The Business Man
Writing these entrees can at times be as tedious as the homework I remember not doing in High School. I have an extreme love hate relationship with this page and the posts often begin with me circling an overweight quivering lap top computer that was at one time labelled “portable” but has proven otherwise everyday as I lug it up on my unexorcised shoulders over Spring Hill here in Brisbane. It’s the same tombstone grey laptop that always insists on asking me to do something, anything, other than forcing out of it a few inspired or completely uninspired lines of Ausso-American babble. I have been restless the past few nights and wanderings tend to ensue as a result. So I went ahead and wandered. It’s what I do.
Those that know me know that I am someone who paces back and forth even when it is in the comfortable settings of your dining room or kitchen. (I love the remodel you’ve done by the way) I find that when you first visit a new city things are fresh and new. Each people and person you pass on the street is someone you capture with the photographic Polaroid camera in your impressionable foreign mind and sometimes out of complete speculation or possibly utter boredom you scrawl on the back of the celluloid picture of your imagination the hypothetical thoughts, passions and stories that your mind will paint on the limited or unlimited imaginative canvas that your mind allows of the people you momentarily rub figurative shoulders with around you. This new and idealistic view I’ve had whilst travelling can at times change however when I suddenly find myself, not as the smiling adventure seeking passerbyer I had first enjoyed being, but simply a hunched, bland, grey coloured, saddle bag growing businessman that advances from airport, taxi, hotel, work, pub, hotel, taxi, then airport pub, then taxi again and so on and so forth.
I have found in these few desperate visits to the travelling corporate doldrums, that I go from buff, hotel gym, outgoing ambitions to late night Hungry Jack (the name the Burger King company took in Australia because a Sydney restaurant already had the name) binges for the sheer sake of tasting processed American style fast food that is followed by a pint or two of Kilkenny at an Irish pub down the street. This is me feeling fat and tired. Perhaps the combination of insomnia and indecision is now being complemented by me being homesick ( Melbourne that is) and exhausted. Tonight I walked around the CBD (Central Business District) in bored silence. I sat and stared at my Sapporo by the non appetising rotating sushi plates that twirled around me in what was supposed to be known as one of Brisbane’s top sushi parlours while two other business men in suits sat to my right and left doing the very same. The only human contact we had was when after a long silence I asked the man to my left if I could borrow his soy sauce. He sprung up surprised at the sudden attention shown to him and awkwardly made the transition back from a suited android to a human being and passed me, to my dismay, the red bottle that had the the higher sodium. Damn that sodium. It’s kryptonic poison to us businessmen everywhere.
Posted by in 22:09:22
