Crossing the Spider Kingdom

In an attempt to be productive while feeling like the physical embodiment of laziness, I'm going to post a standalone story from my trip to Hong Kong in 2013. Yeah, I know it's Halloween, but screw y'all. Between the kids and the internet, I'm tired of Halloween. Bring on Thanksgiving (but not Christmas because, Jesus, it's not even November. Cool it out with that capitalist bull-shlonkey).

So, here's something from some time in early August of 2013. The exact date has long faded into the forgotten library of history.

              “Welcome to Lantau Island,” my taxi driver said. “Watch out for all the spiders!”

              Or, that’s what I like to imagine he said. A more accurate, equally speculative translation might be, “Due to your inadequate information and our strong language barrier, I have no idea where you’d like me to take you, so how about I drop you off right here?”

              And so I found myself, a twenty-eight year old American man, alone on the side of some rural Hong Kong road. It was definitely not where I planned to go, but with a little more leg movement I found what I guessed was Shek Mun Kap beyond some leering villagers hanging out in front of a store. I passed a modest working temple and ascended into the forest behind it, just as my vague reference book had told me.

              All around me, lush, tropical nature slowly encroached onto the narrow concrete trail. It was leading generally up, which was a positive sign. Occasionally a hiker would walk past—another positive sign. I passed a dilapidated Buddhist shrine where I stopped to attempt to decipher the shotgun blast of graffiti left by hikers in ages past. No dice. My Cantonese language skills had not improved since the taxi ride. 

              As I pressed on, the grade increased and the mountain became more rugged. Am I going the right way? I wondered. Will I ever be heard from again? Naturally, I had only packed a single 500ml bottle of water, which I guzzled down in the first twenty minutes of my climb. Hong Kong is hot. And humid. A perfect recipe for dehydrated hiking. 

 After a while, I began stumbling upon creatures that could only be described as fantasy-sized. An earthworm carcass the size of my foot splayed out on the path, a plastic-coated, bony spider the size of my hand guarded its web above me. Am I hallucinating? I realized that I had not passed a hiker in some time.

              From seemingly out of nowhere, a smattering of buildings appeared. These captivating temples before me had surely been established by people who were like me: lost and delirious. They had given up their pilgrimage to live among the giant creatures of the forest. Now, their descendants survived through occasional sacrifices to these beasts. Was my destiny to be one of these sacrifices? Internalizing this possibility, I crept as quietly as I could through the inhabited area, watching the handful of monks I noticed carrying on with their lives and none-the-wiser of my existence. They strolled, they farmed, they sang, but they did not once look in my direction. Not even the resident dogs barked at me. Perhaps they were allowing me free passage. Perhaps they could not see the ghosts of hikers who had died in the forest and not yet known it.

              Still no water. I was awash in sweat as the forest beyond the temples enveloped me. If only I could drink my sweat for hydration! I thought as I wrung out my hair. Climbing further, I came upon another shrine. This one was historically old, as opposed to just dilapidated. It looked like a crematorium. Or a water tank. I hoped it was the latter, filled to the brim with pure, potable water. Again, no dice.

That shirt was once a much lighter blue.

              The foliage eventually relented, giving way to grasses and the looming conical Lantau Peak. For the first time in hours, I knew approximately where I was. There was a sign! And a trashcan! And people! I would not perish in the jungle. But my day was still far from over.

              The sun was directly overhead by the time my sweaty, smelly body half-stumbled into the courtyard of the great Tian Tan Buddha at Po Lin Monastery. I had made it, grizzled and course, to the place where pristine Disneyland tourists snapped selfies—and there were water vendors. I guzzled a whole bottle immediately, washing away the memory of my hardship in the woods. I bought two more, which I slowly sipped under the judging gaze of the 38 meter tall behemoth. “Who is this unwashed ruffian?” his expression seemed to say. 

"Just...just go away."

 Somehow I climbed the 268 steps and entered the altar on which the Buddha sat. It’s worth it, I reasoned. Herein lies some of the alleged cremated remains of the Gautama Buddha. I had little idea what that actually meant to the world or to Buddhism, but I circled around with the others in anticipation anyway. Seeing the charred remains of an ancient, god-like man is enough to call any day a success. When I reached the gift shop without seeing a single ash, I realized that the relic part of the altar was closed at this particular time.

