We still haven't heard from you on the 'anniversary celebration' thread, though - What's your unusual super-power?. Please share your wit with us there.
Do I remember Ann? I fear not; it is over two years since I last got to hang out with your crowd. It is nice to be remembered, though.
I fear it might be very soon indeed, since my bloody landlord is seeking a 35% increase in the rent as of next month (and that probably makes him one of the least insanely avaricious landlords in Beijing at the moment).
You are the only person I know who goes on vacation when he is broke...
I was amused recently to see some online article about couch-surfing as a modern trend. I felt like writing in to them and saying I could set them up with an interview with a past master.
Well, since I am permanently broke, I have to learn to live outside of the normal constraints and conventions of society.
And in fact, being on holiday - if you've got a free crash - tends to be a bit cheaper day-to-day than being in a working mode (more use of public transport, just as much eating out, rather too much consolatory drinking in the evenings...).
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.]
12 comments:
Homer says pretty much everything best...
Cowboy! You're back!!
It's been far too long. I'll put a Simpsons post up every day if that's what I have to do to keep you here!
We still haven't heard from you on the 'anniversary celebration' thread, though - What's your unusual super-power?. Please share your wit with us there.
Are you posting on drugs?
Just 'high on life'!
You do realize not only had I posted in that thread 4 days prior, you had commented on it?
Oh, really - on the Superpowers thread?
Yes, it had slipped my mind. 4 days is an eternity sometimes!!
And that was 8 days previously. Two eternities!!
Nice to know how impactful my return was. Not that I expected fatted calves or owt like that.
My neighbor Ann asked when you're next visiting.
Do I remember Ann? I fear not; it is over two years since I last got to hang out with your crowd. It is nice to be remembered, though.
I fear it might be very soon indeed, since my bloody landlord is seeking a 35% increase in the rent as of next month (and that probably makes him one of the least insanely avaricious landlords in Beijing at the moment).
You are the only person I know who goes on vacation when he is broke...
I was amused recently to see some online article about couch-surfing as a modern trend. I felt like writing in to them and saying I could set them up with an interview with a past master.
Well, since I am permanently broke, I have to learn to live outside of the normal constraints and conventions of society.
And in fact, being on holiday - if you've got a free crash - tends to be a bit cheaper day-to-day than being in a working mode (more use of public transport, just as much eating out, rather too much consolatory drinking in the evenings...).
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