LEG 2

i have embarked upon the second leg of my summer journey. mama and i flew this afternoon from ohio to california. i'm glad to be moving on, though ohio (or, o-flat-o, as i like to say) was good to me. i was sad to see how few mom-and-pop establishments are left. even at home in the west village where gentrification has caught like latent HIV--a brutal reality, at first seemingly symptomless, about which nothing can be done, weakening its natural defenses and eating away at it from the inside out--at least a great number of the local establishments there are not part of huge corporate chains, but are owned and operated by entrepreneurial individuals. in o-flat-o i was dismayed to note the number of malls and chain restaurants. only on small main streets, like on franklin avenue in bellbrook, do you find local businesses. truly no one can compete with the corporate giants in the grand scheme. my, how sad thomas jefferson would be to see all this farmland turned over to chili's and red lobster! sorry, TJ, this ain't no yeoman country any more. in spite of the walmartification of rural america, however, the courtesy in ohio remains unshakable... my pharmacist in ny is a pretty swell fellow, but the pharmacist at drug mart was so truly concerned about how i was going to fill the script for malaria pills which they could not that i felt he might have had my back in a showdown. the busgirl at MCL was as sweet and accommodating as anyone i've ever encountered in the hospitality industry. pedestrians walking through bellbrook nodded when passing, and would've surely tipped their hat to me if it were still fashionable to rock a bowler. the server at steak-and-shake had been to nyc but detested it, and seemed ready to award me a badge of honor for tolerating it all my life. this struck me... how relative life can be. i might have awarded the steak-and-shake server the same badge for surviving rural ohio for a lifetime! is it a stroke of fate, that we are born in the right place? or is it that we are born there which causes us to love it? sometimes it also goes the other way: being born into urbanity, one might spend their whole life seeking its antidote, and vice versa. i, for one, have always felt that the secret to surviving the city (perhaps any city, but especially new york) is to get out of it as much as possible, to remember that life isn't all concrete and shopping bags and suits. and so, here i find myself, sitting in the airport in dayton, ohio, waiting to board for california...


i love flying. almost everything about it: how wrong and unnatural it is that a chunk of steel should fly through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, thousands of feet above the earth's surface. the anticipation of going some place. the people-watching in the terminal and on the plane. the fact that bad food is totally expected and acceptable on a plane, where it would be nowhere else. however, in the years since 9/11 so much about air travel in the states has changed. incessant delays, cancellations, and charging for meals and tv do take so much of the fun out of it. ahhh, i take it all back! who am i to complain? it's still better than traveling by horse drawn wagon on the oregon trail, exposed to the elements and susceptible to dysentery and rogue bandits! i can get there in hours instead of days! 


lucky, modern, mortal fools we are.