TRAUMA WARNING

It's official. Today is going to be far worse than yesterday, and yesterday was awful. Around ninety degrees Fahrenheit. There will be people who say things like 'hah, ninety degrees is nothing, when I was in Vietnam ... " or "wonderful weather we're having, this is lovely" and similar crap, and I'm sure when I go in to work again the boss will be more or less burbling over about how splendid it all was (and he didn't turn on the air-conditioning even once).
But that's overlooking one thing: they're all heartless bastards.

For individuals with peripheral artery disease (not saying who), this is sheer torture, feet ankles calves hips upper back are throbbing unbearably and you are all monsters.

There ought to be a law darn it, I'm blaming the Republicans for this, and an angry letter will be written you can bet on that.

There will be some old folks out there showing too much saggy wrinkled flesh.
And some others with full sets of clothing and a coat.
The bus will be a real slice.


This blogger is a strong proponent of a strictly normal range of temperatures, so that most people are decently covered and will not expose their horrible bodies and highly individualistic tattoos and piercings to sensitive people and little children.
Not that I particularly care about the little children.

Usually I dawdle a bit, then head over to the usual place for lunch, after which I smoke my pipe for a while and go grocery shopping as well as doing my necessary weekly errands. And I was initially planning to also get a haircut today. But today there will be no dawdling, lunch will be early, no pipe after, and short quick shopping etecetera. And no haircut, because he doesn't open till ten and does not have airconditioning. I'll have a pack of gwai yin ciggies (貴煙煙仔) in my pocket for a brief digestive puff before the bank. Pipe once I get home and can sit on the stairs in the airwell moaning and cursing the Republicans who left the heat on.


The less I expose myself to this weather, other people's nasty bodies, and their ill-considered tattoos and piercings, plus tourists wearing shorts, the better.

By the way: Tattoos absorb much more ultraviolet than regular skin, so you might want to get that meaningful crap covering your dermis checked for cancer.



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

THE NORMAL TIME

The temperature outside was over eighty degrees by tea time, which meant that parts of me that had no business hurting, hurt. I wouldn't be surprised if health department records show that more middle-aged Dutch Americans die of circulation-related heat issues during Indian Summer than at any other time. Or run around mother-naked for relief. Amble around.
Ooze around. Slowly glide imperceptably around. Mother-naked.

There's a town in Texas founded by Dutch settlers. Texas frequently has outrageous temperatures, like three months at a hundred degrees plus, no break.
Which is perfect for chili peppers, and lousy for people.
Those settlers are all dead now.
You can look it up.
Q.E.D.

My feet feel like someone else has been walking in them. Someone who doesn't like me one bit, and is determined to let me know. A real blister. I'll tell him so when I see him.

Got a health payment taken care of, picked up a refill down at the pharmacy, did laundry so that I can smell fresh as a daisy during my medical appointments next week, and watched a German family gingerly experimenting with Vietnamese food while eating lunch myself.
Roast pork, spring rolls, rice (串燒豬肉春卷飯 'chuen siu jü yiuk chun kuen faan').

Then relaxed with a pipe for nearly an hour, hugely uncomfortable.
Those Texan Dutchmen were probably naked all the time.

The smoking session while waiting for the bookseller a few hours later was marginally more comfortable, as it had cooled down to the mid-seventies by then. My friend works out in the distant fogswathed part of the city, and consequently arrived beaming like a bloody alligator, having not suffered the heat wave in the Financial District and Chinatown area.

When we were at the burger place, an old friend showed up wearing a colourful bathrobe over his tropical hippie threads. He's more eccentric than ever now, deafer too, an elderly version of Arthur Dent, possibly expecting Zaphod to show up at any moment.
Conversation became odd after that. With much repetition.


Normally, conversations with me are sane and sensible.
And perfectly normal.


As Scarlett O'Hara says, "tomorrow will be worse".
Looks like it will be near one hundred.



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

IT'S IN YOUR PIPE AT THAT TIME

Nothing says prosperous admirable person quite as well as golf, so I'm not at all surprised that several of the old fellows with whom I have to come in contact, regrettably, at work play the game and are their calmest and most tolerable when watching other people play it.
The gravitas and well-considered opinions just roll off them at that point.

