

I’m guessing her hometown is the sort of place where it’s hand-to-mouth. A place where if you don’t work, you’ll probably starve and die… A place where there’s no handouts or welfare and where no one gives you shit…
She said she’d worked before at a factory, assembling Barbie dolls, and as a farmer, planting rice.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer She’d mentioned a young son. And she mentioned a husband, a meth runner/policeman. And that her husband took better care of his fighting roosters than her. And that her husband’d had another wife and kid. And that when she discovered her husband’s infidelity, she split for Bangkok to do bar and dirty massage work…
She said she sends money home and returns to Isaan from time to time to help her parents plant rice...
But she doesn’t talk too much about her family or past… Most of the time she’s over, she’s eating or drinking, or we’re fucking or watching funny TikTok videos of animals on her phone…
Teelak doesn’t ask me many personal questions. She’s never asked about the scars on my legs. But she once asked about all the pills.
You know, I’ve never felt comfortable complaining, to her, about my ghosts, or the night terrors… or the weight of the uniform…
Sometimes I wanna tell her… how every night I’m watching my own worst memories. How every night, I’m a spectator…
I could see Teelak being a good listener… Good as God...
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฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿
I hope for Teelak’s sake that she’s saved money. That she has something to fall back on…
She said she’d been attending a training course to become a nail and hair stylist, that she might open her own beauty salon someday.
But she’d been slacking off in the course, said she was often too lazy to go…
Teelak told me the other week she’d started a Tinder profile… I’m not sure if she’s on OnlyFans or not… And the other day she mentioned she joined a few mail-order bride and similar looking-for-international-love websites…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer While sitting on the toilet to piss, with the bathroom door open, the other night, Teelak told me a fortune teller told her that this year she’d find a
“foreign husband.” She said she wanted a man over 50, but not one that was too “old” like the one her friend Pear had found.
Lifting the bum gun to her crotch, Teelak told me Pear, at 26, had had a fiancé, a Frenchman aged 68. But the Frenchie had suddenly croaked before Pear “got anything from him.”
฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿
After admonishing me for reeking of ganja, a few nights ago, Teelak punched me in the arm and pinched my left nipple. Then she said, coolly, that I forgot her birthday and that she’d turned 41…
I had always thought she was about 33 or 34…
Come to think of it, though, at certain angles and lighting, she does kinda look her age.
฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿
10 AM. And I was already feeling fucked up, melting into my mattress, watching Phillies highlights on my phone. Then I started thinking of her, wondering if today I’ll see my Teelak...
She visits in the mornings and afternoons, but more often late at night.
She shows up caked in layers of sultry, glittery makeup and eyeshadows, neon lipsticks and with her hair dyed different colors.
Sometimes she’s in a sundress. And sometimes she’s in jean cutoffs riding up so high her ass is hanging out the hems.
Normally she shows up unannounced…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The first thing she always does is leave her silver spike-heels by the door.
Then she’s air-kissing, and I love how her lips incarnadine and expand as she smooches at me... Then she goes for a shower in my bathroom, and never has she complained of the sewage-like, fecal scent drifting up from the bathroom drains…
Then, depending on my degree of drunkenness, we might drink whisky and fuck to Megan Thee Stallion songs on her phone.
But when I’m too drunk, she just showers and helps me puke, then steals food and leaves…
Every once in a while, though, perhaps for Karma’s sake, she’ll leave me a small plastic box or two of the Thai coconut pancake dessert she knows I like…
Last week Teelak was flashing her angry smile… bug-eyed and arching her eyebrows, crossing her arms and stomping her foot, accusing me of having
“lots of other girls” over. Teelak flaming with jealousy because she found a long curl of black hair in the bathroom sink...
My buddy Tony told me that professionals in Thailand tend to be possessive. Even though they’re out canvassing Soi Cowboy, Nana Plaza, fucking a whole planeload or two of tourists each month, many Thai sex workers expect a type of customer loyalty and abhor the “butterfly man,”
the man who covets and fucks many different girls.
But I’ve never divulged or answered any of Teelak’s questions... I just mask myself in a goofy smile. Laugh and smirk like a local…
Recently, though, she’s been needling me more and more, imploring me to take her out for dinner and dancing. Smiling at me, through boiling teeth, inquiring… asking why I mostly just sit in my room drinking whisky, reading Russian novels.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Or why I don’t have a Christmas tree. Or any pictures on my walls, aside from a lone Phillies banner (or “Peel-lees” as she calls them).
She’s also been asking me to take her to America. She said she wants to see snow. And she’s been talking about buying a house, looking at pictures of real estate online.
But she’s always gone whenever I wake up.
฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿฿
Teelak likes purple nurples. She likes to hit me with hard punches, slaps on the arms.
She chastises me in Thai, but I can only gleam half of it. She seems especially enraged whenever I call her beautiful, hissing “bok wan dtalot!”
(always a sweet talker!) with bitter conviction…
My Teelak sure has an economy of words. She’s not into disquisitions.
She’s quite blunt and tells me if my Thai sounds like shit or if I’m getting fat or if I shave myself a mohawk haircut that she thinks looks stupid…
But no matter which way her mood swings, and even if she’s just being plain belligerent, I still think she’s beautiful…
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Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
LOAN SHARK CAPITAL
The food cart brought in anywhere from $10 to $70 per day. That normally meant $300 to $2000 per month.
But that didn’t include payments to local police- $50 per month- nor did it include the cost of ingredients, food packaging, cooking gas, plus gas for the motorbike.
Such expenses generally added up to around $300 per month.
At month’s end, and if it were a good month, they’d be left with around $1650 in profit. And if the month wasn’t so good, maybe $150 in debt.
Of course none of this included personal expenses. Living costs, food, utilities, rent. A worse month could reach $300 in the red…
“But this shouldn’t be,” Peechai lamented. He and his wife of 10 years sat next to one another on their bamboo mat, which doubled as their bed, in their windowless, sweltering, sparsely furnished one-room apartment.
“The math added up to $1000 per month,” Lamyai, his wife, agreed, “but that didn’t take COVID into account.”
“COVID,” Peechai snorted, before taking a prolonged sip from a bottle of rice whiskey.
“There used to be loads of foot traffic. Office workers, the tourists.”
“They didn’t lie to us. We could have easily earned $800 per month. The granny selling coconut cakes was once making $2000. HiSo office workers were sending their assistants to pick up cakes from her. The sausage and sticky rice seller too.
Both made enough, eventually, to retire back to Cambodia.”
“But we are nowhere close to retirement.”
“We can’t worry about that now. Right now, we don’t even have enough saved to get us to next month. We’re going to need a loan.”
“No…” Peechai moaned, his nostrils quivering, then his jaw muscles clenched up, as if he were about to puke.
But Lamyai was unmoved; shaking her head, she lamented, “It’s the only way to get us through...”
Arrangements were made. A $4000 loan. With 20% interest. It had to be repaid, in full, within a year, or else the interest rate increased to 35% and an additional 20% on the principal would be added to the total.
Their lender was not a standard banker. The lender was a nearby neighbor. A diminutive elderly man. The old man and his family ran a hole-in-the-wall noodle shop just off the main road and lived in the apartment on the upper floor of the shophouse.
The old man had earlier left a lasting impression on Peechai, as he looked like the Buddha, with his bald head and potbelly, and Peechai had initially viewed this as a positive omen.
The Buddha lookalike’s son, a jowly, muscular, kickboxing enthusiast greeted Peechai with a wai and showed Peechai up to the old man’s cramped but clean apartment.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The apartment appeared almost like an Asian museum. Its living room so full of Chinese calligraphy, paintings of rivers and mountains and various golden Buddhas statues sitting, standing, and reclining everywhere.
Peechai passed an altar, with flashing red lights and black and white photos honoring the family’s ancestors, before entering the old man’s tiny office, which was also heavily adorned in Buddhist and Daoist paintings, calligraphy scrolls and statues and figurines.
It was there that over a glossy, mud-brown wooden desk the loan terms were discussed.
The Buddha lookalike lender spoke in a soft cadence, his words measured, his voice low, calm and reassuring.
However, his son spoke in a booming, bass-heavy voice, a voice that reverberated, shook Peechai’s soul. Looking over at the son, Peechai surmised that the young man might have been a tiger or a crocodile in another life. The young man exuding a predatory energy…
Peechai received a cash-filled manilla envelope. Then the lender’s son escorted the aspiring restauranteur to the door. Before Peechai left, the young man pointed to the phone cradled in his palm, then nodded to a picture flickering on the phone’s screen.
In the picture was a beggar, a middle-aged man who’d been maimed. Disfiguring burns covering his face. The beggar looking like something from a horror movie.
Then the lender’s son flicked the screen to another picture. This one of a grimacing middle-aged man, the man missing an arm, the man kneeling on a street corner, with his lone arm extended, holding out an empty plastic cup.
“Please pay on time,” the bass-heavy voice spoke. The words edged with a discomforting politeness.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Peechai and Lamyai had been banking on the virus situation to improve. For businesses downtown to reopen. For tourists to return. But time went on and the virus only worsened. Every day, higher numbers of infections were reported.
Sales were scarce. With Bangkok practically a ghost town, the couple were lucky to bring in $10 per day. Some days they made nothing.
When the first installment of the loan was due, the couple panicked, knowing they’d be unable to pay. They fretted over the pictures they’d seen, those poor disfigured souls forced to beg. They knew the lender’s son or another goon would be showing up soon. And they did.
The lender’s son came calling, his deep voice resonating, echoing off the walls.
He’d brought along two other goons, also appearing as kickboxers, also covered in tattoos. The pack of young thugs showing up at 10 p.m. to the couple’s apartment, hammering on the flimsy front door, demanding the first installment.
The ruffians cornered Peechai, began backing him up to the grimy mustard-colored wall by the bathroom. Peechai could smell a whiff of sewage pushing up from the tiny, stinky bathroom sink. Beads of healing sweat streamed down his forehead and lower back and he lifted his hands high in the air as if being busted by the police.
Smelling the stink of shit, his heart jumped like a monkey in a cage as he contemplated how he’d be beaten.
It was at this moment that Lamyai emerged with a tray of drinks- a bottle of beer and three clear plastic cups half-full of rice whiskey.
“Please,” Lamyai said, in a calm voice, though her eyes were red and wet, “please, let’s sit down and discuss this. There must be another way.”
The men craned their necks at Lamyai. One swept his gaze over her figure, which, even under her loose-fitting pajamas, was visible and quite fetching, quite sharply curved.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The lender’s son grunted to the other men, who nodded and the three repaired to the pink plastic seats around the small foldable table in the center of the room.
Lamyai handed Peechai the bottle of beer, and then she served the men, who each wasted no time guzzling the whiskey, slamming the clear cups down to the thin table. One of the ruffians even crunched the cup in his hand, staring ominously at Peechai as he did so. All the young thugs looking like tigers eying prey.
Within seconds, though, the menacing young men’s faces blanched, then twisted to mortified. Then they began convulsing and coughing. Eyes popping. The tattooed pack wheezing and clapping their hands to their necks and faces, struggling to breathe, choking on words. The young men then keeling over, out of their chairs, falling to the floor and retching until they finally seized up, froze in place.
Peechai crept forward, stopped and stood above the young men’s fresh corpses, staring, aghast, like he’d seen a ghost.
But Lamyai wasted no time before checking the lifeless men’s pulses. Finding nothing, she rifled through each’s pockets, lifted out their wallets, phones, and sizable cash wads, then carefully plucked off the goons’ gold chains, amulets, and rings, stuffed the pilfered treasure into her knock-off Charles and Keith purse.
Peechai’s mouth tightened as he stood frozen in place. Then he felt his jaw loosen, and it was as if a circle of golden light were rising above Lamyai as she rose to her feet.
“We’ll take an overnight bus back to the village,” Lamyai said. Her words like a warm gust of wind. “Just after we visit the old man for a glass of whiskey,” she went on, in a tone that told only of tranquility.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
TAXI RIDE IN SHANGHAI
At the hotel’s immaculate breakfast buffet, I overheard an American businessman, at the next table, talking to his coworkers about the time in Shanghai he was being driven to a construction site.
The taxi driver was driving recklessly, even for mainland China, and the businessman chortled, said that in China there are “no rules” on the road. It’s every man for himself.
The taxi driver, the businessman went on, was a slender man, who had a ridiculous combover, like what remained of his jet-black hair just plastered to the
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer left side of his skull, and that the driver been quiet. But then the driver began speaking, suddenly, in near-perfect English, of how his family was displaced, forced from their home, their village of centuries, due to the construction of a trendy new English-named shopping/condominium complex.
The driver was tearing up, honking at everything. His driving becoming even more erratic and herky-jerky, full of fits and stops, sharp turns. The businessman getting whiplash. The driver’s voice raising, strained and venomous. The driver recounting how his wife was dragged from her home, beaten and arrested, and his wife’s parents had had their belongings carted out and dumped in the street.
The closer the taxi got… the larger the construction site grew in the windshield…
the angrier the driver became. The driver’s hands trembling, a look of blood in his eyes.
“All this to build shopping mall. Shopping mall, build shopping mall!” the driver kept repeating.
The businessman said that he feared the cab driver might turn on him. That he’d heard of a French businessman recently stabbed on the street in Shanghai and that no one stopped to help and that the police in China generally don’t do anything aside smoke cigarettes and play on their phones and that you’d need to bribe them to do anything. And that they’d certainly never side with a foreigner, even a businessman from a Fortune 500 company...
The American businessman was really panicking, silently. Worried that any second the driver might jerk the car to the side of the road and break out a knife or blunt object.
