About 2 hours to landing.
Thinking about how people never change. This is just a theory, since I've never known anyone from the cradle to adulthood, or from the cradle to anything else.
I've been thinking that if you take a screaming baby, make him 4 feet taller and put him in a coat and tie and put him in a board room and put him into a situation where he doesn't get what he wants, you might have a hard time distinguishing the infant from any of the adults in that same board room. that is what drives me crazy about screaming babies. They are so adult-like.
Lately I look at older people's faces and try to imagine how they looked as children. What their manners were like, how they handled themselves. Was it much different then compared to now? Was the way they walked the sidewalk any different at 8 years old than it is now at 58 years? Do they handle conflict any differently as an adult compared to when they were 4? Do I? Do you?
I've never held an infant for any period of time that I can recall, but if I did it would be interesting to compare the way they resist or welcome the embrace to how they do the same as teenagers or in old age. I can only theorize about it but I'd bet that you could pattern an infant's relationships through life back to how they reacted when their mother held them for the first time.
We're over Junction, Colorado. 90 minutes to landing at SFO. Listening to Fats Domino singing Jambalaya.
One of my little projects to improve the quality of my evidently miserable life has been wiring my apartment so that I can listen to Internet audio in all the rooms. My next plan is to get a dedicated computer with 3 or 4 giant hard drives and create an Infinite Jukebox with thousands upon thousands of songs played back in no particular order. All the songs while not necessarily being great or even very good would at worst be innocuous. Ah, I dream big, having discovered recently that it would not be hard at all to gather 50,000 songs and speeches and pieces of music and store them onto a hard drive and play them back for a decade all the while knowing there was still stuff in there I had not yet heard.
Now I'm listening to Morton Feldman's De Kooning, and trying to figure out what I should do in SFO tonight.
Now it is a whole day later.
3 more hours of this plane.
We are somewhere over Wyoming, I think. Wyoming is one those places that always looks too far away for me to get to, even from these few thousands of feet above.
It is expensive, too. I was keeping tabs on plane fares to Montana for a while, but never got the spark to do the trip. I was thinking about Mt. Rushmore as a place to go, but someone told me that it's really unimpressive when you see it for real. The pictures of it make it look huge and awe-inspiring but in fact it's really small. Or so I'm told. I would like to go through South Dakota, though.
Today I was in a car near the Stanford University campus, tired but coherent. Last night I stayed in Room 200 of the Fairmont hotel at the top of Nob Hill in downtown San Francisco. It is a truly really beautiful hotel. The closet was the size of my first apartment in New York, and considerably cleaner and not infested with roaches.
Dinner was a somewhat absurd experience at a hotel restaurant located in what appeared to be a very deep basement. For much of our time there my friend and I were the only customers. The steak was good, the wine was endless. One of the waiters told me "We have 8,000 bottles of wine." I said "I think we'll only need 1." He laughed perfunctorily, and I realized he heard that oh so snappy retort a thousand times.
I am too tired to sleep, my mind is a jumpy, inchoate screed of irritated thoughts and acrid poison. One thought straddles another with aggressive impunity. I'm getting slightly high on airplane beer, having to drink it in unexpected gulps to prevent it from spilling when the plane hits turbulence, and I am wondering if I'll ever get to sleep tonight. The point of pounding down all these expensive beers was to knock me out and let me get some sleep, but the real result is that I have to get up and go to the bathroom every 5 minutes.
This plane is less than one-third full of people going back to JFK.
I saw what I thought was a funny exchange between strangers on the subway last week. One woman with a portable CD player taps on the shoulder of another woman with a portable CD players and asks "Do you have a spare battery?" The woman responded in the negative, but as if it was a perfectly normal question. It was as if she had asked for a light of a cigarette.
Another incident I saw on the Long Island Rail Road involved a man who sat down with 3 newspapers. Another man sat in front of him and asked if he could read one of the papers. The man with the papers obliged, and the man who borrowed the paper proceeded to crumple up the papers while reading them, rendering them rather hard to leaf through. He threw the wad of read newspaper back at the man, then grabbed the next newspaper. When the generous man with the newspapers indicated he was getting off the train the borrower asked if he could have the address of the man with the newspapers so that he could continue reading his newspaper and return them to him later that day.
And another incident I saw wasin the lobby of my apartment building. As I opened the door to exit the building a very large and putrid-smelling man entered. He did not appear to live in this building, but he walked on in like he lived here. When I came back to the building a few minutes later he had taken off most of his clothes and was lying nearly flat across the floor, looking up at me and massaging his feet and grimacing with such intensity that I could see straight to the back of his mouth. He had no front teeth and his eyes looked electrified. He asked me what time it was and while my mind raced with thoughts that this was a serial murderer I told him I thought it was about 1:15.
Where is Johnny Carson these days? Where are Johnny Carson, Slim Whitman , Fidel Castro, and Deep Throat right now? What are they doing, and what would they do if they were together and playing cards?
We are flying over some kind of swamp-looking land. The pilot claims we are over Nebraska but in fact we have been hijacked and are over Louisiana on our way to Havana. There is a hideous hairy troll crawling around on the airplane wing but no one seems to believe me when I tell them.
2 hours and 33 more minutes of flying time is not that the worst problem one person could face. I am listening to an MP3 of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show. Now Elvis Presley. Next, Ike and Tina Turner.
We are right about in the middle of the USA. The sun is setting behind us, its light commanding the entire western USA like a vast orange cake, and looking something like the first instant of the nuclear annihilation of the USA. The clouds right below us are shadowy and white, like a mold that you know is growing in the refrigerator but which you ignore, secretly enjoying the idea of speechless life sponging its way to thriving prosperity inside your appliances.
City lights on the ground are starting to come on beneath us, and ahead of us is night and gradually more city lights turning on.
Less than an hour to landing, or so the Iraqis would have us believe. Listening to piano music of Kaikhosru Sorabji and marveling at all the inclement weather we have been flying near. Vast, flat black clouds belching lightning storms onto the midwestern and plains states. I wish I had a video camera for that.
I am sitting in a somewhat ridiculous position, scrunched across 2 seats with the back of my head pressed to the window. The flight attendants are chatting about the Business and Marketing classes they are taking at their local colleges. My mind is still bolting about with inchoate thoughts that crash and wrestle but never meet. Thoughts of the day in the 3rd grade when we threw stones at seagulls until we killed one, prompting the school president to rush onto the soccer fields and declare us soulless beasts. Thoughts of the queerly personal relationship people have with electronic devices like clock radios and record players. Thoughts of the visibly wretched man and woman I saw on Broadway in 1991; they were clutching a Learning Annex catalogue and pointing hungrily at courses they would take so they could get a job, the man telling the woman "This course'll set us up. We'll get jobs." All the frail initiatives and ideas for self-improvement and self-amusement that blossom and rot in the same sentence.
