ALL THE BLINKY THINGS

An old friend couldn't hack the cost of living in San Francisco anymore and moved back to Charlotte, North Carolina. The pandemic and post-pandemic economy have not been good to him. Seeing as he's only a few years younger than myself, that's probably a good thing. He's now closer to relatives who can keep an eye on him, in case his health takes a sudden turn down -- which is more of a concern for middle-aged single dudes than for the "I'm gonna live forever" twenty-something crowd -- and he has more space for him and the dogs.

Yes, I'm going to miss him. The crowd from the old place is thinning out a bit.

On the other hand, you can get decent food in Charlotte now.

Including diverse Asian ingredients.

So theoretically even I could live there. Even though it is much colder there at present. And naturally I will bellyache about the weather -- its barely fifty degrees Fahrenheit, cold and gloomy outside there this morning -- so the idea to moving to anywhere on the East Coast is right out, imagine how whiney and sour old cootish I'd sound, and to the best of my knowledge there isn't a Hong Kong style cafe in the entire region.

It's a strange criterion for civilized life. Do they have a place with pastries, milk tea, soy sauce Western food, and grumbling Cantonese peasant types? If yes, that is good. If no, then waah I wanna leave now why did we come here is human life even possible in these ghastly waste lands what is the meaning of existence?!?

Can one at least get a good cappuccino?

It's like the suburbs in the Bay Area. Where you need a motor car for roadtrips to civilization, instead of being surrounded by it on all sides. In SF, Hong Kong milk tea is available barely half a dozen blocks away (Chinatown), cappuccino a little beyond that (Caffè Trieste, North Beach), or even on Polk Street downhill from my apartment, and you can even eat Thai or Vietnamese food within a few blocks if you want something different.

I'm somewhat provincial. I tend to think of everything outside of the city (SF) as headhunter territory with cannibals and violent savages, for crapsakes call out the King's Rifles to control the damned natives and keep them from being revolting, and when is my next package from the old country going to get here, plus there's that pervasive smell from the fish sauce factories and copra warehouses everywhere.

You will be pleased to know that both City Lights Bookstore and Green Apple Books do mailorders to that part of the world; there are literate people in that neck of the woods.
Both William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams were from somewhere in that zone.

As are the crazed necrophiliacs described by Cormac McCarthy, so there's that.


All in all, I would far rather read about the place than be there.
That goes for everything east of Oakland, by the way.
As well as Oakland itself.
In buckets.



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