The Pure Life of Dreams

December 15, 2022July 26, 2025

How to Make Chi Flow in the Room

I am at the Tai Chi beginners class because I know that some of the advanced students will be there and I have forgotten the sequence to the sixth. I sit to the side as the class concludes.

Then as I leave, a man walks with me into an adjacent Victorian style room. The room is empty but sun filled. It has brilliant white walls, with white crown mouldings, tall open stash windows and pine wood flooring.

The man throws his hand back in a sweeping motion, over his head but I don’t recall that move.

I try to mimic him. “I don’t remember that anywhere.”

“Try it again,” he says, and again he throws his hands up carelessly and bends backwards, pushing forward his pelvis.

The class is fully wrapping up now and people are flooding into the room. I stand over to the side.

Some men, young and lithe in black bicycle pants and bronzed naked chests are being flirted with by the women.

I see a different woman through the crowd, her back to me. Her skin is pale on a silk ivory dress with thin shoulder straps. Her legs are thick and also the color of ivory. I prefer her coloring, though I confess I am a little jealous of the ripped bodies of the younger men and women.

Then another woman in a simple white dress and wavy blonde hair enters through the doorway. She is being toasted for her presentation. She has been somewhere exotic and has just gotten back.

“I had to do that because they wouldn’t let me go on to Guatemala,” she says to the crowd.

The projector shines her slides up on to a white screen at the front of the room. It shows an architectural drawing with lines and points mapping the intersections of buildings of what may be an archaeological dig. I want to call out to her that I’ve been to Guatemala but it was so long ago and it would sound pompous.

Instead she comes towards me. She stands to my left against the window while the others in front admire her presentation.

I am aware of her presence, the whiteness of her plain cotton dress lit by the sun, her white skin. The blonde waves of her hair frames and partially hides her face as she tilts her head forward.

She holds up her right hand directly in front of her, as if to reach out to something. I reach out too, brushing the palm of my own right hand across the back of her hand. Suddenly I am overcome with a fear that my palm might be clammy, but she turns to me at a slight angle, her face still in shadow from her hair.

In the shade, I can feel her breath on mine as our lips part slightly to meet.

Leaves and Insects series by Qi Baishi, via WikiMedia Commons.
The name of the Yang Style 108 movement is Retreat to Ride the Tiger.

December 8, 2022March 9, 2023

Throwing Sandwiches Doesn’t Do Any Good

I was sitting with Georgie when it was time to go. This was after cleaning up the avocado sandwich that I threw at the wall.

We were seated in deck chairs outside, in a garden with fake grass, and I had made the sandwich earlier with the only ingredients I could find. A piece of white bread, a thick slice of pâté, cut, but placed in one solid chunk on the bread. Then the avocado buttered on top.

December 2, 2022February 17, 2023

Unloading on High School and its Consequences

I sat at my desk but Rebecca Farmer suggested we go get some ice cream . It was unusual because I had never really spent time with her before.

“Sure,” I said and we went down to the lunch hall, but when we got there there was a long line of people with trays.

“We must have hit the lunch time,” I suggested. And instead we returned our desks and talked a little bit. We sat face to face and Becky, as she preferred to be called, propped her feet up on the chair next to mine.

Only we did not have much to say to each other. Until she asked me about my high school.

“I went to St. Pariah’s,” I said, “only it was very difficult for me.” I struggled to find the right words. “Because I was… was slightly darker than the other kids.”

And she looked at me and said, “It can’t have been that bad.”

“No, you got to realize this was in the eighties.”

After our conversation I decided to leave the office and take a ride on the train.

I got on the overland and it clanked out of the station. It headed through unfamiliar stops into the Bangkok suburbs and snaked across the rusted rail tracks of a major railway intersection.

We passed tall buildings either side of the train that I did not recognize.

We passed a big white sign with the train stop written in green lettering. Underneath, it said “Sponsored by the Thai Democratic Party” and I thought it strange that they would sponsor a railway sign.

I was depressed, so I decided to take the train to the end of the line because I could always just take it back again.

And the route map above the window looked like it would return the same way, and wouldn’t fork in another direction, though I couldn’t be sure.

I put on my headphones and called Elaine.

“I just unloaded on a colleague,” I told her.

We tried to talk, but the screeching sound of the wheels against the rails made it difficult to hear her. Then we hit a dead zone and she went silent for a bit.

And when the train hit the end of the line I got out and there was already a train on the opposite platform so I stepped right on and settled into the last cabin by the door.

As it set off, I looked around at the other passengers and they were all locals. I could see a family with babies but though I looked across at the seats the other side they were not there. Instead the family was a green tinted figment mirrored in the glass. They must have been behind me, or on a parallel train passing by.

It made no sense, but just as I thought I had figured out the illusion, and seen where the family was actually sitting, a young woman smartly dressed in a matching pale pink jacket and shorts walked up to me.

I was taking off my headphones at the time. I remember the warped mouth piece, and she got real close. Too close for comfort. She stood directly over me. She grabbed my wrists with both hands, before sliding one hand under to grab something from my inside pocket.

It was an object I had not seen before, half oval, flat and black but smooth and no larger than the woman’s fist. Like a blackened Venus shell~~, or one of a pair of castanets~~.

Photo by Bernard Spragg via Flickr

November 25, 2022November 25, 2022

Charity for the Afghan Boy

I was back in the Afghan town walking through dusty streets, brown dirt roads lined with twelve foot high dirty white daubed walls. The roads were wide enough for two cars but they were deserted except for street urchins in dirty white jellabahs, boys with dusty black hair who wanted to be your guide.

November 18, 2022April 18, 2024

Gluten Free Pizza and Other Light Quandaries

I had returned home to my old office in New Malden.

We went for lunch across the street because I was told that there was a place that did great gluten free pizza. So we got in line and ordered a small pizza, which Mr Thanh, whose shop had been there for many years, served by splashing it out on the table.