Cars Are Driving Me Bon-cars

I’ve just come back from what should have been an invigorating walk with Piles; a walk training not only the calf muscles and improving my overall well-being and benevolence, but my arm muscles as well seeing I have to drag Piles the whole way. That boy hates heat and should live in Norway, leaving balmy HK to us amphibians.

Anyway, the walk turned out not to be invigorating at all but a kind of nightmare, the reason being CARS.

Pui O on Lantau Island where I have been living for five years; no, not only Pui O, the whole island actually, has turned into some kind of haven for lazy show-offs. Not only can they not walk five meters, when they get their sacred cars (at least two per household) it has to be enormous, fkuc-off SUVs, covered in stickers saying “Save nature!”

Pui O is the countryside and has country roads. These bastards drive as if they’re on the Tolo Highway, clearly vexed at having impertinent pedestrians like Piles and me being in their personal space which they and only they own. They glower. They stare. they honk their horns.

Here I am saving the world’s resources for their children and I get grief?

Because they can’t be arsed to ride a bike to the bus stop 200 meters away or walk, I won’t have shampoo in ten years’ time. The whole world’s everything is based on oil, but they use it like they have their own personal oil-well which will never run out, tucked away somewhere behind Park’n'Shop.

But the worst thing about cars is they’re so incredibly ugly. Everywhere I go, they are, marring the scenery, making it impossible to take photos or let the eye get a good nature workout.

Now Pui O is being swamped by pilots who, not happy being away from their planes for any amount of time, need cars the size of a Boeing 747, to feel more comfortable as they drive a bottle of laxative home from the shop.

Meanwhile the entire Pui O is looking more and more like the gigantic parking lot outside a mall for people with particularly bad taste.

And the ever helpful government doesn’t have to be asked twice: To ensure that these people and their families will soon lose the use of their legs from atrophy, our civil engineering/transport dept is building more and more roads, widening roads, flattening roads and taking away nasty trees dropping leaves on roads, all for the purpose of letting guys with cars the size of houses feel they’re living back in the States or Oz.I’ve written about this before and no doubt I’ll get back to it again and again.

You really want to do something for your children? Don’t drive!

Human Nature – It’s A Wonder Innit

I’ve never even pretended to have any insight into the human mind and its workings. Everything people say, do and think is a source of constant bafflement for me.

But I know one thing about people: They will always do the opposite of what I tell them. In that they are not unlike my dog Piles. If we’re on the beach and I say for example: “Piles, don’t eat that three day dead fish and puke it up later all over the living room floor,” then that’s exactly what he’ll do.

So I’m not at all surprised, when I tell my helper to take Piles for a one hour walk, that she tidies my underwear drawer instead.

Or that she, when I tell her not to use binliners or plastic bags for rubbish but empty the kitchen rubbish bucket straight into the communal rubbish bin (already with thick black bin liner) thus saving one layer of plastic, takes in binliners from outside, pours the rubbish into it and leaves the whole thing on the kitchen floor.

I’m not at all surprised, when my Canto students ask me what’s the best way to learn Cantonese and I tell them talking to some of the 7 million free teachers milling around Hong Kong, ( the old “talking and listening” technique they used as a child to learn their mother tongue in fact), that they instead get Lonely Planet’s Cantonese glossary and only ever talk English with Chinese people, reserving their Cantonese for me.

And when people congregate on my roof for a Sichuan meal and ask me where the ashtrays are and I tell them just to chuck their cigarette butts on the floor (of the roof) because my roof is the Free State Of China and I’ll sweep up everything the next day and isn’t it lovely to be able to chuck stuff once in a while – then I’m not at all surprised that they don’t chuck a single fag end but instead push them into the soil of my flower pots, poisoning the plants.

Not suprised at all. But maybe a little bit baffled.

Then again I don’t listen to what people tell me either.

Bonding With Dog

So yeah, my dog Piles, a pain in the arse. After all this sorrow, despair and incomprehension over the sheer magnitude of the last ten days’ events; Myanmar, Sichuan, human error and evil, all the things that a brain that’s safely ensconced in Hong Kong can’t possibly take in, there comes a time when one wants to bond with one’s nearest and dearest.

In my case: Piles. So I bought him this ball (HK$75.00) , thinking we could have some fun on the beach together; something Beckhamesque: Tackling, some sliding tackles perhaps, Brazilian back-kicks, generally running together with a ball like men do.

Yeah, right. Piles’ idea of playing footbal is this: He takes the ball, crushes it between his not insignificant jaws and instead of heading it back to me, runs down the beach with it, with me galloping behind him, squeaking: “Offside! Yellow card! Nil points!”

Then he eats the shit out of it.

So much for male dog bonding. In future I’ll only do bone-ding with that ingrate. If a dog can show so little appreciation of my efforts but instead quite frankly shit all over my god intentions, how can people ever have children? In my next life I’ll be a technical appliance. Then I’ll get the gratitude and good treatment I deserve.