Full of my Driver's Blood

I can’t get over my driver’s roughness.  This, even in Beijing, where you’re used to grumpy, short- tempered, cab drivers.  This guy has a pencil moustache that gives him a slightly 1920s, Japanese aesthetic. He’s younger than me but appears far older.  One thinks of the Bob Marley line “I seem to wear a permanent screw” when considering his face.  It would appear to register a firm and constant dissatisfaction.  I asked him if he knew the way out from where we lived.  This prompted a guttural “huh?”  He flashed me his face.  I repeated politely but firmly that I was asking him if he knew where he was going.  No reply.  I bit my tongue from asking him rudely if he was from out of town and didn’t speak Mandarin well.

There are some big mosquitos flying around in this cab.  He must have picked them up in another part off town.  Our mosquitos are thinner.  These look like they’ve all, already had their full of blood.  I tried to show one out the window, but he flew off in a circular pattern.  Then he came back and sat by my knee on the door.  Before I knew what I’d done, I’d killed him.   Now there is a stain on the car door every time I look out the window.  There’s another one flying around in a drunken, improbable pattern as well.  I suggest he find the open window.

Pulling up to the airport.  I couldn’t head into the city to meet a friend.  But I can meet him now, on the way out.  This is the routine.  Airport meetings are easier than meetings most other places.  I’m going there any way.  Smashing day today.  The sky is really clear. He is waiting on a bench, having a call, by the “K” section of check in.

OK, perhaps I’ve slightly rebalanced the karmic wheel.  The mosquito that is likely full of my drivers blood, just sat down and I could have mushed him, but I dutifully rolled down the window and though he still didn’t figure it out, I nudged him and the drop of red blood pulsing in his abdomen, up and out the window. Go digest.