今天是大晴天

It was blue sky day, with little evenly spaced spaced white puffy clouds. It was the clearest day since february. Verdant mountain ranges rippled all around the city, like Taipei is a rock chucked into a green slimy pond. On more than 99% of the days, the pollution is so severe that these ranges are invisible, even though they are only a few km away.
I went east to the river park, and it was as alone as I can feel in Taipei. Two skaters came up and watched me warm up. I said hello, and told them to come over, but they didn't respond, and eventually left when my back was turned. Some dudes came up and climbed deep inside in the indian fig trees. They are friendly trees, there in the government allotted floodplain, with tangled trunks and dense, welcome shade. These trees have huge beards of arial roots, hanging down from their limbs. I imagine that they are mirror images of themselves above ground as below. Their thick leaves rustle peacefully in the endless westward breeze, coming down the mountain sides, across the city, across the river, stirring up the dust in the river park. It was so pleasant that I didn't care that I wasn't skating well, or that my water was 35 degrees after the first hour.
As I went about my chores, and soon began to focus on the low, smooth topped but chunky cornered ledges, a dude with huge square glasses showed up with a K2 expedition style backpack. He unpacked a remote controlled acrobatic tiny helicopter, and buzzed it around for a few hours while I skated the ledges underneath. The squeal and squeak and rythym of a god deciding to move from one temple to another accompanied us throughout most of those hours. I couldn't tell which side of the river it was coming from, because the wind can carry it from Datong across the water, or the levee can echo it from sanchong from across the water and back.
After six hours of trying, I landed the three tricks I had narrowed down as possibilities, wihtin about five minutes. Shadows have begun to bleed across the spot, and sanchong people were standing in everyone of them, mostly eyeing me with hatred. I was at the abos0lute limit of fatigue. I packed up what was left of my giant block of wax (I put a nominal coat on the entire ledge, about 100m, just for the fuck of it) and lazily pushed back to Taipei bridge.
It was a tropical sunset. Low clouds reflected the sun on top like spun gold. They were pure white in the middle, like a brand new cotton undershirt. They had a blue-tinged purple color on the bottoms; it isn't a color that has a name, or that I have ever encountered elsewhere, except on the bottom of the clouds in Taipei, on the most beautiful day I have ever seen. It's a color like a bruise, but not as dark, and it evokes melancholy and intransigence and nihilism, as much as the golden top of the cloud evokes the reassuring benevolence of an almighty God that knows that and loves each of us.
Each cloud seemed like a bruised fruit. They were like dozens of epiphanies that fell from high above and had crushed their bottoms on the hard earth, and bounced back up as one to be carried away on the river of air that is 3 km above Taipei.
As I walked across the bridge in reverence of the golden light on Shingun Mistukoshi and the rest of the city, (but oddly, not 101, although the King of Buildings made its presence felt even from teh shadows) many other Taipeinese stopped their scooters in ridiculously irresponsible places to take photos. I took some too.
Then I hit up the yellow jacket rail, on the other side of the river, which reeked of hobo piss and then veered south to my old fami mart, in the hood. Kids were running around yelling and shouting; their grandfathers were drinking gaoliang and TB on the sidewalks, sitting on little plastic 3 legged stools.
Everyone smiles at bearded laowei skaters in Datong. I love the hood. I got some TB's and posted up on the oldest pedestrian bridge in Taiwan, now, used exclusively by cats who want to cross the street, and dogs, when the traffic is too intense to cross the street.
I drank beer there, in the long hanging hair of the indian fig trees, surrounded by the songs of cicadas and tree frogs. Playful little taiwanese bats flitted at eye level, above frantic but reassuring traffic underneath, all reminding me that I had skated all day, and that I'm in love with this place that has become my home.