I guess it’s a good weekend to be laid up sick on the couch.  I tried to pull through the week without having to take a day off for being sick, but by Thursday night I was really feeling like death warmed over.  I went to see a doctor who proceeded to check out everything I was complaining about.  All Taiwanese doctors of course have to know English for studying medicine, but most don’t keep it up, so to find one as chatty as mine is rare.

When he checked my temperature which was a wonderful 38.6, he said ‘Oh, not good’.  When he listened to my lungs as I breathed in and out for him, he kept saying, ‘Eww, bad.  Very bad.’   And when he checked my stomach and side for pain and I told him of my stomach problems for the past week or more he said ‘Geez, not good for you‘.  So in the end he figures I have a Type B flu (is that worse than A or better?  I still get first and second degree burns mixed up), and I also have a bronchial infection in my lungs as well as a sinus blockage which is causing the headaches.  So, from the knees down, I’m okay.  But from the knees up (Farmer Brown…) I’m falling apart.

He told me to take a few days off, which being a Thursday night, basically meant Friday off plus the weekend.  Fine with me (although I hate losing a day’s pay since we are paid by hours and not salary), but I needed it.  He told me the pills would make me tired, which I already was, so I laughed and said that wouldn’t be a problem at all.  I got home about 8pm that night, took my pills, fed Mouthy and the next thing I fully remember was it was 5am on Saturday morning.  I have small flashes of calling work in the morning to tell them I wouldn’t be there, partially backed up by the fact that in the afternoon I did wake for a few minutes and I was sleeping in my computer chair instead of the bed.

I guess I fed Mouthy as there was an old can of food soaking in the sink and a new one opened in the fridge, so unless she has finally figured out how to feed herself, I did manage to take care of her needs.  Of course I was only awake enough to start watching a show on TV I borrowed from a friend, only to fall asleep again until around noon.  I’ve been dozing off every few hours, here and there, but I have managed to read about a quarter of Amityville Horror as I relax, and I went for a walk to stock up on a few things since there is a nice Typhoon coming in as I type.  I actually need to go to the supermarket if I can to get a few more things, but I’ll wait until later as it will be crowded with people both stocking up for the typhoon, and the Moon Festival on Wednesday (another day off). 

From the look of things right now, Monday may be a Typhoon day where they will close the schools and give everyone a day off.  Not bad for me to rest up with, a four-day weekend, then one day back, then a holiday, then two days before a weekend again.  I was tempted to go to the video store near my work and get some of the older DVDs they have there, but I walked to the comic shop down the road where I have free rentals and got Clash of the Titans and Repo Men to try to watch later when the pills aren’t killing me. 

  So from the satellite view, the typhoon is going to cover the whole island pretty soon, but the center will hit lower that Taipei, but we will still get washed out.  Typhoon days are fun, but annoying since almost everything is closed and if you don’t have food at home, you are kinda screwed.  I have some things here, but I will make a run to 7-11 if needed, or to the supermarket if the rain isn’t too bad later on.  Of course now I have a craving for some night market food, but there is no way they will be there and if they are, it would be stupid to drive there and get even more sick from the weather.  It’s a damn good thing I stocked up on peanut butter when it was on sale last month.    Now all I need is some bread to go with it and I am set!

In case you can’t see it, Taiwan is the little island to the left of the swirling vortex about to be covered up…

On my trip home last June I had to get my book collection back from a friend’s house and pack them up to go into a closet in my parent’s house.  I know I should have just let them free into the wild, but so many of those books hold some sort of sentimental attachment to them… and I’m a hoarder of almost anything (who knew ‘hoarder’ has an ‘a’ and not a ‘w’…), so if I have the entire John Riving collection, I’m keeping it (in hardcover to be exact)!  I brought five Rubbermaid bins with me and one big cardboard box.  I planned to fill the bins and the overflow would go into the ‘why the hell do I still have this’ box which would go to a used bookstore for credit or cash.  Of course, who would opt for cash from a used bookstore?  They usually give you twice as much in credit to get older books out of the damn shop.  This is the same thing that happened two days before leaving for Taiwan.

