Variety Show, 1984

" That sonnofa bitch! What, he's totally whacked and he wants to die? Hey! Sonnofa bitch! You drivin' around with your crossed eyes shut? " / " What? " Son of a bitch"? You're the crosseyed sonnofa bitch, sonnofabitch sonnofabitch. You talkin' shit now? " In the Left Turn Only lane a commercial taxi driver and a private chauffeur ( oh my, he drives a Mercedes SLC 500 ), one stabs his middle finger into heaven cursing.
A church steeple shoots up to high Heaven — no, with no idea how high Heaven is. A bright red neon cross is situated right above a bright red neon " CABARET Y┼ÄNGDONG. " Like the antenna tower of some interstellar communications company, . . . probably in the middle of having intercourse with a bunch of those mutherfuckers' souls.
There's no way. They're not going to their " promised land. " Bunch of invaders!
My, literary, behavior's, no answer, questioning, all of it. Center, less questions, fleeting, sus, picions, all of it. End, less suspicion, some, skepticism, are . . . . coulditreallybeendlesssupicionandskepticism?
We congratulate your suspicion and skepticism (sarcastically) — at the award ceremony for the 12th Annual Evergreen Literary Prize. Weird. She didn't really get what was being said at all. Receiving bouquets, . . . taking commemorative photographs with veteran literary figures, and even giving interviews at the newspapers, the poetess felt nothing but hollowed out when she returned home. She felt like she'd just come home from being raped.
Ms. Lee jumped right out of her clothes and got right into bed.
" And then sunlight on the panes, distinct bits of dust, disillusion, disillusion, enough to want to die, to want to kill! "
Rode the bus this morning, and in the in the second seat from the back on the right were the remains of an expansive sprawl of a feastlike spread somebody puked up. After somebody was about to sit down there, they'd jump back with a start and fly away. Contents: grains of rice 55%, little chunks of kimch'i stew meat 15%, tiny top pieces of been sprouts 10%, tofu bits 7%, fried egg — yellow parts and white parts 5%, crushed red peppers 5%, other 3%, in order of quantity.
" Oh Gods of Heaven and Earth! These are said to be the sustenance of our world. Oh please, shower all this down upon us. Oh please, stuff these things down our throats . "
" Now then, will the Secretary of Agriculture and Fisheries please come forward and respond. What in the world is the reason you can't increase grain procurements this year? Now that yer come before us, there's no use to go and try 'n' save face, yer better off erasin' the " N" of the National Party from the National Party Platform, goin' and bustin' a bloodvessel, no matter how high you raise yer voice, those farmin' villages they's a thing of the past, ya hear. "
" Hey! How can you just let leave that shit there? " loudly intones a middle-aged gentleman in his 40's, rather hysterically from the second seat from the back on the left. Rather than answer, the bus girl just spreads a piece of newspaper over the that seat second from the back on the right and walks off.

FOUR SEOUL NATIONAL UNIVERSITY STUDENTS ARRESTED IN DEMONSTRATION Kwanak Police Station. Four Seoul National
University students — Kim Yongsu (22, Math major), Lee
Hyeja (21, Biology major), Ho Hŭiyong (23, Communications
major), Shin Yunho (22, Geography major), and others who
had led a demonstration on campus on the 15th have been
arrested for conspiracy and violation of anti-demonstration
laws. Kim and the others are suspected of having
masterminded the demonstration and of distributing over
1,000 anti-government handouts entitled " Manifesto of the
Democratic Students Struggle " around the library and
student cafeteria at 1:40 in the morning on the 11th of the
month.

