After mounting a campaign that thrust deep into enemy territory, the back and forth along the horizon between earth and sky in Shanghai has become a stand-off again. Have to keep giving people a reason to look up though, distract them from looking down and remembering how many fetuses of baby girls are buried in the ground. The world economy may be grinding slowly, but after having come all the way out of Africa, I don’t think humanity is going to go back in. Although…I don’t quite understand all the tension at the nexus between race and sex, since we’re all black in the dark. But if building upwards doesn’t start again, it will remain what I see from my window, buildings neither tall nor short, beautiful nor ugly. It’s the suburbs, and I know it doesn’t stop from here until the ocean. America is a suburb. It’s the only world power that has to commute just to participate in history. In my hometown I feel like I’m constantly living in the recent past. A couple of weeks ago a girl asked me if choking was a big new sexual trend. God only knows why, maybe she read a story in Cosmo about it. I told her she probably doesn’t need to sort out her feelings about it in advance, since if some guy is sitting there eagerly wanting to choke her and asks her if he can, whatever she answers will probably produce the same result.

I went to an open-mic comedy night at someplace called the Squire Lounge last night with two friends, the name being important only insofar as I dare say it found itself elbowed into more slanderous tirades directed against various people’s bodily orifices than any other title of chivalric rank has before. Inside the bar was the kind of motley grouping which didn’t lend itself to any shared social classification, no matter how broad, except maybe “evacuees sheltering from a natural disaster.” It was a vaguely endearing place nonetheless, with some sort of yarn creation wrapped around a pillar like a knitting project that had regrettably failed to turn into a pair of socks, as well as, up in the rafters, a disembodied, seemingly female mannequin head with what one of my friends and I decided must have been a moustache shading its upper lip, only because I don’t imagine a mannequin would be designed with a harelip. The men’s bathroom had, besides a urinal, a sitter whose lips practically touched the walls on both sides, probably because the owners were tired of people taking dumps on the floor on either side and determined to provide no room for error.

We sat in a semi-circular booth with a two-step rise near the stage. I thought that that kind of set-up by itself practically seemed like an implied invitation for a lap dance. One of my friends claimed that that wouldn’t work because the booth was too high off the ground. I liked that the only problem she saw with the idea was the elevation of the furniture, not the fact that the only people in our near vicinity were bums sheltering from the cold and a couple of people guessing the gender of whom, we decided, could replace bar trivia contests on the nights where there was no act. Finally the performers came on one at a time. Much wonderment at ethnic differences was expressed. A general lack of interest in babies without exciting mental illnesses or poignant disappearances into garbage dumps or the hands of pedophiles was implied. I learned that a much bigger groundswell of dissatisfaction with the state and nomenclature of the vagina exists than I would have suspected.

Outside the bar a bouncer was trying to shoo the smokers on the sidewalk off to more than 15 feet from the building. Most of the art-school types walked further down the street. The hobo wearing the hard hat, on the other hand, had, I take it, armed himself to pursue the opposite strategy. On our way home, a sudden unexpected need to go to the bathroom on the part of the girl provoked a discussion as to how long-haul truckers manage to drive all day without having to stop for that purpose, my guy friend holding that they take anti-diuretics to suppress the urge. Whereas I had assumed that the usual trucker strategy was to accumulate enough veneral diseases that it would hurt too much pee. So that, like in most primitive societies, fear would fill the role of science.

I hate buzzwords and stupid terminology. It partly drove me out of my job teaching English at a business college in Shanghai: it seemed particularly hypocritical to claim to be teaching English to Chinese people while massacring it behind closed doors with barbarous business neologisms. We were as bad as a bunch of womanizing monks. For instance, our teaching trainers would tell us: “We don’t give feedback, we prefer to give ‘feed-forward.'” Whereas I think that as long as we’re making shit up, a word like ‘feed-forward’ would more accurately describe a bird ingesting some seeds or berries and then vomiting them up again into the mouths of its babies. Although I suppose that’s more or less what we were doing too. Of course it’s worse in politics, since the power is greater and the ends are generally worse, and where euphemisms represent the most frustrating concealment of reality other than the bikini. For instance, this horrible new phrase ‘the public option.’ Were I to guess, I would have imagined that ‘the public option’ referred to when a guy can’t find a girlfriend but is still wants to have sex, so he chooses the ‘public option.’ And naturally I imagine that in today’s liberal America when a mission goes wrong in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever the soldiers will no longer abort it, they will “exercise a woman’s reproductive rights” on it.

