More Like Fielding Mellish

It’s hot out there.  Not that I’d know from experience.  I’m grinding, I think that’s an accurate verb, grinding away at an impossible list of things that must happen before we all leave for the summer.  I have no time for a healthy side bar like the gym.  But sitting here, executing, is wearing me out.  My wife returns home and announces it is extremely hot outside.  Somehow this makes me want to head to the gym, even more.

The ride to the gym takes about fifteen minutes if you pedal over on your bike.  Add that to the ride home and you can easily talk yourself into forgoing the cardio routine at the gym and instead, dive straight into some work on the upper body.  At six in the morning time is too tight for any such bike ride.  But now, when the gym’s open all day for kids or adults, this is where I’m heading. 

I love the ride over.  Music and music and music riding out of doors.  Somewhere around the ‘four corners of certain destruction’ crossroads up ahead which badly needs a traffic light, Iggy’s “Search and Destroy” comes on and soon I’m peddling like a really need to get somewhere.  “Love in the middle of a fire fight” is about right. Pedal harder to get to the turn.  I step down as hard as I can and soon note how hard it is to breath.  It’s hazy day.  I’m winded though some of it is cat related the Beijing air is catching up with me.  

The music doesn’t stop when I get there.  It’s a random loop of 5000 songs that never ends. But some Mc5 has appropriately enough followed up on Iggy’s face slap and now I’m strutting across the kid’s campus to “Rambling Rose” imagining Wayne Kramer singing the ditty with his guitar tossed back as he croons.  Then I see the wife of a friend and modulate my strut from full Redd Foxx to something more like Fielding Mellish.  “Hey.  Yeah.  I already got the cardio done, riding over here.”  “Cool.” 

Tuesday, 06/20/17

This Light is Cruel

A friend drove from Haidian to Wang Jing.  I’m glad it was him.  If it had been me I’d have had to have written him by now:  “Hey.  Stuck in traffic.  Even though I left an hour ago, I’m still going to need another fifteen minutes.”  The person whom I’d have had to write that to, is by my side.  He’s driving.  He has now come up from the Third Ring Road along Jing Mi Lu to come upon the infamous Da Shanzi traffic light.  Good luck dude. 

Pleased, though I properly shouldn’t be, that it is he this time and not me who is calling the 3:00PM meeting to say he is stuck.  He’ll be there right away.  “Just a moment.”  He’s bluffing.  This light is cruel.  We’ll do three more turns of it at least before we’re allowed to turn left and enter into Wang Jing. 

Wang Jing is an odd thing to consider.  A satellite city to Beijing, a host of companies have put their headquarters here.  If you’re appealing to the tastes of foreign expats who have kids in Shunyi international schools and who have to regularly welcome foreign visitors into town from the airport and who are regularly jetting out to the same airport, well then, this is a great place to establish your HQ.  But there is nothing here but HQs, really. 

Today, we are heading to the Daimler building.  It’s right across from the globular, curvier than though buildings of the Wang Jing Sohu.  Like all Sohu constructions they do a flabgastingly interesting job building shapes, but all the first floor tenants seem to come and go swiftly.  Nothing strong and commanding, successful seems to anchor the tenancy.  They seem more interested in seucruing tenancy, any tenancy, soon, rather than curating anything particularly rich, varied or enduring for their first floor shops.

My colleague will hold a meeting in a Costa Coffee.  That’s fine.  Across the huge empty courtyard is another Costa Coffee.  I’ll head there.  So do they.  “Oh, hey, hi!”  Fortunately they’ve now moved on, back to the first.  I grade some papers and notice that the time allotted for their meeting has passed.   The time allotted or the next meeting I was supposed to start now is being eaten into. I’m in the hands of my colleague though, who arranged for this meeting.  I’ll wait here till he returns.   I've successfully talked myself out of that second tuna sandwich. 

Monday, 06/19/17

Do You Have His Number?

Does this thing even work?  I inherited this grill from a friend who left town.  It’s a nice grill.  It’s big and silver and it sits outside all year.  We’ve had it now for about five years I suppose and it has sat outside for most of that time.  In the spring, we clean it up and bring it back to life.  Every year it’s the same thing, we can’t find the number for the guy who will ride over with a new canister of gas.  It’s the same routine every year: “Don’t you have his number?”  “I do not.”

