Aliens Prefer Americano

06JUN2010 – Hot as fuck outside, and I’m not in the mood to sit on my floor, pace my floor, sweep my floor, or get into a mental wrasslin’ match with my inner accountant about my lack of groceries as I wait for the Big Fat Paycheck that isn’t due until the first of next month.

Instead, I told myself that, historically and artistically speaking, it’s all the rage to be poor and hungry in New York.  I think I bought it, so I decided to step out for a stout.  Presently holding court at the Barcade, brushing up on my Galaga patterns, and penning nonsense in my ubiquitous journal, as follows:

What do the following have in common?

- Any liquor store

- An aisle of a bookstore devoted to bibles

- The cereal section of your local grocer

- Gun shops

Give up?  Variations on a theme.  How many different bottles of booze can one person possibly crawl into?  Why are there so many versions of the Bible?  How much Muesli do we really need?  Isn’t one gun enough when you catch your wife making magic monkeys with your best friend?

“Well, people need choices.” No, we fucking don’t.  We don’t need leopard print cell phone cases.  We don’t need peanut butter AND jelly in the same jar, and we sure as fuck have no business sipping anything from a can marked JOOSE.  Call me crazy, but sometimes I think free will is a loaded firearm: something best kept under lock and key, especially when there are children in the house.

P.S. Crocs were conceived as a dare.  Ha, ha!  Fooled you!

Common courtesy is a disease we could all stand to catch.  Don’t get the sniffles, or a weekend bug.  Catch a fucking plague of it.  Lose your leg, if need be.

[HHG SHIPMENT ARRIVED SOMEWHERE DURING THIS TIMEFRAME. CASUALTY: ONE FLOOR LAMP]

08JUN2010 – MEMORY OF EARTH: 8^th Ave subway stop, hot summer night, drunk on tequila and red wine.  Across the platform, a beautiful young black girl with Cappuccino skin plucks wandering melodies from her acoustic guitar, the notes lost among the cocktail din of the other commuters waiting for the Brooklyn-bound L.

09JUN2010 – Tired from walking, stopped into Cho’s for an iced coffee.  It’s just around the corner from my place.  Don’t want to go home, but I’ve been wandering for a few hours now.  No money, no friendly faces.

You: “Oh, but there’s so many free things to do in New Yor–.”

Me: Shut up.  I know.  None of them include eating.

Planet WillBurg is kinda weirding me out, anthropologically speaking.  I’ve been dressing like a power nerd since Christ was a messcook: thick black glasses, courier bag, tattoos, camo shorts.  It’s been my thing for years, and I’m great with it.  Imagine my reaction — nay, my chagrin! — when I roll off the train to find these irony-based motherfuckers dropping out of the trees, and all of them look like me.  There’s probably fifty-million dollars worth of India ink walking down Metropolitan Avenue at any given point in time!  So much for being different. Not sure how I feel about it. Safety in anonymity?

I tried to strike up a conversation with the barista.  It went like this:

[brief introductory chatter here, blah, blah]

Her: “So, what do you do?”

Me: (pausing, not wanting to mention government because it always gets a weird response; not quite ready to say, “I’m a writer” because my book isn’t published yet; not wanting to say something coy and asinine like, “Oh, this and that,” because that’s a fucking retard movie dickhead answer; and definitely not wanting to throw down my entire goat-choking title: crisis communications, risk management and media relations specialist…) “Uh, I’m a photographer…”

Her: (dismissively) “Oh, just like everyone else.  That’ll be three-fifty.”

That’s right.  I look like everyone else, and I’m here to open a gallery, just like everyone else.  My mom’s paying for this coffee.  I’ll be over there taking MySpace photos of myself and trying to look poor.

Guess I should go home.  And do what?  (Image of an action figure in blister packaging, sitting erect on the edge of a perfectly-made bed in an inspection-ready apartment.  Towels folded to crisp precision, fridge gleaming – albeit empty.  Glasses and plates washed, dressed to the edge of the cupboard.  Floor swept, files organized by color, trash empty.  Room suffocatingly silent, except for the air conditioner.  Cursor blinking, awaiting further instruction.)

Part of me is thrilled to the gills at not having a social life.  No distractions.  Nothing to do but learn my job, aspire to greatness and write my ass off.  That part of me knows I can survive for extended periods of time on nothing more than beans, rice, tuna, coffee, Sharpies, music, and social media.  But there’s another part of me that knows that first part is a lying motherfucker.  “Friends are a form of wealth, as is knowledge.  Likewise, health.”  I don’t know who said that, probably me.  Plants need food, sunlight, water.  Human beings need their Maslow’s met.

