This 1200 square foot apartment becomes cavernous.  A wall is empty where the bookcase used to be; the books already packed and lining the walls where they wait to be joined by boxes of clothes and shoes. The sofa has been gone for a week.  This Friday, the empty spaces will become larger: the washer, the fridge, the dining room table, the big desk and the two papasan rockers will be gone.  The side effects of divestiture have begun to set in.  The idea of not having things is liberating; however, the actualities are life-altering.

Life without a fridge, for example, makes me rely on others to feed me.  Life without a washer means I have to hand-wash everything.  Life without a dining table means we eat at the coffee table seated in our beach chairs.  An old table that I found abandoned somewhere will hold my computer and my printer.  The clothes in the closet will almost all be packed up by the end of tomorrow.  The next two weeks in this apartment will be Spartan.  We are hoping against hope that the guy who bought our bed doesn’t come a-knocking anytime soon; I sold the floor mats long ago.

I will approach this as a training session for living out of my bag.  For instance, there is no hurry to send my clothes home, but I’ll soon start wearing virtually the same two sets of clothes.  Also, I’ll wane myself off of home cooked meals, at least the ones that produce leftovers that need refrigeration.  By the same token, I need to take more steps to wane myself off the internet.  The compulsive checking of sites is the result of nerves, boredom and planning; certainly, I am trying to get enough face time with my family before I resort to the one-way correspondence.

Nic will join me in some of these endeavors; however, I see that she is dealing with the trauma induced by the current deletion of stuff project by spending the entire morning filling out our wedding registry, filling the spaces in our phantom house/apartment in some unknown city in Anywhere, USA.  Emptying this house and trying to fill a fictitious one are stark reminders of the many variables that remain ahead of us in this year.

I love her for all the work she puts into this because, as is fairly typical of the male race, I hate shopping; I hate it even more when the options are seemingly endless in the infinitude of cyberspace.  This morning, she made it easier for me by showing me the options for salt and pepper grinders, chef’s knives and crock pots.  Now, she’s researching TVs, and I soon have to weigh in on the options she’ll give me.  LCD?  LED?  Plasma?  LG?  Samsung?  Toshiba?  Hell, I don’t know; I’ve not owned a TV in six years.

“Socrates was so hooked on the dominant connectedness of his time—oral conversation—he couldn’t bear to spend time outside the walls of Athens…. A friend showed [him] that putting some distance between yourself and your busy, connected life does wonders for the mind. … Once you recognize that your life will really improve, disconnecting becomes a lot easier.”       –William Powers (from the Opinion Pages at nytimes.com, June 7, 2010)

It’s been about 1610 days since I moved to Korea.  In that time, Ian has started primary school and scored his first soccer goal; Audrey can no longer be cradled on my forearm and is what I perceive as a relatively quiet girl who prefers one-on-one interactions; Lexi was born, grew hair well past her shoulders and can dominate a room like no four year old I’ve ever known.  It was only by pure chance that I was able to hold Ella only hours after she was born last January.

And now, after missing all of these important metamorphoses, you may wonder why I am going to unplug while traveling.  Since the beginning of my Korea-era, I’ve become more and more dependent on technology to try and help with homesickness.  I often check my email more than ten times a day and visit facebook just as often.  While I think Skype and other such technologies have allowed me to keep the most important relationships from crumbling and foster uncle-dom, technology has driven me to distraction; it takes away time from tending to my own spiritual well-being.

I am agnostic and, by definition of this way of life, the idea of ultimate knowledge is unknown and unknowable.  Agnosticism is the ideal I choose because, even though I am often conservative in action (rather than in politics or thought) and often have difficulty with change, I want my perspectives to be challenged.  This is the reason I read widely and try to meet new people.  It is elemental that there are challenges to the “normal” and a constant query of any set of beliefs that I may adhere to.  In this way, I meet the spiritual demand for growth.  Therefore, my Self has manifested and will continue to manifest many times over the course of my physical life.

