Can't Help Being Big

Bulkhead blues.  Passed on the chicken, passed on the beef.  Every single person around me has a screen open in front of them.  If they hadn’t it wouldn’t matter up above there are at least three wall mounted screens showing the map, as well.  What’s playing on all these devices?  There are Nazis dragging nuns around.  There are what seem to be Thai or Cambodian monks in saffron on another screen.  The guy to my right is large and has a large tablet device.  He’s broadcasting some suburban American slow paced drama.  Not that I’m looking and certainly I’m not listening, but nothing seem to happen beyond handsome twenty-something guys nodding intently.  Over to the far right it’s another American scene, but its night time.  Off to the left side there are fantasy people with furry faces fighting each other.  They fly around unconvincingly as creatures do in Chinese movies.  The map suggest were coming up on Anyang which would mean we still had an hour or more to go if we were on the high speed train. 

I’m yawning.  I’m tired and the big guy to my right can’t help being big.  I’m big.  The space is tight.  I’d have to be even more tired than I am just now to properly fall asleep though.  I’ve been reading my novel, trying unsuccessfully to get into it.  Meetings today.  How many can you do?  This was rather efficient as these things go.  I set up a chance for three companies to visit one prospect, each one right after another.  From the comfort of a digital calendar I figured I could duck out and take in a meeting at lunch between noon and two o’clock.  As it was I had to duck out mid-meeting and return, just as it ended.

This movie to my right, which I’m trying to ignore is beginning to bother me.  We are steeped more deeply now into this gathering of the Yale Young Republicans.  I can’t wait to return to the United States and reckon with such people all the time.  Ah, so now the preppy-league are visiting some sort of pole dance club.  I will apply my fleeting discipline to avoid the vacuum of some other man’s fantasy. 

Shenzhen was warm.  Not hot and humid, but pleasant.  Someone I met flew in from Changsha, which I think of as a cauldron.  But he said it was cold and like me, he was overdressed for Shenzhen.  Walking around the city today, I wondered, just how long before all the building and destruction and rebuilding and expansion would result in something everyone agreed was a model urban experience?  All cities we love were a mess at one time or another.  Whither Shenzhen?  They make you buckle up in the back seat of the cabs.  The cops will fine you if you don’t.  The road meridians have cool tropical plants.  Every year a little bit more civilized.  I doubt I’ll live to see it through to fruition though.  No one ever does. 

The announcement that we are thirty minutes from landing has yet to be made.  I told myself I’d write until this alarm was rung.  I thought I’d be stymied early on in the exercise.  I’d felt my stomach muscles tightening earlier in the week.  I’d made it to the gym for four or five days in a row.  Now after two days on the road, the tightness has receded. Once I land, connectivity will resume with all its’ interferences.  I think the loud Sunny Ade in my ear may have blocked out the announcement.  Everyone around me is putting away their devices.  The Nazis and the preppies and the flying fur-balls have all gone away. 

Uh, no. There it is.”Nv shengmen, xian shengmen . . . “ Au Revoir, then.