Charlie Sixteen

14OCT2010 – MSY – I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy to leave New Orleans…

The piece of paper that sent me down here in the first place clearly stated that I was to be “(*)repeatedly stretched to the breaking point, ground into paste, ingested and excreted from the assholes of both September and October for a period of no less than sixty days at the leisure of the King of Hawaii for no good goddamn reason at all.” That I should find myself in the departure lounge, boarding pass in hand forty-four days later is a lucky break, and I have no true business staring into the mouth of a gift horse.

Howe’er.

I arrived at Louis Armstrong International only to discover that my 1130 flight back to LaGuardia had been canceled, and the next one wouldn’t depart until almost 17 p.m., getting me home at 21 p.m.  Lesser men would have screamed, possibly taken hostages.  And still others might have hailed a cab and headed back out in search of debauchery.

But in some weird and admittedly perverse way, this makes me happy. I’ve got the entire gate to myself, I’ve got a seat next to an outlet, and I came prepared: laptop, iPhone, headphones, journal, Sharpies, a brand new copy of Cory Doctrow’s “Futuristic Tales of The Here and Now”, a lightning fast Wi-fi connection, and a damn good cup of coffee.

Pending a zombie invasion, a Die Hard-esque shootout between a burned-out cop and Ze Germans, a colicky baby or some other natural disaster: I’m aces, thanks for asking.

One hour till departure: Seat near the window, bonus! Listening to: Dead Can Dance, Led Zep, Deftones.  Charging: my gadgets.  Checking: my email. Watching: Several hundred tons of taxi gather the much-needed speed to fuck its way into the unresisting sky.  Gravity, lift, drag, and thrust.  Peanuts and Sprite.  Over and over, these common theme of my travels.  All those people, all those aliens, all those dress shirts.., (X) ft of white headphone cord, and (Y) lbs worth of “Compounded Negative Body Issue Monthly” being spread like a fucking virus, their once-glossy corners now gently bent and fetal against the protective interior leather of designer carry-ons.

My eyes move around the room, mining the details, but wholly unable to keep pace with the flow of arriving passengers, the rolling rectangles, the designer sunglasses and three thousand other items of little to no consequence. It makes me wish I could sketch.  Finally, my oculars come to rest on the matched set of thigh-high silver cylinders guarding the entranceway to Charlie Sixteen, my home of record for the next hour.

Trash cans they are, and trash cans they will stay. When one finishes ones damn good cup of coffee, one is expected to do the decent thing and force the empty paper cup into the mouth of said cylinder, where it will tumble briefly southward before coming to rest in the whispered clutches of a petroleum-based, quasi-disposable stomach lining, later to be gutted and gathered by minimum wage taxidermists whose first language is probably not English.

Look at the trash can, now look at me, NOW BACK TO THE TRASH CAN:

Out of sight, out of mind. But when you throw something away, what does away really mean?  The more I stare at the cans, the more I begin to see them as something else, slowly rebuilding them in my head, swapping the plastic intestines for something else:

Suppose that when you tossed a piece of trash into the can, it was instantly incinerated, and that the energy extracted from the incineration process went toward creating the energy required to incinerate the next piece of trash, and so on, and so forth.  How far ahead in our technological evolution would we have to be to pull off a stunt like that? Get back to me on this.

There’s my flight,

TWM

(*not really.)

It’s About Fucking Time

22MAR08 – Getting on toward the end of yet another journal, one that has taken me across most of the state of Alaska, through Brisbane, Australia, before terminating in Washington, D.C. That’s the purpose of the thing, I suppose. Ever onward. Change, the only constant. For better or worse, hell or High Water.

The meaning of life is; trying to hold on to all that we hold dear for as long as humanly possible, all the while hoping that the end doesn’t come too soon. The meaning of life is; to fill one’s life with enough experience to understand in some small way what it means to be alive in the first place.

Sitting at the yellow table in Misha’s, sipping a large triple-shot soy latte, watching the endless possibility of human faces go strolling past the big window…

(A woman standing in line has such a terrible handbag that I can’t bear to look in her direction. I’m relieved when she buys her coffee, runs outside and climbs into a waiting car just as the light turns green…)

(A man in a wheelchair with a painfully quiet voice asks me for a light. I almost didn’t hear him over the sounds of ‘Dub Trio’ in my headphones. When I tell him I don’t have one, he maneuvers his gadget around and asks the back of an unknowing stranger who can’t hear his request over the blaring din of the 1940s. I stand up, clear my throat, and broadcast the request for him. Startled eyes blink back at me from across the shop like deer in the headlights. Oh, dear. Seems I’ve frightened the herd… I manage to locate a pack of matches in the bag slung across the back of his chair and help him light up, arranging the large brass ashtray just so before him…)

I can’t believe I’ll be 37 soon. Who’d have thought it possible? Somewhere inside, I’m still 9, still 19, still 29. Had a moment yesterday where I experienced what it was like to be ‘me’. I could understand for an instant that I was living in this body, making hands my move, making words with my tongue, manipulating a pen into concepts, and listening to the stupid things I say in an attempt to be charming or sophisticated.

Listening to ‘Host of the Seraphim’ by Dead Can Dance. If only scientists could find a way to pry open this song and let me live inside it. If only the landscape didn’t end at 6:17. If only I could crawl inside the breath of angels, drink water from the rivers and walk on the land. That’s a lot of ‘if only.’ Sometimes a song is so good you never want to see it end and when it’s over you want to hear it again for the first time, but you can’t. You can’t go home again. You have to call it something else.

Still so much I want to do in this world… what’s it like to fly a bush plane over the Serengeti plains, watching elephants fuck and lions eat slower animals? What’s it like to leap off a perfectly good bridge with nothing but a long rubber band tied to my ankle? What’s it like to spend a week in wintertime Iceland with the woman I love, soaking in the hot springs and drinking peppermint vodka as the Northern Lights dance overhead? I aim to discover some if not all of these answers. I refuse to believe this is all there is.

I like coffee and the Devil drinks tea.