I've never taken off on a worldwide tour, but twice in my life I've packed a car and headed off across country with a few foolish dreams and a hope of finding myself in the rubble of someone else's backyard. Neither time yielded much more than a broken heart, a broken car, and a whole lot more debt on my credit cards.

The cynical bastard in me fears Sir Brewster will find that China is much like Sir Duke's description of Ireland in the very first BC Radio Podcast: a nondescript place overrun by the same box stores selling the same shit you can find anywhere. The closet poet, romantic, and dreamer in me hopes Sir Brewster and his ever-patient bride will find the meaning of life, the muse that sets the writing guts ablaze with brilliance and beauty, and memories that sear the brainspooge until it turns unnatural colors.

Maybe I wasn't meant for such ambitious things. When the final scores were tallied I wound up pretty much where I started, but in my resignation a chain of events unfurled that led me to TheWifeToWhomI'mMarried, a college degree, and a group of fabulous Sirs (and a gurl) who like to fling fucks and talk about Ryan Adams. My cup runneth over, and it was here all along. Maybe I just had to leave to find it.

May China impact you in some magnificent and meaningful way, Sir Brewster. May it lead you to what you've always wanted, what was missing, or to reassess what it is you've already got in a way that causes greater joy. If it turns out to be the latter, lie about it so you get a better story. It worked for James Frey, other than the part where the First Church of Oprah Winfrey put a fatah on his ass.

The Duke

In a dream I saw a gargantuan glass-tailed Chimera arise from out the waters of the Yangtze River, painting the airways with reels of fantastical Sino-Tibetan oration, holding atween its jaws the heads of a thousand folks shoved out their homes for to make way for another couple dozen running tracks or trampolines or swimming pools or whatever (Frenzied yelps -“Jesus Christ Almighty, we’ve got less than a year! Shift! Fuck your windowsill, y'hear, and your bastard conservatory!”) and clasping in electric hoof-hands two hundred and nineteen bloggers all writhing in ropes of state-enforced silence.

From the window of an apartment some nineteen miles away, a young man with the most sublime jawbone / eyes / torso / six-pack etc sits clickity-clacking on a laptop, looking up now and then for to note the texture of the fire careering out the arse of yon colossus in the distance, flicking through a phrasebook lain open on his knee for to decipher this or that terrible pronouncement.

Spying this from my position top the Hilton Hotel in Belfast, some 8174 kilometres to the right, I let loose a cheekful of whistle at the breeze all scuttling past.