              I wallowed over the monastery food that was included in the ticket price. It was surprisingly good for vegetarian fare, and I was famished. Every grain of rice and ounce of liquid brought to the table ended up in my belly that day. Only when my scarfing, snorting eating frenzy subsided and I noticed the array of empty dishes did I realize the time had come for me to move on. Once again I had embarrassed myself in public, judging by the looks of the other patrons. Or I was just an exotic white man. In all my years of living in Asia I never could tell.

              With a fresh water bottle in hand and two more in my bag, I ambled over to the nearby prayer monuments—upright wooden steles inscribed either with Buddhist prayer or warnings against entering the Spider Kingdom just beyond. Since my Cantonese had still not improved, I had no idea this place existed yet. I was in high spirits, and eager to begin the hike back down.

"Do not disturb the Spider King's slumber!"

              I saw a lone hiker emerge from a path next to the prayer monuments, and recalled from my vague guidebook that this was the trailhead I desired to take back down. A different hike from the one I took up. This one, I reasoned, could only be better than the first one. The guidebook explicitly promised a restaurant with good, exotic beers at the end. That would do much more for me than leering villagers in front of a store in Shek Mun Kap. I yearned for the unfamiliar.

              But only once the dark canopy of trees enveloped me like Red Riding Hood skipping through the forest to grandma’s house did I come to the realization that this path had not been traveled by another human in quite some time. That lone hiker must have only been a lone urinator returning to his Disneyland family. I was entering another world alone. Slowly, the trail diminished to a pencil-thin rod of dirt, surrounded by thick branches, thigh-high grass, and leafy trees. It was precarious at times, so my eyes followed the ground. Quite a ways in I stumbled, only to catch myself from falling. I paused to find my equilibrium and looked up for the first time in a while. Three inches from my face was the biggest, most knuckly-looking black spider I had ever seen. It was the size of my head. I could see the individual joints; the pointed ends of its long, spindly legs; the multi-hued, hairless body; its eyes. Oh god, its skull-hole eyes.

No banana for scale, but that thing's huge.

              I determined that most likely he was the gatekeeper, and his massive web that sprawled across the entirety of the path was the gate. “Who dares enter the Great Spider Kingdom?” he must have bellowed, inaudible to me. My response was driven by panic. I flung a stick in his direction and let it clear the path for me. For those animal rights enthusiasts, remember how large this thing was. (I can never forget!) It would be impossible for me to have killed it with a measly stick. I’m more surprised it didn’t catch it and throw it back at me. It would be back in business with a new web probably before I had finished my hike that day.

I grabbed a fresh branch and perpetually practiced my fencing thrusts as I continued on lest another web creature catch me off-guard. Through babbling streams, green brush, rock stairs, precarious switchbacks, steep drop-offs, wind-rustled leaves, squawking forests, and probably ticks, I encountered no less than a dozen additional spiders of only marginally smaller stature than the gatekeeper. Was he their king? I pondered. At first I attacked their webs, but soon I came to realize the fragility of these creatures and their innate right to life. As I continued to encounter them, I tried limboing under the higher webs, shimmying beside them, and stepping over the lower colonies. I discovered that they were not jittery. In fact, they hardly ever moved unprovoked. I did not need to disturb them to pass by. I could gaze upon them without the worry of my soul being sucked out through my face. I was becoming one with the spiders, an honorary citizen admiring their kingdom as a mindful tourist. It felt good to simply be there observing the nature happening in my midst.

I dallied longer than I could have, resting on rocks and feeling the breeze. I had found a place in Hong Kong where I did not see another human being for hours. I would not have guessed such a place existed before I’d visited. I wondered if any of those spiders had had an interaction with a human before. How did they get to be so huge? Did they eat the other humans they’d interacted with before? Maybe they saw some good in me. Enough to forgive my initial reaction when encountering their king. They spared me, just as those monks had.

Not to mention the views from the Spider Kingdom.

 

              My feet were killing me by the time I reached the village at the bottom of the mountain. I was greeted by wandering cows among the smattering of houses. As I stared into the very soul of the IPA I rewarded myself with, I found it funny that I felt more at peace among the spiders in their kingdom than at the tranquil temple on the way up.

After re-reading that story, I agree with you that it's a little Halloween-y with the Spiders and all. So booyah, it ain't so random after all. 

Wading Through the Sea of Beer Cans (Figuratively Speaking)

Instead of wallowing in self-despair, a sad skin sack full of sorrow on the couch hitting play on the next episode, I read an article that was inspiring and compelled me to a more productive route instead. So here I am, throwing some jumble of words into the deep, dark abyss that is the internet in the hope that it will make me feel just a slight tad better.

