I’ll bet he was myrrh. Bastard, he brings the cheapest gift and now he wants to sodomize me.

When he was reading he could fly away into the wildest skies of imagination, untethered to the reality that his soul was trapped in a wretched creature cobbled together from meat and bone, like us all.

The City of San Francisco is being stalked by a huge, shaved vampyre cat named Chet, and only I, Abby Normal, emergency backup mistress of the Greater Bay Area night, and my manga-haired love monkey, Foo Dog, stand between the ravenous monster and a bloody massacre of the general public. Which isn’t, like, as bad as it sounds, because the general public kind of sucks ass.

When it appeared that even the most passive-aggressive attempts would not work, Charlie resorted to the ultimate Beta Male Attack, which was to tolerate Alvin and Mohammed’s presence, but to resent the hell out of them and drop snide remarks whenever he had the chance.

For the tourist, immersed in the oblivion of vacation spending, Cypress Street provided a bonanza of curious gifts to prove to the folks back home that they had been somewhere. Somewhere where they had obviously forgotten that soon they would return home to a mortgage, dental bills, and an American Express bill that would descend at the end of the month like a financial Angel of Death. And they bought. They bought effigies of.

About to be hanged is my status quo, not a condition that requires your repair.

So I’m like getting some perspective now – like when you’re a kid and you think it sucks that you have to eat hydrogenated peanut butter on your PBJ, and then you see one of those starving commercials kids with flies in their eyes, who don’t even have a sandwich – and you’re all, ‘Well, that sucks.

I am not inclined to use hip-hop vernacular often, but there are times when, like French, it just better expresses the sentiment of the moment.

Parables were never my strong suit. If you wan to say something, say it. So, of course, Joshua and Buddhists were the perfect people to hang out with, straight talkers that they were.

Religion in Chinatown, as in most places, is based less on a cogent theology and more on a collection of random fears, superstitions, prejudices, forgotten customs, vestigial animism, and social control. Mrs. Ling, while a professed Buddhist of the Pure Land tradition, also kept waving cat charms, lucky coins, and put great faith in the good fortune of the color red... and was very much in favor of any tradition, superstition, or ritual that involved fireworks...