Windmill Pulp 1624, Chapter 9, Chinatown Jayakarta part II
Last instalment of the prelude.
I do miss my friends. I had a whole fucking crew of ultra rad lads. Down in the gutters by the shipping docks with the seagulls and seals, flipping charts for pennies. We were the caert-schrijvers of northern Holland, chart scribblers selling cartographic navigation aids to fishermen and black market cargo operations, living on the polder swamps, not that fancy Amsterdam merchant vellum copper cuts. All the fellas working together. Wickjed aesthetical styles and never got any respect, still don’t. No bourgeois ornamentation and materials. We ground our pigment from rocks. We bought our paper cheap from the Chinese. We scribbled our currents with wild hand movements, indicated navigational aids with smears and poetry. It was easier to understand our charts if you were drunk. Rembrandt ripped off our style for painting his beards. Then he stole my girlfriend. We were going places. I gotta get back to that game. Where we all had the energy for true representation and our best stuff was made waking up in the middle of the night sweating and tossing and turning with ideas. I got too into the charts, too caught up in the markets the charts describe. My Toji still gets it, are you listening Toji? Toji Dictation Software for Seismic Transfer to the Windmill Pulp Universe. All problematic lifestyles lead to problems with the chinese: The law of global trade routes and commodity exchange. The reality is I can't leave this feverish East Indian island till I deal with the Chinese. My wife was right to leave with the children. I need them out of my face so I can focus.
They knew I desperately wanted the sauce. Culinary history was boiling massive smoke clouds on the glowing Chinese horizon (Chinese chorizo aborted). All the spices from all the plantations and exploitations of the world were cycloning down into the mother's pots and preserve jars of the Chinese market makers. Local circles in ceremonial cooking practice exchanges, sharing recipes, inviting friends and neighbours over for dinner, it was all happening at record speeds, traditions in formation, right under their very noses a top salivating mouths. Of particular importance were the spicy peppers coming from the Portuguese, spicy red hot sexy little Portuguese clitoral pepper blooms, burning hot on the tongue. The Chinese knew I wanted this stuff bad. And not just the peppers. Entire galaxies of rare and common flavour pods infused in palatability enhancement mediums opening up the flavour particles like ultramarine rock dust in glowing stand oil droplets dewing up on the taste buds. In Chinatown the homeless dock rat working kids pinch nutmeg powder into their noses like snuff, plastered out with bricks of the shit behind the noodle stand alley. One always has to be on their guard. I finished my noodles. Never go up against the Chinese on an empty stomach.
The monsoons were blowing down from China. The Chinese always come down here with the monsoons. The annual migration ritual flocks the business dreamers and provisional goods to be distributed at the Batavian trading post. And also their bodies along what they call the human corridor, a navigational route I've charted many times for brothel owners and loan sharks. The travellers went into debt to the mainland Chinese merchants and once landed had to pay their taxes to the Dutch East India Company. The Chinese were truly an economic and social injection. Selling their bodies to fucking and the market. The cargo had been pouring in the past week and I was anxiously awaiting a boatload of the sauce. But there are dark forces on the other side of the monsoons. The dark Chinese. The Chinese Chinese, not the Chinatown Chinese. I can only trust the ones who put the money in my hand or the sauce in my mouth, I thought. I should never have trusted the sauce. It's over for me now. I will never set foot in a Chinese restaurant again. Me and the lads used to sit around twirling tableclothed tables slurpin sauce and sucking noodles all day and early evening. Maps spread out, crayons in hand, Szechuan dreams on the plate, shattered porcelain now cutting my fingertips.
After I saw the Kong Council men hauling in the traitor giving info to the pirates, I headed down to the Tea Lounge to drop off some charts. Cranking the zither music to the fingers max blisters in the back. Bloodshot eyed ladies with ripped silk robes in a clam shell fold revealing the bucket of feminine pearls, she grabbed my arm in a stroke, "Hey trader man, I'll read you your chart." Slightly aroused, sexual currents algae blooming my chart, but it wasn't because of the prostitutes advances. It was because of the ingested sichuan spice. I took some glances at their nipples shaded softly through the silk's wavering surface distortions. Was this on my charts? Claranti drew her charts on silk. Here I finally understood something was missing. A chart can never be complete. There's always more tools to further the precision of analysis, but then, in the end it has to fall down to intuition. And what better intuition than the stoned fibonacci of moire seduction encircling the female nipple of soft ripe breasts. Time alone at the desk affords many chances for the head to drift into sexual wanderings, but if the price bounces with the fibonacci ratio of the rhino horn, why not with the trance of the prostitutes advertisements. All things in this earth under the design of God for the enjoyment of men, but also if not properly interpreted, for their ruin. I won't let myself be ruined. No time now, get away from me, I said, pushing the cargo whores aside. But still that curvature remained impressed in my retina and I had already transposed it onto the American silver chart, I'd graph it when I got home. The boys were in the back. I bent my neck down and slunked through wonky ceiling joists.
