Back Into the Forgotten

Another guest today.  He’s in town from Shenzhen.  Our second guest this week.   Another old friend who seen my kids grow up as I have seen his.  He’s bought property back in Pennsylvania.  He has a video of the land, by the Delaware River.  It looks lovely.  Limitless.  After twenty years, he’s looking to move back.  It’s a theme we’ll masticate on for the rest of the evening.

He returns a book I’d leant him a while ago: “Money” by Martin Amis.  Certainly my favorite of his novels.  I suggest he try “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth but he pulls out a tomb and says he has to first finish “Capital” by Thomas Piketty.  I had heard many things about the book and its thesis on wealth inequality in Europe and the U.S. when it came out a few years back.  My friend suggests he’s been blown away reading it and I instinctively add it to my Amazon list before it slips back into the forgotten.  

Dumb meeting today.  Someone reached out to a client of mine, who connected me.  That person handed us off to two other people.  They were flat, and bored and it quickly became clear that they weren’t the least bit interested in anything that my engineer was presenting.  Later he and I discussed in the Starbucks basement of this Guo Mao tower, why it was we came to this meeting in the first place.  “Improperly qualified” I typed out to another colleague who’d set this all up. 

It’s four in the afternoon.  But it’s already too late to have missed rush hour.  The third ring road is parking lot.  I notice that a familiar ramshackle area of one story houses that used to have shops selling carpets by the canal, was mid-demolition.  From up on the highway it is possible to see that the storefronts are all still in place, but the buildings that used to extend out behind them have all been flattened.  We’ll have another tower here, surely, before long.

Thursday, 01/18/18