La-La Land

Crumbs on the armchair this morning when I wake up. Don’t know what they came from. Weirder: I don’t know where they come from. I fucking never sit in that chair.

Frequently there are crumbs all over the rest of the room and all over the rest of the apartment, but that makes sense. I sit & eat pretty much everywhere else at some point or other. So like I’m wondering if maybe these crumbs sorta replicated offa all the other crumbs. Prob. assexually—maybe through budding or something?

Hard to imagine a crumb fucking another crumb, but who knows? You never see them moving, let alone fucking, and while they’re small, you’d kinda expect that once in a while you’d notice the movement—maybe even some sound… Oh crumby, crumby, you’re so crispy & tight, you make it risky & right… You, crumby. You, Crumby. You, Crumby. Ooo Ahhhh ya…

And if they are replicating, are they going to claim more & more territory, taking over places to which they are not indigenous, like, well, like this chair?!?!

How did they get in here?! I guess I might not’ve noticed as I’m not in here alla time & plus sometimes when I am I’m asleep or watchin’ something real engaging on TV or once in a while I’m drunk.

It’s kinda fucked up ‘tho. I mean, maybe one day I’ll wake up like Gulliver: trussed up & surrounded by a mass of sentient crumbs who’ll stand there & watch the captured giant struggle. I bet some enterprising crumb would really clean up on that spectacle, eh? (Except crumbs prob. don’t like the phrase “clean up,” since giants like you & I always say stuff like that just before we sweep ‘em up en masse.)

And like maybe the crumbs are gonna take over the world. Maybe they’re already building weapons of mass destruction. Little tiny, uh, dirty bombs, say. Even if a dirty bomb was like really small, it’d prob. still fuck you up pretty bad—& maybe even a few other giants like yerself.

And even if you survived the explosion, you’d be exposed to all that radiation which might make yr. kids be born w/ penises or vaginas in their foreheads or something. Which so long as 2 people w/ corresponding organs met, might not be such a bad thing. Or worse maybe yr. kids could come out just like one of those mutants who worship the bomb in Beneath the Planet of the Apes or like Bernie Mac or something.

I suppose the crumbs could poison you too. I mean they couldn’t poison yr. building’s water supply or anything, ‘cuz that’d be like a person singlehandedly poisoning the Atlantic ocean. But I bet they could poison yr. glass of water. I bet.



Anyway, disturbing phenomena aside, where were we w/ this ongoing (albeit @ a glacial rate) Thing-Fish/Hawaii biz? Shit, man, I haven’t even arrived in Hilo yet? Holy shit! Ah well, you gotta move forward no matter where you are…



Ah, McCarran Int. Airport, with its bright lights, plush colorful carpet and slot machines sitting right in the fucking boarding lounges. So even if you’re just passing through, waiting for a connecting flight, you can take a pull and soak up some of that Vegas ambience. And feed the gluttonous local economy.

On this trip I noticed that in some of the less populated parts of the airport, the people who mind the slots weren’t keeping a very close eye on things. (Would you, if you didn’t have to?) All of the machines have these black stickers with gold colored lettering that inform you that it’s illegal for minors to gamble, etc. And like here and there, that’s exactly what you see.

(Reminds me of when I was 14 and stopped telling the guy at the gas station that the carton of Marlboros I was purchasing was for my bedridden mom. Slow as I am, it didn’t take long for me to understand that he didn’t give a shit and was in fact hoping that I’d shut the fuck up & be on my way. A pack of cigarettes was 96 cents + tax, which at that time was 4% in Michigan. So yes, that’s right, you got ‘em for 1 U.S. dollar. Makes it easier for everyone involved—no change required, though upon occasion, I fucked the whole thing up anyway by paying for the things with a coupla handfuls of change. Lean times between paper route paydays. Ah, youth…

Good thing I went through the hell of quitting because nowadays a paper route wouldn’t hack it. These days you’d need a trust fund to keep yrself in tobacco.)

Anywayz, back in Vegas, I headed on over to the next terminal. Here, as I mentioned in a recent entry, I inhaled a humble meal and encountered that Dawberesque fella. (Not like Pam Dawber, in case you forgot or fell asleep during that Tale of Two Dawbers. More like that guy from Coach.) Which pretty much brings us up to date.

