Truly Helpless — Increasingly Against My Will (A Regulated Verse)

2007/12/19 20:43:23

Have to go for tea at 9 PM — a thoroughly boring affair. Let me dash off a few words. Tomorrow I have another business trip, but it's an evening thing, so tomorrow night's post won't happen. However, around 4 PM I'll put out a basic analysis of next year's market.

This trip — I really don't want to go. But this ID is just too softhearted. When a fifty-something father-figure practically begs you to come help, you just can't refuse. How boring. This ID has a mountain of things waiting to be dealt with, and now I'm wasting days on some pointless errand. My brain must have sprung a leak.

This ID frequently finds myself in this absurd state — a horde of boring people asking me to do this, arrange that. Like tonight's tea — I don't even know why I'm going. Actually, there was already one boring meeting this afternoon. An old acquaintance showed up with a pile of projects, wanting this ID to invest in this and that. This ID hinted in the most roundabout way that if I actually invested in those garbage projects, I'd be too embarrassed to show my face in the market anymore. Sometimes you just don't want to rip off the polite facade.

This ID has always been puzzled — since childhood, I've never liked asking others for favors. I truly cannot recall ever asking anyone to do something for me. I have no idea when I racked up all these boring debts that I can never repay. Must have begged too many favors in a few past lives, and now I'm back to settle the accounts.

A person is born into this world to repay debts. If you can at least avoid incurring new ones, that's probably as close to happiness as it gets.

Enough idle talk. Here's a hastily scrawled regulated verse to send you off. My apologies.

Adrift

Chán Zhōng Shuō Chán

Adrift in the red dust — the end is always bitter
Absolutely no true joy to pluck and offer
Greed and delusion lead straight to the three evil paths
Faith and righteousness are hard to find in the five-colored mud
Mind-painting, heart-drawing — disputing black and white
Divine scheming, ghostly cunning — bluffing east and west
A hundred years of deep drunkenness in a Nanke dream
A different life — yet the same bewilderment