치킨 철학자 뉴욕에 가다
존재는 쓸모로 설명되지 않는다
My phone buzzed.
A KakaoBank alert.
[Card payment ₩327,000] — Still alive, then.
For a moment I existed.
No philosophy book, no lecture, no teacher had ever said it sosimply.
“You, right here, right now.”
The feeling didn’t last. My account balance was empty. The bottom of existence was much shallower than I’d imagined.
I sat in the living room and looked down at the T-shirt stained with frying oil.
After anhonorable retirement from teaching, at my wife’s suggestion I’d opened a chicken shop.
“You’ve got plenty of time now. A chicken shop brings steady income,” she said.
At the time I didn’t know that chicken would become the tomb of my existence.
While frying chicken I came to a strange realization:
chicken is an existential food. Themoment a bird is fried is the extreme of “here and now.” Chicken cannot be stored; theinstant the steam dies away, the chicken is already in the past.
To eat it deliciously requires immediate action.
If you don’t grab the drumstick and bite at once, the moment vanishes.
Life is the same.
We plan for the future and forget how to eat the present until it’s crispy.
What existentialists call the “choice of the moment” might simply be the courage to seizethat drumstick.
Chicken asks you, “How long will you wait? If not now, then this taste is gone.”
At first the shop ran well enough.
But as time passed I grew lazy about marketing andcost calculations; even while frying I found myself pondering the essence of life.
When acustomer ordered “half seasoned, half fried,”
I’d always ask, “Will you have the seasoned first or the fried first?”
The customer’s eyes went blank with unease. “Just… give them together.”
Another day a customer asked, “Boss, which is better — soy sauce chicken, or yangnyeom?”
I gave them fifteen seconds of silence. “That’s like asking whether marriage is better than dating.
”The customer stood there for a beat and said, “Then… just the fried, please.”
He turnedaway, lonely.
People didn’t come to my shop for a philosophy lecture; they came for chicken. By the time our conversation ended, the chicken was already cold.
In the end my shop smelled more of sighs than oil; sales thinned out, and my existence hitbottom before the fryer did.
My wife grew tired.
She was practical; I was idealistic. That difference had beencharming when we were dating, but after marriage it turned into a crack.
Finally she said, “If you stop all that thinking, we can survive.”
I couldn’t answer. The moment I stopped thinking, I felt I would lose myself.
So the chicken shop failed, and my self-esteem shattered crisp and brittle.
She left; now Ilived alone with my daughter.
On TV they kept telling people to prepare for a “second life in the age of the centenarian.”
I hadn’t even finished writing the confession for my first life. Some people learn golfafter retirement, some head to Scandinavia — how did I end up standing in a failed chicken shop holding a cold drumstick?
Then one day I read a headline:
“Surge in crimes by men in their sixties” — arson, improvised firearms, murder over noisy neighbors…
In that instant I understood:
if you remain motionless, you stop being an existence and become an incident.
So I decided. I needed something deeper than chicken.
Some become criminals; I would remain a philosopher. The end of existence would not be arson, but an airplane.
