Ordered from the Wing Kee, our local (as in, two blocks away) Chinese place last night.

You may remember the name from my puzzled rant about how I live in one of the highest concentrations of Chinese people outside of Beijing and yet it is curiously hard to find Chinese food here.

By which I mean Canadian style Chinese, of course. With that in mind, it’s not really that mysterious. I mean, I imagine it’s pretty hard to find a Chinese-style hamburger anywhere in the rest of Canada.

The Wing Kee is basically the only option for my idea of Chinese food that doesn’t also have some weird rule like $40 minimum order or some complicated combo system or some other such nonsense.

So anyhoo, ordered BBQ duck on rice from the Wing Kee last night. I’d never ordered it before but I love the BBQ duck I used to buy at a Chinese bakery/deli, so it seemed like a sure thing.

Not so much, as it turns out.

Because when it arrived, the duck portion of it was like 85 percent bones and fat. Truth. It was so bad that I basically just ate some of the veggies and rice and left the duck part of it for today, when I would be more inclined to dig through the offal to get the small portions of actual duck flesh (which were in no sense BBQ) out.

And that’s what I did today. Most of what I got went right into the composting, leaving me with a few paltry scraps of bland steamed duck meat.

I am disappoint.

To the point where I doubt I will order from the Wing Kee again. it’s such a total and utter fail that it makes me question whether the place is going to be around much longer… or whether it should be around.

Generally speaking, when the food quality of a restaurant takes a nosedive, it means that they are not long for the world. Once they are desperate enough to cut costs that they compromise the quality of the very thing they sell, causing them to rapidly lose customers, the writing is on the wall.

They’ve certainly lost me as a customer.

Dunno where the heck I will get my Chinese food now. The next best place is Bamboo Express, and their version of the concept of an egg roll is a hunk of fried batter the size and shape of a Nerf football.

It doesn’t even have a filling. No bean sprouts or bok choy or anything. It’s just a ovoid blob of the sort of batter the casing of a REAL egg is made of.

Wonton batter, maybe? But even plain old fried wontons are an eight story tiramisu of intricate design and execution compared to these “egg rolls”.

Oh well, Plenty of other places to eat. And if I want Chinese food bad enough, I can take a cab to the mall and go to the food court.

Modern life is so darn complicated.

More after the break.

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Wobbling along the edge

Been wobbling along the edge of a deep depression lately.

The usual signs are there. Moments of black rage nihilism where I want to kill all of reality just to make it SHUT UP for once. Times when a terrible sadness wells up within me and I desperately want to let it out, but I don’t know how.

I try to cry. But I don’t get very far. The ground is barely wet when the rain stops.

And I have a hefty dose of that haunted feeling I get sometimes, like there is a ghost in my soul and it’s trying to get out – or at least get me to listen to what it’s trying to say.

I try, little ghostie. But I haven’t the ears to hear you yet.

My physical health is crappy too. I am not even going to try to figure out the chicken and egg of cause and effect there.

I feel crappy either way.

I’ve been having digestive issues and sinus issues, probably related. My sinuses get clogged, that causes a sinus headache, which makes my head hurt in a certain way that also makes me nauseous and upsets my digestion and voila, cramps in my gut.

Oh, and my balls ache too. Because why let the other parts have all the fun of making me utterly miserable.

I blame the vagus nerve. Who knows what that dang thing is up to.

Meanwhile, in reality, it’s probably all happening because I went two weeks withotu showering and my pores are all clogged up.

And the shower I took earlier this evening should help eventually, but in the mean time, my body still has to build up pressure behind the remaining clogs to push them out and finally let my skin breathe again, and that is not fun while it’s happening.

So I am going to try hard to make myself take another shower, a longer and hotter one, to maybe steam clean my pores instead of waiting for the dam to burst.

Or the fever to break. Take your pick.

What I really need is a long soak in a very hot bath. As hot as I can stand, because it’s the heat that both signals the pores to dilate and melts the accumulated goo inside.

I don’t normally take baths because they are kinda gross. I don’t like sitting there in a stew of my own effluvia. Showers don’t have that problem. The steady stream of a shower takes all that old sweat and skin salt and such away instantly.

My perfect setup would be an indoor heated river that I could sit in and the warm water would reach up to my neck and just flow over and around me, taking all the gross stuff away and cleaning my skin fresh and clean and happy.

