WAITING FOR THE IMPI OR NOT

What with being, as you would naturally suspect, a contrarian sort of person much given to rebeliousness, when I have any excuse at all I am likely to buy a pack of illegal ciggies in Chinatown just because I can. Which it will take me over a week to smoke. Today's cigarettes were Liqun filters (利群過濾嘴香煙 'lei kwan gwo leui cheui heung yin') purchased on my way to a late lunch. Which was also stubbornly contrarian, because salt fish is not recommended for men of my age, people with high blood pressure, or smokers. But it is delicious.

I am by ancestral heritage Dutch, from a part of the Netherlands where people habitually cheat the tax authorities, engage in smuggling, and break other laws that they think are berserk. Yes, the family has been in the New World for almost four centuries (since 1630), but until four generations ago was dense with Dutch speakers, and when I was two years of age we went over there, to that exact same region of the Netherlands, for several years.
At a time when being Americans in Europe was considered just not done.
Damned well uncivilized, and intolerably stubborn.

The Dutch are infamous for being stubborn.

[They just don't tolerate it very well from others. Naturally I remember my school years with some distaste.]

Which sort of explains why I like smuggled cigarettes.


When I went back after dark to wait for the bookseller to get off work (a once-a-week custom of ours going back many years) it was quieter there, but not very much cooler.
The temperature in this part of the city today was quite uncivilized.

In Chinatown it was probably still over eighty degrees Fahrenheit as I smoked my pipe. One should dress appropriately for the climate and the environment. Sadly, not in tropical whites with a sola topee, but in shirtsleeves instead of my usual pervert exhibitionist overcoat.

The Aggretsuko backpack in lieu of coat pockets for pipe and tobacco.
A cartoon design of a drunken red panda screaming is perfect.
Helps me blend in, and might scare off a Zulu impi.
Also, I don't have a sola topee.

[Aggretsuko: a small female red panda who works in the accounting department of a Japanese trading company. She often feels put-upon by coworkers and superiors, and gets drunk every night at a karaoke bar and sings death metal.]

And I doubt that an impi is anywhere near SF Chinatown, despite the tourist season.


Two bars, two cups of tea. At the first one karaoke country music was being screamed and an idiot harangued my friend about selling vile print propaganda, so we headed to the second one. Where it was quieter, with fewer Caucasians.
Still no impi on the horizon.


Tomorrow will be cooler.


And no impis.



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