1:30 AM

So it's 1:30 AM and I am taking off out of the high-rise place, out the electric gates, in my old sneakers - one that has a blinking LED light on it, on the laces part - and everything is quiet.

I can see the city skyline not far away, right through an empty block that is sure to be built on sooner or later, although it hasn't been (built on) already for ten years. Quite remarkable in this day and age.

There's no one really up and around at this hour of the weekend, even here behind the main food strip.

Hey let's go to a museum!

What there is just beyond the main food drag are car places - new cars, some used cars...

Oh wait. There's a couple heading toward me, about to cross a side-street. Frankly they're weird-looking but obviously well-off; that's because they're both scrawny, underfed, fairly tall, and dressed in somewhat matching, you'd think designer old people expensive clothes: these guys (one female, one male) are possibly late fifties. Both of them have lengthy-bodied jackets and they are both wearing scarfs if loosely thrown around their necks. One has a bottle of something and the other literally has two wine glasses by their stems.

Are they coming or are they going...

Who knows. 

I run past them. 

They are chatting away to each other in rich-people conversation.

Their voices drift away from me.

Important, what they were saying? Not important? Don't know.

The night-sky is completely cloudless. A few stars make it past the ambient urban nighttime light pollution.

I generally don't run non-stop. I go back to a normal walk every hundred or so yards. I've got wrist weights on as well.

There's a museum piece.
That's over fifty years old.

...And then I start up again - if I've a mind to - and pad away softly, sometimes if I want to my cadence changes and it's almost like I'm floating and not even actually running as such.

My direction is taking me closer to the river bank, and then around underneath the main highway bridge, to my right, and towards the big casino complex that is here.

There's someone on an electric skateboard with headlights and wearing a black helmet.

I give them a curt salute and they touch their helmet back in acknowledgement.

That's three whole people I've seen at 1:30 AM in the middle of the night in a city of two million people. Sure, closer to the casino there's a few cars and there will be people there...

There's a big white pelican in the water.

There's kangaroos on the island out there, the one in the middle of the two sections of highway bridge (I just threw that in for you, JES, because I know you're reading this, and I know you like those things).

The object of these exercises is not actually running, or not just running. 

After a while I will stop and do some stretching and stuff.

...And then just start up running again, back to home.

That's also a museum piece but
it's brand new!

Nothing happens.

Nothing happens out here.

The Beijing China government's pushing of its youth into the typical huge, communist/Marxist-style, massed athletics and gymnastics programs is faultless.

There's a young guy today, in Canada, who is a master in the Northern Shaolin style. His 'front-end' name is 'Marquis' but actually, that is a title and not merely a first name. His father's family name was 'Lung' which literally does mean 'dragon' and he was the worldwide head of the official Northern Shaolin School. There is of course, also an 'official' Beijing China government 'Northern Shaolin' school today and I'm not sure who is head of that.

But those kids can tap-dance, don't you worry about that! 

I wouldn't get into a fight with any of them.

I'd run away -, I 'practice' running away a lot.

Moses (yeah you know, that Moses guy!), when he threw down his stick, it turned into, as the original language says it, a draconis. Which is not a 'serpent' but I guess you can say it is a kind of a serpent.

LOL

Why do I tell you guys all this nonsense?? ...Well, as you prolly know or have already worked out, it's what I don't tell you, right? People are not ready for it, are they, Jay (Ahmed Malkoun).