Beerplanes or something

Ok I have a beer dilemma.

I was at the Two Roads tap room in the BDL airport, and I got a Road2 Ruin which I always enjoy. Then I had a Two Juicy, another double IPA on tap.

I rated the Two Juicy for the first time and gave it a 4 (out of 5) on Untapped. I have had it before but apparently not rated.

I rated the Two Juicy a 4. Then I went to rate the Road 2 Ruin and I was thinking 3.75, but I had previously rated it a 4.25. dilemma.

Both were really good though

I rated Road 2 Ruin a 4, dropping the score from 4.25

But I like it better than the other, by the end of it. I think it’s that they’re both great, but differ based on mood. Or in this case a pastrami sandwich and horseradish chips.

Fretting over imaginary internet points is a first world problem and a good one to have.

—

My flight was boarding when I arrived at the gate. Since I’m in group FU, I took a seat.

Basic economy again. I don’t like this trend. I get a full size carry on this time though. Which I don’t have.

I have instead a smallish backpack carry on, a 38 liter Red Oxx convertible bag instead. I don’t convert it.

It’s a clamshell design so it’s easy to pack. I can stack my shirts flat at the bottom and button them up around a bundle constructed of the rest of my clothes.

Plus it has room for a couple of board games, if they are smallish, or if there’s only one then medium is ok. Many times I’ve stuffed games into larger games like Russian paper dolls… which are rectangular.

I expect they may still force me to gate check it.

Nope, plane had plenty of room. Groups 7 and 8 went super fast. I’m pretty sure there are not really 9 groups. They just say 7 and 8 to make group 9 feel worse.

It’s 5 or 6 rows forward to the wing exits, for future reference.

I’m not used to flying American. The seats are trying to be fancy, with leatherette and bulbuous cushions in ill-advised places.

Fortunately I have a kick-ass inflatable pillow made by Sea to Summit to use for lumbar support. I inflated it only a little (on the second try) and it helps a ton. I’ve got another like it which goes around my neck. Both are supplely soft, a sort of spandexy nanofleece.

As a result I’m magnificently comfortable, or so I can pretend for 4 and a quarter hours of skybussery.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Being uncrowded as it is, and such is the hope of any groupniner with a largeish backpack or a smallish carry on, my middle seat magically transformed into a window seat, on account of there being no one already sitting in it. Score 1 for seat karma

–

Who made these machines we fly in? By whose hands to we prevail, aloft? Which piece of titanium turbine blade will bump the MTBF statistics a notch. Hopefully somewhere the F else.

Really though we depend on these things, this technology we created. A mud hut is technology and there’s always been rain. And piece of hut is less likely to go through your head at four hundred miles per hour. Ergo, airplanes are safer than mud huts.

The fallacy here is that not all factors are considered. They never can be, so all is fallacy.

The fallacy up there is that we all go out, our light that is our life. Snuffed by shingles. Or staph, or stroke. Or in impossibly bad ways, like being shot two years ago at a country music concert in Las Vegas by an ammosexual fuckwit with a stack of guns and not enough sense. And then taking two years to die. Today.

The truth is, I don’t know her life either. Maybe her injury brought her family together. Life is pretty weird that way. It’s easy to think we know what should be.

Usually we’re right of course. I’m pretty sure everyone who has ever been shot in the history of ever would tell you they’d prefer not-shot, if given the choice any time up to and including time traveling to unshot themselves.

It would be good if we would just, like, stop shooting each other. We have enough flying projectiles without that. I’m looking at you, starboard wing engine.

We’ll save a lot on time machines.

–

This is my new favorite pilot. He gave us all the information we need and then said “this will be my last scheduled announcement”. Praise cheesus.

I feel the pressure in my ears and sinuses at the same time as I feel the pressure of the now-inflated neck pillow squeezing in on my most important vascular system components. Or at least those favored by vampires and villains, as visually viewed on video, Vivian.

