The Good, the Bad, the Douchey

Dearest Readers,

Long has it been since my dulcet odes to Korea graced your browser. You may have imagined that I finally became accustomed to this miserable country and no longer felt the need to lambast its shortcomings through the magic of the internets. Sadly this is not the case. I have either been busy trying to get myself the hell out of here, or too depressed to do anything other than watch old Guns and Roses videos on Youtube. But never fear, there are many absurd episodes to recount.

First up, let me tell you about my run in with the law. Today I’m heading down to the Yongsan police department to sign a statement that will officially put an end to what was a bizarre, frustrating, occasionally amusing and once even inspiring affair.

It would take too long to get into all the details, but the story does demand some explanation. My band did a photo shoot for an incredibly pathetic local magazine called Rokon. This sorry rag is so phony that despite claiming on its cover to be an “indie source magazine”, it often featured Maroon 5 stories and ran a glowing review of the new Mariah Carrey record next to our Indie band article. Thus, when the editor of this lame excuse for a rock magazine refused to give me the photos from our hilariously overwrought shoot, I was rather incensed. After I politely but firmly told him that he had no reason to withhold our photos, he started acting like a bitchy prima donna, and eventually sent me a rude email.

Now, you may imagine that Wexford Sunshine is capable of responding to rude emails with abusive diatribes that will offend your average poser magazine editor. But this douchebag was more than offended by my scathing response, in which I referenced both his lame mag’s Mariah Carrey piece and his own ridiculous myspace page - which I claimed was clear evidence of his problems with a diminutively apportioned penis. Cut n paste this (blognazis at google don't seem to want me to link it), I think you'll agree with my assessment:
http://www.myspace.com/konghaus

Douchebag proceeded to loose what feeble control he had over his tiny mind and sent me approximately 30 text messages in a 24 hour period, which got increasingly more violent and threatening. I wasn’t terribly worried about it until he showed up outside my house the following day and threatened to sick his thug friends on me. At this point Wake me, my lawyer pal Alfonso Izquierda Esquire and I decided it would be best to bring the matter to the police. Before you go calling me a pussy, bear in mind that in Korea I would most certainly be blamed for any fights I got into – regardless of who started them. The Douchebag was apparently born in America, but he’s Korean American and I had to assume his posse would include Koreans who could lie to the cops about the whole thing. As you’ll see in a moment, I was right to be suspicious of the Korean justice system.

So we went down to the police station with a Korean friend of mine named David, prepared to get the whole thing on record. We knew the Douche wouldn’t get tossed in jail or anything, but I figured filing a complaint against him would at least give me the authority to beat his ass with a crowbar with legal impunity – in self defense of course.

Let me pause here to give props to my man David, and all the other people involved in this silly episode, including Alfonso Esq. and his attorney pal Kil-ho Esq., as well as my main man Jun and my boy Dennis (who provided the crowbar, and some damned fine whiskey). David spent 4 hours with me in the police station, translating, explaining and even getting finger printed for me. The rest of the crew was behind me the whole way, whether it meant translating, giving legal counsel or promising to bring the ruckus if anybody had to get thrown a beating. I often criticize the Kims but one thing’s for sure – a Korean friend will stand by you no matter how crazy shit gets.

Sadly, we never did get to kick any poser magazine editing ass. Shortly after we finished filing the report at the police station we discovered that some of the threatening texts I’d been getting from people I thought were Douchebag's violent posse were actually all sent by him alone. Apparently in Korea you can change the phone number that accompanies your text message, so it looks like it was sent by somebody else. Turns out Douche was not only short in the pants, but short on friends too. Furthermore, after the detective called Douche to tell him to come to the station, he proceeded to desperately phone me and my band mates, claiming he couldn’t afford to pay any fines and that the whole thing was just a big misunderstanding.

At this point I thought the whole thing was over and was ready to move on, although part of me had been hoping for a fight (with the law on my side). But the fighting left to be done was not to be physical. It turned out that the asshole detective was too lazy to do his job and file the report on Douche. He wanted the two of us to reach some kind of agreement, so that his office wouldn’t have to press charges. From what I’d seen there wasn’t much else for them to do at the Yongsan police department, but I guess my detective needed as much time as possible for cigarette and kimchi consumption.

Thus he trumped up some bullshit about how he believed that I had threatened the Douchebag in the same way as he had threatened me. At first I laughed at this. Clearly one could not equate making fun of someone’s magazine and calling him out for having a small wang with repeated threats of physical violence and stalking someone at their home. The cop himself had told me that only repeated threats were actually considered a crime. Douche had repeatedly harassed me; I sent two emails. My man Kil-ho called the detective and explained this to him, even translating my emails for him so as to demonstrate their non-threatening nature.

