I’m at my favorite writing location: an airport. I’ve eaten, drank a minimal dosage of caffeine in Snapple form, and in another fifteen or twenty minutes, I will board the airplane and be on my way to Newport Beach.

The flight left on time, which is rather surprising for an Alaska Airlines flight. I bought my ticket with miles a few days ago, and, as usual when I buy a last-minute flight or fly standby on an earlier flight, Alaska printed an ‘SSSSS’ on my boarding pass. When you have such a marking, the security people hand search you and your belongings. I guess the theory is that terrorists will book their flights at the last minute to avoid suspicion. I don’t see the correlation, but I’m sure smart people decided on these security procedures. Or, at least, that’s my hope. The hand searching worked out better today, since I bypassed the longer, normal security line and went to my own special line. The security people seem friendlier on the special line because they know it can be a hassle. Me, I like the personal touch, and I’ve gotten good at lifting one foot and then the other, and holding my arms out to the sides. I feel like my flight is safer because of it.

I had an interesting dream last night. I don’t usually remember my dreams, and even when I do remember them when I wake, the dreams usually vanish a few minutes later. This one I remembered, well, sort of. At first, I wasn’t sure who I was in the dream. When I dream, I can be anyone, and it sometimes a bit to figure out which anyone I am. Sometimes, even when I look or feel like me, it turns out that it’s not me, like it’s a me, but not the me. I like to think of those me’s as coming from a different dimension where the me made different choices in his life. But until I figure that out, I keep an open mind—as open as I can manage when I’m trying to figure out what’s going on around me.

Some people dream vividly. They say they see and sometimes even hear things in dreams as if they were watching a movie or going about their regular life. That’s what they say. For me, dreaming is more like knowing about things than seeing them. I know that I’m looking at something, but I don’t see it. It’s not like a movie screen; it’s more like how I feel after I’ve watched a movie. I know what happened, and I can visualize it in my mind, but I can’t see the pictures again—at least not until the DVD comes out. In last night’s dream, Doolies and I decided to buy illegal drugs and transport them across a state to make $40,000. We hid the drugs by powdering them on baked goods, such as cookies and cakes. Doolies was an evil Doolies, and I was a timid David. When we made a stop, I told Doolies that I couldn’t take the pressure anymore and I wanted to get rid of the drugs before the police stop us. She laughed at me, but I do it anyway, the possibility of arrest becomes too great for me to handle. Hilarity ensues, and stuff happened, but the rest is a blur.

Multiple days: I’ve been putting this off, but I’ve known it for some time now. My one-day stories are not sufficient. While they’re easier to write, I don’t go deep enough to tell the story or get across the thesis. What is necessary is for me to tell stories that I don’t finish in one sitting. I need to find a way to jump back into my story a few days later and keep the writing going. This is a weakness of mine, and something I’m going to have to get over through more practice.

Thanks to my commute—which has been surprisingly easy this week, a huge change after a dreadful December caused (this is my theory) by Christmas shoppers and four old ladies who drive twenty miles per hour beneath the speed limit side-by-side, and five minutes in front of me during my commute—I spend many hours every day listening to my car’s XM radio. In the mornings, I tune to the comedy channel, which plays snippets of stand-up comics, which is all my brain can handle that early in the day. My evening (or afternoon) rides are better. I listen to XMPRI, XM’s Public Radio International, which has many shows I enjoy. Public radio on XM is better than listener-sponsored public radio on regular FM because there are no pledge drives; the monthly XM fees cover the public part of the broadcast, leaving me guilt-free and able to enjoy my shows without having to listen to pathetic pleas to support the “free” public radio.

One of the shows I enjoy on XMPRI is This American Life (or something that sounds like that). Before this show came on the air (a month ago or so), XMPRI ran incessantly an advertisement for the show, which almost convinced me to stop listening to the channel. While the XM music channels do not have commercials, all the talk channels have occasional commercials. Because XM is a relatively new technology, there are not many sponsors, and the sponsors they do have, which include advertisements for other XM shows and channels and GoToMyPC.com, which I never will thanks to their horrible commercials, tend to be repeated ad naseum. The commercial for This American Life explained that the show ‘unfolds more like a movie for the radio.’ Each show has a theme, and the host, Ira Gold, or something like that, plays interviews or stories related to the theme during the three acts of the show.

In the second act of today’s show, the host interviewed a Grateful Dead songwriter, who told a story about how he met a girlfriend at a convention, which was the theme for the show. (An earlier part of the show was about a professional dishwasher, whose mission in life is to work as a dishwasher in every state. He also writes a monthly article or magazine, which they claim is funny. The professional dishwaser attends a restaurateur’s convention, expecting to find the fat-cat boss’s he worked for smoking big cigars and planning the downfall of the common working man. He is disappointed to find that the restaurant owners aren’t evil. They are normal people who covet free food samples and plastic key chains.) The songwriter sees a woman at the convention he was attending (I think he was giving a speech or something) and there’s an instant attraction. He describes it as one love at first sight, even though he never believed such a moment was possible. While she’s younger than he is, they have a lot in common, including the fact that she’s moving into his apartment building in NYC. After a week, she gives up the apartment and moves in with him. A few months later, they both come down with a flu-like sickness. (At this point, I had no idea where he was going with this or what this had to do with a convention—it turns out very little.) He travels to LA and asks his girlfriend to join him because he has tickets to a concert. She flies to LA and they go to the concert. During the visit, she broaches the question of marriage, wanting to have his children. At first, it sounds like he’s going to tell us he broke up with her because he didn’t want children, but he surprises us by saying he agreed and started planning the wedding. She leaves on an earlier flight than he does because she has patients to see the next morning (she’s a psychiatrist). It turns out her flu had been eating at an artery in her heart, and while in the air, she has a heart attack. The flight attendant finds her dead when attempting to wake her up for landing. She was 30 years old.

I don’t know why I felt the need to share it, but it’s such a tragic and unexpected story that I felt it was worth a few words. My writing is rather stagnant this evening. The cramped seat in the airplane made typing difficult, and while I had things to say, I don’t feel as if I said them well. I guess I can’t be eloquent every day (or most days).