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…