super-sock saves vagina

i always seem to be leaving beijing. doesn't matter where in the world i am or what i'm doing, i close my eyes for one second and the next thing i know i'm leaving the big B. in a few days i'm doing it yet again.
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my past is a novel i read once and then forgot. the present is intensely so. one day does not seem to be related to the next, and last week may well have been someone else's life. i couldn't have hoped for more. not long ago i found myself lying on a table at midnight with a blind lady giving me a full-body massage (to think what some people can do with their elbows!). but the point is: it took me 48 hours and two and a half packets of oreos to get home after that. i live for that sort of thing.
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when i moved into my apartment several weeks ago, it was the definition of squalor. an inch of dust covered every surface, my bedroom door had no handle, cigarette butts and empty beer bottles littered the floor in every room, and the bathroom and kitchen were covered in matted hair and slime. nursing the grandmother of all hangovers, i scrubbed the sweet baby jesus out of every surface, removed truckloads of garbage, and neutralised all suspicious stains and viscous substances.
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the following day, two chinese girls moved into the apartment's two other rooms. one is really nice, but the other housemate never speaks, so i don't even know her name. i suspect she doesn't have one. how do you say cretin in chinese? there are at least two other voices i hear in the house on a regular basis, but have never seen the bodies they should be attached to. bodyless entities. perhaps they are the souls of the discarded clumps of matted hair seeking their former vessels. it's china after all.
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to get the apartment i brokered a deal with an evil pseudo-landlord middleman who goes by the new name of 'the fat prick'. on one occasion i returned home to find that everything i owned had disappeared, and a group of nameless and faceless people were milling about inside the house. days after that fiasco, after a handle and lock set was installed on my door and my things returned, i found the fat prick inside my locked room going through my things, demanding to see my beijing residents' card. i don't have anything of value to steal, but what a wanker. the saga continues.
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let's talk about the weather. the first two weeks that i was here were FREEZING. some days the maximum temperature only just got above zero. as a long-term tourist with a mobility problem, i try to keep my pack light, so i only have one pair of shoes, one pair of pants, one jumper...you get the picture. as a result, i had to wear everything i owned on every single day. whenever i washed my clothes at night, i had to wait the following morning in my sleeping bag until everything had dried so i could put it back on. but this isn't really a problem: beijing is the driest place in the universe. any water particles are hunted down and eliminated as soon as they enter the city limits, often sent to far-off country areas in the south west for re-education. so much moisture has been sucked out of my own body that i have been reduced to a mere concept. of interest, the concept that i have become is that of the unforseeable circumstance, in its plurality. i am unforseeable circumstances. which concept would you become after beijing had sucked you dry?
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i have been studying and not-so-studying. i have taken to night-time wanderings, oreos dipped in hot chocolate and giving myself up to the mysteries of human nature. i have taken up residence in a cafe that serves vegetable sandwiches you would kill for. i have developed a strong affinity for my slavic brothers and easy games of sudoku. i have a chinese teacher obsessed with blood groups, have not been cleanly shaven for 3 months and have held my breath all the way to the 15th floor. i have electrocuted myself with a double-A battery. i have disturbing palpitations after drinking coffee, an aversion to raw onion on the side of my plate, and a pseudo-premontion that i will die at the age of 36. peace.
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pics - (1 - view from my apartment - 2 - cafe hump - 3 - haven't had a photo of bastion and i together so i thought i'd just chuck this one in - 4 - my room - 5 - dj dog)