Currently, I lack balance.  I lack focus.  I lack sincerity in the things that I purport to be most important to me.  What I desire is to better strike an equilibrium between the essence of me and the essence of family and friendship.  What I aspire for is to continue developing my ability to accomplish a writing project in an efficient, powerful and meaningful way.  What I want is to include you in this experiment.

What would become of your personal relationships if you resorted to a letter writing campaign as your only means of communication?  What would happen to your ability to observe the world and your place in it if you completely took yourself out of cyberspace?  With an idea inspired by a series of articles in the New York Times last year, I want to test these questions in a unique way.

I have utmost confidence that my relationship with you will be enhanced if I commit to writing you a letter a week.  It is my plan to sit and write for an hour or so every morning before going off and exploring something new in the places Nic and I will be.  Each time I sit down, I will write to a different person in my family; when I write to you, it will be a meditation, an imagining that you are sitting nearby waiting for me to tell you a story of the previous day and the expectations of the day in front of me.

I do not want to be too dramatic about all this.  You have a life to lead.  You will most likely continue on as you usually do; in fact, I hope you do.  However, if the mood strikes you and you want to respond to me, write an old-fashioned letter and drop it in the outbox bound for Kewaskum, WI.  Upon my return to the States, I look forward to reading and catching up on your life over the three months.

At the very least, I wonder if you would be willing to make photocopies of my letters to you; this will be my way of journaling the trip.  Upon return to the motherland, it is my intention to transcribe my letters to you.  The words I wrote to you will become part of a bigger work.  With a little editing, I want to try and sell this unique travelogue to a publisher.  If it doesn’t get picked up, I will still assemble the journal of letters for your perusal: my gift to you that will complete the word picture of my travels.

Let’s talk soon on Skype.  I leave ROK in 18 days.

Bought a knife yesterday.  Aside from the Phillips-head, which will be used for tightening loose screws on our trekking poles, most gadgets may not find a place on this trip.  Say what you want about my penis, but it had the biggest blade I’ve ever seen on a Swiss Army.  4.5-inches.  The serrated knife was the same length, giving me 9 inches of protection and bread-cutting ability.  Major selling points for me.  A leather punch, a toothpick, tweezers, bottle opener, can opener.  To enumerate the number of ways these tools will be useful is a much shorter list than the extras that seem like novelty.

In spite of my lifelong record of losing Swiss Army knives (and even finding a way to fold the blade on my hand once long ago), I asked Nic if I could be the one who always held it.  Say what you want about my penis, but what if I get in a knife fight in Bangkok?  I’ve got the superior reach and have watched way more movies with knife fights than Nic; it stands to reason that I should be the bearer of this responsibility.  Besides, I am older and have learned from all my mistakes.  A sometimes-short fuse (with no actual violence of action on record) has been tempered over the years.  And the penchant for violent thoughts have been expurgated on the page, therefore diffused in fantastical, gothic realism.  But can you take the media out of the American?

I’ve stated before that there are two kinds of dreams.  One is to be discarded as corrupt; media dreams are nothing but the infiltration of the thoughts and fantasies of some other person or persons.  The other kind of dream is one of pure subconscious desire or fear; the incidents and people therein representing an aspect of the Self.  This is elemental to my belief system.  While it is likely there are rarely these purely “corrupt” dreams or purely “pure” dreams (how can we, after all, really extract ourselves from our environment or vice versa?), I wonder from whence my dream of yesternight came.

After feeling guilt about taking a large hostel room for myself from a poor white Christian family in what reminded me of my old neighborhood in Washington Heights, the husband of the family started sending me text messages and photos of Jesus-related items.  I had other business, though.  I was planning a swindle of the local African-American drug dealer (which makes no sense because Washington Heights is a Puerto Rican neighborhood).  I ran from the drug-hiding spot, at ground-level in some back alley.  I passed the drug dealer; he took no notice of me.  However, I suspected he would put the pieces together and would be following me post-haste.  Suddenly I was on a roof, running.  I stopped and received another Christian propaganda text message from Christian father.  Next I knew, I was back on ground level, slowing up because a multi-racial group of men were off to either side of the sidewalk, calling after me that I was a cop, but they were going to let me keep walking unmolested.  However, one of the guys, a Puerto Rican, took out a switchblade and slashed it through the air, smiling, standing in my way and talking shit.  His buddies told him to put the knife away and let me pass, so he did.  I walked toward him to get past him; he continued talking shit.  I said, “That’s it.  Let’s go!”  And I took out my 4.5 inch Swiss Army blade; he took out his blade again.  We started circling each other, throwing little muay thai kicks at the knees and calves to distract and move in for a slice or puncture.

