ghostin the hood

lzyk and I went to a yuppie pop up bar in 大稻埕 so that we could quarrel in public. It is my all time favorite neighborhood in Taipei. It's the only place left with the Japanese era brick architechture; business on bottom, family home on top (sidewalks with 5 kickers every block, but I was arguing, not skating tonight) beautiful taiwanese flowers and ferns growing out of gutters and cracks and arbors and folding sunshades.

It's some kind of beer week festival in that neighborhood, organized by a group of new bars. Most of the area is pretty much empty. I desperately hope the taiwanese people will preserve this jewel of a neighborhood and not replace it with a gaudy glittering monstrosity like the 101 area. But if the development vultures sweep in and eat out the rotting innards of old Taipei, at least I can say I supported it all by buying overpriced hot beer at one of the first yuppie bars to open there.

The bar was pretty awesome. The sweltering heat at 1 am reminded me of drinking at frat bars in georgia, with my white button down shirt sweating through, and my UGA hat stained with sweat and my pastel shorts with crocs at the center of a puddle of brah sweat. The bar was hidden away in the second story of one of those japanese era buildings, beautiful and well thought out. Taiwan was beautiful once. I wish I could have seen it before the communist (ok, fascist) era cement wasteland thing happened. At the same time, if the japanese were still running, I think the skating would suck. I hear it's at least as hard to skate in Japan as in my motherland, because of the human terrain.

Anyway, the bar felt more like an awesome house party in 大稻埕 than a proper bar, because the beer was hot, and we seemed to be allowed to explore whatever parts of the building we wanted to; some other early adopters were still hanging out in their shops drinking and chatting, and welcomed us to come down the steps and hang out, and later, the ones upstairs were just as accomodating.

We posted up on some cool (temperature) granite steps somewhere inside the building, so that we could argue at a reasonable volume and not over the blaring techno, and at one point, a someone came up from behind me, going down the stairs, so I moved my beer quickly, so they could go by without kicking it over. They didn't go by, and as I turned to see why not, lzyk asked me why I moved the bottle. No one was there. The only possible explanation is that I had seen a ghost out of the corner of my eye. I've encountered a few ghosts lately, but then again, it's ghost month, so that's neither here nor there.

Unfortunatley, some other laowai

(https://www.google.com.tw/search?q=laowai&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS557US558&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiVgbeL66rOAhWIVZQKHbl8AAYQ_AUICCgB&biw=833&bih=613)

showed up, and pissed on my parade. I hate not being the only 外賓, partly for the same reasons that I like street skating. It's a poisonous cycle, I ruin what I love by the very act of doing it. Skating a spot and being the only foreigner at a place I like is like shitting on the side walk; you might get away with it, but if you keep doing it, someone angry dude is eventually going to shut it down.

And that is the point of tonight's warbling: I got kicked out of an MRT station today for standing. I was waiting on lzyk at the gate, inside of the Yellow Line of Doom, and security came out to tell me to leave. I played the foreign card, which means speaking to them en francais if they speak english, so they left me alone and I moved outside of the Yellow Line of Doom. Within about 90 seconds, they came at me again, bro, and pointed at the escalator and invited me to "go, go, you no here, no here". It could have been "no hear", but I'm not sure. I jabbered in french, but they looked pretty pissed, so I rode the escalator outside of the station and waited in the heat. I am proud. Being scary is awesome.  I think it was all because of the beard. Lzyk has been beard shaming me relentlessly.

Which brings me back to the bar argument. Fighting in public is not my thing. We walked back through my favorite neighborhood in silence, under the eaves with relentless, endlessly original tropical flowers and ferns hanging out, and between and on and around and under the bricks that were there before fascism and cement architecture, and eventually stomped our way home. After we went to radio silence, I was just thinking about skating all the those spots we were walking past. I can't wait to skate through there on my new set up. I'm going to set it up tonight so that its constituent parts can simmer overnight before it gets skated.