ABSTRACTED, NO PISANG!

When she left for work she forgot her banana on the counter. It lay there, half eaten (eh, plus or minus 70%), abandoned and forlorn, exuding its bananish odour silently like a killer with a can of mustard gas. I am not a huge fan of bananas. Cooked, they're fine. Flaky pastry crust, sugar, butter, and perhaps a drizzle of chocolate syrup while it's still hot from th eoven, or fried like a beignet with a heavy dusting. Great with coffee that way as a snack in the evening. Pisang goreng à la mode de Batavia.

But raw? Not a fragrance one wishes to wake up to. It's a rude uncouth smell.

She must have been in a hurry.

I am not.


Normally on Friday I'm the one rushing out, as I wish to catch the early bus in, so that I can get things done before my coworkers arrive and the crusty old geezers wander in with their inane rightwing prattle, or the neurosurgeon arrives, so I can unlock the door for him and exchange the odd intelligent pleasantry.

Today, exceptionally, I have off. But I got up far too early.
Chalk that up to programming.

It wasn't squabbly oriole noises that woke me up this morning, though one could be excused for thinking of that immediately. I am not a young wife dreaming of her husband at the frontier in Liaoxi and the barbarians have already taken the capital. That boat has fled. Parts of it. Wrong image, wrong era, wrong gender. No Jurchen tribesmen.

[Reference: 打起黃鶯兒，莫教枝上啼。啼時驚妾夢，不得到遼西。By Jin Changxu (金昌緒 'kam cheung suei').]


Quatrain (絕句 'juet keui') by Dufu (杜甫 'dou fu'):

兩個黃鸝鳴翠柳，
一行白鷺上青天。
窗含西嶺千秋雪，
門泊東吳萬裡船。

['leung go wong lei ming cheui lau - jat hang paak lou seung ching tin - cheung ham sai ling chin chau suet - mun paak tung ng maan leui suen'.]

Paraphrasis: A couple of orioles sing in the green willows, a line of herons ascends to the sky; my window contains the western ridges snow of a thousand autumns, my door faces Eastern Wu's myriad mile boat.

The Chinese text shows a balance: Couple or pair in the first line balanced against the line of birds in the second, the yellow of the orioles and the white of the herons, the jade-like hue of the willows versus the crystal clarity of the sky. Window against door, western pass-ridges against eastern Wu, thousand against myriad (萬 ten thousand). It is cleverly done, and elegant.



Second cup of coffee. I have lit up one of the delicate Hello Kitty style cigarettes (貴煙 'kwai yin') wich miss A.A. likes, later after visiting Chinatown I shall smoke the Peterson sandblast pipe that Karl has seen every time we've worked together.



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BOY GENIUS BELLYACHES ABOUT WEATHER

When I stepped out to do some errands, I thought I might be overdressed. As, yesterday, had I been so I would have been. Two hours later I wished that I had dressed much more warmly. A young woman on her cellphone was saying that she couldn't understand how, if her apartment was comfortably in the seventies, it was only sixty degrees outside.
Which it was actually less than because of breezes from Siberia.

Letter to the editor: I wish to register a complaint! How is it that it feels like an early March outside, as March used to be, not this year's March which felt like May should feel, about which I am not happy either, and it sure doesn't feel like May should feel? What we need to do is vote the Republicans out, and revive the old custom of tying onions to our belts as was the style years ago. Just one onion can keep a man warm for hours in a snowdrift!

While I was eating lunch it turned arctic.

In merely one hour it dropped ten degrees Fahrenheit. Which is beastly. All I can think of is those folks in tee-shirts and shorts, which in early afternoon had seemed ideal, currently freezing to death on the tundra surrounding Nob Hill, Chinatown, and North Beach.
Perhaps we'll discover their shivering corpses tomorrow morning.
As well as the fat people they used for tauntauns.

Suffering. Humanity!

In any case, I've mailed off payment for what was still owing on the dexter lower extremity angioplasty, which came due this week. So I'm clean on that score. And the leg does feel buckets better. It no longer bitches.

The magpie is considered a harbinger of happiness. Understandable, given that it is perky and seems quite even-tempered. A very upbeat bird.


Lunch was okay. I'll have something else next time.



