my personal savant

I looked up from my breakfast table the other morning as the everyman of my losmen (hostel-ish place that I live in) sat down to join me. The steam curling around his face alerted me to something out of the ordinary, and I looked down to see what he was packing.+

It turns out that he had brought breakfast with him, in this case a bowl of clear broth with the head and two feet of an unfortunately bisected chicken. Actually, in the employ of linguistic precision, one might never know for certain if you bought the matching and complete set, but I imagine you get the idea.

Seeing someone lay into a chicken’s foot before finishing the day’s first cup of coffee, let me inform you, is actually the preferred approach when you run afowl of such a situation, but nonetheless a generally unpleasant operation.

This struck me as worthy of your time not because I wanted to mention all the ‘totally gross’ (as the over-demanding Skeletor from Los Angeles staying in the losmen who asked me if she could drink the water from the tap might say) things that come with living here—the rats that look and, perhaps more disconcertingly, saunter like pensioners top the list—but because of an unusual confluence.

You see my friend, like a criminally over-serialized self improvement book, quite simply, drops the wisdom on you.

In a nearly unbroken and constantly reversing slipstream of Indonesian and English that apparently only I can understand (other guests and Indonesians remark that they find him unintelligible; flout the theory of me, muse), he will talk for an hour without interruption about the spiritual symbolism of batik color motifs or population economics in Singapore. Often, I cannot shake the vibe that all of these things are occurring to him for the first time, like I am living with a street corner savant.

I could not help asking, ‘what happened to the rest of the chicken?’

Last night, over tea in the street, he went thirty minutes on the etymological roots of the phrase ‘Yo, bro,’ a subject on which I would pay good rupiah to see him go the distance with one Michael Padgett.