这几天心情不好，总不在状态。就贴图玩吧。我很喜欢CSI后来出现的Sofia Curtis，没有原因就是喜欢。

没想到40M能贴这么多图啊？那就把Brad Pitt贴上来吧，我永远的最爱。明天再贴。睡觉去。

我会贴图了，我就猛贴，电脑里的图图们都贴出来。Joan Allen我喜欢！

我还不信我就贴不上个图了，靠。都给我立正！Archie Kao是CSI中的亚裔帅哥，都给我闪开！

January 22, 2007

Sitting across the aisle on the other side, three middle-aged women and one middle-height man of their age were discussing a hot issue. The man was balding and with his back to me. He wore his hair crew cut as if to minimize the baldness, but in vain obviously. His head was a perfect round ball – forgive the pun here – no pun at all. Clamping some packet in the left hand, he was motormouthing, if not maglevmouthing, about sanitary towels, comparing different brands in market, analyzing the costs and profits of each kind and babbling about the NEW functions the product-in-hand had. One woman was sitting beside him, listening attentively as if she could get that pack after the man had finished talking. Anyway, I could only see her back and her garishly dyed yellow hair. A darker coat closed her pudgy and broad back in bulges here and furrows there.

The other two women were sitting opposite. The one to the aisle wore her hair in loose ponytail. Her face was pinkened and sweaty, which had nothing to do with the air-conditioning. It looked more like the sanitary issue did get through to her. The other one was bespectacled; through the thick glasses, a bathtub of freezing water could be heated up in the sunlight. Her face curved inward like a shoehorn. They were listening carefully, too.

Left of them four in another booth, three teenage girls were managing their own gossip club. All of them were wearing jeans, pullovers, sneakers and hairs to their slender shoulders. They snickered and giggled, even guffawed, when the man was saying “This one is more expensive…” or “It also feels GOOOOD…” or “Additional take-in of…” Of course, no matter how hard they laughed, the man was as serious as could be, instructing the three laywomen on how his new product worked a treat!

I was hoping the man would pluck a swath from the sample pack and exercise its sucking – forgive the pun here, too – ability to dry the water beads congealed on the iced coke bottles.

Then a crotchless tot was waltzing past them and halted on a decorative brassy plate inlaid the floor, head tilting towards the brouhaha of the trio and the prattling of the quartet, learning her first lesson on a thing that would accompany her for 30 or 40 years in life. Her parents came from behind and scooped her up, oblivious to the din of the surroundings.

As I was observing all these, I was riffling through Stephen King’s Hearts in Atlantis, and came across the answer Bobby had got when he asked him mother how a woman knew she was going to have a baby:

“She bleeds every month. If there is no blood, she knows it’s because the blood is going into a baby.”

January 21, 2007

Postscript to Kittie Killie

- 01 -

Every time my teaching career in Shanghai got a little herky-jerky, I planned to go back to the one-horse town where most of my childhood had been spent, but there was always someone waiting around the corner and standing me in good stead. Maybe it was my hardnosed character, or in horoscope parlance, my stubbornness, that has kept me, a wayfarer to searching for a life (only he is not sure what kind of a life it was like himself) soldiering on.

Drinking some sludge which they call coffee in McDonald’s, or peeling off to a warren of cubicles in the school where I am working with, or once in a while facing a menopausal female student who yammers what the tenor of teaching really is in a gruff voice, I would ferret out fine books by Stephen King. The bailiwick of S.K. could always give my half-hearted self a snooze. The repartees archly make me a mutant only to be found in my own world, like a naughty boy in a time-out. It’s like the Vick’s Vapo-Rub does to nasal vestibules stuck to two-week-old putrefaction of a dead body or two hundred unclean deadpans.

But I got to read S.K.’s works only since last May, when things around me were already going into orbit. Vincent’s solitaire was finally put to an end. The heft of cavalry in my heart sort of petered out.

But true gashes never heal; Chi-Chin Ting is one of them.

***   ***

When my friend-cum-colleague Laurence entrusted me with his cat guaiguai, I agreed jauntily, saying, “Tant mieux!” Because I had planned to write a horror story interweaving my foe and the wild warrior of the animal kingdom – cat. Non sequitur, the perv and the kitty didn’t really mix, but when Enzyme Pet-Sematary-by-S.K. was totted up, Chi-Chin Ting was dead… killed by a pet cat, which I hereafter named Klux.

(To be continued.)

