The City Along a Canal

No business wearing a long sleeve shirt today.  It’s hot out and I haven’t been able to adjust what it is I put on when I walk out the door.  It was only a week or so ago that you couldn’t leave the house without a coat.  It’s beach weather out there today, although I’m far from any water.  The sky is so hopeful with only faint, distant streaks of cloud.  The driver already had the aircon on when I stepped inside. 

A day like this should be a day to pursue something idle, not race around town in the back of a cab.  I imagine myself fishing, all of a sudden.  I haven’t gone to a lake and rowed out a boat and dropped a line for bass in many, many years.  I’m not sure that I’d really want to pull one in and brutally dislodge the barbed hook from the bass’ mouth with a pair of pliers.  But I like the idea of having nothing to really do except cast the line out and pull it back in, over and over, in the shade, on a lake.  We’re approaching the tollbooth.  Off to the right there is a pond beside Jing Cheng Expressway.  A bird, I believe, is floating in it.  But I’m very suspicious that this water is anything other than toxic.  I imagine the bird leaving soon.  Dissatisfied.  It’s not the lake in my mind, as there isn’t any shadow on that lake.             

             

Stuck now at the tollbooth.  I remember being stuck here once and two trucks with bees in crates stacked high were held up at the toll.  They didn’t have the right pass or couldn’t afford the toll and they were stuck there.  Bees were swarming about everywhere on a hot day and all of the staff had made their way away from the toll where they’d come to a stop.  Only the two-beekeeper drivers with their wide brimmed Panama hats remained beside the truck and the bees.  Not phased by the bees or the heat or the inconvenience.  

Two hours later I’m heading home in a Uber.  It’s the middle of rush hour and this guy has a provincial license plate.  He’s not allowed on the ring roads at this time.  I could have jumped out of the car and tried my luck with another car.   But somehow I figured I’d just go with it.  He’s got a navigation software map that has use crossing the city along a canal not far from the fifth ring road.  We’ve just come up upon it now.  They’ve done some modest landscaping along this canal, there’s a trail and some planted trees, and it all looks reasonably attractive.  Something tells me this must have been a vile, dirty cesspit fifteen years ago.  I’ve done the other ride so many times and it is generally crowded and generally unattractive.  Why not try something different.  I may live to regret this but for now I’ll allow myself the ‘new.’