I spotted this a few months back in a toyshop on Gulou Dongdajie, but only just got around to snapping a picture (with a friend's camera-phone). It struck me as a charming coincidence to happen upon this so shortly after Daisy Sweetgrass had surprised and delighted me by singing Plastic Jesus during one of her shows with The Redbucks at Jiangjinjiu. [Three languages! But none of them is Aramaic?]
Every bar is a memory.
And all the memories huddle together for company, so that in my mind it often seems as though every bar I've ever been in is on the same street, or at least in the same neighbourhood; every great drinking session I fondly recall happened on one night, or over the course of one weekend; and everyone I've ever drunk with fuses into a single person, the idealised Drinking Companion.
Sometimes it seems to me also that the melancholy that infuses so many of these memories had but a single cause, an idealised Lost Love.
Some of these memories I will now try to share with the enormous, faceless, blog-munching world at large.
These, then, are the mental voyages of the boozehound Froog; his many-year mission to seek out new drinks and new places to drink them in, to write The Meaning Of Life on a napkin.... andnotlose it on the way home.
Froog is an escaped lawyer - but there is no need for alarm; he is only a danger to himself, not to the general public. An eternal wanderer, he now lives in an exotic city somewhere in the 'Third World' *, where he is held prisoner by an unfinished novel (or, more precisely, an unstarted novel). He spends a lot of time running, writing, taking photographs, and falling in love with women who fail to appreciate him. He also spends a lot of time in bars.
[* OK, I'll come clean: I've been living in Beijing since summer '02.]
2 comments:
Haha, was wondering when you were going to post this one! Am I right in remembering it was sitting beside a Mr Bean doll?
I don't recall now. There was a large Homer Simpson-Transformer robot at the other side of the display. Not much else sticks in the mind.
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