Starting new track: “Collision Avoidance”. Take a guess as to the subject matter.
This is just an early sketch - no vocals, song doesn’t actually finish etc.
So on Friday I flew back from a beautiful day in San Francisco to a really crappy night here in New York. After holding pattern for 45 minutes off Long Island, we came in for a landing. The pilot announced that we were entering “final approach” and told the flight crew to be seated.
Then, at about 1500 feet, our engines suddenly rev’ed and the plane went into a sharp climb. In less than a minute we had climbed to 2800 feet (love those TV’s in Jet Blue). My heart was pounding. I really wanted to be off the plane.
The pilot said something vague about weather, traffic and that we would be “re-sequencing”, without really explaining what had just happened. After another twenty minutes of dicking around in air we finally landed. I briefly considered kissing the ground.
I mentioned the incident today to my Mom, who went out and clearly spoke about it with one of my uncles - the one who works building collision avoidance systems at Boeing. It then made it back to me that I most likely experienced such a system in action.
My understanding is basically the system noticed two planes are about to smack into one another, and causes one of them to suddenly shift course. Such as climb 1500 feet in a minute.
So, two things: one, I’m happy the plane was so equipped and that the system worked. Thanks to whomever builds those things (my uncle or the competition) for saving my life.
Two, my general un-enthusiasm for flying has been re-doubled. “Hey, let’s strap ourselves in a tube and push it along the end of a sustained explosion, flying 400 miles an hour!” Why the fuck do I keep climbing into those things?
More than ever, I’ve come to regard time as my scarcest resource. This is new, because there was once a point where I had lots of time. In fact I was pretty good at amusing myself.
Having no time means that people want your time. And isn’t that the problem we want? Someone’s time is really a proxy for getting them to do something for another. As social animals we’re motivated to do this. Otherwise, we’d be a sociopath, which in some ways seems simpler to me.
The problem is, in addition to being social, we’re also selfish. All motivations are selfish in the end. So we play this game of social give and take with whatever our scarcest commodity happens to be (time, for most adult first-worlders), hoping to come out on top, with people giving their time to our agenda.
From above it’s another brilliant equilibrium of nature, until you realize you live in the muck with everyone else.
Oops. Out of time. Gotta go.
You’d think the EPA would object to the Mystic Hilton actually bronzing a dolphin, wouldn’t you?
There is a place where my mind goes where my capacity to put up with bullshit fails along with my desire to contain chaos. That is a dangerous place, indeed.
Bandelier National Monument. People have been hanging out in this valley for 11,000 years.
By my count this is the fourth time I’ve been here, and I am starting to get a rough sense of where everything is now.
New Mexico, especially this part of it, is more complicated than many people know. It has all the collision of different folks that I require in order to associate with a place, but there is also an strange underlying calm here.
It’s not a calm that signifies an emptyness though, it’s a calm that’s filled with almost a, well, a power that underlies everything else. That below the surface of the pretentious art scene, the hipster baristas, the Native American entrepreneurs, the loud Texans on holiday….below it all is something far more powerful, far older, than any of us. We are it’s guests. Or maybe flies on its hide.
This is one of the few places I know of where I can get the noise level in my brain to drop to “quiet” levels. I stop freaking out about not being all the things I’m supposed to be and just become Loren. Here in the stillness.