Joffrey: Sugarcane futures fuck at monsoon starlight, downwind with the tide, a million dead seahorses wash up on the shore. Here's your charts.
Chinese Merchant: So the cargo ship sinks? Consider it shorted, Spice Man Joffrey.
Joffrey: You do what you want. I’ve got some fuck to be doing.
Chinese Merchant: You don't like the girls here?
Joffrey: I like all girls, as long as they can cook that shit. You got any Chinese girls who need a job? Maybe a new life in old Holland?
Chinese Merchant: You're more likely to find a Japanese girl these days, but good luck with a full flesh non-animated one. Why dont you check what the monsoon tides brought it. I'm sure a few Fujianese girls have run away from their strict parents. No one wants to marry a drunken farmer.
Joffrey: Yeah I'm headed down there already. Thats what I meant, fuck, you know, that spice shit.
Chinese Merchant 2: We use it for flavouring, the tiger penis and rhino horn are our fuck shit.
Joffrey: And I use those for trading. I'm always one step ahead of you guys, or behind, whatever, but that's why you pay me I guess.
Chinese Merchant: Be careful down there little trader boy. The pirates just beat your company in Taiwan. It's in the hands of the Dynasty now. They have control over the monsoon corridor. Who knows what they'll try to bring in.
Joffrey: What do I have to worry about? You guys are the ones taking all their money.
Chinese Merchant 2: But what if they found out you were the one teaching us how to do it.
Joffrey: I could make them rich with this spice oil trade. Imagine all of Europe with a clay pot of the stuff in their pantries. I know my wife could use it. She's not Chinese and it takes more than a pinch of nutmeg to get me high.
Shit, I thought, walking out with a pocket full of gilders, hmmm, I don't know. can't be a pussy though. Meh, shit happens when you do shit. Let's Get that sauce. I walked out the door and the brightness of the day hit me with that power it has over a couple quick opium tokes effects. A little haze, a little daze. It was misty and atmospheric towards the docks.
I sang songs in my head. Wiejed shit. Fucked up shit. If it's not charts going off in my head it's crazy music. And I gotta say Im pretty sick of charts at this point. And at that point. Walking down to the China wharf where the chinese junk merchant ships were coming in to unload their shit in Chinatown to the chineses merchants. I had the noodle fever. I looked out at the water and it was all glass noodles transparent extractions of ocean water waving in musical crescendos. Killing the birds, Killing the birds, in imperial vienna they wrote music for this too. Really wish it was easier to just kill a seagull. Then again who fucking cares. If i can't seagull, I'll just kill some other shit, like my own expectations. My expectations are over, I thought, looking out at the musical noodle water. Good. So what the fuk is up? Where the fuck is this junk ship at. Where the sauce barrels at? These are the questions that haunt me. And the answers that kill me. Though what would I kill for? Nothing really. Is anything really that great? Yes, it must be. It must be all that great. Yep one of those moods where the chart was going down down. Im dead serious fucking sick of charts. Its the only way I could get fucking scammed like that. Always that little thing the lets your guard down allowing you to let yourself get scammed. Well that was it. Imagine using a chinese crypto exchange, like full on chinese and not expecting to get scammed. well if theres a sick new market only open there and youve got the energy for the pump in your blood then fuck it, send the funds and see what happens. Always worth it, if not for anything but the cultural experience. If I was in China I would go to the exotics marketplace. And if im trading sure as fuck im gonna trade with the chinese, and if the chinese are making sauce im gonna eat it.
