DEAR DDD READER.

     More and more I am reading about how  Las Vegas  is becoming everything that America is becoming. Having not been there and preferring to go to Thailand for any kind of  holiday whack; I’m not sure what that means. Luckily I’ve come across Hunter S. Thompson’s  FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS.  It was published in 1971; certainly at a very different time than what America must be by now. For those who’ve not read it: it’s basically a psychedelic trip of  two incroguents truly living outside anyone’s womb while chasing, barking and tracking down the American dream.  A lean as a chewed pencil writer and a 300 pound Samoan lawyer drive around in a Chevy convertible called, ‘The Great Red Shark’, which is loaded up with the full catalogue of consciousness changing drugs of the time.

     Yeah this is an America where no one worries about the price of gas, there are no ‘no smoking’ signs, anything can go down in a hotel room, and any one who looks or acts different gets plenty of  spotlight while drinking beer. Sooner or later the drugs are spent and everyone in Vegas starts looking like a  reptile and to a certain degree of this reader’s consciousness: it seems more like living in Korea now than to any America I’ll ever know.  Vegas then and Korea now   both a glorious scene. 

    I’m reading ‘Fear and Loathing’ at the 2^nd annual World Cyber Games here in Daejeon, South Korea. The kaleidoscopes happening on the giant Cybergame screens cannot keep my attention; so I walk down in front of  the Plexiglassed ‘game wombs’ where the players, competitors or all that they are, are getting it on to notice that their eyes don’t blink! Nothing. Isn’t it  true that the average human’s eyes blink 20-30 times a minute? I get closer to the womb to see what their finger nails look like. Maybe they are reptiles! I can’t tell; just before I’m close enough big Korean dudes in cheap black suits and shoes with exaggerated toe tips stop me and slither me off to the side and stand real erect. Quickly learn. I know these are serious times with ideas of invasion and terror haunting anyone who gives a damn, and when it comes to standing outside of game wombs and searching to see if the killers of a thousand men have finger nails or some kind of magic talons, well it’s  just not something that can be allowed.

   So out into the lobby. The organizers of the WCG are keeping pre-Vegas looking western towns in more Plexiglas wombs where the eyes of the cowboys and Indians are squinted outward  into a blank stare. Some of their eyes are blinking and this makes sense; as they don’t have to stare into the death by proxy screens like the pro-gamers do. It is about time for a smoke. The Korean cigarettes are a dollar-ten a pack  ‘THIS’,…  I wonder how many packs of  ‘THIS’ would be the same price I paid for the press of ‘Lotus Laughter’ broken up with bits of cinnamon and pumpkin that I had for breakfast at ‘sangsoo’s herb’ restaurant before taking the train down  from Seoul early A.M. 

     Anyway the  breakfast is spreading, and in  these Cyber Games and Cyber Times reality is divided into two categories. Yeah, the living and the dead, the married and the unmarried but more to the point , it’s the synthetic or the natural. The horizontal or the vertical. It’s the effect. Either speedy and kinetic like the neuron puppetry on the pro-gamer’s hand, or slow and discursive like the look on the cowboy’s and Indian’s faces in charge of peace pipes and cigars. By now you know which one I’ve chosen.

     Anyway the three reptiles with pointed shoes are grunting behind me and it sounds like their Adam’s apples are trying to get out of their throat.  No… that is the way they look reflecting and bobbing off the Plexiglas womb. The song  now  playing in the lobby of the Material Pavilion goes, ‘I better walk before they make me run’. No… that is the song playing in my head. At the door to the Magic Castle Game Area, ‘Volunteers’ speak automata English,

     --“Nice to meet you.” “Have a good time.”  Damn,  they are chubby girls by Korean standards and man if they only knew what kind of time I am starting to have. I heard one of them say to me “Don’t laugh at my big flesh ‘cause I am gang girl.”

Turning to her then toward  the suited reptiles. I asked the volunteers to ask the reptiles, “Where did you all get your shoes?” Quickly learn, if at odds with a reptile say something intriguing about their appearance. It always softens their features and their reaction time.

