Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Why I Don’t Fly
The headline is misleading. I do fly. I fly nearly every week. Forty or fifty round trips per year for the last several years.
Those flights have many characters. Sometimes I stretch out and sleep across three rows on a nearly empty morning flight. Friday evenings headed home every seat is packed and the mood is rowdy. Sometimes I put on my headphones and keep to myself. If my neighbor is interesting I’ll talk the flight away.
Once in a while a flight stands out from all others. Often it is the perfect sunset viewed off the left wing from 37,000 feet. That perfect palette of colors that is enjoyed by people in New Mexico and lucky airline passengers.
Very very rarely, there is the ultimate high when it all comes together perfectly and we are flying above the clouds under a full moon. The experience can only be described as rapture. As you descend to just above the clouds, lit with silver light, silent and calm with no sign of the world below, perfection is attained.
Which is why I cannot take the risk of getting a pilot’s license. Come the first cloudy night with a full moon I’d take off and fly and fly and never come down.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Back in the saddle—Pie 1
Day 2 of what’s sure to be a long ride. Still achey and sore from the first day. Coffee burning a hole through the fog in my brain. I stumble awake. Pee in the sagebrush and feed a handful of grain to the horse that’s my companion, my transportation and the source of this pain.
Together we will journey forward.
Monday, August 22, 2005
A Dream
No time this morning for a proper first (second) post, but in the Jo-inspired spirit of more is better, I’m getting words on the page.
Last night I dreamed that Keith had included me as a silent partner in a complex project he was shepherding toward fruition. It had something to do with a tract of land in Oregon—half forest and half zoned commercial, located along Highway 99, the old El Camino Real—some shady Nicaraguans and broken down old armory which might someday hold Fight Club-type fights or even professional boxing matches.
Sometimes it’s nice when dreams don’t mess around with subtlety.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
Beginning
I’m not sure how many weblogs begin without the author’s knowledge or consent, but that’s exactly what is happening here today. Think of it as a launching that decided to skip the unnecessary fuss of a countdown. Besides, there’s been more then enough waiting already. Everyone will tell you that.
Every weblog, like every story, needs a place to begin. Some stumble into existence, barely noticed, while others dive recklessly into the fray headfirst, arms swinging. There is no right way to begin. No best way and certainly no perfect way. The beginning, after all, is just one step among many.
This weblog happens to begin here, with the help of a few borrowed words that some others** once found fit to begin with themselves. Words and sentences pieced together in no particular order, just like our own stories. The words are nothing special. Or maybe they are. We must walk awhile to find out.
So let’s begin.
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. Truth? I’ll tell you what. I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination. How about that? Will that work for you?
My wife Norma had run off with Guy Dupree and I was waiting around for the credit card billings to come in so I could see where they had gone. I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning. To my left, the Minotaur sits on an empty pickle bucket blowing smoke through bullish nostrils. To my right, it is the last quarter of the twentieth century, at a time when Western civilization was declining too rapidly for comfort and yet too slowly to be very exciting, much of the world sat on the edge of an increasingly expensive theater seat, waiting—with various combinations of dread, hope, and ennui—for something momentous to occur.
You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don’t. So you might want to read on. Oh, one more thing. Beware thoughts that come in the night.
**Special thanks to J.D. Salinger, Ursula K. LeGuin, Charles Portis, Robert M. Pirsig, Steven Sherrill, Tom Robbins, Christopher Moore, and William Least Heat-Moon for helping ‘mouse take his first step.
The rest of the journey is up to him.