Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Ave, Charles!

My buddy Charles celebrates eighteen years with his beloved wife. Many of my married friends have inadvertently convinced me that marriage isn't worth it: the fatigue, the fights, the frustration, the fucking kids. Then there are the other friends who both seem to make it all work and seem happy to be hitched.

In his Liminality entry, Charles notes that he and the Missus performed the infamous "padlock ritual" that couples on Namsan do these days: they bought a padlock, wrote their initials on it, took the lock up to the observation deck next to the base of N Seoul Tower, locked the lock onto the fence along with the thousands of padlocks already there, then disposed of the key. Well, they didn't actually dispose of the key: Charles notes that there's a sign on the mountain beseeching people not to throw their keys over the fence.

This got me wondering whether all that steadily accumulating metal now makes Namsan a favorite site for lightning strikes. Beware. Zeus is watching.


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1 comment:

Charles said...

I have wondered if compasses in Seoul might be influenced by all those keys...

I feel sorry for these married friends you mention. I don't know why I lucked out and they didn't, because we got married back when we were just kids and didn't really know any better. I suppose things could have been a lot worse--I feel very fortunate.