Categories
Dream Journal

Spaces of Hong Kong

Never been to Hong Kong before but it’s everything I imagined. I finally came here after years of thinking about it. I’m having a leisurely time, reflecting on the foreignness and how it feels.

The colors of everything man-made is distinct from what I’m familiar with. As I stare up at local palm trees in a courtyard I reflect how the manufactured goods here are all from different factories. So it’s not merely that designs might vary; the actual available supply of something as simple as pigment is slightly different.

I am residing in some big formerly abandoned space that’s mine to play around with. I spend time in various rooms, imagining what I might do in them. I explain to my companions that I’ve determined the largest blank wall space, an arch shape above a long built-in table. I detail a possible technique of using single printed sheets of larger AI-assisted picture, something like the tiled printing mosaic my former roommate used to have. I continue talking to them while hanging over the edge of a doorframe, leaning into the room they’re sitting in. I’m trying to close out the conversation and get drawn into describing the finicky techniques of getting a good photo.

Outside, I see sunset — or something like a sunset without the valence of being the end of a day. It looks like three overlapping gears or prisms, radiating over a curved landscape. I find it difficult to photograph, much less describe. It’s quite a powerful image, but I waited too long in the day to write it down properly… though I still hope not to forget it entirely.

Categories
Glot

Damn You Thingy!

Personification is a dangerous force.

The context isn’t important. But what the hell: I was standing on tiptoes in the hostel’s common room, balanced on one of the the blue wave-print benches I’d grown so used to. Christmas decorations were rising. It was festive, but still a damned hostel. We couldn’t change much about the porthole lights, much as we’d have liked to change them to green and red luminaries of their former yellow selves. Rachel sat at the desk. An English girl of my own age, she no longer stayed at the hostel but still worked there. She was a paradox in pink and black.

Allow me to mention that I love decorating. Wait—that sounds gay. In this sense gay may be taken to mean “something which is overly sentimental or cloying, saccharine; self-indulgently emotional.” It’s the eight-pound heartful of bonbons bought the day before Valentine’s. Even homophiles can agree with this definition on a conditional basis—as we all know, male-female couples are nearly always more gay than gay ones. Anyways, I love decorating… I mean interior design. More on that later. Later later.

So there I was, hanging colored lights over yellow porthole lamps I wished were green porthole lamps and red porthole lamps. And I’ll be a monkey’s gay uncle if the electrical outlet we were trying to use (me an’ Rachel) wasn’t blocked by our silly desk-barrier-thingy.

“Oh, that would be so cool. Oh no… Orin it’s blocked by the thingy!”

“…Damn you, Thingy!!!”