"Since cockroaches always scurry at the sight of humans, I seriously doubt an alcoholic one shared Tom’s drink". Not all of them scurry off - sometimes they scurry towards...
My first job was in a small office just behind a fast food restaurant. 'Pigeon roaches', as we knew them, lived in great numbers in the crevices. They were light grey and bigger than the standard dark brown with gold trim-coloured cockroach found in the tropics. Those themselves are three times the size of the small roaches I've seen in temperate climate in the northern hemisphere which might've taken a swim in Tom's drink.
Once, when my employer slammed a high level window closed, several of those pigeon roaches were dislodged from their perch and fell onto him, scuttling into his safari suit. I've never seen a man strip to his underwear so quickly whilst emitting shrill shrieks. One of my favourite memories.
Another was from ten years earlier when I had a friend who was partial to condensed milk. He'd open a tin and drink from it then put it in his bedroom cupboard for finishing off later. He once left it a few days and, when taking his first swig of the remainder, he felt sugary lumps where the condensed milk had congealed. He bit into the third lump to savour it and found it was the condensed milk-marinated body of a large cockroach that had gone for a midnight swim with its brothers (the earlier lumps).
Pete sold the remainder of the tin to his younger brother.
Growing up in the 1970s Bronx (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhChJ4sEw84), I remember one time as a kid pouring a morning bowl of breakfast cereal and a dozen fat brown cockroaches clattering into the bowl with the cereal they hadn't yet eaten and scrambling to escape. Another time I woke up to a roach crawling into my nostril and then racing into my throat as I tried to get it out. Turning on the kitchen light during summer would reveal what looked to be 500+ startled roaches who'd been idly milling about looking for... anything.
All of which is to say: roaches bring back bad memories. The night I proposed to my wife at the fancy Boston restaurant, I noticed a fat roach sluggishly crawling up the wall beside our table. I knew it was a bad omen, but I proposed anyway. It was not a happy marriage and it ended badly years ago. Roaches, ticks, and mosquitos are all the proof you'll ever need that God was lousy at His job.
"Pity those who have nothing but shopping malls, strip malls and convenience store parking lots. You’ve been robbed of life."
True. They are soulless but, sad to say, an improvement over people staring non stop at their cell phones and never being in the moment and never noticing anything around them.
Recently I noticed, speaking of noticing, an old art deco looking door jam. Depressing to think about how at one time people valued aesthetics and took pride in the little details in addition to the grand designs.
Now architecture and design are purely functional. The outside of most buildings could be designed by a 6 year old. At least the 6 year old would add some fun colors and maybe a horse.
You had me there for a minute with me being a Cardinal Fan. Ah yes, they traded for Tommy Pham. Or Phamtastic as he used to stylize himself. Now back with the Cards after a few nightclub stabbings, heavy gambling and goodness know what else along with fading eyesight. But even with all that he hit a grand slam on his first return as a Cardinal. Go Tommy!
We had an old neighbour named George who lived downstairs from us in a tiny $40/month apartment for decades. He once ran a newspaper stand. He always had his little TV going with whatever (typically Yankees or Mets) game was on. Once, at the end of the 1980s (a year or so before he died) I decided to ask him what team he liked. He told me he liked "the old Gashouse Gang". Of course, there hadn't been a Gashouse Gang in nearly 60 years at that point, but that's the way I think most old people watch baseball: like they are forever 15 years old.
Reading up on the Gashouse Gang years later, it made sense. That was a team with a story, and the story was this: no matter how tough your circumstances or humble your origins, you can fight your way through and out of them and win. That was a story a lot of Americans wanted to hear in the late twenties and early thirties. George never really transcended his poverty-stricken circumstances, as the only thing he did besides watch baseball was read True Detective "porn for old guys" magazines and lose every week at the lottery. He'd shake his head over the losing tickets and say, "they're tough... they're tough..."
