TWO CUPS MILK TEA

The key thing after having two cups of milk tea is the growing urgency of finding a powder room. Especially when it's cold outside. Which, upon return to my neighborhood, necessitated popping upstairs for a brief visit, after which going back out again to finish my pipe. Both the street outside, and the nearby main drag, were nearly clear of people.

At shortly after one I had boarded the bus heading toward C'town, walked the last few blocks with a pipe. Lunch and milk-tea (芫茜魚片粥，奶茶) while watching Ah Sook over at the next table choking on his Hainan Chicken (海南雞). Old men with colds should not 𤜯 ('gap') their food, but it must have been too delicious for calm methodical eating. Which I can totally understand; nearly burnt my mouth on the cilantro fish slices congee.

He looked very happy.

Silent observation of children at a different table. Kid, you're such a spoiled little turd that your little sister is destined to be the brainy one, an academic success. She may not realize it yet, but that will let her escape you and your repulsiveness. You'll graduate from a rehab facility while she goes to Harvard. You'll be a typical sour young Chinese American male no-goodnik, she'll probably be a scientist with peer reviewed papers to her name.

In her spare time she'll write the next great Chinese American novel.
Bitingly bitter fiction.

Those Dutch tourists at the far table haven't a clue about the food. It's not the Chinese they're used to in Alkmaar or Deventer. There is nothing,
NOTHING, on the menu that's recognizably Indonesian.
No, I'm not going to go over to help them.
Part of traveling is discovery.
Good luck!


Pipe after lunch. Opera in Portsmouth Square. Sounds like a martial epic detailing the generations long struggle against the nomadic barbarians from the waste lands (Huns, Mongols, Turks), stirring and inspiring.
Caedite eos, novit enim dominus qui sunt eius!
History remembers their savagery.


誓掃匈奴不顧身 ...


Second cup of tea up on Stockton Street. Warm place. Weirdo Canto-pop on screen, bad Mandarin new year's music on the sound system. Filled the third pipe up for later. The first pipe of the day was an early-seventies petite Canadian, the second a dashing mid-sixties number, the third would be an antique item from the fifties. All three smokes were delicious.

It had become colder. Took bus back.


The only fly in my ointment was that half a dozen times I smelled evidence of over-indulgence last night by New Year's partiers. People, we need rain.
This city is filled with drunks. Polk Street especially.

All of you tourists and coma zuipers need to go back to San Leandro.
Please take your oversized relatives with you.
Thanks, bye.




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