Saturday, November 12, 2016

MAN MAN: DO IT LEISURELY, WHATEVER IT IS

There are several people in Chinatown who always warmly welcome me whenever I enter their place of business. They are very glad to see me, speak to me in Cantonese, and genuinely wish me to leisurely enjoy whatever food and drink I purchase.
It's not just normal customer relations; they are used to me, and we exchange pleasantries.

It took me a while to figure out what was going on.

There is nothing quite so safe as a reasonably clean and courteous middle-aged white dude who is not a screaming loony.

Reassuring, too.


This is San Francisco. We are just about chock-full of screaming loonies here. Likewise tattooed freaks, artistic eccentrics, and downright filthy people who are immensely self-impressed.
Finally discovering a grown-up white person who has not developed into a remarkably weird and cocksure extrovert, totally unpredictable except for the disturbance factor, tells them they did not make a mistake in coming to this country, sanity is indeed possible if and when you finally decide to become white.

One of the ladies seems to believe my parents were Chinese people whose child or children for some misfortunate reason ended up Caucasian. She's from Terrace Mountain, and may not have heard of Gregor Mendel. The Cultural Revolution was going on when she would have taken highschool science classes, and genetics is NOT as revolutionarily correct as vigorous Marxist-Leninist dialectic. Either that or the school was burned down.
Because, naturally, it was a bastion of bourgeoisity.

Some kids act white, some are white.
It happens.



On the one hand, I have spent my whole life being a reasonably clean and courteous middle-aged white dude who is not a screaming loony. And on the other, they never see me outside of Chinatown, so my secret is safe.

When not constrained by calm Chinatown Cantonese social norms, I will usually grub-like molt and shed my human skin, like Edgar the Bug in Men In Black, and dance on tables wearing a lampshade.



My disguise is perfect.

Chinatown is where I go to calm down. It is very restful to have a snackie somewhere there, and then go watch the sportive types at Woo Woo or the elderly gamblers in Portsmouth Square while smoking a pipe.

I like to pretend I'm human when I do that.


The six-limbed hopping terror comes afterwards.

Fangs and slime.




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