And naturally, America's captains of industry also play it.

I myself do not. It's a grave personal failing.


Years ago I did. Because at that time it was a splendid way of getting the hell away from my classmates and smoking my pipe in peace and quiet underneath an umbrella in the pouring rain, desultorily whacking at balls in the tall grass while plotting world domination, as reasonably intelligent teenage boys are want to do.

"Soon, babies, all of this will be mine!"

Golf also keeps a man trim and agile, healthy and limber.
It's good for the digestion and circulation.
The studly man's sport.

One of the things I particularly remember from tromping around the green, green undalations and mud puddles at the Eindhovensche Golf Club is Astley's pipe tobacco, which a doctor whose marriage to a nice bourgeois harridan was on the skids smoked. Damned good stuff. Showed that even though mistakes had been made, he did have some common sense left, and life could very well be enjoyed even though he was beyond the age at which one might acquire a mistress, and below the income level at which that becomes a realistic prospect.

Astley's No. 44 Dark Virginia Flake has deep yeasty notes and great depth, and a beguiling sweetness. It is both tangy and earthy. The No. 109 Medium Flake was a good solid all-day smoke for the VaPer afficionado, tempting and enticing, and is no longer made. Much of the line which was formerly part of the McConnell portfolio has, sadly disappeared, and while all of it would be excellent for smoking on golf courses in ghastly climates it is now hard to get.

Astley's No.2 Virginia Mixture, red and blonde Virginias with just a touch of Perique, is really excellent with a hot cup of tea, which will counter the eugenol spritz that gives it an almost Earl Grey character. Underneath this, it will taste grassy and slightly fruity.
Very suitable for blustery Autumn weather.



Actually, I hate golf. It's a stupid game.
Fit only for smarmy ponces.



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

HEAT, RAIN, NOODLES

Dreamed of the monsoon in a tropical country just before waking up. No, it wasn't bladder related. Rain bucketing down amid great heat and humidity. Streams of people erupting from the transit terminus, including Russian businessmen. Whom you now find all over. It's part of climate change. Later today it will be as warm here in San Francisco as it presently is in parts of the old Dutch East Indies, much hotter inland away from the coast. I suppose something appropriate would be in order for lunch. Now let's see, where can I get rudjak or bakso around here? A plate of lotek perhaps?

While sitting under a corrugated awning while the rain comes pouring down?


There are no tricycle taxis, and it's rather sloped here, I don't want to hike across the hill to Post Street, and we aren't going to be drenched by a tropic rainburst anytime soon. So I'm probably going to have Vietnamese noodle soup or something down near C'town. Where instead of business and tax-evasion Russian I will hear very serious tourist German.

"Mmm, diese knödel sind fast so gut wie die knödel in Heidelberg."

It is always a blessing when foreign visitors enjoy their knawdels. Stuff like that puts us on the map and makes us feel like a world class city. We live for their approval.

Parts of the coast are bearable. Inland it will get up to ninety or above, and the booga booga lives there. And it's like that all the way to the Atlantic, which explains why the natives are out of their damned minds. They started drinking sixpacks of crappy beer-like liquids pretty much the moment they got up, after showering with sweetened ice tea and eating a big breakfast of grits and syrup, eggs, flapjacks, fried meat product, hashbrowns, and a pastry, so in addition to being drunk out of their little pinheads by nine in the morning from late March or early April through October, they've also got diabetes, chronic kidney and liver disease, indigestion, and mis-aligned body chemistry like you wouldn't believe. It explains their peculiar way of thinking as well as the outright goofiness of their politics. Plus why they're all Karen.


You can tell a let about a place by looking at their weather and average temperatures. The Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany? Serious and mature, even phlegmatic. Belgium?
To the south of phlegmatic. Japan? Very nice people, a bit goofy.
The Philippines? Um, the Philippines.

The Philippines.

The Arabian peninsula? It's filled with Philippinos.
Who wear sweaters when it's "cold" there.


The US South? Good grief.
Well no wonder.



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

POKE THEM IN THE EYE!

