Indulgence / It's been a year since I left DC

January 12, 2006
Just me and Lester in this now empty echoing space. I just made a last gin and tonic and then poured the last of the gin down the sink and remembered how I poured a bottle of Great Wall red wine down the sink one evening in Beijing and then road my bike around the 4th ring road. Bach's solo cello sonatas. I like obvious dramatic music as a background to all this leaving. Nights on the roof of the Ramada in Guangzhou watching the fires of the boat people. Watch them brush their teeth and then rinse their mouths out with green tea. Yes yes I know many things are lovely at a distance and who does the abstracting matters.

And one from either late January or early February 2006
The ocean goes all the way to where it stops. I'm wearing a floppy hat again today, and I greeted Pete the manager of our apt. complex this morning by saying "how have you been?" A high school friend found me on myspace and wrote "have you had any babies yet?" Someone I knew through someone I knew professionally once said "women don't matter, only babies." She ate a vegetable kebab and said it tasted good, but we were all suffering from February hostility. I found a drivers license, a pack of cigarettes, and a pack of gum in the parking lot. The kid was born on April 12, 1984, which means he hasn't been of age even a year. I'm going to throw the gum and cigarettes away and leave the license by the mailboxes. Maybe I'll carry it around for a while. I wonder if he has a megaphone in his car.

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When an insane person you don't know follows you and screams at you, you can't scream back because when you scream back you might be insane. I used to frequently feel this way in CVS in DC. Sometimes the crazy person you don't know is angry enough at you to kill you--the Chicago mayor at the World's Fair, for example.

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A male terrier with a rhinestone collar. "You probably don't want to pet him." But of course I did.