He did manage to stick around till the end of the game, however, and I'm thinking that made him tough too.
Being 75, I like, more and more, just seeing little ones or pregnant women. Another thing I agree with Linh with. Like 9/11 or why do I notice, more and more, Israel, Zionists, Jews seem to everywhere associated with happenings I abhor - Gazan genocide, US foreign policy, Hollywood (aside from the occasional good movie amidst the crap,) the holocaust hoax. woke extremism. I especially like his reminding me how every person has their story. Only occasionally does he not feel very good and get cranky.
“They can count on their Commander in Chief to salute their passing tin box” unless he happens to be checking his watch as it passes. Got to make sure he makes it to the ice cream parlor before it closes!
It's a huge world, and we can never know more than a tiny part of it. However, yesterday I was presented with another example of how amazingly small it can sometimes be. Every Saturday morning I have a Skype call with my wife's Taiwanese nephew, who works in Tokyo. He wants to maintain his English skill, so by arrangement, I email him an article or two early in the week in case we have nothing else to talk about. This week I sent him a CNN article about a guy who got ejected from the stands at the Olympics because he was holding up a banner that said "Go Taiwan!" at the badminton match they were competing in.
In the photo accompanying the article, you could see that the guy wasn't breaking any rules, the only rule being against displaying a flag. Laughably enough, a man in the front row of the stands was wearing a windbreaker that DID have the Taiwan national flag on it, and they left him alone.
As an amazing coincidence, however, it turned out that one of the other people in the stands nearby in the photo turned out to be our nephew's co-worker in Tokyo, who just happened to be in attendance. The Taiwanese (excuse me, "Chinese Taipei") team won the gold in that event. Neither our nephew nor his friend had seen the article or the photo, so he was very surprised when he received it.
"Since cockroaches always scurry at the sight of humans, I seriously doubt an alcoholic one shared Tom’s drink". Not all of them scurry off - sometimes they scurry towards...
My first job was in a small office just behind a fast food restaurant. 'Pigeon roaches', as we knew them, lived in great numbers in the crevices. They were light grey and bigger than the standard dark brown with gold trim-coloured cockroach found in the tropics. Those themselves are three times the size of the small roaches I've seen in temperate climate in the northern hemisphere which might've taken a swim in Tom's drink.
Once, when my employer slammed a high level window closed, several of those pigeon roaches were dislodged from their perch and fell onto him, scuttling into his safari suit. I've never seen a man strip to his underwear so quickly whilst emitting shrill shrieks. One of my favourite memories.
Another was from ten years earlier when I had a friend who was partial to condensed milk. He'd open a tin and drink from it then put it in his bedroom cupboard for finishing off later. He once left it a few days and, when taking his first swig of the remainder, he felt sugary lumps where the condensed milk had congealed. He bit into the third lump to savour it and found it was the condensed milk-marinated body of a large cockroach that had gone for a midnight swim with its brothers (the earlier lumps).
Pete sold the remainder of the tin to his younger brother.
Growing up in the 1970s Bronx (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhChJ4sEw84), I remember one time as a kid pouring a morning bowl of breakfast cereal and a dozen fat brown cockroaches clattering into the bowl with the cereal they hadn't yet eaten and scrambling to escape. Another time I woke up to a roach crawling into my nostril and then racing into my throat as I tried to get it out. Turning on the kitchen light during summer would reveal what looked to be 500+ startled roaches who'd been idly milling about looking for... anything.
All of which is to say: roaches bring back bad memories. The night I proposed to my wife at the fancy Boston restaurant, I noticed a fat roach sluggishly crawling up the wall beside our table. I knew it was a bad omen, but I proposed anyway. It was not a happy marriage and it ended badly years ago. Roaches, ticks, and mosquitos are all the proof you'll ever need that God was lousy at His job.
"Pity those who have nothing but shopping malls, strip malls and convenience store parking lots. You’ve been robbed of life."
