Flee, fly, flow some,
all aboard, heading home.
Dateline San Jose airport, 5:30 a. m.
While rampaging through the American south in the last months of the Civil War, Gen. Tecumseh Sherman met a man in Jackson, MS. He was the owner of a downtown hotel, and he was begging the implacable warrior to spare his establishment the flames that were at that moment consuming everything in sight. Sherman did not say so, but he may have been amenable to the hotelier’s request had the man gotten on his knees and groveled. This, however, would have proved an impossibility, owing to a physique that prohibited it. He was, in the general’s estimation, “a very fat man.” The Yankees burned down his hotel.
In the airport a few minutes ago I encountered just such a person, but of the female gender. I doubt the victim of Sherman’s torch had any ugly tattoos, but the woman I just saw had one, a drab and unimpressive gray outline of a butterfly, just above her left hoof. It was permanently embedded in the expansive stretches of what would have been her calf, except that it was a full-grown steer. There were probably others, but she had graciously kept them from sight with copious amounts of polyester-blend cloth that hung loosely on her, if you can believe it. Yes, brothers and sisters, I’m on my way back to N. America, land of the fat, home of the fatter!
***
I’ve never sat down and eaten a bucketful of broken glass, but such a task could not be any less terrible than traveling by airplane. Being crammed into a seat in which the circulation of my blood is greatly constrained is merely the coup d’grace to first getting inside the plane. Nothing says “people are sheep” like airport livestock pens, in which impatient, self-absorbed travelers move and moan and hate the people in front of them.
(O man, my long-suffering wife just uttered words more beautiful than any I’ve ever heard. As we were being herded toward Gate 19 — Why is my gate always the one with the highest numerical designation, and located at the far end of the runway?
— she turned to me, groaned and said, “We ain’t doin’ this again.” Ah, music, darling, music to my steadily failing eardrums. Yeah, we’ve had enough pleasure to last us 17-lifetimes, God please forbid.)
Our plane, best described by the philosopher/poet, Rene Saunts, as being “a winged aluminum tube, not unlike a tin of rancid tuna” is loaded, and I hope locked.