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Ha ha Neti, but who gave El Vin a black eye?
I've been out in the drizzling rain and now I feel like a wet dog. It's been drizzling for two days; it's what I always think of as an urban rain - you know, city lights reflected from the wet pavement and you're just waiting for the saxophones to set in and a humphreybogart-like character to appear before you in a trench coat and hat, asking for a match - that sort of thing.
Instead it was my old gay hairdresser what appeared before me on the pavement, my god, I have never run in to that man as ridiculously many times as I have done now, since I "betrayed" him with another hairdresser...! Very nice guy, though, and a silversmith as well as a hairdresser. A couple of years ago he went to Japan to be represented at an exhibition, and the next time I cut my hair at his salon I was looking at the pictures in a Japanese magazine he'd brought back with him. And what do I see in one of the photos if not my neighbour (the one who scared me half to death knocking on my window when there was a scaffold outside our house) sitting at a cafe which is only two blocks from here. And the salon is on this street, where I live. Very unreal feeling. To add to that, they have the same Christian name, my neighbour and the hairdresser, and my hairdresser had bought the magazine partly because he was interested in buying the chair my neighbour was sitting on... The thing about that cafe, you see, is that everything's for sale there, not just the coffee but also the chair that you sit on, the table that you put your cup on, the lamp that shines its light onto the pages of your book... And he had to go to Japan to find that chair, a five minute walk away from where he works...