Smile

E@L has had enormous problems with the incompetence and insanity of taxi-drivers: To quote Mark Twain in his recently released unexpurgated diary, "All over the world there seems to be a prejudice against the cab driver." And he (E@L not Twain) has taken and given some shit to kopi vendors. You may have noted these themes over the years. So many years. Taxis. Toast. Tired.

OK, listen, E@L hasn't read Twain's Diary, or even purchased it in 3D (i.e. a real book) or electronically, he merely saw it in a bookshop and randomly opened it and the first thing he read, sorry he lies, the second things he read was that quote. IKYN. Had to laugh. Wouldn't read about it. Well, yes we know you are reading about it at the moment, but E@L mean that rhetorically. So he typed/Swyped(tm) it into his PDA (why don't we call them that anymore?) / smart-phone for your considered delectation.

For those who are now puzzling, the first thing E@L read was something about how foolhardy we humans are to believe that we are nice creatures or that we don't lie to ourselves about a host of crucial things. We are pricks of the highest order, he maintains. And there are lots of other bitter, old-man, depressing shit, wonderfully written of course, which the photo E@L took of in order to transcribe it here didn't turn out, and when you're in a bookstore you really shouldn't take photos of the pages in a book and then retake them if they don't turn out, as his didn't, because you don't want to be kicked out, right? You don't want to be recognized next time you try to go in, and get blocked by the security guard and told you are not welcome in their store, or just watched suspiciously as you browse (spooky eyes over shoulder feeling), or have to hand in your camera-phone just in case, sort of thing. So you, faithful readers, you don't get the transcript of the philosophical bit that E@L felt like copying out for you (or himself) here today/tonight.

You. The awake/observant/returning ones, you know. E@L has had enormous difficulty with staff in certain kopi shops. Exhibit A, Exhibit B, etc… Follow the internal links, you lazy bastards.

You know, kopi, Malaysian archipelago stuff, the sock coffee, strained through a pair of clean (one hopes! - ho ho, made that joke up) stockings, sometimes ostentatiously poured from jug to jug over arm-stretched distances with an accuracy that doesn't really impress because you know they've been doing it for years. Or is that the tea? Teh tarik, pulled tea. Fuck.

Meanwhile back in reality-land, kopi is a deadly thick, spoon dissolving, GORD-inducing, grit-your-teeth, morning pick-me-up-and-throw-me-upwards-through-the-roof-like-I-was-Ironman caffeine boost, sweetened with both condensed milk and evaporated milk (when done properly) to a point where it nearly isn't black any more, a drink that E@L loves. Craves like heron. His favorite birds.

Think of it as very runny Vegemite, with caffeine. Not the taste of Vegemite, OK, nothing salty or necessarily horrible, although some people can't abide kopi and purchase multi-million machines to hiss out a bitter thimble full of, what, they call that coffee, in seeking to appease some status anxiety fad that, essentially, George Clooney and other Hollow-wood LA ostentatious pricks are responsible for, just as some people, such as Amanda Palmer might not like Vegemite and prefer to place stuff like "jelly" and peanut butter on their toast, but a taste like concentrated... coffee No, no, no, we refer to Vegemite in the sense of love it or hate it, not as a drink. And for once, it is not cancer on the toast we are in discussion about today. It's just that they're both black.

Now we are on about kopi and eating toast with kaya jam and butter. And a specially prepared toast it is.

The toast has to be um, not really toasted, but slowly desiccated. E@L may have blogged about this before, he remembers vaguely (everything he remembers is vague these days) reminding readers of the first short story in Beckett's "More Prick Than Kicks," something about a lobster and Dante. (Let me know if you need more information. Or a link.) The toasting process is completely different from traditional bread toasting methods (i.e. E@L's). The toast-cooking auntie (usually, but sometimes a pasty-faced student male) places two thickish slices of brown bread on the low heat griller, waits, turns them over on the low heat griller, not once but twice. Take your time. This is an art-form. Only slightly browned, with the lines from the heating element faintly outlined.

The kopi is already in the cup, on the table, but the toast will be a while.

It is toast-dried to a crunchiness that when sliced horizontally, i.e. though the middle of the toast, through the thinnest dimension, they slice it horizontally with toast flat on the bench, they lean on it with a slight pressure to hold it still and with a long flat, round ended knife split it in two, quite clever really, that it is so crisp you would think it is almost ready to fall apart. Almost, but not quite. Because there is a hint of softness yet in the middle. A simmering warmth. A large dollop of sweet Kaya jam (basically sugar held together with some green colored coconut and egg(!)) picked up on the bread knife is spread across the inside of the halved slice with a single sweep that creates a uniform thickness. Three pats of frozen butter, with one positioned centrally so that when the slices are placed together ready to be cut transversely the knife goes through the middle of the butter in order to reveal its full cream (it's often Western Star butter, E@L notes, from the district of Victoria, Australia, not Hong Kong, where he was born - you can run but you can't fucking hide) yellow richness. Both of the pieces of toast are sliced at the same time - one crust snipped off first at some places - and placed on a rectangular plate that they carry out to your table and take away your brown block with a number on it, but leave the used plates and cups from the previous person or persons at the table.

By the time you have the toast in front of you, the kopi is almost gone. You can't get up to order another cup, as when you get back the toast on the table will be cold. You want the toast to still have some calorific memory of its toasting, the butter just starting to melt. Warm still, the crunchy toast brittle snapping between your teeth, the kaya sweet and the butter both warm and melting, yet cold and firm in the middle as well, oh my god. To solve this issue, you order an upsize cup, 30c extra and nearly double the amount. There'll still be plenty left - fuck it's hot, you've got to let it cool down - when the toast arrives.

Or you could get it all to take away if you still worked in the office upstairs, but you don't, you are stuck in fucking Tampines, but do not place the brown paper bag inside a plastic bag as the toast will sweat and become sad and soggy.

So anyway, E@L was in Harbourfront Center today to open a bank account for Super Maid Joyce (who is now signed under his name) and set up a gyro to pay her levy, and he visited his old local, the BF Wang's on level 1. It has been nearly six months since the Great Tampines Disruption. Even so, the lad behind the cash register, the same lad who took his order when he was in Singapore, when he was at the office and when he had missed breakfast, each morning looked at E@L with a smile and said, "Welcome back, sir!" and called, "Kopi upsize, kaya butter toast," and clicked it all into the register before E@L could smile back and offer him a $5 note, something different from the fistfuls of coins he used to fob off on them in an effort to return the three thousand dollars in 5c pieces blocking the doorway to his spare room to general circulation. (If E@L came home with fewer coins than he went out with, he'd punch the air! These small victories, as someone said recently. Was it Obama?)

