Some people might call what I did this week a “failure.” But you know what? Some of us are too busy sucking the marrow out of life to bother with such shortsightedness.
Nay, not a failure, I say: the reason I couldn’t write you a regular substack this week is I was on vacation.
Waking up for the day at 2am, for example, is ideal if you want to find out how your intestines respond to coffee three hours before they’re prepared for it. It’s exciting, gathering this kind of data. Nothing is a given.
Also: the moon. How often do you see the moon?
Then there’s that initial blush, of about eight hours or so, in which things go as planned: you get on the plane in ROC, it departs on time, you see the clouds nestling in beneath you, you nibble on some existential glory in the morning sun, and you arrive to your layover in JFK in a mere 38 minutes feeling almost…smugly peaceful.
There are no children needing you. All the meltdowns in the terminal are other people’s to survive and helm. It’s amazing, the freedom— it’s even possible to feel the pouring out from your own chest of true but somewhat beautifully distant compassion for these poor fools, people traveling with their children.
No one notices anything you do. It’s bliss.