Mr. Bevis Mustard hated bulls eyes, so he had his sons Armstrong and Clinton poke them all out. Their agile fingers busied themselves with the task at hand. Four years old, six years old. Already adept! Child protective services, if they heard about this, would come down on his neck, he was sure of it! All because of those nasty nasty bulls eyes.


There were bowls of it.


No, I have no idea who came up with the term. But it makes sense. The hardened staff of dark tobacco fed into the spinning machine, around which red and blonde Virginia leaves are twisted, forms the centre of the sliced disks, and poetically might be seen as "bulls eyes". In any case, it sounds better than "dog asses", or "horse flies". It remains hard, and when you rub out the disks so that you can stuff your pipe, you must pay especial care to fully reduce the thick fragments lest they become hot flecks that might cause pitting.

If I had kids, I'd set them to work. It would probably keep them quiet for all of twenty minutes. Thirty if they were fastidious about the task. But then I'd undoubtedly hear from the special agents of social services, who'd disapprove of me exposing them to daemon tobacco.

There are currently four or five tobaccos made this way.

Escudo is still like that, along with Three Nuns, Davidoff Flake Medallions, Peter Stokkebye Luxury Bullseye, and 4th. Generation Black Dot. Doblone D'Oro is somewhat more like the typical MacBaren spuncuts, and Cabbie's Mixture by Samuel Gawith, finally back for a brief time at least, is handrolled leaf sliced into disks without an eye in the middle at all.


Having purchased a stash of spuncut tobacco recently, enough for two or three months (in addition to all the other pipe tobacco I am sitting on), this morning I poked out the eyes for extra attention, before fully rubbing out the remainder. I don't like encountering hard bits of eye in my pouch.

Unreducable hard crumbs have been discarded.

This afternoon I'll head downtown for snackies and a smoke.
And, quite likely, a cup of tea around four.
Nowhere near visitors.
Pried eyes.



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

THE DREAM STATE

Over the past few days, while waiting for the bus to Heck in the morning (heading over to Marin County for work), I've noticed a somnolent colony of homeless druggies across from the stop. Rugs, blankets, the fentanyl inverted U pose, and occasional half-awake twitches. It's not the same as the cluster of meth freaks on the corner. There seem to be more opiod trolls, but significantly fewer speed users.

And a voice goes off in my head, grumbling old man-like. "I miss the old days, boy, when people were twitching and hepped all over the city, and we got things done! Not like these days, when they just drift zombie-like through shades of semi-consciousness day-dreaming! Useless vagrants! They should all be wired to the tits at this hour!

Unlike Grampa Narco, I think I prefer the modern era.


Logically, dazed people on the cusp of passing out are preferable to twitching folks hepped and paranoidly jangling all over the place, in motion all the time. You never know which direction they'll go or what strange ideas will hatch in their fevered brains.

Such as the fellow on the bus back to civilization last night.
Excited, and far less intelligent than he thought.
High as a kite on methamphetamine.
Twitchy, twitchy.

Sadly, for a man living in the twenty-first century, in a hip modern druggie paradise like San Francisco, I am by no means the most stoner-friendly of individuals. The only psycho-active substances of which I approve are caffeine (espressos, cappuccinos, lattes, kungfu tea, HK milk tea, a nice bracing cuppa, and the like), highly refined sugar, nicotine, capsaicin, and chunks of properly cooked fatty pork.

And by the way, the first named substance should be in a beverage that has come nowhere near almond milk, soy milk, oat milk, palm oil goo or non-dairy creamer of any kind.

Nicotine in the form of good pipe-tobacco, a cigar, or a smuggled-in cigarette.

As for the capsaicin and fatty pork, I think those speak for themselves.



You know, it's delightful further up the hill in the morning. No stoners or zonked individuals, and hardly any tourists speaking English. Too difficult for them to get to, they prefer the low-lying areas. One can smoke one's pipe in relative peace up there.

There really does need to be a caffeinated beverage establishment up there with a sheltered smoking patio that catched the early sunlight.



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

SPANK THEM!