2007年1月20日

中午去打印社的一个岔路口等红灯的时候发现面前的路上没有汽车，加上我当时比较着急赶时间，就闯红灯了。当我迈出两步的时候发现路对面站着一个小男孩，穿着蓝色的校服，脖子上扎着红领巾，胳膊上戴着两道杠。虎头虎脑，甚是可爱。他正注视着我，我心里当时不大舒服，毕竟自己没有给孩子做出一个良好的榜样。好在当时道路两旁要过马路的只有我和那个孩子，这样，我也就是自责，不会有第三个人在心中鄙视我。可是就在这个时候，让我更难过的事情发生了，那个孩子也开始闯红灯了。当然，那孩子又不傻，他是发现横在他前面的路上没有车才穿的。他是小跑过来的，他的脸上泛出一丝不好意思的微笑，好像是在告诉我：“我跟你学的，你别告诉我老师啊！”那个时候我心里特别不适滋味，更加重了我的自责和罪孽感。当他跑过我身旁的时候我特别想抓住他的胳膊，蹲下身来，很郑重的跟他说：“孩子，是叔叔不对，不要跟叔叔学，叔叔下次保证不再横穿马路了。”我的脑海中浮现的是我轻轻地抚摸着那孩子毛茸茸的脑袋，看着他天真纯朴的吃惊。另一个方面，我也在阻止自己，我不想拦下那个孩子，我怕吓坏他。并且找借口说：“社会就是这样，有好多人闯红灯，面前没有车干嘛站在那里傻等？现实生活中，别说闯红灯了，违法犯罪并且成为漏网之鱼的大有人在。”我的思想斗争很激烈，我当时就感觉我被分成了好几个部分，其中两个部分在争论应不应该拦下孩子，还有一个部分在警示自己注意左右的车辆，不要一不留神被突然出现的车撞倒，还有一个部分的自己在耻笑自己的愚蠢：这么大的人了，在周围同事和朋友整天琢磨怎么多赚些钱的时候，自己却在这里小题大做。我当时真正的体会到被撕裂的感觉。我的眼睛就锁定在那个奔跑的小学中队长身上，当他从我身旁跑过的时候，我也猛地转过身去借着看他。或许是害怕他万一被车撞倒，也或许没有什么原因，只是想看看自己小的时候，如何一步步“融入”这个社会。就在这个时候，我听见那小朋友大喊：“小冉！”我再定神一看，面对他的是一个好可爱的小女孩，橘红色的毛衣和黑色的绒裤让那女孩子成为她同龄人中的美丽公主！那小女孩正朝着那个小男孩微笑呢，而那远去的背影则加快了脚步奔向他的梦中情人。我仰天长叹：“我本将心向明月，奈何明月照沟渠！”

January 14, 2007

- 13 -

(Three months later.)

Martin was sitting in front of the computer monitor and checking his emails, while Klux was curling up around his feet, purring as tenderly as ever. Everything done, Martin shut down his yahoo account and halted there as if unsure of what to do next. Then he got google on, and needless to say, the keyword list was ready, with Chi-Chin Ting grinning at him. Actually, Martin hadn’t checked that specific term since a time well before his cat-leading trip to the unknown community.

However, Martin decided to have a try today. He clicked it and when it was framed in the search engine, he clicked the search button. There were more search results than the last time; this time, six in all. Excluding the two roster-like pages, the rest four looked the same. Maybe it was one story duplicated and relayed on different webs. In a cyber-junk whelming eon, chaste and whores were equally quadrupled.

He tried one of the news and waited until the webpage was in full fledge.

(Oh, my gosh!)

The illustrations of the news and intros inset did give Martin a shudder down to the bladder.

The first picture was a baby in a crib, as lively and lovely as any of its kind in home video stills. It had dewy eyes like those in Japanese cartoons. Mouth was giving a waxing smile like a moon in euphoria.

However, the second picture was a complete upside-down of the first, not by positions but by its keynotes. The baby was nothing but a clotted blood ball. The face was bleeding profusely, one eyeball dangling out from its socket. Parts of the lips were missing, revealing mahogany-stained teeth. Cheeks were obviously mauled. Hairs were in oxblood wisps. The liveliness was gone; death was lurking.

The third illustrative picture was about several police officers, most probably CSI, snapping pictures at a face-down female body, sprawling on the floor. The left corner caught a bit of the crib in the former two pictures, which possibly meant these were from the same room.

Martin was too shocked to read any intros inset and around the pictures, but he vaguely saw through the pictures. His breaths were becoming very heavy and he turned to look at Klux, who looked half-hearted at Martin, as if saying, “Finally, you’ve found out what I had done that night.”

… …

When Martin was doing some straightening in his bedroom, he heard something clawing on his door. He knew it was Klux. It didn’t really strike Martin as something surprising. If anything, Martin thought Klux might have gone back earlier. He didn’t know what she had done, but the hunch told him his cat had done it successfully.

Martin opened the door, the gap showing Klux sashaying into the house. She looked chipper, only equally thirsty maybe. Martin got her water and food and the softball. He sat on his haunches to watch her carefully.

Nothing really different…

… except for some red and gushy stuff that were attached to Klux’s paws and whiskers.

- END -

January 3, 2007

Sometimes we lie, we complicate issues that are not complicated at all, but we have to do that. It’s like you run into a friend, who invites you to go upstairs and have a cup of coffee and shoot the breeze. But you fend off by saying you have something very important to reckon with. Sometimes, you even sketch some details of the imaginary business. When your friend waves off to say goodbye and rain check, you smile a relieved smile, only because you have a pair of sweaty and stinky feet. You are afraid to take off the shoes, which is inescapable if you have to step into your friend’s house.

January 4, 2007

When the girl finished her recitation performance, my colleague on the panel of judges with me, asked me if I should give her a pass. Brows flicking up and down, my grinning mouth said, “She is too cute to execute!” My colleague nodded her wicked smile and cooed, “Got it!” Slipping the cutie’s form into Column A, which meant to “survive,” my colleague yelled, “The next one!” When the next contestant, also a girl, entered into the conference room, my colleague and I traded a look and grinned. According to the data in her form, she was only ten years old, but she actually looked ten years older than my grandma!

January 7, 2007

A colleague asked me with uncharacteristic piety, “How do we say 沙滩阳光 in English?” He lifted a brow, as if he had been tussling with this Herculean question since lions were still bacteria in the ocean. I was impressed by his question, but equally knocked out. I lifted both brows and answered in a voice barely qualifying a whisper, “I don’t know.” His seriousness made me feel I was the guilty boy who was caught red-handed calling the teacher a critter when the teacher herself was standing behind my back. Then he arched the other brow to pinch against its twin, gave me a toothy grin and said, “Sun of a beach!”

[I've caught a cold today and won't push to finish Kittie killie until I am better. At the same time, I am thinking about how to end the story. "Martin Cohen" :)]

[The three segments above were written on a whim. Albert Robbins :)]