The circling seagulls alerted me to the boat that had the fragrance coming off it. A little bit of fermented fish in the sauce, of course. The seagulls do have one use at least. It's like in their eyes. Walking into the golden eye of a seagull. Which actually sounds kinda nice, glassy and glossy gentle fluid, the foetus going home to sleep in the ur-slime womb of existence. The dock is something else. The dock is its own world. When one is on a dock it is as if they are in a different country. Seagull country. If the naive are stuck in a hole and the only way to escape their naivety is to dig their way out, ending up in china, then we must also suspect walking the plank of the dock boards out to sea does bring one that much closer to china. But it is the seashells calling, all us people on the sea are one, hopping along the dock boards. "It is me" i say in my best Chinese "it e here me" I want to give you the suggestion that as one floats on the chart, with the price, as one has no choice but to accept the reality declared my the chart, i too was floating, embracing life by giving myself up to the whims of the chinese, or at least these chinese and the deal they had on the table for me.
They had long beards stringy like a meadowy pubis and their hair cuddled their shoulders. In my head they spoke in parables but my expectations of them were too high. In reality they spoke in observations, observing me as the gulls observed the spice, and I, my appetites, very hungry in many ways. Not that they wanted to eat me. The Chinese are not sadistic in a use-you sort of way. In a tool use way, only incidentally. As the knife has many uses, the boy scout will tell you all too shamefully, but do not dig up his repressed memories. We are not at war with the Chinese and this is by design of the chinese. In their workmanship there is much reflection of our everyday needs, an efficiency of production, and destruction, in my case. Murder in is murder in any culture, and attempted murder is dealt with in a manner dictated by the social norms. All a matter of legal preference as they say. This probably has much to do with the sexuality of the Chinese, who are not exactly known for being all on top sexual. In fact little is known about their behaviour even today. "Are you the navigator?" he, the one, standing tall on a barrel, speaking in portuguese, one cant help but see the animal nature of the man beneath the clothes and customs, in such an incomprehensible utterance of the trading dialect, like watching a samurai movie without subtitles, hominids jabbering around like their prehistoric descendants. "Today I feel more like an alligator, mate, or a croc, less poetically, down in the australian sea."
Naturally they didnt know what the fuck i was talking about. This was by design. When going up against the Chinese, since we have no idea what they are on about, we must do our best to not let them know what we're on about. Unfortunately, they just assumed I was retarded and their confidence grew. “But you are the young chart scribe interested in the sauce?" What language was I speaking? There were charts under my arm. The wharf was suspiciously empty. Sunday I thought, church, I thought. Fine ladies strolling the canals in their best outfits I thought. But no dock rats working the docks. It's still early. Still time for my day to not be entirely fucked up. Wasted, squandered, the usual. Can this day be saved? Is any day not a complete waste? But who am I kidding "For fucks sake," I said in my native sailors dialect, knowing I wouldnt be understood. I could be at home in the bathtub. Aw, that was the fucking problem. But as the summer heat comes on there's less and less cold push to jump into the hot steam session. “I do not like the casual heat of this scenario," I told them in a language even I could understand. "How about we all just have a taste of whatever it is you got in those barrels, set the mood right... you know I would like to know what is going on, in a general sense. Although I have already eaten, in case you're wondering." I'd met conniving gold merchants chiller than these guys. "Anybody got a smoke?” A short badger haired squirmer tossed me a herbal and I hit it with some powder from my front shirt pocket. It lit up hot and tasted good. Why couldnt these be japanese and why couldnt they be women, non digital ones. 3D non digital fully animated japanese angels. The fellas made motions natural to their ways of being and said some chinese stuff to each other. Then one of them produced a porcelain jar of the sauce. "Finally," I said. And walked on out towards it as if I was walking off the edge of the earth. Not a thought about life in the world.
The first bullet struck the wooden piling. I froze with the porcelain dish in my hand and the sauce in my mouth. A second bullet grazed my back, and a third hit the dish out of my hand, smashing it to bits. Hundreds of white fragments and the sauce flew into the air, suspended. The gun blasts continued from the direction of the sun sending a shimmering of lights across the rippling waves, glistening like a million confused pixels. The porcelain bits joined the ripples as the shining sea water washed off the spice sludge. The porcelain sunk and the sludge hung near the surface in a brown and red pool, like a phantom glitch in my reality.