I have dreams where I can fly, or move objects with my mind.  And in these dreams, I can feel the part of my mind that knows how to do these things.  I understand the weight of the object on some deep level.  I feel it rising up, moving toward me, coming to rest in my hand.  But on awakening, that part of my brain reads as 404 FILE NOT FOUND.  It feels like something in me has died.

I wonder what will become of these journals.  Used as tinder, perhaps?

All my travels and
years set free in the tears of
slowly rising flames.

Maybe they’ll put stretch marks on the bottom of a trash bag.  Guess it doesn’t matter, brevity of life, Pale Blue Dot, blah, blah.

Relax, people.  I’m not looking to conquer anything but myself.

26JUN2010 – I’ve fallen into the Pit of Quiet.  I go for days without saying much.  Don’t feel like speaking.  Took everything I had to dress myself and wander into the sunlight this morning.  New York might be safer, doesn’t make it any friendlier.  Found a series of coaxial adapters approximately three inches long on the sidewalk near my apartment.  Walked along twirling this tiny technological sword of state in my fingers, hefting it, feeling the weight of the thing.  Remain silent, stay hidden, Ghost Dog my way through my environment, wait for the map of familiarity to reveal itself.  Muscle memory takes time to form.  Someday I will think to myself, “Remember when this was all brand new?”

Sometimes a woman is a beautiful painting.  She doesn’t need your consent, she doesn’t want your admiration, she doesn’t care for your conversation, she doesn’t require your loyalty, your chivalry or your complication.  Sometimes she just wants to walk down a sunlit street in a pretty dress, wearing her favorite sunglasses and the sandals that took her forever to find.  Sometimes she just wants to be pretty.  Let her.

I’m still afraid of ending up broken and homeless; filthy and terrified, hungry and wasting, begging for the change you got from your latte and have nothing better to do with, but still won’t give it away.  All my clever will be for naught, my stories will fall upon deaf ears, and that will be that.  We leave this world the same way we came in.

The music is this place is god-awful, unless you’re a raging fan of Christmas 1985 Casio keyboards and tone-deaf, two-chord sorcerers wringing every nuance from a simplified rhyme structure, where every line begins with “I feel”.  Makes me want to punch a goat.

Fascinating to consider that people make a conscious decision to dress as they do.  Observe the wild-haired man passing by the window: “I WILL leave the house today dressed in camouflage trousers, a red tank top, worn leather sandals and a healthy stack of ‘rock guy’ bracelets on each wrist.”  There must be an anthropological study on why people dress as they do.  We’re like pirate radio stations, walking the street, broadcasting our likes and dislikes, wearing our hearts on our record sleeves, staying awake on strong coffee and cigarettes, exhaling into the microphone and wondering if anyone is still  listening.

A song is like a piece of software, or a tool.  Someone has to dream it up, write it, assemble it from the tools they have on hand (and hopefully have a working knowledge of).  Then they send it out into the world.  Their user/audience learns of this product, using his/her own personal network to acquire it, and is forced to make an ethical decision:  “Hey, my favorite (programmer) has a new (meme/abstract analogy/external emotion experience/brain virus) available! I will (or will not) engage in the exchange of valued currency to obtain it.”  For some, these programs are just background clutter, and they interact with the program on a very basic level.

For others, the program becomes something like a theme for their computer; it changes the color of their background, selects a complimentary font, or has some other effect on their overall system.

And for still others, the effect is all-consuming: it becomes a photograph, an envelope, a time capsule, a shorthand statement, a bookmark, a reminder of the state of their perception and senses during a moment in time.  “Yes,” we imagine them saying.  “Song X reminds me of time period Y when I was in a relationships A, B, and C with the following objects, systems, or people: [DESCRIBE FURTHER]”

S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y! NIGHT!

TWM

Where Were You When the Nightmare Ended?

20JAN09 – So here’s how it went down. When I woke up this morning, I decided I was gonna do it different.

As some of you know, I’d been given what I thought amounted to a Golden Ticket – photographer’s credentials to shoot the Inauguration. Turns out the pass was only good for the north parking lot of the Pentagon, which, I compare to horses playing ice hockey – oddly amusing, somewhat aesthetic, but not really what I was after. No, clearly this event would be best observed among the people, and there were a lot of them on this freezing Tuesday in January. A look into the future told me an estimated 1 million people would brave the cold in order to witness this event in person. I dressed warmly, checked my gear and Shazam! Off I flew.

