Free Write 2/24/15

    It was Christmas Eve. Fog Stuck to the tarmac at Lindbergh Field. All was calm, except for a single marshaller, awaiting a plane to direct. He sat and waited impatiently, the cool night air blowing against his face. He pulled out his phone to check the time, 12:45am. As he slipped his phone back into his pocket, he saw a huge flash followed by an alarmingly loud noise.

     “Did y’all hear that?” he nervously murmured into his walkie-talkie. A minute passed, with no response, so he thought he’d go back to the tower to check out what was going on. He climbed into his truck and began to drive toward the tower. He stopped his truck about 100 yards away from the building, and reached for the door handle.

     BAM! As he came back to his senses, the man realized what had just happened. An aircraft tail stuck from the rubble of the tower, sticking out like a flaming flag pole, contrasting against the night sky. It was then he noticed it.

     He scrambled through his pockets, frantically trying to find his cell phone to disprove the idea he had in his head. In a panic he reads the last message out loud, “Flying into Lindbergh at 1am, I’m on flight 187. Love you, see you there…” As he finishes the last words, he slowly picks his head up, looking towards the conflagration. As the last bits of the airplane burned up, he could distinguish only one marking on the plane, the big black numbers across the tail, the numbers “187’.

Self Deprecation

     Thinking on your feet, some people can, some people can not. I, for one, have been blessed with the curse of a machinegun mind. Well, its not as precise as a machine gun, its more like a fire hydrant with a truck plowed through it. An uncontrolled, constant flow of knowledge from my face hole to the sidewalk that is my audience.

     With such a plethora of information swirling around in my head, choosing the right thing to say is nearly impossible. Filtering through the good, the bad, and the wildly inappropriate, all in a timely manner as to respond to the person talking to you. This chaotic process is similar to salvaging all the valuables on the Titanic before it goes under. The stress from this selective process is exponentially harder then one would think, and amplifies when there are more spectators waiting for your response.

     And god forbid you lose your train of thought, then everythings out the window. Its hard enough to pay attention to anything anyones saying when my mind acts like a kid with ADHD on speed. Every second of my life is spent fighting the voice in my head thats saying, “Eh…. dont pay attention to that, think of something more irrelevant and useless.” and I do not always win.

     An even worse situation is saying something completely wrong, when you’re thinking about 100 things at the same time you’re eventually going to say something stupid. When this happens you’ll want to set yourself on fire, like a Buddhist monk protesting war, and vacate the area as soon as possible. But you can’t always get away, sometimes you need to just stick it out, and receive the verbal barrage from those waiting to correct and insult you.

     Although, by far, the most excruciatingly painful situation has to be when others ignore what you’re saying. As if anything they can conjure up in their simple minds can top the beautiful masterpiece of linguistics that is cascading from my mouth hole. As if to say, “What you have to say is stupid I hate you.” This infuriates me to the point where I want to abduct a woman, climb to the top of a skyscraper, and swat bi-planes from the sky, like a slightly angrier King Kong. I want to shove my foot in their mouth and not remove it until they apologize for the wrong they have committed.

      Basically, anything to do with speaking to other humans, or formulating coherent thought brings me an intense trepidation; although it doesn’t show on the outside, but it's a constant struggle. But you win some, you lose some I guess.