A party on the other side of the block is more than audible. White yuppies, intoxicated. At some point the police will be called to engage in noise abatement, and, what with being a sour old git who angrily disapproves of twenty-somethings being heard (or seen), I fervently hope they go in with guns drawn. We can't have this. Adults are trying to sleep.
The landlord should be written up. Damned profiteer!


I disapprove of people my own age or older doing things too.
Especially things of which I strongly disapprove.
I am an all-round disapprovalist.
Spank everyone!


Good lord, I think the bastards have a deejay. This is unheard of. Wretched excess. I don't care that tomorrow is labour day and those miscreants don't have to go to work. There are many retired people in this neighborhood whose lives and physical cycles are very precisely calibrated, and who must ALWAYS take their fifteen praescribed pills exactly nine hours after their warm milky-milk (which helps them fall asleep) and eight and half hours after going to bed and having a good night's rest, otherwise they'll wake up exhausted and looking like Imhotep, all rotten, wrinkled, and dried out, frightening the children when they leave the house, and spouting all kinds of rightwing drivel next Thanksgiving.

Do you want to cause discord? Well, do you?

Personally I don't really care, seeing as I needed to get up anyhow for various reasons, and do not habitually drink warm milky-milk to help me fall asleep at night. I just disapprove on principle. And would advocate spanking the yuppies for any and all reasons anyway.

[One should never spank children. It's traumatizing. Wait until they're old enough to vote, at least, and can handle it.
Then generously make up for all those lost opportunities. There are some people!]

Also, I have flexibility as far as my own morning medications are concerned. So for me that isn't an issue. And I would be off work tomorrow even if it weren't a holiday. But I do think that my work days would go a lot smoother if many of those old fossils I have to deal with there were spanked a lot more, brutally, in the years between college graduation and retirement.
They would be better behaved, that's for darn sure.


Let's see if we can put this on the ballot.
Improve society from the bottom up.



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

BOLD AND FEATHERED

Woke up after dreaming of the drongo. Which is an old world tropical passerine bird not native in these parts, which I have not seen in years. Possibly it was the name that made the dream. Drongo. Sounds ... interesting. It's an insectivorous critter. Short legs.
Known for false alarms.

Not a small creature, but not particularly large.

The term drongo, in Australian English, is mildly opprobrious.



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

THERE WILL BE A TEST!

None of the people to whom I spoke in Mandarin today were dumb or stupid or senile or loud or discorteous or out of their mind or bad tempered. None. Not a single blessed one. But the same cannot be said about native speakers of English OR a gentleman originally from Uzbekistan whose English is absolutely fluent. It's been a long day.

Elderly Caucasian men have a simplistic vocabulary which, under stress (temper tantrums), manifests as multiple iterations of reproductive terminology. Nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs. Very much verb. Very loudly.

Consequently, I've had a long day.


Did I ever mention that I am in training for sainthood?


Also, despite having an extensive ability to cuss and swear in Dutch and Cantonese, and my heavens I can be eloquent and poetic doing so, I restrained myself and did not use a single bad word. Good lord I'm such a nice polite patient tolerant forbearing fellow!
I am absolutely staggered by myself.

My my.

My feet hurt, there is a horrible itch near my left collarbone, and my hands feel like they're burning. There are aches and pains scattered in strange place throughout my body, and some other parts itch from the inside out.

I've applied hydrocortisone cream here and there. With vigour.

Upon getting home I had a cup of coffee.

There is piano music.



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

SCARY ELEVATOR RIDE

Was that rain? Actual rain? More like early fog made kind of prickly, although I noticed minute droplets on my pipestem and sought an overhang to smoke. Which was very good. Mostly red Virginia. Sublime after hot tea and a meal. Remarkably there were no other non-Chinese in the place, just about a dozen customers in total, some of whom (one old whispy bearded gentleman) were watching what looked like a modern age soap opera on the teevee, set in a city with tall buildings and a metro station. Office work, if you are clear-skinned mid-twenties, is deeply involving. You get home late. There is an elevator, and you have no idea which of two likable fellows you are destined to have a long twenty episode love affair with, culminating in domestic bliss. It's probably the shy university student.


