You know Micheal Jackson or The Beatles really can't even contend with the long lasting popularity of dinosaurs. Even most of the ancient art of Greece has been overshadowed by the later products of the Roman period. There have been many great civilizations that have come and gone and their moment in the sun was surely replaced by something new and more impressive. But dinosaurs.... no way.... they still have a lasting effect that is incredible. Many immense and impressive animals have tried their best to equate with the coolness and beauty of the big lizards but nothing has ever come close. Dinosaurs were here 65 million years ago and each generation of children still picks up the idea that dinosaurs were and are the only deity ever needed for the human race. No human has ever been able to say anything other than, "Dinosaurs were here 65 million years ago." No 64s and there probably won't be any to say that they were here 66 million years ago. They are just so cool and it is beyond comprehension why more movies and books and clothing and furniture aren't made in direct support of these majestic and enigmatic creatures from a time and world that will never be forgotten.
It is also astonishing how the dinosaur population became so adapted and omnipresent only to just stop being here. One minute they were all hanging out eating meat and plants and doing dino stuff and then they were gone.
There are plenty of theories and beliefs as to why these animals had to leave but none really explain why they had to quit on such a high note. The feeling of dread that many had when Jimmy Hendrix died after a measly three rocking years in the limelight is one iota of how most children feel about dinosaurs existence. "Why did they have to die so young?" the children might say. "Why does something so cool have to be so far away from me?" These are a few of the stirring questions many boys ranging from 8-12 inadvertently ask each day.
My period of obsession and "I will die for anything related to dinosaurs or linked to them" emotional status was a wonderful time but indeed short. I was fantastically excited about all the different colors and personalities of dinosaurs. Still some of the largest words in my vocabulary stem from my early "research" into the world of these herbivores and carnivores. Names like Brachiosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex brought a feeling of elation that could only be compared to an opera lover's first experience in the audience of Candide. To hear those syllables bounce so wonderfully off my tongue made me shudder with delight and hope that my dreams would be invaded by my scaly skinned friends' immense and mind-blowing presences.
I had dinosaurs wherever I was. There were lunch boxes, bed sheets, stuffed animals, t-shirts, pajamas, and an entire library filled with books detailed with those pictures of a full sized dinosaur standing next to the tiny silhouette of me, a minuscule and therefore unimportant human being. I would have been honored to have ridden atop the mighty cranium of an Andesaurus delgadoi. I was truly in love with all things dinosaurs and yet, just like the creatures themselves, I had no idea that they would soon be coming to an alarmingly quick and violent end in my life.
I began to see myself getting carried away with this fixation when I was able to throw out names like Micropachycephalosaurus as easily as one might use a monosyllabic "mom" or "cake." I started to become exhausted with the role that dinosaurs were playing in my life. I was only 9 and already my day consisted entirely around my "Dino Schedule." It was up to rise, take off stegosaurus pjs, out of dino bed, into the bathroom to brush with my triceratops toothbrush, off to school with the dino imprinted clothes where I would drift through class doodling little velociraptors when the teacher's eyes weren't fixed on me, and then back home to play with dinosaurs, read about them and do everything according to my large and cold blooded amigos.
I was becoming sick as one does at the end stages of an addiction. I didn't know how to get over this craving for my dinosaurs. At my age, serious treatment didn't cross my mind and I knew that the only true way to get ride of these creatures was to blitzkrieg them from my very soul myself. So the day came when I went to another place in my psyche and officially stated, "fuck dinosaurs." When my parents arrived home that afternoon they found my bedsheets and stuffed animals sliced to pieces and like their real life ancestors, they were obliterated from this planet. I was finally free of the creatures and had had to sacrifice my sanity (if only for a brief moment) in order to cure myself of them. I believe that to have been the only way.
When something becomes so completely awesome one must go cold turkey and just erase it from one's being.
Now that I have grown and recovered from that aching childhood illness I am mystified in the way that all the children of this new generation have acquired the same gene that will simply not permit them to not like dinosaurs. Luckily the gene appears to be on the Y chromosome as the girls do not seem to be nearly as affected by the allure of these green and brown beasts.
