Plane flight to Mystery

He couldn’t say what he was escaping.  A restlessness.  A certain ennui.  He was simmering a tepid personal stew..  He was tired of himself.

 The warrior monk  had grown old.  He’d  charged one too many windmills. Now he had sciatica. He’d counted coup on his enemies countless times. This new lot didn’t even know coup.  The took offence at neutrality.   They bashed forward like Vogon. The parking lot was the height of their artistic expression.   They worshipped an old drug in their new way.

Now he was on a plane.

“How much longer?” He asked the stewardess. 

Later he asked her again, “Are we there yet?”  She’d didn’t answer. 

There was only one more day in the year.  2018 was passing. It was the year that all the prophecies about Climate Change,  Donald Trump and fake news proved false, yet another year. The promises of annihilation were untrue but  no one seemed to  care  because truth was reduced like everything sacred to mere construction. The role of speech had devolved to a child ‘waaaaaaaaah’ of infantile protest.  The bankers, lawyers and activists chortled with glee.  

He stared at the passing night.

“I am looking forward to my own bed”, he thought.  He considered the problem of his expanding bladder and the two big men between him and the aisle.  

2018 was another year of waste. Urine, shit, plastic, nuclear. 

Outside the window  chariots ridden by gods  passed the jet plane. A saucer full of aliens descended again to  suck the brains from another Canadian politician. Rumors of intelligence are highly exaggerated. 

I dreamed of bugs crawling in my nose and rats eating my lips well still  i lived, unable to move, feeling the pain and dismemberment.   I was awake.  The pain wasn’t something I could distract myself from. I prided myself on meditation and stoicism but rats gnawing on lids seemed worse than the immediate pain and  loss of sight caused by huge carrion birds plucking out my  eyes.  The last sight , an image of beady beurocratic eyes and huge beak.  It just goes on interminably. The hope is fever and death but what if one remains a wake as the worms pass through the body as it turns to dust.  The problem really is the  attachment to this body.

I’m no longer attached to my body. I’ve eaten so much this year   I’m feeling fat.  No matter what politically correct CBT I do in my mind I can’t see myself as handsome with a protruding gut screaming my sins of gluttony and sloth to all that have eyes to see.   I’m no different than an alcoholic reaking of booze or a sex addict playing upskirt with the childrn. I wonder when I’ll reach my bottom. It’s certainly growing.

The rumble of the plane is exhausting.  The air is stale in this tight cramped position in economy. I think first class is getting their air before us.  I imagine a communist revolt using all that Lenin and Che Guevara taught us.  My shoes feel tight as my heart fails to circulate the blood efficiently through the swamp of my feet.  I have the urge to stand up and scream.  Panic builds.  The claustrophobia returns.  I have a  series of phobias I can indulge in like comic books.  I page through them.  I’ve dwelled on them enough all my life.  

The therapy dog lies at my feet dreaming of chasing rabbits.

I’ve had a grand time with family. As close to returning to a womb as an adult is allowed to in public places. I’ve suckled the nipple of nostalgia.  I’m treated as a white hair.  I have to intellectually construct myself as such, being an adolescent looking out on the world from this bloated corpse. I watched two frail old people adventurously boarding the plane and constructed them as adolescent lovers. I’ve lost the ability to look at old people as such.  We’re all children in a sand box.  

I don’t know how it happened.  Every month I learn of  another person close to me or someone I went to college with dying. The good die young we insist.   I live on.   I can only imagine God has a plan or use for me.  I haven’t a clue. I’m trying to embrace the mystery.  Catholics probably handle dementia better than the rest of us.

I’m reading Evelyn Waugh. It’s 1930. He’s at the coronation of Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  I’ve learned the source of the Jamaican name Rastafarian.  I also learn the source of “I and I” a  phrase  I remember from  a Bob Dylan song. Apparently the Syrian Christians since massacred in the millions by Muslims once came to teach in Africa. 

“Are we their yet?”  He asked in subdued voice.