Although it’s Christmastime, around here some of Jesus’ miracles don’t seem so miraculous. “Jesus walked on water!” Yeah, great, so could I right now, it’s frozen. I need to go somewhere hot, someplace burning, maybe a civil war. I noticed the other day that the jail in my town is next to the airport, which seems kind of mean. The airport is just a small private airfield, so it probably doesn’t have a departure board, which is too bad, because I always thought of them as being the things most symptomatic of optimism in any airport. I used to wonder, though, since flights are always listed according to their destination, if there couldn’t be, hidden between the lines of the departure board, a limitless ghost army of planes taking off with no destination, as invisible bureaucratically speaking as the angels climbing Jacob’s latter even if they are hulking steel cans like any other.

One of my best friends from high school who is also frequently possessed by fits of wanderlust has just come back to Colorado from that depraved den of iniquity London, though he only remains among us for a couple of weeks, probably fearing that to absent himself longer would give the mold growing on his walls time to colonize his floor and perhaps take up arms against him. I think he should leave it be: with little money and jammed into some back-alley, it’s probably the only way he will be able to cultivate the famous British love of gardening. He’s only been away from here for a few years, but he has already become detached enough from the genius loci to deliver himself of such judgments as he did the other day when he said something about how Mexicans make “good food.” I had to remind him that in this country Mexicans don’t just make “good” food, they make all the food. Nonetheless, he has the irrepressible compulsion to make invidious comparisons of a man comfortable only in open relationships. He started going on about how strange it seemed to drive or ride a bike when going out at night, since in London one generally walks or takes public transportation. I implored him to tell me more magical stories of the exotic East. Whatever, his idea of a nice city is St. Petersburg, where you risk being menaced by the depradations of wandering noses and disgruntled statues.

I came back home last week, and after taking a couple of runs through town everything seems to still be more or less where it was before. Apparently my running like a maniac back and forth in front of the trees and statues all last summer didn’t make any converts. I noticed signs of more gradual slide though; I’m glad that I’m not going to elementary school in these times, since I ran past my old elementary school and saw that the marquee in front said: “An Evening of Sharing.” A night of sharing…what? Venereal diseases? Vicious rumors?

I think I left China just in time though. I suspect imminent economic dissolution as the entire structure collapses into the vortex of its own lies and made-up employment statistics. And of course it still faces the near-annual Christmastime tradition of the recall of millions of Chinese-made toys containing dangerous toxins, unless the manufacturers try to take advantage of the ever-present popularity of exoticism among Western customers and the growing brand nationalism of Chinese buyers by promoting toys containing lead paint as Childhood Fun With Chinese Characteristics.

Also, my body had reached saturation in many different ways. For example, before I went to Shanghai in August I hadn’t even heard that it was hosting the World Expo next year, and actually, after two months of relentless advertising bombardment, I’ve almost returned to a state of being unaware of it, as I think my brain has begun expelling undigested chunks of Expo-related propaganda, just like my intestine has stir-fried food. Many people seem to fear swine flu mutating to create some kind of super-pathogen, but I worry more that the Chinese government will seek a more efficient means to infiltrate its passive subjects’ brains by weaponizing Expo propaganda, combining it with the flu to create what could then quite literally be called Expo fever. I will know to be afraid if I hear people coughing and expressing enthusiasm for magnetic tramways and ecologically responsible sidewalks.

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.

Outside, buses crawl around the freeways like the larval/caterpillar stage of skyscrapers, their rear view mirrors drooping over the windshield like antennae. I spend my days in the disreputable borderlands of employment, surrounded by horny cats and tempestuous Volkswagens, circling and veering away from my responsibilities like a disenchanted man trying to prevent a conversation with his girlfriend from becoming intimate. I’ve passed the time developing muscles that girls seem to like but will never have cause to use the services of, like buying a camera with a bunch of features you don’t need. For instance, after working out a bunch on the rowing machines I could now make a hasty getaway by canoe. I suppose that could be useful if you were a bank thief but couldn’t afford any more expensive form of transportation. Of course, you could only rob banks next to rivers.

I suppose it’s best not to think too hard about the underlying logic of attraction. Like for example, I never quite understood kissing as an expression of love. I imagine it must have originated from two people arguing more and more heatedly at closer and closer distances until they just started grappling in mouth-to-mouth combat, and realized they got along a lot better that way, when not using their mouths for purposes of speaking. Love creates strange freedoms. Most Americans probably imagine that freedom means the right not to be messed with by anyone else as long as they do not mess with anyone else in turn. But this case seems to be the opposite: kissing apparently gives you the prerogative to try to eat somebody else, provided they are allowed to try to eat you at the same time.

It makes us more like pigs (or, as they are now called again, having been recently demoted for the offense of having become infected with a grievous pathogen, swine). They will eat virtually anything. Forget how many degrees of separation you have from Kevin Bacon, when you’re eating bacon itself, especially somewhere like China, you’re probably only one degree of separation away from the arm of a political dissident. Since pigs will eat anything, they must see the whole world as food, and so naturally any of the goings to and fro upon the the earth that occur outside their stomachs are going to seem somehow unfulfilled, incomplete.

