Asking Me the Same Question

An Uber at 4:00AM.  Will that work?  Staying with a friend in his apartment.  We were up till 2:00AM but I reckoned it wouldn’t be very smart to risk a nap that turned into a greedy sleep.  So I tried to type.  And didn’t have anything cogent to type about.  And I tried to read but I got sleepy.  I’ll be traveling for the next twenty hours, and I decide the best thing I can do is to take a warm shower.  Santa Monica is never cold, except when it is, and no one, it seems, has much of any heating in their houses to combat the cold.  It takes me longer then it should but I figure out how to get the shower hot and I let it warm me longer than I ever would in a normal shower session. 

The driver accepts my app request quickly and is on the way before I can finish winding up the chord on my charger.  I walk right past my friend’s bed and try to keep quiet as I lock the door and step out into the night.  My driver is there, idling on the corner.  None of the Uber driver's cars I’ve used on this trip seem ready to accommodate passenger’s with luggage.  He fiddles for a while and gets my bag in.  Similarly Uber drivers in the U.S. seem to default to the assumption that they will play the music they like until you tell them to turn it off.  I tried my best to listen to the slick, overproduced R&B he was playing for the first few blocks and then asked if he’d turn it down a bit.  He turned it off. 

You make great time, speeding down passed Venice Beach and Marina Del Rey at 4:30 in the morning.  Up ahead there were sirens.  Good, loud American sirens, such as you don’t often hear in China.  I saw the cruiser a few hundred yards ahead in the on-coming lane.  Then, before I could know what was happening, my driver hit the breaks hard and we were both thrown forward before he stopped, safely, not far from the car before him.  Instinctively I spun my head to see if someone else were about to now plough into us.  Fortunately there was no one there.  My driver cursed the person behind the wheel in front of us and it occurred to me that I had been thinking, and had I been asked I would have said, that it was my driver’s fault.  But now I wasn't sure.  I asked him if he was alright.  Perhaps because I thought he should have been asking me the same question. 

Early at LAX.  Uncharacteristically early.  I went to the lounge and once again tried to do work and not fall asleep.  I had a bowl of yoghurt with granola and strawberries, interrupted by bites of banana.  They called my flight earlier than I reckoned they would and made my way, a rather long way over to the gate where no one was boarding and everyone was standing around waiting.  I knew this would be a flight up the coast to San Francisco that I wouldn’t remember and I tucked myself in, once on board, and quickly went to sleep.



Saturday 02/03/18