But finally moving this narrative forward… I found my gate and my shoulders were sore from hauling around my 200# backpack. So there I sat, or rather slumped, for about half an hour before I hopped my next connection to Honolulu. Now this was a long flight—6 hours, to be exact, which, I know is like nothing if you frequently travel overseas, but I don’t. Generally speaking, I’m pretty lucky—or unlucky—if I get out of Chicagoland.

Halfway through the flight, my iPod crapped out. Not that it had been doing me much good for the last few hours. I’d been playing it, sure, but I’d reached the point where I was just too fucking restless and strung out to appreciate anything. I was dazed but wired, which is a lousy combo.

During the flight, I might’ve taken some comfort—or rather been occupied with the lively antics of my neighbors. Directly next to me was a Hot Asian Chick™ but she was attached to this Ultrabland Young Professional White Guy® and they were just the cutest, boring couple who made with little boogums nose pinches n’ shnuggly putcher head on my sho-ol-derrr twitterpating, and where usually I’m benevolent toward young love, here I was trapped between it and a wall. And I was burntout.

I was outta music. I was outta Bukowski—two books had seemed like enough to get me to Hawaii—and the rest of my books were in my checked luggage. So, though the flight attendants were atypically frisky, (I guess that’s SOP for these Hawaiian flights, where it’s reckoned that everyone’s gonna be so thigh-grindingly happy that they’ll be lookin' fer laughs,) I was mostly stuck with the airline magazines featuring Hot Hawaiian Chicks (patent pending) in grass skirts and leis and with tiaras made outta flowers and such and lotsa ads and boring puzzles and instructions for inflating yr. seat cushion.

(A necessary redundancy, since, does anyone really pay attention to those little high school drama class mime productions the poor flight attendants give? I know I don’t. If it really came down to it, I’d probably still be trying to remember if I should put the oxygen mask on myself or the applecheeked toddler across the aisle from me as I sputtered out my last, tortured breath.)

But so anyway, I'd finished inspecting my barf bag for the 97th time when the steward announced the inflight movie. I’ve never paid for 1 of these things. They’re usually some shit I don't want to see anyway. But this time I was ready to shell out. Until I found out it was that movie about the guy who’s such a Red Sox fan that he repeatedly shits on the hot chick who’s after his luuuvvv. (Not to disappoint you, but he doesn’t literally shit on her.)

I didn’t avoid it because I don’t like baseball. As anyone who’s read very much of this blog knows, I’m a pretty serious fan. (Even given recent developments—i.e. the bungholian White Sox World Championship. No offense, Ozzy Guillen, ‘cause yer pretty cool, but I wouldn’t mind seeing the rest of those guys suffering from some sorta chronic oozing boil problem. Signed, one pissed off Cubs fan.) So nope, it wasn’t that.

Maybe yer thinking that my dislike of the White Sox carries over to the Red ones too. Nope. I extremely happy when the Sox came back to hand the Yanks their asses in the ALCS in 2004. (Derek Jeter: ugh, my ass! Creepily, that blank smile stays on his face as his amputated posterior is passed back to him.)

And I was even more ecstatic when they swept those asshole Cardinals! I cackled insanely when they cut to Tony LaRussa’s pale kisser, looking, for all the world, like a deflated balloon fulla wet caulk, as his boys were also handed their asses. Hahaha!!! (Lest you think me harsh here, I would have to say that it’s less the rivalry between the Cubs & Cardinals that makes me insult their Team Manager. It’s more the un-sportsmanlike way in which he talks smack about other teams.)

Holy shit, did I laugh! The Red Sox! Beat the Cardinals to break a 50 year draught! How appropriate is that? And they did it with style.)

But so OK. I didn’t mind that he was a Red Sox fan. I didn’t even mind that the movie looked deeply stupid. Nope. What got me was that the chick was played by Drew Barrymore, for whom I have this abiding affection and lust. (Almost as fierce as the fire that burns within me for Elizabeth Elmore.) Even in a fictional type movie I wouldn’t want any guy to treat her like shit.

And what really made me wanna use my BarfBag was the fact that the baseball fan was played by Jimmy Fallon, who whenever I see him, makes me feel sorta like I just ripped off a hangnail. Repeatedly. For as long as he’s on the screen.

So I decided to pass on the movie. Predictably, the couple next to me hopped right on it. The young lady was especially enthusiastic, though the guy put up no fight whatsoever, and both of them giggled and squirmed through the entire fucking thing. That was a very long two hours in the middle of an already long 6 hours near the end of a very long day.