I went to a few of the used bookstores, but I had a bit of a problem with some of them.  The cool little white house bookshop in the Wortly Village area of London had an old lady who ran it who looked at me like I Was carrying the plague on my shoulders whenever I went in there.  She was nice to everyone that came in, even my friends, but she hated me.  I have no clue why.  I traded books to her on credit, tried to discuss books with her, asking her for specific things and recommendations and she still wanted me gone like a recurring sore on her upper lip.  So I didn’t go back to her that day.

The most popular bookshop in London is the City Lights Bookshop in the nastier part of downtown and they claim to have almost anything you can think of.  Everyone goes there more to look cool than find quality books.  I did get some cool shit from them time to time, but one day I took them a bunch of books which included two Fletch novels which I had bought newer versions of, and was told ‘No one reads this garbage.  You can keep it.‘  Garbage?  Really?  The Fletch books are my inspiration to being a writer, Gregory McDonald created some of the best dialogue fueled novels ever, and he won multiple awards for them.  So, I never went back to those book snobs who had multiple copies of On the Road on display behind the counter as if Kerouac makes you better than anyone else.

There was a cool little shop in the south end I frequented because of the young kid who worked there.  I called him Spicolli due to his exact resemblance to the Sean Penn character in Fast Times at Ridgemount High right down to the voice and attitude.  The owner was also a really nice, laid back guy who would take books he didn’t even need to give you some more credit, and then donate them to book charities.  I remember in my last few months in Canada, Spicolli was working through the Stephen King collection in order of publication so he could read and enjoy the Dark Tower series more.  He even had a big notebook where he kept track of characters, relations and connection between books (especially any reference to Flagg in The Stand, Eyes of the Dragon and other novels).  I took them a big box of books that last week and I told Spicolli that I was leaving for Taiwan.  He said if I wanted to donate anything he didn’t take to a bookfair for charity it would be cool, so I did.  I just gave him the box and looked around while he figured out a total.  He offered me about $25 cash or $50 credit.  I don’t know why, but I took the credit.  I had already chosen the books to go with me to Taiwan, but for some reason I still wanted to free some more books from the store.

I only used a little credit that day, I think only a book or two (including The Invisible Man, the first book I read in Taiwan) and figured I would give the rest to my girlfriend to use when she wanted.  Just as I was leaving Jeff (we were on a first name basis by this point in my totally warped mind) told me his boss was always looking for old VHS tapes and I laughed and told him I had a box I was going to take to the Goodwill just after leaving there.  He told me to come back later when the boss was in and he may take them off my hands.  I laughed and told him to let him know I would be back.

Later that day I returned (still with my credit slip in my pocket for about $45) with the VHS tapes I had no clue what to do with.  The owner told me he was looking more for certain movies and rare ones, but if he liked a title he would take it.  A he started digging I told him I was off to Taiwan after seeing Bob Dylan that night and if he didn’t want them to donate them to one of the charities he helped out and he immediately asked if I had any credit with them.  I showed him my almost useless slip and he crossed out the total and said, ‘I’ll just top it off to $100 if that’s okay‘.  I almost fell over.  One hundred dollars credit at a bookshop with so much to buy at such cheap prices was like giving a crack addict a pre-warmed pipe and a rock the size of Everest. 

I shopped as best as I could, thinking the whole time that my girlfriend could use it all as she read even more than I did, but it was like it was burning a hole in my pocket.  I think I got about 5-6 more books that day, a few that came with me and others that just went into my private collection.  I always felt kinda bad about getting some of those books.  It was like going into a pet shop and getting a puppy, then chaining him up outside and never playing with him.  Would they have found a better home with someone else? 

