윤

Only because it happened the weekend I was on a red-eye for the job I since quit must I have missed the news and maybe a memorial seed of Tricks of the Trade, though all I’m seeing is a porno with that very title released the same year.

Or “Complement.” A popular pick-up card game that was mentioned in a dream I had, jet-lagged from returning from Asia. I tried to get more details about it, but all I saw was that a hanging shoe rack was involved.

Dreamed I had made it through the mountains on foot and reached some exclusive vacation destination by myself. Others were there, but not alone. So I returned to retrieve the wife, whom I had to leave at the point where the crossing had become perilous: small platforms hung by ropes over a thousand-foot drop to the ocean, and the challenge was to make it from one to the next with your physically-less capable partner. I thought maybe the safest way was to secure the line to one tied to a basket, swing her across, then have her help with my turn; considering how many of times we’d have to do this, I wondered why no one thought of just building a bridge. With the assistance of a man the impressive size of Gerard Butler, this film ended, the damsel saved and the couple together; after the titles, it returned to the moment they split up, and she was left helpless and naked, alone on a pier. She fainted and her attractive figure laid there in public. An older inspector, also unclothed, for this was a pre-industrial society, came by and retrieved her to keep her for himself and his Gerard Butler-like penis, but when she came to in his small home, she thanked them and left with some supplies on her back, and sunglasses, to set off on her own. The name of the movie changed to “Little Miss Avenue Nonsense” (it was sense before, and had road or smaller street) to celebrate her self-reliance.

As out of it as I may seem sometimes, my attention will always be there for a mobile app that purports to take you to another reality of some greater import. Perhaps it goes back to waiting for all my cellphones to ring, beating X in a dingy Japanese youth hostel fortified by warm はちみつレモン, or thinking the low-battery antics on my Mattel Electronics Auto Race meant that something special was happening. To me. This time it’s called “Shadow Cities” and what I like (assuming I’ve read the conceit right) is being able to conquer your own block, virtually, and “call” everything in it, at least in your own mind.

Had a dream we were by the ocean, overlooking it as we did at that stop in 宜蘭, and there was a giant turtle near the shore. It swam behind a smaller one, and when it got close enough, gobbled it up. 老婆 was preoccupied with her relatives and wasn’t listening to me when I told her about it, and wandered into the water …only to be swallowed whole herself. I was horrified, and yelled something to the effect of give me back my wife, but stopped short of throwing myself at the creature, as little as I could conceivably do without a weapon against its rock-like hide. Upon waking I re-considered; I probably should have. After all, not everyone gets a trial run at the life (albeit a lonely one, as a practical-minded coward)-or-certain death decision when faced with a giant turtle who’s just eaten your loved one.

That’ll be the tourism slogan. Once again, I’ll leave it to 老婆 to preserve the more important photos. The one I really regret not having taken (like the Muslim cab driver in Vancouver with the flip-phone held in his turban, that was awesome) was of an old man washing dishes in a place we ate near 龍山 while smoking.

China Airlines is as uncomfortable as I remember it; there’s just something about the seats that have me trying to bend metal by the end of the flight. Nice selection of media, however, including the 30 Rock 3rd season premiere (with Chinese subtitles) and enough movies to put together a a summer science-fiction marathon: Moon, which I liked a lot, seeing as how I actually had to put on the headset to follow—which certainly wasn’t the case with Transformers 2. I had to again for Will Ferrel’s Land of the Lost because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing had been released as a major motion picture. What a shame that they revisited this show without the awesome end theme.

Taipei’s TV lineup doesn’t seem to have changed much; in under a week I’ve seen every Bruce Lee movie and more than my share of Jackie Chan and Tony Leungs—had the time, being laid up with what we first feared was the H1N1, but turned out to be more akin to stomach flu or Traveler’s diarrhea. (I suspect the sushi my in-laws always insist on treating us with.) My experience with the health care here is, nevertheless, one for Michael Moore’s films: seeing a doctor and a bag full o’ drugs cost half my insurance co-pay back home.

Dreams, had a bunch, thanks to the mild fever.  In one, Ron and his whore planned to drive me to the ocean and throw me in, so I broke his neck from the back seat without so much as an emotional farewell.  The same night my then ex-wife, our child, another woman and I were registering at some Taiwanese agency, and the only word I understood from her responses was the state of her new relationship: “lesbian” …still, our breakup apparently was amicable.  Then there was the Star Trek movie which had me feeling was worth a revisit, where original cast featured alongside Next Generation, Deanna Troi traveled the corridors in a floating seat and Kirk showed heroic vigor by placing a vital dumbbell-shaped part on his thick head of hair and running off to engineering to save the day with it.

The apartment 老婆 arranged for us reminds me of Blade Runner, except all the flying cars have descended onto the damp streets as scooters. From our eighth floor window I can hear all the noise from below, where shops repeat recordings through megaphones so distorted that even she can’t make them out, and I have to resist the urge to smash. One that played all night sounded like 發燒 (fāshāo), but instead of mocking my temperature, it’s 肉粽 in Taiwanese (バッチャン, because I’m not learning Pe̍h-ōe-jī just for the sake of this post).

That was the name of a giant department store in whatever fancy part of town we were. (I guess it makes some sense, although “caesura” really was mining my vocabulary.) I met back up with 老婆 after walking off on my own to another and we walked together towards this one on the hill. There were two sharp-dressed Orange-haired Black women, twins, smoking in front of us and she told them it was disgusting. They replied with some remark about Confucius and went on their merry way. I tried to get back at them with a similar historical figure, but Nelson Mandela was all I could think of. We boarded a moving sidewalk, the kind in Vegas, taking us up at a sharp angle then leveling off at with an even sharper one and a sign warning me to watch the low overhead. When we entered there were quite a few people with us, so I had little time to look around, noticing only a deep pit with a giant Garfield-like decoration at the bottom. No means of descending was visible to me, but 老婆 grabbed a shopping cart and pushed it down, seemingly on an invisible stairway. All the others proceeded like her. I could not. Then a fellow passed me and with each step he took, blue cushions folded forward, so I carefully followed him.