Today’s soundtrack: the goal slips away
Today at 10:02pm: trying to scare up a date for an upcoming wedding. Houston’s a hard sell



My day began at 7:30am at the DMV, I had to renew my auto registration. The DMV is a miserable place filled with miserable people so I don’t want to talk about that right now. I want to suppress these memories so they can mess my life up later.


Then I went to work, more suppression, but I left early again.

Hey, I’m getting acupuncture to help me quit smoking. It hasn’t completely worked yet (I’ve still got four treatments to go) though it actually has altered the taste of cigarettes. All this just by sticking needles in your ear, who’da thought. If god does exist, human beings must’ve been one of his strangest designs:


G: Here’s the best part about these things! I made ‘em so that if you stick a tongue in their ear they become aroused, but if you stick needles in their ear it reduces the likelihood they’ll commit substance abuse.

ZEUS: And what does this appendix-thingy do again?

G: I keep forgetting.... Ah, I’ll worry about it later.


They say the G-man works in mysterious ways, and U2 says She moves in mysterious ways. It’s Bono vs. the pulpit. Depending on who you are, one of these will take up less space on your hard drive.


My foot still hurts to walk on, so today I went to see Dr. Xu, an herbalist and practitioner of Eastern medicine. She takes Andrew Jacksons instead of health insurance but that’s fine with me.

Dr. Xu is located in a small basement office in one of Chinatown’s many hidden shopping arcades. Following her broken-English instructions, I removed my shoes and socks and lay down in one of her tiny examination rooms. She slathered my foot up in some white pasty stuff and began poking and prodding. “Does this hurt? Or this? Or this?” I shook my head each time.

Thirty seconds later she was poking deep into my sole (which is better than peering deep into my soul, not that she’d find anything in there anyway: “Oh look, some broken dreams, unknown passions and thirty-seven cents in change”) and eventually she found the problem and poked it with her finger. “Yeeeowwwwwww,” I said.

“It is swollen inside your foot. Deep inside,” said Dr. Xu. She looked thoughtful for a moment, then grabbed a bunch of herbs and spices (okay maybe they weren’t spices) and began mixing them up in a cup.

She slathered the resultant brown paste all over the bottom of my foot, wrapped it in plastic and put a heat lamp on it. “Thirty minutes,” she said, disappearing behind a curtain.

I lay on my side, reading “The Warrior Within.” I don’t have a warrior within--if I had to write a book on philosophy it would be called “The Certified Public Accountant Within” or “The Small Whiny Guy Within”--but I’m trying to learn something here.


My cell phone rang, it was Cia. I couldn’t believe I got a signal in the basement.

“Hey I’m in your area,” she said. “I just quit my job! Are you around?”

I love celebrating with my friends when they quit their jobs (we’ve all done it at some point), so I gave her directions to Dr. Xu’s. Five minutes later Cia poked her head through the curtain.

“What is that?” she asked, eyeing the brown, paté-like paste on my foot.

“I dunno. Whaddaya say we get a couple crackers and a butterknife and find out.”

“No thanks,” she said, and sat down to wait while the lamp continued barbecuing my foot.


After thirty, Dr. Xu cleaned my foot off and I was shocked to find, it totally felt better! But then she gave me this disgusting brown potion I have to drink. I don’t know what it’s called but I think most Korean and Chinese people will recognize the smell, I feel like we’ve all been forced to drink it at some point.

Anyway the potion tastes like what you would imagine it would taste like if a monkey who ate bugs was forced to vomit into your mouth. I gulped it down like there was a prize at the bottom and shuddered.


“No kicking for one week,” said Dr. Xu (she’s familiar with martial arts injuries). That’s gonna put a damper on this weekend, I’m off to the woods of Pennsylvania for a Hapkido training weekend. Shite.


Afterwards I wanted to get ice coffee with Cia, but Dr. Xu said no cold beverages (and no sour food, oranges or pineapples! Shit!). So Cia and I went back to my place and I made her an ice coffee while I drank warm water. Then we went and got Vietnamese sandwiches and ate them on a stoop and shit-shot.

It was a nice autumn afternoon out, golden brown and all that. Almost enough to make me forget I had been barred from eating pineapples and have to drink the capuchin-puke smoothie instead. The cruelties of life grow stranger as you get older.


At night we had two hours of rehearsal for the Movie Talkers thingy, luckily at my apartment. Afterwards I ran down to Dim Sum GoGo around 10:30pm to catch the tail-end of Michele’s birthday dinner. In the empty restaurant I sat around the table jawboning with Lam, Tony and Michele while the annoyed waiter hovered and harrumphed.

I had a long day, and I love talking to these guys. We make each other laugh. Trading jokes and fried chicken late into the night, this is the thing that completes my day.

Tomorrow I leave for Pennsylvania. Both Betty and I have injured feet so we’re just gonna be standing around most of the time. I wanted to organize a showdown with the Amish but I guess it’s not gonna happen. Oh well, updates when I get back.


She moves in mysterious ways.