Everyone Knows This

My dear friend is back in the Bay after a vacation in Sweden.  He complains of jetlag and suggests it’s harder to get over when he’s older.  He’s right.  This latest readjustment of mine is taking much longer than it ever usually does.  Joe Henderson is blowing away on some latter day creation of his.  The mix sounds like something from the nineties or the naughts.  Let me know go have a look. . .  Wow.  Shows what I know.  I’m listening to the album “In Pursuit of Blackness” that was recorded in 1971.  Just-shows-to-go-ya’.   I should have listened more carefully.  I’m tired.

I have a call I’m supposed to do in thirty minutes.  What I’d love to do is take a nap for thirty minutes.   I am afraid that I will drop, not into a light sleep but rather something gripping that will pinion me down for three hours so I'll wake up an hour after the call with nothing but apologies.  I’ll stick it through till this call is over . . . and with that sleep overtook me just there.  Suddenly I was watching someone eat prickles off an enormous, passive marine iguana’s back.  It was set up in a manner to suggest this was an old conversation, how you could get water from an iguana’s back spines. Everyone knows this.  You pluck them and you suck them.  Of course.  My brain must have fumbled when it reached for a tension to make a dream with, just now.   I just erased the forty-eight w’s that ran across the page in response to my dead hand pressure that occurred while I was considering the iguana.

My wife told me this morning that the bank had locked our card, probably because they were confused we were back in China.  I dialed the number and was told to wait.  I went about my morning and made my smoothie and bid the girls well as they headed off to school, all the while listening to the only thing worse than Bank of America’s filler music, their filler helpful messages that rattled on for twenty nine minutes of time.  Finally I heard a voice and in my excitement I pressed the red hang-up button on Skype.  I screamed aloud.  A total waste of time.  Now why had I done that?  I looked up an old email from BOA and found a different number, which cut me into a live human, a few minutes later. 

Just like yesterday the sleepy feeling is passing.  After my call I’ll go try to lie down and sleep and wont be able to.  The Times told me that Prime Minister Abe popped out of a tube last night in a Super Mario costume in the closing ceremony in Rio, to accept the passing of the torch to Tokyo for 2020.  It certainly did not look like the head of state of a dormant imperialist power bent on fiendishly reasserting control over China and all of Asia.  ("Don't be fooled!" shouts the imaginary Beijing cabbie in my mind.)  How long will it take before a Chinese leader could make fun of himself that way?  Would it ever be possible to reduce Chinese civilization to a one-liner from a video game?