Might be more than fifty episodes. Gotta max out the profits from those attractive people and their relatives. Dang that city looks clean. Must be somewhere on the mainland.
And they're speaking Mandarin. So clearly China's first world.

If it were in Cantonese there would have been four or five screaming arguments while I was having my meal. The Cantonese are more operatic than Northerners. Any weeping must, naturally, be accompanied by anger and histrionics.

The Cantonese firmly believe in drama.
Northerners prefer quiet misery.
Silent sadness.

One can assume that when folks in the north saw those videos of 'bus uncle' and 'auntie airport tantrum' from several years ago they were totally baffled. Where was the dignity?
Why were they acting like crazy foreigners?

Boys, boys, boys, that isn't anything like crazy foreigners. I live in San Francisco, and know crazy foreigners like the back of my hand. I am surrounded by the creatures.


By contrast, the Cantonese act with considerable restraint.
At all times, whatever the circumstance.
They're phlegmatic.



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

THE RAIN OTTERS

Headlines recently have an otter attacking a woman swimming in Lake Tahoe, a major layoff of tech workers at a Bay Area company, racism at both a local high school and in the military, and rain likely this afternoon. I like otters and rain. We need more of those. I hope they can work something out together. As for tech workers I am on the fence at best.

Praise be to otters in the rain.

Shan't say anything about the racism. I don't see colour, I see texture. You are all lumpy and unpleasant. Does your mother know you leave the house covered with tatoos and slime?

And as far as unemployed techworkers goes, that might benefit the local housing market and drive some more of those people into finally getting real jobs or doing something that benefits the planet, or starting a revolution against corrupt Republicans in Texas, who knows?

Or even becoming influencers who die kayaking down a river.


Meanwhile, Christian nutballs in the rest of the country continue to support a mega-corrupt rapist egomaniac while getting explosive diarrhea and shooting immigrants. And eating dogfood at least one day a week because they can't afford even bad Argentine beef.

Please do not say that we're all in this together.
Because we're not.

You guys live in a part of the country where it's over one hundred and ten in the shade and you can no longer head over to Timmy's Tofu shack because the American food industry has yanked beancurd off the shelves. You're experimenting with rejected beef products, because the strategic stockpile of American steak has been depleted during war. While fending off imaginary Venezuelans trying to infect you with measles and autism. You're all nuts.

Whereas I live in a world where rain otters garbed in tutus save a fallen tower-nesting hippie at Burning Man and a plague of saxophone music at the Palace of Fine Arts gets cut short by the valiant efforts of the San Francisco Police Department.

We are not the same. My morning doom-scrolling is more surreal, and far less frightening, than yours. You live in hell. I live in San Francisco.

You chose that yourself.



Plans for today: Laundry, a pipe, and lunch.
A bowl of freshly peeled longan.
Then teatime.



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

THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONCERN!

One of the most stirring speeches ever, which resonates across time, and speaks to the deepest emotions rational creatures are capable of, is this: "Life, life not all guessing games, Frog, sometimes we have to care about friends, especially friends who love cookies, friends who love cookies so much, they play silly guessing games, because maybe, maybe, just maybe a frog, a very handsome frog, who has cookie, will give best best friend who no can live without cookies, give that best friend a cookie. But, if friendship means nothing..... "

Everytime I hear it, it brings a tear to my eye. There are cookies next to my chair.

My apartment mate years ago self-identified as Kermit The Frog.


A friend recently described me as eccentric. Which is so ablist! I am not eccentric, my apartment mate isn't either! We are one hundred percent normal. Extraordinarily normal. Normalcy is a talent at which we excell. We are able to pinpoint-focus on normalitude.
In possession of a deep well of skill, training, self-conditioned excellence.
We're just not precisely neurotypical about it.
Narrow def normal.


Some of the folks around us, on the other hand ...

The other day a neighbor begged to inform me that the streetperson occupying a discarded mattress further down the block had "put a bomb there, do not step on it". It took me a few seconds to realize that she was talking about a poo smear which was glaringly obvious, nobody who ain't hard of seeing could miss it. Her concern was genuine.