Let's backtrack a moment. Several weeks ago, I came to the realization while walking to work on the verge of tears for no apparent reason that I am depressed. This is not something that has ever befallen me before, but with my background in psychology I was able to identify some of the symptoms that accompany this affliction once I put my mind to it. Although I don't usually feel expressly sad, I am constantly tired, unproductive, unenthusiastic, turning to external stimuli for distraction or numbness, turning away from social interaction, eating like a garbage disposal, not exercising, and generally sluggish in my movements and decisions. All classic symptoms of depression.

I think there is a time that it's okay to wallow in it. Perhaps I'm only justifying my own previous actions, but as I struggle through the path toward recovery, I think a part of that path is wallowing. When you're ready, perhaps as you lay in a soft bed of Cheeto crumbs that was once a couch next to a sink full of now-sentient dishes surrounded by the abandoned delivery-box homes of long-forgotten monoliths of starch, carbs, and butter, flies and odors permeating the air, you begin to put the pieces together of your behavior, mentally logging them, sorting through what needs to be changed, and identifying where you can most easily cut out self-destructive patterns. You may get off the couch, wade through the sea of beer cans on the floor, and finally take a long, hard look in the mirror.

Hopefully you still recognize yourself. For me, this moment has come. I want out, even if the chemicals fluttering around my brain may not. So, serendipity sent an article to my Facebook news feed entitled "A therapist's guide to staying productive when you're depressed or heartbroken," which can be found here. One of the several things I took from the article is that a part of that long path forward is processing emotions, which comes to fruition in this instance through writing, through putting down on a backwoods web-page what's happening. 

I am still grieving from a lost relationship, with a very limited social outlet to help mitigate the damage. I feel stuck, partially imprisoned, incapable, and ineffectual. I have four months left in this country and I feel like that is an obstacle to recovery, to self-improvement, and that fact carries its own heavy baggage. I'm not just ending a relationship with a person I loved, I'm also ending a relationship with a country I loved (and sometimes hated), lived in, and got to know intimately for the past seven years. It's a lot to process, and perhaps it is only inevitable that my current feelings are so weighty without always being consciously so.

The future is highly uncertain after these next four months and there is no way to plan perfectly for that. I'll be relinquishing many of my worldly possessions, living out of a backpack for months, with nothing but myself being the constant from day to day. After that, I'll be "settling down" as the grown-ups call it. Trying to plant some firmer roots in a country that is so visibly and obviously toxic for itself and the world. What will that bring? With my unique experience, will I ever be able to relate to the people I surround myself with again? I feel like the average American is so far out of touch with the world and even the people around them. Am I doomed to be a loner for the rest of my days? All these worries swirl around me in addition to overcoming the grief of loss and loneliness. But it's good to get it out so that I can move forward and overcome these feelings one step at a time.

During the five years that this blog was inactive, I did some (entirely inadequate) writing about some of my travels. Something else productive that I'd like to do is digitize and sort of enshrine some of that writing that I did. It'll be a way to reminisce between more current topics. I'll include pictures as well, and maybe I'll get a wild hair up my ass and devote some time to documenting some of the undocumented memories before they are forgotten forever. In some instances (I'm thinking of Taiwan specifically, but there are others), my only souvenirs were pictures and memories, and memories fade. I'd like to document some of the stories that accompany the pictures before it's too late. So look out for that, campers, like a hungry bear lurking near your tent.

Don't be too worried about me. I know that I'll get through this. I am not suicidal *at all* and it will get better for me. I'm positive that feeling 100% after this will be a higher 100% than before this. It's called growth, mufuckas.

RAWK!

Yesterday I saw my first rock show in a long time. Actually it was two shows. It was nice to get out and talk to people. I don't have many friends in Korea anymore, so my chances of doing something other than sitting on my keister at home are few and far between. Might as well blog about it, right?

I went to Club Heavy, a basement live venue that is a unique place in the world as far as I'm concerned. What struck me as most unique, and as something that would never ever ever ever happen in America was the system in place for acquiring drinks. They had a big refrigerator full of beer and in front of it was a shoe box full of money. If you wanted a drink, you put your money in the shoe box, gathered any change you were due, and got a brewski out of the refrigerator. The drink station was largely unmanned, and pretty much operated on your honor. In America, that shoe box or the money inside would have been gone in about three seconds, and the beer would be stolen frequently as well. It's still so amazing how trusting and safe Korea is. And, I imagine, it will be a huge culture shock for me upon leaving and having to protect myself and my belongings again.

