User:JoeHK247/sandbox-Brad



"Some say our analytical brains and opposable thumbs set us apart from the beasts" - Book 14 NA 6665 L11

Story
He is always covered in coal dust. The ships bring coal from Australia, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Black mountains of dust float through the bay on old Chinese junks. Coal is unloaded onto eager trucks and sent to hungry power plants. He tracks ash on the floor as he walks, leaving a trail of residue everywhere he goes. His wife knows where he's been, the bars he frequents, the people he sees. His beard, once white, has reverted to the jet-black color of his youth. He's not Santa Claus so the ash stains his beard and his clothes? His paths cover the city sidewalks in black soot. The coal is imported every day to Xiamen and he is there to receive it. The ship yard is both his home and his place of work. Like any other, contains tens of thousands of shipping containers, stacked and stored around the harbor. The tracks of the large cranes zig zag through piles of shipping containers, intermittently picking them up and reshuffling their order.

He works hard, in coal and dirt like an animal, with hands burdened with shovels or buckets that displace coal from someplace to another. While he works he considers his humanity, his capacity for complex thought and how it has come to be applied towards the same mundane task that is perhaps better accomplished by beasts with opposable thumbs who would approach the cruelty of such a life with the acceptance of not knowing better. But he, a sentient person, self aware and painfully present in the moments of his work, must endure the routine toil, as it wears away his health and sanity. These working conditions are common among many of his fellow countrymen in the fields of debris that compose China's Manufactured Landscapes of coal, electronics, ship demolitions and chemical waste.

He builds models and bookshelves. They are partially autobiographical constructions that reflect his immediate environment that stack books like the cranes and gantries that shuffle shipping containers into ordered bands of rectangular color in the city harbor. The models move, rearranging and organizing rooms, furniture and space. He produces many iterations of similar models based on coherent logics.