"Ma'am, you might think I'm eccentric, some people do, but I'm not crazy and oblivious. I can recognize a turd. Because I am old enough, and wise enough. I have not lived all these years without a keen ability to identify colonic waste products, AND I've been a resident of San Francisco for decades, where much such substance occurs. I have experience."


I learned all about turds in the boy scouts.

Alas, I think the dear lady lives under a rock, what with being a fundamental-mental Christian who does not leave the house much except to go to her church nearby.
Where they are all like that.
Turd ignorant.



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

DEAR LITTLE PIGGY WIGGY

While waiting for the light to change, I heard the girl next to me scream "Tanya, hey Tanya!" It startled me (some of us don't deal well with sudden noises), and I was glad she didn't have a deeper less femmy voice, lest whomever think it was me. "Tanya, I love you Tanya, you hog!" Okayyyy, is "hog" the next teenage lesby term of endearment? Or can we all use it?

And if so, what are the permissible circumstances?

Personally, I would have thought "little piggy-wiggy" would have been sweeter, but I am not au courant. No longer 'up on juvenile love, lust, and hormonal idiocy. Sad, I know.

In any case, I did not know who among the Cantonese of various ages across the street might be Tanya, so I'm just guessing that "you hog" was affectionately meant. These things are obviously on a 'need-to-know' basis, and perhaps everyone in her school fondly considers her as a perfect 'hog'. The dear little piggy-wiggy.

I too am fond of hog. Particularly five flower meat, that being a cut of streaky pork from the belly flesh. Goes great with preserved vegetable (梅菜，雪菜) as well as rice wine, soy sauce, ginger, and black mushroom. Long simmered. Melt-in-your mouth tender.

Do you have a nickname for your significant other?
Is it "plum vegetable knock meat"?
梅菜扣肉。

With taro also can, (芋头扣肉 'wu tau kau yiuk'), but most often you'll encounter it on a bed of preserved brassica (梅菜), mui choi kau yiuk. Very Hakka, very Canto, universally loved.

Note that the illustration has nothing to do with either dish. A canal that could be almost anywhere. The Netherlands has lots of canals, so does China, and old town Jakarta too.

At it's simplest, the hunk of meat is browned in a hot pan skin side down after blanching briefly to firm it up, then drained, and put to simmer whole, or cut into large chunks or thick slices, with garlic, ginger, star anise, a hefty jigger of sherry or rice wine, a dash of soy sauce or dollop of oyster sauce, and water or broth, for an hour or two, or put in the steamer.
Rinsed snow vegetable, or taro chunks, or even potato wedges, can be added.

Not being fond of taro, I don't have any tips on how to prepare it.
Or how long to cook it either.



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

BEFORE SHOES IN ANY CASE

A friend over on Facebook poses the question whether one should put on his socks before his pants, or after. And many of his readers responded with thoughtfulness and gravitas.
Only one of them (me) brought up the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch.
In passing reference, not as a source of authority.

I do not know if Rav Shlomo Ganzfried (1804 - 1886) applied his mental faculties (paskening skills) to the question, which seems like an appalling oversight, considering his opinion that one must put on the right shoe first without tying it, then the left. Tie the left.
And only then tie the right.

Most of us do not give the matter much thought, beyond doing shoes AFTER socks.

Which, of course, may be taken as a guide line for the entire proces.


*Ehem ... *


Mordechai asked: "I have a critical, vital, PRESSING question for the world: Should socks be put on BEFORE or AFTER pants?"

Put on your socks after your pants. Dress from the top down. And from the inside layer to the outside. Undershirt, then collared shirt. Boxers, then slacks. Socks, then shoes. The watch goes on after the shirt, but you can wait untill you're socked and shod to do that. Reading specs probably before the watch, though. Logic and order.

Regarding the specific order in which to tie your shoe laces, the smart person does not tie them too tightly, so that he can easily slip his feet in and out as needed, and might think that that is too much anyway.


It appears that under his readers, mostly East Coast people, there are a large number who opine that socks go on before pants. Which is absolutely ridiculous. Quite. This tells me that if I ever go to New York, I should watch out. Things aren't right there.