The skinny girl is still there, the one with the hair that falls over her face. She has got a new style, bobbed, but it still falls over her face because she leans over each milk-prepared cup as she pours in the kopi and a splash of hot water, and she stirs with such an earnest ferocity, such professional velocity, that she has developed a kyphosis. She's a shoo-in for a Gold Medal in the Kopi Stirring at the KL Olympics, coming soon, watch this space. She's there at Wang's for life, and happy with the prospect. Doubt that her health plan will cover the spinal surgery she'll required later in life (cervical spondylosis, you can almost watch it evolve in real time). E@L always wanted to tell her to straighten up - good posture, my young lady, good posture!

She doesn't look up at E@L. He didn't get to catch her eye, but she recognizes him all right. He could tell by the way she ignores him. She still hates E@L from the time he asked for a small(!) cup, and not an upsize and she looked at him because she had already poured the upsize, which is Not What He Ordered, but he was in one of his weird moods (before he had his foot pain more or less sorted with thousands of dollars of drugs, perhaps) and he was pissed that she got the order wrong and then he insisted on a small cup, so she had to pour the large one into a small cup and throw the rest out, and, seriously, why the fuck didn't he just take the fucking upsize one, what a fucking dickhead he can be, Christ he hates himself sometimes, which makes two. Twain was right, we are all shitful people. Sometimes.

But the register guy recognized him. And he smiled. And that nice man brightened E@L's day.

The taxi-driver home, man, he was a total cunt.

E@L

History of The Vibrator

Please don't ask me how I found this.



"Vibrator innovation was in fact a driving force behind the creation of the small electric motor."

E@L

Yes

I'm blogging a bit more recently because I am supposed to be doing something else.

E@L

Brief 9/11 Post.

One of my school friends was in the South Tower. (South? The second one to fall.)

I've blogged this information before.

E@L

Ye Olde Post - KTS - EOSS

Might have posted the following text (at the end of this waffle) before, but I am in the process of transferring some OneNote files into Evernote so that I can have them at home (on the Xoom, on the Galaxy, on the MacAir), and some are quite interesting and new to me. It's called EOSS.

Early Onset Stupidity Syndrome, had it since I was a kid. The ability to remember trivial shit, unless it is required for a quiz night, and work/medical related stuff, but forget a person's name 1.5secs after being introduced. To forget what I had written, what I had thought, what my opinions are.

Saw a tall guy on the street yesterday with severe varicose veins. Instantly I thought - Klippel-Trenaunay Syndrome. Wonder if he has some port-wine body-marks somewhere.

Why do I know this, but not the capital of Uganda? That was one of the question the brains-trust should have answered correctly last night. One of the guys has a PhD. In fluid dynamics, so not much help with African capitals in that speciality, although he was correct in putting down Algeria as the African nation that comes first in the alphabet.

The 'al' in alphabet, and the 'al' in Algeria are both of Arabian origin, right? No, only the later, Right? FIIK.

BTW, in KTS, the veins become varicose in because there are fewer valves in the superficial femoral veins than is usual, often only one. (I know this from a lecture a friend, the first sonographer in Australia with a PhD I believe. His thesis concerned venous incompetence of the leg - varicose veins.) Once this valve gives way, and it does eventually, even as a kid, because it is holding up a much larger volume of blood than it would if the column were shared amongst several valves, and then the distal veins distend.

Here is the bit of text I found...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I procrastinate. Like the purist marshmallow that I apparently am, I dither. I look for excuses and for distractions. Like Amazon.com

A package arrived today from Ye* Olde** Blightey. Thought I'd lash myself about the head with some of the British experimentalists of the 60's. Christine Brooke-Rose, B.S. Johnson, Ann Quin. Stuff you probably won't see on the rotating racks at Suvarnabhumi Airport.

Why? Because. Books make a virtual me.

They are cushions. To rest my head upon, to muffle the gun-shot, to torture myself with, a la the Spanish Inquisition***

E@L

* the Y is "thorn", a printer's mark for the "th" sound.

** the "e" is silent. Hence the entire expression is pronounced the same as if it were written The Old Blightey. [Know this from some book by Anthony Burgess, probably one of the Enderby novels.]

*** Cardinals were not involved so much in the Spanish Inquisition. In fact other than the (usually Dominican ) Inquisitor himself, everyone else involved was a member of the laity. [Biggles was not a common name in Spain, at the time, either.]

Commercialised Onion

Not enough money in ads, obviously.

Not funny. Not impressed.

~~~~~~~~

Unless it is funny. I didn't check to see if this was a piss-take or not. [Did check. No, it's not.]

~~~~~~~~

No, I am not prepared to pay $2.95 per month for the occasional giggle.

I have a strict budget for recurring Internet entrapment payments and the $39.95 per month I've been paying since 2003 for the AsianSexWeb.xxx (now long defunct), the $29.95 per month for BigBoobedHotties.xxx (essential viewing for the home-sick Asian expat), and the $19.95 per month for DeepTonsils.xxx, swallow (as it were) that.

E@L

Contact (Part 2)

"Once I did wipe me with a gentlewoman's velvet mask, and found it to be good; for the softness of the silk was very voluptuous and pleasant to my fundament. Another time with one of their hoods, and in like manner that was comfortable; at another time with a lady's neckerchief, and after that some ear-pieces made of crimson satin; but there was such a number of golden spangles in them that they fetched away all the skin off my tail with a vengeance. This hurt I cured by wiping myself with a page's cap, garnished with a feather after the Swiss fashion. Afterwards, in dunging behind a bush, I found a March-cat, and with it daubed my breech, but her claws were so sharp that they grievously exulcerated my perineum. Of this I recovered the next morning thereafter, by wiping myself with my mother's gloves, of a most excellent perfume of Arabia.[He continues in this vein for several pages.] But to conclude, I say and maintain that of all arse-wisps, bum-fodders, tail-napkins, bung-hole-cleansers and wipe-breeches, there is none in this world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs: and believe me therein upon mine honour; for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard of the softness of the said down, and of the temperate heat of the goose; which is easily communicated to the bumgut and the rest of the intestines, insofar as to come even to the regions of the heart and brains. And think not that the felicity of the heroes and demigods, in the Elysian fields, consisteth either in their Ambrosia or Nectar, but in this, that they wipe their tails with the necks of geese."