I never really planned on living long enough to have to worry about doing things that would make me live longer. I always vaguely imagined going out performing some honorable service like dying during a particularly grueling stretch of the work year to give my friends and family an unwonted vacation, and not taking too long to go about it. The course of life seems to me like a funnel where you gradually get attacked at closer and closer quarters with wimpier and wimpier weapons. In your 20’s you might get assaulted with a knife or a Toyota, but by your 60’s they’re more likely to be going at your cells with an instrument that looks like the degenerate cousin of a ballpoint pen. The weaker the weapon the longer doing damage takes and the more it hurts. Getting beaten to death with a plastic shovel would probably take days and would turn you into melty ice cream by the end. When you’re old and hospitalized it can take years, enough time to experience each part of your body dying in turn, as if answering roll call.

The point is people don’t just evaporate or fade away. The body is too heavy and there’s no convenient opening in the package to pry open and let the soul out. It’s like those clamshell packages at electronics stores that are supposed to prevent shoplifting and have to be really mangled in order to get whatever’s inside out. That’s what it takes to detach the spiritual from the corporeal in people. And that was the mistake that my last Congressional Representative when I lived in America made. He took the title “Representative” a little too seriously and thought he had to serve as the representative of the abstract concept of his “constituency” in all ways, become its embodiment. He worried that if the signified existed in some concrete and non-abstract sense the signifier, i.e. him, would not really signify and hence would have no function. So he started trying to take over the lives of his voters, showing up at their workplaces and social functions, doing their jobs and chores for them, hoping they would get totally displaced and eventually fade away into some vague metaphorical space that he could comfortingly stand in for, like a poopy two-year-old does for happiness.

Really it’s simpler, like in China, to just accept the total inappropriateness of your political representation as an opening premise. Having someone like Mao on all the money is a lot better at any rate: I get to sit on his face all day, and if I ever went to a strip club it would be way less awkward to be jamming that into some sweaty orifice than the face on the rupee. Mao certainly wouldn’t be seeing anything he hadn’t seen before. Actually, if I ever went to a strip club I’d bring a bunch of coins, see if any of the dancers would accept those being slipped into their thong, maybe I’d even look for a coin slot on their person–or a credit card swipe.

Although my own writing hasn’t even gotten prominent enough to be judged one way or another by anybody, I’ve somehow stumbled into a job as the final judge of little recourse for the writing of a bunch of college students. Teachers have different ideas about how to do this. A friend of mine says he likes to pick up a paper and say that it feels like it weighs like about a 17 out of 20. Personally, I think the only totally fair system is to beat students at random back into the state of unconsciousness I just woke them up from. Failing that, the only right-thinking way is to evaluate them on the basis of how many trees deserved to die to produce this shit. Usually it’s no more than a couple of twigs, which isn’t so bad in China, since the composition paper generally looks like students wrote on the membrane of an egg. I’ve also thought about just marking them down based on how many vowels they use, since I consider those blasphemous. And no one should get higher than a 70%, since if the Communist Party is only giving Mao himself a C- that’s got to be the upper limit.

Unfortunately, my institute has some quality-control rubbish called “marking meetings” where they try to ensure we are all grading papers according to the same standard, as if it weren’t all subjective anyway, as if, as if, as if… On the other hand, almost every expatriate in China seems to get drawn at one time or another into an interminable discussion about the beauty standards of different cultures. I think marking meetings would have a more useful application here in getting us to all agree on who’s beautiful and who’s a dog. It would be great to see people negotiating over half a point here and a quarter of a point there: “We have to agree that she passes, but the range can only be 11.5 to 12, nothing higher!”

Chinese construction and manufacturing quality is so bad that I have to plunge through a gaping hole in my doorway to leave my room. I head to breakfast, standing in line with the pensioners at the street market. I’m convinced that most people left standing in China after the ’60’s didn’t live through them, they lived around them. I have to teach class tomorrow, and I can’t take the silence of my students, because the one person in the room speaking becomes the dictator, willing or not. Even the skyscrapers follow the ideal of that totalitarian Plato: simple squares and circles, living close to heaven.

I’m so happy that Chinese names are common words, including mine. I never thought I’d see my name in print, but suddenly I’m everywhere, in every book, the texts are practically crawling with me like aphids. Now, reading in the morning, the banality of order swamps me: of course the transitions are going to be a little rough for writers that don’t herd through the hallways and courtyards but instead jump between the rooftops. We scorn the trees because they have no language, but why assume it’s not principle? If you were a tree, would words not be your arch-nemesis?

As the sun starts to set, the Chinese flag suddenly changes from abstract to representational art, and the sun’s rays do their best to blind me. What I say may be falsehoods, but I see them as lampshades for the truth.