Logorrhoea

It's an affliction I get worst when abroad. R is at a business meeting tonight, leaving me to my own devices, although I've had a cordial and and agreeable meal with my folks.

1. San Diego rolls: after cucumber and nori salad, gyoza (fried dumplings), hot saki, and an oyster shooter we (parents and I) try out a San Diego variant of the California roll, which substitutes eel for crab, and is covered in a punguent eel sauce. And it was very good. I have fish sauce pleasurably repeating on me.

2. Later, at a loose end, I take 'Religion and the Decline of Magic' down to the hotel's sports bar to read with background noise. The baseball overwhelms any reading I might muster, and the obese man next to me at the bar invades my personal space while he vocally spectates the baseball game, which is horrible and sad. It confirms the observation gained during a 5-hr stopover in Newark New Jersey airport that Murrcans in 'waiting' mode have lost the power of literacy, and instead stare at a screen with news or sports, or (if vaguely literate) read magazines.

Don't get me wrong- I consider magazines as an art form and an ephemera in their own right, but on a 5-hr stopover something more substantial than 'Heat' is required. Luckily, the chapter headings of magic, religion and astrology successfully dissuade any would-be obese, baseball-obsessed suitors (I can almost hear the guy next to me thinking 'crazy chick') which is the barrier intended. I have a lucky escape.

3. They're having a high-school prom in my hotel tonight, and at 8.30 pm a bevy of couples (mostly african-american) are sashaying in out of stretch limos and cadillacs; the girls in vertiginous heels and the boys in black and white suits and two-tone trilbys. I learned from Faux news today that the average prom dress costs 500 dollars, and feel a compulsion to urge them all to cut the crap, pomp and circumstance and properly get down. I hold this recommendation in, however, not wishing to spoil what they see as the most important night in their 18-yr old lives. I may sneak down later just to see the broken high-heels, the ties askew and the ripped, trodden dresses. That's what it's for, if only they realised, but I'll let them learn for themselves. There's no telling the young, and no value in tarnishing their idealism.