Kansas City: a photo essay--2

I’ve read recently that too much rumination can lead to depression, so I’ll try not to think too much about it, or anything for that matter. I spotted a toy set along the ride: a tremendously large red and yellow plastic set of the sort you see in a McDonald’s. The difference is that this toy set is acting as a bridge between a warehouse and an abandoned looking apartment complex. I try to imagine children playing on this structure and fail. I wonder if the person who brought the toy set there thought it could change the complexion of the neighborhood or the block? Nothing changes.

Normally when I travel, I like to look reasonably good. Talk to your parents or anyone over the age of fifty long enough, and they’ll remind you that people used to get dressed up for flights like they were a special occasion. Now that flights have more in common with greyhound bus rides than anything else, the idea seems quaint. On that day, though I was dressed fine, my face was flushed with lack of sleep, and my stomach was complexly grumbling and giving warning signals that I’d need to find a restroom in short order. In short, I felt like I was dying. I barely remember the airport or the people on my flight, though I was jealous of the woman who fell asleep before me. She was one of those types who managed to fall asleep in seconds, lightly snoring with a slightly pleased look on her face for being so damn good at sleeping. Eventually, everyone on the flight was sleeping. I presume the pilot as well given what I’ve learned about the effectiveness of autopilot. It’s not just for having sex on a plane. I would never, I should confess, have sex on a plane. I fear planes. I suspect that I’m destined to die on one, or barring that, getting eaten by a bear. I would never, for instance, fly on a plane piloted by bears, but perhaps that went without saying. I hope if I ever crash that I am sleeping like a baby. I don’t remember my dreams. In my dreams that I don’t remember, I suspect that I’ve taught myself to fly, and I soar above the ground in those dreams, scouring the countryside for a suitable place to land.



The second picture

I never use cameras but even I know that you should never take a picture out the window of a plane. Whatever it is that you are seeing and feeling, being on top of the clouds, never winds up showing up in the photo. It looks like a mass of white, one more boring thing in an ever lengthening list of boring things. Somehow, I wait too long, and I manage to take a picture (I’m trying to do this surreptitiously, which turns out to be hard, because I know that taking pictures out a plane window is not particularly intelligent, and I don’t want the people across the aisle who I’ll never see again, a nice couple by the look of them, napping pleasantly, to judge me for doing something stupid like taking a picture out a window. I tend to care too much about what other people think though I’ll also point out that it’s often important what other people think, which winds up leaving me feel somewhat justified in caring about what the passenger in 33 c and d think of me snapping pictures of clouds) from inside the cloud, which likes like nothing so much as exactly what it is, a sheet of white.

We are no longer amazed by flying. I suppose a large plane is too much like a bus, and no one dresses up anymore, and they only serve free cocktails in first class. I suspect that when we say flying, we mean something closer to that of Icarus, and I also suspect that flying in a small plane actually feels like flying.