From The Wilderness of the Hot Jazz Underground

I promise to write a lengthier post soon, but in the meantime I was getting worried they'd cancel my account unless I at least twitched a little and breathed out a slight groan to let them know I'm still alive. I have been immersed in a biography of Django Reinhardt, which I finished this morning before a sumptuous pancake breakfast -- it's hard not to read about him and just put the book down to listen to one of his records. I bought a new load of music yesterday, including two Djangos, while Stephanie and I went on a shopping spree (my first in months or years, I forget which), and the day culminated in an impromptu wine and cheese plate evening in the living room watching the new Miami Vice movie, which is impossible to describe without sounding like an idiot. ("Never mind the plot, look at the COLORS! Listen to the MUSIC!")

All in all things have been good lately. Steph and I went to Boston for Labor Day and took a few extra days off to stay with our friends, one of whom -- my genius best friend from middle school -- is at Harvard trying to make motor fuel out of yeast cultures. The fact that he isn't drummed out of the Ivy League for practicing alchemy is an indication of how far our culture has fallen. I'll sum up this trip in a future post.

I'm taking classes in a style of kung fu from southern China called Hung Gar. I'll spare you the detailed history -- all of which is available in various degrees of accuracy on Ted Stevens' series of tubes -- but suffice to say I'll eventually learn how to fight like a tiger, a crane, a dragon, a sloth and a hedgehog. Two of those are fake; I'll let you puzzle out which. My classes are with a private instructor once a week for an hour at the park near work, where I am frequently bitten by mosquitos and end up sweating like a pig in heat. More on this as it develops. Suffice to say it feels good to be studying martial arts again, after my abortive attempt to find a Hwa Rang Do teacher in DC who turned out to have moved away or never existed.

My next reading project is the Lord of the Rings trilogy, straight through. I will bring you up to date, gentle reader, when I feel the time is right. Until then, stay warm and healthy and drink plenty of tea. If you can't find any, do NOT just boil some roots and put them in a pot. The effect is lost in translation somehow.