I've been infected with a heavy dose of caring.
I find myself doubled over in pain as concern, compassion, and frustration claw at my vitals.
The disease has prevented me from writing about frivolous crap, with thoughts on Very Important Subjects crowding out rants and pseudo-blogs. My blockage even survived the literary laser blasts of Harlan Ellison's The Glass Teat, a delicious collection of commentary that serves as a template for well-aimed invective and throws off enough heat to curl your eyelashes.
But the pressure to write something, anything, has finally grown unbearable.
Thus:
If I hear one more tidbit about James Kim I think I'll go make a nice warm cup of tea, just because I can.
The whole saga as crammed down our throats by the media definitely struck a chord. A lot of us are like foie gras geese for that sort of stuff. My own circumstance helped the story resonate with me. I live in the Bay Area. I work in technology so that I can afford to live in the Bay Area. I have two kids close in age to Sabine and Penelope Kim. We often drive through the area that killed James Kim, driving Route 42 that the Kims missed. My wife often bullies me into taking weird, off-the-beaten-path "adventures" on dodgy roads, but this usually occurs in Turkey while I'm nearly in tears dealing with Turkish drivers and, thankfully, the weather is good. There's something exhilarating about putting your life on the line with a $2 map.
We've heard all about the burning tires and the breastfeeding. The touching reunion photos and the death march graphics have flashed in front of our eyes. We've read about the trail of items left behind by James Kim as a shrewd survival tactic or as a hypothermic cock-up or, maybe, as a really twisted scavenger hunt. We've tried to calculate how many mortgage payments it would take to hire a helicopter and drop survival kits. We've wondered how Kati Kim managed to keep such a healthy double-chin with all that freezing and starvation and breastfeeding.
Really, the Kim family should've seen this coming. We all should have.
Given the straight-laced, provincial intolerance that we're wallowing in these days, it's clear that James Kim's death is an emphatic censure from God for the man's unnatural miscegenation, his blasphemous ZIP code, and those damned silly glasses that just screamed Saab-driving, multiple frou-frou boutique owning ($18 for a pump bottle of French soap? $142 for a hoodie?), Sabine and Penelope daughter-naming, yuppie, liberal intellectual.
Just who the heck did he think he was, making a living with his brain, being Asian, and trying his damnedest to save his family?
How is it possible that he could escape death for such a lifestyle?
He was probably OK with gay marriage too, which gets you an automatic smiting right there.
So now I've done it. I've heaped one more clot of words on the quickly composting pile of Kim news. (Reminds me that I haven't had kimchi in too long. mmmm…) Feel free to jab out your eyes with knitting needles or to craft a voodoo doll of me from plastic binder covers and drown it in single malt scotch. I'd suggest a nice Speyside malt, maybe sherry finished. Definitely not an Islay malt. I don't enjoy drinking stuff that tastes strongly of peat, salt, and rotting seaweed.
Pakeha