Gargantua, Francois Rabelais, C16th.

via

One of the classics. Some of us smart-arse 14 years olds used to read the Britannica Great Books version in the school library and, appropriately, almost shit ourselves. Mrs Wilson was not amused.

~~~~~~

I'd wager that the McHarry's Bar at Tampines Grande (hint: next to the Hitachi office) is the only one in Singapore with a toilet of the hands-free, bidet style. Brand name Toto - we are not in Kansas anymore.

E@L

Contact

Is E@L the only person to come down with this particular malady? I thought it would be a pandemic across the smart-phone, pad/tab set and now with OS X Lion, spreading even worse.

My finger tips are killing me!

About two months ago I developed some sort of desquamating rash that took lots of layers of skin off the tips of the fingers of both hands. I am not talking TEN syndrome here, and not Stevens-Johnson Syndrome thankfully, but just this peeling and flaking. It lasted two weeks, maybe a little more.

I went to my dermatologist (yes, I have a dermatologist) and she pleaded with me to stop harassing her receptionist to give me an instant appointment and to stop panicking about the above mentioned syndromes and to keep the skin well moisturized as it is just contact dermatitis, some slight irritation maybe from soap or from washing powder. (I had done some hand-washing of clothes with this German soap liquid soap in Croatia, also in Australia the weeks before my visit to the Doc, perhaps it was that toxic gunk?) Maybe some steroid ointment would help, she suggested. Yes of course I have some at home. What sort of question is that?

So no more doing dishes for E@L. ("You're soaking in it, Madge!" - old TV ad. No? Yes?)

The flaking certainly cleared quickly enough with some simple, cheap (like I don't have 35 bottles of hotel-filched moisturizing cream in my cupboard) treatment as the Doc suggested and there are some pleasing side-effects when you have your hands covered in moisturizing cream for most of the day and night... which we won't go into here as the kids are watching...

However one patch of skin took a bit longer to heal than the rest and that was the medial aspect of the terminal phalanx of the second digit, on the palmar aspect of my left hand. Yep, the tip of my pointy finger, just a little off to the side (towards the flip finger). There was, like, this little divot, or rather a patch of flatness where all else was convex. This is the exact point where I make contact with all my touch sensitive devices (the electronic ones).

BTW - E@L is a molly-dooker, a south-paw - Da Vinci, Obama, E@L...

And while it was still red, inflamed, painful, I was not quite feverish, and there was no swelling - it was a flatspot! - but there was also, obviously, else why write this post, loss of function! (Dolor, rubor, calor, tumor, functio laesa Look 'em up.)

I had this sense of ... exposure, of vulnerability, of minuscule peri-phalangeal nakedness. It seemed like my inner finger was open to the ever-present dangers of our toxic environment...

But that wound too, in time, healed.

Now it just hurts. The sensitivity remains. The little tender little spot on my finger, this clitoral attacker turned victim, is still hurting. Ow. Like a toefucker!

~~~~~~~~

Using the Samsung smartphone is a pain, but not for the reasons you iPhone lemmings would taunt me with, because of the fingers! Lately I find myself touch-typing my texts (like a primitive iPhone user*, what a step backwards for man) instead of using Swype (look it up) and even using my flip (bird, big, third) finger to do all the important action things on the screen, like stretching back and directing the rubber bands for those perturbed avia, for example And making that switch has resulted in my big finger becoming sensitized as well. I now have two tender fingertips, and am having trouble getting all three stars on Level 4.

The MacBook Air is just the same. In fact it is worse on the Air's touchpad. Should I sue? All those multi-touch gestures on these devices, that sliding from side to side and stretching the fingers apart and circling around (does sound like clitoral stimulation, doesn't it?) are taking their toll.

Using the Xoom tab also finds the tenderness, of course but I am not using that much anymore, except to play Words With Friends as it doesn't have 3G... Sigh.

I'm not sure which of these devices is the greater culprit. It's just 'ow' all the time.

~~~~~~~~

Big fool E@L upgraded his Macs to OS X Lion last weekend.

As there is not much to this upgrade other than fucking up the scrolling direction (if you have scroll wheel in your mouse as I do) and being able to stretch windows from any side or corner (copyright infringement, surely), he bought a "magic" touch pad for the desktop iMac. Because of the tippy-tippy pointy-pointy issues on the left hand, E@L set it up in the right side of the keyboard and... you guessed...

Now the finger tips on the right hand are sore. Result, i am using the mouse and trying to get used to the "intuitive" scroll direction. Result: THREE (3, count ;em) sensitized fingertips.

~~~~~~

I was thinking at first, like when I started thinking about this on the weekend, that it might be the new laptop we have a work - a Lenovo Thinkpad with the little red button in the middle... Can we please stop talking about (clitoriseses? clitoratae?) clitorides. (IKYN)

That IBM/Lenovo think, what do they call it, TrackPoint, has small stipples - no not nipples - on the tip and they may have been... no, the skin peeling had started before this creature (not a bad computer actually) was delivered last month.

Ah, OK, enough whingeing. I'll just scroll down, oops up, no, down, to Publish this post now. Ow.

~~~~~~

OK, it's midnight, time for the moisturizer therapy and - hey, stop running to the bathroom E@L! Your lotions and creams will still be there...

E@L


*primitive iPhone user - you might find that phrase rather ambiguous. I don't.

Words On Paper

You're living for nothing now,
I hope you're keeping some kind of record.

Famous Blue Raincoat: Leonard Cohen

~~~~~~~~~~

E@L has had several great out loud laughs in the last few days. Not least was induced by this photo he found on Joanne's I Have Seen The Whole Of The Internet blog-like funny thing aggregator. You know, the type of blog that gets hits. He can't put the photo up here or he'd just keep giggling and not finish the post...

~~~~~~~~~~

And the other bunch of guffaws, many of them embarrassingly public, were from reading Steve Hely's winner of the award for the least subtle book title of the year,


How I Became A Famous Novelist.

Hely is a writer for 30 Rock (love it), Family Man (not seen it) and The Office (US Version, not seen much of it, but it's funny), and you can certainly see the type of idiosyncrasies of many of the characters in these shows in the characters in this book. That is a GOOD thing, because, well, E@L laughs out loud at the idiosyncratic characters in 30 Rock. So he is the target demographic here.

Plus, natch, he had been planning on being a famous novelist himself one day. Soon. -ish.

The book rams a hot satirical skewer up the arse of the publishing industry (possibly, well, for all E@L knows about it, Hely could be completely making it up) and not to mention the banality-loving mouth-open-when-they-read public (E@L has sinus issues) that keeps the industry tearing down trees and polluting the rivers and oceans with run-off from the pulp mills for fun, profit and entertainment. Dumb readers. Out there. In general. Not you. Not me.

It's a hoot. If you do nothing else, grab a copy in the airport bookstore (they still have them?) and turn to the charts on pages 42 and 44, at the end of Chapter 2. Hely has written a facetious NYT best-seller list; it is an hilarious send-up. Guffaw 1.

In Chapter 3 he lists his guy's - Pete Tarshaw - 16 Rules Of Writing a Bestseller. E@L is not going to run through them all here as that would be, like, a spoiler. More like copyright infringement. OK, except for these two.

Rule 9: At dull points include descriptions of delicious meals. Guffaw 2.

Rule 16: Include plant names. Guffaw 3.