Some guys love grills. The mind harkens back to the first Eddie Murphy album: “Now that’s a fire!”  I would say I like grills.  I like to grill things out on the grill.  I do a reasonable job of it.  I’ve learned to season and prepare things well enough ahead of time.  But the time spent out there, over the fire, moving things around, wondering if that jet on the far left is really actually aflame and if the veggies have moved beyond tasty to grizzled, and accommodating Chinese tastes, which hate to see meat served up rare and my own, which has no interest in grilling it all to a cinder, I have no particular interest in this. 

Generally if there is a BBQ it means there are guests over.  Outside has mosquitos and no one is overly interested in standing out there and chatting with me as a flip the pieces of meat over.  Tonight, my friend will brave the mosquitos.  We stand out there and chat.  “Hey get me a plate for the cooked pieces, will ya?” “Is it gonna rain?”  “I think so.”  “Dude, I’m going in.” “No worries.  It’s almost done.”   I’d also rather be inside talking, eating. 

I usually cook lamb chops.  These packets of six are not cheap.  But poked with a fork, and softened with olive oil, and the special Xinjiang sauce we have, paprika, and cumin and something I can’t properly name, with a bit of sea salt, well they taste great.  They always seem to come out wonky when we try to “grill” them with our oven during winter time.  What I’ve prepared tonight is anything if not wonky.  Beef with the same oil and salt with a bit of papaya kneaded into the tissue.  Veggies always seem to get hit with soy sauce.  I know the routine.  And the outcome is tasty.  Everyone, politely agrees.  That’s good to hear.  

I return to the rain outside and kneel down low.  My reading Chinese is good enough to recognize the difference at least between “open” and “closed” on the gas canister.  I turn the drill all the way to closed and try to flame up any residual gas that has yet to escape, just in case.  Nothing there.  Next time I will not be so lucky using the dregs of the gas tank.  Where is that guy’s number?

Sunday, 06/18/17

As Is Her Destiny

Wonder woman.  I’d heard good things.  A guy I was speaking to on the phone the other day told me, proudly he was taking his daughters off to see it.  My younger one asked, or was it I who suggested?  Last night dinner plans got scuttled, the Mrs. returned, later than expected so the little one and I decided to head off immediately for the eight o’clock show at the neighborhood's newest overbuilt, yet to be eclipsed, but for who knows how long, mega-mall. 

Smart girl, my daughter remembered to bring her and my 3D glasses, lest we had to purchase new ones.  I find it all a bit blurry and not especially worth it to strap these things on but there we were on the magic Amazonian island, with a multi-culti-cast of Uber women, who fight to win and ride horses about cliff sides and stoically dread the return, of Ares and warfare. 

Wonder woman, Diana, with a decidedly ‘other’ accent, is the chosen one.  Her mom wants to protect her and her aunt, the realist knows she must toughen her up.  Toughness training leads to the realization in a moment of self defense that she has magic powers.  And, as my daughter pointed out, this must have broken the barrier that protected the island. And before long a German biplane is spied, flying through the air and crashing into the sea.  Diana saves the pilot, an, to my reckoning, annoyingly handsome American pilot, Steve Trevor.

I sighed when he refers to the Germans as the bad guys and when he refers to himself as “above average,” but things pick up when they sail in to a wonderfully realistic representation of polluted, early twentieth century London, smoke belching up from a hundred small stove pipes.  Diana’s radiant contrast to the stodgy city’s norms seems plausible as she secures the requisite attire and the band of brothers who will lead her to the front, where she hopes to find the god of war himself, Ares, so she can put a stop to all this, as is her destiny.  That in the end, evil isn’t simply the Germans, (though never squarely the Americans), proves a nice twist that elevates the final battle. 

For the first time in a while, I’d enjoyed a Hollywood super hero action movie.  There were bits one could pick apart, but I’d almost certainly return to see the next installment when she’ll no doubt return to save the day again in World War II.  I was glad not to have to suppress bilious disregard when I debriefed with my little one.  She dug it too. 

Saturday, 06/17/17