Where They Came From

Going in to the city as I’ve run out of time to delay the purchase of contact lenses.  It’s spring and I’m ready to see the city in short sleeves.  The winter’s no time to trudge around in Beijing.  The grey walls and the grey sky leave little room for optimism.  Spring is a very fleeting matter.  We’ve only a got a brief period to enjoy it before the poplars release their filthy puff balls that collect like drifts of dirty urban snow.  And after that the dust storms come from the Gobi Dessert.  But for now it reminds me of being five years old on Glenwood Road back home staring at crocus buds, wondering where they came from.

More of the wispy, roadside cherry blossoms are alight, along the expressway.  You have to figure that these will really be splendid in thirty years or so.  The city has also planted many of these grafted hybrid plum-cherry trees that seem to be tricked into sprouting blossoms from every possible inch of tree bark, like a unfortunate teen with acne.  They don’t seem real. 

And its the last day of the quarter.  All those things that have to get signed today must get signed today.  There’s really only one left but as always,there is still ambiguity.  “They now want to go through a different reseller.  But don’t worry, its one we already have a contract with.”  “Are you sure they’ll sign it today?  2:00PM, huh?"

Later that night it still hasn’t closed out, but it will and it did.  I meet up for drinks at this new Nuo Jin Hotel.  The Kempinski folks run it and it’s the new definition of over-the-top, here in the capital.  These launches seems to happen perennially here, every few months, for the last three decades.  I’m introduced to a number of young people loosely connected to client work.  One of whom makes a passionate case for predictive analytics pushing democracy to the frontier of obsolesce.  I listen, and probe and wonder what the tract was he plumbed this thesis from.  I ought to know.  I consider a few of the books in my Amazon cart that perhaps I ought to have read by now.   The hotel's buffet is overwhelming as others have suggested it would be.

Friday, 3/31/17