~~~~~

True story. At one point in time, E@L was preparing to consider getting ready to start making notes for his N-word [not *that* n-word] yet again, and thought, fuck, in all these books you read the people must be, like, fucking botanists! He thought, fuck I've gotta flesh out (as it were) the strip-joint and b-j stories with something else, like, um, nature walks. There's nature in Hong Kong, right? There are mountains, hey, must be nature somewhere nearby.

He remembers getting bugged by all these red-bodied dragonflies buzzing over his pool, or swarming halfway along Bowen Rd path and wanted to, you know, make it seem like he knew about dragonflies the way Nabokov knows butterflies, for the N-word. So he went looking up names of the many types of dragonfly in Hong Kong.

He kids you not.

Phew, enough of that shit now. "He saw a lot of dragonflies. They were near trees and some flowers. On the mountain. "

~~~~~

Pete's goal is to get famous quickly so he can turn up at his ex-girlfriend's wedding the next year and show them all that he is not a loser. E@L is not going to tell you how well that plan turns out. Comedy, right? So he spends several months banging on his typewriter, and hey presto - famous. Or infamous, whatever, no such thing as bad publicity...

Two points of order, Australians (the groom-to-be in an Aussie) do no called rugby "rugger". They call it rugby. Neither, when cheering do they shout "hurrah!" (wtf? - is this Goodbye Mr Fuck And Chips?), but "hooray!" (or "Oi Oi Oi").

Other than those minor points, the book is an epic of hilarious literary slapstick. OK it gets a bit hokey at the very end, (Rule 6: Evoke confusing sadness at the end), but then, you know, endings... and beginnings.

Pete Tarshaw was not a blocked writer though. He already has a way with words, he churns out brilliant faux applications for foreigners who desire the prestige of America's ivied universities. So sit and write? Can.

~~~~~~~~

The movie Limitless, another case in point.



Eddy is a self-proclaimed writer who has been not writing a book for 9 years. Not one word. Sit and write? Cannot.

Now, a few chemicals and he pops a great book out in four letters-falling-from-the-ceiling days.

E@L wishes. It takes him four days to finish a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes just a word.

~~~~~~~~

The best modern book on this theme, well the best E@L has read and can remember, is John Colapinto's (4.5 stars on Amazon)


About The Author.

In this one, Cal is supposed to be a writer, but expends all his energy on stories he tells of his sexual shenanigans over dinner parties, and in the end, never puts words on paper. His quiet cycle-riding flatmate Stewart has been taking it all in... When Stewart dies in a crash, Cal finds a manuscript in his flatmate's room, a brilliantly written novel that contains all the tales that Cal has been telling, the ones that he was supposed to writing in his novel.

E@L read this one in Hong Kong. E@L told his buddies how much he liked the novel, but their response was unexpected, though it should have been expected. They wanted E@L to keep telling them those stories of his outrageous action-adventures in the underbelly of the expat elite (in the what?!), and they would write it down as a novel and sell it as their own.

E@L of course did not believe them, just as Cal did not even know that Stewart was capable of writing, but it did stimulate him to start a blog. He thought it best to get some of the stories down, as a copyright sort of thing.

But he would save the best of these stories, the one's he thought were the funniest and that meant most self-deprecating in most cases, for the N-word.

~~~~~~~~~

And you know, E@L is getting old. Sure he looks great and jovial, sprightly, adventurous (he wore no underpants when he walked up to the shop last night - he forgot to put them on) and still young at heart. [Heart? let's not talk about cardiac disease in the family, OK?]

Realistically, unless some medication comes his way, the N-word will not eventuate. If only for the fact that he has too many good buddies now and too much of a social life.

Well is he is feeling old. And he is feeling that every second word he types is misspelled, that all the 'i' before 'e' stuff that he used to be so pedantic about is gone, and that ellipses in his all sentences. Sorry, that *there are* ellipses in all his sentences. He feels that his hands are too slow for his brain, or his brain too slow for the keyboard, or that the letters on the keyboard are jumping around in order to confuse him.

So he is sitting and writing them down now, all the inappropriate stories he has only ever told over dinners in mixed company, all the best ones.

The Taiwanese sumo wrestler story, the Cheshire Cat story, the getting rolled by a hooker with metal staples in her tits story, the first-time rim story, the two Mongolian girl's story, the nearly got a b-j in a bar that doesn't find that stuff amusing story, some Bangkok stories (the "oh, don't tell me you're a man" story, for example), some Singapore stories. He used to say that in his first two years in Hong kong he had already tallied up more *interesting* stories than he had in his previous forty years. Well, he's been in Asia for more than 13 years now...

He is writing them down before he forgets them, before he has to dig out a thesaurus to look for a word that means 'thesaurus' and before he has to Google everything, everyfuckingthing.

People tell him he is not so funny any more. Maybe he has lost his sense of humour. The rest of his senses can't be far behind.

E@L


p.s. E@L's friend Mike McClung, aka Mercer Machine, has been head down and arse up recently too - writing that means, working hard ai it. He has a heap of fantasy stories coming out all over the place. Check his blog for details.

( Hang on! Doesn't a heap have to be all in one place, sort of, you know, by definition?)

~~~~~~~~~~~

My favorite version of Raincoat, Tori Amos from the Tower of Song tribute album. Apologies for the corny video.

Tinariwen

Original

~~~~~~~~

Tinariwen - Tenere taqqim tossam (Four Tet remix) by Four Tet
Remix

~~~~~~~~

Never heard of them until 20 mins ago. Reminds me of some of the beats in Michael Danna's soundtrack to Exotica.

via

E@L

Hit Man

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


How the world works. You knew this, but now it is written down. Similar theme to Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine.



View all my reviews


(and when I say "now" I mean 5 years ago.)

E@L

Big Weekend

Woof. Started with a sake night on Thursday... Friends in from overseas, birthdays, you name it. Finished on pinot noir about 6 tonight. Bad boy.

