YOU CAN"T STOP HERE!

Last night I promised an innocent young person that I would introduce him to durian, which he thinks can't be that way. Specifically, I shall bring it by his place of work before closing, to chase out the last drunken customers.
Why do I like durian? Because I have a mean streak, that's why.
A fruit with a nasty attitude has to be appreciated.
Potent, precise, and unbeatable.


The first durian event I engineered was at a restaurant which no longer exists, where I was well known. They found it interesting and educational, and soon asked me and my horrid fruit to leave. So I did, and headed over to an Indonesian place to share it with the boss and his cook. They were happy to see the stuff, two customers on the mezzanine hurriedly paid and left, and his gorgeous teenage daughter said she would wait for him in the car parked in the lot. She was American-born, you understand.
Tender sensitivities.

Second time was at a burger place. Mister Naguib up at the front worriedly speculated that the Vietnamese place next door had had a nasty accident with sewage. Horrid, horrid, horrid. Louisiana Tony walked smack into the wall of durian reek, turned, and staggered off into the night, overwhelmed, and baffled by what had just happened.

Third time, at the computer company. The facilities manager came running over from two buildings away, convinced that there was a gas leak in the kitchen, we were all going to die. It wasn't until he got there that he remembered that the kitchen was totally electric, no gas.

Durian is subtle and overwhelming. I explain to people that it isn't a bad smell, but that there is unbelievably much of it. This rational and illuminative statement is met with disbelief. My ex insisted that I was an evil son-of-a-bitch who kept a dead space alien in the fridge, and barred the door.

Americans, mostly, want to get away from durian.
It is a robust and uncouth fruit.
Kind of like a sailor.


As Hunter S. Thompson explains in Fear and Loathing: "hier können wir nicht anhalten, das ist Fledermausland!" The movie was in German.
I cannot remember why I first saw it in German. Everything in it sounds better in German. We can't stop here, this is bat country.


"Hier können wir nicht anhalten, das ist Fledermausland!"


The innocent young person mentioned above works in the hospitality industry. He and his customers need to be educated. If a durian can be found by next Tuesday, I shall bring it down to his restaurant.
Because I am good in that regard.
I care.

The problem inevitably will be that there will be fruit left over. Which I will not want to take home, nor consume all by myself. When I ate durian for breakfast in the Philippines, it started sweating out through my pores and fastidious people kept their distance from me, further and further as the day progressed, a widening circle of disturbed repulsion. They could have called in a missile strike: "he's an easy target, lone white dude with no one nearby, do it now!"

No amount of Old Spice armpit smear-stick will cope with that. So I'll seek friends afterwards, to lovingly press all of the rest upon.
Here, Duong and Minh, for you. Enjoy!
A present from bat country.
Fledermausland.



In all honesty, I don't really like durian.
But I like what it does to people.





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