Blog Entries from Iain Aschendale

  1. Our Friend (Istanbul Part II)

    When Mrs. A and I honeymooned there, we'd (I had) forgotten to check the calendar for one critical thing, and arrived during Ramadan. We were walking down the main drag, near dusk, when an older man approached and greeted us. He introduced himself, and offered to show us a restaurant owned by a relative This is one stereotype about Mediterranean culture that proved true in Turkey: Everyone has an uncle or a cousin with the sort of shop you might be looking for. Everyone. Anyway, there...
  2. My Friend!

    In response to something @Tenderiser said in the Things you didn't know you didn't know thread: I didn't know I didn't know Iain was a USian and not a UKian. I (think I) know he's living in Japan at the moment but I though he had emigrated from here, not over there. Huh. That's funny. My best friend out here is English, my textbooks are split about 50/50 between American and British English, and I know that, when I go back home, my friends occasionally comment on my speech patterns, but I...
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  3. Hit Somebody

    So I wanna fucking hit somebody get hit get beatdown lose a fight to someone who is in the wrong and I don't even know why. Overworked? Oh, yeah, shit, I was on the clock for three and a half hours today. Extenuating circumstances of twelve hours out of the house don't count, nor do fucking lazy ass shithead boo fucking hoo the hours I spend between jobs or on public transport I just want to hit somebody get hit shit in a hole in the dirt club my dinner alpha's dinner to death before I...
  4. Something in the Wind

    There's a weird vibe on the boards lately, something in the wind that doesn't feel right. Not ugly. Not yet. Not sure where it's going, but snark and sass seem to be the order of the day. Offenders? Dunno, nobody, everybody, somebody, somebody not new, somebody just new. Little things getting picked at, the edges of the scabs running a tad raw and everyone's out of that grease that Gramma carried in her purse, combination lip balm scrape lotion thread loosener hinge oiler spice, none...
  5. Circular Extinction

    Battlestar Galactica: The Rebootening was actually a pretty good series, but reflecting back on it, I realize that the parts that I liked best were the beginning and the end. Not just the beginning showing us that an interplanetary civilization can (and will, if we get to that point) be taken down by lust, but that moment- -that wonderful moment- -when a hostile actor decides that things will start and end with vernichtung. Annihilation. The Cylons were pretty much carpet-nuking Caprica...
  6. A Fragment

    I've just awoken from a dream, the last clean flight into the plague apocalypse, flying over familiar territory, the forests and fields of Canada, cars lined up and abandoned at checkpoints, corpses. The opposite of Gradia 452, and on arrival, all the usual things were going wrong. Also, US senator Bernie Sanders was aboard. That didn't work out well for him.
  7. Family Resemblance

    Mrs A has a cold. A pretty nasty one, fever nearly 40c. She's been to the doc, it's not influenza, just one hell of a cold, he gave her some meds to help out. So yeah, she's taking the day off. But when I got home from work, she was asleep in bed. She heard me come in, her eyes opened in a kind of unfocused way and... ...she looked just like her mother did... ...towards the end, her brain squeezed by tumors and pummeled by surgeries, her consciousness slowly sublimating into...
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  8. Book Review: Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

    Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel This is what Douglas Coupland would write if he were a better writer. That's not to say that he's not a good writer, in fact, I think he's a very good one, but when I read this, I couldn't help but compare it with some of his work, and the comparison didn't come out well. Perhaps it's just the Canadian thing, although most of it takes place in the US, the book starts in Toronto, and it has a certain Canadian feel to it, at least to my eyes, but it...
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  9. Covers

    A song is not a dress nor a necklace nor a bracelet, not a bangle or a bauble or even a well made suit. Some are. Some are, it's true. Some songwriters put the same love and care and soul into their work that a Cambodian slave-child making a pair of Nike shoes that will retail in New York or Chicago or Shanghai for a greater sum than Mother received the day they took Older Sister away. She won't be coming back. Some songwriters, many songwriters, most songwriters are churning out a...
  10. Ruthless

    Hey man, yeah, like, sorry, y'know, I know I kinda fucked up there, but I'm all better now. I think that trip to the shop really helped me out, y'know, I'm not getting those creepy little fingers rubbing all over my face anymore. Yeah, I know, it happened last week too, but I'm good now. So, who's the new guy? Korean, idn't he? Ah, gift for the missus, right, I got it, she'll like him. So uh, hang on, yeah, I mean, I know that I was acting a little wonky back there, but, um, I don't seem...
  11. Tuesday Night

    It was a Tuesday night, and we were out drinking at the box. My days off were Wednesday and Thursday, so it was my weekend at that point, but it didn't really matter much in those days; I didn't start work until after noon most days, so every night was beer o'clock. On the corner, out front of the convenient store, there was this... I dunno, I think it was some sort of electrical or phone switching box, about waist-high, coated in some sort of hard, stippled green paint. There was a fence of...
  12. Back. Home?

    Well, I'm back in Japan. Back to reality? Two weeks of listening to my oldest friends discussing yard-care tips, back to school problems, 401k retirement plans. No one told me when to run, I missed the starting gun. I'll never own a home, I may never own a car. I may never be able to afford to move back to the US, and I can't afford to retire here. Or there. Reality sets in again. Or perhaps I'm a butterfly, dreaming that I'm a man. Where did that frog go?
  13. A Betrayal?

    So I'm off in a few minutes, but this vacation is different. I've become one of them. For so many years, I held on to the ideal of "packed and ready to move at a moment's notice." When I was a Boy Scout, I got elected patrol leader one year. Pretty much everybody did, at one point or another, so don't read anything into that. But this was summer, and when we went to camp, a new boy got assigned to my patrol. We had this backpacker cult going on, who could pack the least, who had the...
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  14. Steeplechase

    Just awoke on this Monday morning from a dream of running and scrambling through the fields, racing my good friend to a point we knew well. No euphemisms, nothing clever here, just a steeplechase in the old meaning of the word, where a man on horseback, out riding with his friends, would say something on the lines of "See yon steeple of St. Nyaralathotep's? Race you!" and the game would be on. We, of course, were dismounted, because this happens in very nearly the real, and the objective...
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  15. Want to rent a movie?

    One odd moment from my early days in Japan: There was a video rental store across from my first apartment, but I didn't know the system for getting a membership and my Japanese ability was approximately zero, so I hadn't gone over there yet. It was a huge building, two stories, the front all neoned to death. Anyway, I met another foreign teacher who lived in the same building, a girl from Texas, and she asked me if I'd been there yet. I told her my concerns about getting a membership, and...
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