Mid-Flight #2

Poop-coffee refill, excellent.

Interesting: the ground below, dry and drawn like the swirled head of a fresh-pulled cappacino, presents a network of white polka-dots interconnected at random by ribbons of yellow dirt. Each dot only accessed by a single road: picture dendrites speckled with round polyps at the ends. Beautiful from this angle, though at ground/eye level the story may be different.

Perhaps, at that ground level, the dirt rumbles anxiously wishing to regurgitate buried radioactive waste, or trembles in trepidation of incoming mortar shells from amateur navy pilots on training runs. The spots, curiously random yet surely intentional, must serve some purpose. Here in the desert so distant from human life I can't imagine the purpose is benign.

Wait, a water-source. Dozens (hundreds?) of metallic edifices cluster around the only river in sight, a sickly black vein scratched into the crust straight enough to appear man-made. The buildings so reflective and the water so murky it resembles balled-tinfoil grapes bound around a diseased, charred vine. Further down the vine, the blackness widens and spreads into a large, green-black kidney bean, also tinselled with grapes at its perimeter.

Then: nothing. This plane waits for no one, no thing. Dry expanses veiled by a dingy sheet of gray tacked securely from horizon to horizon. I am left to my immediate surroundings and the eight individuals within my four-foot radius.

Gangsta Boy's special lady, properly clad to represent all of her Latina roots (and then some), steals away his headphones. For two eternal seconds the cabin swells with hard-core rap music. Little is discernible through the bass distortion besides 'bee-otch' and 'nigga', before she seals the speaker shells around her ears (hoop J-Lo style earrings dangling at the bottoms). Nigga and Bee-otch are soon emulated from G-Boy's mouth as he rips back the cones, replacing them on his skull to drown out his Latina's reprimands and the rest of the world with it.

The sheet rips and a green-brown slice of agricultural Swiss-cheese flashes through the 'clouds'. This soot-cotton looks too dirty to be normal clouds, and too thin to offer precipitation. I, like most children, harbored fantasies of running atop the clouds, speculating a texture akin to cotton and warm snow. But these... the most imaginative child would be unable to fantasize properties other than mud, beef stew, exhaust, for the air below.

Crap-coffee refill, stewardess? Surely the attendants are near... in the back, front, prepping Ritz and P-nut snacks and vigorously muddling black tar to dissolve oil, corn syrup solids, misc. chemicals to make the 'coffee' taste like sugary-butter instead of poly-vinyl-chloride.

Raw Imagery - Mid-flight #1

To my left: Gangsta boy, Adidas-clad w/ massive headphones, blue-green prison ink half-concealed by a long-sleeve undershirt, gothic lettering on the nape of his neck oddly resembles a bar-code from this angle and distance.

To my immediate left: Four ounces of instant coffee with granular sugar and cream (still visible afloat) pinning down a mapkin (cartographic wipe) and stained with the turbulence-induced overflow.

Below: El Paso, Lubbock, Odessa perhaps? Ants... grids of roadways and reservoirs that spark memories of abused toy trucks in a dirty childhood. I do not know my altitude; 4500 meters maybe, high enough that forests emulate mold growth on the wheat-roll crusted earth. The terrain shifts dryer and dryer as we speed over Texas, into New Mexico: outcroppings of ferritic rock appear like leprous blotches of eczema, replacing any and all vegetation.

So concludes twenty-one days visit with those I love, and so begins visits with those I also love, allbeit friends vs. family. The trip overall was, well, amazing but three weeks is a lot of time to be away from home living out of a duffel bag. This is a good time to reflect, and my mood is such that I am noticing beauty in everything around me.