My Life in So Many Words

A pilot, endowed with lunkhead vowels and no chin to speak of (at least not highly), somehow held my attention for a large portion of this day, although I can't yet say whether this was the beginnings of brain debilitation or simply the resigned masochism of a flat tire. I should point out, however, that the pilot's activities were witnessed while I was sitting out the rain, so it wasn't as if I had much opportunity to leap through azaleas and compare clouds anyway. Still, there was plenty to do within, and it wouldn't have required much effort to ruffle up a time-filler or two. I even had a novel in my bag. Yet there I was, aimed at the tapping window for what must have been three hours, simply gazing at an unremarkable man ready a plane for take-off (or whatever he was readying it for).

Perhaps I admired his dedication under duress, or envied his solid, workaday bread-winning. Perhaps I had only the energy to take in, and not put in. Or perhaps I was simply drowning my day. Whatever the reason, it has prompted a stern reappraisal of the self. Is this where I want to be, watching pilots fumble about in the rain for hours on end? It's not a memory I aim to cherish, at any rate. But compared to the rest of my day, which now I can hardly even recall, it was positively spectacular — and that's probably the saddest part.

Honestly, I have no idea why I'm picking over this so obsessively. Maybe this is proof that there is something to it, that it's not simply an incident my mind has landed upon by accident. Was my father a laid-off pilot? Was my mother a veritable encyclopaedia of plane-preparation trivia? No. Heck, I've never even been on more than one plane in my life, and they've never held my attention outside of that. Why, then, should this mundane task imprint itself so forcibly on my mind that it feels like all the secrets of my life and its failings are contained within it?

God, my autobiography's gonna suck.