But the asshole detective was determined not to do his job and sadly, this country’s joke of a justice system was on his side. I was informed by my lawyer friends that even though technically I had committed no crime, the prosecutor and judge would generally take the detectives word on such a small case. The detective would claim he thought I threatened Douche, no one would ever consider whether or not he had the authority (or even jurisdiction, considering the emails were in English from US based accounts) to make such a claim. The Judge would rubber stamp some kind of fine for me and I would have to go to court to fight it. Kil-ho and Alfonso both thought that defending my white ass in a Korean court was not worth the trouble. I didn’t want to drag them down with me for such a petty thing, so I eventually agreed to acquiesce to the detective’s plan. I would drop my complaint if Douche would drop his, and give me the photos.

Eventually some of the photos were secured, and I was told that Douche had to embarrass himself considerably to get them. I reluctantly went down to the police station with Jun to sign a statement retracting my complaint. But when I got there, we discovered that the Korean legal system did not have a provision for a conditional withdrawal of a complaint. That means I could not withdraw it solely on the condition that Douche was never allowed to file a complaint against me for my “threatening” emails. On top of that, the stupid cop hadn’t actually gotten the Douchebag to sign anything yet, so once I signed my withdrawal I would have no recourse if Douche decided to press forward with his own ludicrous claim. I yelled at the asshole cop, who once again was simply trying to get rid of me, and walked out the door – dragging Jun behind me and trying to tell him not to apologize for me.

In the end Douche was made to sign his unconditional withdrawal first, and I was prepared to never sign mine. But for complicated reasons Alfonso felt he would be compromised as a lawyer if I gave the finger to the system – so today, I will end the silly affair, which has now dragged on for a month. Now of course I am frustrated by the absurdity of this situation – this could only happen in Korea. But I’m also proud of my friends, who truly went beyond the call of duty to keep this asshole foreigner out of court and out of the hospital. Nice work guys.

The Korean Government Is Trying to Kill Me

It was another miserable day in Seoul when I woke up this morning – cloudy with a hint of 90% humidity in the air – and I headed out the door mentally preparing myself for the 10 minute walk to the bus stop and the subsequent commute (see earlier post for all the gory details). I was unaware, however, what Seoul had in store for me this morning, and wasn’t quite prepared as I set off down the street towards the bus. I was about two minutes into the walk, fiddling with my ipod trying to find a song suitable for the dreary morning, when I first heard it; a loud buzzing, that initially resembled a helicopter or something airborne, though it became quickly apparent that it was much closer. The next thing I noticed as I looked down the street ahead of me was the huge, white cloud expanding quickly and moving up the street towards me at speed that I was unaware clouds of any sort could move. It was still early, so it wasn’t until then that I made the connection – the noise, the cloud – and shouted at no one in particular, “FUCK! ITS THE DEET TRUCK!”

The Deet Truck is the Korean answer to the admittedly absurd amount of mosquitoes that somehow manage to survive here for nearly ten months out of the year, and it is exactly what it sounds like – a truck with a large pipe extending off the back that emits deet into the air in a thick white cloud. I had only seen the Deet Truck once before, but luckily I was in my house and able to shut all the windows before it drove by. This time, unfortunately, I wasn’t so lucky.

From the behavior of the Koreans around me – those outside sweeping the street in front of their homes, walking their dogs, etc – you’d have thought that this huge cloud of toxic chemicals posed absolutely no threat whatsoever. Luckily, another foreigner walking behind me and I knew better, and dove for the first taxi that drove by. We had to force the cab driver to roll up the windows – even with the deet cloud coming ever closer he was completely clueless as to why these two foreigners were in his cab acting like lunatics, banging on the windows and gesturing with flailing arms – but we managed to barricade ourselves inside before the cloud engulfed the car. Our cab driver has no idea that picking us up this morning probably added five years to his life.

Once safely in the cab, the other person who doesn’t want to die inhaling toxic fumes and I acquainted ourselves, and commiserated over the obliviousness of the people around us, who were still making no move to get inside and away from the airborne deet. “They used to do this in the small town that I grew up in in the States”, he said (didn’t elaborate on which town that was though), “But they outlawed it”. Well of course they did! It’s DEET for christs sake! On the other hand, this may just be the Korean government’s way of driving the foreigners out, since I’ve only seen the truck around my apartment, which is where the majority of the foreigners in Seoul live. Hmmm…

So my new foreign friend and I made it safely to the station and I headed off to the bus where I would spend the next thirty minutes inhaling kimchi fumes off the breath of whatever passenger was smushed up against me for the duration of my commute. For the first time since arriving in Korea, I didn’t complain.