Words Fail Me

  A carved window at Longhua Temple.

  Jack Black came by work today.  Didn’t get a chance to ask him if there would ever be a Bob Roberts 2. 

It’s always a challenge to express to people back in the States what it’s like to live in a city of 24 million people.  Or what it’s like to live in a place where apartment buildings are skyscrapers.  But it’s also almost impossible to explain just how sprawling Shanghai is.

So, I used a website called MAPfrappe to draw a rough outline of the Shanghai city limits and then I overlayed that outline onto New York.Look at that.  It would devour Manhattan in its entirety, half of Long Island, and almost all of Westchester County.

Now check out Shanghai overlayed onto L.A.It would stretch from mid-Valley in the West to almost out to the I-15 in the east, from Long Beach and Anaheim in the south to nearly Palmdale in the north.

Shanghai isn’t just 大, Shanghai is 非常大.

From the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas:

Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

  Roasted banana with vanilla ice cream was my birthday dessert.
I don’t think anyone knows this story except my mother.  And she’s joined the Church Triumphant.  And would have baked me apple pie à la mode instead anyway. 

When I was very, very young I thought leather jackets were pretty cool and wanted one.  I thought banana skins were sorta kinda leathery, so I was determined to make a leather jacket out of banana peels.

I ate several bananas.  Then — being an idiot, but also a clever idiot — I knew I had to “tan” the peels somehow, so I carefully scrapped them clean and lay them out on the concrete driveway in the sun to “cure” or “tan” or whatever the hell it is that is supposed to turn banana peels into leather.  (No mercury was available, thankfully, or I would have wound up mad as a hatter.)

Anyway, that sort of just made the peels brown, so trying to sew them together (why didn’t I at least try to cut the peels to fit?) failed utterly.  Despite my diligent suturing.

The banana leather jacket project was abandoned.

The point of all this is…sips more depth charge…I am a clever idiot.  I might not know anything about how anything important works, but I know tons about how semi-important things peripheral to important things work.

And hopefully, maybe, possibly that’s enough wisdom to fashion a whole lifetime out of.

We’ll see.

Having drinks at the bar at the Kanaya Hotel.  It’s the ritzy (colonialist?) hotel perched above the Shinkyo bridge over the Daiya River.  In the foreground please note a double of Yamizaki 12.  So much smoother than the Yamizaki 18, won’t you agree?

I highly recommend it, if you have the means.

They ran out of Yamizaki so I switched to Lagavulin.  (Works like a depth charge.)  From an island nation half a world away, I salute you, Scotland.  Alba gu bràth!

Beloved, today I turned 41.  Which means a scant 366 days until my Answer Year!  Life, the Universe, and Everything!  42!