So this year upon packing up my books I made sure a few of those freed, then neglected books were taken on a journey half way around the world to be read somewhere they never should have been.  I’m tempted to save them for somewhere even more obscure than Taiwan, like in the mountains of Nepal next year, or the beaches of either Sri Lanka or the Philippines this Chinese New Year.  But I also kinda want to crack into them now and start reading as I am still on a roll with good novels (I finished The Road and actually enjoyed it’s bleak, depressing story of survivors at the end of the human race).  The two I know I bought that day were The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson and The Paper Men by William Golding which are both here and ready to go, but I also brought back other novels which sat in my collection for long periods of time waiting for their turn as well like Out of Sight and Unknown Man #89 by Elmore Leonard, One Lovely Night and Kiss Me Deadly by Mickey Spillane, Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions by Vonnegut and The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon which has actually been waiting it’s turn to be read since I dropped my absurdist  novels class in university at the beginning of the second semester more than 10 years ago. 

Of course I also have book from here I traded for still to be read, books friends gave me to read and, coincidentally, On The Road, which my girlfriend gave me when I left inscribed with these classic words…

Oh, I did give the credit slip to the girlfriend when I left, I think she still had about $65 left on it which at this bookstore was a great haul.

It’s funny how when I look at the list of books I have read in the last two years, they actually coincide with my weight and general fitness.  It sounds strange as we usually think of a bookworm as someone who just sits and reads all day, not getting any exercise at all, but when I joined the gym here, I gave up my two to three times a week trips to Starbucks to get reading done to working out at the gym. 

Still strange?  I’ll explain.  I always read at Starbucks, but I think the hot chocolates and English Breakfast Tea with half steamed milk and a shot of vanilla with a little cinnamon and nutmeg on top may have been helping my wonderful, world famous love handles get bigger.  Now I love to do weights, but I have always been a cardio addict.  The only problem here is they have only Chinese shows and movies on the TVs in the cardio area (go figure).  So, my choice is watch mindless gameshows with trampy little Chinese girls doing stupid stunts (which I enjoy, but not while trying to get a workout… the blood needs to FLOW) or bring a book.  So, I read.  Sure, I sweat on the books, but I read.

This year I hurt my back.  I still don’t know how, but I slipped something in it and couldn’t do much.  After Chinese New Year I got lax on my workouts and gained some weight… about 5kg (nearly 12 pounds for you Imperialist Bastards!) Sorry, been watching too much Bottom lately.  Anyway, when I sit at home, I don’t read as much.  I don’t have a good comfortable reading chair like I did back in Canada, so I watch TV.  Still being entertained, but now by Hong Kong rips of some of the more popular so-called American sitcoms.  I like to be entertained, and if my body is lazy, then my mind can be too (thus my latest addiction to Alias).

So lately I’ve felt like crap, and to my mind (which is now 96% multi-personality free) I look like crap too.  I didn’t think it was that bad, but then we went swimming a few weeks back in the mountains and one of my friends mentioned how I had gained weight.  Of course, I absolutely hate taking my shirt off in public, no matter how good of shape I am in (that would be phobia #2698, right after my irrational fear of female Sea Monkeys), so I knew there had to be something wrong.

For the last year I have been between 88-90kg (figure it out yourselves you lazy sods…) but now I am more like 93-95kg (seriously, do I have to do everything?).  I am lucky and usually gain weight mostly even, but I do have a nice set of love handles that I got when I was about 21 and never could get rid of.  So those white, fleshy globs of Canadian bacon are a wonderful site to see now.

So back to my point (which at this point could be any number of things) I read more when I work out (how the hell did I get back to that?).  now I don’t like feeling, looking and being viewed as fat, so I have to hit the gym more (although I have a heavybag at home so I can hit something without leaving the comfort of my own home) and I have to bring more books with me.  If you look at my reading list, I read about 4 books from February to the beginning of August, where I not only gained weight from being lazy, but also from a trip home where I ate Canadian food again and fueled my manly saddlebags.

Now, mid-September I am at about five books read in a month and a half and down about 3kg (6.6 pounds… GEEZ!).  Of course people tell me I am getting old and I will of course gain weight, but I refuse to belive it or even let that thought into my head (where I know it will burrow itself in and fester like a bad rash always taunting me with M&Ms and taro cakes).  Yeah, I’m turning 36 next month, but that isn’t going to stop me (cue motivational music now).  I think I’ve been in the best shape of my life in my 30′s (hmmmm… maybe when I gave up drinking, soda, coffee and fast food) so I’m not going to fall apart now.  Not on my watch, Chester (mmm… Cheetos!).

