1957

     How does the mind work?  What jogs your memory and directs it a certain way?
     I live in the Clifford Estates, Panyu, Guangzhou, China and ride the free bus shuttle constantly as a perk to living here.  It's free transportation and I benefit from using it.
     The other evening I was sitting on the shuttle bus surrounded by the scores of Chinese residents of Clifford with no directed thoughts in my mind.  In the front of the bus, just above the front entrance is a digital read-out clock.  It reads in military time, with a full 24 hour setting.
     As I was sitting there the clock changed from 19:56 to 19:57, which of course means 7:57 PM to western eyes.  But to me 19:57 became 1957.  That number jumped out at me like God had been talking to me.
     I felt like Jim Carrey in the movie "Bruce Almighty" where God talked to his character through the digital road sign.
     My mind spun back to my time playing music with The Diamonds.  1957 was the year that "Little Darlin'" was number one in the US, selling 8 million copies.  I heard that date every night, or I should say every show that The Diamonds played.  It was part of the dialogue on stage.
Little Darlin' by The Diamonds

     For the rest of that ride on the bus, even though I was in an atmosphere far removed from American Graffitti I thought about my friends and former bandmates as that bus bumped along.  I had worked originally with John Felton, who died in 1982 in a plane crash while we were playing in Nevada.  But, that's another story for another day.
The Diamonds



     

Car Crazy China

     When I arrived in China in October of 2010 I was whisked from the Shanghai airport to Suzhou in the middle of the night.  I couldn't see much other than freeways that kept going and going, much like the US mainland system of highways.  But, what were the drivers like?  It was dark and few drivers on the road at 1 am in the morning.
     The first experience of something "different" from my past experiences occurred when I road the bus the first day or work.  The bus picked up its passengers as any form of conveyance, but then I learned the driver's abilities.
     The bus sped off at a quick rate, even faster than the automobiles around it.  As time went by, day by day, I learned the nature of the bus drivers of this route (there were more than one).
     When approaching a red light the bus would reduce its speed but not stop. The cars at the light in front of our bus would need to begin their acceleration process meanwhile our bus sped up and passed the cars from either left or right.  What was very disturbing to me was when the bus driver did this maneuver in the left turn lane, bypassing the cars from the left side.  I had only seen this type of maneuver in movies.  Here was a professional driver (with a busload of workers) overtaking the slower moving autos as a common practice.  Whew!I think this guy learned to drive in the air force, perhaps in a dogfight.

     I now live in a secure community in Guangzhou, China.  Since my arrival in Suzhou in late 2010 and today a lot has happened in this country.  When you go to the shopping centers, take an airplane, or simply turn on the TV you see car commercials.  Reading these two articles attached you will see that number have grown from 13 million units to 35 million units in three years!  China's Car Units 2010  China's Car Units 2013
     What does this mean?  Traffic, and also badly trained drivers who are dying to get out on the road.  Cars are now the true form of status symbol.  Nothing beats this.
     Back to driving;  how do they drive?  Badly and more than that, ignoring others, and what we in the west think of as "common sense".
     My living circumstance is to be surrounded by cars within Clifford Estates.  Cars are parked everywhere, even where they should not be.  Ticketing of wrong doers is beyond the thought of police.  There are just too many infractions to deal with.  So, they do not ticket anyone.  People back out directly into oncoming traffic without a thought.  It is expected that these things happen.  But, again, don't forget the numbers which are growing exponentially, more than triple the sales of three years ago.
     The future is open to more and more vehicles, more and more exhaust, more and more accidents.  China is car crazy!

     When the United States was in its automobile expansion times, in the middle of the 20th century, Detroit was booming and everyone knew every car model and we all waited for the early fall for the new car models to come out.
     That same thing is now true of China.  People, who before were ignorant of car makes, are now checking everything out for their car purchase.  Cars are truly a status item and having one represents a person's growing affluent.  Keeping up with the Jones' is the word of the day, except perhaps it's not Jones, it's Zhang.
     Chinese car craziness is only beginning.  The numbers that I mentioned above are only a matter of a small fraction of the 1.3 billion people who live in China.  This blog entry will be out of date in the near future.