Venial Sin

In London now, at brother’s house. Mind blown. It’s stunning. There’s a bloody elevator. I’m jet-lagged and exhausted. More information later. UK people, e-mail me with phone numbers so I can get in touch with you in three months when I’ve lost enough weight to not cringe in public. London has some beautiful men. Luckily for me, each hot man is accompanied by about 18 ugly ones, so I think there may still be a chance for me to find [...]

I started writing this a week ago, on August 14th. It’s Independence Day in Pakistan today, but what’s really got people worked up is the fact that this year, it’s falling on a Sunday, which means that there will be no day off. So far though, Pakistan’s independence day is proving to be a fancy excuse for people to fire off empty rounds into the air and for motorcyclists across Karachi to remove the silencers/mufflers from their bikes and tear [...]

Putting my brother and myself into a room together in an effort to encourage fraternal/sibling bonding and affection is, as I have tried patiently to explain to my mother, the equivalent of banging two pieces of plutonium together just to see what will happen. So why, even after watching us demolish furniture, decorative ornaments and pieces of artwork, does she just fail to understand this?

It’s raining in Karachi tonight. I can smell the ozone in the air, and the feeling of raindrops splashing off my skin is scarily fun. I want to dance in it, to soak in the water and let the sky weep all over me while worlds appear in puddles, gates to other lives and other stories. Old histories, new futures, all of it washed away by the clouds that drift into view and cleanse everything so that we can start [...]

I know it’s kind of butch to concuss someone, but does it still count if the task was performed with the aid of a hardcover edition of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey? From a distance of about a dozen feet, in dim lighting?

Dear Mathias, 10 years, almost to the day since you dropped me off at Logan. 10 things I remember about you and am perpetually scared of forgetting. I figured, what the hell, perhaps it’s a good idea to write them down, record them somewhere other than just my rapidly fading memory, because I think that the vodka quotient alone is driving any sort of remembrance out of my head. So where do I begin? It’s hard to decide. There’s the [...]

Until a few days ago, I was really regretting my decision to leave Karachi. I’m not quite sure why…I suppose it’s because I finally feel as though I’ve returned home, two years after the fact, and also because I’ve finally managed to find myself the sort of social support network (if indeed Diplomat, Mona Lisa, Opiate and Über can comprise a social network on their own) that I so sorely missed upon my return from the US.

I’m at home on a Saturday night, and for the first time in a very long while, I’m rather enjoying the experience. Chinese food was delivered to my door, and with the last season of Babylon 5 in my DVD player, my steamed chicken wontons seem to be redolent with even more gingery goodness than usual. All of a sudden, I hate the idea of going to London. It’s not the jokes about how all people with an above-average tan [...]