In a strangely self-orientalising turn, last night I bought my mum some Chinese journal-writing books for her birthday. You know, with intricate gold patterns stamped on the cover. How "Chinese-y". Where will this self-fetishisation of culture end? God, next I might actually make good on writing my epic hip-hop/kung-fu novel of an alternative "racial history", Soldiers of the Margin. (Imagine a Wu-Tang-ish cross between Crouching Tiger and Samuel R Delaney's Tales of Neveryon.) My brother bought Mum an exquisite orchid, and took some long minutes deciding between what looked like identical plants. I mean, he actually knows people who appear in Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. (They didn't make it into Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, tho, sadly.)
More death dreams: while parking the car in a dark alley, we accidentally crush the head of a homeless man who'd been sleeping in the gutter. His head actually breaks open!
