"this tunnel is a Texas mile"

Seattle, 10:30 PM (Pacific Time), 3/7/05

There is some urge, I guess; some kind of genetic timebomb quietly ticking away, that drives people in my family to prefer the late night ionospheric howl of AM radio. Granted, we're in the mountains, and yes, a little noise can keep you alert. I don't dispute these facts. The real problem is that once we clear the Cascades, once we're surrounded by an invisible wealth of radio signals (I mean, this is the Big City now, bright lights, office buildings, hotels with fancy dress balls or something going on where everyone knows each other and hey, who are these guys tramping through with their suitcases, all "Hey, where's the airport shuttle?" So there are a lot of radio stations, is my point.), what are we tuned into? Easy listening lounge music. "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head." Even adjusting for the atrophying effects of age and small town living that have been visited on us, we are too cool for this. We must be.

We are the only people on the shuttle. Myself, my father, my aunt and uncle, whose son is getting married, hence this trip. Our driver has a slight trace of an accent, Carribbean or something. I go to the airport on this shuttle all the time is what I seem to be trying to say with my studied nonchalance. Look at the casual slope of my leg. I would very much like to stop doing this, but I am stuck in some sort of self-conscious loop, despite the fact that, as I said, the only person around who was not there shortly after my birth is busy driving.

At the security checkpoint everyone takes off their shoes, but I hesitate, because I have not flown since 1998, and I watch TV. I could be being Punk'd. I think that, if we have to take off our shoes, they ought to put some carpet down. A week from now I'll be doing the same at Dallas/Fort Worth International, and an older gentlemen will say that he wears his shoes on planes all the time, and, after being warned that sometimes people with shoes on have to go through special security, he chooses to keep them on, and, of course, gets waved aside and wanded. (Dirty. No, but they just use their handheld metal detector wand.) Also, at DFW, they spray the ground with some sort of citrusy disinfectant.

In addition to making sure we don't have bombs secreted away in our shoes, I guess this makes us less likely to break out into sweet kung fu battles.

30,000 feet above the darkness of the interior, 1:53 AM, 3/8/05

The lights of cities blossom occasionally beneath us, like weird alien flowers or fungal blooms. While considering these organic images it occurs to me that what they actually resemble (in a one to one correspondance) are maps of a power grid. From this height, at this hour, the distinction between the city and the symbols which represent it falls away. (I just read that Borges story about the empire whose mapmakers make a map that is the same size as the empire.) My aunt has suggested that a long array of lights we recently passed was Colorado Springs. If we took off at 11:30, we ought to be no more than half an hour from landing, from a city blown back up to its monstrous proportions. Also I'm starting to feel a little uneasy, in an intestinal sense. This will get worse before it gets better.