     Out around Earthscape Pavilion and down through the valley with all the technology promotion nests lives the absolute vertical reptile dancing in all its shiny Armour. The Korean sky girl, a.k.a. ‘promotion angel’. Over the knee white leather boots. Black hair permed straight down over a ghost’s face. They dance for the public’s attention and the success, or least not another immediate failure, of another get rich Korean brain fart.  Watch them long enough and realize that you could piss, vomit,  jerk off, recite Shakespeare, propose marriage, give up the ghost in front of these animated chalk sticks and it wouldn’t break their techno-struts. If ever stimulated by anything other than dancing like an algorithm  for a bowl of plain rice, all they can do is put up their hands over their mouth or ears or eyes: speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil. Learn quickly that this is the true give-it-away moment of a reptile turned ‘promotion angel’  in Korea and maybe even one for a star struck flashy show girl in Vegas too.

     Changing gears to get to the press room to meet the editor of the mags I’m covering this silly-ass event for;  I feel like maybe I have to defecate, but I’m starting to get numb so I can’t be sure. It doesn’t matter now; inside all the toilet stalls are only incubators where you have to squat down lay your eggs then an underground river comes up and washes them away.

           Suddenly it’s the characters of  the “Half-Life: Counter-Strike” game coming out of a tent to claim me. Giant lizards in black camouflage are scrambling everywhere swirling automatic weapons  into the sky at things only they can see.  Small Children are jumping up and down in joy and in step with the fire of guns, 

     “Stop it. Stop it. Don’t you know what’s going down? It’s a raid! It’s a raid!” 

They’re  not listening to me and somehow I manage to move past the theater of virtual terrorism and into the real world of the Press Room.

     He’s here; the editor of the only English/Korean magazine that matters is already in the press room looking like a lone wolf and pausing over the middle table filled with Chinese journalists and their notebook computers. I think I am hearing phrases like, ‘techno stupor’ and ‘squid kid’, and that means he’s opened the first bottle of Bak-Se-Ju bulging from the  Daejeon Government attaché case. Finally he sits down next to me like he guesses I was here the whole time, but…

     “You’ve gotten here just in time to witness the wasting of blood and thunder. The Chinese over there just keep dressing up little avatars on their screens. You know pink boots blue eyes… blue boots pink eyes. They don’t speak English and they’re not shy about it but proud about it. I even tried throwing a few scratch off lottery cards around the table but they don’t blink just keep staring and smiling.”

     I had to say that that numbfounded stare was going on inside all the game arenas too, but he’s talking faster than my muscles can move, “You know how I advise all male English teachers, at least if they are Americans and don’t look like the back of a bus, to drink blood and take Korean sex for English lessons?  Well ,… (he turns the desk top monitor towards me) read this email  and let me know if you think it will work out…

                         Red Rose you black heart. I thought we had a deal. A deal is a deal where I come from.  Instead of the phone accessory of a lavender flower that you want; I have gotten for you instead a baby’s pacifier for you to suck on while you are hearing the voices of your  ancestors  on  your handiphone as you talk dirty with me.  And I want you to know that if you  think your son is  going   to be safe   because he is staying and learning English in the  Connecticut suburb that Nicolas Gage grew up in, well I’ve got news for you… first of all   your son is a  ballonhead who only cares about playing computer games. The only English  he wants to  know, is the only English he already knows:  “Game Over”. The best thing that could happen to your “Squid Kid”, is that some  derelict neighbors of your son’s “HOST FAMILY”, take him into the city and drop him off in some pansy alley where when he makes free talking about eating spicy and pickled cabbage, the transvestites (look it up)  will take that as a green light to do something funky to him! Anyways, I’ll see you in ‘churchee’ on Sunday .I’m ready  when you are Sincerely Spoken S .

                                                                                          To be continued at some eventuality.                                                                                      

                                                                                                    s.l.s.

                                                                                               The writer is Editor and 

                                                                                               Founder of  ‘DDD’, Life in 

                                                                                               Korea’.  He teaches inside a 

                                                                                               boy’s reformatory and can be 

                                                                                               contacted at:    

                                                                                               [email protected]