OK, so I didn’t really fly. Instead I took the Yellow Line all the way to Chinatown, because L’Enfant Plaza was closed. The trains were packed with people, and there were lines for all the trains, the escalators, other lines, you name it. People were jamming themselves into the cars, blocking the doors and getting the stink eye from other passengers – wait, did I just say what sounded like ‘dirty looks’? Let’s go back and see, because that one sort of stumped me.

Here we are, waking up from the nightmare, on our way to the biggest ‘feel good’ (not to mention historical) event we’ve had in recent history, one of those things that people will remember what part they played in it for years to come, and people are grumbling? I feel certain that anyone willing to do mortal combat with the pneumatic doors of a Metro car would also very much like to witness the son of a goat herder become president. This is, after all, a magical time. Can’t we just get along? (Have we been spoiled by ‘gimme’?)

In days to come, the heartwarming ‘Where Were You When’ articles will begin to trickle forth. Why not? There is money to be had. So which one of these would make for a better headline? “I shoved my way on a train because I wanted to hear Obama speak”, or “Well, some people were rude…” That’s not a question without an answer. It’s not even a fucking question.

Where was I, indeed?

Vendors, vendors, hawking every manner of Obama related souvenir! I heard one man call out, “Don’t hesitate to commemorate!” I bought lo mein and chicken from a cart, juggling my chopsticks through fingerless gloves while clutching the Styrofoam container in my free hand, my bag slung over one shoulder, trying to protecting my phone and camera whilst making best possible speed for my destination, where ever that might be. I listened to my headphones on the way in, because I wanted to keep my space a little while longer. I knew it was gonna get dense. I didn’t really strike up a conversation with anyone, if that’s what you wanna know. I spoke a little here and there, and for whatever reason.

We were packed like cattle, but the mood was energizing. People were laughing and smiling, and there was a sense of friendly excitement in the air! Everyone was chanting his name, and shouting, “Yes We Can!” Can you possibly imagine that dream for yourself, and not think about sex?

Essentially, I just followed the heaving throng. Gave them their lead as it were, spanked their haunches and rode the beast. Many useful streets were cordoned off, so we were directed through the tunnels instead. Walking, walking, walking in my normal fashion; stretching mighty legs far, digging deep, falling through the crowd, watching for openings, never losing momentum. I didn’t have a ticket, so I just kept moving, making snap decisions that I hoped would get me closer to a monument or a specific area, something I could tie my photos to.

Wound up at the west side of the Washington Monument just within sight of a jumbotron. (Just added the word ‘jumbotron’ to my custom dictionary, in addition to ‘Barack’ and ‘Obama’.) Thanks to the guy next to me, giving a play-by-play on his cell phone, I could barely make out what was being said. (“Dear Carl Sagan,” I prayed. “If, against all probability, the words ‘poor event etiquette’ are found randomly painted on the side of an enormous asteroid speeding straight for Earth, please, let it hit this man.”)

I saw only fleeting images on the jumbotron. The sight of George Bush brought forth an ugly reaction from the crowd; catcalls, boos and jeers, which I didn’t find surprising. Perhaps uncalled for in light of the ceremony. But that crazy Dick Chaney and his props! What a show stealer, a real card to the end.

The odd part was hearing hundreds of thousands of people mutter the Lord’s Prayer. The sound of the thing hit me from all sides, and for a moment I felt like a fish swimming through an open-water baptismal. My opinions of religion aside, it was a genuinely moving experience to wade in that river of belief.

Finally, Obama was sworn in and everyone was excited, ecstatic. For a moment, there was a feeling in the air that we could really pull this off if we all worked together. It would require hard work, renewed effort, rolled sleeves. The speech was good – I wonder if Obama writes his own stuff?

But when the golden words ended, the spell was broken, and the excitement in the crowd began to fade. Suddenly there was nothing but faint echoes, as though we’d been dreaming about something utterly wonderful, and had been awakened by our neighbor’s car alarm. People around me began muttering, pushing to get out of the crowd. Again with the dirty looks. I guess I was hoping for something more. But then, we are encouraged to be the change we wish to see in the world, are we not?

On the way back out, no one was waving merchandise. It felt as though we’d worked really hard to have Aerosmith play an enormous free concert, and now that the show was over we could go back to being our rotten crummy selves. (I don’t really think that’s gonna happen.)

