Causality and the power of random experiences never cease to fascinate me. Record snowfall in New York means I wind up at an urban farm in Detroit, where I had experiences with animals. If you snickered when you read that, well shame on you.

Few months ago I got booked for a college gig in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Only it’s not a college gig, it’s a high school gig. Some kind of conference set up by students at the University of Michigan for February 11th. Want me to talk to some local teens about going into alternative careers, and hey, it’s right up my alley.

Maybe in another ten years I’ll be able to lecture on what it’s like to fail at alternative careers. That will be short lecture; it will just be slides of me getting progressively skinnier while the pile of paper in the wastebasket behind me gets bigger and bigger.

The gig is for February, Saturday 11th. I decide I’ll fly in the Friday night before, so I can get a good night’s rest. The school can only afford to put me up for one night, so I have to fly back home on Saturday, sometime after the gig. Fine with me. So last Friday night, I put a backpack on and trek down to WTC, to take the PATH train over to Newark Airport.

I don’t know why, on airplanes, I still find myself hoping some hot girl is going to sit next to me. It never happens but you still find yourself wishing in the jetway.

Then I get into my seat, and minutes later see some big, sweaty, massive bastard coming down the aisle and I just know. I just know that this sonofabitch is 17-D. I’m 17-C.

Sure enough, he grunts and points, and I get up to let him slide in. The two of us sit down and it feels like he’s more in my seat than his. We’re on one of those tiny-ass commuter jets with two rows of two and this is absurd. It’s absurd that me and a guy who can probably lift this plane if it has a flat tire are allotted two seats of identical size right next to each other. Whenever you send a package, they weigh and measure it to make sure they can fit it on the plane. They need to start doing the same with humans because we are basically freight.

But they’ll never do it, because we’re freight that can talk and complain and vote for congressmen and make educated purchasing decisions. Drives me nuts. When I am King, all airplanes will be empty and passengers will bring their own appropriately-sized seats, and you will space them out in a configuration that’s comfortable for everybody. Or better yet, I’ll fill the plane with those multicolored balls from Chuck E. Cheese and everybody will just sit wherever they fit. When it comes time to deplane it will look like you broke open a Contac.

Two hours later me and 17-D have become bonded on a molecular level, like when you press two bars of soap together really hard. I find myself praying that he will pick me up, rip me in half and eat me just to end the misery. I feel like the guy at the bottom of the Abu Ghraib pyramid.

From Newark to Detroit is not a terribly long trip, but at some point in the air we fly through a time warp. We left Newark only ten minutes late but got to Detroit forty-five minutes behind schedule.

After landing, we had one of those things where the plane has to wait on the tarmac. Sometimes the pilot rocks the mic and tells you what the problem is: “Sorry folks, but all the gates are full so we’ll have to wait until one of these planes pushes off.” The problem is always a logistical one, but it would be more exciting if it was something fantastical, like “Sorry folks, but an evil, gelatinous cube is rampaging through the concourse, absorbing and digesting people. We’ll have to wait until S.W.A.T. can trap him in a hydraulic press and crush him into harmless goo before we can approach the gate.”

The distance from the gate to the airport exit is far--it felt like I walked the length of friggin’ Eight Mile--and by the time I made it outside, 10:35pm, I was officially an hour late. After some wandering I finally found the college kids who came to pick me up, a girl and a guy. “I’m so, so sorry,” I say. I don’t know why, but whenever someone is picking me up at an airport and the flight is late, I always feel like it’s my fault, like I didn’t do a good job cleaning the runway beforehand and I caused the delay.

The girl is named C.C. and the guy is named Steve, so it’s good I don’t have a lisp. C.C. and Steve drive me the thirty minutes to Ann Arbor, then take me out to eat at a huge, bi-level pizza parlor with mission-style furniture. The midwest is weird, dude. I put a bacon cheeseburger into my gullet and we shoot the shit.

Next they drop me off at my hotel, a Marriot Courtyard. Suh-weet! In more ways than one--they put me in a suite. Two rooms! Once again I regret that I am not famous or successful enough to have an entourage. I need a posse and, like, sycophants. Sycophants with tricky rants in wicked pants and cliques of fans. Or maybe I just need a rhyme writer.

Or a speechwriter. I sit down at the desk, look at my speech for the next day and decide it sucks. I start to rewrite it, which I’ll later realize was, like the end of the previous paragraph, a mistake.