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NOTHING BUT DOOM

While doomscrolling this morning I came across the news about a Florida man using a frozen squirrel as an offensive weapon in a Waffle House brawl. Ladies and gentlemen, you cannot get any more red state than that. It's the epitome of red stateness, it goes up to eleven.

Waffle Houses and dead wildlife are what a large part of our country is all about.

If instead of visiting parts of Europe during our vacations we had visited the states were interracial marriage used to be illegal (the red states) it would have been both mind expanding and traumatizing for life.


"Let's go to Waffle House and fight while waiting for greasies!"


Sounds like a plan. The entire fraternity house piles into pick-up trucks and roars off down the road, past the holler and the sherrif's moonshine still, over the dirt path through the meth lab trailer park, waking up the entire home for middle-aged diabetic bubbas, till they get to food heaven. Where they'll get into arguments about Nietsche and Kant with precisely the people they would never want their sisters to marry. Hairy butch dykes named 'Lulu-Belle'.
Who wears stained overalls and still smells like cow manure from her job at the combo hospital and veterinary clinic where they turn juveniles into space aliens.
Which is forbidden across the state line in Alabama.
Because the Bible!

I'm convinced that the main reason European tourists visit the United States is so that they can see things like that. There's probably a ride at Paris Disneyland that gave them a taste. Tonnes of Europeans will be visiting the U.S. during the World Cup, so be on your worst behaviour. They expect it. Remember, as the hosts, it's our duty to be disgracious.

Do all women there dress like Daisy Duke? Or just the ones under sixty?

Doesn't matter. And as long as the waitress who brings you the ice tea with that cup of extra sugar does, no one cares. And if Scarlet and Melanie are behind the grill slinging possum patties and burgoo, everything is fine. Want some Jack with that, hon?

Can your pet alligator do tricks? Sit, boy!


Years ago some good old boy lost his head when a support wire for an utility pole snapped it right off while he was leaning out of the passenger side window of his friend's pick-up truck. It's still roaming the swamp looking for a body to attach itself to, so don't go out after dark.




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MANGO MAYO TEA TIME

Do not put the mayonnaise on the mango. Yes, they were bought during the same shopping jaunt, but they aren't meant to be savoured at the same time. At least breathe between the two. This is sound advice. And it's free.

After I finished smoking my pipe I did my shopping, purchasing a net baggy of lychees for the elderly Indonesian Chinese woman downstairs in addition to Japanese mayonnaise, veggies, throat lozenges, and the mango. All of which stay in this apartment. It is a truly lovely mango, which will not be improved in any way by the addition of mayo. That's something that only a deviant would do. Neither my apartment mate nor I are deviants.

Tea time was fabulous. Quiet, restful. Nice pastry.
A long pause that refreshes.
Good beverage.


By the way: Do NOT tell anyone that hamsters and fried oysters taste different. They will naturally ask "how do you know?". Let them panic instead, do not reassure them.
This childcare advice is provided free of charge.

Fried oysters are crunchy on the outside.

A phone call to the pharmacy earlier took care of refills, which I will pick up tomorrow, and I also managed to postpone my jury duty availability dates by a week, so that I don't have to do that during my next doctor's appointment and optometrist's appointment. Serving justice takes a necessary back-seat.

While reading before lunch I ran into a famous quatrain (五言絕句 'm yin juet keui') by Jia Dao (賈島 'gaa dou') which almost everyone knows. It's often quoted.


松下問童子， 言師採藥去。
只在此山中， 雲深不知處。

['chung haa man tung ji - yin si choi yeuk heui - ji joi chi saan jung - wan sam bat ji chü']


"Amid the pines I queried the servant, who answered that his master had gone picking herbs; but in these mountains, with this deep fog, it's impossible to know where he went."


Such short verses are very easy to memorize.
As one does.



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SUNLIGHT, CRUST, AND CHOPSTICKS

What pulled in the customers, mostly cleancut younger Hong Kong Chinese desperate for a semblance of edible food, was the fact that it was a spacious dim sum restaurant, and looked remarkably clean and familiar. All the right decorations. Fu pasted on a wall. Scrollpainting of a horse. Lucky bamboo. Other potted plants. Red things. A small collection of familiar porcelain statues with wine cups before them, and a beckoning cat figurine.