I finished Cormac McCarthy’s The Road tonight at the gym, and of course almost passed out doing it since I have the flu and maybe a little bit of the weight loss has been that I haven’t been able to keep solid food down for over a week now (The Parasite Diet, coming to drugstores and water bottles all over Mexico soon!).  My problem isn’t as much how I look, but how I feel about it, and since I was young, I never liked the way I looked.  So it’s time to hit the bookshelves and the gym and maybe get more reading done while I melt away the fat that is forever latching itself to my midsection. 

My point?  I lost that about ten minutes ago with my sense of reality and three crackers I swore I put next to the computer!

Just to prove I’m not crazy (and to further humiliate myself into losing more weight)… MY LOVE HANDLES!!!

Chinese New Year, February 2010… just after hurting my back, but relatively good shape…

Now, about 7kg heavier…

Two years ago… what I would like to get back to (this is actually when I didn’t have a gym membership… go figure!)

I will probably pull these photos very soon as they just give me the creeps looking at them.  What the hell am I doing?

Looks like the old man’s memory is going on his 60-somethingth birthday.  I don’t really know how old because I never really bother with ages that much and I never remember birthdays either… the only way I remember his is it is exactly 30 days before mine… so start your gift buying for me now. 

Plastic Jesus… the real version for the uninitiated (turn it up though, it’s quiet at first)…

Been thinking a lot about Bubba for the last week and it didn’t occur to me until just tonight that it is now exactly five years since he left me.  Strange how your mood, attitude and outlook can change and be affected by something in the back of you mind from five years ago.

The original post as he sat with me for the very last night…

I may disappear for a few days… It’s going to be hard for a while, but I just keep telling myself that it’s for the best, and I know in the end it is. I loved him with every fibre of my being and I know he knows it. I look at him now through tear soaked eyes, for the last night we have, and I know he will live on. He will live on in my writing, he will live on in my heart and he will live on forever, because he has become what everyone wants to become… a legend.

For those of you who don’t know… here it is once again (re-posted from last year)… The Legend of Bubba-Kitten

The Legend of Bubba-Kitten…

So you don’t know the legend of Bubba-Kitten? Well, sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of the big fat furball that’s sitting on my lap as I type…

Back in 1997 when I moved back to Sudbury for my second year of University, I had just settled in my apartment and noticed something was missing. At first I thought it was my stupid girlfriend who had gone home already after three days to visit her friends (different girlfriend… not the ‘infamous’ one from past posts), but then it sank in, I was living for the first time without a cat. When I was two I got my cat Tiger, then at 11 we got Whiskey. Tiger died when I was 15, and when I was 18 I got George. George and Whiskey were my cats until I moved away to university. First year I lived with roommates and one of them had a cat named Zoe. So, up until this point, I always had a cat around… so I needed one.

On the Saturday afternoon I decided to go to the Humane Society and get a cat. Since I was going to be working and at school a lot, I figured an older cat who was already independent would be good. Man did I pick the wrong cat! When I got there I asked the lady to show me the adult cats which were already fixed and had shots and weren’t hyper little kittens. I told her I wanted a cat that wanted affection, but would also be okay on it’s own during the day if I had to work. I told her how I never lived without a cat and she told me she knew the perfect cat for me.

As she took me into the kennel area, there were about ten cats in cages. She immediately opened up a cage with a huge 16 pound pure black cat with huge green eyes. He wasn’t fat at all… just an extremely large male cat. He immediately jumped into her arms and was the most affectionate cat I had ever seen. I held him and fell in love right away. I of course had the lady show me other cats, basically to get them out of their cages if only for a moment and show them some affection, but this big black cat just stared at me with his big green eyes and I knew he was coming home with me. There was a set of two cats, a brother and sister, who had never been separated before (they were 6 years old), but I didn’t have the money to get two cats, so the decision was made…. Tommy was coming home with me.

