THIS IS WHAT IT IS, YO

Braised pork belly with plum vegetable, black bean bitter melon, and stewed tomato. Rice, soup, coffee. In the anonymous company of codgers and country-types. If you can read this, there is a chance that you would not like it. The pipes I smoked afterward would not please you either.
Dark Virginia flake, fully rubbed.
Sweet, fragrant, perfumy.
Incense-like.


Welcome to my world.
Or not.

It was cheap, it was good. It was cash contante, because if you need to charge a six dollar meal on a card you are out of your mind, yuppie.
Which was something four people, separately, wished to do.
I have to seriously wonder what's wrong with them.
One of them totaled no more than three.
Dollars, not bit coins.
Dummies.

It's a Chinatown lunch counter, NOT a Starbucks or Blue Bottle. These people understand cash very well, and though they also grasp the fine nuances of plastic, that's one service that they will not pay their bank any extra money for facilitating. Why don't you have cash?
Three measly dollars? There's ATMs darn well everywhere, there's even one only two doors down. And around the corner. And down the street.
You do know that Chinatown folk love their banks, right?
There are banks in nearly every block.
Sometimes cheek by jowl.

I went to my bank today. They greeted me by name in Cantonese, we did business in Cantonese, and bid adieu in Cantonese. There were precisely two words in English: "receipt" (收據 'sau geui'), and "balance" (餘額 'jue ngaak').

There is NO reason to utilize your credit card in Chinatown.
Unless you're eating somewhere the locals seldom go.


One other thing: the locals do not make loud gagging sounds or give voice to a shitty attitude when passing someone smoking. Some of them may even look at my pipe enviously, and quite recently a waitress praised one of my briars as a beautiful object.

Why can't you yuppies be so tolerant? Or you gawking tourists?



Four hours in Chinatown, mostly out in the weather, because one cannot smoke indoors anymore, and I was letting the apartment air out before the apartment mate returned home. See, I am considerate of non-smokers.
In return for which some of you yoga practicing gluten-intolerant new-age spiritual types can jolly well shut up, and make a wide birth around me when you encounter me on the sidewalk. Next to two to six lanes of busy traffic (oh, those exhaust fumes!), between the sewer grates wafting pong at the corners of every block, and near the mentally unstable homeless person who hasn't had a bath since Christ kicked it.
In the bitter wind, cold, and rain.

Please go play in traffic.



On a more positive note, I now have a new umbrella.
I've already worn out two this season.
We need the rain.

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