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epistle log 19neteen
the sensible manifold
ears ringing dully from the late bass of the night turns every sound on its side and gives everything the sound of hyper-reality, like waking up on the beach after having been in the sun a long while and your eyes make everything a little too bright and scarily real, kind of like tv versus film, months of tiny perceptions flood all-at-once.
airports are nasty brutish places to hang out, though my creativity flourishes there: letters and scribbles and track charts and production ideas and why do i never bring my camera to the places where it would be most useful? i henceforth vow to never go to a show without my camera. it should never leave my side, even if it has to be fixed with electrical tape. but the airport becomes a zoo of quiet and patient desperation: the air never quite seems right (it doesn't in most churches i've been in either), the lighting is a bit off (down with florescent lamps, and death to halogen as well); just walking into the structures makes me feel immediately different, due solely to the atmosphere. the decor is never quite comforting, which immediately makes it offsetting. people never act normally there: everyone seems uptight, maybe from the impression given us by the powers that be that everyone, even your mother, is a potential terrorist. look at the funny people, mommy: they stay behind the glass while the nice lady says "smoking is permitted in designated areas only; please refrain from smoking throughout the terminal; the moving sidewalk is ending, please look down; while on the moving sidewalk, please stand to the right, to allow those wishing to walk to pass safely on the left." (and they thought no one paid attention to her saccharin stained paraffin words) smokers hide themselves stigmatically away in little plexiglass cubes and everyone seems to sit in the same casually informal position while talking on the data connections with phones. everyone sits in their divided space, hoping that the person next to them doesn't notice the fact that they are hell bent on ignoring them, and if they do, does their hair look alright? do they have something in between their teeth? potential terrorists or not, they are a peer, someone's opinion to fear, and we are all on display.
at standiford field (i will never ever call it louisville international airport, sorry) there are some great photographs taken by a staff member that line the upper balcony at the intersection of the two terminals. all black and white, all very big, nothing genius but very pleasant. i wonder how many others have sat and looked, actually looked at them? they're all signed very gratuitously, but that's passable. to most people they're just little rectilinear frames to break up ever-so-pleasantly the monotony of the nameless colors that surround you and close in on you with oppressive passivity. but this upper deck is a haven of silence:
"there's a seriousness all around, a dead perfection still down, control so alarming, insides bound. threatened to speak, no words on the air, thoughts so covered yet still so bare. weakened words, watered down, sunk. treading through thoughts, motor becomes junk. fingers hidden, tongue twisted, eyes covered, muscles fisted. betraying the lit fuse feeling of go. losing touch with fingers as the feeling continues to grow through tomorrow and burn down today. these bound thoughts race on, never finding their way." -- crain "the dead town."
is there anything so powerless as to watch someone you care about walk past the wo/man with the pseudo-uniform down that walkway into a multi-ton bird about to coast more improbably effortlessly though the vapors, knowing that, from this moment until the stone lands, nothing you nor most others can do will ensure their safety. when you walk down that tunnel, it's no big deal, it's safer than an automobile, etc. but when it's someone else, the fears become much more intimate. odd, eh? but perhaps the more helpless feeling is sitting at the gate, not able to see them taxi out of the gate and down the runway to take off. guessing only by sound what their position is, leaving before you know they're no longer tithed to dirt, walking out of this hellish wax museum of humanity amplified beyond comfortable levels, driving off, leaving them to the hands of someone or something else.
i hate it too.
days weeks later, reunions shouldn't happen in such macroscopic haven. when the president and principal of your old high school come off the plane before she does, you realize just how wrong the whole proposition is. there's just something entirely and inherently unnatural about the whole sequence. and i never remember to not wear my belt with the buckle that sets off the metal detector every time: i know army surplus isn't the height of fashion, but is practicality such a sin? i mean, really?
meeting strangers at the airport is another fun one: standing at the gate hoping your brother gave you the right information and that you didn't consistently misread it the 2 million times you checked both the scrap of paper and the little old monitors and the sign at the gate, and also worrying that you'll look and feel even more awkward than they do, even though they have a right to feel and look awkward since they are at the disadvantage of being in a new place and time meeting a new unfamiliar person while you are on more familiar ground. for instance, walking into an unfamiliar airport and not seeing chuck there but passing his father 10 times because chuck decided to send his parents (whom i've never met) so he could spend some time with some unmentionable. uncomfortable situations amplified by hyper-realistic locales are fun to look back on, but make you think strange things, and do stranger things.
airports are just bad ju-ju. plain bad mojo.
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