Random Shuffle: The Cure, Bruce Hornsby, Amy Winehouse, Jenny Lewis - Page 3

Winehouse these days, of course, is nothing but a tabloid joke. How easy it is for them to bend this hit song and apply it to her own drug-addled ways (she sings she's not going to rehab, and in reality she needs rehab, get it?) I hate tabloids. I hate this culture of celebrity. I hate that an incredibly talented musician cruises towards oblivion in front of cameras and millions of gawkers. I hate that instead of offering help or some semblance of humanity, we instead offer nothing but accusation and tawdry puns.

"See Fernando" - Jenny Lewis
From Acid Tongue

Last summer before leaving China for good, the wife and I took a couple of weeks to do some South Eastern Asia traveling. Part of this trip was spent in Cambodia which proved to be an amazing, exotic, beautiful, heartbreaking, and very weird country.

On one Sunday, right after Sundown we decide we need a snack and maybe some juice so I take off on my own to look for a market. Not really knowing where I am going I walk fairly aimlessly down one street and then another. Quickly a guy on a motorcycle pulls up beside me and says, "Hello." I had long since become used to strangers approaching me and trying to sell me one thing or another and so I ignored him. Completely.

He didn't mind being ignored, nor apparently driving at a snail's pace in the middle of a busy chunk or road and again greeted me. I admit I broke quickly and responded in kind (the Cambodian people as a whole are amazingly beautiful people and I found it harder than anywhere else to ignore their pleas to be heard.) He then asked me what I was doing and I responded that I was just walking. He then asked me if I needed a girl, I chuckled and said, "No."

Then he asked me if I wanted something else of the oral variety. That nearly knocked me off the curb. At this point I had lived in Asia for about a year. As stated I was used to strangers asking me for all sorts of things. I had been to the markets where they yelled at me to buy their wears. I had spent the last couple of days being followed by hoards of poor children begging me to buy water, maps, and books. I thought I heard everything. But I wasn't prepared for random offers of oral pleasure.

Article Author: Mat Brewster

Mat Brewster is a periodic ex-pat wondering if he'll ever find a home. You can find him musing on pop culture, and obsessing over concert bootlegs at The Midnight Cafe.

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