You can see the nose of the plane
reflected in the propeller-cone thingy.

Today’s soundtrack: Where have I been all these years?
Today at 4:10am: making coffee with my eyes closed



So I get off the plane, and just past Baggage Claim there’s a guy holding up a piece of paper with RAIN NOE printed on it. I had to stifle the urge to take a picture.

Let me back up a minute and stop Tarentino-ing the sequence of events.

I live in the moment, and there are downsides to this.

Seinfeld had this old bit about having two sides to your personality--Night Guy vs. Morning Guy. The gist of it was: When you’re Night Guy you stay up late and fuck around, even though you know you have to get up early the next morning--you don’t care, because that’s Morning Guy’s problem. Night Guy always screws Morning Guy.

For me it’s Now Guy and Months Later Guy; the self-sabotage stretches far longer than a single evening. I routinely, unthinkingly do things I’ll pay for in months, or in the case of smoking, years.

When the Writer’s Workshop contacted me back in November to do a reading at Bowling Green I jumped at the chance, even though I didn’t know where Bowling Green was. (Turns out it’s outside Toledo, Ohio.) Speaking fee, travel stipend, thirty minutes on the mic, January gig. Book your own ticket, they said.

I immediately hopped on Expedia, knowing I could get a ticket for way cheaper than my travel stipend. Then I’d put the rest of the dough in my pocket (at least until Mastercard’s damned APR hellmonkeys took it back out).

I booked a cheap ticket, ignoring the fact that it was scheduled to leave LaGuardia at 6am. Not my problem; Months Later Guy will deal with it.

On the morning of the gig I rolled out of bed at 4am, cursing Now Guy for the umpteenth time. He always screws me. I just have to get through this so I can again become Now Guy.

A 6am departure means I’ve gotta be there by 5am, meaning I have to leave my house at 4:30am. Worst of all I couldn’t even take mass transit, which would only cost me $2 to get to LaGuardia, because at that hour the buses run so sporadically I’d have to leave the house at 3am to build in enough time safeguards. On days like this my life is like an episode of “24,” without the action or drama. Just the deadlines.

Outside the house, the door had barely closed behind me when a vacant taxi rounded the corner. I raised my hand and he stopped. It was 4:30 in the morning. I love living in Manhattan.

The douchebag taxi driver tried to “take me for a ride.”

“Where you going?” I asked, when he flew past Delancey Street. “You just missed the Williamsburg.”

“Ah...we should take the Midtown Tunnel,” he said.

“But then I gotta pay the toll!”

“We’ll beat the traffic,” he said. What a terrible liar.

“What traffic, it’s 4:30 in the morning! I wanna take the BQE. Turn around and get us on the Williamsburg.”

He followed my instructions, silent and kind of pissed-off. Every taxi driver in the world initially thinks I’m a Japanese tourist.

Toledo, Ohio is not the kinda place you can get a direct flight to, so first I had to go Cleveland. The flight was unremarkable, and annoyingly short; soon as I started nodding off, the plane began descending.

At the gate there’s only four other people going to Toledo. We go through the door, then down a flight of steps--and directly onto the runway. What the hell is this?

You gotta be kidding me, I think, as a guy in an orange safety vest points me towards the plane. It’s thirty feet away from me and so small that there’s no staircase-truck leading up to it; the airplane door flips down and you climb up a couple steps.

I get inside and, no lie, I’ve been in bigger SUV’s. I mean it’s longer than an SUV inside, but definitely narrower--I’m sitting against the right wall, and I can touch the left wall with my hand.

For some reason there are not one, but two stewardesses aboard, both blondes in their early 30s. I don’t get it.

I buckle in. The stewardesses take their coats off. One pulls the door shut and the other one fires up the plane.

Aha, they’re not stewardesses--they’re the pilots. Sheesh! I feel embarrassed for making assumptions. Though I have to say I’ve never seen female pilots before, let alone pilots so young.

I’m sitting in the front “row,” so it’s basically like the pilots are driving a car and I’m in the back seat, right behind them. The one on the left takes her cell phone out and leaves it on the dashboard. She moves this big lever-thingy and the plane starts moving.

Takeoff in a plane that small is amazing--it just whips down the runway and practically leaps into the air. It’s like, if Michael Jordan was an airplane.

We’re in the air maybe fifteen minutes when I see the pilot on the left take her hands off the stick. She’s futzing with a digital camera, and starts taking pictures out the window. Then, get this, she and the other pilot start taking pictures of each other flying the plane! Maybe they are stewardesses. Back in Cleveland there’s some pilot named Buck looking confused on the runway and going “Lucinda and Cheryl did what?!?”

We land at Toledo without event. The plane is so tiny they don’t even land it, they just fly it into this big net. Okay kidding.

Like the airplane, Toledo Airport is also tiny. So small that if they filmed Die Hard 2 in here the movie would’ve been over in about twenty minutes. I grab a coffee at some kind of donut counter and am delighted to hear the countergirl has an accent. Slightly midwestern. I love being in a place where the people have accents because then I know I’m someplace else.

Then I head for the exit and run into Moneygrip holding up the sign with my name. My e-mail printout says someone named Karl is supposed to pick me up.

“Rain?” he says.

“Karl?” I say. He nods to confirm his identity, assuaging my fears of being abducted.

Actually I wouldn’t mind being abducted, if only so I could try developing Stockholm Syndrome and see how that goes. I think as syndromes go it’s one of the better ones. You’ve got your SARS, your Toxic Shock, your Tourette’s...I’ll take Stockholm any day.