To Get Me Out

 

Keeping up with this blog is proving a bit overwhelming.  The goal is to capture days as they happen but I end up needing to recapture things.  I just gazed out and I’ve been delinquent all the way back to my birthday.  Can it really be that long?  That’s two weeks’ worth of archeology that is demanding attention, along with all the other work that isn’t going anywhere.  The weekends are when I‘m supposed to do my catch up.  That hasn’t been what they''ve been used for. 

I woke up this morning with a sigh of relief this morning, returning to my ever so precious reality from a nightmare world that was not to my liking.  I was in a Chinese prison, somehow.  The transgression that had landed me there was suitably opaque.  I’d helped my stepson file something and the authorities didn’t like that.  So now I was digging dirt with a bunch of other dirty prisoners.  There was a pugnacious Australian inmate there.  He came up to me and said derisively: “He’s wearing a suit.”  I wasn’t and I pointed this out to him suggesting that, as the only other laowai perhaps we could help one another, to which he replied: “Yeah?  We’ll see,” which wasn’t encouraging. 

 

The predominant theme was dirt.  It was a dirty place.  I was digging dirt.  Later, I needed to head off to where they served the dirty meals.  I’m not sure why but this had southern Chinese dirty feel, a semi-tropical filth as opposed to the dry, dusty northern variety.  I remember texting my wife at one point, good of them to leave me with a cell phone, to suggest that she ought to get me out of this place as it wasn’t pleasant at all.  It was about this time, that I realized the prison was an illusion. 

 

But the mind must have known something for all day long, for the first time in at least a year, I was digging holes.  We had bought two large gingko trees, that were resting in thirty- gallon drums of dirt.  I tried to push through the rock and roots to create a crater twice that size.  Near what I’d assumed would be the bottom I struck a piece of shale that had no end, on two sides.  I dug around and down and over and across, but even with the use of a heavy crowbar I couldn’t manage to loosen it at all.  I dug under it and around it as best I could and left the rest for the roots of tis gingko to surround slowly break apart, year after year, in Daoist fashion.

Friday, 04/30/21