But once they reached the construction site, the driver hushed silent. The businessman then paid the driver, cautiously, and stepped out of the car.
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YOU SHOULD FIND A HUSBAND
๑
Soothing synths, waterfalls, and gong chimes sounded softly across the dim, rectangular room. A rosy aroma of massage oil wafting about. An overhead a/c was gently whirring, its icy blasts tickling at the tourist’s skin.
“You should find a husband,” said the tourist, his voice quietly breaking.
The young girl giggled, shook her head and furtively lowered her gaze, then went back to whipping her hands up and down the tourist’s shin, seemingly using all
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer the energy she could muster as she did so. Understandably, too, considering the tourist’s size.
The tourist, compared to most of the slender Southeast Asians, was practically a Big Foot. He stood at 6’4, and was wide-bodied, with thick bones.
The tourist, despite his considerable mass, however, was not a young man. Far from it, in fact. And his countenance told of time’s rough hands. The lines crisscrossing the folds of his face cut deep as dried riverbeds. Gathering time had also taken the tourist’s color; his fuzzy coat of body hair, his neatly trimmed Hemingway beard, his wavy mop of hair… all had silvered.
That coat of silvery-gray body hair, along with his skin’s pallor, and heavyset size, had the locals joking, nicknaming him, in Thai, “หมีขั้วโลก” ( mee kohlok) - the
“Polar Bear.”
Despite the locals’ barbs, which he didn’t pick up on, the tourist certainly didn’t lack self-confidence. Quite the contrary. He had a heavenly-high opinion of himself. Moreover, he looked down on many of the other farangs he’d see around Bangkok. He’d seen countless Thailand expats, around his age, that were, in his eyes, in far worse shape. Most of them far thicker in the waist, with big Buddha bellies far floppier than his.
Not to mention the clothes they’d wear… While the tourist was no fashionista, he was practically a GQ cover model compared to some of the losers he’d see around Bangkok. The fat, pathetic old men in their torn, tattered beer tank-tops, dirty cargo shorts, flannel shirts, corduroy pants and even a few in clunky, black, Velcro retard shoes…
And while most of the losers had fat heads, heads bald as a baboon’s ass, some of those who did have hair, their hairstyles, for fuck’s sake, the tourist would think, cringing just looking at them… Like the loser the tourist had been seeing on Sukhumvit Road, the raisin-faced skeleton, that zombie-looking creature whose scalp was eagle bald, yet this particular shitbird had a sloppy mane of silver locks flapping from the back of his skull, almost an “old man mullet.”
Or worse, the “old man bun” Eurotrash. Those pitiful fucks with their gray hairs pulled into man buns.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer What a bunch of losers, he’d think, glaring at them in disgust. How poorly they’ve aged… How poorly they’d endured the onslaught of time… Unlike him…
Damn right, especially compared to those fuckballs, he was a silver fox. And that’s what he saw in his bathroom mirror, when he’d flex his biceps after a shower, admiring his reflection, thinking of how well he’d aged, how well he’d matured, just like a fine whiskey.
Whenever he’d shave, he’d stop to appreciate his strong jaw, his cleft chin, and he’d feel so handsome, so dashing. He was a proper gentleman. He was what every man should look like. Unlike those sad souls around lower Sukhumvit, who’d aged worse than milk. Some aging even worse than Axl Rose.
But not him, the tourist would think, running his fingers through his thick, moon-silver hair. And he’d grin, devilishly, happy to admire his reflection anytime he saw it, fancying himself as resembling a 1990s, early 2000s Sean Connery, or a 2010s George Clooney, albeit slightly more handsome…
“You are beautiful,” the tourist continued, flashing a flirty, pearly white smile at the masseuse, “why hasn’t any man married you yet?”
The young girl blushed again, keeping her eyes locked on the tourist’s legs and feet, her slim body moving rhythmically as she kneaded and palmed at his plump thighs.
Her strength certainly surprised him, a girl this tiny, with this degree of power and a grip this tight. She really had a vise-grip. Might be from toiling in those rice fields, the tourist pondered, knowing that a lot of these masseuses were migrant workers, came from the countryside...
“Just how old is she?” a wispy voice inquired and faded away, echoing in his thoughts.
The tourist guessed the girl’s age at about 25, though it could have been higher or lower. He’d always been bad at guessing Asians’ ages.
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Looking down, he saw his long feet cradled in the young girl’s small, caramel-colored hands, and for the first time, he awed at just how white his body hair had become. Even his feet, the hair on his toes, had all gone white.
Another voice popped in his head, intruding like a loud, sudden TV commercial.
This voice was an aggrieved one. It was accusatory. Full of guttural sounds and hisses. And it was castigating him, mocking his age, his weight, everything about him. But then familiar, comforting thoughts of football arose in his head, fogged in, and the aggrieved voice quieted, became a garbled hum, before fading to weakening bursts of plosive white noise…
It’d been years since the first gray hair had appeared on his head, atop his right temple. But he could remember it like yesterday. He’d found the gray hair one winter morning, after shaving. In the bathroom mirror, over the sink, he’d leaned forward, inspected his sideburns, spotted the lone gray and knew instantly, exactly what it was and what it meant. It was a message. A message from Death and Death’s son, Father Time. A message that the clock was ticking.
It was around this discovery that he first started asking himself existential questions. What did he want? Beyond the superficial, the materialistic, the sybaritic… he was unsure…
The tourist hadn’t known exactly what he wanted. But he had arrived at a point where he realized that whatever it was that he wanted, he wasn’t getting.
His life felt boring, meaningless. At his office job, every day was the same. Every day it was the same cold faces, the same packed subways, the same casefiles, the same monotonous meetings and memos. The same soporific whir of the central heating/cooling system. The same trivial conversations with coworkers about the same stupid TV shows.
Then he’d come home to watch those same stupid TV shows. Not so much because he liked them, but because he felt like he was supposed to. That if he didn’t, he’d have nothing to say at the watercooler. Although the laugh-tracks, canned applause, and one-liners did ease his mind, if nothing else.
While watching TV, he’d eat TV dinners, delivery pizza, and potato chips. He’d drink soda. Once, he was drinking the same soda as he saw on a TV ad. In the commercial, there was a man his age and build, also alone in an apartment. Then the man is cracking open a can of the soda and instantly is transported, beamed, ala Star Trek, to a wild beach dance party filled with scantily clad women and pumping loud music.
But that hadn’t happened to him when he opened the soda. Or when he drank it.
And on a quiet, intrinsic level, it bothered him that it didn’t happen. He’d bought the same soda, but no girls in bikinis appeared. He wasn’t beamed to an exotic island. It wasn’t fair, he softly raged. But he let the feeling pass and forgot about it once the sitcom came back on.
The tourist’s weekends weren’t much better. He’d go to the same bar with his coworkers and occasionally he’d go on the same dates with the same boring women.
He started wondering what more was out there. He wanted to discover the world, to travel, to see distant, exotic lands while he still had time, before he got too old.
While on the crowded subway, his face ruddy from the blustery cold, his fingers
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer numb, the tourist suddenly had an epiphany. He happened upon the cruelty of life, that he’d slave away in an office, give a multi-national corporation his prime years, then finally, when he got to retire, he’d be a toothless, incontinent old man, wearing adult diapers and shitting himself.
Standing in that packed subway car, full of frowning faces, the tourist knew, he knew then and there, that he had to do something, he had to find something more…
That gray hair, that morning, had put his mind in motion, had put the fear of time in him. That gray hair had instilled in him the idea that time was tugging him further out to sea. And he knew he needed to fill a void.
One wet, cold and ugly fall evening, when he was half-drunk, sprawled out on the couch, the action movie Kickboxer came on TV. It was set in Thailand, which, to him, seemed like the farthest place away from his dreary, landlocked landscape.
With its golden temples, sun-splashed beaches and bustling cities, Thailand, to him, was probably the most exotic place on the planet. He had to go there. It wasn’t just drunk talk, either, it was an omen, a sign from the universe. He had to go there. He had to be there.
So it was decided. He’d visit Thailand during his next vacation.
And thus began his history of visiting Thailand. The 14-hour plane ride was a beast, but sleeping pills helped. He’d always be sure to book a window seat, and once airborne, he’d tilt his head and gaze down at the endless white patches of land and the bent spine of his boring city, watching with joy as they shrunk and then vanished beneath creamy, cottony blankets of clouds. Then he’d feel the euphoric rush of the pills surging through his bloodstream as he’d lean back in his seat and doze off, happily knowing he’d be waking up to palm trees and fun and sun in paradise.
The tourist’s every trip to Thailand was almost the same. But unlike the monotony of his job, the similarity was comforting rather than defeating.
His every trip to Thailand was like this: First, he’d stay a few nights in Bangkok, strategically near Nana Plaza, Bangkok’s biggest red-light district. Then he’d fly south to a lush tropical island and stay at a seaside resort. There, he’d swim in the Andaman Sea, eat heaps of mangoes, and when the sun paled, he’d retire to his suite to sip cold beer and watch the stars from his balcony. Then he’d fly back to Bangkok, for a night or two, hit the go-go bars and massage parlors once or twice more, before finally flying home.
Every trip was practically identical. And that was the point. He didn’t want it any other way.
And why would he? From the first time he’d set foot in Thailand, he’d loved it, had taken an immediate shine to the country, its warm weather, January sunshine kissing his skin, its friendly faces and easy living…
And he especially loved the affordable beautiful women.
The women were one of the biggest reasons why he kept coming back. The “bar girls,” ladies at bars, who’d provide intimate companionship for a minimal fee, they became his fetish. They were the best-looking women he’d ever seen, too.
Drop-dead gorgeous. With or without makeup. And they were almost all slender, with curves cut from stone and with jaw-droppingly sexy, exotic features, hyperborean cheekbones, upcurved eyes like temple eaves, and golden, honey-colored skin… Skin softer than the finest silks…
Better yet, the Thai women were outgoing, fun. Most spoke near-perfect English, could converse freely, and loved to joke around and have a good time. Unlike the escorts he’d hired in his home country, the Thai ladies weren’t hurried, shifty-eyed, or nervous, and didn’t make it feel like they were doing anything wrong…
Not that he cared if they really liked him. Although they sure acted like they did.
The Thai bar girls were damn near Oscar-caliber actresses, smiling, nodding along, and laughing at all his corny jokes. And in bed, they were like porn stars, AVN
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Award worthy, true professional fuck-machines easily capable of satisfying any and every carnal urge.
Not to mention the diversity… of pussy…
In Thailand, he could have a college-aged girl (18-23 y/o) one night, then a more mature girl (28-36 y/o) the next. A thinner girl one night, a thicker girl the next.
Darker skin one night, lighter the next. Big tits, small tits, juicy butt, swimsuit model butt, tall, short, et cetera, et cetera… Thailand, to him, was basically one big buffet of beautiful pussy, a pussy paradise…
The tourist simply loved the ability to choose, being able to walk into a bar and pick whichever woman he wanted, rather than walking into a bar, in his cold country, hoping and praying he could find a lady who liked him.
In Thailand, all the women at all the bars liked him.
๔
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer And so he kept coming back, every year. Though he’d have a killer experience, every trip, still, there were a series of voices in his head, shrill, squeaky voices, that’d speak up, from time to time, during his visits to the Kingdom. The voices following him like a guilty conscience. The voices appearing as audio intrusions, in daytime, and at night, too. And sometimes in dreams. The voices sometimes manifesting in different stages of sleep. The voices sometimes personified and sounded by shadowy, veiled figures, with eyes like black pebbles…
The voices told of self-doubt. And hate. The voices whispering to him that the Thais were all fakes. That their smiles were an act, a pantomime. That behind their smiles, was only emptiness. And faceless greed. That everything in Thailand was fake. All the buildings, everything, it was a mirage. It was artifice. That it shouldn’t be there.
Between barhopping in Bangkok, the tourist sometimes took the Skytrain, and he’d silently stand by the train window, watching the passing scenery of the city as if he were inspecting a painting in an art gallery. Here and there, with the city moving under his feet, the tourist would glance over at a vacant lot and see it reclaimed by jungle, tropical foliage, and the voices would fade in, tell him that Bangkok was a swamp. It was all a jungle. And that’s what it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be a jungle, with crocodiles, snakes, silver streams, waterfalls, exotic birds...
“None of this… None of it… None of it… should even be here…”
From time to time the aggrieved voices would appear, in this way, and intrude on his holidays. They’d boo and hiss. Declare that he was a fraud. Declaim him a lecherous sexpest. Proclaim that he was exploiting people in a third world country.
And that even worse, he was being exploited himself.
When the voices got too loud, he’d quiet them with booze and soothing thoughts of football. But, like a cockroach, they were there, and stayed there, infesting, alive in the walls of his mind...
Back home, back in his cold country, the cockroach voices would normally quiet.
Or, strangely, they’d shift their tone to saccharine, to nostalgia. The voices pining to be back in Bangkok, in Thailand, where everything was as it should be.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The tourist would fantasize, plan his next trip to Bangkok. Doing so would help him avoid lamenting too much about his unsatisfying job, unsatisfying local women…
The local women- ugh. He’d be perpetually disappointed that he couldn’t find anyone comparable to the Thai ladies. The local women, Western women, to him, had become disgusting. Useless. They seemed so masculine too. They’d have short hair, talk like men, act like men, dress like men, and their noses were always too big, their frames fat as milk cows. The local women just totally, in every conceivable way, turned him off.
Worse yet, unlike in Asia, he’d found fat women being glorified, put on front pages of magazines, and even in lingerie ads. He’d gag, throw up inside his mouth seeing scantily clad, overweight pop singers, like Lizzo, wobbling their lardy asses on television. And he’d scratch his head as fat chicks, somehow, were proclaimed by the Western mainstream media as being “brave” for flaunting their flabby figures.