What attracted the very few Caucasian customers was that there were condiments on the tables. Including the most miserable selection of hot sauces on the planet. The bottle that looked the most promising was encrusted with dried gloop from the top down. One table actually had Sriracha, which I snagged when the guest there was abstracted.

As I said: it was a very clean restaurant. Sparkling surfaces.
With thoroughly disgusting hot sauce bottles.

Somewhere in the Midwest.

Altogether a fairly nasty dream from which I'm glad I woke, but other than my plate of food which I had barely tasted I enjoyed being there. Nice crowd just as baffled as I was by the dissonance of location, strange attempts at familiar dishes, clean sparkling, and that large horrifying collection of smeared drippy crusted hot sauce bottles that the local truckstop would be proud to own.

As dreams go, it was quite baffling. Firstly, the chances of myself visiting an "inviting" restaurant for breakfast are extremely slim. My idea of waking up is a cup of strong coffee followed by a tromp around the neighborhood smoking my pipe and barking at dog walkers and joggers. No solids. Then a second cup of coffee while doomscrolling and cussing about Republicans and the most corrupt regime in Washington since President Grant.
And the chances of me ever being in the Midwest are less than zero.


Perhaps it was the allure of a familiar type of environment where both lutefisk and grits, or ghastly church suppers (I've heard about those no thank you) did not threaten anyone with gastric trauma. My idea of the vast centre is mounds of bland protein and hot grease with melted American cheese on everything, sometimes even the dining surfaces.
People saying "ya sure" and "pass the sugar, this food is too spicy".

There are good people there. Large pale pink good people.
Diabetes is their favourite spectator sport.
Jeepers Creepers.



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FOOT AND MOUTH

My feet hurt enormously after being at work all day. Where I had heard all about gay sex among senile delinquents without intending to. It is not my favourite subject. Also paranoid conspiracy horse pucky. Also not a favourite subject. I would far rather put my ear to the ground and listen to the earthworms.


This evening there were too many people underfoot. So the karaoke bar was out of the question, what with being screamingly loud, and jampacked. Some crazy white woman's intended hook-up with a drunk hunk, which went kablooie, while I was on the last few minutes of my pipe, neither interested nor entertained me.

Apparently she proved too crazy. And though staggeringly blotto, he just wasn't drunk enough.

My role in life is to sometimes be an unwilling witness.

I am essentially a prude; people should be civilized in public. Even if the public is after sundown long after business hours and there is only one witness.

And above all, I should not be able to see a nipple and half plus nearly an entire boob. Warm weather brings out too much the slut in some people. Think of the children! For the love of gob, will no one think of the children?!?

It's been a rich full day. As a means of distracting myself from the energetic gay sex among senile deliquents we discussed sebaceous cysts in great detail, and in the evening over food, pink hair and eighteen boxes of books and a drag show were mentioned. Frat boys came in, were carded, and wandered out again. Tat Yee explained to someone that to learn Chinese he should have a girlfriend. An emergency face mask was proffered. The public bus is of course a rolling Petri dish, but tonight was nearly empty.

In a Chinatown doorway the biggest cat I've ever seen stared out at me.
No, it wasn't a mountain lion. Maybe a mutant.
A baleful entity.




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WHY SOME OF YOU ARE STILL ALIVE

Counted a dozen whack jobs in Portsmouth Square yesterday. Near the old biddies playing gin rummy. Whom they were exceedingly careful to not disturb. Because if you bother a Canto granny with a pocket full of nickles she won gambling, the gates of hell will open up. She ain't breaking San Francisco law with her cohorts just to spoonfeed you nickels, boy.

The neighborhood fellows will gladly scrape up your messy remains and feed them to the local coyotes. They can find some Chick-fil-A sauce to make you palatable.
Because that's what it's for. Corpse improvement.

Plus, of course, there are the police.
Some of them have relatives.
Who speak Cantonese.


An elderly Cantonese lady on a nearby bench dropped all of her ill-gotten nickles accidentally while I was cleaning the pipe I had been smoking. I am very glad that one of her friends and fellow card sharks helped her pick up all the coins.
Profoundly grateful, in fact.


