let’s talk about Pipe

Hong Kong:

The Pipe is on.

Everybody working in the hotel is a slave to blank-minded tourists and low wages – tourists hypnotised by the luminous glitter of their phones for hours as they sit flicking through the days’ selfies, photos taken by Iphones attached to the end of retractable wands – this is me walking, me talking, me looking, me posing, me here and me there – my movie of me.

Pipe is on today, gaping barrels, and the ASP camera is on the beach while in the background every dickhead in Hawaii is shakin’ a shaka at the many thousands less than the hoped for millions who are bothered to watch waves breaking and men falling off them – meanwhile all a man wants is somebody across the table to talk to about the futility of war, the futility of politics, the betrayal of money and the cost of a twroom flat with harbour glimpses in a sixty-floor block nestled amongst fifty others the same size  – HK30,000,000.

Can I think about it?
There is a street in HK called Lascar Row; the Portuguese used to moor their boats at the bottom two centuries ago and trade with the locals, now the Chinese have litter stalls that sell small, ornate hardwood boxes for fighting crickets, boxes about as big as an IPhone with sliding ivory lids and hidden compartments, if you sit in the hotel club lounge and talk into them the Tom Dick and Harrys boozing on company expenses think that they’ve been beaten to a new technology while all these things are good for is taking a few choice buds to the next function in the hope that there isn’t a cop wagon just out of sight around the corner in the dark, hardwood truncheons at the ready and nights in cages as punishment for a few soft tokes and wonderment at the size of the silver banking spires that hide the oriental sun.

All I want to do is talk about the meaning of manners and how futile it must be to smile at strangers all day for wages. Pity the waiter, the door opener, the widow who cleans the room, the cripple outside the Catholic Church on Sunday, the only day of the week he’s up for a certain score, cross-eyed, spastic arms flapping. Sharp as a snake.

The Filipina maid who crept into a public toilet last night with a metre of rope and hung herself on the plumbing.

The Hotel.
All these overweight Anglos with heavenly Asian babes filing into the lifts with impatient, erotic intent, anxious to unload – just like Pipe. Anybody want to talk about the never still wave refraction across Victoria Harbour and the physics of soft motion?
No.
I saw Jack Kerouac again today, his skin as black as tar, his long grey hair rotten with bugs and dirt – the old poet was sitting in a plastic chair listening to a Chinese choir singing hymns in some windy canyon, burying all his fingers up his nose because the air isn’t clean up here, it’s all grit and shit, we suck it up.
Pipe looked clean today. Outtasight.
There is no surf in HK and the markets have RipKirl wallets and Bilabone shorts, snuffling meth deadbeats squatting on doorsteps with their hands out hoping for something better than food. Women with bleached eyes and bandy thighs rocking their precarious ways into the lifts.

Assassins lurk in the lobbyways too, triggering old friend paranoia from his damp, black nest, the personal, retractable safety valve that squirts out an armour of suspicion when you know they are coming for you this time for sure.
The Pipe is on and some square-chested boofhead walks behind the camera waving at me as some no-name ASP heathen spills out a thousand words a minute about something that means nothing or at least as much as the spent wave that washes through the feet of the onshore gawkers, you and me.
Pipe is live today.

An ancient widow sat beside me at the hymn singing, and when she turned to look at the the stranger beside her our eyes met, hers were soft with understanding and loss, mine were remembering a mother too many years dead.

The hotel lounge bar, who wants to talk about about eternity, anybody?

No?
cricket boxes can be bought for HK500 and sold on ebay for US500 –