Seattle so far

We are thirty four thousand miles above terra firma, though I am still struggling after three decades to get a foothold. This airport this morning was full of the saddest people in the world, which is just another way of saying it was full of people. Someone I know told me to hike mount Rainer, but I doubt I will make it outside of downtown. I remember the food trucks in Portland and the silliness of the power and light district in Kansas City. A downtown area created for people who were living elsewhere.

I am going out to see some old friends, though there will be fewer of us than usual. Someone has enough sense to participate in bacchanalia every other year, someone else got a new job, and someone else got a tumor. I don't plan on developing sense anytime because I think it would dull my charm, and as I age I wonder if that's all I'll have left, nor am I getting a new job, two is enough, and I will avoid tumors if I can, though our bodies make their own decisions and become strangers to us as well.

I am going to enjoy myself, though I am already mourning their absence. With eight people the city doesn't really matter; the party is an internal force of memories, laughter, jokes, decades past and booze. The changing lights of the cities, the neon in the bars, the pretty people stalking the night are like extras in a film. Right now I wish I was flying to Nashville instead; a city where the party is always going on, a heaven for heretics, instead of having to build something myself in this strange city I'll be landing in after another hour or two.

Some people on this flight are still sleeping, heads lolled at uncomfortable angles, bodies torqued in painful ways that are now part and parcel of airline travel. Others have awoken to the uniform smell of airline coffee, turning in their seats to make chit chat with their neighbors about where they are from where they are going and who is taking care of the dog while they're away.  I hear a snippet of conversation from the girls sitting in front of me, something about drinking  to pass the time and the crushing boredom of school. I think about the job I am currently missing, working in an eighth grade classroom, remembering my own boredom in school, the smell of the tar baking in the hot California sun, twirling a pencil and staring out windows that were so impossibly high that you had to push them open with a long dowel. Who designed such a thing? Were they afraid we'd all run away?

The lady in the middle seat is giving her life story to the polite younger woman sitting in the window seat. Because sometimes all we need is someone who will listen to our inanities, and we don't realize how much we've missed it until someone is chained next to us on an airplane or a bus, and we realize that finally someone will listen to everything we've been storing up. The lady in the middle seat has a wheelchair bound mother and two very small dogs. The rest passes by me like blue smoke curling from fire in the wind. For themoment I am enjoying not being pleasant or attentive to someone I barely know. I am pleasant nearly all the time, a disposition which belies my truer disposition, which is one of slight disappointment, a feeling that the world has betrayed me, or I have betrayed the world. I think I just need to read Emerson. All is silent now though. I go through stretches like this, when I fall in love with silence and observation, stretches where I think it would be lovely to move to a cabin in the woods and watch the snow drift and the cardinals float between trees. I think to myself that I will never speak again. I will just watch the world unfold, keenly observant, recording everything like a camera with intent. But now the flight attendant has spilled cold water near the iPad and on my shorts, and I find myself saying in a pleasant voice, "Don't worry. It's just water."  As it seeps through the fabric of my shorts and coldly onto my thigh.

Hours in and I am still not hungry, after eating a bacon, egg, and cheese croissant for breakfast. I have been off and on the paleo diet of late in order to recover from a summer's worth of indulgence and also to get skinny enough that my mother will say when she sees me " you look skinny" which must give her some pleasure as it has always been the case. I don't suppose she'd take the same pleasure in letting me know I'd gotten fat.

I finished a book on this plane ride  It's the first time in weeks I've had that much sustained time to focus. Praying drunk is a set of stories that are loosely connected and often about death, sadness, and the desire for a faith that has run dry. It reminds me of an article about disappointed unbelievers, those who wish they could dredge up those feelings of belief but live instead in a kind of mournful place.

I don't read for any noble or useful purpose. In fact, I don't remember ninety five percent of what happens in any of the books that I've read. I have only vague recollections of books, like shells scattered on the shore. If you asked my why I liked something I'd say, "that's a tough question. Why don't you buy me some coffee and I'll think about it." In part because I want you and I to go get some coffee. I read then to pass time, to be moved, like in the story "Everything in Nashville is sad." In the story, the narrator's nephew has committed suicide and the family has gathered in the hills of Kentucky to mourn his passing. After the funeral, the family busies themselves fixing things on the farm to distract themselves from the fact of his passing,

"Tonight it is dark on our mountain, and we are far enough away from the city lights to see the milky plenitude. To be sure, we are hoping for a sign. The distances between stars is now calculable but what passes for mourning is harder to measure. We have photographs and folklore. We have words and hands. We can sell the cherry tree. We can fix the water pump. We can build a new dam. We can dredge a new path for the creek and make it a canal. We can shout out into the quiet of the hollow and hear our own voices echoing: ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The words came back plaintive, longing"


I am going to close my eyes soon and sleep here above the clouds. Out this thin box of a window the clouds are shaped exactly like clouds, thick and white, a runway in the sky. Let's sleep together dear reader and not in the way that's been co opted. I'm going to lie down in your lap by the window and listen carefully while you tell me about your day, running your fingers through my hair like you know I love.

The girl in the window seat opens the shade and there are islands floating in the sea. For a moment I cannot tell if the dark masses or the sea are real. Or just thick clouds rising from a stream of white. Even clouds, you see, want to be individuals.

The city appears on the water shrouded by tattered grey clouds strung on the line of the sky.

Travel is like entering a party into a cold staid room, then parting the curtains and arriving in a panoply of delights. The fruit vendors mangoes, avocados, oranges and carrots are somehow brighter than anywhere you've ever been. The buildings are made from the same material that is in your city, but here they've used it differently, actualized the brick and mortar in a way that they would never achieve in the city where you came from. The coffee tastes a bit better, and even if it's worse, still, the woman behind the counter is so much more charming than in the place you've come from. Let us go then you and I.