It all moves fast and beautiful, which you know. But the office is windowless and the work incarcerating, such that circadian progress is novel, even surprising, at certain recesses. Fall is here. I can't see it.

The take-away from Beijing: The rest of the world is much more dynamic and diverse than we are told. It progresses without us; it doesn't need us to flourish. In Beijing, the rate of growth is inhumane and uncontrollable, and every nation is not only invested in it but urging it to hasten. The occidental hold on that beast is romantic and untenable. China could and may eventually become truly the center of things. Everything is happening there.

I am home now and acutely aware that I am captive. I see now (again and more so) that we all are. America is a captive market. We open wide to let them fatten us with saccharine soundbites of copyrighted freedom, productivity, and world benevolence. We are vain and simple, and we buy that made-up shit clubcard. Those of us who don't, or think we don't, become infected with it anyway. You have to leave here to see how much, to be shocked at the extent of your seclusion. And now the contrast is stark. I'm thrown back among the media-suckled and dumbed. We squander our tremendous knowledge, wealth, and leisure on trying to achieve superficial, corporate-sown fantasies.

While we are spinning in tight little circles culturally, interpersonally, and psychically, the world builds itself. We used to pity the Japanese their captivity, for paying the high price for our cheap goods, but now I can't see how we are any less the herd gently prodded to a shot to the head.

In my own myopia, I work with a pack of narrow-minded scientists. You would think the science part would make them curious about the world, but they are only obsessed with the minutia and false prestige of their discipline. It surprises and disappoints. They're their own moribund herd.

I went outside, I breathed the air; it stung. I saw there a million unique things and not a second of repetition, and time thinned to my tread. I got a month, not a week.

The rest of the time, I'm pressing days into palimpsests. I can't see what I've lived anymore.