I feel like I should be posting something of substance during this last week of mine in South Korea, but I have nothing of substance to post about. What is there to say? My head overflows with thought, and my sleep is becoming irregular. Everywhere I go, everything I see–I am trying to absorb it all. I can say with some certainty that I will never be in this country again.
And I read that, and it all sounds like so much grasping at bullshit straws. I often feel like I am grasping at bullshit straws, and only occasionally do I get lucky and come across a straw of authenticity. A real straw. A straw worthy of words. A straw to drink with, or for a cow to eat.
Today I got my hair cut by a gay Korean hairdresser, and I bought some Western dental floss at the black-market store in Itaewon. Korean dental floss is like rope, so I spent five-thousand won on 50 meters of "Glide." I just started flossing last summer, on the advice of my mother. We were sitting in a restaurant in Manhattan drinking red wine, and somehow the conversation turned to dental hygiene. My mother failed to mention the addictive nature of flossing, and as a result of her advice I was forced to visit a seedy Korean black market store to get my fix. It’s killer floss, though, dude… no seeds at all.
you should move to montana and raise you up a crop of dental floss
raisin’ it up
waxin’ it down
in a little white box that you can sell up town.
Flossing is KEY. It makes you live to 100!
Floss won’t grow in Montana, it requires a much more tropical climate.
It used to be grown in American greenhouses, but thanks to globalization almost all the floss purchased in America is now foreign grown. Companies like Johnson & Johnson have deforested huge parts of Africa just to set up floss fields, and they pay the floss pickers only about fifty cents a day.
Chomsky wrote a whole book on the international floss-growing industry. I forget the name, but if you Google “Chomsky floss book,” I’m sure you’ll find it.