I don't know about how this bed would stack up long term, but for tonight, as well worn as I am, I have no doubt that it will suffice. The bare globe above me head is harshly bright for this hour of night, but the lamp on the desk has no matching outlet anywhere on the wall, its cord still coiled up as new. The sound of a fellow alone down the hall with a bottle and a U2 record filters in through the balcony shutters and the floor hums gently with the voices from the TV downstairs where the barmaid sits in a Dockers jersey watching the Saturday movie on free-to-air, trying not to think about seventeen points and when she'll meet her paperback prince. Two voices waft past in the corridor in debate as to if the place is haunted.
Some days I miss the city.
Some days I'd never go back.
It's morning, technically. But the full moon is still sitting well into the pale blue sky and the haze on the ground still seeps around waiting for sunlight to banish it from view, while I look down a clearing with a club in my hand. Golf is about as much 'my sport' as mornings are 'my element', but it's still fun to play games you're no good at if you're doing it in good company, and Tiger Woods I am not. The opportunity to spend time with my old man (and brother) is relished though, and golf is a manly game, a game of beating little indefensible things with big sticks. You walk a couple of miles, go fishing, build some sandcastles, trim some bushes, do a couple of lines of coke off of a duck's back… well… maybe not the fishing. It's all about taking the time.
Last week I went out with some friends to go have dim sum, which I can only assume was fairly authentic, considering that no one in the place spoke any english aside from my friends when explaining to me what whichever dish I was eating was called, such as chicken's feet, foreskin, and sperm cubes. Most of the descriptions were fabricated on the spot, but chicken's feet is quite literal. They taste, surprisingly enough, like chicken, nicely done in a spicy black bean sauce, you just munch down on a claw and then spit out the knuckles. So that was a new experience and every one of the ten or fifteen different dishes I tried were completely foreign to me, barring the steamed sponge cake which was somewhat familiar.
Work has also become interesting of late, and I mean that in the Chinese curse sense of the word - may you live in interesting times. At the moment I'm just digging the pegs in and riding it out, but unless things change for the better soon, I believe I will have to make some changes for myself.