MISCOMMUNICATION IS KEY

Sometimes I think that my apartment mate is off the deep end. Since Saturday she's been obsessing about a pearl necklace which she is restringing, fussing over precise graduation of sizes and the knots in between just ever so. She's done it at least three times by now, taking several hours each time. When I point out that it's fine, just fine, stop frussing, she counters that it's exactly like my pipe work, when I'll spend hours with micro-fibre pads getting the rims perfectly done, or steaming out minute dings whatever. Which is serious aesthetic labour not to be sneered at by any means. But okay, point taken.

Currently there are no pipes I'm working on. But I'm still looking at the rim of an old Dunhill Bruyere, billiard shape, group 4, and wondering if it needs more work. I smoked it last night while waiting for the bookseller in Chinatown. It's around forty years old and has been with me for a while. It's a pipe with a certain gravitas, such as a country doctor or an engineer working for the space agency might smoke.

Or, hypothetically, someone who did credit checks for the toy industry.


One of the pipes I'll have with me today will be a Peterson sandblast, and a Dublin shape natural with Dublin & London stamping and a p-lip. Very harbour pilot in a tropical estuary looking, imagine the mosquitoes and those pesky little sandflies oh look there's a water monitor lizard with nasty pointy teeth. The first for after lunch at a chachanteng, the second after grocery shopping, and a cuppa at the bakery where the elderly Cantonese gentlemen will probably be.

Most of them were born here and speak English far better than their parents' Toisanese, and three out of four have hearing problems. One of them has been long-distance involved with a woman in the mainland somewhere outside of Canton, who is probably twenty years younger than him (so late-fifties at the youngest), and I have no idea how he communicates with her seeing as she is not Toisanese. Perhaps in English?

In any case, it's quite admirable that he is still involved with the opposite gender. Even if it is miscommunicatively and long distance. I myself miscommunicate with a number of people, some of whom are not English speakers, a few of whom are of the opposite gender.
But not in any way like that.

For some strange reason very few of the people with whom I miscommunicate hang around in Chinatown bakeries or chachanteng. I cannot understand why.

Perhaps they're afraid that there are creatures with nasty pointy teeth there. Perhaps just under the surface of their hot beverage. I can assure them that that is not so. I am a Dutch American with an affintiy for water monitors, and of this I am certain. I would know.

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