A
tubby grandfather figure, more of a jolly
salesman with a
gut really. He was wearing a brown suit which I was touching up the shading on around the edges, similar to when you erase on a school picture and it lightens. His job was to provide a
Western and
Christian face for
China. The thing was that the Chinese did not like the guy, I did not like the guy, nobody really liked him. He was something of an ass, there was no structure or substance behind the
facade he put up.
I was in this house with some other people, mostly kids I think. It was a modern house in a
european location, maybe
Switzerland. Then outside in the woods nearby, in a treehouse, however the woods felt stifling in the darkness and we decided to leave. We went back to the house, however it was not the same house as before, location shifted mostly. Our parents decided to have a
potlatch and we were told to go and play. Mounting bikes, we started to ride away when I realized that the right handlebar of my
bike was slipping down. It kept slipping further and further, I turned around and went back to the house to fix it. Vague muffled parent party sounds sifting from the
basement as I found a
wrench and went back to the
porch to start repairs. As I stepped out onto the porch, I saw a train passing through the street in front of the house. It was rolling on tracks that I knew had not been used for a long time, I was very curious. Watching the cars go by, there was an odd assortment of rusty old worn down
boxcars and sparkling new modern container cars which were a plastic yellow. As I looked down the moving line towards the origin, I noticed that It was actually formed of two different
train lines merging into one. Watching the process, it looked complicated and precise. The two source lines were alternating launching a boxcar at the merge point onto the
unified track at a high rate, everything was so perfect that the merge was smooth and tight in the manner of
interlocking gears. Amazed, I moved closer to investigate. There were several
train workers overseeing the operation, and they were willing to talk with me amidst their
calculations.
Blueprints, diagrams, and calculations were scattered all about. The wonder inside me grew as I understood that the timing must be just right so that the cars hitting the jump at the end of their track and hopping onto the new one would not smash into each other and cause an enormous
catastrophe (
a precarious balance?). They never once made a mistake, and invited me into the engine on a testing track to demonstrate why. We backed the engine up from the
launch ending of the track, and then
reved up and
accelerated towards it. Hitting the ramp airborne,
gliding, and landing crisply on the waiting rails at the other end of the
gap.