"Bottoms up!!"

I'm sure I'll be back in more detail when I'm far less exhausted, but for now I'd just like to note what a truly special birthday I had over here in the Southeast. Just grand; a culmination of all the best elements of this trip; grand and hilarious.

Slow ride, take it easy

Singapore is lovely and lazy. Because it's so damn hot, we usually just cat around the house, drinking coffee and eating fruit and blowing scrupulously through a stack of New Yorkers until the early afternoon, when we attempt some sort of adventure. Lucy's parents hosted a lovely dinner party for her father's birthday and invited all their kooky scientist friends, and we all became very drunk off an endless vat of champagne and excellent wine and ate the most delicious courses of squid and fennel and sweet corn and red snapper and lamb chops and, for dessert, vanilla ice cream with truffles, followed by an assortment of whiskeys and cigars. I drunkenly poured myself a snifter of Blue Label, proclaimed it tasted like gasoline, and switched back to champ. Let's see, what else have we done? We went to Chinatown and ate heaps of Chinese food for $1.50. A lot of our excursions have been gastronomically based, in accordance with my desire to, predictably, make this trip, if not my entire existence, "a culinary experience." Yesterday it rained so we stayed inside nursing our hangovers for most of the day, and then went to the movies, and then lost ourselves in this wild underground shopping mall, that was connected, via a series of underground tunnels, to another underground shopping mall, which was connected... you get the idea; one could shop for days without seeing the light of day. This place is a trip. This morning I predict we will make a fruit salad, polish off the remains of our "Asian Invasion" filmfest (1/2 of Lost In Translation + Chungking Express), and then decide how adventurous we are feeling.

Do you know the way to San Jose?

So drunk dude. Surrounded by scientists. Passing out.

plotless, endless

"The cigar, it turned out, was just a cigar; the sand flea just a sand flea. Nature was not 'a grave,' 'a kind parent,' 'a merciless stepmother.' It didn't 'abhor a vacuum,' or 'the old.' Alas, it didn't abhor anyone at all. It just went on, perfectly. If nature was a story, it was a new kind of story: plotless, endless, at once both circular and linear, so vast it seemed not to move at all--a millennium hand, an eon hand--yet everywhere seething with a strange and wondrous energy, telling over and over of two great armies folding into each other without rancor or victory ...we couldn't grasp it." -Mark Slouka explores the mysteriously transcendental, and makes a lot of sense.

And if you aren't the bearer of a Harper's subscription.. Well, I suggest you become one.

Stuck in the middle with you..

Turns out I've seen quite a bit of Brigid this summer. Photos by HBM3.

A condensed report

It's very humid here. Lucy's house is lovely and spacious, and the stairs don't creak once when you step on them. She has a big black lab/chow mix, named Rugby, whose big droopy eyes remind me of my yellow lab, and who apparently hoards off intruders, as the Chinese are superstitiously afraid of black dogs. Behind her house is a hill, and behind that a large expanse of land that consists of coarse, sharp grass up until the point where the forest sprouts. The grass is filled will billions of tiny ants. We sat outside and drank Corona after Corona after Corona, and talked, and I showed Lucy the footage from my fishing excursion. There are little bugs that swarm around, that have red and brown polka-dotted bodies, and whose tiny wings are yellow with brown stripes. Lucy's family doesn't have a car; they take taxis everywhere. When we were in the taxi last night, we would pass dozens of flatbed trucks with exhausted looking dark-skinned men in the back, apparently Malaysian day workers, who have to trudge back home every night through the congested Singapore traffic. We went to a cocktail party--a "free flowing wine party"--at a bar hidden inside of Lucy's father's place of work, "Biopolis," which is basically Disneyworld for biologists, which also, as Lucy explained, could never exist in America, because we don't believe in scientific research to that extent. Apparently Singapore is saturated by a constant stream of unfathomable wealth that pumps relentlessly into its open crevasses. The whole thing is very sexual. We mingled and shmoozed with all of Lucy's parents' friends, all biologists, and from all over, but who have all inevitably been sucked into this small, humid, modernized Asian oasis. "It's Singapore," I heard a few of them exclaim, a couple of times, in regard to the fact that they would have to attempt to wake up before eight on Monday morning for a round of golf in Malaysia after a Sunday night dripping with white wine and whisky, or something like that. I thought of the day workers in the truck, and wondered if they'd pass each other on the highway. A lot of the biologists were English, and I enjoyed being witness to their quippy jokes about Oxford, pubs in Oxford, people from Oxford. Lucy and I talked about Edinburgh to them, and ate noodles, and I attempted to resist coming off as completely, unbearably awkward whilst feigning off the petulant urge to just pass out in the bushes, overwhelmed with synonyms for 'fatigue'. It was breezy, a beautiful night. In the taxi home, before I passed out, I mentioned how tall the buildings were, and Lucy told me that because the country's so small, they're forced to build up opposed to out. Everything is very fertile. Overwhelmingly so.

