The New York Times Machine
I'm just going to hang out here for awhile.
Romance isn't dead, it's compressed to fit on an 8 Gb flash drive.
It's a good life, you know. No one's got a collection like this.
This is the one.
p.s. the chicken isn't chicken
Step 1: don't hack up money as it's allegedly illegal
Step 2: wrap in generous amounts of tape (I like Scotch clear packaging tape) and render unusable if, you know, it happened to get ripped or torn by accident. Step 3: rejoice in doing your part for the economy by "recycling" dirty Fed money into something more useful than more of them.
Why is airport food so expensive? You're trapped in there starving to death and aren't even allowed to bring in a Coke, you've got to get one of theirs for $3. $25 doesn't include the $1 tip to the poor asshole who has to work at the airport, barely looking at me as he rings me up. I sympathize but don't care right now, I'm running off to go play for the next few days while this sorry fucker has to sit here and feed travelers hour after hour. Still it's not even noon and I'm on my 2nd Heineken about to disappear out there into the sky so it's totally worth every penny just to know I don't have to stick around here but 20 minutes longer.
Sorry, asshole, after I finish this beer I'm out. Keep the change.
I woke up in New York sometime late morning, woke up again in Cleveland and watched a Midwestern sunset turn the shiny white of my plane creamsicle orange. I'd seen a sunset like that not long ago and Lord knows I've boarded enough planes in the last year to know better than to trust my awful sense of time. Planes come late, winds blow the wrong way, all the while the rubberband is stretching tight across the country and there's nothing anyone can do about it but hope it doesn't break before it can snap back. It would be 3 in the morning by the time I made it back home though all the clocks would say midnight and I wouldn't know anyway, nor would it matter all that much. Time is a bunch of Xs melting off calendar pages and not all that useful when big monitors are screaming about departing flights in two separate directions leaving in a matter of minutes. I don't think I'll ever get over coming down. Why? There's always another plane to catch.
The sun burns down behind sparse airport grass, the planes eventually leave, the Xs sort of materialize or don't and it's all I can do to catch my breath, buckle my seatbelt, and manage to distinguish AM from PM. At least.
Somewhere, she's laughing about this. I have a partner for the flight down who has followed every step I make since 2006 and one for the long drive home from Nevada.
I'm not sure what I am supposed to do now, I figure a drive through the desert should solve some of that for me. Once my damn plane takes off, that is. This wasn't how I visualized my retirement but oh well, see you in Vegas...
I'm on cat babysitting duty and it's not under the best circumstances.
Upside: infinite LOL cat potential conveniently located in my room
Somehow I fell asleep to Richard Fisher on KQED.
He couldn't stop fidgeting. I've been there and it's usually because I'm scheming in one way or another. Beady little eyes lolling back and forth. Zzzzz This is scarier than SpongeBob nightlight. Zzzzz Fisher said the Fed is working to "do a better job" as PBS chick grilled him on inflation and financial reform. That's when I knocked out. Blahblahblah...
I find it absolutely disturbing, but a snoozing boy (and even the snoozing hamster) seem to be comforted by its bizarre glow. Zzzzz. Total silence. No one running in a wheel or collecting coins on an over-heating PS3. Just me, the sound of my fingers taptaptapping away and that creepy ass fucking night light.
SpongeBob can stay but I'm tossing him into a box as soon as the boy goes back to Dad's. The thing is awful. Seriously. LOOK AT IT. Taptaptap tap tap. Zzzzz...