I am too young and pretty to die.


And, speaking of sauces, I now know where I can buy Kewpie Mayonnaise. Discovered it yesterday. This is important because I owe my apartment mate a bottle of Kewpie, having accidentally left hers out too long. Last year.

This too qualifies as civic improvement. Cantonese women who have Dutch Americans as apartment mates have suffered much, but fortunately condiments partially make up for that.

If that were not the case, this city would be a meaner uglier place.
Cantonese women mayhem is always a distinct possibility.
We Dutch Americans are peace-loving.
Condimentalists.



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COMPOUND IT ALL!

While browsing through the Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty (a book put together a couple of centuries ago showcasing a minute fraction of what was written over a millenium before the present era, during what was a golden age), one word stood out that the poet had used merely because he could: 藁 ('gou'; a variant of 槁 meaning "straw, withered, hay, an old dead tree", used metaphorically to mean household implements and wifely tasks).

The poet was 柳宗元 ('lau jung yuen').

Mr. Lau was a poet and prose writer of the mid-Tang, whose life in many ways follows the customary path of several Chinese intellectuals. Initial scholarly success, and great official appointments, then falling afoul of the powers that were, followed by internal exile to some provincial backwater or hellhole, often so far from civilization that the buses didn't go there, with the unstated intent that he should perhaps die of a tropical disease and thus cease being a nuisance.


There's a county named 藁 in Northern China, as well as a city district (藁城區 'gou sing keui') that was already in existence two millenia ago. 藁城 was founded during Western Han (202 BCE – 9 CE).

Other than that, the word has scant use or usefulness.
If I'm ever in that area I shall have to visit.
It's now on my bucket list.

The list of obscure words that I cannot use in conversation without sounding like a stuck-up sticky wad is not as long as you would imagine, but it contains stuff from a number of different languages. It's greater than my swear-word vocabulary.
Which also includes several languages.


This is approximately and precisely as it should be.



昨夜裙帶解， 今朝蟢子飛。
鉛華不可棄， 莫是藁砧歸。
['jok ye kwan daai kaai, kam jiu hei ji fei, yuen waa bat ho hei, mok si gou jam gwai']

It's circumspeechily about a woman waking up in the morning after whompities and looking at her table of powders and make-up with slightly renewed enthusiasm. Google translate turns it into gibberish with a crawdaddy.



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EXAGGERANT

There is too much to do. But after tomorrow I wil have a four day weekend before going back to the salt mines, so it should be smooth sailing if and when I get off my duff today. In the meantime I'm enjoying the silence. My apartment mate has gone off to work, so I do not hear the creatures in her room squabbling or arguing about fatty inner thighs, so hungry, so very hungry, who is a nice juicy meatball, and "big guy is not as stupid as he looks". Which naturally gets the small she sheep objecting, because she thinks I'm quite intelligent.

An amazing coincidence. I think so too.

Big guy is smoking an old Charatan in the teevee room while wondering if he should look inside the Romeo y Julieta box and see which briars he put in there when he changed the rotation a while back. I have too many pipes, but only slightly over three dozen are in the rotation at any time. So there are boxes with others in various bookcases. It's a welter.


The tropical jungle with howler monkeys starts only a few hundred yards from here. On the other side of the ramshackle service bungalow the muddy river flows, vibrating in the hot moist air, sluggishly toward the gulf and the Java sea, where Admiral Doorman (of blessed memory) still roams the waters fighting Admiral Takagi's forces in perpetual conflict, not knowing that the latter died in battle in 1944.


Okay, so it's warmed up a bit (mid seventies). Which naturally makes the big guy think of malaria, typhoid, skin fungus, do I perhaps need to change out some pipes for others which speak to me, and the plantation economy. Blame the second cup of coffee for all of that.

It is far better to think of gibbons, and small spotted forest cats hunting in the high canopy, than fentanyl addicts several blocks away bent over in that zombie crouch as if kissing their back-ends goodbye. The DMZ starts only a few blocks south of here, then shades into the Tenderloin just below Post Street. Ocassionally one of them wanders north before the drug takes hold, and I'll see them when while waiting for the bus to Marin. Which is mostly cocaine territory. Both Marin and the stumbling druggies make me think of the speed freaks in North Beach years ago. Before the programmers started living in the residential hotels there and lamenting the sad absence of chai and samosas in the ruins of the beatnik paradise.

