That Building's Windows

Dizzy in the shower.  Dizzy in the cab ride.  Rather dizzy and not sure why.  Less dizzy during the breakfast meeting with strangers.  Calloused memes say: “keep it together.”  An anecdote.  A quip about someone.  It all went alright.  Quite well in fact.  What was that strange interruption this morning.  I keep hearing John sing “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” over and over and over as if it might help.

Walking in the early autumn drizzle under the Third Ring Road overpass by Liang Ma Qiao.  Some time to kill and not really sure where to go.  There’s a mall over here.  There’s a mall over there.  I don’t really want a mall.  I’ll walk in the wet and put something in my ears.  Breathe for a while.  “Instant Karma” in the rain.  Well.  I’ll turn that up. That building’s windows form a pattern that catches my eye and I reach for my phone to snap a photo.  My phone is dead. 

This iPhone drains power like summer ice cream off a cone. I was at seventy.  I’d notice that seventy had turned to fifty.  I think we were down around twenty when I set off from the hotel ten minutes ago.  Now I must find a place to sit and charge this all important piece of metal that I never even knew I didn’t have, throughout the first three four decades of my life. 

Starbucks.  Now I’m glad for a mall.  I sit by myself at the counter and call my sister.  She needs to talk.  She’d texted me as much when I was Miss Lizzy in the cab and I couldn’t talk then.  I have a chicken Caesar wrap as I always seem to, hoping there will full mayonnaise bite at the end of the stem.  I never use mayonnaise myself but it tastes so familiar when I consume it unwittingly and I like how the espresso cuts against it.

I go home.  I go back out.  I’m fine.  Now I head to the J.W. Marriott not far from where I was before.  Old friends.  An old view but an interesting new take, staring over from the lounge to the skyline of Wang Jing.  The sun is setting behind the Xiang Shan in the other direction and it lights up these buildings and casts a shaft of gold across the two-storied plane and the flat expanse of Chao Yang Park that lies out before the distant skyline.  

Business but old friend business affords possibilities for many different sorts of conversation.  We’ve moved from products to consciousness.  Is there a metaphysical source behind the Brian’s capacity?  Are there things that are simply unknowable by the brain?  I’m not so sure of this.  It’s energizing to debate about something other than market opportunity and I note my posture and my tone change and become more assertive. 

Tuesday 10/10/17