I floated with the crowd headed south, making important phone calls and sending a flurry of frozen text messages to different friends around the globe, eventually washing up at the Waterfront Metro entrance. I bought three small bottles of Odwalla from the Safeway, and waited for the mob to thin before braving the trains. I am very a patient man, possibly one of the most patient you will ever meet. But even I have my limits.

The nightmare of the Bush administration is over: He’s not pining! He’s passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! He’s expired and gone to meet his maker! He’s a stiff! Bereft of life, he rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed him to the perch he’d be pushing up the daisies! His metabolic processes are now history! He’s off the twig! He’s kicked the bucket, he’s shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!

Well, maybe not dead, but we’ve chased him out of town with few prospects, even fewer book deals, and very little fanfare. There are those, even now, who maintain that history will side with Bush once the roar of the media disapproval dies down. Do I want the ‘truth of history’, or do I just want to continue to hate George W. Bush because he was the easiest of targets, and a vile waterhead at best?

We interrupt this blog to make a confession — I’ve never had much trust in politicians, finding it much easier to assume they are all corrupt before they were ever found guilty of wrong doing. Reagan the Actor, Bush the Elder, Clinton the Con Man, Bush the Younger. I refused to see the good any one of these men might have done, always looking for the bad, and accepting at face value that hundreds of talented liars were hard at work upholding and protecting their bosses’ respective reputations. (I’m a spin doctor, it’s only natural.)

Chalk it up to change (no pun intended), but for the first time in my life I am ready to accept that maybe not all politicians, not all presidents are born scum. When Bush the Younger took (literally) office, I owned (literally) one pair of pants. I was working two jobs at the time, and still couldn’t afford a car. The world was a scary place back then. I took one look at what W. represented, saw the kind of people who followed him, put 2 + 2 together, and figured we’d probably get a postcard from the End Man at some point during the next eight years. We damn near did. And we aren’t clear yet.

The HMFIC has a long road ahead of him, but I feel better about him being at the wheel than I have any other leader. Something just feels right.

What matters now is that WhiteHouse.gov is the official web site for the White House and President Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. What matters now is that the word ‘former’ now precedes the phrase ‘President George W. Bush.’

“Long time coming, but now the snow is gone.” – Josh Ritter

TWM

P.S. Shazam! proved to be a popular program of its day, and for a time the comic book was altered to match the format of the series. Michael Gray found himself typecast after the series ended production, and had trouble finding acting work, leaving the profession until the late 1990s.

Rime of the Astral Navigator (Third Class)

The following entry was found amidst the wreckage of a spacebound shuttle which lost power and fell from the sky approximately two minutes after takeoff from the Carl Sagan Transworld Spaceport on June 22, 2031, killing all 227 passengers aboard.

22JUN2031 – The past three days have been a blur. After graduating astral-navigator (third class!) from PASCAL (Pacific Air Space Command in California), my friends and I headed out to celebrate at some wild gathering downtown. Godzilla’s, I think it was called. I’m not sure. There was a giant fucking reptile painted on one wall, I remember that much.

We piled three deep on the drive downtown, too broke to afford enough cabs. As we pulled up, one of the girls from my class grabbed me forcefully by the neck and thrust her tongue into my mouth, passing something into mine. Cat’s Eye. I recognized the bitter taste. “Enjoy your evening!” she said with a grin. I swallowed the capsule, resigning myself to a long and digitized dream…

At one point I remember being in the middle of the dance floor surrounded by a heaving throng of strangers, hypnotized by the bass line and flashing lights of some wild, half-naked act from Japan – eleven men in loincloths beating eleven gigantic Tyco drums made from some kind of translucent material while eleven topless girls played eleven neon violins as though their very lives depended on it. The night was a strobe-lit mass of sweat and hands and a thousand pounding hearts made the club feel like it was floating somewhere above a raging sea, lost between this world and the next. I could almost see the connections between each person in the room. My heart was an alligator, and a wild grin threatened to split my face in two. When the lights came up, a guy in a motorized wheelchair did donuts through the sticky swamp of spilled alcohol which covered the dance floor, surrounded by a crowd of exhausted people, clapping and whistling and cheering him on.

