This is being scribbled with a broken stub of pencil on the back of some old tax documents in seat 27F of an American Airlines Super 80, Gate K12, Chicago O'Hare Airport, 8:47 pm local time, Thursday, May 23, 2002. Apparently a law has been passed requiring all persons occupying seats immediately adjacent to mine to overflow the confines of their armrests and press their fleshy, flabby shoulders against me, forcing me to curl in upon myself as if my muscles had atrophied. I come to this conclusion because this occurred on a subway, a bus, and now two airplanes, simply within the last two hours.
Plus I just watched my luggage leave my first plane and get hurled with great force into a waiting trolley, likely damanging any number of bottles of shampoo, cologne, haircare prducts, and soaps with which I am wont to travel. And now OUCH, while I wrote that last sentence I saw it snatched back from the trolley and thrown a minimum of 10 feet into my new plane, whereupon the elixir of pastes and potions previously liberated by the overly-enthusiastic baggage handlers was likely ground deep into the fibers of all of my clothes.
And furthermore, I would like to share a conversation from earlier this evening, aboard my first plane:
"Something to drink?"
"Hmm...coffee please. Black. Oh, and please don't bother with my dinner right now - despite the fact that I came here straight from work and due to the X-raying and the stripping and the searching, I had no time to get food, and despite the fact that the hours between 6 pm and 9 pm are generally considered to be prime, choice hours in which to consume an evening meal, and despite the fact that those happen to be the hours we are, in fact, aloft, and despite the fact that one can hear my stomach rumbling over the sound of the engines, well...I would much rather make do with the fresh baked taste of a single, one-ounce package of Rold Gold Colossal Cheddar Snack Mix because I applaud your attempts to lower the costs of running an airline and in turn (theoretically) to be able to offer lower fares, which might actually occur were people who run companies like airlines not actually greedy fucks who don't want to 'pass the savings on' to me, and besides, I would much rather spend the money ravenously descending upon a shamefully overpriced airport McDonalds like a retarded locust the exact microsecond I leave this airplane, two entire, excruciating hours from now."
"Oh, were you still talking, you sarcastic bitch?"
Ahh, you are so skeptical. Believe I made that up if you like. Only my hairdresser knows for sure.
And one more thing: I just had a lovely daydream wherein my flight to Denver was cancelled, so they put me up in a hotel with cold, cold sheets and that odd, distinctive hotel bathroom floor, and plastic vertical blinds over the windows, and I look at myself in the hotel bathroom mirror, and make myself suave, and go out somewhere -- I walk to the lake, like I walked to the beach from Miami's airport a few years ago when I was stuck overnight, or I just get in a cab and tell it to drive around until I see a sparkly restaurant sign that catches my fancy, and I will go in and have an adventure that makes this step backwards into the mundane life I left behind all somehow seem worth it, and that will make me forget what my girls back home are doing without me, because right now the King of Run-on Sentences could realy fucking use it.
P.S. Confidential to Face: I miss my Face! And also, please feed my cat.