illllllllllllli:

My last full day alive, the ninth of december, I am staggered hung-over. We had gone to the country, to this beautiful old pension made with yellow-clay and logs, half-hanok, half-log cabin, where they had all old garbage around to make it feel rustic and it did, even if the things were old rotary dial telephones left outside in the yard, it felt like in the country, in the past, they must have done that, put their rotary phones out in the yard.

We didn’t stay there, we went into town, into Gangneung, and to the beach, where we looked over the east sea, to the horizon, which the air was refracting and making jagged. The sun began to set and we started carousing in different size bars; the first was a self-serve bar with coolers of small bottled foreign beer, to indulge your beer pretension, to satisfy your expertise, the second was small and rickety, it was an old sagging american-style house, with a tiny door and liquor, and it had a club-ass name, bumpin? the third bar looked like it was stolen out of a grand hotel in the mountains of colorado and the barman had long hair and a leather cowboy hat and a woolen poncho.

Caroused, we shot soju with galbi and spent ourselves finally in a noraebang, nearly dead, we got separated and a taxi took us forever the wrong way out in the woods, and then back to the log-cabins. We fell on the floor at five something, the cracks where the wood and yellow soil weren’t flush sticking sunlight and darts of iced northern air on our tops, our backs burning, ondal and sleeping pads, but none of this is the point, it was my second-to-last night alive and the next day, the ninth of december, my last full day alive, we were all hung-over, staggered hung-over, and in the bus station, my “friends” (I use quotation marks to mean ‘so-called’ friends) can’t just eat a smoked egg and feel pitiful, they’ve got to go to lotteria, walking past a hamburger spot called winner’s, with checked tile up to the chest-line and a deli mirror and chairs like mcdonalds used to have, chipped spun-plastic shells, only they don’t swivel, to lotteria, while winner’s was empty and lonesome, lotteria, it’s too full, do I hope to not eat here? Not too-full enough, they find a place and I am too tired to quibble, who am I to demand anything, it’s only my last goddamn day alive, only I don’t want to milk my omen for anything but my own pleasure, not make people feel bad about it, only let them make jokes, I framed it as an omen! Shouldn’t that be enough to not hurt anybody, they don’t have to think about it, let me circulate in the thought of pure fate, fatalism. It embarrasses me terribly when someone says something kind about me as a result, I feel like (am) such an asshole for doing this to my mother I haven’t seen in two years, my brother, my sisters I haven’t seen for two years, my partner, my pa, people I promised I’d meet (again) someday, I just wanted to play with it, but I’m starting to see the joke of it works the other direction, nobody can get mad at me for making them feel sad, how could they believe it, it’s an omen— 

In line, they order quickly, they know what food is here, before I’m ready I am asked, I can’t remember saying anything but surely it was my unpleasant, obsessive need to eat something I haven’t eaten before, I only noticed when they gave me the food, it was called an european frico burger. I thought it was a frisco burger for a while, but what would a european frisco burger be, it was frico, a frico, some deep-fried cheese, do italians do that? but surely not like this, fried sweet cheese, I mistook it for sweet-potato, that sweet, black olives and a yellow pepper and a soup of gross paste and a hamburger, I ate some of it, gross, gross, fucking gross. My partner reminded me of a tantrum I once threw, “why do you people think food has to taste good, what spoiled fucking shits, food is food, if you fuck up your dinner, eat your dinner and tomorrow hope you don’t fuck it up again, but how dare you demand that your food taste good”, I’m sure I attributed it to individualism somehow, but in the lotteria, I feel it would be ideologically noncompliant for me to throw this gross fucking food away, try better to not have ideologies is a good habit, a good practice, have practices not ideologies, but who is not too weary, after that kind of night, to not rely on your abstract rules for living? Each bite makes me more tired and not nauseous but wears me out, the others, my friends (nothing so-called about them, only a passing bitterness and only played at, I haven’t been really bitter in ages, only better and better in playing at it) tell me the lesson is to always order the normal burger but I don’t want to go to lotteria ever again so that lesson is useless for me. I am the lesson for them, I harden what they already know into fact, how could they forget after the frico european burger with fried cheese and black olives, gross, eat the food, time for the bus, we pass winner’s and there, a sense of entitlement, because I’m going to die, even if I’m not, the entitlement exists now, and I buy a hamburger and some fries and think of taking a picture of the spun-plastic chairs and I try to swivel them, this is when I find out they don’t, and think of the small things from america that I still miss, like these kind of chairs and I eat the hamburger and the french fries on the bus, and then sleep the hours on the bus, where the bus driver has turned the heat up to its highest setting, already dried out and over-smoked, still there’s no way to stay conscious, the afternoon of my last full day alive.