We‘d planned to leave early the next morning for a two-hour drive to an amusement park down the coast, but with half our group attempting to re-solidify their minds, we didn’t get on the road until almost noon. Adding insult to injury, we, the proud astral navigators of PASCAL-2031 got lost on the way to the amusement park– a year’s worth of intense training and memorization of nearly every heavenly body from here to the outer rim, and we had to backtrack three different times!

And then there was the traffic jam.

We sat in the heat of Satan’s personal stalemate for two and a half hours, theorizing and guessing at the cause for the delay. James placed the Roadster on auto and strummed his guitar while I cracked jokes, sipped flavored electrolytes, and did my best to make light of the situation until finally the heat was too much. I could take no more. In frustration, I popped the passenger hatch and stomped alongside in the 120-degree heat. James laughed, trying to cajole me back inside. “Come on back in, Mac!” he shouted from behind the controls. “You know there ain’t no fucking ozone layer left above this state!” His eyes glittered like a coal mine, wild black hair standing on end.

The heat was incredible. As I watched black ribbons of heat dancing drunken jigs along the highway, I remember thinking that I wished I’d canceled on this stupid trip. I still had to pack for my flight to CST and the connecting shuttle off-world, my mouth felt like an underground weapons test site, my head was still spinning from the Cat’s Eye, I had almost no money left, and here we were, crawling along like beaten dogs in this godforsaken oven, lost in traffic on the way to an amusement park in the next state. Traffic was so slow I could literally pace myself with the line of cars stretching on into tomorrow, and I swore loudly under my breath for several minutes.

Presently, I heard Macy’s quiet voice from inside the Roadster. “At least have some water.” She held a large, refrigerated canteen out toward me, complete with icy rivulets running down the sides. Sweet Macy. Always logical, always smiling.

I looked up at the faces of the people I’d come to call my friends over the past year, thinking of all the late-night walks and philosophical discussions over coffee we’d had, wondering who put the stars we studied up there in the first place. Shit, if it weren’t for them, I’d already be packed, sitting on top of my suitcase twenty-seven hours early in a dark, air-conditioned room watching the walls close in while the methamphetamine-addicted butterfly known as “pre-space jitters” ran a steeplechase through the obstacle course of my lower intestines. I don’t mind spaceflight, I just hate waiting. Instead, I was experiencing the here and now of life. It isn’t perfect, but it’s all we have. Be here now, right? “Mac, Mac, you got to come back!” sang James, idly strumming a series of chords on his most prized possession.

Laughing at myself, I climbed back in and took a long sip of water.

Later, we pulled in to recharge somewhere off the main road, the summertime stench of flamethrowers and piss assaulting my senses as I popped the hatch, stepping out to stretch the miles from my legs. Waiting in line, a tall, older gentleman in a broad-brimmed hat saw me writing in my journal, a habit I’ve maintained for years. “I bet I can tell your personality from your handwriting,” he offered.

You meet a lot of strange folks in the hydrogen lane, but for some reason, I cautiously handed it over– after thumb-locking the rest of my files, of course. He took my e-pad and examined it. He said me I was a strange creature, “…one of the strangest ones I’ve ever met. You aren’t destined to stay on in this world and, in fact, you come from some place far away from here.” And then he told me I was “filled with passion beyond my years.”

Okay, having an elderly and somewhat effeminate stranger tell me this in broad daylight made me a little uncomfortable, and I was grateful for the security of my dark glasses, nearly black in the glare of the semi-naked sun. We loaded up on supplies, I thanked him for his analysis, and we moved on down the road.

Later, I gazed out the passenger window at the other vehicles whipping past, studying the odd physical manner with which people fill their immediate surroundings: hands on joysticks, heads propped on seats, fingers grazing buttons, a foot propped up on the dash, arms over seats. As we passed a low-slung sport cruiser, I peered down through the bubble; a young girl looked up at me from behind her wraparound sunglasses, regarding me just as cool as ocean air. Her hair was done in tight bunches which stuck out from her head in all directions. She wore tight silvery shorts and a thin t-shirt. I smiled and waved at her. She grinned back, stomped on the accelerator, and vanished into the distance.

We finally got to the park, but I can’t find the rest of my notes. I’ll do them again later. It was worth the trip, anyway.

Now in the preflight departure lounge of the Carl Sagan Transworld Spaceport. I surprise myself with my changing tastes in women. Men are attracted to breasts first, it’s only natural. Then we advance – or at least we’re supposed to. We find attraction in their eyes, their mouths, legs, neck– Japanese men are wild for the nape of a girl’s neck– but feet? This is news to me. Still, I find myself studying the toes of a young woman a few seats away. I doubt she’s headed up; she doesn’t have the look of a spacer, but I can’t take my eyes off her perfectly manicured toes tucked up on the edge of the faux-leather couch, so smooth and dusty brown.