When I asked my four year old students how they felt today as I do everyday they replied as they do everyday: "I feel like a dinosaur, ROARRRRRR!!! Today was toy day and while the girls brought in the newer dolls and things that may not have existed during their parents generation, all the boys brought in things involving their best friends the Dino dudes. One boy with dino dolls, one with dino cards, one with a book of dinosaurs, and one boy who had forgotten his dinosaurs but was happy to show us the T-rex smiling on his t-shirt. They love the dinosaurs to an even more outrageous extent than I myself did.
When we take breaks in the class the students are permitted to draw pictures of anything they want. Every boy will always draw his favorite hunter from the cretaceous period. They will compare drawings with each other and will even have pretend fights using only the flaccid pieces of paper with which I have so kindly procured for them. The boys are dinosaur fiends and find a slight moment of solace each day with a brief and less interesting conversation about beetles only to jump right back to the subject of which dinosaur ate more meat and which one had the longer tongue for more effective roaring.
It is all quite captivating and yet I remember my crash and burn when dinosaurs became extinct for me and I fear that this moment will be even more severe for these children. I am beginning to lose my trust in these creatures because they only seem to be around for a small experience and then they break your heart by splitting all together without even offering to pay for half the check. We shall see what happens with these ignorant boys but I hope that as an ex dinojunkie myself I will be able to guide these young lads to a safe and speedy recovery when the day comes that they too must eradicate dinosaurs from their very souls.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
My apartment
We had to pick something fast because by the time my good pal Dunkle arrived to Taiwan I had been staying in a dirty and loud locker room-style hostel with 13 other dudes who made "social retardation" seem like a gift compared to what they possessed. I had to make that crap palace my home for nine terrifying days where I was alone on this foreign planet simply struggling to find new and interesting ways to feed myself by making grunting noises and raising various fingers combined with a general rubbing of the belly to indicate my condition. I really didn't like having to live in the hostel and so upon Dunkle's much awaited arrival I was very eager to find some other place of residence with more comforts than just the five seconds of every minute when I received a cool gust of air from the room's only fan providing a most unsatisfying relief from the otherwise rain forest atmosphere of the hot and crowded room.
That first day Dunkle and I looked at 7 places all of which seemed ok to him and fabulous to me. I mean I was the one who had been living in a mental institution on the 13th floor of a building so old and decrepit that it swayed in the wind. We finally settled on what we thought was a quaint, conveniently located and inexpensive apartment located just a block off from the uber sheik Minchuan Shi Lu road. Well how lucky for us.
So please allow me to give you a little tour of our anti pussy pad.
We have now been living here for 7 months and while one might imagine that the delightful conditions of this beautiful little bachelor pad have improved and given it a "lived in" feel, it is quite the opposite. Each new day brings more neglect and disregard of all things proper and clean to this apartment which, if it were a child, would have already gotten us arrested on extreme misconduct and negligence charges.
As you walk to our apartment you will be blasted with the foreshadowing of our doom castle by the pungent odors of other people's trash and something that mostly resembles shit and a dead animal's baby. The smell can often become so strong that your walk to the door quickens to a jog in the hopes that through the door you will find solace from the horrid and dirty smells encircling the little back alley.
Your last bit of dignity can be used to give a nice wave and "Nee how" to the local barber who every day greets all those passing by while cursing them under his breath because he knows that they got their hair cut from "those bastards down the street" instead of him.
The walk up the steps would make more sense as a descent as you are basically going to some form of hell anyway. The key turns and the door loudly opens and you have made it into our squat heap.
Now if Dunkle's door is closed to his room that means that the rest of the apartment is almost completely dark as his room yields the only source of natural light in the apartment. I thought it rather unique that all the bedrooms had windows that looked into the other rooms but I now see how they were meant as a distraction from the fact that there are no real fucking windows in the whole dank and abysmal apartment!
