Mind Was Already Alight

And just like that, it looks like Beijing outside.  I’d normally take the side road over to Tian Bei Lu, but in this case, I’m heading to Wang Jing and we’re sailing along an elevated highway access to T3 that I know during the day but can’t quite make out at night.  The trees are all denuded poplars, instead of the majestic hardwoods, I saw driving down the New York State Thruway about twenty hours ago.  One tree I saw must have had the good life from its first day of sprouting.  At least three hundred years old, its branches reached out in all directions equally.   The trunk, impenetrable. 

Twice in the short time I’ve been here I’ve felt an anger bubble rise.  I took the extra time to enter what I believed to be the proper location in Di Di, but the app registered me as near but not “there” as I stopped to double check things.  I called and tried to explain where I was.   In this I was reasonably clear.  I’m on the first floor, with all the busses are.  You know, area 5.  But he chose to ignore that and say, something I only partially understood.  I repeated what I knew.  I wanted the proper word for “departures” and instead said, “are you at the place from which people leave?”   I could see on the app's map, which frankly never works as well in Didi as the one for Lyft, especially when you’re entering in where it is you will be leaving from.  I called him back and clarified that he had arrived upstairs, at departure door number eight.  “OK then.  Wait for me there.”

Crossing into the meridian I felt the immediate urge to walk aggressively into the coming taxi traffic and make them stop for me.  And then I ran a talk-track through my mind of the artful comeback I'd lodge the moment the driver said anything to me.  My mind was already alight, well invested in all this when I caught myself and shook myself free of this silly loop.

Reporting live here from the Jing Cheng Expressway, this precise stretch of which I can see from outside my bedroom window in Wang Jing, and the traffic on a Sunday night around 5:45PM, coming into the city, is hopelessly jammed.  But fortunately we’re now going slow enough that I can recognize the snow on the ground.   Apparently Beijing had a snow storm on Thanksgiving.  And now, New York, a day after I left is having its own blizzard.

Sunday, 12/01/19