"I died of fever on the sands of Singapore."

Off to celebrate my birthday on the other side of the world.

the interweaving of solemn respect and gossipy irreverence

"Nevertheless, and although he himself did not seem to notice it, those letters of recuperation and stimulation were slowly changing into pastoral letters of disenchantment. One winter night while the soup was boiling in the fireplace, he missed the heat of the back of his store, the buzzing of the sun on the dusty almond trees, the whistle of the train during the lethargy of siesta time, just as in Macondo he had missed the winter soup in the fireplace, the cries of the coffee vendor, and the fleeting larks of springtime. Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, they they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end." -One Hundred Years of Solitude

After a month and a half of enduring willfull anchorage to this book, I've finally reached its melancholy, tragic finale. It was great. Wonderful. Spectacular. A truly fine, incomparable work of literature. I'm going to enjoy letting the ending sink in all day as I go about my preparations for my trip.

Which brings me to the next issue: what book do I bring with me? I hate having to begin a new book on an airplane, and I'd hate to be stuck halfway across the world, trapped in the solitude of the Pacific in the summertime with some book that I really just ain't jivin' with. I've been reading The Collected Stories of William Faulkner for the past week or so.. I really am loving the collection--it's a fantastic display of Faulkner's stylistic versatility--but I think we've all learned from experience that he isn't necessarily the ideal vacation read. I foresee myself spending a good portion of today trying on novels, in between lending myself almost entirely to the Twilight Zone marathon (the apparently revived mid-'80s version) on television and facing the mountain of laundry sitting idly in my closet.

Take me to the river, put me in the water

Oooooh, this weekend. What? What was it? Straight glorious, eh. So, we (HBM, Brigid, et moi) spent the majority of the past two days lolling about on a small fishing boat in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, fishing (but alas not catching) and tanning and drinking Rolling Rock and oggling at jellyfish and dropping our feet off the bow and into the warm water and letting them soak, all to the soothing sounds of Django Reinhardt and the Jackson Five and all that. Arts and crafts in the morning, drives to the coast. We sprawled out on the grass under the milky looking stars and talked about ludicrous things having to do with extraterrestrial life, and laughed. We also, on Thursday night, made the ambitious proclamation that we would make this weekend, "a culinary experience," and oh what a job we did. Goat cheese omlettes and fruit parfaits for breakfast. Yesterday Bailey made these insanely inventive wraps for lunch, with feta and strawberries, walnuts and mustard. Dinner was softshell crab, steamed crab, crabcakes, cornbread--the Eastern shore specialty. It was just a great weekend, a culmination of truly ideal summer activities, spent with good friends who leave lots of room for silliness.

And I can hardly believe I'm leaving for Singapore in two days! Should be a hell of a trip, two layovers in Vancouver and Hong Kong, landing me at the humid Chez Lucy two days after I leave here. Let's hope I make it.

"It all comes down, tritely enough, to this: If I were stranded on a desert island and could only take two books with me, I'd take two copies of 'Gravity's Rainbow.'" -David Kipen, a big Pynchon fan.