Sunday, July 1, 2012

Dr. T.J. Eckleberg would have flown out of LaGuardia.

July will be prolific. I've just arbitrarily decided this. A few things have happened in recent weeks to make me want this to be true and sometimes when you want something to be true, you only have to decide it will be.
Just now I opened blogger and felt a bit overwhelmed because there is so much I'd like to write about. Nothing monumentally important has happened (does anything that happens ever qualify as monumental, apart from the erecting of, say, a monument? Ok, earthquake/tsunami/zombie apocalypse. I'll allow those but only those.) yet the past few weeks have been peppered with things and events and I wish I had a notepad handy so I could have written brief notes to remind myself of what I wanted to say.
Actually I did write some notes while waiting in the airport recently for my plane to Anaheim. I include them below, verbatim, because they are brief and, after a cursory rereading a week and a half later, they say exactly what I wanted to say about sitting in an unairconditioned airport terminal, buzzed, sweating and only on the border of being lonely.

JFK Delta terminal is unairconditioned and coated in a thin layer of grime. It is the kind of airport terminal where the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg, oculist, would have felt at home, though now that I think about it, Laguardia may have been a closer drive for him. I drink a cocktail at the improbably named "Stone Rose Bar and Grill" and I can't relinquish the debate in my mind of whether it was a  member of the Stone Roses or a Manic Street Preacher that disappeared into the ether, maybe  falling off a cliff or maybe calmly walking out of a car to change identities forever. (Edited to add: It was a Manic Street Preacher.) It is 10:30am. I choose a diet coke and vanilla vodka because I wanted to fly (no pun intended) under the alcoholic radar of my fellow travellers who may actually be eating breakfast and not devising ways to drink booze like someone not drinking booze. I can't help that I'm a bad and nervous flier. I also can't help that a cocktail almost invariably sounds like a good idea to me.
The Stone Rose Bar and Grill sits atop some very awkwardly, possibly arbitrarily placed stairs but is convenient enough for people watching. I've seen more balding pates atop more harried travelling bodies in the last 30 minutes than I can remember. I wonder where all these people are headed and why things seen from a height of any kind seem like a target. The moment I start to imagine these busy lives as some intricate and undeniably epic story of intrigue, espionage, illicit sex and romance, I realize it is time to order one more cocktail so my brain can shut down for the druation of the journey. Most of these people consist of parts mostly like the part of me that is headed to a conference and only a little like the part of me that is conjuring adventure from the human Breakout game of the airport terminal.


An accurate rendering of my view from the Stone Rose Bar and Grill, only less sweaty.
 I think I ran out of room in my notebook or it was finally time for my flight because that is where my notes ended. My flights were uneventful but I had some memorable adventures in Anaheim that will populate the next entry. The teaser is that at no point did I wear Mickey Mouse ears.

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