To him, there was nothing brave or sexy about a woman being a fatty. Nothing worth celebrating. To the tourist, fat chicks were just plain gross…
Back in the West, the tourist would miss the gentle, thin Asian girly girls, with their absurdly long painted nails, fake lashes, heaps of makeup and luscious lips always stretched into smiles. Their feminine, form-fitting clothes and shiny hair.
Their super tight, tiny pussies and the certain silkiness, reactivity of their sugary skin. Eventually he gave up on dating local women and abandoned any idea of
“settling down” in his native land and its icy, gloomy environs.
Thailand, his once, twice, or thrice-yearly trips to the “Land of Smiles,” were all he needed.
๕
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer So it was natural for the tourist to decide to retire in Thailand. Once he hit retirement age, he decided to leave his home country, straightaway, for good, and he hopped the next plane bound for Southeast Asia.
The tourist rented a small but sunny, furnished apartment in downtown Bangkok, near Sukhumvit Road. It was his little chamber in paradise. And next to his new apartment was a massage shop, where he’d go, nearly every day, for a foot massage or Thai massage. One thing he absolutely loved about Thailand was its availability of affordable massages. Only 8 dollars for an hour of foot massage.
With his body sore from age, the daily massages worked wonders.
Not to mention Thailand’s tropical weather, humidity helped loosen his joints, alleviated his worsening arthritis. It was paradise, truly paradise, and for the first month, he’d felt like a new man. He’d felt young again and on top of the world.
He was living the dream, drinking cold beer, every day, eating spicy food, popping dick pills, and boning bar girls half his age. It was his perfect life…
At the massage shop next to his place, he soon discovered one of the most beautiful girls he’d ever seen. A moon among stars. She had a face that was shockingly beautiful. Beautiful enough to shake mountains. And she was svelte, petite, and honey-skinned, with shiny, raven-black hair falling just past her shoulders. She wore heavy helpings of makeup, too, which he liked, and her ludicrously long fake lashes, sparkly pink eye shadows over her upcurved eyes were just… so mesmerizing… that every time he gazed upon her… he felt light-headed in love…
Even the dim lighting of the massage parlor reflected, like shimmering stars, off her figure, and simply seeing her brought a smile to his face.
Her English seemed minimal, though. As was his Thai, despite his visiting the country for over two decades. Although it was on his to-do list, he’d not gotten around to taking a Thai language study course. The vowels, and the tones, in particular, felt nearly impossible for him. Not to mention the indecipherable script of its alphabet.
Plus, most everyone in Thailand, in Bangkok, touristy spots, spoke “Tourist”, a pidgin dialect of hand signals, body language, and Thai-accented English words, and he found himself speaking more and more in the pidgin syntax and frequently
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer noticed himself saying English loan words in that same Thai fashion, always stressing the final syllable, like com-pu-TUH, et cetera.
However, now that he was living in Thailand, now that he was retired, perhaps he would do the Thai language course, he thought, envisioning chatting up the massage girl. Maybe being able to communicate with a goddess as pretty as her was all the motivation he needed. It’s not like he didn’t have the time. Time, finally, it seemed, was on his side.
๖
That massage shop girl soon came to occupy his mind. She’d flit through his thoughts and even appear in his dreams. She’d replaced the menacing veiled figures, and since settling in Thailand, the aggrieved voices had all but disappeared, become as distant as waves upon a faraway shore.
The massage girl… She’d set his mind in motion, lit a fire in his heart, and he’d daydream about her, then think of her at night before sinking into sleep, replaying comforting mental montages, vivid images of them, together, hand-in-hand, strolling along on an island in the Andaman Sea. Cerulean waters foaming onto a white sandy shore… The two of them sipping coconuts and spooning in a swinging hammock strung between two tall palm trees…
The tourist wished to find out everything about her. Although she was practically young enough to be his daughter, or granddaughter, maybe… Still, she fascinated him. He’d fallen completely under her spell. She was just so beautiful, had a smile that he’d sell his soul for and a perfect, well-rounded hourglass figure, the type of body so perfect it looked photoshopped.
Better yet, unlike many of the local women, she wasn’t a whore, either. She wasn’t turning tricks, hadn’t been fucked by hundreds of baboon ass baldie fatsos and losers like the old man buns, that old man mullet shitbird, and their slovenly ilk.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer With her silky, coy demeanor, she really did seem like a nice Buddhist girl, and she didn’t appear to have any ulterior motives, the tourist thought… Maybe she wouldn’t be an agist, annoying, entitled bitch like so many of the women back home, either...
The tourist made up his mind and planned to ask her out. He watched a couple of videos on YouTube, watched Learn Thai with Mod, and learned a handful of Thai phrases for dating. He was ready. He was READY! He was going to have his own little exotic beauty, his own little perfect china doll. It was all coming together…
Finally, on a muggy Friday afternoon, he did it. Sitting back in his big comfy recliner, the foot massage chair, he twisted his lips into a big Thai smile, and told his dream girl that she “should find a husband.”
Then he asked her, confidently, in a mix of broken Thai and English, if he could buy her dinner.
She only smiled and giggled, didn’t say yes or no. When he reiterated his offer, she again giggled, and mentioned something about “working.” Which he took as a no.
Then she asked him, in broken English, if he had any pictures from when he was young, if he could show her his “young man” pictures.
A chill plaited up his spine. His eyes narrowed. His body hair rose, prickled like a hedgehog… Then a sickness stirred, and formed, like a clenched fist, in his stomach.
So this was it. To her, he was just another old man, just another customer, nothing more... His heartbeat then began to race, his breaths shortened, and his mouth turned dry as sand…
But, only kindling his consternation, the tourist’s dream girl wasn’t sensing any of his internal anguish. She just kept smiling, asked again if he had pictures of himself, when he was “her age.”
“I think you was han’sum man,” she said, smiling wider, and giggling once more, profiting in his grief. Then she whispered something in Thai and snickered with a nearby masseuse, another young Thai girl, who was busily rubbing at the feet of a
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer sleeping middle-aged Japanese businessman, and the two masseuses shared a fit of suppressed laughter.
Pressing his eyes shut tightly, the tourist’s sickness inside grew, spread across his chest. It stung. It festered. His life, everything was feeling like a lie. Everything. All the smiles. It was all a fraud. A FRAUD!
He’d known these ugly thoughts. He knew the voices. The cockroach voices in his mind’s walls. The infestation in his subconscious. But now, now though, they were impossible to suppress, and the cockroaches were crawling from their cracks, and attacking, like phantoms in a horror flick.
The phantom voices were rampaging, pouring in like hordes of starving rats. The voices telling him he was nothing. Not even a human. He was only his money.
That he was a walking ATM. That he was no better than any of the others that he’d mocked.
The reckoning then settled in. It was a dark, cold and hollow feeling that hardened and formed into a shard of broken glass. It pressed to his throat. The tourist then knew… There’d always be… a void… The voices, a fucking football stadium of the aggrieved, appeared and rose, all standing, all screaming at him.
And hovering above, high as an angel, the tourist could see a veiled figure pointing and falling backward laughing.
A clucking rage filled the tourist. His eyes opened slowly, like sliding elevator doors. He then glared at the smiling young girl, jerked back his feet from the stool, stepped out of his big comfy pleather massage chair and rose, as a grim champion, to his feet, and sneered.
The girl, appearing confused, threw her head back and asked, “Is, okay?”
The tourist didn’t answer. Instead, he kicked the girl in her face. Drilled her with a dropkick to her chin, launching her backward, sending the small girl tumbling, collapsing to the floor, landing with a crash. Lying crumpled on the floor, the girl unloosed a shrill whine, then began whimpering like a beaten dog.
Then the tourist, his marbled legs still beaded with rose-scented oil, stormed straight out of the massage parlor’s front door, and began marching, barefoot, toward the golden glaze of the sun.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
BESTIALITY BRO AT THE ONSEN SPA IN TOKYO
飛行機 1
“Godzilla versus a trojan horse hiding ten thousand sumo wrestlers. Who ya got?”
Our Regional Coordinator blurted out at the team. Whether his words were lost to jetlag or just plain disinterest, his mythical matchup went unexamined as the team yawned, unclicked seatbelts, and mechanically collected belongings from our seatbacks and overhead compartments.
This was my first visit to Japan. And I was beginning to feel overcome. Drunk on jetlag, and with the effects of the 500mg THC edible wearing off, everything was seeming so surreal. I suddenly started to experience a certain sensation, a
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer feeling… Something like I was in a sci-fi movie. Or as if I’d traveled forward in time…
Everything around me, everything in the airport, the city, the taxi, the hotel, et cetera… everything… looked so futuristic. Everything was so clean and sparkly and high-tech and automated. And everything spoke. Inanimate objects burst into cute, computerized coos. Doors spoke. Escalators and elevators spoke. Even the Tokyo toilets were automated and spoke. And, incredibly, the Tokyo toilets could even wash and dry genitals at the push of a button.
But rather than grim or dystopian, as the technology of the future is often portrayed, I found the automation and its futurism warming, comical in a sense.
Think Jetsons rather than 1984…
ホテル 2.1
While checking in to the hotel, Our Regional Coordinator, a real road warrior, expertly gauged the mood of the team. He saw the low energy. The lack of pep.
He knew that following our red-eye, trans-pacific flight, the team required rejuvenation before the gauntlet of conferences kicked off. He knew that once the bugle sounded, and the events began, we’d be off running like a pack of greyhounds chasing a rabbit.
And so Our Regional Coordinator clapped his hands, like a football coach on the sidelines, and rah-rahed, fired up the team. Then he suggested we book (fully expensed to Corporate, of course) a day-pass to our Hyatt’s Onsen Spa.
Perfunctorily we agreed. But, later, I was quite pleased that we followed his suggestion, as the spa far exceeded any of my expectations…
ホテル 2.2
The spa was simply the epitome of luxury. Located on the Hyatt’s 102nd floor, the spa’s lobby featured sweeping views of the Tokyo megalopolis. Walking in, I felt at ease as I drew in a deep breath, becoming delightfully awash in a rich potpourri of sandalwood fragrances.
Flicking my gaze at a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, I saw out to infinite rows of Tokyo’s skyscrapers, superstructures. To me, even Tokyo’s buildings appeared futuristic, with skyscrapers that looked like robots. Superstructures that looked
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer like spaceships. I really was starting to feel as if I’d stepped into a sci-fi film, or that our airplane actually was a time machine…
Our Regional Coordinator mentioned something in passing about how the spa has hot spring pools and that hot springs and the sauna are both “tremendous for the circulation.” Then he went on about how in Japan there’s a vending machine for everything, that you can buy beer from a vending machine and how much he appreciated that…
I was finding that the spa had very particular rules about shoes, slippers, and feet.
Upon checking in, we had to stick our shoes inside a shoebox-sized shoe locker in the lobby. Then we were given slippers that we were to wear in most areas but were forbidden to wear in other areas. The shoe etiquette, shoe rules seemed confusing, at first, but I began to quickly appreciate the cleanliness, the ritual of it…
Our team proceeded past the shoe lockers and marched single file toward the spa’s men’s locker room. On the way, we passed a pair of spa attendants. Two CoverGirl beautiful, heavily made-up Japanese women in kimonos. The attendants robotically smiling and bowing.
Then I briefly considered that there could be robots everywhere. Those skyscrapers, buildings could truly be Transformers or UFOs... And all the spa’s attendants could really be robots, androids, or cyborgs, or something similarly scary. And while these revelations made me uncomfortable in a way, I determined that even if the spa attendants were robots, even surreptitiously robots, I would respect that.
Our Regional Coordinator, the type to turn any steering wheel or table into a drum set, turned his big red tomato of a head, split into a smile and suggested:
“We oughta take in a baseball game while we’re here. Japanese baseball, I’m telling you, the atmosphere, you never seen anything like it…”
“The sushi, too...”
“You eat the sushi here in Japan, though, believe me, and you’ll have a tough time eating sushi anywhere else. There’s no going back.”
ホテル 2.3
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Throughout the spa’s various chambers were starry night ceilings, blond-wood walls, marble flooring, and a series of hot and cool pools.
Each of the pools was a rectangle about as tall as a sedan, about as long as a limo, and each pool was about four feet deep with water said to be directly sourced from thermal springs. Digital monitors carefully displayed each pool’s water temperature. The monitors’ numbers occasionally shifting up or down a few pips, like a stock ticker on a slow day.
Aluminum signs were affixed by each pool too. The signs stating, in multiple languages, the water’s mineral content, as well as explaining how the waters help detoxify, heal, and relax the body.
ホテル 2.4
Entering some strange place between somnolent and invigorated, I padded forward, swinging my gaze side-to-side like a real sightseer. I made mental notes, impressed at the spa’s array of other amenities, including Himalayan hot stone-bed baths, Akasuri Body Scrubs, mud wraps, facials, massages, cool-down rooms, as well as an organic smoothie and snack bar... I was even tempted to check out of my upscale yet closet-sized hotel room and simply stay in the spa. It was that nice…
ロボット 3
The spa was well-staffed with a small army of robotic attendants berobed in traditional Japanese clothing.
To a person, the staff parted, stopped and bowed wherever, whenever we passed.
They all looked young, too, the staff. Maybe early 20ish. When seeing us, the clientele, they’d bow and instantly screw their faces into ear-to-ear smiles.
Lottery-winner smiles. Smiles that’d make a dentist proud.