It's only a matter of time before Jimbo flames out. Which will be spectacular. I fully expect him to be shooting adenochrome by then, or experimenting with psychedelics. With a bit of luck I will not be a direct witness to the flaming descent, but will hear about it via via.


The older I get, the more I appreciate people who maintain their sanity.



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GREEN SPECKLED

None of the disgusting fellows in the back came in costumed or naked. Very disappointing. Neither did the members of the pipe club. Which disappointed me, as I'm always in favour of theatre, drama, and embarrassing decisions by other people. I myself naturally don't do any of that stuff. Which is why I do not own any extrovertly bad taste briars, and don't have to brazen it out. Good pipes, good tobacco. Sound decisions.

And of course pâté. A sufficiency of. So from my point of view, in that regard the pipe club meeting was a splendid success. And both Neil and Bernard were there. Neil has been a bit poorly of late, and Bernard is often travelling in ghastly parts of the world as well as exotic refugee camps. So it was almost miraculous to have both of them present.

Nick was also there. He has been described variously as an elderly hobbit, the troll under to bridge, and an impossibly hot hot hot old fellow why heavens I need to stick my tongue in his ear! That young lady got thrown out of the bar minutes later, by the way. I ascribe her passion to the fine tobacco he was smoking at the time. Virginias, touch of perique. I smoke very similar blends, but so far I have not aroused any reactions of that type.
Possibly my ears aren't sexy enough.
I am not alone in that flaw.
Nick is unique.


The experience did not leave any lasting trauma.

All active members were present. In addition to meaty products there was single malt Scotch. Myself, I was high as a kite on caffeine, having been drinking tea since I got in hours earlier.

Let me also clarify, even though it probably hasn't even crossed your mind, that none of us in the pipe club is a beastly old fart. We are all young and vibrant. Including the three gentlemen previously mentioned, who are all retired.


And despite liking them, it is a jolly good thing that none of them ran the Bay to Breakers. also, if they were to hypthetically in fits of insanity do so, they would be wearing sensible clothes. The very first picture of the race I saw today featured two untrim middle aged dudes in the buff, seen from behind. One of them has a back tattoo all the way down to the sunset. Now I am severely traumatized.

No one in the building was dressed in any way that might raise an eyebrow. Well, other than Bill snoring in the back room, wearing shorts and exposing his rather educational legs. But we're used to that. It is Marin, after all. And high seventies.

I asked one of the members to be sure to bring along the Charatan with the horribly green-speckled mouthpiece which I had seen at the previous meeting. It needs a bit of buffing.
He had smoked it outside during inclement weather.
So it's quite oxidized.




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GOOBER TROT

A few years ago I suggested to the local pipe club that they participate in San Francisco's zaniest event, as a themed unit. Naked pipe smokers in the dense fog. As they laboured up the Hayes Street hill I would be there in spirit, giving them moral encouragement, cheering them on. Not in the flesh, mind you, because sadly I alway work on Sunday. They took the matter under consideration, where it still is. And might, unfortunately, remain a little longer.
If I were to join them in that endeavor it would have more of a chance.

Naked middle aged men in the fog is what it's all about.

They fail to appreciate the gestalt.

The paradigm escapes them.


I am actually very glad that I will not be there today, as like them I shall not participate in the joy and radiant cheer of thousands of thematic joggers going from the docks near the Ferry Building to the beach all the way across the city, at whatever speed and in whatever state of dress. The serious runners will be in the lead, Kenyans probably, and the flobbly-wobblies will take several hours more, probably discarding items of clothing as they overheat from exertion while trotting through dense mists righ around the park, finally arriving at their destination hot, drenched, panting, shirtless and pantless, aching in every pore.
Oh it will be such fun!

The pipe smokers among them will be elsewhere instead. There's an open tin of Escudo which I really should sample before I forget. As well as several teabags with my name on them. These are important details.


