5 Star Blues
The view was of people. the streets oozed with people, vertically stacked, but ignorant of each other on the streets. This view and I, sitting above it, sweating like a capitalist roarder, flustered by the hot-heat of the sauna, which I pushed, and pushed to its limits, considering whether it was pleasurable as I emptied more and more water upon the hot coals.
I questioned, for a dangling moment, the human cost of this jellyfish moment, that is, the moment at which I seem most useless and most transparent.
A man handed me a towel. He would never use these facilities, this I am certain of.I imagined him returning home to his family, perhaps in one of the grimy tenements that I make out in the hazy distance from my hotel, that unsettle me so, looming and seeping a brown misery, like a forest on the move. I imagine him returning home from his long days taking in the off-shoots of our steam, his forehead seared perpetually a shiny red globe. I see his wife releasing a child from her knee, to run to him across the barren square-footage, grimly decorated, or perhaps with a noble and savage taste, yes, that’s it, grandma’s silken tableau of a pitched battle in ancient Canton, two armies dressed in red and white carrying small pointed flags, charging at one another on horseback, in combat with blades drawn, yes a startling visage to behold when the domestic bustle silences itself for a moment, like a child exhausted from its own crying. Yes this is his life. His child running across this Spartan nook into his arms, he hurtling said child in the air, to screams that ring out like a magpie’s cry, arms splayed like aeroplane wings, and then back down to a more manageable altitude as the loyal wife, a subaltern beauty, thin, with 
a slightly grey pallor, and dark brownish rings spreading from beneath her eyes to at least as lowas her cheek bones, but with a desirability that shines through in place of cosmetic beauty, yes a simple nobility that yields to his kindness, yes, she inserts herself between her man and child, her longing to be caressed expressed in a shy tipping of the head beneath her shoulders, and rewarded by hands that creep past her waist, as she strokes the hair of their one great hope, their child which they will raise to surpass themselves, to achieve all of the dreams that they had not held until reality gave them substance and intangibility, until reality well and truly made them both possible to hold and conceive but impossible to achieve. Yes, they may very well be the statue by Unknown that adorns the lift of a good many floors of the building.
And then the moment passes and I remember that I’m only here to pleasure myself.
Yes, these ideological fancies serve to palliate the inevitable class guilt, and when they outgrow their welcome in the order of psychic balance, a kind of Buddhist temperance overtakes me. That thing popularly called mindfulness, useful, of course, essential even. And I tell myself to exist in the moment, and the political fades away.
