Raising my cup to David Bowie with this comforting Laoshan black that came in the mail just an hour after I heard that he had left us.

Big Bowie fan. BIG, as in, if it weren't for Bowie I might have never listened to anything that wasn't very angry political anti-authority hard-core punk. Bowie kept me, even in my street punk years, from falling too far down any one specific rabbit hole. I needed a warren and Bowie was part of that system of tunnels I could lose myself in. I always stopped on Hollywood Boulevard( I lived in an abandoned building off Hollywood and Argyle) to look at a huge poster of him that always hung in shop window. Bowie in an embroidered Elizabethan dress laid out upon a divan, long hair flowing. How could I like him and still like the Dead Kennedy's? I don't know, but I did and that ability to appreciate fully more than one thing at a time was helpful for me in those years when total immersion into the punk culture could have eaten me alive and spit back out absolute nothingness. Vonnegut helped too. Burrow hole number three.
Ok, but this is not really about Bowie or me so I move on.
So, I'm sad, (oops, back to me apparently) and I do what I do when I am sad, I drink tea and hit the thrift shops at 9am, before the other riff-raff bargain hunters beat me to it.
I find the usual stuff, new items to put on my tea table, a cheap blue and white teapot shaped like a fish that can never, ever be used, and is in fact, exceedingly hideous I am just now noticing glancing at it sitting next to my keyboard. $3.99 I paid for this? Well, I did get the senior discount. That was another first today, they gave me a senior discount at the thrift shop. This fucking world, man, it breaks your heart in so many little ways in the course of just a couple of hours.
Coming home with my little stash of goodies I found in the mail-box a little package from Verdant Tea with Laoshan Black in it.

I had forgotten I ordered it, but have been waiting for a gaiwan from them, so this was a nice surprise.
I've been neglecting black teas lately and in my rather black mood, the timing was and still is right. Last nights wonderful experience with Soleil's black tea, 'Van Dyke' got me primed.

I like this tea a lot. Tiny little tea leaves, sprightly and springy to the touch after wet, the brew in the cup is like a mixture of a soft black gongfu and an Oriental Beauty, which you know is my favorite tea ever.

I spent 30 minutes sitting in my yard drinking multiple steeps of this. Four grams in a 120ml gaiwan, water temp just under 200. Worked for me!

I am still sad but that's part of the deal, right? I get the good stuff, like tea and family, warm socks right out of the dryer and In-and-Out Burgers and I have to deal with the crap as well, the No-More-Bowie in the world kind-

of crap, the skin lesions, the back-ache, the aging in less than graceful ways.
And that's cool. I can dig that. Just happy to be here, sharing tea. With you.