I went out to B&Q in Shilin today with Dean during…
I went out to B&Q in Shilin today with Dean during his lunch break. He wanted to pick up some paint and I wanted to look at red-or-blue toilet seats, since my bathroom is blue and the present toilet seat is a most disturbing shade of Comet-green. On the way from Jiantan Station we passed the site of the old Shilin Night Market, which is now just an empty field of rubble being picked over by earth movers. The store had nothing but variations on tan and white seats, however, so we took the second-attempt paint and departed. We were about to get in a taxi back downtown when I hit my head on a bus stop sign and realized that I didn’t want to spend such a beautiful day downtown. Here I was already halfway to Danshui, so I bade farewell to Dean and walked towards the Shilin MRT station, stopping on the way to pick up a blue toilet seat from a little store that seemed better stocked than B&Q, at least in the toilet department.
The newly-constructed riverside walkways at Danshui were almost deserted compared to the wreathing masses suffocating it on weekends. Here and there construction continued, but it’s mostly finished and quite nice. After about an hour of walking I found myself at Fisherman’s Wharf, where I sat on the dock and watched boatfuls of tourists motor to and fro. A large bridge over the man-made harbor is under construction at the moment, and I also watched the workers hoisting large pieces of steel into place over the water. The sun set at almost exactly 5pm, and I watched that as well before hopping on a bus back to downtown Danshui. Feeling the need to eat, I walked into the Sunrise Caf’e and up to the rooftop level so I could see the river and Mount Guanyin across the river. As I approached a table by the edge, however, a group of Very Important People erupted in sounds of vigorous protest. Apparently I was blocking their view. “Is there a problem?” I asked, but they errupted into laughter, as Taiwanese are obliged by law to do whenever any non-Chinese person opens their mouth and emits sounds. “Obviously there is a problem, at least with the operation of your brains,” I concluded out loud, and moved to another table. The Very Important People promptly continued their discussion, which involved how troublesome it was throwing away socks when they got dirty and then buying new ones. Celebrity names were dropped and exhorbitant prices scoffed (“78 million? Oh, that’s just too much!” *pouts*). It occurred to me that this was what the Scooby Doo gang would have ended up like if they hadn’t had Scooby and Shaggy to keep them grounded and even mussed up once in a while. Can you imagine Fred, with his ascot and sailor suit, Daphne with her high heels, and even Velma, sitting around in a restaurant bragging about the last celebrity to star on their show? (“Oh, that Paul Lynne, he’s such a card.” “Yeah, but he did like my ascot!”) That’s what these people were like. One of the girls was even short and dumpy, one of them thin and obsessed with her hair, and the one guy was dressed sort of like Fred, but with late-90’s black instead of 60’s colors. If I cared, I would introduce someone like Mindcrime to them, to balance out their little group with gross butt jokes and an utter lack of fashion sense, but I couldn’t care less if they spiral into vapidity and self destruct in a massive ego implosion, creating little black holes of self pity.
I’ve been toying with the idea of putting up little video clips at low resolution on here for people to look at. We’ll see how it works and if I have enough space to spare. Mindcrime has written an interesting little script involving the meeting of two foreigners in Taipei, for filming with the new camera, and I’ve already got the scenes mapped out. Now we just need to get everyone together to actually film it. Hopefully we can do several of these short pieces before tackling something longer.
In other news, my xuedi from college, Moose, is now Commissioner Moose, having won an election in his district in Washington, DC. Cool. I wonder if this means he’ll have greater access to regional superheroes. If so, even cooler.
