the kind of dogs I hate

With very few exceptions, I hate little yippy dogs. They're loud; they're annoying; they're suffering from a Napoleon complex. And South Korea is full of the filthy creatures.

Toy breeds satisfy a psychotic aesthetic need in this country for all things cute and tiny. Doug Coupland, author of the novel Generation X, wrote long ago about the "Hello Kittification" of North American culture, i.e., the draining-away of traditional machismo in favor of what some these days refer to as the "soy boy" ethos. Keep in mind, though, that Hello Kitty sucked the juice out of East Asian ball sacs first, which is why countries like Japan and Korea, which have known plenty of tragedy, sadness, and despair over the past century, seem obsessed with cotton-candy pop culture, from unrealistically high-pitched-squealing girl bands to effeminate, metrosexual boy bands who seem to have learned all the wrong lessons from the slinky pansexuality of the 70s glam-rock era. The result is small dogs that yap-yap-yap whenever I pass by them and their owners—owners who exercise varying degrees of control over their mutant pets.

I was walking home along the Yangjae Creek on Friday night when I passed a couple and their yippy dogs. One of the dogs was leashed; one was not. The one without a leash was about the same size as my foot; it also seemed rather old because, whenever it tried to bark, the bark came out sounding like a raspy whisper. This dog was hard to take seriously. The slightly larger dog, a white, fluffy creature somewhere between a poodle and a terrier, began barking at me as I passed the couple. This prompted the whisper-dog to bark as well. As with many Korean pairs walking along narrow paths, these good folks failed to move aside as I approached them from behind, thus forcing me to weave between them. Consideration for others isn't a huge value in this country, which is why, to survive, you have to become pushy and develop a thick skin. I'm pretty sure the dogs wouldn't have started barking at me had I had more room to pass, but as it was, I squeezed by and got an earful of yipping and yapping.

The male half of the couple spoke in a tone of half-hearted sternness to his excitable little animals, but this didn't deter them. The tinier dog chased after me as I pulled away from the couple, announcing its presence with those soft, pitiful bark-wheezes. I ignored the feckless beast, knowing full well I could crush it in a single stamping motion if it closed in and tried to bite me. As I pulled even farther away, the second dog ran up to me, and it wasn't wearing its leash anymore. This fact pissed me off far more than the dogs' behavior. I often fantasize about taking a heavy golf club to the skulls of irresponsible dog owners. I mean, come on—after having just seen how his dogs had reacted to my presence, the owner then decided to unleash his other dog? I wanted to knife the man then and there.

As if he psychically understood my emotional state, the man came running breathlessly up behind me to scoop up both of his animals. I did my best simply to ignore him and his misbegotten canine midgets, and I kept on walking. If I'd thought I could have gotten away with it, I'd almost certainly have punted the furry little fuckers off the walking path and into the nearby creek. Normally, I'm a dog lover, or at least a dog liker, but when you're irresponsible in how you manage your pets, I'm all for treating them as extensions of your warped and rotten soul, with all the hellfire and brimstone that that implies.

I stopped hearing the couple as I approached the stairs that would take me up and away from the creek, back to street level. As there was only one turnoff before those stairs, I surmised that the couple had either taken that turnoff or deliberately dropped back so as not to be a nuisance to me. Too little, too late, I say.

In the end, though, no harm was done. The incident proved annoying, but nothing more than that. The dogs didn't bite me, and I didn't shatter their ribs with well-placed scoop kicks. This is how incidents often resolve themselves in this country, whether animals are in the mix or no: there's a lot of sound and fury, but in the end, it signifies nothing.

(Still, things like this are irritating enough to write a blog post about.)