A little Chinese boy flipped the switch on his bootleg Toji with the plastic cartridge inserted into its home. The letters rolled across the screen, secreting pixels and humming the static vibrations of the ill-wired monitor:
“In China at the time, dust storms and terrible rains raged. At night, tens of thousands of horses and wild animals fought with each other, their shrieks spread everywhere, snow and ice were almost a hundred feet thick. It is said that footprints of giants and elephants were observed. A tall pale skinned map maker inhabited a wretched mountain top on an island south of China. He protected himself with his hordes of rhinos, giving his trading strength and attacking anyone who challenged his evil madness. Evil, for this man is the cause of our lands rape, desolation, all that grows and provides swindled from us into his pockets, growing rich in spice and gold in his compound. Everything he charted fell under his domain. He navigated the globe, observing local economies and logging the observations into his global trading route system. He corrupted the young women of all the lands he visited, for they could not resist his wealth of knowledge and resources. But his knowledge and resources were evil and ill-gotten. In mediaeval Europe he had studied the black arts, from the Arabs he had learned map making in their animal desire to reestablish God’s creation under man’s hedonism. From the perverted Japanese pornographers he learned to display economic data in geometric patterns, but even the Japanese wouldn't sodomise it into devilish nautical and celestial realms. A demon, seeking to corrupt the soul of all life in China, he scammed the resources from our merchants and markets, he groomed the travelling Chinese merchants of Batavia to do his bidding, and he even drove up the prices of our special culinary sauces. There wasn't a drop of spice or a grain of salt in all the rice bowls of China. But all is not lost with the monsoon winds at your back, from the great leader Chengdong, you must find and destroy this evil they call “Trader”.
All for the cultural experience, as I said. And in my mind, I thought, maybe I was fulfilling my fantasy. What other traders could say they lived and died in the order books. Well, there were all the ones who had committed suicide after catastrophic losses. There were many in the business world killed off by their competitors. But here, I felt to another level I had reached a synthesis with the divinity of the chart. When life becomes meme, one must pay special attention to what is the controlling structure going on in the background. Killed by the chinese over my technical analysis, over my charts, over my trading, over the sauce. What were their plans for this sauce anyways? Would they try to get it to Europe without me? Maybe it was just the nausea of blood loss at near death, the beating of the heart, pulse... pulsing visions of the charts. And there I knew I was bored. I remembered all this. I already had died in the charts, and still they hadn't killed me. There would be no easy release from anything. And I wasn't even dead. Typical Chinese traders failing right at the very end like scammers scamming themselves at life. My merchant friends from the Tea Lounge were carrying my limp body off. But could I trust even them? They did have medicine to heal me. The Chinese do have that sort of stuff, even if you do have to take in the form of orangutang sperm under your eyelids, for the culture. It didn't matter, I was done with the Chinese people and all things Chinese.
Do not worry about me do not. I won't be starving. My love has me covered. Her strong womanly arm is stirring that pot as we speak. She's not Chinese, but it will still be highly edible.That soup spoon arm, twirling the hand around the pot with the spoon. Big swirls, fast, picking up steam. As the swirls lift up the water, more furious steam is steamed up out of the pot, a big chinese pot of all the chinese spice in the pantry, sizzling. Around the cauldron, Joffrey's bodily bath water swirled in the motion of his bodily contortions. Washing his back and dunking his head under the water with nose plugged with the pinch of two fingers. Around the cooking cauldron the chinese spice meat broth oil swirled with the dictations of the recipee's motion requirements, high flame, always moving to prevent burning, blasting maximum heat to blend all flavours and mesh it together while not bringing into a stew as slow cooking would. There are many tricks to the Chinese pot and there are many tricks to the Chinese ways. Have you ever wondered what goes on in the back of a sichuan restaurant? Have you ever wondered why the market prices seem so manipulated overnight when you wake up in the morning, when the Chinese have been going at it overnight, during the asian session, while we are all asleep, ignorant to this beating session? The search for the Chinese question continues. Digging deep into the chinese files. Is this ethnography, it is some kind of geography, the geography of the Chinese mystery? It is really quite impossible for a white person in a western equipped kitchen to produce a complexly flavoured chinese dish. Everytime Claranti tries, my expectations are quite low, yet there is something to it, something I wouldn’t trade away a chart for.
The Chinese question has confronted us for as long as global trade networks have existed. I'm so glad that I myself get to be a part of the conversation. But then again, it is a distraction. Is that part of their tricks? Classic distraction scenario, creeping into our brains, can't get them out of our heads like some manipulative psychopaths, then they rob us in the order books, on the exchange rates, arbitrages, over the counter deals. I'm not always distracted by the chinese. Only when the trades aren't going my way and only when I'm hungry. With a full stomach the trades should fall in order. Please don't kill me yet. I still have a few more trades I wanna make before I die. I can't believe my fate is in the hands of little Chinese boys, but isn't it the same for everyone else?
