Free Vaseline Buddha by Jung Young Moon Page A

thought about.
    Everyday life is often seen as something banal, but also found in everyday life, along with the banal, are the most astonishing, terrifying, and bizarre, and nothing that seems far from everyday life takes place apart from everyday life. And what’s banal is not everyday life itself but certain things found in everyday life. In everyday life there are moments that captivate you, because the moment you step into life’s most ambiguous, enigmatic territory called everyday life you feel a pleasant, unexpected surprise. And such surprises are everywhere, waiting for you at home, in an alley around your house, around the corner on a street, a forest path, or even in an unfamiliar place you travel.
    Someone could, while taking a walk near his home, see a sign that says “National Boiler Association” on the first floor of a building in a residential area he doesn’t normally visit and be touched by it in a strange way, although he would have ordinarily passed it by without second thought. He could also think that the place, which according to the sign, was headquarters to dealers who were probably responsible for household boilers nationwide, looked too small to be the office of National Boiler Association, but the place, home to an association of people whose job it was to make hot water flow from boilers in homes nationwide and let you take hot showers, and sleep in a warm room even in winter, could seem even more mysterious than a secret political or religious society, or he could look at the sign and think that the National Boiler Association could be a social gathering of people who did something that had nothing to do with boilers, or a ghost organization that was involved in something suspicious.
    Or he could come across somewhere in the city he lived in an office called Teddy Bear Association, but seeing that it was locked, to his disappointment—the place could look shut down already, with only the sign remaining—he could stand before the office for a long time, and suddenly recall the touching documentary film by Andrzej Wajda, the Polish director, on teddy bears, and think that although he really hated being touched by touching things in general, he liked how the film touched him. And he could think that if he hadn’t seen the film about teddy bears that had been with people or people who had been with teddy bears, which, if he remembered correctly, although he couldn’t be sure because it had been long since he saw it, showed the process in which an artist in Canada established a teddy bear museum and collected teddy bears from around the world, and showed faded photographs with teddy bears standing side by side with people nearly everywhere in the world, in a living room, on a beach, on a battlefield, in a spaceship, sharing their joys and sorrows, and showed Hitler in the last scene, looking quite impressive, surrounded by teddy bears, he could have passed by the office called Teddy Bear Association with indifference.
    He could also go on a walk around the house he lived in, and see a white mongrel with a tattooed unibrow standing in front of a shop and smile, thinking that the dog, which looked stupid to begin with, looked even stupider because of the tattoo, although there was no telling why its owner had given it the tattoo, and laugh for a change, looking at the dog, which looked like the most dejected dog in the world, thinking that the dog, of course, hadn’t given itself the tattoo, so the owner must have given it the tattoo, perhaps while getting a tattoo himself so that he could always be sure that the dog was his, although there was no knowing what he was thinking. And having a sudden flash of thought at that moment, that, for instance, Baudelaire went around wearing lipstick, he could name the dog Baudelaire, and think that a tattooed eyebrow would have better suited Baudelaire the poet than Baudelaire the dog, and that if Baudelaire the poet had a