Friday Love/Hate

I hate flying, which apparently I will be doing more often with my new job, even though before last November, I had never flown in my entire life of 36 (at the time) years on this stupid hunk of ball called the Earth. I had always said the first time I went up in a plane, I wasn't going to come down in it, meaning I wanted to do a tandem jump first time, but the convenient opportunity never arrived. And I compromised my lifelong nonsense parameter for something (those types of things rule my life in a ridiculous amount of ways, and help make me the self-retarded person I am) to build a relationship with asshole relatives-in-law who don't even speak to us anymore. What a fucking waste.
My problem with flying has never been a fear of being in the sky, and after having flown a number of times, it still isn't. My dislike of flying comes from losing touch with the passage. There is a theory that one reason so many women suffer from postpartum depression is the overuse of painkillers during child birth, so that the woman does not feel the transition of her offspring from inside her body to outside of her body, so there is a certain disconnect as if the baby was lost, and that chemically creates depression inside the mother, even though her baby is right there. Our conscious mind often times is overruled by all the little million year old cellular memory-filled molecules inside of us. Nothing can be done about this; it is scientific fact beyond the reproach of human studies or words.
For me personally, this is similar to how I feel about flying. When I get on a plane in Virginia, and end up two hours later in Florida, the climate, the environment, the type of people I'm around, it all is different, rather suddenly. There is no gradual ascent into a different weather zone, or seeing the make-up of the land shift and the constitution of the people start to alter ever so slightly in common roadside interactions. You are just there.
This has helped lead to why there are so many suburban clusters of chain stores and restaurants that are the same regardless of where you live. The land is clear cut and covered over with a fresh coat of asphalt and pre-fab boxes with easily identifiable brightly lit brand signs. For someone on the move, they don't want to be immersed into another region's insanity all of a sudden; they want familiarity, even if it is a sterilized and homogenized familiar face. It makes me sad there are people who feel more comfortable in a world like that, and that that world dominates the country I live in. Hell, I don't even like taking interstates on long drives because of how soulless they are. You ride the old US routes like US 1 or US 250, and you hit these long desolate stretches with burned out and crumbling restaurant shells or hotels that house illegal immigrants at best nowadays, and you think about what it must have been like back in the day.
Oh well, this ain't my world to control. I just walk around on the goddamned thing until I stop breathing oxygen and they stuff me back down six feet into the surface.

I love getting a review copy of a book that has my first ever published in for-real print story inside of it in the mail yesterday. I opened to the page to see it, read the first paragraph and the last paragraph, both of which did not seem fucking stupid to me. And I scoped one random sentence in the middle, that said, "He smiled a flat grin, missing a few pieces." This made me think that maybe the story didn't completely suck, but I was too afraid to sit down on the couch and actually read it. Plus I had to pick cherries from our honeysuckle vine/poison ivy entrenched cherry tree patch before the goddamned birds ate them all.
The publisher sent me an extra review copy of the book. Sometime in the next week, I'll be throwing up a contest for someone to win it here on the blog. That means that all three of you stand a 33% chance of winning a copy. When I become a famous, full of shit writer/author/runaway teenager self-help master/threat to the government/halfway outlaw type, you will have a ridiculously overvalued piece of my early rise to fame. When I don't become famous, I will help clutter your life a little bit more for as long as you deem it worthy to keep holding onto this obscure thing that nobody cares about. Either way, it will be a thing that happens. And it's better to have things happen than to have things no longer happen, that is for sure.