The smiling, the bowing was a pleasant change from the normal NYC idea of customer service. Those surly shop assistants, cashiers who either have a thousand-yard stare or appear as if they might physically assault you at any given moment…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer However, the spa staff’s smiles, in a way, looked abrading and painful. As if the smiles had a life and mind of their own. As if the smiles might eventually turn, attack and eat the attendants’ faces, like an enraged pet.
Otherwise, the staff generally had a certain glazed look to them, an expression between nonplussed and indifferent. Stoic yet icy. Almost as if preparing for a driver’s license photo. That sort of absently present expression. There but not there.
うんこ 4
The team disrobed. Stuck our stuff in our lockers. Then we showered. Washed off the sticky grime of the 14-hour flight. I found that there was nothing to cleanse the soul like a piping hot shower after a long flight. And the moans of pleasure uttered by my teammates in adjacent shower stalls seemed to constitute a certain consensus.
Then the team toweled off, tread forward, to the pools. We rinsed ourselves off via wooden ladle, from a wooden basin, with what was purportedly pure mountain water. The water was cool to the touch and tingly, giving me goosebumps as it splashed and cascaded over my travel-weary body.
Then we sat and soaked in the “soda bath” pool. The soda bath’s waters were refreshing. And hot. 41.2C according to the digital monitor. Aptly named as well, the soda bath’s waters were blurry as vanilla cream soda, nearly the color of skim milk. The unique coloration lending me a feeling more like I was climbing into a bowl of hot plain yogurt rather than a pool…
Our Regional Coordinator, with tendrils of the soda bath’s steam framing his fat red face, suddenly pulled his piehole into a frown, and started shaking his head, recounting a recent ordeal:
“It was earlier in Q2. When we had several branches’ computers increasingly monitored by Corporate. You know, cutting back on assholes wasting worktime on social media. Jerkoffs going on Reddit or Twitter. Playing Angry Birds, that type of shit…”
“And, like, Jesus, the shit this one guy was looking at. It got flagged, instantly. And understandably. It was… beyond gruesome… Like, snuff films… Bestiality, dogs...
Necrophilia…”
As he spoke, Our Regional Coordinator’s ketchup-colored helmet of hair seemed to be thinning. The skin on his neck starting to sag like a turkey’s. Heavy shadows hung under his eyes and his face reddened. His head, seemingly, started growing larger too, as he spoke, like a balloon filling with air. Like many Irish, Irish Americans, the man’s face had been appearing redder, his head getting bigger as he aged anyway. But this sudden burst of rage definitely did appear to be hastening the process.
Our Regional Coordinator paused and stared blankly as if in a brief trance. Then he mumbled something unintelligible and went on:
“Nah, there wasn’t kiddie porn or anything. But the stuff he was looking at… I saw the screenshots. I even watched him scrolling it. Live. I was watching him on his computer, watching his monitor, like I was God above. Ah, it was insane. This freak streaming videos, looking at photos, of… the most heinous, most traumatic shit…”
“… Imagine being a Facebook Content Moderator. Imagine having to do that for a living. Looking at those videos, those images all day. Seeing animal cruelty, sexual attacks… Like that’s all you do. You look at that. 5, 6 days a week, 8 hours a day.
Watching the worst of humanity… Having to see that content, every single day.
That is so brutal.”
“Bro, no one doing that job is walking away with all their marbles…”
“Bad enough sitting for 8 hours, watching the stuff that does get past the censors.”
“I can see why Reddit dumps those duties on volunteer mods.”
“Was Bestiality Bro on Reddit?”
Our Regional Coordinator didn’t reply to that. Instead, he snorted, then cupped and splashed hot soda bath water on his face. Then he lightly palm-slapped his right cheek with his right hand, then lightly palm-slapped his left cheek with his left hand. Then he went on, words falling from his lips:
“So, of course, I brought ‘Bestiality Bro’ up to Corporate…”
“Yeah, and, like, get this. They told me his office wasn’t profitable anyway, had been shitting the bed for the last five fiscal quarters.”
“Amber Alert.”
“I heard that.”
“Oh, oh no, I used to think of her when I…”
Our Regional Coordinator appeared neither amused nor annoyed at the team’s puns and idiocy. Then he continued:
“So Corporate claims they were planning to liquidate the whole division. I was to be notified in the next couple of weeks, blah blah blah. Corporate even said the sick crap this freak was looking at… that, like, since it isn’t technically illegal, at least not in New York, it itself is not grounds for termination. Only a warning. A fucking warning…”
“I mean, like, what if a client or an investor visits the branch? And they walk by this freak’s cubicle and see him laughing and spanking it to a necrophilia video?
The fuck happens then? Another ‘warning?’ The fuck outta here…”
Our Regional Coordinator squinted and unloosed a low-key belch.
“I’d be concerned about any investor who wasn’t concerned…”
悲しい 5.1
A particularly grim-faced spa attendant walked by, pushing a mop that looked like a giant squeegee. His seemed like one of the lowliest duties a spa attendant might have. Only a leg up, on the spa attendant hierarchy, from scrubbing the robot toilets. And going by the attendant’s dour countenance, he appeared acutely aware of this.
悲しい 5.2
Soaking in the scenery, through a wedge in the steamy miasma, I spotted a large warning sign, and it commanded my attention.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Not that a warning sign in Japan was unusual. I’d come to discover that Japan has a myriad of warning signs. In practically every place imaginable. The signs usually featuring cute cartoon characters. I pondered that perhaps such ubiquitous signage was preemptive. A way for the Japanese to seize back control over their inhospitable, volcanic land. Being in the Ring of Fire, having earthquakes, volcanos, and tsunamis… Godzilla attacks… Such a precarious geographical position must pester the psyche, make one wish to slap warning signs everywhere… I can understand…
But the warning sign commanding my attention contained no cartoon characters.
It was rectangular and matter of fact. In several languages, in bold, red and black font, it stated that “Inappropriate behavior will not be permitted and is grounds for permanent banishment from the premises.”
Our Regional Coordinator stopped speaking until the grim-faced attendant passed us and was out of earshot. And this was understandable, considering the topic of conversation. Our openly talking about bestiality, necrophilia, Amber Heard and snuff videos could be considered inappropriate behavior, possibly.
会社 6
Our Regional Coordinator popped his neck, tilting it to each side. Then he cracked his knuckles so loudly that I thought he might have broken his fingers. Then his eyes caught fire and he went on:
“But it gets worse. Corporate orders me to drive up there. Fucking 400 miles. Six and a half fucking hours. Had my ass trucking it all the way up to fucking downtown Buffalo.”
“Fucking Buffalo…”
“Then Corporate, saving costs, stuck me in the shittiest hotel. I mean, it had a decent exterior but paper-thin walls. I swear, I could hear a couple in the next room doing the nasty for like almost an hour. The lady just wailing... Uh… It was horrific… I’m telling you…”
“Like, I had headphones, but still. It’s the principle.”
“I don’t think there’s any worse sound. No worse sound than listening to total strangers fuck in the next room…”
“Anyways, I had to go, in person, and talk to this sick fuck, sit with him face to face. Corporate saying how the ‘notice of the division’s closure needs to be delivered in person, by upper management,’ blah blah blah, and ‘that I must conduct their exit interviews, file paperwork…’”
Our Regional Coordinator had begun doing air quotes to emphasize his displeasure.
“Don’t bullshit me. Okay. For fuck’s sake, I know it’s to avoid these bastards bitching and moaning on the internet, or a scumbag lawyer, an ambulance-chasing shit-stain, some asshole with a ponytail, coming after us, fucking suing us...”
“I’m thinking it probably won’t be the necrophilia dog dude taking any legal actions. That would be an easy lawsuit to quash…”
“Yo, Bestiality Bro should work for Datadog or SurveyMonkey next.”
“But definitely not Pets.com, if that still exists.”
“Okay. I’m gonna say it right now. I blame Bestiality Bro for the recurrence of the monkeypox virus.”
Our Regional Coordinator’s grimace remained intact, his head starting to look bigger than a basketball.
“Look, it’s part of the job. I know. Yeah, yeah. Wah wah, crybaby, yeah, yeah, fuck you...”
“But it was one of the creepiest experiences... Sitting in a glass-walled conference room, one to one, with this freak. This fucking potential mass killer. This animal who’s into the most repulsive shit. I’m telling you. I’d basically been looking inside his head. I had visited the darkest corners of this asshole’s mind…”
“And not that I care about others’ porn preferences, what they watch. But… Er…
I’d rather not know, right... And not that I’m trying to be a sanctimonious, moralistic prick, or whatever, but it’s just… I’d seen into this freak’s psyche… I’d seen his worst… His worst, most deviant impulses. I mean, who the fuck… Who the fuck wants to watch, like every day, videos, even real videos… Of horses… One
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer video even had three Burmese dickheads taking on a monitor lizard… A fucking lizard… A lizard almost the size of a alligator… I’m telling you…”
“I didn’t know it was possible to… with… a lizard...”
“It’s cold-blooded too, a lizard, right? It must be freezing up in that…”
“But was the monitor lizard a member of the Illuminati, or the British Royal Family?”
“ … “
“Did we ever see him? Was Bestiality Bro ever at any of the upstate conferences?”
“Nope, his department never attended. You never saw him, I don’t think…”
“I can’t believe he wasn’t instantly canned.”
“Corporate should have lashed his ass like they do in Malaysia and Singapore….
Trafficking those websites, and on company time? What a fucking piece of shit.”
“Yo, for real, Malaysians definitely don’t play that shit.”
“It’s about principles.”
“…”
“… Corporate could turn on his webcam or anyone’s in that office, too. Corporate has a whole surveillance center. A bunker built. It’s like the NSA in there.”
“They must have our offices’ desktops on that, too, right?”
“Looks like someone might be receiving a ‘warning’…”
Our Regional Coordinator sat silent for a beat and didn’t confirm or deny that Corporate was watching us or flipping on our webcams. Then the big red mass of anxiety grunted and continued:
“But yeah. This sick fuck looked nerdy as shit in his company picture. And he was in real life too.”
“He was a smarmy son-of-a-bitch. The pencil-neck, beta-male type. Scrawny too.
Arms like garden hoses. The schmo probably never lifted weights in his life. And he was short, quite short, like 5’5. Probably wasn’t more than 120 pounds. And he
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer was wearing these huge eyeglasses, like the size’a coffee mugs, these things. And his pants were kinda tight and riding up and there’s… ankles, shins showing…”
“Shins showing?”
“Shins. And Ankles… Both…”
“An Urkel. If Urkel was a sick and depraved fuck…”
“A what?”
“Forget about it. You’re too young for Urkel. And that’s probably for the best.”
男根 7
A middle-aged Asian man with a wet combover strode by the soda bath. He was completely nude, as were all the patrons in the pool, sauna areas. The attendants, however, were clothed and stood out, conspicuous in their blue and black robes…
In the pool areas, saunas, nudity was mandatory. No bath towels were allowed in either. Only a small white towel was allowed with you. The towel only slightly larger than a washcloth…
Red-Eye Randy, a real meathead, threw out a non-sequitur:
“Why are there easy breast implants, but nothing similar, no easy penis enlargement operations?”
“I bet the Illuminati, lizard people already have that. Special dick operations. But they don’t want the commoners to have them. They know dumbasses would go crazy. Idiots walking around with a third leg, literally. There’d be motherfuckers with dicks the size of NBA basketball players’ legs and shit. Fire hose length dicks…”
“It’s only a matter of time. Wait ‘til you see the penises of the future…”
“They’ll be cyborg penises. Retractable, detachable penises with smart functions.”
“The ‘Internet of Things.’”
“I betcha they already have smart penises in Japan.”
“No way, bro. I’m not getting a smart penis. Imagine hackers getting their hands on that...”
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Nude male bodies, Japanese, save for an occasional honkey, went roaming the pools’ premises. The bodies moving languorously, as soft mood music chimed, waters gushed, and an adjacent whirlpool burbled and bubbled like a boiling pot on the stove.
A waft of eucalyptus oil then simmered over from a sauna nearby, and I sniffed in the fragrance, reinvigorated by it, briefly feeling as if I’d snorted a thick line of cocaine. Then a cool rush of calm overtook me. I was finding a certain serenity to the place. A natural, mothering warmth that I was beginning to appreciate.
エイリアン 8
Our Regional Coordinator’s ears perked up as he caught wind of the eucalyptus oil.
Then he snorted several times in a row, his big red Irish head becoming almost as big as a beachball. Then he continued:
“So I’m sitting across from this freak. I’m across this long mahogany table. And I’m having to ask all these standard exit interview questions. And I’m pretending to care. But all I can think about was the shit he was looking at. Why he’d even want to see that… I’m telling you… It’s the only thing I wanted to ask him about…”
“And I’m wondering just who the fuck this guy really is… Like maybe he’s got an apartment like Jeffrey Dahmer, with cut-up bodies in the fridge.”
“Eh, some people just like the macabre. Not everyone watching horror flicks is a chainsaw-wielding maniac. Not everyone watching action movies shoots people.”
“And not everyone watching porn goes running outside with a rock-hard cock, mounting randos like a wild baboon.”
“Yo, I’d do that if I could. I’d go run outside, go running the streets, rock-hard cock in hand. For real. I’d go run up on and fuck a perfect stranger. As long as they were cool with it, of course. And attractive enough. And of legal age.”
“That’d be an interesting situation to get carded, asked for ID…”
“Bro, real talk, I just hope my mortician isn’t into necrophilia videos. That’s all I ask…”
Our Regional Coordinator didn’t say any more. He shook his head, grimaced again and rose from the soda bath.
“Let’s hit the sauna. It’s allegedly got Himalayan Sea salts. Supposed to improve circulation. Or some shit.”
“The Himalayas have a sea?”
