Now, this is the part where I pretend to be listening

Monday, November 03, 2008

That busker

You have definitely seen this guy before, in his brightly-coloured short-sleeved shirts playing the guitar in underground passages. Of all the places I could've met him in, he walked into me putting on my Halloween costume in a toilet in the City Hall area. Please note that I'm a believer of the "No talking in the toilet" unspoken rule but unfortunately, he started the conversation first.

For the sake of brevity, the following is not the exact word-for-word transcript because I'm sure he was pretty fucking drunk then.

Busker: Halloween ah? Are you Chinese?
Me: Yes, I am. Why?
Busker: Must know your roots, Halloween is a Western festival, y'know?
Me: Ahh yes I realise that, but this only comes once a year and I just want to have fun.
Busker: What are your roots? Your dialect group?
Me: Hakka and Hokkien.
Busker: *Thinks for a while* Ahh I don't know anyone who's that combination but I'm Eurasian, with roots going back to Portugal and Spain.
Me: Wow. I give a shit.
Busker: Your religion?
Me: I'm an atheist.
Busker: I'm Roman Catholic myself and -

Until this point, I've been very patronising; punctuating my sentences with smiles and paying attention to what he says. However, I had to steer the conversation away from religion as it's too volatile of a subject for most people.

Me: Come on Sir, there's no need to talk about religions in -
Busker: Don't tell me there's no need to talk - it's important and why are you so sensitive about it? YOU'RE JUST LIKE THE MUSLIMS.

Iron Man could have eaten an entire iron plate of beans and iron nails, shat it out on an iron sheet while spraying his iron jizz all over it and still be less ironic than the busker. Like I said earlier, religion is too volatile of a subject for most people so please, don't start a conversation on it if you can't talk about it in an intelligent manner.

And to think that I thought that since he's a busking musician in his 50's, he would have seen the world enough to dispense some wisdom to me but well, I have since learned that wisdom does not necessarily come with age.

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