Ah well. At least I had that flight crew, who were in full vaudevillian swing. One particularly Gay Flight Attendant© was acting as MC, dropping in-jokes at fellow crew mates, (thereby provoking many a conspiratory chortle,) and hefting repeated comedic hand grenades at us passengers, leading to further mirth.

Best bit: “If you’ve enjoyed yr. flight we hope you will consider traveling with ATA to yr. next destination. [Professionally slite paws.] And if you haven’t enjoyed your flight, we, Pan American Airlines, apologize.” Haw haw haw! I about burst my appendix laffin' at that one, and they were still tryin to resuscitate the kindly-but-sour old guy in front of me when I got off the plane. Hope he was OK.


It’d been beneath us for some time: a hazy Pacific blur. It was without feature, other than sharp spikes of white light, but the color itself was so beautiful—a warm, striking blue with a hint of fertile green—that you didn’t want for anything else to look at. There seems to be a peculiar, almost unearthly light in Pacific shades. They carry an incredible feeling of vastness with them—nothing like the Atlantic, which to my hereditarily landlocked eyes, still doesn’t look much different from a Great Lake.

And for me, during this flight, the Pacific was well-named. It was calming, but not numbing. Summery, relaxing and alive. Looking at it, I felt exhilarated by the experiences might lie ahead.

For hours, we’d been surrounded by the shifting clouds of high altitude flight. I was surprised when shapes began to emerge from the mist below us. It may sound like a cliché to say that they looked like a mirage, but they were undeniably dreamlike. At first, there were just spots of golden color that might have been islands. But as we gradually descended, they became solid. Now you got terrestrial greens and dark browns and later, there were buildings. Almost all of them were white.

I was pretty sure we’d come down to earth, so to speak, if not touched down, when I saw a cruise ship tooling through the water beneath us. There was something kind of bizarre about it: air meets water meets earth—like that old schema of the Four Elements. Except there was no fire. That showed up later, dude.

srgtse

Humanly Possible

Sometimes, when I travel by myself, I get this exhilarating sense of possibility. In a completely different context, I feel like I could be someone other than my homebound self. I hope that maybe I’ll be able to take at least a small part of this new, less jaded person home with me later. For some reason, during a solo trip, I often find myself assessing my whole life—maybe it’s the metaphor of travel. I'm generally a pessimist, but I am uncharacteristically optimistic in my self-examination shit when I fly.

And then, like I said before, there are the people I meet along the way. And many of them seem to be going through the same process.

There’s often this peculiar, very transient bond formed between people who are traveling alone, almost confessional, in the Catholic sense. Some people will reveal intense, very personal shit to you—in part, I think, because your connection is so transient and therefore safe. Also, maybe, because traveling by yourself can feel lonely at times.

And then your plane lands, and you just say goodbye without a glance back. And that’s it.

For better or worse, I tend to keep my own shit to myself, but I frequently get caught up in listening to other people. I don’t know why. From Phoenix to Vegas, my neighbor was a young woman on her way to pick up her daughter. She was blond and a bit on the heavy side. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she had intense blue eyes and a likable smile.

She asked me if the mp3 player I was carrying was an ipod. Though I recently got a newer one, this was a “very old” model—3 or 4 years old! —lacking even a click wheel, let alone a color display. (Or let’s be British and say colour. I feel like being British today. I am part British, y’know. How’s that for exotic?

As far as I know, I have only one lone ancestor who indulged in that mythic shtick of stowing away on a USA-bound boat. He was British. I picture him as some sorta Dickensian waif with a Cockney accent, a tubercular cough, soot stains on his face and his few possessions tied up in a rag that dangles from a stick.

Anyway, British. How lame is that? A pretty dull gene pool have I. I am whitey, hear me squeak. But OK, at least this fella—my great grandfather to be precise—was paranoid. That’s vaguely interesting. For his entire life, he thought The Law was gonna smoke him out & deport his ass back to ol’ Blighty. (As we British call it.) Ha! Whatta dumbass! Like The Law even knew or cared that he existed!

(Though it’s probably not cool to speak ill of dead ancestors, so allow me to say just kiddin’ Gramps! No hard feelings! Thanks for forebearing me. Or something.)