Or I might have another bowl of Fourth Generation Black Dot. Which is quite good. Very comforting when dealing with either civilized pipe smokers or the rowdy senescents in the backroom. Either tobacco. Washed down with several cups of tea. And snapping like a turtle.
Fondly imagining several absent people flapping their old wattles naked in the fog just after dawn, possibly pushing a beer keg at speed past the appreciate onlookers lining the route.

Jeffrey, we saw you on the news. That beer keg would probably not have rolled back and crushed your testicles if you had emptied it first. Wear a cup next time.



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THERE THERE, LITTLE WOOZUMS

Remember to use your most comforting mother-like voice. Extend your hand in a soothing wavy patting gesture, and softly say "there there". Trust me. To Helen, who has been batty for years and claims that Willie Brown stole her Nob Hill mansion and evicted her, "there there!". To Jake who was convinced that the police replaced his hands with these lobster claws that keep dropping his beer, "there there!" And always remember to also make the gesture of benediction. Be the pope of reassurance!

There there.

When I got in there was evidence that the old geezers had imbibed too much alcohol the previous day. The sink was absolutely filled with whiskey glasses, and two coffee cups.

I knew precisely who the instigator had been.
He's obviously back from Malibu.


It is quite likely that it won't just be the enormous quantity of booze that does him in.
Lines of nose-joy will play a part. Think of the movie Cocaine Bear.
Precisely so. Educational.

Speaking of 'educational', one of the rarely there regulars showed up and bent my coworker's ears pointlessly for nearly an hour. My coworker is really not interested in the workings of ancient lighters other than the silver Dunhill from the pre-butane era in his own pocket.
Which he made the mistake of taking out and showing.



There 'Little White Nipple Dude' will be, in his favourite easy chair in the corner, adjusting the flame heights of his lighters so that they are equal, readjusting them, then refilling them and repeating everything. For hours. "Mommy, what is Daddy doing?" his imaginary daughter asks. And his imaginary wife responds "shhh, it's VERY important!"


My coworker should have simply said "there there" and made the gesture of benediction.
It would have been better. More peaceful.
Restful, even.



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URBAN DAYS

Marin is the last refuge of free spirits, many of them elderly and fading from foolishness into senescence. Obviously I have issues with the place. One of the things I too often hear when working there is that San Francisco is not the same, it has gone down, oh my what a dump. Meaning that the speakers believe that if they wer in charge, why, none of the problems of a modern first world city would exist here, it would be perpetual summer, and flower power and the summer of love would have slid gracefully into an ultra-afforable Paris and London type urbanity. With clean streets and no social problems.

The hippies don't like what the hippies have done to the place.
Plus it's filled with "those" ethnic types.
Hell in handcart!


Now, we've seen what bourgeois bail-outs like them have done to the rest of the world, and it kind of speaks for itself.

Heck, we've seen what they've done to Marin.
It's altogether rather nasty.

Shut up, Karen.

Yesterday I ventured out to Chinatown for a few hours because I man needs to stretch his legs and experience the world a bit, as well as score some eaties. As well as reading about virology, doom scrolling, and reportage from the main McDonalds in Beijing, about which the internet news sites were strangely filled.


Besides, due the non-smoking nature of a man's apartment mate, one must let the place air out for a few hours before she returns home; not only so that one can pretend that one hasn't spent the entire day sitting on one's ass in front of the computer, but so the evidence doesn't point in that direction. Mental health.


Cheung fan. With peanut sauce, chili crisp, and hot sauce.
It's very therapeutic.


病毒學



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DISTRACTED BY BLINKY THINGS

Having noticed mention of Penglai (an island and a fictitious place) I ended up trying to find Gong Sunchang who "seemingly abstracted" had wandered there. Which of course sent me to a dictionary of ancient Chinese from which I only narrowly escaped.

Like any halfway neurotic person, I obsessively count things. Street people. Tykes. Dogs. Women with yoga mats. Robot taxis. Familiar faces. How many blocks I have walked.
Used pipe cleaners. Repeated wordsthat are merely filler.

And I am aware of my surroundings. Box of chocolates. An English pipe from the middle of the last century on the folding stand beneath the Peterson with the silver band I acquired last year, both recently smoked. The fact that the tea tray with other pipes is looking shockingly disorganized. The two tins of crappy tobacco I shall probably not finish in several months.
And I might just give 'em away.