They loaned me a cage to take him home in and we drove across the city in silence as he took in the drive. I think he wanted me to think he was a quiet cat, but I now know better. He hid for the first few hours, but once I fell asleep on the couch, I woke up to him sleeping on my chest with his head nuzzled into my neck. there was no way anyone could ever give up a cat so perfect… then I learned the story.

A few days later I took the cage back to the Humane Society and the woman who ran the place asked me to step into her office. She told me that the family who owned Tommy wanted him back. I was astounded! I thought once an animal was put up for adoption and someone adopted them, that was it, but this family was fighting to get him back. The woman explained that the family had gone away for a few months and left Tommy with their grandmother. The grandmother wasn’t used to cats and was overwhelmed having to take care of him so she brought him to the Humane Society. Supposedly she thought she was putting him in their care, but she filled out all the adoption forms and such, so I still think it’s a lie. So, the Humane Society wanted me to bring Tommy back and pick out a new cat. Easier said than done. I told the woman I had to go home and think about it.

I drove home thinking that maybe I should give the cat back, but what type of family goes away for that long and leaves their cat with a crazy woman who puts it up for adoption? I got home and called the one person who could help… my mom. I told her the situation and she said I had to do what I thought was right. She knew I was already bonded with Tommy and that it would be hard to let him go, even though it had only been one week. So, I sat there and looked at Tommy and we had a small discussion about his old family. I told him I had to take him back and that his family missed him. The entire conversation I thought I was going to cry, and at the end when I decided that I would take him back I did begin to cry. This was my cat and I had to give him up. that was when he made his own decision. As I sat there crying, he climbed onto my lap and rubbed against my chest. He sat down on my lap facing me and I asked him if he wanted to go. He just looked at me, meowed once and moved forward and licked my face like a dog. He loved me… he wasn’t going anywhere.

The Humane Society called the next day asking when Tommy was coming back and I told them I was probably going to keep him. the woman on the other end of the phone was pretty pissed off an was trying to get me to change my mind. Now that I look back on it, she knew she couldn’t do anything about it since I paid and signed the forms to adopt him, but she tried her hardest. She called at least twice a day for about a week telling me the family missed Tommy and their daughter wanted to get him back. I was angry and kept telling the woman that I was keeping him, but she was starting to break me down, so I called at the end of the week and asked the woman what they were going to do for me if I brought Tommy back. She said since I had paid the fees I could pick out any cat I wanted to have for my own. I thought about it and was only willing to give Tommy up if the deal was right. Tommy would go back to a home that supposedly loved him and I would give another cat a loving home, but I figured since I had the upper hand, I would ask for the brother and sister in trade for Tommy. I thought it was a great deal, three cats would get nice homes and the brother and sister would get to stay together, but the woman acted like I had just asked her to murder someone. She told me that there was no 2-for-1 trade… so I told her there was no deal then.

This woman actually told me to stop being stupid and if I wanted the two cats I would have to pay for the second. So, I did what I had to do… I told her that if she ever called my house again I would contact the police about harassment and have her charged. Since at the time I was still a law student, I knew I had all the legal rights to that cat. She did call one more time asking if I would talk to the family myself and I told her Tommy made his decision and told me he wanted to stay. That was the last I heard from the Humane Society.

So, I guess you’re wondering where Bubba came from after all that about a cat named Tommy. Well… Bubba is Tommy. You see, much like the Witness Protection Program in the US, Bubba is the sole member of the CFIH… Canadain Felines in Hiding. If someone came to my door looking for a 16 pound black cat named Tommy, they would only see a 21 pound black cat named Bubba.

The name Bubba actually came from watching Forest Gump one night. Patty (the live-in at the time) and I were trying to watch the movie and Tommy was running in and out of the room like a psycho. The cat just kept running. Every minute or two he would run through the room, then take off again. At one point, just after Bubba (the character) died in the movie, Tommy came in and sat staring at me in front of the TV. I looked at him and said “RUN BUBBA RUN” and he took off like a bat out of hell (damn great album by the way…). We laughed and every time he ran into the room we would burst out laughing and yell ‘RUN BUBBA’ to him. I started calling him bubba as a joke, but the name stuck and he began answering to it more than Tommy. We joked it was his secret name to hide from his old, abusive family, but eventually it became his name and I had a new old cat… Bubba instead of Tommy.

