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I had been walking all day, starting south of QianMen in one of the old Beijing Houtongs, remnants of a much older Beijing. I worked my way through the crumbling old neighborhood to the LiQun duck restaurant mentioned in a guidebook, a small, out of the way place where the only English I heard spoken was the word [...] The man crab-walks up to me and asks, “Lady bar?” and I imagine some sort of chocolate covered ice cream on a stick, but that’s not what he’s asking, so I politely decline. Not hungry, anyway. I wasn’t expecting to find Gentleman’s Mammary Clubs or porn shops in China, but you can hardly exit a [...] At 7 AM on Saturday, Justin and I are met by Wang Ping, our guide to a remote and wild section of the Great Wall known as Jiankou, about 200 kilometers and 3 hours from our hotel. Ping has brought a friend, an attractive young woman of an uncertain name. After asking her to pronounce [...] Using only a printed piece of paper showing the address in English and Chinese, a pocketful of cold, hard cash, and a caveman’s flair for wordless pointing and grunting, Justin, Steven and I share a taxi to the Adobe office. The driver isn’t familiar with the address, but in a city large enough for 17 million [...] It’s a short line of sleepy, shuffling rather-be slumberers at 11:15 pm Sunday night in the Air China waiting line. LAX is a wishy-washy pile of an airport, closer to Lacks or Ex-LAX than to re-LAX. It’s taking five minutes a person to move the line ahead. China here I come, albeit slowly. 11:50. At [...] Slept late Saturday after last night’s 3 AM Xbox party, my head feeling like a pumpkin tossed off the porch by rejected trick or treaters. Greg, Kim and I head into the desert valley flatlands to Twitter-chase a couple of lunch trucks that we’re expecting will shortly pull up in front of a Vietnam memorial. The [...] Friday morning. Inauspicious start to a week of travel. I’m heading to Beijing a few days from now, but first I’m taking an extended weekend in Los Angeles. Unbeknownst to me and ignored in the email that United sent to my iPhone, the flight out of SFO is early for a change, so I arrive [...] At some point in the silent post-midnight hours after I went to bed, but before dawn’s chirruping chorus awoke my second son, Quentin Wilberforce, T.F. visited himself upon us yet again. I have never seen Quentin, nor have I heard the passage of his footfalls outside our door. He must be very light to avoid [...] <This is a guest post written by my wife, Marci> We are counting down the days until our oldest son, Ben, becomes a Bar Mitzvah. There are so many last-minute items to take care of, so Doug and I have divided the list and set out to conquer! My task was going to Lucky’s, a [...] On the first occasion of my nineteenth, I was a college freshman, as full of self-doubt and angst as I was of acne. Bespotted where now I’m beamish, confused where now content, frustrated where now fruitful. M and I had already dated throughout that school year, and at the time, nineteen was legal drinking age. Not that [...] Comic books and electronics. Costumed kids and well dressed suits. Free Hugs, albeit often from kids born around the same time as the iPod, hanging out on the streets wearing hoop skirts, manga costumes and nose-obscuring bandages. Often simultaneously. I’ve spent several weeks in and around Tokyo over the past two visits, including side trips [...] I’m not a pet person. Pets smell, they never grow up and have their own lives, and if you eat them your family gets really upset. Fish meet one of my personal standards for pets: flushability. We also keep an ancient pile of hair and dander, beneath which you’ll find our arthritic cat. She’s grandmothered [...] Or, “How I Spent My Vacation” Warning: unpleasantness follows, as well as an exploration of my propensity for sharing too much personal information. The battlefield was a rank and muddy pit that emptied into a sewer lined with the churning machinery of war. Day and night in endless darkness, the blind and stinking machines ground [...] Couple rows up from me on a crowded plane, a plum-faced baby possessed by Linda Blair squalls in a croaking imitation of The Exorcist, its rubbery arms flailing like an octopus under a sashimi knife. The tyke’s parents avoid eye contact from everyone on the plane including each other, and desperately play it cool. But [...] Someday I’ll write My Lesion Of Honor. In the meantime, file this one under More Stories About Surgery. As I recall, our firstborn was a few years old, and very curious. That is to say, he was filled with curiosity, in addition to being strange and unusual. The two of us were outdoors at a family Sukkot celebration, [...] |
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