Enough about the Chinese... the people you are all salivating over are the japanese. the chinese will always be a deferred problem, the japanese are pure enjoyment of the present.
the in-game chart on auto TA mode.
Trading gameplay time: 10 years. Sex with girls from trading: 0. Missed sex opportunities from trading: 277. Sex with Japanese girls: 0. Factor of likelihood to have sex with a japanese girl if outside instead of trading: 25x. The harsh reality of a game populated by weebs and weeb aesthetics, even for a chad or a normal person at their most chadly of moments. It would be better if we didn't have to know the statistics. But these facts are the cultural situation. The culture is in flames of burning urethras jacked off into oblivion, the fact haunting, though not to be knocked, as long as you can make the mental switch she’ll be just as all that, you will have to settle for a chinese as an approximation of the japanese fantasy. Too real though. Couldn't handle it. A white girl with anime aesthetics will not make me as nervous. The technological tranquilities of the times. Techno babes. Absorbing all the orient has to offer into their glittered accentuated corporal points, eyes, hair, nose and fingertips, those twinkling facial expressions in sadness and in glee. But still not for the crypto gays. No girlies for the gay traders. This is why I am quitting the trade. I've managed to put a european-ess in the bag, and I will hold it. Jealous, never. But a VOC merchant here has succeeded with a half Japanese bride where many have not even dreamed to attempt. See the painting, where all is captured and even the value of the painting itself exceeds the value of a Balinese slave wife on the market, such is the nature of the objet d’art. But the print, this is where we can hold the prize. The waifus on my screen, pixelated, yet collectible and unique. For most of us this will be enough to soothe the passions.
In the order books across the continents, the nameless entities execute their trades, set their asks and bids, have their orders filled, sucking up your liquidity. Who are these people? We know, or at least suspect they are the Chinese, but can we even say for sure. Is this anyway to fight such anonymous battles? Like future soldiers fighting wars through simulators convincing them it's just a video game. How many children have I robbed? Who was the face of the order book assassin spoofing me into a long with no liquidity to sell?
Once the market cycle was over I'd be off this island. Just need to survive till then. "Repression is the common denominator making all things bearable, and chilling hard is the one constant making all things chillable." The mantra of Honma, God of Trading, the Japanese master. Toji, Toji, Toji. In my previous life I didn't play games. That's when it had happened. Liquidated for real. Repress the liquidation and continue on until you make it all back. I think I was in a hidden level. What was that site I was on? Can't remember, deleted my browser history and too often all the time, family computer you see. One pixel for all eternity. Destroying the last refuge of my pixel compartment. It’s not like splitting an atom, you can't destroy all the pixels, images yes, but not the individual pixels. Nuclear explosions are bound to occur in the splitting of such a powerful unit of energy. And I saw it clearly then. It had happened to me before, if not killed or entirely destroyed, at least a decent portion, sizeable enough part to produce in my body a very different life and perspective on the world, different like the... when you've got the right computer and computer accessory setup with pizza, tunes and chill vibes. Gone, insane basically, with sustained enough delusional, no, actually living. Sustained delusions properly fed and maintained, prick the brain into damaged points, simulate a psychosis. On the floor, on the floor, in my bedroom, scammed, liquidated, account drained, brain still too active, must destroy brain, destroy the pixels, begin the delusions.
It was the end of the bull market, end of 2021 and beginning of 2022. The story I will now tell you explaining everything that's gone on with me and with the world, ending up on this island in the years following the collapse of 1624. Pain was rising. Okay, wait, I forgot, I am hungry. I simply can't take it anymore. That rhino meat smells so delicious. I've quite simply got to eat something, and it's quite simply got to be chinese. "Claranti! how's it going with that food?"
"Chinany Dao!"(?)(hard to hear what she said through the atmosphere) Claranti screamed back.
"I swear to god sometimes she speaks Chinese to me.”
This is the end of the prelude to Windmill Pulp 1624. Thank you for reading these exciting 9 preliminary chapters. “Volume 1: Mifella Crash Birth on Toji’s Landing” is to follow. Let the fun begin!