~~~~~~~

Why do we do these things to ourselves?

~~~~~~

About the only thing I care to remember about the weekend is that we (i.e. me) invented a nice (I think) neologism - the waiter who tries to be attentive and do the right thing, but just....fails.


dystentive.


dys -- Ancient Greek δυσ- (dys-) expressing the idea of difficulty, or bad status.

attentive -- late 14c., from Fr. attentif, from V.L. *attenditus, from L. attentus "heedful, observant", Sense of "actively ministering to the needs and wants" (of another person) is from c.1520.


Use with caution, my little ones.

E@L

The Mouse v Super-Joyce

E@L went shopping for a specific type. Soft-soled, forgiving. He needed to minimizes this incongruous tenderness and this chronic pain.

A leather upper and an air-cushioned sole, for example, and Reebok made the ones he had found successful and that enabled him to wear them at work including the long days standing watching customers walk past to the GE booth at conferences, and not look like a software programmer, someone who's come to fix the air-con, or a jogger(!) in mufti.

~~~~~~~~

(Just to remind all you faithful readers and inform all the web-robots who come looking for backdoors to spam this site, E@L has peripheral neuropathy, idiopathic, affecting both feet, and manifest in two distinct ways. The balls of feet have been aching for seven, maybe eight, maybe nine years non-stop. Non-stop. At the desk, in a taxi, in bed, in the morning. Non-fucking stop. Speaking of joggers, the feet feel like E@L has been running marathons in Florsheims. Then there are the electric shooting pains and hypersensitivity that affects mainly several toes. Gout sufferers, feel free to empathize at this point. This latter symptom is well controlled (well less and less lately) by several thousands dollars of assorted drugs, mainly anti-epileptic and minor attitude adjustment products. Hence the slightly more temperate position E@L has had in regards to his frustrations at the various perfidious experiences of culture shock he now takes on the chin in his extended tour of the Asian cultures. The pain in the balls (as it were) remain a problem and only super-supportive shoes help.)

~~~~~~~~~

The particular shoes in his size were not available in Tampines Mall. Well, duh. Westerner sized feet? Not up here in the heartlands. The shop assistant rang through and found a pair of size 45 at Parkway Parade shopping centre.

"Where is that?" asks E@L who has extremely limited knowledge of the wonders of the East Coast of Singapore (another part of the heartlands?).

"Um..." she replied. "It's, um, at the end of Parkway."

"And where is that exactly."

"It's hard to describe." If you are an idiot. Note that E@L did not scream at this point but merely thought of screaming, and instead he smiled and gave his name and contact for the Parkway shop people.

Thank Christ and/or Google for Google Maps, but hang on, IKYN, when E@L opens the app, his screen zapped out and flew across the pacific to centred in on some drug and criminal infested barrio in Mexico City. WTF? Shakes heads, types in Parkway Parade and the app swings back across the vast waters to Singapore. What was that all about?

Parkway Parade, of course the taxi-driver knew it well - it wasn't E@L's home address which no-one has ever heard of. Shoes were purchased. One task. Done. Oops there are secondary tasks: buy some fresh squid and prawns for the curry tonight. This Chilled Repository had no fish deli, so he turned around and headed for the taxi-stand.

A women came up the escalator and walked towards him. A short Filipina, round-faced, glasses. Intelligent, focussed expression on her face. E@L was startled. This lady looked the image of The Mouse. It wasn't her, but she had such a close resemblance that E@L could not help but wish it was her.

Last year, The Mouse had telephoned and cryptically asked if E@L would be prepared to hire her again should she come back to Singapore. The Mouse never called back. Three months later, around Christmas, E@L txt'd her and called but the automatic exchange said something in Tagalog (or Spanish, who can tell?) and disconnected. He wondered what was going on, hoped nothing bad had happened. Who knows, storms, floods, fighting; it's a crazy land. He had really no way of finding out if she was alright, save a full search-and-rescue operation, hacking through dense tropical jungles ("It's using the trees!") of the northern parts of Luzon. Or catching a 12 hour bus from Manila. [Mmm, bucket list: find The Mouse?]

But as he walked on, he wondered if the reason for her lack of contact was that she had come to Singapore after all, or maybe that she had gone back to Hong Kong, and was now employed by someone else. She would now have a local number.

Working for someone else!

E@L's heart dropped, he felt faint, his eyes almost misted. Perhaps she had found another employer, maybe a better, kinder, more generous, more understanding and supportive one than E@L. One with more books. The thought of her being here (or there) without calling to say hello and to explain hollowed him out. He felt cheated, betrayed. These are not just words, not abstract forms, these tell of physical things, measurable things, you all know this. When E@L says his stomach churned, his stomach really DID churn. When he says he felt sick, he really FELT sick, acidic and bilious. He felt pale, clammy. His pulse raced.

Snap. It was an instant.

Hey, he wanted to have The Mouse. He wanted her to be his. To be his friend again and to be his employee again. He didn't want her to have said she would come back to him and then to go with someone else, but maybe she had! But that would mean she had lied to him. Did he love her? He certainly held the most positive and caring attitude towards her. He wanted always her to be happy, he wanted himself to be happy even more, though when the trouble had come and she was forced to return, he let her needs rise above his selfishness. Of course he did, he is a nice guy. Dumb fucker. No, he didn't love her although he wants her, and not just as a maid either, but also as a friend. Was she treating him unfairly, was she being unfaithful? Was she not that good after all?

This was, da duh!, how he had felt the other week-end when Odette had stayed in the taxi and went on with her girlfriend (presumably for steamy sex). Jealous. Cheated, betrayed. LOSS OF OWNERSHIP.

[And yet with his post-modern, self-observant cynical eye, he was amused as he became even further self-informed: he is capable of being an idiot for not only love, like you, like everyone else, but also for a good employee.]

Love and ownership. Proposing, marrying, kidnapping, stalking, raping, pining, committing suicide, murdering, eloping (doing the Romeo and Juliet thing), the Dr Zhivago thing (leaving the missus for a gorgeous tart), pistols at dawn, writing poems, novels, radio dramas,screenplays and operas, attacking rivals in a pub, pillaging the neighbouring tribes for that woman you spied washing clothes by the river bank, starting a war against Troy (the piece of arse that launched a thousand ships), these are things you will to assuage this emptiness.

You know the shape that will fill the hole, and the vacuum is stronger than anything, ever. It's completely irrational. It's lower brain, it's primaeval, it's lust, it's jealousy, it's WANTING. They castrate you because you won't stop, you climb the tower to get to her, you fight the dragon, you...

E@L stands aside from his emotions and think'd: What is really happening is that you want one of your sperm to impregnate her before that from the rivals (real, imaginary, hypothetical) do. Ah, now we are getting to the point... Your selfish genes control you after all. They don't care about the pain, the hurt, the nausea; they just replicate and seek promulgation. That's what they do. It is their purpose and all else is merely the trappings. You are the support system for your sperm, for your eggs. Art, music, poetry. Pffft. Chromosomes rule your life, they are your essence.

This is where the urge comes from, the feeling that makes the world go around, spins it faster and faster... You want that person, you have no idea why or more correctly you have no idea why you want that person so desperately, why all of a sudden you've decided they're yours and you have to have them... It is the forgotten meaning of what being alive entails. We are the too smart apes ruled by dumb genes.

SNAP

Yes, the snapping sensation, that eureka moment, that epiphany, that hit when he thought of The Mouse, was uncannily like the moment of realization that struck him when Odette went from becoming Izzy's sister and E@L's fun-loving, cute, tiny, way-young travel companion to - SNAP - someone else, someone he desperately wanted to screw (but knew he never would/could).

It was in the same epigastric sensation, the same emotion [E@L's repertoire of emotions is frighteningly narrow-bandwidth, like his cricket batting strokes; a no-step straight drive to mid-wicket, backward defense snicked pulled shot to third man, forward defense snick to second slip] but he reached there along a different path, from a different need. Did his genetic core get it wrong this time?

Friends have advised him, slightly less than jokingly, that he should just marry The Mouse, shut up and get it over with: have a perfect wife, a clean house, good food, a quiet voice, someone to talk about books with, no sex. Should he have done that? Should he still consider that trek to the Bay of Islands. Seriously he could not imagine having a better person as a significant other... But her phone number is lost. That was not her on the escalator.

But, no E@L never fancied The Mouse in sexual way... This was no sexual snap at all, it was an emotional snap, one of a lost friend, but also of lost possession, one of ownership.

He wonders at yet another opportunity lost. Is this his density?