As for the experience, it was not a crowded night. Five acts played, and it seemed like the crowd mostly consisted of the other bands waiting for their turn to play or hanging around after their set. Still, it was fun and I'm glad I went. My friend was the drummer in the first act, pictured here:

The bands were quite diverse in their sound, ranging from noisy math rock to 50's surfer rock to post-rock ambiance. Daegu itself is not really a thriving scene as far as live music goes, so they most likely cobbled together whatever acts they could and made an event out of it.

The star of the show as far as I'm concerned was On Earth, a one and sometimes two man act. The main dude behind On Earth is more of a composer than a rock musician. He sets up a huge palette of pedals and effects and goes to town layering beautiful tones and phrases on top of each other until it seems like they'll collectively bust a hole in the amp. Really talented guy.

The show at Club Heavy ended early, so the majority of us ambled a few streets over to Led Zeppelin, another live venue that I never knew existed. A few of the same acts played there, including On Earth, which meant I was lucky enough to see him in both one man and two man format, here adding a bass player to the mix.

As the show ended, this creepy dude decided he liked me and tried talking to me in his limited English, which was fine, but then he sort of...lingered. He kept trying to shake my hand and talking about how he wants to see me again and then he kept staring at me and calling my name as I was trying to get away. It was unfortunate because I liked the Led Zeppelin venue, and he is a regular there. If I go back, he might cut me up into pieces and put me in his freezer.

What Even Is This Place?

Siegfried Sassoon once said, "The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so."

Well, here we all are, over five years from the last activity on World Class Flaneur. I'm positive that all of us have changed in significant ways. Perhaps that was largely instigated by the hellscape we currently find ourselves in that began in 2016 with the death of David Bowie followed by the death of Prince, a one-two shock wave backed by Newtonian physics that, I'm convinced, sent our current dimension careening off its intended path into uncharted space. Perhaps we are all now dizzy, bewildered, and disoriented saying to ourselves, "How did I get here?" in a very David Byrne-esque manner as madmen finger the big red Armageddon button and emboldened hurricanes rip our infrastructure apart and people continue to die needlessly. What a time to be alive, eh?

Or, perhaps it was just life happening. If you had asked me five years ago what 2017 would look like and what I'd be doing at that time, I probably would have just chugged a beer and told you I would be dead by then. Instead of dying, I chose to look back on some of those old blog posts from five, six, and seven years ago and cringed harder than I thought possible. Wow, I was some kind of guy, wasn't I? Not malevolent by any means, just young and unabashedly so. I find that my writing style (and lifestyle) was a bit abrasive, a bit crude, and sometimes annoying. I probably wouldn't want to hang out with myself from 2012 for a very long time, but I was young after all.

On the other hand, it's nice to have this definite record. I can point to a tangible document and confidently say that I have grown in significant ways since then. It's nice, also, to sift through the garbage and dust off some of the memories that I'd like to hold on to, maybe keep them polished and shiny in a mental glass case to look on from time to time.

This presents a problem for me, though. This blog is a time capsule instead of a slow metamorphosis of a human life. There exists this space in that mental glass case, a five year period, where the memories are exposed, unable to be polished or kept from decay simply because they were not documented in a substantial way.

And so much happened since that last post in April 2012. I moved to Australia, moved back to Korea, got married, got divorced, gained and lost weight, went to a considerable number of new places, held several different jobs, met a ton of people, and cultivated or neglected existing relationships to the point where the people I am surrounded by now both physically and digitally are largely different than they were five years ago. People I know have died and new ones I know were born. What a roller coaster if I look back on it as one, but of course it all happened so slowly. I'm thirty three now, and the Earth has had the time to travel fully around the sun five times. That in itself is insane to me.

I suppose the reason I'm here right now is because my life is currently in upheaval. I am largely alone in my daily proceedings, left to my own thoughts and inclinations in the calm before the storm of a huge life transition taking place early next year. I find myself regretting aspects of the past, longing for the future, and mostly not living in the present. To use another quote from a greater person than I, Thich Nhat Hahn said, "We fall back into the past, we jump ahead into the future, and in this we lose our entire lives."

I don't want to lose my entire life. So, in an attempt to rectify a few lost memories and create new lasting ones, I am trying to revive blogging in whatever capacity that pans out as. My thinking is that it will help realign me to live more in the moment. It will be largely for myself, obviously, but if you stumble upon it, you're free to read and follow along at your leisure. This has been a public service announcement from the center of the nuclear cross-hairs.

For the record, I am alive.