Communism, the most carefully thought out half-thought-out idea in the history of the world, may have shriveled in China, but for lots of Chinese men it seems to have been replaced as an object of faith and belief, despite a total lack of evidence of it working, by–the comb-over. Maybe the end of communism itself saddened the hair from their heads. Me, I see things falling now relentlessly: after two months of practically every building over 10 years old that I lay eyes getting knocked down and plowed over, I’ve gotten so used to the sight of heaps of ruins rising victorious from their scuffles with structural engineering that I’m starting to suspect that my eyesight has the power of a cosmic five-year-old to wear out and break everything it touches within a few weeks. In any case, all that’s over, because yesterday I flew back home. I’m always particularly worried about crashing from the sky when I fly to or from here; I love my home, and I wouldn’t want it to be said of me “cause of death: Colorado.” Then again, sometimes I wonder if I ever have even passed through the sky: airplanes seem less like humanity taking to the air than training the air in the ways of the ground. You walk into a steel box, it whirls and shakes a bit and then (at least on long flights) you just wait for the sky to ripen.