~~~~~~~~~~~

Super-Joyce asked if E@L wanted her to help him with dinner? She was ironing in the spare bedroom and had heard E@L chopping up herbs for the curry paste.

"Sure, can you shell the prawns if you like."

Silently (unusual for Super-Joyce) she pulled off the shell, cut out the 'vein' and placed the prawns in a bowl. Then she picked up the squid and put it down again. E@L opened a tin of fenugreek powder for the curry paste. A small moth flew out. A web of fenugreek coloured silken strands formed a nice moth nest inside the mouth of the tin. This must be where last month's Infernal Tiny Moth Plague was sourced. It mainly affected the spare bedroom interestingly, not the kitchen.

"Oh," Super-Joyce jumped back at the tiny moth's sudden appearance.

"I'll do the squid if you like," E@L said and she laughed with some relief.

"Thank you, Mr Pilip. I don't like the smell on my hands when I am folding clothes."

"No, that's a good idea." E@L pulled the head, guts and plastic spine from the top of the small squid. He had two to prepare.

Super-Joyce was still in the kitchen, she hadn't gone back to the ironing. "Mr Pilip, I find this on the floor." She pulled out the rubbish bin [a plastic shopping bag in a bucket], moved some of the prawns shells aside and showed me a curled up black thing slightly bigger than a thumb-nail, eight legs in a clonic spasm. A dead spider. "Is poisonous, I find here, [pointing at a corner near the stove] and spray it. Now it's dead." Obviously.

"Many animals here in your kitchen Mr Pilip," Are moths and spiders animals? Arachnids. Moths are insects, right?

"You need someone to look after you more, Mr Philip." Pause. "Mr Pillip, can you help me?"

E@L looked up from pouring great quantities of coriander powder into the curry mix to make up for the lost fenugreek. "What is it, Joyce?"

"Mr Pillip," her voice was now more serious than E@L have ever heard it, strained, louder, insistent, "my employer has going back to working in Jakarta. He cannot sponsor me any longer. Can you sign for me, can you be my employer?"

E@L smiled lightly. "Well I guess I can..." Then he thought of The Mouse, and his essentially forlorn hope of finding her again. "The thing is, I promised I'd sponsor my old maid if she wanted to come back." That was nearly a year ago, who was he kidding?

"You have another maid coming?" she asked.

"Oh no, no. It's just that she called last year and asked me to... she wanted me to... Oh, that was so long ago. She's obviously not coming. Look Joyce, it shouldn't be a problem but let me think about it. I'll think about it..."

E@L picked up the bowl of prawns to mix with the now sliced calamari. Super-Joyce hadn't removed the inner heads of two of the prawns.

~~~~~~~~~~~



~~~~~~~~~~~

In unrelated news: the lady whose signs E@L had missed way back when and he never called back, has been unwell. Some surgery, some therapy and she is fine now but not yet back at work. E@L sent her a good will txt and they had a few vaguely positive (yet negative, now she can't drink any more and so is unable to come to the distributor's Sake Party at his place this week) exchanges... Who knows what will come next...

Further news associated to this illness: the lady who had been sitting at the same desk previously had developed a similar problem, but unfortunately with a sadder outcome. No-one wants to sit at that desk. It has bad luck. Ghosts. It is the 'cancer desk'. IKYN.

E@L

Taxi-Twitch

E@L is in a taxi and the driver goes the wrong way (i.e. the long way) and is an ancient man with serious twitching issues (sigh - E@L attracts taxi drivers with Tourettes the way Bruce attracts desperate hookers) and, as he assumes all expats require refrigeration, has the air-con set to cryonics. He seems nervous and when E@L mumbles something about turning right and not left he looks back at E@L briefly in the mirror with a expression close to fear in his copper-cornea eyes and the twitches accelerate, though the taxi does not. He seems an overly cautious driver, perhaps because of poor vision and liver disease, perhaps because he wants to give snails a chance to get out of the way.

Taxi-uncle is slowly building up speed as they approach an intersection where he has to turn right (to correct his navigational error) and as the lane breaks off from the forward lane and starts to expand into two where the median strip narrows, he drives in the invisible fourth lane (so common in Asia, but also seen in Italy and France) between all the others.

E@L says, "Uncle..."

