Modernity's Antiseptic March

Oh, San li tun, what’s become of ya’?  I was in a fall time nostalgia strolling along what used to be the ramshackle line of late nineties pizza places, halfhearted family-style places that were achingly international because they had an English menu, that now looks like Ginza.  I’m heading to my hairdresser.  Yes.  I have a hairdresser.  Yes, it’s a glorified word for barber but my hairdresser is French and does wonderfully fancy things to everyone else’s hair.  He merely cuts mine short on the side, a bit longer on the top.  He’s a lovely fellow and that’s the only reason why I bother.  The street in front of his shop has suddenly been turned from the grungy compromise that it has always been to becoming the latest casualty of the modernity's antiseptic march.  It may as well be the cut-out town in Hong Kong Disneyland.  It looks awful and devoid of life.   One more sandcastle then.  San Li Tun merely a decade or two behind my vanishing memories of the Lower East Side.

I walked around after my hair was cut.  Was in the Apple store.  I asked them when the new X phone would be out.  "Yes, but when will be possible for to buy one?"  They apple employee who was mercifully older than forty, began to explain how I could enter a lottery or line up early and I tried, in as gentlemanly a way as possible to stop her mid-sentence ,as none of that would be necessary.  When would it be likely that a regular schmo like me can walk in off the street and purchase one . . . ?

Over at Page One the Singapore Book Store conglomerate chain, I went to the English literature section.  Page One moved in with a splash four years back.  They had three walled sections offering literature in the English language.  I'd bought a fair number of books there for my myself, for my kids.  It was never particularly well curated, as though someone got a crate of Penguin Classics and another of Vintage Classics, and so on, and filled the shelves randomly, but within the load, there were some wonderful titles.  It was such a super big store, that they looked likely to topple over our charming local books store: The Bookworm.

I strode right up to where the literature had always been.  They were Chinese titles now.  Upon asking she directed me to a sorry little, half-stocked shelf.  “That’s it?”  “Yep.” “What happened?  You used to have this entire section devoted to literature in English.”  “Yep.  It’s changed.” 

Indeed.  Come in suggesting you are a friend of the community, kill off all the local coral in the ref and then pack it all up when the biz plan needs tweaking.  Books aren't like other commodities you ruffians.  I suddenly wanted to head to the Bookworm and make sure it was alright.  

Sunday, 10/29/17