If your shoes are wet do not worry as our lax dress policy around the house does not require our infrequent visitors to have any more respect for this place than we do. Sometimes we will invite the small courtesy of allowing someone to wipe his or her feet on the rug from the neighbors house but if we are in haste we invite those to simply drag whatever type of mess right into our dumpster of a home.
As you walk down the small and cramped hallway you pass into the wonderfully decorated living room that still only contains a couch and a TV. If you feel so inclined you are more than welcome to have a seat on the stiff and ugly colored sofa but do make sure to brush off whatever rubbish, be it food or Dunkle's toenails, from the seat as you sit down. You might feel the need to push some other kind of trash or general rubbish away from you but you will most likely be distracted by whatever various bug has decided to invade our house for the week. If you do happen to swat and kill a bug by smacking it against the wall please feel free to just leave the sticky carcass glued to the white wall so that we can avoid cleaning it up until it turns into another thing to bitch about in this eye soar of an apartment that's eye is really more of a butt hole.
As you glance around the null apartment you will notice a complete absence of inspiration combined with the type of carelessness you never really thought existed until this moment. You may even cry.
On rare occasions a patron visitor might have need to use the bathroom. This is usually rare as we hardly ever have any food or drink to offer that might provoke the need for one to use a facility. Nonetheless, there are often those who have consumed something out in the real world before entering into this uncomfortably awkward dungeon and we invite them to purge it out in our little WC.
The source of the freeloading insects is usually in the bathroom as they enjoy bathing on the top part of the toilet who's lid broke a mere two months ago and has been kept that way I imagine to remind us that every single thing we have is complete and utter shit and worthless. The bathroom brings to mind that photo one might have seen from the case files of some sociopathic murderer's outhouse. There are old tubes of tooth paste that have established colonies growing across them. (I think they may even be at war with the colonies from the old can of shaving cream.) When in the bathroom try to keep clean as our inattention to ever buying that second bottle of soap 5 months ago has lead to a bottle filled with water and shaken so many times that the plastic seems like it is beginning to wear through.
On the rare occasion that one of us has decided to buy some food, ei- pasta and cheap Ragu knock off sauce, you might make your way into the kitchen. Despite the fact that no one ever actually cooks there it seems rather dirty and has a generally devirginizing sleaziness to it.
While cooking be sure to give our pots a good scrubbing with the almost empty dish soap as the previous user has most likely not done an efficient job. The convenient idea of buying the cheapest cook ware became inconvenient right after its purchase. Since then the pots have taken on the same malignant appearance of the chamber pots used by thousands of soldiers in World War II. The nice thing is that with our pots you have no need to worry about the nonexistence of our spice cabinet because all the residue from the previous dinner-for-one-loser will most likely have broken off into whatever pitiful meal you are preparing at that moment.
Feeling sleepy? Why come into my room and have a rest. I can't promise you'll be sleeping on a cloud but as long as everyone else is completely still and the TV is off you might be able to have a small amount of quiet and privacy. Otherwise the once charming "window to the living room" in my room will be sure to grant all light and noise access to the tiny closet of a bedroom.
As you glance at my bed you may notice that the sheets seem a bit nonsheetlike. That is due to the fact that I never actually bought sheets except some pink ones with flowers that I gave away for obvious heterosexual alpha-male reasons. My sleeping supplies are actually just the stretchy thing and an old blanket I bought half priced from a street vendor. If you cocoon yourself just right with the small tissue sized blanket you may be able to get some sort of feeling of warmth and comfort. Of course there is really no need for extra warmth in an unairconditioned and humid room like mine.
That should last right up until you start to notice that you are actually laying on a marble slab that simply looks like a mattress. The stiffness of the mattress could only be comparable to perhaps laying down in the street. And maybe that is sounding like a better idea right about now.
You'll be happy to know that I do have a pillow. It is unattractively green with pictures of cows all over it and it feels a little like if someone stuffed five of those brittle airplane pillows into a potato sack and then slapped the imagine of some bovine adaptation of a animal on it.
