That cess in yer chest

Tell me how to keep the smile on my face when I start every morning hacking like an old revolutionary until lung butter splatters the toilet bowl like adolescent lust. And clings to it like a first crush. Every morning ya’ll. I quit smoking and I remember someone saying that the first few weeks/months after quitting you’ll be hacking stuff up. But I know the difference, I’ve hacked up cigarette lung funk before and the consistency is different. What’s rocketing out now looks to be actual chunks of lung.

And my son stands there and watches me. I am his source code for all things, so no sooner do I wipe my lips and moan like I just barfed up last night’s party, then he hacks and spits for all he’s worth, letting me know that he’s doing his best to learn from me. I look into the mirror and see blackheads forming twixt me brows and feel the rattle of leftover lungsnot like the distant rumbling of Mongolian hooves. It aint over yet.

OMFG i have to get out of this place. I have to get my son out of this place.

Caught in the Circle of Funk, smack dab in the middle of a swampy blues session (inspiration is my business? Did I really write that b*llsh*t?). Gray skies above, gray streets below. The echoing hacks of my neighbors and they’re knowing glances like the slow onset of zombiezm has finally got a hold of me and everyone around me, already turning like last week’s horsemeat, is sharing in my woes.

We finally got him. Yes we did, the high and mighty laowai who spurns maocai and carries kebab sticks to the garbage can … we got his ass.

And thank God I came here to the Bookworm and went on a China Blog reading spree to try and find something to write about other than belief systems for runaways and shattered dreams. Thanks to Will Moss I have some spittle on my keyboard. The happy kind.

Thanks to C.Custer I have the image of a fist and a bazooka. Thanks dawg, that made me laugh.

Adam Mayer just walked in and showed me pictures of a new Stalinist apartment block going up on the butt’s pimple of Chengdu and we laughed about the spectre of an ancestral home of concrete, oppression and water issues. That’s funny stuff.

This little essay from danwei reminds me of conversations I’ve had with the Devil in my own imagination. We always end up joking about death and pain. I try and make my imminent demise a shared jest because deep in my heart I am petrified and furious that my time has come before I did what it is I was suppose to do … and while I jest, the devil smirks and let’s me know in a whisper what it was I should have done, just before he smites me. I’ve had horrible dreams of rage and pain recently. In my dreams, when shit gets ugly, a trigger in my subconscious pushes reset

like, no no no that would lead to

so instead we’ll

and then I carry on in a sanitized version of the dream that may or may not need to be reset later on. So when the devil is just about to smite, or has smitten! and the consequences are laid bare, I’ll reset with a joke

he smote me with his sack!

two huge red balls obscuring all but the black goatee and the red ears, caverns of coal and molten core in the background and then the onus is on the devil to explain his balls. And thus I have another shot at another conversation in my brain that staves away the funk and the blues.

Speaking of which, if the blogosphere has nothing to offer, which is the case from time to time, I turn back to the music. Dorian and I walk down the streets of Chengdu with white iPhone wires connecting us to Stevie Wonder and I can’t help thinking as they stare at us

will they go home and say

laowai let their babies listen to music through headphones, maybe we should too.

I guess inspiration is still my business, I just forget it a lot because

the cess in my chest makes me feel the onset of death.