Homage to Lewis Caroll or O Henry? Definately not the most appetizing name for a food establishment -what's all that Business School nonsense about the importance of Branding?

Old paths revisited

I've been off the writing for quite some time, and although I can use the excuse that I have been busy moving into a HUGE palace of a place, cleaning it, planning a housewarming party, catching an unidentified skin disease, healing the same, replanning the housewarming party, and re-cleaning the house again, all 70 square meters of which had somehow managed to gather a huge amount of dust - in fact, if the dust has the right pH level, I can save it up for my roof farm later in the summer....

I want to describe two things; the amazing writing of a popular blog I just discovered, actually a constellation of related blogsites called Festering Ass - so cleverly and realistically written that it blows everything else out of the water. The writing style owes much to the late Bukowski, not only in the imaginative treatment, but also in the gritty nature of the subject material. It is not quite as unpleasant as the parent website domain name would have you think, but for you guys, I'd recommend Tucker Max or Hoo-Ah, whereas women may find a sympathetic node at SlowChildren-AtPlay.

I spent most of this weekend cleaning up for and cleaning up after (no more phrasal verbs please , English Teacher!) my house party, and the rest of my time feasting on Slow Children and Tucker Max. I can't remember having cackled at writing on the Internet in some time.

It even inspired me to dust off my keyboard and make another stab at narrative, and at describing my less-than-drab existence in flashier prose. Tucker Max, for example, has a gift for dialogue - but the man takes no chances, carries around a small voice recorder even while getting shit-faced. That certainly is the kind of dedication (and brazenness) that I need to get my act together.

So in that spirit, I've decided to dig up some of my oldest blogrolls from my times in Beijing, to let you, dear reader, decide whether Korea and my cushy existence here have ruined my prose style or made it slightly better. Here's a sample:


Thursday, 24 June 2004

cat follies
Yuen Lao Shi is the landlord of our courtyard house (in Chinese, four corners house), or is related to the owner of our house, and he lives in the first half of the courtyard, separated from our little foreign enclave by a round Chinese arch/doorway.
He is quite the entertaining sort, by that I mean we have come to love his unique blend of Chinese expressions "Fei Shang Hao! Fei Shang Hao!" and English expressions (he loves to trot out an idiom he's been studying recently), his entertaining way of suddenly bursting into song like some sort of South American Latin romanticentric, and his extreme, often painful love of animal and plant life of every kind.
The pride of his menagerie currently seems to be the cat family he has nurtured from the rooftops to the courtyard floor. There appears to be a floating population in this hutong of anywhere from 2 to a couple dozen cats, depending on whether you count tails or midnight moanings. As the last metaphor implies, the Cat Family is busily reproducing itself into our little ecosystem.
The most recent litter was about two weeks ago, just four days before I got to China. The mother cat apparently had chosen the birth spot to be in our Television Lounge room, in a pile of comforters used by our Weekend visitor Maurice. Apparently she didn't like the cardboard box that Yuan Lao Shi had rigged up for her with blankets and pillows. She scratched the door all night and was apparently all but unapproachable.
Yesterday I came home to find Yuan Lao Shi in a bit of a state. The mother cat had one of the babies in her mouth, and was going around the courtyard in a highly agitated state. According to him, she wanted to move them to a new nest, and was looking for a place.
The problem was, she had already hidden two of the kittens and we didn't know where...they were too small for us to hear our cries, so there was nothing for us to do except watch and follow the mother to find out where they were.
She headed straight for our roommate Joel's room. Joel sleeps on a platform elevated two meters above the floor, accessed by a spindly ladder. The mama cat kept jumping from floor to bookshelf, bookshelf to bed platform, each time an entire meter, wiyh a kitten in her mouth. Then she prowled the parameter of the mosquito net, looking for a way into the bed and cushions.
She did this several times, and finally she gave up. We searched the bed but found no babies. Just in case, I left the mosquito net open and tried to let her go in, in case she had actually hidden some babies where we hadn't looked. But she didn't come back.
Normally I'm not involved in the lives of cats....but this one certainly has even me guessing.

To be continued....The House Party and the Salsa Nazis...

This is basically how I picture my dream retirement scenario. I'm not talking about staring at my hairy, knobby legs, but rather the whole tropical dream thing, the hammock being the archetypical symbol of the same.

One might mistake this picture for the inside of a cheap hotel room in Cuba, instead of Luang Prabang.

Oh Mother earth Nipple pointed at the Mouth of the Sky!

Fruit or vegetable? I can't even remember now; but I'm pretty sure that this is in Laos; the newspaper background is laotian....