.

 After a couple of weeks she figured it out that I was not a son of Han, yet then proceeded to ask if I were Chinese.  A few more weeks passed and our little ritual exchange moved from Chinese to Japanese (it should be noted that this was all in Korea and although I had actually been going to my $400 a month Korean classes, she was only six years old; if I couldn’t figure here speaking out, then I really would have no happy of understanding any foreign languages!).  Finally, sometime near Christmas, she asked if I were American!  I was so happy that she’d finally figured it out that I went across the street to the candy store and got her a box of Ppeppero (a very stale, sickening cookie shaped like a thin stick… have to tell you all about Ppeppero Day, a teacher’s stomach’s worst nightmare!).  Guessing she got hip to the ways of global migration in the 21^st century or simply, finally, asked her class teacher or mommy or daddy where black people who taught English in Korea came from!

Us fourth grade hall teachers on the Winter Teachers' Retreat!

One of my all-time favorite ‘amuse yourself’ activities is assessing the fashion fads these children love to wear. I bet you never saw a kid on one of those shoddy 70′s reruns of Sesame Street, roll up on set wearing a t-shirt that said ‘Je suis un idiot.’ (‘I’m an idiot.’ for you people who chose Spanish), ‘Legalize: Smoke weed’, or ‘Wanna _____?’ (fill in the blank…. all accompanied by a generic smiling face).  And there is, of course, the granddaddy of them all, a sixth grader wearing a hoodie that defied all mental logic I could muster to try to understand what in the world the person who designed it was thinking: ‘D-Squared, Chip Chip Motherfucker’!

Hell no!  Bert would ‘make ddong in his panties’ (ddong = poo) if he saw a ten-year old child wearing this type of fashion terror anywhere near a classroom.  There are also the more vocal students, who cannot answer the simple question, “What is your name?” in English, yet have mastered the use of curses and swears to a point that makes me want to ask if they have an American cousin or ‘a friend of mama who looks like me’ living with them. One of these linguistic savants, after going to sit in his chair, completely missed the seat and hit the floor, exclaiming so loudly that almost every teacher on the fourth grade hall rushed to my classroom to ‘help’, yelping at the top of his lungs, “I pain in ass, I pain in ass!”  “Damn right you are…” I reply quietly to myself as I turn my head to hide my snickering.

The constant drama of my day gets so freaky and Twilight Zone-esque, that I often walk into my class, look at the day’s mission impossible on the faces of those little angels and always, without control, eke out a defeated “Shit!” Yet, none of this mental chaos draws my mind away from the wafting ‘sweetness’ of the smell of a garlic infused, traditional kimchi breakfast in the morning, of which I have grown to love, especially when I can smell it on my own breath (or the aroma drifting up from my pores)!

Now with that said, I guess I should get back to work, planning a lesson in an alien language that will only be understood by myself… and I already know how to conjugate ‘to be’; or, at least, I used to be able to! 

(If extraterrestrials do exist, NASA please broadcast this message for me: SEND TELEPATHY PLEASE, SEND TELEPATHY, ASAP!)

- Seoul, Korea (April 2006)

The Great Farce of American Thanksgiving

I really think I am starting to get a bit annoyed with Thanksgiving.  Mind you, I am thankful for many things and for the life that I have (although my expression of this thanks seemed to be lost with the family this year…. we do a ‘round robin’ of what you are thankful for;  I stated I was thankful for being able to still run a 5K under 30 minutes…. no one understand why that was important… guess being a stallion having had cancer and still performing as such amongst a family of mules doesn’t make sense to the mules… or they’re just jealous!).

But, I’m annoyed with Thanksgiving because people say they are thankful for many things, but they don’t really mean it.  I mean, like I said, I am thankful for my running abilities.  After over 72 sessions of mid -high dose chemo I should not be able to theoretically walk a mile without stress, let alone run 3.1 faster than most ‘healthy’ people, but I can!  People never acknowledge the things in life that they really need!  My family mostly said they were thankful for family, but not many of them take the time throughout the year to appreciate family.

By that, I mean, how many phone calls are made to 2nd cousins, or grand aunts just to say ‘hi’?  How many visits are made to relatives ‘too far to drive to’? My first bout of cancer in Korea I had one extreme phone call from an aunt (who reached me in a very non-English speaking Korean hospital) and a visit from my mother.  But how many people sucked up the phone charges to call and ask ‘how are you’? (another aunt did call, but after receiving a $50 + phone bill, I told her to stick to email!)

