update

I promise I have been thinking the deepest of thoughts regarding philosophy literature art society film and culture, but let me just tell you about diarrhea which, with the assistance of some mysterious Chinese meds picked up at a pharmacy where I all I said was "你好，我拉肚子了" ("Hello, I have diarrhea") and then got a pack of pills with a diagram of a large intestine pushed at me, turned into three nights and a day of constipation, which let's count was ten meals plus lots of idle snacking mostly consisting of colon-plugging processed white flour-based Uighur products since that seemed most innocuous except one meal of noodles cooked only with half a pound of extremely hot peppers (portending pain on exit), of which I was blissfully unaware until the morning of day four, when blinding cramps colonized me and I had to abandon all my luggage in the train waiting room telling the woman next to me "Look at it!" not knowing if "watch" means "keep watch" in Chinese as it does in English, and sprint to first the women's room downstairs (closed) then the men's room (open but crowded with men waiting for the stalls, doors flung open, watched men shitting and crouching and smoking, felt out of place as 16 year old boy/31 year old woman, had to leave) then the women's room upstairs and suddenly empty four days of offerings to the fecal finger of fate. Do you know what that looks like? Atlantis. Layers of cities, almost distinct but mingled at the edges, each layer in a more advanced stage of decrepitude. Hot peppers an apparent specialty of one of the civilizations. A pale archaeologist might step through in knee-high waders and say: Was it plague that disappeared the primitive people? Or, they crafted prized copper urns yet buried their dead in formless mounds. Or, art and learning flourished in the halls of the great library, until the flood. It was the formation of sedimentary rock, God forbid an animal mislodge and become fossilized in a globe of not quite amber for posterity to unearth, examine, wrinkle a sensitive nostril at. I felt faint. Tears in the eyes. For a moment almost said fuck it and just sat in the squat. Grasped bottom edge of door instead. Panting. All better. Twenty minutes later boarded a train for a 35-hour ride to Beijing.