i’ve lived in the lower east side for almost 20 years now, but recently i moved to the depths of chinatown in manhattan.

i love it there, it’s without question my favorite part of new york city. not necessarily the part of chinatown for tourists, but the deeper, murkier parts of chinatown where i’m invariably the only person on the street who doesn’t speak mandarin or cantonese. the only downsides to living in chinatown are:

1-the smell of the garbage on sunday night, which is bad enough to make you want to stuff handgrenades in your nose and blow your face off just so you don’t have to smell the putrefying bags of whatever it is they’re throwing away.

2-the abundance of dead and almost dead animals in the windows of the restaurants. i do have to say that living in chinatown makes me even more solid in my veganism (i’ve been a vegan now for 21 years or so).

i love my neighborhood, but seeing a plate of food like:

makes it pretty easy to remain vegan. i don’t even know what type of fish this is, or was. some prehistoric fish made out of moldy concrete? the missing link? the first fish to venture out of the primordial stew? some people might be concerned that i’m giving away my address by saying that i’m living in chinatown. that clearly means that you haven’t spent a whole lot of time in chinatown, as it’s a byzantine maze that even i get lost in.

see, this is what happens when political campaigns end, i write blogs about primordial fish and garbage bags filled with effluvia. regarding politics, though, i do find it funny that some people in the gop are still acting as if the campaign was on-going. sarah palin recently was talking about bill ayers, for instance. do you think some well-intentioned person in her family or close circle of friends could let her know that the campaign is actually over?

oh, and thanks to the people who came down to santos the other night to support the issue fundraiser.