" Father, Mother, I am so sorry. I have driven a stake straight through your hearts. "
" You see! Now then, what'd I tell ya. "
The Chief Investigator announced that the current egregious/enormous finance corruption scandal has no connection whatsoever with high government positions, and what's more, the current egregious/enormous finance corruption scandal has no connection whatsoever with high govern
?
" Is this rag, that doesn't even know how to use a single quote, supposed to be a newspaper or a government White Paper? "
Oh? They've got a lot to say? Lousy bastards! Go on! You go get some information from them, no matter what!
HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa
He laughs without moving his steeled face the slightest bit. Steely mugged, brazen-faced.
" Wasn't there some 40-something-year-old movie director got some 8th grade girls-school girl pregnant? Huh! How you gonna stick that thing inside a there? Would it've even gone in? "
It must " a" been hell. Every time he stuck it in.
Especially among developing third-world countries, the normalized authoritarian regime can be legitimated base on historical anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggle, can't be, can be, can't be, no, can't be like that, it is, . . .
Now, five professors from national universities attended the Something Seminar sponsored by the Academy of Korean Studies as panel discussants.
At the window of the University Psychiatric Hospital — one red geranium, just after blooming, suddenly wilts with a thud. (Fade Out) Even though it might be the most useless flower of this world, it becomes something spiritual, something full of soul. To a red geranium, it could be a red geranium's spirit, and it could be a red geranium's departed soul.
My you have a brilliant mind! What kind of tundra-like frozen-ass mind is that? If it is a " mind. "
Pak Nosok. 23. Lathe turner. Monthly wage, $13. Eating sweet-potato tempura with his greasy hands. Fingers stained black. That sight, when Yi Songyong (Ewha University, Junior in Food and Nutritional Sciences) glances over, makes her loathe him. As Pak goes on chomping, chomping his tempura until the lady who runs the tempura stand brings him some more, he piercingly ogles the student who looks like she attends a girls-only school. Yi Songyong's mood, at this point, has been utterly, completely defiled. Before his crude antagonistic gaze, which made it seem like he'd chew her up and spit her out any minute, she began to feel as if her body had been stripped naked, buck naked, without a single nook or cranny unexplored.
After 20 — years, would his son meet her daughter in the same way?
All the supermarket walls are covered with mirrors. The mirrors on one side keep the mirrors on the other side under surveillance and the other side's mirrors keep the first side's mirrors keeping the other side's mirrors under surveillance under surveillance with all of that being kept under under under surveillance and keeping and keeping the the . . . .
Master Imje, the venerable monk, came down after sitting upon the meditation mat, in one hand he held his folded mat, and with the other hand grabbed the venerable monk Magok and asked: " Where has the 12-faced Boddhisatva gone? " Magok turned himself around and was about to sit on Imje's woven mat. Master Imje grabbed his monk's cane and gave him a thrashing on the spot. Magok also grabbed the staff, and grappling with each other thus, they entered into the place of the head monk together after all.
At the entrance to the construction site at the subway, the doll-like automatons sway, their red hand-signals going to the left and to the right. They sway vacantly to the left and to the right until 11 P.M. passes by. Under Construction. Beware of Falling! 20 Meters Underground.
Take shelter, in the underground that makes whole the things of this world — all for some later day, some later time!
Well, here is one hypothesis — If — just " if " is all I'm saying — as soon as I'm finished writing this, now, this very moment an atom bomb is dropped into the Seoul skies, how is it you will act then?
I will execute anti-chemical warfare procedures just as I learned in the National Guard.
I will remain sitting quietly.
I will give prayer a chance.
I will shave while knowing in my heart " Even though the world will be destroyed tomorrow, I will plant an apple tree today. "
I will change my underwear.
I will pay my respects at my parents' hometown greave.
I will hug my kids.
I will drink the booze I had buried away.
I — my wife and I — will have one good last fuck.
If that's the case, is the honorable sir aware of the fact that the honorable sir's airspace is already carrying an a-bomb?
Day in and day out day out and day in, that tidbit, knowingly unknowing, unknowingly knowing, even knowingly unspeakably, 10,000,000 beetles stuck to each other bobbing up and down sucking out each other's bodily fluids. Everyday. Everynight. Blinded life under skies of fire. Pitiful, pitiful, pitiful, oh pitiful.
If we all die together all at once, there will be no death for us.
A young mendicant Buddhist monk was shooting contemptuous glances at a newborn, just 3 months old, being carried on the back of a girl in her twenties. Human larva bloomed splendidly like a lotus flower from lust's filthy crotch! Without a care in the world the newborn — nervously keeps watch on the world. (Jan. 31, 1984. In line to go home at the Kangnam Terminal, waiting for a Chonju train).
But that lust is exactly what props up humankind.
On the billboard outside the Piccadilly Theater on the 3rd St. of Chongno there's a picture of a famous Korean actress, crotch spread wide open. 3 months running. In the lower right part, she's holding a naked man's torso tight to her breast and grinding. Her mouth is spread wide open, she's breathing hard panting, moaning and panting. When the entire life and culture of an age are pornography, what do we think we're doing by prostrating ourselves on the cold floor of dawn and writing poetry? What the hell are we doing?
A single kerosene heater in the Health Club turns the hotel into an inferno, all the good men and women on the 7th and 8th floors, none of whom know each other, strain to grab hold of the helicopter's life rope, lose their grip, and fall through the sky to their death, and the sightseers stand and watch, and all the people from the 9th and 10th floors are already piled in a squashed heap of death.
" Woah. Ever seen a person or two drop dead before? Whaat, it can't be more than 30 people. "
However, the novelist Kim Wonu comes out, taking another drink, and proclaims that South Korea's middle class absolutely does not want to see unification like this.
The scattered families, after meeting once, scatter once more.
The times are vexing! Vexing times! Vexing! These times! Vexed! Vexing! Enough to make you grind your teeth.
" I hate the Communist Party, " said the little dead boy who turned into the bronze statue standing in the school yard of his tranquil small town elementary school.
Rush hour — on the crosswalk the staff of the district office, bank employees, workers from the local neighborhood office wear banners on their chests for the " Order in the Streets " campaign and carry pickets to the same effect.
At the far end of ORDER we eventually find the point of a blade.
The thing called ADVANCEMENT is an eternal parade.
Kids from the local elementary school carry yellow flags, halting passers-by who would jaywalk.
We've been halted. All the government and public offices, all the schools, all the soldiers, bureaucrats, civilians at their jobs. A flag ceremony has been put into effect at 17:00 hours, the whole nation, all at once, the unwitting pedestrians passing by stop in haste, face flags they cannot see, salute. Junior high students, full of enthusiasm, flags held high, snap military salutes.
The honorable " BIG BROTHER, 1984 " casts down his lofty gaze and saith:
" Looks good to me! "
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Author of original: 
Hwang Jiwoo
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