Last Night And Determine

I know.  I’ll stay up all night.  That will allow me to catch up on all that work that looms like a mudslide.  Nap from 11:00PM till 2:00AM in a bed that isn’t comfortable.  I get to work.  I can do this.  I need to meet someone at the airport in eight hours but that’s just another time. After an hour or two I’m tired.  That’s not right.  I’m supposed to be refreshed and limitless. 

It’s this damned comfy chair, what’s at fault.  I should sit in the straight back chair.  I’m trying to secure an invitation letter for a Russia visit.  It’s complicated.  There are different stories for what you need and what’s to be done. I have someone now in St. Petersburg who answers my email.  I answer his.  He answers mine.  I answer his.  We’re making progress.  It’s becoming clearer.  I still don’t have a hotel to sponsor me but he doesn’t think the specific hotel is necessary. 

At 6:00AM I consider working straight on through till my airport run but I know I will be a zombie in that world and surrender to the horizontal, which feels marvelous as I doze and depart. 

9:00AM is upon me quickly, of course.  But I hadn’t expected to want to cling to this sleep as desperately as I now want to.  There’s a bit of a head ache and the perfume of regret.  And I recall the obligatories I'd disposed of last night and determine it may have been worth it. 

Out at the airport I talk the driver into picking up my cousin and then returning back home straight away thereafter. “I can do that.” Says my driver. “but we’ll need to stop at the gas station.”  My cousin is already making his way through customs. “Can we do it on the way back?” With that we have an agreement.  I tell my cousin that we’ll meet him at arrivals.  It’s not until later that I realize we’re parked at departures.  Why did I type the wrong word?  Is my English slipping?  “Sorry.  I mis-wrote that.  I’m up at departures."  I’ve arrived.  You’ve arrived.  But it has nothing to do with where I am waiting. 

Saturday 5/19/18

It Smells Like Miami

A meeting at the Four Seasons.  The owner of the last company I properly worked at was a fan of the Four Seasons.  He wife worked for them.  She booked events for them, as I recall.  Our company was one of her accounts.  And so, quarterly business reviews were at the Denver Four Seasons because we had a deal there.  And sales kick offs were at the Miami Four Seasons and the customer event was at the Las Vegas Four Seasons, on the other side of the Mandalay Bay, where the bump-stock madman, murdered so many people from out his VIP suite window. 

The Beijing Four Seasons was nice to see arrive.  Put it near the U.S. embassy.  Across from the time-honored Beijing landscape, the Kempinksi Hotel and the Friendship Store.  Liang Ma Qiao is as good a place as any to stick a new five-star hotel, though there was nothing about the location or the building itself that seemed particularly distinct.  It made me wonder what I would have done.

The smell when you walk inside the Beijing Four Seasons is distinct.  It smells like Miami to my nose.  I imagine I’m in Denver.  Upstairs we have our meeting.  I consider the view out to the embassy compound that I have never before, of course, this being my first time above the second floor of the building.  Lunch, later, is first rate.  The salad bar is not the least bit predictable.  I keep picking at the large hunk of parmesan cheese another guest has set out for the table.

A colleague likes to host people at his hotel, across town.  He doesn’t want to drive and meet me.  I know this about him.  I’ll work with it.  I am driven now, across and over towards the Grand Hyatt.  If Liang Mao Qiao is probably one of the most convenient places for a business hotel, Chang An Jie is, these days at least, is one of the least convenient places to consider.  “Where r u?” He texts.  “Not far.  Three blocks” I text back.  Poor Dongcheng.  It was never really built for traffic.

Later, I'm heading out.  I call a Di Di.  The guys twenty-five minutes away.  I cancel it.  A cab lets someone out and I’m in the back before the driver can say ‘no.’  “New World Department Store in Wang Jing, if you’d be so kind.”  Charge the phone.  Charge the phone a while before you make that call, you’re late for.  And with that meeting, met,  I can head back home.  But when I get there I quickly notice that the electricity is off.  OK.  Candles.  Lighter.  Electricity charging card.  The service desk tells me its 6:30PM and there is no one there who can take a credit card charge. You’ll need to go to the ATM and get yourself some cash.  I don’t want to go anywhere, anymore.  I am notably ready for this day to be stationary. 

Friday 5/18/18

All But Irretrievable

Trying to recall my Thursday.  The guests had just left.  A new guest pending.  He'll be at the airport later today.  Catch up, certainly.  Obligations, that arrived, due.  I remember one call that went well.  And then another that didn’t go so well.  And then the day evaporates into mist from two days on, looking back. 

First stop, look at my calendar.  It doesn’t help.  There’s nothing lodged.  What about my email?.  I remember receiving one.  Another.  But they don’t dispel the mist of what it was I was actually, working on, fretting about, diverting myself from on that day.  There’s nothing till the lone calendar entry of a phone call at 9:30PM.  I remember that call,  remember being tired, sitting there in my comfy chair.  And then I went to bed, shortly thereafter.