You can try and call him Tommy now, but he’ll just give you a “Don’t be stupid’ look. His name has expanded some as Nat (yes, the infamous one…) always called him ‘Bubba-Kitten’ and I nicknamed him ‘Pooh’ since that’s what he smelled like a lot of the time. One day he knocked over a huge floor lamp and I yelled at him and called him by his full name, or at least the full name I came up with at the time… Thomas Bubble-ishous The Pooh Thompson… and it stuck. I think Nat is the only other person who knew his full name until now. He has now been with me almost seven years and I can’t imagine life without him. Everyone and everything has come and gone in my life over the past seven years, but Bubba has been the one rock I can count on. He’s ten years old now, but acts like a kitten now that he has his little sister Kokanee (yes, named after the BC beer…) living with him.

So right now I have three cats… George is almost twelve and lives with my parents, Koko is my sister’s cat, but she lives with us… and there’s the love of my life Bubba. He’s my baby, my best friend and the face I love to wake up to every morning… even if his breath does still smell like ass!

So, there’s the legend of Bubba-Kitten. I could probably make a living off a series of books based on this cat. He comes from a broken home (three times actually…), he steals socks, fetches like a dog, talks with me and will talk into the phone when prompted, loves to stare directly at blank walls and has some of the funniest dreams ever. Even people who don’t like cats end up loving this guy!

Should I have given him back? Maybe… but I can’t imagine what my life would be like right now if I didn’t have him.

---

The quick update after this happened… I adopted a new cat named Charlee four months later who now lives with my parents in Canada.  George died a week after his 15th birthday making him the oldest Thompson cat to date.  I now live in Taiwan with a one-eyed, one-eared cat named Mouthy and take care of, feed and visit about 30 street cats a few times a week and they have all become part of the family Bubba started…

After last Chinese New Year I kind of soured on the novels I was reading.  I took two books with me, but had the time to read at least four or five while we relaxed on the beach in Thailand.  My mistake.  I did take two great books with me and they were nice to just sit and read on the front porch of a little hut we rented on the beach each night as the sun set over the water and we both sat and read until we fell asleep in our deck chairs.  We both read the Gabriel Garcia Marquez short novel The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor which just blew me away, and I also read Issac Asomov’s The Caves of Steel.  I’m not usually a sci-fi fan, but when I do find one I like, I can really get into it.

After that, I guess I just didn’t go with the right books.  I read two different books about Thailand, one by french author Michel Houellebecq titled Platform which if it wasn’t for the sex scenes in the book I would have needed a fork to stick in my leg to keep me from nodding off every few minutes.  Supposedly he’s a groundbreaking author, but when a third of the novel is just technical writing about the resort industry around the world at that time, even some really well written sex scenes can’t keep my attention.

I also read Thai Girl by Andrew Hicks.  This book had potential and it basically took that potential and took a great big dump right on it.  The only thing that kept me reading was the fact that the book takes place on the same island and beach I spent my Chinese New Year, but the book is just written in such a bad way.  The author was obviously writing about himself and tried to make his ex-girlfriend look bad in the book (both at the beginning and the end of the book) but really managed to make himself and the lead character look like assholes.  From the first chapter the main character is a self centered prick and maybe he is supposed to turn into an understanding, love struck man when he meets the Thai girl who gives him massages every day (much better plot for a porn I think), but really you just end up thinking he’s an idiot.  Even the Thai girl, who is supposed to be the epitome of exotic passions comes off as a bit of an annoying tease.  All the little reviews on the book talk about rooting for them to finally make their relationship work with the cultural differences, but I was hoping for an ending like Platform had… (SPOILERS) with machine gun fire, Muslim extremists and a little shock and awe.  But no… just a poor boy who can’t stop loving a girl he can’t have and, of course, one last shot at the ex-girlfriend by insinuating that she had a threesome after they broke off while he ‘learned of the plight of the poor Thai people’.  I love you Jeri for sending it to me, and I enjoyed hating it from the very first sentence to the very last.  At least it made me realize something… I can write better than this in my sleep!!!