One day a Vivian will read this, and to her: Carly Simon says hi

I don’t know any Vivians. In this timeline.

Full face yawning is a thing. Eustachian tubes are one thing, but stretching out your whole fucking face is key to successfully avoiding Schroaderfords Syndrome, which is what makes your head hurt during long flights, and is a thing I just made up. I’m not kidding about the face part though, it’s totally a thing.

I hear it’s the dryness of the air too. My buddy used to bring a humidifier with him on business trips. I thought he was nuts. I still think so. He also turned the heat on in the summer.

–

Not accepting cash is a dick move to people who have shitty credit. Not that I blame the airline. Nothing grosser than having money hands touch food that’s going in your face hole. It’s reasonable risk mitigation. But, yeah, dickish.

I suddenly want to do an rf sweep of this airplane. My data is safe though, I took the free mini pretzels and water. My tray table is the “other airline” photo in anyone else’s marketing materials.

I’m studying for my CISSP, which means I am thinking about risk differently. Semi quantitatively analyzing. Occasionally objectionably overtly avoiding attending against any effort of ego. Id is impishly invasive.

Indeed it in summary involves intense inculcation in internet instruction, interspersed with internet distraction.

–

That’s not all that’s been on my mind. I’ve been having intense dreams which wake me up early. 620, 520, 420 am. What’s weird is remembering them, which I wouldn’t unless writing was wrung from uncaffienated and underconscious neurons. In the second case, that of 520am, it was a nightmare.

–

I dreamed I was in a haunted house. A rotting Victorian hulk, slumping heavily into the withering wheat wafted by a wailing westard wind.

Dark, it was, and cold. Devoid of color, due to disensorous retinal goo.

*English language learners: many of the things I say are not words anyone else will understand. I was going to say they’re not words at all, but once i spray them they stays then.

When the dream began, I wasn’t afeared of ghostery, believing not in apparitions. But among the creaking floorboards, their threats of failure both heard and felt through tenuous toes, stepping slowly and eyes blinking, in an effort to amplify them, I saw shadows move from the corners of my eye

And

everything

stopped.

I awoke in a hospital, modern and bright,

with a competent, pleasant nurse to my side.

She told me I’d been hurt, but I’d be ok,

They preferred to sedate me a bit for my pain.

She left with a smile, and into the frame

a medical GUI, a dosing machine.

It counts down the list of injections she’d set

Then red it turns on the third one down

Overdose it says, then blinks to confirm

I try to call out, but my throat is unable

The first two drugs work on that part

Then through the wall the grim reaper phases

A cloud of grey and black,

Formed but not solid

Ephemerally invulnerable

Opening onyx arms

To pick me up like a child

And I could not scream.

—

—

When I awake from nocturnal brain garbage theater I’m prone to fall back asleep. I’m pretty good at going to sleep actually. I have a lot of practice. Pretty much every day, sometimes more than once. So I sure as shit didn’t want to fall back into that situation, and I knew myself well enough to otherwise engage myself.

So I wrote.

For hours and over breakfast and in the car ride to the place where my friend’s friends were. I’m glad I did.

I’m always glad when I write, it’s just not always easy to untangle from the dopamine spiders to actually get to writing though. Flights are a reprieve.

(*I know I can get wifi, please STFU)

So ok, it’s metagaming. I’m playing with the system, turning the knobs by telling myself that my attention must be affixed as thus. Unplugged but still squinting at a screen.

The Amish may be on to something. Connectedness has definitely evolved us in unexpected ways. Better or worse for the discrete organism, and unpredictability for the collective. We are all one meta-thing. The only known one of those. So, keeping it working is pretty important.

I don’t think hating each other’s differences is healthy. Lots of species died. Most of them. Practically all of them. Even the smart ones, neanderthal, homo allthethings.

#HomoAllTheThings

Hah!