Anyhoo, back to my colorful (oops! Dammit! Colourful.) aeronautical companion… She played—no, fooled—no, fiddled—no, toyed—no, screwed— no, fucked—whatevered around w/ my ipod a little and was moderately impressed by how much shit you could fit on the thing. (Those non-double entrendes that sound like double entrndes are really starting to piss me off, by the way.) It was a 40gb model, (my new one's a 60 gb,) which is no longer the largest as ‘twas in hoary days gone by. It’s supposed to fit 10k songs, according to Apple’s advertising copy, but I just ran outta room at 9700 or so songs.

(But I guess you can’t necessarily fault them here. Song lengths vary. My ipod holds some tracks that are in the vicinity of 1/2 hour—like, for instance some electric Miles Davis from the 70s. Disc 1 of Zappa’s Thing-Fish—which, not to ruin the suspense, I did finally add to my library—is nearly an hour long because I imported each of the 2 CDs as a single track. I really should go back & do the same thing w/ a buncha other CDs, like Sgt. Pepper’s or The Perfect Prescription by Spacemen 3, where continuous song suites end up having all these annoying 1 second gaps. And BTW I have at least one song in my library that’s that’s over an hour long—stoner metal juggernaut Sleep’s “Dopesmoker.”)

Then this young woman showed me hers. Her mp3 player, I mean. And it didn’t hold anywhere near 10k songs in & of itself. But so she unveiled her big surprise with an arrogant competitive flourish, (which was kinda endearing in some small way). You could swap flash chips in hers, each of which could hold, like, a thousand or so songs. You could just carry a handful of ‘em around and you’d have your whole record collection with you too. And if more than 1 person as sharing the thing, each of them could bring their own pile of chips, making it like you had several individual music collections available to you at any given time.

OK that didn’t seem real competitive to me when you consider that I’m the only 1 who usues my player, & I don’t have to carry around the chips nor stop to swap ‘em. Ha! But then I remembered that there’s at least one advantage to the flash chip—you can run with the player or just hop around in general. If you try dancin’ around like the nimble shadows in those ipod commercials with any Apple player besides the nanopod, yer probably gonna find the thing locking up faster than a Flint, MI. merchant at sunset. Still, my newer ipod doesn’t skip nearly as much, & I like having all the shit in 1 place, so I’m stickin’ w/ it.

One musical gimmick seguewayed into another. She and her boyfriend were eagerly waiting to buy a new satellite package—once the dough for a new satellite-capable home audio system had accrued. Soon, she said, soon.

I mentioned that I didn’t listen to the radio much, as I already had too fucking much music, was pretty much perpetually listening to it, and I kinda hate talk radio. Well, yeah, sure, she said, but see, the plethora of music stations aside—and she assured there was one hell of a plethora—they really needed the hookup, because the recently isolated Howard Stern was gonna be coming back real strong with a new satellite program. And she, her boyfriend and her mother were all rabid Howard Stern fans.

(I’m pretty much sympathetically neutral on this Howard Stern jazz, by the way, I really have only a little firsthand experience of his shit and mostly know him through hearsay.)

As is always the case w/ me and strangers, I found myself fascinated by her stories. Like the sex therapist, she was a trifle fixated on herself. The difference though was that she was not nearly as egotistical. She was lonely, trying to be courageous, and, while strange, (very strange even,) entirely likable. Bearing in mind that it was she that gave her stories life— the words she chose, the tone of her voice, her gestures, and the shifting of her facial expressions— here’s a grotesque simplification:

She was headed to Vegas, where her ex-husband lived. Sadly— and maybe with a trace of remorse—she told me she was going to get her young daughter and bring her back to Phoenix.. Student of human nature that I am, I began compiling a scenario in which she’d somehow fucked up. (Drugs? Reckless youthful abandon?) Now, I imagined, she was making an effort to get her shit together and to be with her daughter.

Could be I was wrong. What do I know? I can’t even get my own shit together. But like, that’s a big part of my job— sizing people up as quickly as possible. I ain’t no expert. I ain’t clairvoyant. But I like to think that, after all these years, I’ve developed some skill for reading people.

Anyway, the ex- was an abusive creep, In hopes of avoiding any ugliness, she’d planned to show up while the ex- was at work, She’d pick get her daughter and then get right back on the next flight to Phoenix. Her mother worked for ATA, so she’d been able to plot this thing with tactical precision. Her only worry was that the ex- might’ve taken a day off.

I liked her. After we said goodbye, I felt bad that I couldn’t’ve done more for her somehow. There are millions of sad stories out there…