To say that I am appalled is putting it mildly.



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

AND NOT A PAPER CUP IN SIGHT

All you are allowed to bring into Hong Kong is one open pack of cigarettes with one smoke missing, OR two cigars of any type, OR one opened tin of pipe tobacco. Obviously they have cigarettes because many Chinese smoke like chimneys, and there is a very well-developed trade in Havanas as well as commodious lounges wherein to partake thereof. Pipe tobacco might be an issue. More research is required. In any case, not planning to go there soon. Most of the year it's hot in Hong Kong. November through March is just about right.
From May through October it's rather beastly for an awd fossil with PAD.
And typhoon season as well. I don't mind typhoons.

I mind heat.

Here in San Francisco I frequently bellyache about the temperatures from summer through October. Although many people I know, ruddy deviants with poor judgement, will often say that they love warm days when it's over eighty degrees.

This came up conversationally because I'm thinking of visiting HK sometime next year. Especially if the trip to the plantation in Honduras falls through. As it did before.


Today it got into the low sixties in the city.
Which was just about perfect.

When I saw the price for milk tea at the place I thought of going to for the first time in half a decade, I was utterly aghast. Nearly twice what the bakery I no longer frequent charges.
Good nei ge lord, you folks have lost your minds!
我唔係個蠢嘅遊客！

Much later at the bar I had two cups of tea.
Significantly better company too.
It was almost empty.


The bookseller has backslid, and has fallen into his old passion again. Pinball. I would not be surprised if we eventually read about him habituating dark Tenderloin dives and rubbing elbows with hardened pinball sharks, perhaps even selling his priceless collection of taxidermied roadkill and vermin for rolls of quarter to sate his addiction.
Which would be sad, but what can you do?

He might even start hanging out with Texans and other lowlifes.
Trailer park denizens and Slavs in track suits.
I am again utterly aghast!



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

A HURRICANE? HERE?

With rumours of a hurricane slimmish-possibly hitting California, because of weather deep out in the Pacific Ocean, the sensible man does not panic, but creates a checklist.
Neurotic, I know. But sadly necessary.

EMERGENCY AND DISASTER CHECKLIST

Bath Soap: Several bars.
Blood presssure pills: Enough.
Butter, Cooking Oil, Congealed Grease: Plenty.
Canned Luncheon Meat: A very great sufficiency.
Chili Pastes (sambal): Loads.
Cigarettes (imported and "grey" market): Good lord.
Coffee: You betcha.
Condiments: A great variety.
Condoms: No love life, ergo none.
Cookies: Several containers.
Crackers: Two or three packets.
Dish Soap. Loads.
Dried Tofu Stick: Two large bags.
Fish Sauce (魚露 'yü lou'): Large bottle, sixty percent full.
Kitchen Tissue: Three packs.
Lotion, Hydrating, for Old Geezer Skin: Extra bottle.
Medicated Foot Powder: Brand new bottle.
Oyster Sauce (蠔油 'hou yau'): Two bottles, one half full.
Pipe Tobacco, English-Balkan: I'll be dead before I finish it all.
Pipe Tobacco, Virginia and Virginia-Perique: Enough for several years.
Q-tips ("ear twiddlies"): Hmmm, might need to buy another box.
Roast Duck: Only a few pieces in the refrigerator, they'll be gone before the weekend.
Roast Pork: See duck.
Shampoo: Better buy some more.
Soy Sauce (豉油 'si yau'): A nearly full bottle.
Sriracha Hot Sauce: I'm good, thanks.
Tea (loose leaf & bags): yep.
Tins of Fried Dace (豆豉鯪魚 'dau si ling yü'): Plenty.
Toilet Paper: Two large packs of rolls.
White Cut Chicken (白切雞 'paak chit kai'): Same as the duck and pork situation.


So I think I'm more than adequately prepared.
Plus both I and my apartment mate recently did laundry, so that's okay too. If the hurricane hits this far north we'll simply sit it out going quietly insane from the isolation and tumult.

We're far enough uphill that even if the storm drains get blocked by piles of dead bodies we won't be washed out. And I've got enough matches and brand new Bic lighters that cleaning up detritus should be easy.


