Knowing when to move on has never been a talent of mine. I'm not even sure if it falls in the "talent" category, but either way, I'm not good at it. Maybe it's just that I don't really know why I'm anywhere in the first place, so I can't really know why I shouldn't be where I am, or something like that. So what, if anything, kept me in Kuala Lumpur, a city my brother refers to as, "a pathetic waste of time" for three weeks? Let me dodge that for a minute.
I feel safe in assuming that most of you reading this can read. As members of the reading population of this planet, you may or may not have read something other than my travelogue, and being the brilliant, creative, thoughtful, attractive, and sexy people that you are, some of those alternative, albeit inferior readings probably came from a place familiarly known as a "Book Store". You know the place: Jazz on half volume, designer label lattes for sale in the back, hard wood floors, not enough benches, a table of best sellers near the door promoting Leonardo DaVinci as god and 1001 Protracted Excuses for Living by Dr. Whothefuckcares, art books in the corner. It's the place where anybody can go and feel like a well rounded scholar. One thinks, "Maybe I'm not going to pick up that 'dummies' guide to 4D non-euclidian non-linear geometry, or Plato's unabridged 'symposium' with the forty page introduction by a guy who wears a toga to bed, but damnit, I could if I felt like it."
Just browsing the titles makes us feel smarter. "Why Don't Chickens Bark?","The Meaning of Life is Easy","How God Blew It","Women Are Evil","Men Are Evil","Why Women Need Men","Why Women Need Therapy","So You're A Therapist series on Treating women","Nobody Needs Anybody","Everybody Needs Somebody","What Your Pet Can Teach You About Relationships","How to Make Cheese from Cackers","100 Jokes That'll Get You Fired","Advanced Cooling Thermodynamics of Composite Ceramics vol:2","War and Peace","Peace and War","The Old Man and The Sea","This Book Should Be Burned","Read the Book to the Left of This One","The Book to The Right of This One Should Not be Trusted","Gun's & Ammo","Yoga Weekly","The Bible","Tylenol For the Soul"...
Maybe Smarter isn't the word. In any case, when it gets to be too much, you can always curl up on the floor an take a nap.
They don't let you nap in the parks of KL. More specifically, the roaming guards don't let you nap in the parks of KL. If you so much as lean back beyond a 45 degree angle for a little to long, they'll taser you and drag your body off to the torture booths they have set up next to starbucks. I barely made it out alive. The wafting aroma of fresh ground columbian roast kept me going. Seriously though, they annoy the hell out of you if you try and take a nap in the sunny grass. Nothing pisses me off more than a tease. Why the hell would you bother landscaping beautiful verdant expances of park in a downtown area and then ban people from laying on it. My protests were a bit beyond the musing capacity of my guard, and he seemed determined to stand in my sunlight until I complied with "authorized" park behaviour, so I moved on, but my opinions went not without expression. I was tempted to push the limits of their authority in something of a lay down rebellion, but wisely enough, My Foreign Soil social Miscreance stops at saying "Bullshit" alot, and complaining in a travelog.
I found more subversive ways of expressing my discontent, like walking around the mall using a stick as a cane and alternating my healthy leg every three minutes. Actually, that's the only subversive thing I came up with, and I have to say, I don't think many people were all that comfortable with it, so I'm calling it a success. Things got aukward when I leaned on it too hard and it snapped. I was sitting down to dinner at the time, so I didn't have to fake an immaculate recovery, but I think I did a decent job of wadling away after I paid the bill and explained to the perplexed but sympathetic waitress that it wasn't anything too serious, just a strained psychosomatic ligament. When I recalled the experience for a pair of otherwise bemused Scottish Lasses, they got this weird look on their faces, shook like off-balance washing machines on spin cycle, and Imploded. Actually, they just got creeped out and left, but hey, the contextual visual juxtaposition of perceived strength and inherent weakness expressed as performance art in a public mecca to contrived consumerism doesn't float everybody's boat, so good riddens.
The books made me do it, all 2.5 Kg of them. I'm helpless in a book store, what can I say.
I ended up giving the whole lot to a guy named Dennis. Dennis Manages the only decent french Bistro/bar in town, grew up in Chicago, went to Northwestern, has a father who runs a commune in Amsterdam, drinks scotch on the rocks, and is just barely holding off a marriage to the stunning but fiesty ex-gymnast Russian titled Serina. I threw in a cuban cigar to sweeten the deal. Dennis smokes.
I smoke, occasionally. For starters, if you've never smoked a cuban cigar before, buy a small one to start off with, because it fucks with your head. That's not advice everyone should follow, because some of you could use a decent head fuck, and besides, I don't really know that much about cigars, but I have smoked a cuban, and my head did stop moving for a bit, so I know what I don't know, and everyday that feels like more than less, so for anyone who still reads these things... whatever.
The Indians got it right. Jon and I take turns pulling lungfulls of apple mist through the Hooka as part of a contest to see who can create the most sultry smoke vapours. Jon is winning, by a lot. I just don't have the right lips. We could be some of the last to turn to such enlightenments. Virtual smoke is taking over. Step into an internet cafe when KL schools get out and you'll see what I mean. It's like "the matrix" without the hovercraft and latex. Asian kids are drug addicts when it comes to gaming. If you find yourself between an asian gradeschooler and Warcraft, don't panic, fall to the ground, take up a bhudda position, and scream "Force field times infinity!" as loud as you can. Whatever you do, don't look them in the narrow bloodshot eyes. I saw a guy make that mistake and the only thing that saved him from being torn to pieces was his shiny necklace. Asian kids love shiny things and they have a short attention span. They're like cats, but less sanitary.
Cats like chicken. Asians like chicken. Everybody likes chicken. Maybe we're all cats. It would explain a lot.
I suppose this should all be leading to something of a conclusion. Knowing when to move on has never been a talent of mine, and now that I think about it, neither has how.
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