I woke up, my heart racing.  I had been laying on my left side, Nic was facing me in bed.  I had awoken not because I was about to die (as often happens in dreams), but I had actually kicked out with my right foot.  I don’t know if I actually kicked Nic; I don’t even know if Nic remembers this happening—we’ve yet to talk about it this morning.  But, if I am trying to reestablish communication with my subconscious in order to learn about—and be at peace with—my entire Self and surroundings, what am I to make of this dream?  I head to lands where aggressive behavior is not a part of the culture (Thailand, Nepal).  On the other hand, just like my own country, each of these countries has a past of war and genocide, namely Viet Nam and Cambodia.  Maybe you can’t take the media out of the American, but can you really take the violence out of Man?

Did the medical circuit yesterday and today am the walking wounded and the boring writer.  It’s a reading day.  It’s an editing day.  It’s one of many packing days.

Started the day off with a tea party.  Harmless.  Went to the acupuncturist to try something new on this nagging neck injury, a result of being hit from behind over five years ago in my car.  No treatment been working for a while, so I decided to get drastic: herbal injections.  It’s a three day cycle of ginseng and 20 other herbs and roots.  Only one of the .01 mg injections really felt like a wand fire being put into my neck.

Next up was the dentist.  A standard cleaning with sonic blasters of cold water on my front teeth.  Minor discomfort.  Later in the day, my teeth were sore.

A couple hours later, we visited the dermatologist to zap off some warts on my hands.  Worse than anything in the entire day was the four needle pricks needed for the local anesthetic.  But then I got to watch the doc Exacto-knife the top layer of skin and then get all Star Wars on my viral infections.  The worst one, which is on my right palm near the pinky side, is about the size of a BB.  And a BB could fit in it it is so deep.  I blame this wound for my inability to write well here today.  Also, I will be unable to ride to today’s errands in the balmy 48 degree weather, my throttle hand being tender to the touch.

To round out the day, we spent an hour and a half getting the prescriptions for travel, the most important being the preventative medicine for altitude sickness.  My wife is pretty amazing at organizing in such a logistically sound manner, all things completed before rush hour began.

Better writing tomorrow, I hope.    I wonder if it’s the warts that I no longer have that gave me my powers of writing.

A boring topic, I know.  You really don’t know how boring until you live in Busan in the winter.  Sun, wind, cold.  That’s it.  Okay, sure we’ve had a couple anomalous snow flurries, yet somehow it was still sunny outside.

Did a little survey of the weather in places where we’ll be next month.  Ko Phagnan in southeastern waters off Thailand is 84.  As Nic says, “Yes, please.”  Chiang Mai in the northwest is steamy and 84.  These conditions are excellent for crotchety old knees.  In addition, humidity seems to be conducive to beard growth; fear not, the patchy left side will fill in over the coming month.  If it doesn’t, I’ll just use some shoe polish.

A bigger issue presented itself to me today as I braved the searing wind for a little jog: with no internet access, I may have to talk with my wife about the weather.  We do talk about it quite frequently here, always guessing if we can make the autobike ride  to work without a summer rainstorm catching us mid-journey; currently, we gauge how knifing a 15 degree windchill would be in addition to the wind we endure when riding.  The point is this: in a matter of seconds, I can get weather from all areas of the world and write pertinent notes to a friend near Brisbane to see if he’s surviving the floods (last I checked, all was okay for him); I can also send a note to my father-in-law in WI who gently scoffs at my thinking 1 to 3 inches of snow is a big deal.

