Rough thoughts, on a flight across the country that's lasting too long. Boredom, and the desire to write something, anything, but nothing to write about. Guitar licks from "The Chain" in my head, and the detritus of movies and books I've been reading and watching overwhelming anything original I might have in my head. The paranoia of William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" and Morrison's "The Invisibles" in my head as well, mingling weirdly with the music and mood and longing of "Almost Famous."
GIbson talks about jet lag as the feeling of waiting for your soul to catch up with you, and while I"m not traveling far enough to really be jet-lagged, I know the feeling. Being on a plane feels like living in a soul-proof Faraday cage. You get into a metal tube, and an eternity passes, and then, eventually, you're in another city. Even though it feels like you've actually arrived on another planet.
There's an early Stephen King story called "The Jaunt" where teleportation exists, but you have to be unconscious to take it, because though it ostensibly happens instantly, subjectively it lasts an eternity of nothingness, followed, at long last, but a return to consciousness where the shock of suddenly having stimulus again drives you totally insane. If King didn't write that story after a long flight, I'd be terribly surprised.
It's the type of feeling that you can only get at about 4am, otherwise, after you got into bed five hours previously, spending the entire time hoping and eventually praying that you'll fall asleep any minute now. During my time in the hospital, I took a drug for awhile that had as an unfortunate side-effect what they turned "racing thoughts", a kind of ADHD contemplativeness. My time on the plane is the opposite: call it idling thoughts. An ability to ever really get out of neutral and develop any thought beyond its inception.
So now, I guess, we're getting somewhere with my inability to get anywhere.
I've got to get out of this non-place. Hopefully, in time to snap back to being sane.
