Back in Town.. Train trip down..

On the train to Daejeon, pushing 24 hours of wakeyness, listening to the mellow guitar/saxophone/bongo jam at the end of "Can't you hear me knocking" by the mighty Rolling Stones. It's the end of a highly entertaining and revealing (for me, that is) return to the old places.

Some guy like Santayana once said something like "memory is our own internal system of rumors" and I think I found this while reading a Stephen King novel on the way back to Korea. That might have been all of six hours ago. I picked the thickest motherfucking book at the airport bookstore and that was, of course Stephen King (nosing out the equally logghoreic Dean Koontz. In the same book, King has a character note that memory is also the playground on which we continually build and rebuild our personal myths. This may be true, but King seems to claim that this is self-panegyric in nature,

I have my doubts.

I took a lot of train trips, bus trips, public transport of all kind, and found that my Bay Area …meant that wherever I went I saw something that pulled me back into the good old days. Which largely consisted of memories of failures. Oddly, most of my unabashedly happy memories were triggered by the sight of places I had walked, either solo or with a partner (that partner being, in an overwhelming percentage of the cases, the OAF).

Caught you on TV last night, in a rerun soap You were young and beautiful, already without hope

This is, maybe, why I like Korea… not only does it hold few memories for me (and most of what it does are carefully cherry-picked successes), but it is also a country with no local nostalgia. Oh, sure, they love King Sejong for developing Hangul, and the turtle ships are revered (whatever they actually were), but anything within anyone’s lifetime?

Burn in down, tear it out, make it into highrises. Aside from a rather well-developed facility for nursing historical grudges, a fairly future-based society. And, happily, one in which I have no history.

In any case, other than the 10 lbs I’m sure I gained (turns out it was about 6), the trip home was splendid. I saw almost everyone I wanted to, attending to their rank, as Macbeth very nearly said.

Then he went mad.

Me? I'm going to sleep.