Again, I will try to make my point: without allowing myself internet access for three months, my wife becomes the bearer of this sort of news.  All news, in fact.  I never really asked her if she’s okay with that, but she’s been supportive of my unplugging experiment since the beginning.  It is only natural that I make assumptions that she’s thought through all the pressure that will be on her.  How’s the weather going to be, honey?  How did the Sharks do in the first round of the playoffs?  How’re the Giants doing in spring training?  Did Giffords live?  Is the North shit-disturbing again?  Did I miss another first for my nieces or nephew?

There is great potential here for me to be even more annoying than I already am.  Having said that, one of my aims in this experiment is not to be distracted by things that do not immediately or urgently affect me.  The Sharks will still bow out in the second round.  The Giants will still be playing in May when I come back online.  Important people will live on and die.  The North will undoubtedly be up to their old shenanigans.  Ella, Lexi, Audrey and Ian will have more firsts that I will be there for.  The more I think about this, the more of a vacation it is sounding like.  My only hope is that my family doesn’t feel I am abandoning them; but those concerns should be allayed by the letter-writing campaign.  In the meantime, I’ll absorb my surroundings and write to people about them.  I’ll try to use my crotchety knees to predict rain or find a newspaper to glean some news (weather and otherwise) from or, gods forbid, I talk to someone other than my wife about the weather.

22 days until departure/vacation/evacuation.  It’s as good a time as any to bring you up to speed on many important categories.

1. Sales declaration: With almost all large items sold, the sales department crossed the 1.23 million KRW (aka 1,091 USD) threshold as of yesterday afternoon.  We would like to congratulate the salesman of the year; we would also like to encourage him to try and recoup a full 33% of the grand total original buying price of these items.
2. Itinerary proclamation: If you don’t know by now where we’re going on this trip, read past entries.  (Also, see item #6.)
3. Fitness revelation (the writer’s vital stats):  weight: 203.3 lbs (92.4 kilos).  Gut/around bellybutton, not to be confused with the waist: 38.5 inches (you metric users can do your own damned conversions).  Pecs/boobs: 41.25 inches.  Right bicep: 14.5 inches.  Cranial circumference: 54.97 inches (and shrinking).
4. Medical itemization:  Tomorrow is a busy day for the Nearly Homeless, Mostly Insuranceless, Virtually Jobless Power Couple.  Acupuncturist at 9am.  Dentist at 11am.  Dermatologist at 2pm.  Internist at 4pm to fill 11 travel prescriptions (for eventualities like flatulence, pink eye, diarrhea and other such pleasantries).
5. Marriage index:  For stats on how many times fornication has occurred since December 13^th, how many times the writer’s flatulence has been an issue, the number of times children have been discussed, and the spoken ratio of “love” to “you’re disgusting,” read Harper’s Index™ in the  Decembruary 33^rd issue.
6. This website’s stats (since December 8): words written 16,609.  keystrokes taken (not including deletions or calculations of absurd statistics on the cell phone calculator): 92,939.  Views of the site: 636 (not including the writer’s own incessant visits).  This means that I am writing 26.1 words per site visit; it also means there are 17.67 people visiting the site each day.  C’mon, let’s go, people!  Tell your friends.  Shamelessly promote the writer.  Create demand for attempted humor and perceived insight.  The writer is working his fingers to the bone here.  Loving every moment of it.
7. Food accounting (items to be consumed before the departure of the fridge on January 21^st; the assault on these numbers begins tomorrow.  Read further entries for updates): steel-cut oats: 6 cups.  Dry lentils: 8 cups.  Brown rice: 9.25 cups.  Popcorn: 1 cup (un-popped).  Shrimp: 1 lb.  Ground pork: 1 kilo (do your own damned conversions).  Ground beef: 1 kilo.  Frozen blueberries: 2.5 lbs.  Whole wheat flour: 5 lbs.  Salt: 5678 pinches (do your own damned conversions).  Paprika: 1.5 metric tons.  Cans of mackerel: 2.  Cans of tuna: 8.  Frozen slices of salami: 12.
8. Packing promulgation:  Since the bookshelf will be gone as of tonight, the packing will begin in earnest.  Books and clothes will go through an editing process, packed or donated.  Good thing the salesman had such a good month, so as to cover the overhead of shipping.
9. Russian tea house regalia:  The secret agent has successfully remained secret.  The inner-city excursions to meet-ups has been undertaken by autobike and subway without much incident (knock on wooden nesting dolls).  Only 12 more clandestinations.
10. Beard report (at one month):  Colors observed: orange, red, gray, white, blond/blonde.  Density observed: nice growth all around, with the left side lagging behind; sideburn regions at the top of their game.  Maintenance carried out: upper cheek region needs a razor swipe twice a week; neck and throat clear-cut thrice weekly.  Names the writer’s students may or may not call him: lion, cat, monkey.