Once you take the time to angrily murder a few more mosquitoes that have taken residence in your room like a couple of European Gypsies you can probably get ready to sleep. You can put your things in my closet which is easy to access since the door fell off a couple of months ago. Be sure to spray yourself one more time with Off before heading to bed and then it is off to sleepland where even the dream of a monster chasing you barefoot through streets filled with chomping crabs will feel like the ultimate adventure compared to the conscious knowledge that you actually live in this dismal piece of old cheese that someone made into an apartment.
When you wake up the next morning, the best idea is to just forget even asking if there is any cereal or orange juice and get the hell outside where once out of range of the poop alley you can attempt to have a real life where you have a real job and friends. If you dress yourself nicely enough no one will actually discover that you come from a squalid disease house that makes some parts of Africa seem like a spa in the south of France.
I have lived and stayed in many places in my life and I am sure to stay in many more, (as I naturally plan not to make this apartment my permanent residence) but this little spot truly put the canker sore on the top of the suck ass cake. I could move somewhere else or try to improve these conditions on my own but I could also just keep counting down the days when I will go out and resume my travels where I will stay in places that require me to flush the toilet with a ladle of water set on the side of the bowl. I guess my happiness here spawns from somewhere else than the place where I live or the places I will stay in the future.
That first day Dunkle and I looked at 7 places all of which seemed ok to him and fabulous to me. I mean I was the one who had been living in a mental institution on the 13th floor of a building so old and decrepit that it swayed in the wind. We finally settled on what we thought was a quaint, conveniently located and inexpensive apartment located just a block off from the uber sheik Minchuan Shi Lu road. Well how lucky for us.
So please allow me to give you a little tour of our anti pussy pad.
We have now been living here for 7 months and while one might imagine that the delightful conditions of this beautiful little bachelor pad have improved and given it a "lived in" feel, it is quite the opposite. Each new day brings more neglect and disregard of all things proper and clean to this apartment which, if it were a child, would have already gotten us arrested on extreme misconduct and negligence charges.
As you walk to our apartment you will be blasted with the foreshadowing of our doom castle by the pungent odors of other people's trash and something that mostly resembles shit and a dead animal's baby. The smell can often become so strong that your walk to the door quickens to a jog in the hopes that through the door you will find solace from the horrid and dirty smells encircling the little back alley.
Your last bit of dignity can be used to give a nice wave and "Nee how" to the local barber who every day greets all those passing by while cursing them under his breath because he knows that they got their hair cut from "those bastards down the street" instead of him.
The walk up the steps would make more sense as a descent as you are basically going to some form of hell anyway. The key turns and the door loudly opens and you have made it into our squat heap.
Now if Dunkle's door is closed to his room that means that the rest of the apartment is almost completely dark as his room yields the only source of natural light in the apartment. I thought it rather unique that all the bedrooms had windows that looked into the other rooms but I now see how they were meant as a distraction from the fact that there are no real fucking windows in the whole dank and abysmal apartment!
If your shoes are wet do not worry as our lax dress policy around the house does not require our infrequent visitors to have any more respect for this place than we do. Sometimes we will invite the small courtesy of allowing someone to wipe his or her feet on the rug from the neighbors house but if we are in haste we invite those to simply drag whatever type of mess right into our dumpster of a home.
As you walk down the small and cramped hallway you pass into the wonderfully decorated living room that still only contains a couch and a TV. If you feel so inclined you are more than welcome to have a seat on the stiff and ugly colored sofa but do make sure to brush off whatever rubbish, be it food or Dunkle's toenails, from the seat as you sit down. You might feel the need to push some other kind of trash or general rubbish away from you but you will most likely be distracted by whatever various bug has decided to invade our house for the week. If you do happen to swat and kill a bug by smacking it against the wall please feel free to just leave the sticky carcass glued to the white wall so that we can avoid cleaning it up until it turns into another thing to bitch about in this eye soar of an apartment that's eye is really more of a butt hole.
As you glance around the null apartment you will notice a complete absence of inspiration combined with the type of carelessness you never really thought existed until this moment. You may even cry.
