Yee-haw! Here we are in Dallas, fixin' to catch our flight to CA purty soon now.
After a mere three hours' sleep last night (the period between 1:30 am and 4:30 am is three hours, isn't it? The math looks right, but experientially, it feels more like fifteen minutes...), and a four+ hour flight from Newark, I think I feel amazingly... human. The Xanax may be having something to do with that. We've got another four hours or so, to get to Ontario CA, and then... we'll drive around for a while, and I'm sure by then I'll have drifted into the phase of serious psychological unravelling. We shall see.
I really want to say something pithy about the miracle of air transportation, and the marvel of changing perspectives -- how those little dots creeping along those thin grey lines down below are actually eighteen wheelers loaded with produce, and pushing the speed limit. Impossible for that driver to know he's been examined, even so casually and with such lack of expertise. Equally impossible for him to be aware of that teeny sliver, flickering in the clouds overhead, carrying hundreds of other humans to their various destinations.
I also find landing to be a remarkable kind of twisting experience -- that, in such a relatively short period of time, we've left our lofty point of view, and rapidly approach these gradually swelling blots that become buildings -- it always seems that there should be some noticeable sort of spatial or dimensional membrane through which we have to pass, to re-enter what most of us consider to be the real world. (I also keep trying to see, as though at just as great as distance as existed when we were cruising at 37000 feet, at 500 mph, some tiny things on the tarmac -- some network of cracks in the pavement, some little puddles that, if we looked at them more closely, would prove to be lakes teeming with life.
Mostly though, by then, I'm more concerned with getting out of my seat belt, and trying to find all my ball point pens and their clever caps, determined to escape...
Well, it seems as though our plane from Texas to California is beginning to board passengers. How long would it have taken my grandfather Zimmerman, when he was a boy, to make that trek? I often thought about him when I was regularly commuting between South Orange and Philadelphia -- a ninety-mile trip might easily have taken four days and more on horse-back. Without question, I'm grateful for the speed, but wonder about the loss of a kind of respect for the vastness on which an individual like myself lives.
Perhaps I'll continue this when I've succeeded in completely crossing the American continent, in a few more hours. I hear it's cold in California. Which I think means 60 degrees. If they only knew...
Later that same (interminable) day...
I'm now lounging in a lovely home in Claremont CA, as a guest of John's cousins, Jamie and Nancy White and their two lovely children Ryan and Megan, plus assorted cats, dogs and reptiles. The plane ride from Dallas was uneventful, but for the fact of the incredibly crowded space in which we found ourselves seated, at the rear of the cabin. My additional half-dose of Xanax helped a bit (if I'm taking three mg. a year, does that make me an addict?) ( I can stop when I want to, honest), sending me into a paralyzed sort of coma as we flew over much of the territory in the American Southwest. I kept waking up and looking with semi-wonder at the desert spread beneath me, until I passed out again. We were apparently within an hour of our destination when I began to believe, seriously, that I was going to go out of my mind. It's difficult to savor the beauty of New Mexico or Nevada or wherever the freak we were, with a frozen butt cheek and doubts about ever being able to use both legs again.
Surely, it is still a marvel of the modern world, to be able to enter what is essentially a hollowed-out metal tube, and then hurtle through space, miles above the surface of the earth, at hundreds of miles an hour -- but in my experience, it has become one of the less appealing marvels. Like maybe bandaids were, when they were first invented? In that they were a real step forward, but you had to injure yourself to experience the vast improvement over, say, wadded grasses and a birch wand tourniquet,,,
And I seem determined to eat at least my weight in sugar as quickly as I possibly can -- I brought along a package of cookies from our local supermarket bakery, thinking that these would be just the trick to tempt John into forgetting... something about this mournful trip. But, with each tempting offer -- "Would you like... a cookie?", he declined. So I'm eating them myself. I can always resume my near-starvation regimen when we get back to New Jersey in five or six days (another 1.5 mg of Xanax, I can already tell. Maybe I should throw the pills away. Like that's going to happen...). After all, the all-but-hopeless auditions for 'The Full Monty' are scheduled for early February, and I want to look my very best. Which may strike others as risible, but still...
And I believe I'm going to let this stand as the day's blogue entry -- one of my first trans-continental efforts at doing whatever it is that I'm doing here. I'm looking forward to a few days of walking into the village, to pick up the New York Times at Starbucks, and maybe going to a local diner for breakfast (read: fat on fat, with a side-order of fat, covered in sweetened liquid fat), while John runs about dealing with his sister. Who, in the interests of world peace, and to save myself from a new life as an adult, Vietnam era veteran with a service-connected disability, who is beginning a first-offender sentence of twenty-to-life, for manslaughter, I plan to avoid with all the cleverness and assiduity at my disposal.
I wonder if Xanax would help...
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
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