Self-applied sucker-punch
Who is the bright boy who scheduled me on a 6 AM flight to Chicago this morning? Who's the guy who didn't think very hard about the fact that this does not entail getting up at six, but rather in the godforsaken hour before five o'clock, the time when the human body is at its metabolic low point, the time when waking up to an alarm means accessing one's Emergency Reserves, vague panic and dread naturally following: what the hell is going on? Fire? Earthquake? Wolf attack? Oh, right – that plane I have to catch...
The rest of the story – cancelled flight, interminable line at the Dirt Cheap Airline ticket counter, the haste to the gate for the flight I've been transferred to – well, I should have predicted that too. In any event, now that I'm looking down over the wild uplands of New York State, looking forward in a ridiculously eager way to whatever version of "breakfast" is about to land on my tray table, my poor serotonin system is beginning to recover from the shock; my neurotransmitters, which have been sparking as if some kind of national emergency were underway, have now concluded that there is Nothing Important Going On...I am feeling remarkably like I did that morning in college when I woke up in the back seat of a 1970 Dodge Swinger, parked off of an extremely bleak stretch of Virginia Beach, and waiting for my roommate to wake up too, so that we can go look for a tire shop and get the car fixed, so that we can turn around and head back to school. Then, as now, I wonder how it was that I failed, the night before, to predict what the morning would be like.
Posted by B T at May 07, 2001 12:30 PM