“I think it’s underground, that sea.”
“The Himalayas, isn’t that where the Loch Ness Monster lives?”
“I’m not sure.”
“The Himalayan salts are supposed to be legit excellent at improving circulation. I read that on a blog, I think, somewhere…”
“What exactly is circulation?”
“Circulation is circulation.”
“Well. That’s that settled.”
“Himalayan Sea salts are why the Loch Ness Monster has lived so long. The Loch Ness Monster eats Himalayan Sea salts. Every fucking day.”
“The Loch Ness Monster must have phenomenal circulation.”
“Nah, bro. Fuck that. The Loch Ness Monster watches necrophilia videos at work.”
“And Godzilla watches bestiality videos.”
“Nah, but wait. Is it actually bestiality to Godzilla, since Godzilla is an animal too?
I’d assert that Godzilla has a right.”
“That prospect of Godzilla, or the Loch Ness Monster, bro. It makes me glad the dinosaurs are dead. Yo, fuck those prehistoric motherfuckers. Like lizards the size of a building. Fuck that. Think about a brontosaurus stomping through your city.
We’re way better off without that threat.”
We then rose, in unison, followed Our Regional Coordinator’s lead.
We kept our heads down, our eyes tracking the floor. Not a peel of eye contact as we stepped from the soda bath. Padding our way to the sauna, we passed several nude Japanese men in various states of silent soaking and bathing. To a man, the Japanese looked so stoic. So unshakable. Unlike us, meatheads, Yankees…
anxiety-ridden, red-faced, honkey business fucks…
“I’m telling you. This is why the Japanese live so long. They eat sushi, and they do the sauna…”
“It’s the circulation… That’s the key… It’s the circulation…”
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF XI JINPING
7:00 AM: Xi Jinping awakens to an erhu alarm, Huawei preset from Moon Audio Opulence surround sound speakers in his palatial, 1000 sq. meter bedroom.
His bedroom’s dome vaulted ceilings are 40 m high, painted revolutionary red, and the bedroom’s verdant green floor tiles are cut from solid jade.
His emperor size bed is 20 m wide, 10 m long and carved from a mix of ivory, Cartier diamond and pure, 24k Harry Winston gold.
His scruffy bedhead rests on panda bear skin, ostrich feather stuffed, Van der Hilst pillows, and he rubs his eyes and yawns into consciousness.
The bedsheets are Super Soft Fuzzy China silk, tailor made by Chanel, and his blanket a Chanasya Super Soft Long Shaggy Chic Fuzzy with Fluffy Sherpa (and micro mink)…
The bed’s Kluft mattress is made from blue whale and black rhino bone, and is filled with feathers of extinct, rare bird species only known to specific scientists.
7:05 AM: His cavalcade of PLA servants march in single file, enter his room, serve Xi breakfast in bed, presented on sparklingly shiny fine .999 silver tray, with .999
silver spoons and .999 silver chopsticks…
Breakfast is always the same: black truffle porridge, 8 fried dough-sticks, a tea-boiled egg, sliced dragon fruit and bananas, opal crystal glass of soymilk, and Qing Dynasty porcelain cup of Da Hong Pao tea (lightly mixed with sugarcane juice and crushed, dried tiger penis powder).
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer (Xi Jinping, being an active, practicing, secret society illuminati lizard man/anal vampire, is given a daily injection of blood, rectally; a PLA scientist administering the enema from a hose attached from a wheeled slushie-like roto-machine, slipping the lubed hose in Xi’s anus, jetting up Xi’s anal cavity an enema of blood plasma; a plasma concocted, designed, by top Chinese scientists; its mixture-blood from tiger cubs, Cambodian and Uyghur bred/selected children…) After his morning enema, whilst eating breakfast, Xi clicks on his Stuart Hughes Prestige HD Supreme Edition, 188 inch TV, watches CCTV News, CCTV5 Sports, and occasionally hate-watches Taiwan news channels, shaking with anger at Cai Yingwen’s face, hacking/spitting at the TV screen, and plots schemes to massacre bandits in Hong Kong, those picking quarrels…
Xi Jinping sleeps alone these days. His wife, Peng, complaining of his flatulence, sleeps in an adjacent 1000 sq. meter bedroom.
8:00 AM: By this time Xi Jinping has eaten his breakfast, smoked a Panda cigarette or two and listened, on Huawei smart speaker, to his secretary’s morning “en en en, blah, blah, blah” briefing.
He’ll press a button and have his personal grooming team brush his teeth with Theodent 300 toothpaste, shave his face w/the Zafirro razor, a $100,000 shaver with an iridium handle and sapphire blades.
Afterwards, his wardrobe team enters. After shedding his panda fur bathrobe, Xi Jinping slips on his iKingsky Men’s Sexy Low-Rise T-Back Thong Underwear.
His tailors, wardrobe consultants take constant measurements and adjustments due to his ever-expanding waistline; once appropriate figures are gathered, he’ll be fitted into a Brioni Vanquish II three-piece suit.
Due to incontinence, he’ll be also fitted with a Tranquility Elite adult vacuum seal diaper (to avoid another incident like with the Prime Minister of Kyrgyzstan.) It’s about this time the first of his various bowel movements occur. Throughout his many sprawling mansions, he has had installed Hang Fung Golden electronic throne toilets that cleanse, air dry, and massage his anus, utilizing the latest in 5G
Huawei technology/quantum physics…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Whilst on the toilet he reads the People’s Daily Sports Section, reviews/crosses names off his enemies list, and hate-reads the New York Times.
(His toilet is also equipped with a special robotic prostate massage function which he finds pleasurable and enjoys from time to time, especially after his regular bouts of diarrhea.)
9:00 AM: Disciplined cadres, those without face, carry Xi by Buccellati golden palanquin down the marble hallways, lead him to the meeting hall; the room consisting of a mahogany seat/roundtable, folding seat outer circles (chairs constructed from dissidents’ bones, and the rooms’ walls painted red from the blood of executed prisoners, Falun Gong.)
In the meeting halls, the AC is purposely never set. It’s kept either miserably hot or chillingly cold, dependent on weather conditions, upon Xi’s command…
The 9 AM will be the first of his many meetings throughout the day. It’s always begun by an underling crawling in on all fours, springing to his feet, and reciting a prepared statement, economic statistics, presenting charts, budgets for budgets, and updating the status of various development projects, updating plans for plans about plans and initiatives for the BRI.
The underling is occasionally lashed via bullwhip by a higher-ranking cadre or forced to lick the bare feet, chew foot fungus of superiors.
When economic, pollution numbers are especially disappointing, underlings, and at times all cadres must in unison bow, drink fresh heritage pig blood…
Aside from the unbridled joy of humiliating the underling, Jinping rarely pays much attention during meetings, and zones out, thinking of UEFA Champions League, his asset portfolio, his mistresses, or what he might eat for lunch.
However, if something does spark his interest, he’ll interrupt and, at times angrily, speak his mind, or castigate a comrade, slap or zap cadres with an electric mosquito swatter.
If, in the chance Xi speaks, the room is dead silent.
(One time a feisty cadre from Ningxia made the mistake of unharmoniously talking over Xi Jinping. That cadre has not been heard from since. Rumor has him
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer inspecting air quality, monitoring coal refuse in Shijiazhuang. Although the blogger who posted that rumor to Weibo has, himself, disappeared, so it’s impossible to verify…)
Morning meetings range in time from 2 to 3 hours.
12 PM: Lunch time. Xi Jinping and his inner circle are ferried by Van Cleef Arpels golden golf carts to a spectacular dining hall with impossibly high, 100 m, immaculately painted, vaulted ceilings; the halls’ walls with Wang Xizhi calligraphy and renderings of Mount Penglai, Eight Pillars; dragons, tigers, ox, rabbit; Great Wall frescoes; hammer and sickle flags hanging in perfectly straight lines, every 8
meters.
His inner circle, men around his age, mostly with wealth-bellies, jet black combovers and always in matching white collared buttoned-down shirts and well-ironed black slacks, sit around a circular table, smoking Panda cigarettes.
The Lazy Susan slowly spins, is circled with piping hot trays of pork steamed buns, steamed pork dumplings, fried pork dumplings, handmade noodles, fried chicken, sweet/sour chicken, sweet/sour fish, fried pork, minced pork, fried beef, fried, pickled vegetables, and heaping bowls of steamed rice.
Xi Jinping waits for everyone else to begin before taking the first bite.
During lunch, not much is said, except for brief talks of future diplomatic visits, market fluctuations, European football matches, Olympics updates, and future Party gatherings.
Xi Jinping usually doesn’t speak, just sits and smokes Treasurer or New Century cigarettes, nods and voices an occasional “eng…” to demonstrate comprehension or agreement…
Following lunch, Xi Jinping is brought by palanquin back to his bedroom for his 2-hour afternoon nap.
He again awakes to his erhu alarm, smokes a Panda cigarette, pushes a call-button and receives his daily foot and neck massage from a young female servant or two.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer 3 PM to 5:30 PM: Another meeting or three. Perhaps a visit from a foreign dignitary seeking investment.
Sometimes a visit to a random city or remote village, where, flanked by bodyguards, he’ll speak with the proletariat, many a villager in hysterics, weeping, and sometimes a village elder, smiling toothlessly with his whole face, clutching to Xi’s arm, and then Xi will recite to them a prepared statement, stating how unworthy he is of their devotion to the Chinese Nation, Party and the Socialist cause…
Cigarettes are strictly prohibited during State visits or village visit, except off camera or in bathrooms…
5:30 PM: Dinner with his wife, the inner circle and their wives.
Dinner is often the same fare as lunch, though is heavy on exported version of Tsingtao beer, bottles and bottles of Maotai, various baijiu, heavier on cigarettes.
After dinner, Xi Jinping and his wife have their evening stroll around the compound.
She’ll dictate policy to him in contorted faces and sometimes they’ll argue, and she’ll smack him in the ear, or he slaps her upside the head, and they’ll push and shove, need to be separated by security.
After their walk, Peng goes for her square-dancing and Xi Jinping is brought by palanquin to the sauna.
Xi Jinping sits in the Russian sauna for 20 minutes or so, and is wheeled out, on a rolling table, and scrubbed down, table-bathed and massaged by a young female masseuse, with whom he’ll now and then fornicate or perform other sexual activities (particularly that of prostate massage milking).
Following this, he’s wheeled into a massive Persian style shower room, hand-washed by two or three young female servants, dried, smeared from head to toe in tiger balm, fitted into a tailored red Mulberry silk imperial robe, and driven back by golden golf cart to his master bedroom, so he can retire for the evening.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
9 PM: Xi Jinping is in bed, snacking on Harðfiskur dried fish, chain smoking Pandas, drinking Da Hong Pao tea and will nod off while clicking between CCTV, American gangster TV, movies, and Bloomberg TV.
11 PM: A servant enters his quarters, tucks him into his covers, fits him with a Tranquility Elite adult diaper to prevent bedwetting and turns off the TV and lights.
A WEREWOLF IN BURMA
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Circa 2017
The werewolf reeks of booze. He speaks in rapid clips of American English. But with a Glasgow accent. This hairy beast has been with me since the start of the plane ride and claims he used to work as a roadie for the band Cradle of Filth.
“A bottle of Burmese whisky is only $3… Quality batches too… Washes out the parasites and perfectly pairs with tea leaf salads…” says the werewolf, and I crane my neck in bemusement.
The werewolf goes on to tell me he’s been teaching in Myanmar, at a temple, for two years, teaching English to young monks.
“Young monks?” I inquire, surprise coloring my voice. When I think of monks, I think of elderly Asian men with shaved heads… graybeards atop misty mountains… dudes doing Kung Fu in exotic jungle temples and lone silent sinewy figures meditating in the emerald glow of bamboo forests…
Apparently not, though, as the werewolf tells me that impoverished families in Myanmar will sometimes send a child to become a monk, to live in the monastery.
It’s hard for me to picture 5-year-old kids as monks, but I guess it’s a thing.
At the airport, the werewolf accompanies me through a chrome corridor, its walls blasting neon, like Christmas trees. We then proceed to the immigration controls.
Jutting his furry chin toward the sad-eyed agents seated behind the immigration counter, their faces twisted in a type of bored contempt, the werewolf whispers in my ear, his breath hot and wet and stinkin’ of whisky, “These immigration officers, border guards, customs agents… I wonder what they think of tourists, people who can fly around the world, take vacations… Just look at them having to serve us… Like, here they are, probably living in poverty… And here the tourists are, probably packing more in spare change and small bills than that customs agent earns in a month… Sort of explains a certain degree of surliness…”
I wonder what the customs agents will think of the werewolf, but then I size up the nearby knots of UK/Aussie backpackers, the unshaven, hairy lot, one covered
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer in so many tattoos that barely a speck of his skin shows… And I assume the werewolf will fit right in amongst the Western tourists.
The werewolf and I are launched by psychosomatic slingshot into the city. Then we walk all over Rangoon. We follow the flags. We follow the purple sky and its mango streaks of sunset. We pass progress and songs of the past and we pause our questions, our isms, and we posit nothing.
The werewolf really does fit right in, here in Rangoon. He chews betel nuts like a local, smiles wickedly with his mossy fangs, and skillfully spits big blotchy blood-red gobs of phlegm at the sidewalk.
The sidewalks are a hot mess, too, even without the spit. Dangerous to boot.
Thankfully, the werewolf is my guiding light, helps me avert the ordeal of slipping into an open sewer.
Tilting his hairy face and locking eyes with me, the werewolf explains, deadpan,
“The sidewalks are simply thin planks of concrete, lids, really, atop open sewers.