Sometimes, I only look left once before crossing.  When the date said January 9th on my yogurt this morning, I ate it anyway.  I run the occasional red light if no one is coming (and if there’s no cop around).  And finally, there are times when I don’t return a phone call to my sister or my mom for more than 24 hours.

I live life on the edge, as you can tell.  You remember; you read about my train station experience last week.

Yesterday, though, I got caught up in the overabundance of marginal-quality information about our first stop, Ko Phangan.  I poured over the guidebook and the godforsaken internet for hours, even breaking my own rule by looking for images of certain beaches facing west.  Instead of writing a heartfelt letter to my family about old fashioned letter-writing, I tried to find the perfect beach with sunsets.  You’d think I’d never seen a sunset before.

While they are important, sunsets will not be the only determiner.  There are basic facilities that must be present.  And sand and turquoise water and opportunities to snorkel and a short walk to the beach.  Surely, there’ll be times when we’re roughing it (3 weeks on the trail in April, for example), but the first week is not one of those times.

There are just so many options when it comes to travel, so many things to do, that I feel I am missing out on something great if we don’t choose the right place.  A similar concern comes when trying to anticipate all the dangers.  Just yesterday, when writing about Thorung La, I was driven to anxiety about this danger or that.  It’s been a long time since I really traveled.  It’s been a long time since I didn’t have to be anywhere.  It’s been a long time since I didn’t try to make people and time bend to my will.  This is not just a vacation, a honeymoon; it is also a departure from the regular ways of doing things, a study of how to go without.  This undertaking is to try to find a way to integrate this new-old way of doing things, a way to add dimensions to the relationships with my friends and family.  This departure from old habits and certain addictions could add dimensions to my relationship with my Self.

This Self of mine may soon be no more; he’ll be departed.  In his place may step a greater being; in any case: changed, different.

The idea for the first week is to plant our asses on a beach; knowing me, that probably won’t keep, and I’ll be looking for a trek to go on.  As much as we can plan, not everything will go to plan.  All we can hope is that we get an opportunity to say, “We couldn’t have planned this better.”

I had appointments for 4pm yesterday to sell the couch—which I did—and some kitchen items—which I did.  I am salesman of the 2010-11 year here in the Busan Holmberg Family.  There are speculations on whether I should become a furniture salesman.  The speculations are not my own.  But I am good.

Let me try and sell you an idea: climbing to 5416m (x 3.3 feet=roughly 17,769 feet; 100 feet higher than Everest Base Camp) for a vacation.  With all puns intended, there is one part of the upcoming journey that both literally and figuratively looms above all others, and may indeed be the height of the three month experience.

This is not to belittle the beaches, jungles and forests of southeast Asia.  Certainly, the relaxation is needed in sand and surf; and additional training is needed in northwestern Thailand.  But what is it that possesses us to leave the relative comfort of any other place in the world below 3000m?  I imagine it has to do something with the five-mile-high snow-covered Annapurna massif around which we will be hiking.

