Jan. 22, 2012 at 6:10pm with 8 notes
chinabeijingnotes from
Small Pops

The pops started last night, late, near midnight, suddenly became paranoid that I’d remembered all the dates wrong, the eves and eves of eves of the New Year getting turned over in my head. Bolted up and ran outside, but nothing, one or two dozen shots fired, but ground level, drips and drabs of enthusiasm, seeping backward, nothing skyward.

Spent too much money, the way of things for the first day or so, found ourselves eating vegetarian food, a fucking commercial for veganism-as-class-war, (though it isn’t, it can look that way, can’t it). It was across from Old Confucius’, where inside they put a statue of him to come say hello to, and they put up a nice museum for him, and then rows on rows of big pillars, scrolled in Chinese, describing this or that grand victory over a riot, in Huis or in the countryside, or in the north, from the hordes, two dozen pillars. There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism floats through the air, unnoticed and indeterminate.

Wandered further, ended up in a rich-person’s district, and too cash-rich and mandarin-poor to avoid the rich-person’s hotpot shop, with ponds of fish to run underneath your feet and two, no fucking shit, two different women wearing tiaras with fucking diamonds in them, at two different dinner tables. The hot pot was not just for just thin meats to melt in hot mushroom broth like the poor simpleton shabu-shabu, here were too many things to drop in and prepare, clams and shrimps and tofu bricks and noodles and dumplings and peppers, spiced beefs and a ham, called on the menu “luncheon meat”, in both a slice version and made to look like a stick of bubble gum. The goddamn chinese chopsticks fumbled in my hands, my hand, they became sore, unlearned, under the wooden oak of these oars.

Tina got sick off something, you see, hotpot is not for the hungry, you have to wait for your clam to cook all the way before you eat it, and your pork and your beef and all the other raw meats in your pile, supposedly that didn’t happen, maybe it was the clam or the raw meats or maybe some bug flew in down her throat, but she’s gut-rotten on New Year’s Eve. Here’s hoping it pours through her and we can get on with the grand business of miming the End of All Things, when human-kind finally grows powerful enough to set every spare particle on fire until it pops. That which we call progress, is this storm, I say.

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