Believers

As a nonbeliever, I never wanted to have a Thai massage but somehow there I was. The room was darkened and smelled of warm peppermint. I was told to remove my clothes and put on a pair of baggy knee-length pants that, in my Puritan discomfort, I had to make fun of alone. I lay down on the massage table, heated from beneath. A lady no bigger than a cat came in and crouched beside me. I was belly-down and as good as blind. I said the woman was small but did I mention she had two enormous hands and something like 16 or 17 fingers? And she was not a cat but a kind of demon weaver. My skeleton was her loom, my muscles threads, and she went to work to make my backside into an unimaginable tapestry.

conversation with a backdoor draught

weird revelation
a few days after I arrived to teach in china way back when I saw a group of retarded people cleaning one of the little city squares. It had never occurred to me there were retarded chinese people. All the chinese people I’d ever seen or heard about or read about were not retarded.

making an assessment
first, are there books in the house. Two, which books. Three, what is hanging on the walls. Next, the layout on the floor. Maybe this is in the wrong order?

no, surely not.

der Mensch ist kein Tier
I read an article the other day in which the writer talked about meeting a certain dog in person.
Recently a number of mosquitos have met me in person, but not the other way around.

the screaming man
camped outside my office building is a guy we call the screaming man. He has a beard. His rage won’t let up but as time goes on he gets less scary. Now you know as much about him as I do.