We are voluntarily going to a place where air is sparse.  The five or six days before summiting Thorung La (la=Tibetan for mountain pass) are short but steep treks; one must allow time to acclimatize to the elevation lest edema strikes and kills you.  Yes, quite literally.  We have the luxury of time and astounding surroundings, so we will spend 3 nights near 3510m Manang, taking short day-hikes and resting.  The going is slow thereafter.  Manang to Letdar is only a 720m ascent, but a snail’s pace will be best since fatigue and sparse oxygen are a trekker’s worst enemy: injuries happen more easily.  After a couple more nights of acclimatizing in 4230m Letdar, we ascend only another 240m to Thorung Phedi (phedi=foot of a hill).

All this sounds fun, right?  Well, the push over Thorung La is supposed to be the most grueling.  Depending on your fitness—surely a question mark for me and my knees, Nic and her slight asthma—this is a six to twelve hour day on the trail, the longest day of the entire circuit.  The ascent is a whopping 1040m followed by a 1620m descent.

All of the above info was garnered from the Lonely Planet Nepal trekking book.  I read over and over some of these numbers and wonder, really wonder, if I am capable.  Even with the hikes Nic and I have been on in Korea, nothing will prepare us for the altitude.  For example, yesterday, we had a bit of an outing.  It was supposed to culminate with summiting the highest peak in Busan.  We did not make it.  Although time was an issue (the salesman had to work at 4pm and we got a late start), we cheated by taking a cable car up 400m or so before starting the hike.  Had we made it to Gumgeongsan, the summit is a mere 801m.  What good is this training going to do us in the Himalaya?

I’m not really selling this to you.  I’m hardly selling it to myself.  I have to believe that we are capable of more than we think we are.  I have to believe that the spectacular views will forever be burned into my mind from the Annapurna Circuit; these images and the experience in general will be worth the inherent challenges.  Now, I must spend the rest of the day trying to write a convincing letter to my family that going off the electronic and phone grid for three months is a good idea.  The hardest part for some of them will be when we are on the above-described section of the journey.

I have been doing my best to stay away from too many pictures from the trail where we’ll spend three and a half weeks.  However, for further reading, nytimes.com has some good articles that, in addition to the Lonely Planet book, have helped give me some perspective about the realities of this endeavor.

http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/travel/21nepal.html?scp=1&sq=annapurna%20circuit%20march%202010&st=cse

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/21/travel/03212010-Nepal-Interactive.html?scp=2&sq=annapurna%20circuit%20march%202010&st=cse

Months and no word.  Everyone thought he was dead, drowned in a sea of paper and gristle of gridlock and shit of administration.  But he’s returned.  He’s a killer.  He’s a god.  He creates and destroys.

He’s still afflicted with technological addiction, slipping off the written page to check stats at wordpress, to see if a flaky foreigner has decided to follow through with a proposed purchase of furniture, to get mailing addresses via email, to see who’s engaged and who’s eating cheese and who’s watching the paint dry.

His target: a woman named May who was born circa 1928.  She’s the oldest of five children; she disappeared in San Francisco when she was in her early 20s, then returned to her family home outside Modesto.  A few years later, she helped her father cover up an affair with a migrant worker by traveling with the pregnant teen to her home in southern Mexico.  Documents indicate she died in a hiking accident in Costa Rica.  The killer knows differently.

The killer takes a quick peek online to get his fix, return a few emails.  Then he begins to plot his attack  He trains his mind while he trains his body, walking 3.48km for 30 minutes and sculpting his guns for another 20 in temperature-regulated environment.  He steels his mind against the idea of killing an 83 year-old woman, but her existence must be eradicated.  The killer will use May’s youngest sister, Clara (aka Gretchen) to cover his tracks.  He’ll make Clara/Gretchen the oldest, he’ll make her go off to SF, he’ll make her go to Costa Rica.  He’ll slice useful parts of May and carefully discard the rest to make a better, more streamlined Clara/Gretchen.

May must die.  Clara/Gretchen’s eternal life depends on it.  May must die.  The killer approaches May with his blade, intending to cut precisely through the nebula that she creates.  He expects her to go with a fight.  She may know, however, that she is superfluous; she may concede quietly.  Nonetheless, the killer is ready for anything, his faculties deft, his skills ruthless yet artful.  He deletes a high school “friend” who updates every day with his thoughts on watching the grass grow.  Then he gets to work on May.