on monkeys...

if you give a girl jakarta, she will want a monkey. and she will beg her mommy for one until said mommy agrees - after a thousand disagrees - and even throws in a sugar glider for good measure. one for all my friends! on me, in fact! plus one yellow canary who sings the girlies three awake and asleep, daily and nightly.

these are the deals the mackin parents make when they haul their children overseas to that one area of the world that prompts grae-rose to furrow her brow after a day or two, look at me quizzically, and note with a ventriloquist's mouth, "huh. there are a lot of asians here."

indeed.

but the wonderful peccadillo about jakarta is the taxi system, you know. like time, it heals all wounds and, as a bonus, kills all dreams and promises.

when we ride, we ride sans belts with noses steam-pressed up against the windows, seeing everything we can catch. it's hyper clear that the more we see of jakarta, the more we realize there's so much more to miss.

tuesday, we saw a monkey. he was on a leash and the man who held him had no legs. the monkey stood on his hind ones almost apologetically, in kind of a crouch like they weren't even that great and workable even though his handler and everyone else knows that legs are legs and even monkey ones are worth two in the bush, whatever that means, and so we smiled ruefully as we took it all in on our privileged taxi drive-by.

it was like that scene in the town, kind of, when the van full of robbers in nun masks drives slow-mo by the aghast kid....but this scene was all mucked up with our face masks gleeful for a half-second...until we realized that the monkey was wearing a fedora and a man-mask.

if you've never seen a two foot tall hairy monkey-man in passing, consider yourself fortunate.

we no longer want a monkey. we would also like our nightmares back, thank you very much, jakarta.

here and here.