On rare occasions a patron visitor might have need to use the bathroom. This is usually rare as we hardly ever have any food or drink to offer that might provoke the need for one to use a facility. Nonetheless, there are often those who have consumed something out in the real world before entering into this uncomfortably awkward dungeon and we invite them to purge it out in our little WC.
The source of the freeloading insects is usually in the bathroom as they enjoy bathing on the top part of the toilet who's lid broke a mere two months ago and has been kept that way I imagine to remind us that every single thing we have is complete and utter shit and worthless. The bathroom brings to mind that photo one might have seen from the case files of some sociopathic murderer's outhouse. There are old tubes of tooth paste that have established colonies growing across them. (I think they may even be at war with the colonies from the old can of shaving cream.) When in the bathroom try to keep clean as our inattention to ever buying that second bottle of soap 5 months ago has lead to a bottle filled with water and shaken so many times that the plastic seems like it is beginning to wear through.
On the rare occasion that one of us has decided to buy some food, ei- pasta and cheap Ragu knock off sauce, you might make your way into the kitchen. Despite the fact that no one ever actually cooks there it seems rather dirty and has a generally devirginizing sleaziness to it.
While cooking be sure to give our pots a good scrubbing with the almost empty dish soap as the previous user has most likely not done an efficient job. The convenient idea of buying the cheapest cook ware became inconvenient right after its purchase. Since then the pots have taken on the same malignant appearance of the chamber pots used by thousands of soldiers in World War II. The nice thing is that with our pots you have no need to worry about the nonexistence of our spice cabinet because all the residue from the previous dinner-for-one-loser will most likely have broken off into whatever pitiful meal you are preparing at that moment.
Feeling sleepy? Why come into my room and have a rest. I can't promise you'll be sleeping on a cloud but as long as everyone else is completely still and the TV is off you might be able to have a small amount of quiet and privacy. Otherwise the once charming "window to the living room" in my room will be sure to grant all light and noise access to the tiny closet of a bedroom.
As you glance at my bed you may notice that the sheets seem a bit nonsheetlike. That is due to the fact that I never actually bought sheets except some pink ones with flowers that I gave away for obvious heterosexual alpha-male reasons. My sleeping supplies are actually just the stretchy thing and an old blanket I bought half priced from a street vendor. If you cocoon yourself just right with the small tissue sized blanket you may be able to get some sort of feeling of warmth and comfort. Of course there is really no need for extra warmth in an unairconditioned and humid room like mine.
That should last right up until you start to notice that you are actually laying on a marble slab that simply looks like a mattress. The stiffness of the mattress could only be comparable to perhaps laying down in the street. And maybe that is sounding like a better idea right about now.
You'll be happy to know that I do have a pillow. It is unattractively green with pictures of cows all over it and it feels a little like if someone stuffed five of those brittle airplane pillows into a potato sack and then slapped the imagine of some bovine adaptation of a animal on it.
Once you take the time to angrily murder a few more mosquitoes that have taken residence in your room like a couple of European Gypsies you can probably get ready to sleep. You can put your things in my closet which is easy to access since the door fell off a couple of months ago. Be sure to spray yourself one more time with Off before heading to bed and then it is off to sleepland where even the dream of a monster chasing you barefoot through streets filled with chomping crabs will feel like the ultimate adventure compared to the conscious knowledge that you actually live in this dismal piece of old cheese that someone made into an apartment.
When you wake up the next morning, the best idea is to just forget even asking if there is any cereal or orange juice and get the hell outside where once out of range of the poop alley you can attempt to have a real life where you have a real job and friends. If you dress yourself nicely enough no one will actually discover that you come from a squalid disease house that makes some parts of Africa seem like a spa in the south of France.
I have lived and stayed in many places in my life and I am sure to stay in many more, (as I naturally plan not to make this apartment my permanent residence) but this little spot truly put the canker sore on the top of the suck ass cake. I could move somewhere else or try to improve these conditions on my own but I could also just keep counting down the days when I will go out and resume my travels where I will stay in places that require me to flush the toilet with a ladle of water set on the side of the bowl. I guess my happiness here spawns from somewhere else than the place where I live or the places I will stay in the future.
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