I was walking down a busy boulevard (similar to Hollywood, at Cherokee) when I felt compelled to leave it and use the restroom in a tastefully restored, three-storey-tall, red-brick building off to my right-hand side. The building appeared to house a discothek of sorts, with many people entering and exiting it, and music emanating from within. As I stepped over its threshold I noticed that bricks of raised, white, translucent Chinese hanzi writing-characters had been laid in intricate patterns over many of the bricks, covering most walls from floor to ceiling. The individual, mostly meter-tall hanzi were connected to one another with tapering, starburst-like trails of white and translucent bricks.
Making my way through the central dance-floor, past many happy guests, I entered the well-lit men’s facilities at the rear, whose walls were lined with yellowish-white tiles. Desiring privacy, I opened the doors to both water-closets at the back of this room, only to find sit-down toilets on raised platforms crammed into tiny rooms into which I did not feel like going, as they were dark and terribly close.
Turning instead to a bank of sinks and mirrors on the other wall, I had a conversation with some people milling about there, then exited the restroom into a rear performance space in which a man was playing a keyboard and singing, accompanied by another artist playing the drums. Excited at the quality of the music, I loosed a loud war-whoop, startling many of the black-clad guests who seemed to be enjoying the show (with their backs turned toward me), at which point I was approached by an usher in a black jacket with red lapels who grabbed my left elbow and started leading me to an open hangar door that gave out onto a side road. Halfway there, I shook off his grasp, telling him to not touch me, then mockingly asked him if I had to leave through the hangar door or if I could use the same door through which I’d entered. Realizing that I had offended him, I bowed to him with hands pressed together at the heart, a Thai wai. He stayed silently at my left-hand side, looking at me with widened eyes, until I returned to the land of mortal consciousness - and the pressing need to urinate.
As soon as I lay back down in bed after having finished voiding my bowels in the temporal commode, my alarm-clock rang, signaling the start of morning practices.
americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan
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