EMOTIONAL SUPPORT PIT VIPER

Twelve luscious chive and pork dumplings, a hot cup of yuen yeung, and wondrous praise for my mediocre abilities to read Chinese and speak Cantonese to boot. Followed by a pipe, while internally grumbling about tourists and the over-many Baghdadi merchants selling glittery crap along Grant Avenue nowadays.

Honestly, why anybody comes to Grant Avenue anymore is beyond me. There are a few old-time Chinatown businesses, and a plethora of camera-magnet-teeshirt places. The tourists don't patronize the actual Chinese stores, because they need magnets, zippos, cameras, cellphone cases, and gew gaws.

They do not need tea, porcelain, Hong Kong clothing, or alarm clocks.


While waiting for my plate of dumplings, I watched a Hispanic woman daintily shoveling fried noodles into her mouth. Just beyond her a Japanese family ate, nearer to me a middle aged Chinese American couple enjoyed a meal, talking English at each other and Cantonese with the waitstaff. Out of the corner of my eye I admired a Hello Kitty patterned overcoat draped over a chair beyond the row of potted plants. Pink, red, white, and grey.

There's nothing quite like a clean well-lighted place for dumplings.
I thoroughly enjoyed each juicy mouth-filling morsel.
Hot sauce, Chekiang vinegar, soy.
So good, so good.

If you time it just right, you can head down to Chinatown and back on buses not entirely crowded with maskless idiots. My tolerance for our gaily disease-spreading yuppish fellow citizens is, as you would expect, lower than ever, and it wasn't very high to begin with.

What I think I need is an emotional-support pit viper that will hiss threateningly at people not wearing their masks. Yeah, I know my friend Jonathan in Israel thinks that surgical masks are useless, and the danger from Covid has been overplayed to a fair-thee-well, besides being over, man, over, but he's an idiot in some ways, and has mental blinkers on.

He's not alone in this, but he is unusual in one regard; I still associate with him.
Albeit via social media rather than in the real world.



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