"WHAT!?" he screams in a panic and slams on the brakes; E@L is tossed forward, well he is forced to lean a little bit forward as the car screeches to a halt and blocks both of the right turn lanes and half the forward lane...

They are lucky there are no speeding cars, heavily loaded trucks, cement mixers, emergency or military (some army place full of ancient Jeeps nearby) vehicles coming up behind them (they have all overtaken the taxi already) or E@L would not be typing this.

No-one, in fact, would be typing this: if a post-mortem hacker tried to break into one of the four (including tab) computers they'd fail as E@L's password is unbreakable. No, not "unbreakable" but, you know,like difficult to crack. No, not "difficulttocrack" but ... Oh, you get the point. No, "yougethepoint" is also NOT E@L's password.

OK admission, it is "password", the No2 most common password in the world of cybersecurity (E@L is always second best, where is the justice in that?) and the encrytped sub-directory with all the good porn is called "allthegoodporn, and the password is "unbreakable".

[In Unrelated News: Winning joke at the Headinbra comedy festival: "The computer asked for an eight character password, so I chose Snow White and The Seven Dwarves." Boom boom!]

"Um," says E@L, completely amazed by the taxi-uncle's slight overreaction, but he continues, "uncle, could you please turn the air-con down..."

Taxi-uncle nods a few times quickly and mumbles something in an apologetic tone The taxi starts to move again, slowly enough for him to turn the fan down a notch way before they reach the intersection.

E@L slowly shakes head, puts his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of nose, sighs, etc...

~~~~~~~~~~~~



E@L

Jaded

The bright lights and big... um, bright lights of Soi Cowboy wash over Bruce now, like some much water off so much duck. Bangkok, OMG not again. Way skinny girls wearing not enough (if anything at all) given the settings of the air-con. They have to cuddle their bronzed bodies, so unforgivingly hard and unforgivably toned, they have push themselves right up against Bruce to borrow some of his body's substantial calorific storage.

Ah, dear. The breasts on these girls are so small and sitting up way too high, their nipples too prominent and stiff. And what the hell is wrong with that girl's KNEES? So knobbly, eh?

Jaded. Sigh. Shrug. Meh.

So hard to be impressed these days, so hard to be moved, so hard to be bothered. Same same, only more-so. Really, shouldn't there be more than just ... this?



Bruce is listening...? No?

Well, no-one has come up up with a good answer yet so Bruce will just have to shrug and bare bear it, and buy the not-quite naked girl sitting next to him (knee-high boots are clothes, right?) another 'tequila' before she "go dance now" and he'll pretend to watch the TV while she pretends that what she her and her two colleagues are doing on stage could, in anyone's vocabulary, be called 'dancing'.

E@L

Fever

E@L has been in two, three, any number of minds of late - and going out of his own. Should he do this, should he do that, what's to happen if, how can he help here, how can he limit the damage there... a lot of this is family, in fact most, but there are other issues as well, as you might have gathered from earlier posts, that are occupying large parts of his tiny mind.

~~~~~~~~~

[Pre-reading: Tolstoy, 'Anna Karenina' - at least the first paragraph. T.S Eliot, 'The Waste Land'. Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (Vol1 of 'In Search of Lost Time'). Richard Mason, 'The World Of Suzie Wong'. Richard Bernstein, 'The East, The West and Sex']

~~~~~~~~~

Hollow man, lost man.

E@L has been single and loving it for many years now. He has been in Asia over 13 years. It's usually terrific, you all know that. But swings and dips and high and lows and near-misses and bullets dodged and living alone and sharing apartments and never having even been *offered* a blow-job, let alone a pity-fuck, from our ex-SPG (E@L did get a massage, pajama type, no happy ending) in over three years... all of this demands some contemplation, some life-examination, every so often, as the cleaner's schedule in a public toilet needs a tick bi-hourly. And the question of whether or not the toilet has actually been cleaned corresponds nicely with whether E@L's soul-searching provides a good psychological service and cleans anything at all.

~~~~~~~~~

As you are aware, recently E@L had fallen somewhat into a lustful, nauseating monomania and watched himself develop a ridiculous attachment to someone who couldn't, literally, give a fuck (must be a family trait), and came to the point of turning himself into the sort of fool he so regularly lampoons. He'll call her Odette. Previously, he has been a bastion of common-sense, warning others and himself of what can happen when the blood flows south. He has tried to make his blog a vaccination centre against such feverish idiocy...

~~~~~~~~~~~~



~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ah, Odette, moans E@L, light of my life, fire of my loins, little brown fuck machine of my dreams.

The mystique of the Asian, the strange and foreign Orient, the exotic East (sorry, that's tautological - exotic means foreign and orient means East): The girls that the expat man finds are inevitably so cute, so sweet, so quiet, so acquiescent. And for these females, the expat is so rich and so clean (according to some survey or other E@L read about [in the Bernstein book] many Asian women said that they preferred foreign men because they had better hygiene than their countrymen!!!).

Sure, such selfish superficiality is a part of it, but it's also because the expat man in Asia is, well, in Asia. He is going to met many Asian girls, single ones, pretty one, some on the prowl (on the internet of course as well as the clubs and bars) and their ineluctable charm (specious though it may be - women remain women wherever they find us) will draw him in.

Is it the same for expat women? E@L hates to be controversial [cough, cough, hack, spit] but expat women tend, or have tended in the past, to be expats by default, arriving off the boat in their long frocks and holding hats and parasols, as partners in a relationship - wives, E@L means. The majority of expat women E@L has met in Asia are trailing on the steps of their husbands' career paths. Sure there are many single females who have come over as expats. Talented, determined and gorgeous they may be, but E@L does not apologize for considering them the minority.

And when the married man runs off with the LBFM of his dreams, he leaves the 50ft Zombie Divorcee with gin-blanked eyes, sun-leathered skin, mind emptied of all except the need for affirmation that can only be assuaged by fucking yet another opportunistic male (any race will do) who cares nothing for the encounter.

E@L doesn't want to go into to this Yellow Fever thing too much here, but he needs to provide a little explanation as to why the object of his affliction, oops, affection, is an Asian girl.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

But is it because of E@L's long-term single-man, bachelor, man-alone lifestyle that there has been an arguably inevitable hollowing out of his emotion core, that those superficial, ephemeral and economic relationships seem to encourage, that the shell that remains can be so quickly and easily filled with such a stupid and futile set of obsessions?

It happened so suddenly, so unexpectedly - he has only known Odette slightly, but for years - that E@L wonders why it happened at all. Mere proximity? Merely seeing the evidence that she was bi-sexual and she liked to fuck?

And it was strange to see how it affected his perception of her. At first they were merely traveling companions and then becoming more friendly and closer, the girls and E@L telling jokes and secrets, laughing hysterically as they knocked off the last of the Maker's Mark. (That night of laughter was brilliant fun now E@L thinks back on it. It was that night, after they were tucked up in their separate beds in the lounge room, before his face disappeared into the mesh of his CPAP, that E@L told her, in confused circumlocutions, that he wanted to fuck her. She looked at him, said "Oh, that's nice," and turned her head away and went to sleep. He is still not certain that she understood at all what he had been mumbling so drunkenly.)

But then (no, it was well before the night of the laughter) over the days of sun-lounging and partying that suddenly Odette became to E@L, as did Proust's original Odette to M. Swann, someone to be both desired and loathed, a thing of love and of pain. She was someone else all of a sudden, or she was two people - the friendly niece to his nice-guy avuncular persona getting and giving buddy cuddles and platonic kisses, and then, somehow, a distant creature, untouchable, an unknown mind. Was she torturing him, teasing him on purpose, or was the knife churning in his guts all in his head? Did she know what she was doing to him, or did she think it was still as it was that night of drinking Makers Mark, that the situation hadn't somehow, mysteriously, morphed into a monster - a green-eyed giant of inexplicable possessiveness and crazy jealousy.

As he watches her attention flit elsewhere throughout a long night and morning (from OT to Clarke Quay, a curious inverse of the usual direction, but that is what happens when you run with females) from a Baron de Charlus or two here, to another girl or two there, he feels absent, he feels nauseous, he feels peripheral. Lust unrequited.

At least E@L is not married to the bitch.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

- Dude, you don't know Brittany Spears!
- Yes I do!
- Well, she's never heard of you!
- Really? Well who's signature is that on the bottom of this restraining order?!

