Yes, But I Do Have an Outline

Sleep evades me because I chase too many things. I may have lost my best friend here.
Earplugs isolate me from all external noise, making the internal noise of my heart and lungs so loud that I can blame myself instead of Moscow for my wakefulness.
Calm music used to help, until I understood the calm was in the music, and not in me.
At times I like Moscow. Those times come only when I live my life without describing it. There are periods of calm when I describe nothing. Those times disappear when an experience or encounter is so revealing of the broader picture of this place that the thing in itself kicks my cash crutch out from under me, compelling me to describe what I am living. The crutch makes it hard to leave this place. I am earning well. But when I leave, I feel like someone has pulled a splinter from my wound.
Those periods of calm coincide with periods in which I tell myself that we can know the whole picture only empirically, by knowing all 142 million Russian denizens. Talking about the big picture is nonsense because you can't know the big picture. When you say "big picture" it's just that, a picture you're painting, and a big one at that
Russians often say to me, "You're meeting the wrong people", and I used to think it was just a line. I am meeting the wrong people because of the place I live, where they are in the majority.
A few weeks ago, I demoded a longtime acquaintance to an outlying ally. I told him what I saw in the metro, and he said she deserved it. Strong cues to the effect that this was not a joke went unnoticed, and he continued to blame her.
A woman locked in an apartment and raped for three days. The police don't respond.
An immigrant beaten to death in the subway by 6 Nazis. The police don't respond.
A woman is gang-raped by six men, and no one goes to the police.
These aren't my lives. I am always at at least one degree of separation from them.
This is not my habit, not my own environment. It's somebody else's. But it does effect me, and not just through me hearing about it.
What I used to call turmoil, I now call habit, environment.