It is disconcerting to not be able to remember much about something so important as a day.  If you were Dostoyevsky being brought out in the morning to the executioner's ground, twenty-four hours would represent a life’s worth of time and possibility.  And were I to magically have the view back in, unobscured, every subsequent moment would be essential, a crucial, obvious step towards how I arrived at today. 

But my mind has filed much of those waking hours off in a folder of ‘no particular significance.’  A storage bin further off the main flow of brain power.  Most of life, one suspects, is filed away in this manner.  Were I to have spoken with the delivery man that day and our acquaintance filed off, all but irretrievable, I would sense something immediate, were I to see the man again, right?  I know you.  I’m not sure how.  But I know you.  I met you.  I recognize you.  And perhaps, I could have pulled out our encounter, though more likely I would have been left with nothing but a nagging suspicion from a file, deeply obscured.

Thursday, 5/17/18

It's OK Dad

My daughter popped in my office early.  She was supposed to be at school this morning at 7:00AM for a field trip.  It was now 5:45AM.  “Aren’t you supposed to be there at 7:00AM, my love?”  “Yeah.  I want to get there early.”  “Alright.  Let me get dressed for the gym.”

She was off to Ping Yao, in Shanxi this morning with the rest of her eighth-grade mates.  I  remember Ping Yao.  The Mrs. and I visited the remarkable, medieval city back in 1998.  I don’t think it was the must-see destination it is now.  I don’t believe it was called out in the 98’ Lonely Planet.  I suspect we’d heard about it by word-of-mouth. 

I told my daughter about what it was like to stand above the main city gate.  I remember looking down into the inner courtyard you’d need to walk through to get to the second city gate.  Innocuous architectural flourish until it was explained that this was a defensive measure.  Invaders who made it past the front gate, would be trapped inside, before the second gate, with high walls all around from which archers would fire down on them.  Worse, there were rolling juggernaut devices with spikes protruding that could, it was explained, slaughter dozens of invaders with one roll down the incline.  Woe to the vanguard invaders, certainly.  But once the main city wall had been breached, one can only imagine it would only be a matter of time before the invaders surmounted the next one, over the bodies of their impaled comrades and they would unlikely find themselves in temperate mood with the townspeople who’d let loose these horrible medieval machines. 

“Wait.  There’s a book.  We bought a book when we were there.  Let me find it.  It was a nice book.  There are some great pictures.  Where did we put that book?”  “It’s OK dad.  We’ve got to go.”  “Right.  You remember this Buddha here?  This was from Ping Yao.  We got it on that trip.  It was really heavy to carry.” “I know.  It’s heavy.  Do you have the house key?”

Driving over I went on for a while about how Ping Yao had the empire’s (and therefore the world’s) first banks.  The first place to figure out lending notes, and bullion at interest.  And though Ping Yao could have become London or could have become Shanghai, the center of Chinese commerce moved on from Ping Yao, leaving the city frozen in time, preserved for what it was.  “What are you guys going to do there?”  “We have teams and we have to look for stuff.  And then we have time to explore.  Shop.”  I tried to imagine her there, with her friends in the city of my mind’s memory, with two decades of tourist accretions, tourist compromises.   

We parted ways once we were through the security gate at school, I carried on straight ahead and she went right to pick up some things she said she needed for the trip. 

Wednesday 5/16/18

Far Away From Home

Cloudy, hot.  It’s Tuesday morning two calls in. I’ve got to head to the New York Times after looking through my emails.  There is Ivanka looking breezy with Steve Manukin who looks waxen, and Jarred with Bibi both smiling at the inauguration of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem.  And in the other half of the photos are tear gas canisters raining down on protesters, headlines suggesting fifty-eight dead and over thirteen-hundred injured in Gaza.  Trump, of course, blames the disturbance on Hamas.  I can only imagine the raw reality of so many people, penned into such a small strip of land, unable to leave, unable to prosper, generations of festering.

Beijing is grey today.  It seems a warm, cloudy grey, rather than a day of smog.  Coming in from the country, it isn’t supposed to rain today.  The traffic went well, and we’re moving swiftly enough.  Off to see an old friend who is back in the city from the countryside.  He and his wife are from the revolutionary generation and even though I am gruesomely busy I will make time as we always have something to learn from them when we speak.

Driving into Dongsi, in the old Dongcheng.  A friend’s ATM won’t work.   He called the number on his card and couldn’t get a human being.  He spun round and round in a loop, cursing, demanding an operator.  It’s the same bank as mine.  “Here, call the anti-fraud line.”  I need to dial it every other week.  I inform him that he may need to wait for twenty-minutes before reaching a human being, but he will.  He did.  No problem with his card.  Just needs a different ATM.  Life, far away from home.

And it is grand to try gouji brandy with an old revolutionary who doesn’t drink but with whom I can test my ideas about Chinese history, before I teach my course, next week.  Will Confucianism experience some kind of resurgence?  When might the Party devise a way to transfer power?  What line of reasoning, if any, will China use to persuade the rest of the world, as it concerns power projection?  This was how we spent our lunch, after the stated reason for the visit was through and I’d confirmed that gouji brandy was swell.

Tuesday 05/15/18