Why, oh why, on the day that I’m scheduled to leave for a three year stint in orbit, do I develop a passing crush on a stranger in a spaceport lounge? Looking at her makes me wish I had a camera, or that I’d at least learned to draw. She’s curled up on the seat about twelve feet away, wisps of wavy brown hair piled upon her head peeking out from beneath a blue work bandanna. Her head rests on the faux-leather seatback, and I can’t even begin to describe her face. Words fail me. I watch her shoulders rise and fall beneath a worn grey t-shirt as she dozes in the fading light of day. I can’t help but watch. This picture of innocence, frozen like a postcard on the edge of all my tomorrows, is the image I want to take into space with me. I’ll look down at the swirling blue sphere below me and know she’s down there, somewhere… I glance at my watch. I only have about an hour left on Earth, but I’m too shy to speak to her.

Millions of strangers pass through Carl Sagan Transworld each year– she and I are just two more. Now she’s frozen forever in my journal. I wonder whose journals I’ve ever been featured in, if any. I travel enough; I must have crossed someone’s path.

All around me, people are sprawled out, waiting for their boarding calls, sleeping, chatting, reading eBooks, staring aimlessly at the media grids floating near the ceiling, or goggled into some ‘gram. As the sun drops once again in the western sky, we shall never see Sunday, the twenty-second day of June, 2031, again. At the sound of the tone, the time will be 20:50:10… 20 seconds… 30 seconds… that moment is gone, and so is the next. And every minute after, another wave of passengers flows like a human tide from the tunnel behind me, parallel universes in flip-flops and lightweight traveling garb.

The Carl is like a long and complex hallway adjoining billions of bedrooms and living rooms and bathrooms, an indoor universe for strange aliens wearing nothing more than a bathrobe and slippers. Each one carrying their ID, a boarding pass, and an overnight bag, each one headed someplace different. Comfort is important to your state of mind. I have learned that, if nothing else.

The trendsetters and go-getters are the ones I feel sorry for, spot-welded into their stuffy black “power suits” on the way to some important meeting, dragging their ubiquitous black Lifecenters behind them and breathlessly yammering the details of trade negotiations and presentations into their headsets.

I turn to examine the balding pate of the gentleman sitting next to me, deciding his thinning black locks would be the perfect place to stage a mock war between two opposing armies of toy soldiers. “Guerrilla Warfare in the Black Forest.” Hmmm. I see that he has a case of dandruff. Make that “The Black Forest in Winter.” (A soldier’s entry: “We have all but given up hope waiting for reinforcements, supplies, and shampoo. Many of the men have resorted to cannibalism. All hope is lost, war is Hell.”) I think of the friends I’m leaving behind who’d get a laugh out of that, and wonder if I’ll ever see them again.

My stomach grumbles loudly, churning from the “double-beef mega-burger” I wolfed down in the cafeteria. I don’t usually eat meat from fast food establishments, remembering all too well the Mad Cow Plague of ’15 that claimed 10,000 lives. I ordered a Gardenburger, but the tone-deaf Arab working the counter didn’t seem to give a fuck about my specific “dietary needs”. My tongue tastes like Satan’s armpits, I’m running on three hours sleep since Thursday, my socks are sticking to my feet, and thanks to the can of hyper-caffeinated Thunde®heart I gunned down to keep from missing my boarding call, my heart’s fluttering like the eyelashes of a fifty-foot transvestite in a windstorm. Lucky for me, the industrial pink hand soap that resembles the orgasm of an atomic survivor is drying out my skin. As my face dries, my eyes are literally being pulled… wide… open! Sleep is a five letter word.

As many places as I’ve been, I always expect the next jumpjet I board to go dead and fall from the sky immediately after takeoff. When that finally happens, when the veneer of bullshit is suddenly ripped from my eyes like duct tape from my consciousness, will I be the calm one, or will my thoughts betray me, reaching back to a single moment in my life that I’d prefer to do over? (“I should have talked to that girl in the departure lounge at the Carl… I should have eaten that second slice of key lime pie….”) Which begs the question: which of the passengers will fling open his seat belt with careless abandon at the final moment, howling with laughter because he and he alone Got It Right?

Well, there’s my boarding call. I’ll write more after takeoff…