My main point is that Thanksgiving has become yet another phase of American life; celebrate the holiday because that’s what you’re supposed to do.  This year I went to my hometown feeling like absolute crap, having been so bed sick a couple of days earlier I couldn’t go see my youngest brother on a day trip.  Yet, I sucked it up to go do the holiday and see the majority of my family to show them that I was thankful for them.  Not to sit in a circle and say ‘I’m thankful for you’ (which I am, but saying I was thankful for my running was, what I thought was implied, as saying I’m thankful that after all that chemo my body is strong enough to do something superficial as run, which means it is also strong enough to make a way to be with family and that I am thankful for the physical ability to do what ever for them… guess nuance is another weak point with my lineage).

I don’t mean to offend anyone, but I do mean to challenge them to step up and reevaluate their understanding of Thanksgiving and why we all spend energy, money and time to convene in Fayetteville or Gastonia or Chesapeake once a year to do this ritual that has seemingly become so damn trivial.

Just once I want my family to speak, honestly and tell the world what they REALLY are thankful for, without fear of thinking someone will judge what they have to say;  “I’m thankful for my brand new car” (because my new car shows that I am healthy and strong and successful in my career and am making a future for my family) or “I’m thankful for my college scholarship” (because the scholarship I have now means my mother & father will be able to save more money for a fruitful & relaxing retirement and we will all have much more meaningful years together as a family in the future).

Spare me the shallow crap show… almost 10 years of chemo treatments and recurring worries make me a little impatient for Thanksgiving show…

Lord, Abide With Me

The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
he refreshes my soul.

He guides me along the right paths for his name's sake.

Even though I walk through the valley in the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me,
your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies,
You anoint my heal with oil,
my cup overflows.

Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.

- Psalms 23

Man On Fire

Have you ever felt that you were on fire on a crowded street, yelling and screaming for someone to help put it out, yet no one noticed?  No one looks in your direction; no one offers water, a blanket to put out the flames, not even a spit to help your suffering.  No matter how much you yell, no matter how high the flames rise, no one notices and you just want the pain of burning to go away, yet are too set on living to lie down and sleep, to resilient to let the fire burn out your will to keep going.  Perhaps, you get a few drops of rain to put out some of the raging inferno engulfing your soon to be corpse, making the entire experience a little bit more bearable, but then the clouds dissipate, the sun soon begins to shine and your burning, unrelenting pain continues.  You plead with those who pass you by to help, to do anything, yet they continue to just walk on by.  You beg God for a hurricane, even a fleeting yet torrential downpour to put out the flames and let you go on living, go on going where ever you were going before the fire started.  But nothing happens.  You burn and you cry and you hope for some miracle to release you, not wanting to lose consciousness and slip into an eternal abyss, but just for the fire to go away.  Yet it burns.  You scream.  People ignore you and walk on by.  You exist only as a man on fire; at least in your own mind... because you’re burning and your pain doesn't exist to the other people on the street.  So, you continue to burn, continue to pray for rain and continue to hope that all will be better soon.  You ever felt like that?

No, I Am Not A Machine!

I rarely acknowledge the comments or criticisms of anyone, let alone those of my relatives.  However, once there was a comment made about my life and 'professional achievements' that really rubbed me the wrong way!  A male relative, in speaking of the dangers of following an academic major in college that might not result in a job grossing thousands of dollars every year, related to one of his children that they should avoid certain scholarly areas of study, for fear of ending up like me.  He told that child that if they followed their heart and academic attractions for study, and supposed job/career choice, they would end up hanging around like me, working a menial part-time job, with no hope or possibility of professional or even personal growth or success in the future.

I found this assessment of my life quite hilarious because I had just only completed high-dose chemotherapy (for the second time) and undergone a bone marrow transplant just 14 months before hand and was, at the time, receiving interferon treatments for a related condition.  According to most of the doctors and medical professionals treating me, I was leading an amazingly successful life, in spite of my condition.  Also, I always found it quite pleasing that many people I met were impressed by the fact that I'd undergone cancer treatment in a foreign country, alone, while working and finding remarkable success as a teacher in a foreign country and all the while completing several academic and professional training courses and obtained a few professional and amateur distinctions in linguistic abilities and knowledge in three foreign languages.

But, I wasn't living up the status quo of those who couldn't obtain an eighth of what I already had by the time I was 28 because I didn't have a job with a 401K plan and was only limited to 10 annually cumulative days of vacation time (yet another criticism made by yet another relative, who after me completing a successful semester teaching on the post-graduate level at a college in one of the many places the average American couldn't imagine visiting, let alone working and living in, had returned home for a 4-week vacation).

So, let those detractors detract and label me as a failure and the ever-present example of so many things not to be when their children grow up.  I like the fact that I could run 5K a few weeks after completing high-dose chemotherapy when they have never even come close to finishing a K.  Thanks for all the inspirational hate, y'all!

"Kubla Khan" (Samuel T. Coleridge)

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

- "Kubla Khan" by Samuel T. Coleridge... by far the greatest piece of poetry ever written!  Somehow it fits my experiences across Arabia and East Asia to a rather mysterious point.