Unfurled at Full Gallop

It’s been raining down south.  It was raining up north.  It was drizzling all night in Hangzhou.  Last night I went to bed and there were flashing lights of some karaoke palace flashing across the street down by the great river.  In the morning they were all reduced to deadened storefronts.  The rainy day belonged to the giant rider on horseback, wispy, windblown, his bow drawn. 

Who could that be?  I wondered.  I thought of the martial apogee Lord Guan, but he is usually depicted standing with his sword, not galloping along with the wind.  As I looked it occurred to me that he resembled a Mongol warrior.  The Mongols to my recollection were the final word on launching arrows from a long bow, mid gallop.  They were the ones who finally mopped up the Song around here.  Unlikely to be a statue depicting the Mongols. 

Later when I was at a meeting I asked about this rider.  After a bit of description, everyone said:  Oh, sure, that.  That’s Goujian.  You know, “Wo Xing Chang Dan?”  (Sleep on bracken, lick gall bladder.)  Plot your revenge over time if you’re the vanquished king of Yue.  Savor it.  Much, much older than Song or even Lord Guan.  Long before there was any such thing as “Huadong” or “Zhejiang.” A statue then to Thimestocles or Miltiades, who represent a heroic trait as much as they do the historical person.

Patient vengeance then.  Human, certainly but complicated as national policy.  Sometimes things don’t work out like they do in the fables.  Noble it seems, held close to the heart, unbridled, arrogant, risky unfurled at full gallop.  Hangzhou wants the world to know about Goujian. 

Thursday, 10/12/17

How Fortunate He Quit

I’ve got seat 26L on this flight.  That’s worth remembering.  There’s not seat before me, straight up to the bulkhead.  Unlike the lady to my left I have uninterrupted leg room.  We just had some pretty ferocious turbulence.  It would have been dangerous to have been standing.  The stewardess came and flipped own the seat and rode out the disturbance.  She didn’t buckle up.  I kept expecting her to.  I tried to catch her eye and remind her to buckle her seat belt.  I imagined precisely what I’d do once she looked my way.  But she was looking somewhere else in the cabin, demanding other passengers sit down. 

Back to the routine.  Back to my book.  Guy Crouchback is making his way through the war despite himself.  She has returned suddenly.  How do you say: “fried rice with eggs”, in English?  I can do that.  I am glad she asked me.   

“Duppy Conquerer” has come from nowhere and begins to stimulate my body and my memories.  I adjust my posture.  This is an earlier take.  I hear the classic version from ‘Burnin’’ in parallel in my mind.  This must be from two or three years earlier.  The Wailers, strong and majestic.  Their falsettos effortlessly soaring.  This was probably right before the forklift driver gig in New Jersey.  How fortunate he quit.

  

Not a light to be seen down there.  It must be cloud cover.  This is the northeast corridor of the PRC and there are almost certainly millions of lights to be seen.  They were all there when we took off.  Reading my Evelyn Waugh and stukas are bombing regularly on Crete, whenever they see lights down below.  How terrifying it must be to be bombed. 

Kool Moe Dee wants my attention now as we get up to depart the train.  The West was wild. So says Moe Dee. 

Wednesday, 10/11/17

That Building's Windows

Dizzy in the shower.  Dizzy in the cab ride.  Rather dizzy and not sure why.  Less dizzy during the breakfast meeting with strangers.  Calloused memes say: “keep it together.”  An anecdote.  A quip about someone.  It all went alright.  Quite well in fact.  What was that strange interruption this morning.  I keep hearing John sing “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” over and over and over as if it might help.

Walking in the early autumn drizzle under the Third Ring Road overpass by Liang Ma Qiao.  Some time to kill and not really sure where to go.  There’s a mall over here.  There’s a mall over there.  I don’t really want a mall.  I’ll walk in the wet and put something in my ears.  Breathe for a while.  “Instant Karma” in the rain.  Well.  I’ll turn that up. That building’s windows form a pattern that catches my eye and I reach for my phone to snap a photo.  My phone is dead. 

This iPhone drains power like summer ice cream off a cone. I was at seventy.  I’d notice that seventy had turned to fifty.  I think we were down around twenty when I set off from the hotel ten minutes ago.  Now I must find a place to sit and charge this all important piece of metal that I never even knew I didn’t have, throughout the first three four decades of my life. 

Starbucks.  Now I’m glad for a mall.  I sit by myself at the counter and call my sister.  She needs to talk.  She’d texted me as much when I was Miss Lizzy in the cab and I couldn’t talk then.  I have a chicken Caesar wrap as I always seem to, hoping there will full mayonnaise bite at the end of the stem.  I never use mayonnaise myself but it tastes so familiar when I consume it unwittingly and I like how the espresso cuts against it.

I go home.  I go back out.  I’m fine.  Now I head to the J.W. Marriott not far from where I was before.  Old friends.  An old view but an interesting new take, staring over from the lounge to the skyline of Wang Jing.  The sun is setting behind the Xiang Shan in the other direction and it lights up these buildings and casts a shaft of gold across the two-storied plane and the flat expanse of Chao Yang Park that lies out before the distant skyline.  

Business but old friend business affords possibilities for many different sorts of conversation.  We’ve moved from products to consciousness.  Is there a metaphysical source behind the Brian’s capacity?  Are there things that are simply unknowable by the brain?  I’m not so sure of this.  It’s energizing to debate about something other than market opportunity and I note my posture and my tone change and become more assertive. 

Tuesday 10/10/17

I'd Need to Drop the Matter

The local Italian restaurant sells good wine from Italy at half the price of the menu if you order it to go.  Antonio takes pride in what he does and makes you feel welcome.  I asked or his help for a bone dry white and a red with lots of tannic.  He obliged and off I went on my bicycle.   

When I got home the cork on the bottle of red slid straight into the bottle with suspicious ease.  I sipped the wine just to be sure and it had gone off.  We drank the white.

Tonight we were all at a loss for where to go and ended up going to back to the restaurant to dine.  “Antonio here’s what had happened . . .”  Antonio smiled and gave me a bit of a lecture on how to properly uncork the bottle.  “You see, sometimes-a if you come right down-a this way, the top can just-a break.  You need to come at it-a from an angle.”

I nodded and tried to be pleasant about the instruction.  Yes.  But the cork didn’t break.  It just popped right in.” This was silly.  I didn’t think there was anything wrong with how I’d tried to open the bottle.  “Right and I’m sure that this is important.  But this particular bottle I think there was a problem because it slid right down in and the taste was immediately . . .”  “Exactly.  This is-a what happens when you don’t create a little angel when you start-a to screw.”

I tried to steer away from his buoyancy.  Yes, this all may be true but I think that was a bad bottle.” He’d seated us with a smile and motioned that he had to step off suggesting he hadn’t heard or cogitated what I’d just said.  I had been hoping he’d comp us a bottle this evening.  When the cork first went “plop” I’d been sure he would.  But now, short of demanding it with someone who was otherwise being rather friendly, it would appear I’d need drop the matter. 

He came back with a bottle or two.  “These are really nice.  I forget which one you ordered.  You should really try them again.”  I held the bottle in my hand.  It was the same one I’d bought the other day.  I considered the place name that was meaningless to me.  Should I break the mood and insist that it should be on the house?   I looked up at Antonio one last time.  Was he well-aware and just steering the conversation this way or was he truly clueless as to what my agenda was? 

“Sure.  Let’s try it.  I’m curious to know what it tastes like.”

Monday, 10/09/17