Weekend of pain, loss, and adventure - October 16-17, 2004...

I'm sure that sounds a little dramatic - not to worry, folks, it's all good. I had a great weekend, even though my neck still hurts from all the head I was giving. Just kidding.

I decided to lay low both nights, having lots to do before Mom's arrival this coming Wednesday. Friday night I hit the gym, took the usual steam and sauna, and went home and sort of accidentally got drunk. I used to do this in New York - make a list of things you need to do at home and try to get as many of them done while drinking away mas rapido. It was fun yet predictable - some chores, some story notes, that kind of crap. Nothing major to report, really. Crashed around midnight, I think - can't really recall. Maybe 1am.

I woke on Saturday ready to go to war with the 'to do' list. I went grocery shopping, dropped off some dry cleaning, bought a coffeepot for mom to use while she was here, then hit the gym. There was a yoga class going on when I got there, so I couldn't use the big room to stretch and shit, but I had a good session with the weights and confirmed that I'm a weak bitch, but stronger than some of the sucker MCs in there. In the locker room, I ran into the yoga instructor, a classic Indian yogi - nice big tub, friendly, peaceful demeanor, flowing orange robes and orange t-shirt. He introduced himself as Swami and explained that his style was transformational yoga - integrating not just mind and body, like the Hatha yoga I mess with in NYC, but mind, body, breathing, emotions, and spirituality. He teaches Saturdays and Mondays at this gym, and I may give it a try if I have time.

Anyway, afterward I went to this center on Des Voeux Road called the Accupressure and Foot Reflexology Care Center of the Blind. In essence, it's a massage joint where blind folks provide some serious accupressure massage. It's a lot cheaper than my gym - at $240 an hour, it's about half that of my gym and more in line with NYC Chinatown prices (roughly $30 bucks an hour) - but man, it makes the Fishion sessions in Chinatown feel like a cake walk. This cat worked me from here to Albuquerque, to once again borrow from Ice Cube. I mean, the shit hurt - I knew it was good for me, and I felt good when I left, but daaaamn. Next time I'm getting a half-hour and naming like 40 parts of my body that need attention so he can't linger too long on any one area.

You are let into a room by a woman, then the dude comes in later with her and you tell her what you need to have done and she passes that information on to the dude. Then he sets this talking timer - you know, this electronic voice that says "forty-five minutes to go" and so on, and it's all a little ghetto, like the Chinatown joint. I could hear a dude snoring in another room (separated by curtains, not walls), and phones ringing and all that, but it was a good find and I'm glad I went. Threw him a nice big tip, left my name for future appointments and went off to Lan Kwai Fong to get some food. It's about 2pm right by then - I needed something mellow after my blissful torture session, so off I went with Stevie Wonder in the ipod.

Well, what should I find in Lan Kwai Fong but gobs and gobs of chavs and whores. No, of course not, it's the middle of the day! What I did find, however, was this massive Carnival festival in full swing. You know those street fairs that NYC has here and there throughout the year? It's like that, except Brazilians organized it and there are fewer stalls selling screwdrivers and socks and stuff. This one is all food, drink, insane decorations, magic, mimes, dancers, and music blasting out of speakers placed on every corner. I wanted to get some photos, so I ran back home to grab the camera, stopping first to grab a few samosas (I know, shocking, just shocking. Chucky and samosas). When I returned, things were still in full swing. Like most celebrations of this sort - remember the lantern festival? - it's got a real family vibe, but there were pints of Carlsberg on every corner, and I decided to let the day take a detour and leave the chore list behind for a few hours. The food being sold was truly diverse - in addition to the usual fare of hot dogs, sausages, and pizza, one could eat Indian, Korean, Japanese, a wide range of Chinese food, Thai delights, and some other foods whose country of origin I could not divine.

After a couple pints, I was feeling groovy. In honor of my mischievous mood, as well as Redman's 'Let Da Monkey Out', which I had been listening to earlier, I decided to get a henna tattoo on my forearm of a Chinese character - the monkey. The woman asked me, "You were born in monkey?" and I just said, "Naw - other reasons." Can't really do the "oo! oo! aa! aa! aa!" like in the song without everyone around me thinking I was nuts, so why explain? Shit looks good, though, especially when I flex my not-that-huge forearm. It was about that time that I realized that my phone was missing. The shitty one that the firm issued me, thank God. So there's the "loss" part of the post title (being tortured by a blind man, in case you did not deduce, was the "pain" part of my day). I was a little bummed, not because I lost the phone, but because I was thinking that maybe I got my pocked picked. I can't believe that I did, but who knows? I'm sure it's possible. I'm hoping it's at the massage joint, but I went like five places that day, and maybe the lifter chose that pocket because my other pocket with the ipod had the cord coming out of it and shit, and that might have complicated a clean lift. So I lost the shitty phone and kept the wallet, knot, and pod - no big deal. I was getting pretty nice and monkeyfied at that point, so it didn't really faze me. Whatever. It's a first for me, so I don't really care.

Watching the people was probably the most fun, other than getting nice. There were babies everywhere - on leashes, in strollers, in harnesses, and even some in stomachs. Watching the locals crowd around the Carnival dancers was real funny. I mean, everyone was buggin' - taking photos with phones, cameras, and video cams, taking photos of their elderly mothers posing with the dancers, just flipping out. I took a couple myself, but I just couldn't wedge my way in through the crowd and had to merely chuckle and move on to the next pint and some pizza. The pizza joint had this dish with a pig and two other pig heads resting next to it - got a shot of that. One of the three pig heads is looking right at the camera. Freaky deaky. What else - little girls getting face painting, a stilt dude, a funny mime, a drunk guy who got up and did this crazy dance on a platform, then stepped down and walked on as if everything was perfectly normal...I watched a little girl, maybe four years old or so, mezmerized by a juggler, and I thought about how they were both completely focused on the same thing - one the actor, one the observer. Behind them, construction workers went about their business like any other day, renovating a storefront. I also saw a little red-haired girl dressed like a devil, walking around with her nanny, and it somehow made me feel less lonely - I mean, damn, her folks couldn't even make it out with her, and she was stuck going to Carnival (no 'e' in Carnivale over here) with her nanny. Bummer. She seemed like she was having a good time, though, and so was I. Devil on, little girl, devil on.

At a certain point, I decided it was time to roll out of there. I picked up some dry cleaning that was ready at 5pm and walked to a department store to buy a blanket. Who knows what the clerks thought of me over at the Wing On store, all drunk and welling up from a conscious dive into melancholy with some 'Pictures of You' action on zee ipod...oh, the places you'll go when you're litacious. Finally, I headed home and...drank more beer, packed a little bit for the Macau trip the next day, took some drunken notes for this blog, had some soup and about 2 liters of water, and crashed around midnight.

I think I'm going to do Macau as a separate post since blogger.com has been acting up - it's not showing my previous post about books for some reason, and I had to retype a bunch of this one (which is fucking neat, let me tell you), so I'm going to end this one and start a new one. Peace!

Chucky