Although I know that I have too many pipes (one only really needs between a dozen briars and a score), I have scant clue as to the precise count. It's immaterial. There is always one more that must be brought in, because it says something; harbour pilot, mechanical engineer during the late fifties, country doctor, snarky young man at Harvard, female working on her PHD in South East Asian ethnic studies hiding in her uncle's dusty library with a tin of Rattray's Old Gowrie, a pot of Lapsang Souchong tea, and a bottle of sherry .....
The last time I counted them was a decade ago.
It's probably around three hundred.

The seal-script words above are 此時 ('chi si') "this time", or "at this time", in somewhat archaic literary Chinese, and no longer used in the spoken language at this time.
Sorry. Couldn't resist using "at this time" at this time.

Seal script has two fairly common standardized versions but also encompasses a number of other script versions which are close relatives, but also, confusingly, will have invented forms (i.e. backformations) that never existed at that time. This is because words which did not exist when seal script was the common way of writing but whose components were known (in various combinations; left side, right, top, and bottom) were easily given a logical archaic form when that was needed. Personal names, official titles, brush calligraphy, or personal markings such as a studio, book room, or fanciful nicknames and aliases.

What this means is that there are THREE types of seal script dictionaries: those which have ONLY genuine classically used words, those which have all or much of the modern lexicon, and very complete dictionaries that show every possible variation of more words than were used in either ancient writtings or current usage (with annotations saying who and where or how). That last dictionary type is great fun.



By the way: I should think that the young lady in the library has the following in her collection of smoking equipment, of which her relatives remain unaware: a Peterson System Standard, fairly small. An elegant Dublin. A sandblasted billiard. A straightstemmed Dunhill Shell-briar.
A number of mediocre pipes bought on whims. And a taper-stemmed straight Bulldog, very sporty-looking, which no hobbit-wannabee would be caught dead with.



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TOO EARLY DAWN

Is that a crane at the intersection? I think it is. It is still too dark to readily discern what those machines are. They have been working up there in the night hours, so as to provide minimal disruption to traffic, and I wonder what impact that has on nearby apartment dwellers. Who are probably peeved as all git-out about it. "We don't need civic improvement, we're quite happy living in third world conditions dammit! Just let us sleep!"

Maybe they spent the hours of construction playing Dungeons and Dragons.

Not something I would do, as such geekery is not my bag.

In any case, I took a nap in the evening, which turned into a full night's sleep, only slightly interrupted by tales of a small piglet with a pick-up truck and rambunctious tendencies who roams around the carpet in my apartment mate's room sowing anarchy and discord.

Some of the stuffed animals on her side are superheroes.
A number are merely rebels and repeat offenders.
Rambunction reigns there.

On my side of the apartment, everybody is a good citizen and considerate of the need for beauty sleep. As you would expect. Nothing but good virtuous heathens here.
Some of them furry.

Over at Powell and Clay just over the hill there's a mural with a poem by Meng Haoran (孟浩然 'maang hou yin') on it. It seems nicely appropriate when roaming the neighborhood with a pipe after getting up too early in the morning.

春眠不覺曉， 處處聞啼鳥。
夜來風雨聲， 花落知多少。
"Slumbering in Spring I was not aware of daybreak, but everywhere there are bird noises; during the night there were sounds of wind and rain; how many flowers have fallen?"
['chuen min pat gok hiu, chü chü man tai niu, ye loi fung yü sing, faa lo ji do siu']


At Stockton Street I headed over to Sacramento to catch the bus back over the hill as I did not feel like tackling the slope. From my apartment mate's room there were beastly noises, she was waking up and the creatures were already rioting.

It is time for another cup of coffee.



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WAVING LITTLE FLAGS

Cheeto-Boy is in Beijing, and the Chinese don't know what to do. Re-educate him? Deep-fry him? Whip him to death with limp noodles? This is the question. For the time being they've chosen to wave little flags at him as he bears tribute, like so many dumb barabarians before him. Meanwhile, his rabid pet monkey Vance is trying tobankrupt California by withholding Medicaid funds.