Parts of the planks have crumbled due to wear, tear, neglect, so it’s best to walk on the edge of the street.”
Looking ahead, I recognize how right he is, pedestrians walking single file, on the side of the road; bustling traffic, chaotic bursts of buses, cars, motorbikes, various three-wheeled vehicles whizzing by; however, the sidewalks sit empty, save for the holes.
The werewolf sighs, then cuts a ferociously loud fart, which he declines to acknowledge, and continues, “Careful at night. Myanmar sells its electricity to China, rations it domestically. Frequent power-cuts leave these streets pitch-black, prone to peril…”
I can imagine how horrible it’d be to fall into an open sewer in Rangoon, that sewer water probably so full of betel nut spit that it’d burn me alive like lava.
I’d never worried about trap doors opening into sewers as I walk down the sidewalk, but I guess it’s a thing.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer I stay in a cheap hotel near the temple. The werewolf bunks with me, sleeps on the balcony so he can throw shade at the moon.
Before he retires for the evening, the werewolf asks, rhetorically, “Why is it so many Europeans return to the lands they once colonized? The French in Laos, Vietnam? Brits in Burma? Dutch in Sri Lanka?”
Into the small hours of night, I lie atop the hard, thin mattress, spread out on the single bed, and read Toni Morrison, sip the werewolf’s whisky, and watch the werewolf do drunk yoga on the balcony, catching mosquitoes with his tongue.
I rise early, jolted awake, witnessing the werewolf with his head tossed back and arms outstretched, the werewolf on the balcony bellowing out Beyonce, I think, and I kindly invite him inside.
The werewolf waltzes in, burrows into my backpack, busts out and hands me an exquisite blue and white striped longyi and a Union Jack T-shirt and I ease into the clothes and slather beige sun paint on my face.
Then we drink raw eggs from shot glasses, take turns brushing our teeth with whisky, and clank on our shot glasses with our toothbrushes so as to ward off any evil spirits before we proceed to the temple. As we depart, the werewolf jumps and Kung Fu kicks the hotel’s front door shut, his form perfect as Jackie Chan.
The morning heat, humidity hangs heavy, like a shroud, over Rangoon, and the werewolf drags me, by my legs, down the road. We pass decrepit colonial buildings, glass and steel high-rises, and Chinese shopping malls interspersed among the urban decay of dilapidated structures, motorized street stalls, hovels, tarps, and tin shacks.
Bopping along the street, I people-watch the Burmese. They appear quiet, shy people; they appear curious yet reticent to speak with a foreigner, regardless of language barriers. There’s an abused, downtrodden look to them, a PTSD of sorts, and it’s hard to distinguish their ages…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The werewolf and I flashback to news coverage of Muslim massacres, the
“Buddhist Bin Laden” and sinking rafts of boatpeople. But, to my surprise, at least in Rangoon, I spot many Muslims, Muslims in Muslim headscarves and garb, and the Muslims move freely, mingle with Buddhists, and there’s a sense of coexistence.
The werewolf starts puffing on a hash pipe. “Fucking media,” grumbles the werewolf, smoke misting from his nostrils. “Fucking media only shows the bad stuff. Like Africa, all you hear of is wars, Darfur, Congo, and coup d’états. You’ll never hear about people going to a club, going to a birthday party…”
“It’s about more than fuel prices,” I assert, and I remember watching footage of protests from Rangoon, back in 2007. “The Saffron Revolution,” when monks walked miles and miles, barefoot, the monks’ feet bleeding as they lumbered through the city streets…
Then a bone-cold spasm shudders up my spine, and I almost want to throw my snakeskin boots into the sewer, in a sign of solidarity… Almost…
The werewolf’s arms are like long hairy snakes shooting from his shoulders as he flies a kite made of elephant bones. The bones have been painted crimson, and I’m not sure where or why or how he killed an elephant in the city, constructed an aerial contraption, last night, but I accept it.
We arrive at the Golden Dragon Pagoda and it is extraordinary. Its golden stupa is the size of a small building. It’s a triangle of solid gold with a spiraling tip that the werewolf says is an antenna, a beam to Buddha.
“But that much gold, what’s to stop someone from hacking off a chunk and running away?” I inquire. The werewolf gasps and scoffs. His stoic silence is practically a form of purgatory.
Slipping off my snakeskin cowboy boots at the entrance of the temple, the werewolf whispers that I need to take off my socks too. In Myanmar, the temples
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer require visitors to leave both their shoes and socks at the front gate. The werewolf avers that he once saw a Westerner refuse to take off his socks and get chased out of the temple by an angry mob of fist-pumping Buddhists.
Sort of like the “young monks,” an angry mob of Buddhists is hard for me to imagine. But I guess it’s a thing.
The paved grounds at the temple are baby skin smooth, gray as gravestones and white hot, truly sizzling in the tropical sun. The slick surfaces singe my feet, cooking my flesh, and I feel like I’m trotting on hot coals.
But the werewolf pays it no mind. His feet are hairy but appear tough, hardened.
He recounts the time in Mandalay when he climbed a sacred mountain, barefoot.
Tragically, however, he divulged that the mountain was littered with plastic bottles, candy bar wrappers, and empty bags of potato chips.
“So, you can’t wear shoes, but you can litter and muck up the holy mountain…” I shake my head and lament.
Hard for me to imagine anyone chucking a plastic water bottle into the bushes at a sacred site. But I guess it’s a thing.
After taking in the temple, we kick out to the crocodile farm. The werewolf’s kite lies in an open sewer, so we book a taxi via telekinesis, and the taxi falls gently from the sky. It’s a motorcycle with a sidecar, and its driver is a young ghost, a translucent figure, with bloody bullet-holes for eyes.
“A demonstrator from 1988,” claims the werewolf.
“It’s always sunny when you’re dead.”
We jump in the sidecar, and the motorcycle coughs to life, starts with a boom, like a gunshot, and we power forth, surging into a steel sea of traffic.
Initially I’m unnerved, but the ghost driver pilots the motorcycle with the skill of a Hollywood stuntman, and coolly slaloms and swings behind buses, shoots diagonally across lanes, blasts down narrow side streets and alleys, rips and does donuts around roundabouts, navigates the route with ease.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Soon we reach a residential area, by a lake, where there are scores of spacious estates, multi-bedroom houses with stucco roofs, swimming pools, manicured lawns, and classical Chinese style gardens.
The werewolf snorts, points a paw at the stately abodes. “The Tatmadaw. The meth-men. Those are their houses. That’s where the bastard generals live.”
“What would you rather be, a general, a rich man in an autocracy like Burma or Communist China, or a working stiff, clocking 70k a year, in a civilized country?”
the werewolf asks me, and I can’t grasp why this is a question.
My skin is slippery with sweat as arrive at the crocodile farm. The farm is a big green square, a gash in the tropical shrubbery. It’s fenced in by a towering protective wall constructed from broken glass, shards of smashed beer bottles.
The farm smells heavy over the humidity, like a soggy mix of shrimp and dirt.
I’d been suspecting the werewolf would want to free the crocodiles. “Crocodiles shouldn’t live in farms,” the werewolf scoffs. “It’s an affront,” he exclaims, biting his claws, leaning to the side of the motorcycle taxi’s sidecar. The werewolf had been sitting on my lap the whole drive over, his fluffy fur tickling at my face.
The young ghost driver slams on the brakes, rocking us forward and backward to a stop. Then he dismounts the bike, bends over, lifts his longyi, and digs out a submachine Uzi from his ass and then turns and aims the weapon at us, demands we flee, and refuses any act of monetary or moral compensation, shouting in broken English that he’s an anarchist and a philanthropist. We get the point and run away.
“See what happens when you don’t have access to social media mobs?” opines the werewolf as we leg it to the farm’s greenish glass gates.
I’d never thought an act of charity could end peacefully at the barrel of a gun. But I guess it’s a thing.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer At the crocodile farm, we visit cute little baby crocodiles, and the werewolf holds and hugs one. The baby crocodile has its mouth roped shut; but it’s so comfortable with the werewolf that I don’t believe it would ever bite him.
After visiting the baby crocodiles, we venture to visit the herd. There’s like 66
crocodiles here, in the farm, and they live in a manmade lake, a Florida-shaped peninsula of bleak brown water that has a raised wooden footpath, a long, thin, winding bridge, basically, running through the center of the lake, curving to a right angle and leading up to an observation deck, so that one can literally walk through the crocodiles, and then, literally, look down on them.
But, as soon as we step foot on the bridge and begin to cross through the crocodile lake, we recoil at how rickety the wooden bridge is. Not only is it rickety, but there are also scattered holes the size of suitcases in the bridge. Holes yawning and inviting one to stumble or plunge into the water maybe 15 feet below, ass into the crocodiles’ lair.
I’m amazed such a place this dangerous can even exist. I see a few Burmese, in the distance, on the elbow curve of the bridge; they’re thin and small and probably know their way about. Since they don’t weigh too much, they probably aren’t a threat to break through, but then I look at myself and the werewolf.
We’re both large, hairy mammals. I fear that any instant, we could both fall through this flimsy footbridge.
Then I see more Burmese have entered, are walking toward us, on the path. If we turn back, perhaps we’ll overweight the bridge, cause us all to crash through.
So, with no options, we trudge forward. Carefully. We slink around the holes. We avoid peeping down at the crocodiles, and, given his trembling and teeth chattering, it’s obvious the werewolf is terrified.
I never thought a werewolf could be scared. But I guess it’s a thing.
We arrive, by the grace of Buddha, at the stairs to the observation deck. Initially we’re relieved, but then we see that the stairs look perilous and are full of splinters and crooked nails.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The werewolf pauses. I hang my head over my shoulder, nod at him to come forward. But he’s frozen. I climb the creaky stairs, and yes, it’s unnerving, but I ascend quickly, reach the top and am relieved to discover that the upper observation deck appears more recent and in sturdy condition. There’s even an elevator exit.
Looking down to see the werewolf, he lifts his sad, hairy face, shakes his head. His nostrils twitch, his ears flick, and his eyes dart about. Then he turns, runs, and does a cannonball into the lake, landing with a splash, next to a clump of crocodiles. The crocodiles scurry away, appearing far more afraid of the werewolf than the werewolf was of them.
I never thought of crocodiles as fearful creatures. But I guess it’s a thing.
SHANGHAIED!!!!
一
I was flying into Shanghai for a business conference and still felt like shit from the giardia I contracted on the last leg of my hiking trip through Nepal.
Not to mention that I was shaken by the turbulent ride over the Himalayas, having watched the snowy peaks of the mountains, like a bed of nails below us, as the plane’s cabin violently shook, and passengers screamed.
The plane sliced in through the smog, and several people on board applauded as we touched down safely to Pudong Airport…
After immigration, collecting my bags, I caught a cab and we set off into the bustling Shanghai traffic, and I gazed out at the massive city state, its endless
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer series of structures that were so alive, all glowing and glimmering, flashing their night colors.
My driver’s bouffant hair bobbed in the bumpy ride. He leaned back and asked me directions and I told him I’d never been to Shanghai, didn’t know where my hotel was, aside from its name, location on GPS.
He cursed in a local Shanghai dialect that sounded more like Japanese. He looked pissed. It was the first time I’d been asked directions by a cab driver in a foreign country.
The cabbie suddenly pulled over, stopped in the breakdown lane of the highway.
Big beeping trucks whizzed by us. A scarlet Lamborghini careened inches away, at breakneck speed.
I handed the driver my phone. After a shouting match with my hotel’s front desk, he finally figured out the way...
We chugged into the city, into the Bund area, passed by the waterfront’s colonial architecture and nearby glittering glass towers, sprawling malls and department stores selling luxury brands.
Finally arriving at the hotel, a burgundy, art deco colossus, the bellboy met me and whisked away my bags.
When I greeted the front desk staff in Mandarin, a pony-tailed, rail-thin, post-college age girl in red/black hanfu replied to me in impeccable English. Her demeanor was gruff, her voice plangent, and her horn-rim glasses practically the size of grapefruits…
She averted eye contact, monotonously rattled off the breakfast buffet time, location, check out time, and handed me a key card, said the bags were already in the room.
After handing my passport back to me, with both hands, she pointed me in the direction of the elevator and returned to her phone.
“Service with a smile” wasn’t a thing at this hotel, like most of China, I surmised, but it was sort of pleasant, sometimes, how no one kissed your ass or gave a general fuck…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer On the 7th floor, I wandered through a cavernous hallway that was adorned with antique decor and Mondrian replicas and finally found my room, #721, and entered the fancy, compact, slightly dusty-smelling quarters.
The bed was queen-sized, with a comfy memory foam, super soft mattress- unlike the usual cement-style beds of Asia, and the furniture was a charming walnut color; the lamps, phones were vintage, 1930-esque.
The room’s only window, a single casement, next to the bed, led only to a direct view of the adjacent building’s red brick exterior.
I dumped my stuff. Got situated. The night was still young, and my stomach was growling for a better dinner than the microwave fare, beef noodle slop from the plane.
I went out, stopped by a tasty local restaurant, next door to the hotel, and had a sweet duck dish accompanied by steamed rice and stir-fried Cantonese cabbage.
As I clamped my chopsticks on the last few bits of crispy duck skin, I received a text from my coworker, Denny, who was also in town for the conference.
Ole’ Disco Denny, The Wildman, told me he’d just arrived and was headed to a bar and that I should meet him there.
Though my stomach was still queasy from the giardia, I didn’t want to waste my first night in Shanghai doing my quotidian routine of TV, book, sleep, so I decided to join him, hoping to maybe meet a local lady or that a shot or two of whisky down the gullet might kill off the rest of the virus in my guts...