Still, perhaps I can talk myself into taking one good hot bath to try to reset my skin to it factory settings and maybe treat it a bit better this time through.

That would be nice.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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You know what I really want? Love.

And not just any kind of love. Big love. Powerful love. Strong love. The love of someone far stronger and smarter and wiser than my poor self. Someone who can take me in their arms and tell me everything is going to be alright and make me believe it. Someone who can protect me both from the world and from my own foolishness.

Someone who loves me deeply and completely but not blindly. Because they know me. They get me. They understand who I am and why. They know me flaws and all and still they love and affirm and value me and make me feel like I am truly worth something.

Someone who likes having me around. Someone who wants to hear what I have to say because they understand what I am trying to tell them and enjoy hearing it because they see that I have a lot of worthwhile things to say and value receiving them.

And they are strong. So, so strong. Strong enough to calm my fears and soothe my jangled nerves and make me feel safe. Someone whose power and warmth and vitality can penetrate my fragile frostbitten soul and let me finally feel warm inside.

Someone who can finally make me feel like I have come home. Truly come home. And that everything is going to be good now because at long long last, I am safe.

So basically, a parent. The parent I never got as a kid. Someone to give me all the love and affirmation and hope and protection and guidance and acceptance and encouragement that I never got as a kid and that still lingers as an unmet need even though I am 47.

Clearly, I can’t move forward without getting these needs met in some way on some level. They are not just going to go away. Human beings need certain inputs before they can grow up and like childhood malnutrition, a lack of them leaves marks that last a lifetime and stunt the child’s growth into a healthy adult.

Just as clearly, these needs are not something a big bearded 47 year old man can address via the direct route. I can’t go looking for this missing parent in the real world because such a person does not exist. Not to the point I need them to exist.

Because what I am basically talking about is God. And religious faith is not really an option for me. For better and definitely for worse, I am far too “rational” for my own good and faith a priori to evidence is not possible in my cold and calculating world.

But all is not lost. I might not be able to accept the logically absurd and nakedly petty and self-serving faith of others, but I am a dreamer, and dreamers dream what they need into existence without waiting for reality’s permission.

So maybe I can dream up a God for myself. One who meets all of my needs without needing to exist anywhere outside my capacious skull.

I mean, what the hell, that’s where other people’s God lives too.

I’m just cutting out the middleman.

More after the break.

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Being your own parent

Um, yeah, that doesn’t happen. Not for me. Not yet, anyhow.

I mean, it sounds good. Plausible, even. It sure would be nice if I could do that.

But I can’t do that. So it’s worse than useless. Might as well be someone telling me to solve my transportation problems by flapping my wings.

That would definitely work.

But I have no wings.

And that’s a hard idea to get across to people. It’s only been in the last few days that I have come up with the idea of their being no sequence of moves available to me that would result in my doing X, and while that’s by far the best way of expressing it I have come up with, it’s not exactly accessible.

Except possibly to other INTJs. We all think in chess terms on the abstract level.

Still, I am at least somewhat closer to being able to explain to people why I can’t do that perfectly sensible sounding thing that it totally seems like I could totally do and that would totally improve my situation.

More importantly, I can explain it to myself.

Anyhow, back to self-parenting. Surprise! I remember what I was talking about.

Self-patenting is, to me, at this time, obviously impossible. I don’t have an inner parent that can take care of the paralyzed preschooler inside me. It’s just me, a timid child walking naked through midnight tundra trying to find the way home.

I have no idea where that inner parent would have come from because it’s not like I had any role models. There was nobody in my life at any point who would have modeled proper caring for me.

Even my favorite teacher, Mrs. Rogers, found me very frustrating to deal with. And while I will always adore her for being the only teacher who cared enough to keep at me long and hard enough to break through to me, she was not exactly a warm and compassionate kind of woman.

Just stubborn enough and dedicated enough to wrestles with the impossible kid.

I don’t even have the example of someone else’s parents. I mean, I am sure there were plenty of caring, involved parents around me when I was a kid but I was too socially isolated and miserable to take any notice of them.

More abstractly, to me the idea of being my own parent seems as ridiculous as trying to give yourself a piggy back ride. No matter how clever you are, or how deeply insightful you are, or how emotionally acrobatic you are, it is and always will be a two person job.

But I can see outside that paradigm. I can accept the abstract possibility of being able to be, if not exactly my own parent, than at least my own best friend.

But it will be a long time running.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.