ON FLIGHT

Been thinking about the anthropological implications of airports. Interior scene: me sitting in terminal C13 at a layover in Charlotte, NC, an airport which is inexplicably populated by rocking-chairs and dachshunds. Yes, it's absurd. But so is the nomadic imperative. Stampede mentality. Mixed-nut subsistence. Airports are the least real places I know. Limbos. There was a moth in the terminal with me, flitting around on the carpet by my bags. I wanted to let him out. Maybe he was thinking about the big steel man-made moths outside.

All my literary prescience goes against airplanes. See also: Antoine de Saint-Exupery. See also: Icarus. Humans are the only animals that forego natural selection and demand their wings.

Called J to laugh off my nerves. I said that one day our texts would be part of the archaeological record and everyone would wonder what strange animals we were. He agreed that we were an awkward stage between neanderthals and supermen. We made new names for ourselves, improvising nonsense Latin: Pseudo avihomo. False winged man.

Arrived safely in Pittsburgh, with minimal airsickness. It's a nice city, big without being intimidating. Spent a good deal of today at the the Carnegie Library. There's a backroom in the nonfiction stacks where you can peek down into the natural history exhibits. I spied the brontosaurus skeletons. The best part was that I was surrounded by books on the Brontë Sisters . Brontësaurus--it was too good to resist.

I took a bus from the airport into Oakland. Along the way, I saw a road sign that read PITTSBURGH and to its left, an exit sign that simply read, MOON.