YOUTH IN ASIA

HAPPY New Year! and shit. Isabel and I fled to Vancouver Island for 2 weeks to stay with my mum and Becky. IT was fully immersed in constant drizzle, green and wondrous as it is. EL NINO, as Henry Rollins attests, is a stupid name for something that could drop California at a whim. KERPLUNKifornia. SOME sort of similar weather system took a few chunks out of the island this Christmas. THE little bay my mum lives on got frothy on New Year's Day: her neighbour watched half his dock drift away, LOUIS THE DOG ran away from the wind, and the power got ripped out from under us. IT made for a cozy couple of days, finding us draped around the living room like some sort of halfassed suicide pact. I saw a few good friends too, Ben and Kim and Joel and Dave and Sean, it was tough to stay so briefly, I don't want to be no friendship tourist. TO top that, I felt a bit too dopey to lavish them all appropriately. I still feel dopey. BUT ask me about Tofino!!!

@ @ !!! @ @

SCARS seem to be a major conversation focus for me again. I'VE seen one or two good ones in the last few days. KIM'S is the craziest: on the corner of her mouth is a burn scar from where she chewed a power cord when she was a teething toddler. IT seems nearly everyone has a scar around their mouth somewhere. I'VE got two vertical lines on my bottom lip from where a ferret bit me, but other than a few dents in my head, and gnarly old bike scars, i'm pretty cleanskinned. THE baddest scars of memory are on old friends Alex Beeston and Marc Guillet. ALEX showed me where he fell on a brick when he was a kid. HE 'D gotten up and realized he had a brick sticking out of his head. MARC has a big third eye from from where he pulled a flowerpot onto himself when he was a kid. HE'S always loved it. CAME up with wild stories about it for the ladies = knife fights or an arrow or getting his face caught in an escalator. I'VE always found it interesting that the roughest-looking scars come from bikes. 'WAS that where a crocodile pulled you into a swamp and death-rolled you until you kicked free?' 'NO, that's where my sock got caught in my bike-chain when I was 6.'

IF anyone is even reading this, post me a note about your favourite scar, and I'll copy it onto the next blogposting.

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MY mum goes in for an operation in the next few weeks, so please call her, she'd love to hear from you.