pea and no man

Sing us a song you piano man…

Sluggish was how I started I woke up from my two dreams woke up not knowing what to do typed a bit of my story now I know what Tiffany would do when she enters the apartment I left home at 1pm and the subway took me to school safely and I was there, wrote a midterm test, wrote a test, a test! My first test in university since the olden days of my undergrad years, in fact I wrote two tests today and I aced them both, yippee… I bought pizza and papaya juice and had a light dinner and a reflective moment in the Hart House canteen where there were no empty tables because everyone gathered to watch Emmanuel Sandhu skate and I recall the days I loved watching figure skating and how Lillehammar is already 12 years ago, he skipped a jump! Why do they do that? Is it the timing? What explains? What’s it like? Failed? Then I went up to the living room with a high ceiling and big chairs and big tables where a boy in the corner was playing ‘sing us a song you piano man’ on the piano as I reviewed my notes to Dubliners for my second test and it occurred to me that it was V-day. What is the theme of Dubliners? Paralysis! Nationalism, imprisonment versus escape, corruption, Ireland past and present, catholicism versus Catholicism. What’s the symbolism of the gold coin? What about the girl who walked in with flowers? What about the way I walked eastward on College Street instead of taking the subway home sauntering about telling myself how I deserve a little walk after acing the test and how I ended up crouching by the street chewing my panzerotto watching people walk north and south. A lady hurt her neck on the bus. The driver asked me if I speak Chinese, I said yes, and I did translation for the lady but she spoke Mandarin, and I told her you have to go to the hospital, you have to go to the hospital, so they took her away, the driver shook my hand, and the lady said thanks and I stayed on the bus a voice came on in my head repeating the same questions why why why why why. I recall a poster on the subway station that shows a subway operator and a policeman and a transit constable standing there like action figures one can buy from Toys R Us and I thought to myself how funny and how sensible of me to leave McD’s and forget that sundae for had I lined up longer I would have missed my bus. In the last five minutes of my busride I closed my book, closed my eyes, and thought of snow and snow and snow and… it was quite sad actually, quite sad, but… What is the theme? And here I am I have school next morning early morning and here I am writing what about?

I want to do for Hong Kong what Joyce has done for Dublin.

The phrase runs through my mind the whole time I was walking and thinking… no I didn’t think of snow until the end of my busride otherwise it would have been too sad and if there are many degrees of sadness and if there’s a word that describes clearly each of these tiny slots of what would be sadness and describe each so precisely so lucidly we’d no longer feel sad and there’d be only a kaleidoscope of funny feelings you know what I mean? And snow falls and covers the whole city.