Today’s soundtrack: Well I'm gonna make it on up to you for all the things you should have
had before.
Today at 8:02pm: discussing character development


Time to return to New York; this is my last morning in Arizona.

I’m in the shower at 6:55am, enjoying my last tastes of high water pressure at unlimited temperatures. I want to live the rest of my life in this hotel. I’ll marry, settle down and raise kids all from within room 3211.

The thing about Arizona is it’s super-dry. So this time when I get out of the shower, I open the Aromatic Body Lotion the hotel has included in the bathroom kit and smear it all over myself. I do my face last, and as I’m rubbing it in I smell something...funky. I sniff the bottle suspiciously.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck! “Aromatic” or no, there has clearly been some chemical disaster involving fermentation inside this bottle of lotion. It smells hideous, spoiled and cheese-like.

Even worse, I’m already running late for my flight and have no time to re-shower and wash it off. Plus how do you wash lotion off, the shit is so oily. Wrinkling my nose, I get dressed and bolt out the door.

On the drive to the airport I’m flipping through radio stations, feeling bad about myself because I smell, and continuing to hate radio DJs. Luckily I come across the Allman Brothers singing ‘Southbound.’ “You guys are fucking late,” I mutter.

Traffic isn’t that bad here. New York rush hour kicks Phoenix rush hour’s ass. I make it to the airport on time.

On time to board, that is, not in time to get a decent seat. The e-check-in kiosk shows I’m in the back of the plane in a nut-busting aisle seat, with no hope of switching. I don’t even know what nut-busting means but that’s how I feel about aisle seats, I hate them.

On the plane I’m acutely aware that I smell bad, so for the next five hours I basically have no self-esteem. The woman next to me tried striking up a conversation with me when we first boarded, then quickly stopped. The guy on the right of me is a humongous gorilla whose arms are spilling into my seat. Every time he sneezes I hold my breath for ten seconds.

For “lunch” they serve some kind of poisonous calzone, and a Hugh Grant movie comes on the monitors. How come flying is never a pleasant experience?

At 5pm New York time our pilot drops the plane onto the asphalt with a leaden touch. JFK is grey and rainy. I sit miserably in my cloud of stink until we reach the gate.

After deplaning I luck out and get one of the minivan cabs. My driver has a turban. Happy to be back in New York, I try chatting him up, but he’s not having it so instead I study license plates on the Van Wyck.

I have to teach my writing class at 7pm, so I direct the driver straight to the workshop, in midtown. This is only my second week so I hope the attendees can’t smell me.