WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

The yowling could be heard nearly a block away. It was horrible, ghastly, stomach-clenchingly excruciating, and white. Because ONLY white people in their mid to late twenties treat karaoke as a means of mass-torture. Crank up the volume, everyone to the mike, and scream your silly guts out.

Ah, good clean fun.

My friend the bookseller remarked that if he could go back in time, he would kill the inventor of karaoke. But that it would not help, because karaoke was inevitable.


There are two things baffling about what we encounter every week:

1) Why does Ms. Wong tolerate bad white behaviour?

2) Why do whites behave so badly?


The young white bros had, by their singing, chased away the middle-aged Cantonese gentlemen (cheery free-masons, all), who normally congregate at that place. If Mandarin songs sound twixt sappy and crappy, and Canto-pop has a weirdness all its own, then White songs sound like something Charlie Manson would have performed before repeat-stabbing his victims to death and leaving rude misspelled statements scrawled in blood all over the walls.
Anthems for psychopaths.


56式自動步槍

Four white males, one South Asian, lots of booze, and a popular hard rock anthem by American slasher band 'Guns N Roses'. Did you know that the song lasts for twenty minutes? The neighbors probably didn't either. Somewhere in Chinatown some little tyke probably asked his mother "why do the white folks hate us?" In another apartment, a grizzled veteran of the campaign against the Uighur irridentists fervently wished that he still had his service weapon ("ah, Kalashnikov, my sweet, sweet friend"), while a college student wondered if academic success would take her away from such brutality.

Society is dominated by mean stupid white people, but surely somewhere there is peace?

The four white gentlemen tortured us with a few more chansons. Then Ms. Wong bought them several tequila shots before they left to go 'express themselves liberally' in the nearby dark alley.
They were soddenly, filthily, plastered.
Ghoulish nightmare fiends.


Their South Asian associate was not nearly so smashed, and with the keen intelligence of his kind (Desi Computer wallah) probably resolved to never tell his Maa-Baap about life among the savages, or ever introduce any of his coworkers to people he truly cared about.
Although he may have been warmly supportive.
Of their brain-cell killing tendencies.
No curry for you, stupid gaura.


You know, white people used to be such a well-behaved temperate bunch. Almost as if they were hesitant about making utter spectacles of themselves in public.

What happened?



AFTER THOUGHT

The situation with young white people in San Francisco is really very similar to American Tourists in Europe; you only notice the idiots and vulgarians, whereas the quiet well-behaved ones do not stand out.
Not irritating means not counted.

There are probably sheer tonnes of clean unobjectionable white twenty-somethings in this city, leading lives of genteel internet-yuppie poverty and picking up after themselves. Nice folks you wouldn't mind having as neighbors.
If only you could see them, and figure out what they are.
But they are discreet, and quite invisible.
Still pink and polite.


As much as we were able, the Bookseller and myself resisted Ms. Wong's attempts to get us squiffy. Given that she is a dangerously determined person, we succeeded in that endeavor as well as could be expected.
But we left there walking upright, and engaged in sensible clearly enunciated conversation. Which we maintained all the way to the intersection where customarily we part ways.
It was still a beautiful night.

See you next week.
Zei gezunt.




==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================