We're prepared for any eventuality. Everyone should have these things in their disaster kit, it's just common sense. If need be, some of it can be traded on the black market which will arise in the months before the Federal Government comes to our aid.


The chances of getting hit are infinitesimally slim.
Rather a pity when you think about it.



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

RABBIT RABBIT SEPTEMBER 2026

Rabbit rabbit. Good luck, or good things. I keep thinking about the young lady scoping out the very good condition furniture that someone had left on the sidewalk near our front door. She was photographing it, and talking to the person on the other end of the line. "It might be my height, perfect for under the round window" This was about a white dresser, but then she modified her statement, saying that it just couldn't be her own height, five three, it seemed slightly shorter. At which I remarked that she herself was taller than five three.

My apartment mate is five four or five.

I know five somethings.

Trust me.

What she needed, if she was planning on re-homing a dresser, was a passing Dutchman or Texan. A trim Texan, not one of the usual ones. And while I am indeed a Dutchman, I am not one of the tall ones, though I was considered on the tall side in eastern North Brabant back in the day at five eight or nine. The Dutch have sprung up since then and are now the tallest people on the planet. Also, I'm older now, and did not feel like shlepping a dresser uphill, even though she was quite nice. She didn't ask, I didn't volunteer.

Heavy furniture uphill shleppery is something only the younger fellows do.
It's a gentlemanly act, admittedly, but non-arthritic.
Non-grumpy and non-middle aged.

White wooden dresser, might be five foot three in height. Probably perfect for a short slim woman who lives under a round window.

There were also chairs and a table.

I suspect someone has moved.


Rabbit rabbit.



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

THAT LIKE BERGAMOT?

You will no doubt be pleased to know that what I had for lunch today did not include lettuce, or jalapeños, or beef, or frozen blueberries, or cheese, or radishes, prepackaged corn, salad mix, sprouts of any kind, or, for that matter, anything from Texas. So I am just not destined to loose weight fast and get down to my ideal pre-diabetic weight of less than three hundred pounds, the target for all Americans in the Deep South and Midwest.

Also, I am not in the Deep South or the Midwest.
Or Texas, where everyone is supersized.
Don't have diabetes either.

At night when I'm asleep I hear huge Texan behemoths lumbering past my window on the way to their mating grounds to die. The horror, the horror. Must be at least six hundred pounds of rabid bovine-weasel-karentype each, wearing deep grooves in the trail.


All the rest of you are blessed with good chances of getting salmonella, escherichia coli, or listeriosis, plus fluoxetine and 2,4-dinitrophenol, which will help y'all firm up, slim down, and shed the pounds. It's better than diet pills. You lucky bastards.
Gram‑positive, rod‑shaped bacteria.
Mmmmm.

Enjoy your lumps of charred flesh!

And don't forget to consume lots of liquids. Stomach flu and food poinsoning, while being all-American, can lead to serious dehydration. As well as miscarriages and electrolyte imbalances. You don't want to get sick on the way to a slimmer you.


Herr Doktor Hubert Goubert had descended to Dong Wu (東吳帝國 'tung 'ng tai gwok') with his capable assistant the witch Aunt Gwan (actually a graduate student at the Technische Universität Warschau), and both had a good breakfast of wheat noodles with red stew pork in broth, as well as dumplings (九菜湯餃 'gau choi tong gaau'). Not being proficient in Chinese, Goubert wondered why the numeral 'nine' was in the name of the latter dish, not realizing that it sounds the same as 'chives'.

Tomorrow, they would look for the linden tree, the larch, and the ancient mulberry.
In the meantime, because of the tropic downpour, perhaps a smoke.
Him: Flake in an old briar. Her: slim refined fags.
A faint hint of tangerine peel.
貴煙，陳皮爆珠。


After lunch I stepped out and lit up. It's a bit cold out there, but perfect weather for a pipe. Early company era Barling, script stamping and four digit shape number, possibly by Oppenheimer (1970 - 1977) rather than Nørding (after 1977, till 1980).
It was remarkably quiet at Portsmouth Square.
No locals, no tourists.



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