Tuesday

Oct, 16, 2001

Flying and flying

I am up, no doubt, too early. I'm definitely too early at the airport...can't even check in yet. Leaving nothing to chance. Leaving everything to chance.

I have some coffee and a snack. Check in and get my boarding cards and get my bag checked.

More waiting. I see the flight from Paris is late. Uh-oh. That's, no doubt, our plane. I buy a couple of things and put left over money in an AIDs collection box. I still have money. But you never know if you will really get off the ground. Hang on to every possibility.

We are very late leaving. I think I may make my plane. Paris had been foggy. Everything delayed.

In Paris I run for the plane. If I'm not the last one on board, I'm close. But I make it. I have no hope for the bag. But I'm going home.

I watch Moulin Rouge (didn't like it) and eat and drink and swallow my decongestants. But I don't sleep much.

I have a long layover in Dallas. I can't file a report on the lost bag until I get to Austin, they say. I'm not hungry. I call home. I read. And at last...the last flight of the ten that took me on this trip. Ten flights since flying changed.

I file my lost bag report and get a taxi home. FFP is glad to see me. I'm shortly in my chair, asleep. At home. It's hard to believe for me, every time I come home from far away, that it is actually fairly easy to go from one point on the globe to another over great distances. Just like that. Well, just like that in twenty-some hours.

"Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace..."

John Lennon, "Imagine"

Meta:
We'll just be keeping Lennon's radical lyrics here indefinitely. I'm updating this after the fact. Which means, of course, that I forget even more than usual.

JUST TYPING
Magic tube.
From here to there.
A hundred, no a thousand, things work.