二
It was November, so it had rained and gotten colder, damper, as time passed deeper into night, and walking out of the restaurant, my breath appeared like vaporous mist.
Appropriately, I selected “November Rain” from my playlist, blasted Slash’s glorious guitar into my earbuds and zipped up my leather jacket, stepped and
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer dodged through the masses of humanity in the streets, and I let Siri guide me to the subway.
There were 1.4 billion people in this country, and in places like Shanghai, it sure felt like that many…
Everywhere, there were people. People on every corner, in every building, every car, every bus, pretty much every inch of the city center had a person in or near it.
Most, like any metropolis, minded their business, hurried along, but I noticed an unusual number of obnoxious touts.
The touts mostly fell into two categories: either halfway decent looking young girls, speaking perfect English, on about trying local tea, or short, pushy, tacky dressed middle-aged guys, like gnomes, poking fake, gaudy watches in my face, grunting repeatedly, “Rolex, Rolex!”
These touts were practically the only people who paid attention to me, unlike other Chinese cities where simply being a foreigner rendered you a curiosity, a thing to be gawked at, taken pictures of, pointed at, yelled “hello” at, and basically considered a zoo animal.
I paid little attention to the touts, did my best to avoid eye contact, politely nodded “no” if we did lock eyes, and kept my earbuds firmly affixed...
Shanghai’s subway, despite being massively crowded, was impressive, state-of-the-art, almost futuristic, and it quickly carried me to the bar’s vicinity, which was only a few stops away.
Riding the escalator up to street level, I swiped through my GPS, located the bar, which turned out to be a restro-pub, in a gargantuan shopping center close by...
I rode up another escalator inside the shopping center, spotted my destination:
“Cowboys Bar and Grill.”
Walking in through the open, arched double doors, I noticed the place was packed. But I also picked up on something funny. There were no women there.
Only dudes. At first, I thought this was because of China’s gender disparity.
But scanning around, examining closer, I observed how all the guys were buff or at least in decent shape.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer They were mostly young, too, with well-trimmed hair, and dressed quite stylishly.
Gazing over at the walls, I saw posters of Madonna, Lady Gaga, Queen, Jason Momoa, and then, yes, a rainbow flag.
It was a gay bar.
Ah shit, I thought to myself. Probably wouldn’t meet a lady at this place.
I was surprised Denny had invited me here. He’d never struck me as gay, but I don’t have the best gaydar.
I’d known Denny to be a skirt-chasing maniac. Wait, was he maybe bi?
He was a prankster, though, always pulling gags in the office. Perhaps it was a joke?
I wasn’t sure, but I decided to take advantage of the “fabulous” drink special, slam a couple shots to finish off the virus, then have a stroll around the city, then head back to the hotel, creep online, probably jerk off to phone porn, the usual…
After draining a trio of Russian vodka shots, in rapid fire succession, and paying the African drag queen bartender, who’d winked at me several times, I texted Denny to see if he was at the bar. He replied with only a rainbow flag pic. Sneaky bastard!
Slightly crapulous, I decided to one up him, and I made a fake Grindr profile, with his pic, social media, and phone number, and I showed it to the drag queen bartender, asked her to post it on the bar’s Weibo page.
Figured Disco Denny Boy would have some interesting correspondences tonight…
三
The drag queen waved sentimentally, feigned heartbreak as I left, and on my way to the subway stop, I happened upon a massage place that looked legit and decided to get a leisurely rubdown.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The place was attached to a chain hotel and had the usual foyer, front counter that took your shoes, confirmed which package you’d like.
I chose oil.
A balding, shifty-eyed, runty 50ish man in gray “Guccci” sweatpants and sweatshirt led me up a flight of stairs, down a dingy hallway, into a KTV room.
“No, I wanted an oil massage, not karaoke,” I affirmed, but my words fell on deaf ears, and he scurried out.
I sat into the butterscotch brown leather couch in the center of the room, thinking perhaps another attendant would arrive to take me to the massage quarters.
But a second later, in slinked a very, very pretty young girl, maybe mid-20s, and slim, with catwalk legs…
The China Doll, the geisha white Asian beauty had sparkling sapphire lenses in her epicanthic eyes.
She was simply radiant in her black spandex miniskirt barely covering her pelvis.
And her white button-down blouse showcased a most yummy, spicy pair of round B-cup boobies!
This was some serious Kung Pao Pussy…
Her wavy, midnight mane was waist-length, parted to the left, and she swept it over her shoulder, sauntered towards me, like a kitten, her black pumps speaking with the cherry laminate flooring.
Wordlessly, she sat on my lap, crossed her black floral pattern pantyhose-sheathed legs, and wrapped her warm arms around me.
“What the fuck?” I thought to myself. Had I mistakenly come to a brothel?
I wasn’t sure what I’d gotten myself into. But I certainly knew where I wanted to get into...
“You have pretty eye,” the mysterious Geisha said to me, in a sultry voice. Her breath had a whiff of fruity candy to it.
“How about the other eye?” I quipped, wondering if my humor would land. But it didn’t. And she just quizzically stared at me for a second, like I was an asshole.
Sarcasm and plurals don’t usually translate well into the Chinese syntax.
Geisha licked her dark red, wide lips, leaned in and pecked me, and then backed away and timidly giggled.
I leaned towards her, pecking her softly. Her gem-like eyes widened with an expression of shock, and she shifted her gaze, for a split second, staring down at the floor, as if mired in trepidation, but then she swiveled her face back to mine and replied by kissing me again- this time slipping in her tongue.
And we were going at it, tongue-punching, sloppy, nasty, wet and wild smooching, tickling tonsils…
Hard to complain about snogging a yellow chick this smoking hot, but her kissing technique needed improvement; it was callow, far too aggressive.
I attempted to guide her with gentler, more romantic motions, lighter dips and dashes, but it was in vain, and I relented, matched her ferocity, reckless abandon, and then slipped my hand up into her blouse, over her microfiber, wireless bra, teasing and squeezing on her fantastic, pert little honey tits.
I broke our kiss, laid the Geisha Girl on the couch, hiked up her skirt, and marveled at her T-string thong panties, which were jet black, had strings like dental floss, and I gulped when I caught sight of one of her dark pink pussy lips poking out the V…
My cock was calescent, and it bulged, hardened stiff as cement. The Geisha reached up and lightly patted my tumescent little brother, over my jeans, and smiled approvingly, devilishly.
I reached down to yank her panties off, free her vagina, but my hands froze at the sight of another woman entering the room.
Sadly, it was not another super-hot chick. It was an older, frumpy cow with a bowl-cut hairdo. An obese Auntie in an aqua blue velvet jumpsuit.
The fat fucking bitch was angry, too, and ugly as a dragon...
Not sure if I was mistakenly molesting the bossbitch’s daughter, I relented my perving, sat back into the couch. I felt like a naughty schoolboy.
The Auntie appeared happier, seeing that I’d taken my hands away from the chick’s pussy.
The Geisha smiled at the Auntie, then looked and smiled at me, fixed her skirt and sat her hot tight ass onto my lap, its heat blanketing, grinding into my erection.
Giggling, Geisha hugged me and ran her fingers through my hair…
The Auntie plopped down next to us, the couch shaking, squeaking as she sat into it, and with a Cheshire grin, she said “hello” and told me that I looked like a white Drake. Given her age, nationality, I was surprised she even knew who that was.
Auntie spoke English quite well and asked me lots of questions, about my job, salary, where I was from, where I was staying. I lied in all my answers. I told her my name was Charles Bukowski and I was a police officer from Kansas City, visiting Shanghai before a cruise.
I thought that saying I was a cop might put her off, do away with whatever funny business might be about to go down. Maybe she’d go away and let me return to molesting the Mystery Geisha.
But it didn’t seem to make a difference, and while I spoke with the Auntie, with Mystery Geisha’s tight ass burning into my lap, an impish, 50ish bucktooth motherfucker, in a tacky suit, like a caricature of a British butler, brought in several trays of drinks, food, and then ducked out the room quickly.
Noticing the food, not wanting it, not having ordered it and not having a good feeling about where things were going, my dick shriveled like a frightened turtle, and I cut short the convo with Auntie.
“I didn’t order that food. Um, I think I’ll go now…” I said, as I politely loosened and lowered the Geisha from off me and got up from the leather sofa.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Right as my knees straightened, a trio of pissed off dudes burst in, the three assholes in a triangle formation. One up front, two behind.
The frontman was 30ish and effete, dressed in tight-fitting bright blue slacks and a hot pink polo shirt.
The other two wore the same Guccci sweatsuits as the front counter guy, but they were younger and far taller, bigger and rougher- between the two of them they probably didn’t have a full set of teeth.
The effeminate one, Pink Shirt, slipped me a handwritten bill for 2100 RMB.
About $300.
The Auntie and Geisha Girl promptly left the room smirking.
Watching Geisha’s pear-shaped ass as she girlishly stepped away, I knew heartbreak…
Pink Shirt had an angry scowl, but, given how thin he was, and seeing his tight, loud-colored clothes, and then noticing he had a man-bun, it was hard to take him seriously.
I wasn’t sure what pissed me off more. The man-bun or the bullshit bill.
“You pay for food!” Pink Shirt proclaimed, as menacingly as he could.
The other two goons, who didn’t look like they couldn’t fight, stood blocking the doorway, making their best war-faces too.
Ah shit, here it was. I was being Shanghaied!
五
I evaluated my options.
A: Do I pay them, which would encourage them to continue their nefarious deeds?
Fuck no!
B: Do I call the police?
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer In China?! Yeah right! There’s no rule of law in China! These assholes probably ARE police officers or are paying off, drinking buddies with, or cousins of the coppers.
C: Do I try to fight them?
Well, I’m in decent shape, was an amateur boxer many moons ago.
BUT, if I beat them down, I go to jail, wind up like Wendell Brown... Even though there were three of them, it’d probably be easy to fuck them up. Contrary to popular Western belief, very few Chinese, in China, nowadays, know Kung Fu, or have ever been in a real fight.
BUT, if they did know Kung Fu, went Jackie Chan on my ass, I’d get my face smashed, get robbed, go to the hospital, pay extortionate medical bills, and maybe ALSO go to jail, all of which would totally suck.
Lose-Lose, Option C.
So, I chose Option D.
Buy time…
“Hey,” I pleaded, “I’m really sorry, guys. But I don’t have that sorta money on me.
I’m a tourist. I don’t have that Ali- thingamajig.
“I really don’t want any trouble. Look, let’s go out by the subway station. There’s an ATM. I’ll pay you in cash,” I promised, speaking as conciliatorily as I could, holding my arms in the air as if the goons were cops pointing guns.
Then, without warning, without calculation, I ripped a thunderclap of a fart, a giardia, rotten egg stinker.
The three recoiled, covered and held their noses, retched and shook their heads in disgust. I thought the stink might paralyze them, allow me time to make a run for it, escape, but after the initial impact, they regrouped and hastily gathered their minds.
They spoke amongst each other in their local dialect. I couldn’t understand any of it. One of the ruffians seemed to have objections, was loudly motioning at me, yelling something, but Pink Shirt overruled him.
“Okay. We take you.” Pink Shirt said, nodding me towards the door.
The three assholes allowed me to pass, followed closely behind me. Walking down the hallway, I saw the Geisha Girl, two other pretties and Auntie sitting at a green felt table, smoking cigarettes, laughing and playing mahjong.
Shit, at least I kissed her, felt her up, saw her pussy lip, I thought, consoling myself...
I wanted my shoes, my Air Jordan 1 Low Laser Blues, but Pink Shirt wouldn’t let me have them. The man-bun fuck!
“You get shoe after you pay,” he growled, and pointed me to the door, and I stepped out into the cold wet misty night wearing flip-flop type slippers with no socks.
The three following behind me, I knew it was time to make my move.
I stopped, arched my ass directly at them and let out another violent, effluvial fart.
The noxious burst of gas temporarily stunned them, and I kicked off my slippers and tore off running, into the crowded street, dodging and shoving by masses of people, nearly knocking over a little pajama wearing dancing granny, who shrieked loudly after I bumped into her.
The three fucks gave chase, but I was faster, and I knew I had to ditch them quickly or else they might catch up or enlist the help of a cop who’d surely take their side in the matter.
I ran into the road, alongside traffic, and the road’s surface, the bitumen, felt gentler and warmer than that of the rough sidewalk.
WHHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRR was all I heard, and BAM, an e-bike slammed into me.
The driver, a deliveryman, and I, in tandem, collapsed, crashed to the ground, and the food in a plastic bag hanging from the handlebar of his bike- rice, veggies, mystery meat- went splashing into and over the asphalt like a modern art painting.
The trio chasing me, upon seeing the accident, stopped and stood panting and wheezing, frowned at me and briskly walked off in the other direction.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer It was then the adrenaline receded, and a massive surge of pain rushed over me.
I looked down and saw my right leg bent out of shape, grotesquely, a fucking Gordon Hayward.
Cars in the vicinity drove by, honking, as I lay there.
The deliveryman, not seriously hurt, at least not like me, nothing broken, I guess, got up, dusted off his mustard yellow jumpsuit, slid up his helmet’s visor and cursed at me, picked up his bike and zoomed off.
People nearby took pics with their phones. Many stood and stared.
Grimacing, I fished out my phone from my jean pocket and called the conference organizer, told her I’d been in a traffic accident, sent her my GPS coordinates.
She said she’d call an ambulance, and I dragged myself to the curb, sat and waited, pissed about getting Shanghaied, pissed about breaking my leg, losing my Jordans, and pissed I couldn’t bang the Geisha.
