--YOU DON'T KNOW HOW LUCKY YOU ARE

…I’m back from Vegas, not home yet, sitting in an airport.

Why is that people on cell phones are oblivious to everything and everyone around them?  Why do they practically shout into their phones, despite the fact that a person (you or me, maybe) is sitting less than two feet away?

 I am learning a bit more than I’d like about the lady next to me.  Her friend is having problems with her husband and this woman apparently is not a fan of her friend’s husband and she is telling her friend to tell her friend’s husband to “F$#% off, and say it REALLY LOUD.  Make him cry.”  (Nice advice.)

The man in the cubicle to my right is lying to someone (that could be a good first line in a story), his girlfriend or wife, I’m assuming, though he wears no ring.  He’s saying he’s in Colorado and that it’s snowing, though this is northeast of there and the clouds are only gray and brooding.

A child, maybe four years old or so, is shrieking on a bench while her mother holds her wrist, manacling it, while she checks her Facebook page.

Nobody looks very happy even though everyone here has someplace to go, someone they’re seeing.

Why is that?

I’ll admit it, I like to eavesdrop.  I like to hear how other people live, to learn how we are all different and in some ways precisely the same.

In Vegas you see all types of people.  It’s easy to be critical because you can eventually find something or someone to pick on, but you realize after a while that we all wear costumes.  Some are “Pants-on-the-ground” with boxers showing.  Some are mullets.  Some are beer bellies.  Others are shark skin suits.

I had a fun trip in Nevada.  I laughed.  I drank and ate a lot.  I got fat.  I also came up with a couple of story ideas.

But I don’t want to go back for a while, a long while.  That place is a killer.

...Here are some things I like:

"When I have an idea, I turn down the flame as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go.  Then it explodes, and that is my idea." Hemingway

"Take time to laugh - it is the music of the soul." From an old English prayer.

"What is happy?  It's a moment before you need more happiness." Don Draper

"Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky." Rainer Maria Rilke

"No obstacles fell in his way that seemed to him insurmountable. He might be defeated, as he sometimes was, but he shrank from no hardship through impatience, he fled from no danger through cowardice." J. P. Morgan writing about Napoleon Bonaparte

 "I am a Beginner. What the others are I don't really know. All I know is I am wiped out every six months or so. I die. I have died hundreds and hundreds of times. It is always the same death. I do not know what dies. Why must I always begin again and again – always the same high hopes, the identical death?" Lew Welch