–

Anyway I hope whoever is working security on automatic injection interfaces is good at their job. And I could recommend a compensating control.

Avoidance is one way to mitigate risk. The decision that the possible gain isn’t worth the expanse, followed by the walk away. Sometimes that’s for the best, when not-cliff-diving. Then again you have to weigh that perilous plummet against the unlived experience of not having ever been cliff diving.

I’ve been cliff diving. In high school a bunch of us went to a quarry, and there was a tree platform there we jumped from high over the already profound precipice. The water wasn’t like pavement, it was like ooblek or however you spell it. Non Newtonian. Hard.

Though, I expect it compares favorably to tandem landings under a reserve chute. Someone told me a story about that this weekend, but I’ve forgotten who. I spoke to a lot of people this weekend, but I’m also bad at that.

At remembering conversations, as to what was said by who when. Whom? Grammatically corect while inharmoniously incorrect. Language languishes without textual twists and metered merriment.

–

We, this thing, this collective of all knowledge running on imperfect hardware with no standardization, we are one by our language.

Of many, though, we are. Each of us resonates in a particular way across the four dimensions of meat space. Engaging others. Inducing others to harmonize, ideally. Stirring around in the pot of humanity, making waves of thought and action.

All at different amplitudes across ages. Some echo eons, as our Khan’s, both wrathful and, also quite wrathful.

More though by kindness of deed and dote.

These, while nameless to the Khanquored, are not so among friends.

–

It takes literally no effort to not be a dick to people. Some of them really work at deserving it though, but aside from them, meaning during most human interactions, it’s really not hard.

But being friendly is hard. It takes energy, and lots of it. Being outgoing is laborious. Much labor is laudable, so this alone isn’t enough to contraindicate it. In fact I highly recommend it, when enough spoons are left over from elsewise stressors.

Still, connection makes us us. It is the glue and twine that loops our lives in little loci, with added over-arcing flight paths and route maps. We’re hyper connected and it’s a dangerous internet out there. We define our lives indelibly, subject only to the failures of memory, digital and neural. And fashion.

The organism moves on, from grumpy cat to yelling at cat. To whatever meme is in fashion five minutes from now when you read this. Or five millennia.

That’s the fuck of it all really. Small bits of writing endure. More now, thanks to the decline in fashion of book burning. One good EMP though and it could vanish. A pattern dissolved, dispersed, diffused, defused. After all, I’m flying in a metal tube in the air, my patterns are pretty vulnerable to rapid unexpected disassembly.

But read is different.

Writing read is writing transmitted. A thought compressed, chopped to bits, checksummed and CRCd, copied achronally. Careless of eternity, while carried at C. Or at sea, enbottled post-quill. Which one has the best chance of survival? The meme in the bottle or in the air? Which will end awash and unnoticed, pattern scattered?

But when received the purpose is fulfilled, ears itch with new knowledge. Fingers twitch and scratch ideas into objects. Eyes open to new views, valuing varied vistas.

Which is pretty much just views in Spanish, but doesn’t mean quite the same thing in English.

I took Spanish in high school, so I’m not qualified to discuss etymology here. Not that I ever am, whatever language I’m presently abusing. Or anywhere else either, for example Spain.

Yeah that haiku again. I forget from last time, but the moment happened again. Happens always. When the plane’s tenor changes, engines relaxing, wings pitching forward ever so slightly. That’s what a haiku is. A moment.

Fun fact: everything is in this moment. Or that one.

No, that one.

Look, If you keep trying to grab one you’ll never catch it.

–

We spend our lives walking backwards. The future is behind us. Another language taught me that. We see only our past, as it quickly recedes from us, losing focus in the wash. We’re profoundly unprepared for our future, so much that we don’t recognize it when it arrives. Once we can describe it we’ve already fallen out of reach, unable to touch it.

Now, though, is the thing we can touch, Xeno notwithstanding. But only if we’re looking around us instead of behind.

Landing for serious now.

H