The only thing that gave me any solace was thinking of Denny’s Grindr profile and hoping he’d be getting sent dick pics and shit…
A JUMP TO HEAVEN’S GATE
一
Taylor was born and raised in Grayson, Kentucky, a rural, scenic little town with a population of about 4,000.
He’d had a fairly typical small-town American life, was handsome, outgoing and popular and played wide receiver on the football team in high school. He’d dreamed of playing in the NFL, being a superstar athlete, marrying a supermodel, or marrying his namesake, Taylor Swift, Taylor & Taylor… Oh, he could see them, hand in hand, walking on a glistering beach, under a crimson sun, their names written in the sand… Taylor & Taylor…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer He’d marry Taylor Swift, and he’d be making millions, playing in the NFL, breaking all of Jerry Rice’s receiving records. He’d be on TV commercials. He’d be somebody. Somebody GREAT. That was his dream…
But that dream didn’t pan out, and his varsity teams stumbled to losing records, didn’t even qualify for the playoffs, and he wasn’t recruited by any colleges, and his grades weren’t high enough to earn him any scholarships.
Aside from football, it was largely parties and girls that occupied his time in high school, not too much else. Books had never been a priority.
However, he had developed an interest in science, and became infatuated with the field of neuroscience, obsessed with the idea of him becoming a world-renown neuroscientist, having taken a shine to the topic after watching a few Sam Harris YouTube videos.
After enrolling at Eastern Kentucky University and failing to make the team as a walk-on, he completed his bachelor’s in pre-med (with a minor in frat parties, binge-drinking). Upon receiving his diploma, though, he again didn’t have the grades for a scholarship to med school and went further into debt as he struggled through a neuroscience PhD program at his alma mater and worked part-time stocking shelves at Walmart.
His drinking, which had been a weekend, party thing through high school and college, became an everyday thing for him. He’d begun drinking his coffee splashed with Jameson Irish whiskey, shotgunning 3 or 4 Busch beers with lunch, and pounding 6 or 7 shots of Jack Daniels or Old Crow or Jim Beam bourbon alongside dinner.
Despite his heavy alcohol intake, he was functional, never getting too buzzed where he couldn’t show up to school or work, get his tasks done, though the quality of his PhD research, papers was erratic, and he’d regularly be involved in shouting matches, sometimes shoving and in minor physical altercations with coworkers at Walmart, but nothing severe enough to warrant termination.
After eking out his thesis, completing his PhD, his dissertation, his defense, which he considered to be a work of unapparelled genius, an ingenious work severely misunderstood and maligned by his advisors, Taylor packed his belongings into garbage bags, crammed all his stuff into the trunk and backseat of his blue Ford
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Focus, and drove from Richmond to Louisville to seek work and fulfil his dream of being a famous academic or a wealthy researcher or highly regarded scientist at a multinational corporation. But, to his chagrin, he had trouble finding ANY work in academics or research. At all.
He lacked work experience in the neuroscience field, yet he had just graduated, and many employers wanted a candidate with prior work experience.
This infuriated him. How was he supposed to have 2 or 3 years of work experience when he’d spent the last few years completing his studies? It was indeed quite the conundrum…
The job search left him with a sour taste, and soon he’d developed a disdain for his country, America.
His whole life his parents, teachers, the TV told him of the virtues of a college education and that once he had a diploma in his hand, then he’d have a great job, a house, wife, kids, picket fence, et cetera.
And he’d done that.
Yet here he was, with a fucking PhD, and still no one was giving him an opportunity. No one was giving him shit, and door after door slammed in his face, application after application was rejected, and no one seemed to recognize the brilliance of the online research he’d done and published on his blog and spoken of on his YouTube channel, which had nearly THREE HUNDRED subscribers…
Further and further he sank into credit card debt, trying to simply pay his rent, car, buy food, and his debt compounded, started piling high as a Himalayan mountain-this on top of the six figure sum he already owed in student loans.
Shit…
It made him more and more bitter every day.
It wasn’t only the economics of America, it not being the meritocracy he thought.
He also hated the atmosphere, the political correctness, the bickering, the Twitter battles, the liberals and conservatives whining at each other while people like him barely made end’s meat. It was gross. It was stupid. What had this great country become?
Fed up, Taylor began to look elsewhere, look eastward, far east, to China.
China was the next great superpower, he posited. It was inevitable, with its large population, 600 million strong middle class, its manufacturing base and high-tech society and bullet trains he’d seen on YouTube videos.
He marveled at China’s ever-expanding economy and ingenuity and admired how the government of China got things done. How the people there were so united, so together, had such purpose. China reminded him of America back in the 1950s, when the country really was great.
Taylor had read online of the abundance of work, business and financial opportunities in China and began to study Mandarin.
He started applying to jobs at companies and think tanks, thinking he’d be highly prized, considering his PhD, but all he could find was work teaching English, mostly at training centers and public schools, and many of those jobs consisted of singing songs, dancing and playing games with children, which wasn’t for him, someone of his abilities and education.
Initially he was disappointed, but his spirits lifted when he came across a job for a position at a university near Beijing.
The job was for a “university lecturer”, and while it consisted mostly of teaching conversational English classes, it did offer possibilities of “research” and grant money for projects. Taylor figured it could be a gateway to bigger and better things and sort of liked the idea of being a “college lecturer.” It sounded very distinguished. Surely, he’d be highly respected.
After a brief Skype interview, in which he was asked only a couple basic questions about himself, he was hired, sent a contract.
The work visa process for a “Z Visa” was a pain in the ass, cost him nearly $700 in assorted fees, but he thought of the old adage, “It takes money to make…” and he sucked it up, went further into debt, deeper down the hole after shelling out an additional $1000 for his plane ticket.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Finally, though, after 2 months, he had secured his visa and boarded a plane, for the first time ever, and sat squished into the middle seat, in coach, and flew from Louisville to Beijing, on four connecting flights, for a total of 6,853 miles and 28
hours, crossing clouds, mountains, oceans and timelines, on a preternatural journey to begin his new life…
三
Despite seeing videos, pictures online, Beijing was nothing like he could have imagined. It was colossal and awe-inspiring in a way that was almost like prestidigitation. He was overwhelmed, speechless as he groggily walked through and out of the sprawling, shiny new Beijing airport.
He then boarded a lemon-yellow cab, handed the cagey flattop driver a slip of paper with the school’s address and buckled up as they roared off into the brownish dusk, en route to his school.
Taylor whiplashed and shook with the vehicle as the driver tore through the city streets and highways like a bat out of hell. Panning his jetlagged gaze around in the backseat of the cab, he couldn’t believe how many people there were in Beijing, people in such massive clusters, swarming and teeming everywhere and anywhere, streets, roads, buses, buildings, everything peopled, jam-packed, huddled masses, bunched in, packed like sardines, fucking swimming, brimming, spilling oceans of humanity. There were probably more humans on one city block, bus or subway train than in the entirety of his hometown.
(These Chinese people must really be horny and fuck a lot, he pondered. How else could there be such masses of them…)
Beijing city went on for infinity and was eclectic, varying the spectrum from battered weather-worn gray blocks of Soviet style apartments that sat directly adjacent to ritzy high-rises, and towering glass office buildings, KFCs, shopping malls and supertall skyscrapers situated next to squarish traditional Chinese homes, Hutongs and pagodas and slanted roof Asian temples, the city a truly extensive mix, a striking contrast of old and new.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Taylor’s eyes lit up when he thought he spotted a UFO. But it was in fact a circular black drone that whirred by his taxi’s window and soared off and sliced into the gray haze of the chunky sky, and Taylor sat enthralled, his head cocked back, staring out at the cityscape full of flickering neon glows from endless rows of immense structures, the city’s dusky radiance like something from a sci-fi movie…
It was truly mesmerizing for him, a small-town kid, to arrive in such a dizzying, bustling metropolis… I mean, he’d been to New York City once, but this was another thing altogether, a place this alien, busy, populated and massive…
For the first time in his life, he felt like he was on the verge of greatness. For the first time, he felt like somebody, and he thought of his classmates from high school, still in his hometown, still at the same DQ. Those nobodies still not doing shit. If only they could see him now! He was in fucking CHINA!
四
His university was on the city’s satellite outskirts, Beijing’s never-ending, expansive edge. The campus in what used to be a farming community that was becoming urbanized, developed. Along the roads were tiny lots growing vegetables and ramshackle tin houses and restaurants, small groceries, street side vendors and boxy crumbling concrete buildings.
On nearly every street were newly built mobile phone stores, at least one or two phone stores per block.
Red banners and Chinese flags hung from nearly all buildings, and there were giant billboards featuring Chairman Xi smiling and PLA soldiers saluting at nearly every intersection.
The most prevalent thing, though, in the area had to be the construction.
Construction on a scale Taylor couldn’t have exactly imagined.
There were half empty, half torn down, half constructed, newly constructed and about to be constructed structures situated on each street. There were newly built, mostly empty houses, office buildings, office parks, schools, stores, and some of the stores had fake “Starbucks” signs plastered on their fronts and mannequins standing inside the vacant buildings.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Constant cavalcades of mud-caked construction vehicles, semitrucks rumbled around every road, their tailpipes belching big black clouds of fumes that floated and dissolved upwards. The trucks drove furiously, honking their horns at one another, with purpose.
The trucks’ cargo rattled like storms and the trucks’ clangor bled into and mixed with the ubiquitous construction sites’ drilling, the clanking of heavy machinery, and the two harmonized, sounded a mechanical din.
The half torn up buildings and rubble all around first reminded Taylor of a tornado hit town, but the gray skies and ocher dust and local people in ratty clothes and facemasks sort of gave the place a Mad Max vibe…
五
The university was nice, though. Like a little oasis amid the bipolar fracas of construction and decay.
The campus was green, with many willow and poplar trees, lush foliage, violet and pink flowers dotted about its sprawling grounds.
The buildings appeared sleek and modern, Taylor thought, at first, while being given a tour of the campus by the middle-aged gruff admin lady who’d received him upon his arrival to campus, the lady’s lips not moving much as she spoke and her conservative, long gray pleated dress and her bowl-haircut, her bottle size eyeglasses reminding him of a Mormon, or a cult member…
Peering, looking closer into the buildings, though, as they walked briskly, Taylor discovered that many were empty or half-built inside... The school was only 10
years old and still developing, he figured, like the surrounding area, like anything, really; it was a work in progress…
At least his apartment, on the far edge of the campus, was, well, suitable. It was a basic but clean, spacious 2 bedroom on an upper floor of an 18 storey building.
But it had a few issues…
It as well looked a lot more posh on the outside than it was inside, its outside like a tall red-brick building, maybe a hotel or condo; but its inside had wires hanging
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer from the ceilings in the hallways, and the hallways weren’t lit at night, one needed to use a flashlight to navigate the corridors, and the elevator kinda freaked him out because it still had peeling plastic wrappings on its inside walls and was plastered with ad stickers and graffiti scrawled about and phone numbers written randomly about the elevator car’s silver metal walls.
The elevator also had a persistent odor of secondhand smoke as security guards from the building, as well as Chinese university teachers, would smoke cigarettes in the elevators, and hallways, too. There were often cigarette butts strewn, stubbed out on the elevator floor.
(Fire hazards had always freaked him out, and the fire hoses in the hallways didn’t appear functional, and where a fire extinguisher was supposed to be encased, in a glass box, next to the elevators, there sat only a 1-liter plastic bottle filled with water… It unnerved Taylor, but the building was built of concrete and likely less flammable, or so he hoped…)
The building’s construction was sorta scary too. Although the apartment building was newly built, there were several cracks, fissures running up the walls in Taylor’s apartment, which he hoped were only superficial, those cracks.
The furniture, especially the bed, was hard and uncomfortable. Buying several additional pillows, cushions, and a bed mat, helped.
The road next to the apartment complex was a two lane highway, and it was a bit annoying, with semitrucks and construction vehicles barreling down it, at all hours, and the trucks would constantly pop jake brakes and blare, honk, and beep high decibel horns at one another and at every other vehicle nearby.
Earphones, earplugs, and a white noise app helped with the beeping from the trucks, but the sounds were so high-pitched, they could still be heard slightly…
What’s more, Taylor had several bouts of diarrhea upon moving to China, nearly once or twice a week, having loose sloppy shits or other stomach issues, and he quickly developed breathing problems, too, chronic coughs likely attributable to air pollution in the area, the air leaving layers of brownish dust that coated everything in his apartment, especially out on his balcony, the dust stubbornly present and persistent, no matter how much or how often he cleaned.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Still, despite the flaws, his life in China was an improvement, a big step up from Walmart and the shithole apartments he’d lived in, with their paper-thin walls and bowing ceilings that squeaked and squealed like a pig being slaughtered. Even the slight rattle and squeal of the honking trucks was better than hearing that neighbor lady’s baby’s shrieking and crying or the young couple who were always screaming and cursing at each other, and for sure better than hearing and smelling his last roommate’s farts.
And it was WAY better, too, than the double-wide he’d grown up in.
For the first time in his life he was able to live alone, with no family or roommates.
He finally had a bathroom all to himself.
Best of all, the apartment, utilities were free, so he couldn’t complain, and he enjoyed that he was the only foreign teacher at his school, the attention it gave him, how tall it made him feel, and he loved his light, 10 hour per week schedule teaching classes of docile Chinese students, most of whom just slept or played on phones while he stood at his podium, reading from the class textbook or from a university provided PowerPoint.
Upon reaching China, Taylor was so elated, so high on the country, he barely drank, cutting back to a beer or two, maybe, at night, sometimes not drinking anything for the first time since high school. Of course, it did help, too, that the local beer tasted like piss and the national hard liquor, baijiu, tasted like foot fungus sieved through a stinky sock.