True. They are soulless but, sad to say, an improvement over people staring non stop at their cell phones and never being in the moment and never noticing anything around them.
Recently I noticed, speaking of noticing, an old art deco looking door jam. Depressing to think about how at one time people valued aesthetics and took pride in the little details in addition to the grand designs.
Now architecture and design are purely functional. The outside of most buildings could be designed by a 6 year old. At least the 6 year old would add some fun colors and maybe a horse.
Hi Al,
A while back, I wrote exactly about this, in "Architecture of Cruelty":
https://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/2020/09/architecture-of-cruelty.html
Linh
I need to add: the fashion of painting urban bare walls EVERYWHERE with murals is just a poor substitute for aesthetic architechture.
Banksy is NOT a mural artist.
He is of the resistance.
Yes especially when you consider the (mediocre) quality of the murals
You had me there for a minute with me being a Cardinal Fan. Ah yes, they traded for Tommy Pham. Or Phamtastic as he used to stylize himself. Now back with the Cards after a few nightclub stabbings, heavy gambling and goodness know what else along with fading eyesight. But even with all that he hit a grand slam on his first return as a Cardinal. Go Tommy!
We had an old neighbour named George who lived downstairs from us in a tiny $40/month apartment for decades. He once ran a newspaper stand. He always had his little TV going with whatever (typically Yankees or Mets) game was on. Once, at the end of the 1980s (a year or so before he died) I decided to ask him what team he liked. He told me he liked "the old Gashouse Gang". Of course, there hadn't been a Gashouse Gang in nearly 60 years at that point, but that's the way I think most old people watch baseball: like they are forever 15 years old.
Reading up on the Gashouse Gang years later, it made sense. That was a team with a story, and the story was this: no matter how tough your circumstances or humble your origins, you can fight your way through and out of them and win. That was a story a lot of Americans wanted to hear in the late twenties and early thirties. George never really transcended his poverty-stricken circumstances, as the only thing he did besides watch baseball was read True Detective "porn for old guys" magazines and lose every week at the lottery. He'd shake his head over the losing tickets and say, "they're tough... they're tough..."
He did manage to stick around till the end of the game, however, and I'm thinking that made him tough too.
Being 75, I like, more and more, just seeing little ones or pregnant women. Another thing I agree with Linh with. Like 9/11 or why do I notice, more and more, Israel, Zionists, Jews seem to everywhere associated with happenings I abhor - Gazan genocide, US foreign policy, Hollywood (aside from the occasional good movie amidst the crap,) the holocaust hoax. woke extremism. I especially like his reminding me how every person has their story. Only occasionally does he not feel very good and get cranky.
Ain't that the unfiltered fuckin' truth.
“They can count on their Commander in Chief to salute their passing tin box” unless he happens to be checking his watch as it passes. Got to make sure he makes it to the ice cream parlor before it closes!
It's a huge world, and we can never know more than a tiny part of it. However, yesterday I was presented with another example of how amazingly small it can sometimes be. Every Saturday morning I have a Skype call with my wife's Taiwanese nephew, who works in Tokyo. He wants to maintain his English skill, so by arrangement, I email him an article or two early in the week in case we have nothing else to talk about. This week I sent him a CNN article about a guy who got ejected from the stands at the Olympics because he was holding up a banner that said "Go Taiwan!" at the badminton match they were competing in.
In the photo accompanying the article, you could see that the guy wasn't breaking any rules, the only rule being against displaying a flag. Laughably enough, a man in the front row of the stands was wearing a windbreaker that DID have the Taiwan national flag on it, and they left him alone.
As an amazing coincidence, however, it turned out that one of the other people in the stands nearby in the photo turned out to be our nephew's co-worker in Tokyo, who just happened to be in attendance. The Taiwanese (excuse me, "Chinese Taipei") team won the gold in that event. Neither our nephew nor his friend had seen the article or the photo, so he was very surprised when he received it.
Small world indeed!