Dancing Nietzsche
🦋🦋🦋
“Hyung, I got your vote, right?”
A silent pause stretched out for a good five seconds before he finally spoke, his face and tone of voice no longer reassuring.
“Man, I don’t know. Mom swung by here earlier and pretty much dared me to vote for you. I tell you what, she kinda scared me. I’m afraid I have to side with Mom on this one, little bro. Sorry.”
Unsurprisingly, the honcho, too, was soliciting my siblings. Her goal, though, wasn’t to win them over; no, it was to strong-arm them into voting for her. Alas, my place in the family pecking order didn’t grant me the privilege to employ such a Putinistic tactic.
Thus, I opted for an opposite approach: feign immense sorrow, as if I were the saddest soul in all of Georgia. To sell this act, I needed to embody the skills of a dynamite thespian, à la Denzel, and tug at Hyung’s heartstrings with my dramatic pleas. This was to be paired with a deeply pained countenance. It wasn’t an entirely new strategy, as I had successfully leveraged my tender-hearted brother’s protective instinct for me to gain his support before.
“Hyung, remem—”
“Nope, I don’t,” he cut in. “Save your rehearsed sob story. And don’t try to butter me up, either. It won’t get you anywhere.”
If my brother thought his callous response would shake my resolve, even one iota, he had another thing coming.
“Remember the story you once told me, about the time I saved some frogs when I was just six?”
“Nuh-uh, not playing this game. You know what, I’m feeling some David Bowie, let me turn on the turntable.”
“Hyung, please! All I’m asking is for you to hear your desperate little brother out for just one minute, that’s all. Whatever happened to your ‘I got your back and you got my back, we Bahk brothers cling together like limpets’ slogan you always shouted whenever you needed me to back you up, huh?”
He leaned his back against the wall, looking as frustrated as I’d ever seen my normally laid-back brother. “Argh…you got 30 seconds.”
“Remember the creek in our old neighborhood in Seoul? I don’t have any personal memory of it, but you once told me this story: one day, we were walking by the creek when we saw some kids pelting frogs with stones. You said that I raced to stop them, even though they were older and bigger.
“Remember you said that you’d have pummeled them to a pulp if they had so much as laid a finger on me? Can’t you see I’m trying to save this kitten just like I did those frogs back then!? Shouldn’t you back me up, just as you did back then!?”
My overly dramatic shouts reverberated throughout the cavernous basement, drowning out even Bowie’s rich baritone wafting from my brother’s powerful Bang & Olufsen turntable speakers.
“Why, oh, why do you corner me like this, especially today? You know I’ve been looking forward to our trip to Helen all year! All I want is to enjoy the Appalachian autumn scenery and some German delicacies in peace. Tell me, is that too much to ask?”
I knew how much my brother treasured our annual early-November visits to Helen, a charming German town surrounded by green forests in northern Georgia. While I felt a twinge of guilt for disrupting his important day, the kitten’s well-being came before everything else.
“Hyung, come on, it’s me, your little bro.”
“Honestly, I wanna vote for you, really I do, little bro. I’m not cold-hearted, I feel for your little kitty. But how am I to handle Mom’s wrath afterward, huh? And you know she won’t let it go. I’ll be in her doghouse forever!”
“Come on, Hyung, fortify me with the strength and courage of Hercules, like you’ve always done.” With hands folded, I gave him my best puppy-dog eyes, more poignant than even Puss in Boots’ from the Shrek movies.
“Hercules? What kind of non sequitur is that? And stop doing that face!” my brother threatened, wagging his finger as if he might poke my Oscar-worthy playacting eyes.
Unwavering, I doubled down on my melodramatic, non sequitur-ish pitch. “Hyung, Nietzsche once said, ‘We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.’ Give me permission to dance today with your kindness, I beg you.”
“Really? Even Nietzsche’s tongue-in-cheek quip? Wow, you’re really gonna cling to me like a limpet until you get what you want, huh?”
With a deep sigh, Hyung budged a little, “Alright, enough of this back-and-forth. We’re just going around in circles. Here’s what I’ll do: I’ll see which way the wind is blowing when everyone gathers to vote and decide then. Cool?”
While my brother didn’t explicitly promise his vote, his shift from initially siding with Mom to sitting on the fence was a victory in my book. Sensing an opportunity to further play on his protective instinct for his little brother, I leapt up and exclaimed with theatrical flair, “I knew you’d have my back! I know you won’t disappoint me! Hyung, you fortify me, you fortify me!”
I then darted toward the door, attempting a clumsy pirouette—Baryshnikov, I sure~ly was not—on my way out, to which my brother shouted, “Aw, man, don’t dance ye~t!”