What's sad is that his tiny little hands and wee pudgy fingers are still rotting. Which will soon severely limit his late-night twittering fits. Sad. Probably all that junkfood. The man lives off of it. Sad. It's the only thing that connects him to his base and gives him a taste of how the average blobbo red state voter lives. He and they feast on the same garbage.

They share many other tastes.


Most paradigmatically, big breasteses. Kind of like Oswald Bates.
Or was it the famous jazz guitarist Calhoun Tubbs?

In any case, it's what all the Trump women have in common.

Gotta respect the big breasteses. Big breasteses and hamberders stand in for economic policy, foreign affairs expertise, and political leadership, with the wholehearted drooling approval of every Republican official.

Those are both fundaments and pillars of rightwing patriotism. Why, our great nation would just not be the same without them. All over the world people look to us as a beacon of big breasteses and hamberders.

Deep in the war-torn Guatemalan rainforest, little orphans (Pablo or Pedro) dream of big breasteses and hamberders, and decide to trudge north until they find them.
Big breasteses, 'mberders, or bust!



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THE MEAN

My friend said that what surprised him was that for the first time in a long while not a single part of his body hurt in any way. His work involves minor bits of physical lifting and exertion, the weather sometimes affects his joints, etcetera etcetera. And he takes this for granted, having gradually grown into the age he is now. What I didn't tell him was "that's okay, I'm making up for it". All the same conditions which I mentioned hold, my day had been longer than usual, and I'm a bit older and less crepit.

What I would like is for there to be an average to which everything returns after veering off the mean only a little bit. A standard, if you will. With balance and symmetry.

That way none of us can really be upset when things go slightly akilter. It will all return to normal, or maybe go in a different direction briefly before doing so.


My apartment mate wishes that her skin looked better. I only listened with half an ear, because her sense of her dermal state has always been whacko. She looks fine.

Being Chinese, she still looks twenty years younger than someone white.
Which is precisely as it should be.

And, of course, as a Chinese American female, her mother spent years telling her she was ugly and stupid, because apparently that's what you do to raise quiet obedient girls who will marry a dentist from the same home town, who will dutifully spew brilliant sons who go to Stanford until you fade into the background. It's a twisted worldview, but I've met several people who subconsciously carry that baggage with them through life.

All children should be brilliant and quiet. Boys more so on the first quality, girls especially the last. In a properly run universe there would be no democracy or free-will, as everyone would follow the instructions of the benevolent wise old people without making mistakes.


Naturally, most people think that that is a load of horse puckey.
We just haven't told the old people yet.
They're already very upset.
Don't make it worse.



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REST FOR THE WICKED

Seeing as I got up at five A.M., and have been up for nineteen hours more or less, you can probably imagine that I feel somewhat pooped right now. And I need my beauty rest. Despite the two women considerably younger than myself who seemed to rather like conversing with me at work today. This was obviously well before I started bringing up urethras, prostates, and bladded issues in an effort to get some of the backroom to leave on time. You're welcome, John. All of the above.

It must be my sophisticated good looks.
Rather than my conversational gifts.

You'll be glad to know that I ate a salad for lunch today. As a nod to healthy living. And now that we've got that out of the way the rest of the year will be esy sailing.

Convenience store salad. The one without carrots and shredded cabbage.
Even with Sriracha it was still salad.
None the less.


My feet feel like crap.
I blame the salad.

The bookseller's feet also feel like crap. New boots, still breaking in. No salad.

It's almost axiomatic that one does not talk about urethras, prostates, or bladder issues in the presence of young ladies of the opposite gender. It might make the conversation go entirely sideways. No need to remind them that grandpa's problems might not be entirely in his head. John, you're welcome.

At several times during the day I listened to crackpot conspiracy theories. So if it weren't for caffeine I would not be able to pretend I'm human. My orc personality would surface. Savagely ripping flesh from my quivering victims with poison-dripping fangs.
You only wish it were the Pope who killed the Kennedys, you crazy dingo.

Because of caffeine I spent most of the day high as a kite. Had some more before I left for Chinatown to wait for the bookseller in the evening. I was wired to the tits.


A deep red Virginia with a touch of Perique in the Dunhill bruyere this evening while waiting. Superlative smoke. Only a few pavement "eccentrics" floating by.
Including "coverlet man" two or three times.
I mentioned him last week.
He's worse.



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