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Once from China - by nate

03.05.2002

hour left a lunch, figured out why crystal palace sucks so much last night, not crystal palace fc who suck cuz they sign obscure starters who get call-ups from national teams that only i've heard of, like, say, the usa and prc, but this bad overcrowded disco where there's never enough room to dance but where all my friends, who being chinese and therefore more preoccupied with pretense than simulacra, wanna go. see, you cant dance, even if you can, cuz requisite to dance is space, which is essentially a triaxial delimitation of quadraxial timespace. when people who could be ten feet away with a foot clear in all directions feel the need to wedge their scalps up yr nose, you start to lose yr x and z axes, leaving the little to be done, a la house a pain, with the y.

and they factor in 20% tips even though you aren't supposed to tip in china.

so, anyway, here's why it works:

the place is for married men and their girlfriends. the men cant dance, so theyve built railings making the dance floor take up about 20% of the available floorspace, to make sure there will never be enough room for people to see that they cant dance, or for people who can to prove as much.

they can charge $3 over the price quoted on the menu for drinks, or do what they did to me last night when i got sucker-punched into breaking promises intelligently made to myself to forego crystal palace forever &ever, where you get one menu when you order and another when you settle up, with of course discrepencies in all the appropriate places, cuz the cradle robbers would rather get ripped off than look cheap in front of a girl who might put out to rip them off.

and the horrible djs, and the two speaker pa system that cuts out by half every time the verbose bastard behind the mix gets hit by the propensity to capital talk shit, those are things for which i still cannot account.

their counterparts in edinburgh, ive decided, have softened me into something of a snob.

that must be.

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