At last count I had only read 27 novels since January of 2009 which went back and forth from good to bad and back again.  I wanted to keep pace of at least two novels a month, but sometimes after a run of a few bad novels you don’t want to jump into another one too fast for fear of yet another letdown.  I grabbed some books from my shelves in Canada before boxing them all up from my friend’s house and placing them in one of the closets in my parent’s house (also taking about 50 books out that can go to a used book shop), and I bought a few from Amazon as well to try to give me something to read that I really wanted.  I went back to some old favorites like Vonnegut, Coupland, Spillane and Goldman and added a book I was told to search for titled World War Z (which I am saving for the next beach I sit on).

I found an old copy of Edgar Allen Poe short stories I had never read and was just blown away by things like The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Black Cat and The Masque of the Red Death.  Then I read the short novel Leaf Storm by Marquez. Not his best, but a solid story with very solid characters which is the thing I really like about him.

After that I got into the Mickey Spillane, Mike Hammer novels.  Old detective novels are just damn cool, dripping with testosterone, cigarette smoke and opening lines as simple and perfect as “The guy was dead as hell.”  Mickey Spillane just knew how to tell a story from the point of view of a real man with no worries of political correctness or people calling him a sexist.  He just spoke the truth from his point of view.  You could write pages about exactly how a woman looked to try to capture her beauty or let Mickey just write words like “Whatever a dame’s supposed to have on the ball, she’s got it.  My tongue feels an inch thick when I talk to her and if she asked me to jump I’d say, ‘How high?’”

I bought Cat’s Cradle back in university and it sat on my shelf for years before finally being taken half way around the world to be read.  I loved Galapagos and Welcome to the Monkey House so Cat’s Cradle had a lot to live up to, but wow, did it ever surpass my expectations.  Vonnegut was way to ahead of his time in his writing I think and this book with so many different sub-stories is so well pieced together, all interlinked with the genius invention ‘Ice-9′.  I’m having a hard time not just reading everything Vonnegut has written now because of this book, but I like to spread an author out.

Years ago I was tuned on to Douglas Coupland by, well, a flash in the pan so to speak, who raved about his work to no end.  She was right about most of it, but although I do fit in the category, I just couldn’t get into Generation X.  I was hesitant about reading the latest Generation A, as they keep referring to it as a modern X, but it is so much more.  The tale of five strangers who are stung by bees in a world where the bee population has long since disappeared.  The story speak to so many realities and ideas the way Coupland always does, but it’s the stories within the story that got me.  The characters (for reasons I will not divulge) begin creating original tales which are told in the book.  Each tale is cool in it’s own right, but the one that I re-read about ten times was ‘Superman and the Kryptonite Martinis’.  A quick, funny tale about Superman and a bartender to me tells the story of society today and where most are headed.  And… I either love or hate Coupland’s endings depending on the book, and I have to say, this one is up there as one of his strangest, and best to date.

So, what do I read now?  More Vonnegut or Marquez?  Something different, or more short story collections (which I have many waiting their turn)? I haven’t read any Elmore Leonard in a while and I still have books here from a few years back waiting patiently to take me away for a while.  Animals Taiwan had a used book sale last week where I picked up four more novels (mainly to give more to the group who helps me with the CNR of the street cats around my area) and I got a cheap copy of The Road by  Cormac McCarthy.  I avoided this book before after the disastrous and torturous No Country For Old Men (both the book and the movie), but I figured either my luck will hold out and this book will be good or I chose my bad book wisely and the next one will be good again.  I started it yesterday, leery of what may come from it and McCarthy’s strange writing style.  All I have to say is I stayed at the gym and did an extra hour of cardio today so I didn’t have to stop reading it. 

Maybe my luck with books is holding out after all…