~~~~~~~~~~~~

And it doesn't help as E@L watches as his friends, one by one, disappear into so called 'healthy' relationships. Not all are happy (at least they are unhappy in their own way), but in his social life recently, E@L has become a third or fifth wheel as these couples do weird couplish things like feed sushi to each other across tables while their dusty toes grope underneath same for sweaty, palpitating crotches. And then they go home and have sex. With each other, or so one gathers from the FB videos and photos.

It has been a long long long long long time but once again, a spark has shot off where a flint has cracked across his stony heart. E@L really has no expectation of anything except being ever more cock-teased interminably here, but at least this game won't damage him any further, won't burn him as have the flames from previous flinty times have done (we are talking decades of non-healing wounds here) as he doesn't take it seriously enough. He has retained a modicum of sense and reality, and the fire of this one-sided attachment to Odette has essentially expired.

But it is a symptom.

E@L wonders if he might start to fall in love much too easily, that the vacuum in his (for want of a less value-laden word) soul is sucking furiously. Unlike the girls in his life.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ends with a whimper. Not a bang in sight.

The tick-box must be checked - is it cathartic to write about this or not?

E@L


(hat tip to Scott in HK for that brilliant photo - been hanging on to it for ages to get a suitable opportunity)

Mum Pt 3

My mum managed to avoid the Rehab stay and went straight home (to my sister's). Eating well, feeling bright. Doing well.

Oh, and all results from histology, etc... were clear. 100% cured.

E@L

Mum Pt 2

For those of you worried - my mum has progressed amazingly well since I arrived in town. Must be my influence. They are even saying she might be able skip Rehab and go straight home. An abdominal operation for of those of you wondering.

E@L

Mother

I'm in Australia at the moment in mixed mode: I was working in Adelaide last week and will be in Brisbane next week, but as a) some work in Canberra has been postponed and *more importantly* b) my mother had a moderately tough operation 10 days ago, I'm going to be at home for the moment.

Maybe she'll be transferred to a rehab centre tomorrow, maybe later, but doesn't look like she'll be discharged home all that soon. We'll get some more information tomorrow, and I'll be talking to the surgeon about the complete findings (nodes, etc...).

And if yes, then what? And if no, then what?

She does not look strong enough yet, and her appetite has not rebounded. She's 86.

~~~~~~~~

The sight of my sister sitting by the bed filing mum's nails stopped me - a deja-vu of mum doing the exact thing to her mother when I was what? eleven, as grandma lay in her hospital bed in Colac.

Wispy hair suddenly seems much more gray, the parchment pale skin spotted and loose, her drawn face over newly prominent cheek-bones, her lips catching on dry teeth as she speaks (something cheeky no doubt), a warm cardigan over her shoulder, she strains across to hear, the touch of her warm hand...

The past. The present.

The future.

~~~~~~~~~

Probably even lighter blogging than usual for the moment.

E@L

More is Less

Fuck - this post still tells it better than E@L could tonight.

~ Delete revision "Bruce In Clarke Quay" #456 ~

E@L is just saying the same things over, different incidents, same story, just not as well.

Did *I* write that post? E@L asks. He is quite impressed actually, though as he is two bottle of Port Philip Estate Pinot Noir down, anything would sound good. Adelaide - great food, who woulda thunk?

~~~~~~~~

"What, is he a lust-sick juvenile? Is he M. Swann, that tragic character, unprepared to accept such behaviour in principle but unable stop himself from loving the bisexual, flirtatious Odette in reality. Is he von Aschenbach on a Venice beach-chair dying a bit more each minute as young Tadzio bathes, tantalizing and untouched? Is he Humbert Humbert, never restful, still chasing even after having caught the not-as-innocent-as-he-fantasizes Lolita?"

YUCK!!

"No matter how cynical the man, how adamantine the heart, how cool the blood, how experienced the player, how weary of the world and aware that up between the legs of each female is, as Charles Bukowski explains quite lucidly, just another cunt, and that deep in the dark hollows of that cynic's chest is a flicker of light, a dim glow under a bushell of scar tissue that is the possibility, impossibly, of something close to... something like... love. "

VOMIT!

~~~~~~~~

Is there really any need for more on this topic? E@L knows that the person who figures obliquely in it has read the previous post, she has been out partying with him and told him as much, and still she has managed not to have sex with him, despite a 5:30 am finish, so why should E@L persist, either in writing on this topic or thinking further on this person, why bother continuing along this disastrous and sad, oh oh oh oh lookatthefireworksMilly oh oh oh endintears oh oh so sad, route? Why?

~~~~~~~~

Maybe the off-chance of a pity-fuck? A four-stroke relationship? But would this kill or merely enrage the demon?

Neither of us will ever know.

~~~~~~~~



E@L