oooooo....but I ain't never been a sucka
No I never been a mark
I ain't never been a busta I ain't never been a simp
Potna I always had heart...
- E-40

Oh, would that were true....those of you who know me well know that I have, at one point or another, been most of those things! But, well, I like the lyrics. The world has much to learn from E-40, and that's why I'm going to force it on you many times over the course of this blog. Meng-Tzu once said (or wrote - not sure) that a great man is he who keeps his child's heart, and surely I have kept my child's heart - I'm obsessed with a rapper! I think I was supposed to stop doing that around the time that I was still listening to Iron Maiden. Ah, what can you do? I don't wanna grow up, I'm a E-feezy Fonzarelli kid, he's got the raps and beats and game and shit to really flip my lid....

Ok, back to Kongstein. What shall I discuss? Work? Nah - I'll get to that at some point. Let's talk about my first night out, last Friday, and the mildly amusing fallout. Earlier in the week, I had made plans to hang out with an Australian footballer named Buffs McGee, who used to play for the Metro Stars. Yeah, real interesting, Chucky. Anyway, my stomach had been jacked all week but I still wanted to go out, so we met outside my building at 7pm - it was a real pain in the ass trying to find him among all the other Australian footballers - and we headed to a part of Central called Lan Kwai Fong to meet some of his fellow footballers at a bar called Bar George. LKF is an expat drinker's playground - a P-shaped set of streets full of bars, restaurants, and clubs. It is second home to may of Hong Kong's hardcore expat ragers.

I met several people, most of whom worked for one football club or another, and proceeded to drain Stellas like they were ice cold beers or somethinwater. Great bar - lots of brick and dark woods, stone tile floor, soft lighting, and several areas divided into lounges, a bar, and a small dance floor in the back. Some plants here and there...classy enough but built for partying.

Ok, so New York doesn't totally suck. I have been a little harsh. The truth is, Hong Kong is an extremely materialistic city, but the expats themselves are not. For one thing, the community is too small for anyone to try to forge little mini-cliques and get their in-group thing going, and second, it's essentially the only community there is! In NYC, there are such high numbers of so many different types of people that one can enjoy the 'advantage' of having their little scene. As a result, one can actually afford to be superficial dickheads and talk about how much their lawyer husband makes or which stop on Metro-North they live on or whatever. Here, the world of the expat working in finance, or the media world that covers it, is all one scene, and a small one at that. Throw in the fact that everyone is pretty smart, and you've got a bunch of good folks who just want to have a good time. Every single person I talked to was super-friendly and welcoming. The conversation flowed easily from politics to drugs (there's more suga booga here than mcherbals - can you believe it?) to cheesy Van Damme movies without any concern about making the right impression or coming off as some kind of player. It was alllll good. The pints flowed like water - damn, alcohol is expensive here but they keep it damn cold, damndamndamn cold, as Bart Simpson would say, and everyone was having a great time. The place got packed, too - filled right up with an about even mix of expats and whores, who come in all dolled up like breezys at Webster Hall or something, and everyone got along quite nicely. No knuckleheads, no door bitch, no cover, just a great scene. The TV monitors were playing videos from the 80's, and I got to see - I swear to God - the video for "Stand and Deliver" with Adam and the Ants. Makeup, the two pistolas, the banquet hall - all that? Or maybe it was "Goodie Two Shoes" - not sure, now that I think of it.

Of course, I handily forgot to eat a damn thing, and by the time 12.30 rolled around, I was lit up like "a thousand points of light over Baghdad" - remember that one from the peace marches in 1991? Nah, you don't, suckers. It's cool. McGee and I left and parted ways somewhere - he lives in a huge, spacious apartment up the Peak, so it was uphill for him and downhill for me - and I proceeded to make that flailing, gangly walk that one makes when one is fulla beer and doesn't give a shit. Throw in the fact that I was walking down an incline and I was slangin' limbs around like an anorexic scarecrow with Down's Syndrome and a limp. No offense to anorexics, scarecrows, people with Down's or people with bum legs, ya heard? Thass how I looked. I made it back to the place and proceeded to dance around the apartment in my underwear with the ipod redlined, going from banger to banger (40, Raekwon, Mobb Deep), the ipod slipping out of the waistband of the tighty whities and down into my crack...ah, it was great.

Until I woke up in the morning.

I rose at about 11.30 after several hours of tossing and turning and some attempts at water consumption. Actually, I rose after a brief slug session - not because I was horny, mind you, but out of a desperate attempt to cull any endorphin rush I could out of my alcohol-poisoned body. Yeah, it was a pathetic wack, the kind where you actually feel like you're slugging yourself in the genitals - but I felt good for about two minutes afterward and I was going to take whatever I could get. I finally realized that I had to get out of the house and buy some fluids or I would be crippled for the rest of the day, so I put on some clothes and headed out to the Wellcome food store. no typo, it has two l's. The cart was filled with Gatorade, water, orange juice, and I even managed to spend enough time in the wine section to buy a bottle without heaving. Also grabbed some noodles, red grapes, cheese, and other crap a bachelor buys. I drank one of the gatorades as soon as I left the place - hell with refrigeration, colder fluids are slower to absorb anyway - and fixed a little bit of food. Now I was able to get some stuff done!

ok, gotta go get my laundry downstairs. More later,
Chucky